a PM from Ken?



Edited By Ken'sPen on May 23 2002 at 2:05

What's your favorite top 10 list?

Top 10 Reasons I hate K1d?

Top 10 Reasons I love teh Seph?

Come now and "kibutz"(sp?) with me.

If different music played for each board member, what song woud you hear?

For instance, when you read Maynard's posts, would you hear Tool's "Maynard's Dick"?
When you read Spit's, would you hear Tom Petty's "Roll Another Joint"?

NYTimes: Photographer at Ground Zero

Quote:Even in a Moonscape of Tragedy, Beauty Is in the Eye
By SARAH BOXER


Is it unseemly now or ever to talk about the beauty of the World Trade Center's ruins? When the towers collapsed, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz was 300 miles away, on Cape Cod. Twelve days later he was closer than any other photographer. He now has thousands of photographs documenting the rescue, recovery and raking of the site, and admits to an obsession.

But there is something beyond obsession. With these photographs a crucial turning point has been reached in the visual history of ground zero. For the first time the ruins are being presented as beautiful.

"I wasn't going to limit myself to making it only a drear and tragic event," Mr. Meyerowitz said yesterday during a phone interview. "The worst happened the day the towers fell."

Then beauty slipped in. Photographing the aftermath was "a lesson in transcendence," he said.

"This event will fade, and time and nature will move us along," Mr. Meyerowitz continued. And in some sense, nature already has taken over. Mankind attacked the towers, he said, but "the forces of nature brought it down." That is, gravity made the buildings collapse.

"Nature strewed things about in a particular way," he said, in a way that was awesomely beautiful. And the light itself had a way of transforming the site of horror.

A few weeks ago Mr. Meyerowitz presented "After Sept. 11: Images From Ground Zero," a slide show and talk about his photographic adventures in what he called "the forbidden city." During that talk at New York University Law School, sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities, he used the word beauty more than once. He spoke of nostalgia. And there was even some bravado.

At one point in the evening Mr. Meyerowitz asked for a show of hands. "How many people have been to the site?" Lots of hands shot up. "In the site?" he queried doubtfully. The hands came down.

It was not easy getting into the site, he explained.

Before Sept. 11 Mr. Meyerowitz, who is known for his color landscapes, cityscapes and street scenes, often photographed the trade towers as a kind of urban mountain range, for the light and air around them.

After the disaster everything changed. The mountains were piles of twisted metal. The dominant elements were smoke and water. And it was nearly impossible to get close. When he first aimed his camera at ground zero, he said, a police officer, a woman, punched him in the shoulder and rebuked him: "No photos, buddy! This is a crime scene."

Mr. Meyerowitz reached for his nonexistent press card, but before he could come up empty-handed, the officer directed him to the press area cordoned off with yellow police tape. Mr. Meyerowitz vowed that he would not be among the penned-in press corps. And he kept his promise.

He went instead to the Museum of the City of New York and asked Robert R. MacDonald, the director, for a letter to get him into the site. In return Mr. Meyerowitz told Mr. MacDonald that the museum would get all of the ground zero pictures he produced.

The letter did not do much good as a ticket to ground zero. Mr. Meyerowitz kept getting tossed out, until finally he found someone who took him seriously. That was Amodeo Pulley, a detective in the Arson and Explosion Squad, who encouraged Mr. Meyerowitz to call him whenever he had trouble getting in. "I called every single day," Mr. Meyerowitz said.

Now, after months of shooting four or five days a week, Mr. Meyerowitz has amassed 7,000 photographs. A show of 27 of those pictures, sponsored by the United States State Department, is now traveling the world. Mr. Meyerowitz plans to finish shooting only when the last column from the World Trade Center is finally draped in a flag and removed, in about three weeks. He and the Museum of the City of New York are seeking funds for an exhibition of the photographs planned for August in the lobby at 195 Broadway, at Fulton Street.

During the slide show Mr. Meyerowitz showed an assortment of his pictures, starting with a shot of a 70-foot-deep pile of wreckage. He explained: "One floor fell on top of another," so that as many as 10 floors were compressed into about a foot of space, like an immense book. "What fell was mostly metal," he said. The cement vaporized. "To not see concrete was astonishing," he added.

Mr. Meyerowitz said he is not attracted by natural disasters and wars. "But to see the physical spectacle opened my eyes to what you could photograph." Was he looking for art among the ruins? One picture, taken in the dark, showed firefighters at the south tower who had found one of their own. The scene was "laid out in front of me, like `Night Watch' " he said, referring to the Rembrandt painting.

A shot of rescue workers sitting around on assorted chairs that had come out of the World Trade Center — cafeteria chairs, conference chairs, Alvar Aalto chairs — recalled to him, he said, photographs of Civil War soldiers sitting in front of their tents.

Small rescue cities, he noted, popped up near the site. And they got more elaborate as time wore on. There were tarpaulins, then party tents, then a wooden house with windows built for the firefighters. The biggest white tent, with showers, massages and a dining room was called the Taj Mahal.

There were wash stations, too. "You couldn't leave the site without being hosed down," he said. And there were scrims: over windows, over buildings and over trucks. Even the tombstones at St. Paul's Chapel were protected with tiny white tents.

Mr. Meyerowitz betrayed a flair for poetry. Showing a picture of a parking meter with its glass front gone, he noted that "the heat must have kissed every parking meter" within blocks of the site. One day, he said, a tiny flock of monarch butterflies flew out of a pile of metal. Someone stood up and said, "Souls."

Mr. Meyerowitz described the sensuous experience of ground zero. Every time "a grappler would pull out a piece of metal, oxygen would rush in" and there would be an explosion, then smoke. There was the noise of grinding construction and then pockets of quiet. Once a bugler had slipped into the site and was playing taps. "It was so profound a lament."

There is, Mr. Meyerowitz said, "a nostalgia for the beginning, the good feeling," the hopefulness that survivors would be found, "the uplifting moment of helping."

Now that ground zero is a construction site, "people remember the good old days," he said. Mr. Meyerowitz showed gorgeous pictures of the ruins against a blue sky laced with pink clouds.

As the slide show went on, the fall turned into winter, and you could see the disaster site beginning to clear. There was a picture of a girl with a cart carrying sandwiches and soup. The big globe-shaped sculpture was removed. Toward the end of the excavation you could see "the bathtub wall," where water from the river started seeping into the site.

"It really was beautiful down there," Mr. Meyerowitz admitted. He showed a half-dozen pictures of the Woolworth Building, standing tall beyond the heap of rubble at the World Trade Center site, as it turned from red, to gold, to white, to gray. "An accidental beauty comes up," he said, looking at a photograph of a worker leaning on an I-beam, as if he were waiting for a beer at a bar.

Mr. Meyerowitz photographed collections of things and sights: beams, chairs, tents, wires, welders' doodles in steel, fire hoses, tree stumps, men with duct tape around their legs. But he particularly liked photographing at night. The lot was lighted by stage lights, movie lights, he said, and it was great for taking pictures. He recalled shooting the grapplers as they would take "a huge mouthful in a net," shake it and drop it. "The men would dive into it like they were kids going into the surf." If they found remains, they would take off their hats.

Mr. Meyerowitz was not the only one taking pictures. One of the flagmen hired to work at ground zero shot 70 rolls of film and told Mr. Meyerowitz he hoped to do a book someday. But Mr. Meyerowitz may have been the only photographer who admitted to looking for beauty. "Anytime I found a person who seemed remarkable to me, I photographed him."

One of the most consistent sights at ground zero was the firefighters in their yellow jackets raking the land "like shepherds in a field." One day Mr. Meyerowitz watched a fireman nicknamed Toolie who was just ending his shift but could not stop working. "He picked up a rake," Mr. Meyerowitz said, and began working again. He just wanted to find something. He explained to Mr. Meyerowitz, "We're gardeners in the garden of the dead."

We all have our problems, social inequities, etc.

But, how far can we go to correct them?

My intolerance for people to understand me has been a constant barrier in my life. I try to work on it, but feedback is scarce.

As with anything, people are about 10x more likely to criticize or complain than they are to praise.

How do you cope with the doldrums of daily life?

Hop to it gang.

Ever wonder what our boy mongoloid is really like at home?
ever wonder why he is the way he is?

Allow me to tell you the story of a retarded mongoloid named arpi.



After sobering up and realizing the mistake he had made in fertilizing the beast known as arpi's mother, Arpi's father tried to suck the sperm out her. But alas her huge flaps of skin and rolls of fat were no match for him. The ghonorhea infected products of his fathers shriveled dick were on their own.



A few months later, a retarded mongoloid boy was born and they named him Arpi. Arpi wasn't like other children. He'd much rather play in his own shit then play with other children. His attachment to his mother was eerie at best. The words incest and blowjobs from mom were a regular part of his vocabulary.


That was, until he met Jane. The girl that would change his life forever. Jane took his virginity and showed him that his 3 inch turd killer wasn't just for peeing and putting in his mommy's mouth. She also showed him the art of using sex toys. Arpi enjoyed endless nights with Jane and booboo the duck as she shoved him time and time again up Arpi's ass while he watched sesame street and listened to Ernie sing the rubber ducky song.


He enjoyed booboo up his ass so much, he lodged it there permanently so that he could forever be with booboo. Jane left Arpi after his obsession with booboo started. Since no other woman would come near him, Arpi then turned to homosexuality. He stalked young goateed bikers on message boards. His one opening line however didn't gain him much success. "This thread Sucks" didn't seem to work on young maynard. His lack of any substantial length to his penis didn't help matters either. So arpi deviced a plan to lengthen his 3 inch turd killer.


One night in a naked drunken stooper on the internet, and wearing his sombrero he pierced his genitals and hung a beer can from it in hopes of making it grow. To this day it hasn't help. but Arpi has not given up all hope. His mantra is his creed "maynard will be mine, maynard will be mine".

Seeing as how Arpi is bored with the one trick this pony does, and has sworn he won't read any of my threads or post, I thought I'd give everyone an opportunity to post what they want about him and not worry about what the cock smoking flaming tool will think.

If he posts in this thread, or even reads it, it would show how much of a fucking pussy he actually is. Swearing that he won't read any thread or post I start, and then actually posting in this thread or any other thread in retaliation would show him to be the lieing little piece of shit mongoloid he really is.

Post away folks.
what are you thoughts on Arpi?
Do you think he's a boring and tiresome prick with a broom stick up his ass?
Does his "this thread sucks" monotony bore you?
Has his insatiable desire to suck maynard and sluggo's cock get tired after a while?
Do you think he shits in his sombrero and then wears it to give him self "style"?

Post away folks. Fear not that the turd burglar will read this. Well, he will..... he just won't admit it.

I'll check back later to see the progress....

What are some little characteristics you've picked up from movies and TV that you use in everyday life? Like some sort of intonation or phrases you use. For me it's quotes from The Simpsons which finds its way into life more often than you might think and I also use Number Six's "Be seeing you" from the Prisoner quite often.

So what have you picked up from pop culture?

The Carmex Death Song
Written by: Alex Sandell

When I die,
it's gonna suck,
cuz Carmex won't get all warm and smooshy
when I keep it in my pants' pocket.