Thoughts for the Meeting

[Bradley Hope]

Moonenites, Lunarticks: There is a meeting tonight at Heeb HQ
6:00 p.m., at 18 Bridge St. #3D, just off the York St. F stop.
There will be free pizza.

-- THE NEXT EDITION --

I've written a lot of stream of consciousness stuff about this edition, but here is a bit more formulated version of what I think could be good for the next edition.

Theme is desert / water
The attempt with this theme is to create two sets of content, for the themes, but some will veer towards the intersection more. It's an experiment in themes, too, but I think it will be successful if we get the right mix.

One critical thrust is:
The way water or the lack of water shapes a city

WATER

For New York there are numerous examples of this
- The water table affects how tall buildings can be
Underground streams make some areas much more fertile for trees, hence the weeping willows in the East Village

- There is also water politics, prices
The problems that water causes, too, in an emergency kind of way
Fears of hurricanes, flooding

---> I suggest we do a story about those weeping willows. I think they are a charming, illustrative way to begin
a discussion of the way water physically shapes and affects the lay out of the city

---> There could also be some discussion of the underground streams that Ryan hinted at in his underground theme piece
He mentioned that he was afraid of being repetitive, but I would counter that another key experiment of the moon is to have our themes
course through the entire lifecycle of the publication. I mentioned that I tried to hint at the desert in some of the pieces in this last edition: the
obvious example is the Arizona piece, but there is also a desert thing in one of the 6th borough things

---> I also suggest that we get Konrad Fiedler to put together a collection of pictures of the city overcome with water
as a spot news photographer, he has amazing pictures of floods, storms, etc., water main breaks

---> Steven has also mentioned doing a kind of personal essay, which would be good

---> In terms of interactivity, any way that we can turn that water table map into something interactive would be amazing
One option would be to do another version of the trash map, but using konrad's photos instead
http://www.kottke.org/plus/viele-map/

DESERT

The thing about these twin themes is they really are two sides of a coin, water, or the lack thereof

Keach and I are going to Liwa to record the singing sands of the dunes
There should also be a kind of meditation on how Abu Dhabi is a kind of artificial oasis, surrounded by super salty water
It was just a little pearl fishing village for a few months of the year for most of its history
But oil changed all that
Allowing them to build towers across the island - all pumped with AC and desalinated water
The UAE is one of the largest per capita producers of CO2 emissions in the world

Still it's a terribly dusty, sandy place, and hot as hell
Everywhere, there are sprinklers on, trying desperately to keep little patches of grass alive
And they are trying to artificially make the city more liveable by using water misters to cool down the air, etc.

Anyways -

---> There should definitely be some meditation on Abu Dhabi, probably in the form of a This Island Earth

---> We also have a very very nice set of excerpts from old travel diaries about the desert, and the search for water, from Levi Stahl
I am still thinking of the best way that we can display these
I think absolutely they should be intertwined with the singing sands piece

---> He also wrote a nice fiction piece that is quite Moonish. We have to figure out a good way to add some value to this design wise, or some new media

---> We have a dispatch also from a Texan town from two new contributors. Supposedly, this is just an isolated town in the middle of Texas, but it is drawing some attention for its thriving arts scene

IN TERMS OF the IN BETWEEN of the two themes

--> It would be interesting to find some way to feature a person who is from the desert living in a water-world place

---> The brilliant author JG Ballard wrote two books, The Drowned World and The Burning World, that perfectly mirror our twin themes
One is about an earth with little water, bone dry and nighmarish. The other is about a water world, overcome and nightmarish.
It would be worthwhile to write an essay about the two books, as well as to contact him for his input on this.
Water really is at the center of our imagination in any apocalyptic vision of the future - the lack of it or the too much of it

--> Peter is coordinating an exciting musical composition
Which is basically two songs
One is a desert song that incorporates singing sand, prayer calls, the tesselating image of a desert, the search for water
And the other
is a watery song, a deluge, looking for something dry to douse, etc.

Here is some stuff that Greg has already put together for the desert:
http://www.cosmod.net/mp3s/brad-moon/brads-solo.mp3
http://www.cosmod.net/mp3s/brad-moon/bradsdream-cleaned.mp3
http://www.cosmod.net/mp3s/brad-moon/brads-dream.mp3 

This project should be featured prominently on the front page -
which leads me to another challenge

This front page has to be a bit different than our previous ones
It needs to somehow capture the idea of the twin themes and even be interactive itself, if possible

One image i had is a city in a goldfish bowl, surrounded by sand, but that is a bit silly (it's kind of how i think of abu Dhabi)
I'll leave it up to zack to think about this
it would be be nice to having things we can click on in the central image
but we also don't want the table of contents bar on the right side to be irrelevant

---

In terms of a blueprint
I had just one idea,
A new holiday: Desert Day, where no one uses water from the tap
Lives on a store of bottled water,
it would be like fasting
to impress upon us how fragile life is without it

like always, we can have multiple blue prints

---->>>> Some things we want to think about:

Is there any video we can do?
Is there any other multimedia we can add to some of the projects to make them more Moonish?

Who can we profile or interview that would give us a good insight into this issue?
   It would be quite interesting to contact a few experts about this. Ryan and I can probably think of a dozen disaster people in NYC that can give some kind of impression
   That leads me even to think that Ryan could do an interesting water disaster story, and we could include the flood lines

Who will do what project?
How can we get more designers involved? A few people wrote in about the design aspect: It would be cool to include more illustrations
Maybe the girl from California can do two pictures of cities, one barren and sand-swept, the other submerged, soggy.

What other blueprints can we do?

Over and out,
Bradley

[Levi Stahl]

I picked up Ballard's The Drowned World at the library yesterday, but neither Chicago Public nor the University of Chicago library seems to have The Burning World (also, apparently, published as The Drought).

Levi