About Author: NB Reilly

Posts by NB Reilly

1

In Which I Occupy Wall Street for One Hour

By
NB Reilly
– October 13, 2011


The funny thing for me about Occupy Wall Street is that without the Internet, I probably would never have heard about it. Wall Street exists for me in three different mental spots. There’s the Wall Street of TV and movies, whose main purpose is to serve as the abstraction by which to compare its counter-metonym, Main Street. That is the Wall Street of whatever is going on right now. Then there’s the Wall Street of my morning commute—which takes up a single spot in my brain as a reference point between Clark and Fulton streets and represents a growing dread about the following 8.5+ hours of my day. And there’s also the Wall Street of reality, the physical space dominated by the banks and the douchebags who work in them, and which I have only visited a handful of times, several of them accidentally.

This third one is also the Wall Street of whatever’s going on right now, of course. And visiting it in person after seeing my Facebook feed turned into a kind of group protest live-blog lent it something of a cinematic, on-set quality, albeit for a very grungy, crowded, and more or less inchoate film.

I will admit that my visit to #OccupyWallStreet HQ followed some initial reluctance. I have spent much of my adult life fleeing activism, after a childhood full of what began to appear, by the early aughts, as so much Homerian breast-beating. I had also become a bit resentful of the “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” rhetoric my [doctoral candidate] friends had started bandying about over an “us” that was, as far as I could tell, intentionally undefined. Which, I suppose, makes that statement true, but I didn’t appreciate being shunned for wanting to take a longer view on an evolving process.

But so anyway, then I realized that all I was really doing was holding out hope for something impossible, and I started to think about how the apparently earth-shattering influence of the May ’68 protests has never made any fucking sense to me either, and then also how it was just kind of stupid not to go check out this big important thing that was happening five miles away from my bed.

As usual, however, I did not have my shit together, and I didn’t look anything up, and I even kind of patted myself on the back about it, feeling like I wasn’t compromising any of my “oh, whatever” look-see stance. So as a result, I missed all the speakers and wandered around OWS rather purposelessly.

Here’s what you need to know about Occupy Wall Street. They’re not fucking kidding about the occupy part. From the subway you maunder through the packs of oblivious Wall Street–bound tourists—all somehow unmistakably Middle American or European by their gaits and their shoes—drawn by the faint sounds of people and bongos, and then suddenly you find yourself in the middle of the thing, standing on a chalked Harper’s Index–worthy stat about irresponsible government expenditures, and gazing into a crowd of people in all points of stasis and movement and facing every possible direction.

As I neared Zuccotti Park, a 50-ish townie jogged by in front of me, shirtless and seemingly oblivious to the protests. “So there’s the protesters,” said a squat, hick-accented dude in a Dallas Cowboys hat. And there they were. I had no idea where to go.

Entering the park, I saw a concentrated cluster surrounding a man leading a long call-and-response chant. I forget what he was saying, but it’s not important. Another group hovered around a guy making protest buttons, and down at the buffet line there was a mix of standard hippy fare, along with a big basket of M&Ms, still in the packaging. A vaguely methy-looking middle-aged woman sat at a table, hands atop a cartoonish book/pamphlet called Mommy, Why Do the Republicans Hate America? The “library” along the north end of the park had some predictable titles (Rules for Radicals; The People’s History of the United States; The Chomsky Reader; Readings in General Sociology), and some that were less so (Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays; Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree; Eat, Pray, Love). A couple women snaked in and out of the crowd, handing out pamphlets. I lost mine. A man yelled at me near the food for standing still and obstructing the flow of traffic. There were people sprawled out, defining the pathway with their inert bodies, sleeping (or trying to). Jesse LaGreca was seated in front of a table, wearing the Union kepi and smoking a cigarette. There was an incredibly earnest guy near the library holding a Ron Paul sign. The odor of sage wafted in my direction. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in the presence of so many old white dude dreadlocks.

All in all, the whole thing had the feel of a more admittedly desultory gathering, like Burning Man or the Oregon Country Fair, mixed with a European–style celebratory grève. I overheard snippets of conversation—an over-enthusiastic young man tried to convince a much older man to hook up with a march when he got back to D.C. An awkward teen broke in on a stranger to ask if she was looking for the face paint. She wasn’t. A soft-spoken post-college guy tried to impress a girl he’d just met by contemplating whether or not to spend the night in the park. It seemed to be working.

I came upon a dark-haired young man submitting amiably to the joking harassment of a couple of older gentlemen. His hand-written name tag said Aaron. He told me he’d come down from Buffalo ten days ago to join the protests. He was maybe 20 years old. He’d joined up with one of the 30 to 40 working groups he said were in the park, organizing different aspects of the “occupation.” He told me about plans to expand into other parts of the city, like Washington Square Park, and to get a warehouse space for when it got too cold to sleep outside. He said the website had already raised about $100,000. I couldn’t imagine finding something to care so much about or doing anything so bold and resiliently optimistic when I was that age, and for that I both admired and felt a little bit sorry for him.

I wished Aaron good luck and walked toward the perimeter of the park. The cops standing watch looked bored, and I couldn’t blame them. Surrounded by a bunch of gawking onlookers, Geraldo Rivera was standing across the street, his back to the masses. I couldn’t resist. As I got there, they were just wrapping up the segment, and Geraldo’s crew was breaking down the gear. A burly, soap-opera-ishly handsome guy was following Geraldo around with a fistful of tissues. A dude in one of those bicycle-cum-skateboard helmets started heckling. “THAT’S GERALDO’S BROTHER,” he yelled. “THAT GUY WITH THE TISSUES IS GERALDO’S BROTHER!” A few people tittered. Tissue-guy grinned and raised his arms triumphantly. I realized that there is a permanently condescending quality to Geraldo’s smile. “HE’S BETTER-LOOKING THAN GERALDO, BUT GERALDO’S MORE FAMOUS!” The crowd squawked. Geraldo and his “brother” looked around awkwardly, as if they hadn’t heard. It was the most entertaining thing I’d seen all week. Everyone dispersed and I headed for the subway. And then I went back to Brooklyn to buy a hundred dollar machine that carbonates water, because I am human, and I am weak.

6

Ode to Ken May, My First Health Insurance Provider

By
NB Reilly
– August 29, 2011

I live in Brooklyn now. When I have things to print and photocopy, I often ride my bike to the Court Street Kinko’s (now FedEx Office, stupidly, but more on that later), because printing at my local library branch can sometimes take literally hours and, for some reason, the place doesn’t have a photocopier.

Recently, on the Thursday of my last week of unemployment, I went to print out the offer letter for what could be called my first Real Job. The ensuing shit-show was everything I’ve been primed for in my extensive Kinko’s experience. The place was jam-packed with annoyed/annoying people. The affectless staff were jumpy and disgruntled, most of them taking unconvincing harbor-age behind support pillars and extra-large packing boxes. The computer desks were coated in corporate-hued supergrime and probably gave me some incurable strand of staph and/or hepatitis.

Next, the photocopier line. (How are there never enough copiers at an establishment founded for making copies? Also, why do East Coasters say “on line,” while everyone else in the country says “in line”?) Exhibit A: A crazed hepcat-type guy wearing fake snakeskin loafers, blue-tinted hippy coke bottle glasses, a fedora, and a flowing bright yellow geisha-print shirt. I’m not sure what he was doing, but it took forever, and as he left he looked straight into my eyes with a glint of what seemed an unsettling amount of personal insight. Exhibit B: A flailing Asian woman wearing a blue boating hat and several-inches-thick hose under her prim calf-length blue skirt who began shouting: “Lady! Help me!”—her face tilted up at an ~80˚ angle in the vague direction of the staff—when her copier wouldn’t work. Exhibit C: A WASPy dude, exclusively Nike-clad (swoosh hat, sneakers, socks, and neon turquoise polo shirt), who became almost psychotic when his copier cut off a marathon Rogers and Hammerstein repro sesh. Exhibit D: The rest of us. I had to copy my NYS Medicaid card to deal with a 6-month-old bill from my recent stint as an unpaid intern. Oh, those were the days…

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0

Virtual Unmade Beds

By
NB Reilly
– March 24, 2011

I can remember the first time I heard about the movie Unmade Beds — Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos’s second film, which trails two young people circling mostly dead ends while they hole up in a squat in London. It was sometime in 2009, probably September, maybe the 2nd, as that was the day the New York Times published Manohla Dargis’s review of the movie. I didn’t have any particular feeling for the film going in — I’d never heard of Dos Santos and frankly still don’t have a very solid handle on Manohla’s preferences. (I get the sense that she’s more eccentric than A.O., who, incidentally, I kind of respect for liking movies I pretend not to have enjoyed, in the theater, at 10 bucks a pop.)

In any case, the NYT film cabal made Unmade Beds a “Critics’ Pick,” and I liked Manohla’s review, although I don’t remember much of it. Something about messy beds and messy lives, which sounds about right. I’ve intentionally avoided re-reading it (in part so as not to be discouraged by its quality), so I can’t really tell you much else about it.

See, here’s the thing: after I read Manohla’s review — undoubtedly from the hungover solo comfort of my bed — I immediately looked the movie up in Netflix, only to find that it wasn’t on Instant Watch and wasn’t even out on DVD. Distressed, I clicked a button, and Netflix told me it would be sent to me whenever it was available, which I assumed would be very soon. In the meantime, I used the movie as an excuse to check in with the attractive clerk at my local video store, which I haven’t visited since and wouldn’t be surprised to find replaced by a Duane Reade. Or a stadium.

In the intervening year-and-a-half, Unmade Beds has been relegated to a periodic obsession tucked into the far recesses of my ambient desires. This condition’s symptoms have involved compulsive check-ins with Netflix and occasional drunken conversations about the shift in the function of the film review since the invention of the Internet, and — and at this point of the monologue I would start to get didactic — you know, even the videocassette. Before the videocassette came along — which seems so impossibly long ago, I would prattle on — a movie review was a precious commodity — something to inform you whether or not to go see a film that might only be in the theaters for a few days, and which, if you missed it, you’d likely never get the chance to see again. (Think about that for a second. Imagine reading a really shitty review of Casablanca and feeling like a chump for the next 30 years. Or until whenever it came back around to your local theater, which was probably more like every year for the next 30 years. Whatever, you get the point.) Now the review merely helps you wade through a jungle of crap that’s constantly accessible in a variety of legitimate and/or clandestine online forms. Instead of telling you what to watch, the modern film review now just tells you what to avoid.

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0

Gettin’ Schooled

By
NB Reilly
– March 4, 2011

You know when you’re sitting around with your roommates, lazily scrutinizing the Internet’s wackier corners, flipping from a Guardian story about a breast milk ice cream parlor in London (“Baby Gaga”) to a BBC story about fish pedicures? (For the record, the British have this shit honed to a fine art.)

Well, that’s kind of my life these days. And as great as it sounds, some of this stuff is pretty sad.

Like this story about Kelley Williams-Bolar, a mom in Akron, Ohio. After her house was burglarized, she got worried about her two daughters walking home from school by themselves. So she used her father’s suburban address to switch them into a different school. Seems reasonable to me. If your neighborhood fucks you over, get a new neighborhood.

But the fine officials of Akron didn’t agree. Instead, they threw her in jail. Yes, jail. For nine days.

Williams-Bolar being interviewed by a video crew in her lawyer's office.

“Her prosecution and incarceration are a high-profile example of how schools are getting tougher on parents who sneak their children into other districts, usually better-funded and higher-performing schools. Districts are fighting back, having students followed by private investigators, fining or pressing criminal charges against their parents — even sending them to jail.”

Private investigators?! This raises so many of my hackles, I don’t even know where to start. As we cut funding to schools across the country to levels that even students find absurd, is it any wonder people are taking matters into their own hands? No, it isn’t any wonder. In fact, it’s a system we’ve been promoting for years under a slightly less criminal-sounding name: “private school.”

And that’s why Donna Blair, who was “sharply critical” of Ms. Williams-Bolar, is totally wrong when she says this: “We all want what’s best for our kids, but should we commit crimes to get them the best? The message she sent to her kids was that it’s OK to lie, cheat and steal.”

No, Donna. Not true. It’s the city of Akron that’s cheating Ms. Williams-Bolar by creating an unequal system that deprives her of basic services. And perhaps more than anything else, it’s the progressive de-valuation of education that ramps up these inequalities, serving to crush the meritocratic myth that makes lying, cheating, and stealing anything other than the fastest way up from the bottom.