BrianLehrer.TV; The Return Of Occupy Wall Street

Welcome, it's spring. This means Occupy Wall Street is coming out of hibernation and that Central Park is in bloom, inspiring writers to tell its secrets. We'll hear plans from the activists and pros from the authors. We'll also hear about a disturbing technological development, how data storage will soon give repressive governments the ability to record literally everything a citizen does. Plus, we'll view a viral video decrying the homogenization of world music, but offering an alternative. And first, Occupy Wall Street. Is there truly a general strike in the works for May Day? Where's the movement at in this election year? Two conversations. The first, with Village Voice Reporter, Nick Pinto, who's been covering the protests, and OWS organizer, Cecily McMillan. She's a grad student at the new school. Welcome to both of you. And Nick, like the early spring

brought out the flowers earlier, has it also brought the Occupy movement back out in the streets? It has. For many months over the winter, as the movement kept a fairly low profile. There was a lot of talk about wait until May Day. May Day, you'll see this rebirth, this resurgence of the movement. And five weeks ago, on March 17th, the six-month anniversary of the beginning of the movement, a number of protesters retook Zucati Park. They reoccupied it very briefly until an extremely assertive and ultimately violent police response took place. And so that's sort of created this premature rebirth for the movement. In a certain sense of the last five weeks, protesters have sort of been on the media stage again, even as the bulk of their organization has been towards May Day.

Leading up toward May 1st, May Day, which we'll talk about in a minute, Cecily, but I use the word hibernation, which I've seen, for the state of the movement over the winter. Or do you use that word, though? I wouldn't. I would say that the decentralization from Zucati did a lot to sort of remove us from all acting in one central location. But one positive thing that it did do is it allowed people to go and work strictly with the people that they were most interested in working with. And on the topics, they were most interested in working with, without a sort of oversee from the GA. So, over hibernation. The GA, the General Assembly, the sort of organizing committee of Occupy Wall Street. Right. Which was great in organizing the specific location. But sometimes overstepped to organizing campaigns. So, over the winter, there has been enormous work done on end-core corporate personhood, on jobs for all, on revisiting Occupy foreclosed homes, on congressional

guerilla, sort of forms of running candidates. It's really been a time, I think, for creativity, and for us to delve into specifically the things we're interested in most changing. May Day. How big a deal is this going to be? I think it's going to be pretty big. I mean, the brochure here has a really positive overtone. It says, May Day strike, outgrow the status quo. It's, you know, says that it's being put on with labor and various faith and student coalitions. There's going to be, I mean, the program is quite huge. It's Bryant Park from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. There's rallying and workshops. 12 p.m. a guitar workshop, a rehearsal for the Occupy guitar me with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. Two o'clock March to, with Occupy guitar me to Union Square, Madison Square Park for University, a Union Square meet up with

a March down to Wall Street. So those were a lot of interesting sounding events, but Nick, I've heard the word general strike, that they're really getting, trying to get people to not go to work from all corners of the economy for that one day, and even to block others from going to work in some instances. Is that what you're reporting shows? Yeah, well, I think the phrase general strike has been something of a problematic thing that the movement has sort of had to reframe its positioning on. The original call for a general strike came out of Occupy Los Angeles, and so it was something that was adopted by other camps in the movement. And I think more recently what I'm hearing from Occupy Wall Street organizers is, you know, general strike can mean a lot of different things. What we're really talking about is a day without the 99%. And so that can mean not showing up to work, that can mean, you know, not doing banking, not shopping, that can mean not going to class. There are lots of different ways to sort of step out of the system that

Occupy is protesting, and a general strike is only one of them. So general strike to use that term, is that what you're calling for? No, I would say that, of course, a general strike would make quite a statement. I, myself, back in Madison was really hoping at that point for a general strike. But I don't think we're there yet. You know, I don't think that the movement has gained enough public support for labor to jump on board with that. I mean, it's illegal. A lot of people don't know that. I think that down the road, it's definitely a possibility. But I think a day without the 99% has been something that people have actually been pushing for harder than general strike, and wanting to really men ties with the sort of tenuous relationship that we had with labor to begin with. What worries you about May Day, anything? I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call this a worry. You know, I do think that the movement by sort of placing so much emphasis on May Day for so many months as sort of this

re-coming out party. You know, and there's a lot of really big talk about, this is going to be the biggest thing you've seen from us yet. Nobody knows how big it's going to be. And so there's, you know, as with sort of a political campaign, if you promise big, is there some pressure to deliver? Yeah, there's a whisk of laying an egg here. Does it hurt the movement? If there is a small turnout in New York and elsewhere around the country, does it hurt the larger agenda? At this point, once again, I would say, no. We're in the stages of growth. You know, I think that if several students and people that were activated through the 99% spring training at 350.org put on that attracted a lot of public sympathizers come out. If we see a continued amount of support as we had for other big days, I think that would be good enough.

And maybe that's just the launch rather than the culmination of something. Tell me about the platform that you're trying to get Democratic congressional cards, like congressional candidates to sign. Sure. The group I work with, the Citywide Community Council, has tried to pull together constituents from various different groups that normally have to fight against each other to get heard. We're coalitioning with the bum rush to the vote campaign. And we've established 10 points that we believe are essential to the Democratic platform that we've been promised about over and over again for the Democrats to work on. And we're taking those and we're pushing them left. We hope to go to every congressional candidate in the city, keep them to sign on. And if they won't sign on, then what we're going to say is we're going to use George Martinez as an example who's running with bum rush to the vote and say, we got an Occupy candidate up in six months that's a viable candidate. And I understand that one sort of poster district is the one that Congresswoman Idi

of Velasquez currently represents. And you've got sort of an Occupy wing of the Democratic Party candidate challenging her in a primary, is that correct? Yeah, and it's targeted. It's not that Idi of Velasquez is a horrible person or she's done anything bad. For one thing, she's the top five recipient of Goldman Sachs funds. The second thing mainly is that she's a career politician. The Democratic card line, it seems to me, has been to hold the line rather than push it. And we're trying to get people in there that can push the line. So Nick, this is new for the Occupy movement. They were not into electoral politics. That was one of the things that they most staunchly stood for last year, that it was about changing the culture, changing the meme, all of that. And now we see congressional candidates running in Democratic Party primaries. Sure. I think you could probably still find plenty of people in the movement who would be completely uncomfortable with what S. Lee's talking about. But this does speak to this ongoing negotiation that occupiers are having to do. There are many people who think engagement

with the system is a critical part of moving this forward. There are other people who have a much more radical agenda. And so figuring out how those people can work together, how are those people going to work together on Mayday is a really interesting question. There's a lot of very careful planning in this coalition going on right now. But how do you stage a march with occupiers and union folks and immigration activists in a way that everybody feels comfortable and free to sort of pursue their own agenda? And in 20 seconds, S. Lee, the Obama re-election campaign, meth, or stop the Republicans, or... Well, I think it's important to keep Obama in office. I would say that. But I think that Occupy needs to take a firmer fist in directing where his policies go. Thank you both very much. And after a brief break, we ask, we're now in City University social theorist, David Harvey, where Occupy Wall Street fits into the history of political activism and what the movement might do next.

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We're thinking and talking about Occupy Wall Street. We're now anthropologist with the CUNY Graduate Center. David Harvey has seen political movements come and go and sometimes change the world. Where does OWS fit in? Professor Harvey has authored many books among them a brief history of neoliberalism and most recently rebel cities from the right to the city to urban revolution. Welcome. Thank you. What were you thinking? Watching those two young folks talking about this movement in this moment? Well, I love the enthusiasm. I mean, it's great to see that people are out there doing things. And there's been a lot of protest over the last 20 or 30 years, but it's been very volatile. It goes up and down like this. And one thing that Occupy Wall Street did, I think, by the occupation strategy, was to stay in place. And I think right now they're trying to make sure they're going

to stay in place and they're not going to go away. And I think this is there for the beginnings of a more permanent movement, which really could have a major impact upon American politics and global politics. By staying place, you don't mean physically in Zucardi Park as they were at first trying to do. No, assertive presence. It may involve something like Zucardi Park again. But it's continuous presence is, I think, terribly important. I mean, an analogy I would give you is, for instance, think how the madre is to pleasure de Mayo and Argentina, changed Argentinian politics by every week going into that space and moving around and getting harassed and all those to it. And actually democratization of Argentina came out of that. This is the kind of thing I think they're aiming for. It's a continuous presence so that people do not forget that there's the 99% out there and there's this immense concentration of political and economic power in Wall Street. Tell us more about that Argentinian experience. Most of our viewers don't know it. Who

were they? What did they accomplish? How small was the group? Well, the grandmothers who were wanting to know what happened to their children and the children of the children have disappeared and they assembled in the middle of the military dictatorship and started to just have conversations in the main square. And after a while they came back and of course the police kept moving them around but they kept on coming back, they kept on coming back and they would not go away. And in the end, you know, part of the thing that broke down the military dictatorship was a general sense in the population that the military were being far far too overbearing in what they were doing. So does Occupy Wall Street, in your opinion, in order to be effective, need to grow its numbers or does it need to stay with the same number roughly of active people that they have but do the right things, push the right levers? I think they need to build alliances and I think one of the things that's going to happen on May Day is that there's a connection

between Occupy Wall Street and the immigrant rights marches which back in 2006, I don't know if you remember but back in 2006, they basically closed down cities because all of the immigrant workers didn't come. Now whether the immigrant workers are going to come out this May 1 or not, I don't know, but invoking that tradition and connecting Occupy Wall Street with immigrant workers and then also maybe connecting more with labor groups and so on, it could start to build a coalition which is beyond just the small groups that have been involved so far. I gather you addressed an Occupy Wall Street group in London out in a very public setting. Tell us about that and what you told them. Well, it was a fabulous experience. I mean there was a step of St. Paul's cathedral. I never imagined this would happen in sort of a harangue in the crowd and I have, you know, it's one of those things like you don't know exactly what you want to say or how to say it, but one of the things I said to them was it's very important to try to find public

spaces where you can create these public expressions and this is one of the difficulties the movement faces. There's a lot of public space in New York City but where is there a public space where we can be the public and we can do public things and as soon as you move into public space the police move you out or do something like that kind of, there's a real big question of how a dialogue like this can take place in a public space in such a way as to have a political effect because Occupy Wall Street does not have money. It has people and unless you can get people into spaces and onto the streets and so on, you're not going to be able to have the impact and so there's a preliminary struggle if you like to try to create those spaces and I think there's a party park and the steps or some polls it managed to do that. So there's a struggle to be fought over political expression and how to mobilize that political expression. So one of the things I said was create, liberate spaces in the city where dialogue can occur, where the agoros can form and the assemblies can meet and discuss and think and so on, but we don't have

those spaces right now. What did you think of her proposal for candidates for Congress and the Democratic Party to sign a 10-point Occupy platform pledge? It has to do with everything from student loans to all kinds of things. I don't think we're going to get very far with that for one very simple reason, that politics, including the politics of the Democratic Party, is essentially bought by big money and getting people to sign that, as opposed to getting somebody to sign a big check for to run your election campaign, you're not going to get very far with that strategy. I don't mind if the system is that captured by money, then how does Occupy have any real leverage on outcomes from the outside? It has leverage if enough people can come into those public spaces and demonstrate in such a way as to sway public opinion to their side, and just to give you another example that's going on right now, the Chilean students have been on strike now for almost a year

and a half, 70 percent of the Chilean population now agrees with them and what they're about and they've been at it for two or three years. Once you get public opinion on your side and Occupy Wall Street has not yet quite done that, it changed the conversation last year, so now the Democratic Party is talking about social inequality when it wasn't talking about it before. If they can change the conversation even further, then indeed I think we'll see some real political changes. Professor Harvey, thank you very much. Thank you. Coming up, we're reaching a disturbing technological milestone. One governments will have the ability to record literally everything their citizens do. When you throw away money on wasted electricity, you're throwing away everything you could

have bought with it. Technology can be a tool to enable freedom in human rights, we saw that in last year's Arab Spring as cell phones, the web and social media gave citizens of repressive regimes the power to topple them. But technology can also be used by governments to monitor control and repress their people.

My next guest says we're about to cross a significant threshold. Governments will soon have the ability to record and store literally everything their citizens do. John Viesen Yor is a professor of engineering at UCLA and a fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. He joins us now via Skype from San Francisco. Hello from New York, welcome to our program. Well, thank you very much for having me, I'm glad to be on. There's already a lot that the United States government and other governments around the world can do to monitor their citizenry. What is this threshold that you're referring to? Well, storage costs, everyone knows that technology gets more advanced and less expensive. And storage costs in particular have been plummeting at really an exponential rate for decades. They're actually about over 1 million times cheaper to buy storage today than it was back in, for example, the mid 1980s.

So we don't talk anymore during the day than we ever did 30 years ago or 50 years ago. We don't say more things, we don't go more places. So as the storage becomes cheap, it becomes possible to literally store everything that we say or do or every place that we go. That becomes technologically possible. And then the question becomes, of course, will that technology be used and certainly in some countries it will be? So what's an example of this? This is more of a vision of a potential future than something that's already going on. It sounds like, give us an example of this dystopia that you're worrying about. Well, I didn't know that I would say it's not going on. I'll give you one example. Storage has become so inexpensive that for roughly 17 cents, it's possible to store everything that a person says on a telephone for an entire year, it would only cost about 17 cents or even less to buy the storage to store that. So that means it's possible in countries with populations of millions of people to literally at least technologically possible to store every single thing that's had enough phone.

I'll give another example. It only costs about $50 to store the location of 1 million people every five minutes for an entire year. Again, it costs almost nothing to store this information. So enormous power of digital storage and what that can enable people to store. And then the question is, how about be used and abused? How might it be used and abused? How is it being used and abused? So I think in countries that have a history of strongly authoritarian regimes, I think when it becomes possible to monitor their citizens to this extreme level of detail, and this would be places like Syria and China and in places like that, or a prior to the revolution by the summer, you can expect that technology will in fact be employed to do just that. And so that's a big concern. It basically takes the question of surveillance and inverts it, rather than deciding in advance who to place under surveillance governments will be able to in a sense have everybody under

surveillance and then retroactively make the decision about who they want, if they decide tomorrow that they want to know what a particular dissident said a year ago on a phone, on the phone, that information will already be available. But I gather this is not just the monitoring of dissidents by countries like Syria and China and Iran. This is something different, something more. Well, I think that again, it's important to distinguish between what the technology is capable of and then how it's being used. I certainly don't think we in this country are an authoritarian government to the extent that a place like Syria or Iran would be. I think in places like the United States that the bigger concern is really less government, but just the enormous amount of information that we give often voluntarily to the commercial companies and the surveillance-like nature of that data, I think that is in some sense a bigger concern with respect to privacy than governmental intrusion in many ways. Talk about that.

We're thinking about Google and Facebook and Twitter and all that they can gather on us, and sometimes share with the government if asked to do so, is the concern in this country more corporate compared to more governmental? I think that certainly companies have enormous amounts of information about most of us. Companies know every website we visit. They literally, if you have a mobile phone, which of course almost every adult does, the mobile phone company has a record of your travels throughout the day, every day, where you were at every moment of the day. They know who you call, who called you, your tweets, pretty much everything you do electronic, which is these days so much of what you do is in the hands of these companies. Your images in surveillance cameras, every time you walk into an office building or a public building of any kind, if you use mobile apps, many of those mobile apps on things like iPads, they track your location often with your consent, sometimes with that. No one company may have all that information, but these companies aggregate this information

in the collection of all that information paints a far more detailed picture of you than I would expect any particular government agency has. So I think there's a big privacy concern related to that. So is there a way in your opinion for people to push back against this ubiquity of storage of practically everything we do in the communications world, either in this country or abroad? Well, of course, that's a complicated question. I'll stick with this country. I think there are certainly a heightened awareness these days, and the good news is that people are very aware, not only regular consumers, but the government as well, the Federal Trade Commission FTC, a few weeks ago issued a very detailed report on consumer privacy issues. So I think there's a movement of foot that recognizes some of these concerns, and I'd like to think there's a possibility to recognize, to have some ability to restore at least some level of privacy, but to some extent, the cat is out of the bag.

We're not going to put the genie back in the bottle on some of these technologies. Thank you for filling us in on the galloping technology of surveillance and storage. Thank you very much. To many, another downside of pervasive technology is the globalization of world culture. For example, not all music lovers are fans of world music, at least not when globalization homogenizes it, watering down what's regional, creative, edgy. Our next two guests offer an alternative, where global does not mean sameness. Before we meet them, let's begin by looking at a video about this that's captured some attention online. Globalization is the ridiculous marketing heads, the concept that helps them to sell things that people don't necessarily understand, and it's basically to actually killing

the culture, globalization, globalization, because it waters everything down. Oh yeah, this is a hip-hop beat with Arabic voice over it, oh yeah, this is global stuff. It's all great. You know, we can sell it anywhere, it has no edge, it has no soul, it's like it is, it's like a mall music, where you can buy all stupid souvenirs and shirts that you can tell where they're from either. People are being completely confused, and that's what global culture is going to bring, is this Brazilian or Arabic, and naturally, there will be 300 million states of America around the world. It's just kind of this feeling of sameness, you know? Like when you drive through America, you're like, okay, well, this is musta juice, and

this is kinetic. What's the difference? I don't know. Gas station, McDonald, McDonald, gas station, gas station, McDonald. Pretty soon you'll go to Slovenia and see the same thing too, in a mall. Almost half of a video about preventing cultural sameness. It was created by none other than my own brother, Warren Lehrer, and his collaborators. Warren is a writer and visual artist, professor of art and design at SUNY Purchase. His ninth and most recent book is Crossing the Boulevard, strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, written with his wife Judith Sloan about people in Queens. He's here with musician, Tom Lasolois, deep sing, who embodies a new approach to world music, and is part of an upcoming musical event and a project with NASA that he'll tell us about later on.

Welcome, guys. Good to be here. This video, which was really fun to watch, has also struck a chord with people online, has been viewed thousands of times. What do you think the chord is? Well, I think a lot of people are concerned about this issue of globalization from a cultural perspective and from a heritage perspective of monoculture, 100,000 states of America around the world is something that Eugene Hootz of Goldberg Delo says that he's concerned about and so we have here a critique of globalization, not uncommon from the kinds of critiques that you hear. And deep does this affect you in your music. You come from an Indian percussion tradition. You're playing largely here in the West. Do you see intersection?

Do you see homogenation? Do you see it as a problem? Well, you know, most of everything that I'm doing today now is like through technology. You know, people are sending MP3 files and are maybe able to do a session in the home recording studio and sending it back out to someone in Bombay. So things are changing. You know, you're not really the chemistry of musicians in one room has changed through the world of technology. Is that good, bad, mixed? It's a combination. I wish I would meet my colleagues sometimes, you know? Well, we're going to play the second half of this video right now. You saw the establishment of the problem. Now here is Eugene Hootz in an animation as produced by Warren proposing a solution. I was actually getting kind of alarmed when he was a description of the first start coming out as kind of, you know, move the cultural.

It is multicultural, but it is multicultural. It's about just preventing the sameness of the world, preserving the multicultural layer of the cultures. That's the layer where culture lives and remains to be prolific, you know, and in that layer of the culture, that's where all the best mutations happening. That's where people are not relaxed and they're not comfortable with where they are. I'm all for deriving from tradition, but while knowing your tradition, you already rejected it, you know what I mean? You acquired a distance from it and you inhaled all this new stuff. And then from those two, you go into third position of making an entity of its own.

Through mutating it and making its new, you keep the tradition. Through mutating it, you keep the tradition. Mutating it, mutating it, new, mutating it, mutating it, mutating it, mutating it, new. It's multicultural. It's multicultural. It's multicultural says Eugene in that video. Tell me a little bit, Warren, about the process, because even as brothers I haven't seen your work of making that video, you're using music, you're using speech, you're using

animation. And all the speech and all the stories that we document in the Crossing of the Lord Project are from meeting people throughout the borough of Queens who come from all over the world, particularly who came post-1965 Immigration Act, which changed the complexion of this city, particularly in Queens, which is the most ethnically diverse locality in the country. And we interviewed folks for long periods of time and then we edit and we shaped them into stories that came out in the book and performance that we do in an exhibition. And here, Brandon Campbell, who worked with me on the animation and I crafted the language to have it come alive with photographs that I also took of the people. And well, great job.

And there's a paradox, there's a tension in the progressive impulse, I think. That's embodied in this video. On the one hand, we want to be able to break out of old traditions that are confining. And on the other hand, we want to preserve traditional cultures when we feel they're threatened by modernization. That's a real tension. Yes, I want to hold on to my tradition. I came from very traditional background and I missed that. I don't have it enough in my life. I would love to get back to my tablet training, I missed that a lot. I collaborate with some musicians. But as far as like for work, I'm involved in like as a producer composing, I'm playing more involved with fusion music than anything else. And in the slide that our viewers are seeing now, you're playing tabla behind a dancer. Right.

Oh, this is from a project called Bellagaya, which NASA have provided visualizations and data. And you see the Earth from an astronaut's view. And you see the Earth in ways that you've never seen it before. It's very, you know, for example, we go, we fly over India and then we'll land and you'll see Indian dance and clips from India and then our people singing and playing Indian music. It's quite a sure. And why do you call this a video manifesto? So what's the idea? Is it to try to purposefully find that line in the attention that I was talking about between trying to break out of the old if it's combining, but preserve the old if modernization threatens to homogenize it and destroy it? Yeah, like a lot of manifestos, it makes a critique of the status quo. But then in that second half really presents this alternative and we subtitle it. It's globalization is the title, subtitle preventing the sameness of the world.

And some people think we're going to be talking about preserving tradition, preserving hair at local culture and heritage, but he is talking about mutating the tradition after rejecting perhaps your own tradition and inhaling all these other influences. And then from there you go into the third position of making something new. And for us, that was a great way to end our crossing the boulevard project. We think of what does it mean to be American and what is what is America? A lot of folks in the discussion about immigrants and refugees are concerned that somehow they're stealing what it is to be American or American culture. And I think it's the enlarging and it's the story of America is that mutation based on real knowledge and real rootedness and real hanging out with folks in person and sharing.

So deep very briefly because I want to play a clip of an amazing musical performance that you're both going to be involved with this Sunday. Do you ever feel this tension in your own life as a musician in America that, oh, now I'm crossing a line that threatens to destroy the music that I grew up with, but I want to continue to explore new ways to express it? Yes, I do, but I feel like I'm respectful of what I do to the music, how I approach the music. So I try to have a traditional angle. So you're both going to be involved at the Golden Auditorium at Queens College this Sunday in a symphony that grows out of the crossing the Boulevard Project. We're going to clip from it right now. Anything you want to say very briefly to set this up? libretto written by my wife Judith Sloan and the composer is Frank London and there's live projection of animation that I did with Brandon Campbell and Deep is a soloist and

it's really about the same story of Queens, but also going back pre-1965 Immigration Act to looking at a couple of centuries of migration and becoming part of this fabric. Let's see a little bit from or a rehearsal of what you're going to see this Sunday, Golden Auditorium. Comic-free business, increasingly superb money, was served by the pair of shoes. We call the top to live a big fool. We work desktop, boy, and suddenly hear a fabric shot.

We call the top, it came on hands from the streets. We call the top to live a big fool. We call the top to live a big fool. We call the top to live a big fool. I'm on the right. You worked delivering food. This is the life you escaped to. I wasn't ready to live all the time. But there we cannot be gay. So that video be projected on a screen while the orchestra is playing on stage.

The orchestra and 190 boys acquire. Deep and Judith also doing spoken word with four other actors speaking and translating in different languages. Now I'm supposed to be the journalist in the family and you're supposed to be the artist. But there's a lot of reporting in your work. Yeah, well that's one of the traditions I think that I'm mutating. Is repartage. The globalization video is really a portrait of a character piece of Eugene Hootz. But I'm not maybe using the traditional means of documentary or portraiture. Use all this crazy typography and trying to capture language, find the shape of thought and a way of translating these fleeting moments into something we can study and appreciate and enjoy. Did it work with NASA very briefly?

Oh well it's just NASA providing the visualizations. It's a project called Bellagaya. So that's how NASA are involved with the Bellagaya. And where can people see that? Well we're currently just, you know, right now it's at like 80 minutes and we're planning to take it off Broadway. You just came back from Texas. I just came back from Texas who played at the Outdoor Minute Theatre and it was very successful. So we're just going to take it to Off-Broadway and eventually Broadway. All right. You will look for that coming eventually to New York. Which one of us should call mom and dad and make sure they come on Sunday. I'll call mom. Yeah, that's the deal. Very good. Very good. You should clarify that. Thank you both very much. Thank you. After a break, 19 terrific writers on Central Park. Thank you very much.

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If you haven't had a chance to stroll through Central Park in a while, now is a great time. Flowers are in bloom and the leaves on the trees have that fresh spring green color that doesn't last long. The park is one of our city's jewels of course. And a new book is out that celebrates Central Park and anthology is a collection of writings by 19 authors, including Paul Auster, Francine prose and Colson Whitehead. Editor Andrew Blauner is here with me to talk about the collection. Along with the writer of the first piece in the book, John Burnham Schwartz. You may know him as the author of Revolutionary Road and a follow-up novel last year's Northwest Corner. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. And Andrew, congratulations on the book. Thank you very much. Why in anthology of writing about Central Park? There are so many great stories about Central Park that haven't been told. Everybody knows a lot of the statistics.

There's 843 acres. There's 38 million visitors. There's a population now, according to the latest census of 18 people who live in Central Park. The real estate appraised value of the park is now $600 billion. They're also great photographs and images of the park. But this is a tapestry, a collection of stories, personal stories. In many cases, familial and emotional stories that taken together attempt to tell part of the story of the park, which in many ways is the story of New York. And John, your story is about a patch of the park that you and I both happen to love. I used to live on West 100th Street in a rent-stabilised department and saw the North Meadow transform from a gigantic dust bowl. Sometimes dangerous into the pristine fence-off, hyper-preserved sanctuary that it is now. So for you, it was even more integrated or more integrilling your life because it was part of your childhood. I mean, I grew up on 96th Street, sort of on that dividing line between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue and then Spanish Harlem.

And I went to school on 96th Street, this little tiny progressive private school. And we didn't have a gem. We played in Central Park. And that's, I mean, it's conceivable I spent 35 or 40% of my waking hours in that park with my brother and I playing sports and getting mugged and all kinds of things. It was the 70s. And one of the themes that recurs in these separate essays written by very separate people is, remember, you know, the remembrance of that time when the city was literally bankrupt. And there was no grass on the fields in the park and we were out there. And, you know, one doesn't get nostalgic for it because, you know, as I said, you don't get nostalgic for getting mugged quite so much. But there's something about the visual quality of that time and those memories and being in the city then when it was dirtier and worse in so many ways. At the same time, those memories stay with you.

They stay with you in ways that more benign times often don't. So read a little bit of that as you wrote it down. Speaking of, speaking of getting mugged, well, this is just one event from my childhood. It was in the meadow that one winter's day at the age of nine. I was mugged with the inside of my class and teacher. It was not a dramatic event. It was just another day, really. At that time, it was not hyperbole to say that our schools entire stock of winter sports equipment consisted of two flexible flyers sleds, only one of which was operational. During part time, on days after a snowfall, our phys ed teacher, a large, in our eyes giant muscular gravel-voiced ex-con of surpassing gentleness named Doc, would stack us two at a time on the lone steerable flyer and with huge hands shove us down the mild hillock on the west side of the field that slope, which eventually I would forget existed. Each time the sled would be dragged back to the start line, we'd flock around it like baby penguins, warning food, crying out, Doc, Doc, Doc.

If he picked you, I swear you grew taller instantly. That particular day he grinned at me and the other kids stepped aside. I lay down on that magical sled and took the steering bar in my gloved hands. Behind me I heard Doc call the name of one of the other short boys, and a moment later felt the boys wait stretched along my back, pressing my ribs uncomfortably against the sled. A brief jostling between us for better position, our park is rubbing with an insect wine, and a huge hand clamped down on us. Doc took three powerful strides, gave a shot of encouragement, and heaved us off. The sled dropped over an invisible lip rapidly gaining speed. What snow was left had melted and hardened overnight into a wide basin of rough gray ice that grew rougher and grayer as it thinned over the middle of the field. The metal runners scraped and washed beneath me. I heard a repetitive squeak and realized that the boy in my back was laughing. I began to laugh too. We were both squeaking and laughing with a sled bumping over ruts and runnels in the ice, and then I heard a different sort of sound and I felt a lightness and knew that somehow he tumbled off.

I did not look back. I was on my own finally across the middle of the field and still moving at a decent speed, approaching the two alms of the east boundary, beyond it nothing but the empty walking path in the exit. The sweetness of my triumph began to dawn on me, and I let my feet drag over the ground, slowing my speed. Soon I'd stop completely. For a while I just lay there far from everyone smiling to myself. I didn't see them until they were almost on top of me. You want to say anything about that? I don't regret it. Well, I cut the ending a little bit. I didn't want to go on too long. You know, it was one of those events where you're down far from everybody and there were three teenagers who came and there was a series of events in the park. This is just one of them where they take the sled and go out of the park and duck comes running down the ice all the way, passes me, disappears out of the park, and two minutes later comes back with the sled.

He tells me what he's done to the boys and he just comes up to me and I'm still standing there and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he says, not your fault. And I say, I've always wanted to believe him and he never tells me what he did to them or how he got the sled and he goes back. And there are a series of events over the time where each one is in some way a testing ground, a various notions of bravery or shame. And when I read that passage, I was wondering and wondering, what did this giant ex-con, dim teacher, protector of yours, do to those would be muggers in a more dangerous time in Central Park, enter this dark side of the old park, recurves over and over again. Very much so. Well, coincidentally, a lot of it's situated around the late 70s, early 80s, which given what's happened now with the Aton Pates, the reopening of the case.

It was not far from that sort of period in the city's history. It was also right at that time that the critical moment in the park's history happened, which was the founding of the Central Park and Servancy in 1980, which really turned around the park and was founded by a group of civic and philanthropic people. And three times as many people use the park now as used it in 1980 and it's never been better. But certainly in the 70s, and I grew up in the city and two blocks from the park and have lots of great memories, but also lots of stories of my own of being mugged. I was mugged once by somebody, four kids who asked for a dollar, and for some strange reason as a teenager, who was ready to surrender the dollar. But I asked them to hold on a second. I went to the Subret hot dog stand guy and broke the dollar into four quarters to give each of the kids.

You wrote, we often feel more at home in the park than in our first while homes. We go to be alone and we go to be with others, seeking solitude and community. It's where we go to pray and to play, to meditate and celebrate. My first two anthologies were portraits of people, coaches and brothers, and yet this book about a place, a public place, feels even more personal, private, intimate, so tied in so often to what matters most. And yet I sense from you a nostalgia for the old wildness, if that's the right word, even though it came with real palpable danger. Has Central Park become too pristine in your opinion? Well, no, I mean, I don't think so, and there's a piece by Adam Gopnik in here in which he basically says anybody who says such a thing is preposterous. This is good for the park and it's good for the people who live in it. I just think that we grow up in the time we grow up in and our memories get embedded in that thing.

And one of the things about Central Park in every way possible and why it is a great metaphor as well as a great park is that it's topography, it becomes an individual map for each one of us. And when Christo did the gates, which mapped out in this extraordinary fashion, this pattern of gates through huge orange gates through the park. Right, what was amazing about it is that you can look down from above and see that map. But meanwhile, you're putting your own maps all over it. Mark Helperin has a piece in here that where he's looking at photographs of himself and his father from back in the 40s. And he still amazed by how it mapped him and he maps it and people may come back after him and see where he went. And I think that's just, you know, there's a certain kind of way in which we put ourselves into the places we live and this park, particularly because of its enclosed nature and its openness at the same time in this city, really lends itself to that. There's going to be a symphony space, public radio recording of a selected shorts event, based on or with authors who contributed to this anthology. I want to tell us briefly about that.

That's May 23 at symphony space on the Upper West Side and it'll feature a polloster and Leonard Nimoy and a couple of other actors and actresses and perhaps a musician who is tied into the park, animating some of the stories in the book. Can you say in 15 seconds if Prospect Park will be to your son who you're raising near there, what Central Park was to you? It's a bit of an obstacle because my wife and I, though we live in Brooklyn, then we go to Prospect Park a lot are still tied in many ways to the meadow and that park. We still go up there. It's hard to let go. But I hope both parks about that. Thank you both for that. Thank you. That's it for this week's show. We roll out a new episode Wednesday nights at 730 or see us anytime at CUNY.tv. Next week, Quinoa is a complete protein, but what's it doing in villages in South America?

And check out my daily radio show weekday mornings at 10 on WNYC. Tomorrow morning, the New York mass transit system on of the future. That's on 93.9 FM and AM820, WNYC, talk to you then. Thank you.