February 20, 2008 at 10:47 pm (hippies, rant, utopia)
Politically, I constantly waffle between a desire for utopian anarchy, with no need for order because people will just respect each other, and a desire to have a governments that will take care of people with important benefits and services. I think this mindset is very American. When it comes down to it though, on a personal level I lean a little bit more toward anarchy. This is why I used to go to that nice little anarchist bookstore on Haight street. It’s where I first saw blueprints for intentional communities in a book. It’s where I bought Making Stuff and Doing Things (ostensibly as a gift for my cousin, but I took it for myself when he was done reading it), a D.I.Y. manual for everything from compost toilet construction to making your own cat food to making a secret stash box from an old 8-track tape. I don’t need to tell you how much I love this book. The D.I.Y ethic appeals to me on many levels. Not just the punk D.I.Y. ethic, but the more grown up, country housewife version (an example can be found at down—to—earth), and even, to a lesser extent, the popular culture Better Homes and Gardens, HGTV, Martha Stewart versions.
I don’t want to sound like a *cringe* hippie, but I really get tired of the consumer culture sometimes. I often long to get away from it. Living in an apartment in Braddon, so close to shopping areas, it’s hard to escape.
All I want is a small house, a big yard with a vegetable garden, a herb garden and a chicken coop. There will be a bike shed and a compost heap and a small play area made from recycled materials, and, if I’m lucky, the house will be recycled too. Like this one (-via Neatorama). In fact, why not expand this ethic to a community? A tool lending library, a bike sharing program and a neighborhood garden are easy enough to set up. A sewing circle devoted to re-purposing old clothes is a fun community building exercise and a local food co-op can save people money while supporting local growers and again, encouraging a sense of community. Why am I not doing any of this? I’ve got to go. There’s so much work to do.
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February 19, 2008 at 11:16 pm (just for fun)
(From xkcd, one of my favorite web comics)
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February 13, 2008 at 11:50 pm (just for fun, utopia)
Lately I’ve been a bit torn.
I’ve become slightly obsessed with the Steampunk aesthetic. It’s a bit of a dystopian/utopian science fiction genre in which steam is the dominant technology. Lots of airships and locomotives. Think copper, brass and their lovely offspring, bronze. Lots of guages and rivets and fancy scrollwork. It combines a victorian aesthetic and Jules Verne-esque gadgets with a kind of rugged clunky, grease smeared sense of fun. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is often considered steampunk.
For a while now, I’ve been really into the 1950’s aesthetic. The early atomic age held such a sense of hope, we were going to go to space! There were all kinds of gadgets for the home! Women were women and men smoked pipes! I love the futuristic utopian 50’s thing. The future was right around the corner! I know it was all mostly cold war propaganda but, in spite of the constant threat of nuclear war, it was a happy time. (Not to mention, being a woman with a set of full hips, the 1950’s silhouette is extremely flattering to my figure.)
I tried to draw some similarity between the two aesthetics: Both were times when there was hope in technology. In one, there was power in steam. Transportation between continents was faster than it had ever been. The telegraph was making communication instantaneous. The railways were making crossing continents safe and easy. Minds were abuzz with invention and it seemed like the tide of new ideas was going to take off and the future was bright. In the other, there was the rocket, there were jet engines and we had control of the atom. There was plastic and cheap means of production. The luxuries of modern life were available to anyone. Every man had a home and every wife had a waffle iron. A chicken in every pot.
When I started searching for examples of these parallels, it led me to an interesting observation: many science fiction films made in the 50’s were adaptations of books written in the late 1900’s. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds. These futuristic visions of the steam era were reproduced in technicolor for audiences in the hopeful yet terrified 1950’s. Of course there are parallels between these two eras. Those parallels were being drawn at the time! (Link: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea trailer on YouTube)
All this time I’ve been feeling conflicted and it turns out there’s no conflict after all.
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