More Trouble at Yale-New Haven

Union organizer Kendall Fells said in recent weeks hospital workers have been arrested for handing out pro-unionization leaflets, asked by employers how they plan to vote and called in by hospital officials for mandatory meetings about unionization.

"[The hospital] is now not only violating the contract, they're violating the law," Fells said. "Workers shouldn't have to go through all that to vote in a union election and decide if they want a union or not."

Hospital spokesman Vin Petrini, who last week denied allegations that hospital administrators have tried to interfere in the election, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

While a few hospital workers declined to comment, one worker - who preferred not to be identified - said issues like inadequate hospital staffing and insufficient medical coverage for single parents have persuaded her to vote for unionization.

"We didn't have anything until the union came into the picture," she said. "We need someone to stand up for us."

Hungry For Justice

The Purdue Hunger Strike reaches day 25.

The hunger strike is the latest — and by far the most dramatic — action in an 18-month student effort to encourage a new strategy activists say will facilitate better labor practices in the factories that produce garments with the Boilermakers’ logo. After a handful of rallies, a “dance-in” and a number of other informational events proved ineffective, about 15 members of the labor equality group, an affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops, and the Purdue Alliance of Libertarian Socialists chose to raise the stakes, wagering their academics and their health, as they wait for the administration to reveal its cards. A few, including Franciose, have been starving themselves since November 17, although the bulk of strikers, said Alex Cheng, a senior, joined in November 25, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

A total of 30 different colleges have signed on to the spirit of the Designated Suppliers Program so far, and have pledged to attempt to implement it, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring organization that counts 162 college members and has sponsored the DSP. Among those colleges that have endorsed the program are the institutions in the University of California system and Duke University.

Nova, who does not have any position on the Purdue hunger strike, said a task force of representatives from participating colleges is working to hammer out the details of the program. It would require that, after a three-year phase-in process, “licensees” that purchase apparel production rights from participating universities would receive 75 percent of their products from factories that pay their employees a living wage and recognize the right of their workers to unionize. The “crucial difference” between the DSP and the current codes in place, Nova said, is that for the first time, companies like Nike and Reebok would be required to pay their suppliers a price sufficient to ensure that the standards are met. A “modest” price increase of 1 to 6 percent would likely be passed along to consumers buying their favorite institution’s products in malls or college bookstores.

“Because the DSP, if it’s implemented, will go much further toward actually achieving good worker conditions in these factories than any previous program, I think it will have a profound impact on the broader industry, to demonstrate that better conditions can be achieved,” Nova said.

Some questions about John Oates

I'm writing a paper about the cultural politics of Youtube. While doing so, I found this. Without further adieu, I would like to raise some questions regarding John Oats, who, for the uninitiated, is the short dude with the mullet and moustache barely pretending to play the red Fender.

1.Is Oates now, or has he ever been a Hobbit.

2.Why would the ever want to make him look shorter than he actually is? Or,

3. Is he really that short?

4.What's up with the dancing?

The scenes in which Oates peers out from behind Hall are particularly bizarre.
Ok, back to work.

“You Can’t Stop the Signal,” or Preserving Our Television Future: Firefly, Serenity, and the politics of televisuality and cinema

(A paper i just handed in. Felt like it belonged here. Rereading it, there's some stuff that I didn't do particularly well. The stuff on Star Trek is indebted to a conversation i had with a colleague a few weeks ago, who actually works on and deals with the subject critically, and rather brilliantly.)

In the fall of 2002, the Fox network premiered Firefly, a new one-hour drama from writer, director and producer Joss Whedon, who had created and written the original screenplay for (but later disassociated himself from) the postmodern b-movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer and created the one hour WB/UPN drama of the same name, which was critically acclaimed for its feminist explorations of the horror genre’s metaphorical relationships to the spatiality of high school and suburbia, and the emotional and affective politics of adolescence and beyond. Whedon, who also spun off from Buffy in the fall of 1999 the pseudo-noirish Angel, which, according to audiocommentaries by Whedon and cocreator David Greenwalt, attempted to explore the experience of urban 20something aporia, again through genre horror conventions, is the son and grandson of television writers, and has been depicted as a pop auteur by film critics – the New York Times called him “the king of Geek T.V.”[1] Buffy aired for seven seasons and remains in syndication multiple times a day on the FX network. Angel was canceled in 2004 after five seasons, the last of them without Buffy to inflate its ratings, and is syndicated twice a day on TNT. Only 11 episodes of Firefly ever aired in the show’s (original network) run. Three more episodes made it onto the series’ posthumous DVD collection. Last year it was made into a $39 million dollar sequel of sorts, the Universal Studios film Serenity, and the series is now prominently featured as a digital download on Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s Unbox. That a television show canceled after half a season, its episodes often shown out of order and haphazardly, interrupted by multi-week or month hiatuses, was ever issued on DVD, let alone made into a wide-release feature film demonstrates starkly the power of DVD and new technologies of viewing, consuming, and participating in visual culture.

Firefly is a sci-fi/western drama centered on a group of rogue smugglers navigating the poor, anarchic, underdeveloped fringes of a galactic empire in a syncretic, postwar moment of inequality and repression. The captain and first mate of the ship Serenity are veteran ex-soldiers on the losing side of a rebellion against the Anglo-Sino Alliance in the far future, in which humanity, having long since exhausted earth’s natural resources, has colonized and terraformed the galaxy, with the rich and powerful living in an corporate utopia of technology and abundance on the core planets, and the destitute and downtrodden unceremoniously deposited on the barely terraformed fringes of the system, left with next to nothing and forced to survive however they can, and menaced by the spectre of the unnasimilable Other, the crazed, psychotic, maniacal reavers – people who have been driven inexplicably and homicidally insane on the edges of space. (We learn in the film that this “something” which has produced the reavers is in effect the horror of modernization, of modernity itself.) The series often employs tropes of the frontier, and genre conventions of both science fiction and the Western, to explore themes of imperialism, colonialism, globalization, and terror. (The first episode aired just over a week after the one year anniversary of September 11, 2001, and the construction of the reaver as the enemy of civilization driven mad by its violence and haunting its edges seems particularly potent when read in such a context – the reaver as an iteration of the monster-terrorist-fag invoked recently by Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai[2], a “screen for otherness” through which a “multiform power operates”.)

Those Firefly episodes Fox did air in 2002-2003 were presented out of order. The two-hour series premiere, which introduced the characters and world of the series, was jettisoned in favor of the second episode, which had to then be reworked as an auxiliary pilot. This left viewers and critics like the Times’ Caryn James thoroughly perplexed.[3] The pilot was only aired after the series had been dropped, five days before Christmas and while the rest of the network schedule was on hiatus. Nevertheless, the series was cancelled despite outcry from loyal fans, who found something compelling in the show’s characters, dialogue (peppered with idiosyncratic witticisms and mandarin expletives,) and dystopian vision of a sci-fi future in which the enemy is not some alien menace or mystical force, but rather injustices and inequities which are very much human and very familiar to twenty-first century viewers (as Whedon has pointed out on DVD audiocommentaries.)

As with fans of Buffy, Firefly aficionados were disproportionately women in a genre often understood as a masculinist space in which relationships to texts, themes, and characters have been (problematically) understood as hypermasculine, and infused with “testosterone” – specifically the pleasure of watching characters engage in activities suffused with antifeminine gravitas, often in the form of fantastic or hyperreal violence.[4] Perhaps this is because of the (arguably postmodern) rejection within the series and film of salvific and progressive grand narratives more common in standard genre fare. In the Star Trek franchise, the Intergalactic Federation’s explorations of terra incognita form a heroic liberal narrative of discovery and encounter. In Firefly and Serenity, the Federation’s analogue is a sometimes tragic and sometimes malevolent agent of empire, suffering, and catastrophe. Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg has hailed the film as an exemplar of Randian objectivism,[5] but if Malcolm Reynolds is a “capitalist,” where is the surplus value? The crew of Serenity is constantly flying by the seat of its pants, barely scraping together enough fuel and parts to stay afloat on the long routes of interplanetary travel, and kept in the air largely because of the ingenuity of its pilot, engineer, and captain. While often trying to acquire capital, such money is almost always spent on ship maintenance and food, and the crew often works pro bono or gives what it has earned to the needy, existing on a criminalized continuum between “independent contractor” and migrant worker, frequently inhabiting a “robin hood” identity, which, if libertarian and anti-state, is also profoundly anti-capitalist. The film is more productively read through the lenses of postcolonial theory, autonomous Marxist historiography (a la Linebaugh and Rediker, -- the western outlaw as insurgent pirate,) and perhaps radical anarchist political theory, as a chronicle of a hybrid, syncretic, motley crew of rogues and misfits struggling against not only the state, but the sinister Blue Sun corporation, (which performs hideous experiments on one of the main characters in order to transform her into a living bioweapon,) and “progress” itself, embracing an anti-utopian, immanent praxis of permanent rebellion.[6]

The series was released as a four-DVD boxed set less than a year after the pilot finally aired, in part because of, and in order to capitalize upon the demand from fans. To date, half a million copies of the DVD have been sold, and the series is ranked #29 in the amazon.com dvd store.[7] The robust sales convinced Universal that the show might be worth resurrecting as a feature film, and Whedon prefaced special preview screenings of the film for activist fans with an emotional “thank you” later included on the DVD release of the film. But lest we rush to attribute these sales and this activist relation to televisual culture to Whedon’s authorial virtuousity and exceptionalism, we would do well to remember that this sequence of events occurred in the context of a booming business in Television on DVD[8] – and not only Kompare’s nostalgia-saturated “old” shows from previous decades. It is now commonplace for seasons of current series – like The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy, and Veronica Mars to be released on DVD only three or four months after they finish airing. Similarly, there has been a steady demand for TV shows which were critically lauded or cult successes but canceled by their network – Firefly is exemplary, but so are Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and Wonderfalls. Fan mobilizations, mostly internet-based, to prolong or resurrect series like Family Guy, Veronica Mars, and Arrested Development have been widely chronicled in industry press and major newspapers. This activist relationship between fans and networks/studios evinces a new dimension of the increasing importance of home viewing and an aggressive fandom centered not on the theatre, but on practices of viewing centered in domestic spaces which Barbara Klinger explores in the first two chapters of Beyond The Multiplex. The success of Family Guy in DVD and reruns led to the production of new episodes after a several-year hiatus. But the story of Firefly and Serenity is in part the story of a repackaging so successful and powerful that it invaded the multiplex, imagining and enacting a reversal of the usual trajectory of cinema release to home video and possible TV spinoff (as was, after all, the case with Buffy.) Fans of the series and film are now clamoring for either a sequel film or new TV episodes, possibly distributed over the internet or via a netflix-like mailing system.[9]

One final point that must be raised in relation to the DVD reissues of series like Firefly is how the interpretive schema of the DVD boxed set as a repackaging of history and attempted legitimization of the cultural product at hand as artistic masterpiece or cultural treasure must be reconfigured given the circumstances of their reception – many, if not most viewers of the DVDs encountered the show for the first time in their rerelease, particularly before the Sci-Fi Channel began re-airing the entire series (in the correct order) in July, 2005. The popularity of the DVDs may have less to do with the fetishization of television “heritage” as national past-ness than with a desire to instead resist the foreclosure of possible futures for television and employ complex practices of meaning-making (fan sites, fan fiction, and the fan-produced scripts for “Buffy: Season 8”[10] floating around on the internet) and activist tactics to extend the lives of favorite characters and series on and off screen. I don’t mean to be utopian here – (whatever would the crew of Serenity think?) – but instead to suggest, or rather confirm Klinger’s suggestion, that the Networks have either sufficiently colonized fan cultures or been sufficiently colonized by them that these processes are anything but alternative, and instead very much a part of how TV studios measure and produce success.

---

[1] “The King of Geek T.V. Gets Big Screen Comeback,” NYT, September 25, 2005

[2] Puar and Rai, “Monster, Terrorist. Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 72, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 2002.

[3] Caryn James, “TV Weekend: Fantasy of Future and the Here and Now,” NYT, 9/20/2002, and http://imdb.com/title/tt0303461/episodes

[4] See Klinger, Beyond The Multiplex, 148-149

[5]

[6] An anarchist reading of Whedon’s work is suggested both by scholars like David Graeber, (“Rebel Without a God,” In These Times 12/27/1998)and by dialogue in Buffy itself, when a military colonel refers to the slayer and her friends as “anarchists,” and Buffy’s boyfriend Riley does the same, reclaiming the term in a positive light. (This is in the Season 4 Episode “New Moon Rising, which aired in 2000.)

[7] “Firefly alights on big screen as Serenity” USA TODAY, 9/21/2005 and amazon.com

[8] As evinced and supported by websites like tvshowsondvd.com

[9] i.e., http://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/ and http://www.fireflyseason2.com/index.asp

[10] See Buffyworld.com. The show ended after the conclusion of the 7^th season.

Taped to a bus stop kiosk on fifth avenue a few blocks south of my apartment, I found an ad for a house for sale in New Haven. The house was clearly run down, and judging from the make and style of the arcvhitecture and the demographics of the neighborhood I live in, I'm guessing the house was either in Fair Haven or maybe the Hill, with the former more likely. I find it really interesting that someone would post a home for sale notice on a bus stop, let alone in a city eighty miles away. The flyer raises interesting questions about the connections and links between two working class latino neighborhoods in very different cities, something I might want to look into more if I were an ethnographer, which I am not. Of course, the fact that we are talking about buying and selling property (and because the flyer was in English) means we're talking about folks in the upper economic echelons of both neighborhoods - probably not the old women who stand on street corners here in the freezing cold every weekend and sell homemade churros outside of the clothing and shoe stores and taquerias that line fifth avenue between the park and 63rd (where Bay Ridge begins) but that doesn't meant there aren't circuits of exchange, communication, and community between these cities - whether of kinship, of common origin in the regions of central and southern Mexico from which a lot of migrants are coming to the Northeastern U.S., or other connections of which i remain ignorant. I'll stop here, since i do not want the gaze which i turn on my neighborhood to be that of the detatched and imperial social scientist...

When Union Busters Attack!

So if you watch this video, a billy-bragg accompanied survey of union-busting, police violence, and working people taking to the streets and putting their bodies on the line, you'll notice that the clips from "New York 2005" are from the August 31 GSOC action which took place on the day the NYU administration allowed the contract to expire and refused to negotiate a new one. You can watch members of GSOC (and GESO, and GET-UP) get cuffed and led away interspersed with images of the violent suppression of San Francisco ILWU longshore workers in the '30s and Detroit Newspaper Guild members in '95, not to mention Harlan County mineworkers throughout the twentieth century. Of course, the cops didn't brutalize or beat any GSOCers, - the police had been forewarned that folks planned to take part in civil disobedience - but the rhetorical move is still powerful for me, not so much because of any claims placing GSOC at the "vanguard" of the labor movement or anything so dramatic, exclusionary, or Leninist, but instead because it holds us accountable to a long history of struggle and bloodshed - those who bear what Cornel West at Education in the Streets called the "bloodstained banner," in the struggle for industrial, economic, and dare we add academic democracy. And if anyone has any right to call me to account, then certainly the labor movement is much better suited to do so than, say, a certain NYU Dean who made threatened to do so last year...

Stuart Hall On Youtube

Unfortunately, it's a severly abridged Stuart Hall, and one suspects that the real weight or thrust of the argument, not to mention its subtlety, is lost for brevity's sake. God knows we could have used less Spike Lee and more Hall at the beginning - and the prefatory remarks from the guy from UMass seem somewhat superfluous as well, or at least the manner in which Hall's lecture is chopped up and repackaged seems limiting. Fears of digital diploma mills and the continuing erosion of academic control over academic work notwithstanding (and maybe the way that gets phrased is often dangerously reactionary) it would be pretty great if one could watch cultural studies lectures on Youtube, even if there is a very real danger which must be first overcome in the continuing growth of a rigidly structured superstar system in the professoriate, increasing casualization of academic workers inside and outside of the classroom or digital equivalent thereof, and a dissapearance of the actual work of teaching and interacting with students or restriction of such to the very wealthy and privileged - not that this isn't already a serious problem in US higher education. (A search for Raymond Williams yields tennis clips of Serena and Venus, while "althusser" is someone who posts minimalist ukelele renditions of "There is a Light That Never Goes Out."