Hi Alan, I share your dismay over these horrors.
Often I feel that grieving and witnessing are all I can do so I try to do these. Sometimes I wonder if more is possible, if only hypothetically, even when so much is clearly beyond the control of anything I can conceive of technologically or otherwise. I try to blend hopefulness and realism when I can, and the attached song that Michael and I wrote last August captures a lot of that feeling for me. It is a hopeful song, especially in the first and last sections, but the middle section is as follows: Such hate across the nation Brings tears to fathers' eyes Death by fire and by water Storms of our own demise In any case these are some of the things I think about these days. Best regards, Max ________________________________ From: NetBehaviour <[email protected]> on behalf of Alan Sondheim <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, January 3, 2020 1:26 PM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Subject: [NetBehaviour] Fires in Australia (Apologies for a 2nd post today; I think the situation warrants it. How do we, as a community, respond to this? To the approx. 480m killed? To a Ballard future collapsing around us? How do we stop from harming ourselves, how can we act intelligently with this like this - on top of all the other horrors? Because this is going to spread of course; the ash on NZ glaciers accelerating melt. What do we do? What do we do as a community?) Fires in Australia http://www.alansondheim.org/Victoria.jpg (map) http://www.alansondheim.org/Victoria.mp3 (radio) In Pennsylvania, we had house-destroying floods, mine fires, highly polluted air. We went back and explored the area (around Wilkes-Barre/Kingston) last April. I've had my own things destroyed in floods several times, oddly including a storage container in Los Angeles, a closet in Providence, my parents' house in Kingston. But nothing, ever, like this. Reading Ballard, the world's future is spelled out as a scenario for now. Teaching "The Year 3000" back in the early 70s, I was face-to-face with the statistics. I've continue to talk and write and think about this. I was influenced by post-modern geography, and by the collapsed flora of the Carboniferous/Pennsylvanian, which I collected. I grew up negative. I've been following the fires and started interviewing a few people by Skype, people from eastern Australia. I'm trying to make sense of this, trying to find optimism in a situation which I see as the beginning of something problematic, horrifying. (I'll send the interviews out to the lists.) I listened late last night (here) to the radio - a short segment is above. The map gives some indication of locations. There was a report that 480 million animals have died in the fires. It's inconceivable, as is the number. Best, hopefully, Alan _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
The-Beautiful - Full Score (1).pdf
Description: The-Beautiful - Full Score (1).pdf
_______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
