This is a pretty incredible bit of “you were there” style video. The camera was quite near the epicenter of what was happening at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday.
You can see Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen just moments before, and after, he was felled by a projectile.
Video by Raleigh Latham.
Via Business Insider
Look familiar? After the horrifying events Tuesday night at Occupy Oakland that saw Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, 24, severely injured in a clash with police, this short documentary clip about 1932’s fabled “March of the Bonus Army” seems like particularly timely viewing.
Slavoj Žižek at Cooper Union in NYC, 2009
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek poses some interesting questions in a new essay titled “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning,” which was prepared from the remarks he made at Occupy Wall Street on October 10th (video of that below).
This except from the full essay, which you can read at In These Times, discusses answering conservative’s hollow critiques of the OWS movement:
The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer.
Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.
Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are done — –but what is this violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?
The protesters are called “losers” — but the true losers are on Wall Street, bailed out by hundreds of billions of our money.
They are called socialists. But in the United States, there already is socialism for the rich.
They are accused of not respecting private property — but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day. Think of the tens of thousands of homes foreclosed.
They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990. The communists who are still in power run the world’s most ruthless capitalist system (China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is a sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce.
The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—that are threatened by the system.
The protesters are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.
The protesters are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything. They are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.
We all know the classic scene from cartoons: The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What the protesters are doing is reminding those in power to look down.
Read more of “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning” by Slavoj Žižek at In These Times
Part 2 after the jump…
For thirty-six years, Norma Farnes was Spike Milligan’s manager, agent and Mother Confessor. She was also his friend. Since Milligan’s death in 2002, Norma has shown a loyalty to their friendship, which our world of social networks, Friending, Following and +1ing may never replace. For Ms. Farnes has been collating and editing the millions of words written by the late, great comedy genius, into a series of books - Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan, The Compulsive Spike Milligan, Memories of Milligan - and now, Milligan’s Meaning of Life, his “autobiography of sorts”.
Who else but Norma Farnes could have edited together this fabulous collection of loose threads, extracts, and letters, which make Milligan’s Meaning of Life, such a brilliant autobiography.
As Norma explains in her introduction:
‘A sort of autobiography’. Yes, Spike would have liked that. I can hear him saying, ‘Yes, well, I suppose I’ve had a sort of life.’
...His many followers will, no doubt, find gaps, but it wasn’t my intention to give a complete account - rather an impressionistic journey. I did my best, but as Spike used to say to me: ‘That’s what worries me.’
Farnes should have no fears, as she has compiled a marvelous book, cherry-picking from the best of Milligan’s various writings. Farnes has a terrific eye for the telling phrase and revealing sentence, which presents Milligan as a bruised, sensitive, mercurial, inspired and very funny man. A man who had long bouts of severe depression, suffered terrible nervous breakdowns, was riddled with shyness and insecurities, yet through it all produced some of the our best, funniest and most memorable comedy.
During his life, Milligan produced over eighty books, ranging from poetry (Silly Verse for Kids to Small Dreams of a Scorpion), prose (most notably Puckoon, one of the best comic novels written), and his 7 volumes of War memoirs, starting with the hilarious Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall, plays (The Bed-Sitting Room and countless radio scripts form The Goons and his own classic comedy series Q. In very real terms, Milligan produced more work, and of a higher quality, than most novelists or writers ever achieve in a lifetime.
Milligan’s Meaning of Life Edited by Norma Farnes is available from Penguin Books / Viking Books. Check here for details
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Michael Bentine: The Goon who got away
More from Milligan, plus bonus clips, after the jump…
Well, perhaps not quite everything, but enough that were you to personally experience the demonstration and look around with your own eyes, you’d likely come to regard the mainstream media reports about Occupy Wall Street (especially the lamebrain stuff printed in The New York Post or heard on Fox News) more like loose gossip, bullshit or random fiction, than actual journalism or considered opinion.
I had the extreme privilege of visiting Zuccotti Park on three of the five days I recently spent in NYC and I’m here to tell you that I am much more excited about Occupy Wall Street—and prospects for real progressive change in this country—now than I ever could have been admiring it from afar. It was a life-affirming and quite moving thing to personally experience and hopefully I can get some of those good feelings across here.
On Wednesday, I was picked up at JFK by my old friend (and frequent Dangerous Minds Radio Hour DJ) Nate Cimmino. I checked into my hotel and since I hadn’t been to NYC for a few years, we decided to just walk from Houston Street to the OWS site. It was raining, not exactly a heavy downpour, but the rain had been steady for most of the day. When we arrived at Zuccotti Park around 4pm, it was starting to get dark and it was pretty much locked down with everyone trying to keep dry. Plastic covered everything and people huddled under makeshift tarps just trying to keep their shit together. It resembled a water-logged shanty town and hardly anything was going on. The lines for the brightly-lit food carts on the southern side of the park were the most noticeable thing at that time (these guys must be making bank, especially the falafel vendors). CNN had a mobile video van with a crane and a “crow’s nest” for getting aerial shots of the park. Dozens of NYPD officers in rain gear ringed the park, many of them female officers.
The medical area of Occupy Wall Street.
This wasn’t the right moment to get much of a feel for what’s been going on there, obviously, so I resolved to return on the weekend. Some initial observations though: Zuccotti Park isn’t much of a park at all. It’s more like a concrete plaza and it’s not very big. Keep in mind when you hear people scoffing at the size of the demonstration, that about a thousand people (give or take) is all this area would hold. If many more people tried to join in the demonstration, it would not be possible to move about. It’s already densely packed as it is.
It’s also right across the street from Ground Zero. In my mind, it was in a different (southeastern) part of lower Manhattan, so when we walked down Broadway, the sound of the drumming got louder and then all of a sudden there it was, that came as a surprise.
Greg Barris and me mugging for the camera on one of the OWS live video feeds.
On Saturday I returned to OWS with my friend Greg Barris, a stand-up comedian and restaurateur. Greg’s been taking pizza from his restaurant to Zuccotti Park since the demonstrations began. The festive carnival atmosphere that morning was a striking contrast to Wednesday’s wash-out. Colorful flags, costumed characters and people of all ages, races, creeds and personality types circulated around the square. You could see people who were arriving alone with a look of apprehension in their eyes, but soon afterward, that same person would be seen joining right in.
Several people distributed free copies of The Occupy Wall Street Journal and a lefty books lending library operated efficiently (there were even a few books that I had published). Everyone was smiling at one another and a feeling of fun and solidarity was palpable. I saw no overtly negative signs and I saw no placards whatsoever for either of the major political parties (I’d put the number of Republicans at Zuccotti Park at slightly north of “zero,” but still I saw not a single pro-Democrat or pro-Obama item anywhere, either). There’s a medical area where minor things can be tended to by volunteer nurses and medics and a food area manned by park residents. Greg pointed out one earnest-looking California blond skater-type and told me he’s seen that same guy dishing out plates of free food since the earliest days of the demonstration. The park was notably clean, not at all the unsanitary mess Fox News viewers have been repeatedly told about.
A woman who identified herself as “The Knitting Granny” sat knitting sweaters and scarfs to give to the occupiers. Children in face-paint or costumes carried signs marching with their parents. An elderly gentleman using a walker who must’ve been in his nineties told some of us that he’d been an engineer working with dams and waterways his entire career and what he knew about the “fracking” that’s planned for locations upstate less than ten miles away from New York’s main water supply scared him to death. He came to share his expertise, he told me, and to see OWS with his own eyes.
Several “super heroes” circulated around. A man in his early 30s, who came to OWS alone from Delaware, brought along a solar electrical generator and set it up so people could charge their cell phones. One fellow, who we later saw on the subway, was dressed in a barrel. He must’ve been cold. Another guy carried a “Ross Perot for President” sign and wore a Ross Perot t-shirt and badges.over his coat. He might’ve been the weirdest guy I saw there.
When you hear dismissive asses braying about how it’s “all white people”—that’s a bunch of utter nonsense. You’ll encounter as diversified a group at OWS as you would if you were in a New York City DMV office and that’s really saying something, so these sorts of haters and naysayers, can go jump in the lake. All white? Maybe in the first few days, but now, that’s simply not even in the slightest bit true.
There are TONS of attractive people at OWS and the mood is so festive and jovial that making conversation with members of the opposite sex is very easy to do. I may get shit for saying this, but it’s true: If more guys knew how many super hot women were milling around OWS, there’d immediately be a massive increase in attendance and foot traffic in the area around Zuccotti Park.
Gay? Fret not, there is a “Queer Camp,” too (look for the feather boas on the northeast side of the park). We even saw someone who identified herself as a “T-girl pornstar” make herself hoarse shouting anti-capitalism things and the very wonderful Reverend Billy is a frequent visitor. The age range is all over the place, as well. In fact, it’s hard to generalize anything at all about the people you meet there except to say that they’ve got their eyes wide open about the problems of advanced capitalism and American democracy. That’s the bottom line. THAT was the commonality amongst all of us.
Greg Barris and his sign.
Most people, it would seem, sleep at their homes but come downtown whenever they can. I got the feeling that there was a small percentage of the occupiers who were the ones who were sleeping there. When you walk around in the interior of the plaza, it becomes somewhat apparent that the folks who the media are derisively describing as “hippies,” “punks” and “homeless people” are in fact, quite often hippies, punks and homeless people. They form the more hardcore inner group that performs the very important task of holding down the park. Without their presence, Mayor Bloomberg would have put fences around Zuccotti Park in two seconds flat, so remember that when you’re there and drop a few bucks in their cans. They’re not merely scruffy panhandlers, they’re there in YOUR place if you support the aims of OWS.
Aside from the resident demonstrators and the day-trippers getting their protest on, there are also thousands of tourists milling about taking pictures. The photos they take are then uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and their blogs. The stories they bring back home and to the water-cooler at work and to their online lives will continue to spread the word about what’s going on in Zuccotti Park.
Sunday afternoon at Occupy Wall Street, I met up with Em, the “undercover banker” who sometimes writes incendiary essays for DM, Nate Cimmino, his wife Nicole and my pal, noted photographer Glen E. Friedman. It was another gorgeous, glorious day like the one before it, with intelligent and engaged people joining together for a higher purpose. (I’ve already mentioned about all of the beautiful woman down there, but I’m going to mention it once more so it really sinks in, okay?).
My favorite moment—or moments, I should say—of my three visits to Occupy Wall Street was watching the open-air Big Apple double-decker tour buses drive past, full of tourists with their fists in the air! That was an amazing thing to see. Witnessing that sight, repeatedly, I might add, was as sure a confirmation as anyone should require that a little over a month after its improbably beginnings, OWS is becoming a mainstream phenomenon. When is the last time the mainstream media took up a progressive cause? The Civil Rights movement? The Vietnam War? This is a real thing, not a flash in the pan. The fist-pumping seniors on the tour buses are but one of the signposts of the shift that’s happening in this country. Is there anyone out there stupid enough to still ask “What is their endgame?” Even someone who only watches Fox News has probably figured THAT out by now!
The only disharmonious incident I witnessed in my three visits was when a dopey-looking born again Christian crew (I’m talking total Ned Flanders-types) started telling the people assembled there, but especially the ones sleeping in Zuccotti Park, that they were possessed by demons and bound for Hell. As you might imagine that message went over like a lead zeppelin. A late 40-something gutterpunk guy and a hilariously confrontational black kid got right up in their faces with such intensity (and volume) that they quickly left. When they fucked off, deflated, everyone cheered.
Having said that, the overall scene at Occupy Wall Street does feel, in some respects, almost biblical, with one thousand iPhone carrying Joshuas shouting down the walls of a very high tech Jericho. Let there be no doubts, dear reader, I, and everyone around me there knew that we were witnessing and participating in history. It’s not going to be an overnight change, but anyone who thinks that things can or will continue on indefinitely the way they have been are going to be in for a very rude awakening.
Obama and the Democrats are going to have to move quite far to the left to satisfy their base as we move into 2012 and from what I saw, I reckon that OWS is pretty much 100% bad news for the Republicans, who are going to get the free market and tax cuts for the 1% shoved right up their goddamned asses on election day (I’m looking at you, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan). I mean, shit, once the election season kicks fully into high gear next year, I expect to see some completely hilarious stuff happen, don’t you? It’s going to be the best election ever! Or the funniest, at least.
As the drumbeat for change in the way we “do business” in America gets louder and louder and louder, the elites will have no choice but to respond. 99% vs. 1%? Who’d be dumb enough to bet against odds like that? The changes that are destined to take place in the next decade of American life are going to make people of a conservative political disposition very uncomfortable indeed. The rest of us are going to be thrilled, though, so fuck ‘em.
From my point of view as an “old school” New Yorker parachuting into Manhattan after a few years away, Occupy Wall Street is functioning like a sun that is radiating its heat throughout all of New York City, and then via the media, to the rest of the planet. It’s extremely inspiring. As someone who lived in the city for the better part of three decades, NOW is the best I have seen NYC since the early 1980s. The energy in the streets is near an all-time high. New York is just killin’ it. Something is really happening at the moment and it’s an exciting time to be there. If you live in Philly, CT, New Jersey… go down there and check out Occupy Wall Street for yourself. If you live in the NY metro area and you haven’t been downtown, shame on you for watching it on tee-vee…
Trust me when I tell you that it pained me, absolutely pained me to be the old fart saying “New York used to be better back when I was young”... but I’ll never be tempted to say that again anyway, not after what I saw last week.
Believe.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Original Occupy Wall Street: Stop the City, 1984
All photographs taken by Greg Barris from his Flickr page.
Directed by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson, Underground (1976) tells the story of radical activists the Weathermen via interviews and news footage of the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 70s.
De Antonio reports that he had little difficulty contacting the radicals-in-hiding. Along with cameraman Haskell Wexler and editor Mary Lampson, he filmed the interview in a California safe house, avoiding his subjects’ faces by filming them through sheets and from behind. One camera angle used by De Antonio became a hot topic of discussion among film students. The Weathermen and women are filmed through a mirror. We see De Antonio, Lampson and Wexler with his camera staring right at us, but only the backs of the subjects’ heads. The angle states exactly how the film was made and acknowledges the presence of a camera at all times. What’s more, it suggests that the filmmakers are an active part of the testimony, and not separate from it. To some the shot suggests solidarity with the Weathermen. Others see it as a challenge to the F.B.I.: we’re exercising our First Amendment rights and we’re not hiding from anybody.”
De Antonio, Wexler and Lampson were subpoenaed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an effort to locate the Weathermen. The film was pulled from circulation.
The three, all prominent within the Hollywood community, hired the best lawyers that they could find, and with the support of other filmmakers and actors, including Elia Kazan, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, were able to get the subpoenas repealed . The three were able to use their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, as well as the rights of journalistic integrity which allow for confidentiality of sources.
The Weather Underground were a divisive force within the anti-war movement. Their violent approach to protest, which included bombing symbols of the corporate war machine, was reviled by pacifists who felt their tactics were just a mirror image of the forces the peace movement was railing against. But despite their lack of support, The Weather Underground managed to shake up the system without anyone getting killed but themselves. Three Weathermen died when a nailbomb blew up in a townhouse on 11th street in Manhattan in 1970.
In 1979, Michael Palin and John Cleese were invited onto a chat show, Friday Night, Saturday Morning, to discuss the controversy surrounding the latest Monty Python film, Life of Brian.
The film had outraged Christians across the world, who erroneously believed Brian was a blasphemous representation of Jesus Christ. In America, thousands turned out to demonstrate against Brian, waving banners that read, “Jesus was nailed to the cross not Screwed,” and singing “Kum Ba Yah”.
When the film arrived in the UK, there were similar candle light vigils and councils opting to ban the film from local cinemas, rather than face the ire of Nationwide Festival of Light, a prudish, busy-body Christian group, who foolishly believed they knew what was best for all the British public.
As Life of Brian was released, Cleese and Palin agreed to debate the film with professional Christian and hypocrite, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Mervyn Stockwood, Anglican Bishop of Southwark, who had the look of man who might enjoy yodeling up an altar boy’s arsehole. It was agreed the four would meet in the no-man’s land of the BBC’s chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning, which was hosted by a variety of presenters (most successfully by the great god Ned Sherrin), but on this occasion by Tim Rice, yes that Tim Rice.
It was a brutal schoolyard battle, with most of the bullying coming from God’s defendants. At one point, the prissy Muggeridge turned to Palin and said:
Muggeridge: “I started off by saying that this is such a tenth-rate film that I don’t believe that it would disturb anybody’s faith.”
Palin: “Yes, I know you started with an open mind; I realise that.”
Neither of the Pythons seemed prepared for the Bishop’s and Muggeridge’s well-rehearsed outrage, which was a shame, and they gave their counterparts too much respect. Palin later noted in his diary:
“He began, with notes carefully hidden in his crotch, tucked down well out of camera range, to give a short sermon, addressed not to John or myself but to the audience. In the first three or four minutes he had brought in Nicolae Ceauşescu and Mao Tse-tung and not begun to make one point about the film. Then he began to turn to the movie. He accused us of making a mockery of the work of Mother Teresa, of being undergraduate and mentally unstable. He made these remarks with all the smug and patronising paraphernalia of the gallery-player, who believes that the audience will see he is right, because he is a bishop and we’re not”
I saw this show when it first went out, and I knew then it was a moment in TV history - a major cultural shift, when the accepted (and interfering) role of religion in public life was shown to be no longer relevant, or acceptable.
More from Python vs. God, plus trail for ‘Holy Flying Circus’, after the jump…
Color photographs and footage of London’s Carnaby Street from 1968. Doesn’t look all that swinging, does it?
Buzzfeed have found this clip from the series Second Chance, which seemingly predicted the correct year of Colonel Gaddafi’s death.
Yep, it’s Friday.
Via Buzzfeed
Treasure trove of photos taken (mostly) in the East Village, circa 1979 to 1985 by Michael Sean Edwards. Many of these photographs were taken within a few square blocks of where I lived until the early 90s. Leshko’s Coffee Shop, above, was on the corner of the block where I lived, on 7th Street and Ave. A. KIng Tut’s Wah Wah Hut was on the opposite corner and the Pyramid Club around the corner. I’ve eaten in Lesko’s more times than I would care to remember, although I’m sure remnants of my many hundreds of meals there live on in the arteries of my heart. When I finally started making real money, I promised myself that I would never eat there again, and I didn’t for about a decade. I did finally relent and meet Douglas Rushkoff for breakfast there one morning, although by then, it was Leshko’s in name only, having turned into a white plastic upscale hipster joint, with nary a trace of it’s former down-at-heel Ukrainian dinner chic or greasy menu.
The Valencia Hotel, then a shithole renting $18 rooms to junkies and hookers,now a place that probably charges $450 a night. It was the kind of place where someone like Johnny Thunders would live until he’d get thrown out. A friend of mine who was foolish enough to stay there—and leave valuables in his room—was ripped off badly. Trash and Vaudeville is still there. I used to walk past this place every single day. St. Marks Baths, the infamous gay bathhouse, was a few doors away and had a powerful exhaust that smelled horrible blowing into the street.
And these guys. New York City used to be FULL of these guys, “popeyes” as they were called, drunks so incorrigible that the gin drinkers’s eyes would pop out of their heads for a certain sort of look. Hence the name. In certain areas, there could be dozens of these fellows on every block letting it all hang out, so to speak. Times Square, 9th Ave., much of Lexington Ave, and especially on 14th Street and 3rd Ave., near the notorious Variety Photoplays grindhouse theater and The Dugout, the lowlife dive bar made famous in Taxi Driver—these were the places where the popeyes lived, but you never see guys like this in New York anymore. Not even on the Bowery.
Via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk