The WTC and I

I have two memories of the World Trade Center, one is direct and one not.

My first visit to New York City was on July 3, 1986. In the following forty-eight hours I experienced the following:

  • Arriving at the Saarinen terminal at JFK (I still miss crazy-ole TWA)
  • Several scary “80s-era” subway rides (including the Train To The Plane line!)
  • Gunfire followed by a woman screaming
  • The best coffee and bagel I had ever eaten
  • Attempted murder by cabbie (“pedestrians are targets California-boy!”)
  • Used book stores in every neighborhood
  • A dirty-water hot dog from a vendor in Central Park
  • The joys of trying to park a car on the Upper West Side

On July 4, Nicholas, who was living in NYC at the time, and I tried to get into Windows On The World. We got as far as the elevator where the ground floor maitre d’ took one look at us and refused us entry because I was wearing blue jeans and neither one of us was wearing a tie. I wasn’t offended, in fact I muttered a bemused “wow, snooty New York service… Alright!” to myself. We ended up watching the fireworks from the south tower observation deck… My only regret was that I didn’t take a camera with me.

The indirect memory of the World Trade Center is a flyer and a video I have of Spiritualized’s 1997 show at Windows On The World as part of their “Highest shows on Earth” concerts. I wish I could have been there, I could have finally gotten into the place. (there’s a Real stream of the show here)

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(advertisement from Asbestos magazine, November 1981. Found here and elsewhere.)

A Day Of Forgetting

I woke up early than usual on the morning September 11, 2001 and went about my usual routine of reading the CNN and BBC webpages while the coffee was brewing. I have an incredibly strong sixth sense when it comes to my network and immediately I knew that there was some high latency and congestion “out there.” The CNN page finally loaded in the stripped-down “our bandwidth is saturated!” design and I got as far as reading the “plane hits World Trade Center” headline before running into the next room to turn on the television – just in time to see United 175 hit the south tower.

In direct succession my exact thoughts were:

  1. Holy Fucking Shit
  2. The burning papers falling out of the WTC remind me of that scene in Brazil where the papers blow out of the Ministry.
  3. Ummm… How exactly is the right-wing going to respond to this?

At the lack of a better plan, I went to work – figuring that if World War III is going to start I’d be better off with the higher-speed Internet connection at UCI. Somewhere on the interchange from the south I-5 to the southbound CA-55 was where the news broke that the towers had collapsed. No one really got much work done, I spent the day watching the BBC QuickTime stream and reposting newsfeed headlines from the CNN irc server to ILX. The ten threads (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) make for some harrowing reading…

Two things I wrote back then stick out:

Let’s see… Borders closed, air traffic suspended, police departments on tactical alert, several banking headquarters in the WTC destroyed. Seems like this sequence of events would send the survivalist/Y2K cult/retreatist groups into a spindizzy. I fear that the reaction/possible over-reaction in the ensuing fallout might be even worse than today’s events.

and then later on

I would both love and hate to be a fly on the wall at the CIA/NSA right now – I can’t can’t begin to imagine the collective reaming that’s going on. I suspect that when all this plays out the intelligence puzzle pieces that led up to this will have been pretty obvious, but lacking the “big picture” we simply could not have turned the discreet pieces of data into usuable information.

…

Even if there was prior knowledge, the sheer scale of the attack may have not caused it to be taken seriously. If you told me that four separate airliners were going to be simultaneously hijacked and then crashed into symbolic targets with massive loss of life, I’d say you had the script from the next Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

Probably the most interesting news here on out is going to be what’s in between the lines and what the govt. over-reaction and consequental loss of liberty/privacy is going to be. I’m hoping for the best, but I fear the worst.

Five years onward, today is apparently the day to reference “America,” “Freedom,” “God,” and/or “Evil” and depending on your litmus-tested political position, you’re either honoring the dead of 9/11, the thousands of troops killed in an uncertain response, or the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians. There’s a lot to object about the “Patriot Day” nomenclature, it’s purpose and wording is as vague and downright evasive as the entire Bush II administration. I suppose we all get the holiday we deserve.

I still kinda like the dorky, old-school Americana of Patriots’ Day. Supposedly, it’s a big deal in Massachusetts, Maine, and Wisconsin, but for little ole pre-MTV Laguna Beach it was time for the Patriot’s Day Parade – the one day of the year when the hippie beach town of the Pacific put it’s best Norman Rockwell foot forward and wondered what it would be like to be one of those towns in the East that you only see in sepia-toned photos… Fire department pancake breakfasts, American Legion halls, city officials riding on the back of vintage convertibles, etc. I was in the boy scouts in the 70s and part of Troop 35’s duty was to carry the display banners during the parade and somewhere out there is a photo of me doing just that. I’m sure if I saw it now, I wouldn’t even recognize myself. By the way, the Patriot’s Day Parade is still going strong and much to my delight it’s still kinda dorky and still adheres to its policy of “no group with a political or religious agenda can participate,” no matter how hard someone tries to sue.

I’ve been reading a lot about World War I recently. Not out of any agenda on my part, I just don’t know that much about it except for the basic details and a lifetime of watching Paths Of Glory and The Blue Max. I did have a great uncle who was a reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air Corps, but my prevalent memory of anything World War I-related was being in London for another eleventh day – November 11, 1973: the 55th anniversary of the Armistice, a.k.a. Remembrance Day. I had just turned eight years old and despite a working knowledge of all things related to WWI aviation, I hadn’t still quite worked out what the hell The Great War (apparently World War II was still fresh enough in people’s minds then to not yet be “The Good War”) was all about. London was covered in a carpet of red poppies and my mom and I crowded into Whitechapel to see the Queen lay a wreath at a memorial and then decorate a group of surviving WWI veterans. Not all that different from the veterans you see at those local parades I was talking about earlier.

One of the key events leading up to World War I sounds very similar to a certain event in the Current Situation: Massive loss of life. Warnings that were readily available had anyone bothered to take them seriously. Conspiracy theories about pre-planted explosives and whether a government had allowed the event to happen. Public outrage which is manipulated and channelled into policies that lead to greater conflict. What is envisioned as a quick war (become peace is so boring!) becomes a bloody massacre on all sides.

My first inkling about the Lusitania wasn’t a memorial, a day of remembrance, or a news item – it was a jigsaw puzzle of the front page of the New York Times from May 7, 1915.
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I doubt that most average folks now remember the Lusitania or even what World War I was about and I wonder what the people of 2091 will know of today. Today the Lusitania is a diver’s destination, an annoyance to local fisherman, and an subject of perpetual lawsuits over who owns want. With all of the hand-wringing, political posturing, words and angst expounded over what to do with the WTC site and how to best remember things, it’s worth bearing in mind that no matter what the outcome is it’ll eventually end up being a dusty sidenote collecting rust and weeds. The real memorial will be how we as a country acted and there my deep cynicism turns to deep disgust.

Maybe it’s just best to leave it as a big hole in the ground.

P.S. I’m just as much of a JFK conspiracy guy as the next fellow, but the next person that says “September 11th is the new JFK assassination” is going to get socked. September 11th is the new September 11th. Period. k thx bye.

Commuted

The guy who commutes 372 miles daily from Mariposa to San Jose and back was one of those “sheesh, what a nut!” stories that turn up as the final stories on news broadcasts. Of course I should have known better that these kinds of stories are merely the harbinger of things to come. The phrase “extreme commuter” will be coined in T minus 10, 9, 8, 7…

At least 65% of the 1,700 members of the San Francisco fire department live outside the city limits, and some dwell as far away as Los Angeles and San Clemente, spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge said.

Five of them give out-of-state home addresses, including one in Maryland, and others list local addresses or post office boxes but live elsewhere.

Capt. Michael Whooley, 47, said he would prefer to stay in San Francisco but couldn’t persuade his wife to trade in their 4,200-square-foot house in Apple Valley, Minn. — bought in 2003 for $350,000 — for a “shack” in California.

Whooley said he wouldn’t recommend his schedule for most people, given the strain on his family. “I fall asleep on the plane in Minnesota and wake up in San Francisco,” he said. “There’s definitely a disconnect on both ends.”

And in a colossal case of “WELL DUH,” the LA Times discovers…

That’s typical of sleepover commuters, University of West Florida sociologist Ray Oldenburg said, and many of them are getting more stress than they bargained for.

“It’s disruptive of family life,” he said. “In social science, if you go back far enough, everyone was heralding the infinite adaptability of the human being. And I never bought that.”

Ugh. I’m ready to shout “live where you work you inconsiderate energy-sink jackass!” at the whole lot of them.

The Times doesn’t ask the real questions though…

  • Is owning a house really worth that hassle (especially if you’re not around to enjoy it and/or dead from stress)?
  • Do wealthy residents who can afford these areas have any right to complain when local services are understaffed?
  • Are they willing to pay the property taxes necessary to fund the service staff to live locally?
  • What about the resources used up to commute this distance? (setting aside the issue of the resources used maintain a large house in an exurb area)

Assuming that these questions even matter when the economy takes a dump in 2007.

Apocalypse

Leave it to Rolling Stone to put a banner ad for the military in a Kurt Vonnegut interview where he concludes that the world is about to end and there’s nothing anyone can do.

Later, remembering his hyperagitation about global warming, I telephoned him at his Long Island summer cottage, curious about whether he saw Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. “I know what it’s all about,” he scoffed. “I don’t need any more persuasion.” Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. “There is nothing they can do,” he bleakly answered. “It’s over, my friend. The game is lost.”

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Orion

Everyone in Blogistan is talking about the next-gen NASA spacecraft Orion and the freshly inked contract with Lockheed Martin. Yeah, the Raumpatrouille Orion is way marvy, and the 50s-era “Project Orion” nuke ship is a fun Bad Idea, but I’m shocked that none of the pop-sci-cult watchers out there (and yes Boing Boing, I’m looking at you) namechecked the most notable Orion of all.

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These mock-up pictures of what the 2001 Orion operation would have looked like are pretty cool too.

Radio Birdman

Radio Birdman - Wiltern(I’ll spare you the obvious “Radios Reappear” title, since I’m sure the LA Weekly will fall for it)

You never know what to expect with these sorts of things. Near-legendary, ahead-of-its-time band from the fog of misplaced history gets a quorum of members back together and lets fly. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing: at best you know you’re ultimately going to be disappointed yet you still find yourself making the most dubious justifications. Really, how bad could it be having Evan Dando fronting the MC5?

About the best you can expect is a lot of haze and a brief clearing where everything lines up and you hear what all the fuss was about, but that’s extraordinarily rare. I can think of only one exception and not surprisingly at all, it goes by the first name of Iggy and the last name of Stooge.

The advantage to Radio Birdman is that they’re the most shadowy of cult bands. Last night at the Wiltern was their first US show ever – no expectations to live up to, no disaffected Amoeba-denizen in the back crossing his arms and harumphing about how so much better they were back in the day. And really, no time to think about any of that because they simply tore through their set at 200mph, pausing only to replace a cranky guitar amp. Rob Younger’s (himself an odd mix of Julian Cope and Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror) vocals aren’t quite up there yet, but the rest of the band packed a tremendous wallop. The star of course is Deniz Tek: bona fide Guitar Hero and Buckaroo Banzai incarnate (no joke – after Birdman broke up the first time he became a jet fighter pilot and a surgeon). I wish LA was the last show of the tour, I can only imagine what they would be like un-jet lagged.

(Blurry photo courtesy my new camera phone, there’s a significantly better set of recent Birdman photos on Karena Hoyer’s Flickr stream)

Life’s great! How can I mess it up?

drawme_planner.jpg By applying to grad school of course…

Hell, in these days who doesn’t think about running away to grad school? It’s the A#1 double-plus-good refuge for intelligent social misfits and the self-ostracized. As a grad student you have full social permission to be one of those “oh, never mind him – he’s a grad student” guy.

To qualify, I only signed up to take the GRE. Call it an “exploratory foray” if you will, though I believe that the only people who use that phrase now are drug users, political candidates and the US Military. Helll, I’m not entirely sure that I even want to pursue it past the GRE stage as my dozen or so plus years as an IT Garbage Collector hasn’t yet made me want to stab myself. So far.

The object of all this hand-wringing is an urban planning degree. I love the field and it pays better than rock-and-roll.

The down side? Crushing amounts of anxiety, debt, and an uncertain future. A complete reverse-course for how I am now (in good spirits, debt free, and able to do my thing).

Since I can’t help but be Mr. Perversity, I scheduled myself to take the test on Friday the 13th (of October that is)

100 years of housing prices

Sometimes a picture has more than a thousand words, though only three are coming to mind right now…

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The Yale economist Robert J. Shiller created an index of American housing prices going back to 1890. It is based on sale prices of standard existing houses, not new construction, to track the value of housing as an investment over time. It presents housing values in consistent terms over 116 years, factoring out the effects of inflation.

HFS indeed. That last bar covers the past ten years. Suddenly, I don’t feel bad at all about not owning a house, being in the market for a house, or worrying about a mortgage. That economic hard landing that economists are kicking around looks more and more like a mid-air explosion followed by a smoking crater in the ground.

Welcome to 2007, hope you survive.