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Man With Sign, March 21, 02025
I wake before the alarm and get ready, leaving on time and arriving at Roosevelt Circle at 7:29 for a solo vigil (Craige's out till Monday). It's foggy and slightly drizzly, and I've brought an umbrella along. After affixing my big sign to the post, I hold up EVERY DISASTER MOVIE STARTS WITH A SCIENTIST BEING IGNORED, leaving the brolly furled for the moment.
1/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nVlv1aBY0Y
#ClimateChaos #ClimateChange #CitizenActivism #HindustaniMusic
Traffic is initially heavy but thins out significantly for unknown reasons after about fifteen minutes. Less traffic means higher speeds, which means fewer reactions. I get a few nice waves and smiles, and two guys in a car decorated with anti-Trump stickers pump a Solidarity Fist and call out, "Yeah, man!"
2/
Today's the last day of my mixed fourths/scalar exercise, and I put my concentration into hearing it with the scale passage first, functioning as a kind of pickup or mukhda for the rising or falling fourths. At first this seems almost impossible. I practice it several times with a one-bar pause between cells, starting a scalar run on the first offbeat and landing an octave above or below at the next Sam.
3/
This clarifies the parsing of the line significantly. After a few minutes of working with the interpolated pause I try doing it in a steady uninterrupted flow. and am pleased to find that I'm now hearing the seven-note scalar string as the start of the cell. I make a few more adjustments to ensure this perception obtains at the very beginning of both ascending and descending segments.
4/
By 7:55 or so it feels pretty relaxed, though there are occasional sargam lapses when my attention gets knocked off balance. I begin accelerating, incrementing the tempo of the 8-beat Keherwa taal, all the way up to 123 bpm. Around 8:20 it begins to rain in serious earnest, and I have to struggle with sign and umbrella for the rest of the hour — a struggle which can be seen on the video, recorded at 8:27.
5/
At this point it's really coming down, and I pack up in a state of increasing sogginess and urgency. Blecch. On the other hand, the timing couldn't be better for demonstrating my endurance and discipline on the one hand, and the fact that apparently I *do* have enough sense to come in out of the rain, on the other.
6/
The work remains the same: resist fascism and autocracy in every form. However much I may wish that simply telling the truth would be an unremarkable and utterly quotidian act, I am forced by the exigencies of the moment into a revolutionary role. There are worse ways to write these chapters of my story, however much I may wish for a quiet life.
See you Monday.
Man With Sign
end/