ADDENDUM: May Day 2012 actions specific to, or related to, OWS Arts & Labor initiatives

It's in the nature of these events that not everything planned around them can, or should, be known in advance, but the OccupyWallStreet site has extensive information on both 'permitted' and 'unpermitted' actions anticipated in New York City this Tuesday, May Day 2012.

It also includes a link to known actions in some 125 cities around the country.

I don't have a link for actions outside the U.S., but there is this link to an interactive map showing 1400 Occupations across the globe.

All of this of course is just for starters. Expect a very interesting day. The 1% is on the run.

[I can't credit the origin of the flier I photographed and uploaded here, except to describe it as the most minimal - and commanding - of several available in one of the cooler galleries participating in the very cool Dependent Art Fair two months ago]

adding them up

Today marks the end of a full decade for this blog.

As I have been more than a little slow in posting over the past year (probably from having discovered more of the outside world - and of course Twitter), I felt I didn't deserve a real number on this anniversary; instead of a 10 I've gone for three numbers which add up to 10.

I can't predict what, or how much, will show up in the blog over the next year, but It's not going away. In the meantime this is a brief description of its history, in pretty much the same words I used a year ago:

The blog began when, finding myself totally frustrated with the idiocy and brutishness of my country's response to the events of September 11 and feeling almost totally isolated in my disgust, I started sending a series of emails to people I knew well, sharing my thoughts and my anger. A few months later I started jameswagner.com, intending it to be a more structured - and more widely broadcast - form for the kinds of unelicited rants with which I had been testing the patience of my friends. It was also intended to include ruminations on subjects in which I thought others might share my interest.

Almost from the start there were entries on politics, the arts, queerdom, history, New York and the world, and within a year they began to be accompanied by images and photographs. Many of the latter have been my own.

April 27 is another anniversary for me, much more precious and infinitely more important than the launch of this modest little blog: I met Barry, my perfect partner in everything (and Wunderkind webmaster) exactly twenty one-years ago today.

[the image is that of the modernist numbers above one of the entrances of the building two doors down from us, a very sturdy structure which incidentally houses the National Office of the American Communist Party USA]

the Karsan V1, with just about everything going for it, really would be the 'Taxi of Tomorrow'

Although the very modern, beautifully-designed, extraordinarily-roomy and fully-accessible Karsan V1 was hailed by New Yorkers (65.5 percent of those polled) as their favorite "Taxi of Tomorrow", the city ended up choosing the least popular entry, the hideous Nissan NV 200, to which Motor Trend's Frank Morris referred, somewhat generously, as "a dorky looking van that's being converted to taxi duty".

New York City initiated the competition in 2007 to find a replacement for the unmourned, unlovely, and antediluvian Ford Crown Victoria. Its Dearborn manufacturer had announced that it would discontinue the vehicle by 2012; otherwise, it's likely we would still be enduring its discomforts and its aesthetic and environmental assaults decades from now, even though it was based on an automobile platform first introduced in 1978.

As it had with the proposals it sought and received for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, the city ended up ignoring the results of its own vaunted "Taxi of Tomorrow" contest: In the end it settled on the one design most people didn't like; it was also the design which least satisfied the requirements of the commission.

While the Nissan was certainly the most conservative response to an important challenge, in the end it will prove to have been the most impractical choice, and therefore the most radical, given the parameters of the search: Of the three finalists it responds the least well to current taxi needs, and its environmental and accessibility inadequacies, among others, will look be even more grotesque as time goes by. In picking the barely-adequate, ungainly and unlovely Nissan "they" struck out once more, embarrassing New Yorkers who actually care about the city's ability to get things right (both better than and before others do, if possible). And then there are the aesthetics: The brutal, armored-truck lines of the obscene American SUV fetish object seems to have inured even certain New Yorkers to the gross plug-ugliness of this vehicle.

For what it's worth (and in a supposedly post-industrial and post-Wall Street world i think it's worth a lot) the Karsan is the only vehicle of the three finalists which would have been manufactured in the U.S. To be specific, it would have been assembled in the home country, Brooklyn (Sunset Park).

In an article today, the New York Times doesn't seem quite persuaded by Nissan or the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission that a hired French designer can tart it up enough with a special horn, speckled flooring, and altered paint color to get us to think of the bulky Nissan NV 200 as their promised "Taxi of Tomorrow". I don't believe New Yorkers, or at least those paying attention, will buy it, but then I think of those junky Crown Victorias and, more recently, the cramped hybrid sedans, and ridiculous climb-up SUVs we're dealing with now.

I'll leave the French Designer with the last word, pulled from the Times piece, where it is the last word:

"New Yorkers are so used to their cab rides," [Francois Farion of Nissan] said, "that they sometimes forget how it could be better."

the Karsan: roll up your chair, bike, stroller, or hand truck from a built-in ramp on either side

The Ford Europe's Transit Connect is a very decent "Taxi of Today" and some are NYC rides now*

The dumpy, malformed Nissan NV 200, introduced in 2007, is barely even the "Taxi of Yesterday"

*
the one seen here sighted at Madison Square last October

[first and second images Motoring Dreams; third image blogger's own; fourth image fyidriving]

Galileo Galilei's 1633 recantation: Science did not wait 350 years for the Church's halfhearted apology, and women and queers aren't waiting now

I received a letter today from Robert Niehoff, S.J., the president of John Carroll University, a small Midwestern Jesuit liberal arts university where I matriculated in 1958. The letter was addressed to the university community at large, and I soon learned that it was apparently a response to a February letter written to Niehoff, in his official capacity, by a number of faculty members (approximately a quarter of the total) who were concerned about the Catholic Church's intransigence over the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010.

I'm not Greg Smith (I've had no connection to my own addressee in 50 years) and John Carroll University is not Goldman Sachs (for starters the school is presumably a not-for-profit institution), so the letter I wrote in response, copied below, will not have much impact on anything. I still want to broadcast it however, because I believe the subject itself is important.

Dear Father Niehoff,

The position of most of the contemporary American Catholic hierarchy on the issue of contraception (an issue which, by the way, I am certain you are aware was virtually unknown in previous ages both more and less benighted than our own), is one which has been manufactured by late-20th-century Catholics and other absurd fundamentalist cults in an unworthy, nay, disgusting, collusion with opportunistic political neanderthals.

Beyond all reason and, yes, beyond all issues of genuine morality, it is an offensive which, with the possible exception of the Church's virulent campaign against the rights, dignity, and physical survival of hundreds of millions of homosexuals (I count myself within their number), has been singularly, aggressively and continuously prescribed and launched against both its own members and, most grievously, all of those who do not recognize its domain or its primitive postulates.  

It is just one of the reasons I have been unable to have anything to do with my undergraduate college for the past half century.

Sincerely.
James Wagner
Class of 1962

Niehoff's letter, to which the above text was a response, is reproduced below. The still earlier JCU faculty letter can be read here.

To: The John Carroll Community
From: Robert L. Niehoff, S.J.
Date: March 16, 2012
Re: Religious Liberty and Public Policy

By now I am sure you are aware of the public policy issues surrounding the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 and the controversy these new regulations have caused related to Church teachings.

As part of a broad effort to increase access to healthcare for all Americans, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new set of norms for health insurance provided by all employers--including the nearly 250 Catholic colleges and universities like John Carroll. In particular, HHS generated significant attention by mandating contraceptive coverage for all health plans, which many in the Catholic community regard as disrespectful of its teachings and as an infringement on religious liberty.

On February 10, an "accommodation" was announced by the White House stating that institutions like ours would not be required to pay for this new coverage--however, insurers would have to make it available (at no cost) for those within our health care plans.

I want to reaffirm what I have stated publicly, that "our values are important to us, and our religious freedoms are fundamental to our mission at John Carroll University." Further, I have stated that "we share the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' concerns about religious liberty and church teachings, and we will continue to work with them and with other Catholic colleges and organizations toward a constructive outcome with the Department of Health and Human Services."

In the midst of our national debates about public policy and values, there are two key points that I ask all of us keep in mind:

1) The need for civil discourse, which at its core is a respect for those with whom we disagree, is essential to who we are as an institution and our Catholic and Jesuit character.

There are many tensions surrounding this issue. I understand the strong feelings that many have for this particular subject. Let me make it clear that our University must be a place where this issue--like any other--can be discussed in an environment of mutual respect.

2) The public policy situation is far from being resolved.

I am engaged in this national dialogue together with the leadership and members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). I continue to stay in touch with Bishop Lennon concerning the conversations between those institutions, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The issues related to the HHS mandate are significant and it is unclear that the mandate can survive the legal challenges, which have already begun. At this time when our nation is engaged in a very politicized election period, this issue--among others--will receive considerable attention. It will be the center of much debate, and various points of view will be presented.

Again, I encourage all to remember that our University is at its best when we engage in a respectful dialogue.

[image from the University of Chicago Press]

Barry and I were a part of a large - but very polite and stunningly geeky - crowd of, eventually, one to two thousand people gathered today (Jan. 18) in Midtown.

We were outside of the Manhattan offices of senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Both are co-sponsors of the latest egregious Congressional attack on the Internet, the tech industry generally, and, in its ultimate implications, the basic right of free speech: It's a Senate bill called the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA. The House has its own version, called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA,.

Both bills were actually written by Hollywood and the recording industry, which together have thrown millions at a Congress whose members have admited that the voters have not actually asked for their personal and quite extraordinary ministrations in this area of critical national interest. If the two houses were to agree on its terms and a bill were signed into law it would essentially mean the corporate privatization of the Internet.

The protest had been called by New York Tech Meetup, a group founded in 2004 to represent professionals from all parts of the technology industry in the New York community. Along with many other sites, Wikipedia and New York Tech Meetup went black today to protest SOPA/PIPA, but in a very quick search I found 1stwebdesigner, only one of many useful sites able to provide information useful especially to those less than completely technically fluent.

Why were we all there this afternoon?

Those of us who use the Internet know the difference between fair use and piracy, but an unrepresenative government owned exclusively by the super rich and the wealthiest corporations - including legacy media - a government which can't figure out how to keep people from being thrown out of their homes, a government which worships secrecy while it engages in torture, wars of aggression, and political assassination, which enshrines gun ownership as something of a Constitutional sacrament while erasing habeas corpus, due process, the rights of assembly and free speech, and prohibitions against indefinite detention without trial, is a government which absolutely cannot be trusted to make the right call if it gains the powers contemplated by SOPA and PIPA.

I'm always excited to see theatrical or dramatic elements introduced into political activism, and sine this was a pretty staid crowd, I was particularly delighted when a man stepped into the crowd near where we were standing listening to the scheduled speakers, unwrap a large stash of blank all-black cardboard sheets, and then quickly distribute them to strangers. Most of them accepted their assigned role in representing conceptually an internet blacked-out by government censorship. Others immediately picked up on the image of blank screens they had formed and whipped out their cameras to capture it. The action's creative director appears in the center of this picture.

Nov 12: outside of Princeton someone stops their car to offer food to the marchers on their way to D.C.

The march from Occupy Wall Street in New York has now arrived in D.C. I expect we will be hearing more from them, although the holiday no one can escape in this country may be responsible for a small delay.

Several days ago NYCmarch2DC posted this long account covering five days of their march from Liberty Park in New York to McPherson Square in Washington D.C. The text had been, as they wrote, "composed by multiple marchers and so contains distinctly different writing styles", but it isn't the different styles which the reader will notice; it's the immediacy and intensity of the different emotional notes struck - from very high to very low - in this very candid narrative of their experiences as they marched between Trenton, New Jersey and Havre de Grace, Maryland.

I should point out that the section of the journal I'm talking about includes the moment in Philadelphia when they learned that the police had destroyed the encampment in Liberty Park. I remember reading earlier, on November 17, this tweet from @NYCmarch2DC: "The majority of us from #OWS are refugees. You can see it in our eyes. We are sad, grieving and hurt. We lost our homes while we were away."

When I first clicked onto the NYCmarch2DC site for what would have been the latest account of the march it was very late at night, and as I started I wasn't sure I wanted to read very far; soon I was pretty sure I'd be going through to the end, but not so sure I wanted to share it with anyone else (it was not entirely an upbeat story); finally, and now sitting on the edge of my seat, I decided that I absolutely had to show it to anyone whom I might persuade to read it. It's that good, and that powerful.

It's like Occupy Wall Street itself.

The strength of its simple odyssean prose, generated by some not-so-ordinary people who represent just one modest segment of the one of the most remarkable movements in modern history, will survive both as a document of a great moment and an inspiration for many more.

UPDATE 11/24/11: NYCmarch2DC, continuing the account of the march all the way to its conclusion, has just uploaded this entry, covering the march from Havre de Gras to D.C.

A footnote: I was educated as an historian in the old century, and I've worried for many years about how that profession was going to cope with our modern distaste for letter writing. I don't worry about it any more; we have the internet.

APPENDIX:

• short video clip of video clip of arrival at Independence Hall (watch to end)

• marchers and Philadelphia Occupiers watch livestream destruction of Liberty Park at 3AM Nov 15

• NYPD occupies Liberty; demands unclear

• video of marchers at rest

[image by Stephanie Keith from Flickr]

I love Occupy.

Along with thousands of others I was in Union Square on Thursday afternoon. There I was struck by the minimalism of the sentiment expressed by the sign shown at the top (and also the color, of course), and I snapped a picture of it before it was clear to me that it was only a part of the message. When the marcher passed I got the other side; it wasn't until I was home that I read the smaller lettering at the bottom.

But a really smart demonstration, one with even the faintest smell of revolution, is just not complete without a sign in French.

The text is from a longer slogan, "On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera" (We will beg for nothing. We will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy). It made its first appearance during the May 1968 student protests in France.

I think it's safe to assume that the fact that I was in the midst of a huge crowd of ebullient NYU students had something to do with the erudition displayed on both placards - and maybe with the colors as well.

the scary warning-light trailer parked on lower Broadway at the edge of Liberty Park almost says it all

I rushed downtown on Tuesday afternoon when I learned via Twitter that at around 3 o'clock the New York State Supreme Court was expected to announce its verdict on whether, or how, Occupy Wall Street would be able to resume its occupation of Liberty Park. It had been unliberated by the NYPD barely 12 hours earlier.

I needn't have hurried, for it was more than two hours later that the decision was finally announced. At about that same moment I was on my way back home in order to fulfill at least two obligations almost totally unrelated to what has absorbed almost all of my attention for more than two months.

In the interim I managed to snap these photographs. This is what democracy looks like, although there are also some sad representations of the police state we haven't yet quashed.

Meanwhile, today (Thursday) is going to be very big, all around the country.

Liberty Park inside out, "un-liberated" for approximately 16 hours

torture bracelets by the score

anybody see a terrorist around here?

he carried the pillow as a protective cushion (cops have rammed billy clubs into stomachs)

and copters too (I couldn't see the markings); three here, but I spotted six right away

this too is what democracy looks like

It's beginning to feel like I'm stalking Glenn Greenwald. I was in DUMBO Sunday night at Powerhouse Books hoping to hear he and Matt Taibbi speak. Matt was there, and he was terrific, but it was announced that Glenn had had to cancel the appearance to check out a heart irregularity. I did buy his new book.

While Greenwald's "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful" has just now been published, and was completed before #OccupyWallStreet began, it's argument, expressed within the title itself, is fundamental to understanding both the origin of the protests and their growing strength.

Glenn was also scheduled to talk with people from Occupy Wall Street on Monday evening, and that morning he had tweeted that he was sorry for all the medical drama and "Everything's great now," so I headed downtown to the venue, the atrium at 60 Wall Street. Soon after I arrived I learned that he had extended his apologies that he could not be there that night. I hope he gets some deserved rest, and is soon back in good form.

UPDATE: Greenwald has resumed tweeting.

I lingered for a while before going home. While I talked to people I gathered that there was agreement that the crowd that evening was somewhat larger than usual, perhaps partly in expectation of a respected visitor.

The dry, warm, well-lighted atrium [and Wi-Fi too?] became an unofficial annex to Liberty Park over the last few weeks, especially as the population of the original camp zoomed.

As far as the real estate itself is concerned, the 60 Wall "atrium" is one of those weird New York City public/private spaces. While I was both living and working at the tip of Manhattan in the mid-80's, and as I watched their huge, silly and graceless post-modern tower headquarters going up I wondered what J.P. Morgan was going to do with what looked like way too much lobby space. Then, in the incestuous pattern of bank holdings which has become all-too-familiar over the last decades, its ownership moved from Morgan to Morgan Chase, to Deutsche Bank and then to something called "Paramount Group Inc.". But for over 20 years the four-story atrium "park" with its waterfalls, seating areas and palm trees remained underutilized even during the neighborhood's "banking hours", and it looked completely dead by 6 o'clock. I had never actually used it myself, and I don't think I had even entered the space before this fall.

When I arrived there last night it was definitely being put to use. There were different-sized groups of all sorts of people in conversations or more formal meetings; a few individuals were sitting at computers, and there were several film crews recording and interviewing in different parts of the atrium. Almost everyone appeared to be associated with Occupy. I did spot one tired-looking middle-aged man - probably not #Occupy - finishing a sandwich while sitting at one of the tables; a year ago he might have been the only warm body in the place, outside of the guard or the attendant.

Last night I tweeted (thinking about their very different architectures) that, if Liberty Park was Occupy NYC's messy 19th-century New York, 60 Wall Street was its 20th-century L.A. I should have added that it's an L.A. as free of commercial advertising as the park itself, and that there is at least one more divergence from the common image of Southern California: The atrium is a microcosm.

The two Downtown locations are both in fact Los Angeles and New York City as real urban spaces, whose interactions are face-to-face. See Joanne McNeill's essay "Occupy the Internet" first published in n+1's Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette

The occupation is a gesture against the isolating experience of the screen-mediated online world. A need to experience the world for one's self, to communicate with more than text. So many email threads and conversations over SMS go on, ceaselessly, over points that can be made instantly face-to-face. The "human mic" is not so tedious in comparison.

occupiers, media people, and passersby, together with one unidentified blond-haired, spiffy guy in a pin-stripe suit (perhaps, although improbably, representing the NYPD), quickly surrounded police and firemen on Friday afternoon; the combined city units were shutting down a food vendor on what appeared to be specious cause; the vendor is known to the community and has been sympathetic to its needs

On Friday afternoon I visited the occupiers in Liberty Square. I stayed for a few hours, talking to friends and strangers, and I came back with the images in this annotated photo album.

Incidentally, on Friday night Occupy Wall Street tweeted: "The man who changed Tunisia's history was a street vendor. Police seized his goods". The tweet included this link for the story of the origin of the movement which is now being called "Occupy".

LINKS:

• Ocupy Wall Street
• performance of Stravinsky's "L'Histoire"
• The People's Library
• Urban Justice Street Vendor Project