Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Thursday, September 30, 2004
00:19 - Back in one piece	(top)
Guess what the in-flight movie was on the way up to Newark? The Day After Tomorrow. After that set of images, laughable even if I weren't seeing them on an eight-inch screen ten feet away, was hardly sufficient to prepare me for what the real, intact, non-snow-drowned Manhattan would look like. Driving down the West Side Highway along the water's edge from the George Washington Bridge, the overwhelming feeling I had was: frickin' unbelievable. Some cities, and I've been in a lot of big ones, make pretense of being in the same class as New York; but there's just no comparison. We're talking about an island that's wall-to-wall skyscrapers, from river to river. Every block of Manhattan is as tall and as dense as the downtown of any other city. I drove in to the parking garage a couple of blocks from Times Square, and though pictures really don't do it justice, here's one anyway: Whatever it may have been in the past, Times Square is a theme park today, an unabashed showcase of the advertiser's art�an anti-capitalist's nightmare, the kind of thing to make scruffy bearded college sophomores clutch their faces and melt, shrieking, like the guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And as CapLion says, who met me there, the city's just, well, like that: it's constantly changing, always being reinvented and reimagined by each successive wave of visitors and residents. You can leave for a weekend, come back, and find that something has changed. A building has a new fa�ade, or a bar has moved down the street, or the Times Square billboards have all been rearranged, or the Chevy's is now a Virgin Superstore... ...Or. It's hard to know what to feel, seeing this for the first time, first-hand. It's in a state now where the impact, especially for someone who hasn't even been here recently enough to really remember what it once looked like, is dulled to the point of guilt by the neatness of the trappings, the shiny fencing devoid of memorials except for a few scattered flowers pinned to the bars, the crisp new PATH train station with an acre of spotless underground halogen-lit concrete parkland, and the inspirational messages of rebuilding and remembering and celebrating diversity and so on plastering the walls. There's a kiosk at the entrance to the station with info on the Freedom Tower, whose foundations are currently being begun in the pit that now looks like nothing so much as a benign construction site. And, well, I've got to agree with Mr. Lion who says that the ideal solution, for him, would have been to build the towers back exactly as they had been... except ten feet higher. It's not just a psychological thing, either. This isn't San Diego, where they go out of their way to make the skyline out of buildings with significant non-90-degree elements, where buildings like the Freedom Tower and the attendant Libeskind quartz fragments wouldn't look out of place. This is New York. It's a city that, more than any other I've seen, is built of grids: firm, solid, rectilinear patterns that supported each other as they built themselves up over each other's shoulders, culminating in those two huge impenetrable blocks at the south end. Now that I've walked the streets, I know why the WTC looked the way it did: it's because Manhattan itself, the street plan, is built like a skyscraper. Tall, narrow, rectangular; the avenues the sturdy columns, the streets the lissom cross-pieces, Broadway the diagonal brace holding it all steady, and all of it anchored in a tangled root-ball of concrete in the financial district, the Village, SoHo, and everything south of Little Italy where we ate at Lombardi's, the First Pizza Place Ever (seriously, the very first pizzeria to open in the United States, the one against which all others have been subconsciously modeled, the one with the thick-cut slabs of fresh mozzarella instead of shredded cheese�mmm. But anyway...) The Freedom Tower, in short, doesn't match anything else in Manhattan. There's nothing else around it that's diagonal, triangular, tapered, or (least of all) peters out halfway up to give way to a steel spiderweb that shams its way up to a prescribed height like the false head on an overevolved moth. It just doesn't make sense here. True, it may have been the least bad of the choices the Port Authority had to pick from; but none of the freakish postmodern proposals had the one crucial element a rebuilt WTC so desperately needed: to be more ambitious and audacious and businesslike and quintessentially New York than the original. No matter how many symbolic feet it attains at the height of its pinnacle, the Freedom Tower is going to always represent a sidelong cough and a muttered "Sorry�best we could do." Ah well. I guess we'll get used to it. But I'm an out-of-towner, so my opinion isn't quite what I'd call "meaningful"�not in the way that one's would be who spent his whole life staring at those towers, knowing friends working high up in them, and then one day to have them erased from existence with only a gaping pit and a surgically-sterile PATH station to remember them by. I have no context by which to imagine that kind of loss, or the attendant need for justice to be done, or the inevitable frustration that the ones who carried it out are forever beyond the reach of our gavels or our fists. Mine's a loss in principle, a loss of an actor in the pop culture miasma that defines my consciousness, a loss that manifests itself in a need to reaffirm certain sureties about what this country stands for and how to fight for it. But it's all pretty empty compared to what someone would have gone through who now has to imagine those brick-paved streets buried under a foot of lung-shredding dust, every time he walks through them on the way from one mundane daily chore to the next. But, well, I'm glad I at least got to see it for myself... I don't imagine I'll see it again while it still looks the way it does today. If New York is a microcosm of America at all�and it really is, I've got to say, as the first thing I thought when I exited the George Washington Bridge and got on the West Side Highway and saw the billboards and the names on the streets was no matter what Spalding Gray says, Manhattan is not just some island off the COAST of America; it IS America, all its commerce and energy and history all rolled into one sharp-edged gridwork that could serve as the seed for a whole new America if transplanted to another planet�then Lower Manhattan will be changed before we know it to another painting of glass and steel against the sky, and we'll have to consciously make time to reflect and remember, just as the signs exhort�because we have no time to pause or look back. There's work to do. I've got more to see, tomorrow and part of Saturday. I haven't wrecked or lost the car yet, so I guess I'm ready for another go...