By Robert Ostertag
Like almost everything else, this book changed with the arrival of COVID-19.
BEFORE: There were plenty of good reasons to develop a home yoga practice before the pandemic: save money, prevent injury, go deeper into meditation, tailor your practice to your own body, and, most of all, to do more yoga.
AFTER: For many people around the world, a home yoga practice is the only yoga available. If we are not going to do yoga at home, we are not going to do yoga at all.
So we have rushed to make this book available as a free e-book. A modest but hopefully helpful contribution to the unprecedented coming together of people all over the world in the face of the pandemic.
Robert Ostertag’s work cannot easily be summarized or pigeonholed. He has published more than twenty albums of music, five books, and a feature film. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages, beginning with his work as a journalist covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. His books cover a wide range of topics, from labor unions to the history of journalism to estrogen and testosterone. He has performed at music, film, and multimedia festivals around the globe. His radically diverse musical collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Mike Patton, transgender cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, British guitar innovator Fred Frith, EDM DJ Rrose, and many others.
Check out an excerpt from his forthcoming book: Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat: Technics and Civilization in the 21st Century
Dear Friends,
Forgive me for being such a poor correspondent during my year around the world. The daily kaleidoscope was so relentlessly compelling I found it difficult to collect my thoughts, much less write them down. At the end of it all I have arrived in Berlin, an island of sanity in a crazy world.
More precisely, I am in the naked gay sunbathing section of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s large city park. Green grass, green trees, blue sky, a lovely blanket of calm everywhere, lots of naked men lying in the sun. Families with little kids walking by. The easy mixing of naked gay men and kids on their way to get ice cream bothers no one. Beautiful Berlin.
The only men not lying motionless are me and two others just to my left. One of these is in a motorized wheel chair. He has a disorder which makes it impossible for him to control his movement, and is flailing around in the chair. The other man is the flailing man’s caretaker, who is dspoon feeding the one in the chair. The man in the chair is naked. His caretaker, clothed, has brought him here so he can be naked in the park with the rest of the guys. The condition of the man in the chair is so severe that it is hard for him to swallow, and the quiet tranquility of the park is periodically broken by his loud and urgent choking when the food goes does the wrong way.
I am doing yoga.
Perfect.
At last I can think.
Love,
Bob
