– Der Spiegel says (if I’m translating correctly — always doubtful) that actor and playwright Israel Horovitz is premiering a “supercurrent” piece of theater in Dresden on Dec. 8: Three Weeks after Paradise — a Voice from New York City. I can’t find a thing about this in English, oddly, except these notes from Horovitz regarding his September 11th: “Oliver, my youngest son, was in music class at Stuyvesant High School, just across the road from the WTC, throughout the attack and ensuing catastrophe. He watched the towers fall, all of it. Like many NYC kids, he saw too much. Hannah, Oliver’s twin sister, was in class in LaGuardia High School, uptown. A classmate of Hannah’s got a cell-phone call from her mother, who worked on the upper floors on the North Tower. ‘Thank God you’re alright!’ cried the young girl. ‘I’m not,’ wept the mother. ‘I’m calling to say goodbye.’ Our children are not in Kansas, anymore. They have been jerked from innocence to the worst kind of Experience.” Spiegel says Horovitz’ play about Sept. 11 — a monologue — begins: “It is gone. So long as I’ve been a New Yorker, It was there, but now it is gone.” He’s not referring to the World Trade Centers, but to the paradise New York was for him. As his children watched the catastrophe envelop their lives, he and his wife sat in a sunny kitchen, enjoying the last seconds of that paradise. The CD is already being produced and Spiegel says it it headed here in time for Christmas.
I’m of two minds about this speed (just as I am about the talk of observation platforms and memorials, below). On the one hand, I know it’s too soon for art to bring perspective to these wounds; they are still bleeding. So I am relieved that I have not heard of movies-of-the-week in production (though maybe that’s just because I’m too busy ready about war to read Variety); I’m similarly relieved not to see too many instant books in the bookstores. Too soon, I keep repeating. On the other hand, I crave other views and other experiences of the tragedy — thus this weblog; I cannot get away from the story, I fear leaving it. So the truth is, I would buy those books. I would be first in line to buy a ticket to Horovitz’ play, if it were here.
– The latest Rossi Rant: She writes about an old friend, Wolf, who moved from NY to LA and came back to visit… Ground Zero. “Wolf always had, well, a little too much edge. Let’s just say he was the one guy I knew who got PMS … a lot. But he wasn’t like that last night.
He was sweeter and softer. As we all are, I suppose. I’ve always been an angry woman, well except for the time in my life when I was an angry girl and then before that, an angry baby. Could be a past life thing, or I just inherited the angry-as-hell gene, but damn, I’ve had a fire brewing. I assumed after the towers went down that I’d be the poster child for rage. … and … yeah, some of that came, but really … I don’t feel so angry anymore. Maybe it’s because I’ve now seen firsthand what anger can do.”
She is good, this Rossi. I don’t know a thing about her; what little there was on her site is gone. She’s a caterer by day but she should give up that day job and write.
– The online editor at Arab News discovers the wonders of web interactivity. He gets hatemail; he responds; dialogue ensues: “Once I had responded thoughtfully to some of the more emotional and critical e-mails, I was amazed at what followed. The writers toned down their rhetoric; they were no longer abusive and ideas began to circulate and be exchanged.”
– The Mirror visits Iraq, says they expect bombs from us.
