The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
The writer with the shopping cart
: Greg Allen gets exasperated with Hubert Muschamp’s latest World Trade Center suggestion in the NY Times and concludes, delightfully:
If the Times were the 1/9 train, Muschamp would be the guy who gets on at 103rd, whose jabberings scare the passengers boarding downstream into other cars.
Muschamp writes: “So the review ought to arouse philosophical as well as historical debate. What is there, after all, to be preserved?… This voided void is densely packed with history nonetheless: with the layers of ideology encoded by the towers and by the critical responses to them, and with the changing perceptions of architecture as the city around them evolved.”
Arghh!!!!!
After reading this I’m still not quite sure what Muschamp wants — certainly not the World Trade Center design reborn (a dislike he apparently shares with Norman Mailer) and presumably not a “voided void.” Maybe he would like to see the Port Authority rebuild the original twin towers of the Hudson Terminal on the site. That would certainly qualify as a historical artifact.
However, I think the comment about his ramblings being like having Muschamp board the 1/9 train at 103rd Street is probably a bit off — it’s more like having him board the rear of the 1/9 train at Rector Street with you on it and then finding out only the doors on the front five cars open up at South Ferry and your path to freedom is blocked by the damn conductor’s cab…