WHY FALLING PLANES REMIND ME OF UN CHIEN ANDALOU

I hate air planes, I hate air travel, I hate even more planes flying into buildings, but what I hate the most is planes falling outside my window twice in a year.  There is no poetry in repetition.  Jean Baudrillard wrote a lyrical, searching book on the nature of catastrophe when planes flew into WTC.  Last week's horror is sheer tragedy of errors.  The 2006 hubristic act of a sports star flying a small plane into an Upper East Side building was a lesson on why the rich and famous shouldnt be allowed to inflict stupidity on Manhattan.  The U.S. Airways landing on the Hudson River was a perfect moment- the impossible finale to the many tales of doomed plane stories.  And now, this wretched story of small lives, big hopes and people following their best instincts, only to collide with fate.

The plane crashed near my building- and with the practiced sprint of the disaster tourist, we were glued to the windows staring out in horror and disbelief: again?  Not possible.  Only in badly scripted movies, or real life.  At some fundamental level, if you live in Manhattan, you cannot care too much.  Like the debauched protagonist of Un Chien Andalou who waits to see a woman get hit by a car, watching with disturbing eroticism the crowd that swells around her fallen body, New Yorkers are dullened into the reality of catastrophe.  It is no fun to be on permanent Orange Alert as New York City was during the Bush administration.  And now, even as planes drop out of the sky, no one alerts the city into a panic of false alerts.  The danger here is not from without, it is from within- from the years of Federal Aviation's deregulation to the present scenario of 25,000 helicopter flights a year over New York City without any systematic control of the skies under 1,100 feet.  This is a Red Alert.  Something must be done now, quickly, before something hits my building next.