Where I’m @

20010928

Everyone and their cousins are linking to this week's Onion, and I am now no longer the exception. Seriously, though, they've done a fantastic job of picking out what humor can be found in this mishugas and admixing it with enough serious sentiment to give you a catch in your throat.

20010927

Dear All:

As a project to make myself feel useful, as well as perhaps to do something for other people, I am attempting to build a repository of sorts of images of the World Trade Towers from better times. But not just any pictures; rather, I was inspired, in rewatching Being John Malkovitch and seeing the towers from the Jersey side, to try to assemble a collection of pictures/screenshots from DVDs/stills/what-have-you that have the WTC as a backdrop. For example, I would guess that "The Sopranos" has shown them from the Jersey side at least once, and I know I saw a Jeep ad last night on TV that did the same. Naturally, what I'm hoping for is to create something on the Web whereby others can at the same time remember what the twin towers really looked like (and just how they dwarfed their surroundings) and grapple with the magnitude of their destruction. There's no object lesson, no moral I'm imparting, just a possibility.

So if you know you have something in your collection or if you can get something -- but no news articles or anything that is in some way specifically referential to the attacks, please -- do send it along and I'll keep you posted as to what I create.

Scopophilically,
Tk

20010926

Cool — I made it into The Mirror Project. My autoportrait in bathroom mirror, with a yellow glow.

20010923

Things I’ve thought about in the past few days, Pt. II:

Those of us in New York have had such a different experience with this whole Situation. Yes, that’s in large part because it happened here, because the attention of the whole USA and even the world was on us like never before, but it’s also because in many ways this could only have happened here. Maybe it’s just the arrogance of the transplanted New Yorker talking, but I don’t think that the terrorists in their planning were sitting around debating between New York and San Diego — or even San Francisco. You could make a good case for Washington being a better target (and, given the terrorists’ success rate, one wonders why they didn’t hit Washington more), but New York city is where the most human and economic damage could be done. The World Trade Center is/was only in New York, after all, even if Chicago does have a taller building.

Milton Glaser updated his classic I-[heart]-NY image for the Current Situation to be I-[heart]-NY NOW MORE THAN EVER. Which I think was nice.

A dry cleaner in the neighborhood put up the pages from the NY Post, or maybe it was the Daily News (by the way, why did Billy Joel change the words in his “New York State of Mind” when he performed it on that awful celeb telethon the other night? There’s a line in which, in the studio version, he peeps the Times and the Daily News, but on the show, he did the Post and Newsday) where they printed pictures of a large number of the people identified as dead at a certain point. I’m finding it very reassuring that some major media are making sure to focus on the fact that the dead were all important to someone. It really bugged me when, on the 11th and 12th at least, CNN’s ticker was showing the names of the dead from the planes in simple Name, Town, Age format for hoi polloi, but adding Job Title and Company for those who CNN deemed newsworthy. Do the kids of John Doe from Wakefield, MA really give a flying flea that the cofounder of Akamai was killed? Similarly, do the kids or friends or family of the cofounder of Akamai care more that he was the head of a successful company or that their father/friend/son is now dead? So I was pleased when NPR’s Morning Edition started, at nearly every break, giving a rundown of two passengers and what their lives were like, and to whom they mattered. While Thoreau hit the nail on the head by saying that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that doesn't mean that they aren’t loved.
Conversely, depersonalization is one of the ways that the United States’ public is kept from feeling guilty about our role in the cycle of violence. When we kill people, they’re faceless, nameless. It would make a big difference in popular opinion, I think, if there were someone, somewhere, who could and would post in a public place the name and brief bio, an obit as it were, of everyone killed everywhere. If the deceased was a killer or otherwise shady, that would be noted, but so would the fact that the deceased left behind a brother and a sister and a dog and a high school basketball assist record that still hasn’t been broken.

20010920

Things I've thought about in the past few days, Pt. I:

I went to see my parents in Massachusetts this past weekend. Pretty much I went because I had planned to go that weekend for a while. My sister was supposed to be there, but she lives outside of Washington, D.C., and the airport she had a ticket for was Boston, so that wasn't happening. The trip up there was excruciating: I was taking the bus because it's half the price of the train and not a lot more time, and unemployment has a way of making you willing to suffer to save thirty-five bucks. First off, we were delayed at Port Authority Bus Terminal (which will forever remind me that the owner of the WTC is the Port Authority) for unknown reasons. The driver said no buses were being allowed in or out, so we sat in the bus on one of the ramps leading out of the PA Terminal for about half an hour. I chatted with the woman seated next to me, a woman, as it turned out, who had been onboard a plane the previous evening scheduled to be the first flight in the air out of JFK, until the police showed up with guns drawn and arrested a handful of the other occupants (later released). She was convinced that her flight had merely been bait for potential terrorists, that there was never any chance it was going to take off. Six hours later, we arrived in Providence, an hour after I was supposed to get to Boston and catch a commuter train home with my father.

But none of that sticks with me as much as the drive home from Mass. My parents felt sorry for me, apparently, and, knowing the SO and I were planning on being there in a month for a friend's wedding in Worcester, lent me a car to drive back to Brooklyn. And on the drive home, fairly early on, I saw contrails in the sky, and involuntarily caught my breath. Contrails would suggest that it's not a passenger plane, I reasoned, so it's nothing to be worried about. But still. Between suburban Boston and Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, I saw a smattering of other planes, maybe six or five, and all but one had the contrails. I caught my breath a little bit less each time, but still thought about it. Something didn't seem quite right, though I knew intellectually that planes had to get back up there some time. While I am a fairly observant Christian, spontaneous prayer has never really made sense. Yet seeing those planes overhead, the concept made more sense. Not in the conventional way still, but in the way that, God (or the Divine, at least) being omnipresent, everything you hope is a prayer of sorts. I didn't address my thoughts for the safety of these planes to anyone or anything, the way prayer is generally formulated as opening up a secure and dedicated channel with the Supreme Being, but I did hope for them.

Had to go for a moment.
The people here at the RC are decent people — more than that, really, because they spend every working day doing things that the rest of us are only doing now. Which would explain, perhaps, why the atmosphere here seems so odd. Everyone clearly takes their jobs seriously, but they are probably used to disaster, in one way or another. In a very neutral, or perhaps benign, way, this disaster is merely bigger than they deal with normally. Or maybe not? Similarly, perhaps, for many of the rescue workers. For sure, the civilians who were first on the scene were getting into something that they didn’t understand, which was probably a good thing. If you know too much, and you’re not a trained professional in disaster work, it would be easy to back out.
But the firemen, police, EMTs, others, they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. They continue to engage in their jobs. That’s what’s so hard to grasp in some way, what I’m still realizing in a very personal sense, that this is their job. In the same manner, my dad’s job for many years was to kill or die for his country as a US Marine. One can argue with the rectitude of the military and the soldier’s profession, but it’s a pretty enormous thing when you start thinking about it.
All this dovetails with a growing respect I have for firefighters, one that I’ve been feeling for a few years now. When looked at this way, firefighting is one of the few noble professions around. Noble, that is, in the sense that firefighters do nothing but help people, and in situations and in ways that could cost the firefighters themselves their lives. Now, not that firefighters as individuals necessarily and across the board represent the acme of humanity. But as a profession, it doesn’t get much better.

The past few days have been like coming out of a dark room into a brightly lit one. To push the simile, it’s been like waking up into bright light, but not because this all seems like some sort of bad dream but rather more like the simple act of waking and having to get up and get things done, go about one’s regular business.
Today’s the third day this week I’m volunteering at the Red Cross in Manhattan, doing data entry and other, higher-skilled, tech work. Monday we received a big shipment of Dell equipment, which followed hard on the heels of major donations from Compaq and IBM. Tuesday was spent mostly formatting and installing the IBM desktops that they sent, while others worked on the new servers. Drool.
Today, by contrast, is shaping up to be a slow day. I got here early, thinking I could get some good work done for them, but there were very few tech people here, and the ones that were here had specific projects on which they were working. [Editor’s note: Not that there are tons of tech staff here in the first place. Much too much is done by paper, it would seem. Maybe the donations that are flooding in will help remedy that situation.] So for now I blog.

20010912

1) We're both OK, everyone we know is OK.

2) HOW CAN YOU HELP? (updated 09/19)
Red Cross:
1-800-HELP-NOW (Cash Donations and Information)
1-800-GIVE-LIFE (Blood Donations)

New York Blood Center:
http://www.nybloodcenter.org or 1-800-933-2566

Helping.org:
http://www.helping.org/promos/cs_wtc.adp

If you have any information on terrorists:
https://www.ifccfbi.gov/complaint/terrorist.asp

Yahoo! clearinghouse

20010908

Watched Sugar & Spice last night, and it wasn’t half bad. It certainly manifested many of the usual strong points of a well-done light teen comedy: never took itself too seriously, the right people win, and it clocked in at only about 80 minutes or so (anything over 90 in a comedy is, with few exceptions, stretching things). Right, and no moralizing. As well, however, it had one of the glaring faults of modern comedies — that is to say a slightly forced and hurried ending. You could nitpick, I suppose, about some of the character work and at least one useless subplot, but all in all it was a perfectly enjoyable expenditure of an evening. Which is more than I can say for the night a while ago I was strong-armed into watching the other cheerleading movie that was out shortly before Sugar & Spice, to wit Bring It On. After seeing S&S, Bring It On looks even weaker, due primarily to the cardinal sin of taking cheerleading way too seriously. Of course, besides that, there is a thick river of ersatz multiculturalism running throughout the flick, and a final cheerleading competition that had all the interest of NBC's new “Lost” series.

20010907

Dreams you have when your mother is dying slowly:


We’re in some place that is a combination of hospital waiting room and department store jewelry section. Though I can’t see the jewelry section, I know that's partly where we are because very soon into the dream, Mom takes off a necklace she’s wearing and returns it to the counter. (Since she can’t, in real life, walk by herself or lift her hands as high as her ears, this is unusual.) She comes back and says she’s thinking of getting another necklace, but in a “Delft pattern”. She puts something in her mouth (what it was I knew right after I woke up, but I can no longer remember) and swallows it and begins to choke, and collapses on my lap. Three nurses stand in front of us shaking their heads, one saying “I wonder how that happened. Wish there were something we could do.”

20010906

Broke up the day today by going to the Brooklyn Museum with Ish, Debbie, and their wee lad. Let me clarify, amplify, whatever. Not just ‘wee’, but also purply, unfocused, and cute as the proverbial button. Who knew that babies were so colorful? He was also wearing his French shirt, which gave me the excuse to babble to him in broken French — he doesn't know the difference, right? By the time it matters to him, I'll have brushed the dust off la belle langue.
Anyway, the what that we went to see was an exhibit on artists influenced by anime, and it was a little disappointing. Smallish and the labels for the pieces were over-explained. Two big inflatable rabbits that looked like they could have been Koonses, but no info on the label about the influence of or on Koons. Some drawings that flirted with the upskirts subgenre, but no info about the Lolita fetish of much of anime and the blurring between hentai and non-hentai work. Then I remembered that the only literature at the front of the exhibition was a booklet for parents and children together. One really cool piece of video work that consisted of the artist's playing video games, but very purposefully and making a point. Soul Blade played so that a male character beat the tar, mostly, out of a female character, but then the female (don’t ask me — I don‘t play these games) character steps up and BOOM! whacks the male character and says “I’ll never forget you.” or “I’m sorry.” Kewl.

20010905

So the SO’s back to work, beginning yesterday, and I am not.
Oh, sure, unemployment’s fun and all, but just the same, the lack of income is starting to grate a little bit. Given how bad the climate for openings is, I decided not to buy that CD burner for right around $40, all told. Jeez, when you start worrying about forty bucks, your head’s not in the right place.

Congratulations to L. Jon Wertheim on getting his book, Venus Envy published by HarperCollins. (I don’t link to that place.) It's been out for a month or so, and it sounds like a pretty decent thing. Unfortunately, ‘sounds like’ is going to be as close as I get to this one. Not much into sports books am I. My condolences for having to deal with his editor, who I know personally to be, well, a schmuck.