NEW YORK, NY–The event was in coordination with Occupy’s Another City is Possible national call to action. The ride, organized by Time’s-Up, began at 2pm at Union Square south where about 40 cyclists gathered. We read aloud the Sane Energy Project’s top ten reasons to not build the Spectra pipeline and then set down Broadway, our bikes decorated with windmills and colorful signs reading “Disrupt Dirty Power,” “Protect Our Commons” and “No Gas Pipeline,” and while the sound bike blasted music, we handed out hundreds of fliers to passersby in the village.
We arrived at Pier 54 by 3pm to be joined by a couple dozen more people. We spread out along the Hudson at the pier with beautiful banners made by Direct Action Painters, costumes, bikes, folks from the neighborhood and from across the river, our partners in fighting the 16-mile pipeline that would originate in Jersey City and end in the West Village, storing fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale directly under the new Whitney Museum and the High Line Park. Reverend Billy gave us a rousing welcome and handed over the People’s Mic to Denise Katzman from the Sane Energy Project, who described the details of Spectra’s plan and their spotty safety record.
We led a Plus+Brigade Training of mobilization tactics on the pier, forming a mass Wall and Melt, and then marched over to the High Line with songs like, ”Can we get off of fossil fuels? Oh how I want to be in that number when we get off of fossil fuels!” (to the tune of Saints Go Marching in) and “Get Up! Get Down! No spectra pipeline in this town!”
Our procession now included a cymbal bicycle wheel, drums, a horn, and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir leading the songs along the smiling brunch-goers. We arrived at the end of the High Line at Washington and Gansevoort streets, and circled up at the base of the stairwell, police on all sides. Reverend Billy preached while police were dismantling our puppets and banners hanging from above. The choir sang: “It’s gonna rain. Spectra pipeline, you’re killing this town. People are angry. People are proud. Spectra Pipeline get out of town!”
In a moment of improvisation, after the police foiled our plan for “toxic frack chemicals” to rain down from the High Line onto a group of “unsuspecting West Village gallery-goers,” I set up a tarp behind the gathering and poured the black, yellow and orange paint over my head, as a symbol of the radon, carcinogens and other toxins the spectra pipeline would be releasing into our environment.
Two groups, on bicycles and and on foot, continued onto a garden clean-up and party at La Plaza Cultural in the Lower East Side. We danced, visited the new Museum of Reclaimed Urban Spaces, chatted with gardeners and ate pizza as the sun went down.
The fight continues! Let’s keep it vibrant, colorful, visual and loud!
NEW YORK, NY–Showing up at Zuccotti looking for an angle to a story for a film was not easy. There was movement. Tension. Too many TV news and reporters jockeying. All I noticed were lenses. Press passes and mikes. News trucks and generators and satellite dishes. Everyone seemed important. A lot of talk. Yelling, intensity, and of course a ton of politics. This was great–unless, like me, you are looking for a story to tell. There was too much politics to figure out how to begin. All the meeting s with the GA’s seemed too intense, and how do you film that? Stand there for a long time…
I noticed people running around near the main stream media–live streamers. I started asking questions: who are you? Why are you filming? Where does your work go? Lorenzo Serna explained that he was streaming. This grabbed my attention. Then, Bill Boggs at the press tent handling PR was loaded with intensity. Then Hero Vincent was doing some kind if Skype chat. I started asking all of them questions. This led to meeting Justin Wedes and Priscilla Grim and Flux and Haywood Carey–and Tim Poole. Of course, Jesse Lagreca made a splash with the Fox News people. I knew this was the angle for my film: the media people. They had a job to do. Help drive a story. Whether it was filming, editing, getting out a press release or a newspaper, this was new, exciting, living media happening from Zuccotti in the rain, snow. Anybody getting out a story to the world with this feverish energy was exciting, and to me, the first time in a long while in New York City that media wasn’t old, stale and redundant!
I made a 40 minute film that was almost live. I made some good friends and they shared with me some great video that I couldn’t film alone. I needed a team of 5 camera people 24/7 .
I made a film that mirrored the days and nights of Zuccotti. Raw, fast and real, I wanted the sound rough. The shaky camera from when I was shoved. Zuccotti was not a glossed-over filtered fantasy. I am a hard New Yorker, and this energy was real. The OWS media team is brilliant. From the Direct Action to the graphic artists to Sophia writing the Spanish paper, I tell the story of many people. Personal, yet showing their commitment to OWS media, I filmed it.
This is new journalism. They don’t need press passes and insignias to get out a story. This is greatness in action. I’m happy they trusted me to tell the story. And, regardless of criticism, they know how to create a story, and they work hard.
It was a once in a lifetime event in New York. Finally people said “Enough with the bullshit. We are citizen journalists. This is what we do. We will tell our own story.”
I used my energy to capture it.
-Kevin Breslin-
Editor’s Note: You may view #WhileWeWatch in its entirety here at SnagFilms.
New York, NY – Today, I occupied the May Day International General Strike of Occupy Wall Street. The few thousand Occupiers at Bryant Park midtown, were made up of union workers, disappointed conservatives, disillusioned liberals, veterans of wars past and present, those fighting still for equal access to affordable health care and students who cannot get jobs or pay off their student loans. Protest was almost a misnomer today, because the park was filled with musicians beating their percussion instruments, blowing horns,chanting and singing, with many people swaying to the beat of their own drummer.
Most of us have met a union worker we like or have loved. Many of us have worked a union job. This American worker, so unemployed now and for so long, is a group we can really stand up for and celebrate. There was a police presence there too and they are also in a union.
It occurred to me that the NYPD are occupying also. These are hard working union men and women, doing a job that most of us would never want to do. Yes, the police have been behaving badly. In the beginning of the Occupy movement, they herded young women into nets and assaulted them with pepper spray. They beat up young men with brutal tenacity. When Occupy Wall Street began to step up civil action in the spring, the police met them with seemingly more violence than they have used before, after comments that Mayor Michael Bloomberg made about the police being his “private police force” and after we found out that Wall Street gives huge money to the NYPD, when we all thought their salaries were paid by the taxpayer.
No matter how you want to look at it though, the New York Police are Occupying Wall Street with us. They are there every day. They stay as long as we stay. Most of the time, there is very little tension, and most of the police do not want physical conflict. Their pensions are being cut also. They are losing their jobs as a result of a bad economy in most cities and towns. In fact, many city cops still have their jobs JUST to police the Occupy Movement.
If we started to think about the ever present police presence as being part of our Occupy family, would our relationships with them change? Could we teach them that they are just like we are – Occupiers; city union workers who’s jobs, pensions and benefits are being slashed while they perform work that most of us would never want to do?
If we all felt the kinship that is there, would the police stand down? Would the violence deescalate? We are not going to stop committing acts of civil disobedience. We have a world to change. I would love to see what will happen when we all realize that the police are actually with us, and not against us.
New York, NY – We support Occupy but worry about violent reactions by protesters to police provocation and physical abuse.We came to the march on a peacekeeping mission. Peace for ALL was our objective. With an image of Gandhi and flashing peace signs, we walked the edges and spread our message of peace. We were constantly smiled at and peace signs were returned by spectators and protesters even a few cops. Photographers loved us.
At one point, we heard the “shame” chant, so we rushed over and put ourselves between protesters and police, who had just violently attacked a demonstrator. Quickly others joined us and we were able to calm the crowd, because it seemed a riot was about to break out.
We heard only violent provocative words from angry protesters, no violent actions. We did witness NYPD abuse.
It’s important that Occupy remain peaceful, for otherwise we fall prey to authoritarian provocation. Please DO NOT PLAY THEIR GAME!
New York, NY – Entering Manhattan’s Bryant Park yesterday afternoon felt like walking through my computer screen. The mediated images of Zuccotti Park and other Occupy Wall Street activity I’d experienced through news reports and social media were reproduced perfectly before me, albeit markedly more calm.
Here were more cops and reporters and drummers than I could feasibly count. Here were more camouflage and cargo prints than I’d seen in a single compact area since attending the New York Anarchist Book Fair in 2010. Here was that free library, the Occupy Dessert Kitchen, and copies of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. Not to mention picket signs saying things like “99 PERCENT” and “RISE” and “VOTE SOCIALISM,” among a netherworld of tie-dyed hippies and radicals.
It all came in honor of May Day, for which Occupy Wall Street had helped stage a global General Strike, to get people like me out from behind our digital interfaces and into the streets. It worked.
I came to Bryant Park for a practice session for the Occupy Guitarmy, organized by Occupy’s Music Working Group. At 2 p.m., Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine was to lead a pack of guitar-equipped protesters down 30 blocks to Union Square. Upon their arrival, at 4 p.m., Union Square would host a concert featuring Dan Deacon, Das Racist, Immortal Technique, Morello with Guitarmy members, and more, interspersed with speakers from various labor and immigration rights groups. Later, at 7 p.m., Le Tigre‘s JD Samson and her band MEN would perform near Wall Street.
But first: the Guitarmy.
Enclaves of musicians practiced by running through the day’s designated protest songs: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”, Sergio Ortega’s “El Pueblo Unido”, Willie Nile’s “One Guitar”, Morello’s “World Wide Rebel Song”, Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”, and the traditional “We Shall Not Be Moved”. Throughout the park, photographers seemed to outnumber the several hundred participants. There were banjos, fiddles, ukeleles, saxophones. One pack, a marching band, held horns with signs taped on: “Come Strike With Me,” “Tax the Rich.” I counted at least one Martin Luther King mask, and at least one man distributing a bouquet of pink daisies. Someone was most definitely burning sage.
And then I found the Zombies, a daughter and her mother in pale, blood-streaked face paint. “I represent middle America,” the daughter Zombie said. “Americans are zombies.” She aired her frustrations, already, with May Day. “In other countries they actually shut things down. There are no trains. I had to rollerblade to school in France in the early 90s. This is just entertainment.”
“And they should have had GWAR performing in the streets,” she said, “chopping Obama’s head off.” The man with the pink bouquet delivered her a flower; she ate it. Nearby, a guy asked, “Anyone without an instrument want to make some egg shakers? Egg shakers! Make ‘em here!”
The daughter Zombie, whose named was Shantay, rolled her eyes. “It’s like kindergarten.”
“Last year in Chile, 3,000 students marched and re-enacted ‘Thriller’, protesting for education reform,” she said. “That was a real statement. I don’t know what this is.”
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But the small, ad hoc group of Occupy Wall Street organizers behind the musical May Day strike had a clear and ultimately well-realized vision of how to keep the movement’s biggest moment in the spotlight since 2011 centered on optimism over chaos and brutality. The Guitarmy practices were largely led by Alphonzo Terrell, 29, and an organizer named Goldi, who wore a bandana around his head and other hippie garb. According to Goldi, the idea for Guitarmy first came from an Occupier named Winn Cola at Zuccotti in October. ”Guitarmy is a direct action and a great way to diffuse tensions with the police,” Goldi said, “Because you can’t arrest a song! Right?”
At 1:30 p.m., Terrell performed the first of many human mic-checks to explain how the march would function: seven color-coded sections were each headed by a designated leader with a pirate-like flag. “The key to victory is staying united with your section,” Terrell said. “We don’t want anyone to get lost or hurt. Or arrested.”
“This is Guitarmy,” he continued. “We are about music, love, and unity.” He warned that many people from the coinciding Direct Action protest were intent on taking the streets, but that Guitarmy should remain on the sidewalks, to avoid confrontation with the police.
Morello finally emerged just before the Guitarmy was set to depart from the park. He told the crowd he’d traveled 3,000 miles; that it was an honor to share the streets and songs. “History is not made by Presidents,” Morello began. “It’s not made by billionaires or bankers, wondering who can be bought.” Within minutes of Morello’s arrival it became clear that one of the Guitarmy’s primary functions would be: travelling Tom Morello photo shoot. And although he seemed slightly confused during the march, Morello was enthusiastic, shaking hands profusely and thanking fans who thanked him.
The marching musical performance soon gave way to more traditional Occupy chants: “We! Are! The 99 Percent!” and “The system! Must die! Hella, hella, occupy!” We’d ventured fewer than ten blocks from Bryant Park when a raging “WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” broke out. The march took over the width of Fifth Avenue for the remainder of the hour-long trek. At 31st Street, Morello was approached by a friend, who then apologized for disrupting. “Oh,” he said, “no one can hear a note anyway.”
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That was made up for by Morello’s spirited performance in Union Square, where he took the stage with his makeshift Guitarmy group. Occupy’s Will Gusakov, who stage-managed, noted that having protesters on stage emphasized “an ethos of participation and non-hierarchy” that is intrinsic to the movement, which he hoped the performers would all take on. Morello prefaced “World Wide Rebel Song” with a story about a group of Korean guitar-makers who were fired for unionizing (for whom he’d held a benefit concert). He encouraged the crowd to sing along, noting, “If you can’t remember the words, raise a militant fist in the air, and go ‘na na na’!” The group’s second song was “This Land Is Your Land,” complete with an acknowledgment that Woody Guthrie would have headlined the show, were he still alive.
Next on the bill was Bobby Sanabria, the Latin jazz singer and drummer, after a number of speakers who embodied May Day’s appeal to renew revolutionary spirits broadly. Sanabria encouraged everyone to protest the Grammys’ decision this year to cut 31 categories that “represented diversity,” like Latin jazz, Cajun, and Native American music.
Das Racist followed with fairly straight-ahead performances of Relax‘s “Michael Jackson” and “Rainbow in the Dark” that they cut with May Day shouts. The sound went out towards the end of “Rainbow” but the group continued on with help from a handful of die-hards in the front row. I couldn’t help the thought that a performance of Heems’ anti-authoritative reinterpretation of the Strokes’ “New York City Cops” would have been fitting here.
Dan Deacon somehow successfully controlled a packed Union Square, requesting a circle formation as he usually does in live settings, performing from within the audience. “I know, I don’t look like the most trustworthy person,” he said, encouraging an interpretative dance to “Of the Mountains.” He called it a “Body Mic Check,” which felt appropriate– in an interview last week, Deacon told me, “The first time I saw the mic-check stuff, I was like, ‘Holy shit. That’s exactly what I’d like to do.’”
The sea of picket signs (“Legalize Organize Unionize”) bobbed up and down to the beat of Deacon’s song. He next performed “Truth Rush” and asked the crowd to “part the sea!” for “a Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’-type dance-off.” “Both [sides of the crowd] are explicitly the same,” he said, “It’s important to remember that in life.”
“If I have one goal [at Union Square], it’s to change the way people think about the role of the individual,” Deacon told me last week. He expressed frustration with how media (like political cartoons) often “represent the wealthy as these Goliaths” and the 99% as much smaller people. “It’s a mistake to see your enemy as anything different than yourself,” Deacon said. “These are basic concepts, but they’re often looked over in regards to politics and power.” He said many of the lyrics on his forthcoming record, out by this fall, “are very much anti-corporation or pro-radical environmentalism,” including one “post-civilization” track.
On that note, Deacon said, “It’s insane for people to think we’re not returning to an age of kings, that the powers that be don’t want to go back to being pharaohs, having us build their pyramids. We’re existing in a time that’s post-Declaration of Independence, that’s post-Magna Carta. We exist in a twinkle of an eye of what some consider freedom. People are like, ‘Slavery was abolished.’ No, slavery was just outsourced.”
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While Morello, Deacon, and Das Racist were the biggest musical draws of the day, it was refreshing to later witness topical sets from Immortal Technique and JD Samson, given the setting. Immortal Technique offered lines like ”capitalism and democracy are not synonymous” and “the U.S. is a better country than the people who are running it.” JD’s set with MEN, later in the evening down at 2 Broadway, was perhaps the day’s most inspiring musical moment. The self-identified “protest band” of “feminists and queers” performed a dance-punk song written about the Occupy movement, “Make Him Pay”, as the crowd emerged on Wall Street. It felt triumphant.
Something I hear a lot as a music writer is “can’t expect every band to be Fugazi,” excusing the perpetual dearth of well-executed political songwriting. But this day served as a reminder that new protest music can still be purposeful. That same sentiment came up earlier in conversation with Shane Patrick, a member of Occupy Wall Street’s press team who helped organize the May Day events. ”As much as the conversation with Occupy was a result of broad populist outrage over economic corruption, and the lack of accountability, so many of these things literally run through the narrative of music,” he said. “Is Occupy doing anything in terms of protest that’s really that distinct of anything Fugazi and Dischord did? Not really. It would be nice if you didn’t have to expect that Fugazi was the only one.”
New York, NY – On May 1st during the March from Union Square to Wall Street, I decide to leave the march to use the bathroom. After my bathroom break, upon my return I tried to rejoin the march via an opening where the barricades were moveable, a cop stopped me and I said to him, ” I want to rejoin the march.”
“Its closed now,” the cop replied,
“But its clearly an access point and its my constitutional right to join the march, you are violating my 1st amendment by not letting me back into the march,” I said.
New York, NY – I closed my store and marched yesterday, May 1st, 2012, out of respect and solidarity for the International Labor Movement, aware, thanks to an NPR program, that the Haymarket Square Riot of 1886, Chicago, had been acknowledged in Poland and other countries during their own labor and political struggles.
The personal takeaway, having trudged from Union Square, late in the afternoon, to Wall Street, later that evening, was being an active part of history, punching a big red balloon high into the sky, and observing personal solidarity–as well as some interesting fashions (a number of bleached heads on the guys)–with the cadre I was marching. More significantly, I felt it answered a call to an urgent civic duty, and, quite unexpectedly, also gave me a role in ‘compassionate history.’
At one point, as the NYPD muscled our stream of lumpen marchers aside, I felt like a doomed pilgrim, a Kurt Vonnegut character of sorts, headed for a slaughterhouse chute. Or perhaps even some hungry lions. But I was also reminded that spiritual values, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and Constitutional ones, “to provide for the common weal,” were being resurrected. My faith restored, progressive political reform, better education, fair labor practices, fair treatment to newcomers and their first generation American children, and respect for the rights of LGBT, became, in my heart and mind, the pilgrimage and actual shrine to which we were all headed.
After several rewarding, at times, colorful hours, having stopped at the banks to say “get a job,” chant an expletive or two at the powers that be, while also having been flashed many different signs from enthusiasts, and a few detractors, out the windows of our building-lined ‘canyon’ known as Broadway, we finally arrived, end of the line, at the US Customs House near the American Stock Exchange at the Bowling Green IRT [subway] Station. There, the seasoned Occupiers sat down and began to educate. It’s then I experienced the ripened fellowship of Universalism, as if Logos, The Word—or even just, “Word?”—had been made flesh. A pilgrimage the recounting of which only a modern day Chaucer, or perhaps George Orwell, if only, might be worthy.
NEW YORK, NY–When my girlfriend and I arrived at Byrant Park it was cold and raining. Mutual Aid was just setting up a table and the kitchen was spreading out food under an umbrella. The turnout was lower than I was hoping for but the spirit was high, especially across the street at the picket in front of Bank of America.
The rain stopped after thirty minutes but a persistent mist hovered over us and hid the tops of the skyscrapers. We met our affinity group and headed uptown to join a picket in front of News Corporation, but the picket had moved on by the time we arrived. Still, it was exciting to get out into the streets of midtown. I had a sign that read “Another world is possible. STRIKE!”and as we walked we crossed other groups of occupiers and pedestrians that raised their fists and cheered. The groups of occupiers heading to the various pickets became more frequent and we stopped to exchange information about where occupiers and police were massing. It slowly began to feel like the city was ours.
The crowd had doubled by the time we returned to Byrant Park but before long a group announced they were marching to reinforce another picket, and we headed out with them. Hundreds came with us. When I ducked in to use the bathroom at Grand Central it seemed the crowd had once more doubled in the few minutes that I was gone. The sun was really coming out now.
After picketing in front of Capital Grille and Chipotle restaurant we were back in the park where the crowd swelled to a few thousand people. We ate sat down and shared snacks among ourselves and with strangers. In the background Tom Morello and a mass of other guitarists prepared for the Guitarmy march.
After the crowd left the park and turned down 5th avenue I crossed the street to get a better view. I had to run ahead four blocks to catch up to the front and stood in the crosswalk on the other side, waiting for the march to catch up. Other occupiers gathered at the crosswalk with me and started chanting “Cross the street!” The marches on the other sidewalk, across four lanes of traffic, heard them and gathered at their crosswalk. When the light turned red, both groups crossed, met in the middle, then in unison ran down fifth avenue yelling “Whose streets! Our streets!” It was electric. The crowd poured off of the sidewalk and into the street. The police scurried ahead to set up a blockade of motorcycles two blocks down but we went around and poured into the street again. Two blocks further down we did it again at another police blockade. The energy was amazing.
After we by passed the second blockade the police retreated and ceded the streets to us and we held them all the way to Union Square where all the clouds had receded. And now, all the decentralized actions around New York City are converging at Union Square for a march on Wall Street. May Day may just live up to my wild expectations. A better world is possible. STRIKE!
FIVE COLLEGES, MA–This area of Western Massachusetts, usually a hotbed of progressive activity, has no May Day events (other than an evening theater piece) taking place. Maybe so many activists have gone to NYC, Boston, Worcester or Pittsfield that no one was left to organize anything locally. Let’s hope so.
In any case, feeling pretty stupid sitting in front of this keyboard watching Occupy May Day go down elsewhere, I decided instead to dig out some really ancient plaques buried under a decade of crap and put them to good use. Fortuitously, they spelled out in large letters: “May Day! Corporate siege of planet!!” (They were also waterproof.)
I then drove them to an overpass on I-91 where the state had cleverly installed chain link fencing in front of the bridge’s original rails (making an ideal plaque holder!) and installed them for both north and southbound motorists to ponder (did I mention the plaques were day glow yellow?)
OK, OK, so it’s not exactly the Brooklyn Bridge action, right? But, you can do something, even if you’re on your own.
NEW YORK, NY–After being at Bryant Park for about four hours, some of my group and I stopped for a minor snack break. In the midst of our meal we watched a stream of other protesters leaving the park, passing by us down 6th avenue, turning eastward on 40th street and up 5th Avenue and towards Grand Central.
We didn’t know exactly where the march was headed—there was so much scheduled to happen, and it was difficult to find pickets we attempted to visit earlier in the morning—but we decided to get in on the action. Overhearing the name “Grand Central” from someone ahead, we initially thought the station was our destination until we passed it; crossing the streets, a line of NYPD officers on their motorbikes attempted to stall the march by threatening (and trying) to ride through us as we crossed. But the march went on, stopping first outside the Capital Grille on 42nd street before 3rd avenue. “One, two, three, four, don’t go through that restaurant door!” we chanted as we circled around, “five, six, seven, eight, until they don’t discriminate!”
We backtracked the path we took to get there—more crossing streams of police on bikes, more crossing of streets—converging at Chipotle across from the New York Public Library’s north side. The march quickly became a picket for farmer and immigrants’ rights as a wall of NYPD officers watched from the parking lane, the public standing across the street with their cellphones. We were welcomed back to Bryant Park, which held a relaxed and celebratory atmosphere—confetti, music and art as the day continued.
