Alex Abramovich

Earlier this year, Lucy Raven and I were commissioned by the Oakland Museum of California to make a series of short video portraits of people involved in, opposed to, or otherwise affected by Occupy Oakland. After Occupy Wall Street, OO has been the most visible American Occupy. It has also been the most militant, and following Oakland's efforts to clear the physical encampments at City Hall Plaza – which involved mass arrests, and the wounding of ex-Marine peacenik Scott Olsen – OO became a constant presence in the news cycle, and a pilot light for the whole Occupy movement.

Like Jenny Diski, I was half hoping that the Rapture would arrive as advertised. Unlike her, I spent Judgment Day in Oakland, California, just a few miles from Harold Camping's radio ministry. When the day came and went I drove out there, though there's nothing really to see.

I was watching The Colbert Report the other night when a picture of my local mosque flashed across the screen. Colbert was covering a story that the Murdoch-owned New York Post had broken a few days earlier: a man had barged into the mosque during a service, cursed at the congregants, pissed on their prayer rugs. 'No one can pray now,' someone had told the paper. 'The rugs are completely soiled. It was disgusting.' So far, so bad. But Colbert (who isn't a journalist) didn't know that the Post journalists (it had taken three of them to file the 168-word story) had got it almost entirely wrong.

The Strand Bookstore, which opened on Fourth Avenue in 1927, now takes up 55,000 square feet on Broadway and 12th and has '18 miles of New, Used, Rare and Out of Print Books' in stock. The novelist David Markson, who was born in Albany in 1927 and died in his West Village apartment last month, spent more than a few of his intervening hours at the Strand. (Here's a short clip of him speaking there.) Still, it was a shock to walk into the Strand last week and find the contents of his personal library scattered among the stacks.

On a lighter note: LCD Soundsystem's new album, This Is Happening, is due out on 17 May. On Monday, at a barely announced, last-minute warm-up gig in New York, the group's impresario, James Murphy, dropped to his knees and begged the audience to keep it under wraps. 'We spent two years making this record,' Murphy said. 'We want to put it out when we want to put it out... I don’t care about money – after it comes out, give it to whoever you want for free but until then, keep it to yourself.' Too late. This Is Happening had already leaked, and on Wednesday – following a bit of cat-and-mouse with the music blogs – Murphy streamed the album on the band's website. The timing (or lack thereof) seemed fitting, because time – and the fuck-all we can do about its passing – is what LCD Soundsystem's best songs have been about.