up like toast: September 2011

Friday, September 23, 2011

BAND, a triple-channel video installation featuring indie rock outfit Deerhoof. The piece, which premiered in America at The Kitchen in New York late last year, refashions Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968).

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Monday, September 12, 2011

The Huge First Nothing

Photo: Robert Mongomery

It's hard to believe I lived there 10 years ago. That Noah went to work and I was to fly to Barcelona that morning and despite all the loss that day we came home and our friends made it home and 10 years later we have all gone about our lives.

Many things linger from that time for me. Having lived in NY only recently when the attacks occurred I had to learn my way around a very different city than the one I had moved to a few short months before. I remember passing the missing posters on Canal Street and how they never became backdrop or white noise. Fathers, sisters, the faces of friends and loved ones plastered to the wall in so many numbers... a desperate attempt to find them and then to make sure they were remembered. These posters had to be the most touching and haunting part of living in New York City at that time. They stayed on the walls and fences all over Lower Manhattan until sun soaked and water stained they too fell and disappeared just like the people who had fallen from the Towers and evaporated into the sky.

"After what Walt Whitman called “the huge first Nothing” of annihilation, with the psychic convulsions of a demonic force still redounding in the acrid air, the spirit of the city sleepwalking in purgatorial pain, came the posters. Taped to lampposts, walls, store windows, gathered in great clusters on the sides of hospitals, they were a humble catalogue of the missing, on view for months, intense visual windows onto internal disruption and cosmic pain." Read The New York Magazines coverage of 9/11.