As you can see, I started my Occupy Vancouver photoset at Tiffany last night. What more proof can you require that the 1% have offshored all the decent jobs? That window display is absolutely covered in dust! Ou sont les cleaning persons d’antan?
Moving on to Louis Vuitton. Does anyone besides me remember when they had a window display made of dozens of silver CCTV cameras focused on one pair of $1100 shoes? No? Just me then? FINE! In any case, the 1% are, as you can see here, safely confined behind bars as if in a zoo, and if Alberni is not a zoo, what IS? I ask yez. Especially on a Saturday night.
I got a lot of photos of signs, and although it took me a minute, I did like “Walk like an Egyptian” on the flag, which was over by the potted palm. There’s also a sign crediting Tunisia as the birthplace of modern democracy.
The little “I’m here for you. Are you here for me?” sign at the bottom-right of the “We are not kidding around. Stay a night and talk to us” sign at the top of the steps is the one that was kicked over earlier that afternoon by the chubby, dark security guard, who should have been on the other side of the fence in fact.
There is a guide to hand signals used in the General Assembly propped up against one of the Lions, although for the nearsighted a little more proximity would be helpful. God only knows what’s written on the whiteboard against the other Lion, as I myself am nearsighted and couldn’t make it out, even with the zoom, because I can’t fly.
YET.
I did like the guillotine labeled “Bargaining Tool,” but then as we’ve established, I’m a big old anarchistic meanie who thinks fear can be an effective weapon.
“My Other Occupation Sucks” is pretty good as well. A nice takeoff of the “My Other Car Is A…” bumper stickers. I saw a Porsche once with “My other car is a Datsun” on it.
Actual Bohemians not welcome at Bohemian Grove
Obscene Wealth and Greed are Not Canadian Values
Yeah, whatever. Tell it to Conrad Black.
There are now TWO red Homelessness tents on the premises. The number of tents is growing daily/nightly, and I expect tomorrow to be the biggest day yet, thanks to Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, authors of my favorite theme song. It’s hilarious to me that the YouTube has now become popular enough to have ads on it.
I had an enjoyable conversation with some firemen. I didn’t recognize the jackets, and firemen weren’t around the first couple of nights, so being me I toddled up and asked what group they were with, where they were from. They told me and asked where I was from. I said “The Internet,” and it was FUCKING GLORIOUS because I swear to god one guy’s eyes opened wide in alarm. Then I told them I was a blogger, they asked me where I lived, which was really none of their business, but I’m not very closety so I said Chinatown and we shared a chuckle over the fact that when the alarm goes off at my place all the Chinese people wait till I get there and then sort of shove me at the firemen, like “she’s white, let HER talk to them.” They were quite cool and probably around to make sure there were no open flames in the tented area. Later, I heard some of them go for coffee and they were discussing the income disparity and arguing whether or not it was bigger in BC than in the US.
Well ladies and gentlemen, as you can see from scrolling down it looks like Flickr is censoring all my OccupyVancouver images so that you have to actually sign in to Flickr to see them. I’ve emailed them twice and just get the generic “you can change permissions under Bulk Editing or on each photo” and in fact I CAN’T. Here’s an image they deleted from my blog:
UPDATE: well, someone was censoring my photos, but it turned out to be me. So much for my urge to tinker with the Flickr Uploader. NEVER AGAIN! All fixed now, moving on…
Occupy Vancouver. I'm not lion, this got censored on Flickr
Pretty obscene, eh?
So from now on I’ll be uploading them directly to WordPress.com. I only went to Flickr in the first place because I thought they were better than Photobucket, which censored this image:
Never Forget. Coalition of the Willing, to Power
Sorry to go all Godwin’s Law on you, Flickr, but you deserve it.
I’m uploading the pix here, so it’s going to take a little more time than before, but bear with me. I’m even uploading two videos to YouTube, and by the way, if you’ve got a video capable camera and a YouTube account, there are such a diversity of opinions at Occupy Vancouver that they would very much welcome your presence to document them all. There’s someone there today videoing and interviewing people to upload, and he could use some company.
Here’s the first video, which gives you a good idea how the Human Mic works. Effective, elegant, and absolutely free!
Like I said on YouTube, this is how your political sausage is made at Occupy Vancouver; slowly, inclusively, democratically. I’m impressed. And here’s the second one:
The guy at the end is worth waiting for.
Will update this post when all the images are uploaded. Check back in an hour or so. It’s worth it: I took the GOOD camera today! And should I ever get a 24 hour stretch of internet AND power access, I’ll even do that post on Love Is The Killer App that I’ve been meaning to put on raincoastermedia.com for two weeks!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Here’s your slideshow, finally. It’ll probably be tomorrow before both videos are uploaded, alas.
While the crowd was considerably thinner than Saturday, I’d estimate that tents are up 20%. There are over fifty tents there now, not including the service tents like Food Not Bombs, the Medic tent, etc. And the Kid Zone is well-populated. The General Assembly is in full effect, although not using amplification; I’d heard they couldn’t afford to keep it indefinitely, and some people told me they preferred the Human Mic because it was the ultimate triumph of humanity over impersonal, expensive tech.
The chubby, swarthy, middle-aged security guard who was on duty at the top of the stairs (not the tall, lean, young one who is very cool) made it his business to walk over and kick over signs placed on the stairs, and to tell me “that’s far enough” when I got within two steps of the top, even though the public is legally allowed to occupy the area right up to the fence at the top of the stairs. And yes, he is in these pictures. Click to enlarge.
Operation Don’t Be An Asshat or I’ll post your picture on a blog with four million hits in effect.
The emergent imagery, of a fist clutching a red rose, is pretty powerful, although there are also many images of an open, upraised hand, the open hand of peace as I’ve heard it called. And yes, there are t-shirts. Apparently someone was just giving them away to the stalwarts who are chairing groups and working day after day, but I heard something about you can bring your old shirt down and they’ll put the symbols on it? I couldn’t find The T-Shirt Guy, but you are perfectly at liberty to adopt any of my images and print them out on that iron-on transfer paper you can get at Staples or wherever.
In the daytime the lions had lost the hearts in their eyes (probably under the influence of Asshat, see above) but by sunset the hearts had been re-installed. While it’s a lovely image, ferocious, powerful predators looking at the world through love, isn’t putting something on their eyes what you do with corpses? I don’t know: my family’s so cheap that someone always pocketed the pennies before the wake was over.
One fellow, in true Turning Swords Into Ploughshares style, had a suede arrow quiver for his tripod, which was appropriate. After all the complaints yesterday about the litter smokers made, today was almost smoke-free, and the ones I did see smoking were conscientious about non-asshattery and containing their litter. There was also a volunteer sweeping the steps pretty regularly. And there was an anti-tobacco campaigner on the premises; it IS ironic to be enslaved to Big Tobacco, but you can bet your last bippy, whatever that is, that if I were so addicted I’d be pretty resentful to the people who market that shizz.
The fellow in the More Heart sign is hand-carved of awesome. If you run into him, talk to him, because he has Deep Thoughts and Shit, and more heart than is legally allowed under the Statues of British Columbia. We all need the courage to have More Heart lately; engaged emotion is the last frontier.
Then I got a lot of shots of manifestii, schedules, calls to order, and Lists Of Shit We Need Donated. If you can’t click to enlarge them, maybe I’ll embed them all after a page jump.
Planking at 4:20. OF COURSE.
The meditation circle is apparently a very powerful experience. The original security dude, the tall, lean, non-asshatty one, almost had tears in his eyes as he described it to me. It’s a better world already when security forces partake of meditation circles and have evanescent experiences therein. Maybe I’ll go and report back myself because…
Occupy Vancouver has a second wind now. Yes, the Celebrity Effect is in full effect: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (and could there be a more timely band name?) is going to attend and perform on Wednesday; no time specified yet. He’s been at Occupy LA for some time, apparently, and you can follow his Occupation travels on Twitter. Previously, of course, billionaire Russell Simmons has led meditations at Occupy Wall Street and volunteered to pay for the cleanup via Twitter, to much skepticism. Why’d he use Twitter, people ask…why not just email the mayor directly?
Because Russell Simmons understands the power of social media. You want to back people into a corner, you do it in public so they can’t weasel out.
Accessibility is a big part of Occupy Vancouver, but there’s an ongoing problem with people chaining their bikes to the ramps, which makes them impassable for the wheelchairs for which they were built. Again: don’t be the asshat. Don’t be That Guy.
Gotta love “Please treat this Porta-Potty as if it were your own” signs. So Canadian. And of course it’s Vancouver, so there’s coffee. Free coffee. I’d like to know how they hooked THAT up!
You know, should I for a moment hesitate to photograph people without their permission I just have to look at the Japanese girl to my left at Starbucks, who has been videoing nonstop since arriving at this cafe an hour ago. There IS no “Off-Camera” anymore.
My Dad is so proud of you
My Dad was born #887 Hornby in 1912. He is so proud of you all.
Ran into the Protest March through the Financial District at Howe and Pender. I was minding my own business, walking a friend to her next appointment, and then we saw flashing police lights and I said, “Let’s walk over this way” to nobody’s great surprise. Just caught the tail end of it, but it was substantial. At least a couple of hundred people, lots of signs.
At the VAG there was only one person I saw in an Anonymous mask, but s/he was making the most of it, getting the attention of passing cars. On Twitter there’s been some pushback about the masks and the concept of Lulz in general; people claim that the presence of jokers diminishes the entire movement, but this is getting it absolutely mathematically perfectly bass-ackwards: artists and jokesters are the way radical ideas first begin to integrate themselves into a society. If we got these hard truths from a straight man, we’d get our backs up. Shakespeare knew this when he wrote The Fool into King Lear.
Took a break and hit Cafe Artigiano, then back I went at about 6:00, just as the sunset light started. It gets cold at night; blankets, even those $2 space blankets from Canadian Tire, would be welcome.
Oh, I did see one of those Red Tents from the always-awesome Pivot Legal Society that were part of the Olympic protests. Good to see them still in use: sad to see they were necessary in the first place, and now more than ever.
I got a couple of shots of the beautiful Catherine and her partner David, modeling their signs, “Live in Harmony with Nature by Eliminating Price” and “Science vs Chaos.” Of course you know I’m all Team Chaos, but they were nice people anyway, from the Technocracy movement, and we had a great discussion about how the new paradigm hippies are skipping most of the 20th century and combining the best of the 17th with the best of the 21st, going off-grid with communications capabilities from the Digital Revolution.
It’s not every day you have those kinds of conversations, if you’re not an undergraduate.
Kyriarchy is a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to describe interconnected, interacting, and multiplicative systems of domination and submission, within which a person oppressed in one context might be privileged in another.[1] It is an intersectional elaboration of the concept of patriarchy[1] — it extends the analysis of oppression beyond traditional feminism to dynamics such as sexism, racism, economic injustice, and other forms of internalized and institutionalized oppression[2].
Actually, you have to respect that; the man is under house arrest (still no charges laid, please note) and still he comes out in solidarity at the OccupyLondon protest, mask and all. And here’s me, staying up till 4am removing all my ID and sign-in apps from my iPod and thinking about taking off my nail polish to be less recognizable. Live and learn!
We are allAnonymousnow. The institutions that we’ve built, paid for, worked in, with, and against, have become like those sentient robots in the old movies: we built them to help us, and instead they’ve enslaved us. They’ve taken away our very humanity, so that we really ARE anonymous, so much so that there’s a general push on the part of our organizations to force us to carry identification at all times, because the institutions control the access to indentification and thus to identity itself. They first depersonalized us and then told us we had to carry our serial numbers at all times. Without ID, you essentially don’t exist and you cannot claim any rights in our current climate. Not when things like the Patriot Act exist, when the governments of most Western nations collaborate with bloody dictators to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. Go on, carry your driver’s license, and realize that ICBC is collaborating with the Vancouver Police Department to provide face recognition software so you can be tracked, even while obeying the law. Just in case the government needs something on you. And don’t forget that the gap between the richest 1% and the rest is larger and growing faster in BC than it is in the US, and that Canada has more billionaires per capita than any other nation.
Long ago I wrote about the Manual of Afghani Jihad and the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said that if our world had anything as spiritually compelling as those documents, we would solve most of the world’s problems. Alienation would be a thing of the past instead of the universal constant.
Well now alienation is a weapon.
Anonymous and similar groups have answered that call. Here is their manifesto, in video form, from that pinko muckraker Charlie Chaplin. Why not? We’ve heard from George Carlin and Fran Lebowitz on Occupy Wall Street. Why not Charlie Chaplin?
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
– Oscar Wilde
Occupy Comics!
Here’s a slideshow of Occupy Vancouver shots from News1130 (and hey, if you’re done with your Nony mask, I could really use one! Hint! Hint! I’ll be the one walking around without a Nony mask!):
Demonstrations like the Occupy Wall Street protests, which will hit Canadian cities this weekend, are a “democratic expression of views’’ and “entirely constructive,’’ Mr. Carney said.
“It makes it more tangible, the challenges that that economy is facing, and it makes it more important to demonstrate success on issues such as financial reform,’’ he said.
The words that Mr. Carney applies to the civil disruption carry extra weight because the Harper government is pushing for him to become the next chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a group charged with co-ordinating the overhaul of international banking regulations. There is widespread fear that, the more time that passes, the tougher it will be to muster political enthusiasm for reforms, against which the financial industry is lobbying furiously.
Mr. Carney has been a fierce critic of the industry backlash and has vowed to counter it.
Here are some cool, free-use logos for the 99%. If you see Conrad Black using them, well just take them away from him. He’s a stateless, convicted felon desperate enough to try anything, tho, so be prepared for ninja moves. Slooooow ninja moves.
I am the 99 percent
The 99% has a significant sub-percentage of hipsters. Well, what else are you going to do but protest if you’re an over-educated, underemployed or unemployed person who cares about what the world is coming to and worries that if you don’t speak up NOW, you may miss your chance forever? You protest. And then you party.
Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing
Dear Nonymite: you do realize you’re flipping off the photographer, not the cops, right? Jesus, EVERYONE hates the paparazzi!
Compare and contrast to our earlier Nony in London:
Work it, V!
This is a democracy! VOTE, DAMMIT!!!
Whichever you prefer, the mere existence of Anonymous reminds us that the present moment, yes, this exact moment, is one that has never come before, and will never exist again. It won’t be long until existing power structures have either shattered into a new, digital Brownian Motion model of solipsistic yet collaborative civilization OR the fascists have infiltrated and wiped out the free thinkers, resulting in something akin to the Orwellian KleptoReich that Putin’s got going in Russia.
And that, my friends, reminds me of this, from the great prophet Hunter S. Thompson. Think carefully about these words, because for just this particular second of time, they apply again.
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Where will you be when it does?
UPDATED: a couple of hours after I posted this, I found the following video, which claims to lay out the one-year plan of Anonymous. Presenting The Plan:
“While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”
I have a copy of the Manual of Afghani Jihad (the CIA translation) and selections from the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said back then that if we in the West had any documents as spiritually compelling as those, we would have no alienated teens, no existential crises. It’s literally unthinkable to most people in the affluent nations that their individual lives could actually have meaning; why is this so, when their nations wield the greatest financial and political power on the planet? When they enjoy personal freedoms undreamed-of in most of civilization and throughout history? Why is this, when destitute citizens of the poorest states on Earth change history every day as if it’s their birthright?
And it is.
Could this video and plan from Anonymous actually be That Call, the call to the hearts of the people of the West, for which we have been waiting?
We all know the Rapture is coming. And we pretty much all know we, ourselves, are not going to be beamed straight to Heaven by Saint Scotty’s magical transporter, so it behooves those of us who will be Left Behind (shades of grade school!) to prepare as best we might for life in a post-apocalyptic, zombie paradise.
But just in case it doesn’t happen, I’m doing what a Facebook friend suggested, and leaving empty shoes filled with glitter outside all the gay bars I can find, just to confuse the Christians.
In case of Rip Taylor
Here’s a very servicey video from our friend FrontierFormerEditor on practical ways to prepare for the looting which will inevitably ensue. Get your shopping carts in good working order now, people!
and if that doesn’t cover all your bases, here is a small roundup of Top Rapture Tweets. Yes, I expect this to trend BIG over the next two days. Apologies I can’t grab the Tweetshots, but Tweetshots appears to have been Raptured already.
From ApocalypseHow: Hmm, the world ends the same week as Oprah’s show does? “EVERYBODY gets a CAR! Or thrown into the LAKE OF FIRE!”
Bug Girl: A friend suggested we leave empty shoes filled with glitter outside gay bars on Rapture day. I can totes see you doing that :)
Sean Percival: How about an inbox rapture instead? Just leave behind the naughty ones like my Agent Provocateur newsletters.
The rise of zombies in pop culture has given credence to the idea that a zombie apocalypse could happen. In such a scenario zombies would take over entire countries, roaming city streets eating anything living that got in their way. The proliferation of this idea has led many people to wonder “How do I prepare for a zombie apocalypse?”
Well, we’re here to answer that question for you, and hopefully share a few tips about preparing for real emergencies too!
So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored). Below are a few items you should include in your kit, for a full list visit the CDC Emergency page.
Water (1 gallon per person per day)
Food (stock up on non-perishable items that you eat regularly)
Medications (this includes prescription and non-prescription meds)
Sanitation and Hygiene (household bleach, soap, towels, etc.)
Clothing and Bedding (a change of clothes for each family member and blankets)
Important documents (copies of your driver’s license, passport, and birth certificate to name a few)
First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)
That is what I call Taking Care of Your People! Remember, it’s time to get that granny cart and the acetylene torch all tuned up. Only 48 Earthly hours left!
raincoaster 