An Array of Utopian Flowers
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LA River Revitalization: The Story of Master Plan Gone Awry
Posted on April 2, 2021 | No Comments - Biotonomy: Designing Nature-Based Green Buildings and Cities
Posted on March 26, 2021 | No Comments - Paul Bowles Documentary: ‘Let it Come Down’
Posted on March 26, 2021 | No Comments - Foray into Fungi: The Art of Farming
Posted on March 18, 2021 | No Comments - Trees Please: Saving and Serving the Urban Forest
Posted on February 25, 2021 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
Performance Archive
‘Solaris’ – Tarkovsky’s Vision Beyond an Urban Future
Posted on April 3, 2017 | 2 CommentsA startling vision of the future, somewhere in the cosmos on a planet yet unknown, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris investigates apparitions of the irradiated mind in a nostalgic view of humanity looking into it's own mirror.Transformations: Stephen Scott’s Bowed Grand Piano, Plucked
Posted on February 10, 2017 | 1 CommentCelestial, dark atmospheric, a legendary Odyssey down a road to nowhere, in search of Minerva, the Roman Goddess of Wisdom and Poetry, Stephen Scott's bowed grand piano soars into the imagination, and transforms in the spirit of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'.Political Haiku: The Revolution Will Not Be Roboticized
Posted on January 12, 2017 | 1 CommentMark Morris lays down some poetic effulgence in the budding genre of political haiku, or as he endearingly calls it: Hacku. Let it flow in the Era of the Orange One.LA’s ‘Hopscotch’ – Experimental Opera of the Freeways
Posted on December 28, 2016 | No CommentsThe streets of Los Angeles played host last year to an audacious experiment in mobile opera called 'Hopscotch.' The recording will be released on January 13, and a concert will take place on Friday, January 20 (7:30 pm) at the University of Southern California’s Newman Recital Hall.Prefabricated Surrealism in ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy’
Posted on December 5, 2016 | 1 CommentWatch 'Dreams That Money Can Buy', a Surrealist Film by Dada filmmaker Hans Richter, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.Nico, Warhol Muse, from the Dark Side of the Street
Posted on November 24, 2016 | 1 CommentAt one time billed as the Moon Goddess and Andy Warhol It-Girl, singer Nico's dark, avant-garde music and deep, hypnotic voice were first heard in the Velvet Underground. She continued to work sporadically as a solo artist after leaving the Velvets, though a longtime heroin addiction and methadone dependency sidetracked her career. Check out the documentary on her life, Nico:Icon.Once a Classical Giant, Then Obscure, Felix Draeseke Rediscovered
Posted on November 3, 2016 | No CommentsStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. Felix Draeseke of Germany, once dubbed a "giant" by Franz Liszt, fell into obscurity until only recently.Epic of Cruelty and Revolution in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’
Posted on October 25, 2016 | 3 CommentsBattleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent revolutionary propaganda film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers.The Real Imagination of Artist Francis Bacon
Posted on October 25, 2016 | 1 CommentThe Irish-British Francis Bacon was both reviled and revered throughout his life for his raw, grotesque and confronting figurative painting. This documentary explores the life of one of modern art’s most intriguing artists.Art of Collective Madness in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Impressions’
Posted on September 27, 2016 | 3 CommentsSalvador Dalí and filmmaker José Montes-Baquer, in honor of underappreciated Surrealist Poet Raymond Roussel, shot a fake documentary of an non-expedition to Mongolia in search of gigantic mythic hallucinogenic mushrooms.Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Insurrectionist, Talismanic Afrobeat Pioneer
Posted on September 3, 2016 | 3 CommentsFela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured...and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela's life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship.Improvised Beat Generation Dreams of John Cassavetes
Posted on August 17, 2016 | 2 CommentsCassavetes' Shadows "improvises" Beat Generation Manhattan, where two brothers and a sister, black but inexplicably played by two white actors, careening off track to scaled-back sketches of Charles Mingus' saxophone jazz yearnings. Black and white neon signs blink and the old Times Square looms like the otherworld, naturalistic cordial racism separating the chosen from the downtrodden, both dreaming of making it, of creating something.Max Talley Story: A Secret Utopia Called Devorah
Posted on July 28, 2016 | 1 CommentMax Talley's surreal and disturbing story posits a lone traveler who stumbles into an eerie alternative universe, a quiet utopia, or a slow death trap. Read the entire story for free online at Chantwood Magazine.Restlessly Original Iranian Cinematic Poet Abbas Kiarostani
Posted on July 7, 2016 | 2 CommentsInternationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's "realist parable film-making" expanded the artistic history of world cinema. Called "an icon of change in Iran," his death this past Monday has challenged critics to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery.Speaking in Sonic Tongues – dublab’s DJ Nanny Cantaloupe
Posted on June 26, 2016 | No Commentsdublab innovates music, arts and culture with it's freeform internet radio broadcasts in an age where access to mind-bending creation is both limited and expanded. Premiere sonic explorer, Mitchell Brown <> pioneered the movement with his ambient-abstraction-universe-sampling mix-match radio show "Glossolalia." Vasif Adigezalov’s Mad Mugham Laboratory of Classical Music
Posted on June 20, 2016 | No CommentsStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. This stop, Azerbaijan's Vasif Adigezalov, best known for incorporating traditional modal mugham music into his works.Monte Schulz’s Beautiful Jazz Age Tragedy in ‘Crossing Eden’
Posted on June 14, 2016 | 1 CommentMonte Schulz's literary novel Crossing Eden (Fantagraphics Books), sweeps across the Midwestern U.S. landscape through the story of a family pulled apart in the Jazz Age summer of 1929. A failed businessman, seduced by city lights and the dream of wealth and power, divides himself from his wife and children, while a troubled farm boy runs away from home in the company of a gangster.Geo-Fauvism and Anthropocene: Altered Planet, Wild Literature
Posted on June 4, 2016 | 3 CommentsWelcome to the Anthropocene age, where humans have transmogrified the planet, its oceans and atmosphere, caused mass extinctions and wholesale contamination that will remain for millennia. Beyond the politicians and scientists, the way forward remains in the hands of writers, artists, and designers taking inspiration from wild earth in a movement called Geo-Fauvism.Appropriating the Media Barrage with Negativland
Posted on April 22, 2016 | 1 CommentSound, video, and fury presented on the passing of Richard Lyons, also known as Pastor Dick, co-founder of culture-jamming avant garde music collective Negativland, the third member to die in the last year.“Embrace of the Serpent” Film: Journey of Healing and Ethnobotany
Posted on April 11, 2016 | 2 CommentsEthnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, one of the most important plant explorers of the 20th century, served as a key inspiration in a recent film called "Embrace of the Serpent." In December 1941, Schultes entered the Amazon to study how indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. After nearly a decade of fieldwork, he made significant discoveries about the sacred hallucinogen ayahuasca. In total, Schultes would collect more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to Western science.B. Traven: Underground Anarchist in the Mexican Jungle
Posted on March 27, 2016 | 4 CommentsB. Traven, German underground author, anarchist and writer of the Treasure of Sierra Madre, purposely obscured his origins to evade consequences from his revolutionary past in Germany and to stoke his literary mystery that hinged upon his words: "An author should have no other biography than his books."Jack Eidt and the Bison: Words to Save the World
Posted on March 20, 2016 | 1 CommentJack Eidt, reading from a literary vision quest called "Medicine Walk," Part of Environmental and Activist Poetry/Fiction at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, CA. 12/5/2015, from the Vision LA 2015 Climate Change Arts Festival.Digital Meets Tribal in Fourth World “Possible Musics”
Posted on March 18, 2016 | 2 CommentsComposer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth's tribal musics.The Ambiguous Colors of Haruki Murakami
Posted on March 14, 2016 | No CommentsA documentary on Japanese literary postmodernist Haruki Murakami, as well as a folktale from his novel, "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage." As the Guardian puts it: "Full of ambiguity and sex – all Murakami's signature flourishes are here."The Bear: Grizzly King and the Wilderness Homeland
Posted on March 3, 2016 | No CommentsWatch the 1988 French film The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the story of an orphaned cub and a grizzly in the end of the 19th Century wilderness of British Columbia. The story is based on the 1912 book by James Oliver Curwood.
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