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Week of September 5, 2004:
NEW YORK | Memories of Sept. 11
WORK | Don't meet the new boss
NEWS | Stupid quote of the week
PREVIOUS: August 29, 2004 | NEXT: October 10, 2004
NEW YORK: SEPT. 11
Memories of Sept. 11
It's been three years and I haven't been to the World Trade Center site since the attacks. I didn't think I've been avoiding it, though who knows what subconscious inhibitions I might have. I simply haven't had a reason to go. My first memory of the attack was seeing the towers on fire from Hoboken. I couldn't get across the river, but I could look across the Hudson and see the buildings' distant, smoking silhouettes. I guess it was important to see the atrocity for real, not just as a piece of televised entertainment. Unable to get to Manhattan or even reach the newspaper by phone or e-mail, I stayed in Hoboken, walked the street, offered to give blood (they were just taking names), and finally went home.
My other most lasting memory of the day comes from something I saw later — a short film called "Site" made by Jason Kliot (producer of "Chuck & Buck," "Lovely & Amazing," and "Coffee and Cigarettes"). It was shown at the following year's Sundance festival as part of a group of short films, most of which seemed inadequate for their subject. Kliot's film, unlike the others, didn't show the now-ubiquitous images of the building rubble; he simply turned the camera around and focused on the people who came to look — faces talking, faces silent, faces crying, faces looking down at the ground and up at the sky.
The mood I noticed in the days after Sept. 11 was confusion about how to respond. What do you do when 3,000 people are suddenly killed? There's no ritual ready for the occasion. There's no right thing to say. There's no gesture big enough. There's no human bond intimate enough. People walked the street in a survivor's daze, guiltily enjoying the warm sunshine while trying to figure out what to do about the weight that had unexpectedly settled on their shoulders. The day didn't come with an instruction manual.
Governmental leaders — contrary to the received memory we have of the event today — were thrown into as much confusion as the rest of us. President Bush kept his reading date with the children of Louisiana, as we've seen for ourselves in the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11"; what's forgotten is that he spent the rest of the day flying around in Air Force One while spokespeople reassured the public that he was safe up in the sky somewhere. The president wasn't leading anybody that day — he was hiding.
Still, people searched for a sign — some form of indefineable reassurance that would put everything back on-kilter. The following week, a cashier at the drugstore mentioned to me with some satisfaction that Jerry Seinfeld's quickly organized all-star benefit at Madison Square Garden had raised $8 million for the cause. "So," she said, "at least the celebrities are doing everything they can."
Was that true? I'm sure it wasn't. If they all sold their houses in the Hamptons and canceled their trips to Vail, they could have raised a hundred times that. But the thing that reassured her was that "the celebrities" — these onscreen people we know better than many of our own neighbors — had risen to the occasion. The "at least" in her thought suggested a sort of bedrock — when everything else is in ruins, at least we have someone we can count on. The priesthood, the shamans, of our time had started the process of appeasing the wrathful gods and making it okay for the rest of us.
Three or four days after the attack, I went downtown for an off-off-Broadway play, which was okay. The streets below 14th had been closed except to emergency vehicles, and it was unaccustomedly quiet except for knots of people gathered on the sidewalk. The air smelled black. Furious whites were on the verge of blows with defenders of an Islamic cultural center on First Avenue, although the fight only took the form of angrily hurled and obligingly answered questions about Muslims. Folk singers, peace activists and neighborhood residents were engaging in a spontaneous round-the-clock vigil at Union Square — probably the most authentic ritual carried out in those days because it arose organically without an announcement or an agenda.
But what touched me the most was something I saw on the way back from the theater. Standing by himself on Second Avenue at 10th was a young man playing a kind of elegy for New York on his saxophone. Every passerby seemed to stop and listen or at least drink in the music a little longer on their way by. On this day, there was time to contemplate.
Joing Camero was not New York's most virtuosic saxophonist, but he was the musician of the moment — a Venezuelan-born student who liked to do his practicing on the street. And this was, to me, the essence of New York, the reason we would come back. People come here from around the world to be something, create something, chase their passions and add their energy to the city.
We talked for a while about the music, the people, and how the night felt, and then he picked up his horn again. A few tentative phrases gave way to unstructured improvisation, and just for a moment I recognized a flash of something among the notes — the opening lines of John Coltrane's "Equinox," with their message of both mournfulness and peace. A perfect accidental song for the city.
Postscript: Just to see, I looked up Joing's name on Google and found him at the end of this article from the Daily News, interviewed as he played for the city during last year's blackout. If New York has a guardidan angel, I don't doubt that he's out on the sidewalk playing free jazz for the people in our darkest moments.
September 11, 2004 | 10:14 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20040905.php#e46
WORK: DON'T MEET THE NEW BOSS
Don't meet the new boss
Today marks four months since we got a new boss at Business Week Online, Kathy Rebello. Top management decided it was time for a change, someone new who could chart a future course into the bright digital future. I honestly have no opinion about her as a person because thus far she has been unable to chart a course even as far as my desk. In four months, she hasn't spoken a single word to me. I don't like to form snap judgements based on insufficient information, but I believe I now know enough at least to say that, whatever her other abilities, she hasn't got the slightest curiosity about the little people who work for her. After several years of demoralizing Internet-bust cutbacks, we're down to maybe 20 people on the whole web site, which means that in an hour a week she could have had lunch with almost everybody on the staff in ones and twos by now. At least that's what little old non-management-material me would have done.
MEET THE NEW BOSS
Wherein we see how long it takes for the new boss to figure out that I exist
- More in this series -
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I did get one e-mail from Ms. Rebello a week after she started. (It was a mass e-mail, undoubtedly sent out by her assistant, not an indication that she has the vaguest idea who I am.) Under the subject line "If you were king," she ordered everybody to write her a memo including a job description and the following: "I'd like you to give me a description of the job you'd love to have if 'you were king.' (Hence the enticing subject header). This should outline what you'd like your job to be now and your longer-term goals." I don't know what happened to all those memos, but I do know insincere "management really cares" bullshit when I see it.
Anyway, by now this is all sort of funny to me. I started out just waiting for her to introduce herself, and when that didn't happen for a day, a week, a month, I just thought I'd let it go and see how long it would take for her to simply shake my hand and say, "Hi, I'm Kathy. Tell me about yourself." So now it's been four months. I see her in her office talking to the same three people every day; meanwhile, I hear from other underlings that she's never talked to them either. It's stopped being merely bad management — at some point it turns into farce. And that point was reached months ago.
I'll check in on this subject periodically and we'll find out how long it takes to meet the new boss together.
September 11, 2004 | 10:11 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20040905.php#e45
NEWS: HURRICANE FRANCES
Stupid quote of the week
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| Dr. John Agwunobi |
From a Reuters article on Hurricane Frances:
"I have no doubt that there will be tragedy associated with a storm like this, but I also have no doubt there will be miracles," said Dr. John Agwunobi, Florida's secretary of health.
What kind of talk is that? If 100 people die but a baby is found in some rubble, then that's some kind of happy ending?
Related links:
Reuters article
September 5, 2004 | 11:01 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20040905.php#e44
PREVIOUS: August 29, 2004 | NEXT: October 10, 2004
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