Seven years

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Stockhausen's death was a great work of art

Call me a boor, but in my entire life, I've listened to exactly one composition of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the avant-garde composer who died the other day. It was about 35 years ago, and I have no recollection which composition it was, as if it makes any difference.

Stockhausen made some waves in the days following 9/11:

Not all of his "theories" deserved respect. Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, Stockhausen outraged much of the world when he called the attacks "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there," he elaborated. "You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 [sic] people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment."

Of course, he said it in German, not in English, but you can read the original here.

I don't exactly care whether it was taken out of context, as Stockhausen claimed. I'm not sure how you could say such a thing, out of context or not.

What's fitting, now, is that Stockhausen has finally performed a limited test of his theory of art. And he's proved that his death is a great work of art, greater by far than the rest of his opus.

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Six years

Last year's thoughts here. Two years ago here.

We seem to be sick of it already. And, of course, some of the families of 9/11 victims are suing. Yeah, that'll help.

UPDATE: Allah at HotAir has a great video excerpt from the Naudet brothers filming in the lobby of WTC 1 when WTC 2 collapsed.

UPDATE: This page from the BBC explains to children why 9/11 happened. It is totally beyond belief. (via PowerLine) See also this about the BBC's explanation. -- UPDATE (9/12): Removed. (via HotAir)

UPDATE: If the attacks had been thwarted . . . (via HotAir)

UPDATE: More on 9/11 "fatigue" from OyVayBlog. (hat tip: Soccer Dad)

UPDATE: Almost forgot this one from last week. HotAir had a video collecting clips from morning news shows at 8:00 a.m. the morning of the attack. It's eerie looking back at it.

UPDATE (9/12): Jonah Goldberg weighs in on the "emotional half-life of 9/11." (via Ace, who notes how far Andrew Sullivan has fallen in six years)

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Blurring history

This has been bugging me for the past three days.

On Sunday, the Book Review section of the New York Times gave its cover to Frank Rich's review of a novel by Don DeLillo called "Falling Man." The reference, of course, is to the iconic photo of a man falling from one of the World Trade Center towers on September 11.




The backstory is in an article in Esquire by Tom Junod, called "The Falling Man," which was published two years after the events. The editorial intro to the Junod article starts this way:

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001.

How interesting, then, that the NY Times book review has this altered photo on its cover:


I don't even want to start analyzing the Times's motives for turning this human being, living his final seconds, into nothing but a black spot. It just makes me too ill.

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