[NetBehaviour] ~~~Serenade~~~ under the moon

Johannes Birringer (Staff) Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk
Fri Jun 28 18:47:15 CEST 2019


thanks for the reply --  and again for your willingness to share so much of your work here, your writing & music.

Now, after your reply, and your mentioning of the "Inadequate" text, I took a brief look and realized this is a long durational text.
I stopped after the opening section on the "case" of the ontologies and materialities of the world.

As you all are aware, a great deal of interest has now gone towards materialisms and matter, and ontologies. And also the "terrestrial" (friends alerted me
to a new "manifesto" by Bruno Latour, "Das terrestrische Manifest" - i think the english translation is "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime" -
has anyone come across this?). What fascinated me, Alan, was to find your photo of a substation (attached) with the Inadequate text, why a converter station?

I remember one day not too long ago, we sat in a van driving out towards the desert mountains of West Texas, a long trip ahead, and as we were leaving the outskirts of Houston, I look out of the window and see a substation, located directly next to a cemetery. I wondered what brought the two together.

best
Johannes Birringer


_______________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: 27 June 2019 03:38


Apologies for not writing back sooner, we were away in Ashfield, Mass. with a poor connection.
The photograph is beautiful, incredible, are there videos?
Threnody, yes, mournful and then Shorter Discourses of the Buddha, I was thinking of the Pali Canon, which I read into, as well.
It is all bones, I've been writing 'The Inadequate' for a while now, the text is inadequate as is the topic.
It's at http://www.alansondheim.org/inadequate.txt somewhat revised, it's also coming out in an online and possibly offline journal.
But the point is that a serenade itself is a resonance perhaps for a duration of a feeling, there's always a closure involved, albeit somewhat tattered.
Years ago I wrote a fair amount about the 'tawdry' and I wonder how replete that is, how much is every left.

Best, Alan, see you in September, perhaps October, working out a schedule manque




On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 8:48 AM Johannes Birringer (Staff) <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:
thanks Alan for the text and the music.

I reread your writing a few times, and in fact enjoyed listening to you during this echoing-memory piece in
"the cathedral of resonance," as you call it. I remember that serenades were light, light-heartedly serene, in honor
of some thing or some one, in the musical tradition I was raised in, but it's a while ago that I reflected on that, and you sound more somber
and desperate. On the other hand, think of cathedrals without roofs and yet with memories resonating in their
arms and corridors and bones and limbs, i think memory is a medium too, and I recommend a book I stumbled across
which overtly seems to me a media history/media theory, but it's so much more and I'm enjoying the elemental
sense of it (not devastation but plenitude of nature) - "The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media"
(by John Durham Peter., 2015). The depths of fragility of our bodies and our earth of course are serious matters,
you are playing with fire. If memory is time, thus lost or recorded, then you are doing fine, you are recording!
Now "Threnody," a CD of music you sent me some time ago, refers to a wailing, ode or song, hymn or poem of mourning?
a memorial to a dead person?  music tends to lift me, make me feel alive, does it not to you?

I send you all a photo from current rehearsal, "mourning for a dead moon,"  i hope it will be a uproarious dance piece,
full of wonder, sprouting new leaves, and blue lines or arteries against the dark sky.

best
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
london and houston


________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour-bounces at lists.netbehaviour.org>> on behalf of Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com<mailto:sondheim at panix.com>>
Sent: 18 June 2019 16:59
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Subject: [NetBehaviour] ~~~Serenade~~~



~~~Serenade~~~

http://www.alansondheim.org/serenade0.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/serenade.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/serenade.png

[listening to duduk music, playing c clarinet]

[i worry about increasingly turning inward; the longer we live in
relative isolation here, the more i gnaw myself out. i generate a
cathedral of resonance after the fact of the music, and the music
ceases to be a social occasion, and turns instead immediately into
memory of what would never have occurred here, in this dwelling.
my thought moves between blockchain and holocaust; i was born when
'the' holocaust was in full fury, and now i try to drag the
digital down with me into the depths of the fragility of the body,
without crispr and with minimal prosthetics. this is sound hardly
to be listened to; this is the memory of sound. our minds live in
devastation; i listen to yours.]


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