Wall Street Journal, On Strike?

Wall Street Journal staff across America refused to turn up to work yesterday in protest at rapidly advancing takeover talks between Rupert Murdoch and the paper's owner, Dow Jones.

The protest came as it emerged that Mr Murdoch's News Corp had agreed with Dow Jones on a special committee that would be responsible for the hiring and firing of key editors at the Journal and the company's other news businesses.

and a wildcat, at that.

Edit:

May not have actually been a wildcat strike, since the contract expired in january. Negotiations were still happening through June, so it's unclear to me, from what little i've read, whether the contract was being extended and a no strike clause was in effect at the time of the action. The walkout lasted only a few hours and was clearly aimed at embarassing both Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch, which, judging from the press the action has received, seems to have worked. Here's the "statement" of newspaper guild local leadership.

ramble on?

It's not that I never wanted to move again. My love affair with New York City got complicated sometime towards the end of high school, when i felt like, if New York hadn't exactly exhausted its possibilities for me (anyone claiming that is a lying arrogant fool) there were things i needed to learn outside of New Yoirk, other cities I needed to live in and learn about. And I liked living in New Haven and Boston. I liked walking the streets of San Francisco and Chicago and Tucson and D.F. etc etc. There's an arrogance to New York, too, a "There is No Outside" much less justified and much more empirically false than the claim Hardt and Negri make about capitalism and empire. I don't like it. I love New York, but i'm not sure i need it. And i don't always think it loves me back. Which is to say I want to leave someday soonish.

But I like Sunset Park. I like my apartment, which has felt close to a real home, the closest since Bishop Street. Today I looked out into the backyard and there were hundreds of fireflies floating in the dusk. I like the guys at Charlie's Pizza down on 49th street who stared in dismay at the flatscreen TV as Jorge Posada threw a ball into the outfield (didn't even look like he was aiming for third) i like the park and the middle aged chinese couples practicing waltzes by the pool. I like my walk up fifth avenue and across the bridge. I like my room, my ceiling fan, my windows. I like living half a block from the subway and i like walking ten, fifteen miles a day sometimes, when i feel like it and when work permits. I like sitting on the stoop and watching the world pass by. Hopefully I can stay around here.

I also don't like to move. I like to set down roots and spread outward. I like to accumulate clutter.

Maybe New York is trying to tell me something.

I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore?

For the last two years, I've been renting the top floor of a brownstone in Sunset Park with one other person. The bottom two floors are occupied by the owner/landlords, a professional couple with a year and a half old baby boy. Today my landlords told me and my roomate that he wants to offer us a six month lease, after which they want to take posession of the floor again because they want to have a second child. I like living here and I don't want to move. I'm inclined to take the extension, if only because it lets me procrastinate, and i'm good at that, and there's always the possibility of moving in with the parents for a while and living rent free, though i don't know how productive i'd be. The rhyme is unintentional. But I'm worried about having to move in the middle of exam prep, particularly because I've accumulated enough furniture and commodities which i'd be unable to fit in my parents' place, and my lack of a drivers' license makes moving more complicated - damn NYC upbringing. Plus, something tells me I'm more likely to find friends or cool people looking for places to live in a neighborhood i want to live in in July than I am in January or February.

Anyone have any suggestions?

also, in the department of reactionary activist judiciaries, bad and also bad.

God forbid Yale should do anything kitschy with the Macchu Picchu relics Hiram Bingham may or may not have stolen - like, I don't know, parade the New Haven elite past a pair of confused Llamas for "authenticity's" sake?

In the spring of 2003, workers at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Ave in Chicago, Illinois, went on strike because the hotel owner decided to unilaterally impose a staggering 7% wage cut and slash health insurance coverage and other benefits.

When i was in Chicago that July for an organizing training, the workers were still on strike, and I spent some time on the picket line (and learned a lot of chants. My favorite was "Escucha, escucha, estamos en la lucha.")

That was four years ago. Those workers are still on strike. You can read about their struggle here. There was an action to commemorate the anniversary last week, and i'm told it went well.

Four years is a long time. But then, so is six years.

"One day longer..."

NYU's plan for managing 13% growth in enrollment without further swarming the village apparently involves farming off thousands of students each semester to satellite colonies like the recently purchased island in the Seine. Among that 6 million square foot increase is supposed to be a new space for my department, which i will believe when I see and still won't alieviate so much of what has made the last two years so difficult.

I like cover bands in small apartments.

off topic for this blog, perhaps, but nonetheless worth circulating. There have been many nirvana covers over the sixteen years since Nevermind. Tori Amos. Weird Al. That ska band on Moon who covered "Breed" and whose name I am forgetting, because I am old. They were an easy band to cover because the instrumentation is so straightforward, so simple, albeit sometimes sloppy. I never really liked any of these covers. And I never really liked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that much. Well, that's a lie, but I liked the more lyrical stuff from later on the album more, "Lithium" and "Drain You," and "Lounge Act."

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was by how great Patti Smith's cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is, but I am. It's probably the best Nirvana cover I've ever heard. Kurt Cobain always said the song was a Pixies rip off, but if the original looked towards "Wave of Mutilation," Smith's cover looks more towards "Silver," i suppose. At any rate, i like it a lot.