künstwerk

Reprinting a couple of pieces of mine from the months after September 11.

künstwerk

Review of the here is new york photo exhibit

February 4–March 30, 2002

In the shaky days after Sept. 11, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was roundly misquoted as describing the WTC attacks as the greatest work of art ever. Not so. German, with its knack for single words with myriad meanings, allowed the good professor to describe the day’s events as former angel Lucifer’s Künstwerk. Literally translated as “artwork,” the term more accurately denotes one’s handiwork. In Stockhausen’s approximation, Lucifer represents intelligence used to destroy creation, the devil’s creativity untinged by love.

On display Feb. 4 through March 30 at 72 E. Randolph, here is new york: a democracy of photographs displays 1,500 professional and amateur photographs of the days before, during, and after the attacks. The original exhibit emerged from a single picture posted in a New York store window, more photos being donated in the weeks afterward by dazed Knickerbockers, and applied one after the other like bandaids to the communal wounds. Stacked along the walls and dangled overhead in the Chicago gallery, the prints grant the viewer a visual experience approximating a fraction of the sensory overload felt by Manhattanites on an otherwise a beautiful early fall Tuesday.

Aesthetically, the day helped. Even here in Chicago the sun shone and the air was as crisp as peppermint. Weather favors the recording of tragedy. Challenger exploded against an azure sky, twin curling forks of smoke spiraling like DNA helices about a fluffy white plume. The Hindenburg gorgeously exploded against an early morning rain shower, brightly immolating and consuming itself into a crippled metal skeleton. Despite myself and watching safely from home on 9/11, I couldn’t help but be struck by the awesome sight of the towers burning like matchsticks and winnowing down against a perfect blue canvas sky. While the surface message of the show is one of endurance, American rah-rah, and cuddly solidarity, the unspoken theme is that of the aesthetics and disturbing beauty of destruction. Allegory or otherwise—your choice—Lucifer used his palette to present an “artwork” few will forget. here is new york, then, might be considered the coffee table book version of the whole hellish exhibit.

The late-January press review bore all requisite solemnity, though was largely unmemorable. A batch of suits and ties thanked us, the press, for coming; the show’s beneficiaries, the Children’s Aid Society WTC Relief Fund were cited (proceeds from the sales of selected prints go to them); and the names of the sponsors, Marshall Field’s and the Target store chain were repeatedly dropped. No one noted the unwitting inappropriateness of Target’s bull’s-eye logo being prominently displayed on the podium.

There were firefighters, of course. Not since the Iranian hostage crisis’ embassy workers has an occupation been so in demand for photo-ops and pull-quotes. The firefighters acquitted themselves nicely, of course, with the just-doing-our-job dignity that should come with their profession. Our own fire commissioner, the wonderfully named James Joyce, with his lived in face, stated that as he looked at them and they at him, they shared the ineffable emotions only the men and women in helmets and rubber raincoats can feel. The firemen themselves—names of Jeffrey Straub and Anthony Barone, and imported from NYC Engine 6—looked bright and shiny in their dress blues when they took the stand. Following the outline given them by the event organizers, an accidental note of unscripted emotion occurred when Straub, flanked by a photo of himself  leaning against a car shelled by WTC detritus, explained what he was thinking at the time. Thinking about his fellow firefighter—and next-door neighbor it turned out—who had lost his life that day. A PR emissary takes the podium afterwards, thanking Firefighter Straub for sharing. It was “very emotional,” she needlessly underscored.

I’m sorry if I seem unnecessarily picky about proper tribute. The event is impossible to cheapen, but even the best-intentioned tend to overdo it. Solemnity can be spread so thick it becomes as overwhelming as the grey dust still coating Manhattan. The press review preliminaries, gratefully, ended, and we were left alone to survey the wreckage.

The number of photos was the first thing I noticed. As a first-world nation, we enjoy the luxury of documenting life down to the second. Cosmopolitan vacation spot New York provided an army of shutterbugs that day. Anonymity is the rule, regarding the photos’ authors, but degrees of professionalism seem easy to differentiate. Reasons for taking photos in the face of apocalypse are harder to pin down.

For the professionals, it was just part of the job. It was for Bill Biggart, whose shrine rested in back. The last picture of Biggart’s life is glorious yet horrific: It shows one side of the North Tower exploding into balsa wood splinters. The shot, splendidly framed, was obviously taken while looking up. The same fragments that Bill captured probably buried him. The next photo shows a pile of photographer’s tools—cameras and light meters scorched black, a singed and melted deck of press passes lying beside them.

The amateur photos are, as stated, relatively easy to identify. Varying levels of exposure, poor framing, and unimaginative composition abound. The tragedy, however, adds gravitas to the most banal shots. The exhibit isn’t about ability, it’s about the view through several hundred different eyes. En masse, the pictures all “work”—individually and as a collective.

Two images recur. One is of dragon’s fire bursting from the towers’ guts: A bright yellow fusion heart is at the center, burning brighter than the sun; the fringes of the holocaust are flushed with the colors of autumn leaves, slowly burning black. The other is that of the spectator, gazing upwards, one hand holding a cell phone against the ear, the other slapped against the forehead in disbelief.

Against the west wall, photo #6068 shows American death shrines in the style of Mexican Dia de los Muertos ofrendas. Bright orange posters surrounded by half-melted candles create an impermanent memorial to the unknown dead. One poster states, “I never met you. I will never forget you.” The other laments, “I don’t know you and I miss you already.”

In other photos, America’s bipolar reaction is documented. Peaceniks beg for cooler heads, marching with neatly rendered placards reading, “It’s Time for Reflection Not Revenge” and “Break the Cycle of Violence.” Opinions grow less tolerant closer to Ground Zero. The photos of dust, while visually dull, linger with me. The impact of the planes, the explosions were the media money shot. We didn’t see the dust on TV. We thought it was all fire and falling bricks. Photo #5681 stands out most for me. A William H. Macy clone dressed in blue Brooks Brothers and carrying a briefcase runs through a grey blizzard of lung-clotting dust. Office building dust jams up his day’s clockwork, the very materials in which he daily dealt business. Ironic that. Photos #1240, 1237, and 5192 show further capitalist paralysis with piles of Gap shirts and jeans and Perrier bottles buried in ash. Dust anesthetizes, rather than eradicates the City that Never Sleeps. Dust also provides a ready medium for rage. “WELCOME TO HELL” offers the back window of a Honda Civic in photo #1118. On photo #87, a “NUKE THEM ALL” graffito virtually screams from an opaque store window. Throughout the exhibit the dust messages debate, sentiments ranging from “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War” to the less poetical “REVENGE.”

Moving on, certain photos help me recall a vow I made 25 years ago. On a grade school career day I stood in front of my class, dressed in a yellow rain slicker and a plastic fireman’s helmet—an Independence Day promo piece handed out by a local insurance agent. Words immortalized by fourth-graders before and after me tumbled from my mouth: “I want to grow up to be a fireman, so I can put out fires and help people.” Looking at picture after picture of dust-covered firefighters, burned-out eyes staring from beneath battered black helmets, I wanted to renew that vow. Photos #3383, 5247, 5234, 2424, and so on show walls of other firefighters, EMS techs, doctors, nurses, and just plain good Samaritans, in varying stages of exhaustion, human endurance stretched to a rubberband’s snapping. It’s all here, every emotion, every reaction. Photo #2763 shows two burly firefighters practically in a lover’s embrace. Unwitting comedy is achieved with a Scientologist counselor attempting to comfort a firefighter who looks like he’d rather be somewhere else enjoying his bottle of Poland Springs water.

Many of the photos, it must be pointed out, are disturbing. In #2840 blue-gloved medics handle a woman bleeding as red as her shirt. Beyond shock, her eyes are sealed with rust-colored dust. Still, for every image of a battered, bleeding, and broken human being, there’s a more reassuring and recurring image, that of an extended hand.

E.B. White, best known for Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, provided the ideal title and coda of the show in his 1949 piece “Here Is New York,” which presciently describes the urban inferno to come: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headline of the latest edition.”

Mr. White’s chilling clarvoyance aside (his assessment of the Big Apple’s vulnerability itself a fabulous example of the melancholy poetry of destruction), the effect of the original exhibit rested in its spontaneity, its proximity, and its participatory nature. While effective, we as Chicagoans miss the real power of the original show. Unlike street cows, this bit of city art doesn’t travel well or translate accurately. The gallery offers us a before, but we lack an after with which to compare it. It is our good fortune, of course, that we’re deprived of ashes from which to arise. New York, however, in characteristic braggadocio, shows the horrors it’s lived through and, six months later, has risen above.

Originally published in the Chicago Journal .
®2002 Dan Kelly

My Deeply Held Beliefs Say Go to Hell

Oh…you want to use my services? Yeahhhhh, that’s a problem. Look you seem nice and all, but I just can’t do it, because what you…do…and are…is…frowned upon by my religion. But I have an excellent reason for discrim…uh, declining to serve you.

See, my ancestors chose to follow an abridged version of a religion practiced by a desert tribe millennia ago. This tribe had a direct line to the Almighty through a handful of guys who SWORE they spoke directly with the Creator of the Universe, and that He ordered the tribe to do everything these emissaries told them to do, or else He’d smite them.

Which he did, repeatedly, the emissaries claimed whenever things got bad. Sometimes he came through with food and water and protection—they said—but mostly he yelled at them through the emissaries. He was mad they weren’t following his orders to the letter. Whenever they complained, he’d get P.O.ed and let them get sick or suffer or die or be conquered by the other tribes who THEY were trying to conquer. Now, isn’t that a beautiful story?

Anyway, the emissaries presented a TON of laws to the tribe, and you had to follow them or else bad stuff would happen. A few of the good ones were terrific, pretty much stated not to hurt or kill anyone. Good thing the Creator of the Universe told them that.

Much later, some other guy who, and this is my favorite part, hinted that he was the SON of the Creator of the Universe took that tribe’s tenets and added a bunch of new stuff. He didn’t really dump the old rules, but he didn’t stress some as much as others. For example, he said everyone should love and respect each other. He also said that he’d set families against one another, and that he’d die and come back again to judge the living and the dead, sending the ones who displeased him to a horrible flaming underworld. Maybe. I mean, that’s the general consensus about what he said.

Anyway, he died, and CAME BACK. Wow! That’s a guy you want to know, right?

Certainly, well, his friends said it SORT OF looked like him, but not totally. Except for when he did. He hung out for a while and then flew off to this place no one can see where everyone is happy all the time…even though you’re hanging out with that terrifying Creator of the Universe dude who, uh, once killed everyone on earth at the time with a massive flood, because they were evil. The kids too. Evil kids? Sure. Hey, you don’t argue with a guy like that. He must know what he’s doing.

So, the Son of the Creator of the Universe left his followers, and they spread the word about his lessons across the Ancient World. Then this other guy who’d never met him, took all his words and restructured everything to appeal to the Italians who currently ran most of the known world. He underscored some of the older rules again too–which the son never mentioned, actually… Anyway, this new guy became the Son of the Creator of the Universe’s chief PR flack, after he’d spent some time trying to stop the Son’s religion by slaughtering his friends and followers for blasphemy.

No, no! The Son of the Creator of the Universe’s original followers were totally cool with that.

Man oh man, then it took off! Suddenly, the Italians and scads of other people across the Empire were worshiping this poor carpenter. Especially when they were assured they’d go to that happy afterlife place I mentioned.

What?

Well, yes, there were people across the world who’d never heard of this religion or this particular Creator of the Universe, or the emissaries, or the Son of the Creator, or any of the laws…and, well, to their surprise, I heard they all died and went to that horrible flaming underworld to suffer forever, because…

It’s just a shame, really. They should have known better.

But let me get to my main point. Remember when I mentioned my ancestors? Well, somebody told them about this religion and they signed up…or they were forced to convert under pain of death. Either way, they were in, and since then everyone in my family has been told what I just told you, and we’ve accepted it as is, no questions asked. Because really, how COULD you question it? Answer: you can’t. You just can’t.

My ancestors and everyone since took to heart the laws prescribed by the desert tribe and the Son of the Creator in a book that compiles a couple dozen scrolls written in several different languages and eras, after discarding a few other texts that seemed iffy. The book has been edited and re-edited over the last 2,000 years by heretics and firebrands and tyrants and madmen and other men and women who wanted to amass power and wealth by showing the proper interpretation of the words of the Creator of the Universe who no one had spoken with directly for a thousand or so years. But the awesome thing is, it’s still true. Every last syllable. It’s been changed and altered and sifted and translated, but it’s still the same book endorsed by the Creator of the Universe. And you can’t deny that, right?

Anyway, I follow EACH AND EVERY law outlined by this book. Except the odd commandment about clothing or food or menstrual cycles or slavery or…well, okay, there’s quite a few I don’t follow because they don’t mesh well with my modern life and they’re too hard to follow. Sure, some folks still follow ALL the rules, but they’re wrong, because they didn’t listen to the guy who said he was the Son of the Creator of the Universe. Nope, they listened to the guys who said they were his emissaries. CRAZY, huh? SOME people.

As it turns out though, because I believe in all the rules and laws in this book, I also believe some modern laws can’t be followed, because they interfere with my selective reading…Um, I mean my deeply held beliefs.

Now, even though what I’m doing to you might RESEMBLE the discrimination practiced on other groups of people throughout history, it’s really not the same, because… well, like I said. I follow a few specific rules laid down by a bunch of guys who, several thousand years ago, told an isolated desert tribe that the Creator of the Universe put them in charge of everyone and that if they didn’t listen up and do what they said, they’d be slaughtered or punished horribly in the terrible place of torture no one has ever really seen that the Son of the Creator of the Universe may have suggested exists.

Anyway, that’s why I’m refusing to help you with your wedding.

So, honor my freedom of religion, even when it interferes with all the other rights you’re due. You better, because the super-powered Son of the Creator of the Universe will return some day, prove I’m right, and sentence you to an eternity of pain because you tried to get married. Face it, buddy, the facts are on my side.

And remember, the Son of the Creator of the Universe loves you! And so do I!

Get out.

A Mighty Bastard Is Your God

Whenever a GOP idiot says God approves of something reprehensible, try to imagine the following exchange happening with a co-worker.

God (in the Next Cube): Say, Brad, what’s wrong?

Brad: (Crestfallen) My… teenage daughter was… raped last night.

God: Tsk. Oh, that’s a shame. (Scratches head) Say, was she dressed like a whore? That might have done it.

Brad: What? How could you ask such a question?

God: (Starts squeezing a pair of exercise grips) Come on, Brad, let’s face facts. Was she wearing a short skirt and lipstick? Was she in jeggings? Could the guy see her naughty pillows? Was her hair, you know, exposed? How exactly did she instill lust in the poor guy?

Brad: (Aghast) How can you say that? What kind of unfeeling, thoughtless, hateful bastard would suggest a young woman was responsible for her own rape?

God: (Shrugs) I’m not seeing the issue here. How does saying the little tramp was inviting ravishment by dressing wantonly seem “unfeeling and thoughtless”? (God makes air quotes with his fingers)

Brad: WHAT!?! Are you insane!?! She’s physically and psychologically scarred because the son of a bitch couldn’t control his own urges! Worse yet, she’s pregnant!

God: (Smiles brightly) What!?! Awesome, Brad! A grandchild for you! Mazel tov!

Brad: (Punches God’s lights out.)

That Reminds Me…

My wife and I have yet to mind-fuck our four-year-old son and arrange to have a bizarre and embarrassing photo chase him down for the rest of his life.

What I want to know is NOT why people do things like this (simple answer, with 6 billion of us on the planet, a large percentage are bound to be goofballs), but who sat down, puffed on their pipe or nursed their tea, and thought, “You know what’s good for a kid’s development? Keeping him or her locked into an infant’s mindset.”

Actually, I take all that back and apologize, because breast-feeding is MAGIC!

Waitasecond! I fell into TIME magazine’s trap! CONTROVERSY!

Of Blind Pigs

As Father Mows and Grieves for His Lost Youth, Mother's Soul Dies Slowly While Sipping Her Evening Manhattan and Seconal Cocktail. Meanwhile, the Girls Mirthlessly Engage in the Chilly Banality of the Teeter-Totter. Soon, night will come.

David Brooks and I, in a rare alignment of planets, agree on something. Performing his usual trick of writing a book review and piggy-backing on another writer (usually issuing his own spin on the writer’s intentions), he addresses literary darling Jonathan Franzen’s latest book Freedom. In-between the sycophantic flattery to ensure he’s on future guest lists, and chattering about America returning to a uniform spirituality that never happened and which he never sounds like he practices himself, he points out an observation on American letters:

Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones.

By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s very little about the world of work and enterprise. There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service, technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty and ennobling.

It pains me to say it, but Brooks is right. I’ve often wondered about this phenomenon myself. From Sinclair Lewis to Richard Yates to Raygordon Carverlish to Franzen himself, modern writers have portrayed the suburbs as a static purgatory populated by liars, hypocrites, mental cases, drug addicts, adulterers, and people who only seem happy on the surface… BUT WHO ARE NOT. Every suburban town or village in modernist and realist fiction should have a sign standing outside the city limits: “Welcome to ___________: Nobody Wants to Be Here.”

It’s funny that so much of this fiction comes under the heading of realism. While parts are true enough, it is highly unlikely that every person in a town (that isn’t Twin Peaks, which wears its surrealism like a shawl) can be miserable. Hell, let’s go a step further and say it’s patently absurd to leave every member of a modern lit family swimming in a cesspool of existential angst. Hm, I suppose that’s not fair. Authors usually take care to create straw men and women who won’t accept the reality of their and the protagonist’s inner turmoil and woe. But just because it’s fiction, doesn’t mean it has to be unrealistic.

Brooks notoriously paints his pictures with big fat brushes, and his suggestion that the “Quiet Desperation dogma” forbids authors to explore the many outlets humanity has developed to offset feelings of dissatisfaction and ennui is preposterous. Still, from what I’ve read in the New Yorker and New York Times Book Review, it does seem that most modern suburban lit (that accepted as being big L Literature) spins its wheels in the same morass of alcoholism, failed marriage, career disappointment, and so on. These things happen, but they aren’t the only things that happen there. I’d add that I have yet to read an accurate physical portrayal of the suburbs. Most towns sound like they consist entirely of shopping malls and dining rooms.

It requires no stretch of imagination to realize why this is. I think we can make a fair guess that most modern lit is created by those who loathed their comfortably bourgeois upbringing and couldn’t wait to escape to the big city. Speaking as one such individual, I understand perfectly. But the perpetuation of this portrayal of the burbs as a white hell… why it verges on creating a new brand of genre fiction. “Angsty Suburban Fiction? Aisle 3B, between Romance and Mystery. Right after the Humor/Graphic Novels section.”

For My Next Trick, I Will Fight Crime with This Photograph of a Gun

I certainly won’t say that Molly Norris should have censored herself (especially considering the dweeby innocuousness of her own cartoon), and that she needed to placate the world’s fundamentalist freaks. That just lends ammo those who think honoring other religions’ points of etiquette is the same as mailing plutonium to bin Laden.

No, this is more a case where someone should have intelligently picked her battles and waged a propaganda war more wisely. In America, yes, we have a right to draw pictures of Mohammed… but MUST we? If drawing a picture of the prophet could retroactively prevent the twin towers from falling or lay waste to al Queda from top to bottom, I’d be at the kitchen table, day and night, with my notepad and Sharpies. As it stands, drawing, and putting out a call to draw Islam’s founder, is about as intelligent and effective in the battle against terror as giving the finger to Muslims worldwide.

Here’s the main problem with First Amendment shouters who demand the “right” to draw Mohammed. Say there’s a fellow on your block who’s a real bad seed—nasty, violent, and dangerous as all get out. You want to stop this guy’s reign of obnoxiousness, so what do you do? Right. You find a picture of his beloved grandmother, transfer it to a t-shirt above the words, “FILTHY GODDAMNED WHORE,” put it on, and march over to his house and cockily parade out front. Ha ha! Satire!

After making a few circuits, it becomes apparent that the surrounding homes are occupied by the rest of his family. Real salt of the earth types who’ve disavowed their ne’erdowell relation, but nevertheless love their grammy dearly. Consequently, as they sulkily stand on their porches and watch you march, you suspect they’re not happy with you at all. In your freedom blow-striking you’ve managed to alienate much of the neighborhood.

Oops.

But hey, you sure got under that guy’s skin. So much so, he’s coming over to your house tonight with a shotgun. He’s absolutely wrong to do so, but as the shotgun’s buckshot and gases expand your skull to twice its normal size, at least you can take heart in knowing you did the right thing. Which was to… Uh… Wait, it will come to me.

And that’s the dividing line between striking a blow for freedom, and simply being a impolite and delusional doofus.