Terrorist action 9/11/01 and the aftershocks

http://salon.com/people/feature/2001/09/14/dboyle/index.html

The free mp3 download ("Metro") at the site Ned linked to is a lovely little song.

Now Mark, why would I bitch-slap Ned for inadvertently suggesting a similarity between Jacques Derrida and Nguyen Van Thieu? I think the suggestion is intriguing.

Took me several hours to get back to the city last night - in the Bronx, they made the bus go back to New Rochelle, then back to the Bronx, then to Washington Heights, then over the GWB to Jersey, then down to the Lincoln Tunnel, THEN into the city. It was mad insane. A good 60% of the trip was spent circling the city.

The crash site is still smoking badly.

That it's on an ISP called "Zianet" is certainly odd.

I found out that, contrary to what I had been told, the firm kept its monthly network tape back-ups not off-site but in a safe somewhere in the WTC basement.

I had things I could've been doing, but since I won't have a phone or a desk until tomorrow, and I won't have a computer until Friday, I was basically doggy-paddling all day.

Me and my fellow co-worker in marketing had an impromptu meeting in a conference room with an unobstructed view of Citicorp Center. I can't look at the building without imagning jet airplanes crashing into it. All these tall buildings seem so vulnerable now.

The head of the graphics department is going to be a crucial factor in recreating our marketing materials, but he's completely lost. He's focusing right on re-creating our time sheets, which is really pure trivia because we can use NJ's sheet, and we need other things to be done first, but I'm not going to press it, because I know he won't listen, he'll spend the next few days staring at the screen, doing things at random, deaf at any entreaties to prioritize. He was that way before, but he'll be worse now. He mused over some digital photos of the WTC a week before, and then he left early.

I headed to a bookstore several blocks uptown and killed time, looking through Wayne Kostenbaum's new Andy Warhol bio. I also checked out the latest New Yorker, and while I could honestly say I agreed with nearly every sentence of Susan Sontag's essay-lette, her tone royally cheesed me off, probably out of all proportion. I wanted to say something "the ungraciousness of the professional know-it-all" but any more than that would be me talking out of the side of my neck.

Watching MST3K last night gave me an idea I have to work on at greater length: the Godzilla/Gamera movies are the WTC tragedy played out as farce.

"I don't believe Arabs and/or Muslims all over the globe give a damn about the Palestinians. If they did, as fellow Muslims they would be as enraged and committed to rectifying injustice in the Sudan, the Philippines, Indonesia and so on. I do believe they hate Jews, and I do believe anti-Semitism is the reason non-Muslim and non-Arab nations have helped keep the Palestinian conflict at the center of world politics since the 1960s. It is the intolerable presence of what used to be called "the Jewish state" in the Middle East that drives the external and presumptive support for the Palestinian cause, as an insult and an offense that must be removed. Don't kid yourself that Arafat, who again and again, to Arab audiences, without Western reporters present, calls for the destruction of Israel (as no Israeli government has called for the destruction of the Palestinians), and whose operation supports and sustains both organizing and propaganda for suicide bombers, promising money to their families and paradise for the martyrs, wants anything else. --Greil Marcus"

*Somebody's* cheesed, that's for sure.

Incidentally, how strong was the anti-Semitic streak among Arab nations before 1947?

I don't understand this. In the U.S. media, at any rate, I'm only seeing one side being spun. I haven't seen any major U.S. newspapers or networks describing the U.S. or Israel as terrorist states. Not that they should, but if you want the other extreme, that's it.

I've seen the new subway maps that feature a small blank space on Manhattan that wasn't there before.

I've said that I can see the Citicorp Center, to my mind the epitome of '77-era NY corporate glam; now I've noticed that if I strain hard enough, the Chrysler Building is on the other side of the view. I pieced together a paper model of the place back when I was eleven. It's still my favorite skyscraper of them all. The two together are my guardian angels.

Work was slightly more productive today. I didn't eat lunch. I spent my time in reverie at Border's again. I bought an album of Bach organ works but I can't bother to listen -- everything, include my MST3K tapes, can only be consumed ambiently.

People have been going inside the WTC concourse now. An AP report made reference to the Warner Brothers Studio store and the enormous tacky-ass Bugs Bunny statue that's been on sale at the WTC nearly as long as I've worked there. There's been footage of the escalators that lead down, down, down to the nearby watch shop and its stopped clocks. The disaster robbed me of a place that, in my more confused moments, I say I lived rather than worked in; now, with the berubbled basement concourse the subject of media exposure, my subconscious is being burgled.

They've been raising the spectre of biolgical warfare on the news and now I have these horrorshow images of cropdusters with Sarin or Anthrax over Central Park...I can't stand it. I want to throw up. They just talked about a thwarted plot against the American embassy in Paris on CNN. The Sunday NYT spoke of satellite images of terrorist training camps showing dead animals. And the nuclear power plants...

I had been wondering what had happened to Big Brother USA 2, and tonight I found out. They were beginning to prep the audience for what happened inside the house -- of course, they told them -- and they I realized: Oh God. Monica's from Brooklyn. They explained she had a cousin in there and before I could react...well, of all the things the networks have shown, I don't think I've see reaction shots of people being told the bad news. Even tapes of people witnessing the attacks have been without visible faces, IIRC. Until tonight. Next to the leaping bodies, this may be the most tasteless thing I've seen all week.

it seemed to make sense at the time.

i mean, not really, and just seeing those words on the screen makes me think 'what da fuk?' but they talked about where he had said it and stuff and the context and it seemed to make more sense and be less outrageous. its something to do with charachters in his new work: the angel michael, lucifer etc. and the works of the devil.

"There is just so little to attack. It is the most target- impoverished environment conceivable." - Unidentified former member of the Clinton administration, speaking of Afghanistan.

"James Lee, 70, from Chehalis, in north central Washington State, spoke for many when he said the disaster was not 'going to affect our spending habits.'" - New York Times

What happened there, is - now you have to adapt your brain - the greatest artwork that has ever existed. That human minds can [achieve, also "perform"] something in one act that we couldn't dream of in music, that people [could] rehearse like mad for ten years, completely fanatically, for one concert and then die, that is the greatest artwork that there is in the entire cosmos. I couldn't do that. In contrast, we as composers are nothing.

It is a crime for the reason that the people [i.e. victims] had not agreed to it. They did not come to the "concert." This is clear. And no one announced to them [beforehand] that they were going to bite the dust. What happened there on a spiritual level, this leap from safety, from what is taken for granted, from life, this occurs poco a poco in Art. Or it is nothing.

My friend John reports that György Ligeti, asked to comment, replied to the effect that if Stockhausen actually said this, it shows that he really should be locked away in a mental institution.

So who has more skilz, 2pac or Stockhausen?

Brno pensioner recalls saying "fuck you" to bin Laden

BRNO, Sept 18 (CTK) - Brno pensioner Adolf Grunt, 68, told CTK today of a five-minute meeting he had with Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1992 and of learning afterwards that the "arrogant" man had been bin Laden.
"We met during the building of a motorway in Africa. He behaved so arrogantly that I told him where to get off," said Grunt.
Bin Laden's building company was working on the construction of an airport which the motorway led to. "The bin Laden firm didn't ring any bells at the time," said Grunt, adding that bin Laden's company had not carried out the construction very well. At one point Grunt and bin Laden, whose identity Grunt did not know, had a heated argument. "I used the well-known English phrase 'fuck you'," recalls Grunt.