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We Memoir Econo

Michael Azerrad’s excellent collection of 13 micro-biogrophies of beloved 80’s indie bands is a love letter to the era when pop culture began to fragment into mini-mass media of fanzines, underground rock clubs and vanity record labels. Cribbed from a Minutemen lyrics, Azerrad’s book, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” fleshes out the notion of gaining inspiration, principles and encouragement by the songs from some obscure band that your parents and most of your classmates never heard of.

Teh internets have exacerbated this tendency towards fragmentation. It is regrettable, to some extent, that there can never be another Beatles to saunter across (the equivalent of) Ed Sullivan’s stage and capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation in two and a half minutes. But it is perhaps better to have the Replacements, whose music feels more personal due to their underdog cult status, and whose “Let it Be” far outshines the sorry first record to share that name (made famous by its teevee and film pedigree).

Focused on the SST record label, Azerrad’s book has a clear narrative guiding it, despite its scattered vignette structure. It starts with Southern California’s Black Flag, who spearheaded not just America’s hardcore punk scene, but a network of record labels and concert venues (VFW halls, people’s basements and the occasional Actual Night Club), and follows the story as labelmates The Minutemen and Husker Du push against hardcore’s rigid boundaries, while east coast contemporaries Minor Threat aided in rigidly defining hardcore’s boundaries before leaving the scene behind.

Ian McKaye’s musical progress away from hardcore’s stifling “loud fast rules” while strictly adhering to a non-conformist independence from Corporate America, mass media and liquor provides “Your Band” with its most compelling narrative, as well as its most trenchant observation, courtesy of McKaye’s Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto:

“PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, YOUR PARENTS HAVE TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS THEY CAN TAKE, YOU’VE HAD THE 70’S, YOU HAD HEAVY METAL – GET WITH IT, IT’S OVER WITH, WAKE UP. KIDS ARE LIVING RE-RUNS, THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AND THEIR MINDS GET CLOSED TIGHTER AND TIGHTER, IT’S SUCH A WASTE.”

I missed hardcore, so 80’s indie was all about the Replacements for me (and REM, but they’re not indie enough for Azerrad). Other acts feted by Azerrad (such as Big Black and the Butthole Surfers) were familiar to me by reputation, but no one had made such a compelling case to purchase “Hairway to Steven” or “Songs About Fucking” until this book. Perhaps these bands, too, could be my life.

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Good Write-Up in the Nerd Press

I rarely write directly about work on this blarg, but some of this year’s big adventures got a nice write-up from Beryl Benderly at Science Magazine. Relevant excerpts follows:

On 20 July, the postdocs at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, received official recognition for their new union. It’s the nation’s third postdoc union, but the first to be part of the same union as their lab chiefs.

After a swift and successful signature-collecting campaign, the 350 postdocs on the university’s three campuses became a bargaining unit of the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Chapters. Affiliated with both AAUP, the professional society for college and university teachers, and AFT, a national labor union within AFL/CIO, this hybrid group represents all of Rutgers’s faculty members, research associates, and graduate student employees. A sister union under the all-university AFT umbrella represents the administrative staff.

[snip]

It was, in fact, a drive several years ago to solidify the position of campus administrators by bringing them into the union that first sparked interest in organizing the postdocs. As organizers spoke with “administrators, some of whom were in the laboratories, we would encounter postdocs very frequently,” recalls Shaun Richman, an AFT national representative. “We had all these anecdotes of postdocs sort of sauntering up to us and saying, ‘Hey, can we get into this whole union thing?’ “

Then, “earlier this year, Rutgers AFT representatives [began] asking around to postdocs about their particular conditions and their interest in unionizing,” says postdoc Alan Wan, who was “heavily involved” in the drive. “Obviously, since the faculty and the graduate students–the members of the community that we interact with on a daily basis–are in the union,” many postdocs also became interested, he continues.

A major part of the union’s organizing strategy was having a group of postdocs committed to the cause talk to other postdocs “to hear their stories [and] make the case,” Wan says. “If we had a conversation with someone and they were really positive, we tried to get them involved,” Richman adds. A second strategic step was talking with PIs, because “the postdocs are essentially the employees of the faculty, who are our union members,” Richman continues. “We knew we had to have conversations with some leaders of that community. … There [were] fears. For a principal investigator, I think the gut reaction is … ‘This is going to break the grant. We can’t afford it. We’re not going to get renewed.’ “

But [AAUP-AFT past President Lisa] Klein, who discussed the union with fellow PIs, reports encountering no serious opposition. “Some jokingly said, ‘So I can’t abuse them anymore?’ ” she recalls. “There was no reluctance on the part of these PIs. They did want to see that the postdocs were treated as member of the community.”

The talking campaign was done quietly, “one-on-one, usually colleague-to-colleague,” Richman says. “There was no Web site, … no leaflets.” Once the organizers “knew we were in a position that we could get a majority of the postdocs to agree,” Wan continues, “we officially started the card campaign” right after Memorial Day. The talking took several months, but the official campaign to collect signatures took under 2 weeks. State law makes unionization automatic if more than half of a work group give their signed consent, just as in California. “Two-thirds of all the postdocs signed,” Wan says.

More here.

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Not Enough To Count

I’m coming up on a year in Bay Ridge, which perhaps makes me a “regular.” It’s enough time, apparently, to make friends with the Chinese merchants on 4th Avenue, who seem to really want me to be Jewish. I suppose having Jews around is good business for dry cleaners and Chinese take-out.

I made it to Win Hing last night, just before closing time, to order some sesame chicken. The woman behind the counter, who always wears a pink Yankees cap and speaks very broken English, noted the lateness of my arrival and asked “Working late?” As the food was being prepared, and she started the closing-time clean-up ritual, she asked me for pointers on her English, which must indicate some form of familiarity.

“Is that how you say? ‘Can you sit there?'” “I would say,” I said to her, “‘Would you sit there?’ It would seem more polite. Besides, ‘can you sit?’ could mean, ‘Are you able to?'” She clarified, “Ah, like are you cripple?”

“Exactly.” Finally, she asked, simply, “Are you Jewish?” It’s probably the hat that I always wear, I guess to myself. “Ah, kinda.” “People always say this thing,” she said, “Kinda. What does this mean? Kinda.”

“Uh, it means, ‘not enough to count.'”

At the dry cleaners today, the female proprietor is surprised to see me midday. “Are you on vacation?,” she asks. Yeah, I took a day off to take care of my dry cleaning and other errands. Because I’m cool like that. This cleaner has a very computerized, talking cash register that greets customers with a bubbly “Welcome back!” It’s probably marketed to self-conscious immigrants. The woman behind the counter, however, notes my name on the computer-printed receipt. “Rich,” she says with a pause, “man. Are you…Jewish people?” “Uh,” I hesitate, “not enough to count.”

“I used to live on Kings Highway,” she explains. “All Jewish people there. Names all end with ‘man.’ Fried Man. Gold Man. I see Rich Man, so I ask.” I explain my heritage, for some reason, “Well, my father was Jewish. But he converted.” She smiles and nods at this answer. “Bye,” she says, as I walk out, “Have a nice day!” while the bubbly computer chirps, “Have a nice day!”

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Alas Poor Busky. I Knew Him, Facebook.

It’s been previously noted the unnatural oddness that is leaving behind a virtual representation of oneself on the myface. As this shit gets more mainstream, the awkwardness gets more familiar and yet more surreal. In the Times, Adam Cohen writes of a friend’s Facebook profile becoming a sort of living shrine to a dead-too-soon friend. At least it served that function to those who friended him up while he was still alive, and until his surviving family chooses to pull the plug on the profile. But what of those who die unloved, unmourned, unfriended?

I recently threw in the towel and joined Facebook, the creepy, creepy improvement on Friendster and MySpace. Immediately, the computer intelligence starts recommending friends I should connect with. How does this bloody thing know the names of girls that I went on one or two dates with three or four years ago? And why does this blasted thing want me to be friends with Don Busky? Busky died late last year, and in life we were something closer to enemies than friends.

He was always an odd fellow, more noted for his reclusiveness than his actual politics or personality. As an ambitious young turk, I quickly butted heads with the guy in an attempt to recruit eager new recruits to charter a more active Philadelphia local of the Socialist Party and overthrow an innocent savant who was more interested in publishing silly little zines with a socialist bent. Shortly after I showed up for work in the party’s national office, as a teenage socialist in 1996, my buddy Clement Joseph started cracking jokes about the disembodied brain in a jar that was Donald F. Busky. My only interactions with the comrade were a fairly acrimonious e-mail exchange over his failure to properly represent the party (or, indeed, turn up to a single meeting) in the “Unity 2000” rally planning. His last message to me (and every party member for whom he could find an email address) was addressed, simply, “Cde. Richman owes some apologies.” I met him a few months later at a YPSL convention near Rittenhouse Square in 2001. We spoke not a word, but it was the first time I had been in his physical presence. The brain in a jar was a large man, shy and soft-spoken. He was a devoted Mac user, a labor buff and adjunct professor. We might have been friends if we hadn’t started as enemies. It was a sad loss, but C’est la vie. I soon left the party, and didn’t hear about Busky again until Gabe Ross passed on the unfortunate news about his death last December.

The next time I saw Cde. Busky’s name was on an open public records access request for the list of adjunct faculty at a community college down in southern New Jersey, where I’m helping the part-timers form a union. Prof. Donald F. Busky gets to be a voter in their union election, except that he couldn’t possibly vote “Union Yes” (as he surely would have) because he is No Longer Employed. Still, it was a kick in the guts to see his name on that OPRA list, just as it is a kick in the guts to see him recommended as a friend on Facebook whenever I log in, and to see his name and home address on a mailing label for a mailing we worked on last Friday for the union campaign.

I don’t think his elderly mother (if she’s still alive), or any other surviving relative knows enough to get Cde. Busky’s Facebook profile retired. Therefore, he will continue to haunt me. Perhaps I’ll learn to be a better comrade to those who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil.