PhotoDude.com

Wed. Mar 06, 2002

QuoteLog, 3/6

QuoteLog, 3/6 – "After September 11th, I went back to painting and discovered that without planning on it, or even trying, my work had changed. The colors were softer … child-friendly. I talked to other artists whose work had also changed in the most surprising way. Not what you might think: their work filling not with fear and anger but the opposite. ’I used to make films and collages,’ said my new friend Lisa. ’Now I make dolls.’ Maybe it’s the need to create something soft and comforting to balance all the pain we’ve seen. I don’t know. I’m not a therapist. My friend Nancy said stopping trying to figure out the why and just live it [...] I like the idea of artists surviving and moving past September 11th, helping to raise money for an organization that supports artists. Artists for artists; a self-supporting, self-healing thing you might say. History tells us that it’s always the artists and the writers who preserve time. How would we know about so many things that happened a thousand years ago, if not for the statues, the poetry, the paintings? I wonder if the artwork from this time, will one day be given a name. There was Cubism, Surrealism. Will this be Septemberism?"

Rossi

"Although it has been only six months since the World Trade Center was attacked, already it seems as if we can’t be shocked by those events anymore. But this extraordinary piece of film, to be shown in a two-hour special called 9/11 on CBS (Sunday night at 9), has such immediacy that it brings back how unimaginable the events of that day once seemed. An important, firsthand piece of history, the program is also amazing to watch [...] There is nothing here that shouldn’t be shown and much that is immensely moving. The minor flap surrounding the film is appalling, and an extreme example came yesterday morning on the Fox News Channel when the anchor, Jon Scott, delivered loaded questions to Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who said some victims’ families were concerned about the ”graphic depiction” of deaths on screen. Well, there are no such depictions [...] The film is timely because it reveals how quickly even the most horrifying images of Sept. 11 have been absorbed, have come to seem ordinary: a necessary way to grasp a terrible reality but also a dangerously forgetful change."

Caryn James, NY Times

"I feel sorry for the relatives of the 9/11 victims, and I understand that the public display of the bodies of those they once loved is an indignity. I believe, however, that showing the awful truth of what happened—with, of course, some sensible editing for the sake of decency—will outweigh that indignity, and be a general public benefit. Let us know what was done to us, in more detail than we have so far been shown. Then, when we set out to do what we need to do to our enemies, let’s do it not in a spirit of whooping blood lust, but coldly and grimly, in full knowledge, full understanding, of what it means to cut short a human life, to turn smiles and kisses and laughter into the stiff pale grimace of death."

John Derbyshire, National Review

"It has to do with the contrast between Islam’s self-perception as the most ideal and complete expression of the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—and the conditions of poverty, repression and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live today. As a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East said to me, Israel—not Iraq, not India—is ’a constant reminder to Muslims of their own powerlessness.’ How could a tiny Jewish state amass so much military and economic power if the Islamic way of life—not Christianity or Judaism—is God’s most ideal religious path? [...] When Saddam murders his own people it’s not a story, because it’s in the Arab-Muslim family. But when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage—a rage that must come from Muslims having to confront the gap between their self-perception as Muslims and the reality of the Muslim world. I have long believed that it is this poverty of dignity, not a poverty of money, that is behind a lot of Muslim rage today and the reason this rage is sharpest among educated, but frustrated, Muslim youth. It is they who perpetrated 9/11 and who slit the throat of the Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl—after reportedly forcing him to declare on film, ’I am a Jew and my mother is a Jew.’ "

Thomas Friedman, NY Times