WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 43.6MB)
Today we begin to take some kind of measure of the impacts of the so-called novel coronavirus or COVID-19 in our communities.
Throughout, we’ll be accompanied by “Love” and “Compassion,” two tracks from John Coltrane’s last recordings with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison. Recorded on September 2, 1965 and released in 1977 on the album First Meditations, this has been described by critic and essayist Geoff Dyer as “catastrophic Coltrane” following Adorno’s reflection that in the history of art “late works are the catastrophe.”
What we know about the pandemic being called COVID-19 (a novel coronavirus) is ever-changing. The number of confirmed cases continues to rise; certain areas have been hard hit, from the so-called epicenter in Wuhan, China, to the Lombardy region in Northern Italy.
One primary concern is simply how people get good information so they can plan their lives accordingly. To date we have been asked to wash our hands incessantly or as one of our guests has written, furiously, and most importantly, apparently, we are supposed to practice social distancing.
But what if that’s not possible; and further, what if that only bolsters the destructive individualism that has brought us to our current catastrophes?
But we move finally to “how to help” and how to remember there are many ways to feel the pain of a catastrophe, to the fact that pandemics grow and are fostered from within our systems of living…telling us that this way of organizing our living has to stop.
To begin today, Mia Beach shares two conversations with guests Kass Botts and Forrest Gilmore. Kass Botts is the Executive Director of the Indiana Recovery Alliance, an organization focused on harm reduction and social justice in the Bloomington community; and Forrest Gilmore is the Executive Director of the Shalom Community Center in Bloomington, an organization that supports people suffering poverty and houselessness.
And we’ll end with philosopher Frederic Neyrat who discusses the ways we are manipulated by certain ideas of separation. Neyrat specifically looks at the French context but goes on to discuss the ways that we must reject the kinds of “separations” offered from our built environments and our governments and perhaps find ways to separate from them.
RELATED
Viruses and Separation: Frédéric Neyrat on political virality and competing separatisms
Shalom Community Center
Facebook page for the Shalom Community Center
Indiana Recovery Alliance
Facebook page for Indiana Recovery Alliance
MUSIC
John Coltrane, “Love” and “Compassion” (First Meditations)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Segment Producer: Mia Beach
Executive Producer: Kade Young
