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Read this with wide open eyes!

March 20

Villagers & Pillagers: Who Will Survive the Collapse?

 

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Playing Into Wholeness

March 17

Hi all,

I'd like to refer you to an extraordinary blog experience.

Member Mike Daniel blogs at:

http://www.playingintowholeness.com/blog/

Take a break and read, immerse yourself in his remarkable

photos and inspiring poetry.

Be ready for something different!

 

 

 

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First draft of cover spread for Dreams, Bones & the Future: Endings

March 16

Here is the first draft of the cover for Dreams, Bones and the Future: Endings. This is the third and final volume of the series by Russell Lockhart and Paco Mitchell. We are still working on it so it is not yet ready for distribution. Possibly sometime in the summer. Some excerpts from all three volumes will soon be available on the Dream Network site.

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Haiku

February 24
Haiku prompted by reading "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future is Doing to Us," an article by Giles Harvey in the NY Times 2.23.21.
He left with no words
Narry a nod or gesture
Whereabouts unknown
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Essential viewing from Adam Curtis

February 18

Adam Curtis's new BBC documentary entitled, Can't Get You Out of My Mind, is essential viewing.

Curtis continues the kind of gut-wrenching patch-work quilt that comes together to reveal what

has not quite been seen before, as he did in his The Century of the Self. 

Here is the link:

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/?fbclid=IwAR0x8YFR8fa3cSMQuECD1hF0WzXGIoI_8gqcqw-vyDHngIdmXHVWpgQLqZg#top

 

Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Adam Curtis2021
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, corruption, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence and surveillance. The series deals with the rise of individualism and populism throughout history, and the failures of a wide range of resistance movements throughout time and various countries, pointing to how revolution has been subsumed in various ways by spectacle and culture, because of the way power has been forgotten or given away.
Series
Part 1 — Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain
We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe, and America, societies have become split and polarised. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption—and a widespread distrust of the elites. Into this has come the pandemic that has brutally dramatised those divisions. But despite the chaos, there is a paralysis—a sense that no one knows how to escape from this. Can’t Get You Out of My Head tells how we got to this place. And why both those in power—and we—find it so difficult to move on. At its heart is the strange story of what happened when people’s inner feelings got mixed up with power in the age of individualism. How the hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people’s minds met the decaying forces of old power in Britain, America, Russia, and China. What resulted was a block not just in the society, but also inside our own heads, that stops us imagining anything else than this.
Part 2 — Shooting and F**king are the Same Thing
This next part traverses the story of what tore the revolutions in the 1960s apart. Jiang Qing in China, Michael X in London, Afeni Shakur in New York believed that millions of people’s minds were haunted by the corruption and the violence of the past. They wanted to show people how to escape those ghosts. But they hadn’t reckoned with the fact that the old structures of power still haunted their minds too. They too had been scarred by the past, and some of them wanted violent revenge. While psychologists and neuroscientists were starting to discover what they said were hidden forces inside the human brain that really controlled what they did. But the people weren’t aware.
Part 3 — Money Changes Everything
This is the story of how in the 1970s, those in power set out to create a world free of the dangerous big ideas of the past. They banished the grand dreams of changing the world. And replaced them with money. People would live from now on in their own heads—in their own dreams. And the banks would lend them the money to create those dreams. While China would supply a wave of cheap consumer goods on a scale never seen before in the world. But then money broke free across the world. And people started to get frightened that things were out of control. Not just money—but the world’s climate too seemed to be behaving in a strange, unpredictable way. The systems seemed to have a life of their own. Beyond the ability of anyone to shape and predict.
Part 4 — But What If the People Are Stupid?
No one trusted politics or politicians any longer. Instead we were all one world of free individuals. And we could intervene to save other individuals around the world without bothering with old politics and power. And people became what they as individuals truly were—emotionally and sexually. But power was mutating and finding ways to work its way back into our heads. The politicians realised that they no longer had the support or the trust of the people. So they switched sides and gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf. Instead they began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. And they made new alliances—with the psychologists who said that human beings were irrational and needed to be managed. But we didn’t notice because we were too busy shopping.
Part 5 — The Lordly Ones
It wasn’t just the Slave Trade: 150 years ago Britain had wrecked China by forcing opium on the country. It made Britain the richest and most powerful country in the world. But it enslaved the minds of millions of the Chinese and helped destroy the society. But then the British got frightened of what they had done and created a dream image of a Britain that had never existed, to hide from the fear. This film tells the story of how from the end of the 19th century a magical vision of Britain’s feudal past was created by artists and writers. How folk music and folk dancing was invented to create a kind of safe dream of the nation that could hide the violence and the horrors. The dream persisted under the surface of the 20th century. But as the fears and uncertainties and the chaos of the last few years rose up millions of people started to believe that dream: that it was real.
Part 6 — Are We Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer?
The final episode tells how the strange paralysis that grips us today was created. How all the different forces of our age—that started out as separate have come together to create what is a block against imagining another kind of future than this. How, money and debt, melancholy over the loss of empire, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, Artificial Intelligence, and love and power have all fed into creating the present time of anxiety and fearfulness about the future. And whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really also part of the rigid system—in the West and in Russia and China—where those in power have run out of all ideas. The film also lays out what are the different possible roads from here into the future, and the choices we will have to make about the very different futures we will have to choose very soon.

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A book not to be missed…

February 2
Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, a deckled edge, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book?gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred?and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings?asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass?offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
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Extraordinary reflections…

January 29
Extraordinary reflections...
http://ralockhart.com/WP/2021/01/29/extraordinary-reflections/
ONLINE LECTURE
GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN.FU-BERLIN.DE
ONLINE LECTURE
Locked down in my home-city of Kolkata (Calcutta) in late March 2020, I found myself experiencing the sepulchral silence of my normally cacophonous street, which runs through the heart of the city. Now everything seemed more or less vacant or dead, with only the barking of hungry street dogs echoing...
Background
 
Locked down in my home-city of Kolkata (Calcutta) in late March 2020, I found myself experiencing the sepulchral silence of my normally cacophonous street, which runs through the heart of the city. Now everything seemed more or less vacant or dead, with only the barking of hungry street dogs echoing through the night. Over the months in the most severe days of the lockdown, my only contact with the world was through my computer, on which a deluge of material relating to the novel coronavirus began to accumulate. I began to inventory this material in folders and, virus-like, it began to mutate and grow and occupy even more folders. At some point of saturation, when I could no longer bear to read or hear anything more about the coronavirus—which is my shorthand for the more technical rendering of the SARS-CoV-2—I felt that the only way to occupy my mind and keep sane was to embark on an academic exercise by writing about the coronavirus in relation to theatre.
 
What began as a series of reflections soon began to take on the framework of a book, which I was in no position to write—at least, not yet. I had neither the stamina nor the bibliographical resources to deal with the range of the pandemic’s impact on the world at large. Besides, as in all my writings, I generally begin any publication with a lecture, more often than not, at a conference or seminar. Now, more than ever, I felt the need to speak, to share my thoughts with friends and strangers in all parts of the world. It was out of this compulsion that the decision to record my thoughts on video became inevitable. Equally inevitable was the need to break down this behemoth of a lecture into three parts, consisting of separate episodes. I felt that this was also somewhat more considerate to my potential listeners, who would have the opportunity to select the episodes they wished to hear.
 
My impulse to reflect on 'Theatre and the Coronavirus' in the form of a video-lecture would have remained an unrealized project had it not been for the prompt support that I received from my senior colleague Erika Fischer-Lichte. Her robust encouragement and pragmatic suggestions helped me to sustain the life of the mind during the pandemic. My sincere thanks as well to the entire film crew in Calcutta and to my indefatigable editor, Charlie Lyons, based in New York. My colleagues at the International Research Center in Berlin have not spared themselves in dealing with the nitty-gritty of postproduction and copyright-related matters. My gratitude to all who made this project possible.
 
 
 
Table of Contents (please click on the episode title to access the video)
 
Part I
 
Episode 1 – Introduction (28 min.)
 
Episode 2 – The Closure of Theatres: The Plague and the Elizabethan Theatre (22 min.)
 
Episode 3 – When Theatres Remained Open: The Spanish Flu (1918–1919) (22 min.)
 
Episode 4 – ‘The Theatre and the Plague’: Revisiting Artaud in the Age of the Coronavirus (28 min.)
 
Part II
 
Episode 5 – Social Distancing in Context: Performances in Everyday Life (28 min.)
 
Episode 6 – Political Assemblies: Performing in the Here and Now (30 min.)
 
Part III
 
Episode 7 – Online Performances: A Search for New Forms of Theatre (24 min.)
 
Episode 8 – New Paradigms of Theatre Architecture: A Search for a Post-Pandemic Ecology of Space (23 min.)
 
Episode 9 – Learning to Live with Ourselves: Lessons from the Pandemic (31 min.)
 
 
 
Bibliography & Credits
 
 
 
Synopsis
 
To encapsulate the range of themes in this lecture, which I have described as a ‘speech-act,’ I begin with an introduction where I attempt to locate the threat of the coronavirus within the confines of theatre spaces at structural and phenomenological levels. This leads to two related scenarios in a broader historical context: the first focuses on theatres shutting down in an epidemic, notably the Elizabethan theatre during the plague, and the second focuses on theatres remaining open through the virulence of the Spanish Flu at the end of the First World War. These two contrasting scenarios will be followed by a revisiting of one of the most incendiary essays on the performativity of disease—Antonin Artaud’s ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ (1933) —whose words resonate with uncanny power in the age of the coronavirus.
 
In Part 2, the focus shifts from theatre to performance, and more specifically, to the performances of everyday life. In a sociological register, I juxtapose manifestations of ‘social distancing’ in the global metropolis and in the context of caste in India. This is followed by a brief encapsulation of the philosophical differences between Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben on the benefits and the tyranny of the lockdown. The next episode focuses on the performativity of political assemblies, where I draw on the writings of Judith Butler in the larger context of Black Lives Matter and the Shaheen Bagh movement in New Delhi. How do acts of civil disobedience coexist with the risks of being infected by the coronavirus in the public sphere?
 
Part 3 focuses on the here and now of how theatre artists are exploring new modes of online performance, which compels one to rethink the historical contingencies of the ‘live’ and the ‘mediatized.’ This will be followed by some speculations on the need for a new ecologically tuned theatre architecture in a post-pandemic state of being. And the final episode will focus, in a more personal register, on how we may learn to live with ourselves as we learn to live with the virus through the ethos of waiting.
 
By the time I had recorded my speech-act at a studio in Kolkata on October 27 and 28, 2020, the vaccine for the virus had not yet materialized. Now it is becoming available at least in some parts of the world, even as the uncertainties surrounding the emergence of a new strain in the virus intensify along with the inequities of the vaccine’s distribution.
 
As this series of video-lectures goes public in January 2021, many theatres remain shut or have yet to fully open. I have not attempted to predict the future of the theatre. Instead, I would regard this series of reflections as a document of a particular point in time, which has enabled me to engage with the symbiotic, contrapuntal, intimate and divisive dynamics of theatre and the coronavirus. As in any narrative, much has been left out, and so much more needs to be said on vital matters. What I present here are mere intimations of a crisis that continues from which we can hopefully learn about sustaining our lives in the theatre.
 
 
 
Biography
 
Rustom Bharucha retired as Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A Fellow at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” between 2010 and 2012, during which time he researched his book Terror and Performance (Routledge, 2014), he is the author of several books including Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (Routledge, 1993), The Question of Faith (Orient Longman, 1993), Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance (Harper Collins, 1995), In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India (Oxford University Press, 1998), The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), Rajasthan: An Oral History (Penguin, 2003) and Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Oxford University Press, 2006). Most recently, he has completed a new book Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, coedited with Paula Richman, which will be published by Oxford University Press, New York, in May 2021. This book was inspired by his work as co-Artistic Director (with Veenapani Chawla) on two Ramayana Festivals at the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Research, Puducherry, India, where he also served as an interlocutor for all the discussions with the performers. Earlier, he worked as the Project Director of Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan as part of a larger exploration of traditional knowledge systems. Combining theory and practice at both intercultural and intracultural levels, he is presently working as a dramaturge on a contemporary adaptation of the Mahabharata directed by Chong Tze Chien and produced by the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.
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PANCREAS

January 28
PANCREAS
You have a pancreas, yes you do!
it produces insulin, glucagon, somatostatin,
and pancreatic polypeptide, all of which
circulate in the blood. Without you knowing.
without you doing anything at all.
Does not matter if you are gendered or genderless
Does not matter if you are left-wing, right-wing, or no-wing
Does not matter if you are one race or another or a mix
Does not matter if you are married or not
Does not matter if you are homed or homeless
Does not matter if you are well-read or not.
Does not matter if you are rich or poor or in between
Does not matter if you are a celebrity or unknown
Does not matter if this or that of any kind
Get it?          It      does       not      matter
There is a secret here.
Guess it.
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American Psychosis – Chris Hedges

January 28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14MGbEYQZ2Y&fbclid=IwAR2Rt-OROs70AOfCZn6pVgOxhRKv-BGQvYRW4uwrfYrhBdFy_NcTfPLYH-0

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TIME IT IS

January 24
TIME IT IS
The excellence of
time is unremarked
amid the din of
"not enough"
"too much"
"too fast"
"too slow"
The secret of time
lies in its absence
in its lack of mathematics
in its silence
in its going nowhere
while everyone chases it
or, in fear, flees it
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