Son of Witz

A collage I made right before the September 11th 2001 Terrorist attacks in NYC & DC

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, after seeing the horrible news I grabbed my sketchbook to jot down whatever stream of consciousness I had going. (Had to put it somewhere!) When I glanced at the cover though, I reeled a bit…

You see, back then, I used to go through a sketchbook at least once a month, so I bought cheap unlined comp books and as a ritual before marking the insides, I made collages on the covers. (I should post a collection of them here some time.) The sketchbook I was using that ugly September had the cover pictured above, which I had made within about 2 weeks before 9/11/01.

What is particularly curious about this collage is that the image of New York was from a pamphlet I had grabbed from the top floor of the World Trade Center in the late 90’s when I visited. It had stayed in my collage bin for years until I made this collage. The image is not actually NYC, but rather the scale model of NYC that was in the top of the World Trade Center. So knowing that and seeing this collage as those towers were burning gave me a bit of vertigo, for lack of a better description.

The next thing about it that trips me out is that the explosion coming from the tower was cut out of a magazine (Cinefex 86) about the new Pearl Harbor movie (the Michael Bay movie I’ve never seen).  Later in the day telecasters were calling this a “New Pearl Harbor” and I’m looking at this explosion I’d cut from the “new Pearl Harbor” movie.  Of course, some others seems to have had a premonition about a New Pearl Harbor and this date as well.  

The comic book balloons were cut from some random 80’s comic, I don’t remember which because I used to cut them up with reckless abandon. The quotations echoed things I was hearing from all the talking heads on tv who could never have imagined something like this. “My God, who’d have thought such a thing existed” & “But I’ve never seen anything like this” resonated with the day.

And so I was weirded out by all that, and then a week later the anthrax attacks happened and I looked at the illustration again. Hmm, there is a big blue virus coming in at left, following the destructive Grasshopper. And behind the entire city is a closeup of some virus coming in like a cross between Cthulhu and Cloverfield.  

SPOOKY.

Others had these premonitions too, but that’s their story to tell.  One week later I discovered an amazing album that was released on 9/11/01, Secret Chiefs 3 Book M. With it’s ominous clashing of East and West, Traditional and Modernism, the music was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. I became OBSESSED.  Exactly 1 year later, on 9/11/2002 I went to see Sleepytime Gorilla Museum play and found out they were just signed to the label SC3 was on, and as I was leaving I noticed Trey Spruance, SC3 band leader and label owner, in the back and I introduced myself to him and we talked about this artistic premonition, which he also has a freaky example of. (His story to tell)  I sent him a picture of it. About a year later he calls me out of the blue to help him illustrate the ambitious packaging of his next album, Book of Horizons, which started nearly a decade of collaboration with him and the label. It wasn’t this collage, I think, that convinced him I could do it well, but this was the point of our introduction. Well met, I say.   (Also, go listen to any Secret Chiefs 3 album if you never have.)

[Perhaps It should be noted that I’m publishing this here about 15 years later and dating the post to an appropriate time.]