Friday 9 September 2011

Catching Up With Karlheinz Stockhausen, New York and 9/11



The Reverend Sirs at the Hauntological Society blog have just posted the full transcript a text of mine, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Outer Universe and Me’, which details the story of how Stockhausen and I ended up being photographed together outside a mobile recording studio in the spring of 1999. Originally published in the catalogue for the 2002 Sydney Biennale, it links the two of us with the events of 9/11 through speculations on the future of space travel, a Kurdish street demonstration in Cologne and a missing copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. In reflecting on my reasons for writing this account the way I did in 2002, I found myself returning once again to the day in October 2001 when Rachel, the love of my life, and I got married: after a lot of thought we had decided to stick with our original plan of honeymooning in New York. Barely a month after the attack on the World Trade Centre, it was a very different city from the one we had visited the previous year and where we had first decided to become husband and wife. In a forthcoming post on this blog I hope to share with you some of the photographs we took of the crowds and barriers at Ground Zero during our stay. In the meantime here are two views of Manhattan in early October 2001, where the buildings and streets really did seem that empty: taken together, they tell their own story.

See also: A Memory for Stockhausen Day

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