Best Reason to Leave Manhattan

Face it, most thinking people already have. The avant-garde is dead, but what passes for it has been moving into places like Red Hook, Hoboken and Jersey City, extending outward as the island of Manhattan becomes more and more untenable for the marginal characters who come up with the edgy artistic endeavors that are the real reason why people choose to put up with the hassles of living in the city in the first place. Christ, even fucking Nyack is starting to look good.

Myself, I lit out for the San Francisco Bay Area back in the spring, and I have no intention of coming back until that chucklehead Bloomberg is a memory. I'm an extremist, I admit it, and if I'm going to cross the Hudson, I figure I might as well go all the way. I considered Amsterdam and Beirut, but the climate in Amsterdam blows and Lebanon, like Ireland, suffers from having a pack of genocidal maniacs living next door. I might have stayed if Giuliani had gotten a third term, but Bloomstein is the icing on the Golden Cupcake when it comes to the shit conditions attending upon life in New York.

The jackass clearly didn't learn a thing about cigarette taxation from the Canadian experiment. He probably doesn't even know about it. His recycling moratorium is a symptom of serious brain damage, doubtless incurred by being surrounded with coprophiliacs repeating "Yes, Mr. Bloomberg" at his every utterance for the past decade or so. Being surrounded by sycophants is worse than sniffing paint thinner when it comes to brain damage, and Bloombaum is the poster child for this disorder. I met this overrated and overcompensated ding-a-ling back when I was pushing the Big Apple Circus around. He used to buy a couple of shows every year at Lincoln Center. I don't know if he still does, but he and his armed bodyguards consistently treated the working people there like dirt. He used to like to climb up on the bandstand and whack away on the drums like an autistic child after the show. His percussion skills were at par with his leadership skills, as I recall.

I figured anybody who showed up at the circus with a pack of armed bodyguards had to have some real serious issues about his own importance, given the fact that our head of security at that time was a highly skilled and decorated ex-Green Beret assassin with 38 known kills to his record. I never had any respect for anyone who felt the need to bring guns into the tent, and I still don't. Michael Milken didn't, Jackie Onassis didn't and Michael Jackson didn't. Keith Richards might have, but if he did, he was packing his own, and he left early anyway, probably headed over to the projects to cop. Katharine Hepburn didn't, for sure, and neither did Harrison Ford. They're all more important than this pipsqueak billionaire.

Bloomski is also the worst example of the porcine tendency to exalt the Uniformed Heroes of the Tragic Events of September 11 while totally stiffing them on their compensation, a position Giuliani also perpetrated and a position that interferes greatly with my digestion. This never-ending bullshit of asshole politicians kneeling at the altar of the genuine martyrs of 9/11 while simultaneously fucking them up the ass on their compensation package is completely unacceptable. The goddamned Latin Kings, Crips and Bloods are infiltrating the NYPD, because decent cops are leaving in droves. He's slashing everything that can be privatized, is what he's doing, and he may very well be remembered as the mayor who actually made Dinkins look good, which is saying a lot.

In these times, the best way to vote is with your feet, because there's no other way of driving the point home. My mayor is Jerry Brown. I'll bet a lot of the short-sighted pundits who labeled him "Governor Moonbeam" back when he took his first shot at national office are wishing he was in the Oval Office right now. If they aren't, they sure as hell will be when the corrupt little fuck sitting in that chair finally drags us into World War III this autumn for the benefit of his Pappy's "Carlyle Group" scam, the bin Laden/Bush collaboration that ranks 12th among U.S. defense contractors.

If I can't have Jerry Brown as President, I'll settle for him as mayor. He does a damned good job of running this town, and he's popular across the board here.

I have a beautiful sunlit apartment in a good neighborhood for a mere $825 a month. One bedroom, flooded with sunlight. There are hummingbirds outside my window. I put a feeder up for them. There are 40 languages spoken in my neighborhood, and everybody gets along. I haven't been subjected to a racial insult since I got out here. There are no sirens screaming up the street, and no car alarms at all. There are no Dominicans. I'm sure the Mexicans would kill them. All of the immigrants here seem to genuinely wish to become Americans, as it should be. There are no colonials, and criticism of Israel is not automatically equated with Nazi beliefs. One of the bravest Jews in the world is right over in Berkeley, Rabbi Michael Lerner, a true mensch, possibly one of the Tzaddikim.

The sky goes on forever. The climate is inarguably the finest in the Lower 48. There's a real safety net for people; I won't die simply because I have no insurance. If I have a heart attack, my chances of survival are about 10 times greater than yours simply because of the speed with which an ambulance can convey me to a hospital. The smoking regulations are absurd and draconian, but at least the air is breathable, it isn't the equivalent of a pack of full-strength Marlboros a day. I am a half-hour's drive from Mount Diablo, a true wilderness area, and I can get to downtown San Francisco in 15 minutes during off-peak hours.

A couple of weeks after I got here, I was invited to a party in West Oakland hosted by a bunch of recidivist Survival Research Laboratories types. It was held in a huge parking lot area adjacent to a warehouse. To enter, I had to pass through a military tent. The hosts were dressed in crisp fatigues; there was a very realistic mock tank set up on the roof of the warehouse and what appeared to be a mock V-2 on the ground. They had a flamethrower. They had an open bar, and they were simulating a war zone with bombs and firecrackers and pyrotechnics of every shape, size and description going off on the ground right in the middle of the party action as the band played on.

It was, as every SRL function I have ever attended has been, one of the most thrilling and disorienting events I have ever attended. You could not do this in New York, especially now. SRL is still so far ahead of the curve when it comes to art that it is likely the world will spend at least a decade catching up. SRL doesn't work in NYC, but it works just fine out here. New York is still trapped in the Age of Irony, but we here have moved on to the Era of Cognitive Dissonance. You will never catch up.

I hesitate to say New York is over, but it sure feels like it, for now. Things change, and Manhattan could bounce back. Given my experience of the city over the past 40 years, since I first fell in love with it, I am disinclined to make any kind of long-term pronouncements. The city I fell in love with is gone, for sure: the brassy and cocky Great White Way that gave us Tin Pan Alley and the wondrous contributions of the Jews to American culture has fallen before the hideous Satanic monoliths of MTV, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the unspeakably evil (and eminently unprofitable) homosexual Jewish clique that the Disney organization has become. If Adam Shapiro of Brooklyn cannot stand up for the values that Jewish radicals fought and died for, then the Tzaddikim are in the same boat as the Jedi.

If Bloomschitz can get away with shafting the cops, the firefighters, sanitation and the EMT troops, the city is fucked. I'm nobody's hero, and I'm gonna sit out here and feed the hummingbirds until the tide turns again.