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OASN1 + Human Relations Books Present Ben Nadler's The Men Who Work Under The Ground

The Men Who Work Under The Ground: An Experimental Reading, featuring the poems of Benjamin Nadler + audio by Blake Seidenshaw, Chris Moffett & Amelia Winger-Bearskin + Animations by Paul Mclean [+]

Co-presented by Human Relations Bookstore & Occupational Art School Node #1 on Saturday, December 8, 2012, 7-9PM

• OCCUPATIONALARTSCHOOL.COM
• OCCUPATIONALARTSCHOOL.TUMBLR.COM
• OCCUPYWITHART.COM
• FACEBOOK.COM/occupywithart
• HUMANRELATIONSBOOKS.COM
• FACEBOOK EVENT: http://www.facebook.com/events/299156983534990/

[About The Men Who Work Under The Ground]:

 BEN NADLER
Ben Nadler is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Men Who Work Under The Ground (Keep This Bag Away From Children Press, 2012), and the novel, Harvitz As To War (Iron Diesel Press, 2011). He lives in central Brooklyn, and teaches writing at The City College of New York. He is the grandson of a coal miner.

[Excerpt from Brooklyn, the opening poem in The Men Who Work Under The Ground]:

I always knew we were working against the earth

with a foe like that the odds weren't in my favor.

You attack something for long enough

eventually it attacks you back.

Trespasses are not forgiven.

I do believe electricity

remembers being coal before it was burned. 

[About Human Relations Books]:

Human Relations is a joint venture of some hopeful, fresh-faced youth and the jaded, scowling he-crones of Williamsburg’s Book Thug Nation.

[About Occupational Art School Node 1]:

Our dream is to open a building in Bushwick, Brooklyn with vegetable and flower gardens on the roof, studios of all sorts on another floor (painting, holography, photography, theater, film and all these working together) on another, living spaces and a childcare facility on another and all of these centered on a cooperative economy: food co-op, art and educational co-op, art offered in an alternative economic model. The doors to and in this place will open all ways— out to the community so all are welcome and within the space open to all rooms so people share and work together and create together. There will be teaching in this school, naturally, but no classes. Instruction will be through inspiration and guidance in open apprenticeships. We will practice the spirit of Occupy in the most constructive, joyous, healing way we can. We will step outside of capitalism, not confront or battle it. We will ignore the hegemony of institutions and corporate interests not try to overthrow or fight them. We will work outside of corporate time and within liberated time that flows as it will.

We are doing this. The process is in place. Artists are coming to the school to give lectures, for free. We are attracting people from the community and already we are engaging in an alternative art economy, exchanging services of various sorts for lessons and art. This is happening very fast. We are in deep rem sleep, dreaming hard, and it is a wonderful experience. - OASN1 founding member Chris Moylan

[About Chris Moffett & Blake Seidenshaw]:

Chris Moffett and Blake Seidenshaw collectively assemble, on occasion, as The New Ergonomics (thenewergonomics.com) only to collaborate in turn with other assemblages, reworking the nature of work.

Blake is a contributing editor at ecogradients.com, an online journal of interdisciplinary culture and education. A ceramicist and a musician, he is a cofounder of the Ashtanga Yoga Outreach network. Also: interdisciplinary edutecture; the history and practice of philosophy and the natural sciences; and contemporary (cosmo)political (ethno)ecology.

Chris engages the imagery, philosophy and architecture of education, the way we image forming and being formed by our environments. Sitting in a chair, or refusing to sit still, becomes a form of art making. A nomad scholar and movement educator, Chris is also a founding member of the artist collective ARE (aestheticrelationalexercises.com).

[About Amelia Winger-Bearskin]:

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an assistant professor of Art and Film at Vanderbilt University in the area of Time Based Media Arts and Performance. She works with 'models' (as defined by agent-based computer programming) as a conceptual prompt in her performance work. She has developed a concept of Open Source Performance Art (OSPA) and has spoken about OSPA at various academic conferences and performance festivals since 2010. She performed at the 10th Annual OPEN ART Performance Art festival in Beijing, China, The Performance Art Network PANAsia '09 in Seoul, South Korea, and the TAMA TUPADA 2010 Media and Performance festival in the Philippines. Winger-Bearskin recently spent a month in Sao Paulo, Brazil performing at the Verbo Performance Art Festival (the first American performance artist to be invited to do so), through an international scholar exchange sponsored by University of Sao Paulo and Vanderbilt University VIO and Art Department. She was an Artist in residence at the University of Tasmania (Australia) school of Visual and Performing arts. Other recent performance credits include the Gwangju Biennial [three events: 1) main pavilion; 2) the Lotte Gallery Media and Performance Festival; and 3) the Women's Biennial in Seoul, Korea]. Currently, she is presenting a sound installation throughout the Nashville International Airport, and in Fall 2012 will be speaking about her work and OSPA as a visiting artist at universities in Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; and New York City, NY.

[About Paul McLean]: 

Paul McLean is an artist accomplished in new media and traditional fine art, a pioneer in dimensional production and integrated exhibit practice. He has exhibited in one-man and collective shows extensively since 1986, and is currently represented by SLAG Contemporary Gallery in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NYC). His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; individual and collective expression; and the convergence of 4D methodologies among military, political, business and social sectors. McLean holds a B.A. in English with a Fine Art concentration from the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), two Masters degrees from Claremont Graduate University (MFA in Digital Media, Masters of Arts & Cultural Management) and is currently a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is a contributing writer for the Brooklyn Rail and other publications and has been blogging since 1999. McLean has been a co-organizer of Occupy with Art since September 2011, and is a founding member of the Occupational Art School Node #1 in Bushwick. He creates moving images for projection, art environments and the web; net.art, web and print graphics; paintings and drawings; poems, commentary fiction and non-fiction. McLean lives and works in Bushwick.

Manager-in-Chief

Manager-in-Chief

By Paul McLean

How did Barack Obama win re-election? The philosopher Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed the notion of the "stabilising class": not the old ruling class, but all who are committed to the stability and continuity of the existing social, economic and political order – the class of those who, even when they call for a change, do so to ensure that nothing really will change. The key to electoral success in today's developed states is winning over this class.  - Slavoj Žižek, “Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face”

Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. – Chris Hedges, “The Presidential Election Exposed, Again, the Death of the Liberal Class”

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

- Wilfred Owens, “Strange Meeting”

Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain - if history has taught us anything - it's that you can kill anyone.  – Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part II

War - Nations do have to go to war sometimes, but that Iraq thing was pretty bad, to put it mildly. Somebody should have been, I dunno – FIRED for bad performance. Aren’t you the party of good corporate managers or something? This topic could get 10,000 words on its own. Let’s just leave it at: You guys suck at running wars. -  Eric Garland, “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people”

In the 2012 election, we have a winner. Management won.

Slavoj Žižek is almost right to cite Milner in his analysis. He would have been more correct to point to Peter Drucker, whom George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Drucker wrote the book on Management, literally. The culture of management won the culture war this time. No one seems to have noticed management was a combatant. So, no one seems able to figure out the margin of victory, or explain the results, and consequences.

Chris Hedges is right, too, about what the election was not about, but should have been. Hedges, too, is almost right to slam the liberal class for its passivity with respect to Obama’s “betrayal” of liberal “core values” in his first term. He would have been more correct to consider the values (or lack thereof) of the management class, because that is the key to electoral victory in the United States currently, not the performance of the “Other” voter classes that the professional political punditry claim pushed Obama’s campaign over the electoral finish line ahead of Romney.

Really, the non-drama of 2012 is how boring, banal and mediocre political realities are in the United States. From a management perspective, the Obama victory is the safer bet.

My theory is that the outcome of the election is in fact a story about behavior and demography, but not the story we’re being told via corporate monopoly media, or by the “alternative” media. Voters who swung the election to Obama chose him, because they realized the Republican candidate was a corporate raider whose fortune derived from purging middle-management and labor, outsourcing jobs or destroying them, wiping out pensions, “streamlining” benefits and the social safety net, increasing cost burdens on all but management and owner classes, and prioritizing the owner’s or corporation’s or organization’s bottom line over all else.

Romney is dedicated to making everything from the Olympics to America run more like a business. The problem the voters discovered by reading between the lines or watching Obama’s attack ads is that Romney’s business was Bain Capital.

Plus, Romney is a 1%-loving, 47%-hating superrich asshole.

∞

Click to read more ...

Toroidal [Occupy] Effect

By Paul McLean

1

Occupy is not an object. 

[Time is the only object. 

Everything else is a subject. 

True time is 4 dimensional, 

Heidegger deduced.] 

An object is not recursive. 

A machine can be reverse engineered. 

A system can be monkeywrenched. 

2

[To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility...But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.] - Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Occupy is an idea that cannot be evicted, whose time has come. To paraphrase, more or less. What do you think? Did you Occupy Wall Street, or any of the 1500 towns & cities across the USA where an occupation popped up? To do so was to participate in collective and direct action. So occupation is a verb thing. Doing the Occupy, a strange circular pantomime, a version of dance, if not exactly dance, as such, called also a General Assembly by anarchists and/or direct democracy practitioners. The sound circle formation, or sphere, as old as humankind. Until we don't occupy anymore, for whatever reason, and there have been many given, by many authoritative and even some supportive voices, and it's not, which is to say, we incessantly self-evaluate, critique, deconstruct, parse, negate. A redress of grievances. A gathering of souls. The only way to catalog Occupy is for Jez to invent the Anarchives. It has been done, or did itself. Occupy is play, then, let's say. A revolutionary game. Players are called Novads. We have a literature that is time-based, aspiring joyously to timelessness, dimensionally operating in all time zones we know of & don't, with rules that aren't, LULZ. We are legion. Nobody is Occupy. Everyone can. What isn't Occupy, really? Occupiers discovered much is unoccupied, and many otherwise occupied, and an occupation isn't forever, even if in one aspect it might be, at least in its metaphysics. Occupy is a dream. A network. 

Click to read more ...

UMass/Amherst: The Arts of Protest Series [Oct23]

2012 Arts of Protest Series Presents:

Public/Poets and Protest/Space: A Discussion with Four Occupy Poets,

                       Tuesday, October 23, Machmer E-23, 6:00pm.

Travis Holloway is a Goldwater Fellow in Poetry at NYU and a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 2010-11 for a dissertation entitled “How to Perform a Democracy” and, upon his return to the United States, organizer of the first “Poetry Assembly” at Occupy Wall Street. His primary interests include democracy, poetics, and the relationship between public art and social media. His recent work has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, and Symposium, on C-SPAN, and in the co=authored book, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (OR Books, 2011).

Paul McLean is an artist accomplished in new media and traditional fine art, a pioneer in dimensional production and integrated exhibit practice. He has exhibited in one-man and collective shows extensively since 1986, and is currently represented by SLAG Contemporary Gallery in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NYC). His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; individual and collective expression; and the convergence of 4D methodologies among military, political, business and social sectors. McLean holds a B.A. in English with a Fine Art concentration from the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), two Masters degrees from Claremont Graduate University (MFA in Digital Media, Masters of Arts & Cultural Management) and is currently a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is a contributing writer for the Brooklyn Rail and other publications and has been blogging since 1999. McLean has been a co-organizer of Occupy with Art since September 2011, and is a founding member of the Occupational Art School Node #1 in Bushwick. He creates moving images for projection, art environments and the web; net.art, web and print graphics; paintings and drawings; poems, commentary fiction and non-fiction.  McLean lives and works in Bushwick.

Letta Neely is a Black dyke artist, feminist, and mother. She is originally from Indianapolis, IN where she survived the busing experiments of the 80’s. In the mid 90’s, she lived in New York City where she was a member of the Black Star Express Collective and taught poetry to youth in the five boroughs. She currently resides in Boston with her wife, niece, and daughter. Letta explores the various textures, technologies and intersections of race, sex, sexuality, class, gender, economics and liberation in her daily living.  Hence, her work focuses most intently on the connections and intersections of queerness, blackness, and awareness. 

Letta is also teacher, poet, playwright and freelance writer whose books Juba and Here were finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. In addition, Here was a Triangle Award finalist. She has been New York Fellowship for the Arts recipient (1995), a finalist for both the Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship (2002) and the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Award (1999).  Ms. Neely is a two time winner of the OutWrite National Poetry Slam (1996, 1998) and in 2001 she was named the Best Local Author by Boston Phoenix readers. Her work has been included in various anthologies, literary journals and magazines such as: Through the Cracks; Sinister Wisdom; Common Lives, Lesbian Lives; Rag Shock; African Voices, Rap Pages, Catch the Fire ,Does Your Mama Know, The World in Us, Best Lesbian Erotica 1999, and, Roll Call—a Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art. Her play Hamartia Blues which was produced by the Theatre Offensive in 2002 has been nominated for two IRNE awards.  A second play, Last Rites, received a staged reading with the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, CA and a world premiere production with The Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts. In 2011, Neely was awarded a fall residency with the Garderev Center and was a finalist for the Brother Thomas Fellowship. Currently, she is a recipient of the 2012 Winter Creation Fund Award from the National Performance Network and along with The Theater Offensive, a grant recipient from NEFA’s Expeditions program.

April Penn is a Boston-area poet who frequents the Cantab Poetry Lounge and has been involved in Occupy Boston protests. She is a member of the Boston Feminists for Liberation and considers herself a poetry blogging fiend with plans to write 365 poems a year for the rest of her life. She originally hails from Hammond, Louisiana and Baltimore, Maryland but loves Boston best of all! She has been published in Amethyst Arsenic, Snake Oil Cure, and Spoonful. 

OAS Node #1 [10/5]: Starr Street Slam (TEASER + PRESS RELEASE)

PRESS RELEASE

FOR RELEASE IN ALL MEDIA

On Friday, October 5, 2012, from 7-9PM Brooklyn Rail Editor Theodore Hamm will host STARR STREET SLAM an historic series of readings in the heart of Bushwick/Brooklyn/NYC/USA/Earth at the Occupational Art School Node 1 @Bat Haus. The list of presenters includes Barbara Browning, Doug Cordell, Corey Eastwood, Paul McLean and Christopher Moylan. Come join us for a fine time, for merriment, for smart and inspirational words, for libations and finger foods, for communal pleasure of all sorts!

OCCUPATIONAL ART SCHOOL NODE 1 @BAT HAUS

279 Starr Street 
[BUSHWICK] Brooklyn, NY 11237

L Stop: Jefferson Street 
[Exit the train at the Wyckoff/Starr end of the platform, walk with the one-way on Starr towards St. Nicholas a half block, and Bat Haus is just past the famous taco stand on the left. Look for the yellow ochre door that says “Bat Haus.”]

MORE INFO: artforhumans at gmail dot com

URLs:
occupationalartschool.com 
occupationalartschool.tumblr.com
occupywithart.com
batha.us
brooklynrail.org
artforhumans.com

OAS Node 1 @Bat Haus is an Occupy with Art + Art for Humans Project. Founding members include Paul McLean, Chris Moylan, JenJoy Roybal, Alexandre Carvalho (OAS Node n) and Bold Jez (OAS Node 0). 

THE ALL-STARR STREET PLAYERS:

BARBARA BROWNING teaches performance studies at N.Y.U. and writes novels. 
DOUG CORDELL tells stories on NPR and writes them in the Brooklyn Rail. 
COREY EASTWOOD is a writer and co-owner of Book Thug Nation and Human Relations Books in Bushwick. 
PAUL McLEAN is a regular Rail contributor, dimensional artist and founding member of OASN1.
CHRISTOPHER MOYLAN is a professor, poet-artist, union organizer, occupier and founding member of OASN1. 

THEODORE HAMM is editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

ABOUT OAS NODE 1: 

“Our dream is to open a building in Bushwick, Brooklyn with vegetable and flower gardens on the roof, studios of all sorts on another floor (painting, holography, photography, theater, film and all these working together) on another, living spaces and a childcare facility on another and all of these centered on a cooperative economy: food co-op, art and educational co-op, art offered in an alternative economic model. The doors to and in this place will open all ways— out to the community so all are welcome and within the space open to all rooms so people share and work together and create together. There will be teaching in this school, naturally, but no classes. Instruction will be through inspiration and guidance in open apprenticeships. We will practice the spirit of Occupy in the most constructive, joyous, healing way we can. We will step outside of capitalism, not confront or battle it. We will ignore the hegemony of institutions and corporate interests not try to overthrow or fight them. We will work outside of corporate time and within liberated time that flows as it will.

We are doing this. The process is in place. Artists are coming to the school to give lectures, for free. We are attracting people from the community and already we are engaging in an alternative art economy, exchanging services of various sorts for lessons and art. This is happening very fast. We are in deep rem sleep, dreaming hard, and it is a wonderful experience.” - Chris Moylan (October 2012)

ABOUT BROOKLYN RAIL:

Founded in October 2000 and currently published monthly with a print circulation of 20,000 and an international online monthly readership of over 500,000, the Brooklyn Rail is committed to providing an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

Our journal features local reporting, art criticism, fiction, poetry, as well as coverage of music, dance, film and theater. In 2004, the Rail was honored with several awards from the Independent Press Association-NY, and in 2002 and 2003, we proudly received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Local/Regional Coverage in North America. In addition, the Rail further fulfills its mission by curating art exhibitions, panel discussions, reading series and film screenings that reflect the complexity and inventiveness of the city’s artistic and cultural landscape. If you would like to receive occasional updates on our events and other special projects, please join our mailing list.

Our small press, The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions, publishes books of poetry, experimental fiction, prose meditation, artists’ writings, and interview with artists in addition to art and literary criticism.

The Brooklyn Rail, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, distributes its journal free of charge, and our devoted staff, editors and contributors work on an entirely voluntary basis. We rely exclusively on the philanthropy of foundations and individual donors to meet our production, operation, and program expenses. If you are interested in supporting us, please consider making a fully tax-deductible donation.

ABOUT BAT HAUS: 

Bat Haus is the creation of Natalie Chan & Cody Sullivan, which began as a vague idea just after New Year’s 2012. Through many conversations with small business advisors, bankers, fellow coworking spaces, lawyers, and contractors, this idea has evolved into a complex and well-mannered life-form.

Another Dose of "Withering Ridicule" (for Andrew Sorkin)

 Andrew Sorkin [Photo Credit: (CC) Larry D. Moore]

Another Dose of "Withering Ridicule" (for Andrew Sorkin):

A response to Sorkin's NYT Dealbook post "Occupy Wall Street: A Frenzy That Fizzled"

By Paul McLean

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

- Andrew Sorkin, "On Wall Street, a Protest Matures"

"Fizzle?" "Frenzy?"

One curious effect Occupy Wall Street has on mediocre corporate media writers: OWS seems to induce them to absolve themselves of their consistent incapacity to ever comprehend the movement as such. Andrew Sorkin, who is a New York Times business writer, the inventor of Deal Book, and a gadfly expert for TV talking head shows, is reduced to calling Occupy mean names (a "fad"), critiquing its organizational performance and bragging on behalf of criminal banking syndicates who managed to evade accountability, in spite of OWS protesters. He comes off bitter and confused though.

Sorkin is well-educated. He attended an Ivy League school and stuff. Why is he so dumb about Occupy?

He writes:

By the second or third time I went down to Zuccotti Park, it became clear to me that Occupy Wall Street, which began with a small band of passionate intellectuals, had been hijacked by misfits and vagabonds looking for food and shelter.

Given the way the organization — if it can be called that — was purposely open to taking all comers, the assembly lost its sense of purpose as various intramural squabbles emerged about the group’s end game.

It feels pointless to parse even these two short paragraphs. Occupy Wall Street isn't a boat or plane or car driven by "a small band of passionate intellectuals" that could be hijacked. Don't hijackers make demands? Occupy refused to do that.

"Misfits?" "Vagabonds?" Which Occupy did Sorkin visit once, twice or three times? The one on FOX News? Thank goodness Sorkin didn't find the same terrifying OWS that Michael Gerson of the Washington Post screeched about, which Gerson was able to analyze without even visiting Liberty Square once! Sorkin's befuddled but calm snark wouldn't have survived a minute in Gerson's hellish imaginary Occupy.

There's so much wrong with the couple of sentences quated above. They reveal much more about Sorkin than they do about OWS. "Intramural squabbles?" "End Game?" I keep envisioning Lurch of the TV version of The Adams Family, groaning and shaking his head. Occupy Wall Street never was a collegiate thing, although plenty of college students support it, which is not surprising, given the skyrocketing student debt burdens in this country, and dreadful employment outlook. So where did that "intramural" quip come from? And "End Game" just sounds so Think Tank-y. There is an OWS working group called Think Tank. I don't think that's what Sorkin had in mind. He likely has never heard of Occupy's Think Tank.

Why should we care about Sorkin's opinion or faux analysis, anyway?

Sorkin, according to a report I read, has a net worth in the neighborhood of $10,000,000. By any measurement that situates him in the wealthiest percentile of American citizens. He's a 1%er. Should we expect anything other than what he offers us, which is a perspective that ultimately diminishes the movement opposing his status in society, his class? Sorkin's animus against OWS could be a simple case of self- or class-preservation.

I guess one reason to pay attention to Sorkin is that his is no ordinary opinion, even if it's blogged. It's typical of a blogger to use his own vehicle to record and share his thoughts. This is the basic usage of a web log. Sorkin is a blogger. It just happens to be a fact that his blog is attached to the New York Times, America's most prominent newspaper.

So, to consider the relevance of Sorkin's view of Occupy, we need to note the context. The NY Times is quite an amplifier for opinion, or can be. That the Times reduces coverage of the most recent OWS protests to a couple of minor or perfunctory reports/blurbs in its blogs [plus an opinion piece (also-OWS negating) by Joe Nocera].   one blurb being Sorkin's hit piece (lite), instead of providing a more in-depth reportage of the Occupy anniversary, is only consistent with the editorial policies the newspaper has applied to the OWS story from its beginnings. The New York Times has in effect done its part, as a member in good standing of the corporate media monopoly, to minimize, marginalize and neutralize Occupy Wall Street, since September 17, 2011.

It needs to be said. OWS has been and continues to be without any question a news story of international interest. No matter how much or little the Times' formidable resources might be devoted to covering it.

Sorkin is incorrect in his characterization of corporate media's response to Occupy as a "frenzy," after an initial period of coverage lack. The media, and specifically, the New York Times, through last weekend, has failed to represent the actuality of Occupy as it has unfolded. Numbers of protesters are always underestimated by the Times, for example. Episodes of police brutality against reporters and protesters are rarely explored with any depth at the Times. The civil and legal ramifications of Bloomberg's repression of OWS, the national coordination of occupation evictions, and most importantly, the issues that Occupy has directly confronted are dark matter in the Times' content universe. The NY Times has, if anything and with few exceptions, proved complicit in "managing" the narrative of OWS, which happened, literally, on the paper's doorstep. Sorkin is not exceptional, relative to the Times' crap performance reporting on OWS.

Sorkin's essay is a routine Times-propagated prevarication on OWS, mixing outright falsehoods with half-truths and unsorted non-sequitors. The blogger and media pundit poses rhetorical questions and answers them with talking-points of that prove little more than Sorkin's own biases.

We occupiers shouldn't take it personally, though. Despite the fact that the fanatic "right" media, which is selectively democratic by nature, to put it nicely, and a savage thresher of American values, to put it more realistically, has used the Times as a whipping boy for years. Let's face it. The Times generally is not anything like a "leftist" organ, in any but a few areas of social discourse, and never has been. That said, we can scan the Times' reporting on the many protest movements active around the world over the past year and more, like the one in Greece, or the one in Spain, or the one in Mexico, and so on. When it comes to people resisting top-down oppression, both political and economic, the Times isn't interested. It's more interested in turning Euro negotiations into drama, for example, than expending word count on human cost or resistance. The Times does like the odd action photo of cops in riot gear, though.

The Times is kind of like Mitt Romney. It knows its constituency, and is making itself answerable to only that constituency, and the Times' constituency does not include the sorts of people who would protest in the streets, whatever the grievance. It's a kind of calculus. To quote from O Brother Where Art Thou, the powerful only need ask, "Is you is, or is you ain't, my constituency?" If you ain't, you SOL. OWS, with regards the Times (and Romney, too) is SOL. 

It's helpful to get a clear picture of the paper's position on peaceful citizen or "populist" mass resistance to authoritarian systems and regimes, when thinking about Sorkin and his views. Even though the world's most massive assemblies - ever - against programmatic "Austerity" and other anti-democratic or anti-social policies occurred over the past several months, or depending how one scores it, years, stretching the timeframe to include the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq War demonstrations, or even the anti-IMF outbreaks, the Times has never devoted more time, space, resources, reporters to these stories, as it has to say, fashion, movies and books. Or mergers. Or whatever.

Sorkin's not really the big deal here. The Times employs him. The Times gutted its newsroom, and all it has left for analysis of one of the year's major news stories is some snarky brat with a good media appearance portfolio and a book on the 2007 crash that not many outside the corporate media circles in which Sorkin flits considers relevant. Besides, Sorkin has a rep as being overly "cushy" with his subjects. Compare Sorkin to someone like Matt Taibbi for contrast. 

The Times, with its totemic heads like Kristof, is more a tool of globalist-extremist Davos, than of any generic-extremist "left." Krugman, of course is the one truth-sayer at the Times I can think of - a shining light. He's the token. Sorkin is just a tool.

Turnabout is fair play, Occupiers, and the only thing to do is write off Sorkin and his harangue. Whatever. His tight-assed screed is only a little more subtle than straight-up propaganda. That's what an Ivy League education and a few years on the corporate media treadmill do for shills. It softens the edges of the push-blade. The good news is that few of the 99% read Sorkin, and fewer every day read the Times. 

For what it's worth: Sorkin didn't seem all that impressed with the organizational efficiency of the World Economic Forum, either, but the means test for Davos was "networking." Judging from his January 2011* post, he did seem better able to learn about the details of the astonishing monetary burdens attached to attending the gathering at Davos, than he was at assessing what's been happening with Occupy Wall Street. Maybe Sorkin would get a better handle on OWS, if Occupy were reducible to dollars on an expense account, or something like that. Maybe Sorkin could have taken a step back from his assessments of the fees at the WEF to cross-reference those numbers with expenditures by an average American family of five. That would have been the Occupy thing to do.

I don't know if Sorkin paid his own way to Davos in 2011, or if the Times picked up the tab, but either way, for a guy worth millions, hobnobbing with the 1% seems to have been more rewarding, pleasant and productive than the exchanges he found during a few short (cheap or free) trips from the Times offices to Liberty Square, based on the resulting texts. At least the trip to Switzerland didn't put Sorkin in the same snarky state of mind Occupy did, for some reason. Maybe Sorkin prefers the Alps to the financial district of Lower Manhattan, when the latter's occupied. I can't recall whether Sorkin wrote anything about the occupation of the most recent WEF.

Just for fun, let's juxtapose the two posts, Sorkin's Occupy send-up and the WEF cost-benefit analysis. Or let's frame it as a kind of imagination game, rooted in a conjecture. Is there a difference between WEF and OWS experiences and cost-wise? Did Sorkin note these? Sorkin, during the occupation, could have eaten gratis at the OWS Kitchen, like all the rest of us vagabonds. Or picked out a book to read at the OWS Library. Or joined a teach-in led by one of those passionate intellectuals who shared their ideas and technical know-how with all comers, even misfits. Or offered one: "How to Start a Business Blog at the New York Times." Or Sorkin could have tried to air all his critiques of Occupy at the GA.

I would have liked to have seen that. Did it happen? No. Would it have been neat for Sorkin to compose a structural comparison between the WEF and OWS? You betcha! Did it happen? No.

Really, Sorkin's tally of what Occupy Wall Street didn't accomplish might be boiled down to one thing. Occupy failed to change this pundit's affiliations. He's going to stick with what and who he perceives to be the winners. He's convinced evidently that his estimates of the potential of OWS to alter the topology of civilization as it has been for ages with few sustaining exceptions - an entrenched set of inequities rooted in extraction and exploitation industries and war machines, coupled to corrupt politicians, protected by militarized police forces, surveillance apparatuses, prison systems and message managers - are correct, and that Occupy ought to be graded poorly on that basis. Sorkin is tied to the money, and time, in the Sorkinian corporato-media-matrix, is money, and so is free speech, and the ultimate bottom line.

Time will tell whether Sorkin has chosen wisely. For now, to shift the discussion out of the realm of fairness, or honesty or truth in reporting and/or opinionating, to the realm of spirit, as citizen practicum. Perhaps all Sorkin's gambling with is his democratic soul. Maybe the crux is not his professional credibility. I know, this is the stuff of insoluble speculation.

Still, I'm cleaving to the Arendt model, and not the Blankfein or Dimon one. Sorkin opens "A Hefty Price for Entry to Davos" with this line: "What’s the price tag to be a Davos Man?" The question is whether the answer is a dollar figure, or a spiritual, or at least moral, choice. Blankfein, whom Sorkin once called "the man who can do no wrong," and Dimon, are both Davos men. Maybe we could ask them. Maybe one of them was the sphincter-clinching banker who called Sorkin to get the reporter off his ass, out of the office, and down to Zuccotti Park (see Sorkin's first Occupy essay**, quoted above).

Instead of waiting for a 1%er to phone him to get his expert take on the threat level posed by Occupy (the impetus for Sorkin's first OWS story) to the super-rich, maybe Sorkin will pause to consult his conscience, first. Do I believe that will happen? No. Is it any of my business? Not really. In times like these, maybe all the time, what a person decides to do when faced with pervasive evil, which is what is now the status quo on Wall Street, is his own affair, ultimately.

But, with regards Occupy's impact on the national political scene, all concerns about Sorkin's soul aside... Ask yourself one question: Would Mitt Romney, the ALEC, US Chamber of Commerce, AEI, Koch brother candidate of choice, be on the skids in this election season, if it weren't for OWS? Would Andrew Sorkin and Joe Nocera [or any other pundit] be questioning Romney's serial tax evasion, or his history as on-again/off-again Bain CEO, or his disdain for 47% of Americans? The true answer is NO. Go Occupy! Happy birthday!

* http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/a-hefty-price-for-entry-to-davos/

** http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/on-wall-street-a-protest-matures

Post-script: Here's a little more background on Sorkin and OWS, courtesy Think Progress (http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/10/01/333749/andrew-ross-sorkin-sneers-occupy-wall-street/)

 And a great piece on the Times' coverage of the OWS anniversary here at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting): http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/09/18/nyt-buries-occupy-wall-street/

#S17 -- year 1 anniversary reflection [OAS Node 1 /Transmission]

Digital art by Paul McLean

Year 1 of Occupy by Paul McLean

Happy birthday, Occupy Wall Street. 

What a plenty odd phenomenon 

you are. A riddle, insoluble.

Where are you now, Occupy?

Should we ask over & over,

like a Dr. Seuss story? 

Are you over here

Are you over there

Did you disappear

into thin air?

Where are you now, Occupy?

∞

Wall Street was never occupied, except by itself. From its origins in the slave trade to its present slave business, it is itself, and not even that much. When did a street wield such power over men? Never. Not High Street or Main Street. A street is only the substrate for the mass movement of man. By what motivation would the men and women of Wall Street enjoin us of the mass to action? The short answer is they would not. They would and do encourage us to acquiesce to our being consumed, at a profit (for them).

It is a sickness of man that he would lord it over his fellows, doom the other to misery and impoverishment, when all the necessities of life are in plenitude. We, the collective All of Everything live in a moment of disgrace, as intervention by the 1% so-called. If only the elegance of the few were worth all this mess, but no. It’s untrue. The great and powerful among us are mediocre. They are managers, for the most part, which never anything special and the contrivance of these management types is to assign everything the value of currency, of dollars or pounds or euros or whatever. How boring. How tragic. How commonplace. Why be occupied with the patently mediocre, even it is super-rich and powerful? Sure, that’s a guise, a ruse and a trick, but let’s run with it, for the sake of conjecture, as play. 

It’s actually not correct to say Wall Street was unoccupied by Occupy Wall Street. Our occupation of Wall Street, as such, was dimensional. The convergence of people, and with us our ideas, dreams, outrage, love and hope, switched the focus or at least blurred it for a time. For the “Time Is Money” sub-humans, we attached to that protocol a small measure of discomfort, which they perceived generally as disease. This actuality ought to indicate the fragility of the psychosis that envelops the financial sector, which is now the political sector and the social. Wall Street’s view of itself is tenuous, at best. Most in the know claim it, “Wall Street” per se, meaning the “stock market,” doesn’t even exist at Wall Street, anymore. This is in a number of aspects a verifiable statement. Wall Street isn’t a street anymore, anyway. It is a global managed cycle of consumption. Of Everything. 24/7/365. Timeless, which is to say, “All the time.” 

Consuming in the “global community” and the “free market” cannot, in the management view, be interrupted.* While both quoted terms in the previous sentence are outrageous lies, as we have witnessed perpetually, the mandate they represent for management society, the infinite artificial person syndicate must be fueled by everything. People are fuel. Nature is fuel. Perception and belief are fuels. God is fuel. Everything conceivable by man is fuel. Thus they have manufactured a market that encompasses everything on earth and every imaginary man can conceive of beyond the planet’s bounds. The market includes space, heaven and wonder in its fraudulent balance sheet. The secret of the derivatives market is its enslavement of all we know to its foibles, its notions, its whims, and the whims of those gangsters who manipulate it, many of whom are among the world’s wealthiest individuals today. 

The Everything Market is like the cancer that has fully consumed the body of its host. All systems begin to break down. Action to resist the illness becomes impossible, or at least seemingly so. Even self-destructive addiction becomes a secondary consideration, when the cancer reaches its final phase. The Everything Market, which Occupy Wall Street assembled to combat, peacefully for the most part, is the sort of disease that does not relent in its surge to dominate its victim. It does not stop short at the level of sustainable parasitism. It continues to metasticize until the body of the host is killed, continuing its sick growth to the end. 

So the Everything Market is mindless, as such, an enemy without conscience or an aim. It is death disguised. The mask of the market is the fat face or beautiful vision of unimaginable wealth, power and reproduction, if not sex or sexiness (although people must tend to project attractiveness or lust upon it). The market is insatiable. 

Humans can be incapable of satiation. Society, or societies that are concerned with survival, promote antipathy against mindless excess, except in the odd, highly regulated instances of ceremonial release. Such expressive forms are not uniform, by any means. Still, we as a race have ample proof of the dangers of unchecked anything, or “anything goes.” The social is plentiful in its supply of prohibitions against excess as modus operandi. 

To make examples of “successful” evasion of those prohibition the excuse to justify a catastrophe like the Everything Market is to behave as an addict does, who cannot stop his all-directionally destructive progression toward doom. To make such justifications of the wholesale devastation of humanity and our world the mantras of society is a crime against humanity and world, and nothing less. 

Which is why the 1% must proclaim God to be on their side. For this purpose, they have re-purposed God, the Creator, to suit their diseased, mad demands. No, this narrative is not a new one. The difference now is the scale of destruction possible through such blasphemies. Whether one God is true or not is no longer the point, in the monetized universe of the Everything Marketeer. It is whether a god can be invented to serve the short-term needs of the market and its propellents. 

War and heroism being commoditized, in the artificial imaginary of derivatives, the abstraction of all value, the mobilization of any means necessary to sustain the insane gambit, the only enemy is Loss, and that can be and is hedged. So, that’s that, except for the abominable consequences that such an inhumane program ensures. Casualties and cowardice are rationalized as systemic outcomes. This is the banality of evil. The prime EM players seek to defray and deflect any direct accountability for themselves, in the scheme. They seek to make everyone guilty, or at least not innocent. Is there any sin worse?

How is it possible to not address this chronic problem outside the domain of the moral? Law has been twisted beyond recognition, subverted at every turn by the management society and its Everything Marketeer. The democracies the Everything Market evolved to destroy, because the slaver cannot abide freedom, is now bought and sold by the market, which controls both government and citizen through debt and threat. The threat of the market is enforced by increasingly militarized and “privatized” police. 

“Privatized” means “owned and operated by corporate syndicates and their prime beneficiaries, some of whom, like Bloomberg, have purchased the high offices of the land. 

It is the moral that can yet apply, because in most every person, except for the most deformed among us, is some conception of it. For the moral is another iteration of love, and almost no person knows no love. So how does the Everything Market attack love? By creating conditions in which the value of human life is systematically abolished. Monetizing human life, and the quality of it, is only one way de-humanization or the demoralizing of humanity is accomplished. Enforced poverty, artificially-induced starvation, endless war, drugs are others, for “others.” It is also an important function of management society to destroy to dissent, which is now nothing more than realistic assessment of the effects of management society and Everything Market on life. 

The suffering often wonder how their tormenters can do their evil business day in and day out, consistently striving to generate their product, which is obliteration of Everything (although obviously this is not how the players prefer to identify themselves). Well, they develop sophisticated entertainments. Peering through the lens of the created abject is an entertainment for those most responsible for the massive man-made suffering present in the world. Their warped vision has displaced the created object, or art. Instead we have Everything Art and a market to consume it, and legions of consumers, critics, marketeers, dealers, manufacturers, workers, and so on to tend that market. No longer is does the artist strive to make a thing timeless, for all. Art is contemporary and immaterial, except in its progressive costs. 

A key feature of such Everything Art, as in the Everything Market, is its indecipherable quality. Only the Great Practitioners can comprehend Everthing(s), either markets or art, or any everything else. The Common Man, Woman or Child is not qualified even to enter such markets, without expert advisors. Of course, we have discovered the Everything Game (see LIBOR) is rigged, and learned that the expert advisors are frauds (see Sothebys). It is therefore no surprise that many view Everything with such cynicism. 

We mustn’t however listen to the cynics. They often, wittingly or not, serve the interests of the Everything Market and Management Society. How? By debilitating the confrontational. It is not enough to critique and spread cynicism, when confronting evil. Evil must be met with force, and completely eradicated. This is ancient wisdom. It holds today. 

It is not markets that are evil. Who hasn’t been to a local market and found the experience life-affirming? It is today a rhetorical question, because many people have no concept of any but the Everything Market and its base and debasing derivatives. The same is true of art. Art is not evil, nor is it sorcery or a con. It is so difficult to remember this, when the perceptual and transactional fields are so thoroughly corrupted. 

But try. 

On the anniversary of the occupation of Liberty Square, try to remember that exchange can be a gift. Try to remember that art is real, it exists, and humans still can make it, for us, for all time, the only object, as a form of sacred play [+].

Also, its good to recall that the Everything Market will pass. The infinite artificial person will die. Really. The Everything Market will crash again, even worse than before, because nothing significant has been done to prevent that happening. The infinite artificial person will “die,” or something like that, which is to say, it never really was alive to begin with. We will all just agree to the demise of infinite artificial personhood. Or else, there will be no more “we,” only “it.”

Maybe you can push the passing of these evil manifestations of our minds a bit, and help kill the artificial person that’s killing, maiming or diseasing your dreams. Whatever. You will or you won’t. Maybe you have other more important things to do, more pressing matters. 

At any rate, something will change, because nothing lasts forever, right? Hopefully, things will be okay for you and the ones and the things you really care about. If they aren’t okay, who is there to blame? 

Well, one can always blame the Economy, if you must blame something (not yourself). Too bad, though: the Economy won’t care about either you or your blame.

#

*That chimera, the Economy must feed, like a shark swimming in the oceans of want and ownership; this is another essay.

[CO-OP]: @b.j. spoke Gallery [Trans-animation]

Trans-animation for window display at CO-OP, an Occupy with Art experimental collective project at bj spoke gallery [Sept 5-30, opening reception Sat Sept 8, 6-9pm] in Huntington, LI.

Moving images by Paul McLean. Special thanks to Cody Sullivan, Isaac Moylan, Konstant and Michael Barron. Also, gratitude to Novads of Magic Mtn, Direct Action Flaneurs, Occupational Art School, Living Gallery, Co-Lab Projects (Austin) [+]

Videos from DisciplineAriel performance at OASN1 @Bat Haus [August 25]

Photo by Cody Sullivan

Video by Cody Sullivan of live performance at Occupational Art School Node 1 at Bat Haus on Saturday, August 25, 2012. Performing: Wilson Novitzki (synth, etc), Adam Caine (guitar), Michael Barron (overhead projector), Paul McLean (animations, overhead projector, image uploads).

[MORE VIDEOS]:

• CODY #1: http://youtu.be/5r-u2GFpBUY
• MIKE #2: http://youtu.be/Cii_HplrsMo
• MIKE #1: http://youtu.be/41lNbyjDXeI

http://www.disciplineariel.tumblr.com

OAS Node #1 @BAT HAUS: DisciplineAriel [Internal Documentation]

[DisciplineAriel performs at OASN1@BH Saturday, August 25, 2012]

Michael Barron on overhead projector. Click image to see Bat Haus photoset.[Performance Elements]:

• Wilson Novitzki improvises on synth and guitar
• Photos shot on camera phones by Paul McLean, performers, Bat Haus owners Natalie Chan & Cody Sullivan, and guests (+ digital enhancements as after effects in some instances) are uploaded to the DisciplineAriel blog in real time, or later, and interlinked in the network of OASN1 sites and portals
• PJM animations for DisciplineAriel are projected and presented on one of the Bat Haus computer monitors, looping
• The overhead projector is utilized for real time old school psychedelic image mixing; Paul initiates the sequence, creating a wall projection, with olive oil, water, Guerra Paint and other water-borne pigments (acrylics) in powder, solid and liquid form, including interference and metallic paints, plus coffee; Michael Barron takes over, and also photo-documents the results
• Wilson invites Adam Caine to sit in on the set; Adam plays guitar

Wilson Novitzki, Adam Caine

[LINKS]:

• DisciplineAriel Blog
• Bat Haus
• Wilson Novitzki [Soundcloud]
• Paul McLean [Art for Humans]
• Occupational Art School Node 1 [Main][Tumblr]
  

Overhead projection, iteration 1 [PJM][Narrative]

DisciplineAriel began in early summer 2012 as a "Borderless Art" proposition + mobile media collaboration for Bushwick-based musician and composer Wilson Novitzki and visual artist Paul McLean. The process involved several informal exchanges at Wyckoff-Starr, plus emails, phone calls and a pre-production meeting and 4d demonstration. Web archive links were exchanged and reviewed.

During a two-month European tour with renowned DIY artist R. Stevie Moore, Novitzki composed short electronic and guitar pieces on synthesizer and iPAD. These pieces were uploaded to a Tumblr created for DisciplineAriel by McLean, who added entries featuring "outside" content - from three sources:

• Famed Kauai-based surf guru Ambrose Curry
• The Voyage of the Hippo blog (long-time AFH collaborator Shane Kennedy contributing)
• Anarchivist/revGamer/Novadic transmissions from Bold Jez.

These satellite or context threads also in real time sequences featured neo-epic or -journeyman components and intersecting trajectories. McLean contributed digital still and moving images, as well as photo documentation of "HOME," i.e., Bushwick, the project's point of origin.

The DisciplineAriel performance for Occupational Art School Node 1 at Bat Haus constitutes a "Welcome Home" party for Wilson; a version of "Talking Story;" a prototyping proof for the particular kind of collaboration Novitzi and McLean practice(d); an invitation to further expand the collaboration to include both random and "staged" participation by OASN1 artists [+]

Overhead projection [operator transition phase]

[PHOTO & VIDEO DOCUMENTATION]: Natalie Chan, Cody Sullivan, JenJoy Roybal, Michael Barron, Paul McLean [+]

OAS Node #1 @BAT HAUS: Whatever It Maybe ∞ [Internal Review]

Page 10 of Jeff Sugg's portfolio. Click image to download the PDF of Jeff's portfolio.

Whatever It Maybe ∞
Jeff Sugg at OASN1@BH (August 22, 2012)
By Paul McLean

Jeff Sugg parked his street-painted punk van directly in front of Bat Haus about an hour before his Occupational Art School Node 1 presentation was slated to begin. After a quick smoke, Jeff - master theatrical projectionist, designer, artist, visionary and enabler of visionaries [+] -  commenced to unload the gear he would be using during "Digitizing Theater" into the Bat Haus space. For tonight's program, OASN1 co-organizer Chris Moylan had supplied a digital projector, which Jeff would use to share his slideshow, movies and to create a real-time vignette, an immaterial hand-operated & projected reference table for Sugg's favorite inspirational picture texts. Sugg's influences? Sviboda, Bucky Fuller, Da Vinci...

I provided an overhead projector. The overhead throws a representation of Peter Cooper by Shane Kennedy in the rear of the screening area. The Cooper is our OASN1@BH mascot. Alice Cooper's "School's Out" is the OAS theme song, though I haven't shared that bit of intel with anyone yet, except for you, dear reader.

Tonight (that night), we're in for a treat.

∞

Click to read more ...

[OAS NODE #1]: [TONIGHT!][Jeff Sugg: "Digitizing Theater"]

Jeff SuggOccupational Art School Node 1 at Bat Haus is honored to present Jeff Sugg: artist, theatrical projectionist, designer [+] on the topic of "Digitizing Theater," Wednesday, August 22 from 7-9PM. Tonight's discussion is the first OASN1@BH class session in our Fall 2012 course. 

[JEFF SUGG'S BIO]:

Jeff Sugg is a New York based artist, designer, and technical advisor. He is a co-founding member of the performance group, Accinosco, with Cynthia Hopkins and Jim Findlay and has co-designed their two critically acclaimed pieces, Accidental Nostalgia and Must Don't Whip 'Um. Other theater designs include: 33 Variations (projections: Arena Stage, La Jolla Playhouse), The Slugbearers of Kayrol Island (co-set & projections: The Vineyard Theater),¡El Conquistador! (lights: New York Theater Workshop), The Thomashefsky Project & Let Them Eat Cake/Of Thee I Sing (projections: San Francisco Symphony), Trece Días (sets & projections: San Francisco Mime Troupe) He has also worked as designer for multiple works with theater companies including: The Colllapsable Giraffe, Pig Iron Theater Company, DASS Dance, Transmission Projects. Music design: Natalie Cole (lights), and Natalie Merchant (lights).

In addition to his work as a designer, Mr. Sugg is regarded as a premiere technical consultant and system designer. Some credits include: The Wooster Group (technical artist), Laurie Anderson (video system design), Richard Foreman (video system design), Mikel Rouse (video system design), GAle GAtes et al. (effects designer/engineer), and The Baseball Music Project (video system design). Mr. Sugg has also taught Media and Technology at Swarthmore College. He has led several workshop/intensive courses in media technology at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Rude Mechanicals Theater Company, and others.

For his work on Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, Mr. Sugg received a 2007 Bessie Award and was nominated for a 2007 Hewes Design Award. He was also nominated for a 2007 Hewes Design Award for his work on ¡El Conquistador!.

For his work on The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, he received a 2008 Henry Hewes Award, 2008 Obie, and a 2008 Lucille Lortel Award.

A Jeff's-eye view of the stage.

[PROPOSITIONS]:

1. If drama is the lens through which humanity views itself, how will we see ourselves when that vision is mediated via networked computer arrays? Will theater inevitably become mechanized? 
2. How can or will acting, directing, scripting, blocking, audience interactivity and experience, etc., be affected by new media's intervention in the dramatic sphere?
3. Is there an emergent theater appearing or promised, driven, by the intervention of digital tools and techniques?
4. What does this phenomenon, the digital theater, mean for the economics of theatrical production?
5. How is movement on stage, and the dramatic imagination, adapting to 01 conditions?

One of the shows Jeff worked on.We'll be continuing a discussion started earlier this summer when OAS Co-organizer Paul McLean visited Jeff at St. James Theater to view a tech rehearsal for Bring It On - The Musical, while Jeff was working. We'll be talking about how the computer has shaped new theater practices and hierarchies.

WTF America!

Photo by Paul McLean

WTF America!
By Paul McLean

I’ve been thinking about Harold Jarboe, about a line Harold tossed around all the time. Harold is a Nashville-based filmmaker. I “crawled” him just now, and his website linked a video he’d recently made for former Miss West Virginia Julia Burton, titled, “What a Woman Wants.” By the way, if you look up Burton’s video on the Google, dear wired Rail reader, you shouldn’t miss Burton’s post-video comments on the Y’all Wire version, the one Harold linked. Classic Nashville. Heart.

Harold and I worked together on one art project, but mostly our friendship was a series of exchanges. When I lived in Nashville, our circles overlapped at the gym, coffee shop, art openings, and post-production shops.  When our trajectories crossed – and this went on for years – Harold would get a kind of wild-eyed fierce look on his face and intone (I think this is right): “To be an artist & awake & aware is to be in a constant state of rage.” I seem to recall Harold telling me the source of the quote a few times. I don’t remember what it was now, though.

I used to laugh off Harold’s pantomime. I don’t anymore.

∞

To get rightly situated for the composition of this essay, I listened to Allen Ginsberg read Howl on YouTube. So New Media, man. If I’m not mistaken the reading was taped at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. The audio recording wasn’t properly cited, but it played with a nice photo of Ginsberg in a snazzy suit. Imagine that!

I remember Ginsberg calling out the “troglodytes and fundamentalists and the moral minority trying to control what the majority hears” in 1988. Ginsberg said Kerouac would have called Oliver North a “wimp.”

Google has an archive of news clippings, now. That’s how I double-checked the quote. Who knew? We’ve come a long way, since the days of microfilm at the public library, baby!

Since Allen’s gone to the great poetry reading in the sky, we can only speculate as to what the poet might say about the American police/surveillance/prison state, as it is now, about the corporate media monopolies, about the United States’ endless war program, about the evil that is the SCOTUS ruling on Citizens United.

∞

Finally, to get in the proper state of mind to write this essay, I watched and listened to Joseph Nechvatal’s “pour finir avec le jugement de dieu (complete)” on YouTube, and then I scanned Donnie Brasco on Netflix. I’ve seen Donnie Brasco before, but it seems more real, now that I live in Brooklyn. Art and God’s judgment. Cops and criminals.

I’m going to try to write something important, something that breaks through, something like thunder, a pre-enactment; a Hologram, less like Chuck Close’s self-self-self-self portrait, on view at the New Museum, and more like Eric Leisers’ little ethereal things in “Hologalactic,” on view now at All Things Project at the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, across from John’s Pizzeria.  

WTF, America.

∞

LIBOR.

The whole loan and interest game is rigged the world over, we discover. Then, the corporate media does its best to blackout the story, you know, the one about THE BIGGEST FRAUD CASE IN HISTORY.

JP Morgan Chase. MF Global. Standard Chartered. HSBC. Goldman Sachs. Terrorist-funding, drug cartel money-laundering, investor-swindling banksters-gone-wild. Who’s in jail? Bradley Manning. Who’s on the run from authorities? Julian Assange.

Disneyland. Anaheim. Cops gunning down and unleashing dogs on unarmed citizens, then responding to protests with cops geared-up like soldiers in Iraq.  WTF.

THE BIGGEST PROTESTS IN HISTORY, all over the world, all summer long. Others, it seems like a new one every day, springing up like wack-a-moles, everywhere. Mexico. Spain. Canada. Italy. Syria. Greece. Russia. South Africa. Nepal…  If you relied on the New York Times for your one-stop news, how would you know?

How about the Republican Presidential ticket? Romney apparently is a tax evader, and accidentally remained CEO of Bain Capital for years after he wasn’t CEO anymore. Ryan is accused of using his office for insider trading during the Crash. Those stories? Meh.

Painting by Alex Schaefer
News Corp executives on trial for bribing cops, for wiretaps – and no Department of Justice prosecution. Wal*Mart, paying bribes in Mexico. The Facebook/Wall Street fiasco. Revelations of surveillance networks in Manhattan, the new Jim Crow laws, Stop and Frisk. Chalking artists, like heroic burning banks painter Alex Schaefer, tossed in the slammer. Same deal. WTF.

And on and on.

Who even wants to get into the complete failure and irresponsibility of Congress? It’s a disgrace. The cruelty of politicians preaching proven-failed Austerity, while they protect corporate profits and 1% tax boondoggles, is astonishing. To make matters worse, we have drought, the likes of which has not occurred since the Dust Bowl.  The statistics on American “quality of life” standards, labor conditions, student prospects, medical care and such, are depressing. The Olympics, sponsored by McDonalds, BP and other destructive enterprises, barely put a dent in the malaise. WTF.

∞
I was talking to my friend Don - a Vietnam combat veteran, a retired doorman, a grandfather, a widower – what he thinks about America, right now. His answer was surprising. Don thoughtfully asserted that America is going to be alright. He went on to say that he didn’t think we need a President anymore. He voted for Obama, believed him to be a good man. Don had reached the conclusion, having studied the lives of many US Presidents, that the job might be too big now for one guy, and anyway, that we as a people could get along without a President and Vice-President. He wasn’t impressed, to say the least, with Romney and Ryan.

Myself, I’m going to cast a ballot for Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson.

∞

Occupy with Art is morphing into the Occupational Art School. We concluded the spring’s programs like “Wall Street to Main Street” and “Low Lives: Occupy!” and are moving on to “CO-OP/Occufest” and the Occupational Art School. For a variety of reasons, tactical and ideological, our efforts have been marginalized. With a few exceptions, the art world, as such, is busy folding Occupy Art into its 1%-oriented status quo. No surprise there.

OWS focused its waning organizational juice and its budget on May Day, 2012. The protest was a humdinger, and the posters were great, as was Guitarmy. Since that largely peaceful party, Tax Dodgers got into the Baseball Hall of Fame with their hilarious and poignant antics. Some terrific videos have emerged, and a healthy, robust theoretical discourse, which percolates into mainstream threads and vehicles periodically, especially in the Guardian. The Soul of Occupy has been examined and great thinkers, including Zizec, Graeber and Chomsky, have proffered prognoses. I’ve thrown in my two cents.

People approach me to ask, “What’s going on with OWS?” It happens a lot. I’m supposed to have an inside story, and sometimes I do. What I tell them, though, is “You are Occupy. This is not a spectator sport. Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Scanning galleries of photos and archives of videos from the occupation regularly, I come across reminders of the directness of the Occupy message, which was plentiful and dimensional. One of the Grannies who protested in the park early on wore a sandwich-board sign with the “spectator sport” message. WTF, America, you still don’t get it.

Occupy wasn’t Jesus come to rescue you from the sins and sinners of Capitalism. It doesn’t work that way. OWS was never something you could get by following on Facebook. The occupation wasn’t and isn’t a struggle, mission and task your fractional proxy could accomplish by volunteering in your stead. Most importantly, the problems OWS erupted to confront have not improved. They’ve gotten worse, and for almost anyone who might be reading this text, much worse.

WTF, America? What are you going to do? What are we going to do?

∞

This is your historical moment. The problem is, it doesn’t look, taste, smell or feel anything like what you might have expected. It never does. It doesn’t read like a book. It doesn’t look like a program on the History Channel. It’s not the 60s or the Big War, or the Great Depression. It’s different.

The enemy is not going to appear in a uniform that says “ENEMY” on it. Your enemy is a successful CEO, a banker, and a wealthy industrialist or heir. The cops are not what hundreds and thousands of TV shows convinced you he is. You aren’t safer, now that your civil liberties have been dissolved with pen strokes and normalized lawlessness. The goals of the enemy are, however, the same. Evil psychopaths want to rule the world. They want you to acquiesce. They will insist you accept lives enslaved to their will, to their mad visions. They possess the means and desire to destroy your world, your society, your family, in order to create a New Order that situates them at its pinnacle. In that New Order the best you can be is a manager, a collaborator, a guard, a lackey, a technocrat, a shill or an entertainer. In their universal scheme, they are the stars, and you are nothing more than dark matter, expendable, a human resource.

∞

The “diversity of tactics” discussion in Occupy is a good start. Eventually, it will have to evolve into “by any means necessary.” This is because the enemy, who is dimensional in nature and practice, has settled on that course. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, World War 3 has begun. The enemy is a now-global, syndicated plutocracy, which in one form and scale or another, has been a bane on humanity for thousands of years. Compared to these guys, the Taliban are the Three Stooges. They have the long view. They are willing to do, say, pay for anything to attain, maintain and sustain power, prestige, and a dominant position. They don’t care about you, your dreams, art, truth, beauty, your soul, your kids, your water, your church, your love, your humanity. Their greatest achievement, creatively, is the modern multinational corporation, an artificial infinite personhood, focused solely on the bottom line, equipped with armies (literally, now), the best lawyers, accountants, politicians money can buy, and millions of indentured servants, even straight-up slaves! You don’t even want to know what they do for pleasure (or maybe you do).

The iteration of the corporation they fashioned is Caesar. Its name is on the Coliseum. Everything in Heaven & Earth has been monetized under its rule. Birth, death, food, weather, sex, youth, sickness, conflict, breath… It foments its own art and political movements. It educates the people. It secures them in their (ha!) property and possessions (ROTFL). It explains why, how and who is necessary for good life, all life, to function effectively. What it doesn’t know, it will, eventually. It owns the demos, the democracy. It has the power of life and death, of silence. It is bigger than Nature. Bigger than God. It has destroyed demons and supplanted them with itself. It is its own cosmology. It will send itself into space. It will solve the mysteries of everything, and it will do so because it is the great owner of TIME.

And it is a LIE.

∞

WTF, America. How long are you going to be willing to put up with this? You’ve been robbed blind, swindled, hoodwinked. The goon who took you didn’t look like a cinema wise guy. Who cares! Your kids are being wasted in the deserts, of the Mideast, of the Midwest, of their own addictions, in a land increasingly devoid of meaningful opportunity, in the prisons of America, corporatized prisons, for profit. Your people, the real ones – their loss is the enemy’s gain!

What’s keeping you in your cave? Is it that there has been no resounding call to arms? Forget about it. It’s not coming. The enemy figured out you might be waiting for that and has made sure it won’t be happening. Are you waiting for your neighborhood to mobilize? Have you walked in your neighborhood recently? Are you expecting it to form teams and get on the job? I had that thought for a minute a few months ago, before I woke up.

Are you waiting to get ahead on your debts? Hah! Are holding out for a good job, with benefits, a pension? Just look at Wisconsin, and think of the men, women and children gunned down by cops with machine guns in Marikana. Remember that battle has been raging for 500 years (see Cerro Rico) in every “New World” the extractors and exploiters discover and see an opportunity to “order.”

∞

WTF. America, if you could beat the Nazis, the Japs, the Fascists of Italy in four years, don’t you think you can defeat these scumbags? Are you smart enough? Strong enough? Tough enough? Do you have the endurance? Do you have the will? Is God  - whatever your conception of God is, because THAT’S America - on your side, or theirs? By the way, they don’t care about God. The enemy believes they are gods, more or less.

America, if you could turn the tide of Russian and Chinese Communism and/or Socialism, and set it upon itself, don’t you think you can do the same for the Pimps of Davos? Like Jesus cleaning the money lenders out of the Temple, right? Boom goes the Dynamite! Get the bums out of Washington! Don’t quit until the job is done! Rally under the flag of your fathers!

∞

Or sit on your couch and get high. Go to your therapist. Buy a new CD. Rent a movie. Go to church on Sunday. Get in your 60 hours at the office to keep your job. Take the meds for your anxiety and heart condition. Stop at the bar, go on vacation, get some fishing in, head to the mall, take a drive. Jerk off to porn. Hook up with a co-worker. Play with the kids. Sue somebody. Whatever.

This is your moment in history. You idolize the Greatest Generation. Fair enough. You pine for the hippie free love of yore. Fine.  You celebrate emancipations, one after another, in our country’s troubled but great history. Compared to the great struggle we’ve faced – I’m sorry to be the bearer of the news – ours today is of the greatest consequence. The fact is, though, I think that’s always the case.

∞

The objective is to reclaim Time. I know, that notion seems awfully abstract, even conceptual. It’s real.

Time, your time, has been stolen from you, or you’ve willingly surrendered it, with or without much of a fight, if any. Maybe you grumble about it. Until you and we realize how precious time is, no one will have an idea of what we’re actually fighting for.

∞

The Bomb in the 50s was the most fearsome weapon on Earth. Today, it is and it isn’t. The greatest threat to civilization, to freedom, today is the derivatives market. If you’re not willing to figure out why that is, you won’t understand the 2007-8 Crash, LIBOR, the London Whale, or much of the international news that is, whether you accept it or not, gravely affecting your past, present and future.

The prime players in the world game called “You Bet Your Ass (or his, or theirs-)” have faces, names, houses, countries of origin, personal histories and dramas. Some of these players you may be familiar with (like Bloomberg) and others you may not. It’s more possible than ever to uncover the invisible hand of greed. Occupy has and continues to do a lot of that work for you, which is why the movement has incurred such brutal repression.

∞

One thing I’ve learned over the past year of occupation is that Revolution isn’t what you expect. It doesn’t always evolve in directions you personally might advocate. Revolution may not ask or want your opinion.  It may not respect your gifts, and you can’t own it. Sometimes, it will whip around and bite your ass. Ask the French. They had a lot of good ideas and intentions. They perfected execution by guillotine. Robespierre is a case study in Revolutionary dynamics.

A lot of sane people are very cautious about pushing revolution for that very reason. Many more people will justify apathy or fearful self-removal from conflict for the very same reason. Hitler and Germany – and all their enablers - demonstrated forever why accepting the unacceptable is finally unacceptable. At some point down the line, people usually will have to explain what they were doing, while Evil was growing and then consuming their society.

∞

WTF, America – what have you been up to, while the treasure of your nation, both material and immaterial, was taken from you, by wicked people through subterfuge or direct action? More to the point, what are you going to do about it, now that the cards are on the table, the jig is up, and you’ve been called?

There’s still time to pull yourself together and put down the Hun, but not much. Time will go on, regardless. The same cannot be said for American democracy. America will sustain, as a bottom-up proposition of freedom – not to be conflated with a free market, which has been shown unequivocally to be a lie – only if we individually and collectively commit to protect and preserve it. Obviously, there are millions, even billions of people around the world, who are ready, willing and able to join us in that task, who want essentially the same for themselves. Democracy, like the Granny said, is not a spectator sport. It has to be chosen. Many Americans have bled and died to defend this democracy – not for the Rockefellers, Gates, Broads and Fricks – for themselves, their families, their buddies, their towns, their futures.

∞

If we succeed, we’ll enter a new dimension. If we fail, the future appears Apocalyptic, right? WTF, America. Do it: do it one more time. It won’t be easy, but you’re worth it. Don’t choose slavery.

After that, you can recede into the dusk of history happy, sleeping comfortably in your own bed, cancer-free. The 1% are a cancer. Cut them out, burn them, poison them, like modern medicine prescribes for most cancers. Then, if you survive, try the 99% new agers, with their preventative measures, their homeopathics, whole natural foods, massages and meditation. Choose to be indigenous, a native. Choose to be happy, joyous and 100% free. Sure, that sounds fantastical. But if you finally manage to remove the vampire squid from your face, you might just look upon the world with new eyes, and realize all along you were living on a spaceship called Paradise, and each one of us is a captain, or whatever we want to play today.

Think Rip van Winkle. It may take thousands of years, but people will come around. In the meantime, we can take lots of road trips, make great art and babies.

Photo by Ambrose Curry

Eric Leiser [OASN1@BH 9/17/2012]

Image by Paul McLean

WS2MS: Co-organizer's "End" Notes

Catskill Chocolate Shop

WS2MS Closing Weekend
A Note from OwA Co-organizer Paul McLean

...Can one ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, the trade unions, the parties, the intellectuals and all the energy put into educating and mobilising the people, there are still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twenty years) a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain "passive" - and not only passive, but who, in all good faith and with glee and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama? It is curious that this proven fact has never succeeded in making political analysis shift ground, but on the contrary reinforces it in its vision of an omnipotent, manipulatory power, and a mass prostrate in an unintelligible coma. Now none of this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, the masses are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make football bear a facile responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts it in its illusion of being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened.

- Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

Berlin, Germany ["We the People" at Brik Gallery]

Dear friends,

On March 17, 2012, Wall Street to Main Street launched in Catskill, NY. Since then, Occupy with Art's partnership with Greene Arts/Masters on Main Street has offered the community a diverse program of exhibits, installations, performances, readings, demonstrations, workshops, seminars, and more. We even had our own single edition newspaper! Participants have ranged from celebrated (or controversial) artists with art-world-recognizable names like Andres Serrano, to locally- (and internationally-) recognizable artists like Matt Bua, to collectives like Bread & Puppet Theater and abcdefgCORPS, to poet/writers, like Sparrow, who spans the spheres of Occupy and the Hudson River region, to those folks who brought pieces for the absolutely inclusive "People's Collection," whose participation required no artistic self-definition at all. From the beginning our objectives included generating a rich sample of Occupy arts, commingled with works originating from the region's impressive artist base. In some fair measure, that goal was attained, although to what extent the potential interchange was tapped is an open question. Estimating the populations of possible collaborators versus actual ones won't permit us to congratulate ourselves too much.

Click to read more ...

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" II [Draft/BETA][Preface]

Updated on Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:18PM by admin

[Video link to US Military propaganda exercise sent by Jez]

What Is the Soul of Occupy?
By Paul McLean

II

Robert Henri: Snow in New York, 1902
Source: Artcyclopedia; photograph by Michael Weinberg  

>>
Do some great work, Son! Don't try to paint *good landscapes*. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you - your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

There are lots of people who can make sweet colors, nice tones, nice shapes of landscape, all done in nice broad and intelligent-looking brushwork.
<<

- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

>>
America is one of the few countries where May Day, the International Workers' Day, is not even a holiday – ironically enough, considering the fact the date was chosen to commemorate events that occurred in Chicago, during the struggle for the 8-hour day in 1886. During the cold war, the idea of unions signing on to a statement like this would have been inconceivable: in the 1960s, unionized workers were known to physically attack Wall Street protestors in the name of patriotic anti-communism. But the collapse of state socialism has made new alliances possible, and, in making common cause with occupiers, and the immigrant groups that first turned May Day into a national day of action in 2006, working-class organizations are also beginning to return to their roots—up to and including, the ideas and visions of the Haymarket martyrs themselves.

[Later, in May, in Chicago]

The words might be diplomatically chosen, but there's no mistaking what tradition is being invoked here. In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America's greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.
<<
- David Graeber, "Occupy's Liberation from Liberalism; the real meaning of May Day"

BACK IN TIME

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another calendar year

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to all
the times have changed no more
we are certain to fall

the future seems worthless
society to blame
the price is out of reach
american con-game

there's such a pattern of thought here
it's like i'm just another rock 'n roll fool

i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dismal
for us in mid-thirties
the general opinion
never escapes gerdes

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another part of the crowd

the future r.stevie
may well give up the fight
i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to me
the times have changed no moore
we can certainly see

there's such a lack of emotion
it's like i'm justanotherrock'nrollfool

the future seems dreadful

©1986 r.stevie moore

[PREFACE]: ...Pondering the soul of Occupy, considering art and spirit, reflecting on the "American Spring."

Click to read more ...

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-2, 4+5 & Endnotes]

Updated on Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 05:25AM by admin

3 continues

Bruce Sterling at the European Graduate School, 2010; Photo ©Hendrick Speck & Paul McLean

>>
An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.

I see some daylight in the general cultural situation. I was happy about the [SXSW] New Aesthetic panel, because it revealed things I had never seen. It was exciting because it touched something new, true and real.

Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin.

The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings. Those abject talking-heads, abandoning charge of their machine-crazed economy.… Come home, artists and scientists; all is forgiven!
<<
- Bruce Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic" ( http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/ )

∞

>>
The Zuccotti Park occupation was a dismal failure. The functioning of Wall Street was not disrupted. Occupy Wall Street never occupied Wall Street. Even Zuccotti Park was “occupied” only with the consent of the mayor of New York City, and it was cleared out the moment he withdrew that consent. In the end, no autonomous space was reclaimed. The effort to remake society by multiplying and weaving together autonomous spaces is back to Square One. Even worse, precious little progress was made during the occupation in articulating and working out what the movement is for, or how to solve the serious social and economic problems we now confront.

In light of these failures, it would be a grave mistake to try to glide unreflectively into a “Phase II” of Occupy Wall Street. It is time to think seriously about what went wrong and why it went wrong, in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Above all, I am concerned here to make clear the difference between “prefigurative politics” in the proper sense of the term and what Graeber uses the term “direct action” to mean: “acting as if you were already free” (see below). In the proper sense of the term, “prefigurative politics” refers to practices that foreshadow and anticipate a different world, a world that does not exist. “Direct action” in Graeber’s sense refers to practices that make believe that this different world already exists in embryo within the existing one. The latter notion is the one that was tested at Zuccotti Park and that failed the test.

pre•fig•u•ra•tion n.
1. The act of representing, suggesting, or imagining in advance.
2. Something that prefigures; a foreshadowing.

make–be•lieve adj.
Imaginary, pretended.
<<
- "The Make-Believe World of David Graeber: Reflections on the Ideology Underlying the Failed Occupation of Zuccotti Park" by Andrew Kliman

Augmented Reality documentation by Mark Skwarek (arOccupyMayDay)

[NOTE]: As I see it, the project of facilitating a new model for artistic enterprise and the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street can be subjected to a useful mash-up, for considering purpose, application and utility, among other things. The flaws in ideologies that influenced significantly the formation of OWS are worth looking into, and the wave of "What next for Occupy?" exercises are accomplishing this, which is what must first be acknowledged. The first semi-formal evaluation phase of OWS has commenced, almost spontaneously, post-May Day, a direct action that clarifies one of the quandaries faced by Occupy: in the United States, a call for prefigurative direct action emerging from alien cultural envisioning toward manifestation "in the long term" is a doomed proposition.

Click to read more ...

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-1, Intermezzo]

By Paul McLean

[Video by Liza Bear]

[Narrative]:

New York City, May 1 2012-- Occupy Guitarmy musicians, led by Tom Morello, play Willie Nile's "One Guitar" before marchikng down Fifth Avenue to Union Square as part of May Day 2012. Filmed by Liza Béar, Squaring Off, Mobile Broadcast News. @owsmusicgroup@nothingofficial

[Morello/Guitarmy photo by Theodore Hamm]

3

I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance. - "The movement as an end-in-itself?" An interview with David Graeber by Ross Wolfe http://platypus1917.org/2012/01/31/interview-with-david-graeber/

Planning for May 1 in New York began in January in a fourth-floor workspace at 16 Beaver St., about two blocks from Wall Street, [Marisa] Holmes said. The date serves as an international labor day, commemorating a deadly 1886 clash between police and workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square. - "Banks cooperate to track Occupy protesters" by Max Abelson for Bloomberg [posted at SF Gate, and elsewhere] - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/26/BUTK1O9L88.DTL

The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved. - Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Drew S. Burk and Anastazia Golemi. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam. - "The Sadness of Post-Workerism..." by David Graeber

∞

Ethnic Groups of Madagascar

∞

David Graeber in his essay on Post-Workerism develops an argument about art in the section titled "the art world as a form of politics" that every artist associating herself with OWS should read, since Graeber is a self-described "author" and creator of central facets of it, or even the movement itself, if I understood him correctly at a talk I attended at NYU's Hemispheric Institute recently. Graeber's view of art is grim verging on toxic, but also thin as black ice in Madagascar, the island that he made his anthropological bones on, so to speak, and which is always going to be mentioned whenever Graeber talks or writes, it seems.

Madagascar.

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What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.1]

[Photos of Magic Mountain & Novad actions courtesy Jez Bold]

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA]
By Paul McLean

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.  This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.  An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.  Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.  He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.  Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.  I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. - Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man"

As a matter of fact, setting aside strictly academic art, artists never fall entirely prey to aesthetic co-optation. Though they may abdicate their immediate experience for the sake of beautiful appearances, all artists (and anyone who tries to live is an artist) are driven by the desire to increase their tribute of dreams to the objective world of others. In this sense they entrust the thing they create with the mission of completing their personal fulfilment within their social group. And in this sense creativity is revolutionary in its essence. - from "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vaneigem (a new translation from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012

It is the "fact" of the physicality of artworks, their necessary existence as objects with their apparent constancy, that in fact highlights the "inconstant," volatile, and transformative event at the core of art. - Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art

1

What is the Soul of Occupy?

Adbusters, the Canadian anti-Capitalist magazine that by accounts issued the call for action which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement in September of 2011, on April 12th 2012 [1] released another provocative proclamation on its blog,* titled "Battle for the Soul of Occupy." The text was illustrated with a black, red and white banner graphic depicting the ubiquitous Occupy clenched fist and the text "#DEFENDOCCUPY." The call-to-arms was issued by Culture Jammers HQ and encouraged Occupiers to "Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!" and warned of co-optation of the movement by MoveOn, The Nation magazine and ice cream producers Ben & Jerry, whose influence threatened, in Adbuster's estimate, to "turn our struggle into a '99% Spring' reelection campaign for President Obama."

I don't know about you, reader, but Adbusters' situating Ben & Jerry in a "cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades" seems to me a stretch, and certainly doesn't incite any Robespierresque post-Occupy-revolutionary fervor. I sat next to Ben of Ben & Jerry at an organizational meeting for Mark Read's Illuminator, which B & J's ice cream fortune helped bankroll, and Ben Cohen in my view is not a blunter of revolution. He's a food businessman made good, retired, with cash in the bank, who's making an effort to support Occupy strategically, not steal its "Soul." If anything, the conundrum posed to such individuals who are sympathetic to the movement by the movement's schizophrenic response to efforts by "outsiders" to align with OWS is worth examining. [2, 3]

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