Day 9, September 25, 2012: After a few days into OWS people started leaving books around, but it wasn’t until Day 9 that I noticed a “library”, so I wanted to capture a few of the titles that people were sharing.

Day 16, October 2, 2011

Day 20, October 6, 2011

Day 22, October 8, 2011:  My “Faces of OWS” day – an effort to document the diversity of the crowd.  These two were taken in the library.

Day 35, October 21, 2011

Day 42, October 29, 2011 – what must have been the worst day of OWS, the freezing rain, wind, sleet and snow wasn’t going to stop this library worker from looking over the books.

Day 46, November 2, 2011

Day 49, November 5, 2011

Day 51, November 7, 2011 - Writers Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem and Lynn Nottage come to the library for a reading.

Day 56, November 12, 2011 – The library had become its own thing and one of the most prominent symbols of OWS by this point.  Artist Patti Smith, a frequent visitor to the library, bought this more permanent tent structure for it.  Three days later, on Day 59, the camp would be shut down.

Day 59, November 15, 2011 – Where the police are standing had been the entrance to the library.

Imagine a town in Georgia that had a lot of Baptists in it, and they’re against smoking and drinking and all the ways of the devil, which was a growing problem for the town.  Imagine the local Baptist preachers asked the businessmen in the congregation to not sell “liquor and alcohol, tobacco and drug paraphernalia” because it’s not Christian and they believe that debauchery hurts the community.

This might sound like the premise for Footloose, but conservatives Bob Spencer and Pam Geller are incensed.  Because instead of Baptists it’s Muslim preachers in a small town in Pennsylvania making the polite request to their local congregations.

So in an anti-sharia ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ frenzy, Spencer and Geller argue for the right to drink and roll joints (emphasis mine):

Whatever the cogency of their moral critique of alcohol and tobacco, these Muslim leaders are pushing for a solution that is characteristically Islamic: instead of working to teach Muslim youth self-control and the virtues of avoiding drinking, smoking and drug use, they want to make it impossible for them to fall into these vices by making them unavailable. This is the same mentality that, instead of teaching men to respect women and control themselves, forces women to cover themselves up in public, ostensibly so as to remove all temptation.

Their attempt to portray this as a strike for morality and the common welfare falls flat…Muslims are trying to force non-Muslims — in this case, those who live near and patronize these stores — to abide by Sharia provisions, instead of simply refraining themselves from the things to which they object.

That sounds characteristically Christian – America still has blue laws, and don’t even try to get a drink in Utah.   As if she were writing a column for High Times, Pam Geller cried out, “Where’s the rat pack when ya need ‘em? Dino! Frankie! Sammy! What have we wrought?”  Indeed!

These are the exact arguments that proponents of drug legalization have made for years, and they now share common ground with the Islamaphobic movement, all because a couple of Muslims in Chester Pennsylvania asked their neighbors to stop selling hooch, pork and crack pipes.

In a rush to condemn anything Muslims do, it was lost on Spencer what was he was logically arguing:

Here’s the photo:

She had her Flip Camera and interviewed me about what I thought OWS is all about.  I’m not sure if she plans to do anything with the video.

We walked and talked for about 15 minutes, talking about how she doesn’t like Miami (where she lives), her husband, her life in New York in the 1980s, Obama is a Communist…  She is, of course, very nice, even though I find her politics objectionable and uninformed.

Here’s her Wikipedia portrait:

I also ran into artist James de la Vega, who was making signs for the protest:

Click here to follow Occupy Wall Street on my Flickr Photostream for Creative Commons images.

The cops arrested over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters today, and the people on this post are the kinds of people they are slamming around.  Today Zennie Abraham said in a video posted on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s website that the Goethe girl photograph above  has “signaled the start of a movement”:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement has something the Tea Party could never claim to have: hot chicks at its protests quoting Goethe. This woman, photographed by David Shankbone during the protest at Wall Street, looks like a cross between Laura Croft and Norma Jean. It’s possible to see a whole line of fashion spring forward just from this photo – the latest in protest wear.

Additionally she, whoever she is, totally alters the image of the female protestor: gone is the dirty-haired earth girl with hairy arm pits; fashion models take to the streets.

It’s not just the hotty Goethe girl who is down at Occupy Wall Street – here are some photos of the kinds of people the NYPD are arresting:

See more Michael Moore photos on Flickr

The General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street–an activist initiative whose stated goal is to “gather 20,000 people to Wall Street, in New York, NY on September 17, 2011, beginning a popular occupation of that space for two months and more”–met on the night of September 3rd in Tompkins Square Park (photos below).

Occupy Wall Street has received a good bit of notice (Go Adbusters!) and their aim is to take the spirit of the so-called Arab Spring and bring it to America.  (We heard this before in the Wisconsin protests and Egypt’s revolution).

I haven’t photographed this kind of protest movement for Wikipedia since Anonymous against the Church of Scientology, so I hope to take some good shots of OWS and who knows? Maybe it will actually turn into something.

These were just taken with my cameraphone from Saturday night’s planning session: