Spanish Diary
Day 16?
I keep thinking of 9–11. It seems so long ago yet inexplicably close. This all feels like a repeat, or a remake. Do you remember 9–11? It was around 12pm. I had been painting all night so I was sleeping in late. The phone kept ringing. It eventually pulled me out of bed. It was my brother on the other end. “Haven’t you heard? It’s fucking WWIII! This is it, the end!” Or something to that effect. Admittedly, I’m considerably more dramatic than he is but I’m pretty sure he must have said something similar because he would never call me from the office. That might have been the only time actually…
I turned on the TV and there they were, the images the whole world had been watching for about four hours. And that is what I am remembering now, the images, the media. They loved those images. Whoever the mastermind was, was right, the media would devour them. It was the very best kind of pornography. It was so good they got away with playing them over and over and over and over and over and over… Like publishing the daily number of dead now. 753 dead yesterday! 845 in the last 24 hours! 876, the most ever! Wait now it’s 767, up, down, up again… like the stock market during a crises. I’ve never understood why any resources at all are spent on reporting on the stock market. It’s the fucking stock market! Of course it goes up and down!
Porn. You might think it’s about genitalia, kink and fetishes… and you’d be right I suppose, for the most part. Except it doesn’t need to involve genitalia. Blood, violence and death are just as effective.
I keep thinking about 9–11 and Art Spiegelman’s comics for The New Yorker, in particular one titled “Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop”. I keep thinking about 9–11 and how we all got used to the “new normal” of constant “breaking news”, red and white news tickers scrolling on the bottom of our screens, and how after the shock and the media induced permanent reminder of terror we were in comfortable front row seats for the next great shock of the 21st century, the global financial meltdown of 2008. I keep thinking of 9–11…
