Learning is about recovering. We are flooded with information and we struggled to analyze the important bits and store them in memory. Then, when the most precious moment arrives, we recover those precocious stored bits to save us from ourselves. On
the awful anniversary of 9/11, we now must begin to ask — “What have
we recovered?” — in the steaming, soulless pit that used to be the
World Trade Center.
Cloverfield is a new monster movie set in New York City that —
intentionally or not, brings back, audibly and semiotically — the
horrors of 9/11.
Entertainment does not exist in a vacuum.
Are you burned out on 9/11? If so, is that a tremendous moral crime for which there is no remedy? How can we — as a world of nations — have so quickly become so tired and weary of an event that smothered the end of any sense of freedom we have left a mere six years ago?
The bigger crime is an ongoing inexcusable wallowing mass of death and despair at “Ground Zero” that started as this:
In my article, The Incongruity of Mourning and the 9/11 Memorial, we discussed how to create an appropriate memorial for the World Trade Center loss.
Last week we received updated news the Ground Zero World Trade Center site would be re-built using invisible buildings that blend into the sky, reflect the environment around them and form a transparent skyline while shouting to the world: “Please don’t hit us again! We’re here, but our buildings really aren’t!”
Continue reading → Building Invisible Buildings at Ground Zero
Bones are hardy and can testify throughout antiquity to the state of the person who earned those bones in their body. However, the dreams and wishes of others embedded in those bones are frail and fleeting because memory is convenient and, as humans, we run from pain instead of searching out suffering.
With the recent discovery of 74 more bone fragments mixed with gravel that had been shoveled to the sides of the roof of the former Deutsche Bank building in the ongoing open wound that is the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11, we are forced to reconcile the way we choose to memorialize people beyond bones and flesh. Deutsche Bank — the building below shrouded in black netting and holding the American flag — will be demolished floor-by-floor in June.
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