Strange Daze

So much has happened recently and I haven't really been staying on top of it in the old L-I-S bloggggg. I think I was primarily dissuaded by the amazing lack of response I got when I sent out a mass e-mailing asking for New York Latinos to weigh in on why they were or were not voting for Freddy for mayor. I'm going to publish some of these here right now (without attribution of course: it would be needlessly humiliating at this point).

I’m voting for Freddie. Mike has been romancing Puerto Ricans and every other Latino constituency and showing little for it. I’m one of the "selected" Boricuas and Latinos who had their picture taken with Bloomberg at one of his Latino targetted events. I know "re-elect Mike buttons" printed with Dominican, Mexican and Puerto Rican flags have been handed out to targeted consistencies. I wish Freddy could talk faster.

Fernando Ferrer receiving the democratic nomination has produced the strangest sensation I’ve felt in my gut for a while. On the one hand is the swelling of ethnic pride. Finally a Boricua has been chosen by the city’s dominant political party to lead the way. After the pride subsides comes the nausea. This is the best we could do? A has-been card carrying member of the old Bronx political machine? Someone who’s already lost twice? Someone who reminds us all of our shifty Uncle who only drops by when he needs cash (and we give it to him anyway because us Latin folks are loving and dysfunctionally codependent too!)? Where is our “Barak Obama” figure? Someone who is universally loved inside the community and out? Do we REALLY not have anyone more qualified than this? And then comes the urge to defend him against the Freddie haters. Hey Freddie’s done a lot for the Bronx! Gone are the empty lots filled with fire-charred debris. In their place affordable housing – and tons of it! And not the old school towers of projects than just become urban prisons for their residents. Instead the Bronx is littered with 2 story single family homes where people can live with dignity and take the steps to improve their lives. Freddie deserves a lot of the credit for that, if not all of it. If he can do that with the perpetually neglected Bronx, imagine what he could do for all of New York City?
And besides, do any of the Freddie haters really know his history – good and/or bad? You never hear about this stuff on NY1, only the petty mistakes, the minor controversies and Sharpton, Sharpton, Sharpton. Makes you wonder, do they really love Bloomberg? Or do they just hate the Puerto Rican?
As a young Puerto Rican musician I’m all too aware that the number one issue in this city is not terrorism, it’s not crime and no it’s not even education. It’s the cost of living. None of us can afford to live here anymore, not even full time professionals who make real money. There won’t be any need to improve the schools, if there are no more families who can afford to live here.
Gentrification is turning our city from a land of equal opportunity to a giant hipster theme park. Bloomberg’s policies (while certainly an improvement over the racially divisive Giuliani) have accelerated this process to an extreme that was unthinkable a few years ago. Our immigrant communities, our African American communities and yes our PUERTO RICAN neighborhoods have born the brunt of this process. My home neighborhood Williamsburg wasn’t enough for the wealthy hipsters and now Bushwick & Bed-Sty are the new trendy spots. There are already artists lofts popping up in East New York, so that tells you that no neighborhood is off limits to these people.
So of course I’ll be voting for Freddie. The only other alternative is defeat and the death of our communities. I’ll be voting for Freddie as an intellectual, as a liberal, as a concerned New Yorker and as a Puerto Rican. After all, if Jews could love the disastrous Ed Koch, Blacks embrace the controversial David Dinkins and Italians accept the brilliant, yet completely ineffective Mario Cuomo – then I guess I’ll have to love Freddie. Because he may not be perfect, but as a Nuyorican – he’s all that I’ve got. At least for now…

About Ferrer v. Bloomberg.. Look, pulling that lever's gonna be tough for me either way. The RNC debacle, sure I'm still pissed about that. Oftentimes I think of Bloomberg as "the smiling baby dinosaur "-- doesn't he sort of look like a baby dinosaur that just hatched? -- and yet the smackdown on democracy that was the wave of arrests that day felt eerily reminiscent of the Giuliani Daze. But will I pull the lever for Fernando Ferrer? I'm sayin' "nah." The idea of voting for a registered Republican instead of a Dem populist turns my sphincter in a knot, and yet...Ferrer's a whiner. The Mayor's office is no place for whiners. Yet a vote for Billionaire Baby Dinosaur is probably a vote for "NYC, where people with money reign and play," isn't it. Is there some way to get Stevie Wonder on the ballot?

If Freddie looses, his staff will be partly responsible. He seems to have surrounded himself with a bunch of knuckleheads, and it's becoming a growing consensus.

So Freddy did indeed lose and we're not even going to wonder about the close-ups of Willie Colon and Margarita Lopez onstage not too far from Mike's gal-pal whose name I forget. Actually they were cleverly placed so that they'd be prominent in the wide shots but invisible in the closeups. I don't know, should I go on? How about the brainwashing by TV ad of New Yorkers who all seemed to believe that Mikey did wonders for the public school system when my sister thinks that there are rumors buzzing in the corridors in the Bronx and East Harlem that somehow the test result books were cooked. And no, I'm sure we won't bring up the report that came out yesterday about our fair city's soaring unemployment rate. I mean this is a guy that The New York Times said could become the greatest mayor in our history.

Yeah and I had some photos all set up to post to accompany little riffs on things, like this one of Condi Rice when she said her boss Georgie-poo wasn't ruling out invading Syria.

But this was so long ago. It was before the whole dizzying rush leading up to the Scooter Libby indictment, before this amazing last couple of weeks where there were 30,000 people in a soccer stadium in Argentina jumping up and down with Hugo Chavez and a TV split screen that showed Dubya pressing bourgeois flesh in Mar de Plata as anarkids smashed ATMs just to his right. Then last week, when the House became a chaotic forum for discussing how to pull out of Iraq. Stuff I never thought could have happened as little as two months ago. I'm fighting a tremendous urge to say I told you so. But why would I say that, dear reader, when anyone who reads this thing has pretty much always been on the same page (so to speak) with me any old how.

I met Eddie Palmieri and Luis Tiant the other day in the Havana Cigar place at 666 Fifth Avenue, that place I used to worry about during the Reagan years. And I forgot to mention Henry Kissinger in the lobby of the Sony Building.

One problem: Lack of poetry. Been kind of robotic in the way I experience the world lately. Sure there are these...moments. Some kind of Low East Side thing needs to inhabit me. Calling you down now. The rain is pounding on the window, sparing me and my island from the Katrina hell. For now, anyway. Leaving the candle lit. Wisp of gentle hair by my side.