My 9/11: A Retrospective

The Twin Towers always seemed impossible.

From the moment I first saw them back in the Spring of 1996, to the moment that they were blocked from view by other members of the New York skyline, they always appeared to be impossible.  How could something so huge and so enormous be possible?  My teenaged mind marveled at the achievement on display there, the show of man's ingenuity and creativity.  That would be the last time I thought of the Twin towers, for a little over five years.  I look back at it now and wish I had just enjoyed the moment more.  Especially with what would come.

Six years later, I was attending class at the University of Texas-El Paso, sitting in my Mechanics I class.  At the time, I still had vast hopes and dreams of becoming an engineer, not knowing in a year's time I would abandoned the pursuit altogether and begin my long, arduous journey that would culminate in my receiving my degree years later.  But that is a story for another day.  At the time, I was still very much interested in the pursuit of an engineering degree, and still very much trying to pay attention.

And that's when I started to notice something was wrong.

The door was open to the classroom, as at the time, the Classroom Building at UTEP (yes, it really was, and I believe still is called the Classroom Building) didn't have the greatest circulation, and so the door had to be left open, otherwise the room would begin to get stuffy fairly quickly.  And it was through this open door that I saw people in a hurry.  Granted, people normally would be rushing through, trying to get to some class or another.  But there was something different about this hurry.  It was frantic, hurried, chaotic.  I imagine it was probably the closest that I will ever be to actually seeing what people fleeing from a zombie hoard would be.  These people were running, no, sprinting towards the direction of one of the labs.  And what became a trickle would eventually become a gradual flood.

This was the first class that began that day in UTEP, which was about seven o'clock, if I so recall.  Those of us that went to the class had only heard a casual mention of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, but hadn't assumed anything about it, just a terrible accident.  It was the early days of text messaging and internet on phones, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway, as phone reception in the Classroom building was so terrible that phones would naturally get switched to roaming.  As a result, we had absolutely no idea of what was happening.  We weren't aware that outside, the world was changing, and the world was darkening.

Slowly, I began to see a different story of person intermingled with the frantic student: a listless one, who seemed to be slowly shambling towards some location or another, with the frantic stream of students parting around him like water.  The faces were different, but the expression was the same.  Shocked.  Horrified.  Numb.  

I quickly knew that once class let out, once the bubble of the classroom had burst at the sound of the bell, I had to get to a computer.  I needed to get someplace where I could find what was happening.  The engineering lab was just around the corner.  Once my instructor let us out, I ran towards it, becoming a part of the mob that was not running to class, but to try and get information. I rushed inside the lab to find the front desk, where there typically was some overly perky, attractive female engineering student that would check in your ID, deserted.  I turned into the main lab room, and saw that the projector TV, which we never knew we even had, was set up.  

Displayed, on the side of the wall, was hell.  

I won't rehash my thoughts about what I saw.  We've seen the collapse over and over again, repeated in a never ending killer loop as lives were ended in a maelstrom of fire, hate and ash.  We all know what we saw. and were made to see it multiple times.  It doesn't make it less terrible.

And that's when that same shocked, numb haze, settled over me.  

I sat in Computer Lab 2, popped in a CD, Gorillaz, and began to research what had happened.  The CD had a scratch on it, and for that reason, the only song that it seemed to plan with any sort of consistency was the song Tomorrow Comes Today.  It was entirely appropriate for that day, as I looked back on Yahoo!'s now frantic updates as far as what was happening.  I have never been a big news junkie, and yet I devoured everything that was being updated.  I had to know what was going to.  What the hell was going on?

Though we take it for granted that wealth of knowledge of what occured that day, I cannot explain just how utterly chaotic it was in those first few hours to find out what was happening.  Were we being invaded?  Where there other attacks (and tragically, there were)?  What places were next?  And which planes still flying above were still thought to be suspect? What was going to happen?  Where was it going to happen?  I stayed there for close to four hours, and left just slightly the wiser.  It would remain that way for several days, as facts slowly started to trickle in, and events began to be constructed.  But I cannot nearly begin to explain just how helpless and uninformed I felt, even as it seemed the entire world was changing.

Even though El Paso, Texas is as far away from New York, New York as could be, the border itself changed dramatically.  Planes were grounded, and those planes already airborne, heading to other destinations, suddenly found themselves in a strange place, and nowhere near home.  The border, that artery that connects the two sister cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, was shut down, stranding people from their families.  Federal buildings were closed and placed under lock down, and Fort Bliss was suddenly on high alert.  Overnight, my city, which takes a lot of abuse for being boring, or being regarded as somewhat of a backwater, became almost like an armed camp, as every place went on high alert.  This was not my hometown that I was used to, and even for days afterward, I remember seeing a lot more police cars on the road, and the roads being a lot less traveled, as people stayed in.

Along the way to my next class, I remember seeing something else.  UTEP is a very multi-national university.  Quite often, because it is located on the border, it's thought that it was strictly a very Latin American institution, as there are students there from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.  But there are also European students, African students, and yes, Middle Eastern students.

And, in the middle of the corridor, I saw something that stuck with me.  It was a shouting match between two groups of students: one middle eastern, another American, both restraining themselves as much as they could, as professors and later, a campus security guard, attempted to break up the confrontation..  Profanity, rhetoric, and all other sorts of terrible, violent words were being exchanged.  It was enough to snap me out of my fog, long enough to ask a question from one of the members of the crowd next to me.

"What the hell happened?"

"The Arab students were cheering on the attackers, and the other guys are threatening to kick their asses."

I left, my faith in humanity even lower than it was earlier that morning.

Indeed, a lot about that day was surreal, from the way professors were ignored as they attempted to lecture, to the crowds standing in the student union, watching the TV's, the pool tables and other amusements located within ignored.  For the moment, they were unimportant.  

I remember coming home, and just watching the news, watching the destruction, over and over again.  It was horror on an endless loop, seeing the collapse, especially as more amateur footage came in, and news networks decided to air it, showing different angles, different perspectives, different prisms in which we were viewing the lives of thousands being snuffed out.  I remember hugging my parents, my sister and brother a little harder than usual, as I was glad, just glad that my family was together, even as half a continent away, more families were being torn apart.

I've heard different people say that in two years or so, high schools will have the first generation of children that have no first hand memory of 9/11.  I would argue that that generation has already arrived, for this reason.  My younger brother was six at the time.  Far too little to perhaps comprehend that people had died, that people could be so evil to want to turn pieces of our daily lives into weapons, into deathtraps, into tombs.  How could you explain that?  Could you explain that? 

My parents did what any normal parent would have done, and that was to try and protect their son.  As a result, my brother was largely kept in his room when the news was on in the den, watching my anime collection, and happy as a clam by doing so.  And, for a time, he remained untouched, unmoved, unaffected by the outside world.  I imagine many other parents did the same thing.  I don't blame them, nor judge them.  

I will, however, judge my University.  I would learn years later from one of my professors that UTEP, not long after the attacks had occurred, issued a email to all their staff, requesting them to not discuss at all the current events, and proceed like nothing had happened.  Do not discuss what is happening outside.  Just conduct business as usual.  I imagine that the University wanted to avoid problems, namely between students, but I also imagine that they probably felt that the professors weren't qualified for that type of discussion.  So why bother?  All of my engineering professors certainly did so, which is a shame.  But again, I cannot blame them, as they probably felt,  inadequate, I suppose, to talk about such events.  I would learn, years later, that there were plenty of professors that chose to ignore the email, and try and have a discussion with their classes.  There were no riots or problems or assaults that resulted from those talks.  I do not blame my professors for not talking, or wishing to discuss what happened.  But I will never forget that my University, an institution for higher learning, a place which prides itself on being a place where ideas and events are meant to be discussed, interpreted, and cultivated, instead shrank from the chance to do so, and instead chose to ignore it.  But please, buy season tickets to see our latest terrible football team.

Things would remain surreal for the next few days, as life seemed to be in a standstill.  Federal buildings were closed.  Emergency staff volunteered to go assist in New York, as well as Washington.  Blood banks were flooded with people, as were charities with generous donations for those in need.  People, for a brief period in time, stopped calling themselves liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, ethnicity-American, or what have you.  For a time, what divided us didn't matter.  What politics we had didn't matter.  What we thought of one other, what prejudices we had towards one another, what grudges, what petty arguments, what dark thoughts we might have had for each other, didn't matter.  We were just one people who were trying to help those in need, trying to help our fellow man in whatever way we could, however small. We were just Americans. 

In the years following the fall of the towers, I have seen a lot more death on TV, as more men have tried to use evil and death to try and spread their own messages and agenda, only to have said messages and agenda to be lost by their methods.  I have seen a lot of my generation, and other generations, go overseas to fight enemy threats, both justified and non-justified.  I have seen a lot of my generation, and other generations lose countless men and women, who had it not been for the selfish actions of a few men, perhaps could have made an huge positive impact in our world had evens maybe been different.  

And yet, though I've seen ample evidence of man's evil, that has paled in comparison to the evidence I've seen of man's goodness.  Even though we see so much evidence of death, of destruction, we have even more images of people trying to help their fellow men, people running into the inferno, to save people they didn't know, and yet to them, it was like trying to save a brother, a sister, a father, a mother, a child.  We have seen courage, of strength, of passion, which far outweighs the evil that was committed, and will always continue to do so.

On 9/11, I saw what humanity at it's worst could be.  I also saw that humanity, at it's best, would always overcome it.  And it's something I try to remember, and tell people whenever I can.  Humanity is a good thing, a beautiful thing, and though it may be capable of some truly awful things, there is always enough goodness to overcome that.  We just need to remember that, believe in that, and have faith in that.  

Always believe in our goodness.  I will continue to do so.

The Blackwing Pearl: A Blackwing of a different color.

The original Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 continues to entrance people, even almost two decades after the final pencil shipped off of the line in 1998 or so.  Lots of ink, both digital and literal, have been spilled extolling the virtues of what is regarded to be the greatest pencil ever created.  Fan pages exist, dedicated to the original pencil.  The rare Blackwing sighting in the wilds of eBay commands bidding wars, provided it begins at a reasonable price.  I even have firsthand evidence of this fascination, as my review of the Palomino Blackwing 602 is now the most popular piece of writing that I have ever written.

It's not hard to see why from an aesthetic point of view.  It's an attractive pencil, with it's distinct replaceable eraser design, dark line, and rather classy looking stamping on the sides of the pencil.  It looks good in the hands of an artist, and even lends itself well to being used as a prop, as evidenced by it's use on camera in the AMC series Mad Men.

California Cedar, since buying the rights, name and history of the Blackwing, and resurrecting it under their Palomino brand, has done some good work in trying recreate a classic.  However, they have attempted to take what was already a classic and attempt to improve on what was already regarded to be a good thing.  Their original Blackwing, more of a homage to the original is a fine pencil, though still not up the the standards of the original (too dark, supposedly).  Their version of the legendary 602, a fine pencil, is close enough to the original that most, though not all, of it's original fans, have acknowledged it to be close enough to the original that they've adopted it as a replacement.  However, Palomino now has added a new Blackwing to the fray, the Pearl, which should make some new fans of the legendary pencil, while again sparking up the debate as to how close it is to the original.

First, let's get the obvious monkey in the room out of the way.  This is in no way an attempt to try and replicate the original Blackwing, but more of an attempt to try and further the new Blackwing Brand.  As such, if you're looking to see if this particular Blackwing is another try at replicating the original, I'd advise you to refer to my earlier Blackwing 602 review.  However, if you are looking to see if this is a quality writing instrument, and how it performs, then by all means, keep reading.

The Pearl is meant to serve more as a sort of middle ground, an attempt to combine the darkness of the standard Palomino Blackwing, while keeping the firmness of the 602.  As such, this can be looked at more as a middle ground of the two.  Aesthetically, it's a lovely pencil.  It's semi-glossy white finish is very attractive to look at, and the choice of using simply flat black for the wording on the shaft is a solid choice.  The finish itself looks quite nice, and very much like a pearl, but it also makes the pencil feel somewhat different, as well.  It's hard to describe it, but it feels like you are able to keep a better grip on the pencil, to unelegantly put it.  I'm not kidding, if you try and hold onto the 602 and the Pearl with all the pressure you

can muster, and then try and slide the pencil out, you're going to hold onto the Pearl a lot longer than the 602.  The distinctive Blackwing ferrule is still here in all it's glory, although I do think that in this instance, they should have issued the pencil with a pink eraser, rather than a black one.  Still, it's a sweet looking pencil, and an added bonus is that the wording on the pencil doesn't wear off as quickly as the gold lettering on the 602.

However, the key question here, and it's the bottom line of how any pencil performs, is how does the thing write?  Well, in the case of the Pearl, it performs very well.  Like the resurrected 602, this pencil also has a really smooth line, with very little of the "scratchiness", or lack of a better term, that is seen with traditional pencils.  It's even smoother than that of the new 602, which is kinda hard to believe considering how easy that pencil would write.  However, when compared to the 602, the Pearl produces a much darker line.  Many websites, such as Jetpens and Amazon, describe the Pearl as a sort of halfway point between the original Palomino Blackwing and the 602.  As far as where I would pinpoint this on the lead grade scale, if the 602 was meant to be a 4B, I would probably peg this around the 6B range, which makes me entirely curious as how the regular Palomino Blackwing writes (I don't have a box, but I might pick up a box of them if I've exhausted enough of my pencil stock by Christmas.)

However, the Pearl does have it's faults. For starters, I took a Pearl with me to work to serve as my standard work pencil for a week.  While it does produce an incredibly smooth line, because it is of a softer lead grade, it does have the annoying tendency to lose it's point quicker than the standard Number 2 (HB).  As such, though it does produce a nice line, and is rather easy on the land, it does mean that this probably isn't the pencil for you if you want to have a standard everyday work pencil.  However, it does lend itself very nicely to sketching, as I have found out one evening at a livedraw event, I guess if you were composing music, or even jotting down something simply and quick, like a song lyric or two, the Pearl would work well in that instance.  Another problem that is had with this pencil is that it does have some smearing issues.  While the smearing isn't quite as bad as some other pencils I have used, smearing is still a problem if you are trying to use it for journal writing or for any sort of lengthy lyrical composition.  Finally, as with all darker leaded pencils, you do have some ghosting issues if you are trying to erase the Pearl's leaded imprint, although it's not too much of an issue if you have a lighter touch than most (such as I).

So, all in all, would I recommend the Blackwing Pearl?   Yeah, I would.  Despite it's shortcomings, it is a very good pencil.  However, like the majority of the Blackwing line in general, it is more of a niche product than something that you would be able to use on a daily basis.  It has it's uses.  As an art pencil, it rocks, and it's got style in spades.  However, it is a limited product in terms of a daily use pencil, and for that reason alone I would advise you to buy the 602 if you absolutely have to have a Blackwing as a daily use pencil.

Taping Music Off Of The Radio: A Brief Retrospective

Photo by Tramavirtual

My office Christmas party was this past Friday, and as usual, a great time was had, with lots of conversation, some drunken observations (I never drink at these gatherings for fear of becoming the talk of the office), as well as the usual shenanigans that tend to occur between co-workers after hours.  Rewind back to three hours prior, and I was tearing open my closets like I was robbing the place, looking for a roll of wrapping paper to wrap my secret Santa gift.

It was in this ransacking of my own home that I found something that had been tucked away in the back of a closet for quite some time, the sheen of dust already turning it's oily black exterior into a sort of gunmetal grey. I paused over this dusty little container, curious to what I had in there and what may have possessed me to keep this thing over the years.

Most of these tapes were made back in the 1990's, a magical time when I went from a awkward, shy youth to a even more awkward, shy young adult.  The Internet was still in it's infancy, and still had it's potential to become something new and exciting before becoming overrun by Facebook and porn.  MTV still had music in between their reality show programming, and Kurt Loder was years away from being locked in a freezer like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man, only to be thawed out when someone big from the 80's and 90's had passed.  The highlight of the video game world was probably Doom, in all of it's pixelated gore and glory.   Woodstock had returned, was hailed as a success, returned again, and went down in a fiery mess of violence, commercialism and Fred Durst.

The 1990's were also, more than any decade in my humble opinion, plagued by the misfortune of having an overabundance of albums that had perhaps one or two really good songs, with the rest of the album being only a hop skip and  a jump away from being categorized as a fetid sewer.  Keep in mind, the average CD price was around $12 to $15.  In 90's dollars, that was the difference between buying a music just so I could have access to the song Sex And Candy, or using said fundage on a tank of gas, a cheap date, some illegal beer for a kick back, or some other tomfoolery that I may have been up to back in those good old days.

Fortunately children, or those children who are young enough to have been born after 1990 or so, there were ways to get the song if you wanted it bad enough.  The first was to see if you could bum a CD from a friend that happened to be stupid enough to buy the song, usually for another CD that you had been stupid enough to purchase.  However, if you were desperate enough, and had enough patience, there was a way to get around having to pay for the song: taping said song off of the radio.   It's a long dead art, killed by the digital age, but back then, and several generations before then, we had this down to a science.  All you needed was a Memorex, a stereo with a record option, and some time.

The process began with calling the deejay on the request line, offering everything but your first born child for the chance of the song of your dreams to be played.  This tended to be a crap shoot, as deejays, then as now, tend to ahve their own ideas as far as what is good music that should be played.  I usually had the best of luck with Glen Garza, the only guy at our local (only) rock station to play music after 1986.   I hated Magic Mike, who played a non-stop orgy of Van Halen, both from the Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth eras.

Second, you assumed the yoga-esque pose by the radio, waiting like a lion for it's quarry.  Everyone had their own positions, usually some bizarre love child of the utkatasana and malasana poses.  Anything that prevented you from developing a bloodclot in your legs that would lodge itself in your lungs and kill you like Finney from the novel A Separate Peace.  

And there you would wait, often waiting through aggrevating commercials (like the infamous J.J. King of Beepers jingles), and at times shifting your yoga positions to something more comfortable, even taping an occasional song that you might have liked and had not occurred to you.  We all even had the songs that we knew and hated enough to use for bathroom breaks, grab a bite to eat, or go do something productive (in my case, usually something by Rush.)

And who can forget those moments waiting by the radio when your musical quarry, finally DID come on.....only to have the accursed deejay start rambling on about how this was the band's new single, how he thought it was awesome, and the name of the radio station before the song began to play. All the while, you're crouching there with the recorder going on your stereo screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP! I"m trying to get music here!"  Especially if said deejay happened to love the sound of his own voice to talk right up until the lyrics began (unfortunately, also Glen Garza.)

True, I did have enough recordings where I could remix two different sections into one complete song, and I acquired the skill (a useless one) to get it to where it was seemless.  But nothing beat the feeling of recording the song perfectly from one take to another, without interruption, commercials, or egotistical deejay ranting to ruin it.   Over time, I had even had a sort of loose network with my friends, where we each traded different mixtapes amongst each other for other music that we had.  It was like Pokemon, but without the stigma attached to it.  You would talk about new bands you had heard, shared music that you had, and just find different ways to enjoy something that you may have been passionate about.  And I think it's this part of the tapes that is why I kept them for all these years.  It was the memories of sharing and trading tunes with friends, and the different memories of a more innocent and simple time, of days gone by.

P.S.  Fuck you, Glen Garza.  I'm still bitter.

Kony Protest Methods Have Worked Before

My brother and I have an odd relationship.  Sometimes, we can have long and extensive debates about the weirdest of bullshit.   Other times, we are quite in sync with each other, and can have a fairly polite, opinionated, and intellectual conversation.  Yesterday was one of those moments.

Two things can be taken from that conversational piece:

1. My brother is a devilishly handsome son of a bitch.
2. Protests that garner public attention do work when it comes to bringing evil people to justice.

The Kony video, to boil it down to its basest components, details the rebel leaders numerous atrocities, puts a face to his victims, as well as features a call to action.  While the video does oversimplify the numerous other problems in the region, as well as does not call into question the government’s role in not stopping, but allowing an environment where such a man can exist, it is quite a powerful video.  And it’s effort to call the attention of the world through protests (which are beginning to form, judging from my Facebook events list) and the use of the media to call the attention of the powers that be to action against a horrible man reminds me of another incident like this that occurred several years ago.  In the case, it’s the efforts of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, which eventually brought about the extradition, trial, and conviction of Klaus Barbie.
Barbie was a Nazi war criminal, whose actions while serving as the head of the Gestapo in the region resulted in the deaths of up to 14,000 people, earning him the nickname the Butcher of Lyon.  Barbie would later work for the United States as an intelligence agent after the war, spying on the Soviet Union in Germany before eventually taking advantage of the Nazi Ratline (Wikipedia lists it as US built line, while other sources have it listed as ODESSA).  Barbie would work for various South American dictatorships, including Argentina and Bolivia, running guns as well as serving as an advisor.  The 2007 documentary My Enemy's Enemy also raises the possibility that it was Barbie that helped orchestrate the capture and death of Che Guevara.

In time though, Barbie would be hunted by the Klarsfelds, who are a rather interesting couple.  Serge was a Romanian Jew who lost his father to the Holocaust.  Beate was the daughter of a German soldier who, after moving to France and meeting Serge, decided to go to action against former Nazi leaders.   Their methods and some of their actions, to this day, remain controversial to a lot of people, both in and out of Germany.  However, in my opinion, they were very much in the right in going against Barbie.  The Klarsfelds pursuit of Barbie took place over two decades, both in the legal and public areas.  Beate oftentimes flew alone to the countries where Barbie was rumored to be hiding.  Similar to the recent Kony video, which details the atrocities of the rebel leader, Klarsfeld detailed Barbie’s numerous atrocities in a series of interviews with the print and television media, as well as organizing protests in front of government areas.  The protests were often alone, though as time wore on, she did see a swelling of support.  She also gave a bit of a face to the crimes Barbie perpetrated by having a mother who lost three of her four sons to Barbie’s programs and policy along with her on a few of the protests.  Often times, she was arrested, and due to their actions against hunting not just Barbie, but Nazi war criminals in general resulted in death threats and a failed car bomb attack.  In spite of that, the message did spread, and public awareness and outrage escalated over the war criminal, who was protected in part by the military regime at the time, in their midst.  In 1983, with a change in the regime in Bolivia, Barbie was arrested and extradited to France.  He was eventually put on trial, and in 1987, Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, where he died four years later.

In closing, the use of media isn’t a new thing.  While you may question the motives, or even the organization broadcasting said message, the message itself is fairly clear.  It’s meant to draw attention to an unpleasant and perhaps evil man, and to try and stop him.