Last night, Philip Glass and Lou Reed made a planned appearance at an Occupy Wall Street action at Lincoln Center following the final performance of Glass' 1980 opera Satyagraha (truth-force in Sanskrit), a work about Mahatma Gandhi's early life, produced this month in New York by Phelim McDermott.
Glass, once a New York City cab driver, joined the assembly after curtain call, where he was eventually joined by some police barricade-disregarding opera patrons (one show-goer yelled, "get a job," at the protesters). At the center of the maddening, echoing people's mic (Laurie Anderson was in the crowd), Glass repeated phrases from the "New Castle March" section of Satyagraha:
When righteousness/ Withers away/ And evil/ Rules the Land/ We come into being/ Age after age/ And take visible shape/ And Move/ A man among men/ For the protection/ Of good/ Thrusting back evil/ And setting virtue/ On her seat again.
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross filmed Glass' address. Watch it above and hear Lou Reed's speech—"The police are our army. I want to be friends with them. And I want to occupy Wall Street."—here.
(via Kotke)
