The latest issue of FedEx’s Access Review magazine has my interview with Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who has irritated the island’s dictatorial regime with her blog Generación Y.
Yoani was recently awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize by the Journalism School of Columbia University, but the Cuban government denied her permission to travel to New York to receive it. Needless to say, their childish retaliation has made her more powerful.
The media tour president Obama did over the weekend to promote his health care reform was widely analyzed by all sorts of English language outlets. Yet, as you may have guessed, none of them covered what happened on Univisión, the “fifth network,” even when Jorge Ramos interview was outstanding.
But to realize that, I had to get across what ruined my movies as a kid: dubbing.
Read my column for Mediaite here.
I have reactivated Manal, my music blog in Spanish (formerly known as Lados B), a space to distill my obsessions on culture, Bob Dylan, and the meaning of rock in general.
The first post is an appreciation on Charly García’s latest song, “Deberías Saber Por Qué.”
The second installment of my Meet the Prensa columns on Mediaite is online.
In this interview, Nuyorican commentator Gerson Borrero reflects on his career, soap operas (“they make people stupid”), Fox News (“drive-by racists”), and Telemundo and Univisión (which he accuses of discriminating against Sonia Sotomayor).
It started as a quiet radio talk show—a dialogue between two journalists from competing Hispanic television networks. Both were praising the way their stations had been covering the ongoing hearings of Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee.It was the usual display of Hispanic pride, respect for the accomplished judge and her mother, and the reshaping of the American Dream.
Then NPR’s Tell Me More host Michel Martin asked what Gerson Borrero had to say.
[Review of Depeche Mode’s concert at Madison Square Garden on August 3rd, published on El Mercurio]
Starting this week, I will be writing a column on Hispanic media for Mediaite entitled Meet the Prensa.
In the first installment, I ask a question that has haunted me ever since I became a journalist: Why is there no Hispanic national media outlet—one that serves as standard of the highest writing and content—such as the The New Yorker?
[Read it here. For more on the design and content of Mediaite, visit Fimoculous.]
We all came to New York to try our luck, attracted to the myth of the city: the spell of its skyscrapers, the scenes from our favorite films, the shine of artistic talents that first exploded here, the never ending clink of their imaginary Martini glasses. Inevitably —as someone whose name escapes me wrote— New Yorkers are divided among those who succeeded and those who ruminate their failure.
We are all passing through New York. One of the first things you notice when you start growing roots here is that almost everyone came from somewhere else. (Getting to know native New Yorkers is normally a lengthy task for newcomers, a new layer of belonging.) Yet, it could be argued that we are all native New Yorkers after approving the arduous exam of settling here. There are those, however, that insist 6 to 10 years is the minimum time committment necessary to earn the title. (And after becoming a real New Yorker, you will suddenly find it impossible to leave, they always add.)
In contrast to the cliché that New York is the capital of the world, E.B. White offered a less glamorous view: New York is nothing but an infinity of self-sufficient unities, struggling for identity from one block to the next. The vertiginous quality of New York does not prevent the creation of feelings of attachment to your neighbors, of belonging to a corner, something that progress has destroyed elsewhere.
New Yorkers are always looking to discover new worlds within the boundaries of the city. Restaurants that are opening or closing their doors, festivals held once a year in a remote corner of a borough far from your own, a journey to an unknown neighborhood looking for a unique dish. Everything is a good excuse to jump on the subway and travel through a different world for a couple of hours.
Few things infuriate me more that when a visiting friend or relative says that New Yorkers are not nice. True, some people walk down the street, tension and anxiety written all over their faces. But usually New Yorkers are just trying to get where they are going as quickly as they can. And, yes, getting into a fight with a New Yorker —millionaire or homeless, it doesn’t matter— means tempting fate. But when you need directions, a place to eat, a practical favor from your neighbor, or want to start a conversation in a bar or a square, New Yorkers are accustomed to debating, sharing and helping each other.
We all came to New York in search of that unnatainable fantasy, but stayed because we fell in love with reality: an afternoon crossing the Brooklyn Bridge by bike, a concert that couldn’t happen anywhere else, the smell of coffee in the mornings, the light rain on your face when leaving a bar, the unlikely mix of people in the subway coming home on a Saturday night.
The five boroughs as an infinite map that may well lead to happiness.
José Manuel Simián 