All day yesterday I was wondering what the Yes Men were up to. Late Monday I came back upstate and, with a few aches and pains from trooping all over the city with cameras and gear, and missing a bit of sleep, I finally heard from Mike last night.
“Today, a cadre of Survivaballs took the UN by storm! Success! Not. Seven of the guys were given summonses for mischief, and one lucky guy got arrested: Andy!” He may still be in the can; I have not heard a legal update but I know they have that angle covered handsomely.
The photo at left is someone posing in a Survivaball. This concept was presented several years ago by the Yes Men impostering “Halliburton” officials at a business exec conference somewhere; as a concept for how the wealthy capitalists who are causing climate change can deal with the consequences. If The End arrives, you step out of your building and inflate the device, and you’ll be fine. You can float, you can crash, you can bounce — no matter what happens.
Donning this outfit and bouncing into the United Nations is how Andy and seven others got arrested/ticketed yesterday. (I could imagine them floating up to the west side of the UN in the Harlem River, but I think they took the sidewalk.) This means somebody else has to cover the city in promo literature for their film, which opens at one theater in Manhattan on Oct. 7. More about that another time — I am proposing a New York City field trip to the opening. I am pretty sure they will have lots of volunteers to pass out their leaflets for The Yes Men Fix the World.
Let’s go to the astrology. The Sun is still in the first degree of Libra, at 39 arc minutes as I write, which is to say that today is the first full day of autumn in Hemisphere North and of spring in HemiSouth. The Sun is also about to square Pluto, exact now to about four arc minutes applying, which is the defining theme of this equinox: our first Libra equinox with Pluto in Capricorn. The next of many firsts associated with Pluto in Cap.