Entries tagged with “9/11” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
So I stopped my whining about not wanting to remember (Emerson: "What opium is instilled in all disaster?") and left the office a couple hours early to catch a matinée showing of Man on Wire.
What a perfect thing to do on the afternoon of a 9/11 anniversary. I have to admit, it was tough at first to watch all the footage of the Twin Towers being assembled. Those big waffle-wafers dangling from cranes look in retrospect like so much gingerbread! And the idea of being perched that high can't help but bring the jumpers to mind. But something about Phillipe Petit's giddy storytelling, the relentless egotism that fueled his wire-walking caper, and perhaps most of all the fact that he survived to tell the tale, ultimately constitutes a joyful remembrance of the buildings, even if 9/11 is never overtly referenced.
Something I hadn't expected, though: The film is as much about memory -- about the 30 years that separate the event and the retelling we witness -- as it is about the original events. It's also about art. And most surprising of all it's about the relationships among the people who plotted with Petit and helped him pull it off -- about the damage done by an ego large enough to think up such a spectacular stunt. I'm not sure the storytellers intended it to go that way, but the film making itself is masterful, and I think the director ultimately put together a much richer story than the adventure narrative he may have set out to recount.
Much later in the evening, SSW and I went to see a film one of her high school friends (from an exchange student experience in Germany) had a hand in making. Able Danger, showing for the next week or so at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, may be the only film in existence that can claim the generic designation as "9/11 action comedy/noir homage." Its central character is based on Sander Hicks, owner of Brooklyn coffee shop/publishing house Vox Pop, which features prominently in the film, along with other neighborhood landmarks.
Reimagining Hicks as a hipster/geek superhero/secret agent, the film asks what would happen if Hicks's self-published book, The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle Blowers, and the Cover Up, actually resulted in the FBI and neo-Nazi nutjobs chasing him through Brooklyn on his bike. The comedic referencing of Maltese Falcons, MacGuffin devices, Great Whatsits and other noir staples take the edge off what could have slipped too close to paranoid "truthie" earnestness, though there's enough of the latter to send you home from a fun night at an indie film and deep into Google's recesses.
Last weekend, the DUMBO Arts Council sponsored its eleventh annual arts festival, which I've attended for several years running. I plan to write at length about a couple NY-related projects I came across, one of which really has me excited, but for now I wanted to post this photo a friend took:
This neon work, one half of an installation by the Canadian-born, New York-based artist Juozas Cernius, was mounted over one exit from the waterfront park between the bridges. The other half of the piece, mounted on the other side of the gate (that is, over the entrance), said "GOD IS GREAT."
I love this piece for a million reasons. Why hadn't anyone ever thought to say "God Was Great" before? It's such a funny sentiment: Sure, God was good back in the day, before he sold out. Or, God was great in bed last night. Or God was great, and then humans had to go and ruin it.
I'd seen this photo before I showed up there Saturday. In context I found the piece to be even more interesting. Unless you entered the park, you only ever saw the "GOD IS GREAT" side from the street. The sign looked a little like the entrance to a Christian theme park, with all the families with dogs and baby strollers milling around on the lawn inside.
But the other thing through that gate, of course, is the hole in the sky where the WTC used to be. (Why's it on my mind so much this week?) It's hard not to be in that park and spend some time looking across the river. What does it mean to situate your religious theme park across from Manhattan? (Of course the Jehovah's Witness HQ was in DUMBO long before the neighborhood picked up that acronym and became, as one friend put it, a paradise for yuppies.) Are you safe on Brooklyn's shores, protected from the evil metropolis beyond?
When you turn around to leave the park though, and get the "GOD WAS GREAT" side, it's hard -- at least it's hard for me -- not to associate the sentiment with 9/11 itself. God was great, and then he had to go and provide an excuse for religious fanatics to fly planes into towers full of people. It's a funny sign, but with a hell of a bitter bite.
A few years after 9/11, a friend of mine wrote an episode of a TV cop show in which a husband faked his death in the WTC in order to get out of marriage and child support. At the end of the episode, once the dude's been exposed, his ex-wife hunts him down in the suburbs and shoots him.
Fanciful? It's nothing compared to the story in today's Times about a woman who's called herself "Tania Head." (Her real name may be Alicia, but it's clear that we don't have her full story yet.) Over the last five years she's spun quite a yarn -- naming the civilian hero who helped her from the flames (she had dinner with his parents) and telling the heart-rending story about her fiance (the man's parents and friends say they'd never heard of her), who died when the other tower collapsed. She's taken her story on the road, met multiple mayors, and worked her way into the presidency of a survivors' network.
The Times reporters started out wanting to interview her about this extraordinary set of experiences; a little pressure, though, and the whole thing started to crumble ...
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