Keep Your Riches, Give Me a Bonus Track!
Finally getting their due after a generation and a half of younger bands cashed in on their legacy, the Replacements are in the midst of the rock-n-roll equivalent of a Presidential exploratory committee for a reunion tour. First came Jim Walsh’s adoring biography, and now the Mats’ early funny records get the deluxe treatment from Rhino records, re-mastered and fleshed out with bonus tracks. The Replacements’ later years on a major label were marked by disappointment, as each effort to turn their next record into a “Great Rock Statement” missed the mark, making the out-takes and B-sides an essential part of the band’s narrative. Their indie years, on the other hand, were marked by a constant maturation and growth that culminated in as perfect a record as any band has ever committed to modified petroleum product, 1984’s “Let It Be.” Consequently, the bonus tracks are the usual mix of covers […]
Blame It On the Solo Career
Ever since “Satellite Rides” failed to make them stars and lead singer Rhett Miller cut loose for a middling solo career, the Old 97s have reunited every four years to record a mellow studio album. Their latest, “Blame It On Gravity,” seems slight and easily dismissible, but so did their last long-player, “Drag It Up,” which turned out to be a real sleeper and is probably the Old 97s record that I listen to the most. As can be expected from a band with multiple songwriters and a moonlighting lead singer, the sidemen deliver some of the best material here. In particular, bassist Murray Hammond, always one to take a star turn here and there, turns in a pair of crooning country ballads (Pick Hit: “The Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue”) that serve to remind that the 97’s started out as the band that just might save country […]
Toward Social Justice
One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there. Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” […]
Questions Over Union Neutrality
SEIU’s been facing an increasing amount of scrutiny from the press and from the left lately for its unconventional approach to bargaining to organize. This has been prompted in large part by the California Nurses Association’s controversial decision to intervene in a carefully negotiated and long-planned “neutrality” organizing campaign by SEIU in Ohio, and SEIU’s shockingly violent response at the 2008 Labor Notes conference. In the midst of this controversy, the Wall Street Journal reports details of some of these “secret organizing deals.” The website requires subscription, so I’ve posted relevant quotes below: Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize. The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it […]
Christ May Be King, But At Least He Spares Us Monarchistic Thinking
Teachers at ten New York City schools went on strike Friday over the high cost of health care, but their union was not sued, their president not imprisoned and their members not fined two days of pay for every day out on the picket line. What gives? The teachers in question work at Catholic schools in the archdiocese of New York so their union is not subject to the same draconian law that would apply to the city’s public school teachers. Is their strike not a “disruption” in the lives of the parents who enroll their children there? Do Catholic school-kids not rely on the structure and safety of the classroom as much as public school kids? Of course not. The simple truth is that while Catholic school teachers might arguably have to answer to a higher law, only public school teachers have to report to a Boss that makes […]
A Cut-Out Bin Classic: “Self Abused” by S*M*A*S*H*
In the rock-n-roll hype that followed “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the UK had a brief “scene” that failed to take off. Dubbed the “new wave of the new wave,” it was compared to the summer of 1977 (although, doesn’t the N.M.E. compare everything to the Sex Pistols?) and lasted even shorter. The most prominent of the groups, S*M*A*S*H*, failed to make an impact when their only long player, “Self Abused,” landed on these shores. It can’t quite be called a cut out classic, because there probably weren’t copies pressed to put ’em in the clearance bins. This was a pretty hard record to find in 1994, and I’m lucky to still have my copy. S*M*A*S*H* was a tight power trio, with a hard rock sound, a heavy bottom and lots of great hooks, and oddly fascinating lyrics that leave you genuinely unsure if front-man E. Borrie was a dope of […]
Take a Break, Client 9
Born under a lame duck, for most of my living memory we’ve had only two governors in New York. Twelve years of Democrat Mario Cuomo and twelve years of Republican George Pataki. Now, in the blink of an eye, we just burned through another one. I’m not shedding any tears for Client 9, but I am somewhat dumbfounded that he was felled so quickly by something so…trivial. At Monday’s Labor Research Association awards dinner, NYS Labor Commissioner Patricia Smith stood in for the governor-in-hiding and delivered a pretty convincing defense of his administration’s record. Hundreds of times more wage and hours claims against deadbeat employers than the previous administration. Hundreds of times more health and safety cases investigated than the previous administration. And, yes, he gave over 50,000 early childhood educators the right to organize into unions. Excepting that last one, what is really exceptional about that record? Have politics […]
This Message Is Very Plain: I h8 ur txt msg
Writing in the Sunday Times, Megan Hustad laments the cultural decline of “the office phone call.” People prefer to use e-mail for petty confrontations and negotiations, and valuable diplomatic skills are lost and new employees lose the informal training that comes with eavesdropping on the boss. In my new fancy-pants position with my union, I’ve noticed that my phone calls to people at headquarters frequently go to voicemail, and that the responses come back via Blackberry. This seems to be a weekend for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over the technological devolution of our social interactions. Elsewhere in the Times, Laura Holson notices that these kids today sure do like to send text messages, creating some kind of generation gap. Apparently. Meanwhile on livejournal (itself, a weird barrier to normal social interaction) a friend of mine protests the suddenly rigid tradition of getting into and out of relationships on Myspace, complete with […]
A Second Shot at Reptilian Fascism
It seems I chose a bizarre time to rediscover “V,” my favorite TV show from childhood about an alien invasion of Earth that served as a Holocaust parable. In a Penn Station book store on Friday, I noticed that familiar spray-painted “V” on the cover of a book called “V: The Second Generation.” Date of first publication: February 2008. The salesman who rang me up was as surprised as me to see it. “This used to be a TV show, didn’t it?” The book is written by Kenneth Johnson, who created the initial 1983 miniseries but left before NBC made a mockery out of its sequels. Johnson writes the book as a straight up sequel to the original miniseries, taking place 25 years after the events in the original. In Johnson’s timeline, the Visitors have made good on their promise of sharing their scientific advances with mankind. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s […]
Fascist Reptiles and Other Cautionary Tales
How well does childhood memory of favorite teevee shows hold up? Judging by the maddening 80’s nostalgia currently in vogue, I would wager not well. I mean, “He Man” and “Jem” were pretty stupid as far as kids shows go. They’re simply painful to sit through as an adult. As a kid, my favorite “adult” show was “V,” an occasional miniseries turned shortly-lived regular series about the human resistance against an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. What my five-year-old self enjoyed about the show was the rough-and-tumble adventuring antics of the resistance fighters, the “vshboo, vshboo” sound of the aliens’ laser guns and the frequent reveal that under the aliens’ human masks were lizard skins. An exciting action-adventure serial with no redeeming qualities, or so I recalled. Revisiting the series on DVD, I was surprised to find that the original 1983 miniseries was a taut, sophisticated Nazi allegory. In a montage […]