Damn Yankees

As a cynic and general non-believer in the myths of professional sports, I’m nevertheless amused and warmed by the “mystique” of the New York Yankees. Their series-tying win over the Arizona Diamondbacks last night sent a jolt through me, and in the wake of September 11th, I can see that it does mean something very real to the city, something intangible yet very palpable. It’s the kind of emotional resonance that’s hard to argue with.

Continue Reading

+

Days and Hours

A lot of my time this past week has been spent laboring over a major redesign for Subtraction.com, which mostly accounts for the lack of postings here. With luck, I’ll be able to relaunch within a few weeks. It won’t be a moment too soon either, as the shortcomings of the current design continue to pain me.

That’s not the only thing on my mind though. I’m simply at a loss to know what to think of all of this entire situation. My initial reaction to the World Trade Center attack was swift retaliation. Then everything got grayer and grayer the more I learned about Afghanistan and our role in its torturous past and now who knows what we should really do in order to remain on the side of the right and just. What’s more, like many of my peers, I’m jobless and adrift in an uncertain economic sea, which is its own level of personal discomfort.

Continue Reading

+

Apologies

Novelist and sometime Wired contributor Po Bronson had some thoughts on his own complicity in inflating the dot-com bubble, published yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.The article, entitled “Calculating the Loss and Blame in Silicon Valley,“ has been trumped along with most of yesterday’s issue by a special edition of the magazine focusing on the World Trade Center tragedy. Bronson has a copy of it posted on his own Web site here.

He says, “I was publicly associated with the entire shebang, parties and billionaires and IPOs. I leveraged the hype to build my career. At the very height of the fever, in the summer of 1999, I posed alongside some of my subjects for a cover of Wired magazine. So if apologies are to be made, I’ve lately come to think, I should be apologizing myself.”

I find that sentiment mildly laudatory, but I won’t hold out for similar acts of contrition (even at much smaller scales) from the mendacious snake-oil salesmen that turned a tremendous amount of genuine potential into this pathetic mess.

Continue Reading

+

After the Aftermath

First Ave at MiddayTomorrow it’s Monday, and hopefully the nation will have finally crawled out from under the misery-fueled lethargy of the past week. The mandate now is to return to normalcy, because anything else would be tantamount to an acquiescence to terror. It remains to be seen whether, as a society, we know how to do that yet, whether we know how to leave behind the truly disorienting aftermath that gripped us for days. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget it. I don’t mean just the two crashes that felled the World Trade Center towers — that goes without saying. What I mean is, I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave behind the stupor, the silent confusion that followed it. Or at the very least, I’ll never be able to forget the site of Manhattan’s normally bustling First Avenue on the day immediately after the terror, when it was six lanes abandoned to nothingness.

Continue Reading

+

Titanium

Titanium PowerBook G4So I had a little bit of a distraction from the news and the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster when my PowerBook arrived. I’d been without a Mac since I lost my job a few weeks ago, living solely on my Sony PCG-SR7K VAIO laptop. Thanks to my sister, I lucked across a great deal on a Titanium PowerBook G4. Granted, I’d disparaged this laptop when it first debuted, but with just four models of Macs to choose from, Apple doesn’t leave its devoted many choices. This was the one that suited my needs most, and now that I’ve got it here in my hands, I don’t seem to have quite so many complaints as I did before.

Continue Reading

+

Pictures from Today’s World Trade Center Tragedy

I woke up a little late today, so by the time I made it down to lower Manhattan (on foot), most of the area had been cordoned off, and the twin towers had collapsed already. I was only able to photograph the aftermath, the monstrous, slow-moving mass of smoke as it digested the blueness of the sky. It was misery to behold, but what newscasters didn’t talk about was the strange juxtaposition of tragedy and calmness.

New Yorkers, known to the outside world perhaps best for their excitable nature, are also capable of a staggering brand of indifference — sometimes out of spite, but sometimes too perhaps out of a numbness resulting from years of aggressive living and living among aggressors. That was very much in effect just outside of ground zero, beyond the police perimeter — people walked and chatted on their mobile phones (contrary to reports, I saw dozens of people using their phones successfully), some laughed mildly, some looked disturbed or quiet, but no one was in hysterics. I don’t say this to condemn my neighbors or take away from the tragedy, but to offer an added layer of depth to what’s available through news sources. It was a truly bizarre day.

Continue Reading

+