What if your birthday were September 11?

L.A. artist and Slumdance blogger Nora Murphy has a pal with this unhappy birthday and mentions this fact in the context of telling her personal 9-11 story and linking to her brand-new Buzznet page, which has small pictures of some of the amazing art she created after 9-11.

I wondered what Nora was up to 2 years ago when she asked everyone she knew to send her bottle caps. But, friend that I am, I sent them. Later, visiting Nora and her boyfriend David James, I found out what she did with them.

As Nora says: "When I got home [on 9-11], I picked up my digital camera and pointed it at the television. Through the following weeks of tears, I clicked away at everything that I saw presented to us through the televised media. For months therafter, I continued clicking whenever there was a benefit concert or news conferences or presidential speech, the World Series or the return of football. I had over a thousand photos depicting various stages of the Twin Towers collapse and the people and nation in reaction. I edited them, sized them, printed them and then created several pieces of artwork using hundreds of collected bottle caps as frames for these pictures and applied them to painted canvases and 2 by 4's and whatever else. More than anything, I guess it was a good therapy for me...(I get many different reactions to the artwork - some have immediately teared, some look away, and some delve in and look at every single little image.)"

The little Buzznet pictures don't do her art full justice (maybe add some detail shots, Nora?), but you can get an idea of what Nora created. I cringe at most attempts to translate 9-11 into art or poetry, but Nora's unsentimental art makes some sense of it for me. In every detail, I see the obsessive process Nora went through as she dealt with her emotions, and it's a mirror of my own.

On a lighter note, don't miss her Charles Bronson story.