Monday, July 28, 2003
When the BBC needs to advertise how great it's news service is it periodically picks on the fall of the Berlin Wall as an example of how the BBC was there to document a great moment in late twentieth century history. This it most certainly was, but from what I remember, the news coverage, by the BBC and everyone, completely failed to capture any drama in the moment. It never does. Instead, in those usually unflappable tones, it seeks to smother the moment in heavy velvet drapes and consign them to history. It also seeks to disconnect viewers from the emotion of the moment on the off chance that they might think "That looks like a good idea, let's try that here!" Only when it's safely in the past, by a good few years, are we allowed to look back and acknowledge it's momentus nature.
I remember how undramatic the events of September 11th 2001 were (I refuse to refer to it as 9-11, although the BBC itself now does, even though it uses the UK data format dd-mm-yyyy for everything else). I was on my day off, on the other side of the Atlantic and had no relatives or friends involved. I must admit that as I saw the towers fall my first thoughts were to who the Americans were going to blame and punish. It wasn't that I was callous (believe it or not), but on TV we can see hundreds, millions, entire planets of people being destroyed and it gets called fiction. It's incredibly easy for the mind to detach and start thinking about how poor the special effects are in tragedy. I spent most of the afternoon watching the one American newsfeed I had access to, CNBC Europe which, I believe, switched over to it's pure news feed for a couple of days. And here for me was the only emotional time, when I could hear presenters voices cracked as they realised they had friends and colleagues in the WTC when those planes hit. Switching back to the BBC News and it was all reported with the same enthusiasm as the news of a cat being stuck in a tree in Hertfordshire. 'Professionalism' always.
Which is a long and rambling prelude to a very short entry. John Adams conducted and presented his WTC Memorial piece On the Transmigration of Souls at The Proms last night. I'm kicking myself that I didn't record it. It was haunting, very beautiful and holy, which is a strange word for an atheist such as me to use, but it conjured that idea of sensory overload that many artists in different mediums use to suggest the journey into the afterlife. It was a carefully constructed landscape consisting of sound samples, two choirs and an orchestra, conjuring up at once, confusion, desolation but always the hope for something positive to come out of any great tragedy. It suggested the slow dissolution of the gestalt of all the people who died in the WTC as their souls went on to whatever lay beyond. And it's the one thing in this entire sorry business that came closest to bringing out an emotional response from me.
I remember how undramatic the events of September 11th 2001 were (I refuse to refer to it as 9-11, although the BBC itself now does, even though it uses the UK data format dd-mm-yyyy for everything else). I was on my day off, on the other side of the Atlantic and had no relatives or friends involved. I must admit that as I saw the towers fall my first thoughts were to who the Americans were going to blame and punish. It wasn't that I was callous (believe it or not), but on TV we can see hundreds, millions, entire planets of people being destroyed and it gets called fiction. It's incredibly easy for the mind to detach and start thinking about how poor the special effects are in tragedy. I spent most of the afternoon watching the one American newsfeed I had access to, CNBC Europe which, I believe, switched over to it's pure news feed for a couple of days. And here for me was the only emotional time, when I could hear presenters voices cracked as they realised they had friends and colleagues in the WTC when those planes hit. Switching back to the BBC News and it was all reported with the same enthusiasm as the news of a cat being stuck in a tree in Hertfordshire. 'Professionalism' always.
Which is a long and rambling prelude to a very short entry. John Adams conducted and presented his WTC Memorial piece On the Transmigration of Souls at The Proms last night. I'm kicking myself that I didn't record it. It was haunting, very beautiful and holy, which is a strange word for an atheist such as me to use, but it conjured that idea of sensory overload that many artists in different mediums use to suggest the journey into the afterlife. It was a carefully constructed landscape consisting of sound samples, two choirs and an orchestra, conjuring up at once, confusion, desolation but always the hope for something positive to come out of any great tragedy. It suggested the slow dissolution of the gestalt of all the people who died in the WTC as their souls went on to whatever lay beyond. And it's the one thing in this entire sorry business that came closest to bringing out an emotional response from me.
