The truth is that the horror canon, like any other film group, contains a vast spectrum of work ranging from smack-somebody awfulness to transcendence. The only thread holding it all together is that every horror film DEMANDS something of you—that you abandon the safe, bucolic cognition of your daily reality and confront the darker aspects of being alive. Some movies do this by plopping a likable protagonist in a haunted-to-the-gills mansion. Others do it through crotch-stabbing intestine-smearing celebrations of mayhem. The Woman in Black (opening today!) is of the former ilk, and it's a reason in itself to drop the Judgment McJudgeypants routine and take your ass to see a horror movie.

Part of WiB's greatness lies in its restorative role: It marks the real resurrection of Hammer Film productions. (Hammer also produced Let Me In.) If you're not familiar with Hammer, here are two words to jog your memory: Vincent Price Christopher Lee.

From the 1950s to the mid-'60s, one film company dominated the horror market, churning out megahits like The Curse of Frankenstein and The Brides of Dracula. (Snicker you may, but these were the popularity equivalent of Iron Man II.) With nary a chainsaw in sight, Hammer films celebrated the broody glamour of Victorian abstruseness, packing every shot with heaving bosoms and British countrysides. They made household names of thespian giants like Christopher Lee (one of the great Draculas of all time), Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein, aka the best thing in Star Wars), and of course, His Royal Price (if you don't know his work, there's no hope for you. Just kidding—get thee to Wikipedia!). Hammer films were the antithesis of slashers—Hammer honed its focus to monstrous aristocrats who terrorized innocent farm lasses in the night. Grand orchestral scores accompanied kidnappings of virgins, townsfolk bearing pitchforks and the occasional burning at the stake. While the nukes proliferated around them, moviegoers were entranced with the mystery and casual brutality of the pre-industrial world.

Then came the hyperrealism of the '70s, and things got all Last House on the Left. Horror abandoned its sense of wonder in favor of grisly torture scenes set to Moog synthesizers. Forget the mummies or doleful Dracula—we found the true monster, and it was us.

Cut to modern day, where Hammer has staged a grand return just as our taste for realism is reaching its saturation point. (Right? I mean come on, you can watch every sick and twisted vagary of humanity on your smartphone while eating a bagel, so do we really need more movies full of hapless teens injected with hydrofluoric acid?) And what better cultural trademark to usher in the new era than Harry Potter himself? Daniel Radcliffe was made for oldfangled ghost movies—his expression of clenched stoicism must be a near-reflex after 10 years of Voldemort's BS.

With Radcliffe at the fore, Hammer reclaims its place in pop culture with no explanations, as if 40 years of fevered tech-transmutation hadn't happened. Here we are, right back in the Victorian small town, where life is segmented by stone walls, hedge rows and gloppy English bogs ( Saw? What Saw?). The movie does this setting perfectly—every chamberwick and copper pot is perfectly placed and weighted. Even the wood panels lining a train car evoke an emotional response. Radcliffe's character, a grieving solicitor struggling to support his son after the wife dies in childbirth (another fun Victorian fear) finds himself in precisely the sort of situation one would encounter before solar-powered GPS systems and turbo engines and Gchat: He must travel to a remote village to settle the estate of a now-deceased widow. Her house, natch, is a repository of undead angst located smack in the middle of a fog-infested moor. Kudos to the prop designer for assembling this gothic paradise, where even the sconces ooze creepiness. One plot point revolves around the single scariest collection of toys since Poltergeist—it's a virtual madness menagerie (which presents the question, how was every nineteenth-century child not frightened into a coma by age 4?).

Radcliffe and his spectral companions usher us, the tech-saturated seen-it-all generation, back to this perfect era just before communication and transportation blew up and spoiled all the ghostly fun. WIB proves a valuable point: that modern moviegoers can be entertained by a man, his mutton chops, and a fantastically spooky house. The film contains no huge surprises, and there aren't SUPPOSED to be any—you know when Radcliffe looks in the window and the director cuts to an external shot of his face that a ghost will pop out behind him. But it's STILL SCARY ANYWAY. For the simple reason that we are human beings, and we possess a nervous system that responds in predictable ways to an established set of stimuli. If you prime us with 20 minutes of ominous music and creepy imagery and then slap a ghost in our faces, WE WILL BE SCARED, whether we like/admit/Tweet it or not. We can still participate in that delicious shared experience of humanity, iPhones be damned.

Granted, none of this would work quite so well if we weren't already enraptured by all things Victorian. When our new cultural obsession is a PBS series in which liveried butlers iron the morning newspaper, you know we're in nostalgia territory. Which, in my view, is a lovely thing. Perhaps we're tiring of our information being delivered on an instantaneous basis. Perhaps we're sensing there's a wonder being lost in always having answers at our fingertips. Perhaps we can't learn EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS from RSS feeds. Maybe we still want to MARVEL AT SOMETHING. Even if it is a beleaguered Harry Potter with mutton chops.

This film gets four bloody chainsaws (out of five)—or if you'd rather, four drippy candelabras. Vive le Victorian!

Melissa Lafsky is pleased to have been scared by your movie.

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Even among music fans the name Ronnie Lane doesn't come up much. I'm not sure why. He was an original—"the East End urchin with the pastoral vision," as Mojo put it —and about as unlikely a rock figure as you're likely to find. The bassist and songwriter for British bands the Small Faces and the Faces, Lane gave it all up for a curious (to put it mildly) solo career: he ran away and formed a circus. But then he never had been a good fit for heady 1970s rock stardom: consider the fact that while the other members of the Faces were buying mansions and Rolls Royces, Lane remained in his £7 a week apartment in the uber-British-sounding town of Twickenham. And while the Faces toured America in private jets, Lane drove with his family from city to city in a Land Rover.

The Faces had formed in 1969 as a successor to the Small Faces: singer Steve Marriott had gone off to form another group, and in came vocalist Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood. After four strong albums Lane left the band, unhappy that they were increasingly perceived as "Rod Stewart and the Faces." After this departure, Lane made his best (and least remembered) music. It was a short, fascinating and, ultimately, tragic career—and it was largely received with indifference. As his friend Bucks Burnett said, "Ronnie Lane entertained, and the world—for the most part—yawned." But Lane must have known something like that could happen: he named his post-Faces band Slim Chance.

You may actually be familiar with one of Lane's best songs. That would be "Ooh La La," and if you do know it, it might be because of the movie Rushmore. The bittersweet Faces song was an appropriate closing track for not only Rushmore but for the Faces' final album as well. It's Ron Wood, not Lane, who sings the version above. Here's another version with Lane singing.

It was after this album, also titled Ooh La La, that Lane exited the Faces. So what do you do once you've left a lucrative, world-touring British band at the height of their massive popularity, bearing in mind that this is the 1970s? If you guessed, "buy some land on the English-Welsh border and sink all your money into a ruinously expensive traveling circus and musical act (plus an Airstream converted into a mobile recording unit)," you'd not only be correct but remarkably precise. A circus complete with barkers, lion tamers, musicians, and regrettably "the world's unfunniest clowns" was the "only answer," Lane told Circus (a music, not big top, magazine).

The assessment in Mojo was a little different: they called it "a grand yet foolhardy undertaking." However you see it, the circus was certainly fitting for Lane, who by all accounts was a charming rascal of the highest order, given to playfulness and pranks. One of his funniest: in his early days working at an electronics factory, Lane would lock himself in a soundproof testing room with a coffee and the paper; when someone banged on the door demanding he open up, Lane would wriggle out of the room through a hole he'd cut in the wall, sidle up behind the person knocking, and say, "Are you looking for me?" Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Lane was born on April Fools' Day.

While his first single "How Come" was a hit, coming in at #11 on the charts, things generally had a way of not working out for Ronnie Lane. He failed to achieve a crucial second hit with "The Poacher": when Lane was to perform the song on Top of the Pops the BBC cameramen went on strike, causing the song to languish and barely crack the Top 40. (The above video is from a later performance.)

But Lane was anyway busy with The Passing Show, his traveling circus, and when he wasn't on the road he herded sheep and played music on his hillside. Not only did he play on the that hillside, he recorded there too: on his first album with Slim Chance, 1974's rustic, wheat-between-the-teeth Anymore for Anymore, you can hear band members' children running around and shouting.

Lane eventually had to shut down the circus. Given all those performers and trucks and tents, the Passing Show was the exact opposite of profitable. Lane did manage to earn some money, and a few rock history footnotes, by renting out his Airstream recording studio: Led Zeppelin recorded part of Physical Graffiti and the Who part of Quadrophenia there.

Soon things changed dramatically. After releasing two more excellent Slim Chance albums, Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance (1975) and One for the Road (1976), Lane began work on an album with Pete Townshend. During the recording of that album, the critically lauded Rough Mix, it became apparent that something was very wrong with Lane. As recounted in The Passing Show, a BBC documentary, Eric Clapton noticed his friend's problem when Lane was onstage: "He wasn't actually hitting the strings... it was sort of just hovering above." Townshend saw it too: "He couldn't balance, he couldn't stand up, and I just thought he was drunk." Lane, who certainly loved a tipple, wasn't drunk: he had multiple sclerosis.

Thus ended his most creative and productive years. (He managed to release one more album in 1979, See Me, but it's his least engaging.) Lane experimented with various treatments—including injections of snake venom—and in hyperbaric oxygen therapy he found both physical relief and a new cause. With an eye towards opening a London hyperbaric oxygen chamber Lane organized a benefit concert with some of his friends, among them Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, and Glyn Johns. The 1983 Royal Albert Hall concert was such a success that they took the act to America, but (to make a sad story short) Lane entrusted the proceeds to a charity (which he helped found) run by an MS-afflicted attorney with a penchant for misappropriation. Lawsuits, countersuits and vanishing funds: it was all a great embarrassment for Lane.

Lane lived out his final years in Texas and then Colorado. Completely robbed of his musical gifts with the exception of his voice (itself greatly damaged) Lane performed from his wheelchair in small clubs. Playing with local musicians he became something of an Austin institution. Throughout Lane kept his humor: asked how his treatment was going, he would joke, "Well a mosquito bit me this morning—and it died," and when President Reagan sent a personal letter Lane claimed to have celebrated by snorting coke off of it. But despite his humor Lane was obviously suffering. When he heard about the 1991 death of his old friend and band member Steve Marriott, who burned up in a house fire, Lane responded, "I'm jealous."

But let's go back a bit, shall we, and end things on a more positive, Lane-esque note. What follows is, to my thinking, the strongest available Ronnie Lane performance. Lane was always an eager and engaging performer, but I don't think he gets any better or more soulful than he does here around the 3:00 mark.

It's a song that should play in every pub at the end of every night. The best for last. One for the road.

Josh Lieberman holds a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution. He recently wrote about lost travel writing for the Paris Review Daily.

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Reading a transcript of the speech is probably more comical than it should be, or than it would have been at the time. Having concluded from the fact that he wasn’t dead that the bullet had not penetrated any vital organs, Roosevelt spent the better part of the first half of his prepared remarks assuring the alarmed crowd and the various dignitaries and medical personnel pleading with him to leave the stage that he was not dying and in fact not much affected by the bullet wound. “Don’t pity me,” he said, “I am all right. I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to the speech either.”

The character named Teddy Roosevelt—the blustering, mustachioed bull moose caricature that posterity has given us—tends to shine through here. Only Teddy Bear the Rough Rider, the red-blooded man’s man, would have endured a gunshot wound to deliver a speech in which he somehow tied the attempt on his life to the Taft/Wilson Republican regime’s attempt to disavow worker’s rights and assassinate the former president’s character. Only the notoriously long-winded Teddy Bear would have been saved from death partially by the thickness of his speech manuscript, which was folded into his jacket pocket over his right breast where the bullet struck him. Only Teddy Bear, fiery activist and intimidating orator, would never let a bullet’s progress inhibit the chance for real social progress.

The image is a dream, of course, but it’s always been a compelling one, more so now because one can hardly imagine such a person existing, or such a thing occurring, in modern politics. There are no Roosevelts in either the Republican or Democratic party of today, even among those who invoke him. Such booming candor would hardly be appreciated on the eggshell-laced floors of Congress, where integrity has been been traded out the market door like so much speculation on rotting fish. Is there a man or woman in our assembly of politics who one could see standing next to Teddy on that platform, crippled from relentless attack, but spurred on by the sheer volume of their ideas and their will to push the country forward? Gabrielle Giffords comes to mind, but her story has already been wrapped, neatly bowed, and forgotten at the department of public inattention.

Everyone plays the game the same old way, not applying the lessons of history, but admiring them in a china display of fragile, pretty ornaments to be used when campaign funds dry up. Yet in the back of the cupboard on some glazed filigree of the past, a scene is illuminated in which a bespectacled man reads out to a gathered assembly of concerned American laborers a plan for labor rights and fair economic play, in the state where almost a century later, concerned laborers would again gather in protest against the belligerence of Republican authority—the authority which the bespectacled man had abandoned a century earlier for a now oxymoronic progressive-conservative tandem agenda.

Roosevelt excoriated the party which he had abandoned, and which he felt had abandoned him. “But while they don’t like me,” he said, “they dread you. You are the people they dread. They dread the people themselves, and those bosses and the big special interests behind them made up their mind that they would rather see the Republican party wrecked than see it come under the control of the people themselves.” He probably didn’t even need the bullet-shattered notes in his bloodied coat pocket. The bull had steam, and the hunt was on. “There are only two ways you can vote this year,” he said. “You can be progressive or reactionary. Whether you vote Republican or Democratic, it does not make a difference, you are voting reactionary.”

The cycles of economic crisis precipitated by political ineptitude, followed by the typical blind swing at the nothing of reactionary politics, are well chronicled, to the point that we can look into the reflection of “I have just been shot” and witness the faint outline of our own moment a century later. Republicans, it turns out, haven’t changed that much. The Perrys and Romneys might as well be the Tafts and Wilsons, as beholden to oil and other special interests near the end of their influence as their predecessors were at the beginning (Perry in particular is a bath tub away from infamy). Their voices are interchangeable, monotone, and more those of David and Charles Koch than the otherwise well-meaning Tea Party stooges, who unwittingly voted more money out of their own bank accounts and into those of the wealthiest because they were scared into believing that “progressive,” a word that essentially describes the course of human events that led to their existence, is wrong. In response to this insult, the Democrats have once again disappeared to wherever it is they go, leaving a would-be progressive president to weather a reactionary battery of frantically backward-receding minds (think not of 1912, but of 912). Meanwhile, as winter comes on, Occupy Wall Street, a genuinely progressive movement, struggles with how to proceed or communicate its complaints against a conservative business class whose impaired empathy and endemic contempt for the poor have finally been stripped naked in the public square.

All around us in politics and business, we witness the reactionary—the dread by those in power that the people of this country might not actually like things as they stand. This is as it should be. But where is the voice of reason, haggard from wounding, that nevertheless rings out? Roosevelt the Republican was no perfect president. His jingoistic bravado and imperialistic tendencies softened the bite of his more democratic beliefs. For all his trust-busting, he was at base a conservative with a mind toward expanding American commerce by any means necessary. Likewise, though he loved nature, his enthusiasm was somewhat undercut by his penchant for hunting endangered species.

Still, it was his belief in commerce that pushed him to improve the lot of the average American. It was that same zeal that caused him, an environmentalist Republican, to take the advice of noted hippie scientist John Muir in the matter of conserving natural resources and preserving national park lands. It was Bull Moose Teddy who finally broke away from the establishment, pushing the phantom third party platform that still has no foothold to this day, campaigning tirelessly for the “square deal” he planned to make with all Americans. And then he was shot.

Many of us have been shot, too, many, many times, again and again, in the same exact place. But like Roosevelt, we stagger to our feet after each blow, mindful that we are still alive, though the wound gapes ever wider. Our own speeches have changed over the years, shrunken down now to fit the economy of social media and the various factions which claim pieces of it. One version says, “We are the 99%,” while another cries, “Don’t tread on me.” One’s enemy is big business, the other’s is government. Both decry corruption. Our collective sighing is the echo of one weakened voice nevertheless booming out over the heads of a Milwaukee crowd 99 years ago. “I do not care a rap about being shot,” it says, “not a rap.” Let the hunt begin.

Erik Martz is a writer living in Minnesota, where a famous president once implored state fair attendees to “speak softly and carry a deep-fried candy bar on a stick.”

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If you'd asked me at the time why the bureaux de change had shut down, I'd have had absolutely no clue, nor did I spend any time wondering about it as we wandered, hungry, about various piazze looking for somewhere to get lire. The fact that my holiday had been financed by the U.S. Air Force didn't occur to me as being in any way related. But the "Nixon Shokku", as the Japanese called it, was a historic event. It marked the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system put in place by a passel of politicians and economists at a conference in New Hampshire some 27 years before, in 1944.

The idea of Bretton Woods was to create stable exchange rates to facilitate international trade and forestall the competitive devaluations that had helped destroy it in the 1930s. The way they did it was to fix the dollar to gold (at $35 per ounce) and fix all the other currencies against the dollar, so anyone wanting to do business with another country would know how much it was going to cost him. If you were a foreign central bank, you could, if you wanted, convert your dollars into gold, so really every major currency was indirectly tied to gold. The U.S. at that time owned about 65% of the world's gold reserves, and was required by the Federal Reserve Act to allow no more than four times that amount in circulating dollars. Most of the dollars, obviously, were owned by Americans, and Americans weren't allowed to convert their dollars into gold—in fact, it had been illegal since 1933 for Americans even to own gold other than in jewelry or numismatic coins. So nobody had much doubt that if he wanted gold instead of dollars the U.S. was good for it, and so nobody really bothered converting their dollars to the less convenient gold. Bretton Woods also created the IMF, whose job was basically to make sure the member countries didn't endanger their exchange rates by irresponsible spending—a sort of international "fiscal union" much like what they've been talking about recently in Europe.

As proprietor and printer of the world's reserve currency, the U.S. wasn't behindhand in spreading it abroad. There was the $13bn Marshall Plan, which, together with $12bn in previous aid, revived Europe and so created markets for U.S. goods. (This may not sound like much now, but bear in mind, U.S. GDP at the time was between $220bn and $270bn, and the entire Federal budget in 1948 was about $30bn.)

Then there was a lot of spending on military bases and a flood of foreign investment by U.S. corporations building up their international operations. Still, people didn't really start to worry until the late 1950s. Beginning in 1959, there was a distinct tendency for the foreign central banks, suspecting the dollar was overvalued, to show up at the "gold window" and demand gold for their increasing piles of dollars. Vietnam and the Great Society programs didn't help: The Federal budget more than doubled from 1960 to 1970. The amount of freshly minted dollars grew so much that, in 1968, Congress had to repeal the law restricting circulating dollars to four times the gold reserves, allowing the U.S. Treasury to keep printing. Which, of course, worried the foreign central banks even more. When foreign finance ministers whined about the growing level of dollar-induced inflation, Nixon's Treasury Secretary, John Connally, famously told them the dollar "may be our currency but it's your problem." (Yes, the same Connally who got shot in JFK's Dallas motorcade. By some accounts, he was also, indirectly, indispensable to the election 30 years later of George W. Bush.) Not surprisingly, the foreign central banks kept coming. By 1971, U.S. gold reserves were down from 65% of world reserves to 25%. Nixon was facing re-election in 1972 with unemployment and inflation at vote-squashing levels, and the overvaluation of the dollar tied to gold—though it had been an immense boon to U.S. corporations by enabling them to buy foreign assets on the cheap—was crimping his ability to stimulate the domestic economy.

And so it all snapped that August. Allegedly, it was triggered by a British request to reactivate the Fed's swap lines and cover hundreds of millions of dollars they had absorbed in keeping the markets orderly. These swaps were essentially a guarantee against loss due to dollar devaluation and had been used for years to prevent too much depletion of the US gold reserves.

Connally, however, told Nixon it was a request for $3bn in gold—about a quarter of the remaining U.S. reserves—a story repeated by Nixon in his memoirs. "All Connally had to hear was that some limey wanted gold," according to Charles Coombs, a New York Federal Reserve official, and his mind was made up. Connally persuaded Nixon to default on Bretton Woods and put the blame on "an assault by international speculators"—the European and Japanese. They didn't even tell the Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. And certainly not the fiscal police, aka the IMF. For good measure, Nixon also imposed a 10% surcharge on imports. Politically and economically, the default and attendant measures turned out to be a brilliant move.

No wonder there was deadlock in the cambio. Suddenly, nobody knew what the exchange rates should be. How many lire for your French francs? Shrug. We were a little weary of hitchhiking by this time, stuck in Bologna on a rainy Sunday evening with too much baggage, no map, no phrase book, not a word of Italian and no clue how to find the road south to Brindisi, where you could catch a ferry across to Corfu and Greece. Fortunately, Charles, who was a worried, conscientious sort of bloke, had taken the precaution of buying some lire before we set off from London. It wasn't much, but enough to get us on a decrepit wooden-benched train as far as Bari, about sixty miles short. Bari, across the Adriatic from our goal, turned out to be an exceptionally desolate, parched little seaside town, with oil storage tanks and threatening-looking yobs in tight trousers. We spent our last few lire, after sweatily debating in the August sun, on a delicious-looking iced drink which turned out to be all but undrinkable. (All flash, these Italians, Charles decided). Fortunately, the Nixon shock soon passed, the money-changers became more affable, and, a few spaghetti bologneses later, we found ourselves in Athens, camping on the roof of the Hotel Sans Rival. It was mobbed with fellow travellers attracted, like us, by the price—about 5p (roughly 11 cents) a night¹, as I recall. You could share a room for about 25p, but only Americans could afford that, and the roof was wall-to-wall sleeping bags and European longhairs, transients en routeto and from the islands via the port at Piraeus.

All in all, it wasn't a great trip. We got stuck in a lift for an hour in Athens in the middle of a blazing heatwave. On the ferry over to Mykonos, someone on the deck above puked on my head and there was nowhere to wash my then-copious hair. I didn't even meet any girls, let alone find a Shirley Valentine type romance. For a ridiculous technical reason, few of the photographs I took with my prized 35mm Voigtländer rangefinder came out. Really, overall, a bit of a bust.

Forty years on, with Greece and Italy threatening to throw the international banking system into fresh turmoil, there is some added resonance to this little episode. The Greeks now owe a lot of Euros which they have no means to pay. A lot of that debt is held by Greek banks, which means that those banks are effectively bust. The Greeks themselves are very sensibly withdrawing Euros from their accounts, which puts those banks in a very tight spot. Quite a lot of the Greek debt is owned by German and French banks, so their ability to lend is severely curtailed, exacerbating an ongoing credit crunch which will undoubtedly provoke a recession in Europe next year. Then there's the problem of the Credit Default Swaps (CDSs), which are essentially guarantees of the Greek debt. Nobody seems to know who undertook those guarantees (AIG? Goldman?) or how much is outstanding, but if the Greeks default (and there's a very indignant debate about what "default" means here) they'll be on the hook for the difference between the actual value of the Greek debt and its face value. The shakiness of the German and French banks, together with the CDS threat, may in turn endanger the US banks. (You can play this by buying one of the short financial ETFs, like SKF, with the risk that they might default too.) And then there's the possibility that the same thing will happen to Italy and Spain, whose debt is much more ginormous than the paltry Greek debt. The debacle has already claimed one U.S. victim—Jon Corzine's MF Global, which had $11.5 billion of Italian, Spanish, Belgian, Portuguese and Irish debt (hedged down by some unfortunate counterparty to $6.4bn)—with knock-on effects to its lenders.

Angela Merkel, the German premier, must surely see an opportunity here to put Germany, de facto, at the head of a fiscally integrated European Union with legal authority by treaty over all Euro country budgets. The Brits threw a spanner in those works with their recent veto of the proposed treaty. Nicolas Sarkozy, in France, is wary of full fiscal union, perhaps because France might become its victim if its credit rating is cut, but would still like the EU to have enough clout to make sure the Greeks pay the French banks what they owe. The European Central Bank, which is like the Fed only without the accompanying ability to control national budgets, is ostensibly refusing to come to the rescue by being a lender of last resort. (Except maybe through a back door: its wily new chief, Mario Draghi, is, after all, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs). The Europeans are left with a relatively small "stability fund" (joke!) and our old friend the IMF.

The Greeks have an overvalued currency but no ability to become more competitive through devaluation, except by abandoning the Euro, which would leave them just as poor but without any of the huge advantages of sharing a common currency. (Imagine a United States where you had to change currency, at some unpredictable rate, every time you transacted across state lines). The fiscal police, which in this case means the various European financial authorities as well as the IMF, are only willing to bail them out if everybody tightens their belts. The Greek government, without getting any definitive consent from the Greeks, has agreed to sell off the country—or at least much of its transportation, utility, energy, telecomm, gaming and real estate assets—to foreign (read German/American?) interests in order to help pay their debts.

In short, the Greeks are kind of in the same spot as the U.S. was in 1971, only without the massive economic clout which forces everybody else to forgive them.

But you might as well be poor in Euros as poor in New Drachmas. Even if the EU throws them out, there's nothing to stop the man in the street using Euros, or, pace Gresham, having dual currencies (like, say, Zimbabwe). Putting myself in the shoes of the average Greek, I'd be inclined to do what Nixon did: Default and everybody can go to hell.

¹ By my calculation, adjusted for inflation that would be about 57p today, or around 60 to 90 cents, depending on how you do it.

Carl Hegelman (a pen name) is a corporate bond analyst and a connoisseur of leisure.

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It was the oddity of the singer’s name and his striking picture that enticed me to buy his first CD with not even a minute between first look and printed receipt. What I heard when I popped the CD into my stereo was astounding and peculiar, a heady mixture of Jon Brion-produced clangs and strums and insistent beats. But most of all, there was that voice, a robust croon that was somewhere between two Kings—Nat Cole and Carole. I had seldom heard such a distinctive tone, deployed by someone whose music was, as many critics attested, a worthy heir to that of the Tin Pan Alley era.

That debut effort, though thrilling and highly ambitious, was merely an aperitif to the gorgeous album that would follow. Poses somehow manages to portray exactly the kind of disillusionment—born from an air of glamorous emotional detachment—that embodied New York in the summer of 2001. Beautifully enough, it did not lose its relevance afterwards; it still shows how the landscape of one’s romantic devastation persists despite all larger events. Knowing the potentially superficial tendencies of his concerns, Wainwright nevertheless finds fair weight in them, making songs that read specific and universal at the same time. Yes, it is very much about Rufus Wainwright, troubadour and gay man-about-town, but it captures the milieu of New York at that time with the utmost breadth and accuracy.

The summer of 2001 was, after all, most surely a Rufus Summer. Not only had Poses come out, but, in an inspired pairing, Wainwright had taken part in the most flamboyant melee of the season, Moulin Rouge! On that film’s soundtrack, he sang a plain but beautiful rendition of “Compliante de la Butte” (a song that, Wainwright himself noted, often became misunderstood as “Complaint of the Butt”). That summer, it felt like every gay boy in the city had a Rufus crush. He had become our pied piper, the boy who could appear in a variety of gay venues and hold court at them all. Britney was still dancing up a storm, and the height of J. Lo’s reign was imminent, but it was more comforting to see one of our own get up on stage with a piano and a guitar—and an unapologetic queeniness—and rack up the accolades.

I bought a ticket that summer to see him open for Roxy Music at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. There I was, dorkily waiting in the lobby to have Rufus sign a T-shirt for me. When he spoke, I felt like I was still an adolescent, back home in my bedroom with posters on my walls and my mom cooking dinner downstairs. (This feeling would be multiplied ten-fold that fall when, miraculously enough, Wainwright visited my college campus and I got to interview him at-length for our school paper. Rarely have I felt like so dithering an idiot.) He had adopted a signature look by then, which usually involved a flowing shirt and tight pants and an inspired collection of accessories, and against the leather pants and spiked hair and punked-out style of the Brian Eno devotees at the show, his persona still managed to stun. “Who,” I thought, in a turn of mind that occurs with the most besotted of admirers, “could wrong a person like this? Who could possibly break Rufus’s heart?” The sprawling “Evil Angel,” in which Wainwright recounts an aborted tryst with a lover who promptly disappears, seemed especially cruel. It seemed clear to me that anyone capable of treating him in such a manner was malignant indeed. The same sentiment defines “The Tower of Learning,” a wonderfully modulated piece of music that builds and builds until it practically shatters with longing and the disappointment of unrealized love.

Still a great deal of the allure of Poses derives not from what others to do Wainwright but what he does to himself. The album—and this would be true of the albums to follow it—is quick to admit that the person who breaks Wainwright’s heart is often Wainwright himself. In it he confesses to a fair share of hedonism and masochism; “cigarettes and chocolate milk” are not foisted upon Wainwright, but are willfully chosen by him. The title track continually trains its blame on the singer himself; he is his own cautionary tale. This was, self-reportedly, a time of much wanton drug use for Wainwright—he had written the album while staying in the Chelsea Hotel, so—and the album is the firmest craft of a poete maudit. (When Wainwright recasts the chorus of “Rebel Prince” in French, late in the song, he might as well be inscribing his name and a date on a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems.)

One of the album’s most poignant moments occurs when Wainwright covers “One-Man Guy,” written by his father, Loudon Wainwright III. A brilliant (if borderline misanthropic) ode to living by one’s own rules and habits, it is remarkable not only for the way in which the younger Wainwright flips its sexuality for comedic effect but for the bookend it seems to create: here is a perfectly written song, via pere, that foreshadows all that is possible from Wainwright fils. When the tenderly rendered “In a Graveyard” follows suit a couple of tracks later, we yet again understand the surety with which the younger writer takes inspiration from the older. It is similarly rich yet reserved, and as with many songs on the album, it deals with mortality and other weighty matters so smartly that it reinforces the album’s status as a tool of catharsis and confession.

Take, for example, the deceptively buoyant “California.” Although Wainwright’s songwriting ability has been compared to that of Joni Mitchell, this song is decidedly the opposite, in spirit, to her song of the same title. The Sunshine State, in Wainwright’s view, is hardly “home” but a freon-fueled mess hall of vapid, self-conscious poseurs (sure). There’s hardly a more damning conclusion than “Life is the longest death in California,” but what a deliciously delivered pronouncement it is: Wainwright’s specialty is the beautiful pain behind the bruise. The song’s gift lies less in its misery than in the insidious glee of its tune. If New York brings out the brooding sweep of Wainwright’s voice and lyricism, then California shellacs his melancholy and shoves it out with a bright fuck-you.

There is the lovely but anxious movement of “Greek Song” (“I’m scared to death,” Wainwright proclaims), the percussive and insistent thrum of “Shadows,” the courtly love of “The Consort,” one of the album’s calmer moments. But the album’s title song is its most masterful and it captures from head to toe the self-absorption mixed with self-criticism that was the style among gay men at the time. It was the kind of song that you would play to yourself after stumbling home from Beige, the long-running gay party that finally met its end earlier this year: a gaggle of suited-and-booted, roving-eyed, antsy-yet-effete gays who could easily fit Wainwright’s profile of having no more grave matter than “comparing our new brand-name black sunglasses.” (Cole Porter comparisons abounded at this stage in Wainwright’s career, and this is a song quite worthy of them, as heartbreaking, aching and needy as Kiss Me, Kate’s “So in Love.”) It has a measured rhythm paired with lyrics as world-weary and contrite as they are tender. The song is sung as an apostrophe—“You said watch my head about it,” Wainwright sighs over each chorus—and the unidentified “you” of the song could, it seems, be a variety of people or things: friends, lovers, New York, desire, identity. The most touching moment occurs when Wainwright sings:, “Now no longer boyish / Made me a man / But who cares what that is.” I would have a hard time naming one of my gay friends who has not felt this interior struggle, this desire to slough off the demands of being a “strong man” while accepting his sexuality. At the same time, it does not capture only a queer sensibility. It is a song that could apply to many a fledgling New Yorker, struggling to reconcile superficial concerns with much deeper ones.

During that luxurious summer of 2001—a far funner recession than the one preceding it and following it—the City teemed with a range of sexual options and experiences, and with that freedom came the accompanying doubts and sadnesses and worries. This is exactly the aura conveyed by the album’s cover. On it, Wainwright's shiny coiffe of brown hair is both combed back and spilling forward; his features are so pronounced and his lips so dark as to be rouged. He hangs his head in profile, in apparently some mixture of remorse, shame and rumination. It is obviously a pose, but one with an earnest bearing to it. It's perfect for an album that aims to address such a wide scope, an ambition that elevates it from being a collection of songs to being a social document. It is a break-up album and a coming-of-age album and a work of singer-songwriter angst and then some; it encompasses a vast landscape of feeling.

And what of New York? With the tumult-ridden year we’ve had, there's a similar blend of melancholy and hopefulness these days. New York seems very much like the former Beale home that Wainwright recasts in “Grey Gardens”: it is a partly abandoned, partly occupied playground, gnarled and labyrinthine but possessed of a simultaneously diverting and unsettling atmosphere. The cliques of New York are as segmented as ever, but there also seems to be a shared sympathy about this, as if we are all aware that the scene is fraught but that we must be resilient. We’re like “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” which not only begins Poses but ends it in a slightly peppier reprise. Wainwright was saying that every period has its challenging foil, that we exist between times of fulfillment and frustration. Put this album on and marvel at its still ferocious presence, its moments of clarity, apology, and romanticism. The deep in which it rolls, as it were, continues to stun.

Rakesh Satyal is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Blue Boy. He also sings a popular cabaret show in New York, an installment of which was “Roofies: The Songs of Rufus Wainwright and Fiona Apple.” Photo by Ben Beaumont-Thomas.

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The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a picture of Bold—he has a dark goatee and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He has a “protest name”—Jez. He's in dark, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans whenever I see him, hair askew, a well-worn nylon backpack slung over one shoulder and a scarf not infrequently tied around his neck. In other words, he looks like any number of people you might have seen at Zuccotti Park. Jez is 27 and originally from North Dakota.

Though he’s been involved in Occupy Wall Street from its inception, Jez isn't a career leftist. His current part-time day job is as a subject librarian in philosophy, at NYU’s Bobst Library—the impulse to collect and curate comes naturally to him. And Jez had an idea that was deceptively simple. He’d collect and catalogue all the signs and pamphlets and newsletters and odds and ends of political art the protests have generated. But preserving all of those for posterity turned out to be, as with all things Occupy Wall Street, more complicated than anyone could have foreseen—not least because the movement itself would have trouble seeing the value of an archive.

My “okay” on the tape sounds decidedly skeptical.

But as Bold continued his explanation, he drew on an idea that doesn't require Derrida’s guidance to understand. Put simply, it’s that the history-defining moment has that same old clichéd quality of pornography: you know it when you see it. However, in the moment it can be hard to grasp the moment, so to speak. You may know that “something happened,” but you might not know what it is.

Bold said he had this sense early on in his involvement in OWS. And inspired by a presentation he’d seen at NYU about the collection of artifacts after the September 11th attacks, he decided to get serious about collecting immediately. He told people he knew in the movement to save their writings and signs. He began carrying stuff home himself.

But—and this he says he took from Derrida too, who wrote a book called Archive Fever—he thought it was essential, if the movement wanted to have some degree of control over how it was recorded and interpreted by historians, to collect their own documents. “So I was like, we have to have our own house, and if we’re going to talk about creating our own history, doing all this stuff ourselves, we have to have our own archives. So I was like, all right, let’s do it.”

When I first met him, Jez was referring to the project as the Occupy Wall Street An-Archives. He had also, of course, started a (sporadically updated) tumblr of that name. But when I asked him if he identifies an anarchist he almost laughed.

“The thing is, I’m not! I never even identified as an anarchist until this thing, where I was like, oh, is this what anarchism is?” he says, his voice rising to a self-critical falsetto. “I guess, maybe I’m an anarchist?”

That ambivalence about anarchist politics, let alone activist politics more broadly, was to become a general theme of the Archives project. Maybe that was inevitable. File boxes and acid-free manila folders don’t usually take center stage at a protest. Everyone’s eyes are on the political ideals, not the filing cabinets—and justifiably so, at the time. Worrying about the archives can seem strangely beside the point—until that is, you read the historian’s account, and can barely find yourself in its reflection.

***

On the evening of October 9th, Jez spoke at a general assembly meeting in the park. He announced he’s been collecting for the movement’s archives. The minutes record him as appealing to the example of the Greeks.

One of the people at the general assembly that day was Amy Roberts. Amy is studying for her master’s at Queens’ College’s library school. She is tallish and slim and has pin-straight, dirty blonde hair. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her wear makeup. Amy is from Wisconsin originally; after an aborted first attempt at college, she spent a few years in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was involved in a socialist group there, and started working at a meat plant as part of an effort to improve working conditions. The management tried to put Amy in a quality control job—“because I was white"—but she wanted to see what the cutting floor was like. She lobbied successfully for a knife job. It gave her carpal tunnel, and tendonitis.

Eventually, Amy moved to New York, getting her BA in anthropology from Hunter College just as the recession hit. Looking at the economy, she made the same decision as so many others: she stayed in school, thinking she’d enjoy being a librarian. But it turned out the librarian market was squeezed too. She got interested in archives because frankly, there were more jobs. So now Amy goes to school, works part time, and plays classical violin gigs. She shows up to meetings, now and again, carrying her instrument. She worries, she told me, because she doesn’t have health insurance and lives with roommates, and she’s now 35.

Amy heard Jez speak that day at the meeting and found him in the crowd, offering to help. Her practical soul had the potential to serve as a great complement to his grand ideas. Soon she too was carting signs on the subway back home to Queens. But it was rapidly apparent that the job of collecting these things, let alone organizing and cataloguing them, was going to take more than one person. And Amy and Jez were sometimes met with resistance; people did not understand why they wanted signs, or why it was important to preserve anything at all.

People throughout the movement were forming what they called “working groups,” which were, more or less, exactly what they sounded like: groups of people interested in doing the same kind of work, organized along non-hierarchical lines. Amy and Jez decided to form one for the Archives.

***

I’d been working part-time at NYU’s Tamiment Library for only a few days when my boss there mentioned she’d heard there was an effort afoot to collect Occupy Wall Street signs and pamphlets. I Googled “occupy wall street archives" and didn’t find much. But one listing for the working group’s first meeting finally popped up. It was on the blog at Amy’s school.

It was only when I reached the park that I realized that the listing hadn’t said where I should go. The library seemed like a natural bet. I began talking with a young librarian, a woman whose name I never quite caught. She didn’t know anything about the archives effort, but started asking me questions about it. Never having had much of a talent for thinking on my feet, I said something about hearing it was a collaboration with NYU.

The librarian’s eyes changed. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I have heard about that. And I have a problem with it, as a librarian. I want to know why we are giving our stuff to capitalist, money-grubbing NYU.”

Soon after, Jez and Amy arrived and introductions made. We took off for the atrium at 60 Wall Street. The atrium (like Zuccotti Park itself) is privately owned public space. It makes for a pretty decent de-facto conference center. There are twenty-odd white plastic tables, and a large complement of matching chairs. The overall aesthetic is best described as early-90s-suburban-mall, complete with palm trees, an ersatz waterfall, and recessed mirror-tiles. Reporters have derived several “isn’t this ironic” stories from the fact that the skyscraper rising above the atrium houses the New York headquarters of Deutsche Bank, but every person down there I mentioned this fact to shrugged. There is wi-fi and a (rather filthy) bathroom. By the archivists' second or third meeting, the atrium was so packed with different working groups that the first order of business was always securing chairs, which one usually had to spend the rest of the night defending.

Since that first meeting, the Occupy Wall Street archivists have met every week in the atrium, on Sundays at 6. Amy and Jez usually “facilitate” the discussion, and as such remain de facto leaders. There were anywhere from four to twenty people in attendance. The group split responsibilities into three streams, the first tasked with the archiving and storage of physical materials, like signs and pamphlets and what archivists call ephemera. A second task was the collection of oral histories. And the third was the archiving and collection of digital materials. The last was immediately taken over by a bunch of students from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program (MIAP) at the Tisch School for the Arts, who arrive en masse to one meeting. There were few agendas and fewer minutes kept, but things trundled along, slowly.

The tone of the meetings was generally professional, particularly when contrasted to the more emotionally charged discussions that were often happening nearby. One night, for example, we were quite near a frustrated argument in some kind of technology group about whether the movement should have a website at all.

Some group members were, like the MIAP students, either current or aspiring professional archivists. But more than a few weren’t. Some just liked making media and wanted to help. Some were academics. Some were just hanging out around the park. One night, at a meeting, a SUNY Old Westbury professor named Samara Smith, who is a sound documentarian by trade and has been especially active with the planning of oral histories, pointed out that this might actually be a boon. Involving non-experts, she said, would make the whole project more democratic and inclusive.

***

James Molenda, 32, is one of the few Archives group members who actually slept in the park on a regular basis. Every time I saw him, during the occupation of the park, he was wearing the same grey wool sweater, a piece of duct tape stuck to his chest. The tape marked him as a member of the Sanitation working group, whose job was trying to keep the park at least minimally clean. James is tall and has sandy-brown hair that he sometimes pulls off his face with a bandanna. He's originally from Indianapolis, got a degree in literary and cultural studies from William and Mary, and he now lives in Brooklyn. James is neither a librarian nor an academic. But you could probably call him a professional archivist, in a sense: he is the managing editor of FOUND Magazine, which publishes found notes and ephemera and is edited by Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner of NPR.

I asked James several times how he identifies politically—and never quite got a straight answer. The first time I met him I asked why he stayed in the park, and he said: “There’s just so much to do here.” Later on he tells me that he doesn’t think of himself as much of a protester, though, like everyone else he knew, he’d been “having really long arguments, and coming to different conclusions about economic policy, and politics, whatever, the types of things people in New York Cities in their twenties, when they’re not fucking partying, rail on about.” And the OWS movement just seemed different to him somehow. “It wasn’t just a march.”

James is, admirably, great at getting stuff done. At the first meeting it was already clear he’d be impatient with things like mission statements, and committee work. But he was full of strategies on how to collect the “sheer bulk” of materials in the park. He spoke of collaborating with Sanitation to get them to pick up signs, but that never quite came through; it’s hard to get them to understand why people might want to keep this “garbage.” Many in the Archives group itself seem to feel the same; most members are more interesting in oral histories and digital archiving. So for the most part, it’s James, Amy, and Jez who collect the signs, picking them up from their owners in the park or rescuing them from abandonment on the sidewalk.

They would then take the signs to the storage space the movement has set up in a storefront at the United Federation of Teachers’ building, popularly known as SIS (Supply, Inventory, and Storage). Archives had managed to secure a small corner for its purposes. The first time I visit the space seems huge and empty. But after a few weeks, the Archives area had been walled-in by boxes containing a donation of what James told me was $86,000 worth of comforters. That seemed like too much money until I saw them for myself, stacked to the at-least-14-foot ceiling.

One night it’s determined the boxes must be moved down the long corridor that snakes through the space. Someone stood, or rather balanced, atop the boxes, which were soft and pliable but heavy, and threw them down. James developed a toss-slide technique that I can only say closely resembles bowling. It inspired laughing and clapping all around. Which I mention only because it was one of those moments of unrestrained joy that might tell you why, despite the police hassles and the tedium of committee work, everyone stuck around.

***

One night in late October, after he’d finished his sanitation shift, James headed over to the cardboard recycling hub in the park, where he'd had luck finding good signs in the past. Seeing a set of ten or so that appeared bound together, he started to pull them out of the bin. Suddenly, he felt someone hip-check him and arms circling around to wrench the signs away. “That was the first time anyone at Zuccotti Park had really been aggressive about anything other than, I don't know, hating Michael Bloomberg or being disgruntled that the Kitchen wasn't serving food at 3:30am,” he later told me. The man was tall and lanky and had glasses and dark hair. He was perhaps in his late forties.

James tried to reassure this curious assailant that it was all right. He merely intended to save the signs for the Archives, he explained.

At this the man, whose name turned out to be Tommy Fox, replied: “No, it’s fine, I’m collecting archives.”

And then he left, taking his signs with him.

Amy and Jez ran into Tommy Fox too, some time later. Jez spoke to him, and asked if collaboration was possible. Tommy Fox refused. His stated grounds were that the signs were too important for history to give away. A rumor went around that he was working with the Smithsonian. Tommy Fox became an agenda item at the next meeting of the Archives working group: “The Rogue Archivist.”

I tried, for the purposes of this article and frankly to satisfy my own curiosity, to find Tommy Fox. But for a long time people thought his name was Tommy Knox, and only recently did I learn otherwise, so my efforts were stymied. Other journalists have run into him though—he is one of the drummers, 54, and this purports to be a picture of him, from the back. I called the Smithsonian, and they checked with their curators, who said the name didn’t ring a bell, and that they do not generally “outsource” their collecting. Perhaps Fox merely meant to donate the signs to the Smithsonian, and others misunderstood him. Perhaps it’s all just a rumor. But I have a feeling he isn’t, er, a card-carrying archivist.

The Smithsonian has, however, definitely been down there collecting signs themselves. So has the New-York Historical Society. George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has started up a collection too, though they told The Economist they’re mostly interested in digital materials, as is the Internet Archive. Of all of these bodies, the only one who reached out, directly, to the physical collection branch of the Archives working group is Tamiment. (The MIAP students are coordinating with some of these other institutions on digital issues.)

The entire idea of institutional collaboration is a fraught one. On the one hand, it could open up a world of resources and money. On the other, the longer the group remains independent, the more control it can continue to have over the shape of the collection, and most importantly, future access to the materials. This is a movement that has been heavily informed by the free-culture, open-source philosophy, and the archivists possibly even more so than your average protester. (At one point, while inquiring about Creative Commons licenses, Amy ended up being put in touch with Lawrence Lessig directly.)

When you're with this group, you hear the word “transparency” a lot, and they really mean it. Example: I started recording the meetings soon after I started attending, offering to donate my recordings to the archive itself. The first meeting I recorded ended up being a large one, and the need for some kind of speaking stick arose. After I jokingly gestured to my recorder, the group ended up using it, passing it around and speaking directly into the microphone.

The ideal of independence, though, has been a difficult sell—as has the idea of the Archive itself.

***

The first real hint that the Archives group’s work might not be viewed as crucial to “the movement” came in early November. There is a long and, frankly, boring procedural story lurking in the background here, but suffice to say for present purposes that the movement itself had become frustrated with its primary governing structure, the General Assembly. A proposal to form a second governing body called the Spokescouncil was passed. It’s a representative body, and the representatives are chosen from certain working groups deemed “operational.”

But Archives, for whatever reason, did not get the consensus it needed to be so deemed. (“Operational”-ism, as it turns out, is a highly subjective property.) Several groups, including Sanitation and the Library, voted against it. James was the only Archives member there, and he wrote to me in email afterwards that he “had people talking to me like my parents had just died in a car accident… It's just, ugh, feel like we just got voted off the island.”

The very next night, November 10th, the Archives budget was up for consideration by the General Assembly. The request, which had been discussed and workshopped extensively by the working group beforehand, was for $3,940. Most of those funds were to be devoted to a new, secure storage space. SIS was difficult for members to get into, and there were concerns about climate control to ward off possible mold problems. A large amount of the collection had spent some portion of its life out in the rain.

Amy and Jez got up to present the proposal. “Hi,” Jez yelled, holding a sign with a green lizard on it high above his head. He’d selected it because he wanted to give an impression of what the collection contained. “So we’re from Archives.” Jez told the crowd that the Archives to date had collected 300 signs, showing the diversity of perspectives in the movement. Amy read out the budget, and broke it down for the crowd.

The second the facilitators opened the floor for questions, it was clear that Archives had skeptics. People wanted to know if they had solicited donations, if they’d collaborated with the Internet Archive, if they knew about Tamiment, were Archives coordinating with other institutions to ensure that no duplicative work was being done, and on and on. By the time the facilitators called for the vote the crowd was uneasy. I was so stunned by this turn that James, standing nearby, had to kick me to remind me to raise my hands in the wiggling fingers that indicated an “aye” vote. The budget did not pass, and both Amy and Jez walked away looking ill, extinguished. We ended up drinking away the rest of our evening.

The defeat was made especially bitter by this: right before the Archives budget, the GA considered an emergency request for $29,000 to send twenty OWS protesters to Egypt to monitor the elections. Within three days OWS received a letter purporting to be from some deeply puzzled Egyptians. “Truth be told, the news rather shocked us; we spent the better part of the day simply trying to figure out who could have asked for such assistance on our behalf.” There was talk of overturning the GA’s decision, but ultimately the trip was postponed due to conditions on the ground in Egypt. It’s not clear what the current status of the trip is.

***

When the eviction happened five days later, James stayed until the bitter end, hanging out with a crew of holdouts gathered around the kitchen. He manages somehow to evade arrest.

Amy left the park as the raid was beginning. Later she said she wished she’d thought to take stuff with her, but she didn’t. She just left. The Archives group later tried to recover materials from the warehouse where the NYPD dumped what it had cleared from the park, but it had little success.

Jez was arrested at around three a.m., during the chaos of the post-eviction marches. He was charged with misdemeanor obstruction of governmental authority, and felony assault of a police officer. Because the case is pending, he can’t talk about what exactly happened. It is frankly difficult to imagine him assaulting anyone.

On the Day of Action on the 17th, Amy went on the march and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with the other protesters. She asked some people for their signs. But they are hard to convince, because, they said, “History is now!” Her instinct for preservation was, they thought, premature.

***

Only four archivists showed up to the first Sunday meeting after the eviction. Jez, to whom no one has spoken since the raid, is reportedly out of town. Truth be told, things had been fraying between him and Amy for some time. Amy often frowned while he was speaking at meetings; Jez would talk to her without making eye contact. Jez was mostly interested, it seemed, in collecting the posters and bringing them around to galleries. He’d mention these plans at meetings, although it was never clear when and where he was taking things. His patience for the day-to-day administrative work of running the archive seemed to be running low. I wondered if he’d ever show up to meetings again.

James and Amy were there that first week after the raid, though. So was Shazz (given name: David McNerney), a quixotic figure who joined the Archives group just before the raid. He came in from somewhere out of town (I never quite get a handle on where), and quickly became involved in a number of different working groups. He offered to find the group a donated space, and keeps excitedly speaking of a basement in Harlem he’s found.

The group began discussing how to motivate other protesters to collect things, “people who aren’t insane pack rats,” as Shazz put it. A protester with a reddish beard, someone who had nothing to do with archives, came by to collect a piece of paper from a pad that hangs on the wall.

“Anything that’s written on these should be archived,” Amy deadpanned.

“Are you shitting me?”

“That’s what we do,” Amy continued over the rest of the group’s laughter. “That’s what we do.”

“I disagree heavily with that,” said the interloper, friendly but cautious. “And you know what? If you guys start picking around, like random shit that I leave around… you guys are just creepy.”

“Do you trim your beard over the sink over here, in the bathroom?” Shazz asked. “And what do you do with those clippings?”

“Oh my god,” the interloper said, finally getting the joke. “So now, you’ve got me on your side.”

But he doesn’t quite sound like it.

***

For the next few weeks the Archives group seemed to flounder. James, ever the logistician, began making a catalogue of the current collection. But the promised space in Harlem didn’t materialize. One week no one shows up for the Sunday meeting. The oral history group managed to organize a training, which garnered rave reviews from all who attend, but only a few have been collected so far. Shazz reported to the group that Yoko Ono was donating a piece to the Occupennial, and that she’d specifically asked that the archives keep it, but even if that were true (I requested confirmation from Elliot Mintz, Ono’s publicist, but never heard back), there is no secure area to store such a valuable thing.

I recently asked Smith, the documentarian and oral historian from SUNY Old Westbury, what she thought of the group’s inner processes.

She paused a moment. “I would definitely say that participatory-direct democracy is slow.”

We both laughed.

“But I am not frustrated by that,” she said. These conversations enable careful choices—and that’s important, she thinks.

***

It’s hard to say how many individual artifacts the archive currently holds. Today there are perhaps a couple hundred signs in the collection. There are also bags upon bags of pamphlets from every imaginable advocacy group. There are letters from the piles of mail the occupation received, though Archives does not have the complete set just yet.

The archival impulse is to collect first and ask questions later, and the pamphlets and signs collected represent a variety of viewpoints, some of more obvious value than others:

Due to popular demand, bank transfer day has been extended by me through the end of nov. Show your support. Either pitch a tent or transfer your $

Wes Taylor is a nonce.

When a piece of crap takes a crap, and that crap throws up, then the throw up takes a crap, That's a 401K.

I want to burn Turkish flag.

Vote for Nobody. Nobody will keep campaign promises. Nobody will listen to your concerns. Nobody will help the poor. Nobody will bring the troops home. Nobody cares. Nobody tells the truth. If nobody is elected, things will be better for everyone.

Only about a hundred of the items are catalogued, so far. The group needs to find a space and time to process all the materials. They’ve recently been offered a shared space in Brooklyn Heights, which may mean that they can finally remove the materials from SIS, and from various people’s apartments. They’re continuing to talk to Tamiment about that being the eventual permanent home for the materials, but it’s hard to say what will happen. There is no legal entity at the heart of OWS that “owns” this collection. Whose signature might go on a donation agreement is not clear.

Though it will always be the Occupy Wall Street archive, it’s also still an open question whether these materials, taken together, are representative of the movement as a whole. So much of the collection was done on an ad hoc basis, and a great deal of material was lost in the raid.

But maybe that’s not the right question to be asking. One night in late October, as we were leaving the 60 Wall Street atrium to walk back to the General Assembly in the park, I fell in beside James. He asked me what else I was writing about Occupy Wall Street. I said I was only writing about the archives.

He looked surprised. “But I feel like this is such a small, bookish part of all of this. There are so many other parts to this thing.”

And I knew that. But it also felt like it might be the point.

Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter.

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In November of 1984, Band Aid, an impromptu UK super-group organized by former Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof and pop mercenary Midge Ure, released "Do They Know It's Christmas?" The charity single, intended to aid the famine in Ethiopia, sold 3.5 million copies, making it the biggest-selling UK single until "Candle in the Wind '97." The song's massive success showed that there were sound commercial reasons for marrying pop music to charity causes, a now-familiar union. In this, it preceded, but was ultimately eclipsed by, the American iteration: USA for Africa's "We Are the World." Recorded in January of 1985, the single sold 20 million copies worldwide, a pop phenomenon on a scale unthinkable today. As a song, "We Are The World" is difficult to defend. But as a cultural event it has almost certainly been undervalued, its treacly melody and trite lyrics obscuring any lessons we might learn from it. Pop and politics are in constant conversation, but what happens when they actively collaborate? Who wins, and who loses? And are pop's intrusions into the political realm always regrettable—or can pop culture accomplish things traditional politics simply can't?

"We Are the World" is one of those things that looks great on paper. Consider the personnel: Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Bette Midler, Waylon Jennings, Tina Turner, Lindsey Buckingham, Hall & Oates, dot dot dot, Dan Ackroyd. This lineup outshone even the one assembled in the UK for "Do They Know It's Christmas," which sported a few enduring stars (Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Sting) but consisted primarily of the full lineup of synthpop groups of varying quality (Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Bananarama). And the above-named luminaries merely made up USA for Africa's chorus. The group's principals were some of the biggest stars on the planet: Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones and the man in the glass booth himself, Michael Jackson.

The mega-ness of Michael Jackson in 1985 is hard to overstate. On his way to being crowned the King of Pop, Jackson was much more than just a pop star; he was America's kindler and gentler, moonwalking ambassador to the world, a secular religious figure in the making. Jackson's clout was what made it possible for pop and politics to come together and collaborate. Moreover, his involvement in USA for Africa helped shield the project from charges of self-interest. The major criticism of charity singles was that they weren't about charity at all—see Chumbawamba's "How to Get Your Band on Television" from their album-length riposte to Band Aid, Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records. But such a criticism was hard to level at USA for Africa. In 1985, after all, Michael Jackson was in no need of publicity. Sitting between Thriller and Bad, and only seven months after being personally handed an (in retrospect, regrettable) award from the President of the United States, it's hard to think of any way he could have made his public image more glowingly positive than it already was.

It's worth considering the possibility that he and all the other artists involved (well, most of them) really just did it because they wanted to help people. Jackson seemed genuinely stricken by, and concerned about, the famine in Ethiopia, and for all intents and purposes, he became a political activist on the matter. That neither he nor almost any of the other artists involved (Senator Kenny Loggins, Secretary Tito Jackson) are recalled primarily as political figures today is a reflection of the legacy of "We Are The World." As a political action, it was mostly a failure. But as a pop event, it was a resounding success. The former should not overshadow the latter. Pop does something for us that politics simply can't. It provides that feeling of unity, of togetherness that must ultimately precede any political action. And even if Michael Jackson couldn't give that to Africa, he most certainly gave it to the United States.

You may recall George W. Bush's post-reelection declaration that "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it." Putting together "We Are the World" was Jackson spending the artistic capital he'd accrued over the three years between Thriller the album, "Thriller" the video, and that first moonwalk on "Motown 25." Taken together, these achievements granted Jackson a functional authority, and he used the credibility he'd built up to vouchsafe the otherwise-questionable enterprise of gathering together artists from a bunch of genres and singing a song about African poverty.

As recounted in the documentary We Are the World: The Story Behind the Song and a 1985 LA Times article by Robert Hilburn, the work proceeded in much the same way a Congressional negotiation might: phone calls were made; the particular preferences of individual representatives were considered; favors were called in through a network of power and influence. It was Harry Belafonte, a longtime activist, who, following the success of Band Aid, conceived the idea and used his connections to pull something together. Belafonte brought in an artist manager named Ken Kragen, who recruited two of his clients (Richie and Kenny Rogers). Once Jackson expressed interest, his influence radiated outward and star after star signed on. When the American Music Awards brought everyone to Los Angeles, in January of 1985, the rest came together.

Though the level of talent present was good news for the cause, it caused a lot of worry for the organizers, who had to keep the project's details under wraps (in contrast to Geldof, who had made the recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" a media event in the UK). Said Kragen: "The single most damaging piece of information is where we're doing this. If that shows up anywhere, we've got a chaotic situation that could totally destroy the project. The moment a Prince, a Michael Jackson, a Bob Dylan—I guarantee you!—drives up and sees a mob around that studio, he will never come in." Quincy Jones, Jackson, and the rest of the production team prepped carefully, determining the pair-up of soloists in advance and sending off demos with the admonition to "check all egos at the front door of the studio." As Hilburn reported, "When the soloists began arriving at the studio around 10 p.m., they found their names written on pieces of tape on the floor."

The team also flew Geldof over to lend the project a sense of continuity with "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and highlight the importance of the cause. Geldof said he "was pissed off" that he "had to call them in the first place. After they heard what we did with Band Aid, they should have been calling me. I don't care what they had to do, even if it meant canceling shows. Lives are at stake." This annoyance, however, didn't stop the organizers from using him strategically; the session started with "a moving talk by Geldof, who had just returned from a visit to Ethiopia and reported on the suffering there." Sufficiently chastened, the assembled gentry mostly cooperated.

While the cameras helped to keep egos in check, they also caused problems. According to Hilburn, the first time through the chorus, the men in the group, discovering the key was too high, strained to reach the notes. Given the presence of cameras in the room, this meant that some of the biggest pop stars in the world would be caught on tape singing off-key. Jones had to "diplomatically" suggest the ones having trouble should just not sing for that take. This worked in the moment, but dissent began fomenting during the break. "A few of the men—including Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen—retreated to the far side of the room until Jones called for a more manageable register. After Jennings looked over and saw that Nelson, too, had bailed out, the old outlaw pals from Texas broke into laughter."

Other problems presented themselves but were dealt with diplomatically. As EW reported:

This harmonic convergence nearly fell apart, however, when Stevie Wonder announced the chorus would sing a line in Swahili. Some of the country singers were fit to be tied. Waylon Jennings walked out and didn't come back. Finally a line in English was used instead. At 4 a.m. two Ethiopian women were escorted into the studio. ''Thank you on behalf of everyone from our country,'' one of them said. Almost everybody wept.

The single and album were successful on a scale that's hard to fathom today. Twenty million sales of the single worldwide, the fifth highest-selling single of all time and the fastest-selling single in US history. It won four Grammys, two VMAs, and was considered so important that the American Music Awards didn't even allow it to compete that year. Instead, it was given two honorariums and taken out of the competition. It was inarguably the biggest pop-culture event of 1985, and you can still see its legacy today, if primarily in comedic terms.

As a political action, though, it was less successful. The USA for Africa Foundation did its best, converting donations into a long-term fund. (For some reason, the foundation also flew Belafonte over to Sudan with a planeload of food, medicine and t-shirts.) But the $10 million or so earned from record sales isn't much compared to the amount needed to stabilize an out-of-control national infrastructure—by way of comparison, Ethiopia received $1.6 billion in foreign aid in 2001. Even taking inflation into account, ten million, while a nice gesture, wasn't going to be able to accomplish much.

You could say the larger purpose of the project was to raise awareness of the issue. But even in this regard it's hard to find much to praise. "One hundred years after Africa was divided up by the European colonial powers, the continent is in a state of permanent crisis," begin the liner notes of the USA for Africa LP, and, while that's true, it glosses over more recent, and more relevant, history. The crisis in Ethiopia wasn't just a drought—but a famine, which is to say something caused through human action. Concurrent with the crop failure was a Cold War proxy battle between US-backed rebels and Soviet-backed government forces, a war that consumed a near-majority of the country's GDP, crippling funding for health care or agricultural planning and making distribution of relief exceedingly difficult. People weren't just starving because they didn't have food, in other words. They were starving because the foreign policies of two countries made it very hard for them to have food at all.

And as was pointed out at the time, this was not a problem "We Are the World" seemed interested in addressing. Even worse, the project didn't just ignore this issue—it actively worked to mask it. Though their political purpose was ostensibly to raise awareness of the larger issues leading to famine in post-colonial countries, USA for Africa's materials actively diverted attention away from these issues, holding out false hope of what individuals could accomplish. An insert included with the album, for instance, offered various merchandise the home consumer could purchase, and after describing a $21 USA For Africa sweatshirt as "White, longsleeve, 50/50 poly/cotton," the insert declares: "Your purchase of this item will help feed an African child for almost a month.*"

Note the asterisk. It links to a brief disclaimer: "The net proceeds from your purchase will in fact be used wherever the need is greatest." This shades the truth. USA for Africa was ultimately uninterested in raising awareness of issues about resource allocation in Ethiopia, foreign policy in America or humanitarian aid worldwide. What they were selling instead was a pop-music model of support. Under such a model, you don't mess around with proxies, parties or representatives, budgets or planning—none of that. You find the thing you like and support it directly, and by so doing, you allow it to succeed. USA for Africa wanted us to vote for feeding African babies in the same way we voted for Michael Jackson to become King of Pop: with our dollars.

Politics doesn't work like that. Declaring something to be true does not make it so; desire by itself is insufficient, and simply donating money to feed a starving child is only the first step in a long, unlikely process of getting food to a single child. But you can see why someone like Jackson would want to try. Here is a guy who, through concerted effort, had been able to achieve unthinkable heights of fame; it's only understandable that he might have thought he could literally do anything that relied on bringing people together. Simplifying, cutting to the moral quick, exuding empathy: these had all worked for him before. Jackson named his charity "Heal the World," after all. Not "Help the World," but Heal it, as in fix it completely. It's like naming something the Committee To Make Everything Perfect Forever. It's impossible to accomplish the stated purpose, but it's also hard to argue against.

And that's precisely why it's important to keep pop and politics operationally separated. Politics is the gathering and deployment of resources, the process of finding collective ways to solve practical problems. Pop is the collectivization and activation of sentiment, the best way we have in a secular world to inject higher meanings into our daily lives. Both are entirely necessary for our continued existence, but to pursue the purposes of one realm in the other's space makes for trouble, as when we look to politics to validate our collective identity or to pop culture to show us that YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE in a real-world situation rather than just the world the audience creates for itself. What we can take from the small failure and large success of "We Are the World" is a lesson in why pop culture can be so powerful. It can't get much done, because it's bad with material realities. But this limitation is also freeing. In pop culture, a thing's meaning is whatever we decide it means. And that can be dangerous sometimes, sure. But as a repository for our unquenchable thirst for beauty, for our eternal desire to lie in the light of grace, it's awfully useful.

Jackson's kingship is no idly proclaimed title. In his ability to stand for the soul of a nation, to be the head of state, he stood unquestioned, and he achieved this position not through birthright or blood feud but by making music. How strange that is, and how lovely: for a time, America was represented not by some old fart with a crown but by a man who could sing and dance very, very well. It's easy to stand here and complain about pop's ineffective forays into feeding the hungry or changing the world. But it seems more useful, to me, to think instead about how pop already does make the world a better place without necessarily trying.

Mike Barthel has a Tumblr.

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In response to this fascinatingly worded claim came a link to a brief Times editorial of December 7, 1951. We already know that there was no coverage of Pearl Harbor on the front pages in 1951, ten years later: Japan was already a staging center for the Korean War, and so the Washington Post editorialized that "the Japanese American alliance ought to be maintained in harmony."

But that Times editorial!

When the American people woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, they were living in an age in which there still lingered some of the easy-going optimism of the nineteenth century. They still believed that without too much effort and too much pain things might be made to turn out all right. They knew about Hitler but many of them didn’t quite believe that he existed.

This is a particularly incredible view. (Although it sounds familiar now, too.)

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933; six months later, all other political parties were outlawed. Dachau opened in 1933. Three months after that, Germany left the League of Nations. In 1935, Jews were made non-citizens and "inter-marriage" was outlawed; forced abortions began. Kristallnacht was in 1938. Polish Jews were forced into labor in 1939. Shortly thereafter, Germany was going broke because of its preparations for war, yet invaded Poland in 1939, and Norway, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun in 1939, with the U.S. officially joining in 1941, well before Pearl Harbor, and Hitler's invasion of Russia began in summer of 1941.

But did "many" Americans not "quite believe" that Hitler existed when they "woke up" on December 7, 1941?

In November of 1938, the Times carried this: "Nazism was denounced in vigorous terms by spokesmen for organized labor tonight, who called for vigorous measures to meet the conditions existing in Germany." Ah, the head of the American Federation of Labor!

Two months prior, nearly 20,000 people, "many of them obviously of Central European origin," gathered in New York City, in Madison Square Garden no less, to call for help for Czechoslovakia, according to the Times.

And the Times printed part of Rabbi Joseph Konvitz's Rosh Hashanah message of 5699 in 1938.

And what was this round-up of newspaper editorials from Idaho to Minneapolis to Maine, "aggregated" (!!!) in the Times, saying of Hitler and Jews in 1938?

The brutality of Berlin mobs in last week's anti-Jewish demonstrations, reinforced by new and still harsher decrees from the Nazi government, constitute a chapter in modern history which a short time ago no one would have believed possible. Persistent exaltation of might, however, with the fostering of nationalistic bigotry and the throttling of free speech and press, have done their work.

So this 1951 Pearl Harbor editorial was a bit of nonsensical hand-wringing. It was patently not true; it was the sort of revisionist history that takes place when one can't or won't face the truth of one's own very recent history.

And as for Matt Cooper's claim—this is the Matt Cooper that was the politics editor for Time.com and the former Washington bureau chief of Newsweek—that Americans ten years later faced the facts of Pearl Harbor with a "telling" lack "self-doubt," unlike our current approach to 9/11—well, it's 100% hallucination. (Not least because 1951 was the year in which anomie was reinvented with the publication of Catcher in the Rye.)

There was, in fact, "self-doubt" as the Korean War began. (W.E.B. DuBois, then 82, was arrested for circulating petitions against the war; the Stockholm Peace Petition received between 1 and 2.5 million signatures circa 1950.) There was self-doubt in those ten intervening years, even as the "internment" camps opened and then were closed, in 1944, by the Supreme Court. There was, despite the approving opinion polls and media triumphalism afterward, even doubt and hand-wringing about the fire-bombing of Japan and then the use of atomic bombs in 1945. And surely there was some self-doubt after 1953 as well, when more than 40,000 Americans didn't come home.

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One year ago:
• Das Racist: "We're Not Racist, We Love White People: Ford Trucks, Apple Pies, Bald Eagles"
• The Global Casino
• Who is the Greatest Diva of the Last 25 Years? We Offer Scientific Proof!

Two years ago:
• Longplayer: Q-Bert
• The Britney Spears Tailgate Parking Lot, Ticketmaster, Bruce Springsteen, the Death of the Live Music Video and You
• Terror Anniversary Prompts Outpouring of Eloquent Expression

Photo by Thierry Draus.

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In any event, while you mull that, the recently canceled Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park is back on, for September 30th, although the Times requests that you remember that delightful night in 1983, when "hundreds of concert goers were mauled" after Diana Ross' show. That was back in an odd little moment when Diana Ross was sort of... Lady Gaga meets a black Kreayshawn? Important archival video documentation above!

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