The whole of May 6th was marked by demonstrations which turned into riots in the afternoon. The first barricades were thrown up at the Place Maubert and defended for three hours. At the same time fights with the police were breaking out at the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, at the Place du Châtelet, and in Les Halles. By the early evening the demonstrators numbered more than ten thousand and were mainly holding the area around the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they had been reinforced only after 6p.m. by the bulk of the march organized by the UNEF at Denfert-Rochereau. On May 8th Le Monde wrote:

What followed surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened throughout an already astonishing day. It was a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken. . . There were dramatic and senseless moments which, for the observer, seemed rife with madness.

And on May 7th L'Aurore noted: "Alongside the demonstrators could be seen bands of young hoods (blousons noirs) armed with steel bars, who had come in from the outlying areas of Paris to help out the students." The fighting lasted until after midnight, especially at Montparnasse.

For the first time cars were overturned and set afire, paving stones were dug up for the barricades, and stores were looted. The use of subversive slogans, which had begun at Nanterre, had now spread to several parts of Paris. Insofar as the rioters were able to strengthen the barricades, and thus their own capacity for counterattack, the police were forced to abandon direct charges for a position strategy which relied mainly on offensive grenades and tear gas.

May 6th also marked the first intervention of workers, blousons noirs, the unemployed and high school students who that morning had organized important demonstrations. The spontaneity and violence of the riots stood in vivid contrast to the platitudes put forth by their academic initiators as goals and slogans. The very fact that the blousons noirs had fought in the streets shouting "The Sorbonne to the students!" marked an end to an entire era.

Tags: collage, history, nostalgia, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704

For much my time in Tucson my nighttime companion has been our cat Thing Two. Recently, a neighborhood tomcat started coming around, with disastrous effects on Two's already addled brain. Even though Two was neutered at the proper time, he apparently retained enough male something or other to have it activated by the intrusion. He started spraying to mark his territory. And we spent the last two months engaged in a desperate attempt at behavior modification that showed promise at first but ultimately proved to be a failure.

Now Thing Two has officially become an "outdoor cat." Whether the scare quotes will persist is unclear. I have my doubts whether he will prove savvy enough to survive long in the wilderness he has long been eager to explore. Still, it was better to give him that chance than to consign him to an animal shelter where placing him in a new home would have been extremely difficult. He was happy this morning playing tiger in the weeds. I, however, am not happy at the prospect of spending my nights without his company. It's hard not identify with his plight. And it's even harder to have my sense of isolation so viscerally confirmed.

Tags: everyday, nostalgia, pets
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, humor, nostalgia, photography, travel
Current Location: 85712

When I watch college basketball from the 1970s or early 1980s, the absence of the shot clock is the most prominent feature of the game -- as opposed to the fashion -- and that of the three-point line a close second. I think most observers would agree with me. But I'm also struck by the innocence of its televisual presentation:

It's striking how little effort is made to create drama through interruption of the game's flow. The concluding seconds of this 1976 NCAA tournament contest are a great example. It goes by so quickly, before the gravity of the situation even has time to register. As college basketball became a big-money sport, the length of time needed to complete a game increased even as the use of the shot clock was said to speed up play. I suppose that seeming paradox would make a good place to commence an ideological analysis of the sport's transformation. Sports that the majority of the American public -- or at least the corporate types who speak for that public -- deems boring to watch, such as soccer, are sports in which the divergence between game time and real time is smaller.

That college basketball turned from a sport in which twenty minutes took thirty minutes to play into a sport in which twenty minutes takes forty-five minutes to play speaks volumes about the role television has played in its development. As a side note, its interesting to see the changes in broadcasting between this 1976 tourney contest and the famous 1979 final between Michigan State and Indiana, where, although the feel of the game itself had changed little, the announcers had definitely learned to hype it more effectively, for better or worse.

Tags: media, nostalgia, sports
Current Location: 85704

I don't normally post entries with photographs that one of me LJ friends has already shared. But in this case I have to make an exception. The fact that I spent several hours yesterday discussing life and politics with an articulate American soldier who explained, in detail, the injuries he suffered in Iraq already had me feeling the burden of history with special force. Seeing this remarkable photo tonight pushed me over the edge:

That's me on the right, one of my oldest and best friends -- and the person who inspired me to start blogging here -- cpratt in the middle, at his graduation from UC Berkeley back in May, 1992, and his then-partner Mark Bingham on the left, someone who I always got along famously with and with whom I would love to share my frustration at the officiating, not to mention bad luck, that plagued tonight's contest at Maples Pavilion. Mark was as true a Bear of the Cal variety as you could ever hope to find, someone who made me swell with pride for my alma mater even in defeat. Here's hoping that there are plenty of stupid tree mascots for you to defile in the next life, Mark. You deserve it.

Tags: archive, autobiography, bay area, friends, history, nostalgia, photography
Current Location: 85704
Muse: the Cal fight song in quarter time

Inspired by the "archive fever" of the redoubtable flw, I'm debuting a new feature today. It parallels one I recently revived after a long hiatus. Both represent an attempt to rethink the aesthetics of the fragment, with both Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel and Walter Benjamin in mind. Everything I post under this tag will be presented as it was originally written, without any editing for content. And none of it will have been made public before appearing here:

Last week I was talking to my best friend about music and mentioned that I was surprised at the excitement generated by Bob Dylan's new album Modern Times. "It's terrible," he said. Although this report wasn't exactly unexpected -- nothing I'd read about it suggested that it was up his alley -- it's vehemence caught me off guard. I wasn't sure what to say. I knew I didn't want to back myself into a rhetorical corner by agreeing implicitly to a critical assessment for which I had no evidence of my own to draw upon. But, as often happens when I'm in conversations about matters of taste, I also didn't want to introduce unnecessary tension into the conversation, particularly since it what was turning out to be an extremely refreshing interlude within a week of enervating stress. So I hedged.

"Although I probably won't like it that much, I'm sure I'll like it better than you," I told him. Then I proceeded to give my take on Dylan's much-discussed renaissance of the past decade-plus. "I didn't like Love and Theft as much as Time Out of Mind. But I liked World Gone Wrong better than either. I like that he was just covering other people's songs in that one." My friend and I then went on to discuss other moments in Dylan's career, including the relative low point of the 1980s. "I liked Infidels," my friend confided, praising its harshness. I reiterated my weakness for sentimental Americana of the sort that inspires Greil Marcus to wax hyperbolic and made it clear that I knew my friend, whose childhood included stints in Israel and Europe, did not share this particular taste preference.

Eventually, the conversation turned to other matters including, rather curiously, the punk-metal band The Melvins, about which I may be writing in a future issue of the magazine. But the portion devoted to Dylan stuck with me through the remainder of the week. Thursday my daughter and I dropped my wife off at the airport at 5:45am and then made our way to Starbucks to read and relax before it was time for her school to start. At various junctures in her still youthful youth -- she will soon turn eight -- we have played her Bob Dylan songs, both in cover versions and on the Greatest Hits collection that confines itself largely to his pre-motorcycle crash incarnations. At first she liked "Blowin' in the Wind," which she knew from a Peter, Paul and Mary album, and "Mr. Tambourine Man" best.

When I put the CD in the car last month, though, needing a change from our recent driving-to-school staples, The Carpenters' Greatest Hits, Cabaret, and Carole King's Tapestry, I was surprised to perceive how her taste for Dylan had broadened. This time the songs she wanted to hear repeatedly were "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Like a Rolling Stone," to which she joined her mother and I in several rousing sing-a-longs that were rich with deeper significance for her parents, because she was finding her way in a lyrical landscape that played an important part in her mother's teenage years and, as a consequence, her father's investment in the song. The timing of Dylan's new album was therefore ideal from my perspective as someone who cares deeply about his daughter's cultural education. I told her about the record and promised that we would buy it when it came out.

As it turned out, it took me longer than I'd expected. I had too many other things to do to go to the places where it would be less than $16.95. When we arrived at Starbucks a little after 6am on Thursday and the record was displayed right by the register, I decided that I might as well buy it there. Clearly, I wasn't the only one who made that impulse purchase, since Modern Times debuted at #1 on the Billboard Charts, the first Dylan record in thirty years to do so. Then again, the new Rolling Stones was displayed just as prominently at Starbucks last fall and didn't do as well, so there must be more to the resurgence in Dylan's commerical success than good product placement.

One thing I've been able to notice, as someone who teaches literature and film to English majors, is that a surprising number of literarily inclined twenty-somethings in the post-9/11 era have a thing for Bob Dylan that can't reduced to a general interest in "Classic Rock" or the 1960s. Obviously, a lot of the reason why Dylan's record is doing so well has to do with all the Baby Boomers and againg Gen-Xers who felt obligated to buy it, whether for themselves or as something to share with their children. But I'd warrant that more people in the pre-settled-down stage of life have purchased Modern Times than someone out of touch with college-age students would have expected.

At any rate, as soon as we began the drive up the hill to my daughter's school, I put the album on for us to hear. She seemed to like it, although she was taken aback by how different the Dylan of the 2000s sounds than the Dylan of the 1960s. I, however, was immediately hooked. I have a deeply ingrained tendency to want to redeem cultural offerings that others reject out of hand, so my friend's "It's terrible" may have inspired me, paradoxically, to listen with a more open mind than usual. But as my desire to hear Modern Times has persisted over the weekend and as, more importantly, the songs on it have repeatedly surfaced as a mental soundtrack when I'm not listening to it, I've had to acknowledge that my taste for it goes deeper than any contrarian impulse. That weakness for sentimental Americana is also to blame. Strangely, though, the album's 1950s-era rock stylings have been striking me, not as nostalgic, but fresh and forward-looking.

Much has been made of Dylan name-checking Alicia Keys on Modern Times' first track, with most commentators seeing it as a sign that he isn't willing to curl up inside a music universe shut off from the contemporary scene. And that seems like a good reading. What I've found, though, is that the record's strangely novel lack of musical novelty is more important than any specific up-to-dateness of Dylan's lyrics. It's like he and his collaborators found the way to reveal the roots in the rock tradition without making the music sound retro. The last song, "Ain't Talkin'," even resembles a mid-70s Fleetwood Mac tune at times, but without feeling in any way derivative.

To me, that is. As my conversation with my friend who found the record "terrible" indicates, there is no guarantee that other listeners will join me in this assessment of Modern Times. Even though it doesn't seem to be a period piece to my ears, I do think that an affection for sentimental Americana may be a pre-requisite for genuine pleasure. More than that, though, I believe that it won't be possible for someone to embrace the album the way I have unless she or he is in a mood to hear gentle love songs. Although there's still plenty of irony in both Dylan's words and delivery, Modern Times is ultimately a collection of love songs in both a literal sense -- the second song "Spirit in the Water" is almost like a late Louis Armstrong song in its unabashed cuteness -- and a metaphoric sense -- the music romances the tradition that it invokes.

Maybe the reason that the record doesn't sound retro to me is that it the songs never lose this sense of an addressee. If there is mimicry here, it is mimicry in the service of continuing the conversation, the way you say, "Yes," to a friend even though you might rather say, "No," just because you want to keep talking. In other words, I'm suggesting that Modern Times manages to avoid the sheen of nostalgia by never forgetting that the music it refers to requires wooing. Without that persistent sense of dialogue, Modern Times might as well have been sung in Latin.

I still hear that record in my head all the time. For whatever reason, it penetrated my intellectual defenses and reached that place in my mind where feeling comes first. I do think that it's an excellent and, now that the initial hype has faded, underrated album. But my relation to it traces a detour around any attempt at passing objective judgment on it.

When I conjure Modern Times now, I keep picturing the orange end cap I used for my now-deceased iPod Shuffle, the one that was frozen in time for over a year with a playlist from the summer of 2006: The Silver Jews and Sparklehorse's last offerings, Band of Horses and Bloc Party's debut albums, and the Danielson LP I kept skipping through because it got on my nerves. As much great music as I had on that playlist, however, it's Modern Times I associate with the device, because for some inexplicable reason it would always start playing in the middle of that record. This is how I came to realize that I loved it, for I would almost always listen to several songs before painstakingly seeking out the album I wanted to hear.

I ended up writing a review for Tikkun in which I turned this fragment inside out, focusing most of my attention on the Melvins, who are mentioned in passing here, but using the example of Bob Dylan to prove my central point: "The success of Bob Dylan’s Modern Times testifies not to the renewed vitality of the traditional music industry, but to the fact that there will never be another Bob Dylan." As I sit here contemplating Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, the Dylan-inspired deconstruction of the biopic genre, I'm moved to second my own motion. But I'll also add that there will never be another iPod Shuffle like my malfunctioning one with the orange end cap.

Tags: autobiography, fragment, music, nostalgia, theory
Current Location: 85721

From: "Charles L. Bertsch" <cbertsch@uclink.berkeley.edu>
Sender: cbertsch@uclink.berkeley.edu
To: badsubjects@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: Authority: a long, but not frivolous post

While coming back from a long, uphill hike in the desert-like heat on Mt.
Diablo (S.F. Bay Area) with my friend yesterday, I shared elements of the
recent debate on this list about _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ and
authority and we had a good conversation about it all.

One interesting thing my friend said was that STTNG is a very soothing,
comforting show to watch, but that there seemed to lurk something menacing
beneath the surface calm. She likened the experience to one she has working
with Yuppies (a favorite target of hers--she means people of the 35-45
year-old range who hold managerial/executive positions in her
service-industry company), who present a very therapeutic, concerned facade
on the level of superficial interpersonal communication, but who often act
in ways that contradict that facade. Her point was that these 'Yuppies'
shared with Picard a tendency to act autocratically in the end, but with a
therapeutic--if not happy--face.

I invoked Joe Sartelle's point about the need for a Utopian model of
"structure without domination", of good leadership. My friend replied that
though she is one of those people who, largely because of bad experiences
with parents and others in power over her, always chafes under authority,
she thinks that there is "something about the species" (the human one) that
demands hierarchy and leadership and that she could see the value of good
role models for leadership, but added that she still had problems with _Star
Trek_ and constructed an argument about what _Star Trek_ leaves out and/or
represses much like Richard Singer's well-thought-out and thought-provoking
negative/demystificatory reading of STTNG.

I had been planning to make a post about my own negative experiences of
people in power over me and others who act as if they aren't because they
shun hierarchical models of domination, so my friend's likening of STTNG's
main cast to Yuppie managers got me thinking. See, at UC-Berkeley there are
a lot of professors in the 30/35-45 year-old range, especially male ones,
who disavow their authority in the graduate-school classroom while still
retaining it in practice. In the service of a post-60's democratic
classroom, they tend not to speak from the position of authority very
often. Instead, they let most of the course be taken up by students oral
reports. The idea, I suppose, is that students will learn more by teaching
each other in a non-hierarchical setting than they would by being lectured
to. Sometimes this turns out to be the case. In my experience, however, what
usually ends up happening is that students become hyper-competitive in their
oral reports in order to impress the prof who really does, as they well
know, still have the power to make or break students with grades,
evaluations, recommendations, and gossip with other professors. Many profs,
on the other hand, seem to feel threatened by their own disavowal of
authority, by the fact that they don't have much time to speak as a teacher
to their students, and thus act out in various ways, usually by suddenly
interrupting the flow of class discussion to give mini-lectures proving that
they are smarter than their students and/or suddenly attacking some point
or comment in order to reestablish their critical authority.

The point I was going to make is that I think it's better to have models of
authority that recognizes itself as such than authority that pretends it's
something else. In other words, if you have authority in practice, it's
better to spend your time trying to do something good with it, something
that will benefit the people beneath you on the 'chain of command' than it
is to waste most of your time disavowing your authority, only to
periodically act out resentment over that disavowal. I was thus going to
choose Picard's type of authority over that of the Boomer profs I mentioned
above.

And I still would. My friend's sense that Picard and other officers on STTNG
were actually more like the post-60s anti-authoritarian authority I mapped
out above than they were different from it got me thinking, however. I'm no
expert on STTNG, but am pretty sure that at least Picard's authority is more
like the authority that knows itself than than the authority that disavows
itself/is blind to itself. Nonetheless, I am also able to understand why my
friend--who works in one of those hexagonal or octagonal (it's so postmodern
yyou can't map it in your head!) buildings with mirrored glass on the
outside that looks an awful lot like a spaceship, both inside and out--felt
that STTNG was somehow like her workplace.

It's because the sort of post-60s workplace reforms that have made
Post-Fordist service and high-tech industries very different from the
classic model of American business have, I think, proceeded from a
conception of the ideal workplace strikingly similar to the one in STTNG.
For example, these reforms have established the legitimacy of feelings/vibes
in the workplace and led to the creation of personnel management
positions, filled mostly by women (Counselor Troi, Dr. Crusher), where the
concerns of therapy--people 'acting out', needing acknowledgement,
etc.--can be discussed as deadly serious workplace issues; they have
apsired to create managerial positions for women, but have often ended up
creating new positions to be filled by women instead of putting women in the
older positions (some of which have been phased out); they have emphasized
an 'outsourcing' of micro-authority in which individual units within a
company are given more authority to make substantive decisions on issues
they know about, while transforming higher-executive positions from the
old-school hands-on/a-hand-in-most-decisions autocracy into a more distant,
less involved marco-authority more concerned with long-term strategy and
'steering' than daily decision-making (Picard could be read in this
light--he's pretty hands-on, but often delegates important everyday
decision-making to his officers); the list goes on.

My friend and I ended up talking about these sorts of workplace-reforms,
arguing over their good and bad sides. The S.F. Bay Area is full of
companies whose corporate headquarters are highly-touted examples of the
post-60's workplace at its best: Levi Strauss, The Gap, Apple Computer etc.
Within the white-collar confines of their headquarters, corporations like
these have implemented all kinds of indisputably progressive
programs--liberal counseling/therapy for employees in crisis, equal pay for
equal work regardless of gender/sexual preference, day-care for employees
with children, benefits for domestic partners regardless of sexual
orientation and marital status.

At the same time, however, the 'progressive' aspect of these corporations
almost always extends only to the white-collar (and largely white or
white-identified) jobs within corporate headquarters or regional offices. As
a recent expose in our Sunday paper's magazine pointed out, the
'progressive' post-60's workplace, with all its extra expenses, of clothing
companies like Esprit, Levi's, and The Gap is made possible by the
exploitation of mostly Asian, often immigrant, mostly female labor in the
San Francisco sweatshops where the clothes are actually made. Similarly,
there have been numerous exposes of the ways in which the Silicon Valley
high-tech industry adopts a double-standard for its employees: the
white-collar programmers and marketing personnel experience a progressive
post-60's workplace, while the people--mostly of color--who assemble circuit
boards in highly toxic environments are badly exploited.

How does all this relate to STTNG? As Richard Singer pointed out, we don't
really see the non-officers under the cast-members command very often,
except as background. I don't think it's fair to assume that they are as
exploited as the non-white-collar employees mentioned above, since we simply
don't know much about them. However, it's certainly worth thinking about
what STTNG doesn't talk about and/or represses in order to think about the
good and bad sides of the post-60's workplace I've been going on about. One
of the points Jonathan Sterne's post (I think it was his) seemed to be
getting at was the way in which Utopian visions need to be thought through
in terms of the practices of exclusion that make them possible (an argument
Fred Jameson makes beautifully in "Of Islands and Trenches" and some of his
articles on sci-fi). There *is* a limitation in STTNG's Utopian vision of
"structure without domination", even if it's one imposed by the financial
and narrative demands that keep regular casts small: it is a Utopian vision
of a managerial--what we would call white-collar--environment (and that
includes Starfleet, whose non-Enterprise representatives tend to be
high-ranking officers or high-ranking officers in training).

Now I agree completely with Joe that the limitations of this Utopian vision
do not render it unusable to us and that, indeed, those limitations *demand*
that we use our critical skills to extract--a la Jameson--the Utopian from
its narrative/structural cage. But I think we also need to bear in mind its
negative side, in order, for example, to understand the sort of blind-spots
that can plague good-intentioned workplace reform in the present.

I'm certain that many, perhaps most, of the people who have worked hard to
make the white-collar portion of companies like The Gap, Levi's, and Apple
Computer progressive were concerned only with their own local struggle.
Indeed, they probably had to have ideological blinders on to focus their
energies on reforming their own workplace. And what they achieved is
certainly a good thing for the people it affects--it has its Utopian side.
But it also represents a further severing of the white-collar managerial
class that benefits from their efforts and the post-blue-collar workers who
often quite literally pay the price for them. To rephrase and expand upon
Walter Benjamin's famous dictum, every post-60's workplace reform represents
the putting-into-practice of an aesthetic Utopian vision that is at one and
the same time a document of barbarism.


Well, I'm tapped out. My overall point is that the Utopian vision that STTNG
presents has similar blindpsots to the sort of Utopian vision that motivated
post-60's workplace reform and that, while I by no means think we should
discard either vision, these blindspots are symptomatic--and here's my
most unashamedly Jamesonian point--of the increasingly illegible nature of
global capital and that it is our duty as analysts of contemporary culture
to try to develop and sustain a critical vision capable of relating Utopian
visions to their blindpots, negative or demystificatory Dystopian visions to
whatever signs of hope, however 'micro', are out there.

Charlie, hoping that you read the whole thing and that you share comments to
extend the debate further.

Tags: archive, autobiography, bad subjects, nostalgia, teaching, television, work
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, nostalgia, visual poetry
Current Location: 85704
Muse: memories of the soundtrack to Wild Palms

I was going through some old computer files from the 1990s today and came across one of my favorite "fan mail" messages:

When I received this message, I was surprised to be getting a response to a three-year-old piece, particularly on a topic that had made such a rapid retreat into the past. But now, twelve years after getting this e-mail, I feel closer, in some ways, to the heyday of grunge than I did in 1996. It has been said by many, far better than I can say it, but the perception of history is a long, strange trip.

Tags: autobiography, clips, history, music, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704
Muse: memories of The Lonesome Crowded West

Tags: autobiography, bad subjects, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

Tags: archive, autobiography, family, nostalgia, travel
Current Location: 85704