[This is a slightly revised version of a posting I made to Facebook on Jan 7, 2021.] Sometimes it's useful to say the obvious. The Trump backers who relented in wake of the Jan 6 insurrection at the Capitol are just rats abandoning a sinking ship, not principled people who were misguided until the incident. The incident – the breach and insurrection at the U.S. Congress – was the logical extension of an opportunistic, unscrupulous force (Trumpism) colliding with the foundation of democratic self-government. The opportunistic dishonesty of Trumpism is not an irresistible force, it is a choice, and self-governing democracy is not immovable, not inevitable – it fails without honesty. (I love this unattributed quote I found on Usenet, an early internet forum: "Affability keeps the boat from rocking, but truth keeps it from sinking.") The only thing surprising about the events is that the rats were able to sustain the absurd pretenses as long and widely as they did. They kne
This score is designed to foster paying attention to both one's own moving and to that of others. Paying attention to others through a screen adds another level of challenge to an already challenging proposition, inherent in any collaborative improvisation, of paying attention to yourself and to others at the same time. This combination of inwards and outwards attention can be key to collaborative improvisation, and especially useful in the context where online collaboration presents this additional challenge. To prime for that, the score starts with a kind of specific challenge: participants taking turns doing brief solos. It's important to emphasize that there's nothing particular that one needs to accomplish in doing these solos besides "showing up", being willing to be seen and pay attention to how it feels (and also being brief). Conversely, those watching the solos have the opportunity to experience paying attention to someone else, while still noticing thei