Notes from the Wall Street Occupation!

Fall 2011 has crashed in! Crashing into new program at USC, crashing into Burning Man, crashing into my 32nd birthday! Crashing into the world: right now, the occupation of of Wall Street.

Max Hodes, one of my closest friends, is participating in the demonstrations. This is his report from the front. Get IN!

Letter from the Occupation of Wall Street
by Max Hodes

Questions abound on the street here and in the media, what little of it has reported these events, as to what the intentions of this protest are, how it is organized, what it wants.  From what I have seen that is because the narrative of the status quo, of what protests should look like, simply does not contain a logic for this event.  It is not exactly a protest, not exactly a march, and doesn't have a defined goal.  It looks more like Tahrir Square than any US political rally, though it lacks the focused demand of a leader to resign.  It has international support, a supply chain, and a democratic organizational structure that arose spontaneously.  My thoughts here represent an attempt to understand what is happening on Wall Street.

The General Assembly

The NYT confuses this with an organized group. It is not. It is the name for a gathering of participants who need not be named or declare any affiliation or ever have been here or anywhere else before. It uses a consensus-building model to make discuss and make decisions democratically. Nearly everyone who is at the site seems inexperienced using this model. There are frequent arguments over abuse of process. These conflicts diminish with passing days. New committees and working groups are formed every day to deal with whatever issues have recently arrived. For example, when we arrived there was already a media team. They took it upon themselves to create a 24-hour broadcast on the internet, in addition to shooting and compiling footage with multiple cameras, also on a 24-hour schedule. It was later determined by the GA that there should be a separate Media Outreach committee, dealing with inventing PR tactics and training participants in same. There is a comfort committee, dealing with blankets, cardboard supply, soft things, to increase longevity. There is a medical team. There is a sanitation committee. All volunteers who notice problems and fix them as they see them. Anyone who has an idea is basically free to enact it unless someone in the GA has some principled concern about it. Each participant is given full license to use their time however they see fit. Volunteers are called for where needed, and usually appear in droves. There is a committee of facilitators who might, to the untrained eye, appear to be leaders of the outfit. While facilitating, they do not participate in discussion in the offering of opinions.

As far as larger organizational structures go, this is as good a model as any, but it does have limits which become evident as the group grows.. There simply isn't time for everyone to offer themselves to a discussion and those that feel more inclined to lead than follow seem to end up facilitating. However, that level of participation is still more democratic than a simple yes or no vote. Individuals determine the level of participation they want to see from themselves. Gaps in leadership are filled as soon as someone wants problems solved, because they need to do the solving themselves. The GA seems to create a less inert population because people with the inclination against slow decision making are free to speak up and seem rarely shouted down.

I think that on a large scale, the consensus model could be used in well-trained groups of up to 500. Smaller groups, being more agile, might serve larger communities better by volunteering representatives, training them, and sending them to larger consensus-bodies. In such a way I can even imagine an alternate societal organization to our current one. Over the course of 100 years with sufficient participatory training, unilateral action on the part of a large body of people might be entirely eliminated because the process has the feeling of fusing individual and group identities. Maybe that's wishful thinking. I'm well trained already in the process, and this one was excessively frustrating. When I disagree with the group at large, I don't want to participate at all. And my lack of contribution goes entirely unnoticed. This has it's advantages and disadvantages, but I ultimately like it more because of the choice one is forced to make moment to moment. In the film The Matrix the Architect describes the same choice to Neo: act, or do not act, choose. Without this choice, no process is democratic. Compulsory participation is fascism plain and simple. It's one of the million things we're protesting against.

Why are we protesting

No one knows. Everybody is enraged and everyone has a unique focus. We have not decided on a single demand, and I don't want to. I would like this to turn into a Burning Man-esque event. An ongoing party of the political, artistic and spiritual avant-garde, that becomes an ever-updated cultural institution; a continual protest against the status quo with real political consequences. For that to happen, we will need to find ways of becoming genuinely disruptive. That means we will more than likely be struck down, unless we can somehow strike a perfect balance of necessity and aggravation. If the world demands we stay because we are stirring up right conflict, then we've got a chance at perpetuation. More likely, the cold will get us before too long. The blue-shirt cops seem to like us. The city cut their overtime hours, possibly as a way to get at their pensions, and this is the best chance they've got to log hours before retirement. It's the police lieutenants who are doing the dicking around.

Still we keep getting asked, what we are doing there. And still no one knows. We are occupying because the world is outrageous, we blame greed, and those who feel entitled to their greed. Wall Street is the center of greed. It's that simple. We didn't keep Troy Davis alive. We haven't fed anybody who was hungry, we haven't stopped the monster or done more than create a slightly spectacular nuisance. No one has thrown themselves into the gears of the machine. Maybe what we're protesting is that we can't even see the gears. The machine is a phantom beyond any measure of control except perhaps this one. We are actually trying to alter culture by pushing and shoving it with phantom hands, which turn out to be the only tool available, since the culture is itself composed of phantoms, ideas, fleeting moments, rather than anything concrete and destructible.  There is not, for example, any factory to strike against and shut down.  The machine will continue with or without our participation.   

My arrest on Monday morning was the first that I know of.  It was carried out, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Colbert Report, under an obscure law from 1848 against the wearing of masks at public gatherings.  The arrest, like many at protests, was possibly illegal, but of course legality is not the point of these arrests while disruption and intimidation absolutely are. It snowballed in many more, each more brutal than the last. This got people down there. That and the free pizza. Now the slog war begins. Get bodies in there every day and every night, marching, singing, laughing, being. Not too loud or they'll shut us down, but loud enough and long enough and we'll be undeniable, and then we can become unstoppable. Unless we issue a demand, which I'm pretty sure would get ignored. This is perhaps the point which is missed by the GA: why issue a single demand? Why not continue at this noise making, this occupation, with no singular demand and thus no end in sight?  Why not confound the whole model of protest with an absurd action?

So we press on, activating ourselves ever more despite all the forces that tell us to stop.. That's what we're protesting. The middle of the road with it's long yellow line. That's what we're protesting. A million little hurts and ten-thousand big ones. That's what we're protesting. That we're not allowed to protest aloud. That's what we're protesting.  That public space, the space where thousands of tiny, healthy, necessary, revolutions can take place, has been stolen from us and remade as controlled space, sanitized space.  That’s what we’re protesting.  That the police, and by extension the state, do not protect us, the majority of the people, but the tiny greedy minority which conducts its business on Wall Street.  That’s what we’re protesting.

Oh Sweet Nothing: Chicago to Reno and the Loneliest Road

We’re driving straight into the sun on Hwy 50. It was named “The Loneliest Road in America” by someone who came here before everyone who is here now. But how could one be lonely here, with all the ghosts around? Someone made those petroglyphs. Someone built those mining towns. Someone ate food, pooped, had sex, and walked all over this place. I’m suspicious of people who use the word “people,” who use “human nature,” or “natural,” because usually those words are actually obscuring the fact that the speaker means to say “people I’ve heard of,” or “people of a particular culture I know about,” and often “human nature” is a wildly inaccurate idea of human beings in the 20th century under global capitalism. But the notion that there were humans a few thousand years ago who lived in this desert, and who had at least these three functions in common with us: eating, pooping, having sex--is thrilling to me. It makes me respect the writers who focus on those activities more. They aren’t boring, they aren’t low-brow, they are a threads that actually do connect human beings across time and space, and that makes them deeply important.

In Chicago, we stayed with the fabulous Gina Frangello, inspired writer and publisher. Her 5-year old son Giovanni, when prompted to tell us something about himself, said “I think a lot,” and “I’m cute and a lot of girls like me.” Yes! We’ve been saying these phrases for a week now, whenever we feel the need to remind ourselves how to tell the simple truths that have been socially conditioned out of us. We watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on a blanket in Wicker Park, I drooled at Matisse and Cezanne at the Art Institute, and I got handed free Cubs tickets outside Wrigley Field from a man who disappeared so quickly I wouldn’t know him to thank him today. Thumbs up, Chicago.

In Missouri, we took a long detour to Chillicothe, where one of the more important female mentors of my life, Virginia Sillerud, was born. Grandmother, fashionista, incessant teller of grand tales, inventor of “The Mini Breakfast”* and reckless driver, Virginia is mythical figure of the past who still lives somewhere deep inside a thin body and a fogged-over Alzheimer’s brain. I tried to imagine her walking along those small-town streets in her smart 1940s pumps, a young woman with a red lipstick pout and an itch to leave--she fled for St. Louis, eventually for San Francisco, and didn’t talk about her Missouri childhood to us as kids. I grieved the death of her stories--I don’t know enough of them, and she can’t tell them now. I filmed the town for my family, none of whom have been there. It had a one-street downtown with historic early 20th century facades, and then streets and streets of old homes, half of which were in disrepair. We got a beer at a bar that has been family-run for sixty years. On the wall: a big orange poster that said “Hunters Welcome.” 

In Kansas, we drove off the highway to Lucas, where a bizarre cement sculpture marvel called The Garden of Eden made me the happiest I’d been in miles of prairie. Built by a Populist oddity named Duinsmoor, the G of E is completed with enormous Chagall-ish art that indicts big business, depicts original sin, and entombes the creator and his first wife. A relative gave the tour, and shined a light on Duinsmoor’s lime-encrusted face in his mausoleum. When asked why he had himself mummified, our affable guide said, “He was a visionary, an eccentric, and an egomaniac.” The town thought him insane, in 1900. They owe much of their revenue to him now.

My sister Lauryl and bro-in-law Sammy have a gorgeous new life in Denver, CO, and they invited us into it for Captain America, a late-night diner discussion of the film, and a superlative and royal experience of cinnamon roll at Breakfast Palace before we took off the next morning. 

I forgot my backpack at their house and added over two hours to our driving time. Luckily, we met Bri and Lucas in the town where I discovered my error, and they saved the day! When we returned from Denver the second time back along 70 West, we exited in Silverthorne, crunched along a dark hill, and arrived at a perfect 1980s ski cabin! These astoundingly cute people fed us, housed us, entertained us, and restored our faith in the possibilities for kindness and sharing and lack of suspicion among 20something Americans. 

If you are ever in Delta, Utah, I highly recommend room #40 at the Rancher Motel and Cafe. It sleeps between two and twenty people. 

I like towns named after objects: Rifle, Parachute, Yellowcat, Rabbit’s Hole, Dead Horse Point. But I love towns named after states of being: Desire, Panic, Defiance, Deference, Tranquility. Naming places after people is so arrogant of us. We’re patently classist when it comes to naming human dwelling places--streets, buildings, neighborhoods are named for the white wealthy, and then occasionally renamed for a black, Latino, or American Indian person. When our hubris extends all the way to naming geographical phenomena after people, we are truly lost in the anthropocentric coil. Thompson hot springs? Thompson thinks he gets to privately own thousands of gallons of healing water flowing from underground?

For the phenomena and landmarks of the landscape, I prefer names that offer extreme practicality. Arches National Park. Filled with naturally occurring stone arches, of course. High Point Trail. Up a steep climb, you see. If not practical, they must be poetic: Black Dragon View Area. Yes.

But how about Eureka? There is a Eureka in every state that’s got a natural resource someone wanted to exploit. Gold. Eureka! Iron ore. Eureka! Cheap labor. Eureka! We went to the Eureka Museum in Nevada and got hypnotized by 1934 newspapers that expressed some concern over Hitler’s rise in popularity. I could have stayed there for a year, reading the papers through the war, looking at old marbles and writing desks and the entire collection of printing presses and lintoype machines from the days of the Sentinel. I have compulsive imagining in the presence of antiques: the hands that touched this, the people who read this, the lives that crossed here.

And this is why I am both ravished and ravaged by cities: I am buffeted around by all the lives: every face a piece of art, every building a history museum, every plant evidence of some geological force. I entered Los Angeles to the sound of the Talking Heads, dancing in my car in the traffic. This trip doesn’t end.

Groundhogs on the Northern Haul: New York to Chicago

We’re 227 miles from Chicago. My right hand is swollen with a cluster of mosquito bites that have become one enormous hard aching welt. Anthony has pink eye. The car has lost two wheel covers and the brakes are squeaking constantly. Entropy. Things fall apart. We drink a lot of coffee. I turn to the artists I admire for ways to talk about decay that are fearless and appreciative of its beauty: Henry Miller, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen.

In New York, I had the fascinating experience of feeling severely disappointed by the Museum of Sex. Max (Ted) and I went to it with high hopes. Only one floor, the “Sex Lives of Animals” exhibit, was really mind-blowing. My main complaint is that the Museum of Sex is actually more of a Museum of 20th century, Western cultures’, Sex-in-media, a kind of pornography and erotica retrospective that has unclear notions of where it wants to start and how it wants to progress. The place, in attempting to somehow stay out of any particular political debate about sexuality or censorship or taboo, has rendered itself rather boring and quaint. Great underground bar, great store, a few really good pieces by some mostly contemporary artists. Not nearly enough context for anyone to know the true importance of what they’re looking at historically.

The Tenement Museum, in contrast, was brilliant. Oh, all these museums are too expensive, but our tour guide, Rachel, made our tour the most exciting and important and informative and infuriating (in a good, activist way) 90 minutes possible. I turned to Max and said, “This is really, really fun for me.” Learning, real learning, is one of the most pleasurable activities there is, I think. And now I know quite a bit about the garment industry of the early 20th century on the Lower East Side, which helps me think about immigration history in our country, which helps me understand better what is happening now in Arizona, Texas, California, and so on.

And then we left New York! We met an Amish family in rural Pennsylvania. They had dirty clothes, blunt haircuts, four horses, and they sold us honey in old salad dressing bottles at $2.00 a piece. We drove through two small towns: Desire and Panic. In Desire, we saw a hutch full of baby lop-ear bunnies. They wore black rings around their eyes and most of them still had one ear pointing up, like some fantastic sound had just rolled in from the West. And that is where we’re headed. West on I90, listening to Springsteen and missing Clarence Clemens and drinking no-name coffee from yet another defunct Dunkin’ Donuts. There are maverick, functioning, former franchised donut shops all over this country! Just another reminder that the constant fight for survival is still tolerated by those who fantasize about being the next big capitalist, not the lower management or worker. Desire and Panic. We are not a Buddhist nation, sir, oh my, no.

We stopped in downtown Sykesville, PA and met an arrogant Israeli pastry chef who boasted that he had no employees. His cinnamon rolls were sweet butter dough dancing, and he’d built a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of cardboard and icing.

At the Museum of Labor and Industry in Youngstown, OH, I tried to understand how people in the 19th century poured pig iron, and imagined being a wife in a company town. 

The Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame rose from Lake Erie like a disco-ball promised land and I walked into a U2 concert in Buenos Aires, in Cleveland, and got enraptured by the mad bright 3D crowd and their perfect strong shoulders, but especially by Bono’s screaming desire for the Overman. I last saw U23D in January of 2008, when I was a different Vanessa, living in a different city, thinking much different thoughts about my quite different life. Pow! Time and space collision!

One tendency I see in this part of the country that fills me with distrust is the constant architectural use of boxes. Especially in the depressed areas of cities, the boxiness of the strip malls, little houses, schools, hospitals, restaurants seems like a form of aesthetic punishment. All the signs are rectangular. The windows are rectangular. The siding is a long series of rectangles. The fonts used to advertise are square and symmetrical. I don’t believe it to be much or at all cheaper to write that way than to use script. There’s an inertia to this kind of urban landscape that people take for granted, and I think it’s one of the contributing factors to our being no longer a revolutionary country. When people are given only boxes to live in, they see boxes everywhere. If they are told, in the subtle form of their city planning, that they do not deserve beauty unless they are wealthy, they will believe it, and that belief spells the end of creativity. The Heidelberg Project offered a gorgeous “fuck you” to this homogeneity of aesthetics.

The Heidelberg Project is a street, a nonprofit, a community art organization, a cluster of unlivable, burned out houses that have been transformed into huge art projects in Detroit. One of the houses in the H. Project was covered with stuffed animals. They’d been nailed to the outside walls, and it seemed that new ones kept getting added. One could tell how long a stuftie had been living on the house by its level of disintegration--many of them were drooping and matted, greying and sagging from rain. I photographed their sweet sad faces.

I met a boy at the Heidelberg Project who offered me such hope for change. He was eleven years old, black, living in this ignored and depressed area of Detroit, riding his bike around the neighborhood with a few friends. He let us play with his basketball and I asked him if he’d contributed to any of the installations on the block. He said yes. Which one? I asked him. He refused to tell me.

“Come on, you’re never going to see me again,” I said. “Why not tell me?”
“You gotta guess,” he said, smiling.
“Tell me one fact about yourself,” I said. “Then it will be a fair chance for me to guess.”
“I like art,” he said. “And basketball, and I play football at school.”
We played a brief hot-and-cold game until I’d found all 3 art installations he’d helped with. One of them was a two story home covered with enormous colorful polka dots.
“You painted some of those dots?” I asked.
He nodded.
“That’s my favorite house on the block,” I said.
“Mine too,” he said.
Hell yes. Hell yes. Hell YES.

Earlier. We kept seeing these adorable fuzzy animals on the side of the road--both alive and dead, and then found out that they are woodchucks! Groundhogs! They are incredibly cute, and the internet says that they get killed by cars in enormous numbers because they like to eat the grass at the side of the road. Immediately after reading that, we were hearing more and more reports on the Casey Anthony’s release, and we realized that nationally, accident statistics dwarf the statistics on crime, but it’s crime reports everyone seems to care the most about. It’s as if our collective desire for control over death manifests itself in a phobia of “criminals” instead of a logical move to prevent stupid accidents. Can’t CNN do a story on defensive driving?

We’ve killed nothing but some bugs so far on this trip, so our current level of decay and entropy feels lucky. And now I’m in Chicago, sweating out the dusk in Wicker Park, eating Wheat Thins and tuna on a blanket, waiting for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to play on the big inflatable screen. Pow! Another confusion of spacetime! You thought I was 227 miles from here! And I was.