The Towers
This image is from a movie I first saw in Paris. See below for a clue.
I wasn’t here on the original September 11th. I was in Paris, teaching a coked-up French booker how to use her database software when a friend in Germany called to tell me to get to a TV. “Why? Are you on TV?” I asked. I spent the afternoon trying to reach my New York colleagues. Our developper, holed up in the office, wrote me an email to say he’d seen the first plane’s impact from inside the subway as it crossed Manhattan bridge and entered the tunnel, on his way to work. Mentioned he’d likely be taking the rest of the day off.
I went to the WTC about ten years ago on a visit home from Paris, determined to go to the top and have a look around the city. But when I got there, I looked up and shuddered at what I took to be two freakishly tall, thin black buildings. It was windy and cold on the plaza and I could swear I saw them swaying. Maybe it was me. Childhood memories of what happened when I got too ambitious with my Lego sets flashed to mind. I just said to myself, hell, no. Those buildings had gone up way too quickly for my liking, and my impression was that surely someone had forgotten to think of something important, and that they were likely to fall one day, maybe that very day, with me in one of them. I got right back into the subway and visited the Empire State Building, instead.
Little did I know.
This is the only image of the Twin Towers (which I never got to know and love as well as the Empire State Building) that I have a personal relationship with, and that’s because it’s from the beginning of my favorite movie. I shot it with my Spectra Polaroid while watching it on TV in my tiny “studette” in Paris. I painted the scene, and ironically enough, someone stole the painting while I was packing to move back to New York. Anyone welcoming a distraction from today’s unabashed media exploitation of the honest grievers can tell me if they recognize which movie it’s from.
Anyone?
Fashion clue: the main character’s wardrobe is provided by Emanuel Ungaro.
For a special treat, see John Mavroudis’ website, where he describes the process leading up to the 9/11 cover of The New Yorker, via Drawn.
