Today is a perfectly beautiful day here in New York City. I woke up, fed my dog, worked out a bit and then stepped out into a cloudless azure blue sky. On the elevated subway in Queens I found myself catching the glances of a really cute guy and while pretending to read my latest Haruki Murakami book, glanced back. When he reached his stop, he looked right at me and a smile warmed on his face. On the subway platform, just before the doors shut he glanced back and I smiled. So ended our relationship. I'm a huge fan of the silent love affair, lasting no more than a moment, but like a photograph, each detail burned into memory forever. With days like these, the heart can't help but expand wider; beauty begets love and love begets more love. And today, in New York City, the last of the World Trade Center is removed. What remains now is simply negative space, a twin-towered hole in the sky. Business yesterday had me downtown and I walked by Ground Zero. They've just opened up a covered walkway from Liberty St. to The World Financial Center on the downtown side of the site. Most of the buildings on this side were the ones to suffer the most damage. Plywood covers the windows of all the small buildings, while the skyscrapers are covered head to toe on giant sheets of black scrim, like a goth version of a Christo installation. One building brings back to mind what the whole site looked like at first. It's front side ripped open like some giant had scooped away it's interior. The walkway itself is completely enclosed in aluminum, preventing any gawkers from looking in on the site. Even the Windows in the World Financial Center have been sandblasted over to prevent anyone from looking in. The message is clearly, 'Nothing to see here, everything is fine', but even now months after the fact, all the windows downtown are still streaked with grey soot. You can still find caked in unused crevices of masonry, the white cement and ash snow that was the WTC. The media coverage makes it seem like any day now, we'll see construction workers building in the pit that, until recently, was the largest mass grave in America. It's time to slow down and remember that the original towers were a symbol of their time, for better or worse, capturing the greed, the excess and even the hubris of the Modern Age. It was built so that it's makers would be remembered. It's time to slow down and remember that what we build on this site, will, perhaps even more so than what originally stood on that site, will be a reflection of OUR age, of OUR values and it will be how we our remembered.

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posted by Japhy at 5/30/2002 01:02:00 PM || #

The NY Times has posted an amazing series of articles and interactive features today dealing with accounts of what happened inside the World Trade Center. Included are transcripts of phone calls made from the towers as well as an interactive flash movie that goes in depth, showing the individual stories of people as they tried to escape. One of the things that has really bothered me about the world reaction is that while we have lionized the FDNY and the NYPD, the vast majority of the victims, just everyday people doing their jobs, have been ignored. I understand it is easier to accept the death of a hero than to accept the death of an innocent, but that is no excuse for not honoring their memories just as highly as those of their would-be-rescuers. The power of the Times feature is that it gives voice to the vast majority of the victims, those people who were just begining their day, bleary-eyed, coffee in hand, on a perfect September morning. This is really first class journalism and a great example of how the web can be a powerful communicative medium. Kudos to the NY Times. Check it out.

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posted by Japhy at 5/26/2002 11:46:00 AM || #

...On Lost Love In the past two weeks I have run into almost all the people I have ever fallen wildly in love with. It's because I'm single again, I know, but I still can't help feeling that it's been prearranged, that the people I have given my heart to have some kind of sixth sense, like sharks smelling blood in the water from miles away. Seeing them again has been strange. All the embarrasment and confusion in my head is gone, replaced by crystal high altitude clarity. I am a cool confident cucumber. I am a new born expert at grabbing a shoulder at just the right time, tying it to a slow growing smile or knowing the right thing to say, each word hitting them with maximum impact. It's terrible. I can do this because I no longer love them. How cruel is love? It renders you mute and keeps you up at night when desire is raging, but devoid of passion, makes you master of all the moves. Worse still, even though I can see now that what I loved is no longer there, or possibly an illusion I created all along from the fabric of the real people before me, I love them still. Some people you never really do get over. Someone should carve that on a stone tablet and make every young man and woman that goes out in to the world wear aforementioned stone tablet around their neck. You really can give your heart away and no matter how much you try to reclaim what you gave away so easily, the act can not be undone. Tonight I said that I had given all my love away. I told someone I once loved that love is a fixed thing, you only get so much of it, given at birth and being young and stupid I had squandered it like a midnight candy binge. I said tonight that I have no love left to give. I hope I'm a liar.

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posted by Japhy at 5/25/2002 05:06:00 PM || #

...On the Nightly News The past few nights I have managed to catch that monstrosity called 'The Evening News'. I stopped watching the news sometime in the late 90's when the web finally became a far better tool to gauge what was really news, what was spin and what was fluff. The fact that television news is forced to put heavy emphasis on things like fire and disaster and human interest stories because of the visual nature of the news has always seemed to me disengenuous, so I just tuned off and read my daily trifecta of Salon,The NY Times, and the Village Voice, the combination of all three usually filters out the propaganda and the outright lies. In any event, watching television news was such a revalation! It wasn't that the fact that there is no 'hard' news coverage. Actually, hard news coverage averages about ten minutes, regardlessof whether the show is 30 or 60 minutes, but this is something I knew. I wasn't even all that shocked at the UPN's practice of creating a 'special interest story' based on the preceding show (ie: "Does Buffy go to far in showing sex?"...which by the time it aired had changed to 'Should gays show affection publicly?"). Instead, I was shocked to discover a special on epileptic cats, a hair cream that is supposedly causing girls to sexually mature faster and a feature story on whether 8 glasses of water a day is too much. Yeah, I know- this is typical, and in these dark days we should just accept whatever crap we are fed and make ironic hipster jokes about it, but I watched these specials carefully and discovered that it was all set-up and no delivery. Invariably, the investigator makes a shocking allegation and then, after interviewing an expert on the subject, takes the expert's casual generalized platitude and uses it as proof. For instance- in the case of the titty inducing hair cream, the investigator seeks out a dermatologist who says nothing about the hair cream's maturity inducing effects, but instead, encourages parents to read the label on things they buy.... So, quid pro quo, the hair cream makes girls develop faster? In the case of the '8 glasses of water' story on UPN, a reporter makes wild allegations about how 'Everyone thinks 8 glasses of water a day is good enough for you, but is it?' After interviewing the Man on the Street ('Dave Prendell, Water Drinker' is how he is credited) we meet an expert, who basiclly says that water is good for you, but doesn't know where the 8 cup thing came from. End of Story. This really makes me want to scream. Am I being a prude? I mean, is 'journalistic responsibility' an arcane idea? I know, I know- I'm talking about UPN and the WB...just because the bottom of the barrel is rotten, that doesn't mean the whole bushel is bad, right? Right? Well, then check out what Paula Zahn was talking about this morning on CNN.

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posted by Japhy at 5/24/2002 05:28:00 PM || #