OAS Node #1 MAP

OAS Node #1 mid-residency summary [+ Vision by Chris Moylan]

Use the zoom-out tool to view. Download PDF HERE.

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, October 2012

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.

OAS Node #1 [9/27]: Everyone Is a Curator?

Click the image to read more about tonight's OASN1 open forum on curating.

OAS Sketch by JenJoy Roybal

New OAS Brooklyn Rail Ad [Oct. 2012]

OAS 9.2012 Conference Call Notes [By Jez Bold]

Jez’s notes from yesterday’s conference call to prep for Jenjoy’s OAS presentation at the Black Mountain conference this weekend. Workshopping the presentation at Bat Haus tonight from 7-9pm…

Click the image to view the conference schedule. 

Conference description: 

RE-VIEWING BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE 4: Looking Forward at Buckminster Fuller’s Legacy: a weekend gathering of scholars, practitioners and artists coming to Asheville to discuss, present and experience topics and workshops related to the forward-thinking ideas of Buckminster Fuller with some presentations addressing other topics related to Black Mountain College. 

New OAS Logo

OAS Node #1 is going to Black Mountain!

Please join us Wednesday, September 26th at OCCUPATIONAL ART SCHOOL NODE #1 @BAT HAUS to workshop our presentation at Black Mountain College this weekend! 

OASN1 Presentation Program Summary for BMC International Conference 2012 

• ReVIEWING Black Mountain College 4 
• September 28-30, 2012
• Asheville, North Carolina 
• Thematic Focus: Looking Forward at Buckminster Fuller’s Legacy 

OASN1 PRESENTER: JENJOY ROYBAL 

Bucky in Bushwick: Actualizing Black Mountain in the age of Occupy

 Occupational Art School (OAS) is a start up art school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, born out of the arts and culture committee at the hieght of  the occupy movement. The overall approach is to combine a self-educational salon with some of the sustainable urban strategies expressed in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. After doing a visioning process and researching similar endeavors like Black Mountain College, 3rd Ward, Eyebeam and Bruce High Quality, it became clear that there is no single place that allows one to develop a holistic approach to being an artist in the city in the way we are envisioning. You do your urban farming in one neighborhood, showcase and sell your handmade wares in another and go back to your studio to produce your artwork for a gallery showing, all disconnected. OAS is a one-stop shop for integrating art practice and a sustainable lifestyle in such a way that is regenerative – an artist centric enterprise with a strong educational component provided by its members/participants. Influencing projects from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge include Plant Chicago, Brooklyn Farm Yards and Santa Fe Innovation Park. Courses started in August 2012.

About OAS Founding Member Jenjoy Roybal: JenJoy Roybal managed the Buckminster Fuller Challenge at the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) in Brooklyn (NY) for several years. She is a graduate of the groundbreaking Urban Design Program at CUNY headed by Michael Sorkin. Prior to BFI, JenJoy worked for the City of San Jose implementing public art for capital improvement projects (CIP), and in Santa Fe, NM for a design/build company utilizing indigenous and sustainable practices for housing development. JenJoy is also a painter and video artist with a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago.

OAS Node n: Alessandro Ambrossini's ~SEEYOURSOULWITHATELESCOPE~

[From Ale/OAS Node n]:

Dear Playaz;

Please welcome to our Fibonacci Arena a Italian artist, Mr. Ambrossini! he has a beautiful project called ~SEEYOURSOULWITHATELESCOPE~ which seems incredibly similar to Kaleidoscope, right #jez3prez? :-) it is a project filled with poetry, inviting people to share their greatest dreams. not  consumerist, not necessarily dreams you dream at night but rather dreams that keep you awake and actually keep you going. #OWS is such a dream for many of us, this pluripotential space where we our dreams together trying to make them a reality.  ∞ to ooze #poiesis! ∞  always… :: here is a brief summary ::

~SEEYOURSOULWITHATELESCOPE~

a dream weaver, a dream catcher.   
with a few words (200-400 words) can you share your utmost dream? I believe that dreams can help people and maybe they can change the world a little bit, specially when dreamt together.  if you want you can add some image or video that illustrates your hypothetical, possible or impossible dream ~ even write a poem about your dream. or dreams. 
Would love to have dreams from #OWS. can you share it with me and the world? 

he is a little shy about his English, but there is no need to be shy here my friend. Rafa also speaks Italian pretty well, you guys should definitely Skype! 

He draws and does other media as well. i was thinking about the incredible combo #OAS node 1 + Direct Action Flaneurs + Occupied Stories? :-)  

anyway, let’s make it happen. #OWS could use some dreams to get a bit of #poiesis back on our movement.  

Ale! 

∞

Update on Monday, September 24, 2012 at 10:57PM by admin

Here's my dream…if it is of interest send it along, anywhere...

solidarity,

Chris

Up

Flocks of tamed pigeons

float from a tunnel painted

on the mountainside,

Boulders push their bellies

into the morning light, pear

trees ride the tall grass…

Out on the bay, icebergs drag

their skirts in the summer haze.

Houses slip inch by inch into

the sea as if afraid of the cold.

Occasional breezes stir

The ash and soot falling

In clouds from the east

Somewhere and when they do

The sunlight spotlights

A fellow stepped off the cliff’s

Edge, his legs churning mid-air—

no forward progress, no sudden drop…

Bullets stop at eye-level,

Red clouds pause overhead,

He walks on, not looking

Down, pushing his weight

Into the emptiness that suspends

Him. Pigeons watch with the blank

tranquility of sleep as another

and another steps off, as if

the air beneath their feet held

not space or force or grim

prospects but another kind of

obvious, something worth

the risk of losing , while

others rest…What does it take

to step off the cliff’s edge

when so much is falling:

houses dropping, towns

vanishing in a red sea...

A loud noise sends the flocks

Flying back into the painted dark,

A sudden storm shreds the paper

World, but those who occupy

The edge, the free air, and

The horizon beyond are as

light as baby's breath...

When will they come down?

Maybe soon, maybe never.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter

So long as they persist,

Keep at it, keep going,

Not look up, not look down,

But ahead, taking to air,

everywhere.

S17 by Chris Moylan

September 17

By Chris Moylan 

From the period of the encampments onward, Occupy Wall Street has placed great emphasis on the really, really big day: the first union-Occupy gathering in Foley Square, the march across Brooklyn Bridge, the Times Square demonstration, and so on through Chicago-Nato, Mayday, and the Year 1 Anniversary on September 17. After the eviction from Liberty Square, and the dispersal of the movement, these big days assumed ever greater importance as the media turned from its reductive ‘what does Occupy want’ refrain to ‘whatever happened to Occupy?’

The simple question received the simple answer; we are here, in Chicago, in Philly at the National Gathering, in Union Square protesting police brutality, in Chelsea banging pots and pans to protest student debt, each demonstration reconstituting the public dimension of Occupy and, inevitably, disbanding it late at night, after the arrests and the emotional and physical exhaustion of chanting for hours made continuing pointless.

A news ritual of demand and neglect made for a crazy-making six months or so of enormous effort with little reward. The media paid scant attention to the largest of the demonstrations, no attention to the smaller ones. Why? The answer, if one succeeded in cornering a reporter and getting an answer, returned the circle to its starting point; whatever happened to Occupy? There was a large demonstration? Where? The reporter didn’t see it and, by the way, whatever happened to Occupy? Yet someone was paying attention; the police came out in overwhelming numbers whatever the size of the demonstration. They came with their riot gear and helicopters and paddy wagons, their sunglasses and guns. They made arbitrary arrests, brutalized anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance, and tossed photographers aside like naughty children.

By early June it was clear that the hope for a hot summer of large demonstrations was not to be realized. College students, a large constituency for the movement, had left the city. A wet spring and the early onset of hot, humid days discouraged large turnouts. The economy was improving, and even if the improvement was largely to the benefit of Wall Street and the banks, the sense of crisis that impelled demonstrations in the fall had abated. The demonstrations, however, contributed as much as any of this to the decline in numbers. If the turnout at one demonstration was disappointing, the turnout at the next had to be much greater to demonstrate the vitality of Occupy; if the turnout was large, the expectations generated were also large; laws should change, financial practices should be reformed, the police should be ordered to stand down. If all the shouting and marching was not going to accomplish anything concrete, then why bother?

There are all kinds of reasons to bother, reasons that have nothing to do with the understandable but not very practical desire for immediate concrete results. The one year anniversary celebration of Occupy brought this home, although, ironically, this was another occasion for a much hyped really, really big day.

These reasons were brought home partly because of the psychology of the big demonstration, and partly because of the importance of Liberty Square.

First the psychology, or emotional dynamic. With all the planning that has gone into the large demonstrations, it could be argued that not enough attention has been paid to the post big-day hangover when people have dispersed and the everyday reasserts itself, with all its torpor and addled passivity.  The apocalyptic rhetoric in Occupy--talk of revolution, and not just that, but world revolution—has not not helped matters. The movement has done great things but it has inspired neither a revolution nor a general call for the kinds of measures that might result in a revolution: taking up arms, storming government buildings or offices, targeting key industries for strikes or boycotts... Just what would constitute a revolution, or ‘another world,’ has not been established. Given the diversity of views in the movement it is unlikely that a grand vision or plan will be determined anytime soon. The combination of heroic, revolutionary rhetoric and nebulous results from given direct actions has made for something like a periodic caffeine-sugar rush and crash.

What’s more, the emphasis in Occupy on individual action and responsibility makes large scale collective action seem contradictory, even a bit suspicious. For a leaderless movement made up of self-determined activists there does seem to be a lot of leading and organizing going on. In a culture that is increasingly dominated by top-down, corporate thinking it is understandable that some might suspect a guiding hand behind Occupy events. Of course, anyone and everyone is invited to take part in the exhausting process of organizing Occupy, and if some group doesn’t get together to make things happen then…things won’t happen.

In short, one could detect a tendency toward defensiveness and internal tension or division with a corresponding tendency to assert that everything was fine, the eviction from Zuccotti didn’t matter, the movement was growing… The movement had internalized a tv and web-based perception of it, a perception so literal and narrow that one could be excused for not having understood what was happening. For most people out there in tv land OWS is the encampments. That is what it does, what it is, and without the encampments how can there be anything called OWS? Clearly, OWS is not the encampments any more than the resistance in the American colonies was the Tea Party or student opposition to the Viet Nam War was the Columbia sit-in and occupation. No doubt everyone sympathetic to Occupy who spent time in Zuccotti shares some degree of nostalgia for that period. But the work has just begun.

On September 17 it appeared that everyone understood just that.

The early morning attempts to interfere with business as usual on Wall Street revealed a tactical side of the movement. After months of police infiltration, intimidation, provocation, the movement has become increasingly adaptive and canny even as its street presence, at least in New York, reduced to a disciplined core numbering in the hundreds (with a community of Occupy sympathizers and Facebook friend of exponentially larger than that).  The oppression, it seems, has conjured the street resistance it fears and, to a degree, desires, without achieving the prize: bloody confrontations. Occupy can do some conjuring of its own, and what appears tends to surprise the police and mystify the Wall Street worker bees partly, it seems, because it is there at all. The protests are supposed to be over, aren’t they? Who gave Occupy the right to persist?

The expansive, party-in-the-streets atmosphere of the Times Square gathering and other early demonstrations is probably a thing of the past. The oppression (extending from Homeland Security to the Koch brothers and their fellow proto-fascists to the NYPD) has become militarized; the resistance has become not militarized, perhaps, but certainly street-wise and passively, non-violently aggressive. It has renewed itself, re-created itself, as any art form will do.  That is the dichotomy; the police are an exercise in control and suppression, Occupy is a process of creative expression en masse.

A summer of rehearsals at the Occupational Disobedience School in Bryant Park and in the Friday evening casseroles demonstrations originating in Washington Square Park prepared demonstrators that morning to deploy quickly from different locations, to follow hand signals and relayed instructions, to keep calm in the face of provocation and violence from the police. The 99 Pickets actions in the spring demonstrated that it is better to appear in a number of places simultaneously rather than funnel everyone down one avenue and into police kettling actions. Measures have been developed to slow down, though not consistently prevent, snatch and grab arrests, the go civilian technique being perhaps the most effective (we are all civilians, after all). The movement has studied those who have watched them; it’s so postmodern it should be done in French.

All this did not enable Occupy to shut down the New York Stock Exchange, or to paralyze Wall Street, or to cause the repeal of Citizens United. But it did bring out an army of police and provoke nearly two hundred arrests for crimes like… walking… and crimes like… not looking quite right. The actions made clear, once again, what kind of country we live in. Not only are citizens exercising the right to demonstrate subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, they are arrested and imprisoned in broad daylight while hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walk past as if nothing untoward were happening. This is not healthy.That point will be made again and again and again in the coming months until ordinary people start to respond—as they did for a few months in the Fall of ’11. OWS has moved past the ‘whatever happened to Occupy’ question. The real question is whatever happened to America?

Pussy Riot, Romney ascendant, bad job numbers, Iran-Israel tension, civil war in Syria, Europe tumbling from one banking fix to another, Libor, banks laundering billions in drug money without any repercussions, the war on women, fires burning out of control throughout the West and Southwest, tornadoes popping up like invasive species in Massachusetts and New York and breeding like rabbits across the Midwest, Arctic ice melting much faster than predicted five years ago when Arctic was melting much faster than predicted, drought shriveling a fifth of the corn crop, billions flowing into the presidential campaigns, Congress paralyzed by proto-fascist extremists…

That is, what does Occupy want? Doesn’t everyone want a representative government free of corporate interference and control, a fair and transparent financial industry, an approach to climate change that recognizes the magnitude of the problems that are developing around the world?

Occupy wants to be a disciplined, organized mass movement and a culture of improvisational self-expression and creativity. It wants to cohere into a formidable army of social activists and to scatter into a million self-generating monads of visionary social explorers. It wants to change completely the structure of American government and finance, and to ignore government and finance and build better, more people-friendly, flexible arrangements. It wants not to be an it, but to be an epoch, an awakening and a transformation that will improve the posture and the mood of everyone in this country. We’ll stand straighter and we’ll feel more confident. We’ll eat better, breathe better, think better, live better. Bound to happen.

About that reference to creativity and self-expression… In the evening nearly a thousand Occupiers gathered in Liberty Square. For one night Occupy, all of it, the whole teeming, beautiful, improvisational joy of it was there, where it belongs. Everywhere one looked one saw vignettes of that creative let your freak flag fly spirit that gave a glimpse of a happier, friendlier, funnier, weirder America. A pretty woman in a diaphanous ballerina dress and pedestrian top wandered past a man in a space creature mask. A street theater group enacted a cross between a marital spat and Hegelian discourse on market forces while several couples dozed under the polished wall that separated the Occupiers from an invasion force of cops backed by every manner of assault vehicle. A small crowd gathered around a poet from Nepal and gave the mic check treatment to his lines, sometimes improvising on the words when his accent got in the way. ‘Rise up people to cast off your multiple chains’ became ‘Rise up people you have the beautiful brains!’ A folk singer sporting an elaborate headdress of beads and spangles tried, with limited success, to induce others to sing along to “Imagine,” while a modified GA ebbed and flowed to her right. Drummers and musicians gathered in the southwest corner of the park and raised a wall of pulsing sound around which people clapped, danced, swirled robes, hopped up and down. Young women danced with white haired middle aged guys danced with kids. Some people played chess. Others dished out free meals. Some people marched off to do jail support. Others debated the merits of taking to the streets and getting arrested. The drumming got so loud one could rest one’s head against it. Or dance, or sing or both. The klieg lights went on. So what. This was going to continue until it turned into something else. The cops could wade through and try to impose themselves on it but that would be like trying to put handcuffs on a stream. The currents find a way…

All this dancing and celebrating was of a piece with the marching and chanting. Occupy is a civil rights movement, not yet a revolution. People have been disenfranchised, politically and spiritually. In Occupy, the process of spiritual emancipation (creative, erotic, domestic, expressive, etc.) works with the processes and structures of political opposition and emancipation. One is outflying dance and sweat and paint all over the place, and the other is marching, organization, agglutinated convergence of forces and bodies... But it is all the same art of liberation. Like any art, it will keep changing, keep surprising and puzzling, and people will become impatient and want it to settle down and become predictable. They’ll want it to stop. But it won’t stop, whether the protests are large or small, the cops are in their way or not. Why should it?

New Paintings by Alex Schaefer

Chase burning on Miracle Mile (painting by Alex Schaefer)

Alex Schaefer: 

"I started this painting of the Los Angeles Federal Reserve branch on the corner of Grand and Olympic a while ago but just now got around to finishing it. In fact, it was September 17th last year, the first day of Occupy New York! Like I said, Bank Bailout/welfare for the 1% has got a lot of people upset. Makes me want to go out there an do another one of the same, destructive motif!"

E-vite: CO-OP at b.j. spoke Gallery [Panel]

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/

OAS Node #1 [9/19]: Milo Santini - time[d]raw-ings

OAS Node #1 [9/21]: David Spaner

Occupational Art School Node 1 at Bat Haus is pleased to present an evening with David Spaner, who is visiting New York City to talk about his book SHOOT IT! Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film. Friday from 7-9PM, David Spaner will read a few passages from SHOOT IT! and engage in an open forum on the global corporate movie industry and its positive and negative effects on burgeoning alt.cinema. Copies of SHOOT IT! will be available for purchase and signing. Event is free for first-time visitors to OASN1@Bat Haus. Barter-gifts can arranged with OASN1 for returnees. 

CONTACT: OAS co-organizer Paul McLean artforhumans [at] gmail [dot] com

FACEBOOK EVENT: http://www.facebook.com/events/515008968528042/

ABOUT DAVID SPANER: 

David Spaner has worked as a movie critic, feature writer, reporter, and editor for numerous newspapers and magazines. Spaner's writings about culture (mostly film) and politics have appeared in alternative (The Open Road, Yipster Times, Georgia Straight) and mainstream publications (Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Magazine). His movie coverage and other cultural writing was featured in the Vancouver Province daily newspaper from 1999 to 2008, and won the Publishers Award for best feature writing in the paper. Spaner's column on independent film, "Indie City," also appeared in the newspaper.

MORE: http://www.cbsdtoolkit.com/microsites/?p=3&id=556

ABOUT SHOOT IT!:

Shoot It! is a revealing history of how Hollywood, with its eye on the bottom line, arguably lost its ability to support the work of creative filmmakers; it is also a passionate portrait of the independent filmmakers around the world who have risen up to fill the void.

While the studios envisage a generic universe, repressing local film cultures along the way, talented independents continue to tell local stories with universal appeal. This book is a celebration of those determined filmmakers who, despite it all, overcome every obstacle and just shoot it!

MORE: http://www.cbsdtoolkit.com/microsites/?id=556

OTHER OPPORTUNITIES TO SEE DAVID SPANER THIS WEEK IN NYC: 

Wednesday, September 19th, 7:00pm

Shoot It! reading, screening of Cassavetes' Shadows, & a discussion w/ Leila Goldoni

Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway (at 12th Street), 3rd floor, New York, NY

Ticketing info: $10 Strand gift card or purchase of Shoot It!

Thursday, September 20th, 6:00pm (Doors: 5:30pm)

"Meet the Scholar" clips & discussion with David Spaner

3rd floor Screening Room, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre

111 Amsterdam Ave., 64th-65th Sts, New York

FREE EVENT

MORE INFO: http://www.cbsdtoolkit.com/microsites/?p=2&id=556

AUTHOR DAVID SPANER DISCUSSING SHOOT IT! ON URBAN RUSH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PezskcbmxM

READING + DISCUSSION WITH SHOOT IT! AUTHOR DAVID SPANER AT BOOK SOUP: http://youtu.be/SSfrnmLWD5Q

PREVIEW AND/OR PURCHASE SHOOT IT! ON AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/Shoot-It-Hollywood-Rising-Independent/dp/1551524082

#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.

DRAFT Prelude & Instructions for the Anarchives for #S17

[From Jez]

Comments & criticisms are absolutely necessary. But you can expect something like this to be distributed along with the signs on S15 in Washington Sq & S16 in Foley Sq. Negesti is my main coordinator in NYC right now, but contact me if interested in helping. We need movers and photographers!

                 [DRAFT]

+++++++

                 PRELUDE

In the first days of the Occupation of Liberty Plaza, amidst all of the pragmatic bustle and idealistic anxiety, a small group of radical archivists began to assemble a small collection of the community's signs.  Each sign's anonymous composition showed distinction, each one clever, eccentric, and beautiful in its own right. And when assembled together, the many signs' messages beamed a light in the darkest nights of NY's Financial District, a beacon, a light, one bright enough to outshine even the Eye of Sauron.

And the People came, from all around the city, surrounding states, other nations; they came to Occupy Wall Street. And so the community grew. And as the community grew, so did the Archivists' collection. And as the Occupiers grew proud of their occupation, so did the archivists of their collection. And everyone was so content and busy with all this growth that nobody stopped to ask: what are these signs, what do they mean to us, why are they important...and most obvious of all, what should we do with them?

In the days after the Raid, when we'd lost our place to live, and after the money had begun to dry up, though it had mostly caused trouble anyway, these questions were still unanswered and the Archivists were getting restless. In particular, one that was more radical than most began to suggest wild ideas of returning the Archives to the People, creating a revolutionary archive, a decentralized network of individuals, places, and things, that would be documented by the movement in-itself and for-itself.  While the Archivists either ignored this unfamiliar idea or tried to distance themselves from the archivist, his idea had begun to travel around the movement, and has come to be recognized under a distinct name: they called it the Anarchives.

The Archivists could neither understand the project's logic nor tolerate it's seeming uncertainty, but they also could not suggest a solution for maintaining the non-institutional OWS Archives as the group had originally planned. So instead, the Archivists made plans to give away the collection to the Tamiment, a traditional, institutional archive where the signs would be guarded and documented by experts. And despite these plans to ultimately surrender the archives to NYU, they demanded first and foremost that the radical archivist surrender his collection to them.

But the rogue archivist couldn't stand to see his work perverted and ideas rejected out of hand. So the archivist - now, declared, an Anarchivist! - stole away with his portion of the signs, vowing to return them to their rightful owners. But with no names to go on, and no one to claim to own them, the only rightful holder seemed to be the OWS community itself.  Believing it fitter to lose them among the community of their creators, rather than to stow them away safely for a thousand years in a private tower in Greenwich Village, he stowed the signs in a locker. On the birthday of the movement, he would give them back to the People and let them decide what to do. So the Anarchivist, having abandoned his property to the Commons, leaves the signs to you this day along with the following note:

            INSTRUCTIONS
                     3
            Anarchivists' Challenge

1. Take these signs. Take one or a few, or as many as you think you can personally care for and keep them safe. But DON'T keep them to yourself! 
2. Record yr history of the sign, yr thoughts and experiences and share them with others. Call together events to discuss the experiences and ideas that these signs represent. Be engaged in history, even as you write it.
3. Come together again around the movement's birthday, wherever you are and with however many you can assemble, and prepare to give them away again. These signs belong to all of us, as all of us are their archivists; so we are Anarchivists and so we pledge our dedication.

With all hope in lost causes,
The Anarchivist(s?)
-----

Interested participants are invited to come to Washington Sq on Sept 15 and Foley Square on September 16, 2012, where the Anarchives will be distributed.

We request you join one (or more) of the following start-up communities:
1. An email listserv
2. The OWS Anarchives Facebook group
3. A wiki.occupy.net account

Indicate yr preference and we'll set you up as necessary. We invite you to develop community events using your gifts. You are our historical astronauts. We invite you to imagine & urge you to create the meaning of what the history of this movementous event has been.

Update on Friday, September 14, 2012 at 04:28PM by admin

Would you like to help write the history of Occupy Wall Street? The OWS Anarchives is offering original signs from Liberty Plaza to activist historians & archivists interested in documenting the movement through artifacts of OWS history!

INSTRUCTIONS

Participants are requested to come at 12 pm Noon to Washington Sq on Sept 15 and Foley Square on September 16, 2012, where the Anarchives will be distributed.  In return, we will take yr contact information and invite you to join one of the following start-up communities:

1. The OWS Anarchives Hub @Interoccupy.net
2. The OWS Anarchives Facebook group 
3. A wiki.occupy.net account

Indicate yr preference and we'll set you up as necessary. We invite you to develop community events using your gifts. You are our historical astronauts. We invite you to imagine & urge you to create the meaning of what the history of this movementous event has been.

-----
If you have any questions, plz let me know. & Plz FWD: as interested or necessary!

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

temporary absence from the field of action gives you a good spot to observe spirals. yes, history is a collection of spirals, pendulums that rover. sometimes it is funny my friends, funny how so much intensity can take us time to digest. to overcome a police officer kicking you in the ribs and smiling sadistically is a slow process. one. two. three

~ go 

the choice \\ to #bloom,, to #ooze a fresh movement :: is urgent to be reconciled with......#year1 is done. now, a tad bit of coffee (or tea) and some peace of mind, some books, a humming-bird whistling political literature,, a kiss from your love and we are on our way for #year2. but what is precisely crossing that valley, we still don't know.

in the last months of our movement,, it became clear that it will take nothing more than a philosophic rebellion in #occupy to dissolve the consolidation of power and remove the stench of our stagnated waters :: our ideological springs are contaminated with pus, and became no longer a good source to drink from ........... if we are to thrive as a viable project it is paramount to reject stagnations and seek fresh currents of thought.

to #occupy with our bodies a given space and park there,, pretending that everything is going to be ok because we are there for "as long as we can!" -- is #ostrichism. and the same can be mentioned about refusing debt or domination without refusing to dominate others:: one is not complete without the other.

~ abolition is volition, says the Oracle of Delphi.

sometimes i wonder if we were to "win" or take power. how different our project would actually be? i see organizers,, sympathetic journalist and theoretical gurus still working under a Toyotist paradigm, {{dling! dling!}} ~ JUST IN TIME ~ {{dling! dling!}} :: "hello! we are here to sell you redemption, with the utmost attention to efficiency & results!"{{dling! dling!}} --

or what acid historians call

                  POST-MODERNIST CRAP 

and we BUY IT! efficiency & results! we BUY it! 

#occupy has only one enemy :: ITSELF :: and not because we are blind, unable to see our adversaries marching on us,, hunting us down - it takes more than physical violence to legitimize a dying order. this is clear for everybody with their necks deep enough. we know that THEIR project was discredited after the fall of the Wall in 2008. not even their own priests believe in their bullshit anymore,, and this will always be for our advantage. the greatest threat comes from the obscurity of our own shadows...

the question is if #occupy is "reformable" or will it take a radical departure from the dominating schools of thought in #OWS to break the chains arresting our imagination.

 -- maybe the mirror is a set of questions -- :: despite the Diaspora,, are we dancing revolution freely and with #poiesis, or are we insisting on the same shit? are we adventurous and curious and experimental or are we picking the safe, broad road?

before trying to destroy the Beast (neoliberal state) by clogging its circulatory system (financial capitalism),,

 _ did we ::

(1) prepared something in its place,, a QUOTIDIAN alternative,, or are we making the same mistake of the French Revolution?

 ~~~ the French Terror occupied the vaccum left by decapitations ~~~

_did we ::

(2) realize that we don't need to clash with the state, but rather make it obsolete?

so this is it. #year2 ~

! we more than ever enter a time of self-discovery. maybe #occupy can't be reformed, but this might not be a bad thing :: it takes a while to understand that we can always write history in the way of a wanderer, 

     ~ instead of #settling,

#rooting,

                     ;; instead of #occupying

or  #OCCUPY -- :: maybe just to       #ROVER?

             Happy Birthday family.

Atchu

NOVADIC TRANSMISSIONS from Nodes 0 & n [Pt1]

Novadic Mandala by Angela Taylor

[A sampling of recent Novadic transmissions, dispersed in all directions, via OAS Nodes 0 & n]:

∞

[9.12.2012]

The Memory Palace Story. Fwd: [september17discuss] Explorations in the Anarchives

:

...

....
...
..
..
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.
.
no one should brave the underworld alone...the words kept returning to me though I had long since given up trying to remember where I'd seen them.  Or heard them.  I repeated it aloud and heard the small sound of ALONE ricochet off a thousand walls and down various tunnels, which could only suggest one thing...I was back in the Ballroom.

Fuck.

Feeling both sides of the walls in the small tunnel open out into a wide panel that went up for who knows how many meters...feeling the empty sense of a long dark chasm just a few footsteps away...feeling the thick, dreadful depression of realizing that I'd done a whole tunnel circuit and come up with nothing again.  Nothing but the indiscernible and unmistakable smell of the Ballroom, the largest room in the tunnels so far.  I look down at the ball of twine on my belt, surprised it isn't more empty.  Hadn't I been walking for hours it seemed, maybe a whole day?  Solar cycles no longer made sense, of course, but the memory of "days" still lingered, nostalgia that made the outside world still seem possible.

The Wormhole.  It just popped into my head.  Sounds right.  I wonder what memories would be held in that circular finite tunnel...

Getting turned around and winding back into the Ballroom was hardly the worst thing that could have happened.  I know where I end and where I begin again. Walking back up along to the right side wall, I find the little stone tied with my string...wait, no that's not it...no, this ground feels different.  Gravelly, not so dusty as I recall.  Feeling around more in front of me my hands came to a suddenly very steep slope suddenly sliding down from my hands where the pebbles are shifting and sliding and it feels like there is no SOLID ground, no bottom at all, and so she frantically pushed back and back, trying to shift the center of gravity in the opposite direction to the solid rock wall...

And suddenly I was there.  Back flat against the wall, and apparently safe again.  They're certainly keeping my flight response in check. Whoever had designed this seemingly endless network of caves, whoever had left those sacred objects in a random assortment of shrines, over how much time and how many generations, had they also designed this perilous trap?  The cave appeared to once have been an underground metropolis, but how many people it could have held it was hard to say.  This planet seems to get older the longer I spend here.  And from when I'd had the batteries for my headlamp, I knew abt the drawings and writings on the walls, some inscribed, some paper flaky thin like paint, some dusty colored ash marks left against the earthy walls, and apparently in the same hand.  It was a danger to rub against too many surfaces, for fear of rubbing off the previous memories that were contained there; wasn't that the whole point to come down here?  To investigate the secret network of tunnels: they'd told me to stay away, strictly admonished by the bloodline family for even considering it, and the warning, never, EVER, to lose yr way.  How many had disappeared down here? 

The Goonies, even after they'd had their movie, all of the neighborhood kids had returned to find their way to the former grave of One-Eyed Willy, and all of them had gone missing.  Made for a hell of a newspaper story, but those bourgeois journalists had never really gone that deep in their story, and certainly none had actually gone into the tunnels to look for them...all of them knew "well" enough to stay away from the caves themselves. They rested with a meaningless fear of the absurd, of the potential eternity that lay deep in the story itself...in the people, the dark thoughts, the bold desire for adventure that had driven them into the surface of the earth.  Why...why....why..........

The words were coming from her again, echoing back to her ears, recalling herself from memory.  The Wormhole.  Strange.  I don't know why I'd thought that I was back in the Ballroom.  Encountered it several times before, always the same smell, a rich emptiness that was neither dank nor cramped.  But the spiraling path that descended from where she had entered -- how far down, how to know? -- that was certainly not here.  Stupid, to think I had just ended up back in the exact same place up and nearly ended up sinking into a gravel pit that sounded as if it descended to its own dark infinity.

I can risk a little light here, to illuminate the darkness, and briefly uncover these surroundings.  Not much paper left, but pull out the notebook anyway, and the rock & flint, that could set the paper to flame. 

[CLACK]
  
[CLACK] 

As soon as the spark took, I looked toward the wall and squinted, and it was at that moment that the Black decided to attack.

∞

Les Inrocks - Occupy Wall Street : un an après, que sont-ils devenus ?

Dear Gamers!


this is a press article featuring some gamers (Danielle, Jezzy, atchu), our school of thought #novad, and of course the collective RevGames. there is also a good mention of #Magic Mountain, the famous squatt in Wall Street.

good job and let's keep spreading alternatives.

http://www.lesinrocks.com/2012/09/12/actualite/occupy-wall-street-un-apres-que-sont-ils-devenus-11302283/#.UFC-qrLzIYE.mailto

Ale

PS Thanks Arnaud for the heads up! :-)

∞

[9.10.2012]

Rovers, #Reclaim!

;;playful revolutionaries;;

just quickly bringing to your attention the importance of the historical moment we are living, both regarding our movement and its place in the currents & counter-currents of history. it becomes increasingly clear to me that the whole modus of thought & action we have been experimenting with for the past year in #occupy has now acquired a level of maturity that is typical of a SCHOOL OF THOUGHT. yay, cheers for theoretical consistency! 

the convergence of many intellectuals and ludic practitioners gives me great joy :: this Fibonacci Arena -- a.k.a. Pluripotential Space -- :: has in its womb many complementary threads that are coming together like music.

#Reclaim, for instance - the diligent work Ted has been doing for a while now - is bringing from the London Global Summit a whole juridical framework that code the sovereignty and rights of a society based on roving communes.  

-- me, Jez and Rafa are working on the #Anarchives for a while, the foundation of time and memory of a potential new society. 

the #OAS node 1 (and n!) is the school that teaches these experiments-explorations. and of course, also a place for research,, extensions and interactions. 

#novad (#nova + #nomad = #novad) as a school of thought & publication,, spreading these ideas around the world,, etc

#Magic Mountain, #Salons, - our unleashing of TAZs.

and the #ROVER movement. 

hope that with this small letter, others are able to see the coming together of these planes of consistency. we are doing political literature my friends, we are doing #poiesis!   

Ale

∞

[9.11.2012]

Occupy Wall Street,

We are two freelance artist from Estonia who are passionate about introducing games as a form on serious journalism.

Our latest game "The Assangenist" has come to life in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In "The Assangenist" the player is set inside Julian Assange's shoes, who acts as a symbol for someone bringing sensitive information out in the open. Through the interactive experience we wish to raise awareness on the conflict between transparency and power and show the player first hand, how in this world the fight for transparency can be "rewarded".

The game can be played here: http://www.imepilt.com/assangenist/

If you feel that this game supports your cause and is in any way helpful for making the world more transparent, you can use it any way you see fit!

Best wishes,
Almondi Esco
Co-founder of Imepilt
www.imepilt.com

Spreading the interactive word!

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