This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Life of the Party Needs to Breathe

 So much being written about the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz/Dana Bash CNN interview not delivering anything new or not being particularly revelatory. Well, here's my opinion: I think post-Obama historical/Trump circus era, people have forgotten something. That politics is not entertainment. At its most scintillating, the world is in the throes of chaos, revolution, or corrosive division. At its most banal, we're on the right track. 25 years ago we were dealing with the cultural apoplexy over the president getting a BJ from a starstruck intern. Today, that would last slightly longer in the news than Trump's ear bandage.

And, ironically, as much as the GOP loves to say that the MSM coddles liberals and Democrats, it is precisely these messengers that are bemoaning the Harris-Walz/Bash sit-down's lack of headline-generating material. And even when she admitted that her stance on fracking changed -- and how many politicians are courageous enough to even admit they changed their mind about anything, like, ever? -- it made her look like a flip-flopper. When she didn't depart from what many consider to be Biden's mandate on issues it made her look to some columnists as a puppet running on "more of the same." And bringing her second-in-command even made people say she didn't look secure enough. Funny how WOC and liberal feminists are either coming off too strong and emasculating or, when they bring along their male cohort, suddenly they're "not ready" to go it alone.

She's either the uber-progressive Queen Mother of the legislative Squad (read any conservative news outlet) or she's too centrist to ever be truly decisive about anything, a second Biden term in a DEI gift bag (actual uber-progressives). Meanwhile, the MSM, which was her BFF last week, is so intent not to seem liberal leaning that they'll try to pin her to the wall on the most incendiary threat to her campaign, and I don't mean her laugh: God forbid she actually says anything off-script about the Middle East's never ending crises. Even married to who she's married to, if she said anything even slightly equivocal about the State of Israel she'd be GOTCHA'd out of an entire demographic of registered Democrats.

Michelle Obama warned us not to be Petty Davis and pick on every missed opportunity or errant quote. But in a world where the public is more like an audience at a concert these days than an informed constituency of concerned citizens, we should remember the secret to a good DJ set imparted by someone whose name I can't remember: "You can't play one hot song after the next over and over. You have to have crescendos and lows and flatline moments to make the highs higher. Otherwise you just wear the crowd out." So let's think of the CNN interview as a good time to go to the bathroom or go order another round. But these columnists and many of us need to stop expecting every news morsel on Harris to be a DNC moment.

Right now, Harris is the life of the party. Can we let her catch her breath?

She can't win with some of these folks. But she better win for the rest of us.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Race Problem: A Redux

We see them on the trains, we see them on the news, we see them screaming to random passerby or to no one at all on the streets, from Harlem to Soho, from the Chelsea Piers to FDR. We read about random shootings on usually quiet tree-lined Harlem and bustling Bronx streets. About unprovoked stabbings in the subway stations, places unavoidable to most New Yorkers who just need to get to work and home safely, but whose hearts race nearly every time some disheveled, mumbling, or just downright menacing looking darker-skinned person enters the train or walks between train cars or blasts their music systems seemingly begging for provocation. And this is all a relief compared to the ones who suddenly blurt angry, homophobic, antisemitic, or other xenophobic, homicidal vitriol.

If you live in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles, etc., all of these scenarios are perfectly transferrable.

Meanwhile, on the scary NYC subway commutes, we New Yorkers try to remain calm: keep reading our book, not exchanging eye contact with wherever the (always racially identifiable) voice is coming from -- and that's if we're hopefully not seated the ones seated in front or next to them. And, more often than not, we make it to our destination, relieved that it wasn't us this time. Knowing surely, however, that it will be or was someone else.

Sometimes a change of trains or a complete abandonment of the subway to walk the rest of the trip is the most anxiety-proof solution. But you can't escape the thoughts that intrude on your brain.

Yes, there is that question, that unavoidable trap: "Why are they all always blk?" If you are not blk yourself, this question can elicit guilt, and then relief that you have blk friends who are nothing like this and you have even dated or hooked up with some POC and you absolutely love the Obamas so, whew, you are not racist (liberal) or confirm suspicions that racism, unfortunately, might be horrible but valid, like how animals eat each other in the jungles and some small children get leukemia (moderate). If you're one of the those who can block out these intrusive thoughts -- or reckonings of conscience -- because it's not your problem (conservative-ish) or it invokes the ethos of Kipling's profoundly racist poem,"W$%te Man's Burden," (very conservative), then this leads to a more intricately probing question. What a racist must thing can only seem obvious. But what, I want to know, do other blk people think about this? This situation where, even as I write this, I cannot spell the actual word that I'm referencing for fear of being suspended from this venue.

I don't understand why more blk people -- liberals in particular -- simply refuse to speak publicly about the preponderance of violent crime in literally every major city where we live in large numbers without framing it in the context of whataboutism (i.e. "Well, what about slavery/Jim Crow?" "Well, other groups do it too, what about the Mafia?" etc.). The silence is a deafening endorsement at the least, an indicator of indifference at worst.

This is something I think about a lot because I find it deeply frustrating because you shouldn't have to feel like Candace Owens or Tim Scott or, worst of all, Clarence Thomas, to wish your community was something you could be proud of beyond contributions to music and sports and merely surviving adversity, something all communities have endured.

I'm tired of the embarrassment and shame and disgust with the way we are portrayed -- and, largely, accurately. It spills into the lives of people who are trying to get good jobs and network and live a life above suspicion or presumed pathology or defectiveness.

Many may call this self-loathing. Only those who think their ethnic designation is the essence of their whole person or some substantial quantity of it would think so. And I'm fine with that. I know I love who I am. But I don't like seeing the news every single day and seeing someone that looks like me committing unspeakable acts of violence because they are either insane, drugged out, living in some kind of gang warfare parallel universe, or just downright not quite fully human. How long are we going to allow racism to seem like a perfectly valid and reasonable response to what is happening in our cities by, almost exclusively, members of one racial designation? Find me another rationale and I'll happily take it. But I don't see one coming.

It's overdue for blk people to get ahead of this because our survival may depend on it. You see, our present inoculation from a full-on race war by coddling, sympathetic liberal yts and the refreshing achievements of a certain talented fraction of the community will eventually expire if the balance of blk influence keeps tilting toward depravity. And if we continue to allow our public figures not to speak on BOTH sides of the race problem -- which sounds SO quaint, but remains, however ornamentally coded (DEI is the current incarnation), a race problem -- we are going to find the great majority of us left in a much colder place than before we were before given the chance to prove them wrong.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Contest for the White House in 2024: A Clear Case of Good vs. Evil

To be honest, I'm not even thinking about policy issues right now. I know that sounds ridiculous, lazy even, but if the choice between two truly decent, nice, and relatable, highly intelligent people and two Disney-villiain level freaks is really splitting this country 50/50, then we have a major ethical culture chasm in this country. Yes, the GOP have a major point about the border; about violent crime in our major cities; about disintegrating family values. Liberals really do need a better solution for these issues that doesn't try to justify unjustifiably aberrant behavior on centuries-old beefs that go back to the colonies. But where are the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys and George Bushes (father or son) of that political party? These were/are decent people, respectable conservative voices in very recent history. Where did they go? Now we have two cartoonishly evil people (and a whole chorus of equally despicable weirdos on their ass-kissing end of the legislative branch) who are a couple of red county majority votes away, essentially, in about four or five states, from winning this election. People who basically invented the word "freedoms" but who literally rolled back women's reproductive autonomy a whole half century. People who call themselves patriots but who can't bring themselves to condemn the nutjobs who terrorized our Capitol Building. People who will invoke the Constitution to get out of a parking ticket but who unabashedly denied a sitting president a SCOTUS nomination -- only to imbalance the court to the right in the next administration. All led by a living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins who rants on X/Twitter like a grounded pre-adolescent little monster about every imaginable perceived slight. Whose ear, in case anyone forgot, was supposedly grazed by a bullet or shrapnel or broken plexiglass in an assassination attempt but healed faster than a skinned knee on a five-year old. But we don't need to go there.

(And, neither did they.)

I don't know what the other half of this country sees or hears when they see Kamala Harris but I see my mother and my aunts and all the black women I've known all of my life growing up in my mother's hair salon. I've seen Kamala when she is about to "read" someone in countless black women, I hear in her laugh (the "cackle") the sound of a cacophony of bliss and familiarity when in a room filled with black women, one of them says something that's "right on time," i.e. witty or clever and nails the point or the moment in the soulful way that only women of color can. And when she, as Vance puts it, "changes her voice to appeal to whatever audience is in front of her," I hear my own mother who could and still can code-switch from an "East-Side" black girl from Detroit to an upper-middle class PTA mom in the time it takes to turn around and answer the phone. Harris, I believe, is savvy enough to know who she is familiar to and to whom, in kind, she seems exotic, strange, or disingenuous. So she smartly picked someone who looks to those people like a familiar figure in their communities: the hometown football coach, the Social Studies teacher, the rural, red-state dad.

I don't know who a blustery, bouffant, rouge-wearing con man and his Maybe It's Maybelline sidekick look familiar to, but if you're someone reading this and these are "your people", do you mind helping me understand what on Earth it is that you don't find utterly terrifying about a Trump/Vance presidency? Asking for a LOT of friends.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Happy 30th to Stereolab's Mars Audiac Quintet album

Bought this amazing album on my first big boy trip to NYC all alone in 1994. I discovered Stereolab while looking at clothes at Agnes b. in Soho. Asked somebody who worked there what the song, band, and album were and went straight to Kim's afterwards and bought the CD. (How was I that cool and didn't even know it? Did I know it? Maybe. I also discovered Yo La Tengo on the same trip and bought one of their albums while shopping at What Goes Around Comes Around on West Broadway before it was as expensive as Hermes and Gucci.)

Downtown was sooooooo alive and sexy. Great sounds, great looking people. There was a very European and generally international edge to Soho, the Village, and Tribeca that's gone now. In particular, a cafe on Seventh Ave in the Village called Raphael's that had a loft-like spread, gauze curtains billowing in the wind, a Moroccan vibe that was an actual vibe and not a self-consciously branded attempt at evoking the unevokable, and a gorgeous waiter that looked like a mixture of every ethnicity in the world before that was a thing. He was just beautiful, tall, sample sized, and otherworldly. The kind of model that only existed in the 80s and 90s...I went there every day just to see him.

All those magazines I'd grown up reading. This is where it all came to life.

Strangely, it would take me another year to get into the nightlife scene. So every night after eating at mostly Italian restaurants (my favorite food), walking until I got myself lost, shopping at bookstores, record stores, and thrift stores, browsing art galleries and high-end boutiques, and cafe-ing my way through all the edgy south of 14th neighborhoods, I would go back to my hotel just off Washington Square park and...just go to bed. I remember the lady at the front desk would say, "Aren't you going to go paint the town red?" And I just laughed at her. I was 21 but I was kind of afraid of clubs. I drank but I didn't *drink* drink then. I had just left my frat boy life and was segueing into the world of clubland with no GPS or BFF. So for a year I just kind of lived inside myself.

But by my next trip, only a year later in the summer of '95, this boy was at Twilo, Sound Factory, Tunnel, Bowery Bar, working out at David Barton, and staying at the Hotel Chelsea! And while I still loved my alt and indie rock, house music had taken over the soundtrack of my life and would continue to for a good decade. Electronic music like Sterolab made it only a bridge across the way.

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