(Quotes from Stein & Weber’s dialogue are interspersed in italics with my own words. T.D.)
if you’ve lived in the same city going back to the sixties, nyc at
least, (and you’re, like, a regular person) seeing and being
“perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have been
hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products” is an unh
unh unh state of mind
it’s hard not to think fondly of the brown dusty grass
of the Central Park lawn,
since now tis’ oft a place of claimed territory,
a patchwork of Burberry cashmere squares,
outlined in rich green, and covered in wicker picnic boxes
by ten hours to violins…congas need not apply
and hard not to write, with yearning,
songs (mine) about simpler ambitions
Crackhead junkie hustlers
Going to raise dream money
Reach back and rockabye mommy charms
West Harlem facing university invasions…gone dominoes and
long gone James Brown blarings…and go look at these condos
with Trump name on them looking-over over-seeing the Hudson at
night, five of them with their apartments darkened cause they’re
global investments,………………………..not housing, not housing
Oh squatters wont you please come back, “no co-dependence” for
them with the system (and no showers ’tis true); but wasn’t the
(mostly figurative) acid of those anarchists clear lit?
You know, in our 80’s banging-drums demonstrations against the
real estate industry outside 111 Centre Street, we had Trump as big
puppet racist renting figurehead modeling our “Housing Court is
Homeless Court” theme…and the lawyers, representing those
being dispossessed in the courtrooms above, loved our shit and
encouraged us picketers with quick on-the-down-low “cant be
marching with you but it’s working” commentaries (meaning,
astonishingly, that judges inside were dispensing better judgments
on that day)
“Developers only seek deals that make them winners, and thereby
turn us into one of the President’s favorite monikers: losers.”
And aint that the grist that runs the country, not just the
developers’ game? Ye ole elite, whether in Trump’s biz or not,
love to make us losers…when thinking about “effective
leadership” don’t we need to understand this system that hurts us
beyond the bitchtrump? (before the election my family and I drove
the country coast to coast watching the wheres of Trump and
Bernie signs, and only saw one for the basket of La Hillary
(literally one)…sorry — cause yeah she’s a woman and that
factored unjust like always — but true is my reporting on her non-
visibility in our country wander drive
(and that Dem party machine played nasty tricks too for her in
many states, and I’ve seen forty years of it in this Nueva York
from microphone manipulation to outright physical censorship)
The “obstacle” to anyone being an “effective leader” is that we are
mostly all made to feel like losers and to feel it everyday in part
from the real estate history we’ve lived through and feel daily in
our homes and hoods watching the weak and lovely fall,…and that
man Obama all of a sudden opened up regular language doors, and
made us feel regular, not like losers, so something else crept into
leadership requirements for all things…
(but to be straight as I know it, the whoring between pols and real
estate here, really aint that different from the whoring in
Washington world (so Trump-limited knows things un-limited
too), despite having his own special category in the death making)
Crackhead junkie hustlers
Going to raise dream money
Reach back and rockabye mommy charms
“A developer ‘in drag’ – acting as a planner” YEAH, YEAH,
YEAH, call out them pols, Angelo Falcón made a life of that call
up as a fighter for Puerto Ricans who were always on the wrong
side of statistics…he was an occasional roommate on Claremont
Ave in our Columbia daze and died three days ago, and my
association with him, along with the grey-suited older Russians
who came unseen on Sunday mornings into the first small bedroom
near the entrance door with vodka to cultivate the PR’s in redness,
(this slice was not part of Angelo’s decently long, but loser-themed
obit — as always with the Times’s summaries of left outliers), both
whom the querying detectives linked me to from some unknown
file source…the questions my gunpoint arresting officers laid on
me in the precinct before my trip to the Tombs indicated they
thought would lead this tennis player to confessions about the PR
independentistas and revolution
(let me not be dramatic, it was a short interview, polite enough, a
bit threatening but mostly humorous to me and I indicated that to
the cops…and afterwards they let an AP reporter interview me)
This lil’ bit a bust happened on the East Side 70’a in a Fifth Ave
neighborhood inhabited by the “implementers (and financiers) of
urban renewal plans” and those who look the other way, when me
and Pablo (another Claremont roomy) took out three plate glass
windows of a bank there during a Bring the War Home protest
against the invasion of Cambodia…I was slower and got caught —
that gun they pulled out when I glanced behind sure helped me
stop running
“It’s easier to hide the competitive shifting of costs and risks if the
relationship is framed as one of ‘partnership’ rather than as
adversaries.”…city councils’ “competing for gentrification” …
“in places like New York and Chicago local urban planners must
act as wealth managers for the global 1%”…
PRECISELY, BRING THE WAR HOME, THEN & NOW
Oh that fucking phrase “partnering with” for that “poorly specified
development”
Angelo was a thick-lensed glasses cool loser talking “truth to
power” for decades to Hispanic pols and CCNY educators. My
friend Pablo who has been all over the world improving crop
yields in exploited countries is one too. My brother Benj with his
longtime First of the Month journal’s amalgam of unpaid boy and
girl contributors (and my occasional publisher who’ll not likely be
in love with parts of my simple analysis). All three — just some of
those many losers out there — calling out the elite games played on
the weary kind. But it aint bouts no Trump limited experience in
world politique that makes him fail in his “mainstream” nobel
forays, or as a fulfiller of a vicious agenda which will be reversed
‘pon Pence’s comeuppance. Sure, he’s special but Basquiat’s
SAMO SAMO images from his early street markings are still au
courant. (I’ve talked to a couple of the Central Park 5 in my
travels and think they’d agree.)
It’s about the need to be, as the authors put it so well up front:
being “perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have
been hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products”
no big observation but that is the way of the world history of land
and those who think they own it or otherwise engage in general
thievery, and it has been ever so, so…
below is a quick email I sent out a week ago to a list of people
who’d battled for a decade the Columbia eviction plan as it
expands into Harlem and as its waspbread, not-quite-but-like Agent Orange
pilot president pretends it aint building walls to block away the Basquiats
and Falcóns…it’s about local changes that result from biz-as-
usual real-estate driven world politics says I says I, (quick and
choppy my note my fellow losers is, but sometimes that gets the
job done to start talk, so I just left it as I sent it):
Subject: Re: the NYTimes finally notices the attacks on affordable housing BACK FROM TOM D.
HI All, May 20, 2018
Landlord harassment on the rise, yeah. I certainly am getting many more people consulting me about apartment conditions, and their lease renewals – the care needed to fill them out the right way, as basic as that is. More BS about security deposits too, and leases getting sent back concerning all those added in forms that have to be signed (in the end they are mostly forms that inform tenants and protect them, but not all and you have to be careful of the preferential rent tricks).
And in my wanderings in Harlem (most recent was going over to the Armory yesterday with my granddaughter for a science and technology event run by District 5 and others, but mostly just around West Harlem) I have noticed such a change in the people in the neighborhoods. So many different languages spoken (well, true that has always been, but now it seems it’s more likely a foreign tongue than English heard in any random conversation), coming from students and young professionals primarily but also the lingo of immigrant cultures of course. And all in surrounds that seem to be so bizarrely absent of Puerto Ricans and black folks, just feeling like “where are they?” in the air. Dominicans too, but a stroll in mid-uptown Riverside Park today just kind of brought home a dramatic absence of people who just used to be out and about in the parks, including the Ecuadorians who used to inhabit areas of the park like their big living rooms. Well, it’s an anecdotal observation, but for my money, it’s a real one reflecting populations being driven out, and in my area, it’s certainly dramatically linked to CU expansion.
Well sorry for rattling on, it’s just that sometimes a thing just smacks you in the face and that’s what happened this weekend. Hope everyone enjoys some time off somewhere else this summer, thanks for sending this Times article on gentrification victims Ruth, and for forwarding that petition on preservation of those Harlem buildings (it’s a quick one to sign up for so please everyone, give it a look), Tom D
being “perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have
been hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products”
SAMO SAMO
Crackhead junkie hustlers
Going to raise dream money
Reach back and rockabye mommy charms