[NetBehaviour] stone bridges, QRRR and counter-Munich
Ana Valdés
agora158 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 25 02:46:39 CEST 2016
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" <sondheim at 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-bounces at netbehaviour.org [
>> netbehaviour-bounces at netbehaviour.org] on behalf of Ana Vald?s [
>> agora158 at 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.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at 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
>>
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>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>>
>> "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
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>> ? Leonardo da Vinci
>>
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