I really did move my blog- it really is:
I promise I won’t post anything else here no mo’. Solemnly swear.
SOS held it’s first show at the Hard Drive cafe tonight- it rocked. We saw a lot of new faces, and jawed about the thing that brings us together. Making weird stuff. Gosh, we sure like it! Leslie Benson’s paper weaving creations were an eye-catching attraction, David Krause’s stream of consciousness sculpture was colorful and intuitive. Loren Donner sexed up the atmosphere with four fine b &w prints of the abstracted nude figure. Yolanda Chichester shook things up as usual with and interactive wall piece and Charlie Goldberg displayed a colorful porno print alongside (hell to the yeah). Jason Sheppard went DIY with large color prints on newsprint of his current tinkering endeavors and Lara ummmmmm… insert last name here displayed two woodcut prints. Eve Partridge’s ceramics added a nice down to earth dimension to the show! Lovely. I did the usual- masking taped up drawings of people doing wierd shit. So great- congrats everybody. And thank you to all of our guests!
The Rise Of Community:
1) membership, 2) influence, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and 4) shared emotional connection.
Pseudo-community: Where participants are “nice with each other”, playing-safe, and presenting what they feel is the most favourable sides of their personalities.
Chaos: When people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their “shadow” selves. This stage places great demands upon the facilitator for greater leadership and organization, but Peck believes that “organizations are not communities”, and this pressure should be resisted.
Emptiness: This stage moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings. Out of this emptiness comes
True community: the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community. This stage Peck believes can only be described as “glory” and reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one’s fellows.
Begin with the idea that environment plays the most important role in human existence.
Natural Environment: Climate, population, resources
Social environment: density, diversity, religion, values, age, gender, leadership
It is ideal for every human being to find an environment that corresponds to his or her internal environment. By finding this environment, it is likely that the individual will find other individuals with similar internal environments, increasing the likelihood of building a True Community. Internal environments are in perpetual flux, which is why total community stability does not exist. But this doesn’t mean that True Community cannot exist.
My ideal environment.
The search terms for my ideal environment are:
Art, Youth, Urban, Sustainable, Philosophy, Baking, Hiking, Ocean, Garden
The overall picture for these search terms might be:
In a city by the Sea, a community of young visionaries sat by the fire, discussing art and philosophy, drinking wine and eating fresh bread after a long day of harvesting produce from their rooftop garden.
Immediately, we have an understanding of the nature of the environment.
And I’m going to roll with this because it is what I am passionate about and this is not a philosophical proof or experiment.
Given my search terms, this particular notion also paints a picture that has come to be understood as anti-American. America has come to stand for the liberty to consume. As an American, I am free to be whatever I like, as long as that includes participating in consumerism. I shall work for those who generate stuff. I spend my earnings on that stuff.
So, what happens when I decide that I have enough stuff. Unfortunately for many Americans, this will never happen because genius advertising experts make it their mission in life to convince (this word is unnecessarily strong because most people are so ingrained with the idea of consumption anyway) consumers that there is something better or new to replace the stuff they already own. For example: I have a very good makeup and bath collection, but lately have felt I should go to Sephora to get more. Unnecessary. But VERY desirable.
Another way to consider this outlook that might point to the doomed nature of a Supercapitalist society.
This American Life recently discussed in brief the proverb of the wild success a man would have if he invented a better mousetrap. But here is the thing: the world does not need a better mousetrap. The ridiculously cheap ones we have now are pretty successful.
I have all of the mousetraps I could EVER need and they seem to work just fine- I’m not interested in spending my hard-earned capital on one that works a little bit better.
So, we arrive at the problem with perpetual growth and uberconsumerism:
It is not sustainable. WE HAVE WAY TOO MUCH STUFF and we are so OVERstuffed that our lives are getting super complicated. And I’m not speaking from the point of view of a survivalist hippie. I LOVE shopping. I love buying new stuff. It makes me feel good. I love beautiful things. I love showing off my cool stuff to everyone. I love being hip and fashionable. But only for a minute- everything’s golden. Then, the night ends, I take off my brand new designer jeans and struggle to stuff them into my dresser drawer that is wayyy to full already.
Now I have a couple of options:
I vote 3 because #1 makes me feel like I wasted my money on the pairs I gave away, and #2 is not within my means because I just blew $270 on Sevens. But at what price do I choose 3? My personal image will be tarnished! I won’t give the right impression if I don’t keep up with trends/ fine clothing.
But then- I turn my TV off, keep the items I own in good shape, and continue on with my life.
Uh oh. Another problem. My life WAS consumerism. I spent my time
a) shopping
b) in school
c) researching possible buying opportunities on the internet
d) watching TV, inspired more buying opportunities
e) working to save up money so I could buy more stuff
So, uh, what do I do with all of this time and money and energy now that I don’t want more stuff?
This is a big big question. What now?
Ooo the point emerges. And the reason for my copy paste of generic wikipedia material.
I am convinced that Capital will now be replaced with Social Capital.
Mutually beneficial relationships and a sense of involvement, contribution, constant learning, all around people who are equally as invested as I am!! Sound too good to be true?
Well you’re right. It is.
Because the notion of community in this society is such a far cry from what community is. When I think about Community Development, I think about entrepreneurs building shopping centers and youth hangouts in remote towns. These may be structures that are essential for community building, but lets review the steps set forth in the beginning:
Pseudo-community: Where participants are “nice with each other”, playing-safe, and presenting what they feel is the most favourable sides of their personalities.
Chaos: When people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their “shadow” selves. This stage places great demands upon the facilitator for greater leadership and organization, but Peck believes that “organizations are not communities”, and this pressure should be resisted.
Emptiness: This stage moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings. Out of this emptiness comes
True community: the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community. This stage Peck believes can only be described as “glory” and reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one’s fellows.
Most communities I have ever been a part of have never moved past Chaos.
Community is a difficult thing to build and an even more difficult thing to maintain. And if people are only in it to reap guaranteed benefits, then forget it.
For example: I will join a student group at my University because it will put me in contact with all of the important people I need to know in order to get solid recommendations for an employment position, or whatever.
While this opportunity is an essential benefit of my membership, trust and respect can not be built on this motivation. Communities are absolutely dependent on complex interacting relationships between members, environment, rules, and higher connections, without which communities are false and hollow.
MISSION: Search for True Community development in an ideal environment.
I am a patriotic woman and I am so tired of the negative climate that consumerism has created. I think True Community has the life affirming power to get Americans living again.
I JUST heard this contribution from Poet Andrei Codrescu to NPR’s all things considered. Pretty good stuff.
I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.
This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of ‘em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I’m fixin’ to make the thing run on plum brandy. I’ve got a plum tree.
Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.
Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.
So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it’s the ’70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can’t exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can’t squeeze even an extra penny out of them.
Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don’t even think it’s people from the ’70s: It’s people … from the future!
It’s worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn’t pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn’t worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn’t drive, because they didn’t have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.
Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.
Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.
And now they are coming up the road to my place because I’m a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.
“What did you do wrong?” I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.
“Nothing,” he said. “We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn’t turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In.”
“At least the Second Amendment is safe,” I said. “Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn’t say anything about TV.”
And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:
make yourselves at home
you won’t be bailed in or out again
you’re safe in Second Life
Well I guess the title really says it all. About two weeks ago, I heard the bloodcurdling scream of a Mountain Lion like REALLY close. Even though I have lived in the mountains almost my whole life and know better, I panicked and BOOKED it back home. Since then, I’ve seen bigcat scat around and so every time I can’t manage to get one of my parents to come out walking with me, I spend the whole time out making loud threats to the woods. I have also taken to behaving like a Russian submarine, doubling back every 5 minutes. I just want to GO FOR A WALK without the fear of being eaten. Yeah I know these fears may sound unwarranted and they are more afraid of me…yeah yeah yeah. Shudder.
Michelle Obama spoke to a crowd of more than 8,500 at Farrand Field on the CU Campus yesterday- it was good. I clapped. A lot of what she said appealed to young voters, encouraging us to register to vote and telling us why Barack Obama is the only candidate addressing the issues that concern us most: student loans, health care, renewable energy, and the timetable for Iraq were the issues that stuck out to me. Obama was poised, and spoke friendly and easily.
After that energizing event, another happening.
A treat rolled into Lot 470 at CU. We received a visit from Drive By Press, a mobile print press gallery based out of Texas. They put up their sizable and lovely print collection in the Foundations studio and spent the whole day rolling out custom woodcut prints on American Apparel t-shirts out of the back of their car.
Check them out at
I gave them the shirt off my back to print on and spent the rest of the balmy day sweating in a jacket. Totally worth the baller print of a Mexican Wrestler wearing a sombrero.
Hi I realize that I don’t have as big of a voice as JOYENGINE who I saw this video from. But PLEASE. If you live in Colorado, you have until MONDAY to register to vote. And IF you don’t register by Monday, then any mind-changing revelations you might have about ANY ISSUE on the ballot this November (or October 20tth- yay early voting!!!) will be TOTALLy out of your power. That means that if all of a sudden some HUGE development about EITHER candidate emerges, swaying your opinion one way or another, you will have NO CHANCE to give your input. So register by October 6th!!!!!!
