Skip to main content

9/11


As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 winds down here in New York, I wanted to post a few images of a friend's public art project from this weekend: He drew one of the Twin Towers in chalk along Fifth Avenue from 14th Street to 19th Street. Every ten feet marked for each floor. A cup of chalk at each floor, a gentle encouragement to write a memory, thought, image. I shot these Friday morning, spending an hour watching as people interacted. Fed Ex drivers carefully wheeling packages around the cups. People taking pictures. Drawing. Crying. One woman picked up several cups in anger, throwing them out. A couple followed her, picked up the cups, and put them back. I think the last image summed it up for me the most. I watched the Towers hit, burn, fall 8 blocks away from my apartment. Had the ghost of the buildings, the white cloud, envelope me. Spent the nights that followed burning candles in my windows, the electricity cut off, to let the police officers stationed each night on my corner know I was there. I remember the day. The days. I think it's important that we remember. That we share what we witnessed. Again. Again. And again.





Comments

Anonymous said…
After 10 years, I still have to look away from TV footage showing the event - and I wasn't even there or lost anybody I knew. Cataclysmic! But love your story.

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

Environment

Being an expat, a favorite topic of conversation is 'where I/you want to go next?' or 'When do you plan to go home?' It's a good question. I'm not sure I want to stay in Dubai for ever, but I'm also not sure about how long I want to be here for or where else I would like to live. For almost the first time ever, I have no fixed plans apart from keeping my eyes and mind open to interesting opportunities. And as to going 'home', I have no idea where that is. Constantly moving around as a child left me with the feeling that 'home' is wherever I am right now, so in effect 'home' could be anywhere. The longest I've ever lived in one fixed place was 18 years in London, on and off, but that doesn't feel like 'home' either - I love going back to see family and friends, and it's a great place to shop, but that's about it. I have a great love for California, which is where my extended family is from (and where most of the