Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.61.0411020043420.3403@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: VOTE NEW YORK!!!
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 00:43:50 -0500 (EST)
VOTE NEW YORK!!! It's easy to vote this election! Vote the New York way! We're the smartest city in America and that makes New York State the smartest state! (In spite of Albany!) We have the major museums! The biggest shows! In this city we have neighborhoods from over one hundred and twenty countries! Where I live we have the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Mark Morris dance studios - a huge building devoted to one company, built from the ground up! New York Dolls! Bella Abzug! We have radio stations for every taste! Our cultural economy is tremendous - where else can you find regularly, at a thrift shop, Benjamin and Frege, Pavese, and Madison's The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity? We have the major newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, anywhere in the English-speaking world! We are the home of Yiddish theater and hiphop and just about every form of jazz ever created or discovered! We're the city that produces around the clock, that never sleeps at night, that constantly moves, dances, and thinks! Our daily news is almost always political, and our ball team is one of the best in the country - so good in fact, that we let Boston have the series this time! And we're liberal enough to tolerate a bit of fascism as Bush and his cohorts coughed their way through a national convention! Bill Clinton! The West Village! Civil right and wrongs! We've got the best artists, and poetry begins and ends here, no matter what you heard about the west coast! Our art's so important Terry Allen had to make fun of it! We've got institutions like St Marks and the Met (which? opera or museum, take your pick) that are nowhere else to be found on the continent! And we take our politics seriously without moronic lip-service to god and country! We'll pledge allegiance if the country deserves it! We know the flag's a piece of cloth! We'll stand tall for or against the powers that be, and we'll lead the country in demonstrations if we have to! Vote for us and let us decide! A vote for us is a vote for justice everywhere - we've got the best law schools in North America here - even Derrida came and spoke over and over again, Kristeva just did her heart-stopping tour! We take nothing from no one! We've had the Talking Heads! If we're going to have a mob, we're going to have the best mob in the world! If we're going to dig up dirt on someone, we'll do it to the bottoms of our pockets! If we're going to riot, we'll be second to L.A. but nowhere else! Saturday Night Live! Springsteen just across the river! We move furiously on public transportation! We have one of the lowest crime rates in the nation, and one of the smallest ecological footprints anywhere! We have some of the best universities in the world, some of the most committed filmmakers, and our writers are second to none! Look at me, at Franz Kline, at Charlie Parker, look at the Harlem Renaissance, look at Walt Whitman, look at the Brooklyn Bridge, and marvel, marvel! And of all the places in the country, we never lost our cool over 9/11 but took it bravely and intelligently in stride, even when our thug of a president came down to make political capital of things! We have Olmsted-designed beautiful parks, we've got the Jamaica Bay marshes, the Rockettes, even dancing Santas! We tolerate heterosexuals and just about anyone else; even men and women can get married, and there's never been a question of gay rights, which is our fight and yours, although you might not know it! We question our race relations, our sexual relations, our religious relations, up front and in your face! We don't file style but make it, and you can't follow it if you don't live here, because you don't have the energy! Everyone comes here sooner or later and does something, and even if they leave, they're never the same again! We're smart when it comes to voting, we know the ecological score, the home security score, better than most; we know the foreign policy score, we've got the United Nations, and there's less trouble in the streets in that regard than anywhere else in the USA! We're remarkably tolerant and we recognize our faults and work on them, hard as hell, even in the onslaught of Republican slaughter in an unjust war! Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground! And we'll tell you this, that Bush is NOT our president, that his country is NOT our country, no matter what you hear! We're too smart for that! Sorry Toronto, Montreal, L.A., Chicago, we're the cultural capital of North America! Kathy Acker! Apollo Theater! We're the synaptic pulse coursing through your heart and your neighbor's heart and everything good and bad brought to you in the name of capital, progress, liberality, liberalism, liberation, fury, rap, fashion, power, electric culture, Broadway universe, WiFi universe, mass transportation, just the good life with thrift-shop books and the headquarters for the Daily Show! NBC ABC CBS and radio radio radio! Forget Hollywood, that has-been home of cocaine creeps and heroine harries. Come visit, bring your cash, you'll need it, and we need it too! Whatever you heard, you don't have to watch your back here! We're the Soul of the world! We invented Soul! We got Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Witches, Warlocks, Santeria and more! And when you vote Democratic, just think, you'll be voting with the best of what this place has to offer, this United States, which may not be much outside of the five boroughs, but it's all we've got! So let us lead you to the promised land, and Vote New York, Vote New York, Vote New York!!!! -