Category Archives: New Utopia

The bhakti radical Ravidas (c 1450-1520), calling himself a tanner now set free, was the first to envision an Indian utopia in his song Begumpura a modern casteless, classless, tax-free city without sorrow. This was in contrast to the dystopia of the brahmanic Kaliyuga.

Rejecting Orientalist, nationalist and hindutva impulses to reinvent India, Gail Omvedt threads together the worldviews of subaltern visionaries spanning five centuries Chokhamela, Janabai, Kabir, Ravidas, Tukaram, the Kartabhajas, Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar, and Ambedkar. These are contrasted with Gandhis village utopia of Ram Rajya, Nehrus hindutva-laced brahmanic socialism and Savarkars territorialist Hindu Rashtra. Reason and ecstasy dnyan and bhakti pave the road that leads to the promised land.

The following is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals.

From Namdev, Kabir, Ravidas and Tukaram through Phule, Ramabai and Ambedkar, dalit-bahujan and many women intellectuals have evoked an ideal of a casteless, classless society, and have increasingly outlined its characteristics as a prosperous, democratic, socialist, development-oriented society. This study has traced the varying expressions of the ideal and the concrete forms in which it was envisaged.

In the form of utopian values they upheld, the anticaste intellectuals differed significantly from those who are taken today as nationalist leaders. As G Aloysius (1997) has pointed out in describing a nationalism without a nation in India, Congress as well as Hindu Mahasabha leaders had aimed for cultural nationalism that is a transfer of power without a change in the basic culture (as they saw it) of the Indian people. In doing so, they explicitly or implicitly endorsed its brahmanic elements, and in doing so laid the foundations for a more virulent Hindutva.

Nehrus ideal was a vague socialism, but he associated it with a managed economy, an updated version of what he saw as the traditional brahmanic ideal of service, taking the values of collectivity in family, caste and village as positive and somehow socialistic. This connected him ideologically with Gandhi, though in many respects his marxist emphasis on economic development puts him in the same camp as Ambedkar.

In contrast to the tendency of the elites to seek an independence ideal in the recreation of past values located in an imagined vedic golden age, with many of them idealising varnsashrama dharma, and without much change in the hegemonic structures of society the subaltern intellectuals sought what Aloysius calls a political nationalism, that emphasised equality with solidarity. Theirs was a vision that sought the reconstruction of Indian society, the creation of a new society that would flourish under independence.

Its prosperity is also stressed. This was to remain a themethe ideal, whether Begumpura or an imagined Pandhari, was a city of dancing, of merchants, of prosperity. Its anticaste vision may be contrasted with Gandhis Ram Rajya which indeed focused on village India, with Ram as a supposedly ideal king. Ravidas, even in the fifteenth century, was more secular and certainly more socialistic than Gandhi.

With independence, the creativity of dalit-bahujan intellectuals seemingly died away. Ambedkar died in 1956; he left behind a political party, a policy of a broad Left alliance, a new religion, and a heritage of pride. But the Republican party, though conceived of as a party for all the oppressed (and named after the US Republican Party, seen as the party of Lincoln and the ending of slavery), turned out to be only for dalits and more or less limited to being a powerful pressure group in Maharashtra.

A later, greater effort by Kanshi Ram to recreate the alliance of dalits and OBCs with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has had limited success: for a time it seemed to arouse a thunder all over India. For some time it remained confined to Uttar Pradesh and the northern, chamar belt of the state though Mayawatis resounding victory in the 2007 assembly elections brought new hope and new questioning, especially regarding the alliance with brahmans.

When the Dalit Panther was formed in 1972 by some of the leading writers of Maharashtra, it emerged as a militant organisation but quickly became split over marxism versus ambedkarism, and died within a year. Much of the dalit movement in the following years appeared to be under the hegemony of the Left, and this sapped its creativity.

After 1990, with the new globalisation, and propelled by the internet, a new dalit intelligentsia seized the opportunity to take their cause to the world arena, and in 2001 put caste on the agenda as a form of racism at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. This new form of mobilisation has found it difficult to connect in an organic way with the dalit masses; it was too often based on NGO activity rather than strong mass movements. Yet the many initiatives heralded the beginning of a new era.

Looking a bit like the Statue of Liberty with a floppy hippy hat, the goddess was standing on a computer, with book and pen in hand, springing from the map of India as if to move on to the world. Claims Prasad, who hosted the party, English the Dalit Goddess is a world power today; it is about emancipation; it is a mass movement against the caste order. Over a century ago, Savitribai Phule, wife of social revolutionary Jotirao Phule, had written the same thing, saying in a poem that sudras and ati-sudras (dalits) now have the right to education; and through English, casteism can be destroyed and brahmanical teaching can be hurled away. But it remains to be seen how much the subaltern castes will be able to use the weapons of global connections, computer, and English skills.

In fact, the ups and downs of the emergence of anticaste intellectuals were probably not accidental. The two main eras of creativity were the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries when the great poet-saints and wandering minstrels known as leaders of the bhakti movement sang their songs to arouse the people against priestly dominance and caste exclusiveness and the colonial period. Both represented forms of globalisation.

In the first case, Muslim rule brought a wide commercialism and an era of order to the subcontinent, broke through the stagnation of brahmanic regionalised states, and brought a connection with global trends, both in terms of mysticism and broader stirrings of assertion. In the second case, it was British colonial rule that linked India to a wider heritage. These linkages, and the resources they offered, benefited the anticaste intellectuals who emerged to try to give a telling blow to ritualism and hierarchy.

Similarly, other bhakti poets rejected many of the brahmanic symbols choosing Pandhari over Vaikuntha, often rejecting the avatar theory or turning it upside down, to hail the goodness of Bali, Sibi and the like. Even where names such as Rama were used by poets like Kabir, he made it clear that this was not the avatar Ramchandra and at times combined Allah-Ram: Every man and woman born are forms of you, so says Kabir: Im Ram and Allahs foolish baby, hes my guru and my pir (shabd 97).

Similarly, during the colonial period the initial response of the subaltern Kartabhajas was to hail the prosperity of the kompani, a king bringing wealth and prosperity from oversees. Intellectuals like Phule drew upon missionary research and propagandising to help them provide a full-fledged theory of brahmanism, created by Aryans and maintained through keeping the masses in ignorance. And he turned the avatar theory on its head, again, to hail the rakshasas (connoting demons in Sanskrit) as defenders of the people and Bali Raja as the good king, both powerful and sacrificial.

These early eras of globalisation in many ways benefited the anticaste movement.Yet just as theorists today stress that globalisation has both dangers and opportunities, so it did earlier. The ruling classes and ethnic groups during these early periods also were not interested in promoting mass welfare; outsiders themselves, they often made alliances with brahmans and worked to maintain caste. Muslims themselves absorbed much of caste hierarchy, defining their elite as ashraf descendents of Turks and Persians, Sayyids and Shahs and treating the subaltern caste converts as inferior.

In both cases, in spite of challenges from below, a brahmanic recuperation occurred: the bhakti movement was absorbed, and the anticaste intellectuals of the colonial period were deflected as the call for national independence took on a powerful aura. And with independence, most of the issues raised by subaltern groups were buried.

The way affirmative action was handled was typical: through the policy of reservation that absorbed all the rigidities of the public sector bureaucracy, renouncing any trust in broader policy decisions, and institutionalising an ideological split between merit and reservation candidates. The global forces have been used, in the end, more effectively by the elites, and rather than revolutionary moves towards abolition of caste, an updating and restructuring of caste inequality has occurred.

Excerpted with permission from Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals, Gail Omvedt, Navayana.

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Neither Ram Rajya nor golden Vedic age: Gail Omvedt (1941-2021) on the history of a casteless future - Scroll.in

Its weird, right? says David Farrier, who knows all about the unusual. I dont quite know how it happened, and I find the whole thing bizarre too its outrageous.

A year ago, Farrier the former TV3 journalist who found fame with his film Tickled and the Netflix series Dark Tourist had never heard of a podcast called Armchair Expert.

Actually, he sheepishly admits, he hadnt heard of its host, a Hollywood actor named Dax Shepard.

But now Farrier is living in Los Angeles, has become great mates with Shepard (and his even better-known wife, Kristen Bell of Frozen, Bad Moms and The Good Place), and is cemented with Shepards following as their authority on conspiracy theorists.

READ MORE:* David Farrier's Tickled made into a musical - that he knew nothing about* Dark Tourist David Farrier: 'At least I'm not dead'* Here's what David Farrier has been working on for Netflix. Warning: It's grim

Hes carved quite the niche with two distinct audiences: the 20 million, mainly American audience of passionate Arm Cherries that tune into Shepard, and the smaller, but equally enthusiastic Kiwi crowd following his online newsletter Webworm, where he has unmasked anti-vax doctors and charted the red-pilling of Billy Te Kahika Jr.

Farrier grew up admiring Louis Theroux, was obsessed with making documentaries, and his goal was to deliver one for the big screen, which he did in 2016 with Tickled - the sordid tale of the darkness behind televised competitive tickling.

But the world has changed, and Farrier is quite comfortable in what once would have been considered two obscure mediums: a podcast, and a newsletter. While the world is chaotic, he says, it feels like a nice place to be.

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David Farrier recording the Armchaired and Dangerous podcast at Dax Shepards home in LA.

The attraction was immediate. After 29 minutes into Farriers appearance on Armchair Expert last September, Shepard declared: Im so sad you live in New Zealand: I want to hang out with David so bad. Im on the next plane to the f...... North Island.

Farrier was mainly meant to talk Tickled and Dark Tourist, which Shepard had just watched, but was quickly and enthusiastically diverted into explaining the origins of the QAnon movement and the bizarre Pizzagate and Wayfairgate conspiracies (google them) to an enthralled Shepard.

Soon afterwards, Farrier was, rather appropriately, walking past the Auckland headquarters of the Church of Scientology when his phone rang: it was Shepard, wanting to FaceTime for a yarn.

Then Shepard emailed with the invitation to do a weekly spin-off podcast, Armchaired and Dangerous, in which Farrier would explore conspiracists and other oddities (theyve since recorded episodes on cannibals, cryptozoology and serial killers).

Shepard, who acted in films like Employee of the Month, the CHiPS remake he also wrote and directed, and the Candid Camera-style TV show Punk'd, began the podcast on a whim.

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Dax Shepard records Armchair Expert from a converted space above his garage.

In the past three years, it has featured guests such as Jason Bateman, Amy Schumer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Norah Jones, Will Ferrell, Monica Lewinsky, Richard Dawkins and Judd Apatow, and Forbes magazine declared it the fourth-highest earning podcast in the United States, estimating its annual earnings at $US9 million (NZ$13 million).

It dawned on me how big his network is [and] how powerful and global a podcast can be, says Farrier. Youve got these big personality podcasts, where Joe Rogan is at one end of things, and Dax and [co-host] Monica [Padman] are at the other.

By May this year, Farrier had decided to travel up to Los Angeles, with the knowledge I may not be able to get back, to work on some unspecified projects he wont talk about, but principally, it seems the podcast, which is recorded in an improvised studio above Shepards garage in Los Angeles.

Shepard offered him a spare room (politely declined; he didnt want to be an imposition), while Padman offered the loan of her car (gratefully accepted). Hes just very friendly, and for whatever reason, I dont know why, he likes me! Its like this incredible little family that Ive lucked into its deeply unusual, but I am deeply into it.

Shepards producer Rob Holysz says they trust Farriers storytelling and research work and the intellectual clout he brings to our show.

Holysz says one reason why Armchaired and Dangerous is launching a series of live shows is that the audience love Farrier. So next month, Farrier, Shepard and Padman will record before a live theatre audience in, of all places, Salt Lake City, Utah. Given his interest in evangelical movements, Farrier is duly excited to get some education on Mormonism in the world home of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

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Farrier filming Tickled.

The last time he was in the mid-West state was to launch Tickled at the Sundance Film Festival. The five years since, he says, have been a blur, shuffling between New Zealand and the US, with a year touring the well-received Tickled, then a year making Dark Tourist, the Netflix-commissioned series about visiting places like Chernobyl. (Hes equivocal about a second series: I feel dark tourism is stepping out of the front door of the house these days.)

When the pandemic came, Farrier was finishing another dark tale of the unusual - a feature-length piece derived from a 2017 series of articles he did on the bizarre antics of Grey Lynn antique salesman Michael Organ, who would clamp anything illegally parked in his car park and charge release fees of up to $760 in cash.

Typical of Farrier, the final film, due early next year, has morphed into a whole other thing. Tickleds focus, the late David DAmato, was very much a non-participatory (and litigious) star. Is Organ, who once claimed he was a prince, a willing protagonist? A very good question, he laughs. And I hate to do this and be a real a..hole and answer that by not answering it ... but his presence is felt.

Chris McKeen/Stuff

Billy Te Kahika being arrested at an anti-lockdown protest in Aotea Square.

Farrier had always been fascinated by conspiracy theories, but his interest was reignited by last years worldwide wave of vandalism of 5G cellphone towers (driven by the belief that 5G spread coronavirus).

Such theories had been around well before someone decided Stanley Kubrick had faked the moon landing, but now, Farrier says, we are surrounded by ever-more-crazy variants, and the current crop are a life-or-death thing. For that reason, people are incredibly interested.

In turn, he finds it absurd, ridiculous, frustrating, angering, but always intriguing; a rabbit hole hes happy to keep digging down into. Anyone getting into storytelling, he says, needs to double down on that strange little thing you find interesting, because there is no better person to chase it.

He thinks he now understands their adherents - he likens them to the followers of a cult: something is missing in your life, and you find this belief system that fills everything in and gives you a really passionate purpose it helps the world make sense.

Red-pilling the process of becoming a believer happens quickly, he says, and its hard to unwind. If you try to argue with a friend on that path, you are dismissed as a shill. The only way is to ask questions how did they plant all those explosives in the World Trade Center when the building was fully functional? and hope a slow-growing seed of doubt has been planted.

Farrier is optimistic that as our lockdown lengthens, the conspiracists will be shown up. Look, he says, at Te Kahika, from when he was trying to be considered a serious political figure during the election campaign, to his arrest in Aucklands Aotea Square during anti-lockdown protests at the start of Level Four restrictions.

It is a fall, an embarrassing fall, and I think he will be embarrassed at how much he has fallen, he says. People with extreme views will yell and scream and like the attention, but increasingly, what I hope, is the rest of New Zealand will see it is all a bit embarrassing and pathetic.

As soon as I saw Te Kahika and another well-known conspiracy theorist, Vinny Eastwood, being arrested, I thought of Farrier.

Hes written extensively about both; he produced a study of Te Kahikas social media posts, to diagnose his red-pilling, and he also wrote a piece mainly composed of abusive emails he had received from Eastwoods followers.

In his line of work, he says, abuse is constant, and tonally very similar it feels like the same archetype has written each one.

Hes entirely unruffled by it: Anyone getting intense abuse, I tell them this: if you were on K Rd pre-lockdown at 2am, and some drunk a-.hole is screaming at me from the gutter, saying youre a piece of s..., you dont stop and engage, and say no sir, I need to give you my side of it, and make you understand Im not a piece of s.... You just walk on, because its just a guy whos had a terrible night, who is drunk.

The counter to that is the devotees of Webworm, which began during the first New Zealand lockdown when Farrier was bored and had a few unfinished stories he could polish up.

David White/Stuff

Farrier outside the Auckland HQ of the Church of Scientology.

The invitation came from Hamish McKenzie, the Kiwi founder of the $US650m (NZ$937m) start-up Substack, which recruits writers with followings, offering sign-up fees worth $3,000 to $100,000, to produce online subscription-based newsletters. Substack reportedly has somewhere around 500,000 subscribers and its top ten writers collectively bring in $US7m (NZ$10m) in revenue.

Farrier quickly found the format suited his trademark storytelling style, of starting with some oddity, then taking a weird, personal journey to end up somewhere else. Hes spending increasing amounts of time on it, its begun to pay its way, tips are flooding in, and among his subscribers is one D. Shepard. Hes cracked some significant tales, including exposing the conspiracy theorist beliefs of the founders of Kiwi lingerie firm Lonely. Last week, it was writing about how the giant Auckland evangelical church City Impact had preached an anti-vax sermon to its faithful.

Farrier runs a paywall model which functions in reverse to most media companies: he gives away his biggest, investigative stories, stuff I would say is public interest [journalism], but subscribers, paying $US6.99 a month, get the lighter, more personal stories, like a piece he wrote about would be included in a putative second season of Dark Tourist.

It has led, he says, to a little community who have a really nice time. Its weird how pleasant it is its a utopia of a comments section Ive not seen since maybe in 2000, when I first got on the internet.

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Shepard, left, and Farrier, right, have become close friends.

Farrier isnt sure when he will be home. He routinely refreshes the MIQ waiting list, but admits its more from journalistic curiosity, having written about the flaws in the system, than a desperation to come home. Its a moral question because if I get a spot in MIQ, because I would like to come back and see my family and my country, there are people who need to come back infinitely more than I do that then cant.

He can work from anywhere, and he likes being here when Trump isnt.

And hes been made welcome in California. Hes been recognised by his voice a few times. The Arm Cherries have even made some attempts to pair him off with Padman.

Dax and Monica have a really special chemistry and their fans love and adore them and if they OK someone, give you the thumbs up, then I am cleared, everything is OK, he concludes.

Its a very warm environment: their fans are not like what the f... is this New Zealand journalist doing on the show? Theyve warmed to me, and its a very nice environment to step into.

And behind it is this unusual, but deep friendship. They are weirdly friendly, he jokes. Maybe they are a cult?

After the offers of car and couch, theres one hurdle left to leap in the relationship: an opening to a network of celebrity friends. I keep hinting to Dax: where are the big parties? The part of town they live in, I can sense other famous people around I am angling for it, I am waiting for my invite to the big parties. I think Taikas got that sealed up.

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David Farrier's new life: An audience of 20 million, Hollywood mates and an obsession with conspiracy nuts - Stuff.co.nz

Editors note: This is the third in a series of stories highlighting the five J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize installations in the Exhibit Columbus exhibition opening with a ticketed gala dinner and preview party Aug. 20 and running through Nov. 28.

Mankind has long daydreamed about finding an idealized vision of a society.

During the upcoming Exhibit Columbus exhibition, local residents and visitors will be able to see art and design pieces collectively called "Alternative Instruments." Artist and designer Sam Jacob says the installation symbolizes many different layers of utopian visions developed over the past five centuries.

Jacobs multi-featured exhibition is one of five to be awarded a J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize for this years event, which runs from Aug. 20 through Nov. 28. Individual elements include textile banners, backlit signs, neon and even weathervanes along Washington Street, between First and Seventh streets in downtown Columbus.

In the exhibition, the oldest layer of utopian vision goes back to the 15th century during the "European Age of Discovery," when trade routes were expanded to find new sources of wealth and bring Christianity to new lands.

The first concept of a perfect society is usually credited to the novel "Utopia," written by Sir Thomas More and published in 1516. The story describes the imaginary island country of Utopia in the New World. Its a place with no lawyers, good behavior based on openness, communal ownership of property, the education of both sexes and almost complete religious toleration.

Symbols used by Jacob include the measuring chains used by the British to claim territory, followed by references to the nearly one hundred utopian colonies established in the U.S. between the American Revolution and the Civil War. All of these groups, which consisted largely of Europeans, were all attempting to build a radically new type of society, which Jacob says reveals an intellectual impulse that has always flowed through the American experiment.

One effort to build a utopian community specifically cited by Jacob is the small town of New Harmony, Indiana, located on the banks of the Wabash River in Posey County. Founded in 1814 by separatists from the German Lutheran Church, the residents of New Harmony built 180 buildings during the 10 years they resided there. Many are still standing today.

During the Victorian era (1837-1901) in Great Britain, ugly and dilapidated industrial cities that lacked cleanliness, safe housing and sanitation led many in the British Isles to develop their visions of a better world. It was during this period when a utopian society became linked with attributes such as town planning, education and housing, Jacob said.

Several of these 19th Century English concepts seemed to have their origin in Francis Bacons 1627 book "New Atlantis." In Bacons vision, a utopian society would be ruled by scientists who will eventually be capable of producing made-to-order weather conditions, provide hydraulic miracle machines, and devise remarkable advances in chemistry and medicine.

One of the most well-known British writers from this era was H.G. Wells, who wrote three different fictional books on utopian societies: "Anticipations" (1901), "Mankind in the Making" (1903), and "A Modern Utopia" (1905).

"Alternative Instruments is intended to show that each vision of a utopian society that has developed over the past five centuries had some link or impact on another, the artist said.

"Theres a lot of layers in this project," Jacob says. "The pieces Im making have a lot of references, from Thomas More to 20th Century modernist architectural designs in Columbus and all things in-between."

Concepts and ideology of a utopian society will sometimes manifest permanently in reality. For example, theres the grid system of streets found in Columbus and most U.S. communities that many take for granted and assume are used throughout the world.

"As someone who comes from England, the grid system strikes me as a very, very different idea of how to organize the world," Jacob said. "But it is a New World concept of how to better organize a community to benefit humanity."

Although some of the artwork will be shipped from London to Columbus, Jacob said most of it is being created by an Indianapolis fabricator who is bringing the artists visions into reality.

When the design and art work is placed along Washington Street, the overall impact might look like roadside mid-20th Century Americana mixed with medieval symbolism.

Depictions will include a telescope, a hand holding a symbolic heart, a sea monster, a neon skull and even a backlit version of British sculptor Henry Moores "Large Arch" sculpture outside the Bartholomew County Library. You will also see depictions of sailing ships combined with design and architecture from Las Vegas, an online exhibit description states.

As a whole, all of these items represent the ideas, ideologies, dreams and conflicts about Utopia that have developed nationally, internationally and locally, Jacob said.

"I wanted the viewer to feel that these different pieces are communicating with them, but they wont necessarily be easy to read," the artist said. "It might make you feel like you have woken up in a foreign country. In doing that, it will allow you to look at familiar settings in a slightly different way."

It might be easy to get confused by the quilts hung along Washington Street that contain triangles, squares and circles. But its not hieroglyphics. They are messages written with the Utopian alphabet published in early editions of "Utopia."

While most current editions of the book dont have it, there are online translations of the Utopian alphabet that will allow local residents to decode Jacobs messages. It has already been revealed that one message contains a reference about artist Robert Indiana.

When Columbus businessman and philanthropist J. Irwin Miller began to make his hometown what many describe as an architectural mecca, there was a popular mid-20th Century idea that well-designed buildings and artwork can ultimately create a better quality of life for its residents.

But while many people interpret the word "utopia" to mean "good place," scholars believe Thomas Mores definition was "no place." A good deal of Mores book is satire, with much of it modeled on exaggerated accounts of European voyages, Jacob said. The book eventually concludes there can never be a real utopia because whenever imperfect humans try to reach perfection, they fail.

Thats one reason why "Alternative Instruments" attempts to respond to Columbus as a site, a place, and a history but also as fiction, Jacob said.

About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design, a practice whose work spans scales and disciplines from urban design through architecture, design, art and curatorial projects.

He has worked internationally on award winning projects and has exhibited at major museums such as the V&A, MAK, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as cultural events including the Venice Architecture Biennale.

He is professor of architecture at University of Illinois, Chicago, and columnist for Art Review. Previously he was a founding director of FAT Architecture.

From Exhibit Columbus

Where to learn more

To learn more about all the Exhibit Columbus installations, visit https://exhibitcolumbus.org/.

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VISIONS OF UTOPIA: Exhibit Columbus Miller prize winner examines 'Alternative Instruments' - The Republic

Roman Quaedvlieg standing tall in his smart black suit medals glistening, insignia flashing looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he posed between then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit to protect Australias borders.

Australian Border Force was modelled on a similar agency created in Britain two years earlier but with a distinctive accent. Its Operation Sovereign Borders had changed the culture of military, policing and customs agencies in Australia as they were pushed out of their silos with a new shared priority: stop refugees arriving by boat.

Just 14 months earlier Scott Morrison, then the Immigration Minister, had announced the formation of the new armed and uniformed force, describing it as the reform dividend from stopping the boats.

The 70 year-old department had gained a new role: Border Protection. The old tags Multiculturalism, Citizenship and Ethnic Affairs were artefacts of other ages when population growth coupled with social cohesion had been the goal. The armed Border Force that had emerged out of the chrysalis of the old customs service, complete with new uniforms, ranks and insignia, on that mid-winter day was another sign of Canberras increasing preoccupation with security and militarisation.

Fear and safety were still at the heart of the political narrative just as they had been for most of the time since 2001, when Prime Minister John Howard won an unlikely election victory by declaring over and over: We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come.

He liked to reassure people that Australia would still be taking more than its share of refugees, but the proportion of overseas-born residents fell over the early years of his prime ministership. After decades of multiculturalism the Australian ear was once again being attuned to new arrivals as threat.

Read more: Cruel, costly and ineffective: Australia's offshore processing asylum seeker policy turns 9

By 2015, Australias proportion of overseas-born residents was nudging the all-time high of 30% reached in the 1890s, but multiculturalism was still a grubby word.

Without irony, Commissioner Quaedvlieg cut to the chase, reducing the new nearly 6,000-strong agencys role to its essence: to protect our utopia. Decades before, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin had elegantly demolished the idea of utopias, suggesting they were a fiction deliberately constructed as satires intended to shame those who control existing regimes.

A month after the launch of Border Force, its first big public exercise, Operation Fortitude, was announced. Officers were to walk the streets of Melbourne and seek proof of the right of residence of any individual we cross paths with. The warning was clear: If you commit border fraud you should know its only a matter of time before you are caught.

The residents of the Melbourne branch of our utopia fought back with a dose of theatricality, to prove Berlins point, and the joint operation with the Victorian Police was abandoned in a flurry of protests and press releases. Prime Minister Abbott declared, Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release.

Within a couple of years, the uniformed commissioner from central casting had gone. The intent, however, remained clear. Immigration might be at an all-time high, but exclusion was still the key, and national security was at the centre of Australian public life.

Deciding who could come and the circumstances under which they could enter the country has, as we have been again reminded during COVID times, been central to the management of the Australian utopia since 1901.

Again Isaiah Berlin notes the:

[] idea of the perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present which lead men to conceive what their world would be like without them or perhaps they are social fantasies simple exercises in the poetical imagination.

Australia at the time of Federation was awash with bad poetry by mediocre poets. So if conceiving the nation as a utopia was an exercise of the poetical imagination, it was inevitably flawed.

The first step towards the creation of Australias white utopia was brutal and relentless. It depended on the humiliation and elimination, by design and neglect, of the million First Nations people who in 1788 still called the continent home as they had done for countless generations, managed with an elaborate, ancient patchwork of languages, social relations, trade and lore.

Although the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded them from the census, by the time the 3.7 million new arrivals became Australians in 1901, the First Nations population had been reduced, systematically and deliberately, to about 90,000 people.

The men who debated the legislation that would shape the new nation preferred to avert their eyes. They were not, however, ignorant of what had gone before.

Even in a world shaped by race there was argument, opposition and some shame. Months after Australia became legally, unequivocally white, the parliament debated whether to recognise the survivors who preceded them.

The senate leader and future High Court justice Richard OConnor argued that just as the right to vote was being extended to women because in some states, they already had the franchise the same principle should apply to Aboriginal people who had the right to vote in four of the former colonies. It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard-of piece of savagery, he declared, to treat the Aboriginals whose land we were occupying to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country.

Not everyone agreed. The former Tasmanian premier Edward Braddon summed up the majority sentiment:

We are told we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of the country by giving them votes.

This argument prevailed. White women and Maori were the only exceptions: no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific could enrol to vote. Within its first two years, the parliament had failed two moral tests.

At the heart of the Australia embraced by those who met in Melbourne in the Federation Parliament was the idea of a model society populated by men like them. Utopian dreams had played out in many ways in shaping the new nation. A decade earlier, nearly 300 colonialists sailed to Paraguay in a flawed attempt to create a more perfect, and even whiter, society called New Australia.

Prime Minister Edmund Barton, in the middle of the first year of the century, firmly grounded the new nation in the instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience. Optimism tempered by fear.

What became known as the White Australia policy was necessary, he said, because we know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single years surplus population.

Future prime minister Billy Hughes spelt out the two steps of this dance when he candidly observed that having killed everybody else to get it, the inauguration of Canberra which they considered calling Utopia as the national capital was unfolding without the slightest trace of the race we have banished from the face of the earth [] we should not be too proud lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have.

In 1923 Myra Willard a recent graduate of the University of Sydney paid Melbourne University Press to publish its first monograph, her book History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. She wrote with a contemporaneous eye.

The debates in the colonies before Federation were still close enough for the lines between them and the 1901 legislation to be thickly etched with detail. She grimly recounted the way each colony penalised and excluded coolies and celestials.

The desire to guard themselves effectively against the dangers of Asiatic immigration was one of the most powerful influences which drew the Colonies together, she wrote. She quoted with approval the now infamous speech by Attorney-General Alfred Deakin in which he described the principle of white Australia as the universal motive power that had dissolved colonial opposition to Federation. At heart, he declared, was the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races.

The Australian utopia depended on a united race. This would be ensured by prohibiting the intermarriage and association that could degrade. As Deakin declaimed in September that year, inspired by the same ideas and an aspiration towards the same ideals of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia.

The legislation was finally, if somewhat reluctantly, signed by Governor General Lord Hopetoun just before Christmas 1901. London was discomfited by the determination of the new nation to exclude and proposed amendments to save face with her imperial allies in Europe and Japan. Willard wrote in 1923, Australias policy does not as yet seem to be generally understood or sanctioned by world opinion. It was, she maintained, despite the negative connotations, really a positive policy that ensured Australia would be a productive global contributor of resources and supplies.

By the time the legislation passed, those with Chinese heritage were fewer than they had been in the 19th century. It did not take long before Indian residents who had lived in Fremantle for years, as British subjects, were denied the right to return to Australia after visiting their homeland. Those of German heritage, who made up about 5% of the population at the turn of the century, soon became pariahs wartime internment was followed by the deportation of 6,000 Australians of German heritage.

Gough Whitlam revoked the policy as one of his first acts as prime minister.

Right up to our election in 1972, he recalled, there had to be, from any country outside Europe, an application for entry referred to Canberra and a confidential report on their appearance [] The photograph wasnt enough, because by a strong light or powdering you could reduce the colour of your exposed parts. It was said that the test was in extreme cases, Drop your daks because you cant change the colour of your bum.

For Michael Wesley, now deputy vice chancellor international at the University of Melbourne, and thousands of others, this meant that his Australian-born mother could return home with her Indian husband and brown babies without fear of deportation.

Read more: German experience in Australia during WW1 damaged road to multiculturalism

The echoes still resonate. Fast forward to this year, when the average time in immigration detention rose to 627 days and the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, described deporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents who had been jailed as taking the trash out.

The suite of bills passed in that first parliament at least as much as the Constitution determined the social nature of Australia for much of the 20th century. As Deakin said a couple of years after the White Australia policy was adopted, it goes down to the roots of our national existence, the roots from which the British social system has sprung.

By the time he was prime minister, the bureaucratic method of exclusion was even clearer: the object of the [language] test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out. John Howard could not have asked for a better crib sheet than the speeches of the Federation Parliament when preparing his 2001 election campaign.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: the White Australia policy

That Australia has emerged as a cohesive multicultural society, with people drawn from hundreds of different countries and increasingly from those that were once explicitly excluded is a remarkable achievement. That the First Nations people have survived is in many ways even more remarkable.

But the foundation story of our notional utopia is still undigested and recurs unwittingly in policy language and political rhetoric, in legal and administrative practice and personal abuse.

The brutal speed and wilful political rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart would have shamed even the members of the Federation Parliament; the failure to turn enquiry into action on the oldest issue in the land treaty, truth-telling and settlement with the descendants of those who have always been here is unconscionable.

Methods of border control are now more likely to be couched in the convoluted small print attached to visas, employment conditions and bureaucratic processes, but at some level the old order prevails there has been no national apology to those who were humiliated by the White Australia policy, no formal truth-telling to address these sins of the past at a national level. It has taken 23 years for the compensation recommended by Stolen Children inquiry to be parsimoniously granted.

Hands are thrown up in mock astonishment when another example of institutional or official racism, discrimination or maltreatment makes the headlines. Over a decade, the cost of detaining (and breaking) those refugees who felt compelled to leave their homeland reached double-digit billions. International criticism is once again worn with bravado as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It was surprisingly easy to jettison 50 years of careful relationship-building with China.

Ever since those first debates in the Federation Parliament there has been a moral deficit in Australian politics, a reluctance to go back to first principles, to meaningfully make amends. Until this is addressed there will always be an action deficit. The big public health campaigns have not extended to addressing the lingering racism that has equally pernicious consequences.

No national political leaders rose to the defence of Adam Goodes when the 2014 Australian of the Year was called an ape and booed off the footy field. None came to the defence of Yassmin Abdel-Magied when she sought to contribute to public life. The response to the never-ending list of Aboriginal deaths in custody is couched in mealy-mouthed administrivia.

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard was battered by misogynist hectoring, the message to other women was clear: dont get ideas above your station. Almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her intimate partner, but overwhelmed police seem powerless to help.

Our treatment of refugees attracts a global condemnation that is dismissed as readily today as it was in 1901. Behrouz Boochani will probably never set foot in the country he described so searingly in his much awarded No Friend but the Mountains, and despite public support, the Murugappans the Biloela family spent nearly three years in costly detention on Christmas Island.

Yet when the government banned Australian citizens and permanent residents who happened to be in India as COVID raged from returning home under threat of fines and jail terms, the outcry was impossible to ignore.

The brutality of the old ways still lives in the memory. A colleague recalled her traumatic fear, during the familys first trip to India with their Pakistani-born father, that the White Australia policy would be reintroduced and they would be denied re-entry. It had happened to those returning to Fremantle Harbour a century earlier and, astonishingly, again in 2021.

Public sentiment is at odds with that of those who are most committed to the old status quo. Survey after survey shows a populace willing to embrace change that means people are treated better. But there are few leaders willing to make the case, fearful of an imagined backlash, rather than embracing the need for big tough conversation. Transformation is left to the slow accretion of a new normal.

Tens of thousands turned up at the football waving I stand with Adam banners years before the AFL officially apologised to Goodes.

Those affronted by official treatment of refugees engage in endless protest campaigns, travel to detention centres, provide support and lobby. The Black Lives Matter movement has galvanised some of the biggest demonstrations seen in the country, despite COVID, and the calls for action on the unfinished business of the 33-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries are becoming impossible to ignore.

There is much to be learnt from First Nations people. Their survival and generosity is an inspiration that needs to be taken seriously and acted upon. Without righting this foundational wrong, this country will be forever stuck on a political treadmill, running but going nowhere.

It is striking that one of the most important Aboriginal artists to have captivated the world came from a place called Utopia. Hers was the land of the Alyawarr people for millennia before its brief life as a cattle station. It is a place as impoverished as any of the remote settlements in northern Australia, returned to their traditional owners with only grudging support from the state. But the semi-arid country is the source of dreaming and a culture that speaks to the world when brought to life on canvas. Emily Kame Kngwarreyes paintings are displayed in galleries, palaces and private collections around the world.

They are more than great works of art. It is what Australian art always aspired to be. In the words of the influential Aboriginal scholar and advocate Marcia Langton, Emilys paintings

[] fulfil the primary historical function of Australian art by showing the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, a new way to belong in this place rather than another []

Creating a utopia, or at least an aspiration to do better, requires more imagination and courage than our current system of professional politics permits.

It needs more art and better faith. Politics, like everything else, is now in thrall to corporate modes of organisation and communication.

The emphasis is on the mission (to get elected) and KPIs (to deliver on promises). The headline of every corporate plan is the vision. It is always the hardest thing to define. But without a vision, any plan is meaningless. Our utopia needs a new vision, one not tinged by shame. The old ones have failed the test of time.

This is an edited extract of Facing foundational wrongs careful what you wish for, republished with permission from GriffithReview73: Hey Utopia!, edited by Ashley Hay.

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Friday essay: Our utopia ... careful what you wish for - The Conversation AU

David Byrne-starrer special filmAmerican Utopiais all set to release in the theatres of the United States, but for justone night. The Emmy-nominated film gives audiences nationwide access toByrne's Broadway that played to sold-out, record-breaking audiences during its original 20192020 Broadway run.Read further to know the reason behind the film's one-night theatre run.

Iconic Events Releasing, River Road Entertainment, Participant, HBO Entertainment and Warner Music Entertainment announced on August 12, 2021, that the filmAmerican Utopiawill release in the US theatres for one day on September 15. The HBO film will screen two days before the show marks its return to Broadway at St. James Theatre on September 17, 2021. The theatrical screening of the film will also have an introduction by David Byrne, thefrontman of the American rock band Talking Heads. The film which was helmed by Spike Lee, was jointly bankrolled by Lee and Byrne. The theatrical event will also have a conversation between Lee and Byrne.

American Utopia,a concert film, features Byrne's Broadway show of the same name. It gives its audience access to the iconic show. Byrne's Broadway show played to a sold-out and record-breaking audienceduring its original run from 2019 to 2020. The film featuresGrammy, Academy, and Golden Globe Award-winning musician David Byrne, performing his songs from his 2018 albumAmerican Utopia.Byrne performed with International musicians in the special film. He also sang some solo songs and iconic tracksfrom the former American rock band Talking Heads. The international musicians, who joined Byrne, were Gustavo Di Dalva, Jacquelene Acevedo, Daniel Freedman, Tim Keiper, Chris Giarmo, Karl Mansfield, Tendayi Kuumba, Stephane San Juan, Mauro Refosco, Bobby Wooten Ill, and Angie Swan.

Lee and Byrne produced the film under the bannersA Mule Filmworks, 40 Acres, and Todomundo and RadicalMedia. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2020. It also began streaming on HBO in October 2020. The film garnered six Emmy nominations in its name. The nominations also included the category Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-recorded). Director Spike Lee shot the film at Hudson Theatre of New York.

Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.

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'American Utopia' starring David Byrne to release in theatres in US for one night - Republic World

Its no secret that many Jews love science fiction and fantasy, and that many Jews have been prominent authors in those genres. But in her new scholarly book, Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1945: Immigrants in the Golden Age, Valerie Estelle Frankel makes the connection ever more explicit and compelling.

Frankel (not to be confused with Berkeley author and spiritual teacher Estelle Frankel) teaches at Mission College in Santa Clara and at San Jose City College. To date she has written some 80 books, most of which analyze major pop culture franchises. Her titles include Star Wars and the Heros Journey, Scots, Sassenachs, and Spankings: Feminism and Gender Roles in Outlander and Women in Game of Thrones. The Sunnyvale resident also has written Chelm for the Holidays and other childrens books.

Her latest is an exhaustive accounting of the involvement of Jews in the fantastical genres. She will be selling and signing copies of her books at SiliCon with Adam Savage, a pop culture and tech convention in San Jose on Aug. 28 and 29.

J.: What draws you to this kind of material? And how do you manage to produce so much of it?

Frankel: Somebody once called my stuff what happens when an English major watches TV. It started as: I can see all this cool stuff, all this allegory and references, that maybe others dont see.

As for how I produce so many books, its Diet Coke and not having a life.

So why this book? Why does it need to exist?

Theres an enormous amount of Jewish science fiction and no one has written a definitive book on it. This is volume 1 of a book thats currently the length of five books. Its an enormous topic, more than I expected.

Beyond Jewish science fiction, Jews really invented science fiction as we know it in the 20s and 30s in New York. Before that, we had Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but that wasnt really about plausible science. Stuff based on the technology that seemed right on the horizon, the novels that invented satellites and lasers before they were real technology, those were created by Jews.

The editor Hugo Gernsback, who [in 1926] created Amazing Stories, the first science fiction short story magazine, and the author Isaac Asimov are among the biggest names in science fiction from that time. At the same time, Jews were creating the first comic books. And they also created fandom as we know it, with fanzines and conventions.

Its a huge swath of material to cover. How did you come to the theme of Immigrants in the Golden Age?

It really presented itself as part of the material. The Jews of the 20s and 30s who were writing this science fiction were really writing about the immigrant metaphor, about blending in in a new culture you really see this in the story of Superman. He looks like an ordinary nerd and you can discount him, but if you look closer, theres so much more to him.

But the book actually starts with the first time travel and alt-history, which is from the Biblical era. Frankenstein is arguably the first science fiction novel, and if it was inspired by the golem, then Jewish folklore and fantasy is essential. We also see the role of robots, which are a kind of golem, being big in Jewish work like Asimovs.

Is volume 2 on the way?

Yes. And Im also editing the Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy series for Rowman & Littlefield. Book 2 in the series, which is not written by me, will be Goliath as Gentle Giant: Sympathetic Portrayals in Popular Culture by Jonathan Friedmann. And book 3 is an anthology, Jews in Popular Science Fiction, edited by me, which will include essays about how Jews are depicted in the big franchises, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, DC.

What will surprise people in this book? What surprised you as you researched it?

Heres one example: Lots of people know that Israel was founded based on Theodor Herzls dream of a utopia, and the utopian book he wrote about it [Altneuland]. And lots of people know that he was busy seeking out alternate locations, anywhere that he could create a Jewish state. But people dont know that others at the time were writing alternate histories and speculative works of What if we had a colony here? Or made our promised land there? And some of those were utopian, some were dystopian. I was surprised by this entire genre of other places that could have been Israel.

What are you reading right now?

During the pandemic, Ive been reading two or three novels a day. I really enjoyed Israeli author Rena Rossners gorgeous epic fantasy, The Light of the Midnight Stars. The Hidden Palace: A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker is perfectly nice; it takes a look at the immigrant experience with a golem and a genie. And I was really impressed by Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes, which is Jewish immigrants meets fairy tales.

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Q&A: New book explains how Jews invented science fiction J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

WASHINGTON, D.C. U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) joined Fox Business to discuss her no votes on the Democrats multi-trillion dollar tax-and-spend plans.

Tennesseans Wanted True Infrastructure, Not Socialist Mandates

When they brought forward the infrastructure bill, it was about 25 percent infrastructure. The rest of it had to do with a socialist agenda. I called it the gateway to socialism a lot of Green New Deal in there, new mandates, $160 billion in new fees, a $256 billion deficit. You know, it is something too expensive to afford. What Tennesseans wanted to see was a bill that was all about infrastructure roads, and highways, and rivers, and runways, railways, broadband true infrastructure. They don't want the Green New Deal, and they do not want all of these new mandates. So for me, yes, it was a no vote.

Bernies Budget Is A Wishlist For His Socialist Utopia

This is Bernies wishlist. Bernie has talked for years about having this socialist utopia There's 109 billion taxpayer dollars in this bill to go through and to do amnesty for illegal immigrants. There is money to set up a slush fund or a government-run VC fund on clean energy projects for the Department of Energy. The list goes on and on and on. There are more ways to waste money in this budget than most people would ever believe.

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ICYMI: Blackburn On Fox Business: Tennesseans Don't Want The Green New Deal Or New Mandates - Marsha Blackburn

Hsu was forced to resign from his position as senior vice-president for research and innovation at Michigan State University in 2020 after hundreds of academics at the university signed petitions complaining about his comments about intelligence correlating with groups of humans. He is still employed there as a tenured academic, but many feel his work shares principles with the eugenics movement. Hsu is also an advisor to BGI (the worlds largest genetic research centre, based in Shenzen) and a member of its cognitive genomics lab.

Playing God is a term we hear a lot when we discuss these types of processes. When a couple pay Genomic Prediction to help them select the best of their embryos, they remove a significant part of the historical reproduction process: the rolling of the dice. The effects of this siphoning may be small-ish in a single generation, but consider the effects of this type of selection bias over four or five generations and an even more concerning picture emerges. What truly stopped me in my tracks more recently was a blog post of Hsus from 2012 when he wrote Imagine what a couple might pay to ensure that they get the best out of 10 or 50 possible offspring, optimising over their choice of heritable attributes, and then Compare this with the cost of a Harvard education or K-12 private school tuition. The cost of an IVF cycle is down to a few thousand dollars and could go even lower I hope that progressive governments will make this procedure free for everyone.

Huxleys dystopian vision was born of his fascination with, and fear of, eugenics. His brother, Julian, was an award-winning evolutionary biologist and prominent member of the British Eugenics Society. While Julian was correct in believing that what people referred to as race had no real biological basis, he did believe that eugenics could remove undesirable traits from the human gene pool. The lowest strata, he said in 1941, referring to the poor, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. By contrast, Orwells vision of the future came from his fear of totalitarianism and hatred of the ruling elite. Both authors knew what the extreme end of class stratification looked like; both had attended Eton. When their imaginations held the reins in fiction, their fear and loathing of humans worst impulses domination and subjugation were set free.

More than 20 per cent of Australian five-year-olds start school developmentally vulnerable. There are a complex set of reasons for this, but several solutions are obvious and remain unchanged. The Early Years Education Program (EYEP), for example, was developed by Associate Professor Brigid Jordan and Dr Anne Kennedy in partnership with the Childrens Protection Society, an independent not-for-profit child welfare organisation in Melbourne. Young children who were identified as experiencing extreme adversity (due to a range of factors such as lower birth weight and low family income levels) were offered three years of care and education in the program. The result was an estimated impact on IQ of five to seven points. The report on this program from 2019 is called Changing the Life Trajectories of Australias Most Vulnerable Children and it is compelling evidence for early intervention.

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Thrive By Five is an organisation campaigning to make our early learning childcare system high quality and universally accessible. They believe this is the most significant educational, social and economic reform of our era. A report they were involved in from 2019 titled How Australia can invest early and return more: A new look at the $15 billion cost and opportunity highlighted that poverty, crime, disengagement from education and substance abuse are all correlated for young people, as are family violence, homelessness and child protection issues.

In January 2020, former prime minister Tony Abbott said: That is a real problem in every Western country: middle-class women do not have enough kids. Women in the welfare system have lots of kids. A new report from Credit Suisse has found that in 2020, Australia recorded the third-highest national increase in the number of millionaires, with real estate and share values driving up mean and median wealth to the highest in the world. In the same year, weekly rents for the have-nots increased significantly in almost every major city. Despite this nations extraordinary wealth, we still do not provide young people with universal early childhood education. For children five and up, education is a right, but for those aged four and below, it is welfare for their mothers. The result of this absurd distinction has us trundling along the path to ever-worsening stratification.

Huxley wondered how wed class people pre-birth; Orwell asked how wed do it post-birth. In 2021, science is taking us towards a Brave New World while economic policy is taking us towards 1984. Plagues and epidemics feature in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction too, often taking humanity to a shared brink of destruction. In real life, COVID-19 has not, in fact, affected us all equally. We are in the second half of the second year of this pandemic, and the data shows that the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. What a missed opportunity. The optimum population is modelled on the iceberg eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above, Huxley wrote. The one-ninth in Australia have no interest in sharing utopia, thats for sure.

Bri Lees latest book isWho Gets to be Smart: Privilege, Power and Knowledge. She takes part in Lets Talk About Sex on September 11, 2pm, and Oh, The Humanities on September 12, noon, both at the Wheeler Centre, as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, September 3-12. The Age is a festival partner. mwf.com.au

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Literatures dystopian future is closer than you think - The Age

Its a big day forTravis Scottreleases.

Shortly after unleashing his Nike x Fragment Design Air Jordan 1 Lows, the Houston rapper surprised fans with another collaborative collection. This time around, Scott joined forceswithmastermind JAPANon a relatively small selection of co-branded gear.

Theres a graphic skull T-shirt with a screen print and rhinestone appliqu, a pair of intarsia graphic socks,a cotton twill embroidered cap, as well as a mauve-colored full-zip hoodie and a matching pair of nylon shorts. Each piece features Cactus Jack and Mastermind co-branding, most notably the latters signatureskull motif.

You can check out the Travis Scott x Mastermind pieces, which range between $24 to $180, in the product shotsbelow. The collection is available now at Scotts online store.

La Flame has kept pretty busy throughout 2021, havingdelivered collaborations with the likes of Dior, Uber Eats, and Fragment Design, as well as launching his own cannabis line, inking a deal with A24 Films, and debuting music at Rolling Loud Miami. He is also preparing to release Utopia, the long-awaited follow-up to 2018s Astroworld.

Scott spoke about the forthcoming project in a Juneinterview with WWD, providing a little insight into what fans can expect.

Im in this new album mode where its like psychedelic rock, he said after the debut of his Dior collaboration. So even just like the field of cactuses and mushrooms, you might get tripped out.

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Travis Scott Drops Collaborative Collection With Mastermind JAPAN - Complex

BARCELONA Casagrand luxury apartments offer guests an unforgettable immersive experience in Catalan culture with the intimacy and bespoke touches of a home away from home. Casagrand reflects the citys rich Spanish art and history throughout its 13 individual apartments, sophisticated design, personalized service and array of contemporary amenities. Perfect for groups and catering to the needs of families and multigenerational travel, guests will enjoy a seamless sojourn to explore this European cultural capital, centrally located on Avenida Diagonal, in the heart of this much sought after destination.

The DesignLocated in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Barcelona amidst Gaudi's phantasmagoric and flamboyant creations is Casagrands iconic building designed in 1929 by the esteemed and prolific architect Enric Sagnier. His eclectic style from neoclassical and modernist to neo-gothic, can be seen in many of citys landmarks that he designed including the Palau de Justcia, the Caixa de Pensions, the Duana (New Customs House) and the Tibidabo Cathedral del Sagrat Cor, to name a few.

Casagrand welcomes aesthetes and special works from the city's artistic avant-garde showcased in both the public areas and private apartments, transmitting the essence of Spains contemporary art scene. Exhibiting pieces by acclaimed local artists include Alicia Kopf, Regina Gimenz and Joan Fontcuberta. This is a utopia for those who dream of spending a night, or preferably more, in museum-worthy surrounds.

The spacious and light filled apartment interiors are done with sleek, contemporary design complementing the buildings original structures, wainscoting and textural ceiling details. The furnishings run the gamut of acclaimed local and international designers including Belgiums Dome Deco and Serax, B&B Italia and Gervasoni, to local producers Santa & Cole and Mobenia Luxury. Modernist art, cozy yet design-forward furnishings and elegant dcor come together to create a space that is both compelling and ready to be lived in.

The ApartmentsAll rooms in the spacious 226 square meter Summum Apartments face out towards to the city, offering some of the most spectacular views in Barcelona. These well-appointed apartments accommodate up to nine guests, and feature five bedrooms and four bathrooms three of them en suite, perfect for families with a nanny or extra guest.

Enjoy bustling city views from the living rooms of the 200 square meter Premium Apartments and then retire into total solace and privacy in one of four bedrooms for a restful nights sleep. These apartments boast two inside-facing double bedrooms, two inside-facing twin bedrooms and three bathrooms two of them en suite.

For couples or individuals looking for privacy in an entrancing, light-filled space, the 60 square meter Top Floor Penthouse is the ideal accommodation complete with expansive private terrace. It features one double bedroom, one sofa bed in the living room, one en suite bathroom and one washroom.

All apartments feature sound proofed rooms, 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, Molton Brown guest essentials, handcrafted mattresses made with natural materials and a pillow menu. Family amenities include high chairs, cribs, bath, changing table/diaper container and toys for both the youngest and older kids including video game consoles.

Restaurant Partnerships/ In-Room DiningCasagrand is proud to support the local community with exclusive restaurant partnerships highlighting different fine dining establishments to share the citys celebrated gastronomy.

This summer, Casagrand partners with Els Pescadors, that embodies the heritage of Barcelona. Casagrand will book the reservation, arrange complimentary round trip transportation and offer a complimentary drink for each guest in the party. The restaurant is located near the citys coastline surrounded by old fishermen houses with a huge, beautiful omb tree overlooking the al fresco dining. Els Pescadors is a local family business that was founded almost 40 years ago, and with a dynamic and friendly staff, the Maulini family offers classic seafood dishes cooked with time honored tradition, complimented by an extensive list of Spanish and international fine wines.

Through an on-going partnership with the Michelin-starred Hofmann Restaurant and the Hofmann Catering School, guests are invited to dine at the restaurant located minutes from Casagrand, enjoy a private chef experience or haute cuisine cooking masterclass in the comfort of the apartment, or visit the institution to participate in classes or a variety of other courses.

Casagrand offers room service for guests to enjoy a sumptuous breakfast of local specialties and international favorites and the concierge can also facilitate ordering from any number of the citys restaurants day or night. Theres a superbly curated wine cellar, featuring champagne and a variety of handcrafted cocktails. The property also serves glass bottled purified water to avoid single use plastic in an effort to be more eco-conscious.

WellnessCasagrand caters to the needs of the modern traveler with a dedicated rooftop wellness area featuring a pool for a refreshing dip; lounge area for relaxation; a sauna (upon request) delightfully located in the buildings dome; private yoga classes (upon request) and a gym outfitted with the latest fitness equipment. Rounding out the wellness services, guests can choose from a variety of relaxing therapies to book in the privacy of their apartment from massages, facials and body treatments.ConciergeConcierge services are on hand to recommend and book all tour and transportation reservations, recommendations to the citys best restaurants and nightlife, make arrangements for special celebrations like birthdays, or facilitate tickets to popular concerts and shows.

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Casagrand luxury apartments in Barcelona offers artful living at its finest - Travel Daily News International