First of all, I collect flipbooks. I am fascinated by the moving image. I'm also interested in being a part of anything you are doing ever since we collaborated on "Streak".
But more specifically, why would I want a flipbook of one of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center?
On that morning, along with everyone else, I woke up to the news that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. I woke up with a nasty hangover on a friend‚s couch after an all night drink and drug binge. At first I wasn't aware of how serious or bad it really was. The TV was turned on and there was the Trade Center with smoke pouring out of one of the buildings.
Then I watched in total disbelief as the second plane hit.
My reaction? I went back to sleep. I figured it was a bad chemical induced dream, and when I woke up everything would be back to normal. I honestly and truly did not think it was real.
When I woke up it was still on the news. I was still not real for me. Then it was announced that the Pentagon was also attacked in the same way. They were calling it a terrorist attack.
I made my way home and all I could do was get back in bed.
Every time I woke up things were worse and worse. The towers had fallen.
America had been attacked.
I remember my roommate, a young innocent man from Mexico, his first time away from home, telling me very simply, like a child would say it: "So, I guess there will be a war now."
"Yeah", I told him. "I guess so." Although it wasn't really clear (and still isn't) where and with who.
Like everyone else on that day- the image of the planes slamming into the buildings played over and over in my head. Partly because the Networks kept running the footage over and over again incessantly, as if to verify that it really happened, and partly because I kept trying to sort it out in my own mind.
And now comes the opportunity to have a flip book of this moment. I can hold the moment in my hand, in a small little packet. I can play it again and again, or even reverse it if I want. Re-winding time. After I am old and dead- the book will belong to my children, then my children's children. By that time the image would have faded into a distant memory, or a page from a history book. But by holding this book and flipping it again and again, they might get a small sense of what it felt like to be alive and witness this event on the day it occurred.

Aaron Norhanian
http://www.bozoart.com