Always Bee Cooking #12: Kitchen Roles - Scavenger

We are, all of us, many people. Across time, certainly, but also in any given moment. Often contradictory, as often complementary. I am, in the kitchen - as this column, I hope, can attest - primarily a student. Of technique and of popular (read: often pseudo-) science, of flavor and ingredients and patience. I am many things, though. One of these is a scavenger.

If I were to break down my cooking in purely quantitative terms I suspect a plurality of it would be to feed myself. A late night omelette or a chicken roasted for eating over a week or two. Herb butter pasta that I would be embarrassed to share, but sustains.

A plurality, but not even a majority. Even in strictly audience-oriented terms I am nearly as likely to be cooking for others - or, frankly, for no one - as I am for myself. Whoever ends up eating that polenta casserole or that chicken fried rice is immaterial. I cooked it for an audience of refrigerator space and carrots just before they are overcome by mold. I cook because I need to scavenge, to clear out, to make use.

I scavenge in part because of how long I spent not cooking. My early memories of kitchens aren't at a grandmother's knee, stirring red sauce for sixteen hours. They are trips to the pantry at two in the morning, thinking I am sneaking because I have no sense that everything here is here by design, by labor exploited for a wage that is spent at the supermarket in time allotted for the reproduction of the self, bagged transported and unbagged in precise places. That is only counting the work of the consumer (my mom in this memory), not the producers, the shippers, the logisticians.

I think, in this memory, that I am sneaking when in reality stored food is only forgettable in its presence. The second it is gone it becomes unforgettable. "Do we have chips? check the pantry!" becomes "I just bought a variety pack on Wednesday! You can't have possibly eaten all of them!" the second there are no chips in the pantry.

I scavenge because I have hated grocery stores since long before the novel coronavirus turned each trip into a desire to hoard. Partially from lack of knowledge, which I am slowly overcoming. Partially from social anxiety, from the pressure of being around bodies, each with a mind as full as yours, each with stresses or joys radiating off them. Partially from the analysis paralysis that accompanies a shelf full of identical products, packaged differently, sold at price points that only don't seem arbitrary if you've spent years working in supply chains. Partially because until two days ago I hadn't driven a car in six years and had lived in a variety of food deserts, where grocery stores meant liquor stores or a minimum round trip of an hour, walking. So when everyone started complaining that they couldn't just pop by the store to grab a couple things when making dinner, once shelter-in-place began, a small part of me thought: hello. Welcome.

I scavenge because I have often lived with others who have full time jobs when I didn't. With people who buy things to use and then don't get around to them. Through no fault of their own. We are each of us many, and each of those selves need to be reproduced in order to labor under capitalism. That means eating and sleeping, but also dedicating time to read or play games or socialize. Which is all time spent not cooking. And it's necessary time, every fucking day. So the time I save shopping is the time I spend eyeing what's about to go bad, considering how to flip it into something edible, researching technique and trying to feed myself and my comrades.

I scavenge because I have a hard time getting rid of things, and seeing how others lose them helps me let go. I scavenge because I have a hard time getting attached to things, and seeing someone else's food getting moldy gives me a sense of what it might be like to care.

I scavenge because I'm fucking broke all the time. Even when I'm not, I can't help it. I don't buy things for myself. Except, well. I did just buy this thing. It's a 10" nonstick skillet, and it's the absolute best purchase I've made in the kitchen (because my chef's knife was a gift).

The only pot or pan I had ever bought was BC. You know. Before Cooking. Okay that's really bad. Take two:

The only pot or pan that I ever bought, prior to this skillet, was a cast iron wok that I used all of a half-dozen times over the course of four years. I gave it away as a gift just before I moved back to San Francisco. As in, immediately prior to starting to take cooking seriously. Since then I've scavenged, cooking on really nice cast iron, really shitty aluminum; in pots that are tiny or enormous. The things that others have bought themselves or been gifted and I've "accidentally" ended up using as much, or more, than the people who will take (or gift!) them when they move.

If I'd been asked a year ago what piece of stovetop cookware I would purchase first, a nonstick skillet would have been my last answer. They were what were in the kitchens I never used, scratched up and barely functional. When I started learning about them, they seemed like a scam: here is a surface that cracks under the slightest pressure of a fork or even the abrasive side of a sponge, and when it fails it becomes the worst possible pan. They don't get as hot as aluminum or carry heat as evenly as cast iron; they don't have the magical bullshit people attribute to copper or even the aesthetics of steel. It's just planned obsolescence: the pan. But then I started watching a lot of Jacques Pepin, which is annoying of me, to me. That fucking classic omelette.

For those who don't know: Jacques Pepin is one of the original celebrity chefs. He had a show with Julia Child. He's probably best known at this point for the "classic" French omelette, a creamy, simple omelette, often without filling, that involves no browning at all. It tastes good - it's eggs and butter - but it's mostly a test.

Pepin prefaces the many tutorials for it available on YouTube in precisely this way. It's the way he can tell if a new chef has good technique. It's kind of a pain in the ass, and you kind of need a nonstick for it to even be possible (or a really, really, really well-seasoned cast iron). It's the opposite of scavenging: using only the highest quality ingredients in a very simple way that requires a ton of practice to do right, much less consistently. I may be a scavenger, but like all of us I am also many, and one of that many can't turn down a challenge. Maybe especially when it involves eggs. And, I think, the first one many people learn to cook. Or at least one of the first ones I did. You can't exactly scavenge three-egg and toast breakfast, after all.

Audrey Horne & the City: Katy Keene's Alright

Most of the time, I watch Riverdale when I catch a particularly bad cold. Knowing that I'll be laid up in bed for a couple days I will queue up whatever I haven't yet seen (whether that's Riverdale or The Good Place or Pretty Little Liars or Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated or...) and spend a day or two just plowing through it. Strangely, I actually followed Riverdale's fourth season week-to-week for the first eight or so episodes, and then fell off. A few days ago I wrapped it up, and the day after I spent in a strange haze of the first seasons of its first spinoff.

I doubt I'll ever write much about the fourth season in particular so I'll say here: I think it's my favorite season since the first. Season one of Riverdale is one of the best examples of A Group Of Friends I've watched on television. It's a masterclass in pacing out how to propel viewers through watching four people care about each other. Season two is the one that took off, where Archie turns into a near-fascist vigilante and there is a massive riot outside of a prison. Season three is anchored by a Dungeons & Dragons analog called Griffins & Gargoyles and continues the second season's plot/mystery-heavy structure. Season four scales that back, structuring itself by flash forwards to the death of Jughead.

Those flash forwards allow for way more quiet moments. The season doesn't have to fill blank spaces with side plots; it can focus on what is important to the characters at any moment (whether that's a big mystery or a small character moment) since there is a promise of excitement in the future. That lead to at least one of my favorite character moments in recent history: that second, emphatic yes is so clutch. It's a little riot of excitement in a snowstorm, an expression of the tiny joy of trusting someone deeply and having that trust rewarded, an act of selfless self-deception that rewrites the self. I fucking love it. Season four peppers these moments throughout in a way that seasons two and three often missed, and then it gets to the big reveal and that part's kind of boring but who cares, the joy was the framing, not the execution.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. Between watching seasons two and three of Riverdale, I took a break to watch the entire run of Pretty Little Liars, a show that I had heard good things about and was clearly an antecedent. Even that managed to pay off* in season four, when Lucy Hale (who plays Aria in Pretty Little Liars) showed up as Katy Keene. I expected that was the whole of it and was satisfied. I then found out that it was actually a crossover episode for Katy Keene, Riverdale's first spinoff series, starring Hale as well as Ashleigh Murray (Josie McCoy of Josie and the Pussycats).

Katy Keene keeps some core elements of the Riverdale formula but ends up being more Sex & the City than Twin Peaks. Katy Keene is an aspiring fashion desire in New York City who lives in an apartment with Jorge, a drag queen and aspiring Broadway star, the aforementioned aspiring singer Josie, and frequent guest Pepper, an aspiring Andy Warhol, I guess? She's rich (but is she really??) and maybe a con artist and maybe just needs a little help from her friends. Their incompatible sexual preferences remove most of the possibilities that they will hook up or couple off within the foursome (so no Betty/Jughead Archie/Veronica equivalent, as it were), but otherwise the dynamics are broadly similar. One of the characters even gets to do voice over to narrate the episodes! Except that's actually one of the biggest differences.

Riverdale is, decidedly, not called Jughead. It is also not called Archie per the comics that spawned it. Katy Keene being called Katy Keene strikes, at first, like an imagined 90s spinoff of Twin Peaks called Donna Hayward. Or, perhaps more accurately, a Twin Peaks spinoff called Lana Budding Milford. Although if you wanted to argue that Donna was never a central character in Twin Peaks I don't know that I'd have strong enough feelings to push back particularly hard. The influence of Twin Peaks on Riverdale isn't just that it took the idea of "dead girl rocks town; secrets revealed" and replaced the girl with a boy. It's the primacy of the town itself, the way it chews through people and yet those people stay and destroy themselves and each other. Which is not untrod territory for shows set in New York City (...probably? obligatory mention that I'm certainly no TV expert &, in fact, am barely a viewer). But.

So: Katy Keene imports some of the structure of Riverdale, but guides our focus to the individual rather than the environment via the name. This is not a neutral action, but it's also not a determining one; only a frame. And it's a frame the first season clearly struggles with, given how much time it clearly wants to spend with Katy Keene and how much time it wants to spend with Josie McCoy. The editing feels choppy not in individual moments so much as in pacing, like the showrunners couldn't decide who or if there was a strict point of view character. Ultimately I think this ends up benefiting the show, but we'll get there. Because it's sometimes a bit of a rough watch.

One influential aspect of Twin Peaks I haven't yet mentioned on Riverdale shows up in the latter more as suggestion than actual fact. Riverdale, especially in the first season, often gestures toward the languid pace punctuated by extreme action characteristic of Lynch's filmography - including Twin Peaks. The way shots holding a beat too long leads to plot beats lingering two beats too long leads to mysteries dissolving into an aether of Lore in Twin Peaks is gestured at, as well as the way sometimes those extra beats are suddenly interrupted by an eruption of violence or bliss (Amanda Seyfried high on cocaine in a convertible in season 3, for instance) or inexplicable. In Riverdale those techniques of alienation are just subsumed back into the soap opera structure out of which they were born, but the mark of that alienating use still lingers.

And that mark remains in Katy Keene, at least as far as the show is self-consciously of a piece with (or a piece of) Riverdale. Which is fascinating because, as the show grows into its own, the clear reference points that it enjoys playing with are much more similar to sitcoms and Sex & the City. To that point: Katy Keene really doesn't find itself until episode 5.

"Song for a Winter's Night" becomes sort of prototypical for the rest of the season; it takes place during a polar vortex, so after some setup the main cast is trapped inside with a series of escalating tensions rapidly unveiling themselves. Katy has 24 hours to make a dress for her boss and fashion-industry gatekeeper Gloria; Jorge has a run-in with his mother while in drag and needs a new dress; Josie's boyfriend/manager has been outed in the tabloids as having been intimate with his stepsister, and suspects Pepper is to blame; and Pepper's cons are slowly coming unraveled as Josie does some digging. Between a musical number, some serious accusations of selfishness, the reveal of $60,000 of debt, a broken radiator, a couple ruined dresses, a broken sewing machine and a reconciliation, the episode pushes the group dynamic into "madcap hijinks" territory - editing and all - and comes out the other side with genuinely new dynamics.

That's the show at its best. Hale brings an interpersonal emotional bigness that she was capable of on Pretty Little Liars but rarely got to exhibit (because she ended up tied up with her teacher boyfriend way, way too fucking often) that puts a point on the stakes. Murray keeps the Riverdale energy alive and palpable and can genuinely sing. The show leans into the (cinematic) glamour of New York City's "struggling" artists and does so in a particularly millennial(ly coded, at least**) way. Up to and including weird valorizations of the Chelsea Hotel and Warhol's Factory while meeting billionaires in Washington Square Park (...and having a cable bill be a point of contention, which I guess shows just how far television has fallen given that it has to thematize its own existence to remind the viewer). This is the best stuff not because it enraptures but because it manages to pull off the highwire act of something like a screwball comedy while synthesizing its influences into its own thing.

The Sex & the City influence isn't all bad, but it's most prominent when the show is at its worst. There are moments where it drags its feet and can only get its message across by having Hale do a bad Carrie Bradshaw-style voiceover to explain how she's feeling (even though half the time Hale's acting and the scripting and shooting are strong enough to make the voiceover extraordinarily redundant) about a particular pickle. Or when a subplot extends way beyond its lifespan because the sex is (allegedly) hot, like how much of Josie's screentime is eaten up by the on-again off-again relationship with her manager, aforementioned billionaire Alexander Cabot, or Pepper's with her assistant/lover/former doorperson(?) Didi.

If I highlighted "that second, emphatic yes" of Betty's during Riverdale's snow day episode from season 4, it's because I like it as metonym as much as anything else. The power in these shows - for me, specifically, at this point in my life, specifically - is, in large part, in their modeling of friendship. You may have noticed that's a bit of a theme around here. It's a theme I've been actively thinking through at least since I watched I Know What You Did Last Summer and was kind of blown away by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt's performances, having not long before taken a class on John Carpenter that focused at least partially on the way he portrayed homosocial relationships after the style of John Ford. So, you know. A good chunk of a decade before I realized that I might be interested in the modeling of femme*** friendships for very personal reasons. Like that I myself might occupy that space, for instance, and might have been denied the possibility of actualizing it in early life.

By that very personal, historically-specific metric, for instance, Pretty Little Liars is another important text that, like seasons 2 and 3 of Riverdale, is far too often too interested in the Mystery to allow itself time to stretch out into who these people are and why they react to and interact with each other in the ways that they do. Katy Keene, from its first season, seems like its something that might hit a sweet spot at some point in the future. A season two and three would be nice, I guess is what I'm saying. Even just the one, though, is alright.

*I mean, it paid itself off, obviously. Pretty Little Liars is also excellent for a shockingly high percent of its run, spinoffs... excluded. Ravenswood is such a bummer.

** The other way to say this is "woke" I guess, but I think I'm trying to get that word out of my regular use since it seems less and less demonstrative of anything aside from, maybe, performatively progressive on social issues. Millennial, on the other hand...

***This is an awkward use of femme; "female friendships" doesn't exactly include me even if it's probably more accurate in describing the actual media, and at least at this point "friendships between women" wouldn't either as I continue to develop my own understanding of myself as an enby femme who is trans, &c &c.

Linkout: Melissa Caruso Interview for Spectology's Digital Book Tour

My third interview for Spectology is with Melissa Caruso, author of the forthcoming fantasy novel The Obsidian Tower. It, like Veronica Roth's book, has a very early twist that made having a more detailed discussion... kind of a pain. That, coupled with my less-than-cooperative brain, lead to a bit of a (lets call it) meandering conversation (on my part).

We did get some good conversations about craft - how drafting can help, recycling old characters to good effect, overwriting conversations to develop characters - and tabletop/live action roleplaying, so I'd count it as a win. Plus the book was a pretty fascinating look at obligation (did I say obedience in the episode when I meant obligation? i did!) through the lens of fantasy, which in my book makes it well worth a read.

Linkout: Spectology Digital Book Tour with Veronica Roth

My second interview for the Quarantine Digital Book Tour is with Veronica Roth, who wrote the Divergent books. I've interviewed two authors and one of them has sold 30+ million copies of one book. It was intimidating!

A little behind the scenes: Roth's team reached out to the Spectology folks (which includes me I guess!), and I agreed to take on the interview. We talked with at least a half dozen people to set up the interview, and at no point until the call started was I in contact with Roth. Luckily I found enough in the book that I really enjoyed, and have spent a lifetime learning how to overcome social anxiety. And, luckily, Roth was genuinely engaged in the conversation and happy to answer my "questions." 

I think we hit on some interesting questions about her new book, Chosen Ones, and what it's like to write a visually-oriented novel that tackles mental health questions around "chosen one" narratives. I'd love it if folks who listened would give feedback (up to and including that I talked way too much, which I'm incredibly aware of).

Always Bee Cooking #9: Working Through What This Is

Since my last Always Bee Cooking post at the end of February, there's an argument that I've been embodying the title. In that time I baked my first cake, baked my second and third cakes, baked my fourth and fifth cakes in one day, and baked my sixth, seventh, and eighth cakes on one other day, all with nothing more than about three mixing bowls, a couple of whisks, and some dollar store pans.

I made a sweet offshoot of Sourdough starter, fed and kept it, recipe tested it against my Seared Sourdough Pikelets, and abandoned it. I tested out some pan sauces, spent a week making scrambled eggs and thinking seriously about how to make them better (or the differences between cooking methods, at least). I collaborated with a friend on genuinely great pastas, spent three hours making tater tots from scratch, made my first pizza, stuffed mushrooms, buttermilk-marinated chicken. And those are just the things I remembered to post about on Instagram.

So the lack of posts here haven't been because I don't have "potential content," I guess. It's been for two main reasons. The first are a series of brick walls I've been running up against. You know the ones. They're labeled things like Mental Health, Global Pandemic, Financial Insecurity, Defense Mechanisms Developed Out Of Childhood Trauma And Damn Near 30 Years Of Unacknowledged Dysphoria, Impostor Syndrome From Having No Formal Training And A Garbage Palate. Just normal stuff.

The other is that there's a pretty big gap between what I want this series to be and what I'm able to produce for it right now. What I'm able to produce is this sort of thing. Blog posts with heavy Personal Stories hooks. Text dumps that put people off reading them. Acknowledgments of my limitations that hopefully punch through to something interesting or useful, especially to people who don't have a ton of cooking experience. I can see some theoretical value in that. It's not what I want to be doing, though.

Basically every other post since I started this series, I've been threatening to do a longer theoretical post. I've been threatening that because what I actually want to develop within this space is a genuinely left wing way to write about cooking, from the perspective of someone who is deeply inexpert. Not because people who have gone to culinary school or worked their way up in restaurants are less left wing or some bullshit, but because these are the two perspectives I have and they are two perspectives that feel deeply, miserably lacking from the Culinary Discourse, at least as I'm aware of it. Please feel free to point me toward folks who embody these things, if you know of them. If you point me to some liberal I will judge you, just a little bit. Not that much, though, if it dissuades you. The problem is that I've learned a lot from them, because cooking media is overwhelmingly, exhaustingly, and too often deliriously usefully, liberal.

I would like to clarify that last sentence, but that's precisely the problem. The clarification requires a significant amount of clear background, and the brick walls aren't avoidable. Not even by reference to the framework of reproductive labor. Theory is theory; praxis is praxis; those walls can be fungible, but sometimes you cook theoretically and write actively. And sometimes the structural analysis is right and the individual circumstance is fucking broken.

Is this another empty promise, then, that I'll have a full dissection up, soon, of the pedagogy & ideology of cooking media, especially around how it interacts with learning to cook for the first time in your late twenties/early thirties? I guess that's to be found out. As a comrade says, we can only hold space to allow others to hold themselves accountable. I hope to hold myself to account.

Linkout/Announcement: Quarantine Digital Book Tour with Spectology

I've joined with the inestimable folks at Spectology to edit & sometimes(/mostly?) host a series of "Digital Book Tours," to provide a space for speculative fiction authors whose book tours have been interrupted by COVID-19. You might remember Spectology from when I talked about Samuel R. Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand with them in December, or when I called them my 8th favorite podcast of 2018.

The first episode came out on Tuesday, where I interviewed El Lam about their book Goldilocks, which came out in the UK today and is coming out in the US May 5th. The book was a really neat read - it features five women who steal a spaceship in a climate-ravaged, fascistic near future in order to found a utopian society on a new planet, and does a great job of being both thriller-paced and pausing for character development & striking images. And it does a phenomenal job of drawing characters whose class position defines them against their desires, which is a phenomenal achievement, imo. That's a reductionist reading, but I'm trying to be brief, okay.

Anyway, support Goldilocks when it comes out & subscribe to Spectology, because there's a grip of good conversations about SF novels there already &, yknow, you probably miss my irrepressible giggle. It's terrible podcast audio, but it's irrepressible, so.

Occupy C(OL)A: A Decade of UC Struggle

At the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year a coalition of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty occupy the Graduate Student Commons of the University of California, Santa Cruz. They splinter off of a demonstration at the base of campus against an egregious tuition hike. A prepared statement declares the situation untenable, the space liberated, and demands outmoded. Barricades go up as an attempted occupation at UC Berkeley is thwarted.

The Grad Student Commons holds for a week before voluntarily then dissolving. Over the course of the next four months there are something like twenty actions, primarily occupations and sit-ins, across the University of California system. In 2010 the escalation continues as electrocommunist dance parties are added to the mix to disrupt business and cover for other militant actions. Students also begin to join non-university actions like the riots against the verdict in the murder of Oscar Grant.

In 2011 the escalations spike. Students continue to struggle against the hollowing of the university by the state and the administration and continue to cross over with militant struggle against police brutality. When the Occupy Wall Street movement hits, it is in part due to the veterans and comrades of the Occupy California struggle (in New York and Oakland especially, but also elsewhere) who help transform the idea from an Adbusters photo-op to the seeds of a USian mass movement with a class analysis.

The continuity of national struggle over the past decade is full of ruptures. The police repression of Occupy eventually snuffed it out. Black Lives Matter developed its own momentum and path with, at best, assists from participants and organizers of Occupy. A number of sites of struggle also pop up, from Standing Rock to the Muslim Ban to street fights against alt right and neo-Nazi goons. Electorally, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary candidacy blew open the doors of the DSA, who seem primarily to have educated and agitated in order to position him better for his 2020 run (and surprisingly successfully, it seems, even if he does not take the nomination).

I begin in 2009 not because it is the origin (though it can sometimes feel that way, given the massive ruptures that Obama and the Great Recession constituted) or because it was my own point of radicalization, but because we seem to have looped back around. Graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz are engaging in a wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) right now which started in December of 2019.

They are striking even though it is against the terms set by their union (the United Auto Workers) in the last rounds of negotiation. The strike has quickly been held up by a coalition – of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty – and has faced barely-veiled threats of deportation from former Department of Homeland Security head and current UC President Janet Napolitano. 

The first four years of Trump’s presidency have seen inspiring actions but little in the way of engaged, mass movement building (and no, the liberal #Resistance does not count). COLA4All is reminiscent of that pre-Occupy occupy, spreading quickly across the UC system and, hopefully, into broader movement building opportunities. Hell, they even got a nod from Sanders, and Napolitano backed down quickly thereafter.

Reclaim UC put it well, arguing that the material conditions behind the COLA wildcat strike are consistent with those that inspired the initial wave of Occupy California – “[D]uring the California student movement of 2009-10, everyone understood how the UC administration used its police forces to enable and enforce tuition hikes: ‘Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops.’ 10 years later, tuition increases have slowed down and, with few options for revenue growth, administrators have turned to ‘cost-cutting,’ esp[ecially] regarding labor costs, as a key component of their strategy. UCSC police are still on the front lines of UC’s financial strategy.” 

The conversion of the public university system into a de facto private entity, run like a business with minimal state support, lends continuity to the administrative and repressive apparatus. At a more systemic level, the struggle for COLA is linked to Occupy California by way of the Great Recession. The wave of immiseration that hit low- and middle-income households (with a wildly disproportionate impact on people of color) was a kind of creative destruction. From developers’ perspectives, neighborhoods that had been subject to the slow beat of "Urban Renewal" and tax breakdown were suddenly freed of the one barrier to successful gentrification – the fact that they were lived in by poor people of color who couldn’t be arrested (or murdered by police) for being homeless. Even better when those neighborhoods were adjacent to the booming tech industry. Silicon Valley’s radiating wealth coupled with scarcity artificially created by developers buying up foreclosed houses meant the second half of the 2010s blossomed into rent hikes that left even unionized graduate student workers in a position that they have once again described as untenable.

It would be ridiculous to claim that as goes the UC system, so goes the nation. What is clear, I hope, is that the material conditions facing university workers are not at all disconnected from the material conditions we all face. Graduate students too are being immiserated by the private control of the means of production, by the neoliberal state’s disinvestment from every social service except the military and police, from being propertyless wage workers in proximity to the fluid exchange of venture capital, IPOs, and land developers.

There has been a spark of life in the labor movement over the last half decade, although most of it has been talk. Bernie Sanders and Sarah Nelson have been among the most identifiable spokespeople, but everyone from graduate students to Kickstarter Employees to Game Workers Unite (and even SAG-AFTRA, in striking against the videogame industry a few years back) have been making moves unprecedented since Reaganomics. If that spark is to catch fire, COLA is one of the necessary models.

UAW leadership is facing corruption charges. Unions for Iron Workers and Firefighters have endorsed Joe “Medicare for all is bad for unions” Biden in the Democratic Primary. Even more recently, leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW, a union known for at least a handful of militant locals) endorsed Biden as well to immediate backlash from a sizable group of members. A reborn labor movement without the capacity for actions like the COLA wildcat strike is, at best, only marginally better than the shambling zombie of a labor movement we have seen under neoliberalism.

Like Occupy California before it, the COLA wildcat strike represents a possible path forward in response to the same prevailing conditions, mutated as they have been over the last dozen years. It will require material support, generalization, and escalation. But we’ve done it before. This time we’ll just have to do it better.