“The joy park that I envision for this property would be a place where people would have permission to be, and permission to mourn out loud in their own way,” he says in his distinctive nasal neigh. He surveys the cluster of chain-link fence and lumbering construction vehicles that prowl the ground where the World Trade Center once stood and describes what he’d like to see: 16 acres, not of memorials and commerce, but of grass and people. And buffalo.
This vision is at the heart of “Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor,” a curious 21-minute-long film starring Speed Levitch, a vagabond with a vision. The award-winning production, directed by Richard Linklater (“School of Rock,” “Dazed and Confused”) has just been released on DVD and video. It features a Speed who is nonplussed yet unsurprised by the current plans for what will be erected at Ground Zero. According to the blueprint of architect Daniel Libeskind, who was chosen earlier this year to rebuild the site, a memorial will be squeezed onto a 4.5-acre patch of ground in the southwest corner of the 16-acre site. New York Gov. George Pataki recently announced that the competition to design that memorial is down to eight finalists; their proposals will be displayed to the public next week.
Speed’s plan will not be one of them–for starters, his proposal was not among the original 5,200 entries. But he is taking his idea–“the buffalo proposal,” as he calls it–straight to the people. As articulated in “Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor,” his vision calls for “a park with a memorial in it that is not a piece of stone or anything inanimate, but a landmark with a heartbeat, a living memorial, something that propagates and represents vitality for the future. What about the lost sage of North America, a tribe that has known September 11 for 400 years: The American buffalo.”
Strictly speaking, having a handful of buffalo graze where trade once flourished was not his idea, nor is it expected to be taken seriously by the filmmakers. The idea, as Speed describes it, came out of a bicoastal collaboration of artists for whom he has become the unofficial mouthpiece. And what a mouthpiece. Standing on that corner in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district one recent drizzly afternoon, Speed is riffing. “For 400 years real-estate speculation has decided what this town is going to look like. Every damn step you take in this city, real-estate speculation decided where you were going to stand. The most romantic and passionate moments you had in this city guaranteed you were increasing land value. For the first time in 400 years, a few sullen guys in a room have decided per usual what the city is going to look like, and the city population is distressed, is not accepting it, is not happy with it. There is a glitch in the matrix.”
Speed himself is a walking glitch. A self-styled philosopher-poet-tour guide, he gained New York notoriety and underground cred in a 1998 documentary about him called the “The Cruise.” In that film, he led unsuspecting tourists on literary, existential bus excursions through the metropolis. Speed’s was a tour de force performance, a deluge of diatribes, factoids, quotes and opinions. “Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor” is, in many ways, a sequel to “The Cruise.” He leads the viewer down Wall Street, visiting a statue commemorating George Washington (who looks like he needs his “hand held”) and Alexander Hamilton’s grave site (a fitting tribute to the man who promoted competition because “his tombstone today lies directly across the street from a shoe outlet”). Walking by Ground Zero, he tells us that “9/11 was one of many parables the great sagacious cosmopolitan guru has dropped upon this population to illustrate one of its greatest points: the creation and destruction that is the rhythm of the universe is a part of our universe. Creation and destruction: the dance of Shiva. New York City is an excellent dance floor for that specific choreography.” The film culminates with him astride the iconic bronze bull sculpture at Bowling Green, floating his buffalo proposal.
“Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor” might seem a strange project for a mainstream director like Linklater to take on, especially one who helmed the latest Jack Black smash, a movie that hit the No. 1 spot its first week in theaters. But this is still the Richard Linklater who directed the cult classic “Slacker” in 1991 and the tripped-out “Waking Life” 10 years later (which boasts a Speed cameo, as does “School of Rock”). Linklater, who says he made “not a single penny” on the project, wants nothing more than to “send it out there and see what happens. It’s not really a commercially viable film.” He says he hopes to initiate a more creative dialogue over the causes and consequences of September 11. The straight-to-rental short was a labor of love, shot with handheld cameras on one very hot July day in 2002. The film screened at Sundance and won the TriBeca film festival special grand jury award.
Not everyone who sees it loves the film, though. At times, Speed can seem a bit insensitive. He points to the massive chasm in New York’s heart and says, “this might look to you like a hole in the ground. But what it actually is is a delightful, benevolent opportunity for rebirth.” At some screenings, angry viewers have berated him for his glibness. But many people who lost loved ones in the attacks have embraced the spirit of the film, if not it’s literal intent.
“Nothing about it was offensive to me,” says Andrew Rice, 30, whose older brother David worked at Sandler & O’Neil Partners on the 104th floor of the South Tower. What is offensive to him, he says, is the construction of another commercial structure on hallowed ground where many bodies have never been found. The creation of green space where his brother died (and was among the found) is to him a more comforting thought. Rice, who lives in Oklahoma City, points to the open-air memorial at the former site of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building there as a good example. “It’s a very soothing place for families and also for the people of Oklahoma City to just go and reflect. Having this greenway or park as part of rebuilding the World Trade Center would be great.”
Setha Low, a cultural anthropologist at the City University of New York whose book “The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture” (Blackwell) was published in March, has also seen the film and says it “resonates” with her. Speculating on the as-yet-undisclosed proposals for the memorial, she says: “It is unclear to me whether this is going to be the kind of place that will really be public, that will feel safe and secure. My argument is to listen to people who live down there about what they need.” In surveys she has been conducting around the site for the past two years, she says one distinct pattern has emerged: “The kids are still scared. A lot of them talk about parks and open space.”
Libeskind proposes to build what is being called Freedom Tower, a 1,776-foot skyscraper–the tallest in the world. Cass Gilbert, the architect behind what used to be (and is now again) one of the New York skyline’s defining features, the 1913 Woolworth Building, once said, “a skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay.” All goofing aside, Speed–standing at Ground Zero–argues that this land has already paid enough.
