Eye = I (Information Makes You Go Blind)

You are what you eat, I guess, and this is what I ate while contemplating the essence of islandismo and other identity conundrums. This was the visit of imagined danger--within 36 hours, I got stung by a jellyfish, I slammed the sótano gate on my left ring finger (still black and blue) and my sister was bitten by a bizarre flying insect while cleaning up la casa de abuelo. Alex tried to explain, saying these were manifestations of energy that recognized I had done something bad, and these were just warnings that the repercussions could have been a lot worse.

En realidad I had trouble figuring out what I had done, and just as I pursued that thought, the warnings disappeared. I found myself watching Spider-Man battling Diego Rivera in the Fajardo Caribbean Cinemas outpost, and wondering whether this represented the 1930s opposition between abstract expressionism and the Mexican muralists. But no, Spidey is modernist perfection, created at the height of the postwar industrial economy, galvanizing a nostalgia that never jells in our postmodern entertainments. It seems almost miraculous that Stan Lee's text is rendered here almost completely unaltered, and we can revel in a post-shtetl worldview that (perhaps unfortunately) holds Queens ascendant (echoes of white flight), sort of a hetero version of Angels in America, where J. Jonah Jameson is Roy Cohn, and Mary Jane is...

I remember Mary Jane through a Vaseline-drenched lens of Gwen Stacy and Betty Brant, but maybe I'm giving away too much of the plot. By photographing Spidey, Peter Parker was doing the long story/short thing about everyone from Jacob Riis to Diane Arbus, except it was himself he was photographing, and, thankfully, he wasn't having sex with his girlfriend. "Estas seguro que la pelicula es en español? said the father next to me to his son, the father who mentioned offhand to his wife that he might have to be in New York next week. Again, does it matter? The subtitles occasionally faltered in Mexican slang, but behind me, Spanish-dominant kids yelled "Go, Spidey, Go!"


 


Endless editions of Super-Xclusivo had me reading about Osvaldo Rios's prison term in Vea while I was on the checkout line at Pueblo. There were Don Cholito tees in several Old SJ shops but I was still missing the agua de coco stand at Luquillo. My mind was still on Fahrenheit, the name of a perfume sold at the duty free in Kennedy, and it seemed as if the island was on top of it, or perhaps it was just old news in the aftermath of Vieques. The screening I saw was sparsely attended, but it was being shown at theaters island-wide, not just at Fine Arts, as I had originally believed. The second time was even better, and it had a kind of religious context that didn't occur to me at Kip's Bay. Does the left-right conflict boil down to religion? Sometimes it seems that way, but I'd like to do more research on the anthropology of religion.

 


This guy at the Nuyorican Café in Old SJ was really good but I didn't catch his name. He reminded me of the time I read from my Thinkpad in Copenhagen. The whole thing was so reminiscent of what I went through on East 3rd Street that me sentí en casa. Alex said, "But these are real puertorriqueños instead of fake puertorriqueños." Yeah well maybe nuyorican is fake puerto rican but it's the best we could do under the circumstances. Pero mira, all my peeps at Jake's and Carlitos and Camaradas and Julia's Jam, isn't there just a little disconnect here? Do we really have access to the story about our aunts' hand nearly being severed by a stray machete left carelessly in the kitchen by a hired hand en la finca? Then again, does it really matter? If you're in Plaza las Américas using a Sears credit card, how much more Puerto Rican are you than someone in Orlando or Brooklyn?

What we share I guess is that Ricanstruction love and revolution thing that Carlos Delgado won't back away from. The New York Times > Sports > Baseball > Sports of The Times: Delgado Makes a Stand by Taking a Seat


Tell me the truth, do you stand up for that Blah-blah-America Rudy Giuliani/Steinbrenner-imposed mierda while reveling in bottom-of-the-seventh A-Rod ecstasy in the Bronx? Did you notice in that scene in Fahrenheit when Dubya makes the crack about the have-mores, Bernard Kerik sitting behind Bush, next to Pataki?

Personally, I'm not concerned about the latest Hawking revelation. The New York Times > Science > Hawking Says He Was Wrong About Black Holes
The whole black hole thing seemed a little too pat to me. In truth, for some time now I've noticed that when I throw myself out in the garbage, I come back in a "mangled" form. I'm just happy to express my love for Linda Ronstadt.