Strike!

So, I don't work today and feel a bit guilty. A student approached me in the hall on monday and asked me if I was going to be teaching her class this week since it was her last week in my class. I told her I would try, but because of the strike its very difficult (if not impossible) for me to commute to the suburbs.


The students are protesting the privatization of the universities. So when you walk past, all the lights are off.



All the newspapers are discussing the possibilities of giving this much "power to the people." Strikes are nothing new to Paris. Every time there's a new legislature, its admittance is generally decided in the streets.



My reason for going back to school was through wanting to pursue anarchy intellectually rather than with tattoos and acid washed jean jackets. It started with reading Guy Debord and realizing that anarchy in the UK didn't start with punk rock.

It didn't start with The Situationists either. But they were always the ones I empathized with. Détournement, the Dérivé, politicization of art, graffiti, a society of producer producer poetics.



Eventually, I get into Marx, and not in the typical way, enamoured with Lukacs, Hegelian dialectics. I go from misdirected youth into history and philosophy.
Despite all this, I was horribly disillusioned being in school. I was never good at school, ever. They just kept pushing me through the grades, hoping that it wasn't because I wasn't smart, but because I wasn't challenged.

Nonetheless, University was challenging, but when I didn't care, I didn't care. My grades hurt in my first year. It was around this time that I would sympathize more and more with the Situationist's stance against the academic institution. Then I approached an assistant prof who was very cool, teaching for a teacher who is now a friend of mine, and told her my dilemma. I wanted to learn, I had passion to do this, but when I was doing something I wasn't passionate about I would get horrible grades because I put next to no effort into it. As with high-school.



She told me to write what I'm passionate about. Fuck the curriculum, read on your own. Write on your own, work it into everything you do. If you have a passion, use it as a lens to approach even the most banal. If you don't agree, then don't do it, but criticize it, but do it well.

After this I got almost straight A's through university.



But what now?


Roughly "he's the shithole". The word "chienlit," in French, is used by those in power to describe disorder in the same way that "anarchy" is bandied about in the states. ("If we don't do something, there'll be anarchy in the streets"). The word derives from "chier en lit" -- To shit in bed. A fine mess indeed.

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Mp3s à la No Wave:
Glenn Branca
Statics and Theoretical Girls
Glenn Branca - Glazened Idols
Glenn Branca - You
Solo
Glenn Branca - Lesson No.1 (edit)
Glenn Branca - Lesson No.2

James Chance
James Chance - Contort Yourself
James Chance - The Twitch

Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham - Drastic Classicism

Liquid Liquid
Liquid Liquid - Cavern
Lecture Series on Liquid Liquid by Sal Principato

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many mp3 link compliments of: www17seconds
images are all from posters during the may 68 riots - nothingness.org