The DUMBO Arts Festival. We started with brunch at Superfine which was great. I had almost forgotten that there'd be a band playing there too. The Jack Grace Band. And my steak and eggs and coffee were damn good. Superfine is another of these local, seasonal, changing menu kind of places, which makes it pretty cool in my book. Mine and Katie's friend Rachel came all the way down from Washington Heights to meet with us so we had a little mini-UNCG reunion going on.
After brunch we mostly strolled, stumbling across whatever until we found one of the festival programs on a counter in one of the restaurants on Pearl Street. Here's a pretty good digest of the thing we saw, captioned and all:
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| Best of DUMBO Arts Festival |
Among, many outdoor exhibits and open galleries and studios, there was dancing (both inside and out), musical performances and even a guy cutting someone's hair with clippers that were hooked up to a guitar amp and several effects pedals. This was pretty awesome but not the coolest thing I saw all afternoon. Here's a link to a description of what I thought was the coolest.
After Rachel left us to go to a rehearsal, we walked around for about as long as we could stand and then spent some time watching the dancing and trapeze at the Galapagos Art Space. Galapagos is a great venue and I'm really hoping that Tania and I can book it for Rhythmic Movement 2 in November. The seating is fantastic. Floating islands in a 1600 square foot indoor lake. And it's a LEED certified green building too.
After a little bit of time off of our feet we decided not to wait for the next set of dancers and instead go down to Wall Street to witness the spectacle of dirty hippies protesting everything and anything. I had seen some Facebook posts from one of my coworkers who was there. And we actually ran into the two of them who were there shooting the event, a reporter and a truck operator. Dan, the truck operator who had posted, was telling me how some of the protestors were hassling him as they were trying to interview other people, telling him he was part of the problem. Oh, the disillusionment. One protestor had been sitting around topless all weekend. Not sure what that was about.
The protestors have basically been camping out in Zuccotti Park for over a week now and complaining about Wall Street bankers getting bailouts among other things. The wikipedia article I just linked apparently mentions the protest and already has a pic up. Here are some pics I took:
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| Occupy Wall Street Protest |
We watched the protestors for a little bit, standing in a tight group and airing grievances. It was a lot more peaceful than what I've been hearing about the last few days. Idiots in the streets getting maced because they were resisting arrest or otherwise not complying with police requests. Apparently, they're not allowed to have amplification so, to get around this and so everyone would be heard who was speaking, they would repeat everything that was said, line by line, by each individual person who stood up to speak. This was fun to watch for a while but I still couldn't hear half of what was being said. In addition to not being allowed to use amplification, they are not allowed to even be camping there. The park is privately owned and flyers were handed out today instructing them to not camp there anymore.
I'm glad I got to go down and witness it all on a relatively peaceful day. Whether or not I agree with what the protestors are going on about (some of it I do agree with), and whether or not I agree with their methods (I don't, in fact, I always think they do less to help their cause when they present it in such a way where the people whose attention they're trying to get surely won't take them seriously), it's still interesting to see how many people come out and what they're all saying, what they're signs say. Some of it dumb, some of it compelling, some gross misuse of statistics and some kind of cool ones. There was one in the pics I took with one of my favorite quotes from the Buddha, and probably the most sensible thing written on any of the signs, which I will leave you with now:
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." - Buddha
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