Was watching a couple short docs about 9/11 (one about the artwork destroyed and recovered and the sorting field on Staten Island.)
I need to get something off my chest.
It’s so strange to have been here for that and now this. I wasn’t afraid that we wouldn’t come back from 9/11. We wouldn’t allow anything but coming back; and not just for us. It was in the air. You could feel it. Kinetic, emotion, sensory, sentient...all of it. All of us.
This feeling of worse than unsure? Being doubtful, at best? Noticing more signs that...it’s not looking good and hoping for magic feels so awful. I feel it in my body sometimes.
Like you feel when something terribly wrong and out of your control happens between someone you adore and yourself. Desperation to fix it paces slow acceptance of what is; both jockeying and fighting to take first position.
It’s heartbreaking in a way I never could have expected or known. I never imagined this would be our city.
It’s almost like a break up. I love this city so much. Deeply. Truly love. Not just the idea of loving it. I love it. I fell
In love with it on that beautiful but terrible Tuesday.
Days that look like that day? Clear sky and perfect temperature; perfect weather truly? Not one comes that I don’t remember and pause to think. I don’t push it away. I’m in a way grateful for it.
It’s like nature has a planned seasonal memorial all her own and she’s been on the job too.
The idea that I’m seriously thinking about what steps to take to prepare to leave? Ouch.
I’ll never forgive some people for what they’ve done to us. (This time.) Never.
I didn’t take this photo, but I stood right there. A few times. For me this image will forever be the memorial.
Nearly 20 years.
I know I could say that the violence and looting downtown was a sign of just how much the city has healed. I want to see it that way, but I don’t. Instead it feels like somehow we failed.
The unity we were forced into then found comfort and pride in incorporating so completely into our being as a New York City and as New Yorkers... gone so suddenly and almost, it feels cruelly ambivalent and belittling.
That’s not even quite the word. Patronizing, dismissive, belittling, immature and selfish all at once. That is how I feel toward the many things that have been done or happened here these 3 months.
I’d be lying if I said otherwise or whatever people would want to hear. I miss January.
It hurts losing something that we gained because of that day and who we are...were.
No, not lost. Stolen.
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Wow. This may be one of the most emotionally manipulative things Ive ever heard an "activist" say. This is a photo of my best friend, Charles, and I in 2011. He was brutally murdered in 2013. dnainfo.com/new-york/20130…
He was beaten, bound, had his ear ripped off and was found with his dog Ramses curled up beside him in his blood in the morning. He and I were supposed to have dinner that night.
That week he was moving back to Houston where he was originally from to help launch a satellite office for the non profit he had dedicated himself to. I washed and cleaned his things and sent back his personal items it his family. I kept that photo I just shared; he had had it
This was how a NYU professor addressed the looting in our city. A few days later my block was also looted. I assume that it, like Soho, according to this “educator’s” theory was
not part of NYC. Now that time has passed I want people to know what really happens/has been happening to my home; our home. I hope @nyuniversity will read this and I also hope both alumni and perspective or current students will ask themselves if this is...simply put...sanity.
As one year approaches I hope my fellow NYers as well as members of the NYU community remember and/or ask what it is we wish our city and community to represent; soft bigotry, racism, faux social justice, terror? Or...the New York City that deserves and is better than this.
“I remember when people used to say “all art is sexual”, or to quote Picasso, “sex and art are the same thing”. I thought that was bonkers when I heard it, and a bit pervy, but, alas, all has changed, and now all art is political.
What we really see here is just that all art (and everything else) can be sexualized, or politicized, or seen through whichever narrow lens serves someone’s personal interests (Freudianism, Marxism, Feminism, religion, pure aesthetics…).
if you really pressed people who say all art is political, they’d probably admit that all fashion, cuisine, sports, horticulture, and everything else is political.
Art unshackled from politics is often tricky (a trickster) because if/once it is, the political are blissfully unaware that their perception is informing their presumptions.
For good reason, throughout history many artists preferred to keep it that way.
Freedom in the Aquarium by Sabin Balasa
Excerpt from:
My Lost City
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1935
“What news from New York?”
“Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.”
“Nothing more?”
“Nothing. Radios blare in the street.”
I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the further-est wastes of the desert.