DAVID MOULTON, LLC
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

Well, we are certainly a whole lot less naïve. We now know beyond ANY wishful thinking that bad things can happen, almost certainly will happen, and that some innocent blameless souls among us, even our very selves perhaps, can get instantly and irrevocably snatched away by the cosmic flyswatter that comes ripping through our worlds and lives. We also know for sure that there are people among us who delight in triggering said cosmic flyswatter, just to see the bodies fly. We know it’s a messier, riskier and less predictable life than it seemed, back in 2000, when we were stoned out of our minds in our happy little millennial bubble. Our new self-knowledge is probably a good thing, because that view from the bubble was never really a very accurate one. And us? As media, we play along too well and too agreeably – our closeness to the halls of power tends to, uh, sway us. We are too easily persuaded to run the pretentious photo op, the slick sound bite, the simplistic vignette with its attendant emotional outrage, and the ubiquitous cheap file film clip that, repeated endlessly, circumscribes our reality instead of suggesting the much more complex and layered world that lies behind it. As an industry capable of recording and telling the complex story of mankind during probably the most important, exciting and globally coherent period in our history, we marginalize ourselves sticking with business as usual – light infotainment, sports, sitcoms ‘n movies of all vintages. At all levels, it seems to me, we should be pressing ourselves, our companies, our sponsors, our leaders, to reach toward something more. Technologically, we still celebrate and wallow in the fantasies of our high-rez future, while institutionalizing low-rez (read cheap) transmission and delivery systems. Meanwhile, we squabble about who owns what, who can copy what, who can show what to whom when and who really cares. Finally, in my little corner, “bad audio” lives on, along with a fair amount of decent audio and very little spectacularly good audio. ©1988 - ©2018 David Moulton, All Rights Reserved.   Think about it. We are HONORABLE people, doing HONORABLE work that has value and merit. And that is something that none of the perpetrators of this horror can ever again have. To achieve their ends, they sacrificed their honor, descending to base criminal acts that are utterly incompatible with honor and human merit. They befouled themselves forever, by their abandonment of honorable ways. Honor embraces a code of personal integrity and dignity that elicits respect and admiration from ALL humanity, a code that characterizes the highest qualities in humans. Something like that was at work as we watched every scrap of tape showing what happened last Tuesday. By seeing it over and over from those many different perspectives, we could tell much about HOW it happened, as well as WHERE and WHEN. It will help us, finally, to say goodbye to our loved ones. Finally, the footage taken by a doctor who had come to help, carrying his running videocam with him. It continued to run as he got swallowed up in the cloud of soot and debris as the North Tower suddenly collapsed on the area around him. Here was some really bad audio, too – after the soot engulfed him and his camera, the sound was darkly muffled (I assume the mic was coated with soot, and of course the dust also would tend to dramatically muffle sound) and that dark muffled ambience, like the sound when heavy snow is falling in still air, quiet except for the keening of some bizarre high-pitched wailing looping over and over like a distant agonized banshee stuck in endless grief, was unforgettable. ©1988 - ©2018 David Moulton, All Rights Reserved.   For a series called "Artists in their Own Words," KCUR's Laura Spencer met up with composer David Moulton and artist Lajos Héder during the installation.