We have danced around the fringes of what the L1 really means to the future of music & what this forum & our efforts in music mean to this dot of dirt - the earth. What are we really trying to accomplish here?
This forum & also the Wiki (in an even bigger way) are a gift to the music world & to all the world if we consider it right without too much self importance. What we are doing here is at its core helping others & at its ultimate ends helping the world to better music that can heal all kinds of ills.
We are tooting the L1's horn because we all know inherently that it removes one more barrier to true expression, & true expression is at the core of what we are about as musicians & even more as human beings.
If tomorrow we go up in one big poof! I am glad that we are part of a true extension of the core of mankind here. Cliff Goodwin said in Ashland that his favorite quote about the L1 is that it "speaks the truth". That is what we're after here friends, speaking the truth about what music can do for our little dot of dirt in the sky - & maybe beyond.
Tom
Posts: 3103 | Location: Pueblo West, Colorado | Registered: Wed June 30 2004
I think that spreading the word about the L1 is becomming almost religeous in it's scope for me as I am having a harder and harder time listening to music or spoken word, through any other type of amplification system. I go to Church on Sunday, and have to work at paying attention to the music and message because I am thinking about how terrible the sound is. I wish that I could have known about the L1 a year ago, when our church was spending 17,000 to upgrade their sound system. I want to help prevent other places from making the same mistakes.
In case you've never seen it, here is the picture Voyager took of the earth before it left our solar system. This is us - a dot of dirt. (On the right side - the small blue speck in the middle of the light ray.)
Amazing...
Posts: 3103 | Location: Pueblo West, Colorado | Registered: Wed June 30 2004
Here's what Carl Sagan wrote about this picture. It is taken from here.
This is so beautiful that it brings tears to my eyes.
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996. Image from Voyager 1, 1990.
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.
Posts: 3103 | Location: Pueblo West, Colorado | Registered: Wed June 30 2004
in it's scope for me as I am having a harder and harder time listening to music or spoken word, through any other type of amplification system. I go to Church on Sunday, and have to work at paying attention to the music and message because I am thinking about how terrible the sound is. I wish that I could have known about the L1 a year ago, when our church was spending 17,000 to upgrade their sound system. I want to help prevent other places from making the same mistakes.
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