mattlawyue
Omakase dinner at Sushi Yasuda last night.
Dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar last night with the girl @emmulate. It was Lincredible.
The Hotel Workers Union, under the leadership of Peter Ward, has created a network of one-stop clinics where union members can receive any care they need, free of charge. By building a medical community, and providing their own insurance, the union has developed a system so efficient they can offer free coverage at 1/3 the cost of the average HMO.
You may think that sounds crazy. I think it’s crazy we’ve waited so long to try and replicate their success. So this year we’ll bring the Hotel Trades model to a group of New Yorkers that has a hard time affording health care – freelancers.
Independent workers like temps or copy editors now account for 30% of the workforce, and one in four make less than $25,000 a year. Through the leadership of Sara Horowitz, the Freelancers Union has created a growing community of over 93,000 members in the five boroughs. Working with Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo, we’re going to help the Freelancers launch a flagship clinic, to provide low cost care to any member who needs it. This kind of creative health care model has the power to connect more New Yorkers to primary care, take some of the burden off of struggling hospitals, and strengthen our non-profit healthcare system.
Harlem (Taken with instagram)
Manhattan by night.
The girl to my left was a stranger. The guy to my right was a stranger. Not one word was spoken between any of us for 20 minutes. Our elbows touched a couple of times, but that was about it. Our triumvirate was connected only by what stood in front of us. Food has this odd effect where you feel an immensely personal bond with the people who prepared your meal and the ones you share it with. If every family cooked good food on Thanksgiving there would be less talking, less arguing, and a stronger sense of kinship. Good food - the kind that becomes more than sustenance, the kind that pokes at your moral heartstrings, the kind that can turn a cynic into a believer - has this magical ability unlike any in the universe. For 20 minutes this afternoon, over a bowl of noodles, I got to know the strangers next to me, our slurping content to do all the talking.
Almost a month ago I read a story in the New Yorker about the playwright Katori Hall, and her upcoming play The Mountaintop. This is the official description of the play:
Taking place on April 3, 1968, THE MOUNTAINTOP is a gripping reimagining of events the night before the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After delivering one of his most memorable speeches, an exhausted Dr. King (Samuel L. Jackson) retires to his room at the Lorraine Motel while a storm rages outside. When a mysterious stranger (Angela Bassett) arrives with some surprising news, King is forced to confront his destiny and his legacy to his people.
I saw it this past Sunday, ironically, on the dedication to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
I will not pretend to be a theatre boy or a Broadway kid - I vaguely remember the Lion King on Broadway from my youth, thinking, this sucked so much compared to the movie. How come Mufasa hasn’t fallen to his bloody death, and why can’t I watch Simba stare fear in the eye? It really is a fucked up movie that I will watch on repeat with my niece whenever she wants to.
But the Mountaintop was fantastic. I wouldn’t know how to judge a good play from a bad one to write a credible review. I’ll just say by the end of 90 minutes, I was standing on my feet applauding Jackson and Bassett for God knows what reasons. They were believable? The way they enunciated their lines? Their chemistry? Who knows. I enjoyed myself, and I’ll leave it at that.
And it was certainly worth taking a couple hours out of my Sunday to walk along Broadway on a breezy fall afternoon, jacket and aviators relaxing on my body, a playbill in my hand, inhaling a beautiful New York City afternoon.
But you best believe if there was a Knicks preseason game I would have been home fucking glued to the TV, picking apart why I’m still against the Amar’e and Melo duo.
Maybe there’s more to New York in the winter than basketball after all…
Exactly two weeks ago, as the headlines of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests trickled into the mainstream, I wondered how Occupy Wall Street would capitalize on the spotlight. Where would they go next, and how would the proverbial dominoes begin to fall, spreading the movement from city to city? On which stoop would the narrative perch itself?
(For clarity, as I mentioned in the first post, I’m looking at this through a communications lens).
Two weeks later we have Occupy:
Philadelphia. Washington. Boston. Chicago. Atlanta. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Rome. London. Toronto. Sydney. Hong Kong. Tokyo. Madrid.
How did they do it? Did 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge really catapult protests globally?
Yes and no, but it certainly was OWS first national headline. Two weeks later, they have their second:
Thousands Protest Times Square, Buoyed by Occupy Wall Street.
(Insert incredible photographs of protestors bottling up Times Square).
It’s hard for the media to bullet point a single voice or message from OWS, because there really isn’t one “leader” in the traditional sense of the word, standing at the podium. It’s a bubbling mass spitting varied complaints, leaving editors to generalize in their nut grafs what high unemployment, corporate profits, low wages, and income inequality are:
Marches led by discontent over economy. Basically.
But it’s drowned out by reports of police clashes, arrests, park cleanings, etc. Trivial items that should be near the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. These will certainly keep OWS in the news, but ultimately for all the wrong reasons.
OWS risks leaving it to the editors to generalize what they’re about, and over time, dropping the story further down the pole. Violence with police becomes the inevitable headline. And don’t ignore the public fatigue that will eventually wear on the average person with a job. They might support the movement now, but they’ve got jobs and bills and lives to worry about, certainly more pressing business than waiting for OWS to make their point.
Eventually they will need to formally announce their purpose, either through a press release or a press conference, or risk having this organism die without having implemented any significant changes to the system.
I believe OWS has done a masterful job carrying their momentum through social media, but it would be wise of them to take advantage of traditional media at some point: morning shows, talk shows, radio, etc.
But perhaps the protests continue to grow exponentially, and a high-profile banker - perhaps a Pandit or a Moynihan - says something stupid that catches fire, and social media continues to profile abuses by police, and eventually Capitol Hill is forced to acknowledge the situation, forcing the hand of the President, and then Greece defaults, and then Europe goes bankrupt, and so on and so forth.
That’s the beauty of this, you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
