Not to be a newsmonger, but i am a Journalism student, and so far the coverage of this is ridiculous.
Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City this morning within less than a half hour of each other. So far there is no official word on the motive or on any casualties. The first plane struck shortly before 9am and was described by witnesses as a small twin engine passenger jet. A witness from Dow Jones was quoted as stating that “it looked like the wing crashed down to the street” despite the fact that the majority of the aircraft remain lodged in the upper floors of the building.
The second plane was filmed by television cameras already present as a result of the first crash, and appeared to be a Boeing 737. MSNBC reports that “the FBI said it was investigating reports of a hijacking. A United Airlines employee said he had heard reports that an American Airlines jet had been hijacked and was one of the two aircraft that flew into the center. It was not clear if there were passengers on board.”
The last infamous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred on February 26th, 1993 in the form of a truck bomb. The blast killed six people in injured over a thousand others.
I’ll continue to update with distilled news as it breaks.
best of
This morning i was walking down Walnut street listening to The Green Album and “Hash Pipe” came on and i swear i just started crying right in the middle of the intersection of 39th and Walnut.
For those of you not familiar with Weezer’s vast musical catalogue, “Hash Pipe” isn’t a very sad song. In fact, it’s a song that for all intents and purposes is an emotional flatline; it hardly makes narrative sense to begin with, let alone exuding any sort of sentiment. Yet, there i was in the middle of the street at eight thirty five in my Drexel polo shirt shedding tears (and probably being the laughing stock of every Penn student that passed me on their way to class).
Although i’ve always liked Weezer i was never really a “fan” due to that fact that the band is all boys, and i was only into girls. However, last year Gina and I inexplicably were able to obtain tickets to their sold out warmup show in Philly, and to honor the occasion i bought their eponymous album so i could refresh my memory of their most famous songs. For the vast majority of the intervening year i was happy to sit and listen to the familiar blue album, and to sing it at parties and appreciate it as classic modern alternative rock, if there is such a thing.
I bought Pinkerton for Gina years ago when it had just come out, but i had never really listened to the album all the way through. As a result the only songs i really knew “El Scorcho,” “Good Life,” and “Pink Triangle.” With the impending release of Weezer’s 2001 disc i began searching for Pink only to discover that it was nearly impossible to find… chain stores were out of stock and Weezer is virtually nonexistent in Philly used cd stores. Finally i broke down and ordered from Cheap-Cds. It came in on a quiet day in admissions; i put it on and it sounded nice.
At some point the album came home with me and was left indefinitely in my stereo and the songs started seeping into the nooks and crannies of my brain as the disc spun and spun again on repeat. By the beginning of June i had decided that Pinkerton was the answer to Ani DiFranco’s Dilate: wronged, raw, desperate, sexual, and loud (not to mention self-produced). Suddenly i found myself with a relationship album that i could actually identify with – frustration and breaking it off from the boys’ point of view.
Back to this morning. There i was crying in the middle of the street trying to sniffle away my tears or pass them off as an allergy attack. And i found myself wondering: “Why didn’t i cry yesterday when i was listening to Pinkerton?”
The answer is not an easy thing to nail down. At some point during my identification with Weezer’s second album i decided that it was something that i should be able to do… it was something that i should be able to sonically and emotionally recreate in my own fashion. In the virtually listenerless vacuum that my music exists in i should be able to have those songs and to create that sort of sonic equivalent to an open wound.
Some people just identify with an album because they can chill to it, or because some of the lyrics seem to apply to their life. When i identify with music it suddenly becomes a part of my own catalogue, with each song potentially mated with one of my own as a fluid a-side and b-side or as the ebb and flow of a live performance. There are plenty of albums that i like and love, but if i don’t picture myself onstage singing the songs they are not works that i have a large personal overlap with; i just dig the music. Whereas i typically make mismatched or gender-bending pairings between myself and other artists, with Weezer there are songs that are truly twins of my own progeny, separated only by the physical age and emotional distance between Rivers Cuomo and I.
My bitter pairing of “Splinter” & “Hold On Me” is just a weary attempt to escape from someone else’s bed, while “Tired of Sex” laments that being stuck there doesn’t do one much good in the end. “Unstrung” shares its broken heart and strings with “Falling For You.” “Over You” plays with the pushing/pulling gravity of an imploding relationship, but it cannot admit to enjoying the pull the way “Getchoo” does. “Up & Down” is the culmination of the emotions… the breaking point that nothing on Weezer’s album ever gets to but everything seems to inexorably lean towards. My songs aren’t as mature as Rivers’, and it shows in that i am so focused on the breaking while he is focused on the emotions on either side of it. “No Second Chance” laments a relationship that fell apart without ever directly identifying the person its addressing; its mirror is the tangled web between “Across the Sea,” “El Scorcho,” and the mournful “Butterfly” – songs that are more concerned with lusting, liking, and losing rather than just with the snap of a heart torn in two. Each song in that trio is tied into someone and their life more than i’ve allowed any of my songs to be with the possible exception of “Up & Down.”
Or, maybe i’m full of it and i get off on comparing my meager songwriter existence to today’s darlings of rock. I am by no means a great fan of Weezer’s new disc, but today on the street the oohs and claps of “Photograph” were sucked backwards into feedback and out came “Hash Pipe” and i unexpectedly felt that sudden tug of identification. It felt as though i was watching a video of myself after i write my Pinkerton (or my Dilate) as a cohesive album and then casually discard it to move onto crunchier guitars and more fun. “Hash Pipe” is Weezer taking itself less seriously as a band but more seriously as a production. I have yet to let go of the emotions of “Under My Skin,” and i am still writing from the trailing emotions of this year’s wounds… when will i ever be able to tie them up neatly, package them, and then move on to write something that will in its own way supersede them all?
Heaven only knows. Until then i suppose we can just blame my allergies…
Yesterday was walking walking walking, starting out in my apartment skittering from floor to floor and then off to the office and around the campus and then with Gina delving far into center city where i somehow managed to spend under $20 on a shopping trip for once in my life and then back to university city to walk in circles upon circles that eventually left me sweating and smiling heading back up the stairs of my apartment.
It seems like Gina and i can have one endlessly strung out conversation that will last us from the beginning of whenever we see each other all the way until when she finally has to get back to her apartment to continue with her own life rather than with our all-too-briefly shared one, and yesterday was no exception. I don’t know how we wind up talking about sushi and the existence of an afterlife and cool brands of wah-pedals and bars on South Street that got busted for selling coke all at once with hardly a pause for breath, but we definitely do.
Two intrinsically linked things came out of our infinite conversation that keep echoing in my head, and those things are coping and karma. Gina and i have known each other for eight years now, and in the history of our friendship we can find many examples of events that in retrospect look totally different to us than they felt at the time. Both of us were entirely emotionally unhealthy heading into our last year of high school, though neither one of us would have admitted it to the other (or anyone else) (or ourselves) at the time. Gina had a great new boyfriend and was sure to be a lead in the play, my guitar playing skills had picked up and i was accepted into all of the AP classes i wanted … things all seemed good. Of course, looks deceive, and i was depressed about life and college and even though i was past being obsessed with my weight on a day to day basis i was entirely too thin and Gina was my best friend at the time but she had to deal with her own set of problems that i won’t even begin to enumerate here. And now we get to reflect on the situation and reveal what was going on inside at the time.
Mentioning such meager problems in my life makes me feel like a lightweight, especially considering that i came through it all not significantly worse for the wear. What keeps me wondering about the way the world operates is that at the time i would have told you that i was happy and doing well but looking back i can see through that to my life being relatively empty and hollow at the time. I don’t know how i kept from being miserable and sick and exhausted and defeated. Maybe i was all of that and i didn’t even realize it at the time (and still don’t).
This is where karma comes in. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, and visa versa. Whether or not karma exists as an actual repayment for your actions in life it is present in that your choices will alter you and your psyche for the rest of your life. Comparatively, my choices were easy and my hurdles were not high and i didn’t even think about balking at them at the time, and i think the fact that i didn’t flinch has left me as the relatively healthy person i am now – three years after the fact. What makes me really wonder about life, though, really wonder, is the people who were not ever allowed to make an easy choice and who have always been presented with hurdle after hurdle to leap. I know too many people in my life who have had to face too many challenges, and almost too many of them to believe have somehow walked through all of their fire and brimstone and still manage to smile every day; that isn’t to say that they don’t have problems and issues, but that they aren’t consumed by them all the time.
I am not an especially strong person, and my amassed karma must be equally tiny in relation to the world on the whole. I have never been extremely sick, i have two healthy parents who i have relatively open lines of communication with, i have never been financially in danger of losing my home or my possessions, and i have never been physically or emotionally threatened so much that i was unable to defend myself. But, i know people who have battled health problems for years, who have lost parents to feuds and time, who have lived on incomes stretched to the breaking point, and who have endured assaults on their physical and emotional well being on more than one occasion. What really scares me about life is that sometimes all of this is inflicted on one family… even one person, and that they are left to come through it or to fail somewhere in the middle. I know people who failed and are stuck endlessly in a feedback loop of emotional and physical trauma that they will inflict upon themselves if no one else will do it for them, but what amazes me about life is that for every one of those people i know more than one person who still believes fully in everything life has to offer them rather than inflict upon them after battling a similar set of circumstances. Everyone who has faced against a difficult set of circumstances has problems and regrets, but not every one of those people can wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and that power alone is something that stuns me.
What’s my point? Who knows… is there ever one, really? The point, i suppose, is that my tiny mound of shiny karma is but a pebble in the face of what some people have amassed, and that i just hope that they all get to redeem what life owes to them… and that i will get to see them enjoy every second of it; i’d gladly trade in my karma just for that.
I have this thing for cheesy kid movies where the dorky boy wins over the heart of the popular girl and the respect of his parents and/or peers. Or, rather, i did have a thing for those movies, and now i just have a thing for staying up past 2am to watch them on SuperStation.
The movies always surprise me with their ability to keep the remote out of my hands… this jaded anti-pop anti-teey-bop consumer who barely even gets out to indy flicks once a year stays rooted to the spot. At some point last summer i was home and idly flipping past HBO and i spotted Jamie Lee Curtis and i stopped to see what movie she was in, because i always stop for Jamie Lee, and that’s where the newest chapter of this tale began.
The movie is House Arrest, and the concept is simple: parents are headed for divorce, and so the kids lock them in the basement to work it out. Other kids from school bring their own problem parents into the picture, and hilarity ensues.
The movie is formulaic at best, and that’s probably the reason i like it so much. It is aimed at kids… boys who do not feel in control of anything. It is aimed at the rejects who got thrown into trashcans who would love to garner the respect of the school bully. It is aimed at the ones who pined after the pretty silent girl but never thought to treat her like an everyday person (even though it wouldn’t have gotten them anywhere). And, most cruely, it is aimed at the children of parents hopelessly mired in divorce, separations, and endlessly bickering and remarriage.
So, yes, for those of you following closely, i am the target audience of this movie, and it waylays me hopelessly on my living room floor lying on my stomach with my feet up in the air with full knowledge that Jamie Lee will make up with her husband, and that Jennifer Love Hewit will fall for the simple hero of the film and that the bully winds up being a big softy after all. I fall for it every time, hook line and sinker.
I’m not sure that i really want anything that the movie is offering, but in a way it represents some alternate universe from mine where i had romance hard-coded into my neurons instead of the pop music representation of it. Of course, having nowhere to learn romance from, all i had to turn to was pop culture to educate me. It’s like when in High Fidelity we’re told that “The unhappiest people i know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but i do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.” We’re posed the question of what comes first: the music, films, and culture … or the misery?
I say it all depends.
Some people learn happy endings from their own family and friends, and some people learn them from television and music and movies, and when it comes down to the crux of the matter those of us “who like pop music the most” are expecting a different kind of resolve. We are looking for tidy tied up packages that are easy to fit our minds around, and not uneasy reconcilations and marriages built to last despite rocky foundations. We simply haven’t encountered the concept; hollywood deals wholesale in reconciled parents, and in first kisses in front of the entire cafeteria, and in happy resolved endings. House Arrest is aimed at me because i am trained to appreciate tidy happy endings, and because i want to be able to expect them in my own life even though i know they are as likely as gold records on my wall.
Do i wish that i had a happy two parent home, or that i had good giggly friends who i could idly play football with in the yard, or someone to surreptitiously kiss when we thought parents weren’t all watching? To me it’s apples and oranges, because my life wouldn’t resemble my life if i had any of those things intact. I once just lived a solitary existence resisting advances, and it wasn’t the best thing to do. I have the urge to take meticulous mental notes during these movies so i can apply the things i’ve learned against my life should i ever find myself trapped in a time warp and able to replay my adolescence from where i last saved the game.
In reality, i suppose i am saving up happy endings like the points on the back of a G.I.Joe box, hoping that someday i can put them all in an envelope and send them away for some sort of happiness in return. Here’s for hoping i don’t have to watch House Arrest too many more times to redeem my limited edition prize.
Isn’t it sort of funny that after all that talk about net identity on Sunday i’ve had mine irrevocably altered? If i thought that anyone at America Online gave two cents or ten seconds of a care towards my screenname being hacked i wouldn’t have learned anything during my time on the internet, and since i have i know that the likelihood of seeing me on aolim as KrisisPM ever again is about as much as my suddenly resubscribing to the dreaded AOL service and blogging that my new email is [email protected].
Would you believe that this kept me up last night? Wondering what kind of bored and awful person would just yank my name out from under me just because i was a potential target since i sent them a single IM. Some people hop from name to name and from website to website and from layout to layout, and that’s all well and good for them. However, i take my identity online very seriously after all of these years, and so i am a fan of permanence. The email that everything funnels past on the way to my school account is only the third email address i’ve ever had. This webpage is only the third primary incarnation of my web presence. And, i have only ever had exactly one im name.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to inspire me to do. Is it a message from above that’s it’s time to wean myself away from virtual conversations and back onto real ones? Maybe, but the folks above seem to be ignoring that some of my best friends are mostly virtual at this point. Or, is it instead a reminder to me that nothing is ever really permanent, and that i should have alternate plans for when something i was counting on disappears from my life.
I don’t know.