NYU's newest innovation in the arena of community relations? Paying off people already wealthy enough to live and park their cars in the village. Mike Morand would be so proud. Meanwhile, TA healthcare got slashed again, and tuition's up over 5% for like the seventh consecutive year...

For incoming freshmen and returning students to New York University, going off to college is an exciting time. But it's usually a big headache for people who live near one of the city's biggest universities. NY1's Candace Kelly explains why, and what that school is doing this year to help its neighbors cope.

Sunday is move-in day at New York University, as 4,000 freshmen will find a new home here. And as they're moving in, many area residents will be forced out of parking spaces.

“On moving day all the streets are blocked off and the cars are lined up one by one here and pulled onto the curb,” said Greenwich Village resident. “It's not that crazy, but it's a lot of commotion and a lot of people.”

”There are so many people and so many cars and everyone's trying to get a cart to move in,” said another.

Because so many areas have parking restrictions, for the first time ever, New York University will reimburse those who have to pay for using a parking garage.

“We're trying to figure out the best way to minimize some of the congestion in the area,” said Alicia Hurley, vice president of government and community affairs at NYU.

A couple of weeks ago, i was going to write a long post about how "Estranged" was the peak of the music video as hegemonic mass culture in the era of deindustrialization, deurbanization, and outsourcing. I picked "Estranged" because of the sheer excess - dolphins and aircraft carriers etc, and the historical moment - just as programs like Beavis and Butthead and The Real World begin to displace the music video on the basic cable channel that had made its name on such clips. But how can anyone watch this video and not think that nothing can surpass this for sheer arrogance and conceit?

edit: i guess this has to be a candidate too:

Of colonizing slivers and voracious appetites

The Brooklyn Paper is also picking up the Livingston Street "dorm" story:

New York University is coming to Brooklyn — and so is its voracious appetite for real estate.

The ever-growing private institution, based in Greenwich Village, is opening its first non- Manhattan residence in a Brooklyn Heights apartment tower, and is negotiating what it described as a “merger” with Downtown Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University.

One hundred and fifteen graduate students will move this month into the “sliver building” at 67 Livingston St., between Clinton and Court streets, which is named for the way its narrow 26-floors are wedged between wider buildings on the street. Since the late 1980s, the tower’s 76 units served as a dormitory for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. In March, a private investor bought it for $18.6 million and then leased it to NYU.

I had a strange dream last night involving an alternate version of Highway 61 Revisited sans "Desolation Row" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." I don't really know what to make of it.

I want to write a paper about Heathers.

Again, this feels like an iPhone advertisement, shiny, sleek, and vacuous. Is this where Talib Kweli was on the day that hip hop died?

Max Roach. RIP

I saw him play an hour long set with Cecil Taylor at the JVC Jazz Festival on the Columbia University campus seven years ago. Roach is one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century and in the long history of percussion. His importance to twentieth century African American culture, and to increasingly global - and urgently political forms of popular music, is difficult to overstate.

Last week someone asked me to think of soul/rare groove songs for a wedding mix. Instead i came up with a list of songs that it would be really awkward to hear at a someone's nuptuals. In no particular order:

Freda Payne, "band of gold." ("Now that you're gone/all that's left is a band of gold.")

Honey Cone, "Don't Send Me an Invitation" ("You loved two of us/one of us had to lose. I had but one regret - she's the one you'd choose.") And about 70%-80% of the invictus and hot wax records catalogues, definitely including 100 Proof's "Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed".

Ann Peebles: "I feel like breaking up somebody's home"

Roy C, "Shotgun Wedding," although this could be employed for irony's sake. It is a pretty hilarious song. ("I am the victim of a shotgun wedding.")

Curtis Mayfield, "Give It Up." Clearly.

Irma Thomas, "SHe'll Never Be Your Wife."

Dusty Springfield, "What Do You Do When Love Dies?"

The entire catalogues of Betty Wright and Betty Davis, though my friend is actually putting "Anti-Love song" on his mix, which is kind of hilarious. If you aren't familiar with either of these artists, Betty Wright is from Florida and sings songs about how she is going to steal your man. Betty Davis was briefly married to Miles Davis - and famously had an affair with Jimi Hendrix during that span. She sings very, very raunchy funk.

Martha and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run." ("I wake up feeling sorry i met you/hoping soon that i'll forget you.")

Bobby Bland, "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog The Way You Treated Me."

And i haven't even dealt with Country music, R&B after 1973, or rock. Suggestions? Arguments?



The Peru earthquake looks pretty terrible - hundreds dead so far. It seems trite and disrepectful to conjecture as to how much worse this could have been if the quake had produced a larger tsunami or given how violent an earthquake it seems to have been.