Walking back from a screening of the powerful and provocative new Indymedia-produced film The Miami Model this afternoon, i passed the site of the Moon Ska Records office/storefront at 84 East 10th street. Since Moon shut down in December 2000, the storefront had been barren each time i passed by, but now a fancy yuppie japanese restaurant has moved in. marking the east village's continuing transformation into a commoditized, marketable spectacular image of punk boheme tenement chic. The republicans may be gone from New York (save City Hall, Albany, and wherever the fuck Rudy Giuliani and Judith Nathan are hiding,) but the militarization of the policing of urban spaces continues, concurrent with the continuing corporate expropriation and privatization of what Hardt and Negri term "the Common," and Manhattan's violent transfromation into a neoliberal amusement park for the wealthy and white. So i have little joy at being able to once again walk down Broadway relatively unimpeded by police nets, pepper spray, and nightstick-twirling kevlar-clad agents of state repression. What New York remains for us girlie-men? (And where are all the girlie-women - or in this republican nightmare of gender reversal are all leftist women evil beer-guzzling, hairy armpit, Le Tigre t-shirt wearing, sideburnt and mustachioed drag king dykes from hell?) And how can we create a new one from its ashes?
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