Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Year 02

by

So, now it is the morning after and more tiny details are creeping out about cell phone calls and arrests in Florida and etc. However, i won’t be linking the majority of this day two news, and i want to talk about the reasons why.

I am a student of Journalism and, while i lack a vast majority of the knowledge i will (hopefully) eventually be in possession of, i am both very aware and very critical of the dissemination of information in America. In fact, that is probably part of the reason that i am so continually interested and involved with personal publishing.

I am of the very concrete opinion that in a crisis of national importance the networks over-report the most basic and inconsequential of details and too often ignore the most basic facts of an investigation. What is excellent about obtaining breaking news online is that while news can be continually updated it doesn’t have to be continuously live. This means that the facts of a situation can continue to be present while the latest news can be appended to the top of the file.

Despite this fact, the major news outlets with normally reliable websites remained wholly ignorant of how to report such an important situation online. Simple facts like the time of impact were wholly absent from early versions of the story, and i had to view four different news services before piecing together my initial post with the NBC news photo.

I won’t touch upon the inadequacy of internet servers to handle crucial amounts of traffic because the situation became all-too-evident yesterday as CNN and MSNBC pitched all of their various bells and whistles overboard to save on bandwidth. I am primarily concerned with the way we report news, and what we report. Today coverage is focusing on individual families and acts of heroism, and this is totally appropriate and puts a human face on such a mind-boggling situation. However, in the early hours of a tragedy it is not what the general public most needs to initially see and hear.

Essentially, when an entire nation brings their focus to bear on a single state, city, or square block, the news media should be concerned with providing and maintaining an accurate narrative, correct and up-to-date statistics, and reliable eye witness reports. This does not include bringing in blood-thirsty “military experts” who are practically volunteering to deliver bombs themselves to “whoever” is responsible. It does not include repeatedly asking for the obviously unavailable casualty numbers throughout the early afternoon and into the evening. It does not include asking any and all New Yorkers to contribute yet another description of one of the airplanes’ impacts with the World Trade Center.

Human interest is definitely a point of any breaking news story, but my primary concern yesterday was to distill all of the news that had emerged so that anyone could see a single picture or read a single paragraph and glean important facts. The network coverage on ABC and MSNBC broke reports of the flight numbers and the names of the aircraft carriers shortly after noon yesterday, yet the flight numbers didn’t reach a rapid rotation in the coverage for well over an hour and this morning news outlets are reporting the presence of the aircraft carrier as though it slunk it under cover of night. There is a certain something to be said for continuously involving the viewer in the events so that they feel as though they are part of the journalistic process, but i find it disturbing that we have so few high-end news outlets in America when there is obviously a whole nation who are not hungry for death tolls or perpetrators, but who just want to know what is happening to their friends & family in other parts of the country.

Networks are afraid to cut away from coverage for any reason, and rightly so; there is always the chance of more breaking news and always a fresh viewer tuning in. However, not everyone wants a continuous feed of repetitive news, and that is why i turned on my computer at work before i turned on a radio or a television. As was pointed out by various sources yesterday, the internet is truly amazing because it is an entirely decentralized means of obtaining information, and it was this decentralization that provided the most important details as yesterday progressed. However, it is not unreasonable to expect a few reliable sources to be intermingled with this rush of facts from all sides, and i suppose i’m just surprised that the most consistently reliable source that i have found so far is not necessarily a formal news site, but the personally owned public forum at MetaFilter. Perhaps i simply need to change my ideas about a reliable source is, but i think that we all equally need to change our ideas about what we should be expecting from these sources.

I have no personal response to yesterday’s events yet because at the very root of me i am still numb about it all. However, just as yesterday morning my first instinct was to physically confirm news and then distribute it to my co-workers, my primary continuing concern is the inadequacy of some of the reporters and news services who we were relying on to inform us of the most basic details about this national emergency. I suppose in the face of such a disaster the only way i can feel like i have an impact on anything is to do this.

Blagh.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5640337/

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I’m attempting to construct a timeline.

This morning at least four commercial airline flights were hijacked, though it remains unclear at what point in their itinerary their paths were diverted. The flights were American Airlines #11 (Boston to LA) and #77 (Dulles to LA) as well as United Airlines #93 (Newark to SF) and #175 (Douglas in VA to LA). The contact numbers for the airlines are 1-800-245-0999 and 1-800-932-8555, respectively. Flight #11 was on it’s regular flight path until it took a sharp turn in upstate New York. A flight path indicator shows that it made a beeline for New York City. Despite initial reports that may have been to the contrary, three of the planes were Boeing 757 and 767’s.

At 8:42 AM there was an explosion that was the result of a plane colliding with one of the World Trade Center Towers. Immediately people were told to evacuate, but in the unaffected building the evacuation order was rescinded and people returned to their offices. Under a half hour later (roughly 18 minutes) a second passenger airplane appeared on the skyline and collided with the second largely unevacuated tower. This was broadcast nationally on live network television.

Shortly thereafter (before 10:15am) a third airplane slammed into the Pentagon, entering in it’s E-ring, and penetrating into the 4th and 5th corridors of the C & D rings. Debris spread as far as the E ring. No specific office in the Pentagon appears to have been targeted. There have been scattered reports of a car bomb at the State Building and an attack on Camp David, but to this point they remain unconfirmed. However, a plane carrying 38 passengers, 2 pilots, and 5 flight attendants crashed in midstate Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh. My local Fox affiliate reported that someone inside the plane called local county dispatchers and claimed that they had been hijacked shortly before the crash. There is still little speculation on where this flight had been headed or if the unplanned grounded was a result of a herioc act by the crew. There are no reported survivors.

All told the plain crashes themselves involved over 260 casualties.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5619393/

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Not to be a newsmonger, but i am a Journalism student, and so far the coverage of this is ridiculous.


Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City this morning within less than a half hour of each other. So far there is no official word on the motive or on any casualties. The first plane struck shortly before 9am and was described by witnesses as a small twin engine passenger jet. A witness from Dow Jones was quoted as stating that “it looked like the wing crashed down to the street” despite the fact that the majority of the aircraft remain lodged in the upper floors of the building.

The second plane was filmed by television cameras already present as a result of the first crash, and appeared to be a Boeing 737. MSNBC reports that “the FBI said it was investigating reports of a hijacking. A United Airlines employee said he had heard reports that an American Airlines jet had been hijacked and was one of the two aircraft that flew into the center. It was not clear if there were passengers on board.”


The last infamous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred on February 26th, 1993 in the form of a truck bomb. The blast killed six people in injured over a thousand others.


I’ll continue to update with distilled news as it breaks.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5611509/

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This morning i was walking down Walnut street listening to The Green Album and “Hash Pipe” came on and i swear i just started crying right in the middle of the intersection of 39th and Walnut.

For those of you not familiar with Weezer’s vast musical catalogue, “Hash Pipe” isn’t a very sad song. In fact, it’s a song that for all intents and purposes is an emotional flatline; it hardly makes narrative sense to begin with, let alone exuding any sort of sentiment. Yet, there i was in the middle of the street at eight thirty five in my Drexel polo shirt shedding tears (and probably being the laughing stock of every Penn student that passed me on their way to class).

Although i’ve always liked Weezer i was never really a “fan” due to that fact that the band is all boys, and i was only into girls. However, last year Gina and I inexplicably were able to obtain tickets to their sold out warmup show in Philly, and to honor the occasion i bought their eponymous album so i could refresh my memory of their most famous songs. For the vast majority of the intervening year i was happy to sit and listen to the familiar blue album, and to sing it at parties and appreciate it as classic modern alternative rock, if there is such a thing.

I bought Pinkerton for Gina years ago when it had just come out, but i had never really listened to the album all the way through. As a result the only songs i really knew “El Scorcho,” “Good Life,” and “Pink Triangle.” With the impending release of Weezer’s 2001 disc i began searching for Pink only to discover that it was nearly impossible to find… chain stores were out of stock and Weezer is virtually nonexistent in Philly used cd stores. Finally i broke down and ordered from Cheap-Cds. It came in on a quiet day in admissions; i put it on and it sounded nice.

At some point the album came home with me and was left indefinitely in my stereo and the songs started seeping into the nooks and crannies of my brain as the disc spun and spun again on repeat. By the beginning of June i had decided that Pinkerton was the answer to Ani DiFranco’s Dilate: wronged, raw, desperate, sexual, and loud (not to mention self-produced). Suddenly i found myself with a relationship album that i could actually identify with – frustration and breaking it off from the boys’ point of view.

Back to this morning. There i was crying in the middle of the street trying to sniffle away my tears or pass them off as an allergy attack. And i found myself wondering: “Why didn’t i cry yesterday when i was listening to Pinkerton?”

The answer is not an easy thing to nail down. At some point during my identification with Weezer’s second album i decided that it was something that i should be able to do… it was something that i should be able to sonically and emotionally recreate in my own fashion. In the virtually listenerless vacuum that my music exists in i should be able to have those songs and to create that sort of sonic equivalent to an open wound.

Some people just identify with an album because they can chill to it, or because some of the lyrics seem to apply to their life. When i identify with music it suddenly becomes a part of my own catalogue, with each song potentially mated with one of my own as a fluid a-side and b-side or as the ebb and flow of a live performance. There are plenty of albums that i like and love, but if i don’t picture myself onstage singing the songs they are not works that i have a large personal overlap with; i just dig the music. Whereas i typically make mismatched or gender-bending pairings between myself and other artists, with Weezer there are songs that are truly twins of my own progeny, separated only by the physical age and emotional distance between Rivers Cuomo and I.

My bitter pairing of “Splinter” & “Hold On Me” is just a weary attempt to escape from someone else’s bed, while “Tired of Sex” laments that being stuck there doesn’t do one much good in the end. “Unstrung” shares its broken heart and strings with “Falling For You.” “Over You” plays with the pushing/pulling gravity of an imploding relationship, but it cannot admit to enjoying the pull the way “Getchoo” does. “Up & Down” is the culmination of the emotions… the breaking point that nothing on Weezer’s album ever gets to but everything seems to inexorably lean towards. My songs aren’t as mature as Rivers’, and it shows in that i am so focused on the breaking while he is focused on the emotions on either side of it. “No Second Chance” laments a relationship that fell apart without ever directly identifying the person its addressing; its mirror is the tangled web between “Across the Sea,” “El Scorcho,” and the mournful “Butterfly” – songs that are more concerned with lusting, liking, and losing rather than just with the snap of a heart torn in two. Each song in that trio is tied into someone and their life more than i’ve allowed any of my songs to be with the possible exception of “Up & Down.”

Or, maybe i’m full of it and i get off on comparing my meager songwriter existence to today’s darlings of rock. I am by no means a great fan of Weezer’s new disc, but today on the street the oohs and claps of “Photograph” were sucked backwards into feedback and out came “Hash Pipe” and i unexpectedly felt that sudden tug of identification. It felt as though i was watching a video of myself after i write my Pinkerton (or my Dilate) as a cohesive album and then casually discard it to move onto crunchier guitars and more fun. “Hash Pipe” is Weezer taking itself less seriously as a band but more seriously as a production. I have yet to let go of the emotions of “Under My Skin,” and i am still writing from the trailing emotions of this year’s wounds… when will i ever be able to tie them up neatly, package them, and then move on to write something that will in its own way supersede them all?

Heaven only knows. Until then i suppose we can just blame my allergies…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5604037/

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Yesterday was walking walking walking, starting out in my apartment skittering from floor to floor and then off to the office and around the campus and then with Gina delving far into center city where i somehow managed to spend under $20 on a shopping trip for once in my life and then back to university city to walk in circles upon circles that eventually left me sweating and smiling heading back up the stairs of my apartment.

It seems like Gina and i can have one endlessly strung out conversation that will last us from the beginning of whenever we see each other all the way until when she finally has to get back to her apartment to continue with her own life rather than with our all-too-briefly shared one, and yesterday was no exception. I don’t know how we wind up talking about sushi and the existence of an afterlife and cool brands of wah-pedals and bars on South Street that got busted for selling coke all at once with hardly a pause for breath, but we definitely do.

Two intrinsically linked things came out of our infinite conversation that keep echoing in my head, and those things are coping and karma. Gina and i have known each other for eight years now, and in the history of our friendship we can find many examples of events that in retrospect look totally different to us than they felt at the time. Both of us were entirely emotionally unhealthy heading into our last year of high school, though neither one of us would have admitted it to the other (or anyone else) (or ourselves) at the time. Gina had a great new boyfriend and was sure to be a lead in the play, my guitar playing skills had picked up and i was accepted into all of the AP classes i wanted … things all seemed good. Of course, looks deceive, and i was depressed about life and college and even though i was past being obsessed with my weight on a day to day basis i was entirely too thin and Gina was my best friend at the time but she had to deal with her own set of problems that i won’t even begin to enumerate here. And now we get to reflect on the situation and reveal what was going on inside at the time.

Mentioning such meager problems in my life makes me feel like a lightweight, especially considering that i came through it all not significantly worse for the wear. What keeps me wondering about the way the world operates is that at the time i would have told you that i was happy and doing well but looking back i can see through that to my life being relatively empty and hollow at the time. I don’t know how i kept from being miserable and sick and exhausted and defeated. Maybe i was all of that and i didn’t even realize it at the time (and still don’t).

This is where karma comes in. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, and visa versa. Whether or not karma exists as an actual repayment for your actions in life it is present in that your choices will alter you and your psyche for the rest of your life. Comparatively, my choices were easy and my hurdles were not high and i didn’t even think about balking at them at the time, and i think the fact that i didn’t flinch has left me as the relatively healthy person i am now – three years after the fact. What makes me really wonder about life, though, really wonder, is the people who were not ever allowed to make an easy choice and who have always been presented with hurdle after hurdle to leap. I know too many people in my life who have had to face too many challenges, and almost too many of them to believe have somehow walked through all of their fire and brimstone and still manage to smile every day; that isn’t to say that they don’t have problems and issues, but that they aren’t consumed by them all the time.

I am not an especially strong person, and my amassed karma must be equally tiny in relation to the world on the whole. I have never been extremely sick, i have two healthy parents who i have relatively open lines of communication with, i have never been financially in danger of losing my home or my possessions, and i have never been physically or emotionally threatened so much that i was unable to defend myself. But, i know people who have battled health problems for years, who have lost parents to feuds and time, who have lived on incomes stretched to the breaking point, and who have endured assaults on their physical and emotional well being on more than one occasion. What really scares me about life is that sometimes all of this is inflicted on one family… even one person, and that they are left to come through it or to fail somewhere in the middle. I know people who failed and are stuck endlessly in a feedback loop of emotional and physical trauma that they will inflict upon themselves if no one else will do it for them, but what amazes me about life is that for every one of those people i know more than one person who still believes fully in everything life has to offer them rather than inflict upon them after battling a similar set of circumstances. Everyone who has faced against a difficult set of circumstances has problems and regrets, but not every one of those people can wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and that power alone is something that stuns me.

What’s my point? Who knows… is there ever one, really? The point, i suppose, is that my tiny mound of shiny karma is but a pebble in the face of what some people have amassed, and that i just hope that they all get to redeem what life owes to them… and that i will get to see them enjoy every second of it; i’d gladly trade in my karma just for that.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5573008/