dear Alan
oh, not at all, i think it was a small language misunderstanding. I used the term "barely" in a temporal sense, reflecting on how and whether this radio, this netbehavior list, can be used for sustainable conversation, and it obviously can, but I find it harder. For me it felt that you had posted a very interesting and thoughtful response to my comment in the middle of the night, and even though I was writing back barely 14 hours later and a few times zones apart, it seemed as if our conversation about durational performance and music, detuning and détourning, and collective or communal playing duration, had already passed/past its time, its due, it was gone, it seemed ages ago that we met, we talked, and that you regretted the lack of feedback on the "radio", the network, the audiences. (It would interest me what others here think about reception, feedback, time, reflection and critique, or do we often post our stuff and hurry on to the next stuff we do, without pausing?) Alan you had already moved on to post the "scent of them" text, and your comments on the sung lisu. Aharon then added a personal detail, regarding Edinburgh, and that interested me –– the moments when our biographies come into the picture for a tiny moment, and when you then mentioned your sleeplessness, and that this Palgrave book (£55, Amazon has it for £ 47) is too expensive, i had to reflect for a moment on that one too. Yes, that book (hardback) is too expensive, and I only have it because i am in it and the publisher sent me a complimentary copy, and after reading your text on dead music, i noted that you are cited frequently in some chapters (regarding your dead avatars). The book goes back to a festival, "Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance," held in London in 2007, at which my company showed a dance work and my design collaborator and I conducted a workshop on sensing/sensortizing, and after the 2007 festival, the curators decided it would be a nice idea to do a book. Well, it just came out and so it only took 4 years. Now that is a strange time frame, four years, compared to how we post and move on here, and that is why i enjoyed your reflections on other times, your ride across the desert in 1987 after we all left Dallas, and i agree with you (and then you contradict yourself), the desert is never empty, and oil cities (like Texarkana) don't rise out of nothing and descent into nothing. Probably you were addressing a sense of history and sedimentation, other purposes, within/against a sense of the wilding of rich deserts. (yes, Baudrillard's speculations are quite poor ideological smoke signals; there is no Paris, Texas) In my next posting i will try and comment on a musical experience i had last night, and an instrument i saw in action that I enjoyed a lot, the santur. best Johannes Birringer [Alan schreibt] Johannes, I'm glad you mentioned the Texas experience because I've seen nothing else like it. I think the cities are around 400 miles apart, and the rest is unbelievably emptied. But then I remember reading Baudrillard on the emptiness of America and finding myself angry, since he assumed that the desert is blank or void, ignoring the fact it's been home to Native Americans and wildlife, that it was cultural, responds culturally, just as much as 'comforting' cities might. It reminds me also of Herzog's notion of the jungle which was also home and inhabited and cultural / political, not a brutal or 'seething' nature. My words. Texas is disruptive too because of the nature of the cities - I remember Marlis Schmidt who was from Midland, an odd oil city rising out of nothing, descending into nothing. I wonder if the Sahara is like that. I did read Sandy's essay in Chatzichristodoulou's book which I could never afford, but Sandy sent me a copy, and Yes! So I just wrote John Cayley about seeing him in Providence and the news came on about another John Cayley who just got charged for reckless truck driving which killed a police officer. Strange. Anyway. If I barely replied, I probably did so under a stress medication - I've been trying to go to sleep around midnight because of our current stress of things, and Azure has to get up at 6:15 to get to work as a part-time teaching assistant (there's a hiring freeze for full-tine teachers here). So at 4:15 I may not have been all there, I probably woke out of a nightmare (today's was about the Vietnam War). - Alan, _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
