Nomad Codes

flicks of my youth remade in hardcore, 21-C stylee. The now familiar scenes of the United jet slicing into the upper stories of the south tower, soon to collapse to its knees like a dispirited giant, were unnerving enough. More to the point, they were unbelievable and so, as many would say that day, “surreal”—our word for that reality we are programmed to disavow even as it swamps us like a dream tsunami.
    That morning I also saw some genuinely uncanny media: a few short seconds of live broadcast that rank as some of the most disturbing moments of TV I’ve had the mixed blessings to see. A blond female reporter was standing on the trashed streets of southern Manhattan, narrating her horrifying and, for a journalist, exhilarating morning. (Forgive me if I recall neither the network nor the name of the journalist, but the TV became a babel-box that morning, a slice and dice machine of affect, image, and information.) The woman, who was only moderately in control of herself, was clutching a piece of paper in her hand. After finishing her brief tale she asked the cameraman if he could close in on the item, which, she said, resembled much of the debris about her.
    The pink paper was some sort of invoice, and its entire edge was burned like an ancient map. As the camera zoomed in, nearly filling the screen with the document, the woman pointed at the address in the upper-left hand corner, which read: One World Trade Center. But as she read “One World Trade Center,” some electromagnetic djinn decided to fuck with the feed, for what I then saw and heard was an eerie one-second loop of voice and image: “n world trade center ... n world trade center ... n world trade center,” over and over a half dozen times, her staccato finger jabbing at the address like a robot on the fritz. For a moment the TV became a portal into the compulsive repetitions of the media unconscious. And then the invisible studio editors sweating over their live decks switched away from this abysmal mantra to another, more coherent feed.
    For that brief passage, the news stream so many were feeding off of that day erupted with information’s terror: noise. The transmission snafu reminded me that explosions do not just happen in the material universe of airplanes and stock brokers; info-bombs also rupture the noosphere, dividing, confusing, and destroying minds, our minds, even as the machines that network those minds—the telephones, the web servers, the satellites—groan under the weight of our sudden compulsive need to tune it, to talk, to witness. Our helpless but strangely reassuring envelopment in a frantic media storm was, of course, part of the spectacular plan, admirably orchestrated by these terrorist DeMilles and utterly unavoidable. With our eyeballs glued to the tube, our symbolic landscapes ruptured, we were got good. But for a few seconds, even that symbolic turbulence was disrupted by the tape loop, stinging my throat with the tang of the Real. The glitch was abstract, an artifact of data transmission, and yet it radiated like shrapnel through the Mobius strip of media. This is the trauma that changed everything, and us, in the blink of an eye.
    2001

REMOTE CONTROL

    A couple of months ago, after flying into Chicago on assignment, I rented a car. Since it was on someone else’s dime, I got a Chevy Impala, a smooth ride with cool bubble curves and a dashboard that glowed like the console of a shuttle craft. Making my way from O’Hare to the Doubletree Inn in Skokie, I turned on the radio, stumbling across the city’s peculiar “progressive rock” station KXRT (“like dungeons and dragons on your radio”). Styx’s “Come Sail Away” soon forced me to abandon ship. Then I tuned into a Christian station, where I spent the next twenty minutes listening to one of the most awesome sermons I have ever heard. Between throaty bursts of songbird glossalalia worthy of Al Green, the preacherman filled the rent-a-car with a powerful blend of joy and dread. “My God, my God, I don’t wanna die!” Indeed.
    The next evening, I was returning from Evanston to my hotel. For some reason, the car’s interior light wouldn’t shut off, and I fumbled for the proper button. (Like many Americans, I challenge the interface designers of cars—not to mention software—by not bothering to figure out how anything works before I hit the road.) I noticed a cluster of buttons lining the bottom of the rearview mirror. Accordingly, I aimlessly