Today in photogalleries that I don’t think I’ll be clicking on: “Zoo Animals Face Old Age and Illness”

by Nathaniel Page

On Saturday I left the Brooklyn Zen Center at about two in the afternoon, went down to the waterfront park with my friend Jacob, and smoked a joint. “We should go check out that Occupy Wall Street thing,” I said.

We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and at Zuccotti Park we leaned against a railing and watched protesters pick through a heap of discarded signs in a scene reminiscent of the Rainbow Gathering — tattered tarp structures, five-gallon-bucket drum circles, puffs of smoke rising from clusters of people wearing earth tones. One woman in fishnet stockings held a sign that said “You are Loved.” Some signs condemned the lynching of Troy Davis; others the personhood of corporations. One guy was urging that Kurdistan be set free. One guy was selling falafels.

As we loitered a young woman handed me a flier that described my legal rights and urged me to write down the number of the National Lawyers Guild on my arm.

“You planning on getting arrested today?” I said.

“You never know,” she said.

Just as I was ready to call it quits, a column of protesters began moving north on Broadway. “Wanna go for a walk?” Jacob said.

I fell in next to a hot chick with a designer bag. “This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” a pockmarked, limping man kept screaming from behind me. “This is what Lower Manhattan looks like with a bunch of people in it screaming!” I screamed. Someone tried to give a copy of the Occupied Wall Street Journal to a cop, who said “Sorry boss, can’t take anything. Against the law.”

The cops were standing around us with those “command presence” postures where they take a wide stance, hook their thumbs into their tool belts, and push their pelvises out. I felt good about them being there, initially. I figured they kept the angry motorists we were blocking from running us over.

At the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge half the march headed up the walkway, but I followed the half headed out onto the eastbound roadway. Never seen the bridge from this angle, I figured. Jacob had disappeared. “Whose bridge? Our bridge! Whose bridge? Our bridge!” the crowd chanted. A line of cars crawled along in the rightmost lane, their drivers looking dispirited. A guy pumping a sign that said “NYPD Protects and Serves the Rich” screamed repeatedly “Fuck the rich! Let them pay my tuition! Fuck the rich! Let them pay my tuition!”

A few hundred yards up the bridge, a line of scowling white-shirted police brass blocked us. The protesters came to a stop and looked around uncertainly. A bald guy wormed up next to me. “I gotta get rid of this bong,” he said.

“Drop it over the edge,” I said. I looked down. We weren’t quite over the water yet. A group of metal workers were fixing an overpass on the FDR, and one of them looked up and pumped his fist at us, working the crowd into a frenzy. All the rest just kept grinding and welding.

Bong Man did something with his bong, then pissed in a water bottle and stuck it in a crack between two girders. Meanwhile, the cops wrapped up a heated argument they were having amongst themselves, ripped a prominent protester from the front of the crowd, and roughly pinned him down.

I climbed onto a railing and peered back: another row of cops had blocked our retreat. The crowd began to press into itself; garbage and contraband appeared at its fringes. A cop with a video camera kicked at a vial of white power in the gutter. “Hurumph,” he said. “I wonder what that is?”

People began climbing back onto the pedestrian walkway. “Stop climbing! Stop climbing!” some people chanted. Others chanted “Let us go! Let us go!” Others chanted “This is a peaceful protest! This is a peaceful protest!” Others chanted “Sit down! Sit down!” Others chanted “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” I was smushed against a young woman in Chuck Taylors who was screaming “What’s the prob-lem? Capital-ism! What’s the solu-tion? Re-vo-lu-tion!”

The police surrounded us on three sides with ski netting. Then a line of Metro buses began backing down the bridge from Brooklyn. “C’mon, guys,” one white-shirt told the others. “Nab ’em two at a time! They’re not resisting.”

Not being in the mood for a beating, I turned around and presented my wrists to a gang of hard-asses in leather gloves and black boots. I was bound tightly in zip ties, and Officer Burke — Badge 14131 — walked me up the bridge, sat me in a row of other protesters, and took my picture with his iPhone. “Don’t worry guys, I’ll take care of you,” Burke told us. He was chubby and soft-faced. “I’ll get you food. I’ll get you water. I’ll get you taken care of.” Next to me was Bong Man, who wore sunglasses and a scowl. While we waited Burke played with his phone, his other thumb hooked in his tool belt. A wide man in an impeccable green suit and a big gold ring sauntered by holding a long umbrella and touching each of his subordinates on their shoulders softly, like a Don Corleone.

The bus said it was going to Bay Ridge, but instead it turned around in Brooklyn, went back into Manhattan, and then began a torturous journey around town. First we went up to Canal Street, then we turned left on Lafayette, then we went right on Franklin, then we went up and headed east on Canal again, then we wound down to Chatham Square, midway between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, which is where Bong Man stood up and announced that he could no longer hold it.

“Shut the fuck up and sit down,” a fat and pasty officer named Pak, badge 4240, told him. “It’s all in your head.” But then Bong Man began urinating in his pants, so Pak and Burke brought him outside and behind a phone booth. Pak cut Bong Man’s zip ties off and tossed them in the street, and then had a cigarette.

“Officer Burke!” said Sam, a computer programmer from New Hampshire. “Please tell Officer Pak to pick up the piece of trash that he has just thrown in the street!”

Bong Man got back on the bus with piss all over his pants. “They didn’t get the cuffs off quick enough,” he said, sitting down next to me. “You can’t just violate people’s human rights like this.”

“You think I wanna be here?” Pak said. “You think I fuckin’ want to be here any more than you?” He stared stonily out of the bus.

We crawled through the police headquarters compound, then continued mysteriously past City Hall. We passed close to Zuccotti Park. “Maybe they’ll just drop us off,” Sam said. But then we got on the West Side Highway and headed north. Most of the protesters had figured out how to fish their smart phones from their pockets by then and were texting and tweeting with their heads craned over their shoulders. Whenever Officer Pak saw someone doing this, he said “You can’t do that,” but Burke didn’t care. Burke offered us chewing gum. He placed it into the mouths of the more amiable protesters.

“If you guys wanna smoke, this is your last chance,” Burke said. A protester volunteered that he had a cigarette in his pocket, and in fishing it out Burke found a can of pepper spray.

“Did you know that it’s illegal in New York State to carry Mace?” he said. He threw the canister out of the bus. Then he held the cigarette for each of his prisoners who wanted to smoke.

We stopped in front of the Midtown Precinct on 54th street and idled for an hour or two, while the bus in front of us flashed the message “Call Cops 911.” A black guy who said he’d also been arrested the night before lead us in modified Civil Rights songs. “If I piss my pants/ I’m going to let it shine/ Let it shine/ let it shine/ let it shine” we sang. Burke disclosed that it was his 29th birthday, and the prisoners sang him “Happy Birthday” while he looked at his iPhone.

It was after about five hours on this bus that a man who said he was deathly allergic to peanuts got up with a panicky expression, his face twitching. There was a commotion. Officer Pak threw a bag of peanuts out the door and threatened to charge another protester with murder. Bong Man said, sullenly, “Officer Pak, I need to take medicine with water. I need water.” Another protester who said that his last arrest involved the unfurling of a banner on a coal-fired power plant claimed to be on the verge of fainting for lack of water. A number of half-baked tits-for-tats about human rights violations broke out, with Bong Man always the pro bono prosecutor and a woman with a jade necklace always the police sympathizer. At one point Pak was seen to provide a protester a sip of water. “Did he just do that?” Sam said.

Out of the bus and in the precinct, Burke became steadily less jovial and more focused on his iPhone. Sam and I were cellies. We hooked our hands out of the bars and stared stoically at the convex mirror in the corner of the corridor. The officer on duty let Sam smoke a cigarette, and Sam tried to convince him to come over to our side, claiming that we would never stop protesting until the whole system had been overturned. “Hey man, you’re alright, man,” Sam told the officer. They agreed that it was really the white-shirts who were to blame for the crimes of the police. Another officer said, “Hey man, I’m from Bed-Stuy, do or die. This is all Saturday overtime to me. You guys just put six hundred dollars in my pocket. Keep it coming, man. I’m really on your side.”

Sam and I were released dead last, at around 3:30 a.m.

I think I’ll sell the shares of Bank of America that I have on Scottrade. I bought them in 2008 when the economy bottomed out, thinking they’d have to rebound from there. Actually they’ve tanked about 60 per cent since then. I can use some of the cash to pay for my disorderly conduct fine.

Nathaniel Page is a writer, cartoonist, psychonaut, businesshuman, and freelance philosopher who lives Brooklyn.

Photo by “sign0fH0pe”.

“No drink right now was providing bonding or solidarity for today’s new generation of upscale, white-collar professionals, college graduates who are superambitious and want to climb up the corporate ladder very quickly.”
 — Douglas Cameron, chief strategy officer for Amalgamated, discusses his agency’s new campaign for Ultimat vodka, which retails for about $40 for a 750-milliliter bottle.

“I’m becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I’m 60.”
 — Is Laura Dern kidding? Serious? No idea!

Hooray! It’s October, which really is a terrific month. It seems to get better and better every year, October. (Or maybe it’s just that all the others get worse and worse, and maybe October does, too. But a bit less dramatically so.) A smarter, more contemplative person might note that as we get older we’re more inclined to appreciate stuff like falling leaves, and the slowing of nature’s life cycles. One might make a date to go walk in the woods somewhere, to take full advantage of this fleeting blip of pleasant weather we get before the gloom and bitter cold of too-short winter days afflict us all with seasonal affective disorder. Again.

A wiser person might breathe in the clean, brisk air, and cherish the simple joys of a warm sweater and a whiskey drink (maybe something cinnamony? or with cloves?) And the warming embrace of a loved one.

A wiser person would understand that such joys are all that we ever have, and that in closing up her shop, and unfurling the palette of fiery color that accompanies this annual turn toward death, nature is reminding us to savor these kind of joys while we can.

But for me, because I am easily amused in the way that Kurt Cobain wished he was (and, I guess, considering all the evidence: Him having killed himself, me never having done so, I suppose I actually should be thankful for this. But, you know, it’s not great.) Because I am this way, because I was born in America, in the state of New Jersey, perhaps more pertinently, and at a certain time in history, because I have a weakness for big, silly, three-chord metal songs and starting-readers-level wordplay, I have to admit that, for as much as any of these other reasons, I love October because of the trite, lug-headed, all-too-easy pun that comes with its name. And the attendant celebration of all things brainless and describable by one of the more broad-faced and overused terms in our increasingly insipid modern lexicon. Welcome, fellow mouth-breathers, to Rocktober!

Does yawning help your brain cool off? Sure, why the hell not.

Absurd Taco Bell Dorito Taco Shell Is Corporate America’s Most Abstract Commentary On The Absence Of Authenticity To Date

“This is really happening.” [Via]

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

We, the undersigned, write to express our outrage with the outcome of the “Doctor Who” season composed of episodes 214 to 223.

There were those who held out hope that show-runner Steven Moffat had a nifty and satisfying plan to resolve the season’s primary opening gambit, which was the killing of the Doctor himself. There was wide-spread appreciation at first for opening a season so audaciously. And along the way, Moffat did himself a service with a strong secondary through-line (though it was somewhat abbreviated and telegraphed, as one can fairly expect in a 13-episode season), by setting to rest the mystery of River Song. Too many mysteries makes a show go blind.

Hopes, as they often will be as a season rounds its two-thirds mark, were high! All the crueler then. In the end, this overall winning premise was settled solely by means of someone writing “INSERT SPACE-TIME GIBBERISH HERE” in the final pages of the book.

The resolution, the jam-packed season finale, was beyond nonsensical. To worm out of its responsibilities, the show made use of the most hackneyed — and then also mismanaged! — techniques imaginable.

The struggle of narrative fiction to entertain and engage viewers isn’t that terribly complicated. Television, mostly, is about heroes. The most-common device of this particular sort of narrative is to engage a hero who must discover the answer to a mystery; the audience is on his or her side as we all seek to solve a problem. (This is a standard practice in “Doctor Who.”) When this cannot be straightforwardly achieved, the trick is often then that the narrative, the program itself, by means of the hero, withholds from the viewer — the poor misguided viewer, who then must operate from a false set of principles to be kept in a state of suspense or concern. This is something Moffat performed successfully in his recent “Sherlock Holmes” for the BBC — because, in that case, the viewer identifies with John Watson, not Holmes, and when sneaky, kooky Holmes lies or obscures or manipulates, as he is already expected to, the viewer is betrayed along with Holmes, who registers that betrayal. In this manner of revelation, the viewer’s sense of being cheated must be outweighed by a thrill, or a relief, or a giddiness — or they must at least have their mind blown.

Otherwise, the narrative unfolding is nothing but a cheap trick, upon which, looking backwards, the entire relation of the action is not only manipulative but revealed as meaningless. Lengthy misdirection is literally a waste of time. The season itself begins to collapse in retrospect — for the events of episode one as we know it transpire “after” the events of the final episodes, and, as is the case with time, what is done is already done. At the risk of sounding very much like Comic Book Guy of “The Simpsons,” we believe that the end of “Doctor Who,” with its “death of time” (by what specific mechanism? It is implied that time is held hostage by conflicting timelines, which any reasonable viewer of the show should realize that the plot of nearly every episode would cause such an event — not least of which, say, the end of last season where the entire universe died and was “rebooted”?) and its substituted switcheroo victim (if TIME actually STOPS to punish The Doctor for not dying (which, ahem), is it really not the case that an automaton wouldn’t be recognized as an impostor?) and its hoo-ha about people touching and time-lines joining and reverting and such (which seems a silly elaboration of the conventional and convenient trope of the troubles of meeting oneself in time travel). And, of course, everyone moping about and pulling a long face so as to deceive these watching powers-that-be, right along with the audience. (And then! The added insult to injury: the old “camera behind a window” trick, while the main characters have a revelation before the viewer.) But there’s more! The worst of it all is that then the menace that created this crisis, The Silence — which is repeatedly referred to as a “religious order” and not a race, although they’re all identical is quite specific and lurid physical affect — is then held over for another season.

No wait, there’s more “worst.” For the whole season is resolved in a way to instill an advanced narcissism disorder in The Doctor. Now he is cast as literally the most important creature in the universe, and the “oldest question in time” is apparently about the nature or identity of The Doctor, and some aspect of his history (perhaps his blameless or not blameless role in the sort-of extinction of his own “race” and the apparently perpetually occurring murder of millions). Just what we needed: more self-regard, more tortured moping from the saddest soul in the universe. God, get off the cross already!

The cruelness to the watcher is one thing, to be expected from a writer’s room that needs to weasel its way through a high-stakes season finale. And the stepping-up of the God complex of the hero is an unfortunate by-product that can and will safely be ignored, likely, in the long view.

But then there’s the ultimate insult: the actual “science fiction” of the enterprise. Of the rules that make a world go round, there are clearly absolutely none. Every season finale ends with a fresh universe, that no one remembers. When anything can happen, and be undone and then done again, nothing matters. This show is now, in a phrase, entirely bound by the non-rules of TIMEY-WIMEY BULLSHIT.

This is a dark moment for the BBC in Cardiff. We hereby demand that Steven Moffat be locked in a lightless, soundless box until the end of the universe. Which could come at any time apparently so maybe he won’t suffer long!

Very truly yours,

Your Viewers

Here you will find a story about a bear eating pizza. There is video! That is one pizza-eating bear!

by The Awl

The Wirecutter is a new website designed to do one thing: to tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment. It is a project of Brian Lam, late of Gizmodo. Do you want to buy a TV? Great: here are the three TVs we endorse right now. Here’s what Brian has to say about the site; here’s the best way to use it.

What it is not is a “gadget blog.” There’s really plenty of those, and they’re great! They cover every rollout, every product, every bit of rumor and whatnot in the tech world. The rest of us really don’t need to know all that. We want to know what the best camera is at any given moment. We just want an informed perspective on what’s good. So it’s a tech site for the rest of us.

We’d like to extend special thanks to Federated Media and to Intel for their support of the launch. Questions? Drop us a line.

Your pals,

Alex Balk, John Shankman and Choire Sicha