Protesters clash with police today during the one year anniversary of OWS.

God how time flies. Just 365 days ago, we hadn't even heard of Occupy Wall Street, horizontal democracy, or a Statement of Autonomy. It was a heady time, when we remained blissfully ignorant of what the 99% referred to, and never thought to question who owned Zucotti Park.

This weekend, preparations began in earnest for OWS's one year anniversary. It's almost like the party didn't take a six month sabbatical where it dropped off the face of front page news. Luckily, it doesn't take much to make the media wax nostalgic for the days before the tents went up, and even though today's planned activities sound a lot like a peaceful version of that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, there is definitely excitement in the air. Below, we follow the OWS news of the day, as it happens. If you have any tips, photos or footage that you want seen, send them our way.

3:25 p.m.: Protesters and police clash in Zuccotti Park: OWS had their barricades taken away, and several seemingly handicapped Occupiers are arrested and loaded--along with their wheelchairs--into police vans. Behind the World Financial Center, a Debt March began but didn't draw a huge crowd.
1:12 p.m.: An arrested protester LiveStreams from his holding cell (audio only):

Live video for mobile from Ustream

12:58 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal is claiming over 124 protestershave been arrested since this morning. Meanwhile, photos emerge as NYPD move to Zuccotti:

Via Jay Densen

Via Nick Pinto

Via Federal Flashes

Via Alexa O'Brien

10:48 a.m.:

According to New York Magazine, at least 10 "leaders" of the leaderless movement were arrested yesterday during a tame reoccupation of Zuccotti Park. (This is interesting only so far as the fact that there are leaders, this time around.) While the music lasted well past bedtime on Sunday, several members worried that the NYPD was targeting key members to prevent today's "roving carnival" from happening, especially since the 18 arrested over the course of the night were picked "seemingly at random. Meanwhile...discussions! Planning committees, how we've missed you! Jimmy McMillian...what the hell were you doing there?
http://youtu.be/1qXiY8s4gCg
Not to mention a concert that included Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, as well as a Rosh Hashanah service.
http://youtu.be/Sa_wLovfn28
Currently: The People's Wall protest at the Stock Exchange has been hindered by police presence, herding activists onto the sidewalk and making sure the several small factions planning to join up at the Stock Exchange never met up.
http://youtu.be/GgJ5f9ZqOFc
Guards were checking I.D.s at the entrance of the NYSE and employees were alerted to the beefed up security. Meaning that you aren't paranoid...the NYPD just got a copy of your schedule. It should look something like this:

MON. SEPT 17: RESISTANCE Financial District
On the one year anniversary, people from all walks of life are going to assemble in the streets of the Financial District in an outcry for economic justice. For on-the-ground updates please contact the OWS PR Team directly.

7am – The People’s Wall, a non-violent civil disobedience at the Stock Exchange.* + 99 Revolutions: a swirl of mobile intersection occupations throughout the Financial District which will spring from the People's Wall Action. (Final tipsheet will be out Sunday regarding Monday’s protest and meeting locations)
10am – Storm Wall Street, an ecologically themed convergence for a sustainable future (Bowling Green)
12-2pm – The 99% Return to Wall Street, this assembly will bring together Union workers and leadership, economics experts, faith, community members, students and occupiers to let our voices be heard once more at (Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park)
6-8pm – Popular Assembly (Foley Square)

As expected, Twitter has been the go-to point for breaking news: according to several eye-witness accounts, the police have been arresting protesters at random. (Of course, now that we know that tweeting about OWS might be used against you in a court of law, people may be exercising some restraint when reporting on the police. Hopefully not.) The livestream is also back, so you can follow along at home.

Live video for mobile from Ustream

David Crosby and Graham Nash in Zuccotti (Getty Images)

Yesterday afternoon, Zuccotti Park members were treated to a musical set from two thirds of 70s folk rock supergroup Crosby Stills and Nash. If there was some media outlet out there that had yet to compare Occupy Wall Street to Woodstock, David Crosby and Graham Nash's arrival on the scene with a set list of five classic hits (including “Long Time Gone" and “Teach Your Children," the latter of which probably only struck those over 40 in the park as somewhat ironic,) would have rectified that immediately. Before launching into "They Want It All," Mr. Nash dedicated the song to "the guys in the buildings down here.”

Watch the entire performance below, courtesy of Vimeo user JoeyBoots.

Crosby and Nash @ Occupy Wall Street - Full Set - NYC from JoeyBoots on Vimeo.

Surprisingly, at no point during the concert did a member of the audience yell out "Play Freebird!"

The Lincoln Center.

“We’re a very democratic place,” Eric Latzky, the vice president of communications at the New York Philharmonic, said over the phone last week. “I think there was a healthy expression of ideas from a lot of people.”

When it comes to creating a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it seems that everyone has an opinion. This Saturday, the night before the anniversary, the Philharmonic will play what it is calling “A Concert for New York.” The program is simple: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the uplifting “Resurrection,” with two excellent soloists: soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.

But the process of choosing the piece was more complicated. What tone do you want to set at an event like this? You don’t want to be too mournful, or too triumphant. Not too explicitly tied to 9/11, but not too general.

Alan Gilbert, the orchestra’s music director, and Zarin Mehta, its executive director, began planning for the concert almost two years ago along with then-artistic administrator John Mangum. “What came first,” said Mr. Latzky, “was the idea that the orchestra should acknowledge the anniversary musically. And I think Alan and Zarin began discussions about what that might be almost that far back. Probably the idea of the event came first and then the specific music that would be played. It’s different from most programming we do because this event had a very clear ‘theme,’ so to speak, from the start, which is not necessarily true of regular subscription events within the season or even most special events.”

“We were kicking around a lot of ideas,” said Mr. Gilbert, in an interview in his office in Avery Fisher Hall.

They considered Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the commemorative musical work to end all commemorative musical works. There was also talk of a larger program—“more of a potpourri,” Mr. Gilbert said—that would feature New York composers, as well as another one that would have involved lots of New York musicians. They thought of Mozart’s Requiem. They considered John Adams’s piece “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which was composed in the aftermath of the attacks and premiered by the Philharmonic in September 2002. That piece won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and the orchestra’s recording of it won a Grammy in 2005, but it hasn’t played it since.

“‘On the Transmigration of Souls’ is a wonderful piece and I think he’s a wonderful composer,” Mr. Gilbert said. “For me, though, this was the chance to look ahead and that was such a product, great as it is, of that moment immediately following 9/11. That’s potentially more limiting in terms of the way people can deal with the piece than a piece that’s more, I would say, timeless and universal. I think it’s a piece that deserves to stand on its own as a musical statement. It’s so loaded with associations that to do it, especially on the 10th anniversary, it would be unavoidable. I do think it will have a life as a pure and direct musical statement. This just didn’t seem like the time to bring it back.

“Finally, Zarin and I thought of the Mahler Second. It’s a huge work, but it is a very pure, musical, human statement and that’s how we decided to finally come down.”

In a post on his blog Seated Ovation last week the writer Will Robin called the Mahler symphony the wrong piece for the occasion, writing, “The arc of Mahler’s Second is ultimately one of triumph, even triumphalism … Commemoration should be about mourning and remembering, not resurrection.”

“It’s my favorite symphony,” he added, “but it has little to do with a sense of mournful peace,” and he suggested the Fauré Requiem instead, or Brahms’s “German Requiem,” which the orchestra played nine days after the attacks.

“We are kind of a voice for New York,” Mr. Gilbert said. “The possibility in a concert is for a shared humanity, a shared experience. I’ve been very struck and moved by what people have said that that Brahms Requiem meant for them.”

But for this occasion Mr. Gilbert didn’t want a requiem, nor did he want a piece that would be explicitly associated with either the attacks themselves or with death, including another of Mahler’s symphonies he considered.

“Obviously we thought of Mahler 9, which is a piece that is very much about death,” he said. “I love Mahler 9. We’re doing it later in the year. But to me that’s just too intense at the end. It’s too obviously about death. And while many people died and it’s a huge tragedy we want to remember that and commemorate that, at this point it’s 10 years later and people are trying to look ahead.

“I can see that we could have been more somber and more pointed and had a piece that is very specifically a memorial and emphasize that side,” he added. “But I don’t think this precludes that response. What is interesting to me about Mahler 2 is that the triumphant glory that he undoubtedly achieves at the end of the symphony has another side to it. It’s not one-dimensional by any means.

The Philharmonic’s press materials for the concert make much of the fact that the orchestra played the symphony on what it calls “a similar occasion”: Nov. 24, 1963, two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Then-music director Leonard Bernstein, who led the orchestra on that occasion, wrote of his choice, “We played the Mahler symphony not only in terms of resurrection for the soul of one we love, but also for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him.”

But as James Oestreich pointed out in The New York Times last November in a review of a book on Mahler, “Bernstein trotted out the ‘Resurrection’ for almost any occasion, including his 1,000th concert with the New York Philharmonic,” adding, of Mahler's Fifth, that “if many Americans know the Adagietto at all, it is probably from its use in the Visconti film Death in Venice rather than from any occasion of mourning.”

“Mahler 2 means everything, and thus nothing,” Mr. Robin wrote on his blog. “Mahler 2 opens seasons, it closes seasons, it marks moments of happiness and moments of tragedy … Classical music shouldn’t be this versatile; no art should.”

But Mr. Gilbert said that the symphony tacks with subtlety between narrative specificity and open-endedness.

“It has a very explicit message—resurrection—which for obvious reasons is appropriate for the moment,” he said. “But even more than that is the lack of specificity of response that it’s possible to have to this piece. Mahler himself had a very clear program in mind when he wrote the piece but I don’t think he ever wanted to limit the way people would react to the work. He himself was so multifaceted and so complex, with his Jewishness; his conversion, probably more for expedience than for anything else, to Catholicism; his interest in folk music and the mystical side of life. It can obviously be thought of as religious, but at the end of the day it’s not only that. There’s nothing predetermined in the way people can react to it. And I like that it can be a very individual and unique interaction between the audience and the work. It leaves [open] the possibility of people dealing with their emotions in a private way.”

The title of the event—“A Concert for New York”—was the phrase that the Philharmonic’s staff had used to informally refer to it during the planning process. While the concert will be broadcast on PBS on the evening of Sept. 11, Mr. Latzky said that the orchestra’s administration consciously chose not to add to the glut of events and memorials (not to mention traffic and security) that will take place on the anniversary itself. The orchestra is counting on the fact that in the midst of sobriety and sadness, people are also going to be seeking dazzling redemption.

“The journey that the Mahler Second takes you on is what people are for the most part trying to achieve 10 years later,” Mr. Gilbert said, “going from angst and despair and questioning the meaning of life, through the third movement, which he called this kind of frustration at a meaningless life, then to the movements that celebrate better times. That’s exactly what this story is about.”

editorial@observer.com