Dear Alan and dear Johannes and dear Ruth and Marc and so many others dear
to me. Dear because we share a feeling of despair and frustration but we are
stubborn enough to believe in beauty, in sharing, in creating...In the
middle of the horrors of the Holocaust camps people created, in Rwanda poets
found time and places to write, in Chile Victor Jara sang at the Stadium
before they cut his hands. I truly belive as Albert Camus wrote once we are
heroes. Not because we make heroic deeds but only for surviving and for
coping with the small chores of everydays life.
Ana
On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 4:38 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote:
We go on because otherwise one's giving into fear, I'd say
"just" giving into fear, and statistically and otherwise one is
almost entirely safe, not however in Turkey or other countries
where the singularity of the iron fist overshadows all. Turkey
is turning into another hell; I don't think (and I'm speaking
ignorantly) France for example is. The U.S. remains to be seen
of course. But there are other natural disasters, and disasters
the result of negligence or stupidity as well. And we can't
forget that there are other moments of exaltation; otherwise one
is living in a constant state of anger, anguish, depression -
and that is unbelievably counter-productive; that's happening,
it seems (according to the news) to be happening everywhere in
the United States now, fury from the left and right
simultaneously, and I fear fury as much as anything; there has
to be another way. So the question is NOW - what is to be done?
Should we accelerate the violence and rhetoric in a kind of
incandescent accelerationism, or should we learn, even at this
late stage, to listen to one another? (I admire the work of so
many on this list who believe in, open up to, the commons where
listening and activism, art and non-art, prevail.)
- Alan
On Tue, 26 Jul 2016, Johannes Birringer wrote:
apologies. yes, it was loaded, and terror is a word
I now dread to hear, day after day, and day after
day, and I am sorry i linked something that you had
sent us, Alan (not about the historical Johnstown
incident, but about your poetic media work with the
QRRR and the bridge), with a few lines that I had
jotted down from a a Munich poet who recently died.
I was trying to ask the question how we go on, what
warns us to be fearful or to resist fearfulness for
our lives (condemning, perhaps, others or seeking
for culprits to blame), to believe in the kind of
democracy we cling to or hope to live in if we are
fortunate, and what do you do when the tide quickly
or gradually turns. I write to friends in Turkey
yesterday, who tell me artists and academics have
now been forbidden to travel. Just imagine you are
told, sorry, you can't lave the country. You climb
on a train, and watch out to spot the aggressor who
may have a backpack on their shoulders, with a bomb.
You stand in line to a rock concert, and the person
near you blows himself up. You go to a fastfood
restaurant, some one pulls a gun and starts
shooting. You dance in a disco, someone starts
killing people on the dance floor. You walk on a
promenade, somone drives over you in a huge truck.
You attend a peaceful pro democracy rally, as folks
did in Kabul, and then there is an explosion. I was
asking for a counter narrative.
regards
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
From: netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org
[netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org] on behalf of
Alan Sondheim [sondh...@panix.com]
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 1:58 AM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed
creativity
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] stone bridges, QRRR and
counter-Munich
"Terror" is already a loaded term and it effaces
sometimes what one might
want to reveal. We just have different attitudes
here. And poverty wasn't
the issue in Johnstown at the time. I apologize
again, however; the
discussion is too loaded for me as well.
On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Ana Vald?s wrote:
Dear Alan I think life is inclusive and
terror in Munich and what happened
in Johnstown are not exclusive but
includes each other. Poverty and to feel
different are the mothers of the terror
as well.
Ana
Den 24 jul 2016 21:41 skrev "Alan
Sondheim" <sondh...@panix.com>:
First -"Lone wolf" - from the WSJ
- "The Phrase Lone Wolf Goes
Back Centuries A phrase used to
describe the culprit in the
Sydney siege stretches centuries
back to Native American chiefs,
Kipling and Crane."
I've heard it all my life.
Second - The bridge and what
happened at Johnstown is quite
different - two books are David J.
Beale, Through the Johnstown
Flood, and David McCullough, The
Johnstown Flood. As I
mentioned, I think, a minimum of
2209 people died from drowning,
the physical force of buildings
bearing down upon them, and
fire. The bridge was a retaining
wall for debris, buildings,
fire, people dead and alive, and
animals dead and alive.
It seems problematic to me -
having been up and down in
Johnstown, seeing the poverty
there now, and so forth - to
immediately have this slip into a
dialog about the Olympics and
the usual discussions on terror.
Johnstown wasn't this; it was
also very much about class
differences, etc., but it was also
about heroic efforts to save
thousands and thousands of lives
(which involved everything from
creating hospitals from scratch
to building railroad tracks in a
very few days, etc.). It's not
that I don't think the other
issues and dialogs are important -
they're absolutely critical - but
the issues are not the same
between the two.
When I was in Johnstown with
Azure, we walked to the damsite
(where the dam gave way), where
the Little Conemaugh River still
flows - and for us and many people
there, the issue is the vile
pollution from mine runoff - which
kills but slower - that's
evident everywhere; the River ran
bright orange, nothing lived
in it at all, and it's part of the
watershed.
I apologize if I'm overstepping my
bounds here, in the
discussion; I just feel odd about
the slippage into a discourse
which seemed to me to efface what
happened 5/31/1889 in
Johnstown, what's happening there
now as well.
Alan
On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Johannes
Birringer wrote:
Dear Ana
not wanting to engage in
ideological fracturings
here, to be honest; you must
be refering to the
passage that my friend from
Houston had sent me in
the reference to the Olympic
Games of 1972, he
spotted a sinister irony in
the choice of the site;
you will recall that the
militant group 'Black
September' , a palestinian
organization, took
responsibility for the
hostage taking, there is
little disputing that, and i
had no intention of
causing harm with labeling.
I was more interested in the
perversion of term lone
wolf (which was a literary
term i think, from
Hesse's Steppenwolf). My
friend from Texas also
pondered the scene he found
on the internet captured
during the Munich shootings
last Friday: "An
extraordinary altercation
took place between some
individuals filming the
Munich killer as he wandered
around a roof car park which
was empty. A fair
amount of invective was
directed from the group
doing the filming at the
killer below. His response
to this was to repeat, "I am
German." A strange
response. There is perhaps
no easy answer to the
question, 'What did he
mean?'"
maybe you have an answer.
regards
jb
________________________________________
From:
netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org
[netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org]
on behalf of
Ana Vald?s
[agora...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016
9:11 PM
To: NetBehaviour for
networked distributed
creativity
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour]
stone bridges, QRRR and
counter-Munich
Johannes I am always moved
by your words. You have
such a touching way to paint
with words:)
When you use the words
"Palestinian terrorists" I
react. Because I has been in
Palestine several times
and the only terror I met
was that exerced by the
Israeli soldiers at the
checkpoints making us run
from their rubber bullets
and from their gas
grenades.
And many of the old Israeli
politicians, as Menachem
Begin, Sharon and others
were called terrorists by
the English when they bombed
the King David Hotel
killing many civilians and
when they killed the
envoy from the United
Nations Folke Bernadotte.
You are born in a country
who exerced terror over
Europe and Africa killing
civilians and executing
Jews, homosexuals and
dissidents. The English
exerced terror over the
Boers in South Africa and
were the first creating
concentration camps.
The French called the time
between 1791 and 1794 the
Regime of the Terror when
not only the French
aristocracy but also the
political dissidents paid
with their life their
dissent.
My point is terror is such
an ambiguous word and I
think no one should label
others with it since
terror seems to be inherent
to all people and to all
cultures.
Ana
On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 1:56
PM, Johannes Birringer
<johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk<mailto:johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>>
wrote:
Receiving a note from Alan
Sondheim, on the road, he
mentions a stone bridge
where he
created a piece "changing
the bridge lighting to
produce,
sequentially, and on
different lighting
levels/apparatus, SOS, QRRR,
and
MAYDAY (QRRR is an old radio
code for
warning/danger/disaster);
this
alternative with flame-light
images on the bridge
side (invisible from the
trains that run above it)
representing burning
crushed buildings and
people....."
i am not sure why I think of
the bridge, but a
friend from Texas, after I
told him
about the chaos in Europe,
the shootings, the
terror, the military
putsches, purges,
and the new security
measures, the increasingly
heated debates on refugees
and migration, Islamism,
fascism, and violence,
well, he noted that the
shootings
in Munich took place on the
site of the former
Olympic Park.
The Olympia shopping centre
is a two-tiered
glass-covered mall that was
built on the site of the
1972 Olympics.
The Munich Games were
overshadowed by a terrorist
attack in which 11 Israeli
sportsmen and a German
policeman were
killed after being taken
hostage by Palestinian
terrorists.
Now we hear that the
shooting last Friday was by a
young "lone wolf" (and what
exactly do they mean by
lone wolf).
A Munich-based poet, the
late Paul W?hr, once wrote
about Die Wirklichkeit unter
Beschuss (reality under
shooting attack)
alles ist doch in Ordnung /
es geht weiter /
ich glaube /
ich glaube es geht weiter /
ja des glaub ich schon.
(translated)
everything's all right, no?
/
life goes on /
I believe /
I believe life goes on /
yeah, I believe so /
that short QRRR, I tend to
think, was meant as
W?hr's satirical comment on
"weltfromme
Bekenntnisformeln" , pious
liturgies that we tell
ourselves, as we must repeat
them and murmur them in
the face of the all the
constant flare ups.
Johannes Birringer
c/o Interaktionslabor
G?ttelborn
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org<mailto:NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org>
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
--
https://anavaldes.wordpress.com/
www.twitter.com/caravia158<http://www.twitter.com/caravia158>
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
<http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/>
cell Sweden +4670-3213370
cell Uruguay +598-99470758
"When once you have tasted
flight, you will forever
walk the earth with your
eyes turned skyward, for
there you have been and
there you will always long
to return.
? Leonardo da Vinci
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
==
email archive
http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org /
cell 718-813-3285
music:
http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text
http://www.alansondheim.org/ub.txt
==
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
==
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/ub.txt
==
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
==
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/ub.txt
==
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
--
https://anavaldes.wordpress.com/
www.twitter.com/caravia158
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
cell Sweden +4670-3213370
cell Uruguay +598-99470758
"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your
eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long
to return.
? Leonardo da Vinci
