more youtube procrastination

(Marlena Shaw, "Woman of the Ghetto")

(Phyllis Dillon's version of the same song, which I grew up with via an old Heartbeat/Studio One comp i bought when I was fifteen.)

(Ken Boothe and Stranger Cole, "Arte Bella."

(Prince Buster, "Shaking Up Orange Street.")

ack

Last night i realized that word was counting footnotes in the word count, and I dropped from 7,000-something to 5300, which is scary, because it means i hadn't gotten as much done as I thought I had, but also potentially helpful because it means I still have a lot of space to expand and add in the next 29 or so hours. Oy.

more cool stuff from youtube.

Some Roots-era Mayfield...


Mary Timony Band's "Sharpshooter" (2007)

And finally,

serendipity.

In the process of trying in vain to track down an old article from the Yale student publication The New Journal on the 13 latino replacement workers who joined the September 2003 picket lines, I came across a scholarly article on the '84 strike that I'd never heard of before - Pushkala Prasad's "Organizing Culture in a Union," from the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 1991. I guess the reason I hadn't come across the article before is that it's disciplinary sociology, which is not where I'd locate my own research methods, and it came out significantly later than most of the scholarly literature on the strike, from Herbert Janick's "Yale Blue" to Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Women Workers and the Yale Strike" and Linda Anderson''s article in Fronteirs to On Strike For Respect. By 1991, GESO had already struck once.

But Prasad's article's pretty interesting. There's a discussion of tensions between HERE officials and strikers over whether singing on the picket line removes focus from the economic issues, which is fascinating. And the early 90s social constructivism approach does interesting work to resolve some of the questions Josh Eidelson raised in an excellent term paper he wrote about the strike a million years ago and was nice enough to share with me when I was doing some research on the clerical worker labor movement shortly less than a million years ago.

Back to work.

The LA Times has a story today on UCLA's hospital, which, the story suggests, may be giving liver transplants to members of Japanese organized crime syndicates in exchange for large donations. There's much in this that's disturbing, not the least of which is the orientalist frame in which the reporter casts his subjects - "ruthless," etc. (Goto as Togo?) and the undercurrent of economic nationalism which is present in the story and explodes into fullblown white racism at times during the comments.

Not that I think the university and the state get off the hook for this. When millions have no health care coverage, even if the donations are being put to good use, there's no defending a system which allows those with money to receive care and leaves the fates of those without money to chance (and a slim one at that.) None of whihc is to argue that the technologies of medical knowledge are always a good or progressive thing or that forms of care are not themselves implicated in the logics of power and the strategies of managing populations we take to be normal.
(I have no idea who did this or what they were trying to do, but i recognize the text - it's the last few sentences of Hardt and Negri's Empire.)

The first time i heard this song (at a party on a mix a friend had made) it totally shocked me. It's one of the wierdest Philly soul songs i've heard - though i'm no expert.

Anyway if you're unfamiliar with the Three Degrees, who were one of the more well known girl groups of the 70's, this video should help somewhat:

In which it has been good to know you (for the most part)

I didn't get as much done today as I'd like, but did manage to wrap my brain around Clyde Barrow's arguments in Universities and The Capitalist State, which is a rather interesting book. I'm not yet completely stir crazy from not having interacted with another human being for more than the few seconds it takes to ring up a cash register (excepting picking up my exam question tuesday evening,) and my brother's frequent Mets related text messages help prolong the inevitable, even when he's informing me of Aaron Heilman's latest collapse (for which the media will no doubt blame Carlos Delgado's postcolonial antipatriotism) rather than ,oh, I don't know, Oliver Perez pitching a perfect game or something similarly implausible.

I have a sinking feeling my examiners are not going to like the way I've organized my exam, that I have considerable surgery to perform. I have the time to do so if I must, i suppose.