The brutal reaction of police towards #occupywallstreet protestors in New York City, of campus police at UC Davis to students, and in many instances around the country have only inspired thousands more to fill American streets with their voices. That inspiration, a reawakening within the spirit and mind, is contagious – in my case, it came at a personal cost many years ago.
Category: Politics
It should come as no surprise that Brooklyn political boss Vito Lopez organized a press opportunity featuring himself and an assortment of political pets claiming to be in solidarity with the occupy wall street movement.
I’m writing this at the end of the twelfth day of #occupywallstreet about a place many people are calling Zucotti Park. I know it as Liberty Square and so should you. The best part about this movement is twofold for me, here’s why.
If you’re like me you might live next to a building that was foreclosed on and is now inhabited by local vagrants. Here’s how foreclosure overtook it.
On my trip down the Newtown Creek aboard Captain John Lipscomb’s ship – before the city’s bout of winter madness – we grazed through a putrid-smelling “rotting mud,” described by the captain as the result of a century of contaminants being poured, dumped, or leaked into the creek by polluters. But, he told me, “in one hundred years this could be prime real estate.”
In the video enclosed author Mary Gaitskill reads “The Astral Plane Nail and Waxing Salon” at the Franklin Park Reading Series in Crown Heights. This fictional story about Ashley Dupre and Silda Wall, Elliot Spitzer’s tryst and wife respectively, originally appeared in New York Magazine last fall and deals – intensely – with the dichotomy of Eve and Lilith. The tale features cameos by Elizabeth and John Edwards, Rielle Hunter, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It’s a long one – three parts – but we’re sure you’ll enjoy the ride.
We’re trading Brooklyns, moving from the thriving, throbbing 24-hour Crown Heights – where the noise of blasting reggae at 3 AM is matched only by the noise of blasting cantorial music at 3 AM – trading it in for the placid, tree-lined, and, yes, backyard-filled streets of Flatbush. My Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to a Modern Orthodox neighborhood. My non-Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to the suburbs.
The way some writers obsess about relationships — whether it’s poets reading poems about how they want to sleep with another poet in the audience, or novelists writing thinly-disguised (or not-disguised) accounts of their trysts/flings/marriages — I obsess about cities.