[dovate.com] » 2006 » July
This is the best thing since MC Hawking.
This is a strange and complicated world.
But anyway, when deciding on whether or not I wanted to study (cultural) Anthropology or History, I chose the latter. Both disciplines have unique challenges and drawbacks.
History is a top down subject. It stands at a distance and examines events from a perspective of cold objectivity. More importantly, it takes a step back in time, waiting for an events consequence, before trying to explain it. History is not about dates or things that already happened. History is about space, time and humanity. It’s the physics of the liberal arts world.
History sees no event as discreet. Populations form and foment into a set of fuzzy scenarios driven by economic, cultural, geographical and geopolitical events. Those scenarios boil over into situations wherein historians have borrowed or invented a word to define them… like Revolution or revolution.
But there’s the problem. Historians suffer from ivory tower syndrome. They spend a lot of time in libraries reading the work of other historians. Sometimes the debate gets so academic, so theoretical, it stops reflecting whatever reality it’s trying to explain.
And that’s the strength of Anthropology. Anthropology gets out of the library. It is defined by fieldwork. It derives meaning from microcosmic studies. It’s a ground-up discipline. It’s the biology of the liberal arts world.
I’m gonna stop there. Although I ate up all my undergrad electives with (cultural) Anthropology and had a couple History requirements in the subject, I’m not really qualified to discuss it as a discipline.
What I did learn and what made me choose History was its intellectual honesty. It holds no pretense to be anything but pretentious. I found that (cultural) Anthropology was scared of its self-importance and tends to deny the stuffy intellectual qualities that drive its research. Anthropology was a subject founded by a bunch of Europeans trying to live among the ‘other’ while dancing the line between ‘going native’ and conducting ‘scientific’ research. That history is strong within the discipline today and it’s pretty fucking pretentious.
I prefer honest pretension… something you can call out without admitting something you don’t want to. But anyway, I’d write about what really inspired this sudden, random diatribe, but why would I want to get into that here?
Conspiracy weekend is now over, so I can get back to talking about normal stuff that everyone can get behind – like utter overall crapiness of the excessive heat warning which begins 3 hours from now and ends Thursday at 8PM. Since I’ve been old enough to work through summer, what exactly is supposed to be this season’s appeal?
Since conspiracy weekend is not quite over, I’d like to talk about the most interesting thing I heard during last nights “9-11 truth” broadcast on CSPAN. A lot of airtime was given to the absolute terror the left has in coming anywhere close to the subject of a (non al-qaeda) 9-11 conspiracy. Speakers continually pushed the fact that the gatekeepers of the liberal intelligentsia would rather lick Rupert Murdoch’s Italian wingtips than discuss the subject in an on-the-record forum.
(Just for the record, the liberal intelligentsia = The Nation magazine, Air America radio, the biggest blogs, i.e. Kos and of course, Noam Chomsky)
Much of this can be easily dismissed. Most of these ‘gatekeepers’ don’t actually believe there was a (non-al qaeda based) conspiracy. This is fair. This would also explain the lack of discussion. But it doesn’t explain the total silence. In the last year, I’ve been surprised at the number of people who after a long conversation and maybe a few drinks, slowly and carefully bring up their suspicions about the official 9-11 myth. This conversation is happening with surprising frequency. Unfortunately, most people don’t say what they’re thinking except among friends and behind closed doors.
As I said before, I don’t know the truth and I don’t pretend to, but I most definitely have questions… the biggest one being the same that BYU physics professor Steven Jones. It’s also the same question that’s conspicuously been left unanswered by 2 very expensive/extensive government funded (and in the NIST case, independently investigated) reports. Why did World Trade Center building 7 collapse - and especially - how did it collapse the way it did? At this point, after FEMA, NIST and academic investigations, the only theory left standing is Jones’s. That theory is both disturbingly reasonable and has serious implications.
To read Jones’s paper, click here.
I know the left is trying to show solidarity from blog to Alan Colmes. I know that there’s a plan and a frame that drives the agenda and that talking all crazy about the nations new purpose (war on terror) is no way to win elections, but to consciously shut subjects out of the debate - especially on the internet - is a bunch of bullshit. People aren’t thinking within the predominant frame… but they are censoring themselves into it. That’s pretty shameful.
You can always comment anonymously.
Well, I watched some of the CSPAN broadcast on “9-11 truth.” What was presented was… not much. I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to know “the truth,” especially when that truth stands on such treacherous rational ground. There are most definitely questions, but this broadcast provided no answers. I did miss the physicist though…
God-dammit. I just erased an entire post by hitting the wrong button.
What I was writing about - is how since I stopped watching so much television - CSPAN has become one of my favorite channels. Turning on the TV after a long absence, regular network broadcasting can be jarring and uncomfortable. Lights, colors, flashing, vapid talk. Then there’s CSPAN, dull, lifeless and rich in content.
Tonight at 8PM EST, CSPAN will delve into the relam of 9-11 conspiracy. A recent symposium, moderated by the Rush Limbaugh of the libertarian realm - Alex Jones - focuses attention on some of the stranger aspects of the official 9-11 story. For example, why did World Trade Center building 7 (home to CIA, DOD, SEC and other federal offices) just collapse, at near free fall speed, for no apparent reason into a neat little pile? (FEMA and NIST investigations reached no conclusions) BYU physics professor Steven Jones presents on the extreme physical improbability of the official 9-11 story.
Other speakers include University of Minnesota Professor and former Marine officer James Fetzer and historian Webster Tarpley.
While I don’t personally know what happened, the official story is about as improbable as any of the conspiracies. That much more is/was known in the time leading up to the attacks of 9-11 seems likely. That the attacks were allowed to happen are within the realm of imagination. That the attacks were planned and carried out from within is on the outside edge of reason.
But anyway, a little skepticism never hurt anyone. Watch with an open mind. It’s CSPAN, so you don’t have to feel like a tinfoil hat wearing nut either. It can’t be any more full of shit than your normal congressional debate.
Seems that the slow grind of the apocalypse is affecting dovate.com. My web hosts servers have been going up and down due to wildfires and excessive heat. O’well.
There’s something I don’t get about Mayor Street. Have you ever seen him speaking in a neighborhood church? He’s animated. His voice rises and falls. He moves his hands. He looks and sounds alive. He’s captivating and he demands your attention.
Have you ever seen him on TV in front of a mass audience? Did you see him last night? He looked like a zombie. He sounded like he was giving the speech from some remote location through the body of man who had just died. Through vague electrical stimulation and a wooden speaker lodged in the back of the throat, someone with a remote control was barely able to mimic the behavior of a living, breathing human being. That’s speech to the media Street. I hate that mayor Street.
Where’s church Street? Why doesn’t he ever speak to the city like he speaks to some local congregation? The best he can do for a mass audience is raise his voice slightly in a half-assed attempt to sound excited. Can you hear it? Each word and even syllable with an awkward pause in-between: “Yeah, are, you, excited, Phil,adelph,ia!?”
I wish church Street would talk to Philadelphia… Especially when he’s talking about something as serious as the slow burning war that covers large swaths of our city.
This is - by far - the best travel article about Philadelphia that I have ever seen. Originally, published on salon.com back in May, 1997, I’ve copied and pasted it here in its entirety. I reproduce it out of fear that salon will pull it and It’ll be lost. People have to archive this stuff. If you’re a purist, or just want to generate traffic, read it on its original page here.
Philly is obsessed with the strange
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS | a friend once asked me where the weirdest place I ever had sex was. I didn’t hesitate for a moment with my reply. “Philadelphia,” I answered. “Definitely Philadelphia.”
While she may have been expecting something more along the lines of “in the men’s room of the Royalton,” I stand by my response. Philadelphia is one of the weirdest places on earth, regardless of what you happen to be doing there. David Lynch has claimed that it was his years living there that inspired him to write “Eraserhead.” Specifically, Lynch has called the home of the hoagie “the sickest, most corrupt, decaying city filled with fear I ever set foot in in my life.” This critique may not jibe with the image of colonial charm and soft pretzels the town tries to maintain, but it probably does not surprise its citizens. And yet, despite this citywide abundance of oddness, Philadelphians remain true to Philadelphia. Maybe it’s because there’s something in the sickness of Philly that is eminently attractive. Quaint even.
Philadelphia occupies a special place in my own heart because I spent a portion of my youth there, studying film at Temple University. I fondly recall the ’80s as an era of high weirdness, even by Philly standards. It was the waning epoch of boss Frank Rizzo’s administration. It was the time of the botched siege on MOVE headquarters (which immediately inspired the dance-floor chant “The roof! The roof! The roof is on FIRE!”), and the memorable last press conference of state Treasurer Budd Dwyer, which ended with him blowing his brains out in front of the assembly. It was the heyday of Gary Heidnik — a spectacularly colorful local serial killer who drove around in a Rolls Royce and fed his chained-up victims to each other. All in all, it was quite a time.
But now there’s more to Philly than just death and small-town-style political corruption. I believe the tide began to turn in the late ’80s, when the city made the bold move of finally allowing skyscrapers to be built. Previously, tradition and a lingering sense of colonial decorum had dictated that no building could go higher than Billy Penn’s hat — a reference to the statue adorning City Hall’s dome (a statue that, when viewed from certain angles, appears unmistakably aroused). That all changed when the gleaming monolith Liberty Place was built. A mere decade later, the skyline of Philadelphia resembles, well, an actual skyline.
But it isn’t the old and new phallic symbols jutting out of downtown that make me love Philadelphia. And it certainly isn’t the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall. I love it for the same reason John Waters loves Baltimore — Philadelphia is not hiply cynical, it is not coolly self-aware. It is unconcerned with itself and unpretentious. It is, quite simply, the real deal.
Other cities pervert diner culture with grotesque faux-’50s nostalgia, with “Pulp Fiction”-style Marilyn Monroe iconography and $5 milkshakes. But Philly doesn’t have to embrace the past because Philly has never left it. At the Melrose Diner, napkins are emblazoned with the less-than-Shakespearean verse, “Everybody who knows goes to the Melrose,” and waitresses wear cutlery-shaped pins that don’t just tell their names but also reveal the years they started. As in, “Betty. 1967.” The Melrose is a place to sample the local specialty scrapple (rhymes with crapple), a chunky, mysterious kin of sausage. Personally, I prefer the Melrose’s apple pie with vanilla sauce, and the kind of damn fine cups of coffee that would wow even a David Lynch character.
For an even more intense flirtation with artery-clotting Philly delicacies, I can head down to South Philly for the evening and experience the cholesterol level-shattering sandwiches at Pat’s. This open-all-night titan of cheese steak is as significant a Philadelphia landmark as anything in town having to do with the year 1776 and the founding fathers. On summer nights, the sidewalks surrounding the eatery resemble the climax of “Close Encounters” — hoards gathered in glassy-eyed awe under the bright lights. It’s just that instead of grooving to an intergalactic melody, this throng is getting buzzed on the smell of grilled onions.
When I’m in the mood for a more substantial dinner, or just want a few post-steak drinks in a congenial atmosphere, I gather some friends and perch in the jewel of South Philly — the Triangle Tavern. The first time I ever went to the Triangle, I felt like a Jersey-born Alice who’d stumbled down into a beer-soaked Pennsylvania rabbit hole. I couldn’t stop repeating, “What is this place?” over and over and over.
The Triangle is a big, boisterous Italian restaurant and bar — a place with all the requisite trappings of wood paneling and mussels marinara. What sets it apart is the house band. The performers are an exceedingly average-looking, post-middle-age troupe, performing a repertoire of old standbys and what can only be described as classic rock. Imagine, if you will, your Uncle Tommy, T-shirt, jeans and beer gut a-go-go, belting out a powerhouse version of “Born in the USA.” Better yet, imagine him doing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Needless to say, it’s not a pretty picture. But it is, I assure you, a compelling one. There is something both perverse and charming about the floor show at the Triangle — something that big city neo-swank hot spots, with their martinis and their cigars and their relentless irony, could never hope to have. People go to the Triangle not to look good but to have a good time; and the guys in the band even have a perma-”having a ball” expression plastered to their faces. The patrons cheer wildly. And you come away with the feeling that if only Uncle Tommy did have a band, he’d be a much happier guy.
That’s what the Birthplace of Independence is all about — personal freedom, including the freedom to march to a different drummer. Philly is, after all, the home of the “Mummers,” who bring marching to a different drummer to a whole new level. New Year’s Day in Philly is traditionally rung in with one of the world’s most unusual parades, straight down the city’s main thoroughfare. Where else in America could grown-up men dress in sequins and makeup and do what they themselves refer to as “strutting”? At least, where else would hetero men do this? Perhaps only in Philly could regular Joes adorn themselves in enough plumes, spangles and rainbow-colored lamé to make the drag queen contingent at the Pride parade look like a flotilla of Mennonites.
Although nothing in the world can compare to the spectacle of the parade itself, I can get a vivid sense of the festivities, as well as an education into the tradition of mumming, at the Mummers Museum. While Rocky Balboa never triumphantly dashed up this landmark’s steps (there aren’t that many), it still deserves recognition as one of Philly’s most important attractions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art may have a distinctive façade and its share of Duchamps, but the Mummers has something else — the kind of fantastic displays the dadaists couldn’t have imagined on their best surrealism-soaked days.
Close in sound but not in spirit to the Mummers is Philly’s other great institution of distinction — the Mutter Museum. Dedicated exclusively to 19th century artifacts of physical deformity, the Mutter boasts misshapen skeletons, mutant fetuses in formaldehyde and plaster casts of freaks galore, all in somber, scholarly surroundings. It’s exactly the kind of place I can imagine “Eraserhead’s” alien baby feeling perfectly at home in.
There are, I know, people who come to the City of Brotherly Love for the historic monuments, for the Rodin Museum and the shops of South Street and the pretty cobblestone neighborhoods. I’ll never understand these people.
The Philadelphia that excites my imagination exists almost entirely off the beaten path — in the diners and the dark corners, in the human oddities preserved at the Mutter and out roaming in the streets, in the exhaustive silent film section of TLA Video, in bars with names like Doobie’s and Dirty Frank’s. Other cities — your New Yorks, your L.A.s — have significant populations of professional eccentrics. There, being weird is an occupation and an art. It’s liberating, but it’s also a competitive, full-time job. In Philly, being weird is just a way of life. For that, I love it. David Lynch may have found his best nightmares there. But for my oddball-embracing soul, it’s a dream come true. May 20, 1997
Nobel Peace prize winner, Betty Williams speaking to a group of schoolchildren:
“Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.”
In all fairness to the ‘validity’ of the award, it was named after the inventor of dynamite and Henry Kissinger won one.
On Saturday, I picked four and a half pounds of blackberries and 7 pounds of peaches. Nothing like getting out in the sweltering heat and fighting swarms of beetles for a few pounds of fresh blackberries. Really, it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon. I’m sure the charm wears off fairly quickly, esp. if I wasn’t able to keep and eat my bounty, but for a few hours here and there, it’s just fine.
I guess I should justify this post, by making an educational point. I want everyone to think about your food this week. Do you know where it came from? If you don’t, you should. If it traveled more than 150 miles from farm to plate, try and get something local the next time you shop. If your store doesn’t carry local produce, go to one that does. If you live in the city, this shouldn’t be a problem. Go to a farmer’s market, a local produce store, join a CSA. These things are actually fairly important… or at least as important as creating a sustainable, healthy and less wasteful society and a vibrant and environmentally sound local economy is concerned. That’s all for now.
It’s been about a month since I installed pixelpost on my front page. Now - finally - I’ve started tweaking it. The first thing I’ve done is add thumbnails. You’ll notice at the bottom of the page, a whole week’s worth of images. I’ve also tweaked the exif info. You’ll may or may not notice that I’ve removed ‘camera type’ (It’s a Canon 20D) and added focal length and ISO. I’d also like to add that so far, pixelpost is fairly easy to modify. Highly recommended.
I’ve recently heard that I’m too negative about things. While most of my negativity is really just dark sarcasm, this post is actually just plain dark. You were warned:
A casualty of Philadelphia’s recent popularity and influx of condo buying, BMW driving, $11 martini sipping grown-up Wharton grads, has been the loss of much of the grit that many longtime citizens have come to identify with. I’m not talking about crime, we’ve still got plenty of that to go around… what I am referring to is the feeling you get when you walk by the Forum XXX theatre at 22nd and Market just after the sun goes down. Now imagine it as it was a few years ago. There was no Trader Joes. The old Stetson Hat factory above the future TJ’s wasn’t full of million dollar condos, it just a rotting abandoned warehouse. There wasn’t even a Papa Johns. The 4 corners were a parking lot, an abandoned factory, a Salvation Army thrift store and a giant porn theatre… (and of course skyline pizza, who had no problem bending the ‘law’ and delivering you a 6-pack with your pie.)
I’ve always said that coming home from New York on the Chinatown bus can be a surreal experience. You get on the bus in New York, bustling and electric. 90 minutes later you get off in Philadelphia. Things look almost exactly like they did in New York, but they just don’t feel quite right. The streets are emptier, the air heavier, the people strangely distant. I’m talking about center city here. The neighborhoods all have their own character, and in many cases that character is strong as an abandoned insane asylum; but even still, Philly’s most commanding sense of strangeness and foreboding is strongest in its skyscraper spotted heart.
Sure that sense of scum is still here and it’s still strong, but much of it has been obscured by flashy restaurants, nightclubs and hip new bowling alleys. Take 13th and Sansom. Artisan crafted, organic gelato? Stephen Starr’s El Vez? Not 5 years ago, that intersection was one of the most deeply disturbed places in all of center city. Now it’s dirty and weird, but it’s also unrelentingly trendy.
I was going somewhere with this – I was gonna talk about the lady I see every morning –she’s about 50 years old, dresses in thrift store sundresses, bleaches her hair and it looks like she puts her makeup on with a paint roller (her lipstick, every morning is smeared across her face, 1, 2, 3 inches beyond the borders of her lips) That woman is really beautiful… not in a way that makes me think she’s sexually attractive, because in that sense she’s incredibly unattractive… but she is otherwise beautiful. Today she was with a man who pierced his septum with seashells. He wasn’t being trendy, it looked legitimately ritualistic. How much more interesting is that than an $11 martini? That’s pretty much where I was going with this. That’s all for now.
News today is that German scientists plan to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. This is great news! In case you didn’t know, humans were once just a single species of mostly hairless, bipedal, swollen brained ape. As recently as 30,000 years ago, we shared the terran landscape with completely different species of comparably intelligent (if not more intelligent) species. Others existed as well… the Indonesian “hobbit” for example.
Actually if you believe those crazy “evolutionary scientists,” as recently as 70,000 years ago, our species nearly went extinct. Reduced to a few thousand feeble scavengers, homo sapiens stood at the brink of oblivion. Think of all that would have been lost. Also think of the whole host of social problems that we’d have had we – as a species – not made it out as the last hominid standing. Most likely, there would be a dominant, rich species and a subjugated poor one. But instead of bickering over imagined differences as we do with the biologically meaningless, yet socially persistent concept of race, there really would be a difference between us and an entirely different species.
What if this other species lacked language? What if they were smarter? What sort of internet sites would be devoted to Neanderthal fetishists? What would Rick Santorum say? The questions are endless. With the reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome, many of these what-ifs can be answered.
Also, and most importantly, some 30 millennia ago humans likely hunted the original Neanderthals to extinction. (sorry) With the new genome, the possibility will exist “to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants.” Talk about righting past wrongs in the most twisted way possible. That’s all for now.
So WPVI TV, Philly’s local ABC affiliate ran a investigative piece on the tiles last night. While good in theory, the broadcast was typical hellion propaganda. The piece - located here - did interview the Resurrect Dead team, so that was good. Other than that, I was disappointed that they included footage only of inferior new-school tiles. New school tiles are far less impressive both stylistically and aesthetically. They were also a little off on a few of the facts, “Ressurrect” vs. “Raise” and so forth. Overall, the piece was nice to see.
This morning on my way to the bus I found a middle aged man crouched down on the corner of 10th and Locust, marveling at the remaining tile at the intersection. “That’s really something.” He said to me when he noticed me watching him. We talked for a minute. He saw the newscast last night and it had captured his fascination. I introduced myself and told him a little about the documentary. Chalk that up to as the first odd Toynbee tile related coincidence in his life. I wonder how many new fans have been and will be made as a result of last night’s coverage.
One thing I was happy to see, was a photo of the infamous James Morasco. While it’s a shame the Morasco family continues to get hassled by the media - now 3 years after his death – it was still nice to finally put a face to a name. Another innocent bystander is the man living at the infamous South Philly address. According to our sources in Buenos Aries, the tile listing the south 7th street address was laid in the mid to late 1980’s, before the current resident moved in. Its old owner, “Railroad Joe” Julius Piroli may or may not have had anything to do with the mystery. To find out more, you’ll just have to wait for the documentary.
As always, for all your Toynbee tile news and for information about the documentary, please visit Resurrect Dead. Thanks and Goodbye!
Here’s a photo of a Toynbee tile from Balad, Iraq… WTF?
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The copycat tile was discovered by a poster to this site.
These photos show the first nanoseconds of an atomic explosion. The camera is 7 miles from ground zero, the focal length is 10 feet and the shutter speed is 100 microseconds.
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So this evening I’m a committed recluse. I was inside here eating some buffalo tacos with homemade guacamole and watching CSPAN and the UN is giving an incident by incident report of the steadily deteriorating Middle East… that shit was too depressing for dinner, so I switched to PCN, the Pennsylvania version of CSPAN. There I see Rudolph Giuliani stumping for Lynn Swann.
Fortunately for PA, Swann displayed the political savvy of a personal injury lawyer and the vision of a Democrat. Over the course of the press conference he must have spoken at least a couple hundred words, but I’ll be damned if I know what in the fuck he actually said. There was something about caring about the people of Pennsylvania. There was something else about taxes and then a thing about how PA looks at the little picture - which complicates things - because if you stop and look at the big picture, things are really very simple? And then some more about taxes, but not that they were high, or low… but more that he was aware that they existed.
Meanwhile Giuliani, the supposed star of the show came off as an unprepared, arrogant, lying douchebag, with none of the charisma to back any of his transparent bullshit up. Woefully unprepared for his appearance, Giuliani was just stood there making shit up; like when he said that Swann was one of his sons favorite football players of all time… because you know… every little kid from New York idolizes wide receivers from Pittsburgh who retired years before they were born.
But moving into the political spectrum… actually none of that really made an impression besides Giuliani’s self-promoting moment when he announced his ideas on running for president.
But anyway, didn’t everyone hate Giuliani until about September 10th, 2001? And what the fuck has he done since then? And for that matter, what did he do on September 11th, besides being in the right place at a catastrophically bad time? If a chimp with a sash that said ‘mayor’ on it had bounded around ground zero and thrown its feces at random cab drivers, people would have flocked around it like frightened little lambs. Does that give that shit tossing ape the legitimacy to run for president… especially if it got its mayor sash by acting like a deranged fascist?
In closing, if Swann wins this race, things are a lot more fucked than I thought… and that’s saying a lot. Ed Rendell - take him or leave him - is about as honest a public servant as you’re gonna find at the governor’s level. Yes, he’s a politician, but when you see him speak about public education and about the work he does for the people of this state, you can believe that he thinks about and cares about the things he’s saying. I know this because I’ve watched the man for years. No matter where he speaks and to what audience, to 100 people or on national TV, he always shows that same passion. He speaks from honest to god conviction about things he actually believes in. Think of Bill Clinton, only balder, sweatier, uglier, jewisher and actually sincere about the shit that comes out of his mouth.
That’s all for now.
My girlfriend, Liza is in New Hampshire. I’m in Philadelphia. Long ago - relatively speaking - I had a girlfriend, who in the summer, lived in New Hampshire. I used to take the train up there to visit her. She lived on some land that had been in her family for about as long as land can ‘be’ in a North American family. She lived in an old one-room school-house. The time I spent up there is some of the most important time that I’ve experienced in this lifetime. I’ve been happier, I’ve been more captivated, I’ve seen places far more beautiful and I have felt love stronger than I did in New Hampshire; but I don’t think I’ve ever been more relaxed. Not relaxation in a physical, hedonistic sense, but truly relaxed. My time there was like a massage for the soul.
But anyway, this post is about something different. This is about what I wrote on August 9th, 1999. That day, I turned in my final paper in my class on human evolution at the University of Penn museum of Archeology and Anthropology, walked straight out of the building, jumped in a taxi and went straight to 30th street station. There I got on a train to Boston. Just outside of New York, I looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline. I saw the World Trade Center towers and wrote in my blue spiral notebook:
NY fucking city. The greatest city in the history of humanity. There it is as it always is. And as it will be until its covered by water or destroyed by terrorists.
Two years and a month later, September 7th, 2001, I was on my way back from Maine. I remember looking out at WTC1 and 2. It was night. They were glowing in the sky. I was amazed that the city was still there.
