 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
 | |
|
Offoffoff has asked some noteworthy people from New York's independent arts community whose work had some special connection to the World Trade Center bombing to tell us about their work, their experiences over the last year, and their perspective on what the city has been through. Over the next week or two we'll present their thoughts.
Josh sends these thoughts and memories from Japan, where he's helping produce one of the company's shows. Like the company's plays, his essay lasts a really long time and throws a lot of ideas at you but you'll do well to stick with it. NEW YORK SINCE SEPT. 11: I Never Felt Love That Big in My LifeBy JOSH FOX New York I love you. You should get nothing but love, nothing but love. For years and years. Love and support. As I have always believed. Nothing but love.
I slept until 12:30 p.m. on 9/11. I was having a dream about being trapped in a burning office building, when I heard a knock on my door. I woke up to Ryan's economical report. "You better come upstairs, they've crashed planes into the World Trade Center. Both towers have collapsed." "Who's THEY?" "Terrorists. Nobody knows." I run upstairs to the TV. See the footage of plane number two crashing into the towers and rapidly fall to pieces. I call Aya immediately, also asleep. There was no possible way she could have been anywhere near there, but as soon as I hear her voice I feel relieved, as if somehow, everyone I knew was in immediate danger. What we did last summer My story is not a particularly fascinating one. The night before I had seen "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" at Union Square global-googleplex, and I ran out during the final credits because of an incredible eye-splitting headache. I had been getting them very consistently for about three weeks, but this was by far the worst. I collapsed onto pavement on Third Ave. Aya ran to get me Advil. We had to take a taxi back to Brooklyn. We were trying to have a good time in the final two weeks of the International WOW Company's first "summer intensive program." The greatest and most amazing summer of love that I had ever experienced, up until that day. At the end of May 2001, we decided that we didn't want to stress ourselves out over the summer with another full-scale production, we decided to just, you know, do a simple summer training and workshop-type program. Have some ensemble quality time. Train and work on weird ideas. We asked company members if they wanted to create projects, explore their own directing, teach physical workshops and the like. We held auditions, we got about ten submissions for projects from company members, we thought, hey no problem. HA HA HA HA HA. It turned out to be the most work we ever did organizing anything ever. We were run ragged. With about 6 projects running on any given day, rehearsals took place in rotation in our space for basically 16 hours a day, from 1 p.m., some days until 4 in the morning. 60 people all running all over the place creating compositions, doing various physical trainings, working on short projects. It was heaven and hell at the same time. The parties were incredible, the work was incredible, the house was trashed on a daily basis. There was hardly any time to be alone. The project I wanted to workshop was called "The Bomb." It was about sex and nuclear war. I felt that our state of nuclear awareness as a culture was hitting an all-time low. I also felt very very uneasy about the future of New York in particular, the city I was born in. In "HyperReal America" in February 2001, I wrote about nuclear terrorism: "You wanna buy some uranium you can trade blue jeans for it in the Ukraine . . . and here is where it would happen, man. New York City is A-number-one-overkill zone. Who the fuck is gonna bomb Washington, it's just a buncha statues." "And the Pentagon."
It seeps into the subconscious. It had been with me my whole life. This constant sense of thinking that this was the last generation. That we were at the beginning or the middle or the end of THE END. You know? I was sick of it. I wanted no more of it. Out of my life, out of my thoughts, build a brighter future. But to do that, we had to deal with the Bomb. We have to get down with the Bomb, wake up the motherfucking Bomb and move on. We had to understand that it was never going to go away, that the knowledge and the power over the life and death of the whole planet was not just going to be buried in a hole somewhere and evaporate forever. Just like language, the bomb is here to stay, and if human beings are going to survive for another 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 years, then we are going to have to deal with it and get the fuck over it, as a species. It also dawned on me that if human beings are going to survive for that long, that this is perhaps the infancy of our partnership on the planet. Us and the bomb. Here to stay? Perhaps. We're either both going to go or both going to stay. One or the other. I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in January 2000. I don't know what I was expecting to find. I was struck by two things, the first was the Urakami Prison, which was at the direct hypocenter of the Nagasaki Bomb blast. The prison held mostly Korean and Filipino prisoners of war. Something about how both prisoners and guards and wardens were vaporized at the same instant was stunning to me. That certain barriers matter not at all, when history decides to move. I stood on the twisted steel and concrete foundation of the prison, which they left intact. It's in the middle of the Peace Park. Actually, Nagasaki was the most beautiful little city that I visited in Japan. I recommend it. The second thing was how beautiful nuclear explosions are. Really weird thing, that. In the A-Bomb museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there are constantly rolling reels and reels of nuclear test footage. Red bombs, blue bombs, black and white bombs, bombs blowing up entire islands in the south pacific, bombs at night and bombs during the day, H-bombs and super H-bombs with orange-colored starbursts. I was never sure what these reels were supposed to do, impress us with horror and fear or awe and beauty. What kind of god would lay these mysteries hidden for us to discover? What kind of matrix is nature, which includes such things as orchids and mushroom clouds? Anyway, it seemed a good way to spend the turn of the century, right? Who could figure out what the hell to do with that fucking weekend? A sincerely first-world dilemma. More than one half of the people on the planet earth will never make a phone call. They have friends, they fall in love, they just don't talk about it on the phone because they have no phones. But I wasn't thinking about that in Nagasaki. I was thinking about the security of the first world. Or at least my little corner of the 1st/3rd world in Brooklyn. I still am. We are standing on the edge of a cliff. It's in there The immediacy of my thoughts on September 11th is still surprising. I immediately blamed the same fucking guys I been blaming all of my life. I immediately felt the powerlessness I have always felt my whole life, just more so. I immediately thought of America's long history of violence and greed as the mainstays of our foreign policy. I immediately thought, now we know what it's like. I have always been enraged at what I felt was some crazy faraway force called America was putting New York in the crossfire, these insane policies that create havoc and hatred all over the world, were endangering my hood. Why can't we all just get along? We can. But that's another story. Yes, we can, if we can figure out how we are ALL implicated. If you live in New York City and you are paying your taxes, you are paying for cluster bombs who are killing innocent people just like the ones who died in the WTC. How does that make you feel? Is it worth the price? Do you want to be a part of that? You personally? But this story is about trying to remember 9/11. Hard to "remember" something that is with you every day, like a knife in the stomach. I burst into tears three times today. Haven't really stopped crying, really. It's the only human thing to do, to succumb to the emotions. It was the people who never broke down that scared me the most, the ones, like my landlord who built his entire Mexican frozen-food business on a bigtime Gulf War burrito contract. As I returned the afternoon of the 13th, covered in ash, from 16 straight hours of volunteer work at Ground Zero he said with a smile, "And now it's time for us to go over there and kick some ass." The aforementioned Mexican-food plant has since moved from Brooklyn to Florida, thus freeing up some significant real estate for our rehearsals (10 year lease — rental, in case you were wondering).
Researching the piece over the summer, I was frantically combing the Internet for a recording of the audio test of the Emergency Broadcast System. You know the sound. You know the guy, "This is only a test . . . " But I couldn't find it. It was out of print or whatever, not nowhere to download from. (I forgot to check Napster, actually, at the time, I think it may have been one of the five records they still have.) But I did find some guy who had uploaded the actual numerical frequencies of the terrifying tritone, so you could recreate it in your home with a cheap Casio organ or a tone box or somesuch thing that I wasn't going to have time for. But you see the point. If you ever heard that sound, that sound is IN THERE. Opening weekend of "The Bomb" last March, while driving across the Williamsburg Bridge, I heard the test three times on three different stations inside of about 20 minutes. Somebody must have still had a tape of it in an attic somewhere in a box with a picture of Mikhail Gorbachev and they dropped it off at NPR. All of this is to say that September 11th was not an out-of-the-blue isolated incident. It was not the day that everything changed. It was, of course, the most horrible day most of us have ever lived through. But it is incredibly important, I think, to see it as part of a chain of events that has been going on for years and years. And as far as violence and destruction go, we in the United States we have been doling out significantly more than we have received. What kind of world do you want to live in? Don't you think the United States could make it possible? If we really were true to our ideals? Next | Jump to part 2, 3, 4 OFFOFFOFF.COM • A GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK Reader comments on Josh Fox: I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life: Post a comment on "Josh Fox: I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life" |
