by Rob Brookman

Here come the planes
They're American planes
Made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said:
Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds
– "O Superman," Laurie Anderson

The day started ominously; the phone downstairs rang several times in quick succession, a sure sign of bad things to come. The callers were friends, family, even a client. Their messages were the same. Turn on the television. A plane crashed into a New York City skyscraper.

Just roused from sleep, not yet in the invigorating grip of caffeine and suffering the hint of a hangover, the images broadcast from Gotham appeared unreal, almost cartoonish. Inky smoke belched from the upper floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Bits of paper and other debris wafted in the wind like hellish confetti. Reporters on the ground in Manhattan struggled to define the evolving situation for the anchors confined in their network studios – it was an airplane that inflicted the damage, perhaps even a jet, according to eyewitnesses. Despite initial suspicions, it wasn’t a bomb. Surely, it was a tragic accident.

It wasn’t an accident, of course, a fact made all too clear just five minutes after I began watching the scene unfold.

In some ways, the initial images of the second jet, caught live by the networks, remain the most horrible. Shot from a distance – perhaps from Uptown, perhaps from a New Jersey rooftop, it was hard for a non-New Yorker to tell – they mirrored the way most of us witness any tragedy, from a distance, looking through the confused, fragmented kaleidoscope that is real time. For the split second it was on the screen, United Airlines flight 175 looked impossibly small and insignificant, a pitiful black dot set against the vast, powerful tableau of lower Manhattan. Only the fireball that spit from the South Tower testified to its awesome destructive might.

Time and again on September 11, what appeared small was revealed as large, and what seemed large proved small. As planes, buildings and so many thousands of lives were transformed into ghostly rubble, it was impossible not to feel the bone-deep chill of old comforts, old priorities and old confidences being wiped away. Even the familiar white noise of American life – the omnipresent hum of commerce – was hushed into a stunned silence.

Well, you don't know me, but I know you
And I've got a message to give to you
Here come the planes
So you better get ready
Ready to go
– "O Superman," Laurie Anderson

In the quiet that descended on Tuesday, music, too, lost its voice. A handful of rock radio stations here suspended regular programming and opened the phone lines to listeners. At my neighborhood bar, where I retreated for companionship, the stereo was yoked into service amplifying the television. Concerts were cancelled throughout the city and almost everywhere else.

I found I had no stomach for spinning discs at home, either. When I could tear myself away from the uninterrupted news coverage, I tried: Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen, Public Enemy, Orüj Güvenc, Thomas Mapfumo, Thelonious Monk, Aaron Copeland, anything that would signify. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, though, music seemed a poor palliative, a good-time trifle capable only of washing clean the stain of small-time troubles.

It’s not really a trifle, of course, not in ordinary times, when hope at least musters the strength to counterbalance fear. Hope, after all, is the coin of realm in popular music, the implicit backbone that props up sad songs and happy ones, declarations of love and howls of anger. But when hope is hard to come by, when simple security suddenly takes center stage in your hierarchy of needs, many of pop’s bedrock sentiments and promises ring false or, worse still, silly. In the days immediately following September 11, I found myself hearing much of my music collection as a nostalgic relic from a different time.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice
And when justice is gone, there's always force
And when force is gone, there's always Mom
– "O Superman," Laurie Anderson

As I write this, a week after the attacks, I think many things about American life have changed profoundly, changes that may persist for months, maybe for much, much longer. But hope, a resilient facet of the human condition, has gradually crept back. And with it, my taste for sounds made for pleasure and pleasure alone.

Yesterday, I sought out the least attractive, least sentimental CD I could find, and settled on Flipper’s debut. I came to the track "Life," the one that goes "Life! Life! Life is the only thing worth living for" (and, parenthetically, "I know it has its ups and downs"), and thought it sounded pretty damn great, even a bit uplifting. I tried other discs, as well, ones by Joe Tex and Sebadoh, X and the Magnetic Fields. They sounded pretty great, too. Perhaps this week I’ll even get around to playing the stack of unopened CDs I received just days after the events of September 11.

For many Americans, the last weeks have afforded a brief snapshot of another world, a very real world where constant terror, ongoing devastation, and crushing, unrelieved poverty amount to a life in which the volume is forever turned down, in which entertainment is forever tempered by despair. Glimpsing that other world should not make us feel frivolous. It should make us feel very, very fortunate.

May that fortune not desert any of us again.

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