The 0.5% of the 99%

99.5 percent of "the 99 percent" at Occupy Wall Street are good people, interested in participating in something bigger than them and making things better for all of us.

Tonight, I met the other 0.5 percent.

There was a dude at the General Assembly clearly up to no good. Like, holding his lighter like a gun and "shooting" people. Then stomping across the middle of the seated gathering. These weren't political acts in any way, just disruptive.

Then he steps on the kitchen table and just starts grabbing handfuls of food. Some people call security (OWS has its own security team), and I made that call, too.

Then a thrown slice of pizza hits me in the side of the neck / shoulder.

Yeah, it pretty much looked like somebody puked on me.

I just glare at the dude because (1) I'm not interested in fighting him, (2) this doesn't seem like the place for it even if I did and (3) I figure security (dudes bigger and scrappier than me) will handle it.

What happens instead is that one of the peace-hippies is like, "Don't do anything, I'll handle this." I think he started to try to calm the guy down.

As things were tense and people were milling, one of the facilitators was like, "If you don't need to be here, please clear the area." He said that generally and to me. So I left. Why didn't I say, "That guy just threw a slice of pizza at me, so I think do I have a reason to be here"? I guess I thought he knows what he's doing, and this is his home not mine. But that's not right.

And a few minutes later, after the dude caused another disturbance and made like he was going to hit people and the peace hippie walked him away and the dude could be overheard saying, "I can be here. I'm a good person" -- why didn't I say, in the presence of actual cops just five feet away in case things went down, "If you're a good person, will you apologize for throwing that pizza at me?"

I didn't really want his apology, but I wanted him to learn a lesson or leave or get himself arrested. But I did nothing.

Does that make me a pacifist? No, I think it just makes me a sap.

I hope for the sake of everyone else there that the peace-hippie modulated this kid's attitude, but still he should have been made accountable in some way for his act of aggression -- and I should have sought that accountability. If I believe in justice, if that's what I'm down there for, then I should demand justice for me, too.

(I guess I oughta take my grievance to one of the Working Group meetings. I mean, if throwing a pizza at a person isn't enough to get someone ejected from the movement and protect the safety of everyone, what is? But maybe the moment for justice has passed.)

I debated not telling this story because I don't want people to get the wrong idea about the OWS scene. It also felt wrong to keep this a secret. Draw your own conclusions.

If nothing else, the notion of personal security -- like the notion of passing controversial proposals about the when the drum circles can perform** with "nine-tenths consensus" (sort of a contradiction in terms) -- reveals the natural difficulties of managing....governing for lack of a better word.... a large, diverse and growing group of people. I keep reading stories from pundits about how the movement being "co-opted" by the Democratic party or Michael Moore or fill-in-the-blank-here is going to break up and kill off this movement. I haven't heard anyone who's actually been down there express this sort of sentiment. More likely it will just be the petty stuff that starts to fester. (That said, it doesn't really require living there full time to embrace the movement, and the petty aggression is most felt by the cats who are living there full time. So maybe it won't even be that big a problem.)

I hope none of this makes me sound naive about what's going on out there. I don't think I am. Frankly, I'll take a night of disappointment and a sauce-ruined shirt if it means people will speak out about the problems in our country and we get some change.


** the great drum circle controversy sounds silly, I know, but it's a big deal to these guys. Uh, I'm not helping make them sound serious, am I?.....but really, it's all caught up with freedom and fears of outsiders trying to fracture the movement, and....ok, I'm done talking.

On the Next Episode of 'Hoarders'

Look what I found on the street!

It's a giant bag of Styrofoam peanuts!

Can you believe somebody was just throwing this away?

This is like a $50 bag of peanuts. Seriously. This is like somebody saying, "Oh, you're moving soon? Here, take 50 dollars."

And a little research indicates they're the biodegradable kind!

33-Years-Young

On Wednesday, I celebrated my 33rd birthday. Tomorrow, I start menopause. Just kidding.

It was a great birthday because I didn't have to go to work. (Is there anything more soul-sucking than having to sit inside a cubicle on your birthday--especially when it is nice and sunny outside?)

I met up with Nell for lunch, and we got manicures and pedicures at my favorite spot. Then I met up Dan for dinner at Osteria Morini. Great pick by Dan. Amazing food, ambiance, company, the works. I have a very good husband.


Me at 33. (me at 29, 30, 31, 32 - don't I look like a completely different person each year?)

I always get a bit introspective around my birthday. I can't help it; it's in my nature. A lot is going to happen to me this year. Within a few months, my life is about to change a whole lot. Year 33 will definitely be a year to remember. Am I being too vague? I will get deeper into it in another post.

As for today, I spent the afternoon with Heather and Drake in Brooklyn. We got me some birthday cake (a glorious chocolate cake with chocolate frosting!) and then we checked out the carousel in Dumbo. My old point-and-shoot camera died over the summer, so I bought a new one for when I don't want to carry around the big guy, and I have to say, it's been pretty fun taking snapshots with it--especially at super-wide 22mm mode.









I think Heather and I liked the ride better than the kid. Have you ever seen such a sad little face? Oh, well. Better luck next time :)

Occupying Wall Street

Honey, bring me my checklist of '60s dreams come true. (Yes, that's Peter Yarrow on the left. And we're singing "Blowin' in the Wind." At a protest!)

By now you've heard of the Occupy Wall Street protests, yes? You may be skeptical of them. I was, too, so last Tuesday night, on Day 11 since the kids started camping out downtown (and two days after that really nasty pepper-spraying episode), I went to check them out. This is what I wrote in an email to some friends:

Can I get sincere for a second?

I went down to the Occupying Wall Street protest tonight....I'd been meaning to check it out, and then this afternoon I saw that Cornel West was going to be speaking, so that settled it.

There were a good 500-700 people there....hard to be certain how many were tourists and protest-tourists (inc. myself) but the core group was definitely in the hundreds. The conversations I listened in on were intelligent, naive, passionate, respectful.

Brother West was amazing, of course. He doesn't shake hands; he hugs. Also he's like 6 feet tall -- 6-3 with the afro. Everything that's conducted there is done so without microphones, so anyone who is speaking (on "the people's mic") says a few words at a time, then waits for them to be shouted out by the crowd in unison. And I have to say, it was pretty electric when we were shouting along with West's mini-sermon.

From what I saw in an hour, including a portion of their evening General Assembly meeting which was much, much more organized and more democratic than I expected, these kids (and they are mostly kids, with a few O.G.'s scattered around) are earnest and committed.

Now...their mission statement is straight-up kooky. They look way too "dangerous" to get any traction with middle America. Undoubtedly one of these kids is going to say or do something stupid. They're easy to write off in any number of ways. But every day they're out there (this is Day 11) gives them a little more credibility, that at least they're serious about sticking it out. It gives more time for Michael Moore and Cornel West to attract attention and people like me. And, best case scenario, enough non-threatening, establishment-type regular folks get on board that it gives cover for a mainstream Democratic politician to embrace at least the underlying emotion behind the protest. We're not going to get Wall Street out of Washington, but if this could convince one of our elected officials to show a little spine, well, it will have been worth it. That's an extreme long shot, but hell if we can't show some love to some people who are out in the streets.

As Occupy Wall Street has continued to grow as a national movement and in the attention paid to it, I've become even more fixated. So I went back down there today (I thought I'd make a couple donations to their "library" -- the Autobiography of Malcom X, and the Portable Voltaire) and my trip confirmed that it's a really positive, inspiring scene. Just good vibes.

The protests have taken some flak because "they don't have a central message" or "they don't have any solutions." That's what I thought, too, until I went down there. But that's not really where it's at. These protests are about the frustration that the 99% of us are, now more than ever, at the mercy of the other 1%. So what does that mean? Income inequality? Corporate influence in politics? Wall Street recklessness? Media fecklessness? The housing bubble? College tuition costs?

Yes.

And by drawing sustained attention to these issues, these kids are doing something meaningful.

It's not on them to come up with the solutions. (Might I add at this point that they've revised their mission statement in the past week to make much less kooky. Some of them still look "dangerous;" some of them are street urchins. But most of them are decent, friendly people.) What this movement needs is for ordinary, voting Americans and establishment politicians to work within the system to make the system work for us again. The pendulum swings, and it's time for it swing on back a little.

There's a lot more I could say here, but let me just sum it up by saying that on the whole, it's an incredibly positive scene. That if you have a chance to check it out, you should (and perhaps even refrain from judgment until you do). If you're not happy about the way things are going, join in.

New Yorker Festival 2011

Yvonne has finally, successfully, nudged me into recapping this year's New Yorker Festival, also known as "my Super Bowl."

She said we needed a recap, if for nothing else so we don't forget what we saw.  (Indeed, I'm not totally clear when we started going to the festival....but we must have started going in '05, then missed it for Ara's wedding in '06.  Then I had some CLASSIC panels in '07 when Yvonne was launching this blog's predecessor, Polish Ham....then we were in New Orleans in '08, but managed to hit up '09, '10 and now '11.  Not bad!)

By only going to two events last year, I felt like I missed out.  This year, I did four.  Yvonne, for whom this is not quite a personal Super Bowl, still went to two.  A quick rundown:

** Friday night:  Yvonne, Kim, Kayleen and Nien saw a talk with the novelists Jeffrey Eugendies, Nicole Krauss and Jhumpa Lahiri.  She'd been waiting six years for Jhumpa!  And then found her a little cold.  Still, good stuff.

** Saturday:  AWESOME war reporters panel.  Badasses (male and female) telling war stories.  Jon Lee Anderson is the coolest man alive.  And the way they're all so matter-of-fact about being kidnapped in Libya, or persona non grata in Sri Lanka, or how they just had to go to Iraq -- all without glorifying what they see there -- makes a person wish he'd never left journalism.  Just a little.

Also went to a fantastic panel on capital punishment.  The panelists on both sides were very persuasive, but I'm still against it.

**Saturday night:  Our main event:  a one-on-one interview with Owen Wilson.  Except it wasn't one-on-one, because out came surprise guest Wes Anderson.  And then all the questions were directed to Wes Anderson.  This was not really what I had in mind.  However, I asked a question for the first time at one of these events (about the LEGENDARY unaired pilot Heatvision & Jack), and it wound up being the best question asked all night.  

**Sunday:  For the third year in a row, a 75-minute lecture by finance page columnist James Surowiecki.  I didn't love it as much as Jason did.

But really the best part was getting together with the poker people over drinks and bar food (which we did three times in one weekend) to compare all the different events we went to, all the cringe-worthy questions from audience members who aren't us, and all the glory that is....the New Yorker Festival.

Cooperstown: The Non-Baseball Parts

Yvonne with the Great Pumpkin.  Yep, Pumpkinfest 2011: We Were There.

Cooperstown sits on a big lake.  It's real purty.

Back to the pumpkins.  At the big weigh-off on Saturday, local businesses buy a pumpkin and sponsor it in the Pumpkin Regatta.  On Sunday, they paint them, hollow them out like canoes then race 'em in the lake!

With some time to kill before the regatta, we snuck in some birding at Goodyear Swamp, on the opposite end of the lake.  Four positive IDs in one hour; Yvonne spotted some good ones.

Another view of the wetlands.  Lovely, right?

Seriously.

We made it back in time for the second of three races.  That pumpkin in front -- the Hampton Inn pumpkin -- crushed it.

Other highlights:  The sweet old inn where we stayed (the photos don't do it justice), the one traffic light in town, and seeing the tourist who broke the color barrier! 

Cooperstown in Pictures* (*Mostly)

The Hall of Fame is a serious place.  They spell "Museum" with "v"s!

At the Bambino's locker.  As you'll see below, I loved the Hall.  But this seems like a good place to express a beef:  all the goods are behind glass.  I get it.  It's priceless stuff, you don't want it touched or damaged -- but the Met has 500-year-old tapestries hanging al fresco; certainly SOME of the treasures of baseball's past could be en plein air.  It just makes it more immediate, more real.

Re-creating a memorable photo from my '89 trip, inside Hank Aaron's locker.

Yvonne loved how I was loving this section.  They had this whole exhibit on baseball's record books, with lots of fascinating stuff -- like how Ty Cobb's lifetime average of .367 (one of those stats I committed to memory long ago) is actually .366.  Some dude went back and looked at all the official scores from Cobb's career and found that he wasn't charged for a number of at-bats that he should have been, which lowered his official lifetime average.  Insane.

Second place in the day's trivia score.

This is where we took a break after the three-hour mark.  Above is a shot of Yvonne's favorite player, Hideki Matsui.  Yes, this is a photo of a photo of Matsui's face painted on a jumbo jet.  You gotta love the Japanese.  

At the entrance to the Hall itself.  That ethereal glow behind me?  That's greatness.

If I'm gonna rock the Oaks jersey, I gotta give some love to the greatest Oak of all time, Kirby Puckett.  You're my boy, blue!

 

Addendum: I wasn't the only Visalian "in the Hall."  He doesn't have a plaque, but he does have a mention in the chronology of the game which makes up the main exhibit:  Orval Overall, a pitcher with the 1906 National League Champion Chicago Cubs -- who were, incidentally, led by Fresno-native first baseman-manager Frank Chance (who IS enshrined). 

Addendum #2:  Yvonne was an impeccable sport.  Five (!) hours in the museum and nary a complaint.  Although this did happen over a photo of the first night game, from May 24, 1935...

Me:  That was as good as it would ever get.  It's been all downhill from here.

Yvonne:  Do you even listen to yourself?  The things that come out of your mouth sometimes...

 

(No one is surprised that my favorite era of baseball pre-dates my birth by a good 40 years though, right?  And I'm not entirely serious about night games...especially after I read the letter that FDR wrote to the Commissioner in 1942 urging him to keep baseball going during the war, and in fact to keep up with the night games so that the boys on the day shift could catch a game.  Love FDR.)

All in all, not a bad way to spend a day!  Thanks, love, for the gift of baseball!