An Array of Utopian Flowers
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What Every SoCal Beach Town Suffers: Parking
Posted on May 23, 2013 | No Comments -
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 | No Comments -
Vandana Shiva: Maintaining Biodiversity and the Seeds of Freedom
Posted on May 11, 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.
Read More
Literary 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." -
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. -
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. -
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" -
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." -
Jack Kerouac’s Lowell Blues: Cast-off Boots of Time
Posted on July 1, 2012 | No CommentsJack Kerouac wrote in 1950: “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America–for reasons which are never deeper than the music. Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of a country.” -
William S. Burroughs – Colorless Questioning the Invisible Morning
Posted on June 21, 2012 | 1 CommentBurroughs wanted to free people from the slavery of addiction, whether to heroin or money or sex. "The Garden of Earthly Delights" was his shorthand for the diseased saturnalia of American affluence. From his earliest writings Burroughs foresaw a time when human beings, drenched in orgasmic "freedom," would be reduced to their bodies, their minds completely manipulated by advertising and mass media -
Book Review: Monte Schulz’s Roaring 20s Memory Palace “The Big Town”
Posted on April 4, 2012 | 1 CommentSchulz crafts an extraordinary picture of urban life in the Roaring 20s, where modern dreamers and their romantic illusions collide with American wealth and decadence on the eve of the Great Depression. -
Monte Schulz: Dreaming Jazz America in “The Big Town”
Posted on April 2, 2012 | 1 Comment"Monte Schulz's *The Big Town* exposes decadence, wealth and consumption in Jazz Age America as spiritual myopia -- where desperate, haunting characters hinge their lives on impossible dreams. This lyrical, gripping novel is as close to 1920s America as it gets, and penned with such frightening realism that the chaos of a bygone era erupts from its pages." - Simon Van Booy -
Terence McKenna: On Shamanic Schizophrenia and Cultural Healing
Posted on March 30, 2012 | No CommentsWe have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness. -
Mother-Nature Is Not A Wicked Witch: Oren Lyons on Oz
Posted on February 20, 2012 | 2 CommentsBaum's "Wizard of Oz" as a Utopian American Dream soft-peddles an anti-nature-prejudice amid dazzling urban-industrial landscapes. This bias at the expense of the earth's resources has led us to today's environmental and economic collapse. -
B. Traven: An Anarchists Death Ship
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No Comments"Being mixed up with a strike is a different. Laborers attacking the profits of capitalists are out. When a strike is to be quelled, all consuls work in unison, regardless if only a few months ago they would have rather liked to cut one another's throats." -
Occupy Los Angeles: Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”
Posted on October 18, 2011 | No CommentsAll machines have their friction, but when the friction comes to have its own machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such as machine any longer. -
To Erzulie of the Seductive Summoning Sea
Posted on July 30, 2011 | No CommentsHere we follow poet Lenelle N. Moise's surreal submergence into her mother’s passion for water, the sea, vodoun. Imagery, juxtapositions, fluidity, they haunt this reverie, influenced by unseen forces, diaspora and the Haitian sea goddess Erzulie.
