- They Can’t Drive These Cars Themselves (9/5/2007) - Is the NYC cabdriver strike successful? It's hard for me to say. The only time that I spend in Manhattan these days is a few minutes underground, switching from the Long Island Rail Road to New Jersey Transit on my way to Rutgers. The Taxi Workers Alliance, which called the strike over a city mandate that yellow cabs install credit card machines and GPS systems, claims that 80% of the city's cab drivers stayed home.… …
- The Human Being Inside Bill Foster (9/4/2007) - Still poring through Si Gerson's books, I'm having fun playing labor historian, although I'm not sure who's benefiting (a young comrade in another forum complained, "this post seems like a big name drop...I don't really need to read the words of dead men to know how I think society ought to be structured."). I came across a fascinating observation about William Z. Foster in Nat Hentoff's lamentably brief biography of A.J. Muste. Muste is best… …
- Wisdom in Old Books (9/3/2007) - Shortly after writing about Sophie Gerson's passing a few weeks ago, I was contacted by her grand-daughter Frieda and daughter Deborah. They're cleaning out the family house in Bensonhurst and thought I might be interested in some of Si Gerson's books. Would I! Si had a voluminous book collection on topics like socialism, the labor movement, election law and policy and New York City politics that stretched back decades. There was an impressive diversity to… …
- Every Five Years Or So (9/1/2007) - Like some strange comet that irregularly circles our solar system, two great bands graced our record stores with the rare appearance of new records. The Mekons are perhaps my favorite band. I've written about them extensively here and in other places. An original summer of '77 punk band - contemporaries of the Gang of Four - our comrades from Leeds released a string of good-on-paper singles and LPs, broke up, reunited to play benefit concerts… …
- In Defense of the Blond Beauty Queen (8/28/2007) - Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, seems to be the internet joke of the week for her rambling, incoherent response to the token political question lobbed at contestants in this weekend's beauty pageant. The blond beauty queen was asked to account for why, according to "recent polls," one-fifth of Americans can't locate their country on a world map. For the sake of posterity, here is the transcript of her response, which I had already… …
- Watching the Detectives (8/26/2007) - I want to be Philip Marlowe. Or maybe Nick Charles. My favorite kinds of movies are film noir, particularly the hard-boiled detective genre. I love the interplay of shadows and light in black and white. I love the cynical worldview, the disdain for scruples, morals and basic decency. I love that the characters drink rye and gin, smoke Chesterfields, wear fedoras and ties, consult the phone directory for research and do any number of other… …
- Remembering Sophie Gerson (8/14/2007) - I learned today from a comrade that Sophie Gerson passed away on March 20, 2006 at the age of 96. Sophie was a lifelong Communist activist whose own work was overshadowed by her husband, Simon W. Gerson, the writer, champion of proportional democracy and shoulda been City Councilman from Brooklyn. At Si's memorial a year earlier, speaker after speaker (including yours truly) paid tribute to his illustrious career as a public Communist and lightning rod… …
- Ga Ga for the Last Next Big Thing (7/14/2007) - In 1976, Lester Bangs greeted the Rolling Stones minor album Black and Blue with a sense ironic relief. "They really don't matter or stand for anything, " he wrote, "which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!" Slightly less witheringly (but only just so), The Onion's Noel Murray writes of Spoon's latest… …
- Portrait of a Charming Man (7/1/2007) - It's hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I'm not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he's a high elder of the Mormon church, he's just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so… …
- Back In the Line (6/17/2007) - At first blush, Thursday's story in the Times Metro section that disgraced former Central Labor Labor Council President Brian McLaughlin has returned to work as a rank and file electrician has a certain poetry to it. McLaughlin is charged with stealing from the New York State legislature where he served as an Assemblyman, from his own re-election campaign, from his home local in the Electrician's union, from the Central Labor Council and, most ignominiously, from… …