NPM: Stephen Cramer

Okay. So the Melville and Lovecraft poems we looked at were interesting, but fall short of stellar by varying distances. Now we move on to some prime cuts.

Forgive me if I've told this story before, but for most of my teenage to twenty-one years, poetry and I shared an antipathetic relationship. I didn't get poetry -- especially not the modern free verse stuff. It wasn't until I took a college course in formal poetry and started writing sonnets and terza rima myself that I began to understand and appreciate the stuff. (One of the sestina selections from last year observes a sinister pupose behind this often-observed pattern.)

So I submitted a piece I wrote for the class to the school's lit magazine, and the editors decided it made the grade. The faculty member overseeing the publication called in a couple of judges to select two of the issue's pieces (a short story and a poem) to earn special recognition as the cream of that semester's crop. The poetry judge chose my piece, giving me some English department cred and a fifty-dollar prize, which I promptly spent on more weed.

That poet was Stephen Cramer (born 1975?), and today we'll be looking at a few pieces from his Shiva's Drum collection. Most of these are among the ones I recall him reading out loud during his visit.

Remember what's been said about the necessity for a poem to sing? We've already looked at a couple of poets who understood how to write in the forms of poetry, but experienced some trouble coaxing out the music. Cramer shall serve as an excellent example of a poet who knows how to make spoken words sing out, and is really good at it. I would suggest reading them out loud -- but please, just read them. I ask for so little!


For Brendan

I knew her first as the rhythm
         of her cane on the floor above——faint
lexicon of creaks and taps that let me
         invent her cramped apartment——the certain
television, the recliner, and withered

         ottoman she sidesteps to the kitchen.
But it’s my neighbor’s laugh that turns
         The ceiling’s thick plaster to rice paper.
the same laugh that, outside, calls to her heels
         her scooter- and trike-propelled tribe

of neighborhood children, this extended family
         she’s adopted because polio’s kept her from kids
of her own. Outside the grocery she asks
         about my sister’s second child. Two years
of agencies, I answer, and still paperwork’ll

         keep him from her arms for weeks.
                                           Texas,
A transitional family, and another imagined
         room——portable crib, plush mobile
dangling from the respirator, and a rainbowed
         circus whirls to his charted pulse.

The sweet anxieties of early parenthood.
         Two decades of marriage, it’s 1975,
and my mother starts the new year
         with her own troubled pregnancy,
the early delivery that may not be early
         enough. First hours on the other side of labor,
and a clergy absolves the failing child——
         prayers, fogging the surface of a plastic
womb, blur his gestures to vague curves.
         Then, once the child’s prepared

for heaven, the doctors do their best
         to delay his trip, and he’s wheeled away
to the last of four transfusions, the one
         that finally sustains him. Those anonymous
donors, their blood bagged and chilled

         to come alive again in me——I’ve never wondered
until today what their names might be,
         what community of fluids cruises my veins.
Little one, all this to tell you something simple:
         we're of one blood. The grocery’s lights

fizzle and fade. My neighbor’s dark skin deepens
         to twilight. I’m walking her home, a bag
in each hand, and she’s describing
         the milk, eggs, flour, and the buttered
cornbread they’ll become. When I pull out

         the photo of a child, curled, almost,
into a fist-sized ball, she props her cane
         against the door. Ain’t that something, she says,
and laughs one of her two-syllable laughs
         that truly means ain’t that something.

Then she pauses, looks at the ground,
         and honey, she says, talking, now, almost
to herself, if you knelt each time
         a miracle passed your eyes,
you’d never get off your knees.

Blanket

Penn Station’s cavernous staircase,
and two children whisper to the waists
of commuters—please ma’am, god bless
you sir—each time one drops coins
to the cardboard they hold.
But beneath the wilting trays,
their hands sift through pants——
deftly, even gracefully——easy enough
when people’s sensations are lost
somewhere between missed cabs
and this backward syntax that sticks
in their mouths like sugar burnt
over peanuts on these corners.
Later, tallying cash and bruises,
the boys’ll toss down a grate
the incidental keys to no place
they know. But now, when a nearby
woman approaches, cradling a baby,
they give each other looks. Please,
you say, not her. Not her.
But then, the timing just right,
the woman——I can’t say this slowly
enough——she casts her baby
to the air——
            and there are seconds
when the baby’s suspended
with nowhere to land but pavement
before a stranger——what else to do?——
drops his bag to catch it. He’s looking
for burns, expecting blood, when at once
the woman and two kids grab
what they can, which is
everything——bag, wallet, keys.

How long does it take him
to know this was a design, a ruse
repeated time and again to perfection?
This time two incidental cops disrupt
their practiced sequence so, trading
their sister, their daughter, for a slim
handful of spoils, the three turn into crowd,
and the man’s left holding a child
at arm’s length, offering it back
to everyone or no one.
When no one takes, he finds
himself holding her to the sky
as though to bear witness that, yes,
here is a child, a breathing
prop, paused in a man’s arms
before the landslide of years——before
her hands can grow streamlined
to pocket lining, before she can sell
herself beneath these tattered lights,
trading the cardboard
for an orange mesh tanktop
with tears in all the right places,
her skin barely cupping
the curve of flesh where it swells
to deeper brown. But wait——none of this,
as yet, is so; something out there
wants to lift her from her own life. Look——
already someone opens a blanket
embroidered with a map to the air,
spreading India, Egypt, Peru, over her
shoulders arched against the siren.
And when they take her away,
that’s the last anyone sees——
not a single finger or knee-cap
of the girl, but only a blanket
that swaddles a lucky child
in the folds of a created world.

The Whetstone

Almost metallic, almost guttural——
     at times the sound’s so plaintive,
it could just about pass for human——
     this deep, grated hum at corridor’s end,
42nd Street. I’m drawn less by the music

     itself than by memory’s blind pull,
the twanged vibrato half-triggering——what?——
     already the moment’s gone, and I’m left
with the shift and commingling of the crowd.
     Then, there he is——a man’s dragging a bow
across the smooth edge of a three-foot
     hand saw——unlikely vehicle——his free hand
gliding then grappling, bending the metal
     to impossible notes the workshop
never dreamed of. Curve on top of

     curve——his creening neck mirrors the hard
arc of steel as it curls to follow
     a cascaded run of notes showered
from the tape deck behind him.
     His shuddering forearm seismic,

his wrist all nuance, he lets vibration
     polish rust to a silver burn, the metal
warped out of utility just to prove
     that anything–the busted tools
marooned in basement shadows——

     can be contorted into song. Memory’s
blind pull, then I close my eyes and
     I’m there in the dank cellar of the house
my grandfather built——strung roots
     dangling, drill bits hung in diminishing rows——

all he left behind. Back from the chapel’s
     service, I palmed his cross-hatched
whetstone, rubbing it to feel
     the years, hearing, almost,
the insistent whistle of his bait-knives

     and shears, the sinuous vocabulary
of scraping noises——rasp, grind,
     sputter——elevated, like this saw’s
fizzled solo, to music. I’ll retain
     from his life no lofty moment——

not the words of one intimate
     exchange——but a humble sense
of accuracy. If he were here
     now, he might not be able to articulate
all the facets of loss, but he’d tell me

     how many tiles trimmed this wall
to resonance, while all I try to say
     grinds to dust, coiled shavings.
After all our efforts, what lasts
     Besides the endless shaping

toward precision? Any memorial’s
     inadequate, double-sided
as this man’s blade still shimmying
     before me–—one edge can slice you
while the other keeps singing.

Abide with Me

If she can’t trace the cloudy
     synapses that lead to her daughter’s
          name, still my mother’s mother
can accompany Monk’s ensemble,

her throat trembling the high notes
     over the last state line before home——
          fast falls the eventide. She no longer
owns the strength to produce

all the sounds the spirit contains, songs
     from her other life when the Church
          lifted her even from the sudden fall
down the garden path that left her leg

useless. Home, the stale odor
     of a weeklong absence mixes
          with a smell we can’t name until we find
the sink spattered with white

and the glass birds fractured,
     sticky with real, matted feathers.
          Then it’s just a matter of finding
the catbird in the corner

who must’ve hurled himself
     again and again toward nothing,
          wounding these trinkets
until he owned their stone wings.

This morning, she wipes the pane
     smudgeless than rocks her chair further
          and further from this palmful of life
that couldn’t get out the way you hope

you will. Fast falls. What will stay with you
     as these lyrics have remained with her,
          what words to nudge you through
until you’re riding the last even tide,

rocking toward a sheen of clouds
     where the last thing you see is your own
          face before you pass through to light
or shatter with the trying?

What We Do

Metallic detonation arcs
     over Broadway's gulf, and the aluminum
          contorts to contain the continuous
syncopation wrecked into its side——

     with two feet of pipe
          a man's beating a keg till it turns useless
for anything else but to carry
     his liquid rhythms. He's drumming

          a rim full of dents, angled
facets that pull to themselves
     all the sun they can bear before tossing
          a tremelo of light off the bricks behind.

Look around: whatever this sound is
     that ricochets the streets is contagious——
          less drums than a seasonal quickening
that everything's so busy keeping up with,

     new desire mixing up the thick torpor
          of the past months. At my feet,
two pigeons struggle over any spare
     piece of garbage to entice a female.

          They fumble in this patch of spilled popcorn,
gurgling and churring in figure eights,
     inflating the sheen of their necks
          over their turf. Even when she dodges

away, they just keep flashing iridescence
     for no one. Noontime, the drummer's checking
          the metal where he's reflected
in more than one place, tucking a stray

     curl behind his ear. But just so you don't
          forget whose block this is,
when a woman goes by
     he's sent demonic, like he knows

          this commotion's for keeps,
and he's thrown into a shimmy
     of the hips which he rises out of
          just in time to fit the mechanical stumble

of a far-off jackhammer into his running
     cadence. These sounds the music wants
          to encompass, make its own,
so in the end, you can't tell if he's playing

     the drums or if they're playing him.
          Because when you're itching
to finish with your wrists
     the rumble that begins in your gut,

          this is what you do——you're ready
to bang on anything for love.
     You'll break your hands
          to get that rhythm out.

Chapter 5 (The Secret Soul of the City)

(Image callously ripped off from James F.)

(First, a totally unrelated topic: In the last post, I suggested that #Occupy had disappeared from the news. It would seem that my report of its death was somewhat exaggerated.)

Not long ago I was asked to read some of my work at a local "coffee shop" type event. What I ended up choosing to read was a digressionary chapter of an unfinished project (other excerpts have been posted here once or twice before). Between you and me, I was clearly stealing from that chapter from Lalka I posted some time ago.*

Chapter 5

On my third night in Boulder I dreamed of New York.

For the first few years after stepping outside the Port Authority with Gilliam and taking in the north and south of Fifth Avenue in a prolonged wide-eyed sweep, I lived in constant amazement at my new home. Though I grew up on the rim of Providence and spent my truncated university days in Boston, neither town could measure up to The City. Even when I had lived there long enough to know my way around the streets and associate every intersection with its nearest subway station, my tendency to walk with my head tilted back and jaw hanging open frequently elicited sneers and rolled eyes from passersby who mistook me for a New England bumpkin on vacation.

For the newly arrived, it is often the case that the price of admission to a life waking, working, and sleeping in the hub of the human world spares one little means of purchasing the luxuries and perks for which the city is so renowned. As a lowly copy shop clerk I could barely afford my share of rent on our Manhattan toehold, let alone pay for theater tickets, cover charges, cab fare, designer threads, Apple gadgets, or tabs at two-drink minimum lounges. I lived on a tight budget, bringing my lunch to Kinko’s in a reusable bag, carrying my coffee in a thermos, and subsiding on canned soup in the two-bedroom Murray Hill apartment I shared with Gilliam and four strangers.

My home had a fine view of Lexington Avenue, infrequent roach sightings, and a furnace that only broke down once a month or so. Excepting Gilliam, I did not much care for my roommates – for reasons which anyone who has ever occupied a living space with four people with whom they shared nothing in common but an inability to afford their own place will appreciate. But for the most part, the apartment remained a peripheral concern. I spent as little time there as possible. When my shift ended in the late afternoon or early evening, I never went straight home, preferring to stay outside and wander the grid until I simply lacked the strength to walk any farther.

On its best days, the city was mystical. Intoxicating. During the spring I felt like Walt Whitman; I wanted to climb up on the upper deck of a tour bus and enumerate Manhattan’s wonders over a megaphone. The bridges, the Bowery; Broadway’s boisterous swagger and the supernova spectacle of Times Square. The stone cathedrals and stained glass saints; the lustrous obelisks of midtown, blinding in the afternoon sun, blazing to spite the worst of any winter. The drummers in the subways, singers at the crosswalks, the students and seekers smoking on stoops; old Cubans contemplating checkmates across stone tables, the brilliant and beautiful people at the museums exchanging confidentialities in whispered French and Cantonese. The parks, the piers, the Corinthian columns and cobblestone streets, the statues in the squares; the delirious rush of the midnight J train tearing through space over the livid churnings of the East River, and the Lower West Side looming above the trees at sunset, inverted and shuddering in the Onassis-Kennedy Reservoir…

On its worst days, New York was altogether nauseating in its appalling reality. It was a hundred-thousand madmen digging through the garbage, pleading for McDonald’s money, and howling in crowded subway cars about George W. Bush, the aliens, the FCC, and Babylon. It was doomed doomsday prophets, crackhead fistfights, rag-men sleeping on the sidewalks in the sleet. It was pigeon shit. It was piss on the stairwells, crusted condoms on park benches, charred metal spoons, and garbage – garbage everywhere. It was single mothers with deep lines in their faces dragging screaming children by the wrists, one in each hand; it was old men who knew they’d work until they died, and when they died, they’d die alone; it was the palpable weight of loneliness and exhaustion on the late train, and it was the periodic thump of recognition that your face is only one of eight million, and the other 7,999,999 pairs of ears around you have no time or interest for what your mouth might have to say to them.

None of this was new to Gilliam, who, unlike me, did not come to the city as a carpetbagger. Having grown up immersed in New York’s sensations, scenes, stenches, and idiosyncrasies, he barely seemed to notice them. His parents still lived on Roosevelt Island, but he never spoke to them. I never asked his reasons – and reasons he surely had – but it seemed most likely he wished to live as little beholden to them as possible.

After returning home from Boston, Gilliam subsided on a slew of temporary sales positions, often working seven days a week. He selected his jobs carefully, only taking ones that paid commission – preferably those that allowed him face-to-face time with his marks. Gilliam could sell an icemaker to an Eskimo, provided he had the chance to shake his hand and look him in the eye. With the money he pulled in, he could have easily had an apartment to himself, were it not for his plans. The bulk of his earnings went straight into savings and stocks, not to be touched until he had amassed enough to start his business – once he figured out what sort of business he intended to start. Despite making at least seven or eight times more money than me, the weekly budget on which Gilliam lived was as meager as my own.

He kept a close watch on events and trends within Manhattan’s cultural sphere, intending to know his way around The Scene once he had the cash and clout to gain admittance to it. More than anything else, he paid attention to events in the art world. Although modern art held little fascination for him (self-congratulatory rubbish, he called it, though never when anyone who mattered was around), Gilliam was keenly interested in the things with which modern art was associated: cosmopolitan multinational crowds with fat wallets, thick rolodexes, and empty heads; trust-funded, easily-impressed girls attending SVA and FIT; journalists, bloggers, bankers, trendspotters, and socialites, all tipsy, talkative, and accessible; and, most importantly, free booze. Since neither of us could regularly accommodate fifty-dollar drink tabs, we went to galleries instead of bars. Once a week or so, Gilliam would call me at work to tell me about an opening that evening in Dumbo, Chelsea, or the West Side, and I’d rush home after my after my shift to shower, change into one of my rotating sets of dress clothes, dab cologne behind my ears, and pick up a pack of Nat Shermans at the corner store, primarily for their value as a conversation starter.

The art was pleasant to look at, even if I usually didn’t understand it. If the bottom-shelf chardonnay and cans of Rolling Rock left anything to be desired, it certainly wasn’t a better price. Because it was all free, and since I felt so ill at ease in a building full of strangers who all seemed to know each other, I returned to the makeshift, intern-staffed bars at least four times an evening – however long it took me to feel as in my element as Gilliam, who scarcely needed a drop before he could approach an attractive or interesting stranger with a business card in his extended hand and wearing his I’ll give you the world grin to tell them who he was, what he planned to do, and how they could be a part of it. His story changed from night to night. I think he was waiting to hear himself tell the right one; the one that had the greatest likelihood of becoming real with the help of the person to whom it was addressed.

His successes were mixed. He got invited to a lot of parties, filled up his address book, and let a lot of sloshed professional women and grad students take him home, but never found the investor, collaborator, or untapped innovator he needed. For my part, I met a lot of new people, but nobody ever wanted to know what I was doing afterwards, and the phone numbers I handed out on napkins never got any calls. Still, there was never a shortage of brief, intimate conversations with strangers who were eager as I was to discuss the city, their work, and their aspirations over a cigarette – whose tips I usually replaced with a pinch of green herb.

It was on these nights that I sensed the wonder of the city most acutely. Exiting a gallery after sunset, lightheaded, high, tired from my day’s work, having lost sense of myself in the noise and jostlings of the crowd, and finding the city awash in its own light, I invariably found myself pausing at the curb and gazing out at the streets and up at the towers, contemplating where I was, what it was, and what it might all mean.

The hardest thing is knowing what to ask. The object stands before you, too massive to be apprehended within its own vicinity, but nonetheless solid and self-evident. But no less evident is the riddle – and it reaches an especial salience in the mind of the stoned and tipsy college dropout in his early twenties.

Why?

It is impossible to grasp New York in its byzantine entirety. Though you might take your first and last breaths in the Presbyterian Hospital between ninety intervening years; though you could master the grid, commit to memory all the significant names, dates, and places, follow the cyclical seasons of neighborhood decay and revitalization, ride every tour cruise, and tread every foot of sidewalk on either side of every street, at the vital core of any individual conception of the city rests a kernel of inscrutability that resists all reason’s attempts to crack.

What is the city? How was it created? And for what purpose?

Is it within the mortal mind’s capability to chart the lengths of every street, track the paths of every copper wire, know the heights, foundations, and interiors of every structure, plumb the depths of every sewer pipe and subway tunnel, and calculate the converging, colliding, and diverging paths of the tens of millions of human beings to walk its streets since the first bricks of Fort Amsterdam were laid in 1614? Could human intelligence appraise the efforts of desire, design, and will that transformed the bucolic island of the many hills into a veritable organism of amalgamized stone, machinery, and human masses?

I sometimes thought of Archibald and Aristotle. We are what we repeatedly do; it is with cities as it is with men, which are the very atoms of metropolis. The city’s nature can be understood by what it does: its identity rests upon its function. But what was that function? What could New York be said to do?

And I wondered why I should be at such pains to understand a thing erected by men; built by human hands and conceived by human minds – hands no stronger, minds no greater than our own. How could it be that a human creation could defy human understanding?

Sometimes I would loiter outside the gallery and nurse a cigarette, waiting for somebody to approach and ask for one. I’d light it for them and ask what they thought about the city, what it was, and what it meant. Most of the time they didn’t understand what I was asking. The ones who understood could never answer. Though I kept pressing them, and they kept mulling it over (or pretending to), their cigarettes were always finished before any appreciable progress could be made, and they never hung around for much longer afterwards. And I would end up going home and watching VH1 with my roommates, only to corral my thoughts.

One October evening, we left an opening at an art space in Dumbo – myself, Gilliam, and a gregarious Romanian photographer he had met inside and who was eager to show him her work back at her apartment in Queens. It had stopped drizzling. After breathing in the evaporated perspiration of two-hundred bodies for the last three hours, we all agreed we should take a walk, so as to savor both the evening and the seventeen glass of white wine we’d consumed between the three of us.

We found ourselves drawn westward, and soon stood at the rocks straddling the bank of the East River. Partitioned between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, a segment of Manhattan rose from the gloom, lit by innumerable yellow beads strung in rows across the massive, motionless forms of the Lower East Side. At the towers’ base, the double-tiered FDR Drive flowed with living light, passing with the same liquidity as the waves slapping against the stones at our feet. My companions’ conversation about David LaChapelle became small and distant as the tantalizing problem of the city’s being reexerted itself.

I asked myself the same questions, arrived at the same incomplete answers, and came no closer to a conclusion than I had on any of the last twenty, thirty, or fifty nights like this.

For the first time, I thought to consult Gilliam. I asked him: what is the city?

Gilliam said nothing. His fixed, laconic gaze toward the opposite bank told me he considered the question useless. The photographer answered for him: it was New York, she said, the greatest city in the world. When I pressed her for specifics, she only elaborated so far as adding that this was where it all happened and that there was nowhere else like it.

I asked Gilliam a different question: what made the city? If we couldn’t grasp the whole of its nature, could we at least understand the physics by which it assumed its form?

Of course, said Gilliam (not a little drunk): having, wanting, getting. The exchange of what one has for what one wants.

The five boroughs that are New York form the four-chambered heart through which the life of our world flows. It is the magnetic pole of means, and means attracts means. And so all things are drawn irresistibly toward the city.

This, Gilliam said with a grand gesture toward the rows of towers across the river, is where all the currents converge. It is the fulcrum of civilization; the citadel of humanity; the very fountainhead of capital. Why should the man in need to drink content himself with waiting for the well to fill or praying for the rain to fall when he might tap into the very wellspring with a little exertion?

But what makes this place the wellspring, I wanted to know.

The people who come here to search for it, Gilliam answered. Listen: a star is a star because it is massive. A star becomes massive by first being massive – by existing at the center.

The photographer remarked at the profundity in his choice of metaphor. Gilliam ignored her.

Human beings have needs that must be met if they intend to continue being human. The means to acquire the things to satisfy these deficiencies flow through the city like an underground vein pushing against the surface. By seeking means, we make the means, and make the city grow. It has always been this way, ever since we decided to stop being apes and start being people. There is no other alternative. If the heart stops pumping, the body must die.

It sounded so simple. I could not question or refute any of this – especially not when Gilliam answered with such assured conviction while I was at pains to even produce a question.

I asked Gilliam, for the first time, why he was so dead set on his grand plans. Why wasn’t it enough for him to work and be paid for it?

He thought about it. A train roared eastward on the Manhattan Bridge, and he waited until it passed to give his answer:

Because it’s what a man is supposed to do. A boy follows. A man leads. The architects of our world were people who refused to content themselves with just getting by. The city was built by men – men with ambition, who would rather provide for themselves than be provided for by others.

His face was lit up by the flash of the photographer’s camera. His focus broken, he shrugged and commented on the weather before sitting back down.

I considered what he said, and knew that Archibald and my father would have agreed with him. It was early yet, and I had tomorrow off. I resolved to spend the rest of the evening revising my résumé and searching job listings once I returned home and sobered up.

We parted ways soon afterward. Gilliam and the photographer headed for the F train with their hands in each others’ back pockets, while I walked crookedly toward the ACE station at Red Cross Plaza. At the entrance, a young vagrant with a southern accent asked me for a cigarette. I gave him the whole pack of Nat Shermans from of my pocket (there were probably twelve left) and waved off his thanks.

The platform on which I waited nearly thirty minutes for the uptown train was deserted, save for an old bum with bleeding gashes on his face who lay passed out against support beam, and a gorgeous girl about my age wearing a dress that matched the paint upon her cherry lips. She listened to a pair of earbuds and stared unflinchingly at the white tile wall across the track.

I paced and ruminated what Gilliam had said. It weighed up well enough, but something in it still seemed to ring hollow.

The city was built by human beings who had to find the means to meet their wants, and their efforts made the means by which other human beings could meet their needs. Ten, twenty, fifty million simple, and singleminded efforts toward an interminable gradient of individual necessity. Thus the current flowed, and the city accrued like sediment gathering at the mouth of a spring. New York stood, then, as the product of twenty generations of human endeavor. While its people lived through labor, the city piled up around them; turbid waves left in the wake of human life, remaining for the next generation to push through, coalescing, splitting, and mutually destroying one another. And thus New York was made, sustained, and transformed – though not through any deliberate intelligence or focused purpose.

At last, the train arrived. The girl in the red dress boarded a different car than me. The vagrant remained snoring against the rusted pillar. I got on the train and shared a car with six or seven inexpressive faces with eyes that only opened to check the station stops and lips that remained press together except to let a cough pass through.

The train rushed through the darkness at the city’s roots, and I realized that the city wasn’t the cause, and it wasn’t the end. It was only the side effect.

Twenty generations of human beings in the pursuit of their day-to-day interests had pushed and shoved each other across four centuries for the things their natures on each of the 147,000 days of those four hundred years, and the city was the imprint of their actions. How could the product of a hundred million different human efforts toward a hundred million different ends in a hundred million different directions be understood, except as incoherence?

And this was the heart of human existence: a mechanism built by an appetite with no aim, plan, or goal but to keep itself fed and sheltered for a time and live in such a way that life was free from want as could be managed. An indeliberately constructed labyrinth, continually rebuilt and expanded by the men who wandered it – mastered by the thing their fathers made!

It was raining when I emerged from the subway. Thirteen streets and three avenues stood between me and my apartment. I didn’t have the cash for a cab. Somewhere in Queens, Gilliam was dry, warm, and probably sharing a bed with his Romanian photographer, and I would have to hear all about it the next day.

While I waited at a crosswalk for the light to change, a Lexus swinging a right struck a puddle, drenching me from the waist down. I thought about how none of this would be necessary if I had a car of my own, and decided that moment that placing myself in a position to afford one must become a top priority.

The rain came down harder. I ducked into a bar to wait it out. After five minutes, the bartender noticed I wasn’t buying anything and told me to leave unless I planned on having a drink. The cheapest beer they had was six dollars, which I hadn’t the luxury of being able to part with. He pointed me toward the exit, assuring me of his sympathy – but rules were rules. No purchase, no shelter.

Home at last. I couldn’t get inside the room Gilliam and I shared because our other roommate – a postal clerk in his mid-thirties – was loudly copulating with the latest boy or girl he’d brought home from the Pyramid Club. In the other bedroom, our one female roommate yelled at the boyfriend on the other end of the phone about his reluctance to let her move in with him. Our remaining two roommates sat on the living room couch in the grip of some psychedelic drug or other and watched Mr. Ed reruns with the volume turned up to drown out the screams and grunts from behind either bedroom door.

Too much noise. I shivered it out in the kitchen with a cup of tea and can of tomato soup, and grudgingly washed the dishes my roommates left in the sink to pass the time, vowing that one way or another, I would be living somewhere by myself this time next year.

The last pinch of herb in my pocket barely amounted to a puff, which I exhaled through the open window. Our apartment was on the fourteenth floor – the window in the kitchen pointed north along Lexington, where the Chanin and Chrysler Buildings billowed upwards to eclipse the electrified sky. From the towers’ unseen foundations extended a glowing thread that gradually widened, quickened, and at last segmented into cars and cabs humming in the breeze as they passed below. The whole visible city seemed a baroque carven canyon through which flowed a miraculous clockwork river that radiated golden light.

Magnificent, I thought – and in the living room, Wilbur asked Mr. Ed if he thought they would ever understand women, and Mr. Ed answered: "Don't try. Just enjoy 'em."

And I decided, on the advice of a talking horse, that for all of her strangeness and ugliness, and for all the sense I couldn’t make of her, I loved New York and could never bring myself to leave her. It seemed just as rational as anything else in that place on this night.

A few months after that night, I gave my two weeks’ notice at Kinko’s when a respected international manufacturer hired me to fill an open position within its editorial department, where I would assist in the drafting and editing of its product manuals. I moved into an apartment of my own and bought a Volkswagen Beetle. My thoughts turned from the secret soul of the city to the operational particulars of motorized tie racks, shoe-shining machines, paper shredders, and electric toothbrushes, and how they might be most succinctly expressed to the masses of searchers and spenders too wrapped in their own business to sort their own ties, shine their own shoes, destroy their own documents, and exert their own arms to clean their own teeth. I stopped smoking herb and started smoking Marlboros; I stopped visiting galleries and started visiting bars. My relationship with New York settled down. It no longer confounded me, and it was only in dreams that the city appeared to me with the same bewildering beauty and strangeness I saw when I first arrived.

That night in Boulder I dreamed of the Chrysler Building in the rain.

* Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. - T.S. Eliot

Of site crashings and book trashings

Two items on tonight's agenda.

If you got redirected here via 8easybits.net, this probably isn't what you were expecting (or wanting) to see. An explanation is in order!

About a month ago I got it in my head to transfer 8easybits.net to a different host. Transferring all the files seemed to go off without a hitch, but we hit a bit of a snag during the domain transfer -- which is why the site was down completely for a few days there. I ironed everything out with the new host, changed the DNS whatchacallems, and naïvely dared to hope that would be it, and everything would be up and running like it was on the old host.

Oops!

Something evidently went very, very wrong during the transfer. The site's engine is busted and I don't know how to fix it. The content is backed up in at least two different places, so there is no need to worry about any comics being lost. (The commentary might be another story, but I'm trying not to worry myself with more than one thing at a time.) But the borked CUSP setup is so obsolete that you can't even download it anymore, much less find a readme file -- not that I'd be able to make much use of it, anyway. I wasn't the person who set everything up to begin with, and I have absolutely no conception of how SQL or PHP is supposed to work. Unless somebody with a functional knowledge of this stuff feels like doing some pro-bono work for the sake of preserving history, 8easybits.net as we've known it for the past seven years is probably a memory.

So why did you change hosts to begin with, genius? you ask. First of all, the host I was using before kept upping its rates, and my income isn't exactly keeping pace. Secondly, I've been working on putting together a new comics site under a new domain. My plan was to use the new site for all the new comics, but to keep the complete 8EB archives in the same place for anyone to browse whenever they wished.

Again: oops.

Looks like we're stalled out for the time being. I'll probably rig up an archives page with some blog software at some point, but that will have to take a backseat to everything else I have planned. 8easybits.net will link to this (updated bi-weekly, usually!) blog until the new comics page is set up, which should be whenever I have a sufficient backlog to maintain a strict, once-per-seven-days update schedule for a three-month period. Until then, I'm afraid our soirees are restricted to the present format. (And do note that this is no longer the latest entry. Click the "Beyond Easy" banner up top to teleport your browser to the most recent update.)

I'm awfully sorry about this. And I'd also like to say that if you're still coming back to reread 8 Easy Bits from time to time, thank you very much -- I think that's really cool.

Moving on, then, to item two!

And now for the bad news.

The night raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zucotti Park camp put me in a really foul mood, which didn't get much better as more details kept coming in. What outraged and frightened me more than anything else were reports that the NYPD tore down the famous People's Library and threw the entire 5,000 book collection into a garbage truck. I felt as though a weight had been removed from my chest when word came in that the news of the library's destruction was premature.

Unfortunately, it seems that the report of the premature report was, in fact, premature.

When members of the encampment visited the garage on 57th Street to retrieve the books, they found the vast bulk of the collection missing. Much of what remains is damaged or practically destroyed -- almost as though it had been fished out of a garbage truck at the last minute.

So it would seem that that big rant I had prepared for Tuesday's update and then scrapped still applies. Jesus H. Christ. I would feel nothing but absolute, unalloyed horror at the NYPD's actions if the idiocy they've demonstrated weren't so confounding as to almost seem comical.

The kneejerk liberal reaction to events of this kind is to cry (or type, preferably in caps) police state, fascist pigs, etc., etc. Usually, I find this sort of epithet-hurling unhelpful, even when there is a grain (or a heap) of truth to the claims. But when city police go ahead and toss five-thousand-plus library books (and make no mistake -- even if it was not housed in a permanent structure or publicly funded, this was a library) into the back of a garbage truck, it takes more restraint than I possess to refrain from entertaining recollections of the world's Nazis, Maoists, Red Khmers, and every other representative of the elemental belligerence, intolerance, and ignorance that has been pissing on civilization like a territorial mutt in a flower garden since the torches were put to Alexandria.

Okay, so maybe it isn't very funny at all -- not even in a dark kind of way. But Bloomberg's bumbling attempt at a cover-up is freaking hilarious.

The announcement that the books were safe came from the Twitter account of Bloomberg's office. Why was the announcement necessary? Well, despite the NYPD's best efforts at a media blackout, news from the ground spread quickly via Twitter. When demonstrators tweeted about the loss of the library, major news outlets seized upon the story. (After all, government-sanctioned destruction of books is something that tends to strike at the public's nerves.) Bloomberg's office quickly claimed the library was intact in order to prevent the aforementioned Nazi parallels from drawing themselves.

When Bloomberg's office announced that the book were safe, a many of us (including myself) took them at their word. Why not? Given that the news of the library's destruction was aggressively put into circulation by the protestors themselves (and subsequently seized upon and propagated by mainstream news outlets), surely Bloomberg's office wouldn't be stupid enough to serve up a baldfaced lie about the status of the books and not anticipate the same people calling them on it, right? I mean, that's the kind of trick only a really, truly, profoundly, astonishingly, blitheringly dumb person would expect to work.

Almost as dumb, at any rate, as Bloomberg's responding to Thursday's demonstrations by insisting that the real story was that the turnout was lower than anticipated -- which is not only another blatant lie, but practically a challenge directed toward the demonstrators. It's the sort of thing a carnival clown shouts at people in line at the dunking booth in order to get them pissed off and ready to go.

Maybe Olbermann is right. Maybe Bloomberg is Occupy's man on the inside. Ever since Tuesday, he's done the movement nothing but favors, disguising them as antagonism. It has to be intentional. The three-term mayor of New York City cannot actually be this stupid, can he...?

#occupy Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Last night I went to sleep in a really foul mood. When I woke up, the first thing I did was check the news, so I began this morning in an even worse mood.

You've probably already seen the reports. You don't need to be told that Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD brought the truncheon down on the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Square last night.
Some weeks ago, when touring the park and dropping off some supplies for the campers, my friend James ominously stated that the NYPD's budget outweighs that of some smaller nations' sovereign military forces. The scene that began at around 1:00 a.m. was practically a YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK exposition for the pleasure of New York's Republicans and sadists.

Nor should it be news to you that journalists were aggressively prevented from accessing the scene (and in several cases bullied) by the police, so most of what we know about the crackdown comes from Twitter, yfrog, and YouTube. You don't need to be told the stories of unprovoked beatings and gassings, wanton (hell, downright gleeful) destruction of protestors' property (tents and tarps were slashed, cameras and computers were broken, and I can only imagine how much donated food was chucked into the garbage trucks that pulled up to the park along with the police vans and sonic cannons), and the refusal of Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD to comply with a New York City judge's ruling to allow protestors back on the scene.

You don't need to be told. All of this is old news. Every columnist, blogger, and interested social media user has already reported the facts and weighed in, leaving your present armchair correspondent with precious little to contribute. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll be able to move on from the subject and thinking about something else until I've tossed my two cents (well, three) into the distended coin purse of Internet discourse.

FIRST CENT: THE FATE OF THE LIBRARY

Scratch that. Contrary to previous reports, the famous Liberty Square Library has not been destroyed, which makes the diatribe I had prepared (and its exquisite allusions to Alexandria) totally unnecessary. This would make me feel so much better about the whole thing were it not for....

FIRST CENT: JUDGE STALLMAN AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

This afternoon -- hours after a New York County Supreme Court Justice issued a restraining order against Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD -- Judge Micheal Stallman ruled that the demonstrators' first amendment rights do not permit them to camp out at the park indefinitely, and that the police crackdown (bulldozers, pepper spray, batons, and all) was all good and legal. And just like that, Liberty Square has reverted back to Zucotti Park -- for now. Protestors are being allowed back on the site, with the proviso that they can't build another campsite.

There's a whole lot about this to make one feel scared and upset, but on the whole, the movement probably stands to make a net gain from this. Just when the American attention span was in danger of flitting elsewhere, and a month before the merciless New York winter threatened to move in and kill the movement slowly and ignominiously, the Liberty Square occupation goes out with a great sound and fury that shocks the whole world into tuning back in.

For the time being, public assembly isn't altogether banned -- and if the Occupy crowd can muster the tenacity we've come to expect from them, they'll back, tents or no tents. Bloomberg and the NYPD just giftwrapped them a reason to press forward, and here's hoping they rise to the occasion.

SECOND CENT: MAYOR BLOOMBERG'S BONEHEADED STATEMENT

"We have been in constant contact with Brookfield [the park's owners] and yesterday they requested that the City assist it in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules in the park," Bloomberg writes. "But make no mistake – the final decision to act was mine."

I can admit -- through a great deal of teeth grinding -- that Bloomberg's case, in its own limited context, is not an unreasonable one. But toward the end, there's a part I cannot read without biting my tongue:

Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.

A major motivating force of Occupy Wall Street was the fact that nobody who mattered -- lawmakers, executives, members of the mainstream media -- was listening when people tried to get a word in about America's growing income divergence and systemic flaws in its economic system over the noise about debt ceilings, job creators, and Kim Kardashian. Since writing blog posts, mailing letters, submitting articles to left-leaning magazines, and holding lectures wasn't convincing our greasy-palmed policymakers that economic injustice is a real and very serious national problem requiring an earnest solution, some people decided to find a more visible platform on which to air their grievances.

And now Bloomberg congratulates them on a good try and tells them their time is up. Two months is all they get before their platform gets yanked out from under their feet. Better luck changing the world next time, kiddies; also, you're welcome for the two months.

Putting aside the arguments about right to assembly, that last sentence is what really boggles my mind. If saying a thing like "now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments" with a straight face in a post-Citizens United America isn't absolutely daffy, it must be smug and malicious.

You already know about the Supreme Court's unfortunate ruling that handed America's oligarchic interests their own personal bullhorns and national P.A. systems for the sake of "free speech," so you don't need to be told. It was already the case that the entrenched minority could control the media, but Citizens United now allows them to pick and choose which politicians they want to see running for office, and spend however much money they want filling the airwaves with slander and misinformation.

Admittedly, that does read like a hyperbole. We're exactly not looking at a Netrunner future just yet -- but the point is that the wealthy have more free speech than the rest of the populace. They get to control the conversation. They pick what's on TV. They pick what's on the radio. They pick the issues our lawmakers are willing to fight for. Occupy Wall Street was a brilliant tactic towards leveling the playing field and circumventing the gatekeepers to introduce economic injustice into the national dialogue. (Before #occupy, you sure as hell didn't hear those words mentioned beyond "fringe" publications.)

Without a sustained public demonstration, we're back to "you've got your free speech and I'VE GOT MY FREE SPEECH." The encampment was precisely what gave the demonstrators the ability to make their case heard. Without that platform, the people who are driving the push for accountability in the financial industry and an America that isn't rigged against most of its citizens' interests are stuck trying to shout over the owners of the world's biggest megaphones.

THIRD CENT: TEABAGGERS AND TROLLS

I'm seriously starting to wonder if Karl Rove isn't cutting checks to people who troll CNN.com's user comments sections with "TAKE THAT HIPPIES OCCUPY A SHOWER WHY DONT YOU HA HA HA HA" bilge.

Earlier tonight I expressed this sentiment on another social media platform and received these responses from a distant acquaintance:

Karl Rove hasn't paid me shit. You'd be surprised how many people, myself included, who feel all this occupy nonsense is a waste of time. And furthermore that it is populated mostly by young academic types who can afford an ipad to tweet about their 'noble' endeavors. Most of those who are really getting fucked by the system are too busy actually going to work in order to feed their families to bitch about it. 

Of course there is a minority of haves and a minority [sic] of have-nots. That is how it has been since the dawn of civilization. Why should that suddenly change? And as for all the socialist idealists present at these protests, they need to wake up and realize that socialist and communist societies are just as guilty as capitalist ones of having extreme inequity between rich and poor. The only difference is that at least in capitalism you have an outside chance of making it into the privileged class with a mix of hard work and luck.

Compared to most of the rancorous gibberish I've been reading all day to furnish myself with excuses to take smoke breaks, this is positively constructive and reasonable.

But the point is that the sheer loathing directed towards the evicted Occupiers is astonishing. They're all stoners. They're all criminals. They're all basement-dwelling America haters. If they're not pampered, soft-handed academics, then they're penniless, filthy hippies. They're nothing but a bunch of whiners who don't understand how the world works. They should just get a $50,000 a year job with health benefits, like I did, because it's really just that easy.


Okay. Let's assume, for argument's sake, that the Occupy demonstrators really are nothing but a bunch of stoners, inexperienced students, unemployable burnouts, and messy hippies. Does this really make their grievances any less valid?

And to introduce some variety into our sources, let's look at a few numbers offered by FOX News' own Juan Williams. Thirty-nine percent of Americans fully approve of Occupy Wall Street. Seventy-six percent agree that the United States' economic structure disproportionately favors the wealthy. Fifty-five percent feel that income inequality is a significant national problem. Sixty-eight percent favor raising taxes on citizens earning more than $250,000 a year.

So why are we hurling epithets at the people -- be they hippies, stoners, slackers, or hell, even frustrated working stiffs -- who are making a serious effort to get America to notice and confront the fact that it has transformed into a de-facto oligarchy?

"Get a job," they're told by people who already have jobs, and choose to ignore the 16% underemployment rate and a minimum wage that has not kept pace with living expenses.

"Go out and vote," they're told by many of the same people who, in their next breath, complain about partisanship, gridlock, and the remarkable inability of Barack Obama to get even a god damn jobs bill passed during a period of widespread chronic unemployment.

Can you blame them for feeling as though the conventional avenues might not be a viable option?

And there's still more to this. A characteristically brilliant piece by Matt Taibbi hits the nail squarely on the head:

Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it....

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Let's pull out our cultural barometer and see what's in the air right now.

The acquaintance we heard from above blithely admits that people are getting fucked by the system. We know and accept that our government is broken, our politicians are bought, and nobody in power has the balls to give our most pressing issues anything more than lip service; we understand that the Supreme Court has basically tossed aside judicial impartiality, but we're also aware that nobody will listen if we complain. We know that the bankers who crashed the economy have gotten off scot-free and are still making billions of dollars ripping off the have-nots and helping the haves turn their money into more money, and most of us are apparently perfectly willing to let this slide. We accept that climate change is going to drown our cities and decimate our agricultural capacity, and we're not doing a thing to prevent or prepare for it. We know the food we eat is probably killing us, but that's cool too. We know the folks in the board rooms at our inescapable multinational corporations care singularly about profits, but we've come to expect that from them and learned to live with it. We've embraced the emptiness of our culture to the extent that we now celebrate vacuous bullshit with a lack of irony that would make Andy Warhol's speed-addled brain turn somersaults, and we're tired of trying to resist it. You already know all this; you don't need to be told. Nobody approves of how things are going and nobody's happy with how they are, but we've convinced ourselves that we have no choice but to shake our heads, take our stress-reliever of choice, and get on with our lives as they are, because nothing we do will make an ounce of difference.

And when a motley group of students, hippies, literati, and urbanites devises a model (albeit temporary) alternative and propose that things should be and can be different, we castigate and tear them down for having the nerve not to resign themselves to the insufferable status quo that the rest of us invited on ourselves and continue to hoist upon our backs.

The losers had it coming. God bless America.

#occupy on the ground

Well sports fans, I'm still sick -- somehow. Your guess is as good as mine. I've been directing what little energy I've had towards the completion of a few different long-term projects (and to answering email, Formspring questions, reader comments, etc.) so I'm once again short on a substantial update. Fortunately, shutterbug and patriot James is stepping in to give us a close-up look at the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been making the headlines lately. Most are thumbnails; click to see higher-res versions!

I've taken an interest in greywater systems ever since moving to the Quaker Farm. It's some interesting (AND EXTREMELY PRACTICAL) stuff.

"I'd occupy HER Wall Street," a friend commented when I showed him this photo. (Only he didn't say "Wall Street.")

"INFINITE GROWTH IS NOT POSSIBLE ON A FINITE PLANET."

"INFINITE GROWTH IS NOT POSSIBLE ON A FINITE PLANET."

This would be the Zuccotti Park you've heard so much about.

For the correlation between foreign wars and economic injustice, please see Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam" address.

Correction: It was actually FDR.

However good its author's intentions, this sign is mistaken. The quote is from Whitman's "Song of Myself," which (as the title might suggest) is not about Lower Broadway. If Walt does have a poem about Lower Broadway to his name, I'm having a hard time finding it. There are these two pieces, but they're obviously not what the person drafting the sign had in mind.

#occupymuseums: An Excercise in Imbecility

This is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping the Occupy movement would not get itself into. An #OWS splinter movement (apparently with the approval of the main group) is sticking it to the Man at one of the main nerves of his plutocratic body politic: ART MUSEUMS.

Wait, what?

Let's try to wrap our heads around this one by taking a gander at Occupy Museums' call to action/manifesto:

The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite. For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. We recognize that art is for everyone, across all classes and cultures and communities. We believe that the Occupy Wall Street Movement will awaken a consciousness that art can bring people together rather than divide them apart as the art world does in our current time…

Let’s be clear. Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs. The wide acceptance of cultural authority of leading museums have made these beloved institutions into corrupt ratings agencies or investment banking houses - stamping their authority and approval on flimsy corporate art and fraudulent deals.

For the last few decades, voices of dissent have been silenced by a fearful survivalist atmosphere and the hush hush of BIG money. To really critique institutions, to raise one’s voice about the disgusting excessive parties and spectacularly out of touch auctions of the art world while the rest of the country suffers and tightens its belt was widely considered to be bitter, angry, uncool. Such a critic was a sore loser. It is time to end that silence not in bitterness, but in strength and love! Because the occupation has already begun and the creativity and power of the people has awoken! The Occupywallstreet Movement will bring forth an era of new art, true experimentation outside the narrow parameters set by the market. Museums, open your mind and your heart! Art is for everyone! The people are at your door!

Okay. Right.

Since I am once again short on time this evening, we'll just be looking at a few quick points.

1.) If the artists of the 99% don't want to deal with a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite, they can just, you know...find other places to exhibit their work. Small urban galleries, perhaps? Public parks? Universities? The Internet? How about their own apartments? They could clear the furniture, distribute flyers, hang work on the walls, hand out wine and cheese on platters. That definitely seems like a more constructive use of their time to me.

This immediately strikes any reader who isn't a struggling artist himself as a personal gripe disguised as a political statement. "The false hierarchy of the cultural wing of the oligarchical puppet state won't exhibit my work, so their very existence must be wrong!" One might also suspect them of hitching a ride on a highly-publicized political movement to buy themselves some media attention.

2.) For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or [sic] art, he says. How? This is not exactly a self-evident statement. Details, please? Explanations? Examples??

(When a truly persistent artist finds no market for his work, he takes it elsewhere instead of trying to burn down the market.)

3.) Why the fuck are you protesting the MoMA, of all places? It's not exactly turning tremendous profits. In fact, last I checked, it barely breaks even. What's these folks' beef, anyway?

An organizer tells a journalist that the place isn't necessarily bad, and the art isn't necessarily bad either, but he doesn't like having to pay $25 to get in.

The admissions price is a direct consequence of the MoMA's not receiving any government funding. Even if you want to put your fingers in your ears for the conversation about the United States' tremendous federal budget deficits and national debt, are you really willing to blame an institution for not wanting to exist at the mercy of Congress?

And before you bitch about its entry fee, why don't you go look at its membership plans? Hey, look! You can pay $75 a year for a membership, which allows you to support an establishment that offers great works of art for public viewing (which would probably otherwise be locked up in some billionaire's mansion), come and go as you please at no further cost, and bring a friend along at an 80% reduction in price!

Maintaining an art gallery of the MoMA's size ain't cheap. The "exorbitant" entry fees help pay for staff salaries, security, site maintenance, power (climate control is equally important for the art is it is for the comfort of the visitors), property taxes, etc. But that's what it costs to keep so many pieces by so many highly-sought artists under the same roof for public exhibition.

4.) The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs.

Oh! He played on the homonymity between the words "canon" and "cannon." Cute! (Or maybe he actually misspelled "canon" and I'm giving him too much credit.)

But still, what? I would think that an effective manifesto should give detailed reasons for a party's grievances than just assume everyone is already aware of them -- especially when they're so abstract.

5.) If you don't like the records the mainstream labels are releasing, stop buying them and look for music elsewhere. If you don't like what the museums are displaying and promoting, PATRONIZE DIFFERENT MUSEUMS. Better yet, start an art blog, find some like-minded contributors, and promote stuff that's beneath the museums' radar. (Something similar worked pretty well for a little music blog called "Pitchfork," didn't it?) This would also be much more productive (not to mention tasteful) than taking advantage of a public protest about economic injustice to draw attention to yourself.

6.) Okay, wait. Maybe what he's saying is that the wealthy have a disproportionate influence on what's hot and what's not in the art world. Probably -- but first of all, that's nothing new. If you're in the business of art and want to make money, you make art that appeals to people who have money. Otherwise, you make art for the love of it and be grateful for the chance to do it. And secondly, who gives a crap? Find different patrons, go to different museums, blah blah blah.

Economic injustice is a matter of widespread concern because all aspects of a nation's life exist in the context of its economic state. This is why #occupy is important and necessary. Not being able to find a job after ten months of looking is a pretty good reason to take to the streets. Not being able to see your and your friends' paintings on display in the Museum of Modern Art because of the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism kind of, well, isn't. And it's really no reason to get in someone's way and make a lot of noise when they're taking the day off to visit the MoMA with a friend from out of town. That's not going to endear them to your cause, and it certainly won't make them look at #occupy in a positive light.

I wouldn't care about this in the least if it didn't reflect so poorly on #occupy as a whole.

The Occupy movement actually seems to be endorsing these people, which has the potential to be extremely counterproductive (provided Occupy Museums doesn't just fizzle out in a week). If #occupy wants to affect serious policy changes, it needs mainstream support, and not just the reliable backing of the young and far-left. Frivolous side-projects like Occupy Museums only add discordance to a movement that already receives enough criticism for its lack of a unified message and set of actionable demands. (Side note: a specific demand may be forthcoming.)

Having an #occupy endorsement stamped on self-indulgent abstractia like Occupy Museums just provides the CNN and FOX News personalities with ammunition. It exposes the movement to ridicule after all the work it has done to demonstrate that it represents more than just the usual protest crowds (kids, hippies, academics, privileged hipsters, etc.).

I brought this up on Occupy Wall St.'s Facebook page earlier today, but it scrolled out of sight within ten minutes. One response I got (before my post was buried) went like:

We really don't care if msm takes this seriously. Our seriousness isn't dependent on their interpretations

No, but your results are. Unless you want all your time and effort to amount to nothing more than a three-month street fair, you damn well better care how the wider public perceives you.

Occupy needs to stay on message. Economic Injustice. Economic Injustice. Economic Injustice.

The movement can't afford to be defined by the pet causes of its fringe elements -- I seem to recall something like that happening to the Tea Party around the same time it began to sink out of favor with the silent majority. Once the public begins tuning out #occupy as a bunch of manifesto-touting, overacademized weirdos, the conversation will change, policymakers will turn their attention elsewhere, and that will be that. And I don't want this to happen.

#occupywallstreet: Arguments, Ruminations, Photographs

As Occupy Wall Street endures, so too does the "web blog sphere" chatter about Occupy Wall Street. If you're sympathetic to the movement (I think it has lasted for a sufficiently long time, attracted enough supporters, and spread to enough cities that we can appropriately refer to it as a "movement"), you will not mind. If you're trying to tune it out, I'm afraid you'll have to put up with it for at least a little longer.

The fact that Occupy Wall Street is calling attention toward a fundamentally broken component of American society is reason enough to at least pay attention to it, even if you can't totally support it. After all, the United States is a nation that doesn't snap out of its mass media and toy-induced coma very often, and this is especially true of its young people. The "Occupy" movement suggests that maybe Generation Y does in fact have a pulse, and despite whatever reservations I might have about the demonstrators' means and ends, what we're seeing is definitely preferable to watching the thousands of them shrugging, going back inside, and tweeting their minute-by-minute reactions to the new episode of Jersey Shore.

Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon I stopped by Zuccotti Liberty Park with James to drop off some food, clothing layers, and bedding for the campers before heading back toward Pennsylvania. Apart from mentioning the almost unbelievable increase in the demonstrators' numbers since my first visit, there is little I did or observed that some other local blogger hasn't already discussed himself, or that the photographs James has been taking throughout the week (some of which you can see below) can't illustrate with less verbiage and more eloquence.

Right when Occupy Wall Street began making the news about two weeks ago, my friend Jen and I shared our views on the matter over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and really got on each other's nerves. It spilled out into an email exchange that tapered off after we both got tired of being mad at each other, but Jen did raise some points to which I never had a chance to respond. I'd like to take a look at a few of them here -- but it bears mentioning that this isn't a case of me wanting to pick a fight and revive a disagreement (sup Jen). I just think some of Jen's points make useful starting lines for discussion.

Let's begin! 

Most of the corporations out there are providing commercial products/services or are supported by the public in some shape or form.

Again, personal responsibility.

It's good that they're out there voicing their opinions and making their concerns heard, but they probably don't consistently patron companies that are socially and economically responsible. If they did, these companies wouldn't be struggling to make a profit and this whole corporate-greed thing wouldn't be a problem.

Before we start looking at the legitimacy of her main point, I have a bone to pick about the "personal responsibility" chorus. Why should it only cut one way?

I worked at a Borders store for three years. When the company started having financial troubles, employee hours got cut; the worse things got, the less we worked. Perks were systematically eliminated. There was a "temporary" freeze on employee wages that ended up lasting for the remainder of the company's existence.

This in itself isn't the reason why many former Borders employees are so bitter. After all, when money is tight, everyone in the house has to make sacrifices. But in this case, it was the store employees who were made to absorb the splashback resulting from executive incompetence.

My friend Anna (a former member of the management staff at Borders' King of Prussia Mall location) can give us a few names and numbers, since her ear was much closer to the wall than mine:

(11:27:19 PM) annatheclamma: hmmmmmm
(11:27:22 PM) annatheclamma: well
(11:27:58 PM) annatheclamma: I think our wage freeze started in 2007
(11:28:18 PM) annatheclamma: in that time, we had george jones as a ceo
(11:28:28 PM) annatheclamma: who got ousted, but got a bonus when he left
(11:28:32 PM) annatheclamma: then ron marshall came in
(11:28:43 PM) annatheclamma: got a bonus upon being hired, and one upon being fired
(11:29:06 PM) annatheclamma: then mike edwards came in, who got a bonus with the promotion, and a severance package even after the bankruptcy
(11:31:09 PM) annatheclamma: I know everything was filed with the sec
(11:31:50 PM) annatheclamma: mike edwards got 125,000 in severance
(11:32:27 PM) annatheclamma: wait the top 4 execs each got $125,000
(11:32:32 PM) annatheclamma: just in severence
(11:32:47 PM) annatheclamma: from a bankrupt company that gave its workers nothing in severance
(11:33:51 PM) annatheclamma: george jones got 2.09 million in severance
(11:35:05 PM) annatheclamma: I was there for 5 years and made $10.75 an hour
(11:35:10 PM) annatheclamma: completely fair

Why do I get the feeling practices such as these aren't especially unusual, given how similar it sounds to reports of lavish post-bailout bonuses across the financial sector? And why is it that only the wealthy are allowed to lecture the lower classes on the issue of personal responsibility?

But we've already veered from Jen's main point, which was about how it is upon the concerned consumer to patronize the right businesses and eschew the "wrong" ones, and I cannot dispute this. Nor can I argue with the fact that we essentially voted in Exxon, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, despite never actually pulling a lever for them in any ballot box. None of these huge corporations with questionable ethics would have ever made it big unless large numbers of people hadn't willingly directed portions of their incomes toward purchasing their services or swag.

Participating in public demonstrations, getting the word out, making yourself heard, and, yes, even voting in public elections are all important toward creating the momentum that carries reform.

But all of these are relatively easy and quick methods of trying to foment social change -- and real change is never easy, and it most certainly isn't quick, especially not where systemic reform is concerned.

A tremendous majority of the population adheres to a lifestyle that pumps money into the coffers of multinational corporations, many of which don't necessarily behave in ways a responsible, respectable person should be expected to. (If corporations want to be treated as "entities," i.e., people in our legal system, I see no reason not to hold them to the standards to which we hold any United States resident.)

We can bitch about the evils perpetrated by oil companies, but our whining doesn't make a difference if, for all our righteous umbrage, we're driving fifty miles back and forth to the office every day and taking the car to cover any distance greater than half a mile. We can lament the decline of the manufacturing sector, the death of locally-owned shops, and the rise of wage slavery, but our grievances ring hollow when we willingly support businesses like Wal-Mart (which contribute to these problems) out of frugality or convenience. 

Smaller retailers exist, just like better companies do. You and most Americans are too lazy to seek them out, or refuse to spend extra money to buy them. It's not worth your effort or the inconvenience to look on the internet for a small bookstore (despite your claims, they do exist - like the Strand, and a couple of ones in New Brunswick, there's one that i go to in Watchung Plaza), research the companies that you choose to buy products from, or utilize the services of many smaller independent companies on the internet, but its easy to blame the worlds woes on something bigger and more powerful than you.

I actually think this speaks for the necessity of the changes for which Occupy Wall Street's anti-corporate core is pushing.

Let's say you're living out in the suburbs somewhere. You want to buy a new pair of shoes, but would also like to keep true to your newfound sense of social responsibility. You establish a small set of criteria for the shoes you buy and the store from which you buy them. First, it is necessary that you can be completely positive that the shoes were not assembled by child laborers or sweatshop workers, and you would also prefer that they were made in America. You consider yourself an environmentalist, so you want to invest in a company you can be assured isn't just offering consumers a shallow "we've gone green!" platitude and is actually taking significant, proactive steps toward curbing their emissions. And since you yourself are an unpaid intern, a retail worker, or are attending graduate school, it is no less important that these shoes are affordable.

So: where do you go to buy these shoes?

Even if somebody wants to adopt more responsible purchasing habits, it is EXTREMELY difficult to practice them. Finding an accessible business that's committed to screwing over as few people and leaving as small an ecological footprint as possible can be flat-out impossible, unless you happen to live in a major urban center.

("Where do you find them? The Internet, duh!" someone has suggested. Hm. Well, remember that we are making our imaginary purchase as environmentalists trying to minimize our carbon footprint, and the jury is apparently still deliberating the emissions output of a shopping trip vs. the emissions output of home delivery, but excellent point. That duh was well-deserved.)

On Sunday evening, James recounted an argument he had with someone who got a kick out of pointing out that he supported Occupy Wall Street despite keeping a checking account with TD Bank, carrying a BlackBerry in his pocket, and stopping by Subway for lunch. James argues that there is no double standard: he can patronize particular businesses, he argues, and still lobby for tightened regulations and business reform. This makes James something of a moderate within the Occupy Wall Street ideological spectrum: he doesn't believe the whole commercial landscape needs to be altogether bulldozed, but nevertheless requires some overdue pruning and edging.

But let's assume James is incorrect, and the only ethically consistent path of action is for him to withdraw all his money, cancel his credit cards, get rid of his phone, eat only organic, locally-prepared foods, patronize only locally-owned business, only purchase products that he knows were manufactured by companies concerned about human rights and environmental impact. What can he do? 

I'm sure there are people who would be fine koombayaa-ing around a campfire and hanging around drum circles in their free time, good for them. But you can't expect everyone to want to live like they did in the olden days in simple housing constructs eating vegetables that they pick from gardens that they grow themselves.

Individual conclusions will vary -- but if we really are looking at a binary choice, it seems tragic that it must be one.

I've met and spent time with a handful of people who, when faced with this one-or-the-other dilemma, chose The Other. These are the people who go completely off the grid. They drift, they join communes, they squat, they get their food and clothes from dumpsters. In brief, they effectively sever themselves from society. They can't "vote" with their dollars to support sustainable and ethical businesses because they have no money. No mainstream politicians represent their interests. They are pretty much excluded from public discourse; after all, who cares what some dirty, dreadlocked bums have to say about anything?

We have wandered into a point where we are essentially required to support multinational, profit-fixated, too-big-to fail businesses in order to participate in mainstream culture. When the thinking man's pair of alternatives is either enduring the prickings of his conscience (which consumer spending can nicely numb) or self-imposed exile and asceticism, what's the easier choice to make? (Thus, we call the ones who make the hard choice "crazy people.")

The media has been mentioning an announcement made by Occupy Wall Street's "organizers" -- even though, in reality, the person responsible is not affiliated with OWS's planners and corrallers -- encouraging supporters to simulataneously withdraw all their money from the Big Banks on November 5. I'm not sure precisely how much the banks might stand to lose from something like this this (it's not as though the people supporting Occupy Wall Street control a big slice of the national wealth, which is sorta why they're protesting to begin with -- but never mind that), but let's say, for argument's sake, that for some reason enough people do cancel their checking and savings accounts, taking enough money out of the banks to do them some serious damage. (Again, this is not likely.)

What would happen then?

Probably nothing good. Shockwaves would diffuse throughout the economy; companies enact another round of layoffs, consumer spending decreases, more companies begin laying off more people as a result, the stock market plunges, wealth is lost across the board, and the threat of a double-dip recession stops being just a threat. (Or maybe nothing happens at all? Who knows?)

But we'll imagine that this is a real and likely possible result if enough people follow through and stop patronizing the Big Banks on November 5th. Upon first glance, threatening to derail the (agonizingly slow) economic recovery in order to make a point might seem irresponsible and perhaps even terroristic -- but remember that these people are not threatening the government, civil institutions, or the populace itself. They are threatening to stop patronizing a set of for-profit commercial institutions. Free market logic not only gives this sort move the okay, but actually encourages it: everyone has the right to take their business elsewhere, after all. This is one of the very pillars of our economic system.

But where are we when, by taking their business elsewhere, a crowd of discontented consumers could actually endanger the public good? (Remember Too Big to Fail?)

Something is undeniably rotten when we have to support certain commercial institutions in order to preserve the welfare of the state. It is equally vile that we must make a choice between patronizing these businesses or otherwise living on the fringes of society (if that is indeed the reality of the situation).

Economic inequality remains the issue on which Occupy Wall Street keeps its focus. But, really, this isn't just an economic problem: the culture itself is in need of reform. 

Granted, most corporations certainly need a massive slap in the face, but if those principles were applied to everything (even good businesses), there wouldn't be much of an incentive left to take risks and start a business if there's a massively oppressive cap to how much they can gain from it and if the chance of going bankrupt is dramatically higher.

Again, this implies the duplicitous narrative that only two alternatives exist: either business becomes almost totally deregulated and everyone gets to have money again, or else excessive and pointless regulations will make it impossible for anyone to ever make money again.

I refer to you a cartoon that has been making the rounds lately:

We've been imposing regulations and reforms upon businesses for years, and it doesn't look to me like business is doing all that horribly -- at least, not where the multinationals are concerned. It is more accurate to claim that excessive regulation can hamper small businesses, which is why regulation cannot be one sided: the legal reforms that compel businesses to behave more responsibly must be drafted, implemented, monitored, and, if need be, modified with the utmost diligence and responsibility. (After all, it is no less duplicitous to suggest that all regulation is necessarily helpful regulation.)

There is no recipe or guidebook for such procedures; no universally-applicable principle by which we can strike that balance between too much or too little regulation in every case. But it is counterproductive and pointless to squabble over whether it should be all or it should be nothing instead of putting in the difficult and necessary work of finding a suitable mean.

And now, in the interest of the public good, I am going to step down from the soap box and turn the rest of this update over to James and his camera.

More pretty pictures might come later. I'll point you toward higher-res versions as soon as James makes them publicly available.