My close friend Suzanne was in town for just a weekend to attend the funeral of our friend John. John had been a surrogate parent for Suzanne for the decade (mid '80s to '90s) she spent based in New York, with side journeys to get married (in St. Paul, 2 years) and live with a crazy dancer-choreographer (Mexico, 1 year). John and his partner Bill were the anchors of a group house in Park Slope in Brooklyn that felt more like a community oasis that you might find in Berkeley. There was a big old grand parlor with fine furniture and china, a formal and informal living room, a study, five bedrooms, a lovely backyard with flowers and chairs and a water sculpture, and what Suzanne used to call the most restful bathroom in the world. It wasn't a fancy bathroom; just spare with a claw-foot tub, a couple of plants, and a simple chair for clothes and towels. With the window onto the back and its view of the Manhattan skyline, it presaged spreads from something like Living Simply a decade later. But the house also gave off a sense of some long-lost Brooklyn townhouse lifestyle, which John and Bill played up with fancy dinner parties, lavish Christmas feasts with evergreen boughs and roaring fires and sherry and a big tree in the front bay window like some vision of genteel urban holiday of yore. For awhile they ran a salon in the parlor where their wide circle of friends performed Sunday afternoons and we all had wine and snacks. Suzanne was the only of their ever-rotating group of young artist roommates who lived on the top floor with them, in two tiny rooms facing one another across a hallway. I loved the severe spartan-ness of Suzanne's rooms; the front one with just a round table for writing and a chair, the back with a mattress and soft colorful fabrics. The house was a sanctuary for me. We spent hours drinking red wine and drawing tarot cards, talking about the dance world and our big plans. We rented foreign films and watched them in Bill's study as he flitted in and out. I'd come over and sit in the garden, even if Suzanne wasn't around and John or Bill might bring out iced tea. We made dinners in the big kitchen or joined other housemates and all ate together. When I made a large site-specific piece for Prospect Park with like 15 dancers, all in white, and it drizzled and everyone was cold and muddy, we all went to the house and had cheese and wine and laughter while our clothes washed and dried right there. I recently ran into a friend who had been in that piece and she commented specifically on how wonderful and cosy that after-party had been.

It seemed like everyone eventually came through the house; I myself had been there for an after-performance party before I even met Suzanne, one of Sara's pieces (Coney Island, maybe?). Later, Suzanne and I and Nathan would rehearse (i.e. lie around on the floor and stretch and talk) in an empty front bedroom, by candlelight,. John and Bill, after fifteen or so years, and tired of maintaining a large, rundown house and the instability of rotating housemates, lucked into a condo right on Prospect Park. I'd been there just last year when Suzanne came from Switzerland with her partner and two daughters and stayed with them. We had another lovely dinner party and John, who was often tired and rundown, was sparkling and funny and kind, as always. The funeral was a big Catholic Mass. John was not very old, really, just 15 or so years older than I. In fact, he must have been my age when we met. How quickly life passes, and how important the quotidian sharing of small experiences, often what is remembered as just the background of larger ambitions and personal dramas. I really have not felt so at home, so known and welcomed, as I did when Suzanne and I were the closest of friends and John and Bill her fond American family.

What's with the abundance of gerund-plus-name punny titles: Judging Amy, Crossing Jordan, Watching Ellie. They resemble but are grammatically dissimilar to, say, Leaving Las Vegas, Saving Private Ryan, Punishing Kiss, Enduring Freedom, sparkling water, or wanting out. While wearying, the list is hardly exhaustive. Why not Losing Patience (a bittersweet comedy about a wandering Alzheimer's patient and the people who love her), Currying Favors (madcap adventures of the family Favor and their magical tandoori oven), Taxing Timothy (a CSI-style IRS drama. gripping, ominous.), Courting Miss Astor (period drama about unsuitable suitors vying for the hand of high society heiress. lush, atmospheric.), Shrinking Violet (shy but stunning jailbait discovers her superpower -- changing size at will), Grounding Sam (widower named Sam struggles to bring up his teen daughter, Samantha, while battling methamphetamine addiction and running his crop-dusting business amidst terrorist alerts), and Tasting Victory (plucky Victory moonlights as a specialty call-girl while putting herself through sommelier school).

Artspost: First, I went to see both nights of "69 Love Songs"; the Magnetic Fields at Lincoln Center. They played them through in order, with simple orchestration. Everyone was hoarse by the end of the second night. The audience was warm, there was a lot of breakage of the fourth wall and informal byplay that broke the stiffness of a concert-hall venue. It was quite a treat.

Two Texting-resonates-with-the-Zeitgeist clues, both, courtesy of the Times:

1) On February 1, I wrote: "It's very frustrating to read bits and pieces of what I've observed in print, knowing that those writers have legitimacy, get paid, had a sense of rightness and purpose in their observing, while I'm flailing about without context, unemployed. In dance, I used to feel impinged-upon when I read about a piece using fairy-tale imagery, a certain autobiographical/wry voice, things that I felt were 'my' territory. In writing about outside events, the timeline is shorter...the material is carbon-dated, and access to similar work is instantaneous ... I have this theory about art, though, that works against the tenats of 'journalism'. I was not much interested in the insta-art responses, whether visual or performative, this fall. Good art about important things (a tautology) takes time, should take time. Good writing about important things varies in tone and outlook; there are various types for the different time-relationships the writer has to the subject."

From March 3, NYT: "Meanwhile, the actual events of crisis are communicated far more directly today than at any previous period in history. In 1937, it took a couple of days for Picasso to hear the news of Guernica; today, he would have watched it unfolding live on television. This immediacy and its accompanying glut of images and information is itself a challenge to artists. One difficulty in making art about Sept. 11 is that it is hard to create anything that rivals in magnitude the live images that so much of the world spent days obsessively watching on television.

In the face of this new reality, the demand that art respond literally, directly and rapidly to crisis contains an underlying note of panic: an urge to demonstrate to a broader public, through a definitive statement on something of great social moment, that art is indeed necessary, that art can still make a difference, despite a growing fear that it is not and cannot. ...

In today's total society, [Adorno (and I just bought his collected essays a few weeks ago)] wrote, "even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter." That "idle chatter" is what artists really have to worry about: the cloud of effusive, emotional responses that arises, like dust, in the wake of a crisis event. The task of the artist is to find, train and shape a voice strong enough to rise above that idle chatter — which is a process that is as highly individual as artistic inspiration."

2) A long long time ago (early 2000), I linked to "World of Awe," a lovely hypertext project. It's now in the Whitney Bienniel. This, from a Times article on the (nonaffiliated) whitneybienniel.com:

"Yael Kanarek, a New York digital artist, took a rocky landscape from her "World of Awe," one of the online works in the official biennial, and adapted it for Mr. Manetas's site. She said the digital medium's malleability made it possible for her to participate in both exhibitions, adding, "True, one is a bit stiff but all- powerful; the other is experimental and lively." Either way, she said, "I'm with my peers on both sides."

Mr. Manetas insisted that his site was not intended to be viewed as an alternative biennial, an Internet-era version of the Impressionists' Salon des Refusés ... Mr. Manetas wants to make two points, neither of which has much relevance to the Whitney Biennial. As the site's collage function is meant to demonstrate, digital technology can empower nonartists to do creative things. In this environment, where anyone can piggyback on the work of others, Mr. Manetas is also concerned that the enforcement of copyrights will hinder expression.

Even if one accepts his statement that the site is not a direct attack on the Whitney, just using the address WhitneyBiennial.com implies an element of criticism. Peter Lunenfeld, who teaches media design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and served as one of Mr. Manetas's curators, acknowledged this. With online art featured last year in high-profile exhibitions at the Whitney and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he said, the Net was losing its shaggy aesthetic.

"People are starting to get a sense of portentousness and pretentiousness coming out of the museum community, because that's what museums are good at," he said.

WhitneyBiennial.com is meant to restore some spontaneity to the Web. So, he said, `it's disingenuous to say that there's no critique involved," even if it is low on Mr. Manetas's priority list."

Also in the Bienniel is the work of an artist who gathers small bits of text and data from the harddrives of people who download her software; the software then floats randomized snatches across the screen. I have a file called "found" on my harddrive, which is uninvited text, images, and html files that even Norton Clean Sweep won't delete from my cache. Periodically, I move all the shards to the "found" file, with the intention of forming "found-collage pages." (my web skills are not up for this, which is the only reason I've not done it). I have animated porn banner ads, buttons, images of every genre, geometric shapes, zillions of arrows, part of an interview with Michael Ondaatje, etc.

It's February, a time of rest and preparation, according to the wise and wonderful Nathan Whiting.

"DISTURBED
I'm lost in the dark,
lost in many colors.
Confusion grabs
a searchlight's phantom flashes.
Lost in blue
a bat would scream
and measure dotted answers.
A silent owl slips
through maples
without bottom. Who searches?
Whatever I am
won't find a way easy.
I turn again.
Insects scatter. Days disrobe
and fall dead,
but remain a map without rest"

wow, Nathan has a web presence (but not computer).
"Poet Nathan Whiting (This Slave Dreads Her Work As If She Were A Lamb Commanded to be A Musician, Hanging Loose Press, 1980) also simplifies the submission process by numbering his poem groupings, with the titles of all the poems in a group listed under a corresponding number. He keeps this list of numbers in the same notebook that contains the original, handwritten versions of the poems, where there is little chance it will get lost. Each time he sends a group poems to a magazine, he records the magazine's name next to the appropriate number.

Whiting tends to send out five or six poems at a time. If a magazine accepts one or two poems, he'll sometimes simply add one or two new poems to the grouping. If magazine accepts several poems from a group, he's likely to merge the rejected poems with a few unaccepted poems from another group.

Whiting lists the magazines again on a second sheet where he records the date sent, group number, date returned, comments, and an approximate date to send to that magazine again (or he could enter "never" here). This process makes resubmitting to magazines almost automatic, because editors often give a clue as to when they'd like to see work again. If he gets an encouraging note from an editor, he'll want to resubmit sooner. For other magazines he'll enter a question mark. Going through this list periodically, he can spot what magazines are due for new poems. He's also developed a color-coded process to spot things more easily: if a magazine rejects all poems, he puts a black pencil line through the entry; if a magazine accepts one of his poems, he puts a red line through the entry and if magazine is not currently reading manuscripts, he puts a blue line through. He places a purple check next to the entry if he's saved an editor's note in a separate correspondence file."

as for me, I think I'd best stop putting the cart before the horse. it is time to clean my flat, take yoga, shred outdated lists, and act with clear intent. I have some computer and website maintenance to do and also a new freelance assignment. I need to return some letters, make some phone calls, polish some writing, and focus. Preparation, for Nathan, is not acting (also dovetails with merc retrograde in capricorn. this week, merc will go direct just as Saturn goes direct and the chinese new year follows. all of these symbols reinforce one another; proceed slowly, with integrity, attend to unfinished business, and clear a space for the new.) Preparation is a pause, a gathering, a combination of organization and intuition heightened by practice (preparation is dance class, as opposed to applying for a gig).

And, also from nathan:: More pride, less ego.

In the spirit of not posting only demanding text, I offer the following relaxing links:
Feminist Stripper, recommended by Lily Burana, whose writing I like and who turns out to be a character from my past.
Satire wire's Mo Bettah Evil Axes, um, satire
While I liked the list of (odd) results I got on google when I typed spiral jetty salt shower coin, I was looking for this page, part of Temporama, a travel project documentation site. I like the sensibility, curiosity, and the fact that the writer auctioned off all his/her belongings on eBay as a conceptual art project. Then he went around and visited the winning bidders and took pictures of them with his former objects.
So this woman posts to the knitlist that we can check out her scifi novella, and I do, and it's actually really really good. I was engrossed. And I really dislike science fiction.
The halfbakery project is subtly designed. (carpe demi haha) A good place for those game show ideas you never got around to becoming a tv exec so that you could produce.
In Passing, an overheard conversation site. Has anyone made a directory yet of the found text/ found artifact/ found images sites online?
Before I got into weblogging, I was an obsessive chathead. And one of the truly funniest people in chat (who I later met) is an old hippie turned web designer. And I stopped in sometime in October and ended up saving a few of her comments. Copyright her, and she rocks::

Bunni V: I think we should give citizenship and a free plane ticket here to any Afgan woman who brings a dead husband to the ticket counter

on anthrax: Bunni V: I"ll die if I get it for sure cause I'd cut it into lines

And, finally, an essay on proximity and community, which was a segue, but due to low audience participation, polling is now closed. Thanks to the gracious and generous Ruthie's Double who presented me with a seven point path to personal fulfillment. Votes were 4-0 against taking the writing workshop, 2 said votes being virtual and 2 from real-life friends.

The holidays felt like a 2-week vacation for the U.S.; everyone seemed to take the Friday before Christmas off for a five-day weekend; last Wednesday through Friday were skeletal workdays, and then another 4-day weekend through New Years'. The time passed very quickly; went to Macy's the day after Christmas... total mayhem, absolute plunderage, racks overturned, shoe department looked like people had just thrown the shoes up in the air and let them fall like expensive confetti. I bought a pair of said shoes, as my regular work/walking shoes wore right through the heels creating a very steep edge which continually caught on stairs and sidewalk cracks, courting disaster. My new shoes were the only basic (non-neon highheeled psudosneakers, non stilettos or upper east side matron pumps) thing on offer, although they pretty much look like bowling shoes in a two-toned brown motif. Remember when a pair of basic black Doc Martins was all you needed?

The following day, a van plowed into the back of a city bus on that same corner in Herald Square, squashing and killing 7 pedestrians.

Last Friday I went back to Ground Zero having heard the rumor that a public viewing platform was opening. An international crowd of 50,000-plus solemnly walked the circuit outside the fence. The platform did not open until Sunday, and although I wanted to get up at 6 and be one of the first on it (for journalistic coup), it was dark and cold and I slept on. The Times reported that the actual first person was one of those people who makes a career of being the first in line for major openings and events; he arrived at 5 and waited for 4 hours.

I went down at 2 pm, the line stretched 4 blocks up Broadway and then circled almost entirely back on itself around another full square block. At first I just wandered around soaking up the almost frenzied voyeurism; then, as penance for my sloth, got on the end of the line and shuffled forward as the sun waned and the wind-chill drove the temperature into the teens, reaching the platform at 5pm. We were given less than a minute on the plywood walkway. Police shouted "no stopping! don't block the walkway!" to people who'd waited almost three hours for this moment and struggled with cameras and maps, trying to orient themselves. I saw far less than I'd seen both on the ground inside the perimeter the night before Thanksgiving (when I waited almost three hours for the chance to take a Red Cross 'walkabout') and, two weeks before that, when a kindly cop escorted me onto the family viewing platform on the West side. There is, literally, less to see; all of the destroyed structured have been fully dismantled. More than that, the regimented, generic 'tour' experience creates unbridgeable distance. Although interviewees professed emotion and catharsis, I felt more estranged from the event and the site than when I stood at the Canal Street cordon (10 blocks uptown) in the first week of shock. But I did need to do the public tour to sort of create the circle or cycle of the site's symbolism.

Last night I performed in front of an audience for the first time in, what.. three years. New Years' Eve my friend Heather called from L.A. in high spirits and a sense of unlimited possibility. She told me I should break the ice, get back out there, even go to Open Mics if I had to. So the next day was bloody marys and a leisurely brunch, tidying the house and watching Topsy Turvy (Mike Leigh's Gilbert and Sullivan tribute... excellent). I went at about 2:30 over to St. Mark's Church to the annual 12-hour poetry reading to see if there were any slots available. No, and $15 to get in. But the alternative reading (there's always, in every organic, originally egalitarian annual event that becomes a scene, a growing history of slights or disgruntlement against the 'institution' that creates an 'alternative' event), which used to be a small, anarchic event at Jazz of the Streets, was now at the Knitting Factory, and profiled as a 'Voice Choice' for the day. After much bloody maryage over hours and the very long movie, it was dark and cold and 10 pm when I decided fuck it, rather than putting off onto a list things like "get out more. participate," I'll just go down for the end.

I walked down (it's at the very southern end of Soho, truly, if you go 2 blocks east, you're solidly in the government/courts/police plaza area). I walked in and there was this table with cd's and chapbooks and I signed up for the open mic. There were 150 scheduled readers, and they were running a good hour behind. The MC's.. both the one onstage and a second one who came in for the final hour... sucked. Back in '96 I MC'd a performance benefit/festival in this space; I used to know eveyone on the scene. Now, it was the same vibe and same scene dynamics.. but all new people. As usual, the range and intensity of talent in New York is astounding (and remember.. this was the alternate reading.. the 'real' talents, 12-hours'worth, were at St. Mark's). Also as usual, showcase formats have a deadening effect on the texture and uniqueness of the performers. The 3-minute limit was so strictly enforced that people rushed; you hardly glommed on to a given reader or singer's cadence, vision, or 'voice' before they were replaced, leading to a sort of tv-soundbite-sampler feel. A woman who did a surprisingly fine poem about a childhood friend's suicide was gonged off the stage just as the piece culminated in the moment the man threw himself from the George Washington Bridge; several singer-songwriters had their mic turned off right in the middle of the rousing refrain (including the guy who'd mc'd the previous hour)... and these were the invited performers. Add to this the sort of suffering-through vibe of an audience composed almost entirely of people waiting several hours to read themselves and each of their few friends waiting to hear them so they could leave... well...

I knew just 2 performers, two of the best, veterans. Joel, aka, Baron von Blumenzack, aka ZeroBoy, was there in a faux-fur vest and white cowboy har, roaming restlessly around, pissed off because he was supposed to have gone at 10:30. He did a sort of year-end wrap-up sound collage; he's unique and a fine performer if you ever get the chance to see him, well worth it. His sound effects are all from the mouth; he did news soundbites, the countdown, crowd noises, sort of mimed a dejay and slowed down/distorted the effects as if the whole thing was pretaped. He has gotten nothing but better in the last few years; he's supposed to be profiled in this coming weekend's Post. Matthew Courtney was there; he just read a few quotes from famous authors of yore about the human condition, ending with Aeschylus? Euripides? on courage. Matthew was an art star of the spoken word in the '90's, appearing on MTV and touring; I've been in a seies he curated some years back. He is very at home on stage, and very compelling, with a sort of retro, urbane understatement of faint irony, always styish shaved head and fitted black suits. He's also a better MC than almost anyone for these events and, as I've noticed before with seasoned performers, there was a visible relaxation in the room once he took the stage, a sort of relief and trust from all the striving, rushing. He took his time, made some asides and bon mots... I think there would have been a riot had the singularly insensitive flag-waver dared time him out. (I say insensitive because he would flag people who were clearly ending their pieces, not allowing a few seconds' grace or dignity).

Open mic was last, which meant that people who'd signed up at 4pm had waited eight hours already. The mc went down the list and took the first four people who were still present. I went out to the bar for a beer. There's a video monitor of the main stage at the bar, so performers and audience members know when what they came to see is going on. We watched a few rant-stylists (with sound turned off), and then the mc came back on with the list. I rushed around to the theater just as he was reading off my name (last on the list). "I'm here" I said. Went back and downed my beer, watched a rant-poet refuse the 3-minute limit and get pushed off the stage, shouting fuck you!, and went up and speed-read my 'Dear Dr. Scholl's" letter. I knew from the radio segment that it was 3 minutes and 15 seconds long, so I was editing as I went, and nowhere near as calm or rhythmic as the piece deserves. The timer waved the flag at the penultimate sentence, so I skipped nuance and read the last few words.

There were actually people there, as the final hour (scheduled for 11-12, although it was now 12:30) was given over to Surf Reality theater collective people. We stayed to hear Reverend Jen (who Heather had mentioned last night on the phone to me as running a good, non-slam open mic) describe her Troll Museum (funny and nice). I got introduced to her boyfriend, Nick Zed, the experimental filmmaker, who said "We just made a film; "Lord of the Cockrings." A woman came over to me and said "that was great; you made me cry." She then got onstage and belted out "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Walked the cold deserted streets home thinking, plus ca change, plus le meme chose.

I'm learning a bit about the frustrations of journalism. Without strong contacts to expedite publication, I've been unable to get out this article, which I think is an important and underrepresented facet of post-September 11 New York. It's especially frustrating in light of the time and emotional honesty that the people I interviewed (both cops and civilians) shared with me, all trusting me to tell and share their stories. For that reason, I'm publishing it here. (it's since been published by The Villager)

POST-ATTACK EAST VILLAGE

"Die yuppie scum" graffiti covered this neighborhood back in 1988, when the Tompkins Square riot pitted squatters and homeless rights activists against cops on a hot August night. "My horse is my penis! My stick is my dick!" taunted the crowd as mounted riot police charged protesters and bystanders alike, bottles rained down from rooftops, and helicopters beamed searchlights from above. Now, this same corner serves as our neighborhood's shrine for the missing; poems and flowers and candles for those we thought we reviled. One of our block's French bistros, long bemoaned as an example of the gentrification that supplanted any remaining real bohemia with destination fun, replaced its Prix Fixe chalkboard with an open invitation for free dinner for blood donors and volunteers. And the cops at the 9th Precinct's station house invited local street artist Chico (Antonio Garcia) to paint a new mural on their garage bay door: "To the Community: Thank You."

This is the East Village, iconoclast central. And in our grieving, we are redefining our stance against authority, shaping a leftist patriotism, and reclaiming our community. The thirteen years since the Tompkins Square riot have seen the very gentrification the demonstrators feared. Overpriced Thai food trumps funky performance gallery. Community gardens bulldozed and developed. The raw anger and rebellion, the most vocal squatters and punks, the most fabulous Mud Club faces, the edge and the squalor, have been gone some ten years now. And yet the East Village remains invested in its outsider image. We are aggressively dressed-down, overeducated, insular artists, or, at least, indie-culture mavens, with slight disdain for mainstream culture and consumerism, and selective memories about our own invasion of this Eastern European and Hispanic neighborhood. Multi-national corporations and their minions? Bad. The K-Mart at Astor Place? Yeah, but with irony. The excitement-seeking weekend crowds of poseur rich kids? 'I never go out on weekends, it's so annoying.'

Long-term residents often share the views expressed by performance artist and community archivist Penny Arcade, that the police are protecting real estate interests and "your right to walk down Avenue B in a slip." When, she asks, did the police become an overnight eviction squad? "Since when does the housing department own a tank?" Gentrification, to Penny, is police enforcement of middle class values. Safety is safety for trendoids and entrepreneurs to exploit the neighborhood without respecting it. Cabaret artist Helen Stratford concurs, "The police were seen as a threat to creativity, intelligence, originality, and all of the magical things that happen in chaos. They enforced order, conformity, the law."

But after September 11th's pyrotechnic horrorshow, viewed on tv or on our very own rooftops, our New York was literally invaded by the other New York, and then, virtually, by the world's images and ideas of New York. A strange triangulation effect took place then, between us, our city, and the media. The shocking disjunction between the here-experienced and the here- codified, reported, explained back to us on our televisions and radios called into question any sort of reporting, any set of images, any representations. We New Yorkers often have that dislocation, of having the sites of our everyday lives sold back to us in heightened, glamourized images, peopled with models, celebrities, even people playing glossy simulacra of ourselves. But now our loss was the world's loss and we were being told what our streets were like, what the towers symbolized, what to feel.

The morning of September 11th, Avenue A was its usual weekday morning self. People ran errands, there was an especially long line at the bank. But like dye threading through water, lines of refugees marched uptown, in suits and in pantyhose, clutching briefcases. I had never seen so many people on Essex, walking; I had never seen these types of people, in these numbers, outside of midtown. There must have been sirens, because I saw hundreds and hundreds of vehicles with flashing lights racing west on Houston, and there must have been conversation and radios, because I seemed to know that the subways were closed. There was perhaps a fifteen-minute window where the two worlds coexisted as if superimposed; the residents and the survivors. I remember silence and the silent stoicism, which I now realize was severe shock, of the dusty people, the inability of our neighborhood to react, to interact. Several of us got into a slight argument trying to explain the best way to get to the Manhattan Bridge to a middle-aged Caribbean woman. "I don't know this area," she said. This was not their New York, and they were not, until now, characters in ours.

Our air was foul and choking. No one could maintain any sort of dialogue, and it all was too horrible to say "isn't it horrible?" On Wednesday, a friend waved off conversation, saying, "That was before yesterday. I mean, none of that matters now." We wore air filter masks and warned one another about patriotic troublemakers roaming nearby. A large gathering outside a church looked like a Happening, but was just a local AA meeting letting out. Photocopied pleas for blood, for donations were on every pole. The missing flyers followed. Candles outside a building might mean a loss inside.

Our neighborhood was cordoned off. Here, in the zone between 14th and Canal, with only official traffic and bona fide residents allowed, an authentic grief and solidarity took shape. We were incredibly respectful to one another; the homeless, briefly, became real people rather than a cause, just as the faceless sell-out yuppies moved from symbol to individuals in the heartbreaking Times tributes. The cordons let us feel the real soul of our neighborhood, without the clutter and chatter of the party crowd. They allowed us, too, to feel how close we were to what had happened, insiders. There was, I think, a little of the velvet rope feeling, how far in can I get, how close can I be, that was less about the later wave of terro-tourism and more about respectful witnessing, validating that we were a part of this tragedy. The constant sirens, the police policy of 'omnipresence', the discarded tapes and blue wooden barricades, the detritus of emergency, all made it feel real and closer than repetitive broadcast images, heroic/patriotic montages, rhetoric, and analysis.

Acquaintances took time for real conversation in the middle of deserted streets; we talked not of what we'd witnessed, but of mundane things, but with a slow, grave cadence and real listening. A memorial far less dense and organized than that at Union Square took amorphous shape in Tompkins Square Park, the shape of a huge heart outlined with candles and full of flowers. A small shrine formed on the unbroken, block-long brick wall of the ConEd plant, source of intermittent, ominous hums. A more profuse floral display blossomed on Avenue A just south of 14th under a breathtaking new mural of the city's skyline Chico painted on September 11th. The Hell's Angels New York Chapter on 3rd Street strung the largest American flag I've ever seen from third-floor height, spanning the street. And the 9th Precinct was reclaimed from tv-land's NYPD Blue iconography for the community, decorated with hundreds of thank-you cards from local schoolchildren and from as far away as Oregon, and with the ever-fresh flowers at the sidewalk shrine (now seasonal with pumpkins).

Detective Jamie Hernandez, Community Affairs Officer for the precinct, tells me that community response was instantaneous and overwhelming. People called and stopped in, asking what they could do, what the cops needed. Local hospitals and clinics and a YMHA offered beds for those crashing after long shifts, and free care to the five precinct cops injured on the first day. People brought food. "This one woman, she's a character, she likes to stop by, she likes to dance. Always asking us for money. She brought us two packages of cookies and some juice. And she was crying because she said this is all I can afford. What are we gonna do, tell her we don't need it? It was the type of thing… you just wanted to grab and her and scoop her up in a big hug."

Irene Nolan owns Ponica, where she sells her own clothing designs, two doors down from the precinct house. For the first week after the attack, she stayed at home, watched tv, and felt isolated and afraid. One day she went down to the West Side Highway, and there was Helen, with a bunch of American flags, cheering like mad. Helen tells me that Irene grabbed a flag and held it close, and that marked the change. "Me? With an American flag? Embracing American values?" She opened up her shop because people need a place to gather, and she began to organize and coordinate donations to the precinct. Her schedule shows that for almost two months, every day, local restaurants delivered dinner for 75 cops. Once Irene began to call, people began calling her. "How can I help?"

Irene tells me that participation saved her life, saved her from isolation. "It was scary to be alone during this time." And Helen tells me that everything has changed, that the cops and the community have humanized one another. Before, she says we could romanticize anarchy, chaos, and revolution. But now, "I see they are protecting our ability to create, to rebel. The taste of true chaos made us value the order and stability within which we experiment." One night a cop decided to paint a huge flag for the station house, and it kind of didn't look that good. So Lieutenant Sam ran up to Chico's house at 11 pm. The cops know Chico because, before he got commissions, he got busted for graffiti regularly. And Lieutenant Sam said, "We need a mural, something with a flag, a thank you." And Chico grabbed his stuff and painted it in about half an hour. Irene shows me a photo of a broadly smiling group, some in uniform, "Cops and hippies, hanging out," she says.

I go to a breakfast that the police are giving for the community. There is laughter and genuine warmth, lots of cops, lots of business owners, and lots of artsy people. Detective Hernandez has made gorgeous, framed plaques for the people who'd dropped off business cards with their donations. They feature stunning, detailed pen-and ink drawings of the precinct house made by a street artist in '99. The precinct has also taken out a full-page ad in the Villager. "Being a Police Officer is a very difficult job, but in these past days, you, the community, have helped to keep us strong, to reinforce the oath we have sworn to uphold the law, and made it easier to cope with this tragedy. They say that New York City is the greatest city in the world, but this saying cannot be complete without the greatest citizens of this city - like the residents of the Lower East Side." One cop says, "I'll never forget that first night at ground zero. A citizen showed up with a shovel, wanting to help. That's what this community has been like." Irene, who's from England, gives a beautiful speech about having lived here for 30 years but never having felt American until now. Someone else talks about a new era, a transformation in how we all deal with one another. "These are our heroes and I'm glad that our society's changed so it values that." Everyone cheers. Lieutenant Sam (Airam Ortiz) notes that she asked to be transferred to this precinct, and jokes about "world-famous graffiti artist," Chico. The photographer who came by snaps picture after picture, everyone wants one of them with the cops, their plaque. Helen, resplendent in swirling Victoriana gown, plays cabaret accordion, and then, as the gathering winds down, a gentle "America the Beautiful."

Coming home I pass a building on 7th Street with an actively tended shrine. Candles burn, flowers are fresh, and on the door is posted a Times bio I had just read, and resonated with, last night. Joyce, I remembered reading, "was the epitome of cool." Of course this is where she lived. There are wonderful cards and a pumpkin: "I love you, Joyce." September 11th is everywhere, still. The missing posters have given way to fliers for peace vigils and nonviolence teach-ins. A craftswoman who makes beautiful decorative objects from twigs and dried flowers has made a flag for her boutique's window. I pass a gallery displaying images of the towers in various media and abstraction, a show called "Reaction." "Many artists felt compelled to create on, or within a few days of, 9/11. Others could not work for days or weeks."

The nation moved on, to abstraction and analysis, before New York was ready. And the smell and the rubble and the dust and the sirens and the tape and the posters; I want them to stay. Too quickly, the material races ahead of the emotional. We New Yorkers are still stuck on minutiae when the media has moved on to meaning. For the first time I understand that meaning can be the enemy. It's always imposed, and, always, particularity is plowed under, tamed. It makes sense to me that things should be disrupted, that we should be forced to confront what happened. And I can't be the only New Yorker who feels a tad proprietary, as if the world has wrested our tragedy away from us for its war and its lessons and its justifications and its catharsis. Ours. I am so proud of my city, and for the first time it feels like mine -- not just this tiny dying bohemia, one of only a few such in large cities in the world where my choices, my lifestyle, make sense -- but all of it.

The yuppies have ceased to be symbols for us, in the way that New York has ceased to be purely a symbol for America. The way cops and firemen are symbols, for protesters or in patriotic montage. The way the East Village is a symbol for those who market our lifestyle back to us. The Trade Towers were at once symbol, movie location, and place for events in our lives. Something real, undeniable happened, and shook out the complacency of easy labels and smug dismissal of the not-us. And any return takes us into the sort of thinking that allowed terrorists to abstract and generalize "Americans," to attack symbolically in a way one can never particularly. Every single person I spoke with moved from the abstract to the particular, from generalizing to moment. Over and over I learn that returning to the moment, to the real, cuts right through conceptual understanding. And we can't go back.

Someone has graffiti'd the sidewalks again. But with fat outlines of flowers, simple and schematic. The image is almost banal, yet oddly resonant & persistent; it surfaces intermittently from the fringes of my subconscious, the blossoming of new hope.

copyright2001

Had a very strong nightmare Thanksgiving night. I had neighbors who were close friends, a European couple. They had a sumptuously spacious apartment (although, in real life, the apartments in this building are all the same, just mirror-images on either side). The apartment was so light and airy, many windows, both open spaces with linking archways and nice old-fashioned cubbyhole rooms, all wood, mantlepieces and cupboards. Then, they committed suicide. First the man, then the woman, jumped off the roof. I had a particular grief for the man, thinking his death was a loss for the world; he was kind and funny and multimedia knowledgeable and an artist. They had everything to live for. Their deaths had a sinister, secret, seamy underside vibe.

Immediately as word got out, the building was besieged by apartment-seekers. I'd always coveted their flat, and thought if they ever moved out, I should get first dibs. And it didn't seem right strangers should shoehorn in because of tragedy. So, although I felt mercenary, I called the landlord (who was kindly and reasonable, not my real landlord who's taken me to court many times), and he agreed to lease me the apartment. Somehow I have the lease in front of me (also background of attractive young people in hall, at door, looking for the super, wanting the flat)... and I see that the rent is $1600 a month. I had no idea my friends were paying that much. I couldn't see how I'd possibly be able to commit to coming up with that kind of money. And yet, thinking about being tethered to my affordable, but oppressively tiny, apartment for aeons to come, thinking about this beautiful space, how much my life would change to live in it (faint ominous undertone of menace, however, in the prospect), I wanted it terribly much. Somewhere in here I came across a small journal-like notebook the guy had left for me to find, saying that they wanted me to have their apartment, and had left money for me, and I search the apartment and dark, New Orleans-atmosphere city, tracing his last steps (to nightclubs and strip joints) for an envelope of cash. But even if they left me some.. how could it cover even one months' rent? How would they have that kind of money put away? They lived charmingly, but boho-spare. everything seemed to hinge on how much money might be in the envelope.

While I'm looking for the money, word reaches me from the landlord. I've dithered too long. He just got a call from some absurdly pompously-named guy with a title from England.. who he rented the apartment to.

It seems to me that the key to this dream must lie in the murky parts I've forgotten; a sense that the couple had a houseguest, a woman, for awhile, and she, first, had jumped off the roof. A sense of apology in the journal that my friend was not who he presented as, there was a secret life. The details of the flat's furnishings and layout. And the exact pathway of the search for the money, where I seemed to meet people who expected me, had messages for me. Otherwise, I don't get it. And it had a more horrifying feeling to it than some NY real-estate joke.

The couple most reminded me of Rob and Monique, an impossibly creative and hip Dutch couple who did environmental performance art, video, and sound/light setups for clubs. Rob worked as the sysadmin/troubleshooter/tech for DCTV, a community television production nonprofit in a gorgeous old firehouse. They biked everywhere. Rob was the first man I saw to ever wear a skirt, matter-of-factly, and with a topknot and his stunning physique and chiseled face, he looked like an aryan samurai. One Fourth of July, back before no-tolerance, the firecrackers from kids in the street went on and on and on, and Rob went out on 11th street, naked, and just stood there, still, until everyone stopped. Rob was crazy about Monique, knew she was the one the night they met and campaigned to make her realize it, too. She didn't want kids, but they moved to Japan, and I got three birth announcements, gorgeous silkscreens. The one for Bo, their eldest, reads "Born, I open my eyes to the light."

I've been busy, have a large editing project, been volunteering overnight shifts at a red cross relief center overnights, which wipes me out for the next two days, and writing a lot. A big article on police-community relations here in the East Village, which I was really hoping Salon would take, but didn't, and this following piece, which had been forming in my head for weeks and I finally sat down and typed out Saturday night. I was very lucky in that I have a distant cousin who works at NPR and she helped me get it to the right person in time for Thanksgiving week. I just got back from recording it. I had to edit it down to a third of its length, which was so hard, and made it a bit more uniform in tone, less nuanced. So here it is for you guys:

Dear Dr. Scholl's, I'm not sure if, in all the chaos, anyone has remembered to thank you. You FedExed a truck of insoles to an unofficial group of civilian volunteers on the West Side Highway, just because we called you and told you the rescue workers needed them. That took a lot of faith in us, a bunch of strangers with no address, and, as far as I could tell, you didn't ask for a tax break or a receipt or a sponsorship banner. It was nice of the FedEx people, too, I think they bent all the rules to make the delivery. They even came over to ask us if we could use a whole bunch of donations that people had FedExed with no directions except "to the disaster" or "for the rescue workers."

Last week I volunteered for the Red Cross respite center, and I walked home with a really nice guy who'd worked in the sleep center, where the rescue workers take naps and he had to wake them up at the end of their breaks. And he commented that nobody had thanked us. I was manning the front desk, just sitting there, and a group of cops were leaving and one caught my eye and said "thank you". And I said "I didn't do a damn thing." And he said "Thank you anyway" And I pass that on to you. I know that sometimes you're not sure if anyone noticed, if your giving has made any difference. So I want to tell you it has.

The Boy's and Girl's Club of St. Paul's Church in that small town in Wisconsin, you made those beautiful care boxes for the workers with first aid stuff and toiletries. Every one had a thank-you card for the workers in it. Things were really hectic and your gifts got here so fast, we gave them all to the men going in to the World Trade site and I'm not sure if anyone took the time to thank you. I do remember one guy, he came over for some aspirin, he was all muddy, and he said, "Look at what I got". He pulled a letter out of his back pocket and unfolded it. "This little girl wrote me a thank-you letter," he said. "I'm gonna write back." He was on his way downtown for another shift, and maybe when he got home, when he fell asleep his wife or his partner decided to do his laundry, because those jeans were really muddy. And maybe the letter got lost in the wash and he never got a chance to write back. But I want you to know how much he enjoyed getting it and tell you thank you.

And the Hispanic Community of Greater Baltimore, you pulled up in a small white car and unloaded lots of spring water. I know you guys had been driving a long way and there was no time to for us to stop and talk, and maybe you just turned around and drove back home and it all seemed like a dream. I want you to know how personal and generous your gift was. And the big truck that pulled up from Vermont, was it Burlington or St. John's, it looked like the whole town had collected donations all week, and I think you'd been driving around New York, looking for where to drop them off so they would be used, and the unloading was fast. I hope you knew how much we thank you.

And the neighbors who keep the flowers fresh at the firehouse shrines, and the local restaurants who donated so many meals to the police of the 9th Precinct here in the East Village, and the hospitals and clinics who handed out air filter masks to pedestrians, and whoever made that amazing lasagna all us supply depot volunteers devoured, thank you.

The Great Jones Street firehouse has a big "thank you" banner up, I wish everyone could see it. It's a beautiful old-fashioned red brick and wrought-iron building, it even has a little french-door balcony. Firefighter ----- showed me the hundreds of cards that have come from all over the world and a photo of some French firefighters standing in front of their truck which was decorated with both the French and American flags, and the Paddington Bear firefighter that they have on the dashboard of the fire engine. And, amid all the colorful crayon banners and gifts, I saw a simple typewritten letter. It was from a neighbor, a guy who lives on Mott Street, and he wrote "I am so sorry. I wish with all my heart there was something I could do." And I want to tell that guy that he did do something, and thank you.

And, you know, maybe some of the things you sent didn't get used the way you imagined. It was as though waves of love and support were coming from everywhere, by truck and by mail, and waves of confusion and chaos and need and grief were going out, and wherever they met they made a big splash. I know that there were some homeless guys from a shelter nearby who came to the supply depot and ended up working very hard, doing some heavy lifting and the trash removal. We had boxes and boxes of toothbrushes and deodorant and soap and some of the men asked if they could have some, and we said yes. But I don't think you would have minded either, because even in the midst of terrible tragedy, there are many small stories of need. We did hand out toiletries packs to some of the people waiting to get into their Battery Park City apartments under escort, just to pick up a few things. The people of Battery Park City tend not to think of themselves as needing help, so at first, no one said yes, but then they saw the soap and toothpaste and shampoo and the packages went like hotcakes. The Mother Theresa nuns came and made sandwiches and snack packs all day for two weeks, and when our location was closing, there were very many bags of used clothing. And the nuns asked if they could take some. One nun explained that they only own two cotton saris, personally, but "we need it for our mens". It turns out they run a shelter for men with AIDS here in New York, and so the used clothing found a very worthy home, thank you.

And thank you, the nurses who rushed from the hospitals with supplies for the triage centers. It broke all of our hearts that there were not more patients. And probably those supplies were all sooty or got lost and your hospital's supply inventory is all messed up, because it was such a profound crisis and it created waves of secondary crises, of secondary chaos, and still is. But thank you. Thank you, too, to the EMTs and metalworkers who traveled very far to help out at ground zero and then were told there were too many volunteers. I know you wanted to save people and would have worked around the clock, but maybe you ended up like the one guy from Tennessee I met who paid for a hotel for a week just to stand at the edge of the highway and hand out boots and flashlights. Thank you.

And all you people who felt so helpless but who practiced kindness and charity in your own communities, thank you. Maybe someone you knew felt as though all of the love and energy was being sucked up by us here, and that their own loss was insignificant or forgotten. And maybe you babysat the kids or made a casserole for an elderly neighbor or loaned a stranger your cellphone or opened up an extra check-out lane in your store so that people had less stress. Thank you. All of those local kindnesses helped us here, we could feel them.

So thank you to the people who've remembered other charities and more private tragedies, thank you to the people who've been kind to colleagues, thank you to the people who took a group of kids swimming, even though you weren't in the mood, thank you.

And thank you to La-z-boy for those nifty recliners, the workers zonk right out on them, all of them are kept in fully reclined position. Thank you to all of the children who've sent cards, do you know that the fire stations and police stations and respite centers are decorated with them? They have an activity table with colored paper and markers for the guys to write back, but sometimes they're really tired and just want to lie in the La-Z-boys.

And thank you Dr. Scholl's, you rascally catchy brand name, so easily confused with Dr. Seuss or Dr. Spock, and if there was a real Dr. Scholl I apologize, but I'm opinionionated about the influence of multinationals on both our domestic and foreign policymaking, and the havoc globalization can wreak on indigenous economies and cultures, and I'm tired of brand pollution where everything is brought to me by and sponsored by, every moment of my life, it seems, but, Dr. Scholl's, you really came through for us. And even though the word "corporate" makes my teeth itch, it suddenly seemed as though you were a group of people, not unlike the people who worked in the WTC, not unlike the volunteers, people just like me. So Dear Dr. Scholl's, thank you.

It's truly disorienting to live in a culture that you don't 'get'. They tell me that Bush's approval ratings are 90 plus percent. But no one ever asks me or anyone I know. They tell me about varying unemployment rates or health coverage percentages but, again, I don't think those figures have ever included the people I know. I thought when Bush was elected that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and now that emergency-mode has handed him a mandate for the next three-plus years, I see potential and signs of irrevocable damage. Creepy alliances and indiscriminate promises of aid, erosions of civil rights, spree-spending packages without real thought to budgeting or long-range consequences, and all 'sacrifice' being borne by the same people who always sacrifice; the working poor, recent immigrants, the children of poor school districts (of course, we'll be testing them a lot and pulling funding from those schools for poor performance, calling it 'educational reform'). Very disturbing stuff, but even more disturbing is the public's lack of outcry. Does no one see the world as I do? Is no one paying attention? Or do my values have so little in common with my age that I can't even function in this society?

Some critical writing: stimulus package critique. The Observer's war on terror op-ed essays. Herbert -- Shame in the House.

Tired of being an intinerant, solitary observer, sans any external validation or context, I decided to write a 'real' journalism piece. And, feeling that I'd frittered away too many years to patiently climb a new ladder, I aimed high. I sent it to the Times. They kind of told me they don't accept unsolicited news pieces, but what the hey. So they didn't publish it, so here it is, loyal readers:

In the heart of the East Village, across the street from Kim's videos and Benny's Burrito's, sits a mysterious brick building, the source of intermittent, ominous hums. The uninterrupted brick façade extends the entire block of Avenue A from 5th to 6th Streets. There is a bus shelter for the uptown M (14? 11?) on the sidewalk. From September 11th to October 5th, a stretch of the building's wall served as the local memorial for the missing; a site for candles, flowers, pleas, and poems. Now, a thin ribbon of yellow 'do not cross" tape attached to blue police barricades surrounds the building's perimeter. Pedestrians walk in the road inside a line of fluorescent-red cones, and the bus shelter is taped and closed. The nation is on highest alert, and the 9th Precinct is protecting the neighborhood's ConEd facility.

Since October 5th, the Friday night before the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan, the heightened police presence and pedestrian barricades here have reflected the mood of the nation and governmental response to anticipated threats. Advance warning of the bombing campaign might have been gleaned when the one patrol car stationed on 5th Street and Avenue A since September 11th was augmented by another, and the pedestrian barricade went up. Sometimes there are cruisers on each corner of the block, but on this balmy October Monday, Officer Rosado sits alone in his scooter on Avenue A and Sixth Streets.

Even Officer Rosado isn't sure whether he's protecting a generator or a transformer, but he is sure that he's performing a service for the community, even if some inconvenienced pedestrians "don't seem to get it."

"Could it be protected better? Yes. Could there be a guy on another rooftop? Sure. Could this stop a truck bomb? No. Do we need more permanent concrete barricades, maybe a shell? Yeah."

Officer Rosado is part of a campaign of psychological, even symbolic, deterrence called "omnipresence," already a tactic in high-crime areas. Rosado explains, "This is a known drug block. Having a cop on the block will stop that activity, not for good, just for that time. We can only protect like three blocks, but we're watching, if they see us here…" As for terrorists? "Can I do something to stop this? I can try. If they see a cop 24 hours a day, they might think twice."

Whether the tape itself proclaims the building as a target, how keeping pedestrians off the sidewalk helps deter terrorism, and whether the police presence is reassuring or anxiety-producing for local residents aren't Officer Rosado's to question. For the time being, and indefinitely, "It has to be done."

While "98%" of the public has been supportive, one or two people a day will "act annoyed;" complain about inconvenience or question the necessity of the barricades. Rosado doesn't get it. "Just comply. It takes 30 seconds to cross the street. What's the big deal; this is for everyone." He saw a special on how they live in Israel last night. They search your bags when you go to the movie theater. "Would it really bother you to be frisked in the theater? A ten-minute inconvenience?" He thinks that maybe we took what we had for granted before September 11th. And that things have to be different now.

"I don't want my family in a mall shopping and all of a sudden something goes off. So I think this is a good thing. So much as it induces anxiety; Better safe than sorry."

This protection doesn't come cheap. While the extra hours everyone is working take their toll on the officers and take time away from their families, they also cost the city money. How much money, and for how long, are questions which will become more important as emergency response gives way to permanent policy. Both the 9th Precinct and Office of Public Information refused to comment on details of how security measures are assessed and implemented or on who is calling the shots and who is footing the bill. Officer Braun at the Public Information headquarters said "We do not discuss security issues." When asked who will decide which measures to take and for how long, he responded "I don't know what you don't understand about what I said. We do not discuss these issues."

So while public policy decisions remain in a black box, Officer Rosado does his job. No one could have anticipated, even prevented, he thinks, what happened on September 11th, and maybe he can't anticipate or prevent a really determined attack on this ConEd plant. "But it has to be done." Before September 11th, someone shoots up a place, you thought emotionally disturbed, now you think 'terrorist.' He saw on the news how people would rather drive all the way to Florida than fly, they're afraid to open their own mail. And electricity is important; for the street lights, for the hospitals. So you do what it takes. He only wishes the pedestrians understood. And the ones who don't get it? Because he's there, maybe they won't have to ever get it. Maybe they'll never have to lose someone they love. " People act all inconvenienced. It's just a block, just a corner."

As much as he seems to accept that life may have to be different now, there's a tone of wistfulness. We should be able to get on a plane to Europe, to Florida, without fear. "Would I want to live anywhere else? No. I can't wait for things to go back to normal It takes a toll. But we knew going into it this was the job."

Behind the barrier tape, the remnants of the untended community memorial on the south end of the building's brick wall consist of two bunches of dried flowers, an unlit candle, and a tiny paper American flag.

Irked by the ideologues? Vexed by the vitriol? Annoyed by Armageddon?

No question that New York is weird right now. Sometimes I just sit in my chair and listen to NPR about anthrax or our lack of real intelligence or viewpoint-dissemination abilities in the Middle East. Sometimes I flip from channel to channel (two channels. no NBC, ABC, WB, Public Television) and wish I could see The Mole or even an earnest Tom Brokaw talking about his own targeting. Sometimes I think I really have to clean the house, sort my papers, and resume the circuitous pathway to my Lifegoals, and sometimes I think, like Heather W, that a large nuclear blast is imminent and, later, kids will ask in school, as they might of the Jews in European ghettos, "but why did the people just stay there? why didn't they leave?" I had the thought, stepping out of the shower, what if there really ARE parallel universes; what if I could just step into the one where all energy and resources and attention weren't focused on terrorism and its aftermath.

I've been indulging in gallows humor that seems sidesplittingly funny at the moment but that later I can't recall. It's frustrating, this site. I want to write, need to write, but I can't figure out how to archive, there's no 'discussion' option for feedback on blogspot, and my newish site meter shows, with rare exception, "length of visit," a full column of 0.00.

Here's some links (remember links?)
Times article on Haruki Murakami, who has written about both perspectives of the Tokyo subway gassing, and who sees the current conflict as a collision between incompatible networks (something I've been thinking of. We really aren't speaking the same language. We hardly inhabit the same world.)
Your basic retaliation is a trap article.
Your basic there's a hidden agenda in this war article.
A great Tom Tomorrow comic you've probably already seen.
From the "Freedom From Religion Foundation": What is a freethinker? And stop with the god and country propoganda already.
Saffire's list of questions we don't know the answers to.
Crisis net archiving projects article.
Nonviolence
Roots of Muslim rage perspective.
Security/Civil Rights perspective.
Web resources for journalists.
Amazon entry for The Emperor, which I highly recommended some posts back and highly recommend now.
Slightly hokey but pretty damn nice poem by a Buddhist monk.
This from planetwaves.net, a super astrology site. Eric Francis gives an astrological analysis of both September 11 and the date bombing began (highly technical, so not linked, but the charts echo and reinforce one another), and, in answer to any sense of despair or futility, he invites us to shield the planet. Letting healing and love energy flow through you to everyone; using any meditation or spiritual tools you've developed, spending time with good people or in good places. This is something I've been thinking of. Aside from the obvious media-vilification-elevates-crackpot-to-antimessiah stuff, there's a sense in which so much collective energy and attention focused on fear, what-ifs, and on one person, skews us all, knocks it all out of balance. What, instead of obsessing about (meditating on, because that's what it is) images of horror or hatred, we collectively meditated on the figure of the Dalai Lama (and there's a man who has much to complain about, reasons to hate, and yet channels love). What if we imagined the future we want instead of the one we fear? Not in some ersatz pie-in-the-sky way, but in the 'realistic' and intense way we're now envisioning a loss of possibility and the direst of outcomes?

The collective mind-state of the U.S. right now reminds me of my own family. Any five-cent therapist will tell you that an identified problem member of a family (whether by drugs or metal illness or behavioral disorders or alcoholism or illness) will skew the entire family dynamic. People assume roles, often for life; they accomodate, resent, caretake. The energy of the system is polarized toward and around the problem, until the problem defines the family, and each person's response defines their part in the problem. It's very hard to let go of this, to stop giving all attention to the crazy one or the drunk one, to stop living in crisis or emergency mode, to stop living (and not-living) in reaction to the what-ifs, if-onlys, and but-theys. Withdrawing energy from the other-created urgency can change the entire system. It can at least allow a new relationship to crisis and the space and breath for peace. Let's stop letting hate-mongers, of whatever stripe, dictate the patterns of our thoughts, our emotions, our days. Give yourself some real time off; we don't all have to know every single thing at every moment, we don't all have to obsessively monitor, react, fret, remonstrate, imagine. It's possible that starving this amorphous entity of energy may find us re-shouldering a transformed, lighter burden. We all can act according to our highest natures right now, in whatever form that takes. I think that that will change the world, now, when despair is not an option.

Along those lines. (Breszny on the apocalypse within)

terro-tourism

Laminated poster of the twin towers, anyone? Available on street vendor stalls along with your flag pins, red white and blue ribbon loops right on Fulton and Broadway. Never-seen-before scenes of carnage! 11 o'clock news or linked by your intrepid bloggers. Shrines with burnt-out candles, dead flowers, rain-bedraggled missing posters, and streaked and dripping penned platitudes and poetry.

Kinko's today, waiting for Heather F's 391-page manuscripts to be bound for the Guggenheim (axiom of applying for grants; it takes until the post office closes on deadline day, no matter how much 'time you have'). People making their band flyers, graphic-art mockups, formatting their resumes. meanwhile 100 assorted Congresspeople in yellow hard hats "tour the site." Liz Taylor, Muhammed Ali "tour the site." Celebrities and politicians and heroes striding amid the rubble.

Writing that works for me right now: Zeldman's journal (glamourous life links). Times article on the chaos and randomness of the initial rescue scene. Comes closest to capturing the haphazard personnel (bike messengers tagging body parts; specialized rescue emts cooling their heels on the west side highway; casual vandalism, total contamination of the later sacrosanct 'crime scene,' and elastic time). The latter I know from both the Clarkson work and from Tuesday the 11th when I stood at Washington and North Moore for six or seven hours, near a triage center, waiting for all the lined up ambulences and fire engines to be given the all-clear to go in (anyone not directly on the scene already had to wait until about 6 pm when WT7 collapsed. I watched the fire leap from floor to floor, zigzagging at a rate of about a floor every five minutes), waiting for the injured to come for care and comfort (all the ripped-open bandages, makeshift guerneys, stacks of ivs and sterile dressings, every sort of volunteer cleric, nurse, medical student, doctor) and not one patient. those hours felt like minutes. Why was it getting dark? And why was everyone waiting, rushing from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in a blare of sirens, to wait in a line of flashing lights that stretched for miles. The utter arbitrariness of cordons; duck into a bar at the right time, and you were 'legitimately' in one zone, pockets of even casual-seeming passersby in increasingly dense dust, crowds further down, the cadre of police manning my barricade paying a delivery guy for a bag of takeout food on the street, him turning around and walking back into the cloud; the mix of mundane and urgent; the crowds of guys on bikes with cameras, angling over and over for a break in the cordon, a cute gen-y guy with no shirt on rollerblades writing in the inches of dust on a parked rescue vehicle; the stringers with notebooks interviewing anyone, everyone, a guy I thought I was just talking to as a person trying to get my name for attribution, then losing interest when a woman near me claimed to have been inside one of the buildings. A sense of pockets and pockets of such penned, impotent voyeurs and would-be rescuers in little deposits closer and closer to what must, surely, be frantic activity. We couldn't all be waiting like a post-apocalyptic de Chirico, could we?

I find myself wanting information of a hard, detailed, and specific nature. Why, if all of America knew there were other hijacked planes in the air, were people in WT2 urged to go back to their desks? Didn't someone from the FAA or whatever call the civil defense emergency hotline or whatever and anyone think to notify the security/emergency people at WT2? And this engineer-guy interviewed on some news show... said he knew immediately the burning jet fuel would melt the steel supports, that collapse would be quick. They didn't have that information on-site? Firemen; aren't they supposed to have experts on how fast/how far a fire will burn? And who set up the ground cordons? Why was the triage center right at the base of a burning building? Who let all those off-duty and retired guys put the plastic flashers on the dashboards and race on in to add to the chaos (I saw scores, hundreds of them speed by. City buses commandeered by squadrons of police.) How many people from the surrounding area died from curiosity? I want diagrams, time-lapse 3-d cutaways of who wa where and who they spoke to and where they went and where they fell and why. A labyrinthine Rashoman of an hour and a halfs' events. The kind the relatives are attempting to construct; the last cellphone signal, the last sighting. Inevitibly, the loved one was last seen "staying behind to help others." How many people from, upper floors got out? How did they do it? Floods of survivor accounts just add more questions. I want a computer-model interactive diagram where I can change the variables until everyone is rescued. The game would be "get them out alive." The elevators that still worked, the ones that became hurtling fireballs. The escape door that leads to a rain of debris; the one that offers shelter. The eyewitness stories of sublime foolishness; the radio reporter who jumped into a cab and ended up running from debris three times, each time smashing open a boat, a store, in order to shelter. His report was billed as "one reporter who helped rescue victims," but as far as I could tell, he ran, he ran back, he ran, he ran back, he took a cab to his mother's.

I wanted to experience what the financial district is like now on a workday, before all traces, both physical and emotional, beyond the cordon are erased. Here, things have returned to a more level of testiness, to which I am much more sensitive. In the bank, I tried to use the machine-deposit option to bypass long lines. As I filled out paperwork and juggled envelope and receipt, a woman came over and said "excuse me!" and then again "excuse me!" very sharply. She said "I'd like to use that," with ascerbicy, and I found myself gathering my bag, pen, checks, and deposit slip to move and let her in. Then I wondered why her using the machine should displace mine... perhaps she thought her deposit was more together or she had a more urgent life to get back to. I then waited for her. This upset me more than I think it used to. Similarly, on my way to the bank, I passed a man putting a desktop computer into a sports bag. he then began smashing the bag on the ground from over head height. I said "why are you doing that?" He said "it's obsolete, nobody wants it, and all my data's in there." I said "you can't just erase the harddrive?" He said "No. Is that all right with you?" very sarcastically. I found the destructiveness and waste disturbing, as even older computers have scavengable parts. But it was more the blatant wastefulness and selfishness (this is of no use to ME anymore, so I'll destoy it and throw it away) and, I guess, american-ness of it that struck a bad note right now.

On edge, I took a train to City Hall where things still matter. I wanted to see whether the dusty streets rife with barricades and police were yet bustling with people in suits. In fact, no. Business is not as usual. The Fulton mall area (wall street's answer to 14th St; discount stores, cheap clothing and fast food) had about half the businesses shuttered. I asked two cops whether service vehicles could get in yet. They said yes, trucks of goods and food usually restocked the local service businesses in the early morning. The then told me it was more a question of having customers. "I seen maybe two people go in that hat shop all day." They seemed in a way to want to talk 'about it' as much as me. Did I work in the financial district? Had I been down that first week? Well, I'd never believe how much better it is now, how much better it is than anyone thought possible, all the rubble gone from surrounding streets. I told them that first week was one of the most intense periods I've lived though. They shook their heads in concurrment.

I walked south, several blocks east of the site perimeter, past the Stock Exchange. Traders in blue jackets leaned against police barricades with their cellphones. Almost every large building had yellow barricades blocking all entrances but one. Lobbies and plazas were deserted. The cordon from the crash site was pushed farther back that it was last weekend, I believe to prevent crowds of gawkers from obstructing the entrances of businesses already disrupted in every way. I passed those old-two-storey brick remnants of old NY, now tony restaurants and private clubs; they were open but not at all bustling. The streets seemed about a 2:1 ratio of tourists/curious and people in their workdays. So while it was about as crowded as the financial district usually is, the demographic and tone were entirely other. Verizon vans offer free phone calls; ganga of hard-hats and national guard roam around, buildings are inexplicably cordoned off. Even the expensively dressed businesspeople I saw moved slowly, seemed distracted, and were drawn to the streets with the most appalling views, there to stand still. Most overheard conversations would be things like "..but it was the second tower hit that fell first" and, between two clerical-seeming workers sharing a smoke-break at the foot of a fancy tower "..so you coping any better yet?" She shook her head briefly 'no' in reply.

I walked straight down to the water. East of the Staten Island Ferry building is blocked for a bit, but finally one road offers egress and I passed under the final off-spur of the FDR Drive (still closed to incoming traffic) and walked through a narrow parking strip to a harbor walkway. There, facing Brooklyn, directly to my right, were a line of flat boats with gigantic cranes mounted on them. Long flatbed trucks were lined up, and each would move into position and, in a laborious ten-minute procedure, the crane would locate, grapple, and lift gigantic twisted metal beams from the trucks and swing them on the barges. The truck drivers would pull up about 50 yards to right near me, jump out, and sweep loose debris off their truckbeds. A helicopter flew in between two barges and landed at a helipad there. The farther crane seemed to be loading smaller debris, because with every grapple and transfer, huge clouds of dust would rise in the air. It was a stunning day of dramatic light and clouds. The cranes formed such clearly etched lines on the horizon.

On my left was a pier from which ferries continually loaded and departed, returning commuters to Brooklyn, to Weehawken and points north in Jersey. I believe those are running indefinitely and are free. I walked north now, along the water's edge, and to my left, in neat rows perpendicular to the freeway passing overhead, were containers, gigantic generators. "Plug in to Cat Power" several boasted. (that's must be where she got her name) There were like 100 of these gigantic container truck generators, with logos and license plate from everywhere, just sitting there. Now I'm at the South Street Seaport. An octagonal ticket booth for Circle Line tours has a small sign "Tours are cancelled indefinitely because of the World Trade incident." Instead, another set of ferries departs from the pier. Police everywhere. The restaurants and clothing shops are open, but, despite the zillions of tourists and curiosity-seekers, empty, as is the promenade (the crowds press west, toward the rubble). At the farthest extension of the promenade, three suited men watch with great interest a tugboat, its sides encased in buffer tires, as it docks and then casts off in an unscrutable errand. Perhaps a dozen people sit in the sun, most with cameras, weary, one woman chronicling in her journal. I go up two levels to the wooden deck where more people sit in lounge chairs, more snap pictures in every direction. The restaurants at this level are almost empty.

Looking back, south, at the cranes, they are more abstract heiroglyphics now, just bright yellow boy toys. Some of the views are so beautiful, the cranes with their glass-and-metal buildings backdrop, a view from between generator-containers straight up the canyonlike roads, framed in the distance by a suspended walk bridge. At one angle, improbable symbolism, stunning clouds and light backlit the pefect triangle a crane and its load make, perfectly framing, because of perspective and vantage, the statue of liberty.
I leave South Street Seaport on its service, ugly side, the north. A huge ship, "The Floating Hospital," is docked there, along with its vans and ambulences, but aside from several dockworkers, it is silent and empty. And then, to my right, is the Fulton Fish Market, and, across the street, all its businesses. Turning left to re-enter downtown, I'm in a brick-paved ye-aulde-ny broad alley of chi-chi restaurants and tech start-ups. I see one couple at a sidewalk table, no traffic, and many barricades where phone guys are workign to get service restored.

Now I'm on Pearl Street, lots of condos and terrace apartments as I walk north, just where the Brooklyn Bridge begins. lots and lots of flage on the balconies, and a bit of seige mentality, more trucks and sirens than buses, a verizon van with long lines of residents wanting to make phone calls. I take a left on Gold Street to get a bit more taste of financial district friday. A large building on my left displays a large sign "Yes, we're open, welcome back," but a large bulletin board just to the left is jammed with flyers for the missing. Then I see why; cattycorner to the right is NYU Downtown Hospital, many ambulences parked in front, and its entire ground-floor front facade papered with 'missing' posters. I read these. Some of the people look so damn nice. Some of the flyers have a name and number, others have place of work, last seen, last time spoken to, last seen wearing, close-ups of tattoos and jewelry. Two I found especially moving were side-by-side flyers of photocopies of identity cards and papers of two young Japanese colleagues. Clearly faxed, and more formal than the American flyers, the text was identical "Were supposed to be attending the Wolf Group Conference at Windows on the World with colleague." The flyers gave both an american contact and a Japanese address and number for their company. There were also several flyers for EMTs and ambulence drivers. One flyer said "Is this man among your hospital's unidentified males???"

I took a right then, moving west, and immediately passed a charming little firehouse on my right. The shrine was very compact, almost formal. I passed it, avoiding the gaze of the two firemen in front of the bay, and saw a simple notice up on the door. "Company # wants to thank the community for your love and support. Four of our men died on September 11. We have started a fund for their families, donations of any amount are welcome." I turned around and pulled out a crumpled $5 and handed it to one of the men. "Can I give you this? " I said. I mean, I'd been feeling in a way as though the firefighters' families have been receiving love, donations, and benefits out of proportion to several other groups of victims, but at that point I didn't care if the guy turned around and bought coffee and donuts with that money, I felt very emotional.

I walked back west, straight along Fulton to Broadway, where one of the most striking and disturbing vistas dominates the rising street. It's the entirely burnt-out shell of, I believe, WT4, black girders, a schematic monument to a building. South on Broadway and the businesses' glass is covered with thick dust, still. A J Crew was open, or its doors were, its displays apparently now a memorial; several sweaters on torso forms link sleeves, all covered with thick dust. A shoe store, still closed, its expensive shoes covered in silt like an archeological dig of a civilization of great luxury and excess. (I can imagine the 'nova' narrative about this civilization). John Street frames the other famous view; a stunning single facade lattice rising over huge huge smoking piles, and the chopped-off (wires protruding, form sliding from rectangular to organic) end of WT4. Now I looped back north, walking toward city hall again, glancing west every once in a while for the slide-show, partial views enframed by every cross-street. I was very tired and did not think I'd be back, and yet I wanted my eyes to record, my body to absorb, every nuance of this moment of history, to register.

toxi-city
The antidote to terrorism: Fox's 'who wants to be a princess?' (who wants to go to a party that 'only the aristocracy and celebrities can attend' and get a 40,000 dollah necklace?).

The analogy to Pearl Harbor is particularly apt. In a foreign policy course in college, studied Pearl harbor extensively. In fact, there were a variety of warnings. Our choice to recive and portray an 'unexpected sneak attack' was a political/policy decision.

Followed blog links to Salon's topical articles on 'terror sex' and the return-in-time-of-crisis-ex... According to Salon, everyone’s having “apocalypse sex”. I can’t get “overdue library book” snogging. Everyone’s being called by concerned exes; I did not get called by any exlovers but my landlord has called 4 times for the rent.

“Sins of the father visited on the son”
“Hey dad, can I have the keys to the country? Oops I totaled the country” symbolism of Bush in power.
Perhaps Monica Lewinsky’s was the blowjob that ended the world (backlash against gore, bush in power. Total war)

The world's attention has moved on. Blogs, even those recommended by 'blogs I trust' spout or link smug left-wing rhetoric on intelligence (or lack therof), tolerence (ditto), warfare (one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter). Meanwhile, we suffer from sick-city syndrome. I fully expect this illness to be 'discovered' and defined by investigative journalists to-come. Wanting to encourage business-and-tourism-as-usual, toxic levels of molten plastics, solvents, asbestos, and organic corruption are dismissed by government p.r. as 'acceptable'; several million New Yorkers develop symptoms from autoimmune disorders to chronic asthma, birth defects shoe in the 'terror sex' baby boom (Salon sez: 'best sex I ever had; we fucked as if it were the end of the world. to U2 as well'). Last night was my first foray from the gravitational vortex of ground hero or whatever the fuck. I did a soundscape to accompany Heather Woodbury's performance, Track 9 of 12. She did a fantastic job of incorporating 'the thing' without restructuring her entire narrative around it. I'd not read the script, there was no run-through, but it seemed to work. 103rd St, El Tailler Latinamericano. Took the subway home, doors open on the second avenue F-stop and the acrid, humid, rotting smell is so strong. I tell myself it's just the subway, the way it traps heat and humidity and odor along the tunnels with no ventilation. But the odor increases as I climb the stairs, and then I am home, or blocks away and my eyes sting and I want to retch. Is this what I've becomed accustomed to? Was 103rd St., Broadway, traffic city, Manhattan, the freshest air I've breathed in two weeks? The unsaid about the cloud. What they say in those invariably blue-collar communities where smoldering mines or tire piles have become the defining odor, the accepted. What they said in the communities of honest burghers during wwII: "we didn't know anything about the camps. but there was this sweet burning odor."

Toxi-city; sick-city syndrome. Rat poison, mosquito spraying, the cloud. Just shut up and eat your sushi.
listen to/watch the national media for the 'inside the mind of bin laden' special. See eggheads who've 'lived with the northern alliance rebels' opine. Take a gander at airport security. Now walk a block and a half to the candle and flower-outlined chalk memorial at Thompkins Square. Take the subway at rush hour, and in the Times Square station, one of the most push-and-shove of rush rush-places, crowds of shock-still witnesses to the mural of 'missing' flyers on tile walls. Even just around the corner, a score of flowers and candles. The police leave this encumbrance to pedestrian traffic; passersby respect the one or two silent candle-lighters with heads bowed.

The news machine has moved on to retaliation and security; we are a city in a pall. You can't know, you shouldn't know; may you never know. Let you who cast the first generality have tasted not of specificity, which admits no abstraction and does not ease.

The sky is a bright, yellowish gray; again I wake up to such an intense noxious smell I am sure the building is on fire. Today I turned in the last chunk of medical encyclopedia; the past week has been one of those nightmarish times of working, in decreasing blocs of time in decreasing concentration, then napping, then waking up and sitting back in front of the piles of pages that never seem to decrease. Things I resolved:: never to take work without seeing a sample; never to take work on a project where the amount of editing needed is in vast disproportion to how far along the project should be; never accept hand-editing (my hands were cramped claws with huge blisters); and never work for under $25. There are other things I want to do with the time this stole; and yet, added together, my billable hours hardly agree with the stress and omnipresence of onerous-dreck-hanging-over-head.

Went to the Empire State to hand it in in person. Office faces south, and, as the tallest building now in Manhattan, an unobstructed straight-shot view of the ex-WTC; probably a cinematographic view of the disaster itself. I didn't ask. Harold, in a roundabout anecdote (Bill Russell interviews Kareem Abdul-Jabar, says "you're pretty good". Harold says, "so, you're pretty good at this) finally gives me much-needed validation that I kick ass (and have saved theirs) at editing. I'm offered another book, a knitting book. With the tentative economy, I accept. I also find out that last week Heather Woodbury, close friend and colleague, has won the Kennedy Center Playwrighting Award, a prestigious and fairly lucrative grant that I helped assemble for her. Despite my self-chaos, I hope to get her Guggenheim Foundation application in by next Monday's deadline

We are too accustomed to peace and prosperity to take in at a deep level that our lives and priorities might change, whatever our obsession or information-gathering around disaster, war, safety. Witness the customer at the deli where I got a morning coffee berating the counter-guy "Everyone shops here! Annie is so sweet. But you.. you're.. horrible! Crabby! You never get my sandwich orders right, either!" She stalks out, leaving her sandwich and the Korean counter-guy takes it out on a black youth who asks for a straw for a soda he bought elsewhere; "Why you ask for straw! Why you want straw from me?"

Collateral damage at such deep levels and widening, flat surface ripples. What if you were the person who called a meeting that brought people to the WTC? What if a friend covered your shift at Windows on the World (where everyone who was there died, and everyone who was not lost their livelihoods. The Times coverage of this has done a good job of contrasting the backgrounds and resources of these largely-recent-immigrant victims with the top-notch mid-life professional demographic that dominated the WTC workers. Movingly, the Windows on the World workers, from dishwashers to freight-elevator operators, were inordinately proud to have arrived at the defining symbol of american culture, sending money and pictures of themselves at their recognizable workplace to far-off family.) What if you'd asked a friend to run an errand in the Plaza? What if you sold the hijackers their ticket and told them "have a nice day, sir"? What if you'd lost a loved one at Oklahoma City or in the first WTC bombing and had to hear politicians and rescue workers, cornered by the press to describe that which we have no conceptual framework for say "those disasters pale in comparison." What if you've had a loved one die in a traffic accident over this last week, where it seems as though the country's love and attention is focused on one group of fellow citizens and has forsaken others? What if you have memories of previous personal trauma that are surfacing or torturing your dreams? A fire at your house that seems never to have ended now that everything smells like burning, all the time?

We must strike the world as some autistic, cheerful giant; our overpersonal conversational style and consumer wastefulness, our voracious and acquisitive travel habits, our wilfull ignorance of our deeper, intricate, historically complex and often shameful foreign policies, our oppressive multinational branding. And yet our sweet naiivete that our lifestyles are enviable and open. It's so shocking and ironic that it was that very innocence that was used so successfully to use our very own materials, in our very own country, from our very own airports, to attack from within. The cordial and open welcome we afforded to traveling students and businessmen, the belief in universal goodwill, and the inability to plan for or secure against that which is alien to our national character; these endearing, maddening American traits were exactly those that the terrorists enjoyed, exploited, and tarnished. A terrible loss of innocence, one perhaps viewed with ambivalence by even our allies,as if a wake-up call to the consequences of world domination was well-overdue.

Things are "getting back to normal", although I'm having moments of cognitive dissonance, seeing full sidewalk sushi bars of chattering young people, repressing or blithely accepting (as if repetition into numbness turns reality into an image file) that less than a mile from where they sit lies an open funeral pyre. The local newscasters are chirpy again, after two weeks of rising to the occasion and acting like real journalists (Pablo Guzman breaking down as he reported the transcript from the level-headed flight attendant who gave the most useful information about the hijacker's methods and identities... "what would you have done? he cried. "she had two young children". The anchors patted him. "Oh, Pablo" they said.) I'm waiting for Vogue magazine's subtle evocation of rescue chic. A model hanging off a fire truck, walking down a debris-filled street flanked by admiring construction hunks, special 'heroine' spreads of real EMTs in hard hats and Versace. I'm waiting for the SNL skit on the eurotrash going through airport security: "That's my Prada manicure set! be careful! That's an ionizer! (as the bomb squad rushes in) That cost me 3,000 at Hammacker Schlemmer! Not my Evian! At least leave me my Evian!"

I saw a bit of hard-hat chic as early as Wednesday the 12th in Soho. Along Canal, entirely a rescue vehicle and heavy equipment zone, tripped a skinny young thing in a strappy, tight black dress and a yellow hard hat. This weekend I took a long walk that basically etched the perimeter, beginning on the West Side Highway, where the sprawl and activity of our relief station has been replaced by a few white tents for newscasters and only a few scattered buckets and boxes of miscellany (waterlogged sugar, a few batteries, one glove, 50 or so "I Heart NY" bags) remain. I wound down through Tribeca, joining crowds of tourists clutching flags and cameras. No vehicle traffic and the swarming curiosity-seekers approximated a macabre street fair. Peanut and hotdog vendors, a gumbo stand. Few of the real eateries open, as delivery trucks have been barred. Yaffa's however, was jammed, with a line for the outside tables, now perhaps 700 yards from the carnage. The financial district defies description; the streets deserted of traffic, clean as a whistle but covered with an endless fine silt, swarming and lost tourists (it's as confusing as Greenwich Village down there), huge generator trucks, cranes, ConEd vehicles parked all along venerable financial alleyways, no restaurants open. How can anyone ignore what's happened who works there, there are no delis for the morning bagel and no power-lunch bistros. Cracked windows and lots and lots of "for lease" signs as if companies took one look, saw their worker productivity sliding into the toilet, and moved shop. The pedestrian barricades to the ever-popular "ground zero" are irregular. You can get very close around liberty and jane streets, and looking west, into the setting sun, the red glare caught metal and broken glass like some apocalyptic heavyhanded movie symbolism. Most people wanted to get good pictures, some were trying to explain the former layout to one another (I wanted a map, it's profoundly disorienting.. where did what used to be?), too many had brought young children, and only one man sobbed, collapsed on a police barricade. Battery Park is a National Guard encampment. City Hall Park is locked up. I walked down to more deserted southeast areas and it was very creepy; nothing open, all dust and echoing footfalls, a mix of civilians and military, all with i.d. necklaces.

I was struck particularly about how the intense emotional energy has been expressed at a remove, and this very close crowd reminded me of the very people who'd be in line to go up to the observation deck on a Saturday. This is saddest around the very closest financial district fire stations. The largest spontaneous memorial/vigil was on 14th St. because that's where the initial cordon zone began. And in Tribeca and Wall Street, which has just opened to civilians, the most decimated firehouses are the most bare of the profuse floral and candle tributes which have turned the city's firehouses into mexican-catholic style shrines of color and excess. And yet the poor working firemen down near the crash site are beseiged by tourists, endlessly snapping their pictures. If you walk from here west along Great Jones, you pass the Great Jones firehouse on the right. Don DeLillo delighted in the firemen and used them as ballast/contrast for his debauched rock star antihero in "Great Jones Street". I walks that block to and from yoga and pass the guys playing catch, calling out to the locals, leaning cross-armed against the bay doors. Fourteen of those men are dead. Continue west and pass the 3rd Street and Sullivan house; 11 dead. At sixth avenue, take a brief right to the Sixth and Houston station. Banks of floral tributes, candles, messages, pictures along the facade over head-high. I did not go closer to read how many dead.

On third street between 1st and 2nd, the largest American flag I've ever seen hangs down from a wire stretched across the street at 3rd-floor height, out from the Hell's Angel's NY chapter house.

Ceremony is important. As in "standing on". As early as Saturday the 15th, I saw one stand-up journalist on network news declare that "there is no hope of any survivors." It was possible that we all agreed, might even say that privately, but it was a huge gaffe. I understood why there are protocols then. It's up to the clergy, the mental health counselors, the friends and family of the bereaved, and the leaders of the rescue units, and our mayor, to gently ease us into that awareness until the pronouncement, when it comes, is already accepted, almost a relief and a release.