That morning I woke up earlier than usual, around 6 am to a beautiful day in Los Angeles. When I look back now it’s as if I was roused by some silent alarm. I had hardly been awake for more than five minutes when the phone rang. A friend was on the other line. “Turn on the television,” he said…
Divided World Remembers September 11 Attacks: “A divided world remembered the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks Monday, with allies promising to fight fanaticism, critics saying U.S. policies had fanned more violence and a militant leader promising “new events.”…Monday’s outpouring of emotion reflects an international landscape vastly changed since terrorists hijacked four airliners in 2001, crashing two into New York’s World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and another into a Pennsylvania field.” [ap]
Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Freedom Tower, on the rebuilding of Ground Zero and the drama that surrounds it, which he likens to “a novel, a cheap novel.”: “For many, Sept. 11 has become very abstract. People forget already what this was all about. They think it’s about pretty facades and square-footage prices. They don’t remember anymore that it’s about people who perished, it’s about America, it’s about some pretty big ideas.”
Elegy for an Icon [nyt photographic tribute]
Slate has been running a graphic adaptation of the 9/11 Report, which sets text from The 9/11 Commission Report to graphic illustrations. To start the report from the beginning, use the navigation on the right after the site launches.
We’ve talked about the film about Father Mychal Judge, The Saint of 9/11, here before. Today, AfterElton has posted a review of the film…
The Path to 9/11 ABC “docudrama” update: ABC airs edited version of 9/11 film.
Joel Meyerowitz talked to the Boston Globe about Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive, a book of 400 photographs culled from more than 8,000 he shot at Ground Zero for nine months after the attacks: “When I first started to do it, I just couldn’t get enough of it. I’m almost embarrassed to say, it was so vitalizing to me as a person and as an artist. I felt young again. I felt a passion I’d felt in the ’60s, when I couldn’t wait to get back out on the street…I was probably never more at ease making photographs, because I subsumed some aspect of my normal working methods. I felt this thing is going to write itself. I did not want to editorialize or in any way inflate it with a personal sense of drama or the profound…I have a weird connection to ground zero. I get within a few blocks of it and it’s as if I can smell it. Even though there’s nothing to smell, I get that memory whiff of dust and burning and all of the combinations that were blended, all those things burning. It all comes back to me.”
Top illustration from the September 11, 2006 issue of The New Yorker.
