The Empire State Building (ESB)

At least ten people have been shot at the Empire State Building this morning including an as-yet-unidentified shooter according to a spokesman for the New York City Police Department. The male shooter was killed, but the NYPD says further information about the gunman or his motivations is currently "unknown."

We'll update this post as soon as we know more.

Original Post (9:54 a.m.): At least four people have been shot at the Empire State Building this morning including an as-yet-unidentified shooter according to a spokesman for the department. The shooter was killed.

“At least four people were shot outside the building including the perp and the perp was shot dead-on-arrival,” an officer with the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information told the Observer.

The NYPD spokesman said they had no further information about the shooter at this time. He also said they could not provide any information about how the incident began.

“We’re still gathering information on that,” he said.

Update (10:05 a.m.): According to the New York Post, the shooting stemmed from a "dispute between coworkers" and left "at least two dead including the gunman" and "a total of 10 people shot."

Update (10:21 a.m.): An NYPD spokesman, Sergeant Ryan, confirmed that ten people were injured in the shooting including the gunman, who was killed. Sergeant Ryan said it was a "male perpetrator" but that other information about his race, age or possible motivations is currently "unknown."

Update (10:33 a.m.): A Flick user, MCM Photography has posted a very graphic set of photos taken outside the building.

© Mickey C Marrero Photography Inc.

Update (11:04 a.m.): Intern-on-the-scene Jonah Wolf sends the below photograph of observers filling 34th Street.

The crowd outside the Empire State Building post-shooting

Update (11:12 a.m.): The shooting was apparently sparked by a dispute between co-workers at a business inside the Empire State Building, according to the Daily News. WNBC is reporting that the deceased victim may be the boss of the shooter. DCPI wouldn't confirm the report.

Update (11:21 a.m.): Hani Durzy, director of corporate communications at LinkedIn, writes to The Observer: "We are extremely relieved that we can confirm that all LinkedIn staff in our Empire State Building Office are accounted for and safe."

Update (11:25 a.m.): Mayor Michael Bloomberg just confirmed that the shooter was a fired employee. He was a 5356-year-old worker at Hazan Accessories Imports, and shot a co-worker three times when a .45 semiautomatic handgun.

Update (11:32 a.m.): More details from the press conference: there are one dead and nine shot; the shooter attempted to shoot at a cop on the scene, according to the mayor. Police have begun letting people in to the Empire State Building's 33rd Street entrance, The Observer's Jonah Wolf reports.

 Update (11:37 a.m.): Another gruesome photo from @StephLauren:

Victim in the Empire State Building shooting this morning.

Update (11:39 a.m.): The perpetrator has been identified as Jeffrey Johnson, 53 56, a former employee at Hazan Imports, where he designed women's accessories, according to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The victim was 41.

Update (11:54 a.m.): The Observer's David Freedlander tweets that the shooting occurred by building's north entrance, near 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, according to Commissioner Kelly's post-press conference comments, and that one of the victims hails from North Carolina.

A receptionist at one building tenant, meanwhile, tells The Observer that building management told her company that workers could leave the building through the 34th Street entrance, but can only enter on the building's south side.

Update (11:57):

The shooter's car.

Update (12:17): Statement from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who commended NYPD and emergency responders: "Our state has no tolerance for senseless acts of violence that harm our people, and we will do everything possible to ensure that law enforcement officials have the tools they need so residents of the city and tourists can enjoy everything New York City has to offer without fearing for their own safety and security."

Update (1:16) After Mike Bloomberg's press conference, Ray Kelly briefed reporters on the shooting. He updated the shooter's age to 56--earlier accounts had him at 53--and said that there were multiple cross complaint harassment allegations between the shooter and victim that lasted a over a year. "There was an ongoing dispute between the suspect and the person that he killed." He added that it appears as if several of the nine shot were wounded by police responding to the scene.

Update (1:26): “Within a quarter of a second, it was mass chaos," an audibly upset Kim Levering told The Observer's Daniel Edward Rosen over the telephone from her Park Slope apartment. "

Ms. Levering, a senior writer and communications director at the nonprofit Autism Speaks had gone to work like any other day, exiting the Q train at 32nd Street and Sixth, and was walking east on 33rd Street when the gunman opened fire.

There was a "pop, pop, pop," Ms. Levering said, followed by mass hysteria. She turned to head back west to Sixth Avenue, but got caught in the crush of people trying to flee the chaos. "“I almost got trampled when I got up against the wall and tried top turn to go back,” she said. "You couldn't tell if the shooter was chasing us up the street."

Ms. Levering, who told The Observer that she was leaving New York tomorrow on a trip to Burning Man, made her way to Sixth Avenue, walked downtown to 30th Street and made her way east to her office—where she stayed for a few minutes before deciding to head home.

"The adrenaline was so intense that I was uncontrollably shaking for two hours," she said.

Update (1:33): The Wall Street Journal has identified the victim as Steve Ercolino, 41, a vice president of sales at Hazan Imports, according to his LinkedIn page, and a 1992 graduate from SUNY Oneonta.

Mr. Ercolino

Update (1:39) Tony Malkin, whose family controls the Empire State Building, released a statement expressing his sympathies to the victims and noting that the violence didn't spread to the interior of the building: "This unfortunate event had nothing to do with the Empire State Building or with terrorism," he said. "The Empire State Building and its Observatories remained open throughout, and continue to be open and operating." The Observer has the complete statement.

Update (2:03): The Times points us to a t-shirt art business that appears to have been run by the shooter, Jeffrey Johnson, a graduate of Ringling School of Art & Design in Florida.

The crowd outside the Empire State Building

Update 2:20pm Jonah Wolf reports from the scene at the Empire State Building:By 10:30 AM, a crowd had gathered at the police line on 34th Street and Broadway, just east of Herald Square. Employees of businesses on that block—ASA College, Aéropostale, Forever 21—were told to show their ID or call their managers in order to cross the police line. Onlookers watched as police cars entered and exited the block.

Mark Lee, visiting from Essex, England, said he and his family "heard the sirens when we were going in" to the Empire State Building, but were still able to ride up to the 88th floor unaware of the shooting outside. "You can even go up to the 102nd floor," added his younger son, Robert, after leaving the police barricade.

"I'm glad I was late. I didn't have to dodge any bullets. God works in mysterious ways," said an employee of tour bus operators City Sights who declined to give his name.

Brandon Thorpe, who witnessed the shooting on the way to work at Penn Station, said, "You know that was retaliation. That means we have to get guns not just out of his hands but out of everybody's hands."

"I heard five gunshots," said Maria Almodovar Ramos, who was at work in the building on 10 West 33rd Street when the shooting occurred. "The shooter then ran toward Fifth Avenue." Seeing the police on his tail, the shooter apparently abandoned his grey Nissan and ran up Fifth Avenue toward 34th Street, where he was shot.

At approximately 12:50, a medical examiner van was seen leaving the crime scene.

Update (2:33): Raymond DiGiuseppe, chair in the Department of Psychology at St. John’s University, writes in on the shooter: “Jeffrey Johnson is too old for this aggressive act to be from the onset of psychotic disorder; and he’s too old to have unusual aggression typically found in younger men," Dr. DiGiuseppe said in an emailed statement. "Most professionals in our field think of aggression as impulsive, but we find that the three R’s revenge, resentment, and rumination can also play an important role in triggering aggression. Bringing the gun to his previous work place shows some degree of planning. Without knowing if he has a history of psychotic behavior, personality disorder, or neurological condition, if I had to predict, I would hypothesize that he has been ruminating about getting revenge and harboring feelings of resentment for the past year since he lost his job and that he would view this event as the result of being treated unfairly.”

Christine Quinn dishes (a little) on her upcoming nuptials.

Add Mike Lupica to the Ray Kelly for mayor bandwagon: “Go back across the history of the city and try to find another police commissioner you think could get a 77% approval rating even serving half as long as Kelly has.”

Top Republicans like Peter King, Michael Grimm and Marty Golden think Kelly should run.

Voters want a new direction for city schools from the next mayor.  Read More

This reaction did not go appreciated by Park Slope parents, and now, the keepers of the listserv have put a kibosh on any more discussion of the frozen dairy treats and their interloping purveyors:

"We are calling a HALT to all discussion of the ice cream thread and the responses it has received," reads a message sent out by the list's moderator. "For me the best news is that clearly there isn't any REAL news to cover or this wouldn't have received the coverage it did. It is time to focus on spring, holidays, vacations, and the great things our neighborhood has to offer."

The message went on to remind those who sign up for the Park Slope Parents list forwarding messages to the press is not allowed and that "our list is awesome."

Full message below:

Hey All,

We are calling a HALT to all discussion of the ice cream thread and the responses it has received. For me the best news is that clearly there isn't any REAL news to cover or this wouldn't have received the coverage it did. It is time to focus on spring, holidays, vacations, and the great things our neighborhood has to offer.

We do want to remind you that while this is a private group, it's a private group of thousands of people. While we'd like to think that everyone respects that privacy, we should know that we can't count on that. As we remind you in your joining agreement, belonging to PSP is contingent on respect for the privacy of your fellow members. Forwarding group or private messages to other people, websites, or blogs, without their expressed approval, is not allowed. Think before pressing 'send.' You should be willing to tell a person to their face what you are writing to them (within the spirit of community, in a kind and respectful way). Finally, the seeming anonymity of email should not be an excuse for incivility.

Our list is awesome. In the past week a woman posted about miscarriage and received an outpouring of support. People are getting help with their fences, go-karts camps, and assistance in talking to kids about where and how babies are made.  We're offering help to parents raising secular kids and dealing with religious families.  We'd be just as helpful with parents raising religious kids dealing with secular families.  So bring your issues, your dilemmas, your thoughts, your questions and your answers to PSP. We are a diverse, wonderful group of parents with lots of different perspectives!

Park Slope Parents

The card showed Mr. Cooper and Robert Cooper, his domestic partner of 27 years, and the couple’s five adopted children. (Robert Cooper changed his last name when the couple adopted their first child 25 years ago.)

“He told me how beautiful my family looked, and I said to him that I hoped that if you decide to run for president that you will remain a strong and consistent advocate for gay rights and for gay marriage,” Mr. Cooper recalled.

The president, he said, looked him straight in the eye, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Jon, we will get there together.”

“It sent a chill down my spine,” Mr. Cooper said. “This guy gets equal rights for gays. Of course he is a supporter of same-sex marriage.”

Mr. Cooper became the first elected official in New York to endorse Mr. Obama’s White House bid, served as the Long Island campaign chair in 2008, and was named an “Obama Victory Trustee” this year, tasked with raising at least $100,000 for the president’s re-election effort.

He married his partner in 2009, in Connecticut, a few months after same-sex marriage was legalized there.
But now he wishes that his fellow advocates for marriage equality would just lay off the matter for a little while.

“I’ve probably met the president 15 times, Mr. Cooper said. “And I happen to believe that personally Barack does support same-sex marriage. But whether he should come out—excuse the expression—and express public support for it is another matter.”

Mr. Cooper’s stance puts him at odds with major gay rights groups, especially the Freedom to Marry Coalition, which, in addition to gearing up for five state referenda across the country on the issue this November, embarked earlier this year on a quixotic quest: to get the Democratic Party to include support for full marriage rights into the party platform that will be introduced and voted upon in at September’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

Of course, it has been a long time since anyone read, let along fought over the contents of a party platform. Instead, party platforms have become much like the conventions themselves—slicked up media narratives designed to be as bland as possible for an increasingly diminishing audience of party regulars. And once the convention is over, they are largely forgotten. Even off-handed comments made before a hot microphone get more attention than these supposed documents of party priorities.

Occasionally, scuffles will break out, but it has been a while. In 1992, a minor uproar took place on the Republican side of the aisle when a group of pro-choice delegates tried to tone down some of the platform’s harsh language on abortion rights, but they were quickly dismissed by the officials from the George H.W. Bush White House. On the Democratic side, you have to go all the way to the 1980 convention—when Ted Kennedy pushed for a health-care-for-all plank—to find the last major platform fight, according to Alice Germond, the long-time secretary to the Democratic National Committee.

“It is a statement of who we are, what our beliefs are, and how we will address national problems,” Ms. Germond said. “But to be honest with you, I don’t think there are that many Americans who will be waking up at 4:30 in the morning to find out what our party platform is.”

For Evan Wolfson, the executive director of Freedom to Marry, the platform push is an effort to codify what the Democratic Party implicitly believes about same sex marriage.

“This is where the majority of Democrats are, and it’s where the majority of independents are, and it speaks to the values that the party historically embraces,” he said. “Because we believe it is the right thing to do, and happily, the right thing to do politically, we stepped forward to put the party firmly on record with where the majority of the party already is.”

For Mr. Wolfson, Mr. Obama is already a de facto supporter of same-sex marriage—he noted that the president has already ordered the federal government not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, has called on Congress and the courts to overturn the law and has opposed state efforts to enshrine antigay marriage laws in their constitutions. Last year, he notes, Mr. Obama told supporters at an LGBT fund-raiser that “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country.” And then throw in the fact that at a pair of fund-raisers in New York this month, First Lady Michelle Obama told supporters that a Supreme Court heavy with Obama-appointed justices would permit their children to “love whomever they choose.”

“Has the president connected the dots between what he has said and what follows from it?” Mr. Wolfson said. “That is what we are calling for. But if he has affirmed the bedrock principle that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple—well, ‘every other legal right’ is the right to marry.”

At first, members of President Obama’s campaign scoffed at the effort, although part of their dismissal sounded like they simply resented being pressured on the issue from supposed allies. Now, however, there are signs they are starting to take it seriously. Last week, The Washington Post reported that the White House’s political team has had discussions with leading Democrats about the upsides and downsides of coming out fully in support of gay marriage. And in the few weeks since the effort was launched, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as both New York senators and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have all signed on (Gov. Andrew Cuomo—who actually brought marriage equality to New York State when he pushed a bill to legalize same sex marriage through the Legislature—so far has not.) Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is serving as the chairman of the convention this year, has also come out in favor of it.

Both sides of the debate are able to cite polls saying that their side is correct.

Urging caution, Mr. Cooper said, “Fifty-four percent of African-Americans are not comfortable with same-sex marriage. Thirty-two percent of Latinos [are not]. There sizeable minorities of two key constituency groups. The reason I would urge it not to be incorporated into the party platform is that already Republicans are going to be involved in a very intensive effort suppress voter turnout among key constituencies. We don’t need anything out there that might inadvertently support those efforts.”

While it’s unlikely these voting blocs will fall to Mitt Romney, they could keep voters home in swing states like Ohio and Florida.

Mr. Wolfson however cites the fact that a majority of Democrats are already in favor of marriage equality, young people overwhelmingly support it, and even independents and Catholics, he says, support it.

“This is no longer the third rail that operatives used to think of it as. We are no longer in 1996. We are no longer in 2004. We are no longer even in 2008,” he said. “This is where the center of American politics is today, and the Democratic Party, which has done so much to get it there, should be able to stand with its own values to make the case to bring the country forward.”

What remains unknowable is where the president’s head and heart are. Asked earlier this month during a press conference call about Mr. Villaraigosa’s endorsement of the platform plank, Jim Messina, a top political adviser to the president, declined to speculate on what the party platform would ultimately say.

“Look, we’re in the big-tent party here,” he said, and proceeded to detail Mr. Obama’s “great record on fighting for fundamental fairness for all Americans: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and many other accomplishments we are very, very proud of.”

Still, it is hard to find anyone close to Mr. Obama who honestly takes the president at his word that he is “evolving” on the question of gay marriage—as if somehow the son of two parents whose own union was illegal in many states when he was born and who grew up to be a constitutional law scholar is merely a witness to his own mental transformation on the issue.

“I have no doubt that if the president gets re-elected, that he will come out in support of gay marriage,” said one supporter who has discussed the issue with the president and who asked to remain anonymous to avoid revealing the content of private conversations.

It is this hesitancy, driven by a presumption that an ever-narrower slice of swing voters disapproves of marriage equality, that is the single biggest animator of Mr. Wolfson’s effort.

“In politics there are people who make their living by being risk-adverse,” he said. “There are others who make their living by trying to slice things into narrow little chunks, and there are others who put forward a vision and trust that the American people will respect leadership and authenticity and values—and often it's those are the ones who change our politics and strengthen our country.”

In the press call, Mr. Messina attempted to deflect the decision away from the president, saying, “You know, there’s a process. There’s not even a delegate platform committee yet. There’s a process to go through this discussion and the DNC will go through that and we will have a platform.”

In truth, there are complicated parliamentary rules that detail who gets on the platform drafting committee, how the planks get voted upon, what kind of amendments may be offered and what the final document looks like, but there is little doubt that the party platform will represent the priorities of the president.

“There is a platform committee, but they rubber stamp it,” said Ed Kilgore, a Democratic strategist and someone closely involved with several Democratic conventions in the past. “It is going to be totally up to the Obama people. No way somebody will get up on the floor and propose a plank [without his approval]. The real question is whether the president is ready to back marriage equality. He is ‘evolving,’ but most of the Democratic Party is already there.”

Mr. Kilgore, however, said that he could imagine a scenario where other gay groups try to curb some of Freedom to Marry’s efforts, citing the fact that they have been on a roll in states across the county and may be hesitant to push their luck over platform language that is largely meaningless.

But if he is wrong, and Mr. Wolfson and his supporters push a marriage plank only to have it fail, there is no telling what will happen at the Democratic convention, although there could be enough drama to make the “brokered convention” fantasies over the Republican side of the aisle seem tame by comparison. Democrats sound determined to avoid this fate.

“We will not let Republicans enjoy a party,” Ms. Germond said. “We are united by candidate. I do not expect there to be a floor fight.”

But Mr. Wolfson refused to rule out the possibility of walkout.

“It is way premature to have any conversation about that. The process hasn’t even begun yet. We have begun the conversation. We believe we are talking with friends and people who are mostly in support of the freedom to marry and we have every reason to believe this will be in the platform.”

So, nothing dramatic or symbolic if you don’t get your way?

“The convention is in September,” he replied evenly.
dfreedlander@observer.com

“At the heart of the enterprise,” Ms. Gornick continues, “lay a self-regard that made the writing rise to unmatched levels of verbal glitter and daring, even as its dangerously narrowed scope ruled out sympathy, much less compassion, for any character on the page other than the narrator himself.”

Where this project goes—post-Bellow, post-Roth—remains uncertain, but What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, 224 pages, $24.95), the newest collection of short stories by Nathan Englander, the 42-year-old novelist and playwright, may point a way forward. Here, the identities straddled are not Jewish and American, but Jewish and really Jewish. Fitting in with an alien and dominant culture is not a concern. What is, is what it means to be a Jew at a moment when so many make competing claims on the meaning of the word. Non-Jews seldom make an appearance in the world of these stories, and, when they do, they are almost invariably a menace in some form, or a lover not fit to take home to Mom.

Persecution lurks as a consistent if vague threat. And, everywhere, the Holocaust. It is as real to Mr. Englander’s characters as it was to their parents and grandparents, a grief unresolved, a warning still to be heeded.

“Deb is very interested in Mark’s parents,” Mr. Englander writes in one story. “They’re Holocaust survivors. And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone … ‘Do you know,’ she’ll say to me and Trevor, just absolutely out of nowhere, ‘World War Two veterans die at a rate of a thousand a day.’”

Deb, meanwhile, is crestfallen when Mark recounts being in the locker room at his father’s country club when his father meets a man, who, like him, has numbers tattooed onto his arm.  The numbers are entirely the same, except that the other man’s is three digits higher.

“So I say to my Dad, ‘He’s right ahead of you,’ I say. ‘Look, a five,’ I say. And yours is an eight. And the other guy looks and my father looks and my father says, ‘All that means is, he cut ahead of me in line. There, same as here. This guy’s a cutter, I just didn’t want to say.’”

In another story, a bunch of suburban school children are plagued by an anti-Semitic bully. They recruit a trainer, a former soldier in the Israeli army, who makes them watch a Holocaust documentary for motivation.

After the film, he turned the lights back on and said to us, yelled at us, “Like sheep to the slaughter. Six million Jews is twelve million fists.” And then he segued from fists and Jewish fighting to the story of brave Trumpeldor who, Boris claimed, lost an arm in the battle Tel Hai and then continued fighting with the one.

The gang troops over to the bully’s house and hurls a rock at his family’s bay window. It misses and hits the side of the house with “a great big bang. We fled. Still imperfect, still in retreat, we ran with euphoria hooting and hollering, victorious.”

In moments like this one, Mr. Englander achieves almost Roth-like levels of hilarity: the boys get their first self-defense class when they convince Boris to fight one of them. The poor lad gets the wind knocked out him, and asks how much.

“How much what?” was Boris’ answer. He displayed a rare tentativeness, which Larry might have noticed if he hadn’t been trying to breathe. “For the lesson,” Larry said. And here was the wonder of America, the land of opportunity. In Russia, if you punched someone in the stomach, you did it for free.

Then there is the story of the octogenarians at a Catskills-eque summer camp for the elderly, who become convinced that one in their midst, Doley Falk, a killer at the bridge table, was one in real life as well, half a century before—a Nazi guard at one of the camps they were sent to in their youth. Never forget, as the saying goes, and they scheme to get up a little Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on the unsuspecting Mr. Falk.

In the world Mr. Englander has constructed, if the Nazis don’t get you, your fellow tribesman—or your personal portion of collective guilt—will. Thus a Manhattan businessman, who has changed his name from Feinberg to Fein, can find himself face to face with a murderer’s row of his Hebrew school rabbis when he stumbles into a Port Authority peep-show joint. Two elderly settlers can find that the fate of one of their daughters relies on the wisdom of rabbis and the slipperiness of the ancient texts, in a story that, in its setting and plot, owes more to Paul Bowles than to Roth or Bellow.

The title story is an homage to Raymond Carver, and if a Jewish-American writer must come to grips with the likes of Bellow and Roth, for any American short-story writer the standard is Carver, whose spare, Edward Hopper-esque landscapes populated by broken-down characters dominated MFA programs—and thus the form—for years after he wrote them in the 1980s.

But Mr. Englander’s voice is far too ironic to take the master seriously.

Carver’s iconic story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” is about two couples sitting at a kitchen table, sharing an afternoon and a bottle of gin. In Mr. Englander’s, two women, friends from their Orthodox girlhoods in Queens, reconnect after many years. One, Lauren (who insists on going by “Shoshana”), ran off to Israel and turned Hasidic, raising 10 girls with her husband, Mark (or “Yerucham”), an enormous man who, except for his black hat, could pass as a background singer for ZZ Top. The other, Deb, has gone in the opposite direction, moving to Florida and, with her husband, the narrator of this tale, raising a son, Trevor, whom, now a teenager, Mark takes one look at and says simply, “He does not seem Jewish to me.” It’s identity one-upmanship’s dagger-in-the-heart.

“A lot of pressure, I’d venture, to look Jewish to you,” Deb’s husband says. “Like say, maybe Ozzy Osbourne, or the guys from Kiss, like them telling Paul Simon, saying, ‘You do not look like a musician to me.’”

In this tale, however, it is not a bottle of gin the quartet commune over but a bag of weed Deb finds in Trevor’s room. They talk, like their predecessors, of the meaning of love, but really, of trust. How could Deb keep knowledge of Trevor’s pot habit a secret, her husband wonders? What other secrets is she hiding?

But, since this is Nathan Englander and not Raymond Carver, the question of hiding comes down in the end to a game of who would do for you as the Gies couple and a few other people did for Anne Frank.

This book received rapturous blurb-work from all the right people—Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers et al.—and most of it is well-deserved, even if there is perhaps one too many dream sequences or flights of postmodern fancy for this reader’s taste. In these stories, Mr. Englander has a tendency to square his narrative circles with overwrought moralizing or sentimentality, but the stories are so tightly wrought, the sentences laid out so cleanly, the dialogue so real and the humor so self-lacerating that one is inclined to forgive him.

If Mr. Englander is in fact the future of Jewish-American prose, then that future looks to be a far more moral and compassionate one than the writing of the recent past. The scale and the stakes may be smaller, and the language less daring, but the humor and the brilliance, and the investigation of cultural identity, are all still there.

dfreedlander@observer.com

twitter.com/freedlander

Tea Party members hold a Tax Day protest. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The most memorable moment from the first major Tea Party rally in front of New York’s City Hall, in April 2009, wasn’t the woman chain-smoking cigarettes by a guard rail, there, she said, to defend “smoker’s rights.” Nor was it the machismo menace that hung in the air, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” signs held by untrod-upon-looking junior insurance executives in for the afternoon from Glen Cove. It wasn’t even the palpable anger at Mayor Bloomberg, who (presumably) sat in his office a few feet away and, his efforts toward gun control and bike paths notwithstanding, was the only chance Republicans had of holding onto City Hall that November.

No, the most memorable moment of that afternoon was the speaker who took to the microphone and urged everyone present to put down their tricorner hats and give a round of applause to the people who had made the rally happen: the New York City Parks Department, the sanitation workers, the police guarding the barricades.

These were “the working people,” the ones lionized by this movement for the screwing they had been taking from the Obama administration and  assorted powers-that-be, but they were also government workers, their salaries and pensions paid for with hard-earned taxpayer dollars, their very existence dependent upon public largess.

In the two and a half years since that gathering, there have been hundreds like it across the country. In 2010, Tea Party protesters and their ilk not only took out the Democrats in Congress, but even managed to squelch the ambitions of a few Republicans who were deemed insufficiently conservative by the latest right-wing litmus test.

But by late 2011, Glenn Beck, once the Cassandra of this crowd, had been shuffled off the stage. The town hall meetings that first alerted the mainstream media to this new substrata of the body politic are now filled not with conservatives yelling at Democratic congressmen to keep their government hands off of Medicare but with liberals yelling at the Republican reps to let the Bush tax cuts expire. The debt ceiling has been raised, budgets have been passed. The likely Republican presidential nominee is as far removed from this tumult in the streets as the average CEO is from the jobs he outsourced.

Into this breach have slipped a couple of books that attempt to explain this new world we now find ourselves in. Each has its appeal and goes some way toward answering what remain the most compelling questions about the Tea Party movement: How, in the wake of perhaps the most conservative presidency since Hoover, did a bunch of white, comfortable citizens in late middle age take up the banner of public protest in the manner of those hated ’60s rabble rousers of their youth? What, in other words, made the silent majority—after the conclusion of a presidency that paid more fealty to the right wing than any in recent history, and just a few months into the next presidency—decide that they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore?

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

One of the most sympathetic answers to this question comes from Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, the two Harvard political scientists who wrote The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 264 pages, $24.95). The two are receptive to Tea Partiers in a way seldom found outside the right-wing echo chamber. Their book is the result of sitting with Tea Party activists at rallies and in meetings, in an effort to determine what, exactly, motivates them.

On the whole, what they found is that the Tea Party is made up mostly of, in a word, grumps. They are galled at the prospect of a Democrat in the White House—especially a black, Ivy league, former law school professor Democrat. A number of Tea Partiers, they write, date their start in politics to the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign. New recruits tend to be found in areas with large numbers of recently relocated retirees yearning for a sense of community. Although “members of the Tea Party do not bear the heaviest economic burden, they do have some of the most negative views of the economy … [T]hreats to [their] investments convinced many Tea Partiers that hard work is no longer fairly rewarded in America.” They are concerned that their children will not be as successful as they have been. Six in 10 believe that “when it comes to good jobs, America’s best days are behind it.” They love certain aspects of the federal government—Social Security, national parks, Medicare—but wag a disapproving finger at funds going elsewhere. Tea Partiers, the authors write, “condemn the behavior of the young in moral terms.” They fear that “younger people have ‘lost the value of work”’ and lament “that all the kids now ‘expect to be praised’ no matter how they perform.’”

Racial minorities come in for a bad rap with Tea Partiers: “Tea Party supporters are even more likely than other conservatives to believe that racial minorities are held back by their own personal failings.” But they aren’t the only ones:  “It is important to note that compared to other Americans, Tea Partiers rate whites relatively poorly on these characteristics, too. Tea Partiers have negative views about all of their fellow citizens; it is just that they make extra jaundiced assessments of the work ethic of racial and ethnic minorities.”

However unflattering all of that is, the authors have a tendency to downplay some of the more baleful aspects of the movement. They are not violent, they write—“tossing out the occasional emotional epithet or toting the occasional over-the-top sign is as far as they will go. Most Tea Party leaders may use aggressive language, but they do so only to foment activism for protests, electoral activities and other appropriate venues for the expression of political views and differences.” Never mind that Gabby Giffords still has trouble using her facial muscles.

Rule and Ruin.

That most Tea Partiers date their involvement back to Goldwater’s presidential campaign a half-century ago is telling, according to Geoffrey Kabaservice, a Yale historian and the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press, 504 pages, $29.95). It was at the 1964 GOP convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco that Mr. Kabaservice pinpoints the origins of the Tea Party-like litmus tests for ideological conservatism. “[T]he venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning,” he quotes one convention-goer recalling. Another said, “I felt like I was in Nazi Germany. It was really scary.” The object of the conventioneers’ ire wasn’t Lyndon Johnson; it was their fellow Republicans, the ones who favored Nelson Rockefeller over Goldwater.

For Mr. Kabaservice, the Tea Party is just the latest iteration of a wing of the Republican Party that has been trying, since the Eisenhower era, to drum out the ideologically impure. The idea of a nonconservative Republican Party, or even a nonconservative Republican, is something that would be bewildering to readers who don’t remember the John Lindsay administration—pretty much anyone under the age of 50—but as Mr. Kabaservice tells it, the Party of Lincoln once had a sizable and vibrant liberal and progressive wing, and the notion of parties being merely vehicles for ideological expression was considered threatening to the Republic. It would be easy to imagine one of the moderate Republicans Mr. Kabaservice describes with a campaign sign that had the word “PROGRESS” draped across it, much as Barack Obama’s did in 2008, instead of the motto that so many of the people Ms. Skocpol and Ms. Williamson write about would seem to favor: “RESENTMENT.”

All of this makes it more understandable that the Tea Party would act so venomously toward Mayor Bloomberg at the rally in 2009: That lost wing of the GOP that Mr. Kabaservice describes finds something close to its embodiment in the current resident of Gracie Mansion. Mr. Kabaservice describes a part of the Republican Party that was solution-oriented; instead of clinging to a few safe phrases—“more defense,” ”lower taxes”—it valued civil rights, the environment, an internationalist foreign policy.

This wing of Republicanism disappeared largely through a series of maneuvers on the part of conservative stalwarts to retake the reins of the party apparatus. No one has yet given a full account of what drew the GOP—or the electorate—on its rightward lurch over the past few years. That it was the result of a series of small skirmishes among college Republicans or state legislative leadership votes seems unlikely.

So, what did cause it? And why does the Republican Party continue to move further and further rightward while the Democrats seem to stay in place? Can the Tea Partiers have that much sway?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the two major parties are simply much diminished from what they were in the era that Mr. Kabaservice describes. Back then, their attraction was that sense of community that Ms. Skocpol and Ms. Williamson describe as a reason retirees join Tea Party groups. Who registers with a political party these days? Virtually no one, if they can help it, and that leaves the parties to the zealots. Combine this with the fact that so many fewer Americans vote in general elections, districts are gerrymandered to reward incumbency and increasing mobility allows citizens to live among kindred spirits, and the Tea Party takeover of the past few years is not very surprising.

But where do we go from here? Mr. Kabaservice ends his book with the example of the absurd Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Senate candidate most famous for her hard-line antimasturbation stance and who once took to the airwaves to proclaim that she is not a witch. Buoyed by conservative, Tea Party support, she defeated a well-liked congressman for the Delaware Senate Republican nomination, and went down to defeat in the fall to a Democrat, depriving the party of a likely pick-up in the Senate.

There has been no indication that Tea Partiers are regretful over the way this played out, since, as the saying goes, better a Senate full of Democrats than a Senate full of those indistinguishable from them. Ms. O’Donnell seems unlikely to be the end of the Tea Party, but this very well could be the final wave of books about the movement as the party’s establishment and radical wings collapse into one another. The Republican presidential nominee will almost certainly be Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts moderate, as a series of self-described Tea Party candidates have fallen by the way side. And who does Mr. Romney count among his endorsers? Christine O’Donnell.

dfreedlander@observer.com

“In here, it says about the blacks in America and the community here,” said Nadine, 26, gamely translating from German her guidebook. “It says it is very different from the mass in Germany. There it is very quiet, you know. Here you can wear blue jeans and T-shirt. And it talks about the singing and the dancing. And it says it is the most lovely thing in Harlem.”

Was she a fan of gospel music? Were the records of Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams and the Staple Singers on constant repeat at her home in Germany?

No, she said, pointing at her mother standing next to her.

“But we loved Sister Act.”

They are not alone. As the tourists descend on New York for the holiday season this week, in addition to the usual sights—the Statue of Liberty, the Broadway shows, Ground Zero—is another must-see that few below 125th Street know much about: old-time religion, uptown style.

It has been like this, Harlemites and church-goers say, for well over a decade, when tour buses first started depositing eager Europeans (and to a lesser degree, Asians) on the doorsteps of the neighborhood’s houses of worship. Then, at least it was manageable, and the churches benefited by a getting a little cut of whatever their purveyors of the “Harlem Gospel Tours” could provide.

Now, the guided tours aren’t as much of a problem as the tour books and the accrued word-of-mouth over the past 10 years, which sends the hordes mostly to stand around and wait for hours at Abyssinian, Harlem’s most storied church and the one listed as a must-see in seemingly every guidebook on the planet.

This past Sunday, close to 400 people showed up.  Some days it can be several times that. Typically, only 200 or so get into a sanctuary that seats around 1,200.

And so at Abyssinian, the ushers, decked out in their Sunday finery, double as bouncers, keeping the line straight and deciding who receives entry into what has apparently become Sunday morning’s hippest nightclub.

“Ladies and gentlemen, monsieurs and mademoiselles, señors y señoras,” said one usher in the flat tone of someone who has had to make the same speech hour after hour, week after week. “During the course of my announcement you might see some people approach me and say, ‘Mister I have a question.’ If anyone does that I am going to ask them to go to the back of the line and they will lose their place in line. You may be tempted to call me rude or impolite or terse. I am willing to address everyone on this line, but I must do so in a way that minimizes chaos, disorder or anarchy from arising. Next thing you know the sidewalk is flocked and we have all sorts of problems.”

The line began murmuring, trying to make sense of what they’d just been told.

The windup finished, the lecture continued.

“It is now 9:36. Some of you are asking when you will be allowed in. This is the best answer I can give you. The 9 a.m. service is scheduled to end at 11 a.m. The key word in that sentence is ‘scheduled.’ We will try to accommodate as many of you as possible.

“Thank you for your attention, and enjoy your stay in New York,” he added.

The usher went on to describe the rules of the service—no cell phones, no pictures, no video, no getting up and leaving early. It is not like the churches in Europe, he says, where visitors can peer in while services are going on.

And it is not, he notes, 42nd Street. There is no discount ticket booth. It is not a show. It is a church, and the people are there to worship God.

After the lecture the feeling on the line was mostly confusion. One man who had a video camera out was told to put it away.

“What are you filming me for?” one of the ushers growled. “I don’t want to wind up on no YouTube. Who puts somebody they don’t even know on YouTube?”

The videographer, a tourist from Finland, meekly put away his camera.

“I don’t know,” he said when asked what happened. “I think I upset him.”

Despite the warning from the ushers that they were hours away from letting anyone in, and that no one was guaranteed entry, not a single tourist left.

The lecture, and the line that stretches not from the door of Abyssinian but from around the corner, is an improvement. In years past, the atmosphere outside the church had dissolved into a circus. Tourists would crowd around the entrance and try to edge their way past the ushers. They would say how far away they had come, try to bargain for just a little peek inside. Groups would gather across the street, staring longingly at the church, or perhaps plotting how to storm its walls.

In response, the church has tried to make the early 9 a.m. service for members only. They have added a Wednesday service and tired to encourage the tourists to go to that one if they can’t make it in during prime time.

“We are happy to see men and women come from other places,” said Rev. Calvin Butts, the longtime pastor of Abyssinian. “And we want them to get a flavor of who we are, to hear the gospel, the fellowship, and to take the good news back home.

“Our ushers are extremely polite, very well behaved. What they face are often tourists who are not so,” he added. “The tourists who come do not contribute significantly. I want to accommodate the tourists. I want them to have a wonderful worship experience but in order to make sure they are handled politely and wonderfully and warmly I have to have people there on an almost-full-time basis. We have wonderful volunteers but it becomes more like a job and it costs us money. The tourists come and the plate goes by, and they put a dollar in, but that doesn’t help much.”

An hour or so later, the line had stretched to nearly 300 people. A little makeshift global village developed. A woman opened up a tea and coffee stand. An older man in a red felt hat was blaring the blues gospel CDs he is selling. They looked as if they were preparing for war—hopping up and down, stamping their feet to stay warm.

Three teenagers from Australia were among them. They said they had never been to America before. Got in last night, went to Broadway, did Times Square and Rockefeller Center, then got up at dawn to come here.

“We really wanted to see the kind of church you see in the movies. So we looked it up on Google and found this one. There were crazy mixed reviews. Some said it’s terrible, you are not going to get in, they favor all the black people and they were just standing for 50 minutes and saw nothing. And other people said it was amazing.”

“Yeah,” added her friend, “the ones that got in.”

Out in front of the church, a family of five—an overly tanned mother and father, three bright blond kids—stepped out of a chauffeured Mercedes SUV. They were all wearing Yankees caps and said they are from New Jersey. The ushers lined them up in front of the door, explaining that they try to make accommodations for domestic visitors. Out back, another lecture began.

“Ladies and gentlemen, monsieurs and mademoiselles, señors y señoras,” the ushers yelled in the same tone. “I submit that the church will be full before we get to your place in line. If you choose to stand here after I am done speaking you will be doing so purely on a stand-by basis. And you cannot or will not be guaranteed entry into the church. There are other churches in the neighborhood. If you take a left down this avenue you are sure to find some. Some of you may ask if you will be able to get into those churches. The best answer I can give you is I am a member of this church. Therefore I do not know about the policy of other churches.”

The foreign influx, though, is mostly an issue at Abyssinian. “We don’t have problems like that,” said Bobbie McDaniel, the pastor of nearby Metropolitan Baptist Church. Other churches have been known to send out an emissary in a van to try to pick up those tired of waiting in line at Abyssinian. On Sunday, a man named Ivan Hickman walked up and down the line trying to convince those shivering in place to turn and head to Mother AME Zion around the corner.

“Gospel music is gospel music. It don’t matter where it comes from,” he reasoned.

A vet who pulled out his i.d. to prove that it was his 53rd birthday, he said he hoped the tourists would throw him a few dollars for directing them to the right place.

“Just hoping to make a few dollars before football starts,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

Mostly, the locals and the church attendees didn’t seem to mind all that much. A few came up to the line and apologized.

“It can be disruptive to the churches,” said Michael Henry Adams, a Harlem historian and tour guide. “The visitors are dressed inappropriately. They felt like they were being in a zoo. But once people recognize how much money there was to be made by being on display, they found it less objectionable.”

In the line, three hours after many had first arrived, the bad news at last had begun to settle in. Another usher came out for the eulogy.

“We have reached our seating capacity. The best thing you can do is come back on Wednesday. We don’t have any more room. That is it for today, ladies and gentlemen. I am very sorry. The church is now closed for the day. I don’t have the room. There is no more room.”

No one moved.

“You guys aren’t listening! We don’t have any more room. There are other churches in the area. It is finished! It is finished!”

The few dozen remaining tourists looked up confused, asked each other what just happened and then, as if by instinct, settled back into line.

dfreedlander@observer.com

Tired perhaps of discussing the Jersey Shore's heteronormativity and its power dynamic, academics at New York University are next taking up the scandal of the summer--the case of former IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn and his alleged rape of a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown.

Called, "The DSK Scandal: Transatlantic Reflections on Sex, Law, and Politics, the two day conference "aims at interpreting the transatlantic dimensions of this event."

"On the one hand," organizers write in an email that went out last week, "The mutual misunderstandings revealed important differences between France and the United States – not only between the legal systems, but also between the media cultures, as well as the political ones. On the other hand, the political dimensions of the story – in terms of gender, class, and race, and even sexuality – did transcend such national differences."

Among the discussion topics are "Sexual Violence in Public Discourse" and "The Politics of Seduction:  The Role of Sex in Democracy."

No word if Cy Vance will attend. Full schedule below:

 

THE DSK SCANDAL: TRANSATLANTIC REFLECTIONS ON SEX, LAW, AND POLITICS

December 1-2, 2011, New York City

 

Cardozo School of Law (55 Fifth Avenue)
Institute of French Studies, New York University, at La Maison Française of NYU (16 Washington Mews)

With the co-sponsorship of IRIS (CNRS/EHESS) & Faculty of Law, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, and the support of UMI Transitions (CNRS/NYU)

Co-organized by Éric Fassin, Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez, Julie Suk, Frédéric Viguier
From May 14 to August 23, 2011, from Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest to the day the penal charges against him were dropped by the New York City justice system, the sexual assault indictment initiated by Nafissatou Diallo’s accusation provoked extraordinary public attention throughout the world. While the penal case is now over, and regardless of what becomes of the civil one, or the French lawsuits that followed, this will certainly be an affair to remember: it will remain important in the years to come not only because of what happened, but also for what it has revealed about France and the United States, as well as its potential impact on both societies. Not only is the affair a mirror; it may also turn out to be a catalyst. Thus, it would not be a mere scandal, now behind us; the DSK moment could prove momentous.

This two-day academic conference, co-organized by French and American scholars and institutions, aims at interpreting the transatlantic dimensions of this event. On the one hand, the mutual misunderstandings revealed important differences between France and the United States – not only between the legal systems, but also between the media cultures, as well as the political ones. On the other hand, the political dimensions of the story – in terms of gender, class, and race, and even sexuality – did transcend such national differences. Many feminists were quick to point it out: exceptionalism (whether French or American) is irrelevant in matters of power. As a consequence, the necessary cultural approach must eschew culturalism. In particular, attention will be paid not only to the different languages used within each society (in particular in law, media, and politics), but also to the self-examination this confrontation occasioned, and as a consequence the transformations that may result on both sides.

The conference will be organized around three related panels to draw out the legal, political, cultural, and social implications of the DSK case in the United States and France.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

 

4-6:30 pm - Introduction/Welcome and Panel I  Sexual Violence in Public Discourse (Moot Court Room, Cardozo School of Law)
Panelists:
Laure Bereni (CNRS)
Kimberlé Crenshaw (Columbia Law School and UCLA School of Law)
Amy Davidson (The New Yorker)
Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)
Frédérique Matonti (Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Moderator:  Julie Suk (Cardozo School of Law)

This panel will address the media treatment on both sides of the Atlantic, not only of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, but more generally of sexual cases and scandals. It will include questions such as what is considered “fit to print,” how, and when, the revelation of names and pictures and the cultures of privacy, the issue of sources and leaks, the coverage of the United States in France (and vice versa), the investigative traditions and the relations between the media and the political class in both countries.  To what extent are media practices with regard to rape victims driven by the law of privacy and/or freedom of the press?  How is the legal disposition of a sexual assault case influenced by the media’s representations of it? Whose voice gets to be heard in the public when allegations of sexual violence are made against politicians and public officials?

Friday, December 2, 2011

 

10 am – 12 pm  - Panel II  Justice for Whom? Rape and Comparative Criminal Procedure (Moot Court Room, Cardozo School of Law)
Panelists:
Tiana Bien-Aimé (Lawyer and Consultant to Equality Now)
Pauline Delage (IRIS)
Emmanuel Saint-Martin (France 24)
Julie Suk (Cardozo School of Law)
James Q. Whitman (Yale Law School)
Moderator:  Paris Baldacci (Cardozo School of Law)

This panel will be devoted to comparisons of French and U.S. criminal procedure as they were understood throughout the DSK scandal –and how they are actually used by feminist activists in both countries. Discussions will cover such issues as the (infamous) “perp walk,” understandings of “the presumption of innocence,” and the mechanisms by which a rape victim’s credibility is evaluated.  How do the victim’s past sexual and immigration history play out in each justice system?  Do American “rape shield” laws (and exceptions to them) have French analogues?  How did prosecutorial discretion and adversarial fact investigation affect the DSK case?  Might a rape victim fare better with judicial investigation of facts and/or limited prosecutorial discretion?    How significant was the American “beyond a reasonable doubt” criminal standard in the prosecutors’ decision to dismiss the DSK case?  What are the legal problems raised by the prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn initiated by Tristane Banon’s complaint in France?  How do the different relationships between civil and criminal complaints in the two legal systems affect the trajectory of a rape case?

1:30-4 pm - Panel III  The Politics of Seduction:  The Role of Sex in Democracy (La Maison Française of NYU)

Panelists:
Delphine Dulong (Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Eric Fassin (Ecole normale supérieure and IRIS)
Renée Kaplan (France 24)
Ruth Rubio Marín (European University Institute, Florence)
Joan Scott (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Moderator: Frédéric Viguier (NYU)
The DSK scandal is the latest chapter in an ongoing transatlantic debate about the politics of seduction.  The French and American political cultures reflect different attitudes about the relevance of a politician’s sexual affairs to their ability to govern.  The two legal cultures reflect different understandings of the line between seduction and sexual aggression.  The concept of seduction might also inform the different concerns of French and American feminism, which have led to different policies to combat gender inequality.  The United States has a robust law of sexual harassment, on the one hand, but France has laws requiring gender parity (known to Americans as “quotas”) in positions of political and social responsibility. Might the DSK moment narrow the gap between French and American understandings of seduction and gender relations in a democracy?

This is, after all, someone who once described Piers Morgan as “a canned ham” and “a self-fluffer,” who suggested that Adam Gopnik had been “put on earth to annoy,” and who wrote a devastating 1,000-word takedown of Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn’s behavior at Tim Russert’s funeral (“I don’t question Quinn’s grief or the sincerity of her gesture, though I suspect that Quinn may have also queued up to receive Communion because it would give everyone at the service an opportunity to get a good look at her on such a somber, star-studded occasion. It’s hard to pass up such an opportunity for visibility. Nothing like a Mass with all the trimmings to blossom the drama queen within”).

But sitting at the Café Un Deux Trois in midtown—a favored postcinema haunt of his and one of his mentors, the film critic Pauline Kael—and sipping on a Diet Coke, Mr. Wolcott comes across as meek, if not a tad shy. He apologizes for not standing up, explaining that he fears knocking over the table. “I once did that. At a business meeting. Oof, it was awful.” (His girth has been a frequent object of derision from his critics, who often become his critics after Mr. Wolcott writes something untoward about them.)

Mr. Wolcott was there with The Observer to discuss his new memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, an engaging, snappily written remembrance of his early days in the city. Whenever the book hops from the ’70s into the present day, it is usually so that Mr. Wolcott can update us on how some shady character from back in the day turned out.

For example, a playwright who lived above Mr. Wolcott in his first basement apartment—and whose noisy lovemaking is described as “like a train chugging into the station, picking up speed as they reached the final whistle”—is spotted decades later walking across 23rd Street. Without breaking stride, he spreads his arms and shouts, “Hey, we got older!” A public access television porn purveyor/provocateur (there apparently were such types in the ’70s) is spotted on an uptown bus, looking like Shrek “if Shrek were the color of disgruntled instead of clay green.”

On the day we met with him, Mr. Wolcott had run into someone from Project Runway on the bus. “I mean, I love Tim Gunn,” he said. “Tim Gunn’s philosophy of life, I love: this is what the situation is. Make it work. Use your time. He doesn’t get into a cosmic thing. It’s a real utilitarian, almost Mr. Spock sort of approach.”

Lucking Out purports to be a look at New York during a time when “it wasn’t just the criminality that kept your radar alert, the muggings and the subway car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxysms that punctuate the city, the sense that much of the city had suffered a psychotic break,” back when it was a “city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes.”

But really the book is a how-to on the writing life. In this regard, Mr. Wolcott was helped along not just by talent but by a pair of helpful mentors. The first of these was Norman Mailer, his boyhood literary idol. Mailer suggested Mr. Wolcott for his first job, at The Village Voice, on the strength of having been sent a single article that had appeared in the Frostburg State college newspaper.  At The Voice Mr. Wolcott was tasked with weeding through the slush pile, where he learned what to avoid if one wanted to make it into print:

“Avoid preamble—flip on the switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five hundred word slot: no matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. … Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo,” he writes.

At the Café Un Deux Trois, Mr. Wolcott expanded on this notion.

“You have to remember that you always write for readers,” he said. “Most people, their idea of a reader is not even a person, it’s like their expectation of what this piece will do for them. ... You have to realize that if you don’t make something clear, if you don’t make something interesting, they will abandon it in the second paragraph.

“It’s one of things I learned, that even if you are Norman Mailer, you can’t set up road blocks for the reader—they don’t owe you.”

The second of these mentors was Ms. Kael, who tracked Mr. Wolcott down in that basement apartment and brought him into her orbit for late cinematic discussions at the Un Deux Trois, or still later ones at the Algonquin. It was Ms. Kael who preached the importance of dispensing with mercies in criticism.

“Tender feelings were a fraudulent cover for larger failures of nerve,” Mr. Wolcott writes.

In an interview, he mused on what made both of these giants take him under their respective wings.

“I think it was because they felt I was actually speaking my own mind, that I wasn’t working second hand,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine not wanting to do that because where is the fun of writing if you are always second guessing yourself, if you are killing the energy in what you write through qualms and self-doubt, and ‘so and so won’t speak to me again’? One of the things I quickly learned was that it doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t speak to you again because they probably won’t speak to you anyway. If you are a New Yorker, you get snubbed by people you don’t even know anyway.”

Lucking Out wasn’t Mr. Wolcott’s idea. He had other ideas for his next book (he has already written two—a novel and critique of the media in the run-up to the Gulf War).

When his agent suggested a memoir, he was skeptical.

“I thought that if I am going to do a memoir, I don’t want it to be a bleeding heart. I don’t want anybody to have sympathy for me. Because there is no reason for anybody to have sympathy for me. But you know how writers are. They will milk the sympathy.”

Mr. Wolcott said he wrote the book in part to describe a lost world, a world where even a dropout from Frostburg State could gain a foothold on the journalistic rockface. “To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky,” he writes. “A writer could still dream of climbing to the top, or at least getting close enough to the top to see who was up there enjoying themselves.”

In the city he lives in today, rents are too expensive and outlets too few for anyone to arrive, as he did, on a bus at the Port Authority and expect to find a job. And there certainly wouldn’t be a Pauline Kael looking around for people to go to the movies with.

“One of the things I didn’t realize until later, the kind of generosity that Mailer had, and that Pauline had, most writers don’t have because they feel like there is a limited amount of success out there and I am not going to give anybody any of it,” he said.

The invocation of Ms. Kael is an elegiac one, and not simply because the legendary film critic is now a decade dead. She wrote at a time when criticism and the arts mattered in a way that they don’t now. And she represents a time when a film critic could go elsewhere besides the movies. Mr. Wolcott may be the last of this breed, one whose TV review gig turned him into an authority on punk rock, and who is still asked to write about everything from movies to ballet and books.

Mr. Wolcott doesn’t have a circle of young acolytes around him like Ms. Kael did. If he did, he said he would tell them, “Simply don’t hold yourself back as a writer when you start out. I don’t know how people can market themselves—that’s a whole other thing—but don’t hold back as a writer from the outset because once you hold back, all sorts of patterns will follow. There are very few writers that start out cautious and careful and then as they get older loosen up and go into a gallop.”

But if there is one message in the book it is that success in the writer’s life, or in any life, really, is as much a matter of lucking out as anything else.

“There are so many ways it can fall apart,” Mr. Wolcott said. “Thing just happen in life. You marry the wrong person, you start drinking, you have an illness, you go for the job that you think is the ideal job and it turns out to be the thing that kills you. Or they stay too long at the fair—too long at a certain magazine or at a certain gig. If you don’t change tactics or change the way you work at some point it really does just become filing copy. You don’t want to be one of those writers whose name comes up and people go, ‘Oh, is that guy still alive?’”

dfreedlander@observer.com

Vito Lopez supporters march from Borough Hall to Occupy Wall Street in the Financial District. Brooklyn Bridge, Tuesday Oct. 25

Longtime Assemblyman and Kings County Democratic leader Vito Lopez married the Brooklyn Democratic Party with the Occupy Wall Street protests yesterday, leading a delegation of supporters, political allies, unions and community groups over the Brooklyn Bridge to make common cause with the demonstrations.

The protesters marched over the bridge fronted by a police escort, carrying union banners and printed red, white and blue signs--"LIVING WAGE FOR A HEALTHY NEW YORK;" "MILLIONAIRE'S TAX NOW!" and of course, "WE ARE THE 99%"--reminiscent of the mass-produced slogans handed out by Obama for America. The signs were of a far more professional design and stock than the hand-painted ones familiar to most observers of the protests. And although there were no drummers, the Lopez-led marchers repeated the chants we've gotten so used to after a month and a half of covering Occupy Wall Street.

"All day, all week! Occupy Wall Street!"

"Shame on Morgan Stanley, shame on Goldman Sachs!"

Mr. Lopez has been challenged by a group of young reformers in his North Brooklyn stronghold who have attempted to remake the county's Democratic machine into something more open, transparent and progressive. And Mr. Lopez's wholesale embrace of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which regularly tout their open, transparent, and progressive bonafides, seems like an effort to steal some of his opponent's arguments.

At the front of the procession, protesters in white "Assemblyman Vito Lopez" sweatshirts declined to speak to The Observer--perhaps because Mr. Lopez had just given a speech (a few speeches, we heard) on the other side in which he decried the media for portraying him unfairly. "It's because I'm a politician myself," one woman said, by way of apology.

We didn't have much luck further down the march. Union members pointed us to other marchers, who turned out to be just as shy and directed us instead to union leaders and spokespeople who were not present. It was a striking contrast to the occupiers, who speak freely to the press--often to their own detriment--and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the movement has any leaders.

One protester and union member who didn't want to be quoted told us he felt Mr. Lopez's agenda and views are in line with the Occupy Wall Street protest. "That's my personal feelings," he said, as an extra hedge. "Not my organization's."

How did Mr. Lopez's speech go over? we casually asked two 20-something members of the retail workers union. "Which one? He spoke for five minutes between every speaker." And where was Mr. Lopez now? "I would guess he's at the front," one said. "Politicians don't lead from the rear."

We could identify Mr. Lopez by his "lumberjack shirt," he said.

In fact, The Observer found Mr. Lopez, clad in red plaid, in the anchor position with his chief of staff. "All we're doing is showing solidarity for the fact that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, that's all," Mr. Lopez, told The Observer as we stepped off the bridge into Manhattan. He was reluctant to say more. "Write about how this was was a successful march," he said. "I'm done."

He directed The Observer to his chief of staff, Leah Hebert, who was also short on specifics. "We want to make a change in Albany," she said. "We want to make a change in the city."

Once on Broadway, the union members, joined by Zuccotti Park occupiers and escorted by policemen on motorcycles, picked up their pace on the way to the park. "This is all Brooklyn, right?" one occupier at the corner of the park asked as the new protesters arrived, handing out fliers.

"We got Vito Lopez!" one young man affirmed. "We got city councilmen!" He accepted a flier with enthusiasm. "North Brooklyn and South Brooklyn need to step up to the plate!"