4 posts tagged “wtc”

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.

Found at the advertising group here on Vox, a post about a Russian anti-smoking animation can be found here:

http://publicite.groups.vox.com/library/post/6a00d41418d2bd6a4700d41421401b3c7f.html

   It is meant to be humorous, but if you do click on it, please note there are 9-11 jokes (planes crashing into the Twin Towers). Which makes me wonder: are some countries ready to laugh about the deaths of thousands of people? I think it may be too early. In fact, I don’t think many of us ever can. I sure as heck don’t make Pearl Harbor jokes, and that was 66 years ago this year and I wasn’t even alive when it happened.
   Please note that the person who posted about it at Vox is not the animation’s creator, so please do not direct any flames to him.

[Cross-posted] A year ago, at this time, I was trying to get to sleep because I knew I would have to get up early to get to Ground Zero to join others commemorating 9-11. I got up around 6.30 a.m. and took the subway in to Manhattan, and met a woman who had travelled there from California. In fact, most of us had come a long way. I spotted two Australian caps among the crowd.
   When 9-11 happened, it was 9-12. Here in New Zealand, I was woken up around 6.30 a.m. by Edward Hodges, who called me after he learned of the attacks. I had returned from New York only weeks before, so this was a surreal moment. But it never hit me: I tried watching the news, the commemorations, and I felt distant. Maybe it was my mind shielding me. That’s why, in 2005, I had to go.
   Although I had one friend who was killed in London last year, on July 7, I lost no friends on September 11. The people who died were friends of friends. The boyfriend of one of my team could not get back into his apartment. A colleague’s office had to be shut till the area was cleared. That was about it.
   I still have pictures, when researching a story, of 9-11 itself, taken from Soho by friends. They showed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers ablaze. I even had images of those falling to their deaths. I doubt I will ever publish them. But even then, it was still some event, some tragedy, in a foreign country. I must have had ice water in my veins.
   But last year, it finally hit. I saw the firemen at Engine Company 10 mourn the loss of their colleagues, and comrades from Europe came to join them. I saw the notes people had signed on memorial boards. I saw tears. An old man wore a T-shirt commemorating his son, a firefighter who perished in the World Trade Center. Cops were there: hard, big blokes who could have stared down crims had tears to contend with in their eyes that day.
   It touched me because these were people like me. Of every race. Every creed. Every culture.
   Condi started talking below, but it didn’t matter. I was already in the moment.

Where are we now? I remember doing business in New York was easy. People trusted you. Shook your hand. People were globally minded, thinking, ‘What borders?’ I can’t do business in New York anywhere near that readily any more. Suspicion first. Get a cast iron contract. Weigh people down before you make them your friends.
   The business environment in New York, which is all I really knew, changed drastically that day. That is what the terrorists robbed the US of: not its wealth, not its power, but its trust of cross-border dealings.
   A friend of mine, who was a waiter in New York, told me that people were nice to him—a gay, black man—for about two weeks. After that, the mood soured. He was back to being just a waiter. But something was worse.
   My Arab–American friends told of people reading Arabic-language newspapers, published in the United States by Americans, getting kicked out of restaurants and cafés.
   There was something seriously wrong. And if we are to show the terrorists that they are insignificant, cowardly bastards, then I long for a return to the America I knew and started working with, and in, in the 1990s.

I still stand by my words written on September 11, 2001. If I had a blog then, these would be on it.