Category Archives: New Utopia

Josh Hamilton as Lance Hornsby in The Walking Dead Season 11

Theres a scene in The Walking Deads latest episode, Out of the Ashes, that really got me thinking about a different show.

Eugene and his compatriots have finally been allowed to enter the Commonwealth and go through a brief orientation process where they watch the guy in the picture aboveLance Hornsbytalk about the wonders of this newfound Utopia.

After orientation, the group splits up. Eugene is walking with his new love interest, Stephanie, who actually does appear interested in him rather than just a honeypot designed to lure in strangers. Theyre walking along the clean, perfect streets of the town eating ice cream cones. It makes me think of The Good Place, a comedy about several not-so-good people who find themselves in The Good Placea paradise with a dark underbelly theyre yet to discover (I highly recommend the show, especially its first season).

This is, I suspect, not so different from the Commonwealth, which appears to be rather perfect at first blush, but which we know has its own darkness lurking underneath. Yumiko finds her brother and while he insists its not too good to be true, he does add a qualifier: So long as you follow the rules.

Our heroes muck it all up, of course. Instead of taking their time to get settled and build up trust, they immediately hatch a (very poorly conceived) plan to radio back to Alexandria. Princess tries to distract Mercer which probably makes matters worse, and before you know it everyone except for Yumiko (who was processed separately and is having a nice conversation with her brother) is under arrest and facing exile.

Curiously, Hornsby steps in and argues for their release, Stephanie at his side. Shes being charged as a citizen while the others are refugees, but it does appear at least like she was genuinely helping them. Then again, it could all be part of a larger ruse on the Commonwealths part to lull our heroes into a false sense of security.

Stephanie only helped so that they could all get arrested. Hornsbys intervention is just part of the con. Once he has their trust, they spill the beans on their compatriots and the Commonwealth moves into actionthough what action and why remains to be seen.

Cailey Fleming as Judith, Anabelle Holloway as Gracie, Kien Michael Spiller as Hershel, Antony Azor ... [+] as RJ - The Walking Dead _ Season 11, Episode 5 - Photo Credit: Josh Stringer/AMC

This is just one of four stories that comprise Season 11, Episode 5 of The Walking Dead. The others involve:

Something is off about this season. A lot can happen in an episode and it can still feel weirdly boring and slow. Its like, if you could pluck just the good bits from each episode you could sew them back together into a couple very good episodes.

Instead, we get lots of filler and awkward moments like when Jerry recognizes one of the Hilltop zombies and is like Thats Tony! like were supposed to know who Tony is let alone care.

Maybe it wasnt even Tony, maybe he said some other random bit characters name like it means something. Please, writers of The Walking Dead, in order to get us to care when somebody dies you must spend time establishing who they are first.

This applies to all of Maggies poor, unfortunate souls as well. Oh know, not Agatha, I friggin loved Agatha she was the best. I am so sad that she is gone. Woe is me.

As for Judiths teens, I like to imagine that at this point most kids and teens would be pretty hardcore, raised in a dangerous and deadly and traumatizing world. Theyd be a little screwed up, sure, but theyd be tough like Judith. Why is she so tough but these other kids who grew up in the same circumstances are playing zombie bite dodge and being clowns?

Also, Im getting Lost extra vibes at Alexandria where we constantly encounter new people we dont recognize and who dont matter and who simply serve to prove that if we dont know this many characters in a zombie apocalypse show, maybe its time to slim the cast down a bit.

The whole thing is just a little dull when you come right down to it. A little dull, a little uneven, and shockingly slow-paced for the final season of The Walking Dead.

Then, too, I have questions about the Commonwealth. Those ice cream cones Eugene and Stephanie were eatingthe creature comforts as he calls them. What kind of manufacturing and agriculture do these people have? Its not easy to produce all the components necessary to make these. Sugar alone would be a pretty big undertaking, let alone the dairy and so on and so forth. Is that really where the Commonwealth is diverting its resources? Hmmmm.

Am I wrong? Did I miss something brilliant about this episode that someone else noticed? Let me know!

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The Walking Dead Season 11, Episode 5 Review: The Good Place - Forbes

THE MONOLITHIC VILLA in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains an hour south of Marrakesh, Morocco, designed by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of the Paris-based architectural firm Studio KO as a French clients holiday house, embodies contemporary Brutalism tinged by the Bauhaus. Shorn of ornament and minimally furnished, the fortresslike vacation home is all jutting red sandstone angles and expanses of glass, opening onto the cinnabar-hued landscape. But turn a corner and there looms what the architects refer to simply as the Wall, a two-story-high concrete cliff decorated with more than a dozen bas-relief circles in an array of sizes, some with abstract daisies at their centers. In so stark a context, it may be hard to understand why the duo, Fournier, 51, and Marty, 46, added such embellishments until Marty offers a one-word explanation: Olgiati.

Although they have never met him, its unsurprising that the pair would want to include a homage to the 63-year-old Swiss architect, who practices in his tiny hometown, Flims, an Alpine enclave two hours from Zurich. Little known beyond the design avant-garde, Valerio Olgiati is a cult figure of the digital age, revered by the cognoscenti: His 25 or so conceptual, meticulously crafted structures, as well as his computer renderings of those never (or at least not yet)erected, have become legendary for their idea-driven purity and shocking forms. That his portfolio is so limited unlike major firms where there are hundreds on staff and dozens of in-progress projects,he has a team of 10, which includes his architect wife, Tamara only heightens his influence. He is regarded as a bulwark of incorruptibility in a world of starchitects who stamp their names on billionaire-friendly residential towers and Instagrammable but ultimately gimmicky buildings. Relying upon a theoretical framework and his own volcanic charisma he has a reputation for reducing students to tears, and has never shied from expressing contempt for peers who he believes have sold out his Howard Roarkian devotion stands out as a rebuke to an architecturally milquetoast, commercially driven era.

For most of us, architecture is a profession of compromise, says the British architect David Chipperfield, 67, who recently finished a tower overlooking New Yorks Bryant Park. We are service people, turned on and off by the client, not so terribly different from window washers. But Valerio is different. He believes in the physical substance of architecture, not the impression that something should not just look interesting but be interesting. That makes him incredibly important to our field.

Last year, mid-lockdown, the musician Kanye West, whose passion for contemporary design is well documented, took his jet to Zurich for a day, then drove to Flims to dine with Olgiati in a local restaurant. The meeting landed the architect a commission for both a Los Angeles apartment for the recently separated West and a quixotic megaproject that would render literal the underground nature of the architects appeal: an artists colony built beneath Wests Wyoming ranch (which is reportedly 4,500 acres), as vast as the subterranean cities of Turkeys Cappadocia, with up to 200 dwellings, as well as studio spaces and a performance venue.

Olgiatis buildings are as hard to categorize as they are to fully comprehend. His most notable structures are made mostly of tinted reinforced concrete; they seem initially forbidding but, because of his sense of proportion and his clever placement of light sources, can feel surprisingly intimate within. Consider, for example, the 2007 music studio that Fournier and Marty referenced: Built for the classical composer Linard Bardill in the traditional Swiss town of Scharans, the project came with stringent zoning restraints the structure had to not only occupy the exact footprint of an existing barn but also maintain its original silhouette. The architect, who never sketches, conceived of a sort of ghost barn, a windowless 3,000-square-foot concrete shell colored dark red. Afterward, he cut a giant oval into the roof, turning most of the interior into a courtyard; the studio space itself is behind a convex sweep of glass that follows the ceilings arc. A pure minimalist might have stopped there, but Olgiati instead adorned the tanklike exterior and some of the indoor space with nearly 300 hand-poured concrete medallions, for an effect both harsh and transcendent.

The School at Paspels, completed in 1998, is a bunkerlike structure intended for primary school students, built into a steep hillside in rural Switzerland. The three-story pale concrete exterior is rigidly rectangular, punctuated only by a few elongated, symmetrical frameless window openings. Inside, the four larch-wood-lined classrooms are set about four degrees off kilter from each other; moving through the building, you sense the slight distortion, as though the structure itself were in motion. In 2010, for an auditorium at Plantahof Agricultural School, Olgiati constructed a towering gray concrete wedge that evokes a prehistoric monument or a slice of an asteroid sheared off on its journey toward Earth. Illuminated through a pair of long windows near the base, the interior has the theatrical elegance of a dimly lit cathedral. Then theres the 2019 open-air Pearling Path Visitors Center on Muharraq in the Dubai archipelago, a building intended to enshrine the centuries-old pearl-diving industry in the Persian Gulf. Its a vast forest of 32-foot-tall columns topped with a thin concrete canopy perforated by pentagon-shaped cutouts, pointing in myriad directions; as the sun crests, it casts slashing shadows through the openings.

What unifies these disparate structures, other than their unforgiving material, is Olgiatis professional philosophy, which he espouses at international lectures and through classes at the Academy of Architecture Mendrisio near the Swiss-Italian border. Says the British ur-minimalist John Pawson, known for residences that evoke a Zen state of nothingness: With me, all I can do is show the work, but Valerio has the big idea.

OLGIATI CALLS THAT idea non-referentiality. Historical context is dead, he believes: Architecture should be an end unto itself instead of a reflection of its era, local culture or any sort of concocted narrative. People think its crazy to believe you can make something truly new, but thats because they lack talent and imagination; they are stuck, he says. To him, vernacular references get in the way of making truly great buildings. Besides, he argues, such constructs are often tortured and artificial or made up after the fact with a self-righteousness he finds repugnant.

Its a midsummer afternoon, and Olgiati, who is tall and fit, with white hair, and wearing a black, Japanese-designed outfit, sips a double espresso at a long steel table, one of the few things not made of concrete at Villa Alm, the vacation house he and Tamara, who declined to give her age, share on a hill in the Alentejo region of Portugal, two hours southeast of Lisbon. They spend as much as half the year at the house, which was finished in 2014 and is perhaps his most potent showcase.

From a distance, amid gnarled cork trees and a few low-slung farmhouses, its form evokes a massive open gray cardboard box. But inside, up a 110-foot set of concrete stairs theres no railingthe cartonlike sides reveal themselves as the walls of a courtyard, planted with tall, spiny succulents and other desert plants. The open-sided cube, which looks out on the garden through glass sliding walls, is entirely in shade, a refuge from the relentless sun. Although all the surfaces and structural elements are concrete, including furniture of Olgiatis own design, the stark effect is softened by velvet sofa cushions as gray as nearly everything else in the room. (Linen velvet, he clarifies. Just the right texture and amount of relaxation.) As darkness descends hes served both lunch and dinner, including a saffron risotto with green beans, during a 12-hour conversation that has careened from Le Corbusier (His buildings have no soul) to issues of race in America (Why cant you people figure this out?) to his disdain for the Pritzker Prize (Its become just about who is culturally acceptable, not about the architecture at all) an Isamu Noguchi lantern throws patterns onto the walls. No one expects it to be intimate in here with the concrete, he says. You see? Theyre completely wrong.

The subject to which he keeps returning is contemporary architects unwillingness to cast off commercial concerns and cultural pandering. Its a worldview that likely has its origins in his Flims childhood, as the son of Rudolf Olgiati, a well-regarded Modernist architect who, perhaps incongruously, collected Swiss folkloric artifacts. (His sons first major project, started soon after Rudolfs death in 1995, was the Yellow House, a renovation of a traditional three-story 17th-century residence owned by the local church in the center of Flims that now houses Rudolfs collection. The younger Olgiati removed the daffodil-colored clapboard and covered its prismlike form with textured masonry that he painted spectral white.)

But his most formative period was the two years he spent in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, having followed an American girlfriend there. (Their subsequent marriage fell apart, sending him back to Switzerland he and Tamara now occupy the same 350-year-old Flims house he grew up in, which he updated in 2017 after an earlier reimagining by his father.) Frank Gehry and Morphosis, the collective led by Thom Mayne, were then experimenting with wild geometry, found objects and innovative materials, which made the city a locus of contemporary design. With no contacts, Olgiati had to leave California before gaining a professional foothold, which he still regrets, even though his career flourished only after he returned to his more conservative home country. In Switzerland, he says, you win the poker game when you have the best cards. There, you win because you play the best game. I liked the bluffing, the bravado. I would have stayed if I could have.

The most important thing he learned in the United States, he adds, was that the world had permanently changed, and architecture needed to follow. Ours, he believes, is a globally mashed-up era with no meaningful shared references or objective truth. And so buildings, he says, must stand on their own. Even abstraction is too derivative because, by definition, it has a figurative source. (People ask me all the time what the medallions are on the Bardill studio, and they get upset when I tell them that I dont know, he says.) Olgiati admires Modernist masters like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as the contemporary Japanese minimalist Tadao Ando, but takes his own inspiration, for example, from the monolithic rock pile structures of the Aztecs, for which historians cannot find an antecedent. By contrast, Machu Picchu, the 15th-century Inca citadel in Peru, is an abstract reinterpretation of the surrounding mountains. Fantastic, he says, but derivative.

Granted, designing entirely without reference is impossible, he concedes. After all, unlike art, architecture has to follow physical laws to shelter people and not collapse usually entailing walls, floors and roofs. He acknowledges that these tend to evoke earlier structures or motifs, at least to others. But working toward greater non-referentiality is his constant goal. (In keeping with his theory, he says he doesnt know exactly where such an impulse came from.) I build the building for myself, because I am the benchmark, he says. This is not arrogance. How else would I measure something?

These days, his hopes are buoyed by West, whose aesthetic ambitions are as limitless as his budget. Olgiati says West is the best client hes ever had, unfailingly gracious and generous, and they speak on the phone, email or Zoom often West calls at all hours from the bedroom, the studio, the bathroom. While he was working on his album Donda, he sent the architect one of its tracks, a mournful vocal at that point backed only by piano, seeking feedback. He says I am Picasso, and his job is to buy land so that I can create, Olgiati says. I have never had anyone who appreciates so much what I do. Wests underground village, which he hopes to finish within the next few years, will be accessible from the scraggly prairie by a ramp descending into the ground, leading to a third-of-a-mile-long arcade. The dozens of communal dwellings, which feed into the central spaces, will have circular bedrooms mostly taken up with mattresses, and walls of pink and blue marble to be illuminated by light shafts from vast windows onto the surface. He doesnt want to buy furniture, he wants me to make it all from concrete, the architect says. (West declined to comment.)

If Olgiati harbors doubts that the subterranean utopia will ever be realized, he doesnt let on. Instead, he relishes the precise planning. Like the design aficionados and architects who seem to live vicariously through him, you find yourself wanting to believe such a thing can happen, that as amenity-laden condo towers and giant faux-Modernist mansions pock the land, Olgiati will indeed build his Atlantis deep in the ground and that it will be pure and strange and uncompromised. Yes, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but I wouldnt be surprised if they managed it, says Chipperfield. And wouldnt it be amazing?

Link:

An Architect Whos Known for Aesthetic Purity and Counts Kanye West as a Client - The New York Times

There is an old saying that if you find yourself in a hole, the best course of action is to stop digging. If only Australia understood this wisdom. Abandoning the French submarine project, the government has decided to double down and design a new nuclear-powered sub with technology and assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom. To continue the homespun metaphors, Australia has decided to go from the frying pan into the fire.

Many of the questions that previously cast doubt on the wisdom of the French boat deal and design remain unanswered in regard to its replacement. Just why does Australia require a submarine that has the range to operate in the South and East China Seas? What strategic need is met by these submarines? Can a relatively weak nation such as Australia realistically aspire to a three-ocean defence force? The best answer we have is the need to maintain the rules-based order, but certainly there are other ways to achieve this end instead of embracing the most technologically challenging warship ever created. One is reminded of the TV show Utopia and the episode which skewers a Defence plan to build a force to protect Australian trade routes from its own trading partner. Slightly off-topic, yes, but telling.

It will be at least a decade before a single boat is in service, even if everything goes to plan.

Worryingly, the operational theatre in which these boats are meant to sail, the waters off Chinas coast, are relatively shallow and sit in the shadow of a considerable anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capacity. At present, the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is reputed to be weak in ASW, but it is improving. By the time Australias boats arrive, in ten or 20 years, its capacity could be pretty robust. As it is, any Australian submarine that attempts to do something in these waters, such as launch a tomahawk missile, will reveal its position and shortly thereafter be destroyed. By, say, 2034, the PLANs ASW capability may well have reached the point that even attempting to penetrate these waters would require suicidal courage.

The drawn-out timeline is not in Australias favour. Eighteen months of consultation will precede a decision on requirements. Then there will be a design phase as Australia creates an entirely new class of boats. Workers will need to be trained and a nuclear industry built. It will be at least a decade before a single boat is in service, even if everything goes to plan, and there are plenty of points at which the plan can go off track. To meet this need, an off-the-shelf foreign built option would be safer and faster, but that option is off the table.

Australia currently has an air force that is optimised to act as a wing of the US Air Force. An answer needs to be given on whether a similar decision has been taken for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). Realistically, the only way an Australian boat could operate in these waters if the countrywere at war would be as a unit of a US Navy task force. In effect, two second-order decisions have been taken by Australia and it is not clear whether this has been understood by the government or the public. First, the RANs nuclear fleet will have to sail under the air cover provided by a US carrier task force if it is to survive. Second, if the United States is at war with China, so is Australia, since the Australian Defence Force will be integrated into the US force. Without any discussion by the Australian parliament or review by the Australian public, Australia will find itself as a minnow in a war between two nuclear-armed great powers.

A nuclear submarine is of no use in a conflict driven by climate tensions.

By insisting on the need for a long-range boat, Australia has turned its back on other, more promising options with which to meet its security needs. Have no doubt, I believe Australia needs submarines. It just doesnt need ones that are designed to operate at such distances.

The island chain to Australias north is pierced by several maritime choke points, principally the Lombok and Sunda Straits. Further north is the Makassar Strait. A fleet of smaller conventional subs could easily guard these waters. Moreover, coming on line are a host of uncrewed underwater vehicles as well as propelled mines. These are deployable from aircraft, small boats and even submarines. In fact, Australia could build a small submarine whose mission is to command and control a fleet of uncrewed vessels. The command boat would be relatively undetectable due to its small size, while the uncrewed platforms take the risks. The nuclear sub programs great cost, whatever that ultimately may be, will soak up the monies that could have gone to this less risky option that embraces novel solutions.

A nuclear sub only addresses one of Australias future security threats and, unfortunately, a less dangerous one. Climate change has been rightly described as an existential threat that risks destabilising nations across the Asia Pacific. A nuclear submarine is of no use in a conflict driven by climate tensions. Why is Australia determined to invest in a weapon system that only meets one aspect of its security needs? As I have written recently, Australia needs to take a different approach to the consideration of its security, one that meets the tensions that will result from the rebalance of power that is underway in the Indo-Pacific and that addresses climate change. To consider only a part of the defence requirement is even more short-sighted than buying nuclear subs.

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When you're in a hole, stop digging: Australia and the nuke sub deal - The Interpreter

There is a legend of the seventh century Irumbai temple near Auroville which tells of a Siddhar (an enlightened sage) who re-ties the anklet of a dancer in whom he sees the form of Shiva himself. The locals mock him, and Kaduveli Siddhar is furious. He utters a curse that breaks the temple lingam in three and commences a ceaseless drought. The frightened villagers beg for mercy, the Siddhar relents, the lingam is partially rejoined, but the curse can be lifted only with the arrival of some people from a far-off land, he says, at some far-off time.

Many today say those people must have been the early Aurovillians.

There is another, better-known legend of Auroville which tells of a fair-skinned seer from a far-off land who comes to Pondicherry (now Puducherry) and finds a rishi in whom she sees the form of Krishna himself. Other fair-skinned people follow, drawn by her magnetism, locals join, and her vision of human purpose and unity compels them to build a city from the red earth of a drought-ridden land, transforming it into a forest. They work with what they have, not always having enough, and, like the villagers in the old story, not always able to understand the whys of anything: why a woman is paralysed or a child drowns, or why the miracles they envision do not occur.

But they make Auroville the place it now is.

The first story is immortalised in the reliefs on the walls of the Irumbai temple and in the little booklets the priests will give you if you ask; Akash Kapur makes fleeting reference to it in his new book, Better To Have Gone, a memoir of growing up in the universal township and experimental community called Auroville, just north of Pondicherry. Its the second story that preoccupies himnot as legend, as I have told it, but as an assemblage of the biographical tales of a handful of early Aurovillians: of the charming and brilliant John, trapped and propped by his elite American life; vivacious Diane from small-town East Flanders, determined to escape her controlling mother; the strong-willed French survivor of Nazi concentration camps who becomes Satprem, and several secondary characters entering and exiting this pageant as it unfolds.

Better To Have Gone Auroville, Love, Death And The Quest For Utopia: By Akash Kapur, Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, 699.

Through the minutiae of their stories emerges a narrative history of Auroville which runs roughly as follows. Seekers of various stripes are drawn in the 1950s-60s to Pondicherry, where the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is in the hands of the Mother, a Frenchwoman born Mirra Alfassa, the spiritual collaborator of the revolutionary freedom fighter and yogi Sri Aurobindo. The place is already a community of sadhaks (roughly, spiritual practitioners), both Indian and not. The Mother has an idea of a city of the future, a place of freedom, experimentation and never-ceasing progress where human unity can manifest and where each individual is a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. This city, which she calls Auroville, is founded in 1968, with a call to all men of goodwill and pledges of support from governments and agencies around the world.

Then commence the human travails, the actual work of translating lofty aspirations into material practice. This is the focus of Kapurs writing and in the lives and strivings of the early Aurovillians lies this books first premise: There is no dreamy mythology of Auroville, the quest for perfection is inherently imperfect; there are no goddesses and gods, only people who are dreamers, searchers, rebels, each trying to fill a distinctive gap in their soul. It is through each of their quests, thrown and shaped by the actual circumstances of their lives, that Auroville comes into being.

There is another quest here, and that is Kapurs own. Both he and his wife, Auralice, are children of Aurovilles formative years, having grown up through the tumult of early community building, as the Matrimandir, a monument to the Divine Mother at the centre of Auroville, is being built. Diane is Auralices mother, John eventually becomes her adoptive father. Both die within hours of each other. What was it that drew these people here? What brought them to their deaths? Better To Have Gone offers a reckoning.

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Kapur reaches into letters, archival records and the dark labyrinths of personal memory to investigate. There is no mystery here, as we eventually discover, maybe at best a tragic love story or a rending family drama, certainly a childs (that is, Auralices) poignant coming to terms with the incomprehensibility of her parents life choices and the weights those laid on her. Poised at this personal fulcrum, Kapurs project is one of sense-makingand not the way Aurovillians and many Indians as well do it, seeking explanations for the why of things in abstract divine will and purpose. Explanations based on divine providence and faith wont do for Kapur; he has had a surfeit of those, they are part of the burden to release. Instead, he veers towards rationalist, almost historiographic methods. Enlightenment rationalism is thus the second premise of this bookor at least Kapur wants it to be. He wants to rail that faith is somehow the opposite of reason, that it doesnt make sense, that it can wreak havoc.

So, he turns to experiences more readily comprehensible. Aurovilles early years play in his words as on those scratched and grainy family films we all so love watching, even if this is no idyllic time. Life involves contending with snakes, parasites, the lack of equipment (using bus schedules as timers for bread in the bakery), the need for money as much as the desire to eschew money exchange (the origins of Aurovilles so-called cashless economy), wary and sometimes violent local villagers, and a harsh, brutally hot environment. At times one has the sense of witnessing the progressive insanities of a pioneer, to borrow Margaret Atwoods poetic wordsbut Auroville is hardly the monolithic settler colony historian Jessica Namakkal unfailingly insists it must be. The community wrests with challenges that are at once physical, material, ideological and spiritual.

Aurovillians see their labours as attempt(s) to materialize spiritual consciousness, and Kapurs rationalism strains and gives way sometimes, but the frames keep clashing. How does Auroville work? Johns American father wants to know, programmatically, pragmatically, at the same time as Diane feels complete in the silence of the Matrimandirs construction site and the simple lives, sacrifices and spiritual leanings of this nascent community endear local villagers to the Auroville idea.

With all this as background, it is difficult to think of Auroville as utopia by any measure but Kapur feels compelled to raise this spectre. Utopia is a place thats perfect and that doesnt exist, he says with conviction, and then, hesitantly: I guess it would be more appropriate to say that Auroville is an aspiring utopia. Loose definitions circulate: Thomas Mores utopia, Soviet-era imaginaries, our common desires for fresh starts and alternative lives. It is never clear how or when any of these notions attach themselves to Aurovillethey do not figure in common Aurovillian parlance, and appear neither in the Mothers own descriptions, nor in the Auroville charter. The Mother once remarked that utopia was the basis on which they (reporters, observers) tell you, You wont succeed (Agenda vol.9, 6 April 1968). Nonetheless, it becomes Kapurs proverbial straw man, to be set up and knocked down.

The Mother, too, features in Kapurs dramatis personae alongside the others. There is a certain blank, staccato rhythm to Kapurs writing and his presentation of facts: Diane cries, the Mother cranes her neck, John is shattered. The tense is present and continuous, happening as we watch; there is very little to suggest that the Mothers envisionings are any more or less important than the interpretations and experiences of all those who carry it forward. At times Kapur erupts, asserting passionately that Human beingsindividuals, familiesare mere sideshows in the quest for a perfect world; they are sacrificed at the altar of ideals. But he never really tells us what Aurovilles ideals are. He reproduces the Auroville charter without comment, and says nothing of the specific notions of freedom, unity, and progress that Aurovillian endeavours equally embody. No comment either on the importance of India to the formation of Auroville, except as clichd eastern salve to broken western materialism. As for the people who are willingly and even wilfully sacrificing themselvestheir actions bewilder the rationalist in Kapur. His only recourse is to make their sideshows central.

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Really, he says, Auroville has emerged from the rubble of the Second World War. It will later have its own cultural revolution (referring to the 1970s conflict over self-governance that shook relations between Auroville and entities associated with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram). Via such sleights of hand does Kapur place Auroville amidst an odd jumble of responses to post-war despondency and other social uprisings, alongside the Japanese Yamagishi movement, the ill-fated Jamestown settlement, Israeli kibbutzim and Maos revolution. Aurovilles primary distinction is merely that it outlives most others.

For all the filial affection Kapur clearly has for this place of his birth and growth, these are damning moves. They open the door to a reading of Auroville as a bizarre utopian cult (Zo Hellers 5 July article in The New Yorker is proof) and they undermine the values that the very Aurovillians Kapur writes about so deeply espouse. It makes little difference that he comes around, from a preoccupation with the inexplicability of Aurovilles deaths to a rebirthing of sorts, after a meditation in the inner chamber of the Matrimandir, no less, but the path he opens for personal sense-making is one that deliberately sidesteps the Mothers vision of Auroville, only cursorily considers even Aurovillian enactments of that vision, and focuses overwhelmingly on how people imperfectly materialised itas though that is the only reality worth reporting.

To frame a story as legend, as with the Siddhars tale or the lore of Auroville, is to recognise just how fantastic it is: amazing, a touch incredible, but always containing an explanation of the present and opening energetically to the possibilities of the future. To frame a story as utopia-that-isnt is to establish an underbelly shot through with the worst forms of callousness and cruelty. This second is Kapurs goal and the books chief failing. Saying Auroville isnt a utopia is, after all, very different from saying it was never meant to be one.

I am reminded of why it is that traditional Tamilians will never speak ill of the places of their own birth: Its a question of loyalty and of risk. At 79, Johns father writes a letter to his son: I admire you on your pilgrimage, he says, and in a blessing that gives the book its title, May it have a good endingbetter to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. It takes a lifetime of a fathers love to arrive at this point of comprehension. Who else would make such an effort?

Deepa S. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist and researcher with the University of Houston-Clear Lake, US. She lives and works from Puducherry and Auroville.

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Sifting myths from facts in the experiment called Auroville - Mint Lounge

Who do you think of when you hear the word Bitcoin? Maybe a certain billionaire? A bored but ultimately generous hacker? El Salvador?

Whoever comes to mind, it probably isnt a seasteader like Grant Romundt, Rdiger Koch, or Chad Elwartowski, three men who last year collectively answered the question: What if a frontiersman had a baby with Captain Nemo, and that baby then pissed off a Greek god?

It was designed to be a utopia. In October 2020, Romundt, Koch, and Elwartowski clubbed together to buy a $9.5 million ex-cruise liner, the Pacific Dawn, which they renamedMS Satoshi after the founder of Bitcoin. They had a simple dream: to build a new society on the ocean, free from taxes, regulations, and fiat currency. At the heart of the community would be Satoshi, surrounded by a collection of space-age-looking pod homes and two floating platforms in the shape of a B for Bitcoin designed for farmland, parks, and manufacturing.

If youre thinking that all sounds a little pie in the sky or sea then you have better instincts than the Bitcoin bros did.

We were like, This is just sohard, Romundt told The Guardian for their deep dive on the project.

As the trio quickly learned, the high seas are not, as they are so often made out to be, a wild and lawless paradise. In fact, theyre some of the most highly regulated places on the planet especially for cruise ships.

I was thinking a week into the job, I can see Im going to be resigning, Peter Harris, the experienced cruise ship captain hired by Koch to pilot the Satoshi, told the Guardian. He didnt understand the industry He just thought he could treat it like his own yacht.

The problems started immediately. The ship, it turned out, was not legally seaworthy. The group had planned to dock off the coast of Panama, but instead, they were forced to sail to Gibraltar for essential checks and repairs. Even after this, they found insurers would refuse to cover the ship They wouldnt even tell us why we werent insurable, they just kept saying no, Romundt said.

When they finally made it to the Central American country they hoped to make their home, they ran into a problem that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time: what to do with all the effluent. Barred from discharging it into Panamanian waters, they would have to sail the 19 kilometers (12 miles) out to international waters every three weeks to dump the waste there instead.

And then there was the cost: $12,000 a day in fuel when they were on the move, and up to $1 million a month for upkeep even when docked. They couldnt make up the costs from potential Satoshi citizens for some reason, not that many people wanted to leave their friends, homes, jobs, and solid ground for a life of seasickness and cramped quarters.

The dream was doomed, and they knew it. The trio were forced to sell the ship before they even reached Panama We have lost this round, announced Elwartowski. In a final twist, the trio couldnt even scrap the Satoshi without running headlong into the realities of international law: the junkyard that bought her was based in India, a non-signatory to the Basel Convention governing the disposal of hazardous waste, and they were legally not allowed to send the ship there from a signatory country such as Panama.

The story has a happy ending at least for the Satoshi. It now sails with a new cruise line under the name Ambience; instead of a community of crypto-miners, it's now home to a few hundred globetrotting retirees. As for the seasteaders, theyre still harboring the dream of ocean colonization but theyre out of the cruise game for now. After all, as Elwartowski concluded a few months after the debacle: A cruise ship is not very good for people who want to be free.

[H/T:The Guardian]

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The Bizarre Story Of The Bitcoin Bros And Their Doomed Floating Utopia - IFLScience

Last years Rock Bottom Rhapsody partly detailed the existential crisis that befell LaFarge following his move from St Louis hometown to LA in 2018, a long dark night of the soul that brought out self-destructive tendencies. The follow-up, provisionally titled Siesta Love owing to its summery afternoon swing, is brighter in tone, charting his journey back to some kind of contentment. The pandemic, it transpires, worked in his favour, a cancelled tour giving him the space and time to fully recharge.

Opening track Get It Fore Its Gonetypifies the more carefree musical approach, a warm-breeze moment set to a quasi-calypso rhythm. Its a trick he repeats a few times during In The Blossom Of Their Shade, from the Caribbean-scented Mi Ideal (whose lyrics provide the album title) to the lovestruck Tropiclia of Yo-Yo. At other times, LaFarge and his band approximate choogling Creedence (Fine To Me) and the New Orleans R&B perfected by Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino (Killing Time).

But these smart stylistic detours mask something a little deeper. Lyrically, LaFarge feels like hes still in the process of banishing a few demons. Long For The Heaven I Seekis a baleful country tune whose narrator is burdened by life, a plea for deliverance that follows in the weary bootsteps of Hank Williams. I strain to hear heavens bells ring/But Im tired of waiting for the angels to sing, laments LaFarge, his high, nasal voice sounding suitably Williams-like. Another teary cowboy ballad, Drink Of You, struggles to booze away time and trouble, while To Love Or Be Alone despite its balmy demeanour offers a bleak summation of a romantic relationship: Its in our nature to cheat/And also to kill/Its inevitable that one of us will.

Ultimately though, In The Blossom Of Their Shade strikes a hopeful note. Against a backdrop of societal chaos, Rotterdamenvisions a new utopia, before LaFarge bows out with Goodnight, Goodbye (Hope Not Forever), the implication being that the worst is now over.

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Pokey LaFarge In The Blossom Of Their Shade - UNCUT

History usually means acceleration.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen, says Lenin.

Revolution, war, disaster on such occasions, time quickens, so that the extraordinary becomes commonplace.

Covids not like that at least not in any simple way.

In Melbourne, weve endured the worlds longest lockdown: a unique experience by anybodys reckoning.

But who knew that making history could feel so dull?

In that respect, the pandemics very different from other great turning points.

Think of how the outbreak of the first world war set the 20th century in motion and then how the outbreak of Covid froze the 21st in place.

The prolonged lockdowns induce a weird languor. The weeks all blend into one. You walk through treacle, brain-fogged by the simplest tasks, with your well-intentioned plans for exercise and self-improvement giving way to sweat pants and indolence.

Nothing happens, as Estragon complains in Waiting for Godot. Nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful.

The fight against the virus depends less on us doing anything (other than getting vaccinated) and more on us doing nothing. Rather than bringing us together to face a common challenge, it keeps us apart, with each household bunkering down behind its own sealed door.

Its an experience encapsulated in the changing connotations of zoom. A term that once invoked speed now signifies immobility, as the morning commute gives way to permanent onscreen meetings.

The Italian futurist Marinetti, glorying in the velocity of modernity, declared slowness naturally foul. As he recognised, one can measure conventional progress entirely by tempo: the pace of assembly lines, the speeds of jet airlines, the processing rates of CPUs.

When, in the 1890s, the novelist Paul Adam marvelled at the cult of speed, he was discussing that new-fangled device known as a bicycle. Today we take for granted that our phones work their digital magic in microseconds. Thats why our current situation discombobulates us so. After a century or more of going faster and faster and faster, weve come, unexpectedly, to a standstill and were frozen with the shock of it.

In other circumstances, you could imagine experiencing the Covid torpor as a much-needed break, a chance to relax. In Victor Hugos Les Misrables, Enjolras explains utopia in precisely those terms.

There will be no more events, he says. We shall be happy.

Walter Benjamin, a very different kind of revolutionary, gestures at the same idea when he describes humanity as desperately pulling on the emergency brake as historys locomotive chugs toward catastrophe.

But thats not what Covid represents.

Were not in this wretched situation because we decided to slow down. Were in it because we didnt.

Think of the pandemic as the gears seizing in an overheated machine driven too fast for too long.

In December, the Lancet attributed Covid to human activity that has led to environmental degradation. The cities grow, faster and faster, the forests shrink, and the factory farms of the new metropolises bring new pathogens into contact with a dangerously susceptible population. Its a familiar pattern.

Jean Chesneaux describes ecological crises as arising from the imposition of our wound-up present on the slow time of nature, as we exhaust and consume a world that cant keep our breakneck pace.

The rise in zoonotic diseases is one manifestation of that imposition but not the only one. The same Lancet article described, for instance, Covid and climate change as converging crises, different facets of the same emergency.

Hence the peculiar psychology of this very peculiar moment.

We might be less busy but nobody feels calm. The sensations more akin to tropical languor, the unbearable stillness that precedes a storm. Its a feeling we must shake, lest exhaustion becomes apathy. Weve paused but history hasnt and the worst is still to come.

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Big moments in history usually set the world in motion but the pandemic has frozen it in place - The Guardian

Not without complications, the region saw the return of many of its beloved festivals in 2021. Like most, the Buffalo Humanities Festival was not held last year, but it returns this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, at a new spot, Silo City. Christina Milletti, Executive Director of the Humanities Institute, sees the festival as a chance "to talk about ideas. To imagine together. To try to sort through the most important issues of the day."

A series of panel discussions exploring the theme "Utopia" will run each day of the event, which is free of charge though online registration is encouraged.

We experience who we are, who we want to be in connection, in reference to narratives," said David Castillo, Director of the Humanities Institute.

"As we look at the challenges were facing we need to rethink about the stories were telling ourselves. We need to think of, not just the stories that exist, but the stories that havent been told yet. And thats where Utopia comes in. Those stories that havent been told yet.

Scholars from the University at Buffalo, Canisius College, Daemen College, among others, will lead the panel discussions. Some of the titles include "New York Utopias: Past, Present and Future," "Walt Whitman's Beloved Coimmunity: The Calamus Project," and "Spirits of Feminism: Raising Radicals from the Dead in Lilydale, NY."

"What we always try to do is engage the audience in a conversation so that were all participating together as a community towards imagining a better future, Milletti said.

The discussions will be held in two open spaces at Silo City. Those who have not been vaccainated against COVID-19 will be asked to wear masks. Road construction is in place on way to the venue so organizers ask attendees to be patient as they make their way to the site. Each day's session begins at 12:30.

Any number of institutions across the country are starting to realize that Humanities cant be separated from our data-driven colleagues," Milletti said.

"Were all seeing the facts and figures about climate crisis and social injustice. We can read the statistics, but you frequently need the Humanities to interpret them and to answer the questions about the data."

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Silo City hosts the return of the Buffalo Humanities Festival - WBFO

Rethinking the Role of Experimental Cities in Combating Climate Change

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In the evolving campaign to combat climate change, big and bold solutions are increasingly easy to find, from the conceptual water smart city and ecologist Allan Savorys vision for greening the worlds deserts to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasios plan to turn part of Governors Island into a living laboratory for climate research. Oyster reef restoration is occurring at nearly every critical junction along the eastern seaboard, from Florida to Maine. These are worthy efforts, and yet, when considered collectively, the onus for solving our climate crisis is being left largely to municipal governments and private actors, making most solutions piecemeal, at best. The success of one approach has little to no correlation with that of another. But what happens when all related solutions can be applied within a single, controlled ecosystem when environmentalism and urbanism are not at odds, but working in concert? Enter the experimental city.

A half-century ago, the environmental movement entered the modern era with a sense of urgency. Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? wrote Rachel Carson. Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? As the movement grew, anarchist factions of the mainstreamled by the likes of Edward Abbey and Earth First!promoted hands-off approaches so extreme that their isolationist and anti-urban subtext wasnt too hard to infer. Cities were considered the source of all our problems: vice, pollution, overpopulation, you name it. The era of urban renewal pitted Robert Moses on one side and Jane Jacobs on the other, fighting over the basic principles of urban development and preservation. On the fringes of that fight, a different breed of urban thinker emerged, one who saw solutions to our environmental woes simultaneously embedded in efforts to make our cities not just better but designed anew.

As it happens, my adopted state of Minnesota was once home to two experimental cities that should be on the minds of the building community, climate activists, and governments alike.

Athelstan Spilhaus was a futurist, inventor, and syndicated comic strip artist. From his post as dean of the University of Minnesotas Institute of Technology, in the 1960s, Spilhaus conceived of a new kind of city, modular and self-sustaining, to be located on a 60,000-acre swath of unincorporated land in Aitkin County, Minnesota, roughly 87 miles west of Duluth. His Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) would have been a shining example of intergenerational education, clean energy, and efficient mobility. It would be a malleable proving ground for new technologies, demonstrating in real time, what could be accomplished when the soundest principles of urbanism and environmentalism were spliced within a functional urban core.

The MXC presaged things like carbon capture and sequestration systems and integrated internet of things (IoT) solutions. Recycling, circularity, and reversible design would have been standard, and nary a combustible engine would be allowed within city limits. There was also a fair bit of planning and schematic work that went into this place, from envisioning a subterranean utilities network and intracity mass-transit system to mandating strict limits of the amount of land that could be paved over. The real genius of Spilhaus city, however, wasnt to be found in any specific vision of the future, but in a future that could naturally beget other futures.

While the MXC was taking shape, a conservationist and Minnesota state senator named Henry T. McKnight was planning a more modest version of an experimental city, but in many ways no less ambitious. The planned community of Jonathan, Minnesota, located 30 miles southwest of Minneapolis, was envisioned as a Work, Play, Live alternative to the kind of poorly regulated sprawl that was by then commonplace, and that eventually placed enormous strain on the natural environment. Largely modeled after the radical suburb of Reston, Virginia, which itself was modeled after Ebenezer Howards Garden City concept, Jonathans communal village plan included a high-density core where businesses and services would be centered and lower-density residential pockets along the outskirts. Modest backyards were interconnected to a community greenway, walkability was prioritized, architecture and the landscape existed in balance. But building an idyllic community of 50,000 residents, especially one situated beyond the outer suburban rings, required attracting middle-class families and young professionals, with more than visions of harmonious urbanism.

Integral to the Jonathan plan was affordability and a diversity of housing types, including everything from single-family and multifamily units to modular housing, stacked prefab structures, and an intricate apartment complex built into the trees. McKnight also wanted Jonathan to be a tech hub. He envisioned belt-driven sidewalks and emissions-free cars, a mass-transit rail line connecting the town center to the Twin Cities, and a proto-internet for the free exchange of community information. For a time, some of this worked out. In 1970, Jonathan was the first new community selected by HUD for financial assistance as part of the National Urban Policy and New Community Development Act. Homes got built. People moved in. Over time, though, it proved too difficult to lure urbanites as well as rural residents to live in a half-built city of the future. By 1978, HUD had foreclosed on the town, which eventually was annexed by the exurb town of Chaska.

For anyone who hasnt seen the documentary film about MXC, The Experimental City, it should still come as no surprise to learn that, unlike the town of Jonathan, Spilhaus city never broke ground. And while thats owed to a litany of political and economic factors, the fact is, deep down most people arent interested in the prospect of living in some version of Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City or under a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Utopias, by definition, can never be, and even if that werent true, no one wants to be imprisoned inside what amounts to an elaborate social experiment, no matter how well-intentioned. Still, the examples of MXC and Jonathan are worth re-examining, especially when considering the gravity of our climate emergency.

In thesage wordsof Edward Mazria, The time for half measures and outdated targets is over if we are to stop the irreparable destruction of our cities, towns, and natural environments. Interestingly, our current predicament isnt some reckoning over a lack of bold ideas and concrete solutions. Far from it. Its a reckoning with our political will (or lack thereof) and inability to take decisive action.

We shouldnt pine too much for past attempts at utopia, whether its LBJs Great Society or the New Towns movement. Urbanism doesnt need its own MAGA moment. That said, I would sooner see the burning of fossil fuels banned outright by government decree tomorrow than I would my local town council announce a community composting program. Both are great, but only one takes dead aim at the problem. If only more states and counties, super-injected with government funds and sound guidance from the building community, chose to pursue holistic experimental city models, then just imagine what future disasters may be avoided.

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Rethinking the Role of Experimental Cities in Combating Climate Change - ArchDaily

If theres one thing the Left knows cold, its deception. From Vladimir Lenin to Saul Alinsky, leftists are unparalleled masters of the art of victory through hoodwinking: Defeating opponents by fooling them into false agreement.

Owning the battlefield in this war starts with controlling the language. Weve seen this play out in the debate over abortion access, with pro-choice activistsredefiningpro-life to mean anythingbutthe conviction that life begins at conceptionand swindling unwitting Christians into their ranks.

Now its spreading to the debate over climate change, with environmental activists claiming theres nothing partisan about their one-sided campaign to fundamentally transform America. Radicals, socialists, and authoritarians know that global warming offers them the best chance to weaponize Big Government and dictate where Americans live and work, what they drive, eat, and buy, and even what beliefs theyre allowed to holdall through fear.

Truth-loving skeptics are all that stand in their way. So what better way to defeat them than by undermining the skeptics unity with false promises?

Meet the eco-Right, the collection of lobbying, litigation, and activist nonprofits that identify themselves as free market yet who have bought the Lefts argument that the Earth is getting dangerously hot and were to blame. Groups likeClearPath,Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and theClimate Leadership Councildisagree over specific policiessome want a devastating carbon tax to reduce emissions, others want federal subsidies for expensive lithium batteriesbut all want skeptical Republicans to compromise with uncompromising leftists on their global warming policies.

By doing so they threaten to undermine both affordable energy in America and the future of the conservative movementwhich is why theyre often funded by the likes ofGeorge Sorosas well as theFordandHewlett Foundations.

My colleagues and I at the Capital Research Center first broke the news on the secret liberal mega-donors bankrolling the eco-Right in order to rebrand radical environmentalism as conservative. Our new report,Rise of the Eco-Right, compiles years of research and investigative reporting to expose the funders, leadership, and lobbying of the eco-Right, exposing a web of overlapping boards and shared donors in service to a destructive and cynical agenda.

Weve studied the professional Left for decades and are all too familiar with activists use of deception and misdirection to camouflage their agenda to the casual glance. Unlike Activism Inc., we believe that Americans should be free from fearmongering to listen to arguments from both sides and come to their own conclusions in the global warming debate.Rise of the Eco-Rightaims to make it clear that climate-conscious conservatives cannot compromise with the Left because activists arent interested in anything less than a green socialist revolution.

Dont take my word for itthats the crux of anopen letterto Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signed by 263 activist groups in November 2019, urging Congress to pass the Green New Dealarguably the most sweeping legislation ever proposed in Americato combat increasing income/wealth inequality and rising white nationalism and neo-fascism in America.

Todays environmentalists are more interested in environmental racism and restitution for Black and Indigenous farmers than the environment, and theyre no longer hiding it behind the fig leaf of saving the planet from greenhouse gases.

Recall theexplanationthat Green New Deal author Saikat Chakrabartis gave to theWashington Post: Do you guys think of [the Green New Deal] as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.

Heres the bottom line: carbon taxes, green tech subsidies, and greenhouse gas pledges will never be enough for Big Green because the debate isnt reallyaboutthose things, but power. Activists know this, which is why theyve abandoned these market-friendly proposals for the ultimate prize: the utopia of socialized medicine, federal jobs for everyone, slavery reparations, and more.

The eco-Right offers the Left a backdoor for the kind of statist policies that conservatives would never supportif they werent falsely labeled. Its a sirens song that promises free market answers to climate change but will only result in tyranny. Conservatives, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by listening to the eco-Rightso dont give up the ship.

This article was first published in RealClearEnergy on September 14, 2021.

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How the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism on the Right - Capital Research Center