• Beyonce does interview with bleeding feet
• Newest Obama ‘loves to chew on feet’

yesterday was monday.

something is missing…..

So I’m trying to offer a “makeup” post today. Ten tunes. But no comments this time. It’s another swamped week, I’m afraid.

1. Professor Longhair, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.”
2. Todd Rhodes, “Rocket 69.”
3. Lou Ann Barton, “Sugar Coated Love.”
4. Marcia Ball, “Married Life.”
5. Madonna, “Don’t Tell Me.”
6. Asylum Street Spankers, “Beer.”
7. Lyle Lovett, “I Love Everybody.”
8. Cole Porter, “You’re the Top.”
9. Louis Prima, “It’s Good as New (I Painted It Blue).”
10. Dinah Washington, “I Love You, Yes I Do.”

1. Dinah Washington, “No Voot, No Bout.” Innuendo-laden jazz, rather than blues or r&b — though Dinah did plenty of those in her day as well. And did them damned well.
2. Wynonie Harris, “Lovin’ Machine.” Hmm. Looks like it’s going to be one of those MMMs. Harris made a good-sized career of saucy jump blues tunes like this one. “You put a quarter in the slot, things light up, out comes your lovin’ in a Dixie cup.”
3. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Want Your Body.” Today’s randomness is definitely all hot and bothered . . . and growing more so by the minute.
4. Joe Tex, “I Want to Do Everything for You.” One of the more underrated figures of ’60s/’70s soul.
5. Fats Witherspoon, “Hook Line and Sinker.” I’ll be honest. I know next to nothing about this track. I think I found it on a compilation of old r&b sides, and it somehow found its way from there onto the iPod. A yeoman-like effort. It won’t make anyone forget Louis Jordan or Fats Domino . . . but it’s also nothing I’d turn away from if it came up on the radio.
6. Al Green, “Let’s Stay Together,” Is there a sweeter voice in ’70s soul than Al Green’s? I know there are many who can compete, of course. And a few who are undoubtedly his equal. But anyone who can put him to shame? I don’t think so.
7. Drifters, “Try Try Baby.” I’m pretty sure this would be the early Clyde McPhatter version of the Drifters. Not one of their bigger hits, but some vintage early ’50s doo-wop all the same.
8. Tom Waits, “Puttin’ on the Dog.” One of the “Brawlers” from Waits’ Orphans three-disc set. Play an old Howlin’ Wolf record at half-speed, lay a whiskey-soaked mashup of lyrics from various Rufus Thomas and Big Joe Turner tunes on top, and you’ve got this track.
9. Four Tops, “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” Some classic early ’70s Motown — and the last Top Ten hit for the Tops. The little “Shaft”-like bursts of guitar scattered intermittently in the background always make me smile.
10. Adverts, “One Chord Wonders.” And now for something completely different. Nine straight tracks that all live somewhere in (or at least near) the blues/r&b/soul . . . and then straight into ’70s punk DIY nihilism. I think if you listen close enough to the last thirty seconds, you might actually be able to hear Kurt Cobain being born in the midst of the multiple repetitions of “We don’t give a damn.” No, really, you can. Honest.

Better than ever? Maybe not. But at least one friend told me that MMM has become the highlight of her week, and that she’d missed it during its hiatus. That can’t possibly be true, of course. I’m sure MMM is merely the third or fourth best part of anyone’s week — at best — but, wherever it ranks in your personal pantheon, I’ll try not to take it away again anytime soon.

No extended song-by-song commentary this week, I’m afraid.  Classes begin tomorrow and I’ve miles to go before I sleep.  But I will note that the world really needs to be reminded about the Irma Thomas tune above.  Which is not a cover version.  It’s the original.  And vastly superior (IMHO) to the Stones’ cover version (and that isn’t so much a critique of Mick and Keith and Brian as it is high praise for Irma).

I’m teaching two courses this semester. Both of them are filled to capacity, which means that students who want to get into either of those courses either have to hope for a fortuitously timed drop by someone currently in the class, or they need to ask me for a permission number to get added to the roster. Since registration for spring courses began a couple of months ago, I’ve probably had two dozen queries along these lines. Most of which have been pretty straightforward and easy to handle: the student in question sends me an email, asks about one of my two courses by name, and I tell them I’ve added their name to the relevant waitlist.

But I’ve also had at least half a dozen queries by students whose requests to get into my course ignore “little” details like specifying which course they want to join. At least three queries from students who don’t provide me with their full names (’cause, of course, there’s only going to be one Chris or Elizabeth or John who might show up in my classroom (either of them) on Day One). And at least two queries from students expressing a strong and profound interest in taking my course . . . in an email that’s actually addressed to the instructors of three or four different courses that the student in question wants to get into.

No one knows why they do what they do, indeed . . .

PS: How did I forget to include this bit? About 25% of the students who I’ve written back, asking for (a) their full name and/or (b) the course they want to join, have never written me back again. I suppose that’s good. If you have a hard time answering either of those questions, after all, you’re going to have a helluva time with an actual exam or a research paper.

So. Here we go. The next ten shuffled tracks off of my iPod (with side comments, as the situation warrants), no matter what the effect might be on any residual cred I’ve still got. I’ll try to make this a weekly thing. Mondays should be pretty good for me in that regard this semester. It’s a prep day, but a little blogging makes for a good prep break, yes?

1. Jon Rauhouse, “F86.” Rauhouse plays pedal steel guitar for Neko Case — and damned fine pedal steel it is, too. Not sure if there’s any other way I would ever have stumbled across his stuff long enough to bother picking up any of his CDs, and I find them to be hard to listen to straight through in one sitting. Not ’cause they’re bad (they’re not), but because there’s only such much instrumental pedal steel I can take in one dose. But he’s actually great to have come up in shuffle mode every so often.
2. Big Joe Turner, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.” An r&b classic. With some of the dirtiest clean lyrics I know of. “I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store. But I can look at you till you ain’t no child no more.” Bill Haley and the Comets did a lamer, tamer version of this that was a bigger hit. But this is the version to chase down and keep.
3. Nine Inch Nails vs. Spice Girls, “Closer to Wannabe.” One of my fave mashups. Whoever has the idea to put “Closer” and “Wannabe” together has a warped mind and a wicked ear, in all the best ways.
4. Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” I teach courses on pop music just often enough to have a bunch of “classic” rock on my iPod. I probably wouldn’t seek out this track on my own too often these days, but if you have to have a bit of mid-60s folk-rock-pop floating around in your head, this track isn’t such a bad choice.
5. Dr. John & the Lower 911, “Keep on Goin’.” A track from City That Care Forgot, the angry (even if it “ain’t as mad as it coulda been”) post-Katrina CD released by a N’awlins musical legend.
6. Barrel House Annie, “If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It).” Classic dirty blues about the eternal problem of trying to house oversized farm animals. “It may not stretch, it may not tear at all, but you’ll never back that big mule up in my stall.” (Huh? What did you think it was about?)
7. Heatwave, “Grooveline.” What the hell ever happened to this group? Between this track and “Boogie Nights” alone, they produced some of the finest dance-funk of the ’70s. But who knows about them any more? Okay, okay. You knew. But you’ve clearly got taste. But why doesn’t anyone else?
8. Aretha Franklin, “Day Dreamin’.” Courtesy of the very fine, super fine, ultra fine Atlantic Rhythm ‘n’ Blues 1947-1974 box set. I actually bought this set on vinyl, one double-record album at a time, when it was first released. And it was a marvelous introduction to a great swath of music I’d never heard before (the Big Joe Turner track above is on one of the early volumes). And it was high on my “must-upgrade” list when I finally made the switch to CDs.
9. Billy Bragg, “I Keep Faith.” Opening track of Bragg’s most recent album, Mr. Love & Justice. And his show at the Cedar Cultural Center was one of the live musical highlights of 2008 for me. Just him and a guitar and a helluva lot of great energy. At one point, he joked from the stage that we should all become his Facebook friends. Turns out, he wasn’t joking. Go on. Go to Facebook. Search for “Billy Bragg.” Then ask to be his friend. He’ll say Yes.
10. Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA” (live). This isn’t the fist-pumping full-band live version from the 1975-85 live box set. It’s the raw, angry, acoustic version from the NYC live set. The version where I think Bruce finally figured out a way to play the song so that it became impossible to hear as the jingoistic bit of patriotism that many people treated it as for so long. You can hear the crowd try to push him into that spirit a bit here. he sings the chorus, they start cheering madly, as if they’re anticipating the full band will kick in and give them the “Ain’t America the Best” anthem they want . . . but they don’t get it. And it’s better that way.

Damn. I got lucky. Nothing shameful at all in that randomness. Maybe next week.

• Elton John, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”

How bad has this been for me? That whiny harmonica solo and some truly pathetic lyrics (”laughing like children, living like lovers, rolling like thunder, under the covers”) have been stuck in my head for over a week now. I’ve managed to chase Elton away for brief periods of time by seeking out good music . . . but he’s always snuck back in as soon as as I’ve let my guard down again. So I’ve resorted to actively seeking out other, slightly less grating earworms because I feel I have a better chance of purging those from my system . . . or, barring that, I can at least have something bouncy and upbeat lodged deep inside my head for a while.

I know, of course, that there are lots of good reasons why people don’t make it to conferences.  Not enough time.  Not enough money.  Competing obligations.  The simple need/desire to be a homebody for a while, especially when conferences fall during the gap between semesters.  So I don’t really blame my curious but absent friends for not making it to Jamaica.  Still:  You should’ve been there.

I have been struck by the multiple requests for reports — not just friendly “how was the conference?” queries, but an explicit desire for extended details (who was there? who gave good papers? what’s new and hot in the field? etc.) — from friends who would have fit in perfectly, who would’ve enjoyed themselves immensely, and (most tellingly) who have been to enough conferences themselves to know that even the most thorough “report” is no substitute for being there.  The feel of a conference often matters as much as (and probably more than) the actual content of the presented papers, or the roster of attendees, or a rundown of who said what to whom at the hotel bar on the final night.  So I’m not going to try and provide a detailed accounting of the who and the what of the event, ’cause even if I were to feel the muse and be graced with the most eloquent way to capture five days worth of conversations, I still couldn’t do the event justice.  You should’ve been there.

One of the things I most appreciate about the Crossroads conferences — or at least the past two renditions — is the degree to which they take their international-ness very seriously.  To be sure, they’re not some perfectly ideal space of worldly cosmopolitanism: the official language of the conference is still English, and the global South remains under-represented.  At the same time, Crossroads isn’t the sort of “international” conference where most of the usual suspects from the US, Canada, and northern Europe simply gather in a big chain hotel in some different corner of the world for a long weekend and have the same basic conversations with each other that they could/would have had at a conference back home.  For me, Crossroads somehow manages to simultaneously feel both smaller and larger than those sorts of conferences.  It’s smaller, insofar as Crossroads has a much more tight-knit, communal feel to it than a Hilton/Sheraton/Hyatt-style conference.  While it’s still a fairly large gathering, I’ve come away from the past two versions feeling like I’ve shared an experience with several hundred people — and that doesn’t happen at most other conferences I attend.  And it’s larger, insofar as the people you’re sharing that experience with represent a much broader slice of the world than is the norm for “international” conferences.

We do it all again in 2010.  In Hong Kong.

You should be there.

[background here and here and here]

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by George Lipsitz have also purchased Guitar Plan 1 and 2 by Stuart Hall.

. . . until I saw the labels for them, that is. Just when did “original” become another way to say “white”? And shouldn’t people of color get to hide their expressions behind a cardboard frown too?

1. Film #2 [2001: A Space Odyssey -- Bo]
   • Deliberately buried. Huh!
   • I’m afraid I can’t do that.
2. Film #4 [Citizen Kane -- Bo]
   • Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland. He was thrown out of a lot of colleges.
   • I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.
3. Film #7 [Dr. Strangelove -- Bo]
   • I can’t talk to you now. My president needs me!
   • Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
4. Film #9
   • If I’d been a ranch, they would have named me The Bar None.
   • I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something, what do you think?

And, as always, this is for amusement purposes only. No gambling.

1. Pick fifteen of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie. (Or in some cases, just remember them.)
3. Post them for everyone to guess.
4. Strike out each quote when someone guesses it correctly, and append the names of the movie and the guesser.
5. No Googling/using IMDb/Wikiquote search functions. That would be cheatin’.
6. Tag ten people (I upped this from five, since I figure half my taggees won’t cooperate).

I’m tagging Anne, Gaughin, Geoff, Greg, Grrrl on the Bus, Jonathan, Mark, Mel, TAFKAB, Ted, and Timothy. [Yes, I know that's not ten. But these go to eleven. And that quote's too easy to actually use below.]

And I found I couldn’t stop at fifteen either. You can see why I gave up on that mathematics degree, eh?

1. Cute? Baby ducks are cute. I hate cute! [Bull Durham -- Timothy]
2. Deliberately buried. Huh!
3. Extra cheese is two dollars. [Do the Right Thing -- Ted]
4. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland. He was thrown out of a lot of colleges.
5. He was my boyfriend! [Young Frankenstein -- Greg]
6. How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss? [The Usual Suspects -- Ursa @ Socialism for Gunslingers]
7. I can’t talk to you now. My president needs me!
8. I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school. [Fight Club -- Ursa @ Socialism for Gunslingers]
9. If I’d been a ranch, they would have named me The Bar None.
10. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. [The Third Man -- Timothy]
11. It’s only a model. [Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- Greg]
12. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool. [Sunset Boulevard -- Jake]
    
13. Traffic was a bitch. [The Player -- Greg]
14. We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones. [Stardust Memories -- Timothy]
15. We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder. And I was thinking about that anklet. [Double Indemnity -- Greg]
16. You’d think that wiping out an entire race of people would calm ‘em down. But no. Instead, they started getting frightened of each other. [Bowling for Columbine -- Greg]
17. You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us. [Casablanca -- Timothy]

Update: For the sake of legibility, I opted to underline correctly identified quotes, rather than strike them out.

What made this particular memory trigger so . . . surreal? (I’m not sure what the right word is here, so that’ll have to do for now) . . . was that it happened with Mom in the passenger seat.  Which wasn’t awkward because sharing tales of teenage drug use with one’s mother isn’t exactly an easy thing to do (though maybe there was a shred of that) as much as it was awkward because Mom’s got some serious memory issues of her own these days.

So while I’m experiencing a surfeit of memories from 20+ years ago, Mom’s having trouble remembering some pretty basic facts about her own life . . . and trouble remembering conversations that happened mere moments ago.  Twice during that same car ride, she asked me how old I was.  ‘Cause she couldn’t remember the answer to that question on her own — and ’cause she couldn’t remember that she’d asked the question a mere twenty minutes after I’d answered it the first time.

Perhaps there is some sort of odd “conservation of memory” principle at work here, but the juxtaposition of my mini-flood of memories with Mom’s increasingly “gappy” memory has made for a bit of a push-me/pull-you feel to my trip so far.  I don’t think this is quite what they mean when they say you can never go home again . . . but maybe it should be.

Today , I received a phone call from City Chiropractors.  The woman on the other end of the line asked for me by name.  She said that I’d been involved in an accident yesterday and wanted to know if I needed their services.  I said (in effect), “What the fuck?”

As far as I can tell, the best explanation so far (if we want to assume that Minneapolis’ Finest aren’t getting kickbacks from selling information to local businesses, anyway) is that the officer of record on the scene ran my license plate number in the course of filing his/her report . . . and then mentioned me by name in said report.  Which meant that my name showed up in the public record of the accident . . . and that trolling lawyers and chiropractors could then call me at home the next day to see if I wanted to avail myself of their services.

So I wind up taking a long, hot soak in the tub.  It doesn’t cure my ailing back completely, but it’s relaxing and it feels good.  I stand up to get out of the tub . . . and my body does that woozy-dizzy-headrush thing that happens when you get up too fast.  So I lean against the wall for a moment and I kneel down again to help clear my head.  Which works.  Until I stand up again, that is, when the headrush thing comes back.

Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

The third or fourth time this happens, I realize that I’m also feeling nauseous.  And I have an internal debate with myself about whether it’s better to try and fight this feeling off, or if it’ll be restorative to give in to it and get it out of the way.  My body, however, decides it doesn’t need to wait for the conclusion of this debate.  So I find myself briefly enjoying the pleasures of the dry heaves.  In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense.  I’d had about four hours of non-contiguous sleep the night before.  I hadn’t eaten anything all day.  I’d just given my body a major change of temperature by climbing out of a steamy hot bath.  All a lovely recipe for a moment or three of woozy purging.

The geeky bit?  The first thing I thought of when I realized that I might be getting ready to pray at the porcelain temple was that this could be a useful way to “reboot my system.”

Anywho . . . it has been a long time since I blogged properly.  Sorry to come back with a stomach-churning post.  Better things to come soon, I hope.

I would like to say that I’m surprised by President Bruininks’ comments about the AFSCME strike in today’s Daily. That, however, would imply that I expected him to say something that demonstrated honorable leadership — and that, as a result, I was caught off guard by his failure to do so. Given the administration’s generally hamfisted handling of the strike, however, I wasn’t at all surprised to find Bruininks dishing out more platitudes and propaganda. Disappointed, yes. But not at all surprised.

Bruininks claims that his childhood in a union household taught him that “no one, absolutely no one, wins when you have a strike.” But if he’d really learned that lesson, he’d have given AFSCME the same deal he gave the Teamsters. Not “something close” or “essentially a comparable proposal,” but the very same deal. It’s what AFSCME was asking for, it amounted to a ridiculously tiny sliver of the University’s overall budget, and it would have prevented the strike from ever happening. Presumably, Bruininks chose to offer AFSCME less than the Teamsters — and then to hold firm to that offer, even after the strike was called — because he thought that a strike wouldn’t hurt his administration badly enough to make it worth his while to avert it.

Bruininks’ description of the administration’s offer to AFSCME “essentially a comparable proposal” to the Teamsters deal is a fine display of propagandistic “weasel words.” It sounds well and good to say these are “comparable” offers, but all that really means is that it’s possible to put them side by side and consider their similarities: not that they’re actually equivalent to one another — much less that such a comparison would demonstrate a rough equivalence between them. By the same token, it’s possible for me to compare “President Bruininks” to “a weasel,” but the mere fact that I can do so doesn’t actually mean that Bruininks is a devious, thieving vermin — much less that such a comparison is fair to the weasel.

Bruininks also speaks compassionately about “reach[ing] out to our employees to see if we can heal whatever wounds are out there.” But he wasn’t interested in showing any such compassion or generosity when AFSCME workers asked for a living wage: he offered them a substandard deal and then refused to budge. He wasn’t interested in healing any wounds when faculty, students, and staff told him — over and over again — that his failure to settle the strike was hurting the University: he simply sent a few form letters to a tiny fraction of the University community who expressed such concerns, and then dismissed the rest of those dissenting voices as “noise.” And his definition of “reaching out” appears to be limited to “asking for money,” since the only outreach from the administration I’ve heard of has involved calls from the Alumni Association asking recent graduates — who also happen to be AFSCME workers, freshly back in the office after the end of the strike — if they’d chip in to help pay for the new football stadium.

Bruininks can put all the PR spin he wants to on the strike and its aftermath, but it’s going to take more than spin to “heal whatever wounds are out there.” If Bruininks really wants to do that, he needs to start by actually giving AFSCME the contract they asked for. Having failed to do that in the first place, however, now he will also have to work overtime to rebuild the good will — throughout the University community — that he’s so carelessly tossed away. He thinks that there “might be” some “lingering negativity” about the strike. The fact that he’s unsure about that shows that he simply hasn’t been paying very close attention. I’m sure there are people who weren’t bothered at all by the strike — and even people who would applaud the administration’s actions — but there are a lot of us who are still seething about the whole thing. I think most of us would be delighted to see Bruininks make a genuine and sincere effort to repair the damage he’s done to the community. But he’s certainly got his work cut out for him.

This year, however, the CFD will need to succeed without any financial contribution from me. This year, I have already elected to “continue [the University's] historic commitment to service and outreach” (to use President Bruininks’ words) by contributing to the AFSCME strike fund. I find it ironic — no, strike that. (And I do mean “strike that.”) I find it appalling and hypocritical that President Bruininks can attach a message to the CFD brochure expressing his desire for faculty and staff to “join [him] in this great tradition and contribute what [we] can” to “the needs of the state and its citizens” when he has so callously turned his back on the legitimate needs of the AFSCME workers who are such a vital part of the University community. The brochure works very hard to explain how much good can come from even a minimal contribution — a mere $3 per pay period can apparently do a great deal for the people of Minnesota — and I have no doubt that these claims are sincere and accurate. But it is nothing less than galling for President Bruininks to ask faculty and staff (and most especially staff) to embrace a spirit of generosity that he is clearly unwilling to apply to his own management of the University: less than 0.1% of the University’s budget, after all, could have been reallocated in ways that would have averted the AFSCME strike completely.

When President Bruininks can “walk the walk” of giving generously to the community in ways that match his ability to “talk the talk,” I will happily consider giving to the CFD once again. In the meantime, however, my financial generosity will continue to go towards the AFSCME strike fund. After all, if I’m going to donate a portion of my paycheck to the community — and I’m happy to do so — I’d prefer to share the wealth with people who clearly understand what the word “community” really means. And the University administration’s behavior these past few weeks is a clear indication that too many people in Morrill Hall simply don’t have a clue.

Anywho . . . last Monday’s post never happened because Monday Night Football demanded my attention.  My team (who shall remain nameless here, seeing as how they have the most heinous and offensive nickname in all of professional sports) was playing, and when one lives 1100 miles away from one’s team’s homebase (and the guarantee of weekly TV opportunities), one doesn’t let a MNF appearance by one’s team slide by.  The blog, I’m afraid, suffered as a result.  But I did come away from the experience knowing, for the first time in my life, someone I could turn to should I ever want to place a bet with a bookie.  Not to mention a bar where “buying” shots for the bartender seems to mean that you and he and half the staff all drink for free.  So it wasn’t a total loss.

Less pretty — and something closer to a total loss (at least to this point) — is the AFSCME strike at the U, which officially ended last Friday . . . but only because the striking workers couldn’t afford to stay away from steady (if still inadequate) paychecks as long as the administration could afford to hold out.  There’s much more to say here, but I’m still feeling far too angry about it all to get it down cleanly.

1. Today, I wound up having lunch at the Dinkydome after my morning teaching. Which meant that the most convenient route for me to take to the strike location for my afternoon graduate seminar [sorry, no link yet, since the syllabus is still in flux] took me across the 10th Avenue Bridge . . . which gave me my first up-close, in-person look at the wreckage of the I-35W Bridge . . . which, even more than a month later, is a mind-blowing sight to behold. I’m not even going to try to capture in words what it feels like to see that much twisted steel and buckled concrete in one place — if you can count the full expanse of the Mississippi River plus several hundred feet on each bank as “one place” — since words won’t do it justice. But it makes it even harder for me to imagine what it would have felt like to be on the 10th Avenue Bridge precisely when the bridge right next to it crumpled without warning. Nikki didn’t have to imagine such a thing (though I’m sure she wishes that things were otherwise), since she was there.
2. My graduate seminar — which happens to include Nikki — looks like as strong and promising a group as any I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching. And I’ve taught my fair share of stellar groups of students. Saying something like this in public, of course, will undoubtedly inspire some former student to wonder what was wrong with the cohort they were in when I taught some previous seminar. So let me assure any such folks, here and now, that any shortfalls in their cohort were someone else’s fault entirely. If nothing else, the occasional weak links in my graduate seminars — they’ve been rare, but the ones that I’ve had have tended to be pretty memorable in their weakness — are probably not folks who’re keeping tabs on my blog.
3. The ongoing saga of the AFSCME strike at the U. continues to be . . . well . . . ongoing. If there are active negotiations underway again between the administration and the union, neither side is saying so publicly. So folks like Nikki — who’s also one of the striking workers — will apparently be walking the picket lines for the foreseeable future. And I’ll be teaching my graduate seminar off campus for as long as the strike lasts.

So I dedicated a chunk of my Labor Day to writing the following letter to University President Bob Bruininks:

It’s the start of a new school year and — in all sorts of ways — the campus looks gorgeous. I’m especially impressed by the flowerbeds around the Mall area. Two weeks ago, they were nothing special. Today, they’re filled with brightly colored blooms. Minnesota has extraordinarily fertile soil, but I know those flowers didn’t suddenly blossom overnight. They were purchased and planted to make the campus look extra beautiful at a moment when students and parents could be suitably impressed. World class universities don’t look like sandlots. They’re scenic and picturesque.

At the other end of campus, where the old remote parking lots are being torn up to make way for the new football stadium, things may not look quite as pretty as those flowerbeds, but I know that this is growth that the University points to with pride. The temporary ugliness of bulldozers and cranes will give way to a sparkling new facility that will benefit the University community for decades to come. World class universities don’t limit themselves to short-term planning. They think big and they plan for the future.

Last spring, in what was widely hailed as a major coup, the University lured Tubby Smith away from Kentucky to coach the men’s basketball team. Big name coaches like Smith don’t walk away from big time programs for peanuts. Reportedly, his new contract earns him more than $2 million per year. World class universities don’t pinch pennies. They know that a high quality product often costs more, and they’re willing to pay for it.

This summer, some of the University’s lowest paid — but most vital — workers entered into a fresh round of contract negotiations with the University. They asked for a pay raise that would allow their incomes to keep pace with inflation. Reportedly, the gap between what the workers requested and what the administration offered amounts to a bit more than $2 million per year. World class universities don’t pinch pennies . . .

If the University of Minnesota genuinely wants to be one of the top three public research universities in the world, it can not pinch pennies when it comes to paying the people who are essential to making every department, every office, every unit on campus function. It needs to recognize that a high quality product often costs more — and it needs to be willing to pay for it. The University can find a way to pay for new flowers every August that will be gone by mid-September. The University can find a way to pay for a multimillion dollar stadium that will sit empty more days of the year than not. The University can find a way to pay a single coach enough money to resolve the current labor dispute. So why can’t the University find a way to give 3500 valued workers a wage increase that will let them keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads?

I recognize that, ideally, the University shouldn’t have to choose between flowers and football stadiums, coaches and clerical workers. There should be room for a world class university to have all those things — and more. I recognize as well that the University does not simply mint fresh money in the basement of Morrill Hall, and that there are often more demands — legitimate demands — on the University’s budget than it can adequately meet. Faced with the need to make tough choices, however, a world class university does not abandon the people who keep the machinery of the university running. It takes care of them first.

I like the fresh flowers very much. But I’d gladly forgo them — this year and every year — in favor of keeping knowledgeable, efficient staff members working at the University. Faculty can do our jobs perfectly well whether there’s a stadium on campus or not, whether the basketball coach is a Big Name or not. But we can’t do our jobs well without the colleagues who are currently asking for nothing more than the ability to keep pace with the rising cost of living.

I urge you to bring a fair and equitable offer back to the bargaining table — and to do so sooner, rather than later — so that the current labor dispute can be settled and so that we can all go back to the task of making the Minnesota the world class university we all believe it can be.

Sincerely,
Gilbert B. Rodman
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies

It’s an especially curious — and disturbing — story, given that today is the two year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. The “murder board” story isn’t a breaking story or time sensitive news, after all. And, barring the appearance of a fast-breaking bit of news, CNN could just as easily have devoted their lead spot to an anniversary piece: “Katrina: Two Years Later” or “Rebuilding the Big Easy” or some such. It’s a pretty safe bet that when the six year anniversary of 9/11 rolls around in two weeks, CNN (and much of the rest of the mainstream media) will quite happily run such anniversary pieces. Stories with sentimental titles like “We Will Never Forget” or “The Day Everything Changed” or “Where Were You When . . .” There will be plenty of patriotic flag-waving. And New York will almost certainly not be the target of “blame the victim” reporting.

Of course, the “problem” with journalism that would remember Katrina in the same fashion that 9/11 has been (and will be) is that such reports would need to acknowledge that, two years later, large swaths of New Orleans are still in shambles. That the federal government completely failed — in both the short and the long term — to respond effectively to the first massive disaster to strike the US in the post-9/11 era. That thousands of people displaced by the storm and the flood still can’t go home again.

And heaven forbid that CNN should point fingers at the government for failing to serve the public during a major catastrophe.

1. A few folks have inquired about the long-promised but not-yet-delivered intellectual property tale. And I’d love to say that this has reached a point of resolution that would allow me to share it here. But, alas, the denouement that was afoot in April got postponed . . . and has since been deferred . . . and may still be a few weeks away from achieving sufficient closure to go public with the tale. But I haven’t forgotten. Promise. (Truly curious parties can always contact me off-blog for further details.)
2. I keep meaning to write a more detailed post about the Cultural Studies Now conference — even though Ted Striphas has already proclaimed that my previous tease of a post fulfilled that duty. There’s more to say than that, I think, but it’s been a hectic month since London, and the fast approaching semester only adds to the frenzy. But this story, too, will be shared.
3. The latest entry in my personal lifelong struggle with institutional “check one box only” approaches to racial identification came last week, when the University noted that it did not have a formal race/ethnicity code connected to my personnel file . . . and asked me to fill out this form. I was particularly amused by the last two lines:
   

   The University may acquire this information by visual survey. This may, however, result in the collection of erroneous information.

   I have fantasies of the University sending teams of ethnographers — all trained in the subtle art of “visual survey” with respect to racial identification — into the field to suss out the “truth” about folks such as myself who “fail” to shoehorn ourselves into a single box. And I want to be a fly on the wall for the deliberations that result from different team members deciding that different visual cues are the key to answering the question “correctly.” “Sure, his skin’s pink enough,” someone will say, “but those aren’t a white man’s lips.”

Sometime over the past week, I did actually manage to HTMLify my presentation from the conference, but let me save a more detailed report on the event as a whole for a later post. For now, I’m still processing the bridge collapse. So far, at least, no one from my circle of friends and colleagues and acquaintances was on/under the bridge at the crucial moment yesterday . . . but given the where and when of the situation, it’s still perfectly plausible that someone I know wasn’t so lucky, and I simply don’t know it yet. The bridge is — was — right next to campus, and I-35W is the major north-south highway running through Minneapolis. I didn’t use that bridge every day, but it also wouldn’t have been unusual for me to have done so: I crossed it at least twice last week, walked by it on two other occasions, and was more or less right around the corner a mere hour before it fell.

For me, though, I think the biggest chunk of my “there but for the grace of Elvis” reaction to yesterday’s tragedy is the fact that Minneapolis is very much a river-straddling city. Unlike, say, St. Louis or Memphis, where the river marks the line between the city and the suburbs (and not always the most desirable of suburbs either) and one can plausibly spend years living and working in the area without ever needing to cross a bridge, here the river pretty much runs through the heart of things. I’m sure there must be people in town whose lives are such that they rarely have to cross the river, but I suspect they’re the exception, rather than the rule. There are six or seven different bridges across the Mississippi that I might use on any given day for any number of reasons, and I can easily need to cross the river a dozen times (or more) every week. I’m not exactly worried about crossing those bridges again — the odds that a bridge that’s stood for decades will crumble at precisely the moment you’re on it are still pretty damned small — but I’m also mindful of the fact that I could very easily have been on the I-35W bridge at the wrong time yesterday . . . or that those long odds might’ve kicked in during any of the other bridge-crossing moments that routinely happen.

Dear Gil Rodman,

We loved your blog, thank you for the great content! I would like to give you an iPod Shuffle gift in exchange for a link to our [sitename] site on your site navigation panel.

[sitename] ([siteURL]) is a free [site descriptor] research tool for students and educators covering over 20,000 [site descriptor]. Please add our link using the anchor text “[sitename]” and I will send you your iPod certificate. For more information on iPod Shuffle, please visit http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/ – you just need to select your preferred color :)

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

[name]
PR Coordinator
[sitename]
[siteURL]

What was particularly amusing about this request is that the site in question is completely unrelated to any topic I’ve posted about over the past year and change. The site in question doesn’t sell imported auto parts, but it would make about as much sense for me to link to this site if, in fact, that was its focus. I’m assuming that the same request was sent to thousands of bloggers pretty much at random — and I suspect that the iPod Shuffle offer isn’t what it’s cracked up to be either. Anyone else out there get hit up with something like this?

• Our insurance company knows that we’re not married. At least not to each other. In spite of the fact that the friendly agent we dealt with asked about our marital status so that he could process the policy accurately, the final paperwork showed up . . . and Margaret was listed as “Mrs.” More curious, though, is that her last name remained the same, so she’s evidently now married — by an astonishing coincidence — to some other member of the Werry clan.
• Margaret handled most of the calls for fresh utility accounts on the new place, since all but one of the utility accounts on the old place are in her name — and her name only. When she called the gas company and gave them the new address, though, she found that she’d already been “disappeared”: when the previous owners of the new house made arrangements to close their account, the gas company automatically put the new owner’s name into their system. And, though both Margaret and I would have shown up on any formal records of the then-still-pending transaction, the gas account for the new house was already set up solely in my name. Perhaps the gas company figured I was so enraged by Margaret marrying someone else that they assumed I’d already kicked her out.
• As we were signing up for thirty years of debt yesterday (and so I am no longer unencumbered), we hit the part of the paperwork where the government asks for racial/ethnic identifiers so that it can (ostensibly) make sure that fair housing laws aren’t being violated. And though no one at any point prior to this had asked either of us to self-identify along these lines, we were both listed as “White.” And only “White.” As I added the other relevant X’s to this form, I said something about how this new (to them) information had better not do anything to mess up the deal.* To her credit, the closing agent sounded genuinely horrified and disturbed at the very thought that such a thing could happen to anyone.

Meanwhile, the house remains lovely. But evidently, I’m now a single white male. And Margaret has been lucky enough to find a new husband who already had her last name. I do hope she’s happy. Maybe the gas company can tell me where she and Mr. Werry are now living.

*In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, Patricia J. Williams writes about a real estate transaction coming to a screaming halt the moment she corrected the same mistake on her paperwork.

• Billy Joel, “An Innocent Man”
• Foreigner, “Double Vision”

These are the two abysmal excuses for songs that have been stuck in my head for the past 72 hours or so. To make matters worse, as far as I can tell, they’ve appeared there completely of their own accord. There were no wayward encounters courtesy of the grocery store PA system. No drive-by musical shootings from a passing car radio tuned to some classic rock station. No forthcoming “blast from the past” concert announcements that might have reminded me that such dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

No, the ultimate unfairness in all this is that these Elvis-forsaken bits of dreck have apparently come to besiege me from deep inside the recesses of my own brain.

There are only two ways known to humanity to rid oneself of earworms such as these:

1. Finding a good “head cleaner”: i.e., a tune with enough oomph to drive the offending ditties away, and with enough staying power to keep the demons from coming back. The downside, of course, is that you’re simply replacing one earworm with another — but, done well, the new demon is much better to live with for a few days.
2. Passing the infection on to new hosts. Which, my dear friends (or former dear friends, as the case may be), is what I’ve just done to you.

Baby’s First Spivak
see the happy people. we call them “altern”

see the sad people. we call them “subaltern”

see the altern speak. hear the altern speak.

see the subaltern … no. no, you don’t.

the end.

Baby’s First Gramsci
karl was right. but karl was wrong.
let me tell you how in song.
rich men rule. rich men bad.
rich men make the poor real sad.
karl thinks poor are fooled by rich
who turn poor’s minds off like a switch.
i think poor are pretty smart.
rich don’t rule their minds — they steal the heart.
poor can still defeat the rich
but it’s not easy — life’s a bitch.
poor folks minds are full of doubt
but strength of will should see them out!

Baby’s First Said
once upon a time, there was a happy land called “the west.” only the people from the west didn’t know they were part of “the west.” they thought they were the whole world.

then one day, some people from the west met some people from “the east.” and the people from the west realized that they weren’t the whole world anymore.

but the people from the west liked to think that they were the whole world. so they pretended that the people from the east were weak and lazy. and so they sent soldiers with guns to kill the people from the east and steal their gold. and they told lies about the east that made the people from the west believe that all this was fair and good and right.

eventually, the people from the west forgot that the stories they were telling about the east were lies. but they couldn’t stop telling those stories because those stories made it possible for them to still believe that the west was the whole world.

and they all lived unhappily ever after.

I never got around to Baby’s First Deleuze, but maybe now I need to do so . . .

–waitasec. Nevermind. This is, after all, an ad for silicone breast implants.

Even better, though, is the that the site linked above gives you the chance to click through for a larger version of the same image . . . that turns out to be the same size as the original image. Which doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in what the product will do to enhance one’s . . . intelligence.

[Tip o' the linking hat to Stay Free!.]

Today, I find myself on the verge of having a(nother) comparable story of my own to tell . . . but I’m holding off on sharing the full details here until there’s a clearer resolution to the current problem. One way or another, there is a cautionary tale to be told here. The only remaining question is whether that tale has a happy ending or not.

Right.

It’s snowing today. For the second time since that balmy March Monday. And we haven’t seen the sunny side of 50 in more than a week. This does not make me happy.

The pictures don’t quite do it justice . . .

. . . if only because they don’t necessarily capture . . .

. . . the openness of the space very well . . .

. . . but Margaret and I are on the verge of a crosstown move to a new home.

Right before Margaret left for six weeks of New Zealand summer, we saw two films in a row that included a comic scene where a family corpse was moved from one place to another. In both cases, the scene in question wasn’t something either of us would have predicted about the movie when we entered the theater.

Since Margaret’s return from the Land of Relentless Scenic Beauty, we’ve seen two films in a row that ended with a crying baby being transported through a raging battle. What’s more, in both cases, the battle in question involved a guerilla uprising against a fascist state. And, again, this wasn’t necessarily something one could necessarily have guessed in advance.

So now we’re wondering what quirky theme we’re in for next. Movies where people mistakenly eat the family pet? Movies where the hero(ine)’s big secret if revealed in the backseat of a parked car? Movies where Perry Como records figure prominently in the soundtrack?

Just came home from seeing The Departed at the glorious second-run theatre around the corner. And it was, in all sorts of ways, classic Scorsese: it’s not a film for folks who flinch at a little blood (’cause there’s more than just a little to be found here), but it’s sharp and engaging and taut . . . and it’s tough to make a 151-minute film seem taut.

Still, as I walked home from the theatre, I found myself wondering about the film’s opening moments, which feature footage of white-vs.-black violence from the Boston busing furor of the 1970s, with a voiceover from Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello:

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying — we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a fucking job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this — no one gives it to you. You have to take it.

And then, after that, except for one brief line (also in the opening few minutes) from Matt Damon’s character, blackness effectively disappears from the movie as a subject of any significance. There are no scenes where Boston’s Irish mob tangles with crosstown black crime bosses, no visible racial tensions involving the movie’s lone black police officer, no further utterances of the N-word from Costello (or anyone else): for the last 145 minutes or so of the film, it’s simply a white man’s world, and no one else really matters much.

Which, to my mind, makes that opening speech and the accompanying footage all the more disturbing. Maybe the idea was to convince us that Costello is a cold-hearted bastard — except that Costello is also clearly supposed to be (and is) charming and charismatic (while still being a brutal crimelord) . . . and there are enough early scenes of Costello behaving like a violent badass to render any opening “tough guy” speech unnecessary to establish his credentials as such. So those initial words and images feel much more gratuitous than anything else: an excuse to have the biggest star in the movie drop the N-bomb and accuse black folks of being lazy, and to recirculate old images of rocks being thrown at (presumably) “lazy” black schoolchildren. And then, having done that, we can sweep all the blackness that’s just been invoked back under the rug and get on with the “real” business of watching six white men (Baldwin and Damon and DiCaprio and Nicholson and Sheen and Wahlberg) rack up an impressive body count to determine which of them is the real Alpha Male of All Boston.

It’s possible, of course, that this happened long ago and no one bothered to tell me. But tonight, one of the students in my other class — the class that I failed to mention in my post on the Science Museum of Minnesota’s exhibit on race — revealed that she had been poking around the department’s website … and, in so doing, stumbled across these wayward scribblings of mine.

It would be easy — too easy — for me to respond to this particular moment of discovery (and the apparent sense of surprise that accompanied it) in stereotypical fashion: i.e., to affect a wry sense of superiority and comment on the putative naivete of students who fail to realize that their professors have lives off campus that include all sorts of things that “ordinary” people do. Grocery shopping. Happy hours. Movies. Blogging.

Much as there’s some truth in such a response — it is always amusing to watch the visible shock on some students’ faces when they encounter me pushing a shopping cart by the cheese counter at the local supermarket — it would also be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that this sword can (and often does) cut both ways. That I sometimes get caught with that surprised look when I run into a student of mine at a “faculty” bar (as if one has to show a suitably endowed c.v. to get in the door?) or at the pet supply store (as if students don’t need to buy dog kibble too?).

So I’ll own up to having been caught off guard by my student’s revelation. Not upset, mind you. And, as noted above, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all, especially since I’ve often blogged (or, in some cases, deliberately not blogged) with one eye on the possibility that my words might someday wind up in front of my students. But there was also a part of me that was genuinely unprepared for the reality that at least some of my undergrads would eventually — inevitably — find these words.

And it’s probably good for me to have that bubble burst from time to time. I like to think that I’m good at remembering that “my” students are adults in their own right, and that if I were to encounter most of them for the first time in any number of other contexts, we’d all just be “ordinary” people to each other. But it’s also awfully easy to get caught up in the “us vs. them” mentality that permeates so much of the student/teacher discourse — even for those of us who don’t want to embrace such an adversarial way of framing that relationship.

So a tip of the proverbial hat to the newest reader of this humble blog (even if she never reads it again) for the helpful reminder of the gap between my own ideals and what actually goes on inside my head sometimes.

What’s amazing to me, though, is that I’m still getting such messages at all. Officially, my USF appointment ended in early May 2006, and I assumed that my two USF e-mail accounts would get closed out not too long after that. I figured there’d be a relatively brief delay — maybe a month — while my change of status trickled through the University’s bureaucracy and tripped all the appropriate Off switches. And even though I knew from personal experience that said bureaucracy is dense enough that light bends around it, I also knew that the USF administration is awfully persnickety about what faculty can and can’t do using University resources — and figured that the latter would trump the former when it came to things like closing off access to USF computers.

Guess I was wrong. Nearly nine months after the official end of my employment there, both my old USF e-mail accounts are still fully operational. Most of what comes into these accounts these days is spam . . . but I do receive a few wayward e-mails every week where the sender believes that I’m still the Director of Graduate Studies for my old department: a title I relinquished way back in 2004. A more mischievous soul could probably wreak all sorts of low level havoc with this. The stakes, however, simply aren’t worth the effort, especially since the people who’d probably wind up having to clean up after any such mischief are people I still like.

And, if my visit to the Science Museum of Minnesota’s new exhibit on race is any indication, it’ll be a long, long time before we get to a place in this country where we can routinely have sane conversations about race. That’s not a knock on the exhibit, mind you, which is very smartly done (though I’ll admit that I’d have been happier if Ward Connerly hadn’t been accorded even the minor “expert” commentator role he was given in a couple of places), but some of the visitor feedback — of both the live and the recorded variety — was unsettling.

The section of the exhibit on racialized sports mascots, for instance, included an album of visitor comments . . . that was all the more disturbing because I suspect the curators filter out some of the more heinous responses they’ve received. The comments from pre-teen children were all very sweet in their open-minded desire to treat other people with respect and kindness, but they weren’t enough to offset the multiple comments from (alleged) adults about “whining” Native Americans who should “get over it already” and stop complaining about team names like “Redskins.”

I also watched the female half of a twentysomething white couple interact with a computerized questionnaire that attempts to assess people’s beliefs about the connections between national and racial identities. Asked to decide which of about two dozen nationalities were “white” or “non-white,” she confidently decided that Britons and Canadians were white, but every other nation on the list was non-white. And she did so at a speed that suggested she didn’t even bother to need to read the list: if she didn’t recognize the name of a nation right away, she didn’t even bother with the “not sure” option — she just pressed the “non-white” button and moved on. Even granting that the questionnaire is set up so as to encourage such sloppy thinking — I’m not sure there’s a nation on the list that can safely be said to be mono-racial, either by its own standards or by those currently in play in the US — the ease with which this woman divided the world up into “people like me” and “people not like me” was frightening. After she was done, she turned to her date/boyfriend/husband and (in a complete misreading what of the screen was actually telling her) proudly proclaimed that she’d “gotten them all right.”

It’s possible, of course, that I was simply caught off guard because the students in my “Media, Race, and Identity” course this semester have been surprisingly game when it comes to these sorts of issues. Not perfect — by any means — but I don’t think too many of us (myself included) have perfect conversations about race and racism: it’s way too fraught a terrain for that to be the rule. But they’ve been an impressively earnest and open-minded group — all the more so given that we’re only two weeks into the semester. And I can’t recall ever teaching these issues in the past without there being at least a small (but vocal) undercurrent of self-interested resistance to the conversation somewhere in the group. I’ve got my fingers crossed (though I should probably know better) that the rest of the semester will run so smoothly.