Beautiful People from the Future's topics - tribe.net

from the future - SAGRADA soiree and shakedown: June 12 @ DNA

2008-06-11T03:31:28Z

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Come create a sacred space with us!

Please join us at SAGRADA, a beautiful event supporting the vision of the 2008 Burning Man Temple!

Thursday, June 12
DNA LOUNGE, San Francisco
7pm-4am

We invite you to eat, drink, dance and make merry while offering up some abundance to this year's community temple space, BASURA SAGRADA. For years, people have relied on the temple as a physical space of transcendence, a place to connect to their own sense of the metaphysical and provide meaningful offerings and prayers to the beyond. Now, we come to you in great need of your financial support so that we may continue to make the temple a reality!

The Sagrada Soiree offers many ways to tithe along with fellow burners, patrons, and temple supporters. With sumptuous dishes creatively served by temple avatars, tasty libations, performances by mind-blowing troupes, live painting with Shrine and others, it's a unique event not to be missed! In addition, we will be hosting an incredible art auction featuring one-of-a-kind works by artists and friends of the temple, some special presentations by the Basura Sagrada creators, and other delights to complete this lavish evening gala. Plus, it's all set to a beautiful soundtrack by some of the best downtempo talent in the city!

Later, we will throw open the doors to the entire community, and turn up the heat (and the volume) for some splendid late-night celebration. With more performance, more music, and more art than you can believe, SAGRADA will provide an exciting peek at what this year's temple has to offer!

Get your tickets now and support this sacred undertaking!

SAGRADA SOIREE — 7pm-4am
$150 ($250 for two!)
Hosted reception between 7-10 pm, with VIP access to special performances, presentations, and pre-event admission to the silent auction. Includes ample hors d'oeuvres and drink specials, conversations with the artists, and much more!

SAGRADA SHAKEDOWN — 10pm-4am
$17 PRESALE
$20 AT THE DOOR
edIT: anasia: saQi: COMMA: mozaic: EPROM

For tickets, please visit www.dnalounge.com
For more information about the Basura Sagrada temple project, visit www.basurasagrada.org

Basura Sagrada is working with MAPS, a generous non-profit foundation, to make a portion of your Patron Level ticket price tax-deductible.

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posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

How we learned to stop having fun

2008-03-12T02:31:25Z

copied and pasted from
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2047969,00.html#article_continue

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We used to know how to get together and really let our hair down. Then, in the early 1600s, a mass epidemic of depression broke out - and we've been living with it ever since. Something went wrong, but what?

Monday April 2, 2007
The Guardian

A long hard look at the self ... Self-portrait by Johannes Gumpp 1646 (Corbis)(detail)

Beginning in England in the 17th century, the European world was stricken by what looks, in today's terms, like an epidemic of depression. The disease attacked both young and old, plunging them into months or years of morbid lethargy and relentless terrors, and seemed - perhaps only because they wrote more and had more written about them - to single out men of accomplishment and genius. The puritan writer John Bunyan, the political leader Oliver Cromwell, the poets Thomas Gray and John Donne, and the playwright and essayist Samuel Johnson are among the earliest and best-known victims. To the medical profession, the illness presented a vexing conundrum, not least because its gravest outcome was suicide. In 1733, Dr George Cheyne speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanisation, "have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England."

Article continues

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To the English, the disease was "the English malady". But the rainy British Isles were not the only site visited by the disease; all of Europe was afflicted.
The disease grew increasingly prevalent over the course of the 20th century, when relatively sound statistics first became available, and this increase cannot be accounted for by a greater willingness on the part of physicians and patients to report it. Rates of schizophrenia, panic disorders and phobias did not rise at the same time, for example, as they would be expected to if only changes in the reporting of mental illness were at work. According to the World Health Organisation, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, while ischemic heart disease trails in sixth place. Fatalities occur most dramatically through suicide, but even the mild form of depression - called dysthemia and characterised by an inability to experience pleasure - can kill by increasing a person's vulnerability to serious somatic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Far from being an affliction of the famous and successful, we now know that the disease strikes the poor more often than the rich, and women more commonly than men.

Just in the past few years, hundreds of books, articles and television specials have been devoted to depression: its toll on the individual, its relationship to gender, the role of genetic factors, the efficacy of pharmaceutical treatments. But to my knowledge, no one has suggested that the epidemic may have begun in a particular historical time, and started as a result of cultural circumstances that arose at that time and have persisted or intensified since. The failure to consider historical roots may stem, in part, from the emphasis on the celebrity victims of the past, which tends to discourage a statistical, or epidemiological, perspective. But if there was, in fact, a beginning to the epidemic of depression, sometime in the 16th or 17th century, it confronts us with this question: could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be in any way connected with the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?

There is reason to think that something like an epidemic of depression in fact began around 1600, or the time when the Anglican minister Robert Burton undertook his "anatomy" of the disease, published as The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. Melancholy, as it was called until the 20th century, is of course a very ancient problem, and was described in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates. Chaucer's 14th-century characters were aware of it, and late-medieval churchmen knew it as "acedia". So melancholy, in some form, had always existed - and, regrettably, we have no statistical evidence of a sudden increase in early modern Europe, which had neither a psychiatric profession to do the diagnosing nor a public health establishment to record the numbers of the afflicted. All we know is that in the 1600s and 1700s, medical books about melancholy and literature with melancholic themes were both finding an eager audience, presumably at least in part among people who suffered from melancholy themselves.

Increasing interest in melancholy is not, however, evidence of an increase in the prevalence of actual melancholy. As the historian Roy Porter suggested, the disease may simply have been becoming more stylish, both as a medical diagnosis and as a problem, or pose, affected by the idle rich, and signifying a certain ennui or detachment. No doubt the medical prejudice that it was a disease of the gifted, or at least of the comfortable, would have made it an attractive diagnosis to the upwardly mobile and merely out-of-sorts.

But melancholy did not become a fashionable pose until a full century after Burton took up the subject, and when it did become stylish, we must still wonder: why did this particular stance or attitude become fashionable and not another? An arrogant insouciance might, for example, seem more fitting to an age of imperialism than this wilting, debilitating malady; and enlightenment, another well-known theme of the era, might have been better served by a mood of questing impatience.

Nor can we be content with the claim that the apparent epidemic of melancholy was the cynical invention of the men who profited by writing about it, since some of these were self-identified sufferers themselves. Robert Burton confessed, "I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy." George Cheyne was afflicted, though miraculously cured by a vegetarian diet of his own devising. The Englishman John Brown, who published a bestselling mid-19th-century book on the subject, went on to commit suicide. Something was happening, from about 1600 on, to make melancholy a major concern of the reading public, and the simplest explanation is that there was more melancholy around to be concerned about.

And very likely the phenomena of this early "epidemic of depression" and the suppression of communal rituals and festivities are entangled in various ways. It could be, for example, that, as a result of their illness, depressed individuals lost their taste for communal festivities and even came to view them with revulsion. But there are other possibilities. First, that both the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about 400 years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.

One approaches the subject of "deeper, underlying psychological change" with some trepidation, but fortunately, in this case, many respected scholars have already visited this difficult terrain. "Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement," Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, "that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place." This change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them". The European nobility had already undergone this sort of psychological shift in their transformation from a warrior class to a collection of courtiers, away from directness and spontaneity and toward a new guardedness in relation to others. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the change becomes far more widespread, affecting even artisans, peasants, and labourers. The new "emphasis on disengagement and selfconsciousness", as Louis Sass puts it, makes the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrange-ments, which is all to the good. But it can also transform the individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else.

Historians infer this psychological shift from a number of concrete changes occurring in the early modern period, first and most strikingly among the urban bourgeoisie, or upper middle class. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits (Rembrandt painted more than 50 of them) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spaces - bedrooms, for example - in which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly "be oneself". More decorous forms of entertainment - plays and operas requiring people to remain immobilised, each in his or her separate seat - begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival. The very word "self", as Trilling noted, ceases to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.

The notion of a self hidden behind one's appearance and portable from one situation to another is usually attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be - a peasant, a man of commerce or an aristocrat - and any attempt to assume another status would have been regarded as rank deception. But in the late 16th century, upward mobility was beginning to be possible or at least imaginable, making "deception" a widespread way of life. You might not be a lord or a lofty burgher, but you could find out how to act like one. Hence the popularity, in 17th-century England, of books instructing the would-be member of the gentry in how to comport himself, write an impressive letter and choose a socially advantageous wife.

Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. This is a notion that takes some getting used to; in the early years of the theatre, actors who played the part of villains risked being assaulted by angry playgoers in the streets. Within the theatre, there is a fascination with plots involving further deceptions: Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own death. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre, for "men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts". It was painful, in his view, "to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ... to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ... having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets". The inner self that can change costumes and manners to suit the occasion resembles a skilled craftsperson, too busy and watchful for the pleasures of easygoing conviviality. As for the outer self projected by the inner one into the social world: who would want to "lose oneself" in the communal excitement of carnival when that self has taken so much effort and care to construct?

So highly is the "inner self" honoured within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress - a requirement, as Trilling called it, for "the emergence of modern European and American man". It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, "of an untrammelled freedom to ask questions and explore", as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan put it, that allowed men such as Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine. Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism, versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, "primitive") personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a "self"? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.

But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, "the obverse" of the new sense of personal autonomy is "isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation. As the 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]." The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation and, with it, depression and sometimes death.

But the new kind of personality that arose in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was by no means as autonomous and self-defining as claimed. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them: "How am I doing?" this supposedly autonomous "self" wants to know. "What kind of an impression am I making?"

It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self. What seems most to concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose "society". Mirrors, for example, do not show us our "selves", only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure. In the 19th century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace". This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.

If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depression - anxiety - was surely another. It takes effort, as well as a great deal of watchfulness, to second-guess other people's reactions and plot one's words and gestures accordingly. For the scheming courtier, the striving burgher and the ambitious lawyer or cleric of early modern Europe, the "self" they discovered is perhaps best described as an awareness of this ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one's behaviour to the expectations of others. Play in this context comes to have a demanding new meaning, unconnected to pleasure, as in "playing a role". No wonder bourgeois life becomes privatised in the 16th and 17th centuries, with bedrooms and studies to withdraw to, where, for a few hours a day, the effort can be abandoned, the mask set aside.

But we cannot grasp the full psychological impact of this "mutation in human nature" in purely secular terms. Four hundred - even 200 - years ago, most people would have interpreted their feelings of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating self as "soul"; the ever-watchful judgmental gaze of others as "God"; and melancholy as "the gnawing fear of eternal damnation". Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God.

Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquish - "I was a full year before I could quite leave it" - but he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil's snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression - suicide - and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, Durkheim found that Protestants in the 19th century - not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion - were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late 16th century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of "deep, underlying psychological change", both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. Burton suggested many cures for melancholy - study and exercise, for example - but he returned again and again to the same prescription: "Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company ... a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth." He acknowledged the ongoing attack on "Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays" by "some severe Gatos," referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: "Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bagpipes, &c, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best." In his ideal world, "none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings ..." His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the 16th century. While the disruptively "mad" were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick".

A little over a century after Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, another English writer, Richard Browne, echoed his prescription, backing it up with a scientific (for the time) view of the workings of the human "machine". Singing and dancing could cure melancholy, he proposed, by stirring up the "secretions". And a century later, even Adam Smith, the great prophet of capitalism, was advocating festivities and art as a means of relieving melancholy.

Burton, Browne and Smith were not the only ones to propose festivity as a cure for melancholy, and there is reason to believe that whether through guesswork, nostalgia, or personal experience, they were on to something important. I know of no attempts in our own time to use festive behaviour as treatment for depression, if such an experiment is even thinkable in a modern clinical setting. There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasures have served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression.

The 19th-century historian JFC Hecker reports an example from 19th-century Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia. An individual, usually a woman, would fall into a kind of wasting illness, until her relatives agreed to "hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient's house," where they dance and generally party for days, invariably effecting a cure. Similarly, in 20th-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we would call depression would call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a "sar" spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.

We cannot be absolutely sure in any of these cases - from 17th-century England to 20th-century Somalia - that festivities and danced rituals actually cured the disease we know as depression. But there are reasons to think that they might have. First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer's sense of isolation and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of self-loss - that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the 19th century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the "self", he alone dared speak of the "horror of individual existence", and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading classics - rituals in which, he imagined, "each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him".

The immense tragedy for Europeans, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European "progress", they had done something perhaps far more damaging: they had completed the demonisation of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help - the mind-preserving, life-saving techniques of ecstasy.

· This is an edited extract from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, published by Granta at £16.99. To buy a copy from the Guardian bookshop for £15.99 with free p&p contact 0870 836 0875 or email support@guardianbookshop.co.uk. Barbara Ehrenreich will be speaking with Geoff Dyer at London's ICA tonight (www.ica.org.uk)

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 1 reply

Following my bliss...

2008-01-23T03:10:01Z

« Need a cat loving friend in... | main
New Business Launch in Portland OR Tue, January 22, 2008 - 6:57 PM

I'm launching my business this February 2 here in Portland. It's a Boutique Health Food Store and Sustainable Weight Management Center. A what? you might ask...visit my site for a more detailed explanation....

www.simplynourishing.com
(website design by: Cristopher Darrow)

I've had this dream for many years, and just recently decided to stop dreaming and start acting. It's been countless hours of the most invigorating (usually) work I've ever done. I'm beginning to feel how it feels to follow one's bliss and it's worth the risk!

Grand Opening: February 2nd,3rd,9th, and 10th for yummy samples and discounts! And always; program discounts for friends and family, mention tribe for 10% off products.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

I love Beautiful People from the Future

2007-11-02T18:19:48Z

photo set http://flickr.com/photos/kylehailey/sets/72157602789230519/

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 4 replies

"with great power comes great responsibility."

2007-10-27T04:08:09Z

spiderman wasn't the best movie, but that line was so spot on.

Our community is very, very powerful, very strong, passionate. amongst us we have movers and shakers, dreamers, believers, doers, activators and givers. I am consistantly surrounded by beings that astound and inspire me.

Unfortunately, we must expect, within all of that power, that there will be great intensity, even tradgedy. and there has been. much of it lately. just in the past two weeks, so much shit has gone down it makes my head spin. But what i have been feeling and need to communicate is that it is not just about "being careful" to not hurt ourselves, take too much of a substance, drive recklessly, or avoid certain precautions when dealing with the law... it is about stepping into our roles as conscious humans and taking responsibility, actively, with the power we hold and living by example, and with integrity.
this is not a test run, folks!!!
this is it. this is the one. we are the OneS. but we are not invincible. we need each other for support, so GIVE it. we need our heads for survival and for important communication, so keep them on straight. we need our hearts and our connections to our own emotions and others', so stay tuned to yours, and Listen carefully to others! it takes a Super Powers. you are a SuperHuman if you choose to be. not immortal, but still greatly empowered. these are separate things. and it is YOUR CHOICE to be this way. it is always a choice. remember that.

I see who you are. i can look at you and see what beauty you possess, in all shades and forms, but it is up to you to recognize your own unique power and fight the good fight, consciously, daily. and to take responsibility for your actions so that not only will your own life be whole, healthy, but also because of the rippling effect that you have on those around you, those who love you. there has been a lot of dissecting going on lately of our community, culture, "scene"... but i believe that more important than expending energy on analyzing, is ACTING, and being the best people we know how to be. lifting each other up is key. but holding our own heads up, with humility, compassion and respect, is ESSENTIAL.

"i see who you are. behind the skin and the muscle...." (bjork- from volta)

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 4 replies

this changed everything

2007-10-25T15:13:30Z

The following, below the dotted line, is *not* my writing. It's the reposting of a blog at
http://social-creature.com/this-changed-everything
reposted below for your convenience only

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tiffa novoa 1975 - 2007

heavy shit today.

tiffa was not just a fashion designer, she invented an entire aesthetic style. she was not just one of the founding members of a notorious performance troupe, she helped to create an entire subculture. she wasn’t just a visionary artist, she was a force of nature whose ripple effects inspired, and will continue to inspire, her closest friends and countless, thousands, of people who are likely not even aware that this is the woman responsible for their inspiration.

i barely knew tiffa, and i can easily say that she affected the course of my life.

in the spring of 2004 i ran into an unusual-looking group of folks walking around venice beach. later i would describe the way this posse appeared at the time as superheroes in street clothes–from a street on a different planet. having previously worked with the dresden dolls in boston before moving out to LA, i had only one idea of what this gang could be. i went up to them and asked, “what are you guys? are you a band?”

the answer came back, “no. we are a circus.” the group was called, simply, el circo.

two months later i found myself at a seminal event in the los angeles underground. it was a fashion show for onda designs at a downtown warehouse. the fashions were tiffa’s, though i had no idea who she was at the time, and the people i met that night, and would meet in the years after who had been involved with the production of that night, would become some of my dearest friends and colleagues. the name of the party was “VITAL.”

in the scrapbook i have from that year, full of flyers and other mementos, i still have a flyer for VITAL, and underneath it, in a bout of prescience that completely astonished me when i rediscovered it looking through the scrapbook a few months ago, i had written the words:

“THIS CHANGED EVERYTHING.”

so i had known even then.

i had known immediately.

seven months after VITAL i became the production manager for an LA-based circus troupe called lucent dossier, which was just two months old at the time. five months after that i was working with lucent and the do lab on redbull’s ascension event, getting a hands-on, crash-course education in culture marketing from the experts in the field. (that event was also the first time i actually worked with el circo, 1 year after meeting them on venice beach.)

the night that 2005 became 2006 i was at the new year’s eve party put on by madison house and anon salon where i watched the dresden dolls and el circo perform on the same stage.

a year and a half later i was developing the marketing strategy for the do lab’s lightning in a bottle music festival, on which el circo were very significant collaborators. and now, six months after that, i’m writing this post on my marketing website, getting so nostalgically lost in the mystical, cyclical serendipity of all these events, that it actually made me manage to forget for a moment why i sat down to write this post in the first place.

by the time i’d become involved in this whole circus, tiffa had moved on to a new design label, ernte fashion systems, moved to bali where the production was based, and become a significant couture force from paris to tokyo.

i know this because many of my friends who have themselves become designers and gone on to start fashion labels are her friends, her artistic progeny, and have been inspired by the path she blazed and the creative visions she wrought.

in a 2005 SF-Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the burningman community have had on san francisco nightlife, and west coast underground dance culture in general, the writer paid particular attention to the legacy of el circo:

El Circo has fused a musical style and a fashion sense that are major departures from the old rave scene.

El Circo [is credited] with creating the postapocalyptic fashions that many now associate with Burning Man. Most of the original El Circo fashions, which convey both tribalism and a sense of whimsy, were designed by member Tiffa Novoa, who has since hit it big with her Onda Designs.

….That fashion sense has carried over onto the streets and into the clubs of San Francisco, giving an open and otherworldly feel to many parties.

….It can also be a personally transformative experience. “At first, this was all costuming, but now it’s who I am,” says Matty Dowlen, who manages El Circo’s operations and looks like a cross between a carny, a hippie, and a trapper.

…. “A lot of the women in El Circo were some of the most beautiful in the world, and [Novoa] dressed them up to look even more beautiful,” [Electronic musician Random] Rab says, noting that it changed how the denizens of El Circo conceived of themselves. “One day everyone was all hippied out, and then they were all tribal and tattooed.”

…. El Circo strives to cultivate a new kind of culture and communal ethos.

this is what tiffa created.

she was one hell of a powerful being. powerful enough to create a vision of the world that was so mesmerizing it enchanted a whole subculture and even managed to redefine people’s sense of self.

my love goes out to all my friends who are mourning her loss. she will be greatly missed. what she has created will continue to inspire countless others to pursue their creative dreams. it is bigger than life–or death.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 3 replies

there is no point

2007-10-20T21:51:41Z

"The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the
powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress . . .

The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the
capacity for the erotic love of one human for another.

We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing
to the solitary nightmare of depression.

Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who generate
their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance . . .

There is no 'point' to it -- no religious overtones, ideological
message, or money to be made -- just the chance, which we need much more of
on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous
existence with some sort of celebration."

-Barbara Ehrenreich, *Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 4 replies

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

2007-10-19T18:20:26Z

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
Roald Dahl

I see magic in our community but it's fragile like a flower to be wonderoulsy admired or easily missed .

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

Out with the PLUR and in with the Classism

2007-10-15T00:18:31Z

An interesting commentary on the scene from my friend Stephen:

http://people.tribe.net/trix/blog?topicid=4299e2d5-26ec-4cd0-a1f3-944bb0008beb

So you might have noticed that I’ve gotten a little political lately. If you’ve missed it, read some of my most recent posts. Time to change things up for a bit and talk about something local. Perhaps I can tie it into the general American trend of greed and power taking over individual choice and freedom. Perhaps it’ll be a stretch. You can decide for yourself.

Last weekend several of my friends and I went to Symbiosis Gathering (www.symbiosis.org). The multi-day festival featured some of the best local and international electronic artists from across the spectrum. Overall, I was very pleased with the music that I heard, from old favorites (Deru) to new ones (Mala). Although the music was the focus of the event, what I noticed more than anything else was the culture of the various communities that come out for this (and many other) events and festivals (what we used to call “raves”) here on the West Coast. Before I continue, I want to put out there that I don’t intend to point fingers specifically at Symbiosis, because they are just one of many events and crews that perpetuates this movement of our subculture that I will describe and critique. These new characteristics reach beyond that festival and are both present in year round events put on by many West Coast event production communities as well as our daily lives. Furthermore, I’d like to state that the ideas in this essay may seem just as judgmental as the attitudes and behaviors that I am calling out as harmful and destructive. Regardless of how you feel about my critical thoughts enclosed, you should know that they come out of both my personal observations and of people in a variety of “social classes” who have shared their impressions through honest conversations over the past week. And now, back to business.

I remember a time when we were all saying “its all about the music.” It was a time when people from many different walks of life found a space to shed the layers of bullshit of the everyday world to express themselves, to find “peace, love, unity and respect” and be welcomed as the freak, geek, weirdo, etc that they truly were. This weekend, I found myself deeply aware of a shift away from these old raver values, into a vanity and classism that is now intricately woven into this part of the rave scene.

I’m not sure what to call this section of the “rave” scene that I am speaking of, but it’s a spin off of the breaks scene, which has musically moved in the direction of hip hop, and whose members predominantly consist of those fond of sexy low bpm, bass heavy tracks (bassnectar, the glitch mob, etc), feathers, fedoras, reconstructed clothing, psychedelics and the art inspired by them, and performance-ritual. You get the picture. I’m not here to call out that this scene has gotten fucked up (most of you have probably observed this already), but I am here to point out what seem to be the deeper layers of why it’s now the way it is and how it has influenced the way we all see and carry ourselves in our communities and in relationship to one another. I’m not implying that these social mores exist in a scene that we are not part of, but rather I’m recognizing and calling us out that this scene is OUR scene. In doing so, I aim to implicate us all as accomplices in something inherently superficial, greedy and self-serving that ultimately discourages open-mindedness and open-heartedness.

Symbiosis provided a perfect opportunity to conduct some anthropological research on classism in this part of the West Coast rave scene. Looking around, it was easy to observe how when certain music is playing (or djs performing) the dancefloor divides into different cliques based on appearances. It was apparent that beyond the superficial differences between cliques, there is a pecking order or class hierarchy, where the upper classes look down upon and don’t associate with the lower classes based predominantly on their appearances.

It’s hard to say exactly what defines a certain class, but the most obvious and defining characteristics is appearance as defined by fashion, body image, age, etc. The upper echelon are the trustafarian peacocks (www.urbandictionary.com/define.php and their wealthy associates. Think couture clothing, custom leather, and those who more or less keep the tribal markets and bazaars (and the poor artists of Bali) in business. A breed that remarkably resembles the fashionistas of NYC or Paris. They are attractive, they are skinny, they are young, they are “the beautiful people from the future” as several people I know have called them. I watch them only associate with their kind, often turning a cold shoulder to those who dress and look differently. I might as well call it out - they are the El Circo’s of the scene. Yes, there are some who don’t look like them but who get acknowledged – mainly, the djs and drug dealers who have their own kind of power – these people are somewhat welcome into these circles, even though they will never be considered their equals, and are treated more like a powerful and influential servant class. The allure is obviously tempting, what a great opportunity to be near the rich and powerful and at the same time invest in your art.

Working down the social hierarchy are the tutu-ed faeries (who some might say are trying to create their own separatist elite class, but I don’t think they’ve succeeded), then those who sport reconstructed clothing, and down the line we go. Where do you fit in?

So what’s the problem? Well, the challenge is that these rich and powerful folks propagate the memes of the scene. It might be the music geeks that support new upcoming talent in the underground, but it’s the upper class that define what is cool and hip. They are the ones who support the designers and artists on the largest of scales, and the rest of the scene follows suit. What is cool is woven so deeply and intricately into the culture that we become unconscious of our choices and attitudes towards those who look different than us. Not only do aesthetics weave their way into the scene, but the whole vanity meme follows suit. The rich and (therefore) powerful may be vain, but they’re also sexy and mysterious – the allure to follow their lead is strong. The superficiality trickles down to all levels, where even those closer to the bottom judge those who appear different, with regard to fashion, body image and age.

As I stood on the dancefloor Sunday morning at the forest stage, I looked around me seeing it all play out. It seemed like there were so many people dressing not to express themselves, but to mimic the upper class trustafarians, convinced that they are making their own personal choices. And as I looked around, I knew that despite their efforts some would never make their way up the social ladder into those exclusive circles because of their age, weight and income. I became sad for those who (whether consciously or unconsciously) strive to be accepted by the upper class folks by not only emptying their bank accounts on fashion accessories, but also participating in body modification (not only tattoos and piercings, but also insane exercise regimens and health food consumption). Our self esteem is so easily dependent on others’ acceptance of us, so it is all too easy to fall into the traps of changing ourselves to be more like the beautiful people.

The rich and (therefore) powerful set the standards for the culture, their financial influence over the arts determines what is cool, and the rest of the community attempts to live up to these standards, by spending hard earned money to meet the subculture’s rules. Meanwhile, as the most affluent group looks down upon the rest of the community for not being cool, hip, styled, etc, the 2nd most affluent group follows their lead and submits the classes below them to the same scrutiny (despite the irony that they will never be able to be accepted by the upper class, unless they find more disposable income, get skinnier, younger, etc). Rinse, repeat all down the social ladder.

The social hierarchy or pecking order is set and the attitudes of social climbing, or associating with cool people (or those of your class or better) becomes a large motivating factor of participation in the scene, regardless of what class you belong to. As we move down the pecking order, the classes are more tolerable and welcoming (as you would guess since they are oppressed by the higher classes), but still have judgment towards those below them that don’t fit the mold.

You might be saying “that’s not me, that’s them!” However, I challenge you on that assertion. Its so easy to point fingers and not take responsibility. I cannot say that we all do this, but I do and have witnessed it happening in my closest friend groups and across all of the social classes. I’m here writing about you and I just as much as I am writing about them. These ideas of vanity and classism extend all the way down into each one of our social circles and affect us all individually. For example, one of my dj friends who we would all agree lives his life in a class above mine, was quick to condemn the class above him for their vanity and classist attitude, since they have treated him like shit in the past. He confidently said that his group of friends is unlike the elite group, because when they gather he feels comfortable and welcome. Through some discussion, we both came to realize that we both belong to social classes, where some of us are welcomed and others are not because of appearances.

I’m not saying that our unwelcome is always intentional. I believe more often than not that we are working so hard at maintaining our status (self worth) in a certain class, by reinforcing the connections with those in our class, or trying to make connections with those in higher classes, that we find ourselves without time or energy for those whose appearance is of a lower social class.

So back to Symbiosis…Later on Sunday afternoon, when I went over to the field stage I noticed something different where sounds of psytrance filled the valley. The “trancers” as we call them have their cliques, but there doesn’t seem to be such a classist, hierarchical organization based in money and appearance. I was a part of that scene for a long time and never noticed those things being present and that still seems to be true today. Trancers, whether they dress in those fluorescent Star Trek outfits, wear tie-dye, regular street clothes or some ridiculous costume, smile at each other and dance with each other. There is no pecking order that you must work your way up to be welcomed into their stomping ground. Hell, you can even look like a breaks or hip hop kid and they are welcoming. And there seems to be much more permeability in the different subgroups in that scene. The PLUR values seem to have held out as the scene has avoided in some way or another the classism that’s worked its way into other systems.

So why has this happened in this part of the scene and not the others? Why is it largely limited to the West Coast? I’d like to blame LA’s influence, but that seems a little too simple. Perhaps those attracted to this kind of music in the rave scene are also easily tempted into the excitement of sex, drugs and fashion that the elite have brought within the boundaries of the community and once again the geeks want to be just like the cool kids, just like high school. Now’s the second chance to be popular.

Where do we go from here? I find myself looking at my own attitudes towards the people in the scene and see that I have my own judgments based on people’s appearances. How do I step away from these judgments? As I contribute my energy to music and art events in SF, how to I insert my beliefs of non-judgment and acceptance into a scene that has already been infected with these vain and blindly classist attitudes. Does throwing an event in this scene automatically continue to push these vain attitudes that favor those who have more money to live up to the standards set by the elite? Can we continue to financially and socially support those promoters, artists and designers who reinforce classism and social hierarchy in our music scene? What changes are we willing to make? Do we feel the need to make changes in our own contributions to the scene that reinforce the class and social hierarchy and the vanity that comes with it? Are we mature enough to take a step back and reflect on how own social status (and the urge to maintain it or climb up the social ladder) is tied to our self esteem? In what ways are we willing to change our own attitudes and behaviors to create a more open, loving and friendly culture that doesn’t judge people based on social class and appearances both in the larger scene and in our smaller social circles?

At last weekend’s festival, I saw a theme that has been growing over the past few years as the West Coast breaks/hip hop scene recreates our mainstream culture’s standards that empower the rich and powerful and look down upon those who don’t fit the mold. The more those who don’t fit the mold change to fit the standards of the elite group, the more they are accepted by the culture as a whole. The pressure is immense to leave those with undesirable characteristics behind, even if it means oneself. Almost mindlessly and helplessly, so many of us take on these negative attitudes and spread them throughout our subculture, often rejecting our own identities, values and self worth in order to be seen and accepted by others. It is a way of life here in our little culture that I’m not proud to be a part of. I am looking for ways to create some change, in the face of the powerful forces that influence our lives with harmful and negative energy. How sad that we who try and create communities that differ from typical American values, end up embodying the same unhealthy attitudes and repeating the same destructive patterns.

My goal with this post is to create an ongoing dialogue about this subject so that we can create positive change in our lives. I'm fortunate enough to be connected to people in many social classes, so i hope this facilitates dialogue between them. When you go out this weekend, take these ideas with you and observe what you see on the dancefloor and in yourself. I’ll probably bug you from time to time about this, because it is important to me and it so easily gets pushed aside, because it brings into question so much of what we look forward to each weekend. I welcome your comments on my blog, via email, on the phone or in person. See you soon on the dancefloor.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 11 replies

strange & beautiful : The answer is never the answer

2007-10-09T21:44:32Z

plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.
The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

Ken Kesey

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

Cycles

2007-10-09T18:40:01Z

So here I am pondering the social cycles.

So now we have brought to light the shadow side currently in our close community. The seperation that is keeping us from being united on all fronts (the often snobby, insecure, 'elitist' way of treating others, often based on chosen style and the way people react to being subject to it), possible solutions (either accepting that as the case and speaking up when you feel someone is doing it to you, or consciously meeting someone you would normally hold in some contempt just to challenge yourself and the current norm at each gathering). I wonder though what the norm will be when and if we finally do that? Will it all of a sudden be an egotistical move that we will all want to be the kindest and the opennest and how will we rebel against that? By cliquing up more again?

As I wrote that, I see that it actually can't be that bad what a great ego move to want to be as kind and as open as possible. I believe ego is positive or negative based on conscious intentions and ability to be honest with yourself (or accept a truth as perceived by another coming from a right space). I only speak in terms of ego because I am big on checking my own intentions and motivations.

I see and hear a trend with our counter culture (thru Burningman in a large part or as my major example) that there is a general rebellious nature against whatever norm is established. I have heard many people speak of burning the Man early (and one finally just did), or just against the Burningman Org. So many against the way things are now (we all are against the government I assume, but this is on a smaller level I am speaking of). Is it out of really wanting change based on idealistic nature? Or is it just because some people really need to not be present as things are until they have changed or are changing? Is this the way we should be to change things on a larger level or is it just because some people need things to bitch about and that is what makes them happy?

I am all for change and believe that it happens as naturally as the world turns, and that we are all where we are supposed to be, which makes it really easy to accept the now and see where we are heading if we keep up what we are doing with buying locally, trying to stay out of debt and make our own businesses and paths for ourselves outside of corporations and by doing more for foundations to help around with Global issues and having as much fun as we damn please as long as we want because we celebrate our freedom.

Does anyone else see what I am getting at here and care to share a view?

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

That's just It...

2007-10-06T07:54:59Z

"What is the "it" that happens at Shambhala, Raindance, Symbiosis, Syntergenesis, Toxic Beach, Beat Church and of course Burningman?
Anyone have a name for it?
What are people feeling, believing...

~People ARE Feeling, Believing! Due to a variety of reasons/conditions, we are living the experience we create more consciously and consistently than ever!
An evolved blend of stark realization of our past experiences & a new hope for a better/cleaner, MORE PURE future has us living in a very
dynamic environment... So often, it seems we a re presented with a choice. Choicefull recognition of our place within divine karma! The playground of synchronistic perception is so VAST! The more we tune in to the workings of, shall we say, FATE...the more we remember our humble place within it all, and therefore our gift of REFLECTION....our gift to all that keeps on giving!!!

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 2 replies

Kyle: your photography

2007-10-04T20:39:23Z

I was going to send you a personal message but I thought this would be of wider interest to the west coast vibe tribe.

What is your photographic background (are you professional?), and how do you set up photographs at crazy festivals like Shambhala? Do you just haul your camera around and take photos everywhere - or do you have a space where you do your work? What kind of camera and technique do you use?

Your photos look so polished, it is hard to believe you are taking them in the Shambhala dust clouds.

I am starting to enjoy photography more, and would appreciate any kind of tips for the rough and tumble of festival photography.

J

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 4 replies

Beautiful People from the Future

2007-10-04T20:36:27Z

The current main picture for this tribe is from El Circo Friday night at Burningman. After I had posted this photo on flickr, someone commented on it saying my photos "are like windows into a different world. Photos from a colony of Earth in the far flung future."
I couldn't help but wonder at the similarity between this comment and the current catch phrase "Beautiful people from the future."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kylehailey/1451488050/

As the discussion on Out with the PLUR and in with the Classism was rolling, I thought "Beautiful People from the Future" (BPF) was a bit pejorative, but after thinking about it, I decided it was positive. The/our "scene" is positive in that anyone can be a BPF if that is something the enjoy or desire or whatever. I find it tremedously liberating and it stimulates my imagination and brings me wonder. it's just about creativity and expression. When I take pictures, I love the deep expression or crazy creativity. The creativity I that I'm attracted to comes through clothing, make-up, headdresses, tattoos and the expression comes from ecstatic dance or deep trance or standing in solidly or laughing or flirting or being timid.
If someone is just beautiful but not present or feeling it or if they put on a beautiful outfit but aren't connected to it I think it shows and I generally don't take those photos, but then again I could be totally wrong. Its so amazing how different my perceived experience can be from the others which is somethign the whole recent PLUR discussion showed me.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 1 reply

Animals and Anxiety - Dionysus and Conformity

2007-09-27T19:21:25Z

I found this little blurb in my friend Vera's blog (http://tinyurl.com/3xfxql) about what I said at the El Circo dome Friday at BM - I'm surprised I was this lucid or maybe it's just Vera's nice writing style, but either way I find these ideas intriguing :

... so I asked my ears again, and this time they guided me to the El Circo dome! I was very pleased because the El Circo dome tends get all animalistic and shamanistic on Friday nights, which I had experienced first-hand three years ago. The animal energy, just like last time, made me feel kind of anxious. But I had a lot of fun dancing, and then I ran into my friend Kyle, and we talked a little bit about the anxiety, which he was feeling very strongly as well. His theory was that we get anxious because the animal energy is so strong, and even though it's a good energy, it implies anarchy, and the lack of rules or control is what makes us nervous because we are used to having rules. I wasn't sure I agreed completely with his theory because for me, there was also a piece of uneasiness around conformity - because El Circo is all about tribal headpieces and feathers and leather, and I with my lack of feathers and leathers didn't feel like I was going by the rules. But maybe that's just my own personal story, and maybe Kyle's personal story was what was causing HIS anxiety, and maybe each person's anxiety is created by their own personal story, and the animal energy just puts us in touch with what our story is? I don't know.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

IDM in Cathedral Park Sun Aug 19th

2007-08-04T22:24:02Z

Portland so so goes beyound my expectations!!!

=================================================

The Playground Crew Presents...........

"Sunday Afternoon in the Park"

The first in an ongoing series of FREE outdoor dance events at Portland Public Parks.

Our first installment will take place as follows:

Sunday August 19th 2007
at Cathedral Park Amphitheater (under the St. John's Bridge in North Portland)
<a href="maps.google.com/maps MAP </a>
Noon till Sunset

Providing the Sun-Drenched Beats will be:

Manoj
Evan Marc (AKA Bluetech)
Phidelity
Jacaranda
E.L.M. Crew
Loki
Rain

This select group of talent is coming together under the guise of "The Playground Crew" with a commitment to creating fun, light-hearted, family & friends-oriented events that are open to the public, free of charge.

Join us for a day of outdoor fun, relaxation, dancing, and picnicking all set to the soundtrack of Downtempo, IDM, Minimal Techno and House beats. Everyone and all ages welcome!

There will be an e-flyer coming soon for anyone who wants to pass it along.

Also, we are soliciting support and donations from anyone who feels they can help us pull this off and offset the cost of applications, permits, insurance etc etc. We will NOT be soliciting donations at the event so there will be NO pressure to do so. But if you feel that you can support in any way, it will only help us to ensure more of these events, and help make them the best they can be. This is a community effort so feel free to join the community!

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

that viiiiiiiiiiiiibe...

2007-07-12T22:10:17Z

from Kentucky: How i found the vibe...

(this was written in response to finding the Flicker photos that Kyle took at Emerg-n-see...)

i try to channel as much of the west coast into Kentucky as i can. it all started jan. '06 ... just a year and a half ago... somehow i stumbled onto the HoopGirl website, and bought my first hula hoop - then bellydancing, then fire -- now i'm moving to SF in Aug --- planning to spend my first night in my new apartment the night of the Burn (!) -- to study Oriental Medicine in Potero Hill... (well, i guess it was probably my interest in Oriental Med. that actually sparked my west coast transferance).
but - photos like yours, and ideas like yours (i read the article on your "Tribalization" photo) are exactly what i need to siphon a little bit of that mysterious mytical energy that you are able to capture on film - that is what keeps me going, manifesting colorful change... even in Kentucky!!
thank you again!!

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

wetribe.com

2007-05-28T22:43:02Z

Check out http://wetribe.com

Of special interest:

http://www.wetribe.com/links/

which are photographers I find inspiring in the "scene"

The website is pretty bare bones.
If you have any ideas and or content, I'd love to hear from you.

I've been hacking away in my spare time on bits and pieces of the website.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

what do you call a RAVE?

2007-03-05T23:48:04Z

When you go dancing what do you call it?
I'm going to a
Party
Club
Gathering
Rave]
Bar
Basically most of the dancing would be most of America calls a rave but when I think of a rave I think of candy and blinkies.

I liked the term "ecstatic ritual"

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 2 replies

magazine article

2007-03-02T20:33:39Z

Photo article on our dance culture

JPGs at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kylehailey/sets/72157594565974779/

PDF at
http://www.basskitty.com/magazine.pdf

The above is an article I'm doing (still a typo or two left to fix) for a friends online magazine:
http://www.earthrites.org/invisible-college.htm

My ultimate goal, is doing a book on our dance culture but doing the article made me think "hey, I should do an online magazine". An online magazine would be much easier to tackle, help promote interest, provide content and experience in layout and design.

Drop me a line if you'd like to contribute.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 0 replies

Hippies

2007-01-30T23:45:28Z

Hippies ... it would be fun to have one catchy term for the current "scene".

"Indigos" rings beautifully. I like the word indigo. I wonder if it could work? Indigo children strikes up too many unrelated associations with Indigo Children.
Hippies ... it would be fun to have one catchy term for the current "scene".

Burners is a possibility but probably has issues, just like the 3 guys who "own" BM are now in a lawsuit from what I hear. I feel like "burners" is just a tangential term and refers to too much and too little.

Freakers gets used a lot, but just doesn't sound that fun to me.

Techno tribal pagan is clutzy

There *are* many tribes involved.

Technology is totally involved - psychedelic art is done more and more on computers, music is done more and more on laptops, people connect more and more via tribe.com and as well as on the more general public myspace.com.

There is an appreciation for metal, feathers, leather,crystals,stones, bones, tatoos ie old tribal symbols.

Psytrance in Australia and Europe seems similar to the feel I get in the Bay Area but ironically many of the Bay Area people can't stand trance anymore though most of them loved it 10 years ago. Trance seems a bit Walt Disney of psychedelic music with the gaudy decorations and dayglow colors. Many of the Bay Area trancers went more tribal, leather, fur, piercings and cirque (Cirque Berzerk, Vau de Vire, El Circo, Mystic Family Circus) and their music turned more Break Beats, IDM, glitch, psydub and now dubstep.

I feel a similar attraction to the Trance culture but I feel much more mystery and beauty around Oracle Gatherings or Synergenesis (though I can go off on their shallowness and consumerism but I can leave that to someone else and just revel in the beautiful part).

My wonder is of an unknowable, unfathomable beauty, richness in life that I can only wonder at and I see an acknoledgement of this ineffiable vastness of being expressed in the community through art, dance, music, free-form community revels and of course inner exploration.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 3 replies

Urban Tribes or something more

2007-01-30T22:27:44Z

I've wondered, reading through Urban Tribes, if the "it" I feel in my communities is the same as Urban Tribes, but Urban Tribes seems so mundane, similar to what I had with friends when I moved to San Fran in 1990. I had community, even a psuedo hippy house. The community I had in 1990, I loved but it didn't fascinate me. I think the difference is the ecstatic rituals and collective joy. This quote is great from

Barbara Ehrenreich at the Commonwealth Club
The Suppression of Collective Joy

"Why is there so little collective joy today? Why is our culture bereft of opportunity for this kind of thing? Mostly, we sit in cubicles at work and we sit in our cars. If you mention 'ecstasy' people think you're talking about a drug. The cure for loneliness and isolation and despair is Prozac... The simple answer is: the ancient tradition of festivities and ecstatic rituals was deliberately suppressed by elites -people in power who associated this kind of frolicking with the lower classes and especially with women...

"The Romans had their own Dionysus worshippers in Italy and they slaughtered them in 60 BC with the kind of ferocity they later directed at Christians... The Protestants were the real killjoys. They just wiped out that entire calendar of festivities from the Catholic church and outlawed dancing and masking. Around the world it was mainly missionaries who crushed the ecstatic rituals of indigenous people. In this country, slave owners banned not only reading and books, they banned the drum. They understood that in these kinds of rituals people found collective strength. "

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 1 reply

group ecstacy - 'Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy'

2007-01-30T22:26:37Z

Interesting read on ecstatic dance

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6783317

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 1 reply

Fascination

2007-01-24T17:16:33Z

I'm fascinated by the sort of techno tribal pagan gatherings. A gathering on the bay one night became the tipping point in my fascination. My fascination peaked as I watched this group of 20 and 30 somethings dancing in the dark of night in the soft red light of a bus parked nearby to crazy amplified deconstructed music and distorted electronica in this deteriorating forsaken industrial spot on the beautiful but polluted waters of the bay. It was a strange mix of nature, destruction and celebration. The celebration in this ababondon spot seemed like some medieval cult that was "worshiping" a secrete energy and beauty of life that is usually hidden to the average reguard.

One question I have is what to call this scene. Techno-pagan? Most of these people feel no connection to paganism, though a lot acknowledge some sense of a deep meaning to life expressed in the experience.

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 2 replies

Cyberpunks Anticipate a New Digital Counterculture

2007-01-24T06:42:35Z

http://www.saffo.com/essays/cyberpunks.php

From Wired Magazine, September/October 1993

Like a sun-grazing comet on a deep-space trajectory, the cyberpunk movement is disappearing as quickly as it arrived just a few years ago. Moreover, the movement was hardly more substantial than a comet's fuzzy tail when it came to numbers -- there were never more than 100 hard core cyberpunks at any time before the term hit the mainstream press.

But don't sell cyberpunk's social impacts short, for insubstantial comets have long been potent messengers. I suspect that cyberpunks are to the 1990s what the beatniks were to the '60s -- harbingers of a mass movement waiting in the wings. Just as the beatniks anticipated the hippies, cyberpunks are setting the stage for a coming digital counterculture that will turn the '90s zeitgeist utterly on its head. This movement in the making has yet to be described, much less named, but eerie parallels between the beatnik and cyberpunk movements offer strong hints of what is to come.

For starters, both movements were given focus by literary fiction. The beatniks took their cue from a handful of "beat" writers (Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs), while cyberpunks found their identity in the cyberpunk science fiction genre defined by writers like William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and John Shirley. Moreover, the lead works in both traditions orbited around emerging infrastructures: Kerouac's "On the Road" played off the concrete mobility enabled by the Interstate Highway Act, while Gibson's "Neuromancer" portrayed a future world wrapped around vast information highways. Eager readers never realized that neither writer was really one of them: Kerouac disliked driving, and Gibson banged out Neuromancer on a 1924 Hermes typewriter.

Like the cyberpunks, there were never more than a handful of true Beatniks -- less than 120 in all before the movement hit the media in the late 1950s, according to essayist George Leonard. Leonard's descriptions of the North Beach beatnik milieu parallel today's cyberpunk culture. Word got out on the grapevine about parties at people's "pads", and like raves, these happenings quickly evolved into underground quasi-commercial events. Just as cyberpunks carried their network identities into the physical world, the beatniks were fond of pseudonyms. "Everyone had a name, like in Damon Runyon," observes Leonard. Ironically, neither group named their own movement, for just as the cyberpunks were so dubbed by a literary interloper, the term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco gossip columnist, Herb Caen.

Once labeled, both movements quickly surrendered their visual archetypes to the cultural mainstream. In 1960, youths the world over were aping the goateed, cool-shades beatnik look, while today, PDBs --people dressed in black-- affecting electronic lifestyles are more numerous than network nodes. This surrender would send both movements into the black hole of history, but not before they inspired larger movements to come. Just five years after the end of the beatniks demise in 1960, the hippies emerged from the Haight-Ashbury to change our cultural landscape forever.

Like cyberpunks, the beatniks were for the most part low-key, slightly mournful loners. The beatnik's individualism was a sullen and stubborn reaction to the optimistic company-man materialism of the Eisenhower era, just as the cyberpunks stand in stark contrast to the antiseptic military-industrial orderliness of the Reagan-Bush years.

But Kerouac later concluded that "beat" also meant "beatific" --imbued with joy or blessedness-- and it was this aspect of the beatniks that became the germ of the hippie movement according to Leonard. "it was a time of grace," he told me, referring to the early days of the Haight-Ashbury, when it seemed that a new age of cultural consciousness truly was dawning.

Optimism and a sense of community distinguished the hippies from the Beatniks, and will also distinguish the cyberpunks from the coming digital counterculture. The cyberpunk world is starkly distopian, serving up the sort of intimate but uneasy accomodation with technology portrayed in the movie, "Bladerunner." I will bet that the digital counterculture will reject this bleak vision for a future where technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth, substituting a deep sense of interdependence in place of lone-wolf isolation. Cyberpunks envisioned humans as electronic cyber-rats lurking in the interstices of the information mega-machine; the gospel of this new movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.

It is too early to tell what the digital counterculture will call itself, but the history of the hippies offers a clue. "Hippie" traces its origins to "hipster," slang for a cruel and cynical 1950s subculture that predated the beats. The digital counterculture thus is likely to appropriate an older term for their own in the same way that the hippies appropriated and turned "hipster" into something entirely new. I'll bet that they call themselves something like "tekkies", consciously adopting the scornful slang for nerds of the 1980s, stripping the word of its industrial coldness and making it synonymous with the human control of technology.

The hippies appeared in 1965, several years after the beatnik movement had gone public. Given this chronology, the Tekkies will arrive sometime in the mid-90s if not sooner. Watch the skies for a new comet -- it will be digital, and its tail is likely to glow in technicolor swirls. Its arrival will change all of our lives forever.

http://www.saffo.com/essays/cyberpunks.php

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that thing

2007-01-08T23:52:30Z

hmm...hard question. Something i've sat with for years, wondering what is this "thing" or "feeling" that has drawn me back over and over, despite inconvience or exhaustion or the cops showing up as if this "thing" we are doing is wrong. I don't have a name for it. I can describe it as a relief, a blissfulness of being or feeling connected to myself and the music and my body AND the folks around me, smilling and sharing in what I imagine to be a similar experience or feeling.
Uh-oh, long answer

posted in Beautiful People from the Future - 1 reply

anyone have a name for "it"?

2006-12-10T04:47:50Z

What is the "it" that happens at Synergenesis, Oracle Gathings, Shambhala, Raindance, Toxic Beach, Burningman etc?
I've tried to convey parts of the mystery, appreciation and fascianation I have for it through photos.
http://kylelf.com
I titled the book "West Coast Vibe". Someone looked at the book and asked "do you think it's just on the West Coast?" and then that brought up the discussion of what "it" is.
Is there a name for "it" like there was for the hippies in the 60s?

The name "West Coast Vibe" came from a story I heard about Soulclipse in Turkey. Supposidely people at the festival saw the art, music, cloths and performance of people from the West Coast and said " I really like this 'West Coast Vibe'".

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