Post-Hippie communal life in the US

Oh! Those dreadful Hippies! I fully buy into the theory that things need to be out of date before they can become fresh and inspiring again and after reading 'The Alternative, Communal life in New America' (1970) I am again convinced that while some aspects of hippiedom are again relevant, the phenomena itself will need another 50 years for people to come to it without preconceived resentment and teeth grinding. 'The Alternative' documents a few of the reported 500+ autonomous communities that sprang up in the US from the mid sixties onwards. William Hedgepeth's language is a showcase of everything that is wrong with hippie speak: overexcited staccato, ridiculous arguments about cosmic conciousness and thought patterns that need fixing, over-abundant pseudo-psychedelic onomatopeeing, and in general a special kind of optimism that can only invoke cynicism today (we know hoe THEY ended up). But my continuing inability to see through the veneer of beards, paisley and headbands is perhaps in itself a sign that what these people were up to has not yet been fully absorbed and digested by society. The back to the land movement was an unrivalled experiment in discovery of new ways of sociability, outside the 'dollar economy' and within boundaries of ecological sustainability. So I find this book (it was suggested by a reader, thank you) completely annoying but in a stimulating, self-questioning kind of way. But is it a good book? Dennis Stock's pictures maybe stress the messianic look of the average homesteading hippie a bit too much.The writing is Time/Life more than the New York Times (say) and in the end what fails this book is that what appears to be a sympathetic inside portrayal is really a betrayal of the life style by packaging it in media clichés for a middle class book buying audience.

John McPhee: Dostoyevsky in the age of Discovery Channel

Annals of the Former World (1989) brings together John McPhee's four previous book on US geology with a new closing essay and the sum surpasses its parts. Geology is a descriptive science and McPhee's book is above all a kind of dictionary fieldwork in the depths, shales and dispositions of a technical language. It's a Dostoyevskian book because you have to live with it for weeks. Not because it is that big (it's less than 700 pages of medium typeset, not the 1500 pages of fine print of The Brothers Karamazov) but because the abundant descriptions of rock and outcrops are the reading equivalent to a 7+ grade boulder climb. The second thing that is at the heart of McPhee's geological project is his sly but constant coupling of geological and human time frames. This book deals with geology but its subject, in the last analysis, is the human condition. Annals of the Former World is the great non-fiction competitor to all the great American novels. It's view of America in geological time is itself a critique on the basic assumptions of, say, the religious right and all other short sighted voices. And it has great maps to boot.

Drop City: A Total Living Environment

Drop City: A Total Living Environment (1967)

By Albin Wagner

It is impossible to define drop city. It fell out of a window in Kansas three years ago and landed in a goat pasture near Trinidad, Colorado. At first droppers lived in tents and tarpaper shacks. And then other began to see the same vision and began making things.Geodesic domes. Now there are sixteen to twenty Droppers living in ten domes and as many different ideas of what Drop City is as there are droppers.

We have attempted to create in Drop City a total living environment, outside the structure of society, where the artist can remain in touch with himself, with other creative human beings.

We live in geodesic domes and domes of other crystalline forms because the dome shape is easier to construct. We live on a subsistence level and almost entirely scrounge the materials for our buildings. All materials are used. Car tops, cement, wood,plastic. The cheapest and least structural of building material are structurally sound when used in a true tension system.

We can buy car-tops in Albuquerque, N.M. for 20c each. We jump on top of a car with an ax and chop them out, stomp out the back glass, strip off the mirrors, and pull out the insulation. All of it can be used to cover a large dome for the small cost of about $30.

We have discovered a new art form: creative scrounging. We dismantle abandoned bridges by moonlight. We are sort of advanced junkmen taking advantage of advanced obsolescence. Drop city was begun without money, built on practically nothing. None of us is employed or has a steady income. Somehow we have not gone hungry, or done without materials. Things come to us.

America, the most affluent waste society. There is enough waste here to feed and house thousand works of art. To the townspeople in Trinidad, five miles away, we are scroungers, bums, garbage pickers. They are right. Perhaps the most beautiful creation in all Drop City is our junk pile. The garbage of the garbage pickers.

Drop City is a tribal unit. It has no formal structure, no written laws, yet the intuitive structure is amazingly complex and functional. Not a single schedule has been made, and less than three things have come to vote. Even though Droppers rarely, if ever, agree on anything, everything works itself out with the help of cosmic forces. We are conscious of ourselves and others as human beings.

Each dropper is free. Each does what he wants. No rules, no duties, no obligations. Anarchy. But as anarchistic as the growth of an organism which has its own internal needs and fulfils them in a natural, simple way, without compulsion.

Droppers are not asked to do anything. They work out of the need to work. Out of guilt or emptiness the desire to work, hopefully, arises. If it is no longer work, but pleasure. Doing nothing is real work. We play at working, It is as gratifying as eating or loving. We are based on the pleasure principle. Our main concern is to be alive.

Droppers come in all sizes, shapes, colors: painters, writers, architects, panhandlers, film-makers, unclassifiables. Each has its own individual endeavours and achievements. These perhaps tell what we are doing more than anything else. But they cannot be enumerated. They have to be seen, read, touched, heard. They speak for themselves. But we do all have this in common - whatever art we produce is not separated from our lives.

Droppers have painted the Ultimate Painting. A rotating infinite sphere, a circular geodesic structure loaded with spatial paradox, complete with strobatac. A painting to walk up the stairs into and lose your mind by. The Ultimate Painting was done by five Droppers, to make it five times better. The Ultimate Painting is for sale for $60.000.

The Droppers have printed a comic book called The Being Bag. We welcome the feds and postal inspectors who come to harangue us about its content. Our poet looks forward to the inspectors and their reading of his work.

Droppers make movies, black-and-white wind poems, flickering TV beauties with the subliminal delights of pulsating Coke ads, the crystal-molecular good sense of a dome going into time-lapse, and the grunting goodness of sex. We have two movies on Drop City for distribution. 

The second week in June we held a Joy Festival. The First Annual Drop City Festival and Bacchanal Post Walpurgis and Pre-Equinox overflow and dropping. Over 300 people attended. It was a freakout in all media, 96 hours of continues mind-blow. 

We want to use everything, new, junk, good, bad, we want to be able to make limitless things. We want videotape recorders and cameras. WE want computers and miles of color film and elaborate cine cameras and tape decks and amps and echo-chambers and everywhere. We want millionaire patrons. We need the most up-to-date equipment in the world to make our things. We want an atomic reactor.

Drop City the first attempt to use domes for housing a community. Buckminster Fuller gave us his 1966 Award for "poetically economic structural achievements." We hope to buy more land, build more Drop Cities all over the world, the universe. Free and open way stations for every and anyone. Living space and heat can be made available to all at a fraction of the present cost through application of advanced building techniques such as solar heated domes. Already Drop City is firmly established near Albuquerque, N.M.

Drop city is Home. It is a strange place. An incredible webbing of circumstance and chance, planning and accidents, smashed thumbs and car-tops. We are not responsible for what and where we are, we have only taken our place in space and light and time. We are only people who want love, food, warmth. We have no integrity. We borrow, copy,steal and and all ideas and things. We use everything. We take things, we make things, we give things.

Drop City pivots on a sublime paradox, opposing forces exist side by side in joy and harmony. A psychedelic community? Chemically, no. We consider drugs unnecessary. But etymologically, perhaps. We are alive. We dance the Joy-dance. We listen to the eternal rhythm. Our feet move to unity, a balanced step of beauty and strength. Creation is joy. Joy is love. Life, love, joy, energy are one. We are all one. Can you hear the music? Come dance with us.  

Drop City is one of the more famous of the numerous back-to-the-land free communities that emerged from the middle 1960ties onwards throughout the US. I found it in "Notes from the New Underground", a 1968 anthology collecting several important texts and writers from that period. This text catches the feel of the time well I think, it also catches the childish inconsistency that is the first thing I normally associate with hippies. Simon Sadler has a good account (PDF-link).

Quotes from Aldo Leopold

"The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas." - Aldo Leopold.

Finally I read that classic of US nature writing: A Sand County Almanac (1949) by Aldo Leopold. It's a wonderful book that mixes slightly insane hyperbole, dreamy-yet-factual descriptions of place, remarkable ecological observations that are still urgent today. Invading species, the history of landscapes, the husbandry of wild species, the need to think like a mountain (that is seeing ecosystems rather than species), the place of top predators in nature, the dangers of tourism, the moral need for wildness. The concerns of Leopold are modern, his language is that of an antiquated American gentleman, formal but pleasant. Leopold is voice from a bygone age, his book I will reread.  

"Just as there is honor among thieves, so there is solidarity and cooperation among plant and animal pests. Where one pest is stopped by natural barriers, another arrives to breach the same wall by a new approach. In the end every region and every resource gets their quota of uninvited ecological guests."

The Comanche Empire

Nomads, the historical records show, can evade, resist, stop, sustain, exploit, destabilize, and destroy empires. They can also build enduring empires of their own, but only if they modify the essence of their being and became less nomadic. Nomadism appears fundamentally incompatible with empire-building. Empires thrive on structure and stability, whereas nomads - at least the nomads one finds in most scholarly studies - are shifting and factional. Their institutions, like their very way of life, tend to be fluid and ephemeral, and they lack such classic elements of empires as state structure and surplus-generating agriculture. Indeed, to preserve their might, nearly all nomadic empires develop over time more fixed institutions of governance and production that required at least seasonal sedentarism. 

Countless colonial officials failed to comprehend and contain the Comanches. Comanches deflected the controlling gaze of colonial agents through their traditional political culture in which power was dichotomized, leaders could be both strong and weak, and group membership was flexible. A vast collection of relatively autonomous bands and organized for multipolarity and fluidity, the Comanche nation appeared formidable and fragmented, structured and shapeless, incomprehensible and impregnable all at once. Seen from the outside, the Comanche nation was an amorphous entity that lacked a clear center to negotiate with - or obliterate - and an explicit internal structure that would have rendered its external actions predictable. The Comanches, it seems, were so dominant not in spite of their informal, almost atomistic social organization but because of it.

The Comanche Empire (Yale, 2008) by Pekka Hämäläinen has been my best read in months. It describes the emergence of an obscure band of Shoshone's on the great plains just before 1700. Here, equipped with horses and fired by unbounded energy these former hunter-gatherers created the wide-ranging semi-nomadic, trade-centred, raiding-dependant Comancheria empire that lasted for over a century. George Catlin, who painted the Comanche village above in 1834-35, estimated that principle Comanche village had six to eight hundred tipis organized in long parallel lines "which gave the settlement  a gridlike appearance of streets and rowhouses," according to Hämäläinen. On the outside this book is the story of the rise and fall of the Comanches, but it also incorporates anthropological and ecological views, explaining how ecological factors and social organization contributed to their success. The Comanches, I can't help myself comparing, were the Vikings of the great plains.