Start Spreadin’ the OWS

By: Matthew Battles
November 17, 2011

Filmmaker Casey Neistat has mastered the art of the viral video, and his coverage of the police assault on Zuccotti Park transcends the customary limits of the form. Pairing the best of eighteen hours of footage of helmeted phalanxes and spirited arrests with Sinatra’s recording of “New York, New York” breaks the song’s savagery free from its quatschifying caul of rat-pack bonhomie. It’s almost as if this song has been winging its way through history, risking all the perils of hollowness and nostalgia, to find its roost in this moment. See the video now before it’s taken down. — via Quinn Norton

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Casey Neistat, nostalgia, NYPD, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, Quatsch, rat pack, Sinatra

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Start Spreadin’ the OWS

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