Yesterday, my mother called me from Times Square and her voice was full of excitement. She had signed up to volunteer as a medic and was caught in a huge mass of bodies en route to Chase Bank to withdraw all their money. She’s sending me her copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. With some luck, I’ll get it next month (thanks to Can Post).

Occupy Wall Street has gone global, with marches on Saturday, October 15 in more than 1,000 cities all over the world. Yesterday Rome was in flames, Madrid’s streets were bursting with bodies, Hong Kong had people walking around in over-sized i-Phone placards with graphic messages depicting the factories’ exploitative labor practices. The movement that began in Madrid on May 15 at Puerta del Sol and then mushroomed in New York City on September 17 has permeated the home, the media, the typically apolitical and—reaching across traditional barriers and gaps—is bringing all walks of life to the streets.

I went to St. James Park in Toronto earlier today, counted tents and read signs and did an overall vibe-check. I felt like someone had pressed the mute button, but maybe that’s just because I can’t stand drum circles…

Say it ain’t so… but of course it is. New York City’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg is threatening to evict Occupy Wall Street from its Zuccotti Park headquarters tomorrow morning. Last night Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly alerted Occupy Wall Street protesters that they will be “cleaning the park” at 7 a.m. on Friday, October 14 and, in so many words, will do whatever it takes to make re-occupation impossible. If they proceed, there will be resistance and there will be turf war.

At this point, it is well known to many that Occupy Wall Street is not a flash-in-the-pan protest. To trace back to the beginning, in mid-July, hacktivist group Anonymous and long-time culture jammers Adbusters posted a call for a month-long occupation of Wall Street, beginning on September 17, 2011. September 17 was a Saturday. Generally, the only people in NYC’s financial district on a Saturday are tourists visiting the WTC crater, weekend shoppers, Staten Island commuters and Battery Park City dwellers. My first thought was: why Saturday? A lot of people don’t have to work on Saturdays, thereby making it easier to attend the event, but would this choice of date at this particular venue also create limits from the outset?

This has been an eventful few weeks: Jack Layton’s death, Steve Jobs’ resignation, Hurricane Irene, the overwhelming resurgence of speculation and replaying of the September 11, 2011 attacks in the days leading up to its tenth anniversary, the deaths of George Kuchar (experimental filmmaker) and Jeanette Ingberman (founder of Exit Art, a long-running experimental curatorial project) and on and on…. so the following is purely escapism.

The ‘tanorexic-narcissist’ syndicate The Real Housewives of Wherever is not going to happen in Toronto, but for a brief moment, there were talks of this reality series coming to town. Perhaps it was too soon after the disastrous release of the webisodes for Lake Shore, the utterly despicable Jersey Shore knock off that some Torontonians foolishly allowed to happen. As an expat, there’s some empathy for Gawker’s perspective on this series as “the least important sociological experiment of our time.” This is old news at this point.

I visited the recently launched Guggenheim BMW Lab space in NYC last weekend. Designed as a hybrid “urban think tank, community center and gallery space” it is temporarily housed (from August 3 to October 16, 2011) in a lot formerly occupied by an architectural salvage place that partially collapsed in 2000 and soon after, was condemned and summarily demolished. To my recollection, the lot has been abandoned ever since and the architectural relics the place used to be filled with haunt the corner. Also attached to the project are an organic, local café and Urbanology (Wed-Sun 1-5), an interactive role-playing game for urban explorers.

During my visit, I noticed Mars Bar, the landmark East Village dive that for many years was located just across Second Avenue from the Guggenheim BMW Lab, was gone. Apparently, it was shut down by the Department of Health, and the owner—sensing a long and losing battle with twenty-plus years of accumulated bug corpses, rodent feces, safety pins, needles, cigarette butts, blood, semen, vomit, saliva, urine and etc.—decided to close up shop.

The Guggenheim BMW Lab is an open-concept structure designed by Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, with plastic chairs and mesh walls attached to a collapsible infrastructure. Its design clearly reflects its mobility. The Lab is open and free to the public—access from both Houston and 1st Streets—and the hours are amenable to most people’s work hours (Wed-Thurs 1-9, Fri 1-10, Sat-Sun 10-10). Public events—mediation, yoga, performances, lectures, interactive debates, talks, screenings—are scheduled throughout the day.

Proust.com is a new social networking site based on the popular 19th-century parlor game Marcel Proust was fond of playing. Though it was a fixture in Parisian salon culture before his time, this list of twenty or so probing questions has come to be known as the “Proust Questionnaire” simply because his answers were so… Proustian.

The developers of Proust.com, which hovers in a nebulous space between a digital scrapbook and a dating site, state that they are not Proust scholars and that the impetus for this site is to provide its users (“you”) with a way to better “know the ones you love,” by telling your story in “the spirit of sharing that the Proust Questionnaire represents.” However, in the WordPress-like interface used for this site, the line “Growing up, who did you most admire?” reminds one vaguely of a hackneyed password-reset question.

Vanity Fair has used the Proust Questionnaire as a back-page feature since 1993, and in 2009 compiled their results into the book Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life. They have even developed a “Turbo Proust” interactive version at http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/proust-questionnaire, where readers can compare their responses with the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Tom Waits and post the results to Facebook.

The developers of Proust.com do not note the popular existence of the Vanity Fair interactive Proust Questionnaire in their exposition of the site. Instead, they present it as a novel way to share and memorialize one’s personal history via photos, videos and text files. The site is ostensibly geared towards bored OK Cupid users and neophyte digital scrapbookers.

To this end, Proust.com offers its users features that Vanity Fair’s does not, such as:

a multimedia platform, where content can be edited or deleted;

Greetings. The topic for this first post on Metaviews has metastasized; every route feels like a new cancerous growth. What is happening?

Here’s an introduction in lieu of an expanding field of potential routes this blog may take. My only other experience in blog writing has been in the form of an auto-destructive web-text that was already written but open to the process of ‘automatic writing’ according to the mood of the moment: an experiment in techno-affectivity. Its content wasn’t identifiably reportage, polemic, or diaristic—common forms for noncommercial blogs. And it wasn’t quite art or blog, though I was aiming for a participatory hyperfiction. It didn’t set up a dialogue—and this is why I ended it.

I went into blogging then too with a tentativeness that makes me question fear and consequent immobility in totality. My brain shuts off. My body aches. All effort culminates in dull pain. Among my few sources of relief is that Raoul Vaneigem once said his main shortcoming was his “lack of self-confidence.” I feel better already. But I am also aware that I may be cultivating some bad habits towards new experiences, or to experience in general. And possibly—albeit I am reluctant to admit it—an aversion to being visible.