“You just don’t fit in.”
Apparently, to soften the blow from being fired from her reality show, contestants on Martha Stewart’s new version of “The Apprentice” will be told, “You just don’t fit in.” Ha! Where have I heard that one before?
Great Live Concert Moments
Former Washington Post music critic David Segal just published the sort of “goodbye to all that” article that gives rock-n-roll nerds like me big ‘ol boners. Segal writers about the Ahab-like quest for “great live concert moments” – moments during a live concert that are so unique and memorable that you realize you are sharing a special intimate moment with the band a few hundred fans (I don’t attend arena concerts as a rule, so it’s never more than a few hundred). So, I’m thinking of some of my own great live concert moments. The first to spring to mind was a 2001 New Years Eve show by the Fleshtones at Handsome Dick Manitoba’s little club on the Lower East Side. The Fleshtones would gladly admit to being a party band, but their party that night was truly cathartic as we bid goodbye to that awful year. We counted down […]
The Soul of Street Art
It’s hard to decide which side is more annoying in the recent furor over subway graffiti, art and New York’s bad old days. On the one side, you have Mark Echo, a former graffiti artist and current clothing designer and mini-mogul. Echo recently held a ‘graffiti party,’ in which a couple dozen artists tagged up a totally fake-looking cardboard facade of a subway car, in a supposed celebration of the street art and hip hop that sprang out of City Hall’s abandonment of black and latino neighborhoods during the fiscal crisis in the 70’s. In reality, Echo is repackaging and commodifying that old youth rebellion in order to relive a bit of his youth and, well, to sell a bunch of clothes and stuff. All youth rebellion eventually gets coopted, but it’s far worse when it is self-inflicted, even if delayed. On the other side is Mayor Mike, and the […]
New Edition of “The Socialist” Magazine
Another season, another publication. I am the “guest editor” of the September-October issue of “The Socialist,” the magazine of the Socialist Party USA. This issue features an essay from David McReynolds defending the “troops out now” position. Barbara Garson takes on Paul Wolfowitz and other free market “true believers” at the World Bank. B. Guise documents the decades-long love affair between ExxonMobil and G.W. Bush. Eric Chester returns to Santo Domingo, forty years after the popular uprising against United States’ domination. And I republish my requim for Si Gerson. There’s more in the pages. The issue will hit the stands in two weeks. You might as well subscribe to the magazine. It’s not like you can count on running into me these days.
The End of Easy Oil
There’s lots of hand-wringing over the totally-surprising rise in gas prices in the press (I mean, who would have ever predicted that rising demand and limited supply would cause price increases?). USA Today unwittingly finds a silver lining: As she folds clothes at a Laundromat near her home in San Pablo, Calif., Thamara Morales, 30, counts up the ways high gas prices have changed her life…Trips to Wal-Mart are out. The closest one is about 15 miles away. Just to get there and back costs more than she might save by going. Yes, this might hurt Wal-Mart. It will also hurt the sales of behemoth SUVs and minivans, and certainly discourages the construction of more pre-fab “exurban” communities. This particular American Way of Life – a two car garage in an enormous shack in a white bread suburb of nowhere in the desert, an hour-long commute to an office park, […]
The Column That Never Was
The column that I was hired to write for a certain Queens weekly has been canceled before the first piece was even published. That piece, a critical look at the fall-out from Congressman Greg Meeks’ support for CAFTA, did not appear in this past Thursday’s issue, although an editorial lavishing praise on the Congressman for his championing of banks over people, was featured rather prominently. I called to find out what happened, and was told the next day that Rep. Meeks had called the newspaper to complain about the previous post that appeared on this blarg. That’s all, she wrote. The managing editor – who hired me – explained over and over that “integrity” is really important to the paper, and that I had really crossed a line by posting the Congressman’s voicemail message to me, without explaining that I had called him first. Of course, I explained that I […]
Meeks and CAFTA: Follow the Money
Gregory Meeks is catching well-deserved heat for his support of the Central American Free Trade Agreement – a NAFTA-style trade deal that narrowly passed in Congress last month. Defeating the bill was the top political objective of organized labor this summer, and Meeks was one of only 15 Democratic congressmen to join with Bush and the Republicans in supporting the bill. Meeks has enjoyed dependable support from labor – over a quarter of all financial contributions to his 2004 re-election came from unions and his name has appeared on the Working Families ballot line for the last three election cycles – but now there are many in the labor movement demanding that he be cut off from any further support. The Working Families party, and many of the city’s labor unions, will be sending mailings to 75,000 union members who live in Meeks’ district, documenting the damage of CAFTA, while […]
The Boss, and the Boss’ Boss: the Strike at British Airways
The wildcat sympathy strike at British Airways is wonderfully inspiring and a real victory for working people around the world. Of course, the mass media is emphasizing the nightmare stories of tourists stuck in traveler’s limbo, and complaining that this isn’t even British Airways’ fault. Like hell, it’s not. Like many modern corporations, British Airways has subcontracted a major department – its in-flight food service – to another company. You come across this all the time, even if you’re not aware of it. If you stay at a hotel, but eat breakfast at its restaurant, that restaurant is probably owned and operated by a separate company. If you purchase a computer and call technical support, you’re probably speaking to an employee of another company – based on another continent. The motivation of the boss is to cut costs and remove extraneous concerns. An airline already has to pay and manage […]
Congressman Meeks on the Defensive
On July 27, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed CAFTA by a vote of 217 to 215, thanks to 15 Democrats who went to the other side and voted with the Bush regime for multinational corporate interests. My representative, Gregory Meeks was one of the “CAFTA 15”. Like any good citizen, I called his office before the vote to express my opposition to the bill. Now that the bill has passed, I have a new card to play. I have recently been hired to write a new bi-weekly column for the Times Ledger newspaper group in Queens (Queens’ largest community newspaper, with over 50,000 paid subscribers). My first article should appear either this Thursday or next and will focus on the fallout from Meeks’ vote. On Sunday, I attended a press conference organized by the Working Families party, and attended by representatives of labor unions in the AFL-CIO and […]
We Should Be Working on the Rail Road, All the Live Long Day
One of the more frustrating tendencies of narrow-minded NIMBYism is the knee-jerk opposition to railroad expansion in Queens and Long Island. Residents in Maspeth are already howling because Congressman Jerrold Nadler has secured 100 million federal dollars for the design of a rail-freight tunnel under the harbor, from Bayonne to Bay Ridge, a project that he has long-championed to rebuild the port of New York and bring back the region’s capacity for shipping and manufacturing. The lack of easy cross-harbor transportation caused many shipyards to close and greatly increased the use of trucks on our streets (and, with them, greatly increased pollution and asthma). The lack of high-speed, high volume shipping hastened the departure of many of Brooklyn’s and Queens’ factories and breweries. Televisions, spark plus, staplers, beer and so much more used to be made in New York and shipped out to the rest of the country, providing hundreds […]