June 23, 2007

An e-mail from a reader, C., in Maryland . . .

“I was out of work on 9/11. Not just laid off. Assassinated. Shot in the back. . . I tangled with the CEO of a richly-funded start-up and got whacked. It was a brutal event . . . He burnt through $60M or so and wanted to pin it all on me, his VP, Sales. He got shown the door shortly thereafter and has never done anything of merit since.

“My former sales guys who I hired for New York had to scramble out of the sales office I opened up for them in the shadows of the WTC and run two or three miles home. My feeling staring at that TV on that morning was one of complete and total loss. How would the world ever return to normal? How would I ever provide for my kids again? I had ruined my career, I thought. And now this.

“Yours was a hard book to look through for me because it brought all that back. My home crumbled with those towers. . . . I am not done with your book, simply owing to my schedule as of late, but watching The News Get Made, and learning what went on on the other side of the lens during the attack is just incredible -- the story of the two brother's in the firehouse is heart-pounding to read -- like the drowning sequence in A Perfect Storm."

EVENTS IN NEW YORK.

Photographer Susan Watts, who was shooting for the New York Daily News on September 11 (see page 22 of Watching the World Change) has a new exhibition opening in New York’s Battery Park on June 28, courtesy of the Alliance For Downtown New York. The show, called “Milestones to Recovery,” is touted a “celebration of the rebirth and revitalizaton of Lower Manhattan," and it will be on view all summer.

Television producer Tom Flynn covered the events of September 11 for CBS (see pages 30-31 and page 134 of the book). Struggling to find a proper voice and an appropirate medium through which to process his strongest experiences and emotions, he settled on an unconventional format: the epic poem. Flynn will recite portions of his riveting “BIKEMAN: This Forever September Morning” as part of a literary showcase on Monday, June 25, at 7 p.m., at the Players Stage in Manhattan’s fabled Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park South, on 20th Street.

On September 11, 2001, Nikki Stern, a communications consultant, lost her husband James Portorti, a geologist and business analyst who was working for the insurance firm Marsh & McLennan. Stern's activism as former executive director of the advocacy group Families of September 11 (see pages 69-73 of the book), along with her accomplishments as a burgeoning writer, have led to her new role as a blogger. She recently launched 1 Womans Vu and I encourage readers to pay a visit.

From Regis LeSommier, New York correspondent for the French newsweekly, Paris Match, responding to the June 16 posting (below), “PARIS’S PADDY-WAGON SNAPS”…

“I agree with most of your comment. ‘They are as reliable in the trenches as they are on the rope line’ sums up the essence of good photographers.

“When my friend [Getty photographer] Spencer Platt got his World Press [Photo Award] this year, he made a point of saying he refuses to be qualified as a war photographer. I do believe there's no such thing for journalists either. We should be able to cover with the same degree of professionalism all sort of stories. If only 2 to 5 per cent of the pictures shown [at the annual Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival each September in] Perpignan are actually published, it has to do with what people want to see in magazines and not only because photo editors suddenly have turned into celebrity zealots.

“[For the upcoming issue of Paris Match], the angle I chose to write about [concerning] the two [photos of the] crying girls is that they tell a lot about our preoccupations. I focused on the link [that] Nick Ut's images made between a time where the war made the headlines and another where there's a war going on but people are more interested in seeing what is happening to an heiress who, a porn video apart, has done absolutely nothing in her life. I don't think there should be any judgment made about it. It is the reality of our time. On the other hand, if celebrities were not interested in Darfur and other causes, we'd probably never hear about them.”