The Civilians Occupy Your Mind/Low Lives 4: Occupy! [#m3]

Ana from LA performs Manissa from New York in The Civilians Occupy Your Mind/Low Lives 4: Occupy! Event on March 3rd.

OPEN CALL from The Civilians/Occupy Your Mind:

[via Morgan]

Dear Occupiers,

We at The Civilians create work based upon interviews taken from real people who find themselves in a particular political or social circumstance of controversy or interest.  Over the past several months we've been interviewing people involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.  With these interviews we’ve held two cabaret-type performances in Joe's Pub at The Public Theater in NYC.

Now we are getting everyone involved! Watch what people have already done here.

Click to read more ...

OWSJ: No es lo Que Dicen

By Jason Flores-Williams for the Occupy Wall Street Journal

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

When you see prison movies or documentaries about prison, it’s all about the visits. Wives coming on Thursday, girlfriends coming Friday, kids coming on Saturday. But prison is really about distances and disconnection. It’s loneliness and estrangement. One person’s life is frozen while the other person’s life has movement. This creates fractures between people. The inmate is sitting in a cage thinking that everyone’s forgotten him, while the other is trying to survive in the ruins often left by the inmate.

Prison takes a terrible situation and makes it exponentially worse. Rather than healing or rehabilitating people, it deepens every wound, rips open every scab and spreads infection in every possible direction. Prison mutilates families. It takes whatever might have been once healthy, good or at least salvageable, and leaves it twisted and damaged beyond repair.

That the Christian family values people are the ones most in favor of the drug war, incarceration and severe punishment is one of the sickest and most grotesque cancers on our society. Nothing reveals the lie that is the Right in America more than the fact that these self-proclaimed lovers of liberty and personal freedoms are the ones most responsible for the draconian laws that have ripped families apart for generations. It is my fervent belief that the drug war—which has damaged millions of children and families for more than forty years across five continents—would have been addressed more pragmatically and sensibly if not for a pocket of right wing Christians in North America who have used it as a vehicle to express the blackness of their ugly and vindictive hearts.

Poet-Bashing Police

Great American poet Robert Hass describes his Occupy experience in today's NY Times Sunday Review section.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine. 

Click HERE to read the rest of the story.

Concentric Circles

Occupennial co-organizer Paul McLean penned this essay on concentric circles and the structural dynamics of #OWS, plus related phenomena for his blog AFH2011. To read the essay, click the images above or below.

[NOTE: The final pre-publication draft version is HERE.]

Concentric Circles: A Conjecture about the Dimensional Nature of the Fast-Spreading Global Occupation, in Text and Images

∞

Interdiction is always a rule of the State; impossibility is a regulation of the real.” – Alain Badiou, “Highly Speculative Realism on the Concept of Democracy”

We’re living in a Post-9.17 World.

Two months + 1 after the #OccupyWallStreet movement (and it is one, now) congealed in Zuccotti Park, a sketch of the New World Order is in order. Last August, those of us who took Badiou’s seminar at the European Graduate School witnessed this trajabadore philosopher map infinity and finitude, using set theory, to assert a vision of the universe in which series of derivative values constituted a whole that itself existed as a beautiful, animated array of derivative components. The Omega of Badiou and the sets of finite phenomena, which are Its expression, are hinged in a conjecture. #OWS is such a conjecture: a being-event that impossibly de-regulates the real, and defies the parameters of superimposition. But how does such a moment work?

It’s my contention that Time is the only Object, and everything else is Subject. I asked Badiou during a coffee break whether Philosophy needed Art. It had become clear to me that art required the love of wisdom, the evaluative functions of philosophy, after encounters with the likes of Kittler, Lotringer, Agamben, Ronnell, Badiou and others. What wasn’t clear was whether philosophy, which could think about anything it seems, needed art. Badiou said, “Philosophy needs art, now.” I would suggest that #OWS proves this, because perceptually we appear to be spanning dimensions, and on this side of the void that attaches to progressive perceptual consciousness, we seem to have returned to the beginning. In the beginning there were concentric circles...

Occupy Wall Street: It Ain’t Over Yet

Occupennial co-organizer Chris Cobb wrote this essay for his SFMoMA blog. To read the essay in its entirety, click HERE.

Surely Fox and other news media wouldn’t deliberately try to smear a legitimate grassroots movement opposing such things as financial industry corruption, media corruption and bias, and political corruption? No of course not, the news is always fair and balanced.

OWS Library: “Books are like people”

To read the terrific chronicle about the #OWS Library, posted by Mira Schor on her blog "A Year of Positive Thinking," click the image.

When the NYPD raided the Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park this morning, they tossed  the 5,554 books that were assembled from donations into The People’s Library, an extemporaneous institution with a proper librarian and its own website,  into dumpsters.

According to the story as reported this morning on mediabistro.com: “According to the city’s eviction notice, the “property will be stored at the Department of Sanitation parking garage at 650 West 57th St.” But the librarians dispute this: “it was clear from the livestream and witnesses inside the park that the property was destroyed by police and DSNY workers before it was thrown in dumpsters.”

The People’s Library, set into the North East corner of the Park near the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, was one of the most beautiful aspects of the occupation site...

Design 111 and #OccupytheClassroom

http://occupytheclassroom.tumblr.com/

Julie Takacs teaches Design 111 at SUNY Cobleskill. The students of her class happened to be studying texture/collage as the #OccupyWallStreet movement began to go nationwide. After discussing the situation in class, she challenged them to create a collage that expressed their viewpoint on #OWS. Shedidn’t influence them on which side they would take, but allowed them to use their own personal situation as the basis for their work.

The students presented their collages to the class and in doing so they shared their ideas and opinions. Art is a strong form of communication and she wanted to show her class how to take their work to a wider audience beyond the classroom by posting and sharing on the internet. The tumblr platform seemed perfect for the art show, so the class elected the name for this blog and agreed to have their work published on the web.

After this work was done, she presented the projects to a group of senior graphic designers. They are supplying the tumblr blog with the graphics they did for the campus.

The names of the participants:

The Design Class: Serifat Adesina, Jim Buzon, Mike Constantino, Samantha Dequatro, Noelle Gushlaw, Kemar Hemmings, Sydney Hewitt, Kumasi Knight, Victoria Kodak, Kristie Laverdiere, Aaron Maas, Hailey Markel, Jason Marrano, Josh Meilak, Alexis Peters, Heather Price, Adolfina Rodriguez, Brittany Schell, Kayla Shea, Danielle Sweetser, Brian Walker, Beth Watson, Professor Julie Takacs

Graphic Design Club: Professor Margrethe Lauber, Bianca Ramos, Hannah Nye

Common Ground

hi all, had a really interesting conversation today on the subway home as I was leaving OWS with a woman who worked for a bank on wall st. and she was open to having a dialogue, but really felt like she and her co-workers were taking the hit for the 1% even tho she was a divorced mom who had to work her way up from nothing. We tried to explain to her not to take it personally, that it was the structure of the system that was the issue but people of her ilk are very goal oriented and really was hoping to hear our demands and proposed solutions. I invited her down there to discuss and told her how important it was that she participates in the process and see for herself what is happening, rather than taking what the media says at face value....anyway, its just these types of dialogues that I think is what's best about this movement. It was an uplifting moment for all of us just to communicate.

In other news, my friend in Canada posted this amazing poem/song on facebook, and I told her there was a web archive for poetry, so Paul, or someone else out there if u have a spare moment, can you upload this, and maybe send me a link, so I can tell her it on line?

Thanks so much!
O

>

Zipporah Lomax :

The world is stirring...history unfolding beneath our feet, before our eyes.

 

Inspired by the OWS movement, I started writing a song. It quickly became more of a poem...a poetic commentary...my take on the issues we face.

 

I'd like to share it as my small contribution on this day of solidarity...

 

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'Common Ground'

by Zipporah Lomax

 

everything has gone awry

a great divide has grown

between the hands that hoard the pie

and the measly crumbs we're thrown

 

they enjoy their privileged lives

while our homes are foreclosed

they're keeping us in line

with all the wealth that they withhold

 

they profit off our ignorance

expecting us to play the part 

of obedient indifference

robots, with shopping carts

 

well-designed to distract

and keep us misinformed

the media's been hijacked

by those who bank offshore

 

they've poisoned our sea and sky

through oil-driven greed

they contaminate our food supply

with their modified seeds

 

they've stolen our autonomy

and our right to choose

they perpetuate inequality

through narrow-minded rules

 

they've made health a business

selling pills to those in need

they benefit from illness

growing rich off our disease

 

we know it won't be long

before they try to buy our souls

before our lives have been withdrawn

exchanged, for fool's gold

 

they've kept us on our knees

believing change would never come

but down on wall street

the revolution's just begun

 

we're waking from our slumber

it's time to stand up strong

take back what they have plundered

we've held our tongues too long

 

we'll shout until our cause is heard the whole world 'round...

they may tie our hands, but our voices cannot be bound...

something's gotta give...the wall has gotta come down...

...we all deserve to live on common ground...

 

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