DJ Spooky Fails OWS Library in Attempt at Club Night

The Village Voice reports that DJ Spooky invited the Occupy Wall Street Library to consider "how the revolutionary politics of the occupation and the glitz of the downtown nightclub scene would mesh" by holding a book party/dance party at the club Work in Progress ("A modern reimagination of Andy Warhol’s Factory?" asks the New York Times) -- and, according to the People's Library Blog, OWS Library was kicked out of its own party. The Voice tells us how it started:

For Paul Miller, who as DJ Spooky has built a career on self-consciously remixing and re-purposing archival material, the partnership with the Occupy Wall Street library made sense.

"Occupy Wall Street is a movement of fragments," Miller mused before his set, placing a donated book, his own Rhythm Science, on the library's table. "This whole library project is kind of sampling text."

Miller doesn't claim to have followed the Occupy movement very closely. "I travel too much. I'm mostly in Europe and Asia," he said. The idea for the evening came out of emails with Stephen Boyer, one of the movement's librarians, who was recently accepted to the European Graduate School where Miller is on the faculty.

At Miller's direction, flyers billed the free event as "Occupy the Library -- books and dance featuring DJ Spooky and the People's Library." Librarians promoted the event on their website, urging other occupiers to attend. The library would serve as outreach for the movement to a heretofore untapped demographic, while soliciting book donations for its collection.

But "[m]ore than 50 library supporters were kept outside in the pouring rain and ultimately turned away as bouncers determined they didn't fit the look the club was going for," and eventually they were asked by club management to remove their table of books, which had been set up for hours:

"Wow -- that whole exchange felt exactly like a lot of our interactions with the cops," said librarian Darah McJimsey afterwards, as behind her a heavily feathered burlesque dancer began to strip down for the club's growing crowd.

After Miller intervened on behalf of the library, they were allowed to keep their table, albeit in a hallway outside the event space. But at that point, the librarians weren't clear why they were even there.

"I want to give a shout out to the People's Library!" Miller said as he took the DJ's podium a few minutes later. "Who brought books to donate tonight?" The audience barely looked up from their cocktails, and Miller launched into his set. Out in the hall, the last occupiers pushed past the bouncers and out into the rain.

"The club failed us," Boyer said as he left. "We had an understanding. Our name and our imagery are all over the flyers for this event, we promoted it, and now they're not letting us in. We feel used."

Good riddance, said Braunstein afterward. "I found them fucking ungrateful. I did them a favor, and it wasn't the favor they wanted, so they threw a little fit. A bunch of them tried to get in, and they probably hadn't showered in days. All of a sudden I'm supposed to change my rules for them? It's a night club!

"I'm not about dividing people into the 99 and the 1 percent," Braunstein said. "But honestly, the Wall Streeters inside are a lot nicer than those guys, and at least they pay some of my bills."