OWS updates (UPDATED)

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(please scroll down for update)

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Via Sarah at Lipstick Underground:

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Due to family being in town, blogging has been light and may remain so for just a while. Hopefully, we'll be swinging for the fences by Monday morning.

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(UPDATE #1):

Radical Chic: The beautiful people lend a helpful hand.

“Whatever the reasons, we’re all in the same room, and that’s pretty powerful, right? We’re participating in a conscientious … participation.”

Penn Badgley, an actor on the hit series “Gossip Girl,” has a face too mathematically perfect to be truly interesting, but at this celebrity consciousness-raising gig for Occupy Wall Street, he looks genuinely excited. He bounds onto the stage, grabs the microphone and yells “mic check!” Invited guests from the Occupy movement wince at this earnest misunderstanding of the people’s mic and its reworking of the relationship between society and spectacle in an age where politics takes place mostly on television.

In the early days of Zuccotti Park, the people’s mic was developed as a solution to the police ban on electric amplification. The order ended up being a gift to the movement, as voices were carried by chanting a speaker’s words back to them — which kept remarks pithy and aware of the audience.

In the chic Bowery Hotel, the formula isn’t quite working.

These actors, models, artists, publicity flunkies and those young and well-dressed enough to make their way past the bouncers have spent most of their professional lives learning how to half-listen until it’s their turn to half-speak. “My boss just told me to show up,” says one of the P.R. girls. It’s as good a reason as any to learn about a new people’s movement.

Actual microphones. Bowery Hotel. Models. Invited guests. Getting more and more grass-rootsy by the day.