I'm finally catching up on the ShaBlog after a week of Jewish music events here in Manhattan, organized by Oyhoo in the New York Jewish Music and Heritage Festival. On Monday, September 11, I attended the Jewish Music Awards at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. I was also a member of the board of journalists who nominated and voted for the finalists in each category.
The show was hosted by actress and comedienne, Jackie Hoffman, whose musical interludes, such as "You're Not Buddhist, You're Jewish!", kept the audience entertained after somewhat awkward moments in the show.
Admittedly, while the venue was fantastic, and the live performances were superb, the event was poorly attended, which often resulted in embarrassingly weak audience reaction and applause. This reserved audience phenomenon became apparent when the talented DJ rap artist BennyBwoy and his highly energized crew of Jamaican jammers put their groove on the stage, only to be met with befuddlement from the audience, who were not hip enough to translate the Jamaican dialectic requests to join in with clapping or echoing "ho, ho!" I'm not sure why so few people attended the show ... It could have been the price, or a lack of promotion, or not enough interest being generated in these upcoming Jewish artists. But for some reason I was reminded of a scene from This Is Spinal Tap, when their band manager lamented, "I’ve told them a hundred times: put ‘Spinal Tap’ first and ‘Puppet Show’ last!"
After the show, I took a moment to walk by the September 11 light memorial nearby. As I gazed skyward, my eyes following the vertical path of these beams of light, I could see highly luminescent objects fluttering about. They looked like spirits trapped in an ethereal cage. I'm not sure what I was seeing, but I suspect it was moths, attracted by the light. It reminded me of all the office papers that blew around in the sky after the towers fell five years ago.
Friend and fellow blogger Esther Kustanowitz was there, too. She writes,
We have had our pillars of smoke and fire, which led us into chaos and despair; now we have our pillars of light, our luminescent hope that extends forever into the heavens, melting together at the top and seeming to form rungs. We climb, unsure of where we'll end up, but we use the ladder because it is our legacy.
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One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying "We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I've ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four "pilots" among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake "pilot" of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These "hijackers" somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn't work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn't work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won't let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you "aren't supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn't respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn't happen, not even close. Somehow these "hijackers" must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn't have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were "supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these "hijackers" wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more
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