In lieu of anything more substantive, i defer to my examinations and my teaching load and instead belatedly offer a random shuffle for last friday.

The Cure. "Love song." The 311 cover and the whole emo thing kind of ruin this sing for me. I thought it was really profound when i was in high school. I think most people do. Or most people who know it when they're in high school, at any rate.

Booker T and the MG's - "Time Is Tight." This is a pretty incredible song, and you get a sense of how versatile the band was when you realize it's basically the same people playing on "Hold On, I'm Coming" or "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," two songs which sound like they're in a different decade and genre from this one.

Liz Phair - "Canary." Weird moment in Exile in Guyville. Minute long piano solo intro and then the vocals kick in and it's incredibly bitter and fierce and fascinating. I skip to "Fuck and Run" too often.

Go-Betweens - "Boundary Rider."

Neko Case - "Maybe Sparrow."

Dusty Springfield - "Live Here With You." I have mixed feelings about owning this record.

Blind Melon - "All That I Need." Stop laughing. It's not a bad song.

De La Soul - "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" This song samples six others, layering them on top of each other.

Curtis Mayfield - "We Got to Have Peace."

Grant McLennan - "Malibu 69". RIP.

wow

That's like four years of David Swensen, right there...

The independent arbitrator peiceing through the ruins of the sabotaged election process at Yale-New Haven hospital has ruled that the hospital engaged in a "methodical dismantling of the terms and commitments of the election principles agreement" and has fined YNHH 4.5 million dollars, almost half of which will go directly to aggrieved workers. The report itself is at times chilling.

Why such conduct doesn't demonstrate to the same arbitrator the necessity of card check neutrality in such an atmosphere of intimidation and managerial terror tactics, I cannot begin to understand.

Is it full compensation? Not quite, said Meyerson. "Full compensation would be winning the process by which workers would have the right to freely and fairly choose to unionize."

Para leer a la universidad neoliberal

“This place is magic,” Michael Morand ’87 DIV ‘93, Yale Associate Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs, said in an interview with the News. “Yale is a magic kingdom, and this has extended the magic.” (Yale Daily News, 10/19/07)

This quote is interesting not simply for its excess, its absurdity, but because in terming a 20 billion dollar corporation sitting in the middle of one of the U.S.'s poorest cities "magic kingdom," (the geek in me wonders which one - Mordor?) Morand is revealing some profound truths about the optics and ideologies of the neoliberal university. Magic kingdoms, as Dorfman and Mattlelart would remind us, erase the realities of labor, of exploitation in favor of self-sweeping brooms, axes chopping firewood without arms to swing them. Yale as magic kindgom, perhaps the most exaggerated and thus paradigmatic example of the university's elitist, exceptionalist, self-representation. Amidst the glitz of new libraries the people who will clean them, make them run, and teach overflowing FORMAC sections in their basement classrooms fade from view. But without them the edifice collapses, the university does not run. And New Haven's interactions with and role in the immiseration of New Haven's racialized geography of labor and difference can't be ignored either. Yale is the medical debt burdens hanging over the heads of its med school library clerical staff. It is sixty six years of picket lines and a dozen homeless people sleeping on park benches in the New Haven green. There is no difference between the university and the "real world;" universities like Yale, like NYU, like Columbia are high stakes, large scale, often violent participants in urban and global economies through endowment investments, through real estate, through the patenting and privatization of knowledge. Morand suggests that Yale's new library "extends" the magic of the university's privilege and power, but it can not and has never been able to fully obfuscate the conditions of its existence - which is its imperial presence, and the movements which are contantly seeking to trouble and transform it.

Please Put Rambo Back Inside Your Pants

Continuing this blog's longstanding interest in the cultural politics of peeing on stuff, (not as kinky or gross as it sounds,) I was thinking recently, as i cleaned my apartment and tried to straighten up my cd collection, about songs which employ the trope of urinating on memorials to capitalism and imperialism and racism as an anarchic and liberatory act. Perhaps i have gone off the deep end.

I am thinking specifically about two different moments in Bay Area radicalism. The Dead Kennedys' "Stars and Stripes of Corruption," from 1985's Frankenchrist, acknowledges the phallicity of state warmongering (the title of this post) but nevertheless reads pissing on the Washington Monument as an act which can conjure forth a radically other vision of the patriotic, and indeed, the nation itself. The Coup's "Piss On Your Grave," (from Steal This Album (1999)) explores the histories of racialized slavery, imperialism, and labor exploitation as a counternarrative to a tour of George Washington's grave which culminates in Boots/the narrator "fins ta take a pee pee" on the headstone and a loud trickling noise and panicked tour guide followed by a blitz of flash bulbs a la the Japanese tourists in Ski Patrol, a wry comment, i think, on the possible limits of politics as bodily spectacle.

These tracks are both epic in scope and length - "Stars and Stripes" is over six minutes long and concludes perhaps the Dead Kennedys' most experimental and ambitious record. "Piss on your grave" is nearly as long, a standout track on an album full of them. Pissing, in both, becomes a gesture of a masculinity in revolt, In Biafra, the masculinity may or may not be slightly queered. For Boots Riley this is about black communist masculinity, aggrieved by capitalism's degradation of black womanhood -- " girls work till they back ache and their breasts don't lactate, " for instance, or "That bitch ass on the front of a buck/never gave a fuck/he forced his black women slaves/to give him dick sucks/and when he bust a nut/he'd laugh and cackle/let the leather whip crackle/send 'em back to pick tobacco/shackled." Revolutionary nationalism via the prostrate and wounded black female body, the scene of subjection. For both, pissing is a radical act of refusal, a masculinist rejection of an emasculating social order - for Biafra it initiates and makes possible the claim that the "real patriots" are "those with the guts to work for some real change."

Biafra's song is interesting too for its simultaneous rejection of the masculinist, phallic logics of neoconservative militarist foreign policy and its turn towards queer punk machismo in the same move. Pissing on the Washington Monument is both a reclamation of hijacked national political discourse of freedom, "the people," etc, and visible, and smellable (olfactory?) marking, not only of territory, but of disgust, and of superiority to a debased political culture. But the "standing above" of this rebellion through micturation seems ill equipped to imagine broader social transformations which also call into question masculinity in its more subtle and pernicious forms...

random shuffle:
Jean Grae: "Whatever"
Architecture in Helsinki: "Do The Whirlwind
New Pornographers: "From Blown Speakers"
Guided By Voices: "Striped White Jets"
The (international) Noise Conspiracy: "Will It Ever Be Quiet?"
Camper Van Beethoven: "Epigram #2"
Annakonda: "Wheedle's Grove"
The Clash: "Somebody Got Murdered."
Black Merda - "Over and Over"
The Specials - "Do Nothing"

random shuffle

Mahavishnu Orchestra - "Vital Transformation." I think this was my favorite track on Inner Mounting Flame when i was in high school, though it's been a while and I can't really remember. McLaughlin's great, and the violinist is amazing.

Snooky and the Cosmic Flowers - "Hearing Things." From the Golden State Funk compilation. Good stuff.

Minutemen - "Please Don't Be Gentle With Me."

XTC - "Life Begins at The Hop."

Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway." From the Numero group Belize City Boil Up compilation. There are numerous factually innacurate statements in this song, such as "if you want to have a smoke, you've got to have tobacco." Nevertheless I like this song.

Pere Ubu - "Street Waves."

The Advantage - "Double Dragon 2 (Story and Boss Music)." Crappy video game, good theme music. The sucess of an endeavor like this band demands in a large part on how seriously they take themselves. The more, the better. I don't like irony very much. More on that later, maybe.

Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Happy House.." Great song. Someone should cut a version of De La Soul's "Kicked Out The House" with a beat that samples this song. Or maybe that would be too ironical.

Black Merda - "Good Luck." I discovered this album this summer. It's amazing. Go find a copy.


Camper Van Beethoven - "O Death."

I can't sleep and i'm inexplicably itchy - i think it's an allergic reaction to something. At some point I'll write a post about how Dwight Hall's board, apparently totally disconnected from its activists and student leaders, wants to throw in its endowment with Yale's, which could place the funds of the center for public service and social justice in places like Argentinian shoe factories that don't pay their workers for years, private and abusive U.S. prison corporations, calamitous attempts to privatize natural resources, and oil wars, none of which seem to align well with Dwight Hall's various stated mission. The proposed bone they want to throw concerned parties, to create a separate, socially responsible fund, is really somewhat ridiculous, as if such a move could somehow balance or offset the very real problems inherent in how we know Yale invests its money. Putting a couple thousand bucks in microlending or whatever is nice and all, but it doesn't render any less fucked up the three million that's gobbling up Argentina's telecommunications industry or riding IMF structural adjustment privatization to coal power in Indonesia...

But for the moment I'm lying awake, reading Josh Freeman's Working Class New York, enjoying the schaadenfreude of the Yankees' loss to the indians (thank you, gnats of Lake Eerie,) and marveling at Manny Ramirez's dramatic three run home run in the bottom of the ninth to beat the angels. It takes my mind off the mets a little. Not too much though.

Freeman's book is fascinating. I took it off my exam list at the last second, but i think it needs to go back on now.