Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Took a look at the site on the flyer I saw in Union Square last night: NYC Stories. They have the “riding the avalanche” story posted as an urban legend, but nobody’s confirmed it either way yet. I hope it’s true. We all hope it’s true.
Slept much better last night, with earplugs in half the night, but I still feel exhausted. I’d like to sleep for days. Hope I don’t nod off at Laurie Anderson tonight. That’d be so embarrassing.
Yesterday, one of my cousins sent me a cartoon that’s making its way around the net. It’s a map of the region around Afghanistan and the country itself has been turned into a large body of water called Lake America. This really pissed me off, especially after the last note I sent her asking her not to send me jingoistic crap. This is what I sent back:
Please don’t send me stuff like this right now—or ever for that matter. After the rain tonight, we have Lake Trade Towers in lower Manhattan, and this doesn’t seem at all amusing or right to me. Maybe it’s hard for people outside the city to grasp, but we are no longer immune to having the shit bombed out of us, and I live in one of the primary war zones, something that’s been brought home to me very vividly. I used to joke, flippantly, as smart-ass kids will, when the Cold War was on and urtsmith was an active base, that it was better to be the news than see it. Well, careful what you wish for, I’ve discovered. I don’t really want anybody else dead right now, except for the perps. I certainly do not want all of Afghanistan turned into a wasteland. I don’t hate these people. I con’t want vengeance. I want justice. They are two very, very different animals, and they are the dividing line between civilization and barbarism.
Later:
Work at Bayard was brutal, but they did at least come through with the check. Ted Hamil, who writes them, is such a good guy. Yesterday was as busy a day as they come, and it’s been like that for months now, with only a few slow days here and there. Traffic and checking were amazingly subdued, even Joe Cozzi, who usually blurts out whatever comes into his head, including utterly mangled snatches of 70’s and 80’s songs in an equally mangled voice, was more or less silent today. No tasteless jokes, amazingly few un-PC ethnic slurs from Danny, not much teasing from Tim, just a brief outburst of drooling over D’Angelo from Yolanda, in which I joined wholeheartedly.
Paula was moving like molasses, uncharacteristically, and George was in the foulest mood I’ve ever seen, which he at least had the grace not to take out on anybody, and I barely got out of my chair for seven hours. My stomach hurt most of the day. I’m beginning to wonder if my ulcer is coming back.
When I did go out, it was pouring, as it did all day. I can only imagine how difficult that makes things for the S&R people, with everything muddy underfoot and the air steamy in their heavy uniforms. By the time I left at 7:00 PM, a thick fog had settled in, shrouding the top of the Chrysler Building. It was one of those nights when I wouldn’t have been able to see the WTC anyway, even the lights, probably. Everything was truncated, decapitated.
Once I’d escaped—and tonight it felt like escape—I first went to the downtown side of the train, either so distracted I wasn’t thinking right, or instinctively heading home, I’m not sure which. Times Square was eerily subdued, when I finally got there. Granted, it was raining and I haven’t been up to 42nd Street in a long time—not much at all since the Disneyfication—but there really weren’t many people out, though the lights were all as bright as usual, glimmering in the puddles in the street. With all the construction and scaffolding up there, it looks a bit like the Blade Runner set in the rain, if only there’d been more people. And everyone who was there worked in the area. The tourists have fled, despite Disney.
I met up with Jennifer DeMerrit almost immediately, and we made awkward small talk until Marcia showed up. It was good to see her again. She’d been planning to go on a trip in October with her aunt to Moscow, St. Petersberg, and Stockholm, but has canceled it now. Her aunt, however, is still going, brave soul. I don’t blame Marcia for deciding not to go, but I don’t know that I would have canceled either. It’s awfully close in time, (scheduled to leave on October 10th) but on the other hand, if you let horrible things keep you from doing anything, in this world we’d all be housebound agoraphobics. It’s such a great opportunity on the one hand, and such a risk, at the moment, on the other—not the flying so much as the location. I don’t know that I’d want to be in Russia right now.
I’m of two minds about going anywhere. Part of me would really like to be anywhere else right now, and another part of me doesn’t want to leave the city at all because it feels disloyal, like leaving a friend in the lurch. I’m relieved I don’t have to run home for Dad’s surgery, though I do need to go home and see them sometime. Just not Right Now.
The Laurie Anderson show, “Life on a String.” was . . . interesting, and I don’t mean that as a mealy-mouthed critique. I just don’t quite know how to describe it. I don’t know whether she tailored much of it last minute, but if she didn’t, she’s either strangely prescient or has a much darker mind than I do. The show, I thought, was loaded with images you could easily apply to the loss of the attack.
She did, in fact, open by dedicating the music to the “opportunity we all now have to examine the events of the last few weeks and react to them with commitment and compassion.” Parts of the show were funny, parts were sad, parts seemed trite to me, even though her use of cliche is very intentional, but overall, it was very, very beautiful. I’ve only heard “O Superman“ once, so I can’t say if she recast it, but I think she did. One piece in particular was a near-perfect verbal and musical description of, oh, Tribeca and the meatpacking district in particular, and what Soho used to be like, giving it that definite Blade Runnerish atmosphere that I’ve always loved, and that you only get in fall or spring in the rain, late at night, when the manholes are hissing up steam and nearly everyone but you is in bed.
Her electric violin’s got beautiful tone, even when she’s making it squawk and bark and jar. The opening, which reminded me of Alasdair Fraser at his most melancholy, had me in tears because it was so beautifully played, that something could be that beautiful in the midst of all this horror.
All around, it was a Blade Runnerish sort of day. On the train on the way home, I finally got a seat next to the window, facing backwards, which offers the best view of the city as you leave it. I almost wish I hadn’t. As we passed over one of the north-south avenues, I saw smoke and steam rolling up it from the site, and sensed the huge absence of the towers in the darkness. But it wasn’t even a complete darkness. In the void where the towers used to be is an inverted bowl of light, the glow of banks of halogen spotlights and neon torches that outlines everything around it in silhouette. I had thought before that the lights were on again in most of downtown, but I saw tonight that several buildings, including the Woolworth building, are still utterly dark, without even emergency lights in the stairwells. They were just dark hulks against that glow, with steam from the rain hitting the smoldering ruins of the towers roiling up from the site around them. The man sitting behind me had the same reaction I did, murmuring “Oh my God.” very softly. A scene from Dante, or Milton, by way of Ridley Scott.
The word for today on Anu Garg’s Word of the Day e-mail, was annus mirabilis. I can only think that John Dryden must have experienced something like this.
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