It’s horrible being back at work today. It’s a complete farce. My boss is telling me that we really ought to be getting back to our duties, but it’s ridiculous. I’m so agitated I feel sick to my stomach. It’s just too distracting for me to concentrate on anything. Everyone I talk to has their own horror stories to tell, there are still sirens down in the streets, and people keep calling to see how we all are. We can’t escape it yet, and it’s much more difficult than being cocooned at home with the TV news. I desperately need to stop thinking about all of this now, but I’m too close. I’m pacing around the office like a caged animal at the zoo.
I was thinking as I walked up Park Avenue this morning that it was fascinating to see daily life creep back. People were walking to work, there was traffic again, everyone wasn’t staring at the sky any more. It was a little subdud, sure, and there were cops and cadets and military personnel everywhere, but it seemed much more normal. It’s not, though. Start talking to anyone and you find that Tuesday’s massacre is still a visceral presence. Everyone knows someone who was down there, everyone is worried about someone who hasn’t turned up yet. Everyone else seems to be as distracted as I am.
Also, I just got this story from my old childhood friend, Lynn:
Dear Family and Friends,
This is the first time I have been able to get access to email so I wanted to give you all an update. Let me start by saying that what I saw and experienced was life-altering and I haven’t even begun to deal with the psychological effects yet. This is what happened.
I had an 8 a.m. meeting at City Hall with the Mayor. When we heard the first boom it shook the building but we assumed that it was due to the construction next door in the Tweed Courthouse. However when the Mayor’s staff and an exec from the Port Authority ran out of the room, we knew that something was up. We ran to the windows and saw the top of the WTC on fire. Within minutes I watched another plane crash into the second tower. Panic ensued but we were told to stay in City Hall as [something missing here]
I made it across the street (about 200 yards away) to Park Row and got a call from my Dad on my cell. I told him that I was fine and that I was walking with my boss back to the office because they wanted all employees to check in. At that very moment I heard a loud boom and watched the first tower collapse into itself. There was a giant cloud of swirling dust, bricks, steel and smoke moving at lighting speed in my direction. The crowds on the street were screaming. I cried to my Dad [something missing here]
They gave us water and masks as they dealt with the severe casualties. I then heard another loud boom and saw the second tower collapse. I ran out of the lobby (which had all glass windows) into a windowless men’s room (the nearest safety I could find). I scared the crap out of two guys peeing but who cares. After the second collapse everything was worse: more screaming, more debris, more wounded, more chaos. Eventually I ended up on the floor of a first floor hallway [something missing here]
In the late PM, the hospital organized walking groups and I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to my girlfriend’s house in Brooklyn Heights (about 1.5 miles away). I had to stop because I was throwing up, felt faint, had difficulty breathing, had diarrhea and was dizzy. She helped me out, cleaned me up and around 5 pm I began to walk home to Park Slope (another 2M).
Yesterday I went to an emergency facility. I had several tests done, including a chest scan, and the doctor confirmed that I have smoke/debris inhalation. My oxygen capacity is below normal but not to worry. It’s not bad, but enough to be uncomfortable. My symptoms come and go as I get better. I’m on meds and hope to be okay very soon.
My office is closed. We do not know when we will open as the building has been damaged. If I am feeling better tomorrow, I plan on assisting my colleagues who are at work in Brooklyn. My company, the NYC Economic Development Corporation, is trying to find temporary offices for all the displaced companies (including us). So far everyone in my department, Real Estate Development, is accounted for, including my boss.
I happy to report that my good friend of 13 years, “Ziggy,” made it out alive from the 72nd floor. He is a broker at Morgan Stanley and reported to work today at a temporary office in midtown. I am blown away by his bravery and commitment to help others.
The skyline looks very eerie now. I doesn’t look like NY. It doesn’t look like home. However, I have no doubt in my mind that NY will come back because we are tough people who deal with tough situations all the time without blinking an eye.
My love and sympathy goes out to anyone who may be affected by this tragedy.
Love and BIG BIG thanks to you all — L
If you don’t live here it may be hard to imagine that we are all hearing stories like this all day long. I can’t wait for things to settle down some more, because it’s so exhausting to keep processing all of these experiences.
Well, back when I was a senior studying design in 
I was plucky, though, so I still kept reading about design and keeping myself involved in the field, hoping I was just in a rut. I tried to get the most out of my student membership in the 
It wasn’t just the final products that struck a chord, but also the way Art spoke about how he came up with stuff. He hadn’t become enslaved to a Mac, and has never really made use of a computer part of his work at all. He made stuff with his hands, pushed around typeset galleys, and experimented with what could be done on or off press. He played with the materials at hand, and tried some things just to see if it could be done. A cruddy budget could be an opportunity to see how interesting a picture could be made with photocopies and white-out. If a retro-style wood-type poster was needed, why not just have an authentic old poster shop set the type? If a burnt edge was needed for the design, why worry about creating an illusion when it’s simpler to singe the stack of press sheets? This is what real “thinking outside the box” was about before that became such a terrible cliché. And behind all this was a sharp wit, a really solid sense of typographic texture and form, and an understanding of craftsmanship needed by the designer, the printer, the typesetter, and anyone involved. It was so damn refreshing. It was exhilirating to see that there really could be a place in design for all the other things I loved and was learning: drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, whatever. It made me realize that design could be what I made of it. It could be personal and expressive and still work for someone else. It could be tactile and physical and textural, not just a flat abstraction or a printout.
I raced home that night with my head overflowing with ideas and inspiration. Nothing specific, but just these flashes of other ways to try things I’d been doing all along. I took out a couple of huge pieces of paper and feverishly scrawled all the ways I could think of to make images or to set type or make marks on paper or deal with paper’s third dimension. It sounds corny, yeah, but that single brainstorming session opened the floodgates for me. I wound up redoing all the projects I’d worked on that semester, starting most of them over from scratch and doing about a million times better. I got the same grades I would have otherwise, probably, but that wasn’t the point. I realized how to do work that I was excited about, that I was proud of.
With a few lapses in conviction over the years, those lessons have stayed with me, really playing a huge part in making me the designer — the artist, if you can generalize like that — that I am today. This is not to say that I do work that looks like Art Chantry’s. Far from it. I’ve worked out a lot of my own visual and conceptual and philosophical ideas over the years, and seem to have arrived at an approach that is certainly my own, little seen as it may be these days. (I might also point out that this is the same approach that led me to give up on working as a designer for the time being, freeing me to think of design as my medium of choice for personal work, not just a job I happen to like.) No, I learned how to incorporate play and handicraft and integrity into my work. I learned that slick or flashy is not always good, and that new solutions can come from old tricks, as long as you maintain a fresh perspective. I know, that’s a lot of ethereal-sounding hoo-hah, but it’s true. Damnit!