Welcome to occupied New York

where your one-week rental comes complete with effective undeclared martial law, a public-private police force willing to brutalize and arrest any and all unsanctioned disturbances to your agenda, assurances that certain yale juniors known to wear "Fuck White Supremacy" t-shirts will in the future be kept 100 feet away from any and all event personages, (we love you thomas!) and free run of the gentrified upscale amusement park into which we've spent the last decade transforming the city. Amadou Diallo? Patrick Dorismond? No, silly, that was for the september 10th people! We're september 11th people! We don't shoot immigrants! We just detain them infinitely, deport them, and lock them in our wal-marts! (When not using them as strikebreakers against revolting service workers at our alma-maters. Good help is so hard to find these days.) Ok, we only shoot them sometimes. Or we just let them die in the desert and hope no one notices! But back to the subject! Yes, New York can be yours for the low, low price of a few tens of millions of dollars, which which your allies in big oil, voting machines, and the defense industries can surely spare, and a smidgeon of political capital. Well, we can even make you look moderate. And we'll throw in exploitation and expropriation rights to any marketable tragedy and trauma you may wish to capitalize upon while here! Don't worry, we'll keep that pesky multitude we keep hearing so little about from the news networks we own and control from utilizing any of the spaces we still pretend are 'public.' After all, i mean, how better to use all those millions we're spending on "defense" and "security" than abusing and beating the people who actually live in this city?

For me, part of the fight against the conventions has been the central question of the privatization of urban spaces and the corporatization and militarization of the "new times square"/herald square area as well as the trauma of september 11. The republican convention's attempt to hijack New York is a totalizing gesture which constructs our city as a sort of pliant tourist destination and historical curiousity and the attacks of september 11th are understood similarly as an opportunity to take advantage of the rich history of a site available for political exploitation. Those of us who actually live here, who work here, who have fought to shape and reshape the social geography of this city, are silenced, confined to pins for delegates to ogle and police to beat and spray or banished to the "nether boroughs" or to neighborhoods tour buses stop in only for a dash of ethnic flavor for their narrative of gentrifying urban potpurri or dare not drive through at all. Bloomberg's winning right now, standing on the shoulders of 8 years of Giuliani and twelve years of zero tolerance policing and racist politics of exclusion. This week, we aren't just demanding an end, we're building a new new york together.

one commentator on the police violence at the Poor People's march (via the NoRnc Listserve):

After an initial brief scuffle the police managed to get the barricade a

little over half way across the street and then stopped and radioed for help.

They then tried again to push the barricade through the crowd. By this point

many demonstrators had linked arms to block the progress of the barriers. As

this was happening 12-24 police in riot gear stormed the crowd from the north

with a two handed baton charge knocking down numerous demonstrators. Seconds

later about a dozen unmarked police scooters charged the crowd from the south

running into many of the people still on the ground. Police officers and

horses then cleared the intersection forcing demonstrators east on 29th St.

Eventually people were allowed to disperse and only a few arrests were made.



This event highlights the misuse of protest pens by the police. These barriers

have been an ongoing source of tension between demonstrators and police and

deny people of their basic right to freely assemble. The NYCLU

report “Arresting Protest” highlighted the misuse of pens at the Feb. 15, 2003

anti-war rally, and it is clear that this practice has continued despite a

court order to the contrary. As long as the police continue to aggressively

divide legal demonstrations in this way, they will have incidents of

confrontation. The job of the police should be to protect demonstrators and

the public and not to escalate confrontations through pointless micro

management of protests.

shame on the NYT (and the fucking cops too)

Most of the interactions i've seen with delegates have been peaceful. Yes, we're protesting them, because they are invading our city to plot how to frther fuck our world over, and while they dine in fancy restaurants we're getting the shit beaten out of us by trigger happy cops acting like hired goons for capitalist plutocrats. I seriously doubt the account of a protestor attacking a cop at the poor people's march is true, because i was there and the march was completely peaceful until the riot cops went nuts and began pepper-spraying and fencing in the crowd and not letting folks leave. The attacks on the mouse bloc folks last night were unjustified and the press should be condemning these repressive acts of state violence against peaceful protestors rather than making absurd apologies for police violence. In the wake of the past two nights, i'm very worried about what the direct action planned for tomorrow (check out RNC Not Welcome for details) is going to look like. All of these actions are non-violent, but the police have already coded the a31 Coalition as terrorists and Nonviolent Direct Action as a pernicious fifth columnist terrorist act, and i doubt the police will be as scrupulous as the folks in the streets in eschewing violent acts, given that they seem to have adopted a "by any means necessary" approach to ensuring that the Republican party's corporate welfare-subsidized rental of midtown manhattan (an ambitious privatization project if ever there was one) continues with minimal disruption.



Aside from the police repression and the paper of record's fallacies, the protest itself has often been powerful and inspiring. Prior to the police attacks, the Poor People's march was a huge high point. Yesterday's march was massive, fun, and with the possible exception of 2/15/03, which was sort of a singular experience, and the anti-nuke demo in central park my parents brought me to as an infant, among the largest protests at which i've ever been present. This morning's Still We Rise march was energetic, loud, and beautiful. While i'm amused at how many old friends from high school i've bumped into in the course of the past two days i'm more struck by the sheer stregnth of the determination i'm seeing in the marchers, demonstrators, protestors, et alii, to build together the new world we are carrying in our hearts.



more later.

the new geso site is hot!

If i were a Yale graduate student, i would join based on the coolness of the website alone.

sorry about the lack of posts. Ipods are very time consuming. Hardt and Negri are coming to sign books or something at the barnes and noble four blocks from here in september. Bizarre, but it'll probably be a hoot.

"This is a song about a superhero named Tony. It's called 'Tony's theme.'"

Negri and Hardt's Multitude seems both more comprehensible than its predecessor, (this after only the first 72 pages) with ample definitions and explications of the authors' ironic excursions and satirical attacks on ideologues reactionary and neoliberal alike. It's also more immediately topical, with direct references to torture and biopolitics in this global moment of imperial consolidation. I take issue with the teleogical account of "ever more democratic" structures of organizing and social change by the multitude, which seems to exhibit a certain selective memory about forms of struggle in previous eras, but i nevertheless am finding the book both fun - references to Star Trek episodes' philosophical ruminations on mechanized smartwars and huge section headers proclaiming "May The Force Be With You" continue Empire's delight in brilliantly absurd juxtapositions (St. Augustine and the Wobblies, for instance, though i continue to believe the whole thing was a tongue in cheek Dylan reference) and emiiently useful alongside Butler's Precarious Life for theorizing this new(?) age of imperial war and what other possibilities we can build from its ashes.



Finally saw Kill Bill 2 last night. As with the first half, stunningly beautiful direction and cinematography, bizarre and absurd story. Thurman, David Carradine, and Michael Madsen, all contribute terriffic performances, and RZA's nod to Liquid Swords (the clip from Shogun Assassin) is worth watching simply on its own merits. My parents are back in the country. My dad still has no moustache and i am totally freaked out. He looks five years older without the hair on his face to mask the lack thereof on his head.



Evan worries that people are finding his site by searching for "horse fucking" and cautions himself to tone down the derogatory adjectives with roots in taboo interspecies non-consenual sexual encounters. Then he promptly calls Farallon Capital Management "filthy-goatfuckers®."



Rock on.