The Billiken's Bluff

On Hot97 Funkmaster Flex has a regular feature called "Air It Out" where listeners 3-way call a friend/lover/co-worker who they are having some issue with and conference in Flex.


[Sidebar: Flex has two of my favorite radio DJ tag lines of all time... Keep it gator and keep it global and Call two Suburbans and a hearse because Funk Flex is killing them.]

He serves as mediator and facilitator. He makes it happen. The couple either works it out or they don't. But the entire radio audience serves as witness to the personal problem. Hot97 consistently runs a promo spot for Flex's feature (they must feel it is particularly good, or representative of what Airing It Out is all about). A woman calls her ex-boyfriend, starts talking, her voice begins to crack, falter and she begins crying:

Nelson, I loved you so much and you left me when I was sick after 9/11. You broke up with me and I want you to apologize.

Nelson apologizes.



I just have this brief raio clip to go on, it is interesting to me.

How much of it this personal and how much is public? Not Hot97's format itself, but Nelson's ex-girlfriend's complaint... Does 9/11 hurt, does her respiratory illness hurt, or does it hurt because she simply wants Nelson back?



Does Hot 97 play this promo because Nelson and his ex-girlfriend's story is unique or because it is full of drama and references That Big September Thing?



These are obvious questions. (That makes sense to me, don't it?)

I watched Larry King and guests discuss Ann Coulter's comments last week on Good Morning America. Coulter spoke about how some widows of 9/11 victims might be capitalizing financially and politically on their husbands' deaths:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much. [..] And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?"

I'd rather die a death of a thousand paper cuts than listen to or look at Ann Coulter. Criticizing her in any systematic way is more than I can bring myself to do. I don't want to have to process her commentary and then react coherently to it. But she has become a news story with her latest comments. Larry and guests discussed (in spite of her venomous outburst) whether or not Coutler's general point can be debated. Is there any merit to it? These commentators asked:

Are we a culture that gives victims carte blanche to speak out in a public forum? Is there a statute of limitations on public grieving (a la Ayatollah Khomeini)?



Are we are a culture that glorifies and caters to victims? (think personal injury lawsuits... think when the Republican PR machine turned vice presidential candidate John Edwards' profession into a dirty word, the expletive - Trial Lawyer)

Ann Coulter asked what really drives these women? (Nelson's ex-girlfriend included). Is it pure visceral grief or is it the potential for something to be gained either - sympathy, financial, or political?

I am interested in how 9/11 is used and portrayed. Because, for starters, "I was there man, fucking 'Nam."







I don't think it affected me much as I mentioned yesterday. I was able to function and become interested in other things as early as the day it happened. But it has certainly affected things around me. Wars have been waged in tangent to it. Politicians invoke it. Vocabulary has been created by it War on Terror, extraordinary rendition, Fabulous' freestyle line al qaeda the talk. Movies, books, songs, presidencies will be referencing and reworking That Big September Thing for the rest of my life.

This is big and broad and I could write for a long time about this but for now I'll confine it to film.

A few movies have done it right. 9.11.01 as background. As a part of the story but just the primer coat. People are not affected by events this large in a constant gut-wrenching (widow's and family members excluded) way. It's more of static, background noise. It's what you read about in the paper as you're riding the subway (in between glancing at an attractive woman sitting across from you). It's what you talk about with your friends in between discussing the Mets, work, and what beer to drink. And actually its that thing that you don't talk about directly with your friends because it is taboo (at least in my small circle). We were there and it is too obvious to be discussed or there is nothing to say. Maybe.

So movie/art that does it right, does it like this... Ground Zero as the view out of Barry Pepper's window while he and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are discussing Ed Norton's imminent prison sentence in 25th Hour. Norton is their childhood, neighborhood friend, 9/11 is something that affected the city they live in. In Pepper's case and location, downtown Manhattan blocks from the WTC, it was shocking and awing but in a more practical sense it changed the view from his high-rise floor to ceiling windows. It dropped housing prices in lower Manhattan. It is background, literally and figuratively. It changed political landscape and altered the Manhattan skyline as viewed driving over the Williamsburg Bridge. The sun shines a little stronger through your window on Fulton Street from 5:00pm to 6:30pm because there is a clear path across the island. There are no obstructions from a 100 story building. This is not cold and heartless. This is how objects and architecture and infrastructure and cities interact with people. So Peppers and Hoffman drink Amstel lights and talk about Norton and whether he will make it in jail. They wonder if he is tough enough and decide he is and remember when they were all young and friends in school. They look out his window perched hundreds of feet above the gutted WTC site. It is a stark image below but they say nothing, maybe Hoffman shakes his head slightly. They drink their beer and talk about their friend.



The Big September Thing in I Heart Huckabees is mentioned in passing during Mancala Hour, and during alternative therapy sessions. Maybe 9/11 is why Jason Schwartzman is in such an existential funk and can't find meaning in his work or life in general, or maybe this depression is because his cat died when he was 7 and his mom told him it's just a cat and who cares and he never learned how to mourn properly and he never was able to move on. Maybe Schwartzman is crusading for greener zoning laws and Mark Wahlberg is fighting for reducing our dependency on petroleum because of 9/11 and Mideast conflict or maybe people are just always taking up causes. The Big September Thing was big and dramatic and singular and easy to reference because it wasn't hidden it was THERE and everywhere.




But it wasn't that big. Nothing is. Schwartzman wants to be a successful project manager for his Open Spaces Coalition, he wants to be recognized poet, he wants to have sex with the French philosopher. Huckabees leaves motivation open-ended (as it is) it doesn't tell you that the world stops and that people are glued to their TV or unable to leave bed after 9.11.01.

Even while everyone was glued to the TV or evacuating downtown, I was still interested in the weather (it was nice) and girls and excited about not having school and excited about the uncertainty and possibilities of things to come, and the fact that I was wandering around and unable to go back to my apartment and only wearing flip flops.

Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life... than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last something was happening to him.

This is not to say that nothing is sacred. Looking at the other end of the dramatic spectrum. Oliver Stone's forthcoming 9/11 film, called World Trade Center does not appear to be nuanced. It is not a slice of something approximating real life. It is melodrama. I think. I imagine it will document the events of the morning of 9/11 as they unfolded at the WTC. Police and Fire Department rescues. 911 operators fielding calls. Some scenes from inside the towers. Attempts at escapes. Scenes from the airports as terrorists boarded planes. Metal detectors. Sirens. Smoke and dust. Panoramic shots from Brooklyn and Queens. News clips. Worried families in Ohio transfixed in front of the TV. Presidential addresses. Dedications to the victims of 9/11 scrolling down the screen at the end. Maybe, probably 3,000 names listed on the screen before the credits roll. I have not watched a trailer for this movie or read anything longer than a paragraph about Stone's film, but I would be shocked if this were not the way the movie played. And really there is nothing wrong with this approach (except one point which I will get to in a minute). This movie has to be made by someone. But it is not a film, a piece of art that does anything. It doesn't show anything we don't already know. My issue is that Nicholas Cage stars in this movie as a police office or a fire fighter. He is horrible. Not just a bad actor, but distinctively so. He always plays a slimy awkward dufus. It's fucking disrespectful to the victims to have Nick Cage play anyone in a movie about 9/11.



This I feel strongly about. A movie loses all footing in reality with Cage starring in it. You can only cast him in preposterously-plotted movie like Lord of War which basically read like the passage Joseph Heller's Catch 22 when Milo Minderbinder forms M&M Enterprises and in the space of one page becomes the sole distributor of vinyl flooring to the Indian subcontinent, the Supreme Ruler of Eurasia and the Sun God of Ethopia.

I have lost my footing in this post.

Stone's approach makes sense though. People want that movie because they want landmarks, benchmarks in their life (I think, speaking on behalf of all people everywhere). Easily identifiable events where everything changed, where it all went wrong or started to go right again.

[Writing about 9/11 feels strange. Like you only have one shot at it and you better get it right in terms of tone and purpose.]

But my point originally... Nelson's ex-girlfriend just wants her boyfriend back. She is Airing Out the fact that she got hurt, not by debris, asbestos, or Bin Laden, but by her boyfriend. She wants him back and wants him to want her.



Argue with me or applaud me.