Seven Red

Some of my facebook friends and others have been posting and reposting this email exchange between an NYU Stern School of Business professor and an MBA student. To summarize the exchange, the MBA student showed up for the first day of the professor’s “Brand Strategy” class an hour late, apparently because he or she was “sampling” the first day of other courses in an effort to determine which course to take. The professor sent the student away immediately, since he has a standing policy of refusing entry to anyone who is more than 15 minutes late for class. The student, who could not have known of this policy (not having the syllabus), complains to said professor in an email, explaining the situation, even though he or she has decided against taking the class. It shall be left at that, yes? Oh, no it shan’t. For the professor suddenly feels the urge to demonstrate how much bigger he is than the student, and fires off a rousing, caustic email upbraiding the student for all sorts of shortcomings, and suggesting that he or she get his or her collective shit togevah, like, yesterday. The email finds its way on to the intertubes, whereupon a cheer erupts, and all us betrodden professor-types are meant to fist-pump vicariously through the emailing skillz of our Stern Professor friend, hereinafter, Professor Bickdick (on account of his having such a bick dick). Take that, former abusive student-types!

Now, far be it from me to choose sides between an MBA student and a business school professor (I also don’t adjudicate the relative ethical merits of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, for instance), but there is an odd irony involved in the exchange that most have failed to notice. To get to it, you have to follow the logic of Professor Bickdick’s reply, which I’ll repost here in its entirety:

Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would like to offer some feedback.

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

xxxx, let me be more serious for a moment. I do not know you, will not know you and have no real affinity or animosity for you. You are an anonymous student who is now regretting the send button on his laptop. It’s with this context I hope you register pause…REAL pause xxxx and take to heart what I am about to tell you:

xxxx, get your shit together.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Professor [Bickdick]

Wow. That’s a big dick he swinging around, no? But we should notice a few things about this argument. Professor Bickdick first deploys the usual language of business discourse, suggesting that our hapless student should have performed a risk analysis, and probably would have been wise to hedge his bet. Well, that’s why he’s a business professor type: he can call up the most banal jargon for every situation. But the question is in fact central here: Professor Bickdick is actually quite serious (despite his protestations that he will only get “serious” later) – he’s quite serious, that is to say, that the student should have deployed precisely these decision making devices “in the face of substantial uncertainty.” What we know about Professor Bickdick is that he seeks, at least at the level of his instructions here (I won’t pretend to read his mind) to transform all aspects of life into business decisions. Can we go further? I think so. Apparently, before becoming Professor Bickdick, the good “doctor” (well, I wouldn’t go that far – ahem) made his name by starting a fun little internet site. I won’t link it here, since I’m not in the business of sending more hits to such venues, but suffice it to say that it involves envelopes that are red, and is primarily concerned with leveraging the gift relationship in the service of high priced commodities, to wit:

You give to affirm a friendship, to celebrate a new beginning, to thank a colleague, to honor family, to connect with a loved one, to commend successes, to mark passages, to give a little encouragement — or just because it’s a joy to give.

Put another way, there’s no aspect of your life or relationship in your life that can’t be translated (through the mechanism of Professor Bickdick’s brilliant web site) into a luxury item, like, for instance, a mother’s birthstone necklace ($95 USD), a silk and cashmere cardigan (when your friend or loved one is sick! – $150 USD), and etc. Everything – and especially the gift relation – can be commodified. Finally, Professor Bickdick was teaching a class on brand strategy. Now, I couldn’t find a direct description of a course called “Brand Strategy,” but what would seem like a similar course, “Brand Planning for New and Existing Products,” lists part of its goals as the following:

Creatively explores multiple ways that the branded product experience can create associations in the mind that may develop into mindshare (e.g., the immediate and preferential recalling of your brand when a need arises). Measures the knowledge effects of brand awareness, disposition, propensity, expectations, attitudes, and behavior and discovers the resulting level of brand equity.

Yummy mindshare! If I may risk a lay translation: the class that the student was sampling is concerned with hooking people affectively to a particular brand, or set of brand signifiers, at basically every level of their existence (disposition, propensity, expectation, attitude, and behavior). Or, simpler still, the guy teaches people how to create desiring consumers. So, to summarize, not only does Professor Bickdick instruct his almost student to treat decisions on attending classes as risk analyses; not only did he make his bones (and probably his substantial fortune) transforming the gift relationship – which is structurally immeasurable – into a calculable commodity relation; but the very class that the student had the gall to interrupt is directly involved in the production of a consumer subjectivity. And what is Professor Bickdick upset about?

He’s upset that this student acted like a consumer! He’s upset that this student treated his class as nothing more than another product on a store shelf, to be sampled at one’s leisure, tried out, inspected, and bought – or not. The “lucky lottery winner” that is the student’s Monday evening professor is not a lottery winner at all, but the brand that won the market share.

Oh, but wait, you say. Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “disrespectful behavior” and “decorum (i.e. manners)?” Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility?” Doesn’t that count for something? Why, yes. That is where Professor Bickdick is at his most inconsistent. It is here where we see that all the blathering about risk analysis and all the background on brand building and mindshare never really cut it even for Professor Bickdick. Never mind that Judgement (sic) and Decision Making – presumably based on some derivative of rational choice theory that remains the grand fetish in our business schools – operates in direct contradiction to a notion of mindshare, which seeks to eliminate precisely such analytic calculations in the commodity’s consumption phase. You can’t square “immediate and preferential recalling” with the putative neutrality of risk analysis, however deluded both positions may be. But no matter. As we know from one of Deleuze and Guattari’s pithier aphorisms, nothing ever died of contradiction.

The real incoherence comes when Professor Bickdick tries to mix in remnants from what are essentially dead social formations (decorum, manners, respect for institutions, and the like) with his otherwise formulaic and predictable capitalist jargon. The professor is actually upset that the student treated his class like any other commodity on the market, but he’s equally upset that the sacred unity of his lecture was disturbed. Notice that Professor Bickdick never once suggests that other students themselves may be disturbed by late-comers, an easy enough argument to make, and the only real pragmatic objection to the student’s actions. Rather, the late-comers’ “behavior” is inherently “disrespectful.” It fails to pay due tribute to the eminence that is the professor, or acknowledge the size of his massive, er, congregation. In this sense, Professor Bickdick is quite right to introduce a paragraph break between his nonsense on “substantial uncertainty” and his real lance thrust on a supposed “code of conduct.” The first is the capitalist explanation of how the student erred. The second is the feudalist explanation of the same. We also know from Deleuze and Guattari, however, that the first effects a universal decoding – and indeed, it is precisely such a decoding that all Professor Bickdick’s activities actually serve to produce. It’s all the same to his “gifting” website if you’re celebrating a marriage or consoling the bereaved or honoring a colleague or whatever: it all translates into money, the universal equivalent, and all the dense cultural codes associated with these particular activities fall by the wayside. If there’s a better example of universal decoding than Professor Bickdick’s website, I’d certainly like to hear about it. What Professor Bickdick, in his dick-swinging zeal, doesn’t seem to understand is that such decoding would include his sacred “codes of conduct.” We have, then, the odd presentation of an MBA student who behaves in precisely the way Professor Bickdick teaches people to behave – in the mode of capitalist production, as a consumer, and etc. – but who Professor Bickdick must also sternly lecture (with the joke sent out to friends, no doubt) for violating in that very decoding behavior some archaic mode of feudal respect.

And we’re supposed to cheer about this? Even if we put Professor Bickdick’s incoherent email aside, we might at least say that, yes, yes indeed, we’ve all been tempted to write such emails. And we’ve all been tempted to do so precisely because we teach in this fraught context, where we’re constantly negotiating between the the decoding effects of the classroom gone commodity and the recoding or residual coding of the classroom as hierarchical institutional space. It is in that conflict that the desire to respond in these ways almost always erupts. So, why do most people I’ve taught with not write this email? Is it because we’re still mostly untenured, and such emails would look egregious to a tenure committee? Yes, certainly. Our labor interests are not spared the decoding. Is it because we generally don’t have time to compose such emails, given all our other work and interests? Yes, that too. But there may even be a simpler explanation – however complex the context in which such desires emerge and decisions are made.

Probably, unlike Professor Bickdick, most of us actually like our students.

1) Random Things I Don’t Want to Say on Facebook

A. I’m pretty happy about all the snow the South is getting, since we’ve barely had eight inches in Chicago this winter, total. Every time they describe another southern snowstorm, I smile, and even chuckle a little.

B. When foodies tell everybody what they’re making for dinner, I kinda roll my eyes a little bit and mouth the words “Fuck’s sake.” Also, people who post which bar or restaurant they’re going to. I know people probably roll their eyes when I post more 50-picture albums of my kids, though, so I guess we’re even.

C. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, name-dropping motherfuckers. Really. It’s beneath you.

D. Whenever Project Runway is on, I want to post “I have to question the taste level” as a status update, but then I forget, and then I don’t care.

E. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, pretty self-congratulatory in a way that makes me mildly uncomfortable. Isn’t it a little like walking into a crowded room and saying “Hey everybody! Here’s this thing I want to say that shows you all how great I am!” Or are people supposed to behave this way? Have I been wrong all along that there’s something distasteful and anti-social about that? Cuz it seems like people do it, like, ay-lot, and it seems like I always scrunch my nose up and pull my shoulders in when they do.

F. I’ve hidden posts on Mafia Wars and other such shite. Now they’re starting to use their status updates to tell me about it. I feel like joining the game. To kill them.

G. I’m kinda pleased that some people who always struck me as affected IRL retain their affectations in Facebook prose, but the sudden seeming authenticity of that renders their previous affectation less annoying, even though it remains affectation. Curious.

H. Facebook Axiom: You’re the only one of your high school friends who has really changed.

I. The way some people post music videos, it reminds me of that friend you had in high school (who hasn’t changed, by the way) who always tried to put music on in the car because he wanted you to like it too, and he’d play it off like he was trying to have a conversation with you, but would really be waiting for you to comment on how good the music is, which was always clearly signaled by the fact that he kept nudging the volume up a little for every minute you ignored the awesomeness of his new favorite song, even while acting all casual about it, so you finally had to say “Oh, what’s this?” and “It’s pretty good,” just to get him to stop that annoying behavior. Yeah, some people who post eight or nine music videos a day are like that.

Speaking of which.

2) Search Engine (or, The Hard-Headed Never Learn) – Some of the search terms that people use to find their way to Seven Red are hilarious. But my favorite so far is the person from Albuquerque who typed the following into Google: ‘”method man” “carpet get” explain.’ That led our New Mexico friend to this post on The Wackness, which cites the lyrics from Biggie and Method Man’s song The What?, to wit, “No question, I be comin’ down and shit / Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get.” Now, it would seem to me that the “explanation” for this verse could be pretty clear. Carpets get tore up (from the floor up, as it were). But more, no? In the early-to-mid 90′s, the term “rugged” was much favored in East Coast hip hop. Often paired with “raw” (as in EPMD’s Crossover “I speak for the hardcore/ Rough, rugged, and raw…” and later in The What, “Ninety-four, rugged, raw/ Kickin’ down your goddamn door”), the term was both a synonym for “tough,” and designated a style of rap that hadn’t yet been assimilated by the music industry. Its use in this case could also be a typical Method Man joke, switching from the signified to the signifier mid-line: “I gets rugged” turns back to the signifier (“rug”), from which it’s a short step to the new signified (“carpet”). We’ve already seen something like this in the lyrics from Protect Ya Neck (I mean ooh/ Yo check out the flow/ Like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin/ N*ggaz off/ Because I’m hot like sauce/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me *uunh*), where the last word should be the word “cough” (rhyming with “off” and “sauce”) but Method switches it up to the actual sound of a cough (“uunh”), which rhymes with blunt, thereby introducing a new rhythm.  I’ve mentioned this moment before, largely because that simple transformation from the word cough to the sound of the cough is, for me, one of the singular genius moments in the maturation of hip hop lyrics, together with Rakim’s development of multi-word, multisyllabic rhymes that extend past the couplet (“The only time I stop is when/ Somebody drop and then/ Bring ‘em to the front cuz my rhyme’s the oxygen”). So that’s my explanation for our Google friend, but far more amusing is the situation that would have caused the search in the first place. So, our friend is sitting around listening to the song, hears the lyric “Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get,” and says “Hmm. What does that mean? I know, I’ll go Google it! Maybe somebody will be able to explain!” I kinda love that. So, there you go if you’re still searching, New Mexico.

Is this really going to be a weather post? A weather post? No. I guess I shouldn’t do that, not least because it really means we’ve hit bottom on subject matter – the worst kind of uncomfortable small talk: “Cold enough for ya?” Yeah, well. But it is winter, finally, after a mild November, so we’re just hoping to get our trips off OK out of the sucking pit of O’Hare. We have quite a few. The whole fam will fly to Albany, and from there the short drive to Schoharie to see Granny and everyone else. Then we drive to Queens, spend some time with the NYC famiglia, then back to Schoharie. Then she and the kiddos make the solo flight back to Chicago, while yours truly takes the Amtrak to Philadelphia, where I have some – ahem – business to take care of. No, not that kind. The other side of the table kind. The asking the questions kind. Should be interesting. Then I fly back to O’Hare, and then it’s New Years. So, winter, finally. I suddenly remembered that we’re leaving from Midway.

Has this been pointless enough for you? Good. Because it was all a thin ruse, a mere delivery device for these adorable pictures of the kiddos in and around various signifiers of the season.

1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.

Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.

Scene 1: me at computer, actually typing up the grocery list. she folding laundry on the sofa.

she: Hey, on the April baby boards, one person has a kid named Wolfgang.
topspun: I like that.
she: Yeah, Wolfie.
topspun (being pedantic, as per usual): Volfie.
she: Yeah, Volfie.
topspun: I once knew a guy named Helmut.
she: What’s short for Helmut?
topspun: Nothing. If a man’s name is Helmut, you best damn well call him Helmut.

Scene 2: About 2:30 Friday afternoon, me walking out on to back deck to take a writing break; three gangbanger dudes who moved in next door about two weeks ago walking down their back stairs.

topspun (making eye contact, lifts hand in greeting): What’s up, man.
gangbanger dude (looking genuinely surprised and delighted to finally be addressed by whiteboy neighbor): Hey man! (holds up a twelve pack of Modelo). You want a beer?
topspun: Nah. I’m working. Thanks, though.
gangbanger dude: Cool, man.

Scene 3: Jewel-Osco at Foster and Pulaski, check out line.

ellie: I want to press the button. Hey, I can’t reach it!
she: OK, but wait until the lady is done scanning all the groceries.
ellie: I know, but I want to press it!
cashier in next aisle (to Ellie): Do you have enough money for all those groceries?
ellie: I wasn’t talking to you.

It’s getting a little heavy in here, I’ll admit, so I want to lighten the mood a little with story time. Every night, as part of the going-to-bed ritual, I have to tell Ellie a story. Note that I didn’t say I have to read her a story. No. I have to make up a story for her, on the spot. So, a few of the story series:

1) The Good Witch – The Good Witch stories always start off the same way. Ellie is watching TV with her daycare friends (Elliot, Gwendolyn, Zoe, Sadie, and MaeBelle), when the Good Witch comes on the television and proposes some adventure. Ellie and her friends have to help out some other kid in trouble in some part of the world. So, in one, they brought water across the desert to a village. In another, they saved a town from a giant snake. And the like. They always get to the place by saying the place name three times, and get back by saying “Chicago Chicago Chicago.”

2) Brooklyn Stories – These are a subset of the Good Witch stories. Rather than have a different kid-who-needs-help and place for each one, however, all these stories take place in Brooklyn, and involve the same kid and antagonist. Ellie has requested these almost non-stop since we got back from our trip. They start off with the Good Witch coming on TV, as per usual. The kid-who-needs-help is their friend in Brooklyn, Pinky McCoy, who has a green-haired dog named Punkrock. Pinky is plagued by the Meanest Boy in Brooklyn, a little jerk named Meanie Meanie Roger Marini, who is constantly stealing her shit and otherwise effing with her. How is he the meanest boy in Brooklyn? One time, he jackhammered the sidewalk so no kids could ride their bikes. One time, he stole all the balls in town and sunk them in the Hudson River, so no kids could play ball. One time, he glued the doors of the aquarium shut so no kids could see the fish. But he’s got a special vendetta against Pinky McCoy. In one story, he kidnapped all her dogs, including Punkrock. Another time he flooded her basement and put a shark in it. They funneled it out with the help of the New York Aquarium, which didn’t particularly like Meanie Meanie Roger Marini anyway, on account of the door-gluing incident. And etc. Each time, the kids have to say “Brooklyn Brooklyn Brooklyn,” at which point they are transported magically to Pinky McCoy’s house, where they solve some problem caused by Roger Marini. When they’ve solved the problem (for instance, rescuing Pinky’s tent so they can camp out in her yard), Roger Marini always says “Drat! Foiled again!” Ellie loves saying this. One more twist to the Brooklyn series. After they’ve foiled Roger Marini, Ellie insists that they all visit Aunt Allison and Zio Fredo’s apartment, at which point Ellie has to recount what happened to Aunt Allison (which turns out to be a nice little test in comprehension), and then has chocolate milk made for her by Zio Fredo: first you pour the milk, then you squirt the syrup…and then what? “Stir! Stir! Stir!” Two weeks of these.

3) Stuffed Animal Series – Then there are the stories deriving from Ellie’s stuffed animals. First, the Gypo the Giraffe stories. Gypo is sitting at home one day, when he suddenly gets a call from his friend DeeDeeDee the Lion. There’s going to be a dance party at the townhall! But poor Gypo doesn’t know how to dance! First he watches a dance show on television, but when he sees the people dancing he says “I…..don’t like that dance!” then he watches a dance movie DVD. “I…..don’t like that dance!” So he goes to the movies to learn to dance from a movie in the theater. But he doesn’t like that dance either (you always have to say “I…..don’t like that dance!”). He goes to a ballet studio. “I…..don’t like that dance!” He goes to a dancehall. “I…..don’t like that dance!” But finally, it’s time to go to the dance party at the townhall. He meets DeeDeeDee the Lion and Ellie, and then the music starts. He didn’t like any of the dances by themselves, so he combines them all together, at which point DeeDeeDee says “I…..don’t like that dance!” There’s a variation in which he pays a dance instructor, but doesn’t have enough money, so he goes to work at various businesses in the neighborhood. When he comes back with the money, the dance instructor informs him that he already knows how to dance, because that’s what he’s been doing all day: Gypo’s dance is sweeping and folding, and watching dishes, Mr. Miyagi-style, and so forth. Then there are the Henry the Parrot stories, in which a city parrot always longs to fly to South America, but makes some mistake that prevents it, like trying to follow Canadian Geese south for the winter only to learn it is spring, and they are flying back north. Then there are the Slippo the Hippo stories. Slippo is an entrepreneur who makes the best tasting mud pies ever, so Ellie gets the back story on how he got the recipe and ingredients together, like when he met a little man who lived in a tree who made the best cocoa in the whole world. On and on like this.

What I’ve learned: It’s pretty goddamn hard to make up a new story every night.

On Saturday we took a trip down to the Taste of Lincoln Avenue festival. Luckily, we ate before we left, so there was nothing much to do but drink beer and bump into too-rich twenty-somethings. Oh, and the Kids Carnival.

  she and Ellie have quite the conversation on the El.

  But Ellie wasn’t really happy until she got to go down the giant slides.

   But that wore her out, which of course meant it was time for…more beer!

  This is the part of the story where the kids are asleep so I’m standing around drinking beer.

Then back on the train, Rafe in tow.

We just moved to a new place, and I more or less moved half our stuff myself in order to reduce the moving costs. But that’s not cost free, either physically or in terms of opportunity costs. In any case, one of the costs has been the continued neglect of this here blog. I’ve found it’s hard to blog when you’re carrying boxes of books down three flights of stairs. Harder when you’ve done that all day. Now that we’re set up, I wanted to add this random post to convince myself that I am still adding posts, and that I haven’t given up on this blog in the same way I’ve given up on the Mets’ season (you’ll notice the really severe slide started as soon as I put up a Mets blog post, by the way). Meh.

So,

A. The Wisdom of she – Only people who understand percentage get rich. Very few people understand – really understand – percentage.

B. Soundtrack for the Moon Landing, 40 Years Later – NPR was having a moongasm today. I think one of the big breaks between my generation and my parents’ generation is general feeling about the moon landing. Put plainly, we really don’t care all that much. But hearing the ecstatic recitations on NPR today, I was struck by how much some previous generation does care, and does still get worked up about the whole thing. The moon! I mean, can you imagine? So, a top five songs for the moon-landing-iversary? Suggest other, dear Reader:

5. David Bowie, A Space Oddity (obviously, but for something new, try Natalie Merchant’s cover on the Live at the Neil Simon Theater album)

4. Peter Schilling, Major Tom

3. R.E.M., Man on the Moon (double obviously)

2. Modest Mouse, 3rd Planet (from “The Moon and Antarctica” album – and you could take the whole album, for that matter)

1. Billy Bragg, The Space Race is Over

The #1 jam is the transitional moment – the confused space between those who care and those who don’t care:

My son and I sat beneath the great night sky
Gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
He says, “Why did they ever go?”
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cuz where in the hell’s that at?
Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone
I’ll never get out of my room
Now that the space race is over
I can’t help but feel that we’re all just going nowhere

The Billy Bragg song really captures it for me, and has for awhile. The space race is over. This was the second theme on the radio today: nobody cares. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the end of the outside signaled of course by Derrida (il n’y pas hors-texte), and worked into a geopolitical register by Hardt and Negri. Empire is the end of the space race, the impossibility of exit, in its traditional, spatial sense, anyway (it’s no mistake that its cover features a shot of the Earth from space). That’s already what the sad contrivance of Billy Bragg’s lament names, though in this very specific way:the problematic of immanence. And the moon landing would serve to date the demise of exit fairly well, and would be in line with other datings of the so-called postmodern (Jameson’s abandonment of the gold standard comes close enough).

But maybe push it back a bit. Just before we moved out, exited, our old place, we saw Revolutionary Road, several months late, as per usual. It’s really of a piece with all the great exit literature of the period, and it all spells a similar desire struggling with the immanence of capitalist society. From The Organization Man to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to The Lonely Crowd, these are 50′s narratives of exit, or confronting the problem of exit’s demise. In Revolutionary Road, “Paris” may as well be the moon – it serves the same function as the moon serves for Billy Bragg. Of course, the 1950′s version is now clearly lunacy, but it culminates in the space race in the first place.  But the shift to “don’t care” really shows the new phase of the transition, one in which the anxiety about spatial exit has been eliminated; the moon landing fails to register after the baby boomers because Empire is already consolidated spatially. (A few years ago I heard an interview with Billy Bragg while we were driving in the car; my mother-in-law, a mathematician, was in the back seat. Bragg made a much more forceful case, recalling how shocking it was that mathematics could do that, could make one get to the moon. Three huzzahs from the back seat. His English accent helped too, I expect. I think this is right, and part of what he wants to say). So Billy Bragg’s quite right in a number of way, but chiefly this: where in the hell’s that at? The old labor philosophy – trained in the spatial logic of the line and the factory gate – can only ask this question. And gaze up in wonder.

But this is really the anthem for a labor movement that’s utterly finished.

How I know I’m getting old:

1. I see that Bravo has a show called NYC Prep, which follows the travails of Manhattan prep school students, a la the Real Housewives franchise. I may be confused about the way these shows gain an audience, but it seems like their only purpose is to stir up class resentment. (The utterly despicable and tedious Miami Social would be the ultimate in nauseating behavior).  That would be, of course, fine by me, but the right seems to understand far better than the “liberals” how to leverage that resentment politically, so it’s more or less a wash.  So she has NYC Prep on for ten minutes or so, during which time I grow increasingly disgusted, until I realize that I’ve hated these fuckers for twenty years. Since before they were even born.
2. Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” is now apparently being used to peddle Tide laundry detergent. We be to crap what key be to lock.

Bloglect. Been busy here with a million different things. she tells me that they don’t pay me like a lawyer, so I shouldn’t be working until 2:30 every morning, then getting up at 6:30. But she knows I secretly like to, and I can’t really sleep anyway. But since the bloglect has been going on pretty long now, I thought I’d just update with some random stuff.

I stumbled out of bed; I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette, and I tightened up my gut
I said “This can’t be me, must be my double.”
And I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what…
-Leonard Cohen, I Can’t Forget

On Tuesday we trekked down to the Chicago Theater for our Big Night Out, and this time it went perfectly. The sitter got here at 6:30 or so, and we drove into the Loop. There wasn’t a spot of inbound traffic on Lakeshore Drive, and then we actually got a free parking spot on LaSalle. And then there was the show itself. Wow. I guess it helps if you are an uber-devoted Leonard Cohen fan (are there any non-zealot Cohen fans?), but I think even the uninitiated would have appreciated the artistry of the show. It was just beautiful and wonderful, and, as she said somewhere, made you forget your cynicism for just a little while. I was particularly drawn to Dino Soldo, who played, as Cohen said, “all the instruments of wind.” It was kind of a bonus that he was a little bit hip hop, rockin’ the Kangol and banging it out to Take this Waltz like it was thumping in a club. The guy had stage presence, for sure. I also liked that they played a few songs from Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs, which I consider one of the great unappreciated albums of the decade, and underappreciated within Cohen’s corpus (it’s hard to compete with I’m Your Man, sure). It was just a perfect evening. And three hours. You felt like you got your money’s worth and then some. Hell, I left wanting to pay more. I would show the DVD that they’re selling of the London live show as an example of creating ethos. You can’t but be drawn to this kind of funny, humble and graceful, yet remarkable performance. Easily in the top ten live shows I’ve seen. Top five. Of course, I’m a zealot.

One of the great things about this concert, we noticed, is that nobody quite knew how to dress for it. Or, to put it another way, the variety in dress was just off the charts. You had people there looking like they were going to opera, and people there who look like they just stumbled out of a Virginia Beach knock-off of Margaritaville. It was pretty hilarious. I was also reminded of this line from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music: “I sometimes suspect that it is at such sit-down shows – for Leonard Cohen, say, or the Cure, or P.J. Harvey – that one best gets a sense of what the mid-nineteenth century battles over classical concert behavior were like, as the listening and the dancing sections of the crowd get equally annoyed with each other, and as the attendants struggle to keep everyone seated” (125). He can pretty much scratch Leonard Coehn off that list.

But graceful and humble is not me. Here is a snippet, pretty close to direct quotes, of a conversation we were having today. The subject: should we seriously look into this condo in a borderline dicey neighborhood. The issue is, of course, not the neighborhood itself but the schools. When they require uniforms in elementary schools to discourage gang activity (yes, elementary schools), it’s a bit much, even for me. So, I say, “yes, well, we’d then have to roll the dice on these application-only public schools.”

she: Or we might have to face up to sending them to private school.
topspun (who walks around saying things like “I went to New York City Public Schools, public university, all the way through…ain’t a damn thing wrong with public schools”): Fuck it. I’ll drive ‘em down here to Saint Matthias and hand ‘em over to the goddamn nuns.
she: …
topspun: They’re like Polish over here, y’know? That’s good Catholic.
she: So it has to be like ethnic Catholic?
topspun: Of course.
she (laughing): It can’t be American Catholics?
topspun: American Catholics are like fucking Protestants.
she: Heh.

Mind you, I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew the parish borders down to the street level, as in “You live on the other side of 26th Avenue: that’s Saint Luke’s.” But it was still largely immigrant or first generation Catholics: Italian, Irish, Croatians, etc. And I’ve got it into my head that this is reasonable Catholicism, where nobody really cares that much about the performance; the church is a place to get your bearings rather than run your life. Plus, there’s booze. Of course there’s still the guilt and all that, but it’s really paganism with some moral structure thrown on for show. I’m not talking about the 60′s and 70′s Catholicism, with the hippies playing the guitar in church and all that. Saw that whole bit a little in college, and I was like “No thank you.” But neither is it this totally weirdo suburban American Catholicism. When we lived in State College, I saw a Catholicism I was totally unfamiliar with. The whole practice resembled one of these evangelical  churches, and the people were real zealots, all hyper-conservative politically and just deadly serious about the teachings. It was unnerving. Needless to say, she and I are both atheists, but if we have to pack the kids off to a Catholic school, it would have to be the kind that includes the wink and nod.

Back to grading. Oh, and we’re on the quarter system, so I still have 4 weeks of class left. It hurts at this time of year. But then again…