Photo: Becky Wartell
I had been doing a lot of
social justice work over the last decade of my life before Occupy, and I always
felt like I was doing specific events and specific actions, but I never felt a cohesive
underlying network or community that was addressing the root of the issues. We
were always kind of scratching the surface of the issues. I volunteered for the Willie
Mae Rock Camp for girls, and that’s an empowerment camp through music. Part of
our mission is to really reach out to underserved communities who don’t
traditionally get formal musical training. In doing that, you look at the music
schools in New York City or the arts education in New York City public schools,
and you say, “Okay, that’s the problem.” We’re just a tiny solution, 200 girls
per summer, to an endemic problem in New York City’s education system. I didn’t have a
background in organizing professionally. I didn’t come from
anarchist or activist background like other people. I came from this
music background, so I brought what I had, which was a lot of knowledge
about music and the music industry, putting on shows and doing things like
that.
Let me premise this by saying that I really dislike the phrase, “in the park” because we’re now 18 months out, and we've spent so much more time out of Eden than in Eden, so it’s frustrating to constitute what we do based on Zuccotti. I guess I knew about Occupy from Facebook originally. Some friends had posted it. I didn’t go down on the first day. I was teaching and working, and I thought, “Okay, it’s a one day thing. I’m going to give them some money,” and I kicked money to the WePay. On day two or day three, I thought, “Okay, I gotta go check it out.” I was blown away. I’m a musician, but I’m also a nerd, so the thing I was really drawn to was the library as soon as it sprung up. I started bringing books down and talking to the librarian and met a bunch of other writers who were also nerds and hanging out in the corner with each other.
That’s how I got connected to Occupy Writers affinity group, which started within two weeks of Occupy. Essentially, it was just creating this public list, and then publishing on that space. Specifically, we were asking people to write about their Occupy experience directly, not just the philosophical ideas around it. We also published people’s feelings on debt culture or on intellectual property law or artist rights or whatever it was. There were some really, really high profile people on there, like Lemony Snicket and Judith Butler. That was a really initial push that got Occupy out to the literary world and the journalism world very early on. It made it not just seem like a youth movement that was happening in the streets but electrified an entire base of intellectuals, writers, poets and creative people. I was really excited about that, and I did a lot of work on that. Like everything in Occupy, it was so overwhelming at first. We got like five hundred emails a day. Each one of them had an attachment, and the person wanted it posted right that minute. We were all volunteers, and we all wanted to be in the streets, so it was a real struggle.
One night I was lying in bed and
freaking out because I thought, “God, it’s like three weeks into Occupy and
nobody has set-up a music version of this. That’s crazy." It seemed like
everything had already happened in Occupy at that point. So I was lying in bed and I got up at like four in the morning
and I went online and I bought a URL- occupymusicians.net. Someone had already
bought the .com. The next morning, I
emailed the folks at Occupy Writers, and I said, “Hey, I’m going to start this
other website doing the same thing, and who knows what will happen from it.”
Someone said, “Oh, well someone just emailed us yesterday and told us that they
bought the .com, and he lives in New York. You should meet him.” It was a
composer and activist and record label owner that was also inspired, so he and
I met up right away. We started it quickly. It also had some big names and many, many local musicians, so that got a lot of press.
Throughout the whole thing, I was going to Zuccotti and hanging out and going to the general assemblies, but I didn’t really make any connections. I didn’t join any groups or anything. I was really timid. My piece for Occupy Writers was called, “I’m and Amplifier.” It was about the fact that I’m a really shy person and that I really hated participating in the human mic, but I found myself just completely selfless, full voicing the mic in these spaces. It took a while for me to come out of my shell and be a full participant because I was pretty shy. As soon as Occupy Musicians launched, I got a formal invitation from the Music Working Group to explain myself, so I was scared to death about that. I went down to 60 Wall Street, and there were like seven or eight different clusters meeting simultaneously. It was completely packed, and people were having these really heated discussions. I found the Music Working Group and we explained ourselves. That was my first working group meeting. Now, I’m probably at my 3000th working group meeting. After that, I sort of just jumped in and became a more formal part of the community.
Throughout the whole thing, I was going to Zuccotti and hanging out and going to the general assemblies, but I didn’t really make any connections. I didn’t join any groups or anything. I was really timid. My piece for Occupy Writers was called, “I’m and Amplifier.” It was about the fact that I’m a really shy person and that I really hated participating in the human mic, but I found myself just completely selfless, full voicing the mic in these spaces. It took a while for me to come out of my shell and be a full participant because I was pretty shy. As soon as Occupy Musicians launched, I got a formal invitation from the Music Working Group to explain myself, so I was scared to death about that. I went down to 60 Wall Street, and there were like seven or eight different clusters meeting simultaneously. It was completely packed, and people were having these really heated discussions. I found the Music Working Group and we explained ourselves. That was my first working group meeting. Now, I’m probably at my 3000th working group meeting. After that, I sort of just jumped in and became a more formal part of the community.
The Music Working Group formed when we were in the park and
facilitated music making in the park. We had so many arguments about what our
role was and how we were going to do certain things. One of the things that
came out of that time was we said we weren’t going to endorse anything. We were
only there to facilitate live performance. We didn’t want to get involved with
selling anything or producing CDs or doing any of that stuff. There were so
many offers coming in from all over the place about commoditizing Occupy, and
we were pretty serious about avoiding that as much as humanly possible. After
the eviction, we had to regroup and figure out how we were going to facilitate live music once we had been scattered.
There were a lot of things that happened in the winter that were sort of episodic, like working with WBAI during D17 to do the live simulcast of the in-station performances that were being broadcast live on radios in Duarte Square. It wasn’t until we had an arts cluster meeting in the spring that Winn, who was a full-time occupier at Union Square at that point, had this excellent idea that she’d been nurturing for a long time about having a guitar army. It was an idea that walked out of her mind like Athena from the head of Zeus. She had it all fully formed. She knew exactly what she wanted to see. She presented this idea. It was super on point, exactly what would work for us. Everybody was excited about it. That was in April, so we had less than a month to come up with all of the other logistics of putting Guitarmy on for May Day. We created a songbook. We created fliers, some armbands. There were tons of meetings about it and how we were going to stage everything.
Guitarmy met for the first time at Bryant Park on May Day. We thought there would be 50 or 60 people there, and I would say there were 300. It was really a lot more than we had expected. We ended up being the lead of the march from Bryant Park down to Union Square. Tom Morello was an invited guest and ended up being one of the first people in the march and brought a ton of press with him. A group of us filled the stage at Union Square and played three songs. It was a smashing success, tons of great press, lots of really great feedback. People from all over the world contacted us after that. They wanted the song book. They wanted instructions on how to start their own Guitarmy. That’s how it started.
Then, immediately after, one of our working group members proposed that we do something even more insane than that, which was to put together the 99 Mile March, which was from Philadelphia to New York City immediately following the Occupy National Gathering. It was a contentious issue. A lot of people had some very serious concerns about it, which were very well founded. We went ahead with it. Again, we thought there would be 20 or 30 people. There were more than 100 that stayed the whole time. It was the thing to do after the National Gathering. I didn’t realize it then, but those were pretty lean times for NYC Occupy. The 99 Mile March was one of the bigger things that the NYC Occupy did that summer. Our return to NYC, which was through Staten Island, over the ferry and then into the ferry terminal was a very, very powerful return to our home at Wall Street and was a really powerful march. A lot of people said to me that that gave them a sense that Occupy was still alive and well and regrouping and coming up with creative new tactics.
Then when Hurricane Sandy hit, our working group banded together and all went to Staten Island because that was the place we had built one of the best relationships that we had. The last night on the march, we had this incredible family from Occupy Staten Island that opened their house to us, gave 100 of us a place to sleep that night. My first thought when the hurricane hit was of them. We went out there, and we were really the first responders in some of those communities. Occupy Sandy is a huge part of the recovery effort and the facilitation of that now.
There were a lot of things that happened in the winter that were sort of episodic, like working with WBAI during D17 to do the live simulcast of the in-station performances that were being broadcast live on radios in Duarte Square. It wasn’t until we had an arts cluster meeting in the spring that Winn, who was a full-time occupier at Union Square at that point, had this excellent idea that she’d been nurturing for a long time about having a guitar army. It was an idea that walked out of her mind like Athena from the head of Zeus. She had it all fully formed. She knew exactly what she wanted to see. She presented this idea. It was super on point, exactly what would work for us. Everybody was excited about it. That was in April, so we had less than a month to come up with all of the other logistics of putting Guitarmy on for May Day. We created a songbook. We created fliers, some armbands. There were tons of meetings about it and how we were going to stage everything.
Guitarmy met for the first time at Bryant Park on May Day. We thought there would be 50 or 60 people there, and I would say there were 300. It was really a lot more than we had expected. We ended up being the lead of the march from Bryant Park down to Union Square. Tom Morello was an invited guest and ended up being one of the first people in the march and brought a ton of press with him. A group of us filled the stage at Union Square and played three songs. It was a smashing success, tons of great press, lots of really great feedback. People from all over the world contacted us after that. They wanted the song book. They wanted instructions on how to start their own Guitarmy. That’s how it started.
Then, immediately after, one of our working group members proposed that we do something even more insane than that, which was to put together the 99 Mile March, which was from Philadelphia to New York City immediately following the Occupy National Gathering. It was a contentious issue. A lot of people had some very serious concerns about it, which were very well founded. We went ahead with it. Again, we thought there would be 20 or 30 people. There were more than 100 that stayed the whole time. It was the thing to do after the National Gathering. I didn’t realize it then, but those were pretty lean times for NYC Occupy. The 99 Mile March was one of the bigger things that the NYC Occupy did that summer. Our return to NYC, which was through Staten Island, over the ferry and then into the ferry terminal was a very, very powerful return to our home at Wall Street and was a really powerful march. A lot of people said to me that that gave them a sense that Occupy was still alive and well and regrouping and coming up with creative new tactics.
Then when Hurricane Sandy hit, our working group banded together and all went to Staten Island because that was the place we had built one of the best relationships that we had. The last night on the march, we had this incredible family from Occupy Staten Island that opened their house to us, gave 100 of us a place to sleep that night. My first thought when the hurricane hit was of them. We went out there, and we were really the first responders in some of those communities. Occupy Sandy is a huge part of the recovery effort and the facilitation of that now.
We need to be the Occupy movement right now because of the
struggle of the 99%, the vast majority of human beings on planet earth. It is so complex and the problems are so
interrelated. I feel that one thing that
Occupy has done really well is live up to the slogan, 'All of our
grievances are connected' by pointing out and facilitating those relationships
and making them really strong, working between labor and undocumented workers rather that trying to isolate their various issues. Just today I was doing the
fast food restaurant worker solidarity. They make $7.25 an hour. They’re
getting their tips stolen from them, their wages held back. and their lives are vastly different than
the life I know. But I can connect
that struggle very easily to say, the criminality of the housing market in New York City. If the vast
majority of people are making $7.25 an hour, then there’s no way anyone can afford
rent, so all of these things are so connected.
I feel that it’s important not to become a specialist, and one of the greatest things about Occupy to me was proudly saying that I don’t know and that I want to learn about it. From the park onward, there’s been a lot of that. During Occupy Sandy, none of us knew what mold really was and how horrible it really was. We had no fucking idea. Then, we realized that FEMA has no idea, and the Red Cross has no idea how to do it either. Just admitting that and going and finding people who do know about it and testing it made better practices for the whole entire recovery community, but it takes saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this. Who can find who can?” I think Occupy is really good at having a healthy sense of curiosity and self-reflection and just honesty and checking each other, calling each other out, so you don’t just bullshit your was through something you don’t know about. You get a lot of people who are learning and growing as a group to become better at what they do and to seek creative and different things.
I wouldn’t say that this is an avant-garde. It’s too broad-based and long growing to be an avant-garde, but I think that maybe we were the tipping point that pushed a lot of this stuff about class consciousness and concerns about the ultra-wealthy and corporate responsibility or lack of responsibility into everyday conversation. My family is a working class family, but they don’t articulate themselves as a working class family. They live under the delusion that they are middle class and that they have things better than other people. Ever since Occupy happened, there’s a real change in this articulation of, “Hey, you know what, actually, things are pretty bad, and this is the reality of my condition, and what can we do to change this?” I think that’s a powerful thing, to see people have consciousness of their place in the world and a sense that they can actually agitate and articulate for change.
I feel that it’s important not to become a specialist, and one of the greatest things about Occupy to me was proudly saying that I don’t know and that I want to learn about it. From the park onward, there’s been a lot of that. During Occupy Sandy, none of us knew what mold really was and how horrible it really was. We had no fucking idea. Then, we realized that FEMA has no idea, and the Red Cross has no idea how to do it either. Just admitting that and going and finding people who do know about it and testing it made better practices for the whole entire recovery community, but it takes saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this. Who can find who can?” I think Occupy is really good at having a healthy sense of curiosity and self-reflection and just honesty and checking each other, calling each other out, so you don’t just bullshit your was through something you don’t know about. You get a lot of people who are learning and growing as a group to become better at what they do and to seek creative and different things.
I wouldn’t say that this is an avant-garde. It’s too broad-based and long growing to be an avant-garde, but I think that maybe we were the tipping point that pushed a lot of this stuff about class consciousness and concerns about the ultra-wealthy and corporate responsibility or lack of responsibility into everyday conversation. My family is a working class family, but they don’t articulate themselves as a working class family. They live under the delusion that they are middle class and that they have things better than other people. Ever since Occupy happened, there’s a real change in this articulation of, “Hey, you know what, actually, things are pretty bad, and this is the reality of my condition, and what can we do to change this?” I think that’s a powerful thing, to see people have consciousness of their place in the world and a sense that they can actually agitate and articulate for change.
The world that I hope that Occupy will help bring about is
already happening. I feel like the thing about social justice is that there are
two basic things. There are the utopianists and there are the change people. The
good thing about Occupy is that it didn’t force your hand in one way or another.
There are absurd dreams that everyone wishes would happen –New York bans cars
for life, and we have a green city with rooftop gardens everywhere. That’s
really important to keep that vision and also work for incremental change. For
me, I’m glad that Occupy has both and that it’s held on to both visions about
how the future could be.
A friend of mine is a scholar of music, and an amazing guitarist. He gave a talk at the New York Public library about the folk scene in New York City in the 1050’s and 1960’s. He was actually talking about this park.He talked about those times in Washington Square Park when everyone would come here on Sunday afternoons, and there would be ten different circles of musicians, pockets all over the park based on what their affiliations were – the bluegrass people over here, the youth labor camp people over here, the Jewish camp songs over here. His talk was completely packed. Everyone was over 70 years old. Everyone had been there, and they were all still doing social justice. They were reminiscing. They were remembering how they got to where they are now.
It was pretty awesome being with that group of people. That’s what I want to see for us, that we have built relationships and communities and trust networks that perpetuate themselves, grow wider, globally and last not just our lifetimes but the lifetimes of our children. The consequences of that is that it’s so ubiquitous that everyone knows somebody that does this daily, and it prods the majority of people to take the first small step to change their workplace, their family life towards a more progressive space and that the ripple effect is gigantic. I feel like doing that, the consequences intended would be gigantic.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
A friend of mine is a scholar of music, and an amazing guitarist. He gave a talk at the New York Public library about the folk scene in New York City in the 1050’s and 1960’s. He was actually talking about this park.He talked about those times in Washington Square Park when everyone would come here on Sunday afternoons, and there would be ten different circles of musicians, pockets all over the park based on what their affiliations were – the bluegrass people over here, the youth labor camp people over here, the Jewish camp songs over here. His talk was completely packed. Everyone was over 70 years old. Everyone had been there, and they were all still doing social justice. They were reminiscing. They were remembering how they got to where they are now.
It was pretty awesome being with that group of people. That’s what I want to see for us, that we have built relationships and communities and trust networks that perpetuate themselves, grow wider, globally and last not just our lifetimes but the lifetimes of our children. The consequences of that is that it’s so ubiquitous that everyone knows somebody that does this daily, and it prods the majority of people to take the first small step to change their workplace, their family life towards a more progressive space and that the ripple effect is gigantic. I feel like doing that, the consequences intended would be gigantic.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/