Finding Utopia - Taylor Camp

In 1969, thirteen Hippies–refugees from campus riots, war protests and police brutality–fled to the remote Hawaiian island of Kauai. Before long this little tribe of men, women and children were arrested and sentenced to ninety days hard labor for having no money and no home. Island resident Howard Taylor, brother of actress Elizabeth, bailed out the group and invited them to camp on his vacant ocean front land–then left them on their own, without any restrictions, regulations or supervision. Soon waves of hippies, surfers and troubled Vietnam vets found their way to this clothing-optional, pot-friendly tree house village at the end of the road on the Island’s North Shore.

In 1977 after condemning the village to make way for a State park, Government officials torched the tree houses, leaving little but ashes and memories of “the best days of our lives.”

John Wehrheim’s 1970s photographs reveal a community that created order without rules and rejected materialism for the healing power of nature. The story of Taylor Camp’s eight-year existence is told through interviews made 30 years later after tracking down the campers, their neighbors and the government officials who finally got rid of them.

Finding Utopia Film Festival presents

TAYLOR CAMP - Living the '60s Dream.

Saturday, May 29 - Aloha Theatre - Kona, 7:30PM
Sunday, May 30 - Hawaii Theatre - Oahu, 2PM
Sunday, May 30 - Palace Theater - Hilo, 5PM & 7:30PM
Tuesday, June 1 - Kalani Oceanside Retreat - Pahoa, 8PM
Wednesday, June 2 - MACC Castle Theater - Maui, 7PM

http://TaylorCampKauai.com for trailer, reviews and details.

Download File: Look Inside Taylor Camp.pdf

Link | Taylor Camp

I haven't seen this dvd yet and also I thought I'd posted about this place before but don't guess I did... but it belongs here on this website. :p

Read more...

Kris Kuksi

"Fantasma" by Kris Kuksi

One of the selected works in the "Imminent Utopia" exhibit at Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, NY (Nov.-Dec.)

"I get inspired by the industrial world, all the rigidity of machinery, the network of pipes, wires, refineries, etc. Then I join that with an opposite of flowing graceful, harmonious, and pleasing design of the Baroque and Rococo. And of course I add a bit weirdness and the macabre." --Kris Kuksi.

Read more...

Federation of Damanhur

Federation of Damanhur

A United Nations award-winning sustainable community, Damanhur is an eco-society based upon ethical and spiritual values. Founded in 1975, the Federation numbers 1,000 citizens and is located in Valchiusella, in the foothills of Piedmont, only 40 minutes from Turin airport. Damanhur promotes a culture of peace and balanced development through respect for the environment and social and political commitment. The Federation has centres in Italy, Europe, the Americas, and Japan and is linked with organizations worldwide.

link | link


Damanhur is renowned for its beautiful underground Temples, created entirely by hand and decorated with mosaic, sculpture, painting, glass and metalwork. The Halls of Water, of the Earth, of the Spheres, of Mirrors, of Metals, the Blue Temple, the Labyrinth: the Temples of Humankind are a three-dimensional book, that tell the story of humankind through art and beauty. The Temples are also a laboratory where science and spirituality are united in the search for new paths for humanity.

link

Read more...

Earthling Society: Beauty and the Beast

Earthling Society: Beauty and the Beast

Painted in rainbows and ocean waves, Beauty and the Beast (4 Zero) is a willfully bedazzled tumble through bright '60s acid rock, bucolic '70s heat waves and one of the first worthwhile updates of unadulterated, melodic psych since the '80s Paisley Underground. For a band that's frequently been dark and intense in the past, mining ore from Krautrock and heavy space music, this comes as a happy surprise. The stare-at-it-for-ages, flower power artwork of Santa Cruz's beautifully gnarled Stacie Willoughby is the invitation to the bottled sunshine inside.

Even when the words are world weary, there's lift in the music. Singer-multi-instrumentalist Fred Laird calls this "a farewell to our more obvious space rock leanings, instead we have drun deep from the well of visionaries such as Syd Barrett, Todd Rundgren, Kevin Ayers and John Cale. Not to mention our increasing obsession with the seven classic Utopian albums that the Moody Blues created from '67-72." That they wrestle a wriggling approximation of their lofty influences armed only with their trusty 24-track porta-studio, "hell-bent on recording in every warehouse, kitchen and toilet," is extra impressive. Like the lip-smacking painting of a reclining, curvaceous Aquarian queen in a mini-dress inside, there is much that's resplendent and sensual about Beauty and the Beast (which makes a dandy, if irregular, alternate soundtrack to Jean Cocteau's 1946 film of the same name, especially when combined with a water pipe, apple flavored tobacco and voluminous floor pillows).

By the time you arrive at the lush, swirling final stretch of "Valerie A Tyden Divu," "A Playground Mystery" and a hidden track that could be lost Boards of Canada gold, Earthling Society has you in their tender fist. See, they wave a freak flag as well as anyone but they've got some bite, too. Guitars groan and all the black goo they've swam through to get to this stage still clings to the rocks along their coastline. It's that melancholy algae that gives these bright waters such a coppery glow. There is the tang of reality here, ache wrapped in echo and reverb, but there just the same. It's a lovely album, really. What more need be said?

This particular cd is a combination Moody Blues and Boards of Canada

link

Read more...

Bobby and Barak

TOM HAYDEN

Bobby and Barak


For one who has experienced both eras, the current movement for Barack Obama has achieved a living remembrance of Bobby Kennedy's campaign in the week when RFK's murder is painfully remembered.

On June 4, 1968, I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick's Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision -- a movement-driven progressive government -- was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.

"Dad, don't you recognize anything of yourself in this movement?", asked an angry email from my son Troy, nearly forty years later. He was working 24/7 with his [now] wife Simone, for Barack Obama, spreading the boundless energy of the young and an artist's flair for silk-screens. How could I share your giddy utopianism, I wanted to respond, after the murders of the Sixties icons -- John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, all of whom I had known as a young man? [MORE »]

hat tip to krinda

Read more...

Chasing Utopia

Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions or, Voluntary Simplicity

Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

[Read More »] | Blog

Read more...

Utopian Bliss Balls

Utopian Bliss Balls is a product exclusively available at Azarius. They are derived from the real Bliss Balls from the sixties, made of psychedelic LSA seeds and bee wax. This modern variety contains Hawaïan baby woodrose (Argyreia nervosa), fo ti tien (Centella asiatica), damiana (Turnera diffusa), ginseng (Panax ginseng) and bee pollen.

Very popular in the sixties among hippies and artists in California. Azarius gives them a brand new look! Made with the traditional ingredients like the Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds and damiana. Gives you an LSD-like trip.

Never heard of them, but it's sure got a great name.

Read more...

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Deerskin jackets and potter’s wheels, geodesic domes and star charts, instructions on raising bees and on repairing Volkswagens, advice on building furniture and cultivating marijuana: all this can be found here, along with celebrations of communal life and swipes at big government, big business and a technocratic society.

Can this encyclopedia (Last Whole Earth Catalog) of countercultural romance have anything to do with today’s technological world, a world of broadband connections, TCP/IP protocol and the Internet?

How could the romantic, utopian culture of the 1960’s, with its deep suspicions about modernity and its machinery, be closely linked to one of the most important technological revolutions of the last hundred years?

link
login: bozetta
password: rednose

Read more...

UTOPIA

Let your community be small, with only a few people;
Keep tools in abundance, but do not depend upon them;

Appreciate your life and be content with your home;
Sail boats and ride horses, but don't go too far;
Keep weapons and armour, but do not employ them;
Let everyone read and write,
Eat well and make beautiful things.


Live peacefully and delight in your own society;
Dwell within cock-crow of your neighbours,
But maintain your independence from them.

link

Read more...

Forget the Haight and Woodstock

A new book makes a compelling case that Laurel Canyon, home to Joni, Zappa, Mama Cass and many more, was the true center of '60s rock.

The '60s were all about neighborhoods. Haight-Ashbury, Greenwich Village, Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, Watts, Tu Do Street, Harlem, Woodstock -- for Americans, at least, the decade was divided into a series of remarkable communities, some utopian and others nightmarish, each with a strong claim to being the epicenter of that turbulent epoch.

link

Read more...

Animal Collective's forthcoming Prospect Hummer EP (also on Fat Cat, and already cruising file-sharing networks more than a month before its official May 16 release) refines and looks back at their many sounds. It’s a good entry point into their catalogue. And there’s a very special guest: Vashti Bunyan, the late-’60s British songstress whose recently rediscovered work has become a touchstone for folk artists who’ve arrived in the last two years. Bunyan disappeared onto the moors after her 1970 utopian-Britfolk debut, Just a Diamond Day, tanked on arrival. In 2003, she reappeared for "just this one time" collaborations with Piano Magic and Devendra Banhart. Animal Collective collaborating with Bunyan has been compared to Radiohead collaborating with Pink Floyd, but I'll reserve judgement until I've heard more.

Read more...