Michael Moore has spent the last three weeks at Occupy Wall Street, but it was a Brooklyn bookstore he occupied Friday night. The activist filmmaker came to BookCourt, one of the oldest bookshops of the borough, to read from his new collection of short stories “Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life.”
And Brooklyn was clearly looking for trouble that evening. The event attracted close to a hundred people, although it had only been announced two days in advance. The back room of the store, an old greenhouse where the readings take place, was swarming with people. The crowd extended almost all the way to the children’s section, by the front window.
Moore was late. The audience killed time leafing through the pages of copies of his memoir which were stacked at the counter, and chatting with the owners, Henry Zook and Mary Gannett. Zack, their son, was in charge of the event. He ran back and forth from the door to Moore’s bodyguards, only stopping to say hello to the many regulars around.
Moore finally arrived and apologized for his delay.
“Greetings from lower Manhattan,” he added, sparking a burst of laughter in the room. The reading would come later. For now, he was a man with a cause.
“The political system has been hijacked by the rich,” he said. “We are the 99%. We are the majority.”
He kept the microphone at a distance. He’d lost the habit of using mics, he explained: on Wall Street the protesters can only rely on their joint voices, “the human microphone.”
Moore didn’t have to win over the assistance, and he knew it.
“I voted for Obama,” he said. “Maybe some of you voted for him too?”
This was a safe bet, as the laughs in the room confirmed. Yet the crowd nodded when he expressed his disappointment in the President of the United States.
Moore remembered his admiration for the man who’d dared to put his full name “Barack Hussein Obama” on the ballots, back in 2008. “I want that man back,” he concluded to a round of applause.
Then it was time to look further back, into Moore’s early life.
“Do you want a funny story or a sad one?” the cap-wearing author asked.
“Funny” was consensus, though Moore would give his audience both.
First, he imitated his teenage self, and his indignant tirade at the Elks Club’s “Caucasian only” speech contest on Abraham Lincoln, the “great emancipator.” He then dialed down the sarcasm and read about a priest he’d been close to who confessed to having blessed the Enola Gay before it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Most of the audience had to stand through the reading but only few left before the end. What had begun as a political rally had turned into theatre, with Moore enacting his own existence; it was hard to walk away. Many stayed after the microphone was turned off, to get books signed or to shuffle through the store.
But “occupied BookCourt” could only last so long: Moore soon headed back to Manhattan. The Wall Street protest would move towards Washington Square the next day, he had to be with them.
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