Today, that rule has resulted in an arrest. A woman was taken into custody by a group of police for resting on the ground underneath her umbrella. The Seattle Stranger reported on the incident, saying:

Moments ago, 40 police officers surrounded a woman for her ostensibly illegal occupation of Westlake Park.

[...] Dozens of other protester are in the park, but they’re standing. Not this woman, who was sitting with her umbrella upright and purple sleeping bag and a purple yoga mat next to her. She refused to budge. One protester offered her a cigarette, so she smoked it calmly as police closed in tighter. [Emphasis from the Stranger's post]

According to the Italian newspaper Corriere delle Sera, the rioters were a small group of mostly young people, separate from the larger movement, who had planned on hijacking the protests “days before”:

Most [rioters] came on Saturday morning. At about 11 am, [police] at Pomezia followed and stopped a Fiat 600 with a youth and three young women on board. In the boot were five rucksacks containing a veritable arsenal – four motorcycle crash helmets, ten gas masks with filters, 500 glass marbles, a large professional slingshot, four balaclavas, four shin guards, two builder’s hammers, a crowbar and four bottles containing liquids. The report already forwarded to magistrates refers to “individuals belonging to the anarchist insurrectionalist area”.

As the AP noted, hundreds of thousands of other protesters, who called themselves “the indignant,” marched “without incident” in Rome and elsewhere across Europe. The Italian capital’s mayor himself blamed the violence on ”a few thousand thugs from all over Italy, and possibly from all over Europe, who infiltrated the demonstration.”

In a speech immediately prior at Washington’s Freedom Plaza, the Princeton professor hinted that he was expecting to be taken into custody before the day was out:

[West] jokingly said he has come today to Freedom Plaza and to Washington DC, because he finally wanted to get arrested in DC to make the sacrifice Martin Luther King was expecting from him in the fight for justice and freedom.

In the video below — in which West was interviewed by NoCureForThat.org — Capitol police are shown cuffing West and escorting him inside the court building. (The arrest footage begins at around the 2-minute mark.)

Here is a panoramic photo I took in Times Square Saturday. This is a single-shot view of the crowd, which largely stopped pedestrian traffic through the busy commercial hub for a few hours.

I heard many of the chants from what has become Occupy Wall Street’s repertoire:

“We. Are. The 99 Percent!”

“How do we fix the deficit? End the wars! Tax the rich!”

“Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!”

And there was the usual colorful collection of homemade signs, often scrawled on the back of broken down cardboard boxes.

“You’re God damn right, it’s class warfare!” declared one.  ”I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one,” said another.

This young woman borrowed from Frederick Douglass’ 1847 “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” speech:

I saw Jesse LaGreca, who, after his interview with Fox News went unaired — and viral, is now Occupy’s first full-fledged celebrity. People were stopping him to pose for pictures.

It was a diverse crowd — in age, aesthetic sensibility, and race. I bumped into Ted Actie, a Brooklynite and member of Occupy Wall Street’s people of color working committee. He told me that the crowd at Zuccotti, which was more homogeneous in the beginning, has improved in terms of racial diversity.  “If we can’t stop racism, genderism, ageism, and all the other -isms, then it’s not going to work — no matter what happens with the economy,” he said.

The police presence — usually significant in Times Square — was as massive as I’ve seen it at any Occupy event to date. That includes police who may have been posing as protesters. I videotaped this man, with a walkie talkie in his belt and an “Occupy” T-shirt slung over his shoulder, casually chatting with two badge-bearing plainclothes officers. This video was taken after most of the march had cleared out of Times Square, in an area behind police barricades that was being kept strictly free of any protesters or members of the public.

Another video of the man is here. Some of the other apparent undercover officers were wearing orange wristbands. I asked the man with the “Occupy” T-shirt whether he was a police officer and he told me he was with “sanitation.” I asked him about the t-shirt and he just smiled and shrugged. There were was no one from the Department of Sanitation in sight and no one cleaning the streets. I haven’t seen any of the real protesters wearing branded “Occupy” clothing.

The NYPD, it’s worth noting, has a history of sending officers into marches posing as protesters, drawing the ire of activists and civil liberties advocates. I’ve reached out to the department for comment and I will update this post if I hear back.

Despite no reported instances of violence by protesters, a reported 70-plus were arrested Saturday. The two primary rules officers are enforcing are the law banning groups of people wearing masks and the requirement that marchers remain on the sidewalks (a permit is needed to march on the street).

Here is a taste of the magnitude of the police presence in Times Square (click for full size):

After spending a few hours in Times Square, word spread that the crowd was to head back to Washington Square Park. That is a city-owned green space surrounded by an up-scale residential neighborhood and NYU. It has been used for a few general assembly meetings because it is significantly larger than Zuccotti; it is also seen as a candidate for a second occupation. Attempting to sleep in Washington Square Park would almost certainly bring a confrontation with police because camping is prohibited in city parks.

While occupiers ultimately decided Saturday night not to attempt to sleep in Washington Square Park, there were several reported arrests and a large police presence.

Mangum played mostly songs from “Aeroplane,” which convey a sense of world-shattering loss through the strange imagery of two-headed boys, burning pianos and fingers notched Cronenberg-style into spines. Aside from a short Minutemen cover (“Themselves,” which begins, “All those men who work the land …”), there were few overtly political statements during his set. In the video, you can hear someone yell,  “Play some Dylan!” and the crowd sang along with the line “We know who our enemies are” on “Oh Comely.” Before he left the stage, Mangum told the crowd: “You guys have done a beautiful fucking thing.”

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral. Mangum and other artists — including Amanda Palmer, members of Radiohead, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Talib Kweli — are obviously sympathetic to the demonstrators, but their music has not necessarily been intended to carry the weight of direct political statement.

Has the art of the protest song faded? In the 1960s and during earlier protests, “musicians were invested with such significance that they were expected to provide answers to the world’s problems — even to spearhead a revolution,” writes Dorian Lynskey in his recent book, “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holliday to Green Day.” “For a songwriter coming of age now, the idea that music can, and should, engage with politics seems increasingly distant.”

Perhaps, but the decade since 9/11 has seen massive upheavals in art and politics, which means we are only just learning new ways to combine the two. Immediately following that event and in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the bulk of the politically minded music came from the right — most notoriously Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American),” but also Darryl Worley’s pro-war “Where Were You” and Chely Wright’s “Bumper of My SUV.” Dissenting voices were either largely ignored or, in the case of the Dixie Chicks, aggressively maligned.

However, as that war continued with no visible progress or identifiable endpoint, the pendulum swung to the left, and diverse acts such as Pearl Jam, Norah Jones, TV on the Radio and Rhymefest took up the subject from a slightly more oblique angle. Instead of vocalizing opposition to the war, they worked more to document life during wartime and to examine their own uncertainty and alienation. They struck “a mood somewhere between resignation and a siege mentality,” wrote pop critic Jon Pareles in the New York Times almost five years ago. “Awareness of the war throbs like a chronic headache behind more pleasant distractions.”

Of course, Occupy Wall Street is not an anti-war protest. Instead, it has more to do with the same economic concerns that Woody Guthrie protested in the 1930s and 1940s: the ever widening rift between the haves and have-nots and the corruptive entanglements of government and business. These issues have a similar “chronic headache” effect, and the country’s economic woes inform so much music today, occasionally as a primary subject but more often as a backdrop against which life plays out in music. That’s the milieu of acts like the Drive-By Truckers, another Athens band whose songs are set mostly in a volatile red-state South. With great sympathy and insight, they write about characters at loose ends both financially and spiritually, and songs like “Space City” and “The Righteous Path” offer more sobering and realistic portrayals of small-town American than any of the myths perpetrated by D.C. or Hollywood. Significantly, they don’t ally themselves with one side or another, but instead take a documentary approach to post-9/11 America.

Even a song as rousing as tUnE-yArDs’ “My Country,” off her rambunctious and highly praised second album, “w h o k i l l,” is less about recession-era politics than frontwoman Merrill Garbus’ own experiences growing up poor and reading third-person accounts of her childhood. Because it boldly commandeers the national anthem for what is essentially a breakup song with a nation, it might make for an intriguing OWS anthem, especially with its questioning refrain, “When they have nothing, why do you have something?” Still, “My Country” reveals just how circuitously contemporary musicians address politics and protest, as if skeptical of the baby boomer doctrine that pop music can change the world.

Even during wartime, politics can be slippery terrain even for the most revered or well-intentioned artist. For every group like the Truckers or tUnE-yArDs, there is an act like Conor Oberst and Steve Earle, who tackled politics head-on in the 2000s and lost their footing. In 2005, Oberst released a single titled “When the President Talks With God,” a protest song aimed explicitly at Bush and so squarely in the ’60s mode that it was like he had consciously decided to try to live up to the “new Bob Dylan” label he’d long been saddled with. Yet, for all its outrage, the song isn’t particularly well conceived or executed: “When the president talks with God,” Oberst sings, “are the conversations brief or long? Does he ask to rape our women’s rights?” Those are the first three lines, so there’s really nowhere else left to go. Similarly, Earle’s politicized country-folk in the early 2000s represent the nadir of his storied career. “John Walker’s Blues,” about American Taliban John Walker Lindh, may have been incredibly controversial in 2002, but his approach came across as far too self-conscious. And the less said about his tongue-in-cheek love song to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the better.

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. In other words, artists as well as their audiences must rewrite the rules of protest music so that it applies to the current moment instead of the past.

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away. In the meantime, this generation has simply found new ways to approach the subject, both in and out of music. And in the end, who’s to say that Mangum’s two-headed boys and airplane funerals aren’t ultimately political in some sense? They’re certainly rousing, and in Zuccotti Park, that was enough.