An Array of Utopian Flowers
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Wildlife Crossings: Animals Survive with Bridges and Tunnels
Posted on May 19, 2013 | 1 Comment -
Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No Comments -
La Loba: Wild Woman, Luminous Wolf
Posted on May 15, 2013 | 1 Comment -
Vandana Shiva: Maintaining Biodiversity and the Seeds of Freedom
Posted on May 11, 2013 | No Comments -
African Garden Cities: Urbanization Without Planning for People
Posted on May 7, 2013 | No Comments
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WilderUtopia in 64 Languages
Chasing Ice: The New “Inconvenient Truth”
Arctic Melting Before Our Eyes - In his new film on the disappearance of Arctic glaciers, “Chasing Ice,” author, award-winning photographer and reformed climate-change denier James Balog used time-lapse photography to capture global warming in progress.
Read MoreEcological Urbanism
A City Green Re-Imagination - We must demand an ecological retrofitting of our urban environments to live together more efficiently, giving credence to community, allowing space for the open wild.
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Performance Archive
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Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsIn 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961, finally published in his native land the book promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now, the "controversies" dominate his legacy, including issues of censorship, obscenity, misogyny and anti-Semitism, clouding the import of Henry Miller's words. "Tropic of Cancer" broke literary ground, mixing novelistic forms with autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, and surrealist free association. -
Lady Lazarus: The Hurt Imagination of Sylvia Plath
Posted on April 25, 2013 | 1 CommentRobert Pinsky on Sylvia Plath: "Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open." -
Uganda: Coffee Farmers Sing Delicious Peace
Posted on April 12, 2013 | No CommentsA community of coffee farmers in Uganda has formed the Peace Kawomera Fair Trade Cooperative, focused on people of different faiths putting aside their differences to overcome generations of conflict and poverty. Now a Smithsonian Folkways recording has been released to celebrate their achievements. -
Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Subversive Champion of the Disinherited
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsAlmost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism. -
The Gamelan Vibrations of Lou Harrison
Posted on February 28, 2013 | No CommentsLou Harrison: A World of Music is an intimate portrait of an eclectic composer who traded a fast-paced New York career for a remote cabin in the woods. Harrison, a polymath, iconoclast, writer and activist, embraced artistic playfulness over the business of composing. Experimenting freely with western, eastern and custom made instruments, Harrison forged a new course for 20th century music. -
The Battle of Algiers: A Brutal Portrait of Urban Guerrilla Warfare
Posted on January 26, 2013 | 1 CommentGillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece, "The Battle of Algiers," as a study of the brutality of urban guerrilla warfare, serves an Arab-street-level counterpoint to Kathryn Bigelow's US-imperialism-centered, torture-driven war propaganda film, "Zero Dark Thirty." -
Ingmar Bergman: A Tenuous Searching Faith in “The Seventh Seal”
Posted on January 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. -
E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Soul’s Adventure on New Year’s Eve
Posted on December 31, 2012 | 1 CommentE.T.A. Hoffmann's Literary Gothic: Every New Year's Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out. -
Emily Dickinson: A Mystic of Stillness Who Mocked Heaven
Posted on December 28, 2012 | 1 CommentEmily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. Unafraid of her own passions and talent, she embraced the world around her, yet faced a debilitating illness and family intrigue. -
The Nutcracker Prince Battles the King of Mice at Christmas
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsSuddenly, mice fill the room and the Christmas tree grows to dizzying heights. The Nutcracker also grows to life-size. Marie finds herself in the midst of a battle between an army of Gingerbread man soldiers and the mice, led by the fierce Mouse King. The mice begin to eat the gingerbread soldiers. -
Nikolai Gogol: Magical Ukrainian Fairy Tale on Christmas Eve
Posted on December 24, 2012 | 1 CommentDevilry and mischief pervades the night before Christmas in Nikolai Gogol's dark ode called Christmas Eve. The devil absconds with the moon hidden in his pocket. Thereafter, he roams around tormenting people as he pleases. -
Matt Pallamary: Guaraní Shaman’s Quest for “Land Without Evil”
Posted on December 17, 2012 | 2 CommentsMatthew Pallamary's acclaimed novel "Land Without Evil," recently performed as an aerial acrobatic stage show, narrates the true story of a young shaman of the Guaraní people of South America facing European conquest and conversion to Catholicism in the 1700s. -
Chasing Ice: The New “Inconvenient Truth” – Arctic Melting Before Our Eyes
Posted on December 10, 2012 | 3 CommentsDr. James Hansen: We can fix this. The answer is a price on carbon. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest, reflecting their cost to society including the economic devastation wrought by storms like Sandy, the toll on farmland and ecosystems, as well as priceless human lives. -
Who Bombed Earth First! Organizer Judi Bari?
Posted on November 29, 2012 | No CommentsOscar-entry documentary chronicles the unsolved mystery of the car bombing of Old-Growth Forests Activists and their later arrest by the FBI for their own injuries. The film also illustrates the Redwood Summer movement to save the Headwaters Forest of Northern California and Judi Bari's victorious 1st Amendment lawsuit. -
New Orleans: Shantytown Soundings at The Music Box
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsDithyrambalina will look like a house, but sound like a musical instrument. A growing group of local and national sound artists are experimenting with interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards allowing visitors and musicians to bring the house to life through their touch. -
Federico Fellini: Intuitive Visual Art
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsFellini: "I think almost exclusively in images, which explains why an actor's face and body are more important to me than plot structure . . . . The key word to understanding my kind of cinema is vitality. What I seek is to live the expression itself." -
Detropia: Detroit as Utopia or Dystopia?
Posted on September 18, 2012 | No CommentsCaroline Libresco: DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. -
Austria: Operatic Spectacles Rise from the Lake at the Bregenz Festival
Posted on September 10, 2012 | No CommentsThe Seebühne, a floating opera stage of bewildering proportions rises every summer from Austria's Lake Constance, the centerpiece of the annual Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival). It has staged productions such as Verdi's "Aida," Giordano's "André Chénier," Bernstein's "West Side Story," and next year will be Mozart's "The Magic Flute." -
John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes – A Meditative Journey
Posted on September 10, 2012 | No CommentsJohn Cage’s 1948 magnum opus for prepared piano, takes the listener through an hour-long journey told as a meditative story. Influenced by the Hindu aesthetic theory of rasa, or emotional character, it intones the listener toward tranquility. -
Stories of a Maya Rebirth: Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe documentary "Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth" presents an alternative worldview to industrial capitalism consuming the earth, following six young Maya into their daily and ceremonial life, revealing their determination to resist the destruction of their culture and environment. -
Space Exploration: Ray Bradbury and the Mission to the Red Planet
Posted on August 30, 2012 | No Comments“The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....” --Ray Bradbury, "The Martian Chronicles" -
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Bayou Culture Sinking into the Gulf – By Jack Eidt
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No Comments"Beasts," a hard-knock ecological fairy tale about the disappearing Louisiana bayou coastline, highlights the fragility of the region's hurricane defenses and the resulting devastation of communities and cultures living on the flooding margins. -
Dirty Realism: The Anti-Social Satire of Charles Bukowski
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsI go outside - and all up and down the street - the green armies shoot color - like an everlasting 4th of July, - and I too seem to swell inside, - a kind of unknown bursting, - a feeling, perhaps, that there isn't any - enemy - anywhere -
Gonzovision 1970s: Hunter S. Thompson on the American Dream
Posted on August 11, 2012 | No Comments"America could have been a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race. Instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails. Everybody wants power over a country that's had it's day." -
Adams on Kerouac: The Buddha’s First Noble Truth Unveiled at Big Sur
Posted on August 11, 2012 | 1 CommentComposed for the opening of LA's Disney Hall, Adams references Kerouac's evocation of the first of Buddha's Four Noble Truths in his piece, celebrating the freedom of the California coast at Big Sur.
