One...two....click....pause.

Has it already been six years? Having words like “terror” and “war” feed to you daily by the news has a way of locking in the freshness in the media Ziplock bag I’ve thankfully been able to unhinge myself from in this transplanting to another country for a year. I remember where I was when it happened…when the world changed. I was sleeping, sleeping through change due to an end of summer cold that prevented me from working on yet another film where I wasn’t getting paid. I remember that night laying back in the mice and roach infested apartment building thinking that it was time to make a serious stab at film, join a union, get my driver’s license, something…anything. None of that would happen. The September 11th attacks would become strong motivators to travel, see more, experience more and be more. I awoke after both towers had already fallen blissfully unaware that a tragedy of global significance had taken place in a city that was once a place dreamed of by this small town kid who’d never seen buildings higher then ten stories before. I’d eventually visit the city that never slept and even gaze over it from the observation deck of one of the two buildings which that morning had crumbled. After turning off the coffee pot, probably not the best of cures for an end of summer cold that prevents you from working on a film where you weren’t getting paid, I flicked on the television and saw the image of a smoking building. What was Die Hard doing on so early in the morning, I sleepily thought. I changed the channel and saw the building yet again. Watching the images rerun not really paying them much mind I picked up the phone and checked my messages. Maybe Meg’s had called wanting to hit a diner for supper or maybe a big name production was finally giving me a break and I’d be in some real movie cash within a week. Lord knows I was getting sick of canned pasta and Kraft Dinner. We had one message. It was neither Megs nor movie money. I heard crying first followed by a gasp of air and then a rush of a message from my then roommate’s girlfriend. It was incomprehensible having just woken up and only with two sips of coffee in me. I played it back. I played it back again. “They are closing off downtown now because of the attacks. I am caught in the subway. Do you know what’s happening? I love you.” What the hell was going on? Attacks? Coffee sip. ATTACKS!

I looked back at the TV and the smoking building and the repeated shots of that building falling, people jumping from that building and a plan crashing into that building. Jesus, I thought, Toronto was under attack! I didn’t clue in to the fact that this building should have been recognizable. I’d seen it in postcards, books, Woody Allen films. Flicking over the CNN where one can always expect a nice bold headline to accompany the image you are watching, I discovered that this was New York and not Toronto and over the course of the next 20 hours I don’t think I changed the channel or moved from my seat. I must have gone to the bathroom and made something to eat but all I remember now is the endless rush of death and fire. I gorged myself on the news reports. I was working for the Toronto Film festival at the time and the next day I headed into to work. Later that week for the first time in the history of the festival the screens would be blank as the festival would be canceled. I remember just walking around the city in a daze. I saw a Baskin’s Robbins customers getting into a fight with the Indian clerk. I read about more possible attacks on major cities, Toronto included. Police were every where. It was madness. I purchased a small American flag and tied it to my backpack. I didn’t know what else to do. Everywhere along the way into work the newspaper boxes were empty. I would find a copy of the SUN the next day in a box many blocks away from the downtown core. On the two-page spread was a shot of the first plane flying into Tower One and in large, red type was the word BASTARDS. This was the start. Here was a word that we still weren’t allowed to say on television in bold font on the front page of the city’s most popular newspaper. I purchased two. I still keep them in a plastic container somewhere back home. I would also grab some of the free papers and tried to find an issue of the Toronto Star but all were sold out. Why did I need so many papers reporting this story? Was I thinking I’d learn anything new? I was caught up in a media storm, a tornado that swept up millions of people. I know I wasn’t the only one glued to the television or snatching up papers by the dozen. News, I wanted news! I didn’t watch much else that week but CNN and CBC and FOX. I recall initial disgust at the endless replays of people leaping to their death but still I looked on. This was the biggest nationally televised car-wreak in my lifetime and like a highway gawker I just couldn’t look away. Like the Columbine shootings and the slew of school shooting reporting in the months the followed, the media had sucked me back in.

A few years prior to the 9-11 attacks I was a news report or at least I was trying to be one. I had a gig at my small town paper and in the days before I got most of my news online I would watch nightly news reports and pick up local papers to keep myself updated on world events. I can’t think of any particular story that may have altered my desire to keep up with current events, probably a collection of things, but somewhere I just become ill with reading about death and crime and corporate thieves that permeated the papers I read with my breakfast cereal. Greed and murder doesn’t go down well with Lucky Charms marshmallows. Maybe it had always been that way and I was blind to it all, but suddenly it just appeared that tragedy and celebrity were prominent over other goings on in the world that were vastly more important then the wardrobe Britney Spears choose to wear to Denny’s. I opted against following this trend and wrote more human-interest stories for my small town paper. I wrote about the last drive-in closing down and the end of that era for Eastern Ontario. I wrote about the dying small town music scene that had flourished in the 80s. I wrote a weekly column about this new fangled thing called the Internet. More and more the news sickened me and, most of all, it was depressing me into a sad stupor. Was this the current state of our world? Was the media portraying only the worst of us? I would change my career path to film with an underlying hope to make documentaries on the good things we have on this spinning ball and I wouldn’t follow much of the news in film school. It would take the 9-11 attacks to entrench me once again in the news addiction I’d been fighting and for the next few years I’d be scooping up the free press and other local papers that tossed around the words “terrorism” “alert” and eventually “war” and “suicide bomb” as though they were upping readership by 100 each time the words saw print.

Later, when I moved to Ottawa, I could usually be found on work breaks buried in the paper reading or watching CNN and over time I developed a rather cynical view of the world. I still have a lot of that brewing and though I find a lot of it is justified there is much that should just be jettisoned. In the last few months working at the video store I scooped up many documentaries which would launch my love for reality cinema. Here, mostly in independent productions, real truths are reported and realities portrayed untouched by mainstream newspapers. I became tired of reading about American politics which shadowed my own country’s leaders. Canada, more so then ever in recent years, had become a country of people that knew more of American politics then their own. We devoted large chunks of airtime to the war and entire five page paper spreads. Stories like the plight of Canadian farmers and gay marriage would often take a backseat to war and terror. It would take something like SARS to get Canada back on the mind of Canadians. Japan isn’t regurgitating American news like we do back home. Japan is really an amazing little bubble. Here, unlike Canada, they are still battling against Western influence. The biggest things to get through to the Japanese from the West has been Disney and McDonalds. Japan, I’ve often said, is like walking around in an amusement park or, sometimes, a David Lynch film of course a lot of that stems from just how new it all still is to me. Singing garbage trucks…talking vending machines… The country embraces its own music, films and television (something we can’t strongly admit to in Canada with Canadian cinema only thriving in Quebec and the biggest of our artists only obtaining success by a leap across the border) and the Japanese are still deeply rooted in their old customs, legends and traditions. In Canada we leach American Idol and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and the only time we really bitch about America infiltrating our airwaves and media is when two American teams are in the playoffs. Here if the Japanese are going to get in bed with something from the Western world they do so on their own terms as seen by the Rockabillys, Nightmare Before Christmas and Stitch accessories on cell phones and generic American clothes from the 80s dawned by Japanese teens making fashion statements.

Now I wish I could say the move to Japan cut me off entirely from Western reporting but in the English press here it is just as much doom and gloom only with a different slant. Stories making the news on the front page of Japan Today deal with a boy drowning during his swimming class, the bodies of 4 babies found in Saitama, 2 deaths in a recent typhoon, a crooked cop and a supermarket manager that was arrested for beating a shoplifter to death. Yup, more of the same tragic tales that sell newspapers. However you will note there is no repeated mentions of “Bush”, “war”, “Iraq” and “terrorism”, the buzzwords of the Western world and this is the anniversary of the attacks. If any a day would be devoted to such press it would be today. Of course one could argue that Japan is not participating in such battles and thus the papers do not merit reporting them but I would then ask why does Canada feel the need to repeatedly print suicide bombing story after suicide bombing story instead of local doom and gloom if you want to go that route in the news? I’m sure there is enough Canadian tragedy going around out there. I know these issues are not going away and it is somewhat selfish of me to want to just turn the world off yet most times I still want to do just that…invent some type of remote control and hit the pause button. I realize when you hit that button again everything continues as it was before but what a great moment it would be locked in the pause. I look back on the attacks six years ago now and I still get angry…I still get upset and this is a good thing however my rage and sadness doesn’t only belong to the needless loss of life that transpired on that day but also to the world which that day created and the number of lives still lost daily in a war that uses 9-11 as it’s catalyst. This world all to lovingly embraced by mainstream media. Glorified and sensationalized as it continues to sell fresh fear. Today I am going to remember words like “valor” “bravery” and “unity” and hit that pause button for awhile on the popular press. One…two…click…pause.