6 posts tagged “2001”

I was going to get an early night, but really couldn’t let the day pass without writing an editorial about 9-11. I remember going to bed in the small hours of September 12 (NZST) thinking that nothing was happening. Was I ever wrong. By 6 a.m., a friend had already called me to tell me what had happened in New York and the Pentagon.
   I put it up at Lucire, since most of (our) September 12, 2001 revolved around fashion, both at New York Fashion Week and the Wellington Fashion Festival. Your thoughts on the piece are welcome.

At one point, it seemed Keeley Hawes was getting cast in receptionist roles. There was The Avengers movie with Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery; and this pre-Tipping the Velvet Channel Five comedy, Hotel!, which had nothing to do with Arthur Hailey. Watch out instead for the stunning Lysette Anthony (who would be in her mid-30s at this point, but wow), Pakistani actor Athar Malik, better known as Art Malik, playing a terrorist again (he was a Mujahadin warrior in The Living Daylights and the villain in True Lies), and Lee Majors as the President (who probably doesn’t need much of an introduction). Some good sight gags, much in the vein of the Zucker movies.

This Ali G interview for Red Nose Day with David and Victoria Beckham is a laugh—and in many cases, very clever. I keep thinking this was the funniest—especially as the Beckhams know what he’s like, unlike many of his other subjects.
   As many of you know, wankster Ali G is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, and was far more famous than his other characters, Borat Sagdiyev and Bruno, on his old TV show.

[Cross-posted] As it is September 11 here in New Zealand, I thought about what I might write in tribute to those who fell that day. Then I remembered that I wrote something last year at this time, viz. quoting my own editorial written on September 11, 2001 (which, of course, was the 12th as far as Kiwis were concerned).
   I recall the world changed that day. I was planning to return to New York and September was my month back here, recharging batteries. Needless to say, that return never happened.
   I still remember the usual crisis-mode version of me kick in and I never felt the grief of the families on that first day, because my duty was to make sure that my team was all right, as well as friends who lived in Lower Manhattan or who were due to get off the subway stop beneath the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers around that time.
   Then I had to attend the start of the Wellington Fashion Festival (my parking ticket is shown above left) and no one was in any mood to celebrate.
   And I devoted the time following 9-11 to my work on corporate social responsibility, leading up to my first Medinge Group summit that year. (The name had not even been coined at this point.) Much of that energy was used in my book Typography & Branding; if anyone still has any copies of it, you may see an idealistic streak underlying most of the words.
   But we should retain such ideals, even if many of us have been given good reason to be cynical in the years that followed.
   If the deaths of nearly 3,000 people are to have any meaning, it is that: a reminder that we do hold certain principles dear and they should be retained and practised.
   One friend waiting tables back in those days said New Yorkers were nice to him after the disaster but the bitterness and nastiness returned two weeks later.
   It is sad that it didn’t take long for some of us to forget a tragedy, and the seventh anniversary of the attacks on the United States should be a reminder that at one point, we did re-evaluate our lives and their meaning.
   And whatever positive result that came from that introspection should resurface on September 11, 2008—and we should at least make a commitment this year to hold on to some of those life-affirming thoughts for longer, rather than see ourselves return to the cynicism that mars so much of modern life. We owe the victims a lot more than going through life living half of our potential, or in negativity. Their deaths have to mean something more.

9-11 parking stub

Despite the shock of 9-11, which happened in New Zealand on September 12, 2001 thanks to the time difference (why don’t we insist on calling it 12-9?), I still had to attend the breakfast for the first day of the Wellington Fashion Festival for Lucire. And, that morning, I had to pay for car parking.
   I had used this parking ticket to write on—the back has a note to my father—and when he lent me a suit to wear to Dan’s funeral today, I found this item.
   It brought back a lot of memories and a lot of worries that morning—a friend of mine working for Verizon used to get off at the WTC stop on the subway. I rushed back to the office to see if I could get through to New York, found out everyone was alive, then hung up so other services could use the phone.
   I watched a lot of plans go up in smoke that day—I had intended to return to NYC in October 2001, funnily enough with one intention of checking out the World Trade Center’s observation deck.

This is my 9-11 commemoration post and in case you thought the title is a typo, I can assure you it’s not.
   Mention to any New Zealander ‘9-11’ and while we would understand the reference, to us it all happened on the morning of September 12, 2001.
   I remember switching off the TV before 1 a.m. on September 12 thinking that there was no big news that day, and went to bed. It really did start off as a quiet news day.
   All night, I dreamed about people—probably Americans—channel-surfing. No matter what channel they got to, it was the same news item. I could not make out what the news item was.
   I was awakened by a phone call from my friend Edward Hodges, who knew I had people in New York covering Fashion Week. He also knew of my close ties because I was in New York in August 2001. I was outside the Twin Towers weeks before, declining a friend’s invitation to visit the Observation Deck because I would be back in October. 
   Edward filled me in. I don’t remember panicking. I just remembered that I had to find out what had happened to my friends. The charitable would call it grace under pressure. The less charitable would call it an automatic reaction to shock. Maybe they are both correct.
   September 12, 2001 was the first day of the Wellington Fashion Festival. No one was in a mood to party. I had to get back from the breakfast do at Kirkcaldie’s to find out what had happened to friends and colleagues. One, the husband of my host in New York, was normally due to exit at the WTC stop on the Subway at exactly the time the first jet hit.
   I found he was OK after calling but I kept my conversation short. ‘Is everyone OK?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, I’ll hang up then.’
   I don’t know how I found time to do it, but I wrote an editorial in Lucire that day. I was flattered to find that it touched such a nerve that it was forwarded in emails around the world at that time. Our website cover background went from red to black. The event did inspire me, perhaps, to preach my humanist agenda more and a lot of its thinking was found in my 2005 book, Typography & Branding, which I actually wrote in 2002.
   That evening there were three Festival events: one at the National Library (where Susan Bartels told me that she had a friend who did not make it to work because his alarm did not go off—otherwise he’d have been in the World Trade Center), a second one in the sheds on the wharf for Minx Shoes, and a third installation on Cuba Street, at which I met the jewellery designer Mandi Kingsbury.
   The following weeks were strange. I had a friend who was a waiter in NYC and he noted a change in behaviour for a fortnight after 9-11. People were nice to him for two weeks, then became bastards again. I don’t know if his being black and gay had anything to do with it—African–American friends indicate to me that it might. An Arab–American friend down in Princeton told me how her friends were getting kicked out of cafés, some just for reading a newspaper printed in Arabic. These days, those weeks seemed more surreal than the actual attack.
   Down here, we were united with the US and we even sent troops that time to Afghanistan.
   We were also united in prayer. Churches organized prayer vigils. The US recorded a statistic where a clear majority of Americans prayed on and immediately after 9-11.
   I returned in 2005 to pay tribute to those who perished in the Twin Towers, joining thousands of mourners on the morning of September 11, eastern time. By then, it was a very different world again.