| eyescratch on Tue, 18 Sep 2001 04:47:30 +0200 (CEST) |
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| [Nettime-bold] new york, new york |
<head>
[ this is a letter i sent to friends and loved ones telling them i
was alright. i'm scared of "putting my foot in my mouth" yet once
again. yet yet yet to speak the mind... today i saw a man sitting on
one of those typical new york trash cans made of an orange wire mesh
crying. the candles were out all night, people carrying them to
makeshift memorials. the missing faces hang at the bus stops.
feelings are at a door jam running now public now private, and all
the while the door cringes in it's hinges. ]
<body>
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 22:55:34 -0400
Subject: New York, New York
ciao ihr lieben
hello + hello + hello
it is silent in the city, and still no one sleeps. we tear ourselves
away from the tv altar to go to the cathedral to fill this quiet
space with our thoughts of dread or even guilt.
one hears more beatles than bob marley, per chance because there is
nothing left to resist. the air is filled with soot that this city
now strangely smells like prague in winter or east berlin. it is
asbestos not brown coal. the wind has changed that is why we smell it
now, before it blew out to sea. i smoke fancy japanese charcoal
filtered cigarettes trying to get a good breath.
yesterday i worked building a set for a fashion show down on 18th
street. physical labor which was rewarding as we lugged heavy flats
up the steps of the roxy here. we had just carried it all in and were
attaching the legs to the flats for the runway when someone came in
bringing the news that a plane had crashed into the world trade
center. we workers ran out to the west side highway watching as
ambulances and fire trucks rumbled past blowing their horns and
sirens. the twin towers were alight and burning, visible even from
where we were three kilometers away. eventually we were herded back
inside, back to work. i listened to the radio on my walkman bringing
the news updates to the crew. they bubbled out of my with a
disbelieving laugh i could not control. others make better faces in
the face of tragedy. i was just attaching a leg to a flat and grabbed
for the bolts to hold it when it slipped and fell. a co-worker said
"timber". simultaneously i heard that the tower two collapsed. that
meant all the fire trucks and ambulances we had watched go by were
now buried.
again we ran outside to look. teams of doctors were running from car
to truck and there was a line of ambulances a mile long. people
latched on to their cell phones to try to re-connect with the ether,
umbilical cords which had stopped pulsing. yes we all realized pretty
quickly that something had changed. that we are being born to a
different place and we don't know how to walk. again we were herded
back inside. we were told that the event was cancelled and we were to
take everything apart again and reload the truck. i almost stayed
outside wondering whether i would watch with my own eyes the the
other tower fall. i guess i needed the money from this job.
eventually that news came over the radio along with the plane that
fell on the pentagon. ave maria.
it is events like these that plunge the media and everyone else into
a spiraling glide where everything seems "aus der luft gegriffen" and
if i hadn't seen those towers burn with my own eyes i might believe
it was a hoax designed to trumpet a bush war. at least it all makes
less sense now. the floodgates are open. yet i saw it and there were
no enemies as of yet, no person or group claiming to have done the
thing. at noon we had finished the job, yet i was told that if i
didn't fill out my tax forms i wouldn't get paid this week. so we
trudged south to the office where one guy was already screaming for
blood. i eventually found myself upstairs in the office where i saw
the first television blaring. i got my forms from a distraught girl,
visibly shaken who was barely able to tell me how many dependents i
had. i walked out of there having made my mark next to the 9/11 date
(the emergency telephone number here!).
i walked uptown since the trains weren't running. along the way i
bought a bright red hat with two dragons circling the chinese
pictogram for dragon. the guy i bought it from finally had the cab
fare to get home to the bronx. along the way i stopped at the public
school i had volunteered at during summer school teaching interactive
design. a girl whose mom works at the world trade center was visibly
shaken, having thought her among the victims, yet then gotten a call
saying that she had been late to work that day. it was chaos on the
phone saying hello as students scrambled to call their parents to get
the ok to go home. radios, tv's and the mulling of students added to
the cacophony. many went home with others.
i made it uptown and mulled about the apartment a bit, yet felt the
urge to go out. an italian place up the street lets you drink
cappuccino and smoke at it's bar so that was were i headed. i got a
seat and ordered a beer. next to me a young woman was glancing up at
the screen of the TV above the bar and between drags on her
parliament cigarettes wrote notes into a little book. it turns out
she is french and was due to fly out of here that day. she had given
a talk at columbia university and is writing a book on piracy telling
me that most of the pirates were protestants revolting against the
catholics on the high sea - at least that was the cover story for the
fight for economic gain. yet these hijackers were not driven by
economic gain. it is perhaps more like the crusades which seems to
ring true in most ears of new yorkers, because i hear that again and
again. we spoke about calvino and we spoke about enzenberger and we
spoke about the situationists. yet nothing seems to describe these
"zwitter-gestalten" between mercenary and pirate. are they simply our
realityTV villans? all i know is that i watched peoples' faces
change. they have become elated as on the tv filmed on the west bank
and outside the church here. the cool modern "mine" has flown with
the ashy wind.
today i popped a tekno tape mixed in sarajevo in my walkman and
cruised on down to alphabet city. i met a man who i knew from the
squatter scene who has since found god and proceeded to preach to me
and gave me a ticket to "eternity", a play being performed on my
birthday. i fell on my face playing soccer and i filmed some tiny
beautiful girls playing with a ball. i made a phone call and suddenly
there were bodies running saying there was a shooting up the street.
police closed in fast. there is little to no traffic there because
everything is closed. the auto-free city we always dreamed of. if it
just weren't for the wheezing in my lungs.
much love
jeremy
<script>
[ saturday to sunday a group of us sat in an apartment sowing little
white flags to place next to american ones that dot the scene and at
the vigil spots by the river. we used silken bed sheets and sticks
found in the street and park. at sun up we headed out to greet the
brooklyn rush hour traffic with the fruits of our labor. these flags,
mean they peace or ceasefire or surrender all carried some different
meaning to the cars and people that stopped us on our trek towards
the east river. these iconoclastic apparitions solicited thought -
before the knee-jerk reaction coming from some of the political
leaders who don't seem to be thinking, pokering with lives lost. we
are used to the bugs bunny version or the westerns where the virgin
glory, if i may call it that, signals the end of the movie. surrender
- who would america surrender too? peace - it has been thoroughly
disturbed, a quiet wind now before the storm. ceasefire - yes, it
would be something to be seen. at ten we were finished and beat,
drinking coffee at the williamsburg passage, reading the sunday
times. kmart sponsored an ad with old glory, printing "this side up"
above the stars. why do they belittle us so? we spoke upon the advent
of war, and a friend from columbia said pointing towards the rubble
on the front page, this is what it looks like in the rest of the
world already, you're going to bomb that? the times had an
interesting phrase from lincoln in the editorial: we must
disenthrawll ourselves. ]
[ to say something perhaps about the buildings. these legs of new
york. limbs for the system of exchange. a lot of talk, "in your face
capitalism", is about rebuilding the same structures again down to
the last detail. (other's say no!) spirited americanism of the copy
like the concrete parthenon in nashville. certainly it would be
better than a memorial. yet to the fallen, this smacks of
forgetfulness. true, i stared at these towers looking, each day and
each minute at a different digital picture. one wondered about a
hidden order between which lights were on and which off at any given
time of an evening marking the array. a year ago i watched a cubano
band play beautifully on puerto rico day at the WTC plaza. this
concert took the edge off of the complexes resonance for me. let us
hope that the drive for something new wins out. ]
[ of course there is also the story of the leprechan who tells the
unsuspecting protagonist to mark the whereabouts of the pot of gold
with a little white piece of cloth. he then goes out in the night and
puts white cloth on every branch making the pot of gold impossible to
find. ]
[ http://www.eyescratch.cz ]
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