Here's my report for today, which I wrote for the Radical Philosophy Association:

Well, today was a completely full day.

Environmental workshops starting at 11 a.m. and going on all day long at Liberty Park and in a public atrium on Wall Street itself near wbai. Fine speeches and discussion.

Then at 3 pm a pick-up acoustic band performed and gathered a crowd, singing for hours. Great stuff! A few of us added new verses to old civil rights standards. My contribution was to "We Shall Not Be Moved," which went "We're Occupying Wall Street, we shall not be moved; Occupy Wall Street, we shall not be moved, just like a tree that's standing by the water, we shall not be moved." (I never understood why a tree standing by the water would not be moved by tsunami, etc., but what the hell ....)

Before that, Loudon Wainright III performed (boring, at least to me). At same time, many committees were meeting. And then Alex Callinicos spoke at 5 pm (using "repeat after me", aka "the public mic"). At same time, a group of 200 or so religious folks walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and arrived after church, led by Rev. Daughtry and City Council member Charles Barron. Many Black churchgoers. So Barron started speaking (also "public mic") 15 feet away from Callinicos, each facing away from each other at a 30 degree angle, and it was a wild hodgepodge of call-and-response from two different large groups trying to talk in the space left by the other!

Also at 5 pm, Angela Davis spoke at OWS at Washington Square Park, followed by separate General Assemblies in both parks. My friend Johanna went to that; I took off uptown to the Upper East Side to a protest called against Mayor Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion, where the Mayor was hosting a number of US Senators and Congress people, and the CEOs of some of the Wall Street companies who were demanding another $4 billion in cuts (or was it trillion? It almost doesn't matter at this point). Many older activists came there, around 100 people, which was great for that well-heeled area of the City. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were asked to speak before being beheaded, and Marie brought a terrific wedding cake ("Let them eat cake") we we promptly devoured.

This was organized mostly by leftish Democrats, but lots of others showed up. I gave an impromptu speech (and also asked if anyone had brought the guillotine), and the FOX-TV camera guy asked, "Didn't you go to Stony Brook?" I said yes, and he knew me from there 30 years ago, saying that he was involved in the periphery of the Red Balloon Collective (my collective) back then, and that he's still radical even though his job is working for FOX. Great seeing him! (We did a good job at Stony Brook all those years.) We then marched out of the police cage and up to the Gracie Mansion corner, but the cops were aggressive in not letting us stand or picket there. They arrested one woman who led us there. Meanwhile, a fellow I met showed me individual pictures he'd taken of every cop that was there!, for which he had developed an app to throw them all into a poster together, automatically, on his cellphone. It was great. We marched around in circles for 1/2 hour eating cake (we should have more catered picket lines, it's great for us and drives the cops crazy with hunger!) before going our separate ways.

Got home to Bensonhurst on 2 trains and a bus in record time from up there, an hour and 10 minutes (instead of the usual 2 hour trip). So here I am, ready to crash but also too excited to do so.

Every day's a left soap-box circus (in the best sense) at the Occupation.