From Cottage Link Magazine:
John Steinbeck wrote that redwoods, once seen, “leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always – from them comes silence and awe.” As we walked among them in several groves along the 31-mile long “Avenue of the Giants”, we could only echo Steinbeck’s emotion. It ‘s one thing to walk among the ruins of civilizations gone millennia ago amidst noisy shutterbugs and souvenir hawking vendors – it is another to touch the tallest and oldest living things in creation in a peaceful green gallery and feel time itself.

This is exactly what I feel when I visit these forests. My times in the Redwood Forest are some of the most memorable and inspiring I’ve ever had. When I am there I become quiet, realizing that my busy-ness and my striving to become important is not as important as I perceive it. My place in this world is not the center, and I am much less important than I have thought. But this is not a bad thing, it brings me to become less selfish, more caring, and more compassionate of a person. The joys of Friluftsliv.

For those who want to see more science fiction playing out in their daily lives:

Leonid Meteor Shower -

Time to start practicing your Friluftsliv. In the next few days the earth will be passing through some cloud dust that was left in space by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533 AD. Get out of the city, leave your houses, run for the hills, the night is going to light up! According to this article at RedOrbit, the peak hours will be this Monday night (actually Tuesday morning 11/17/2009) in the wee hours of the morning (about 1am PST). That’s not going to work! It’s Monday night, I work the next day! Quit thinking like a robot, participate in humanity and do this because this is what will improve your quality of life – enjoy the meteor shower.

Sam Adams Utopia -

This article from Beer Advocate talks about Jim Coch, founder of Sam Adams, and the creation of a beer that invites drinkers to explore new possibilities for beer drinking. The Utopias beer is supposed to redefine beer with 25% alcohol, with huge amounts of flavor, very experimental brewing and aging techniques, and extremely nice packaging. The bottle itself looks like a brew kettle, but to me it also looks like a yert. It is possible that Sam Adams is indeed helping push the limits and boundaries of beer, and also presenting the world with a business model that takes independence and craft as a primary focus. I have never had the Utopias beer, that seems seems to be a symbolic representation of the growing craft brewing movement, because the bottle costs $150 (the aged bottles are on eBay for a lot more – see picture below). While I applaud Sam Adams for their success and great beer, it does seem that this Utopias beer is purely for the beer connoisseur and those with money to spend. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I just wanted it to lead up to the next down-to-earth-sci-fi topic: Jefferson State Brewery.

Jefferson State Brewery -

This brewery was started in 1998 and only lasted 2 years. The images and text that make up their beer labels and beer coasters seem to be utopian in their vision. Jefferson State Brewery calls for democracy, community, and freedom through their beer. Through the name of the brewery, it’s location, and their visuals they have clearly identified themselves with The State of Jefferson – a secession movement that would have parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon break off to form the 51st state. They believe their values, economy, and landscape are so far different from the whole of mismanaged California they should no longer be associated with it. They are essentially a working micronation, utopian in vision, but wholly committed to seeing their vision carried out. Many of the business and households in the designated area gladly display their support by hanging State of Jefferson signs. It’s too bad the brewery didn’t work out.

Science Pub -

Our last little bit of down-to-earth science fiction comes from the collaborative efforts of McMenamins (those masters at expanding our idea of what is a pub) and OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). For those of you near Portland, they have created the Science Pub, a venue for drinking beer while learning about science. I visited the “science of beer” lecture but they’ve also had lectures about the science of why we are afraid of spiders, and a lecture about earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific Ocean. Upcoming lectures include “How Gecko’s Stick and Why We Care” and then in January they’ll have “Hitchiker’s Guide to Cyber-Science.” Sounds good doesn’t it? In my opnion, and I’ve alluded to this before, Science Pub should be offering degrees and provide a recognized alternative to University education which costs too much and schools rarely allow beer on campus.

If you stuck around for the picture of the Utopias beer on eBay, here you go:

In the last twenty four hours I’ve had three encounters with the concept of evaluating work, leisure, and chilling out. I wanted to share them with you because lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to have a “microtopian ethos” where instead of working and striving for a larger utopian goal, you sit back to enjoy life in the “here and now” (as described in this article about Education As Art). So, here are the examples I have come across – The first is a quote by Throeau, the second comes from last night’s season finale of LOST, and the third was in an email about a person who teaches meditation and accidentally flipped someone off…

1. A quote my friend found:
The truly efficient labourer will not crowd his day with work, but saunter to the task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. – Henry David Thoreau

2. An example from the season finale of LOST last night:
An interesting thing happened on the season finale of Lost last night when Sawyer, Juliette, and Kate ran into their old friends Rose and Bernard. The younger group were on their way to stop Jack from blowing up a nuclear bomb buried on the island. Rose and Bernard offered the group some tea and showed them their house on the beach. When the group asked Rose and Bernard to help them stop Jack they shrugged it off and said that they were enjoying their life, they made a house for themselves and wanted to live slowly. They said something to the effect of “Even after travelling back in time 30 years you are still trying to find ways to shoot each other?” I believe Rose and Bernard have discovered that their obligations and sense of duty are self-imposed and/or societal constructs and that it’s important to reevaluate what you are doing and why. They were happy to sit back and allow the younger generation to learn their lesson; they no longer felt the need to choose sides, stop the bad guys, and save the world because it can become a futile and tiresome task. Maybe the better thing is to cultivate an atmosphere for friendship and togetherness and to enjoy the life you have.

3.A story I received in an email:
An interesting thing happened as I was arriving to teach class this past Sunday.  My car was parked right in front of the store and I was (street side), getting my things I needed out for class.  As I was doing so, someone drove past me and honked–obviously trying to tell me that somehow he thought I was in his way.  Without even thinking about it, my arm raised in the air and I gave the guy the finger–yes, the middle finger.  Perhaps, as I was raised outside of Chicago, or that I spent a few years living in NYC, this was just natural gut instinct, I’m not sure.  Just as soon as I noticed my middle finger pointing upwards towards my west bound assailant, I realized (as if I forgot) I was parked in front of the building that I was scheduled to teach a meditation class in just a few minutes.  Needless to say, I had a moment of embarrassment and doubt, asking myself what kind of person does this and then goes and teaches a meditation class?  And as I walked into the store, I just had to smile at the absurdity of the juxtaposition of events.

So, what is this leading to–a public confession?  Not exactly.  From my perspective, everything and everyone is our teacher.  What I realized through this event is that we are much more than the sum of our actions.  With that, it is not so much the things we do that hurt us, but rather the judgement we impose on ourselves.  When young children get punished for doing something wrong, maybe they cry for a bit, but then it’s over; completely forgotten and perhaps they learned not to do that again.  Kids have an incredible lucidness and resiliency to them. But as we get older, we err on the side of solidity and we have to tell ourselves the story of ‘what a bad person I was’ and then we tell that story over and over, again and again until it firmly sets in and we actually believe that it is true.  If I choose to, I could still be beating myself up over that unfortunate incident on the street.  But as soon as I walked into the store, I completely let it go.  In other words, I didn’t take it personally.  I wasn’t proud of it, but I didn’t mistake me for my action.

We make mistakes and we do things that don’t always reflect our highest selves–and sometimes we just embarrass ourselves.  But nothing could be more futile than beating ourselves up.  In this scenario, the incident was the lesson and the punishment–my karma was instantaneous….  If you touch the hot stove when your mother told you not to, it burns.  But if you keep telling yourself how you stupid you were for doing it, you just keep scalding the wound.

At the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington, near the Oregon border, you can see this wonderful chess set among nearly 100 other chess sets from around the world. I didn’t quite catch it immediately, but if you played this particular set you would need to choose if you were going to be the communists or the capitalists. I don’t remember which country this set was from but it’s obvious that they favored communism; the capitalist pawns are bound in chains.*

Thankfully communism and capitalism, and even socialism, aren’t the only options we have in life. While it may seem that the overarching governmental and economic structures surround us at all times, there are thousands and thousands of examples of people like you and me who are making small but conscious efforts to implement new types of ideals into their world. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are a few examples of things that I have seen around my neighborhood that embody an economy of generosity. Below are images of three free boxes. Someone has taken old real-estate magazine stands and transformed them into boxes and houses that are meant to bring small bits of enjoyment to you as you walk by. On a given day, you might find free clothes, bottled water, street zines, pens, pencils, cigarettes, or anything else that people decide to leave in them. The one directly below is complete with a garden. These serve to be positive social interventions and they subtly motivate us to think slightly differently about the way the world works (or could work).

I’ve always been curious to know if these free boxes are set up and then left alone, or if someone comes by and cleans them up occasionally. I would hope that the latter is the case. I know that the one directly above is updated and taken care of often. It used to be an entirely different color and one day it disappeared and was soon returned in this new state. This one is actually different than a normal free box. There is usually a pad of paper, and pens and you can draw images and submit them into the slot at the top. Every now and then a zine will appear and all the submissions are published inside. I’ve actually written about this one before here.

A while back this free box had a number of small plastic astronaut toys and I couldn’t resist taking one. Since then I have left a packet of lemon ginger tea for some other lucky person. I like the idea of giving and receiving and thinking about reciprocation. Below is an image of the astronaut; I keep the space cadet in my kitchen on the door frame.

***update***
I originally posted info about the chess set as the capitalists vs. the socialists. I was incorrect. Here is information from Colleen at the Maryhill Museum:
The set Maryhill has is a propaganda set, “Capitalists versus Communists.”
Designed by the sisters Natalia and Yelena Danko for the Lomonosov State
Porcelain Factory in Leningrad in the 1920s, the set has often been
reproduced since. Ours may be a later edition.

One side does represent Soviets — the pieces carry obvious symbols of the
Soviet Regime and are portrayed as upstanding Soviet peasants — virtuous
etc. The other side does represent capitalists — the King is death holding
a human thigh bone; the Queen wonton, etc.

The following was written by a friend of mine, Ariana Jacob, and was entered into the publication I produced for Utopia – A Science Fiction Marathon. Thank you Ariana.

__________

Utopia literally means no place. Knowing that reminds me that it is not somewhere where I want to live. I want to live in a place where I belong and feel at home, and that means being very much in relationship with the actual place where I live.(1)

The motivation for utopian projects is the wonderful and enlivening stance that we are an active part of creating the world, that our actions can shape our life according to our most precious beliefs. But somehow following the path of creating utopia doesn’t work out the way people envision. Why have people’s attempts to make the world over in the image of their ideals not produced ideal places to live?

The outline of the utopian story is a group of people trying to make a better world by breaking away from the ordinary world where they grew up. That story has been lived out over and over again. The classic American utopian experiments are the original puritan settlements and the Back-to-the-Land movement of the 1960s and ’70s. I was born into my parent’s Back-to the Land project.

Utopian projects begin with rejecting where you actually are and trying to start over to make a better place. But the ideals people want their new better world to embody come out of the same culture that those people want to leave.

Everything about who we are is a product of the culture we come from – how we see and feel and understand. Our vision of how the world could be different and better is actually a part of the world we see as faulted and want to separate ourselves from. The good and the bad parts of our culture are intricately linked with each other. Our ideals grew out of humanity’s complicated messy history and they cannot be pulled free of that history. They drag the whole dirty tangle along with them. We cannot peel off the parts of our culture and our history that we want and leave the rest.

Utopian projects don’t turn out the way they were planned because we can’t start a totally new way of life since we carry within us the structures of the old way. But we also cannot start over because there is no place in the world that is free of history. Designs for a new place have to include the reality of what has come before them or they will be forced to change when faced with a real place. An idea always has to change when it comes into contact with physical reality. Utopias are first perfectly built from ideas and then people try to recreate them somewhere in the real world by imposing them on an actual place that already has other stuff going on. Utopian projects run into trouble by not acknowledging what was there before them.

The long history of utopian world reinvention shows us that we can not leave the old world behind, so we should pay a lot of attention to how we are related to it, even the parts we know are wrong. We are more than our intentions. We are implicated in and accountable to the whole history that came before us and created us as who we are, not just who we wish to be.

We want so strongly to live lives that embody our ideals. We want to make the world a good place for us and for others to live. Utopias as ideas of place that don’t really exist anywhere can help us to reflect on how we live in our real lives. But the work of making the world a good place to live involves less designed perfection and more getting in deep with what is already here, around us and in us.

Ariana Jacob
Portland, Oregon

____________

(1) In order to belong somewhere there has to be a relationship between two real things, a person and a specific place. I am implying that through acts of relating to a place it becomes somewhere good to live, instead of a place having to be “Good” by design.

“A HISTORY OF ART over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products – and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

“I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation, is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.
[...]
“Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about “content” and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.”

What you just read was the introduction to A Call to Artists: Support Parecon by Jerry Fresia, an article in the book Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, edited by Chris Spannos. I’ve only read a couple essays from this book but I’m becoming quite fond of it. The book seems to contain lot about determining and participating in the building of our own present and future, and in a very tangible way. The articles I’ve read so far talk a lot about parecon, or participatory economics, as a viable political model. There is also a text from Michael Albert who wrote Parecon: Life After Capitalism, what seems to be an initial text for this participatory economics. I am positive that some of thoughts in this blog will be influenced by this book, so I will continue to update you.

Here’s what I’ve been up to this summer (just kidding, it’s not really everything I’ve done!). Click the image below to see it bigger. Last week I enjoyed a nice holiday but I will be posting more about science fiction, utopia, and beer soon. Well, since I’m on the subject of taking a holiday and utopia, I guess I will just bring up something that I’ve been reading. I bring it up because I’ve recently done some thinking about creating ideal schedules (read about the schedules here and in my other blog here). Read more below:

Excerpts from Henri Lefebvre’s “Work and Leisure in Everyday Life” (1958):

In our era, one of the most recent forms which criticism of everyday life has taken is criticism of the real by the surreal. By abandoning the everyday in order to find the marvellous and the surprising (at one and the same time immanent in the real and transcending it), Surrealism rendered triviality unbearable. This was a good thing, but it had a negative side: transcendental contempt for the real…
[...]
The relation between leisure and the everyday is not a simple one: the two words are at one and the same time united and contradictory (therefore their relation is dialectical). It cannot be reduced to the simple relation in time between ‘Sunday’ and ‘weekdays’, represented as external and merely different. Leisure – to accept the concept uncritically for the moment – cannot be separated from work. After his work is over, when resting ore relaxing or occupying himself in his own particular way, a man is still the same man. Every day, at the same time, the worker leaves the factory, the office worker leaves the office. Every week Saturdays and Sundays are given over to leisure as regularly as day-to-day work. We must therefore imagine a ‘work-leisure’ unity, for this unity exists, and everyone tries to programme the amount of time at his disposal according to what his work is – and what it is not.
[...]
The first obvious thing that the so-called ‘modern’ man around us expects of leisure is that it should stop him from being tired and tense, from being anxious, worried and preoccupied. To use a term which is now very widely used by the public at large, he craves relaxation….Thus the so-called ‘modern’ man expects to find something in leisure which his work and his family or ‘private’ life do not provide. Where is his happiness to be found? He hardly knows, and does not even ask himself. In this way a ‘world of leisure’ tends to come into being entirely outside of the everyday realm, and so purely artificial that it borders on the ideal. But how can this pure artificiality be created without permanent reference to ordinary life, without the constantly renewed contrast that will embody this reference?

That’s all for now. I think I may create a double feature recommendation based off of this text, look for that soon. These topics of labor, work, family, leisure, relaxation, are all fascinating to me.