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 I fully buy into the theory that things need to be out of date before they can become fresh and inspiring again and after reading 'The Alternative, Communal life in New America' (1970) I am again convinced that while some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.

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).

The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City

When the San Francisco Diggers (an anarchist group for who free meant free as in beer and free as in freedom) left Haight-Ashbury to found the Free Family in the summer of 1967 they started on a path that would establish a network of communes intending to share skills and resources on the basis of hospitality, total freedom and self-expression in such a way that all necessities of life were available for free. They were on their way to 'create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old' (as David Graber wrote about OWS) on what appears to be a grand scale across the US. 

Next to the architectural fancies of Situationism and the shy, half-understood communal implications of Occupy perhaps 'The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City' (source images) should be read as a leading text outlining a full set of problems that need to be solved before a community can step outside the confines of modern society. It is a fascinating text; both in living memory and strangely antiquated: for starters, its a vision of the future fully depended on cheap petrol.   

Of course, as Peter Coyote shows in his biography 'Sleeping Where I Fall': reality was more stubborn than the Free City vision anticipated. The 'four pearls of wisdom from the leader' he cites convey a picture of the daily realities at a rural, overcrowded hippie commune:

•  If you let the baby shit on the floor and then eat it, you'll have a sick baby and a shitty floor.
• Free food doesn't mean that I cook and you eat all the time, ass-hole.
• It's fine if you want to take speed, just don't talk to me! I don't actually care that the insects are communicating with you.
• I know the Indians used moss for tampons, but you're picking poison oak.  

Did you know that word 'hippie' was coined by Time Magazine as a derogatory term for baby hipster?

The utopia experiment

The Utopia Experiment (April 2007-September 2008, pics) was conceived by Dylan Evans as a scripted experiment in post-crash primitivism in which volunteers lived in a small community in the Scottish Highlands as if society as we know it had collapsed. From the comment section following an article by Evans and twitter-buzz it appears that the results of the project were, euhm, confusing (?), with Evans himself pulling the plug because he thought his volunteers too weird and social group dynamics moving into unwanted trajectories. James Durston observed it for a month and wrote a report for The Independent. Go read it, fascinating stuff. After noting that his desk skills (typing, googling, etc) are inadequate for yurtian self-sufficiency Durston learned that one learns very quickly, and that soon after one can pass on these new skills to newcomers. This is not that strange because, after all, gardening, foraging, simple construction work, do not demand special skill or intelligence; they are part of our core capabilities as humans.   

I spend most of my time in the garden, mainly because I consider it the most urgent aspect of setting up a self-sufficient community. Others, though, have different priorities. Tommy is here to see how the artistic and cultural sides of the community develop, and gets straight down to painting a welcome sign. Graham, a 19-year-old architecture student, is keener to build things, and starts hammering together the compost bins. Carla is more experienced in communal living than any of us and moves between spinning wool, making cordial and salting the pork joints from one of our butchered pigs.

In fact there is evidence that, all through the project, new arrivals have been able and willing to slot into whatever gaps need filling, as well as discovering their own. Take Dougie, a 49-year-old from Aberdeen with wanderlust. Tommy and I quarrelled fiercely with him on two occasions after we thought he behaved rudely to visitors to Utopia. In those moments, I questioned whether someone so antagonistic was appropriate for the project. But during his week on site, Dougie collected armfuls of chanterelle mushrooms from nearby woods, picked winkles and mussels from the shoreline and introduced rabbit roadkill to the Utopian menu. Without him, Tommy and I, the only other volunteers, would have continued ignoring our surroundings as a potential source of food.

That kind of personal knowledge, I soon notice, passes quickly to other members of the community. Within a day I discover that dandelion roots and stinging nettles make nutritious side dishes when cooked correctly. A week passes and I am baking my own bread and making dinner for nine people. Two weeks in and I have built a bunkbed, made a chess set and put up a sturdy support for a clutch of runner beans. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that the major challenge at Utopia is not the learning, which is contagious: the more one does the more one feels liberated enough to continue doing.