27 August 2007 - Pittsburgh, PA | What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

27 August 2007 - Pittsburgh, PA

Maybe it was the full moon. Maybe it was the warm weather. Maybe the Rolling Stones were in town. Maybe we were competing with some staged public battle between a local Named-After-An-Almost-Extinct-Wild-Animal sports team and a from-far-away Named-After-An-Almost-Extinct-Wild-Animal sports team. Maybe it was the fact that classes were just resuming at Pitt. Maybe it was the atomization of individuals and breakdown of community inherent in the large city experience. Maybe it was a lingering fear of zombie attack. Whatever the reason, the Pittsburgh screening was very small.

We knew it would happen eventually. We knew that, one of these days, we would build it, and they would not come. So in a way, it’s a relief. It happened. And we survived the experience. But still…

We had some nice walks through the Oakland neighborhood, from our hotel to the strip of restaurants and shops near Pitt. We had some great conversations with Jason and Giuli, about psychology and evolution and scale, about navigating collapse, about tribalism and re-wilding and finding new ways of being as the absurd and insane dominant culture unravels around us. It was really good to meet them, to hear what they were up to, to share wisdoms and experiences and insights. We wish the Tribe of Anthropik the very best in their endeavors as the future unfurls…

We showed the doc to a small group in a cozy conference room at the Holiday Inn. Afterwards, we stayed and talked for some time, a small circle of souls, awake and aware as the city slept all around us. It was sweet and real in its own special way. And walking back to the car in the night, the zombies left us alone.

As a general rule of thumb, we noticed a correlation between large cities and smaller attendance on this tour. We’ve speculated a number of reasons for this. We wonder how much it has to do with the connectedness of our screening organizers, and how much easier it is to be connected in a smaller town. And we’ve wondered if it might just be much more difficult to stop and look seriously at the world situation when you are living in a large urban area, knowing deep inside that those larger urban areas are likely to be hardest hit. Lots of ideas. We’ll continue to observe and reflect, as we travel about with the doc. There is, as always, much to learn.

On to Baltimore…