At least once a year I’m asked by a high school or college student or by the people that teach them to reminisce or answer questions about riot grrrl.  But this year is different.  Last year Pussy Riot brought riot grrrl back into the news as hipsters and journalists alike searched for adjectives of historical relevance.  Now the Kathleen Hanna documentary is sparking riot grrrl reunions and conversations.  Spring 2013 has brought abundant blossoms of “riot grrrl” in the Google newsfeed, most often used as an adjective to describe new bands and even six hundred dollar leather jackets.  I recall buying our clothes by the pound at thrift stores.  Team Dresch had the best band merch because they’d buy a tour’s worth of thrift store clothes and silkscreen their name on them creating unique keepsakes instead of interchangeable mass produced logo wear.  I don’t remember any leather jackets.  Cow murder was frowned upon for food or fashion, amongst the riot grrrls I knew.

We’ve had several riot grrrl documentaries so far, and several books, all precious documentation of a movement that deserves to be exhaustively archived as a rare explosion of female art and politics in a genuine subculture.  Because the most popular bands and scenes continue to receive the most attention a riot grrrl stereotype has formed: white, collegiate, and probably gay.

Happily, Angie Young, director of The Coat Hanger Project, and first time director and riot grrrl veteran Vega Darling have been filming interviews for their documentary Riot Grrrl: The Self Told Narrative, which focuses on previously neglected scenes like Los Angeles and Atlanta.  In Los Angeles white girls were the minority.  The best place to see riot grrrl shows was at Macondo Cultural Center in East L.A. Orange County riot grrrl promoted matinee shows at the original Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana with the local peace punks, Food Not Bombs, and the Black Panthers, no less.  In Atlanta riot grrrl had a thoroughly pagan flavor with witchy pentagrams decorating the fliers of bands like Pagan Holiday.

The Revolution Rising zine collective in Los Angeles were a real revolution in my life.  Their zines, like Meathook and Housewife Turned Assassin, two of my favorite titles, contained writing that was a revelation, and the realization that I wasn’t alone.  A quote surrounded by heart and kitten stickers could shine like a bright spotlight on some dark corner in your life.  Revolution Rising were former members of L.A’s first riot grrrl chapter who had gone off to start a collective that would focus on issues of race, art and writing, and they wanted to include males. They were Equalists, inclusive not exclusive.  I loved their art shows; blank walls filled by anyone who cared to share their creations.

Revolution Rising fundraisers always had the coolest bands: TummyAche, Crown for Athena, Heavens to Betsy. Founding member Tye would sit in a corner reading the tarot for free.  Tye was my Benjamin Franklin.  She taught me to say genderism, instead of sexism, because sexism isn’t sexy.  Because of her I notice whenever I or anybody else addresses a group that includes women as “you guys.”  She’d do it, too, and we’d all end up laughing.  I learned to call myself not a feminist, but an equalist.  Tye’s fellow Revolution Rising founders Sisi, Danielle, and Debbie L. were the most articulate, determined, creative women I had ever met.  I was so thrilled when they asked me to join Revolution Rising, and never felt worthy even when they treated me as an equal.  They stage mothered me into my first show, booking my band to play a fundraiser before we had a name, drummer, or songs.  Soon I was doing my own zines (TVi, Eracism, Light and Shadow) and trading them with zine writers all over the world.  All the ladies at the post office knew me by name.

 The author’s unsuccessful attempt to rejuvenate riot grrrl with a display of suggested hairstyles.

Revolution Rising and riot grrrl changed my life, gave me back my voice, and gave me the courage to express myself (and to glitter sticker everything in my vicinity including my guitar).  Riot grrrl has changed thousands of lives, mostly but not exclusively females.  I would never have written songs, played guitar or bass, started a band, toured, become an editor for an award winning online journal of progressive politics, studied martial arts, or produced documentaries if it hadn’t been for riot grrrl.  Before riot grrrl I didn’t believe in myself or my gender.  I found my self-esteem in being what people wanted me to be.  Family, friends, and schools had all convinced me my nick name was “shut up”.  I had been threatened, attacked, even nearly murdered so by the time I was in high school I didn’t have ambitions; I was working on my survival skills.

The inspiring example of so many women and girls, and supportive males, putting on shows, starting bands, running clubs, and record labels, organizing collectives, raising money and finding supplies for homeless and abuse shelters made us feel like we could do anything.  My band’s third show was opening for riot grrrl icons Bikini Kill.  Almost a thousand kids were there with zero corporate involvement. No mafia clubs. Nothing but fans and bands. Kathleen Hanna herself frisked the ticket buyers as they entered.

At the time I thought these were the first sparks of a prairie fire of cultural evolution that was going to sweep across the world. It seemed like girls were forming bands in every high school and college in America and the UK.  But actually I had arrived late to the party; riot grrrl was already in decline. The media was saying the movement was no more. At least the LA Times had the guts to publish my letter pointing out that we were playing seven riot grrrl conventions the summer after they had pronounced it dead.

The conventions were amazing, transformative events.  At rape survival workshops just seeing hundreds of young women weeping as they told their horrific stories was profoundly healing, as we realized that our battle for civil rights was far from over.  We learned from each other how to play musical instruments, how to sneak free copies at Kinko’s for our zines (scoop straws), we met fellow writers, and distributors, discovered music and art, bands were formed, silk screens bartered and traded.

But the conventions weren’t all revelations and humble thank yous.   Mean spirited gossip and back stabbing between fans, bands and show promoters disillusioned many an idealist.  My own band once experienced a good old-fashioned shunning based on a rumor that turned out to be a lie.  I guess it’s inevitable when you get a bunch of abuse survivors together, and many of them untreated, all hell will break loose as they begin acting out on each other. Whatever happened, it didn’t take long for the whole thing to rip apart. Bands broke up.  Radical zines were replaced by benign blogs. Indie distributors closed up shop.  The all ages scene across the US disappeared. Clubs like Jabberjaw and Impala in L.A. and The Small Intestine in Baltimore from which bands like Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine and Hole had sprung, were all closed down by local city councils and fire departments who accomplished what the nazi punks who used to attack riot grrrl shows in Los Angeles never could.

One of my colleagues, an otherwise relatively enlightened chap, when chagrined by my sportive angry sense of humor and general pushiness with my opinion, informed me that riot grrrl had died twenty years ago.  I was to stop acting like a riot grrrl.  Except that I don’t act like anybody but me, thanks to riot grrrl.  And riot grrrl didn’t really end, it just went seedy and then had another bloom.  OG riot grrrls, OGRG, are now college professors, schoolteachers, published authors, magazine editors, lawyers, filmmakers, professional artists, and yes, many are moms, including gay moms.  Whenever I run into another OGRG I imagine that must be what being in the Hell’s Angels is like.  It takes three hours just to catch up on news.  We all still consider ourselves riot grrrls, even though one of us wrote a thesis about the use of “girl” to minimize women.

New riot grrrls pop up every day.   Today chapters exist in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Adelaide, Hamburg, Paraguay, Birmingham, Vienna, Paris, NYC, Brazil, San Francisco, Limerick, Bielefeld, Wurzburg, and Windsor, Ontario, to name a few; some cool riot grrrl zines come from Tokyo.  Tumblr has become a zine unto itself for many new grrrls.  Riot grrrl influenced bands are flourishing from Grim Dylan in the U.K, to The Savages, Husbands N Knives, Lisbon’s Anarchicks, and Berlin’s The Jezebels. Check out the long list of bands on Cats Against Catcalling! the new riot grrrl compilation from riot grrrl berlin, their sixth riot grrrl compilation so far. You can download the earlier compilations for free at riot grrrl berlin’s tumblr.  My favorite is #5: Mansplaining on the Dancefloor.

 Grim Dylan

Willie Mae Rock Camp, supported by former riot grrrls, has taught many girls how to play instruments and write songs. Riot grrrl lives on in bands and Ladyfests all around the world. Every continent and many countries have now hosted their own modest riot grrrl or riot grrrl inspired events. That doesn’t surprise me, because the injustices that inspired riot grrrl are still with us.

I usually do interviews for Newtopia and Reality Sandwich.  I have one in progress with Marianne Williamson.  She’s an amazing woman, and very busy.  I haven’t heard from her for a couple days.  Whenever that happens, with Buddy Roemer or any of my interviews, I always wonder: “Oh shit, did they google me?”  That’s part of being a riot grrrl, too.  Yet for such fitful exhibitionists we didn’t document ourselves very well.  Any old neighborhood garage band has more pictures, fliers, and other memorabilia than your average riot grrrl collective.  For all our work on self-awareness we don’t seem to have held our creations in very high esteem.  Perhaps their disposability was part of the attraction, another rejection of patriarchal standards.

Courtney Love once warned me that riot grrrl would chew me up, spit me out and leave me bitter. She was right about the chewing up and spitting out, but she was wrong about the bitter.  I’m proud of what we accomplished.  I’m grateful that I had the chance to change my life, that a whole scene existed that was devoted to liberation, and that I got to see with my own eyes the realization of a culture that I had always been told was impossible.  I think of it as a glimpse at a magnificent future.  Someday I hope we’ll experience a real female renaissance in the arts, the celebration of our gender when we truly achieve liberation, will light up all humanity.  Meanwhile, riot grrrl is here to stay.

If you were a solitary riot grrrl or a member of the collective and you’d like to participate in Riot Grrrl: The Self Told Narrative please contact the directors of the documentary here.

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

On May 11th, 2013, in the middle of rural Missouri, The Spark documentary team will build a tractor from start to finish to donate to Our School at Blair Grocery in the lower 9th ward of New Orleans.  Right now they are raising money toward the goal of 13,500.00, which covers the construction and transportation of one LifeTrac, an easy to repair multi-use tractor.

Dr. Marcin Jakubowski lives in rural Missouri with his Open Source Ecology colleagues.  Off the power and water grid they live in earth brick huts.  Everyday they work on building the Global Village Construction set: the fifty machines needed to build small sustainable communities with modern comforts.  Day and night the team designs and tests, developing plans that when finished will be released for free on the Internet.

Open Source Trencher.

The Spark shows us the team preparing for their first release, “Christmas Gift to the World” the unveiling of their first four machines.  Fighting weather, deadlines and the inevitable interpersonal conflicts the team discovers that solving the world’s problems isn’t as simple as implementing good ideas.

Nat Turner was a teacher in New York when the plight of the lower 9th ward in hurricane ravaged New Orleans moved him to drive a blue school bus there.  Nat turned the ruin of a grocery store into an alternative school for at-risk youth.  While teaching his students he pays them to grow food, which he sells to local restaurants to support the school.

Local restaurant owners fight over prices, students and staff must navigate disagreements and aggression, physical and emotional damage caused by the hurricane influences every interaction.  But Nat’s biggest problem may be success.  Can he grow his community without destroying it?

So many documentaries look at problems without doing much to suggest solutions.  The Spark looks at two brilliant solutions to major problems in our world.  Ideas so wonderful most of us finding out about them wonder why they haven’t already been implemented.  Why aren’t there already clusters of rentable sets of fifty machines underwritten by a small fraction of all that money wasted on the consequences of not having them?  Why isn’t every school growing its own fruit and vegetables for local restaurants and their own cafeterias?

The Spark exposes the challenges that adversity and success can put in the path of the most dedicated and intelligent among us.  The 21st century’s answers to 20th century problems lack support because these are not for profit ventures that could attract interest from Wall Street and high profile politicians.  These solutions aren’t about making some suit rich.  They’re about really changing how society works, about the potential to lift millions out of poverty.  This truly inspiring film is full of hope but never neglects harsh reality.

DJ Turner is a post-production supervisor and associate producer of The Spark and I spoke with him recently about the project and his efforts.  Disclosure: DJ is my friend; we’re producers on a documentary now in post-production.

Where can people go to donate to the LifeTrac for Our School at Blair Grocery?  What do we get besides a legit tax deduction?

Our website. Click the donate button.  People can also donate by check through the International Documentary Association.

Or by check: All check donations must be made out to the International Documentary Association (or IDA) with THE SPARK written somewhere on each check, preferably on the memo line.

Checks should be mailed to:

1632 McCollum Pl
Los Angeles, CA 90026

People will receive their name in the credits and receive updates on the film and its affiliate projects.

How did you begin working with The Spark director Ian Midgely?

A mutual filmmaker friend connected us. I had already heard about Open Source Ecology, and had recently returned from my first trip to New Orleans.  Both story lines resonated with me deeply.  I had also wanted to get involved in documentaries so it seemed like a perfect fit.   I offered to cut a new trailer on deferment, and Ian of course accepted.

Sustainability would seem to be such a universally beneficent goal, what has this film taught you about the challenges and politics of sustainability?

Well it seems that many organizations are at a chicken-&-the-egg predicament.  The catch 22 is that we are trying to create ways of living off the grid, yet in order to do so, these organizations require significant start-up funds and are often very dependent on grants and private equity.  You need money to make money, so without initial funding infrastructure becomes an issue.  There is no instruction manual for this stuff yet, so most are experimenting by trial and error.  And because of that, many programs don’t become self-sustaining for years down the line.  Both of the organizations in the film are just now getting to the point where they can even consider trying to sustain without grants or investments.

Another major challenge is people management.  When you can’t pay people or fully provide for them (which usually tends to be the case in the initial phases of these projects) accountability becomes a very tricky thing to uphold.  Productivity will quickly dwindle if there aren’t proper incentives and/or accommodations.  It’s another catch-22; without the right team and proper management it’s difficult to build a functioning infrastructure but without the proper infrastructure it’s really hard to get dedicated and talented people to commit.

Open Source Ecology exists at the crossroads between intentional communities and open source tech.  Are there any plans down the road for the creation of an OSE built model intentional community?

Absolutely.  OSE headquarters, Factor-e-Farm is a 30+ acre farm.  After the Global Village Construction Set is complete, Marcin hopes to create a small community that will be almost completely reliant on their own inventions.

James Slate, an affiliate of OSE is also planning an eco-village in Tennessee that will focus on development of sustainable technologies. Technologies for instance that can aid people in more urban settings where complete sustainability may be unrealistic.

What’s the latest news from Our School? 

Our school is currently going through a restructuring phase.  They have minimized staff in order to structure the program that will be self-sufficient and rely very little on outside grants.  The hope is that they will be growing and selling enough food to employ kids without receiving aid from the state and city government.

The Sparks focuses on Open Source and Our School, what other projects have you seen in relation to this film that you think we should know about?

Occupy Love is about post-occupy movement and asks the question, are we evolving as a global consciousness?  It shows our potential to move beyond the current paradigm and seek out solutions to living harmoniously, sustainably, etc.  Like The Spark, Occupy Love is about what happens after the occupy movement- how do we stop discussing the problems and start taking action.

A Place at the Table is about hunger in America and where our food comes from.  Agriculture is one of our biggest industries, and yet one in two children will at some point in their life be on food assistance, which is not nearly enough to eat healthy, nourishing foods.  Like The Spark, A Place at the Table looks at ways of providing nutritional and affordable food to even the most impoverished areas of the country.

You directed a short called Grave Dawn, the true story of a young German soldier at the end of WWII whose opposition to the war results in an act of kindness that ends up saving his own life.  Are you directing anything now or planning to?

I seem to be directing more and more music videos these days.  I enjoy the creative freedom that music videos allow, but feature films are my true passion.  I am currently writing a film that is a soul-searching tale set against the backdrop of Thailand.  This will most likely be my debut into feature-film directing.  It’s a film I’ve been developing for many years and am finally ready to move forward with it.  I also plan on turning Grave Dawn into a feature someday.  Erwin’s life story (of whom the film is based on) is pretty remarkable.

You were a founding member of Youth Empowering Youth, a non-profit giving high school students the opportunity to make and showcase documentaries on local and global issues. Any news to share about that?

Unfortunately, the program dissolved once the founders passed the torch.  It was a really special program; I still remember some of the docu shorts these kids did. One was about a Jewish woman who was assigned at Auschwitz to be Dr. Mingela’s personal illustrator.  It was intense.  Another one I remember followed a man who was homeless by choice.  Really powerful stuff for 16-18 year olds.

You’re also working on the documentary Exile Nation: The Plastic People, a film Zona Norte and the photographer activist Chris Bava directed by Charles Shaw, with myself among others.  What inspired you to work on that film? 

The content and the subject matter.  Deportation is a very sensitive subject to me.  I grew up in the vineyards of Northern California, surrounded by migrant workers and their families.  People don’t realize how vital of a role they play in our economy.  There is too much ignorance, misinformation, and hypocrisy surrounding the subject, and this is way for me to help bring attention to a critical subject.  And man, the first time Charles showed me footage, I was floored.  The first thought that ran through my find was, “Holy Fuck”, the second thought was, “sign me up”.

After the tractor build, what’s next for The Spark?

After we film the tractor being built and delivered, we will return to our cave to finish editing the third act.  We hope to have screenings in June and a completed film ready for submission by August.

Article written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

“Nick Zedd’s films are legendary – he is a truly seminal figure in the New York underground.” – Jim Jarmusch

With Jim Jarmusch and John Waters as fans, Nick Zedd’s place in the history of underground cinema is certain.  Anyone who appreciates what Jarmusch calls “the rough underside of our overly-processed culture” already knows the legend.  In 1985 he christened and helped inspire the further elaboration of what we now call the Cinema of Transgression.  Black humor, shock, jagged imagery and editing, clashing bright colors and deepening darkness, disordered faces, the fractured expressions and urgent madness of what Guy Debord, a kindred spirit, called The Spectacle, our alienated lives of consumption and masks.

In 1979 his film They Eat Scum was a key moment in punk cinema.  As for 1983′s The Wild World of Lydia Lunch how can you not love a film that IMDB summarizes as “a filmmaker follows his girlfriend around London with a camera featuring narration from a cassette tape she made for him to break-up the relationship.”  Riot grrrl before riot grrrl?  Police State (1987) was 15 years ahead of its time, grappling with issues the Bush junta made vivid for everyone after 9-11.  Nick’s sense of humor is evident in films like I Was a Quality of Life Violation (2004) and the video short sexual spoof Lord of the Cockrings (2002).

The son of a post office censor whose job was deciding what mail was obscene enough to warrant legal action by the post office, Zedd’s talent for controversy is not limited to film.  Zedd authored the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto publishing it under his pseudonym Orion Jeriko.  Like Aleister Crowley’s Equinox, most of the writing in Nick’s Underground Film Bulletin was his own under various aliases.  His writing has been published by a collection of publishers any writer would drool over: NYU Press, Hanuman, and Grove.  Not only did he tour with Lisa Crystal Carver’s Suckdog Circus in the 90s, his films were a crucial part of the multimedia experience.  You can see him in the documentaries Kill Your Idols and Blank City.

In March 2013, Zedd penned The Extremist Manifesto.  If you’re an outsider artist, musician or filmmaker never have the words of Dickens rang more true: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  Digital technology allows us to access resources we never could have before, and alternative channels of distribution are sprouting up everywhere.  Yet music, film, and art seem to be in, at best, a holding pattern.  Read about a first time documentarian presented by Sundance and you’ll find a background in feature films.  Scratch the surface of new artists and musicians and you’ll find an old school contact usually running the show or at least opening gates.  That’s why I find Nick Zedd’s Extremist Manifesto refreshing.  Nick is writing about the art world but what he says is just as true of film and music.

I caught up with Zedd recently to get his thoughts on the state of art and our cultural state today:

You’ve been painting. What inspires you to paint? Are your themes derived from your unconscious or from events in your life and the world?

Boredom. I don’t know where it comes from. I know that once I’ve painted something I like to look at it.

In Totem of the Depraved you describe how as a teenager a bad acid trip, bullying and alienation inspired you to start “painting a lot of surreal canvases of deformed naked people flying in the air.” Has painting been a constant theme in your life, or have you returned to it and if so why?

No. I stopped painting when I was 18 and didn’t go back to it until 2009. A friend in Brooklyn commissioned me to do two paintings for $100 each on canvas he supplied. He let me use paints he had lying around. We were so impressed with the results that I decided to do more. It was good therapy after shooting a TV series with lots of neurotic comedians. Now that I live in Mexico and have to deal with so many unreliable people, it’s nice to know I can make paintings by myself and not be held up by the indecisiveness of collaborators.

My work on surreal assemblages and paintings comes from a very different place than my music, is that true for you when it comes to painting and film, or do you find that they are similar for you?

Painting comes from a completely different place for me than films and writing. Working in a new medium is a process of discovery. I’m reinventing myself, being born again. Doing something new that I never expected to be doing.  I can’t compare it to anything from my past.  I felt the same way when I tried being a vocalist in a noise unit called Zyklon B. We performed live and recorded a single. Each time it’s something new like when I acted in a play. Doing that TV series was like doing time; being in boot camp for 5 years but I loved the enforced discipline and lessons in diplomacy and challenges from assholes I faced every week. Painting is the exact opposite. I have to force myself to do it with no idea if anyone will ever see what I’m making. Having a channel that reached millions with the TV series gave me a different motivation. With the paintings there are no compromises. I make them entirely for myself. I am a success on my own terms, with no audience and no money from it, though I did sell a couple of paintings and I showed them in some galleries in NY and Virginia a few years ago. I’m blown away by the fact that the outside world has shown so little interest in these paintings. Everyone who sees them seems to be shocked and astonished by them but no gallery or museum will show them. That indicates a deep level of corruption and cluelessness among the curator and collector class.

Xenomorphosis your term for when “an alternate universe smashes your reality tunnel and neurological re-engineering occurs” seems to be a natural for the internet where so many worlds collide, and yet, except perhaps on certain porn aggregator sites we find ourselves in the world of Facebook where everybody’s fifteen minutes of fame drips out in updates about visits to the dentist, cute cat photos and relationship status changes. Why do you think that is, and is there a way to bring xenomorphosis through the net?

That’s because FB and the Net are SOMA. Huxley predicted it in Brave New World. We are enslaved by distractions and easy pleasures that cater to our narcissism and prejudice. The Internet has become the perfect tool of mind control, much more effective than television. The global elite has mentally enslaved an entire generation with laptops, IPads and other electronic shit. Now humans actually think they are freer when they’re really less free. This spectacle is part of the devolution of the human species.  Xenomorphosis can NOT be accomplished through the world wide web. Xenomorphosis requires DANGER. Neuro-pathways are domesticated and tranquilized through the net. Xenomorphosis happens away from laptops and the Internet when you experience something directly and opposing forces unite, creating cognitive dissonance. This can occur when you make love to someone, are in a physical fight, or are watching certain of my films in a darkened theater or viewing my paintings in person. Likewise experiencing a musical noise unit in person can accomplish this objective. I’m sure there are many other ways to experience xenomorphosis in your life. It’s up to you to make it happen.

 Kronos by Nick Zedd

After five decades of corporations repackaging revolutionary art as fashion and entertainment we find ourselves in a world where music is boring, film is redundant, and art has more to do with investment than consciousness. Where do you think we’re headed next?

We are headed towards the ExtrEmist ArRT ReV0Luti0n. The New Extremist Manifesto points the way. It is an occupy movement of the mind, replacing the commerce and commodity based paradigm that has enslaved intellectual growth for decades. The massive compulsion to conform that constitutes the current malaise of contemporary art is the direct result of turning ready-made appropriationism into the same religion that Duchamp was trying to eliminate when he introduced it to the world 100 years ago. Devoid of imagination and conviction, today’s successful business artist sees the art world as a new Wall Street game. It is a giant hoax that dupes millions, just like the 9/11 inside job, a mass deception that enabled naked imperialism to cloak itself in a mantle of self-righteousness while committing mass murder around the world. A new era of critical thought is coming as millions are plunged into austerity by puppet governments with genocidal agendas. The entertainment industry won’t be able to stop what’s coming when our prison planet explodes.

In the past when we’ve had hard economic times artists have turned it to their advantage. Abandoned buildings became clubs and galleries. Kids banded together to create scenes and spread the word. Why do you think that is not happening now?

Because everyone is being brainwashed by the Internet and rents are too high. Humans are like sheep – pathetic. The occupy movement was the best thing happening in the last few years and it’s not over yet.

Earlier this year Glasshouse in Brooklyn presented Nick Zedd and the Cinema of Transgression, a five-day event you curated featuring your films and films by and about The Cinema of Transgression movement. What was it like for you to present this retrospective in a city where you once flourished as an artist, that has since become moribund, gentrified and so hostile to underground art that ultimate booster of NYC Patti Smith not too long ago warned artists and musicians to stay away?

It was fun but sanitized. The students and pod people showed up and had to leave early so they could go home and get up the next day and go to work. The walls were too white and the lights were too bright. I tried to fix that by covering the walls with old posters and paintings and asking that the lights be dimmed. Everything was too clean but people were free to make it dirty. The storefront door was kept locked to prevent “undesirables” from entering unless the door-person approved, which I didn’t understand. People were walking down the sidewalk and didn’t look in, unless they already planned to go in. The death of curiosity exhibited by today’s Normals can make you agoraphobic. But the people inside were curious, especially during the panel discussion.

What really struck me as weird was a painting class being held in a storefront 7 blocks away, where a room full of people were all copying the same painting. They all paid money to be taught how to copy art. They all accepted that this is what you do to be an artist. You copy.

You live in Mexico now with Monica Casanova and your son ZERAK. How has Mexico influenced you creatively? Do you think you’ll be doing any work with a Día de Muertos theme?

The only influence has been a couple of video diaries I shot here. Everything else I’ve made since I moved here could have been made any place on earth. What I create comes from within me, not from the place I’m living. I don’t plan to do art that follows a cliché imposed by the culture I’m in. I don’t copy. Or when I do copy, it’s from more obscure sources. Although I like the Day of the Dead stuff, I just don’t think I could improve on it. Mexicans do it best.

Current creatives seem to have a sense that everything has already been done. Impotent irony rules the day. How do we cure artistic apathy in artists and their audience?

By making extremist art.

 Tantalus by Nick Zedd

Anger has become discredited in art. As a riot grrrl band leader in the 90′s I felt then and I still feel now that there’s plenty to be angry about and all sorts of stupidity and injustice to rage against with black humor and word scalpels, but the modern audience shrinks away. Why do you think anger has been blacklisted?

Cowardice. You just have to ignore all the shit that’s out there and do your own thing. The world has always been ruled by conformists. It’s just more obvious now. If you don’t like what you see, do something better.

In The Extremist Manifesto you wrote: “The fact that breakthroughs in history are the exclusive domain of the AMATEUR (a lone individual who invents and innovates) is beyond the double-think reality tunnel of the insulated curator.” When the Internet was born many pundits thought we were at the beginning of a golden age for independent and amateur art, instead we have huge junkyards of unfiltered content ignored by an audience that still wants “official” art on a corporate silver platter. Sure, the gatekeepers are to blame, as are lazy consumers, but is there some way in which amateurs have failed to take advantage of the opportunities the net allegedly provides?

Forget about the net. It’s a dead end. There are a lot of talentless amateurs now getting their 15 minutes. It’s better to be outside of all that, start over again, meet people in the real world who agree with you and form alliances, organize and do something new. There will be massive resistance and indifference, just like when there was resistance and indifference in the past when things were better. One has to be obsessed in order to create. That comes from within. Movements only exist in the real world outside of the Internet, which is a crutch. (Even though the term “real world” has been perverted into meaning something fake, there still exists a world of people who aren’t glued to computer screens, though they are harder and harder to find.

What do you think of movements like OccupyWallStreet and the Intentional Community Movement that seek to drop out of consensus consumer society by creating alternative cultures within it?

They are the most positive social and political development to happen in the last 40 years.

I think the title of your film “War is Menstrual Envy” is one of the most brilliant observations I’ve encountered, right up there with Adam Parfrey’s neckties are castrated penises. What’s your take on gender relations in the early 21st century?

Women, like always, have more power than they realize which is why the Republican Party has waged a war against them. Men and women give each other strength when they work together. I owe a lot to the women in my life and they owe a lot to me too.

THE EXTREMIST MANIFESTO
by Nick Zedd

Thoth by Nick Zedd

Now that contemporary art, a system that stands for privilege, nepotism and political connections is finally dying, get out of the fucking way. We who have been locked out of your galleries, museums and art holes… ignored, reviled and cast aside for having convictions (and belonging to the wrong class) are the voice of the future. We spit on the fashionable insignificance of today’s culture. We puke on moderation, a generation’s fashionable irony and deliberately boring contemporary art. We shit on your chronic timidity and your tamed and domesticated notion of what art can be. The time has come for a rupture, a break, and an honest method of digging our way out of the manure of contemporary art. Your system is spineless and must be replaced.  Those who are proud of being imperceptible are lost.

Today’s gatekeepers remind us that painting is dead and if that’s the case, then so must be photography, movies, music, writing, sculpture, performance and all human creativity. The logical implication of curatorial culture’s hierarchical dominance is the negation and replacement of the individual with a neutered clone. Academia’s curatorial class, we are told, are god-like. They determine history. Their choices are showered upon us from above. The fact that breakthroughs in history are the exclusive domain of the AMATEUR (a lone individual who invents and innovates) is beyond the doublethink reality tunnel of the insulated curator. Today’s curatorial elite has determined that passion, anger and conviction are replaced with ironic indifference, a stance of self-removal, an evasion, a retreat into the herd. With sheep-like acquiescence, a generation of followers has emerged with no point of view, afraid to stand for anything, yet pretending to be fearless while hiding behind an ironic indifference that amounts to a compulsion to conform. The follower artist’s philosophy is one of capitulation.  Through capitulation the follower is conditioned to anticipate and grovel for the expectation of inclusion into the world of high culture and it’s attendant material rewards.

What the followers, apologists and their gate keeping masters fail to understand is the essential non-differentiation between high and low art. Today’s smut is tomorrow’s fine art. The profane, with the passage of time becomes sacred. Having suffered under a reactionary ontological hermeneutics for the last fifty years, the extremist movement constitutes emergent phenomena, which is more than the sum of the processes from which it has emerged. Interpretation theory rewarded by dominant culture would have us believe that history is objective when in fact its subjective nature is based on hierarchical systems of exploitation benefiting a global elite.

Extremist art is non-metaphysical, based on the senses.  It establishes the human body as the ultimate arbiter, the component that allocates wisdom.  In an empirical sense, extremist art is a unified confirmation of one’s resistance to and transcendence of status quo thinking.  The Simulation imposed upon us by shadow governments and hidden elites must be exposed and destroyed. That includes a cancerous art establishment based on commerce and the malignant dictums of predatory capitalism that negates individual breakthroughs based on lived experience. Non-referential, non-simulated breakthroughs are accomplished by plunging into life and grabbing it by the balls. This means taking chances, offending people, causing alarms to go off and generally disturbing the equilibrium in a strategic manner.

We are the new extremists, armed with a vision to see through the charade imposed upon us by the gatekeepers of consensus reality, who manage a mass hallucination we choose to reject.  Ours is the art of bad taste, which blots out and destroys your system of lies and self-delusion. For too long the sheep among us have been rewarded for their subservience to a bankrupt system of lies. WE SHIT ON GOD. BECAUSE THERE ARE NO GODS AND THERE NEVER HAVE BEEN.  ALL SYSTEMS OF TOTALITARIAN CONTROL MUST BE SUBVERTED AND DESTROYED. HUMAN FREEDOM DEMANDS VIGILANCE AND RESISTANCE TO HIERARCHIES, WHETHER IMPOSED BY REVOLUTIONARIES OR COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES. WE ARE FOR ACCELERATED EVOLUTION THAT SUPERCEDES REVOLUTION. WE ARE EXTREMISTS UTILIZING PROVOCATION, ENLIGHTENMENT, HATE AND LOVE.  WE WILL UNITE OPPOSITES.  c. Nick Zedd 3/6/2013

Article Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Imagine a world where abandoned McMansions become sustainable intentional communities where people, by sharing their resources, skills, and work, and renting rooms to like minded but more temporary guests, find not only congenial social lives but the time to work on art, music, inventions, writing, film, whatever dreams drive them.

Amid the universal lament about unemployment and the economic crisis every once in awhile a startling statistic shows up about the kids taking the brunt of it. Generation Y the media likes to say.  Though often maligned by elders, Generation Y is rather extraordinary.  Look at the angry rebellion of the baby boomers, and the nihilistic slackers of Generation X.  As Generation Y matured to discover that their elders were handing them a world of water and energy shortages, climate crisis, AIDS, the surveillance state, and disappearing jobs and dwindling wages you might have expected an explosion of anger in the arts and culture, but on the contrary we got Occupy Wall Street, dance festivals and sustainable communities instead.

Media coverage has been minimal, as the first green shoots of a new way of defining the social contract have blossomed, on the Internet and in the brick and mortar world.  Skillshare.com lets you erase the distance between continents so you can learn what you’re curious about, and teach someone you might otherwise never have met.  The hippies used to hitchhike but Generation Y has zimride.  Cash only, however, no ass or grass.

Freecycle.org helps members get rid of what they don’t want anymore and get something they need for free, through trades moderated by local volunteers.  West Hollywood alone has over two thousand members; Freecycle claims almost ten million worldwide, not bad for a nonprofit grassroots movement.  Gooze lets you trade games and movies you don’t want anymore for ones you do.  Couchsurfing.org connects travelers with couches from New York to Nairobi, you can even choose hosts who share your interests, like fellow musicians.  MamaBake helps locals get together and gives them recipes to make big batches of food, saving time and money.  That’s just the Internet. Then there are the communities, for example, the Los Angeles Eco-Village Intentional Community three miles from downtown, where forty residents experiment with new ways to make urban living less harmful to our planet and us.

Cohousing.org lists dozens of intentional communities; California leads the way with 39.  Some are really neighborhoods, but community meals bring everyone together a couple times a week.  Seniors are especially drawn to these communities, in a country with a sky high divorce rate dying alone becomes less likely in a long term neighborhood of all generations instead of a retirement facility.  But they are also a way for young families to enjoy the benefits of village life, including shared labor and a safe environment for their children.

Human rights lawyer, Mediator and Sound-Healer Priya Mohan is a member of Core Council with the Convergence Network.  By going back to the community building practices of ancient cultures, like council circles and principles of conscious communication. Tribal Convergence “through facilitated council meetings, community focused workshops, celebration, performance, and ritual, participants of Tribal Convergence share our growing skill base and our accumulated knowledge, offer supportive collaboration, network our projects, cultivate tribal alliances, share our passions and experiences, and envision the possibilities of the future.” A major component of Tribal Convergence and the Convergence Network (TCN) is to activate and support intentional communities on the local level as well as weave in the larger networks across the country.

When Event organizer Adam Steinberg and Tantric teacher Stephanie Marks began LA Tribal Convergence Think Tank Spa, Priya and her co-facilitator Michael Tam Wood were brought in to support the structure for meaningful dialogue and the vision of the Think Tank at WiSpa. What better place to relax while working on solving problems present and future, as the Romans clearly understood. Guests write their interests and skills on stickers they wear.  Spa facilities are available.  Priya and Michael shared TCN’s facilitator training material such at the Ojai Foundation’s guidelines on the Art and Ways of Council.  The TC Think Tank community less than a year old is already incubating multiple projects including a local clothing swap, a community sharing website that will invite international participation, and a permaculture immersion field trip where members can learn more from working permaculture establishments.  Here alternative healing practitioners, musicians, filmmakers, and others look for ways to help each other out, and evolve an alternative way of life.

I recently interviewed Priya about this brave new frontier.

How many in the TCN community?

Tribal Convergence is a design of local and regional gatherings, creating a sacred container that serve as co-creation centers for participants and ambassadors of widespread communities. Our events are intentionally designed as intimate gathering spaces for ambassadors to connect with one another and cross-pollinate amongst the various communities that come together. Ambassadors carry back offerings and resources from the network, deepening a collective bond back to their regional communities.

There are approx. 100-200 people who are active at the core level within each of our active geographic areas,  (Vancouver BC, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver); and approximately 100 participants per newer/smaller region (Bay Area, Ashland, Puget Sound). The sum of our active communities is approximately 1300 people who are aware and participating on the local or core level of Tribal Convergence Network~ TCN.

Through the network of our networks, we are weaving and aligning our personal communities together into the whole. Through these connections we are establishing relations with hundreds of people around us, culminating in a range of hundreds of thousands of bright souls who are connected to us from close allies to broader community affiliations.

How long has the community been evolving?

Tribal Convergence as a community has been evolving for the past 3 years. It is a synthesized version of many other long-standing community projects, collaborations, and cultural movements spanning the past decade and beyond. Over the last year, we created the Convergence Network to develop our efforts into a functional organization to serve the larger Tribal Convergence community and network as Tribal Convergence Network.

What is the beauty of intentional living?

Living well and thriving is a common value and aspiration in our community. Being surrounded by people who share values of wellness creates and supports an awareness of habits and practices of healthy living, eating, and communication. We value inclusivity in the communities we are developing, living with the intention of becoming diversified centers of offerings.  Many of our land-based intentional communities also serve as centers for learning to embody the values and cultivate healthy practices. There is a vibrational coherence created when people organically share lifestyle through Yoga, Chi Qigong, meditative practices, hold Council, develop the land, and garden together in a sacred container, sharing special moments of life.

This heart-centered social experiment requires that people elect to walk transparently through spaces of potential discomfort into our growth experience. Our devotion to shared intention and values provokes, motivates and inspires new ways of dealing with tension and self-limiting beliefs.

Through these inspired actions, we are creating high functioning communication and relations-oriented networks of trust. When we Trust love and self-respect we are able to show up in our co-creation together and hold one another accountable.  Through this we live in a space of intentionality and provide a meaningful depth of connection with each other.

How do locals and neighbors feel about the community’s events?

Our large-scale community events are hosted in various locations, on lands stewarded by collectives and intentional communities. We focus on the value of maintaining good relations and acting with sensitivity to the larger community in all respects. It is common for our gatherings to inspire the curiosity of neighbors.  Locals often come over and engage to the degree it is natural for them. In general it has been a positive dynamic, resulting in new introductions between neighbors and opportunities for community relations to develop. As time unfolds we are seeing and intending the sites of our events, local and large, to be active thriving communities. We are talking about a generative culture. We are creating spaces for overflowing abundance, in a way that is appropriate for each place and person into an integrative perspective of community.

What are the biggest threats/ challenges the community is processing?

Our community values include being in right relations with ourselves and reflects back through our collective endeavors and being in integrity with others and the earth. We invest our energy in articulating our shared values, ways of being with each other (kin code) and working agreements, all designed for how we relate in shared space and energy with each other.

Our practice of shared values is channeled through systems of conscious communication and agreements within our relations and collaborations. Accountability is an exploration of humility and transparency, which clarifies our intentions and commitments. This relates to our personal journeys, as well as relations with our community and extended networks. Step by step, we are templating models and modeling templates. We are witness to our process and self-aware through learning and understanding what it means to approach tension and conflict with mindfulness.

This devotion awards us the opportunity to grow from our own experiences and it inspires our ways to resolve tension. We recognize the value of staying current with changing circumstances and how they affect our agreements and relations with one another. As we walk with one another in the path of our values, we are learning, creating and facilitating systems to ensure mutual agreements and resolve conflicts if they arise.

We are currently in the process of developing a protocol to resolve tension, revealing “the why” behind potential conflict. This is intended to proactively address tension into supportive and considerate resolution. It will include a process designed to gracefully address a situation that is discordant with the values and agreements we collectively commit to.

We are coming back to a culture of empathy and compassion, open to all perspectives as we respect the sovereignty of individuals and varying interpretations of how our core values may be practiced.  We are also a community who values cooperative guidance and mutual support. In times of tension, we appreciate the opportunity to learn from our process, which guides and supports our mutual growth.

In practical application, TCN is a group of facilitators in service to provide some of the ways we can address difficult situations. In developing conscious gatherings and intentional communities and documenting our experiences, we are learning how to navigate through tension and conflict with compassion, humility and forgiveness. Through this process we are standardizing recourse and actions to address challenges in a constructive way. Our agreed system of values and protocols is being provided in service to support the mutual growth of community, entrust participation and engagement, and to facilitate integrated resolutions.

TCN is bringing this awareness to the greater context of west coast festival culture, regional events and intentional living. TCN is offering shared values into the movement, as stewards of the land, with intentional communities as center points, and festivals as our major trade routes and market places.

Along with the larger festival culture, TCN is showing up within our network of communities to explore, co-create and template systems designed to work with the many inter-connected aspects of collaboration in this atmosphere.

How important is the Internet to the TCN community?

Tools of technology are important to sustain the experience and value of what we create in person, and to keep people connected beyond the geography that limits us. We’re moving into the techno-village that activates the global community and our living models of intentionality.

Production of media and documentation of our emerging culture and community is a well-established and major part of TCN’s public engagement. Our conscious media pieces are being developed to serve as tools to empower the growing community. Since its inception, TCN has attracted talented media artists and allies, such as Elevate Films, to come together in our shared vision and collective experience. We are telling Our Story.

We have successfully captured the experience of past events, archiving our potent gatherings, ongoing oral traditions, and practices. In our dedication to building and maintaining relations with Indigenous and First-Nations communities, we are sensitive to the cultural impacts of capturing devotional moments not traditionally appropriate for public broadcasting. Through relations building, we are able to tell a story of this emerging culture while honoring the lineages that have maintained direct connections to ancient ways of living in balance and harmony.

On a practical level, the Internet is very important for the purpose of scheduling meetings, promoting/sharing knowledge of the where’s and why’s of events and workshops. It allows for the coordination of collaborative work beyond geographic limits.

We are working on developing web tools to assist our community in the sharing of resources, collaborative synergistic project and community development, among many other things.

The focus is not to spend MORE time online but rather to facilitate the opportunities to experience and engage in community. The real live interactions are key for growth and progress; the Internet provides an amazing tool to facilitate collaboration and connectivity at the global level.

How widespread is the intentional community movement?

All of humanity is waking up to their relationship to nature. For some of us, this is a time of reawakening the indigenous heart of humanity within ourselves. In this process, we are reconnecting to one another and the environment, to develop intentional communities and permaculture movements, to learn from First Nations Peoples while refining the voice of who we are as new tribes.  In this response to our call to live an inspired balance and be the change, we are co-creating neo-tribal living systems that are driving conscious choices about the way we choose to be and live together.

The consciousness is felt throughout the globe. Intentional communities have been emerging for generations, though not specifically attributing to the reawakening of tribal aspects in the West Coast movement.  The movement is also reawakening the Indigenous First Nations such as the Idle No More movement, demonstrating these times to be legendary. The movement is inviting all of us to come into the consciousness of our relations.

The inspiring renaissance of emerging communities focused along the West Coast is fueled and highlighted by the Transformational Festival Culture. Many hot spots include Vancouver, BC, Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Ashland, The Bay Area, Ojai, LA, and San Diego and indeed more and more in Central America and South America, as well as in New Zealand, Australia, parts of Europe (Findhorn in Scotland, Tamera in Portugal, Damanhur in Italy), and Auroville in India are pretty well known spots, but they are all over.

For more information you can look on:

http://directory.ic.org/records/ecovillages.php
http://gen.ecovillage.org or

http://imaginationhealer.weebly.com/permaculture-villages.html

for an idea of how widespread the intentional community phenomena is. These Tribal Communities seem to be emerging out of the convergence of a variety of groups including raw/organic food enthusiasts, yogis, permaculturists, artists, integrative systems thinkers, transformational festival goers, interpersonal relationship therapists, healers, indigenous wisdom keepers, and so many others – of which there are concentrations all over the world.

Tribal Convergence Network is evolving the framework of Tribal Convergence, a sacred container for gatherings and intentional communities to assist in connecting inspired, Earth honoring communities, building bridges for generations of collaboration and co-creation. Because ”Never in the history of our planet have we had so many beautiful hearts stand up for all the right reasons…. to help Mother Earth….  We have beautiful work ahead of us, we’re going to take all these lessons from the past and step forward into the future, knowing that what you have learned is the truth… that we are all connected, that we are all relatives and that all the relatives around the world will realize that we are all related. ” Chief Blue Star Eagle, Star Knowledge Conference 12/12/12

What is the most exciting project the community is currently involved with?

Our most passionate “project” is the social movement, itself, growing towards thriving interconnectedness. We are creating a cohesive network of people aligned in our values. The projects, community centers, relationships, and tribes born of collaborations keep each of us engaged and inspired. We are developing relationships with other inspiring architects of spirited change like The Paititi Institute, The Ojai Foundation, The Earth and Spirit Council, The Star Knowledge Conference, The Four Winds Foundation, and Earth People’s United. Whether local or network wide, TCN offers guiding principles to the values of conscious collaboration which translates to co-creation with intentionality around our shared values and ways of being for the greater benefit of the planet.

Our next TCN leadership retreat is called Awaken and will be taking place May 16-19, 2013 in the California Redwoods. Awaken is the evolution of our journey.

Awaken is an offering of Tribal Convergence to the greater community. Tribal Convergence is the creation of an intentional container to strengthen our relationships, weave alliances, showcase our network’s endeavors, and amplify the potential for collaboration and momentum on innovative projects that serve our network as a whole.

Awaken is bringing together the creators of Tribal Convergence and Enchanted Forest, along with Evolver Nor. Cal, Elevate Films, and many other conscious allies with whom we are co-creating a very special event. This is a call to engage Visionary Action, inviting the participation of intergenerational artists, leaders, visionaries, community builders, earth guardians, and innovators to join in co-creative solution-ing, as we foster solidarity through collective community intelligence, celebration, and inspired artful living.

We are interweaving the design of a conscious festival, leadership summit, and community retreat into one potent gathering. As a collaboratively produced event, we employ the principles of generative practices, land steward partnerships, intergenerational bridge-walking, whole systems design, innovative networking, facilitated GUILD council sessions, team building, and SEVA conscious service principals, to support local community participation and personal empowerment with emergent systems to further build the world we wish to see.

Awaken is also the culmination of TCN’s conscious efforts in learning how to model and live within the best practices and core values which weave cohesiveness and solidarity throughout our network.

We invite you to join us May 16-19, in the Spring of 2013, for this Visionary Retreat, held in partnership with the newly acquired Camp Navarro, a community gathering site in the Heart of the California Redwoods, as we support this community based land node with offerings and resources that STAY on-site to continue adding generative infrastructure for future gatherings. This will be a limited capacity event with registration beginning Feb. 20 at www.awakenthefuture.com.

The Los Angeles regional node of TCN is a sponsoring partner of the I.AM.LIFE campaign in collaboration with The Luv Amp Project. I.AM.LIFE is a life-affirming music, arts, and media project in support of Generation Waking Up, Amazon Watch, Pachamama Alliance. Through the I.AM.LIFE campaign, the Luv Amp Project holds two guiding principles- radical collaboration and radical interconnectivity. “We chose to play with community groups who are doing the same thing and coming from the same place… grassroots foundation and a bigger responsibility for what’s happening on the planet.” Tony Moss, The Luv Amp Project.

THE BLOOM, a groundbreaking new documentary web-series, illuminates the blossoming phenomenon of Transformational Festivals, immersive participatory realities that are having profound life-changing effects on hundreds of thousands of lives.

THE BLOOM tells the vibrant, compelling and colorful story of a cultural renaissance in progress with the artistic sensibility and inspired creativity from which the culture has been birthed.

The visual dialogue and experience promotes the sustainability and evolution of transformational festival culture by creating a shared vocabulary & understanding of essential issues, empowering participants to contribute towards the integrity of the culture and be a part of collectively navigating its course. This story builds a bridge of understanding and creates an invitation to communities and allies with similar values who may find resonance with the transformational aspects of festival culture. THE BLOOM contributes to the creation of a better world by disseminating the model created in transformational festivals to communities and audiences in many contexts.

The Bloom was born at a Tribal Convergence gathering and will provide an opportunity for hosted screenings, which also serve as a TCN series of workshops, panels and a vehicle of community engagement. More than 50 screenings have been confirmed for the first episode, to be released in March 2013.

How important is spirituality to your community?

Spirituality is the taproot, which nourishes our community. It is an essential force directing the movement within our network, with inspiration being the common thread between us.

The nature of one’s spiritual practice is completely a personal choice.  While we feel full engagement in our community offerings is certainly beneficial, we also recognize and respect individual resonance with where one feels most called to participate.

Our shared values make us a cohesive group, while our approaches, disciplines and practices may vary.  A devotion to personal development and the expression of our visions is our commonality, as is our outlook of mutual respect, interconnectedness and a personal responsibility to self, others and the environment.  Our spiritual values are experienced in our deep connection to nature and our global family. In that, we honor that interpersonal relationships require the nurturing of clear communication, honesty, authenticity, and a deep exploration of our purpose with one another.

We are a group that chooses to be co-creators of a reality we envision; where mutual cooperation allows for abundance and peace to prevail for all beings, where all can exist, thrive, and be free.  Being inspired is key to all we are doing together as we collectively elect to thrive through these states of immense change in our world. The tribe that encompasses this network understands that a thriving humanity can only come through thriving individuals.

Article Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Kate Magic with King Zachary cake

Every New Year’s Eve, the self-proclaimed “word gurus” at Lake Superior State University release their 38th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for “Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.”  In 2012 “superfood” was on the list!  Well, superfood was new to me.  I spent the month trying out not Kate Magic’s recipes but the superfoods they’re made from. Goji berries are tasty little red candies I like better than most candy.  Cacao nibs are a crunchy treat for chocolate lovers like me.  Maca is a savory tea that’s almost a cup of broth. I think I have a little more energy, I have noticed a little more clarity, maybe I’m just talking myself into it.  It will take time for me to decide, but for now I like them enough to keep eating them.

Raw Magic is a new kind of cookbook, a superfood cookbook. King Zachary’s Cake, for example, is a colorful berries and honey confection that looks like confetti.  Kate’s recipe for Chocolate Mayonnaise may not be the unhealthy taste bud sensation imagined by my redneck ancestry, but it is a delicious treat that leaves you feeling energized instead of knocked out.   Not only are her recipes tasty and fun to look at, she gives them names that will charm children and inner children alike:  Mermaid Soup, Firewizard Crackers, and Purple Mayhem.  It’s like finding Gandalf’s recipe book.  Purple and green Witch’s Tea is perfect for Halloween and Midsummer’s Eve.  Adults will find recipes with aphrodisiac intentions and memorable names.  Kate’s pheromone arousing recipe for Orange Orgasm is earthy enough to include red onion.

Have you ever wondered about the raw diet?  Do you have a friend or relative who swears by it?  Or who attempted it but failed?  Maybe you’ve experimented with it yourself.  It always made sense to me.  But until now the books I’ve looked into never got me enthusiastic enough to try.  The examples I tasted didn’t impress me (except for my friend Mardhi’s vegan cupcakes).  You can’t solve every cooking dilemma with poultry seasoning or tempeh.  But Kate’s recipes grabbed me, from their names to their ingredients.

Process Media designed a pleasing book that manages to reflect Kate’s punk DIY aesthetic while still having the familiar ease of any cookbook in your kitchen.  Kate’s writing is packed with information.  She begins by giving the reader crash courses on her favorite superfoods including maca, cacao, goji, pollen, purple corn extract, and many more.  These are not meant to replace healthy raw vegetables, that part of the raw diet Kate covered in her best seller Eat Smart, Eat Raw.  Kate recommends a moderate approach.  Newbies shouldn’t think of a raw food diet as a leap into one hundred percent commitment.  Simply adding raw food elements to your diet can improve your life.

Kate’s candy recipes are drool worthy and must be a delightful blend of health benefits and delicious flavor.  For example, the deceptively simple name Minted doesn’t hint at the cacao butter, peppermint, raisins and coconut flakes, or the glistening chocolaty chunks.  I wasn’t able to try them, but I did try some of the combinations she bases her recipes on, and even rude combinations of, say, goji berries and cocoa nibs, are a taste treat.  I tried the blend out on my favorite human canary and he reported after one day of minimal but steady munching increased energy and clarity of not only mind but vision.  Day two he kept munching and stuck to his story.

Kate provides many useful tips culled from her two decades of experience with raw food.  For example, look for deep red goji, the orange kind seem to have more pesticide content.   While writing this I was complaining about how cold my room is and how I just couldn’t get warm.  As part of the experiment for this interview my canary decided to brew me a cup of maca tea.  After I drank it I felt so warm, calm and comfortable I checked the label to see what is in this stuff.  So I read what Kate has to say about it: maca helps you resist cold.

Kate also recommends maca for relief of teenage angst.  If you’re a mom who has been wondering about raw food for your children get this book.  The candy and cake recipes left me longing for a childhood I never had.  Best of all you don’t have to feel guilty about sharing these treats with your kids because they’re healthy.  If you’re a romantic looking to find the one or to please the one you’ve found, these recipes are more like charms than the typical store bought confections most of us think of as candy.

I recently interviewed Kate on her passions for superfoods and the raw lifestyle.

Do cold and flu season get the “you shall not pass” at your house? 

I wish I could say yes, but in my experience, raw foods don’t prevent you from these things anymore than it does getting run over by a bus! We still live in a polluted environment and lead busy stressful lives like everyone else. The difference is, when we do catch things our immune systems are very strong. So our symptoms aren’t severe and we shake things off very quickly. I don’t think any of the boys have ever actually had to take to their bed for days.

You write about how right diet improves spiritual practice.  Which came first your spiritual awakening or your experiment with nourishment?

For me, it was the spiritual awakening first, then I looked for ways to sustain that and found raw foods and yoga. But for many people it’s the other way round. That’s one of the reasons I love raw foods. People get into it just to lose weight or help deal with their IBS. Before they know it, they’ve found a whole new dimension to life they never even knew existed!

Here on the west coast of America we’ve been nervous about the aftermath of Fukushima, which impacted the entire globe.  Rumors circulate about contaminated seaweed, apples and milk.  Any advice, including foods to eat to protect ourselves?

The best food to eat to protect against radiation is chlorella, a blue-green algae. And fulvic acid supplements such as shilajit and zeolites. Also, always check with your suppliers. Anyone selling Japanese seaweed should be getting it tested for contamination levels and should be able to share that information with you.

My mom was a waitress who raised me in an American diner.  I feel like I haven’t eaten if potatoes aren’t involved.  I distrust food that isn’t beige.  Share some ways people like me can challenge the programming that keeps us tied to food we’re used to.

OK, well eat potatoes and beige food with a salad! Raw food doesn’t have to be about giving up the things you love. Find the new things that sound exciting and interesting to you, and include those along with your old favorites. It’s about doing what makes you feel good, not about deprivation and denial. Gradually, as your taste buds change, your inclination to eat the foods that serve your body the best will grow stronger, and your desire for less than optimum foods dwindle away.

As someone who is so conscientious about what you put into your body, and who has some beautiful tattoos, are there any guidelines you follow about ink?

My tattooist is vegan as well, so I know she only uses vegan inks. One of my inks has been blessed by Tibetan lamas so is particularly special.

You’re an energetic and creative businesswoman.  You lecture and give workshops all over the world.  Your Kate’s Bubble website is the hub of a community.  For Rawliving.eu you’ve not only designed twenty products but assembled the best collection of fair trade organic raw food resources in Europe.  You’ve mentioned you didn’t have much support from your family when you were starting out.  You credit your diet with giving you the energy and clarity you need, but when you started out, what got you going and kept you going?

Call me a hippie, but I’ve always had a vision of a better world. Of people living in love peace and unity. And I believe that change begins in ourselves, in our hearts. When I discovered raw foods, I knew I had found a way to facilitate that change both in my own personal life, and to influence others to make that change.  It’s this vision that propels me.

Do you have any plans to expand the Rawliving online shopping service to other continents?

At the moment, we ship all over Europe. We would love to have a distributor for our products in America, if anyone reading this is interested!

You give fifty percent raw food daily as the threshold for sustained improvements in health and seventy percent as pretty much optimal.  What about for an experienced raw food eater like you, is there a dramatic difference between 70% and 90% for you or is it more subtle?

There is always a noticeable difference the higher percentage you eat. And there is definitely a magic that happens when you get over the 90% mark. But patience is vital in this process. You need to up the percentage gradually for sustainable results, not rush in and get in over your head.

As a musician I have so many broke, starving friends who try to eat as raw and organic as they can.  If you could recommend one food to depend on what would that be?

Maca or a blue-green algae such as chlorella, Spirulina or Klamath Lake algae.

The delicious Incan turnip

You’re raising your boys on raw food, what kind of differences have you noticed?

I know every mum thinks their boys are the best. But I would say my boys are happy, contented, and rarely argue. They are bright, intelligent, motivated, and helpful. They rarely get sick and have lots of energy. I home educate as well, I think that plays a big part.

Moms who give their kids unconventional diets usually get a lot of grief from self appointed guardians of how things are done, did or do you? 

No, I think largely because I am very comfortable with it myself. I am not defensive or apologetic. Nor do I preach and try to convert people. If you are clearly, genuinely, happy and healthy and just going about your business, people tend to respect that.

Is there any example of an exceptional healing thanks to superfoods that you’d like to share?

Maca is probably the one I hear the most stories about, particularly for women. It works wonders on all kinds of hormonal issues – adolescence, PMT, fertility, pregnancy, breastfeeding, the menopause – that’s most of us at one time or another!

What do you say to those who warn that these superfoods haven’t been sufficiently tested, for example, that theobromine in cacao could be harmful rather than healthy to some people?  

Most “superfoods” are in actuality plants that have been consumed for hundreds if not thousands of years, and have a reputation for healing that has been passed down through the generations. Personally, I trust the wisdom of the ages over modern western science. Secondly, I always go by my own instincts. If something is working for me and makes me feel good, I carry on taking it. If I don’t notice any benefits, I stop. My body is my guru, not any outside “expert.” That’s all this is about. Learning to be fully engaged in the conversation we are having with our bodies. Most of the time we are not even aware we are having a conversation, we are ignoring the messages from our body, denying them. Eventually, that leads to chronic disease of some kind or another. But when we pay attention to this mind-body relationship, like any relationship, it becomes more and more fulfilling and rewarding the more time and effort we put into it. “Yoga” means union, and it’s the same process. Finding this unity and harmony within ourselves so we can carry it out into the world. I firmly believe that when future generations look back on this time, the beginning of the 21st century, it will go down as the most insane time in human history. But instead of wringing our hands in despair and contributing to more of the chaos and insanity, we can most effectively become part of the solution by recognizing that real change firstly comes from within, then generates outwards.

Article Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Editor’s Note: Our trusted Mongrel Patriot spent a great 2012 interviewing notable people our readers truly care about while also turning us on to some bright new minds on the socio, political and cultural scenes. Here is a first-hand account from each of her subjects, filling us in on their activities, thoughts and whereabouts since appearing with us.

BUDDY ROEMER
Presidential Candidate 2012

Nothing has changed in the Capitol of the Bought. Special interests own both parties and are committed to self-preservation and the status quo.

Tax Reform, Budget Reform, energy Independence, genuine HealthCare Reform, true Banking Reform, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and Trade Reform (smart, not free) are necessary and possible, but the Special Interests must be identified and carefully watched.

Campaign Reform must happen before we can restore balance and vision: Full disclosure, 48-hour reporting, no lobbyist can make a payment of any kind, Citizens United must be challenged and repealed, and criminal penalties must be imposed.

In short, we must impose speed limits on the superhighway of political vote buying.  If we don’t lead with Campaign Reform, nothing will change and Congress will enact make-believe cuts and so-called tax reform.  America will continue to be a nation in trouble where manufacturing jobs are disappearing and the future has dimmed with excessive DEBT and a Congress INDEBTED to the Special Interests.

We can solve every problem by building a team of all parties under the leadership of a President Free To Lead.  With this crew bought and paid for by the Special Interests, I am not holding my breath.  Join with us at thereformproject.org and let’s turn America around.

Original interview with Buddy Roemer.

ADAM PARFREY
Feral House and Process Media publisher, writer, filmmaker

The event that affected me most this past year was the bloody suicide of a close friend and Feral House author, Nicholas Johnson. Nick wrote the book, “Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica,” thought by many to be a masterpiece. And I concur.

Nick’s suicide showed me once again how tenuous this life can be and how one action can affect us all. I’m still working my way out of it.

This past year we’ve also gone through the final financial settlements of a divorce. How love can become transformed into a quantitative issue. Man, how that can bring you down as low as you can go.

Not everything was a downer… We’ve had modest successes, both publishing a lengthy personal project called Ritual America, and touring it across the country.

We’ve also finished two screenplays that are currently going into production. One is called “Dallas in Wonderland,” a thriller that examines the crazier aspects of the JFK Kennedy assassination cover-up.  Also, Jonas Ackerlund, a former death metalhead, will be directing our co-authored script based on the Feral House book, “Lords of Chaos.” We know it’s probably happening since we got paid for it.

As far as book publishing goes, we’re going forward with a lot of important and spectacular work despite the geek-ridden techno fascist rule of the industry.

Nonetheless, we look forward to 2013.

Original interview with Adam Parfrey.

DEBRA KAATZ
Author, acupuncturist, healer

This year has been full of energetic changes and a rise in consciousness of treating ourselves and the earth better. I think the important lesson for this year is to be satisfied with what we need and not to expansively accumulate. In my healing world the year has been filled with students from many disciplines learning how to balance the five elements within themselves and how to expand their paths through the spirits of the acupuncture points. Next year sees me teaching in several countries and publishing the spirit of acupuncture in French as well as a book of essays in English on energetic transformations.

Original interview with Debra Kaatz

JOHN TRUDELL
Activist Poet

It’s time to recognize the identity of industrial hemp…the practical uses of industrial hemp as a major environmental act… the reality of creating a true green economy as a way of generating environmentally friendly economics through agriculture for industry…the economics of industrial hemp will dwarf the economics of medicinal and or recreational marijuana…while providing oxygen to the sky that’s being suffocated in carbon dioxide…research and learn the realities of industrial hemp…and what ever makes sense, act on that makes sense by putting energy into spreading that makes sense around…..its time to bring the environmental and economic national dialogue…..hemp is earth medicine…..

Original interview with John Trudell.

KENNETH ATCHITY
Producer, writer, publisher

What I’ve learned in 2012 is that my belief in the power of stories has defined my entire life and I’m grateful for having figured out my life’s purpose at last. I’ve also learned nothing is impossible unless you make it so, a lesson I keep learning every single year. In 2013 I’m looking forward to applying that lesson to the books and movies I develop and publish and produce. No matter how challenging, bring it on! Human determination changes history. —Story Merchant Dr. Kenneth Atchity, author of The Messiah Matrix (insert LINK: http://www.messiahmatrix.com)

Original interview with Kenneth Atchity,

ANGIE YOUNG
Filmmaker

This year I have learned that the only way to breaking the blocks in your creativity is through love and full acceptance of every part of your broken beautiful self.  You have to take those pieces of you that you have been resisting and really look at them until you can embrace them.  I was blocked but this year I got unstuck.  Next year I’m looking forward to finishing Riot Grrrl: The Self Told Narrative.

Original interview with Angie Young.

SABINA ENGLAND
Filmmaker, Performance Artist, Writer

2012 has been both horrible and great. I’ve had some wonderful experiences performing onstage and working with new artists and musicians, who helped open my mind to new avenues of artistic expression. But I’ve also gone through some horrible shit. There was a death in my family and people had betrayed me that I loved and trusted. I underwent a major existentialist life crisis and I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. I didn’t know if I was wasting my life away making art and videos–stuff that nobody gives a shit about. My best friend is also an artist (a visual painter) and we both went through the same struggles together, crying to each other if our lives were worthless because we didn’t lead normal lives like other Muslims. But in the end, maybe that’s what Allah wanted us to be– not be normal, to lead un-ordinary lives and to make art and videos until we die… I’m not gonna stop doing what I love doing. I hope and pray that 2013 will bring me some new experiences and good tidings.

Original interview with Sabina England.

KELLY HERESY
FIRST OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTOR PEPPER SPRAYED

My journey which unexpectedly lead me to a park in the Financial District and the middle of a global uprising actually began two months earlier, when I negotiated out of my lease and committed to living as an Urban Nomad and not paying rent for 1 year. I started a blog (www.liverentfreeordie.blogspot.com) with the intention to document my experiences bartering goods and services in exchange for a couch to crash on. But before long, Occupy happened and Zuccotti Park spontaneously transformed into the perfect laboratory to test out the ideas on which I based my experiment in living free.

What I had wanted more than anything was to opt out of the system. To not pay rent, to avoid using money, to get by simply through cooperative, non-exploitative exchange of energy and goods. I found early on that one individual opting out alone is extremely difficult if not impossible. You need a community of individuals supporting each other to make it work. For a brief period in Zuccotti Park, that community actually existed. It was amazing to discover that I was not alone in the desire to opt out, and that changing the system is in fact possible.

Since the eviction, my focus has been on how to establish permanent sustainable communities. The conditions simply did not exist in Zuccotti Park for it to continue indefinitely. The key issues obviously are control of the land and food resources. I’ve spent most of 2012 connecting with intentional farming cooperatives, and have contacts on the West Coast and Upstate New York, as well as with farmers in Central America. I also recently completed a course of study in urban farming and hydroponics. It is an ongoing process that continues in 2013. We’ve planted the seeds of the New Paradigm and are ready to watch them grow.

Original interview with Kelly Heresy.

CHARLES SHAW
AUTHOR, FILMMAKER, FESTIVAL ORGANIZER

2012 was a nomadic year with visits to Tijuana, Portugal, Costa Rica, Australia and Belize.  In 2013 Exile Nation: The Plastic People will be edited and hopefully released in late summer.  With the death of Chris Bava, the focus of the documentary has shifted somewhat.  The story of the nationless citizens trapped between the immigration and drug war policies of the United States and Mexico will be told along with the mission Chris took on as an activist working to help the hopeless and as a photographer documenting in powerful images the truth about a problem that exists also in other areas of the globe where the nationless struggle to survive ignored by the rest of the world.  In 2013 I am also working to build an international festival and permaculture center in Belize using the Fractal Nation network that began at Burning Man.

Original interview with Charles Shaw.

ARTICLE WRITTEN BY TAMRA SPIVEY

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

A dreamer who realizes his dreams and helps others do the same, Ken Atchity has impressive credits in the worlds of film, television and publishing.  His long list of academic achievements and awards include a Fulbright Professorship of American Literature at the University of Bologna, the Faculty Achievement Award at Occidental College, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Awards, and he was consultant on classical drama for the Mark Taper Forum.  He’s published over a dozen books, everything from academic studies of Homeric literature to essential self help for writers.   He edited the Classical Roman Reader and Classical Greek Reader for Oxford University Press.

Ken left academia to create a series of hybrid ventures that on the one hand develop inexperienced talent and on the other make deals for major projects in the boardrooms of studios and networks.  He has developed a flock of writers, at first shepherding them to book publishers, now guiding their entry into the wild world of e-books.  He’s also produced TV and feature films, one starring Angelina Jolie, and indie films, including Hysteria the hit of the Toronto Film Festival in 2011.  His documentary The Kennedy Detail (2011) was nominated for a daytime Emmy.

Ken serves on the board of directors of Yogagivesback.org whose mission is “to mobilize the global yoga community to empower women in India to build sustainable livelihoods,” which is awesome.  Kayoko Mitsumatsu, a Japanese documentary director, understood the power of micro-loans after producing a doc about Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and creator of the micro-loans culture.  Having gained so much from yoga herself, Kayoko found a way for yoga students to return some good karma to India.  Mothers and children can be given the resources to lift themselves out of poverty for the cost of a yoga lesson.

I recently caught up with Atchity to discuss his projects.

Your new thriller the Messiah Matrix is based on your research, which has led you to believe that the origin of the Roman Catholic Church can be found in the cult of Augustus.  You point out the numerous similarities in timeline and beliefs between the cult of the first emperor and the Jesus mythology, including titles Augustus had that included Christ, and savior. You propose that Augustus convened the great minds of Rome to gather together the greatest myths of history up to that point to create a paradigm of the perfect human. How did that Roman ideal become wed to the rabbi hanging out with hookers and lepers?  

The novel suggests that the cult of Iasius actually began in Judea, launched by King Herod in gratitude for Augustus sparing his life after he made the mistake of siding with Antony against Augustus. As a Judean cult, it gathered local details before being spread throughout the empire by the emperor himself. I always thought the parallels between the history of Caesar and the myth of Jesus were uncanny, and in this story I found a way to challenge the reader to examine them for himself through the eyes of the characters.

Why is Augustus Caesar the central historical figure of The Messiah Matrix?

Augustus Caesar was the most powerful ruler in the history of Rome, and perhaps the most powerful ruler in the history of the Western World.  His Pax Romana, the two hundred years of peace he established throughout his empire after taming the entire periphery of the Mediterranean, which the Romans referred to as mare nostrum, “our lake,” remains unrivalled in world history.  Known in his monuments through the empire as “savior,” “father,” “the mighty God,” “God and son of God,” “shepherd,” and “prince of peace,” he was all-powerful and exerted vast, pervasive influence throughout his Empire, an influence that remains with us to this day. His shrewd policies concerning religious tolerance, celebrated by the construction of the Pantheon in Rome, initially led him to allow continuance of the religions of the nations he conquered. He eventually realized that a multi religious empire would lead to civil unrest and violence so he took measures to create a single religion based on individuals honoring the God within us all that he believed would engender peace among the nations.

Will Christian readers anything new about the roots of Christianity in The Messiah Matrix?

The book is written for anyone, like myself, who’s ever wondered about the historicity of Jesus and who’s been troubled by the numerous contradictions found in the Gospels. If you’ve been inspired by the core teachings of Christianity but wondered if the figurines in the Christmas nativity set are based on actual fact or are instead mythic icons this novel was meant for you and will give you plenty to think about. The literalists seem to feel that Jesus being “mythic” instead of actually historical is somehow demeaning to the Christian founder—when the very opposite is true. Nothing is more powerful than myth, which is a public dream that endures through the ages.  The true history of Christianity has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, partly intentionally and partly out of ignorance. The Messiah Matrix reveals crucial structural and conceptual aspects concerning the roots of Christianity, clouded by history through the ages that will change the reader’s understanding, possibly forever. But it should not in any way be a detriment to believing in the essential doctrines of redemption and transformation that is the seminal essence of Christian—and indeed almost every—religious faith. The challenge is stripping away the layers of organized religion to find that essence.

Swami Vivekananda wrote of a dream he had when a ship he was on passed Cyprus, an Essene told him: “This is the island where Jesus was invented.”  Whether historical or invented, from the most superstitious to the sublime, he haunts every walk of life.  What is it we’re after with this Jesus mystery that has so fascinated humans?  

We’re after the enormous transformative potential that lies within each of us as human beings—to overcome our beastly nature and transcend it to the level of our angelic (divine) aspirations. That is the true meaning of ‘the christ,’ symbolized by the fish image described in the novel.

You have an unusually optimistic view of current events, which you compare to the great Jesuit scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of “the Omega Point.”  Please share with our readers this idea that we’re living at the Omega Point right now.

As I said in a recent Huffington Post, we are nearing the point of full communication among humans, which will make us ‘ubiquitous in time’ and nearly all-powerful (since governments and religions will no longer have the power to deceive us about events—someone THERE with a cell phone will transmit proceedings to the world before the press and propaganda have had a chance to spin them). All knowledge will be shared, as it is in Wikipedia; all images will be accessible. The very idea of living in TRUTH will begin to bring out our better nature as a species and eventually vanquish the evil within us. Call me crazy, but I think that’s what’s going on right now thanks to the worldwide web. One of the final hurdles is overcoming our addiction to organized religion, which blinds us to the responsibility for our own destiny, which is the essence of evolved humanity.

In 2011 you were one of the producers of Hysteria, an English comedy about the invention of the vibrator as a medical apparatus to deal with Victorian women in a culture where the female orgasm was usually dismissed as the province of prostitutes.  The film ran into the difficult film distribution market. it didn’t comfortably any genres, it’s not a good date movie, guy movie, buddy comedy, kid movie or horror movie.  What surprised you about who liked the film and who didn’t?

I’m never surprised when a great little film doesn’t reach its audience. In this case it was a combination of factors—the star being unavailable for publicity when the film was released, and the distributor being preoccupied with Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (which I loved, by the way, as a former professor of comparative literature). I believe the film will find its audience eventually thrown downloads and DVDs, and during the award season. I’m disappointed but I take a long view of the work I’m involved with—if it’s good, it will eventually be ‘discovered.’ I certainly see that happening with The Messiah Matrix, which I believe is one of the three best books I’ve written, along with my first Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory and A Writer’s Time.

In 2010 you were involved in the production of The Kennedy Detail.  The film became notorious among JFK assassination conspiracy experts because it supports the lone assassin theory and even throws cold water on the rumored affair with Marilyn Monroe.  What do you think of America’s fascination with conspiracy theories?

I think our fascination is perfectly understandable. It’s so much easier to believe that a pivotal world figure like JFK is assassinated through a vast conspiracy than through the machinations of a single maniac like Lee Harvey Oswald. Living is the constant working of an enormous jigsaw puzzle and nothing is more frustrating than believing that there are certain pieces that we may never find—and therefore never be able to complete the puzzle. So every possible piece—the mob, Castro, the CIA, the Russians, even the Secret Service itself—becomes a candidate for solving this great unsolved mystery. The film hopes to throw light on this process of constant assembling and reassembling that is our human nature.

You’ve had many years of experience in the film industry and have been in involved as a producer in the production of over thirty  movies.  How has the business changed?  Care to predict the future of the movie biz?

If I worship anything in life I worship change, and the divinity within it—the very spark of life. And change is what’s been happening in spades for the last five years to the point where both publishing and entertainment (not to mention, as you well know, MUSIC) are changing so rapidly no one can say at the moment exactly what’s going on. But one thing is clear on the film side: this is, and will be, for the next few years at least, the ‘age of the independent.’ Because the studios have retrenched down to making a handful of films each (instead of 20-30) each year—and those with massive budgets, over $150 million), the explosion of moviemaking has been in the indie world where I spend most of my film time. What this means for the writer is that he must find a way to become a PRODUCER, raising the money or attaching the talent needed to move his story to the front of the conveyor built. I predict that writers who become producers will govern the future of the indie renaissance.

As many years of experience as you’ve had with film you have even more as an expert on publishing.  How do you feel about the future of publishing?  Is there a place for corporate publishers in tomorrow’s world of writers or are eBooks and direct author to reader relationships the new book business?

I’ve never been so excited about the future of publishing as I have been for the past 2-3 years when it’s become crystal clear that the sea change is underway. We’re living in a time as exciting as the last decade of the fifteenth century when Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press changed the world’s access to knowledge virtually overnight. That is what the Internet is doing for publishing. For storytellers in particular—and I believe we can change the world through stories—this is the first time in centuries that we have direct access to a worldwide audience. Traditional corporate publishers may continue for another fifty or a hundred years but they will become even more focused on “established brands,” the authors whose names are household words because the cost of their overhead demands they publish books that are “pre-sold.” But for the new voices and new ideas direct publishing, via e- and print-book both, find their way to their markets without interference from the gatekeepers of old. What could be more exciting than that?

In Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory you showed how the ancient bards provided cultural retrospection and a moral compass by telling the story of the wrath of Achilles and the consequences of breaking the laws of hospitality of Zeus.  Now we’re in a world where misinformation is everywhere.  So-called facts are countered by other so-called facts, all cherry picked to support economic, and political and religious agendas.  I personally believe that the laws of Zeus still apply; I see the results of its successes and failures every day, do you?

Yes, it is dizzying to hear, in clip after clip, politicians quoting facts against the “lies” of their opponents. But the good news is that we all have access to Google, and we can all research the facts ourselves and decide whom to believe. The future of culture depends on the intelligence of the computer-accessing individual. Stories still change the world. I knew that in Messiah Matrix I had a better chance of saying what I wanted to say about the ravages of organized religion if I described the theory as part of an exciting story than as a nonfiction study. My book on Homer sold a few hundred copies in the past 40 years! So its description of how culture is transmitted through storytelling went unheeded by the widest audiences. In fact, I moved from the academic world to the world of commerce precisely because the new world I’ve worked in for 25 years now is all about reaching the widest audiences. In a novel we recreate the experience of the campfire, where people gather around to hear a story and discuss what to make of it. The Internet is that campfire, with the after-postings the chatter of the gathered. The laws of Zeus allow us to gather and comment and respond to the poster and one another. How exciting is that!

From 1980-1988 you were editor of DreamWorks: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly about the relationship between dreams and the arts.  Contributors included Ursula LeGuin, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, John Gardner, Carlos Fuentes, Stephen King and Eugène Ionesco.  How do your dreams influence you and your work today?

I am living my dreams, and have been since I left the academic world twenty-five years ago. So many projects I’m involved with originated with a dream—whether a daydream or a night dream—and I’ve realized that the more dreams I facilitate the more facility I have in generating them. They just keep coming, waking or asleep—and the thrilling thing for me is that I get to assist in making the dreams of others come true. That’s been my life mission: helping stories change the world by getting them to their audiences.

44 young girls who are funded now by YGB’s “Sister Aid” programs to stay in school as well as receiving out of school supplementary tutoring.

How does Yoga Gives Back work and what’s going on currently?

What is going on at the moment is that Kayoko Mitsumatsu, head of YGB and my dear wife, is in India for three weeks to document (she’s a filmmaker) the results of YGB’s support to the women and children in the villages, and is reporting back daily (see yogagivesback.org) that the program has become so popular that one wall in a rural community depicts children walking around with bags bearing the “Yoga Gives Back” logo. Again, she has taken her story—“For the price of a lesson, you can change a life”–to its target audience and is witnessing the transformation that yoga practitioners’ support can achieve in these lives.

In 1995 you wrote a little gem called Cajun Household Wisdom.  Since this interview will be live just after an election that has deeply divided America, can you offer a Cajun saying for our political predicament?

Don’t get into a pissing contest with a skunk. Seriously, whatever the outcome, President Obama represents the future of America as the dream of the melting pot come true. We are living in historical times, to have seen him be elected. We are finally reaching the potential represented by the Statue of Liberty. This remains, truly, the land of freedom and opportunity.

Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

If you eat food you need to see the documentary Food Inc.  When I first met Robby Kenner I thanked him for making a film that I could give people instead of having to explain all the details of why they should be paying attention to industrial food production.  When you see those colorful aisles of products in the supermarket not only are they all made by a small handful of companies, but most of them are just different combinations of the same substances made to resemble food.  Right now in California, Monsanto is pouring money into their effort to stop the state’s voters from mandating GMO labeling.  But what about the loss of habitat for heritage crops amid the aggressive spread of these agricultural killer zombies?  If you’ve seen Food Inc. you might be surprised to learn that Troy Rousch, the pro Monsanto farmer, is supporting California’s initiative because he thinks consumers should have the right to know, and the free market, not manipulation, should decide the fate of GMOs.

Food Inc. is one of the top 25 grossing theatrical documentaries of all time.  It hit number one on Amazon.com beating out all the Hollywood blockbusters.  One of the most striking things about Food Inc. is that it tells the horrifying truth with hypnotically beautiful visuals.  Over six years in the making, it received widespread critical acclaim, and dozens of awards, including an Academy Award nomination.  But Kenner’s work consistently earns accolades.  He received a Peabody and an Emmy for Two Days in October his American Experience documentary for PBS about a day in the life of the Vietnam War seen through the eyes of a soldier in the field and a peace protestor back home.  With Richard Pearce he created The Road to Memphis for the Martin Scorsese series, The Blues.  Newsweek called The Road to Memphis “as fine a film as ever was made about American music.”  Kenner has directed numerous specials for National Geographic and American Experience.  His HBO documentary about five encounters with online love When Strangers Click inspired a subculture of Internet relationship confessions, and was nominated for an Emmy in 2011.  He’s currently at work on another film for Participant Media, the company he partnered with for Food Inc.

Not only does Kenner make beautiful films, he provides a model of ways filmmakers can further their impact on the causes they document.  With the help of allies in Silicon Valley and academia Kenner launched FixFood.org to showcase a series of animated web & TV spots about the unsustainability of our industrial food system.  Each campaign gives consumers a practical action to take that can help address the problem. One of the shorts focuses on the looming disaster of overuse of antibiotics in our meat.  80% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to factory farms, fed to animals so they can survive their crowded, unsanitary conditions.  Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, superbugs, bred in these farms entering the air, the water, and our food cause sickness for which we have no medicine.  The FDA hasn’t done anything to address this problem, only we consumers can.

Fixfood antibiotics

Another short urges consumers to contact the USDA about their pending approval of GMO corn that can resist the chemical 2,4-D, a principle ingredient of Agent Orange.

Fixfood GMOs

Go to Fixfood.org and learn how you can make a difference.  It will only take a few minutes, but it might change your life, and the lives of future generations.

Robby Kenner was kind enough to take the time for an interview, adding Newtopia to an illustrious list including Time Magazine, Oprah, the Daily Show, and the New York Times.

When you made Food Inc. you thought you were doing a simple film about where our food comes from but you wound up confronting corporations who wouldn’t allow questions to be asked, let alone answered.  Three years later where are we?  Are things as bad as ever or are there signs of progress?

I think, to begin with, in making Food Inc.,these food corporations ultimately weren’t interested in having consumers look and find out how the food is made, or where it comes from.  I was just really surprised to see how much they just didn’t want us thinking about what’s in our food, and how it’s prepared, how it comes to us.  That was a surprise, how off limits it was.  Obviously, slaughterhouses shock people, but where does chicken or meat come from?  A slaughterhouse.  At the same time there’s far more than that they don’t want you to think about, like healthy cereal with blueberries in it that has no blueberries in it and nothing healthy.

What’s happened since Food Inc.?  I think the film and numbers of books, and a growing movement, created a large movement of more and more Americans who became more and more concerned about what they were eating.  I think this took the food companies by surprise.  Big surprise that people really cared about what’s on their plates.  They found it very inconvenient.  I think they were really thrown off and didn’t know how to respond for a while.  On one level I think they thought they were doing God’s work.  They were sending us a lot of calories very cheaply.  Unfortunately, the consequences of that cheap food is becoming more and more clear, that ultimately it’s making us very sick, and that cheap food is ultimately way too expensive.  I think there was finally a backlash from these companies saying hey you know corn syrup is good for you, or this or that.  Not really wanting to look at the problem.  And now we have the Just Label It! campaign about GMOs.  I was part of a campaign about antibiotics in the meat.  I think we should have more transparency.  I think people should have the right to know what they’re buying.  If you want to go buy a Big Mac, great, go buy it, but we should have the right to know.  And we should also factor in how much this is costing us all.  I don’t want to pay for these companies to make huge profits polluting our land and making us sick, and I have to cover the bill as a taxpayer in multiple ways.  I think we’re fed up with that.

Just Label It! got 1.2 million plus to tell the FDA to label GMOs.  Meanwhile Monsanto has spent millions of dollars supporting the No on 37 campaign in California.  What do you think of 37, and do you think it will pass?

I’m told that there’s a chance at the moment that it’s going to pass.  Though I have to believe there’s going to be a ton of money coming in to stop it.  I presumed it didn’t have a chance.  Right now I’m being told it’s looking good but things can change very quickly.  It’s just amazing.  Here’s my argument about GMOs.  On one hand these guys were able to say this product is absolutely different to the point that we can patent it.  But it’s not different enough that we have to label.  I think there seems to be an inherent contradiction in that.  I can’t tell you it’s absolutely bad.  But I was just speaking to the corn farmer Troy Roush who was in our film, who uses numbers of Monsanto products.  He had just come back from a Monsanto sponsored vacation.  I asked him about being a corn farmer using GMOs and he said you have to use the latest products to stay competitive.  I asked him what’s happened since Food Inc. and he said well unfortunately these latest products have a terrible side effect. The one downside, if Food Inc.helped sponsor a more localized fresh movement, and buying from farmers, is that the new GMOs, the spray that you put on them, are eliminating everything but commodity crops.  So any specialty items like tomatoes, carrots, broccoli, they are all getting killed.  They’re not going to exist in the Midwest.  That was Troy talking, a guy who’s a conventional farmer.

How do you feel about water?  Is the current drought doing anything to change the way corn subsidies have been used to fill our supermarket aisles with different variations of the same crap?

The fact is that people were saying the green revolution is going to save the world with drought tolerant crops, which hasn’t come to fruition.  One of the big problems is that we’re growing corn that we’re feeding to our automobiles.  People around the world are going to starve because of it.  Ultimately we have to learn to eat less meat.  We have to eat differently if we’re going to survive on this planet with seven billion people.  Obviously there are fewer and fewer resources for more and more people, and meanwhile meat takes an astounding amount of water.  We need to become more conscious that it’s not our god given right to waste.

What’s Fixfood.org working on now?

I don’t really want to talk about it, but we have a new campaign in the works.  The antibiotic and GMO campaigns still have large numbers of people signing.  The purpose of Fixfood was that I would go around and talk and people would ask what can I do and I think it was trying to create a movement so there would be legislation through retail which could help bring about change.  It’s so hard to bring about change within the government.  I think ultimately these companies will listen to their consumers, and that’s what Fixfood is attempting to do, to get consumers to take action.

You recently went to Japan to visit an organic farm that’s been operating since the 70′s.  Did you speak with the locals about Fukushima?  Were you nervous visiting there?  What did you learn from your trip?

I think there are parallels between Fukushima and GMOs.  There’s the precautionary principle that’s been violated.  In Fukushima we had teams of nuclear experts who said their sea wall would never be penetrated.  It proved to be a disaster.  With GMOs we say don’t worry these things won’t contaminate the rest of the world.  They say these things are safe and yet we don’t know for sure.  Maybe they are.  But we’re violating the precautionary principle.  The people in Japan were very concerned and felt very violated because they have a lot more trust in their government than we do in ours.  All of a sudden everything was being questioned in a way that it had never been questioned before.

Robby Kenner visits a farm in Japan in May 2012.

At my kitchen table you told the story of a Food Inc. screening where some of the biggest CEO’s had to watch the film and then were allowed to ask you questions.

Well it was off the record.  I can just say that I did screen it and it was very interesting meeting with the heads of different companies.  I think they were unprepared for Food Inc.but curious and interested.  They weren’t ready to have their consumers wanting to know where their food came from.  It took them by surprise.

How do you feel about our choice this presidential election from the point of view of corn subsidies, organic farming, and the dangers of corporations like Monsanto?

Well, we might be cutting subsidies, but we’re raising insurance premiums.  It could become even more expensive.  I wish people would guarantee me my highest price for everything I do from now on.  I think that’s a good deal.  It’s hard not to do well if you’re always guaranteed the best price.  And yet they’ll say look subsidies are being cut.  In terms of what’s happened with Obama, it’s very disappointing that here we have a first lady who is talking about health and yet ultimately the Obama administration has been more helpful to Monsanto then the healthy food movement.  But I think that they’ll still do more than the alternative.

Is the government cracking down on people growing their own food as we sometimes hear?

I don’t know if the government is really cracking down on people growing their own food.  I’m not sure if I really agree with that.  There have been rumors that Monsanto is going to make it illegal to do this or that but I don’t think that’s true.  It’s just that it’s not an even playing field.  People who are growing food that makes us sick have more support than people who are growing healthy food.

Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Photo by Steven Dewell

If you’re going to talk about counterculture in second millennium America you’ve got to talk about Adam Parfrey and Feral House. Patron saint of the socially unacceptable, Adam’s sense of humor always seems to be underestimated by his critics.

The counterculture of the sixties and seventies despite its reputation for rebellion and excess ignored the Velvet Underground’s speedy realism, preferring the operatic pretensions of The Who, or the vague virtuosity of Yes. Then came Raygun’s America. Hairspray bands and alleged family values ruled the day. Sure, you had glimpses of the truth in the cartoons of Crumb, or in the music of The Stooges, or Dead Kennedys, but no one had yet come along to build a nice wide road for readers who wanted to know what’s really going on behind the scenes of the mainstream. Adam wasn’t the only one to build that road, but he laid down a lot of pavement.

His publishing company Feral House has put out over one hundred and fifty books, books that have caused controversy and even inspired censorship. One of Steve Jobs’ last official acts was banning two Feral House books from Apple’s distribution network. a 1991 satire on ‘50s men’s magazines, Cad: A Handbook for Heels, was banned in Canada. Feral House published Unabomber Ted Kaczynski ‘s book after Adam exchanged dozens of letters with the philosophic felon. Many Feral House books offer peeks into the minds of gangbangers and serial killers. But Feral House is also one of the most fun publishers ever. Consider this feast of titles: Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History & Consumption; Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films; The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words. And of course, American Hardcore.

As an indie musician with my own recording set up one of my favorites is Tape Op: The Book About Creative Music Recording, a collection of essays from early issues of the magazine that is catnip for analog and low-fi hungry musicians and engineers. Many of Feral House’s books are lavishly illustrated and all are beautifully designed and printed. Speed-Speed-Speedfreak: A Fast History of Amphetamine is shaped like a big pill. Where else but Feral House can you find otherwise lost images of sexcapades of the Weimar Republic or Times Square before they cleaned it up? From surprisingly menacing Shriners to Aleister Crowley, British intelligence agent, Feral House books present an array of unforgettable characters.

A skilled writer himself, Adam’s features have appeared in the Village Voice, Penthouse, and Hustler. From 1990 to 1994 he wrote a weekly column for the San Diego Reader called Hell…A.

But Adam doesn’t only write and publish books. He’s credited as being a research consultant on film projects including Charles Manson Superstar in 1989. In 1995 he co-directed Speak of the Devil, the Anton LaVey documentary. He co-wrote the screenplay for Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and co-authored Lexicon Devil about Darby Crash and The Germs. He played The Minstrel in Crispin Glover’s 2005 macabre comedy “What Is It?“  The book he edited and published, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr., was the source for Tim Burton’s film Ed Wood. In 2012 he co-produced The Source documentary, to mention only a few of his film-related credits.

Adam also created recordings with Boyd Rice, as co-conspirator and fellow minstrel of the dark side. In 1997 Adam, Boyd and Jim Goad released an album called Hatesville, and an album with a collection of his recordings has the fetching title A Sordid Evening of Sonic Sorrows, in collaboration with hardcore band Poison Idea. Half easy listening with disturbing lyrics and half punk meets doom metal it features a cover of the Steppenwolf classic “The Pusher” along with covers of songs by Lou Reed and Black Sabbath, including an over-the-top version of “Paranoid” with a thespian delivery that sometimes brings to mind John Cale circa “we can all feel safe like Sharon Tate.”  Enjoy:

With Jodi Wille, Adam not only co-created another successful and unique publishing company, Process Media, but Adam and Jodi also held now legendary salons in their faux Black Forest house on a four acre compound near Silverlake, which included masters of ceremony like Daniel Pinchbeck and John Sinclair. An L.A. Weekly feature article from 1995 describes small oil portraits of irascible iconoclasts Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, and Celine, but Heidegger and Aimee Semple MacPherson are represented as well.

Adam, the son of theater and film people who found success in Hollywood, grew up a couple blocks from the beach in Malibu during the sixties and seventies, where his experiences as a child around well practiced drunks like Jason Robards Jr. helped him form a practical understanding of our impractical world. For example: “My feeling about liquor and drugs is this: the problem isn’t the drugs or the liquor, it’s the people themselves.”  In 1982 he put on a theatrical production about the notorious Gilles de Rais in San Francisco.

You might say that Amok Press, his earlier publishing company, and Feral House were born in the New York Public Library as Adam searched for the shocking facts that he’s become so well known for providing. Among the earliest was the revelation that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the celebrated Supreme Court Justice backed a California law for sterilizing the “unfit” that helped Hitler’s ideas about eugenics, though Adolf toned it down a bit.

Adam’s first book publication, in 1986 with Amok Press, was the infamous Nazi Joseph Goebbel’s novel Michael, a glimpse into the still relatively at that time rational mind of a man before he was swept away into the mass madness of his peers.  But Adam’s first breakthrough was the now classic Apocalypse Culture in 1987 which included real life stories of necrophile Karen Greenlee and Masonic criminals in an essay title “King-Kill 33. A Revised Edition of Apocalypse Culture included Adam’s own wonderful observation that bow ties and business ties are symbols of self-castration.

Enjoy my interview with Adam below:

So let me get this straight, you went to Santa Monica High School in the early seventies?

Yes, dear old Samohi. I lived near the Ventura County Line, and the school bus rides were an hour each way. On the way into Santa Monica, the bus picked up a girl with special needs who seemed to always choose to sit next to me. She was an epileptic, and all too often she would have a seizure in which her arms were flailing into my face. Fellow students on the bus shouted at me to stick a pencil into this poor girl’s mouth. I knew nothing about what to do, but it didn’t seem wise to me to stick writing utensils into her mouth.

Then attended UCLA (where you were co-editor of the Arts Section of The Daily Bruin?)  So what was it like? 

This was 1976, and I learned a great deal about writing doing reviews and features. At this time I received a small stipend, too. This was a time when it was quite cheap to attend school. One of my biggest memories of working on this paper was the time when Iranian students were protesting The Shah, and for reasons unknown they decided to not allow us to leave the building while chanting “DOWN WITH THE SHAH!” The good thing about all this was that I was able to purchase from the protesters the earliest Khomeini propaganda that included great political cartoons of Jimmy Carter as Satan himself.

Were you an already macabre fish out of water or did the surfer stoner good vibes inspire you to counter them? Or did you simply party away all the mellow until only the feral remained?

Though I loved living near the beach, and did a lot of fishing, clamming, and body surfing, I was very pale, dark-haired and looked too goth prior to the time that goth even existed. As such, I did not fit the surfer archetype at all. I also didn’t much care for the “Locals Only” xenophobia.

When you were 21 you toured with what you called a “second rate Shakespearean company.” What roles did you play?

This group was called The New Shakespeare Co., and it was run by a Weimar-period German woman named Margit Roma and her man friend. She spoke about Max Reinhardt to me a great deal. We traveled around the country, particularly the deep South, and we were particularly coveted visitors by the girls at women-only Christian colleges down in Georgia and Tennessee. Sometimes we’d crash at locals’ homes. One woman in Arizona imagined that I looked like Elvis Presley, and as such wanted me to fulfill her Elvis fetish. The group was racially mixed, and as a result we were booted from some cafes and motels in some towns in Mississippi and Alabama. It gave me an understanding why so many honkies are particularly venomous about our mulatto President.

I joined this group to see the country, and we did, but mainly from the point of view of the cheapest hotels at the perimeter of various towns. I was hired after Margit Roma saw me in a touring college production of A Midsummer Nights Dream playing Oberon. It was all strange fun.

The hilarious Encyclopaedia of Hell: An Invasion Manual for Demons Concerning the Planet Earth and the Human Race Which Infests It compels me to ask if you were a fan of the original National Lampoon.

That magazine was a great thing for a while in the ‘70s….

How is the evolution (devolution?) of publishing and book selling from brick and mortar to ebooks impacting Feral?

Our office is now in our house, and we try not to have too many expenses so that there are lesser consequences to selling fewer books, as it happens these days. Several chains that sold a lot of Feral House books are now out of business… Tower Books, Virgin Megastore, Borders… also a lot of independents. People have so many distractions today in the form of reading material that I’m amazed that we’re still able to keep going. But we do.

You co-wrote and published Ritual America in 2012, accompanying the stops on your book tour with a slide show.  The book reveals the American fetish for secret societies and shows how even the most apparently innocent can turn out to have dark secrets.  What was the most surprising fact for you personally that you uncovered?

What surprised me the most was that at least half the entire country belonged to some secret society or another from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, how they were literally everywhere and possessed a major role in the structure of the nuclear family.

This year the film you co-produced The Source documentary, directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, played SXSW and other important film festivals. Besides the hot hippie chicks, what drew you to this quirky story of a judo champion who had once robbed a bank who turned into an organic foods pioneer and guru to a small tribe, many of whom still revere him?  What have you learned about the rapidly changing world of documentary filmmaking?

Jodi and I had great interest in “cults” and communes, and how society treated and often mischaracterized them. I was working on a book about The Process Church of the Final Judgment, and one day while browsing Amoeba Records I discovered a student video about The Source Family and showed it to Jodi, who on her own contacted the group, and as a result had a long-lasting connection to many ex-members. First was the book, and then Jodi and Maria’s film, which is really extraordinary. They did a great job with it.

With the white witch of Los Angeles, the glamorous Maja D’Aoust you co-authored the Secret Source in 2004, a revised edition was released this year.  The book shows how the ideas behind the fad of positive thinking unleashed by The Secret are just the latest in a long line of positive thinkers that ultimately reach back to some of the most profound, esoteric, and ancient roots of spiritual culture. It passes what I guess is the Adam acid test: does it muckrake?

There were a few things I discovered and revealed about people involved with The Secret, but the primary reason for the book was unveiling the occult beliefs in American and world history.

But the tone is sincere and frankly metaphysical. Is this the inner Adam?  Or did you adopt neutrality while traveling through yet another intriguing frontier?

It would have been easiest for me to fall back on a skeptical point of view, and disparage all metaphysical ideas as utter hogwash, but that wouldn’t have been true to my personal experiences. For example, before I took Ibogaine I would have never believed that plants had a certain intelligence and connection to human experience. Now I cannot deny that it happens. Now I see Skepticism, the kind with the capital S, as another belief system that provides comfort to many by empowering believers with the illusion that they know all. Why reduce the mystery of the Universe to ideas that can be encompassed in a 6^th grade Science class. BTW, I love Science, and have subscriptions to Science magazines.

In 2012 you published Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium, a book by a three-decade veteran magician from the Magic Castle about his career as a cold reader pretending to be a psychic. It reminds me of the popular documentary Kumare, because both pose the question can someone pretending to have spiritual insight to scam people actually do some good despite themselves?  As the author himself says, no doubt sometimes something is happening, but when you try to make a buck off it consistently it turns into pure entertainment. The Fox Sisters could have told him that a hundred years ago!

Actually the Fox Sisters found their way into Ritual America.  It intrigued me that the author of Psychic Blues didn’t reduce psychic beliefs to a total Nightmare Alley situation, but I’m also interested in the ways of those who conduct those gypsy scams, too.

Still, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t had any uncanny experiences yourself?

I have.

In 1995 in an interview in Cyberpsychos you said you believed you might be on some sort of blacklist. While magazines like Conde Nast would call you for ideas, they wouldn’t entertain the idea of simply publishing your writing. So are you blacker now more than ever?

For a couple years after Apocalypse Culture was first released, it sold well and had certain notoriety, but for some time no one wrote about it or reviewed it. Some of this, I think, had to do with an article called “Aesthetic Terrorism” which tried to draw the blinds on the scammery of Fine Art. It even named names, and you just don’t do that because a lot of people in that world controlled magazines and newspapers. I didn’t say the right things or kiss the right ass to receive media glory.

Has almost two decades of the world wide web changed the way blacklists work?

Absolutely. Prior to the web fewer people and fewer publications controlled a great deal more. Now it’s all everywhere, and even the New York Times does feature articles on Feral House publications, like the other day with a piece on Psychic Blues.

You commissioned and published Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State, before Bush won the 2000 election, before 9/11.  So you’re probably not surprised by how much more privacy and liberty have eroded under Bush and Obama?

We tend to forget what happened under the Clinton Administration, like the so-called Crime Bill, which later ushered in Bush’s Patriot Act. Both Democrats as well as Republicans are interested in building up the police state.

In 2002 you edited Extreme Islam: Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism.  You took strong stands when you published 50 Reasons Not to Vote for Bush in 2004, and then 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush.  It was a courageous choice since you were potentially inviting trouble, again.

Disliking George W. wasn’t a particularly courageous choice. Difficult not to speak out when this douchebag was our figurehead.

Last year you were involved in an interesting problem regarding the Process Media book The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, published three months before the Dervaes family, one of a handful of urban farming pioneers, decided to trademark “urban homestead.”  On Valentine’s Day you received the cease and desist letter that had been popping up in mail boxes across the nation as the Dervaes tried to sew up their control of the phrase.  Then mentions of the book began disappearing from Facebook, from Process Media’s own page!  Facebook told you they were banning the links until they heard otherwise from the owners of the trademark.  You warned the Dervaes you’d take them to court if they didn’t back down, but they didn’t back down.  Of course, I want to know what’s happened since, but also how did you feel about Facebook deciding to vanish your important book and what it says about the potential and actual pitfalls of digital culture?

The great Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken up our cause with Urban Homestead and the patent/trademark office. Hopefully this govt. organization will see that they gave a private party the ability to abuse rights to a generic common term. Thousands of backyard gardeners support our cause here, and even have their own Facebook page.

Five years ago you left Los Angeles for Port Townsend, Washington, like Gertrude Stein leaving Paris for her farmhouse, instead of salons you now entertain stayovers. I know you visit often, but what made you give up on your hometown? And what do you love best about your new hometown?

It may sound strange, but in LA I felt bombarded by issues of traffic and electromagnetic radiation, and felt better getting out to the country, where I can more easily grow food and keep a big dog and chickens. I like to get out of Port Townsend in winters particularly. I do love LA too. My past is all there, and so are many of my friends.

What new projects are you working on that you’re excited about?

I’m glad to say that my excitement level of projects that I’m working on have not receded at all.  One book coming soon is called “Dying for the Truth”… It’s primarily from the Mexican blog called blogdelnarco.com … But the book has other images and information that has not yet appeared on the blog.  The book is called “Dying for the Truth” since the journalists and citizens involved in it have been threatened and killed as a result of revealing the gruesome stark truth of what’s going on just South of the border and throughout Mexico itself.  It’s going to be particularly difficult to publish due to the insanity of the situation down there, the stacking of bodies and limbs and the bizarre dark aesthetic of the murderers. It may be the most gruesome book that’s ever been published. But we need to examine why much of Mexico and its citizens are dying.  We’re also excited about forthcoming films with scripts that I co-wrote. One is a feature film based on Lords of Chaos, and the other is a thriller of sorts based on the weirder aspects of the JFK assassination cover-up called “Dallas in Wonderland.”

You’ve seen society from so many unique and often ignored perspectives through so many changes from the hippie optimism that flourished when you were a kid to today’s rampant pessimism. Looking to the future of our country and our world what is your biggest fear and what is your biggest hope?

This a complex issue. I’m not a fan of mass movements per se; they seem to bury unorthodox thought, but I do see a need for hive-like beliefs if the human race wishes to carry on in the future. What are seven, eight, nine, ten billion humans going to do when the land and water is totally poisoned and exhausted? It may not be pretty.

Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.

Born in Texas, Brian has fond memories of growing up Methodist.  At about the age of eleven he joined his family and his church heeding Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for civil rights marches. But he also remembers other pastors warning that King was a commie, and that commies could march right on to your street, knock on your door, and cut your head off!   A few years later Brian had the experience of being swept up in the joyous celebration of being saved in evangelical churches. After that he lived first in India, then in Kenya, before settling down in Toronto as an independent historian.

Brian first authored The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History (2001), which shows that for most of history water has been the measure of civilization, and the mess we’re making of our ecology now is an old human tradition. It’s no accident that the cradles of our cultures are now deserts.  The myth of paradise lost is not a myth.  As resources become scarce coercion becomes more important than production, sound familiar?

Women, who were important when they watched after the garden, the herd and the children, lose status in a society of scarcity.   Western religion was born in the desert, and western economics was born from our religion. No wonder we still hear monotheists declaring that we should use nature up, instead of preserving it for future generations. In a world of polluted rivers and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this is one of those books everybody should have to read.  To give us hope, the book also provides examples of human beings coming to their senses and preserving instead of destroying.

Brian also wrote Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History (2008), a real eye opener about the schizophrenia of Christianity, or how does a religion of peace and poverty wind up supporting wars, wealth and power. He looks at everything from Hell to the Lord’s Prayer through these two prisms that provide very different views of the world.

Different Visions pairs nicely with the book he released the following year Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story (2009), which details exactly how Jesus got the worst make over in history as everyone from the apostles to the Roman Emperors corrected or explained away what Jesus really said to suit their own ends.  The Jesus who wanted people to think for themselves, who was non-violent, and treated women like human beings, has been twisted into all sorts of rude caricatures, many of which have had more influence on human history than the real thing.

My favorite of his books, though, is his latest A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization.  From female warlords who were also high priestesses to the poignant outhouse goddesses, two girls murdered and thrown into outhouses, who became goddesses who provide the inspirations that so famously happen when you’re indisposed. The book is a treasury of inspiration.

What inspired you to write about China’s immortal women?

That goddess book comes from having a mix-up in the head between places I’ve lived. I grew up in Texas with all the culture wars over religion and the American way. Then India, where there are a lot of goddess religions. Then Kenya, where the men are the bosses but the women are the real leaders. And finally Toronto, where everything gets mixed together.

What was it like moving from Texas to India and then Kenya?  What impacted you most about each of those places?

In India, the thing that got me most was the falling water table. All over the Deccan plateau our wells were falling at maybe a foot per year, and there were already periods at the end of the dry season when various wells went completely dry. The higher caste people didn’t want us to use their wells. Anyway, maybe there’s nothing so strangely terrifying as the prospect that even the groundwater will disappear. I thought these huge Asian countries were facing problems of the past, but I realized they are facing the problems of the future.  In Kenya, the villages were mostly female. The guys were mostly off in the cities trying to make cash, leaving the women behind to manage the farms and kids at the same time. And these people were marvelous. They were sculpting the hills into terraces to stop soil erosion, and doing group tree nurseries, covering their hills in young trees. I realized that these women were the main force holding back the desert, and their values may well save the world.

Having mostly heard about the prejudice against female children in China, I was amazed to find such a rich spiritual heritage of goddess worship in Chinese history.

In China, there are hosts of goddess traditions. The most popular deity in the land is a woman (Guanyin, or Kwan Yin), and others like Mazu have around 100 million devotees in the world. These cults are international, all over East and Southeast Asia, and spread everywhere by migrant communities or popular appeal. If we added the many goddess traditions all together, they would count as one of the biggest religions in the world. These traditions go back to the dawn of history and have been popular in every age. In China, the age of the goddess never died. I figured we could learn more about what these women and their religions have to say, about life, death, health, sexuality, partnership, spirituality, and the ultimate happiness.

Why do so few people know about the women’s spirituality of China?

Of course it’s obvious that the values and religions of Chinese women have not ruled the country. Warlord rulers had set the dominant values and religions, so that the guiding principle of Chinese civilization seemed to be blind obedience to superiors. The warlord rulers claimed to be the central objects of their people’s loyalty, the hired Confucian officials claimed to be the official spokesmen for their civilization, and the eldest males of each household claimed to be the central figures of the family. But who believed these claims? The women commonly took themselves as the central characters in their lives. They went ahead and built their own social worlds and their own versions of religion. Their religions didn’t really have state backing, and the female leaders didn’t have power over other people. They were just popular. They were not “organized religions,” just “folk religions.” They were countercultures, and maybe the greatest counterculture on earth. It’s very likely that the popular women’s countercultures been closer to most people’s hearts than the official doctrines of the rulers.

Tell us a tale you find particularly poignant.

One of my favorite stories about women’s values is about the Queen Mother of the West, Xi Wang Mu. This goddess was the chief of the shaman-women, and perhaps the most popular deity in China down to medieval times. And according to tradition, she paid a visit to the great emperor Wu around the year 110 BCE. This emperor had launched victorious wars against the barbarians, and built the might of China to rival that of Rome. He had adopted an official version of Confucianism as the state religion, in which the main moral obligation was for subjects to serve their superiors. In his political and spiritual roles, Emperor Wu would be roughly equivalent to the combined figures of Roman emperors Augustus and Constantine. To top it off, Emperor Wu claimed that the most popular goddess in the land had come to pay homage to him at his court. It was a piece of egotistical propaganda, and it was as if Emperor Charlemagne had claimed that the Virgin Mary came down from heaven to bless his rule. According to court propaganda, the Queen Mother came to offer Emperor Wu her praise, and maybe even give him her love. But according to the popular version of the story, the Queen Mother came to the emperor and said: “You were born licentious, extravagant, and violent; and you live in the midst of blood and force no matter how many Daoists you invite here in hopes of immortality, you will only wear yourself out.” Maybe that suggests something about the role of women’s religions in Chinese history.

Theatrical representation of Guan Yin, goddess of mercy.

What lessons can we learn from Chinese women’s spirituality?

I think the many female spiritual teachers in China developed a host of insights about living with authenticity, partnership, balance, harmony with nature, healthy diet, natural healing, sexuality, or inner peace. Daoist lineage founders like Wei Huacun or Cao Wenyi, or Buddhist saints like Miaoshan, or the great Tibetan teacher Yeshe Tsogyal had a tremendous influence on Chinese religion. Their spiritual practices such as Tai Chi or inner alchemy might become the new yoga in terms of popularity around the world. These teachers even developed spiritual practices specifically for women, and even more specifically for virginal women, those of childbearing age, and post-menopausal women. It was not one approach fits all.  Anyway, there’s a lot more that the counterculture of Chinese women has to offer, and I think anybody interested in a more balanced way of life should check it out.

Tell us how Raine Eisler influenced your work.

I’m a bookworm for history books, and a few writers inspired me a lot. Riane Eisler’s The Chalice & the Blade let me see a pattern in all the culture wars I’d been seeing. She showed how history is a running competition between visions and values, where the dream is either real partnership between people, or else a dominator system of proper order through a chain of command. Eisler showed how that competition played out in Western history or religion, and I saw how it applied in India and Africa as well. I got the idea of writing about the competition of partnership and dominator values in other civilizations.

Tell us about the Chinese Partnership Research Group.

In 1996, Eisler told me about a new book from China called The Chalice & the Blade in Chinese Culture that was written by a team of Chinese scholars called “the Chinese Partnership Research Group.” They basically told the story of relations between men and women in every age of China’s history, exposing tremendous detail on how the clash of cultures had worked out in China. It was great, but the book was very hard to get in the West, and it was written in a way where most Western readers would mostly get lost. The authors made too many assumptions that the readers already knew something of the events or people they were talking about.  I decided to build on this, and make a Westerner-friendly story of China’s culture wars, that would highlight the values and achievements of Chinese women, especially their religions, which were made by and for women. Because growing up in the West, I always felt that religion was a mainly male thing. All the gods, rabbis, priests and mullahs I knew were male. I heard there used to be women’s religions in the ancient past, but those were blown away as superstitious nonsense a long time ago, by whatever means necessary. So I wondered, how would women make religion if left to their own devices? And I realized the answer was staring us all in the face. The great women’s religions of India or China, or elsewhere, were standing there, popular as ever, in the modern world.

Festival of the folk goddess Mazu in modern China.

The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History is one of those books everybody should have to read.  You were born in Corpus Christi, an area hit by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Does your study of history give you any hope that we can avoid the worst-case scenario future some of our monotheist neighbors seem to think a desirable outcome for humanity?

Probably most people in the history of the world have hoped to make the land they live on richer over time. They have hoped to make the land greener and more fertile as they work it, and in many cases they have succeeded. In traditional China the village women acted like matchmakers between plants and animals, so that the fish, the rice, beans, algae, willow trees and water buffaloes all helped each other to grow. They achieved something we can call “permaculture,” where that land’s fertility was sustained over thousands of harvests. I think we need to learn from that, and get back to it. Basically, local communities can save and heal the landscape they live in, but it takes a long-range, community spirit. If we leave everything to market forces, then the market interest is always to maximize what we take over what we put back into the land in every season, till we hit the dust bowl. Saving the country will take communities, and it will take communities saying no to corporate priorities. I think people like Vandana Shiva and her village women in India are among the greatest leaders in the world on that.

Your book Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History neatly labels Christianity’s historically split personality as “partnership” and “dominator.”  The Christians who joined together to march for civil rights practiced partnership Christianity.  Their neighbors who wore hoods with the KKK after church on Sunday were dominator Christians.  Do you think partnership is the future of Christianity, or will Christians always have a dominator shadow?

Of course I got the terms “partnership” and “domination” from Riane Eisler. And Eisler showed how there was a competition between partnership and dominator visions all through the stories of the Bible, and all through our history ever since. The histories of Islam and Christianity have run pretty much parallel in that way.  And from meeting some great Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women in North America, I realized that women commonly have their own versions of their seemingly male-controlled religions. They tend to ask their own questions and give their own answers. Rather than asking, “What does the ultimate authority require?” they tend to ask, “How good can our relations with others get?” In other words, women have tended to ask partnership questions rather than dominator questions. Of course lots of men want partnership answers to life as well, since experience shows how much better that can be.  So I think women’s influence and partnership values are on the rise in all religions, and we’re going to see more options for balance and wholeness. Maybe even Christianity and Islam can achieve a balance of yin and yang. But as always, some people freely want domination. They flock to authoritarian leaders of the Muslim or Christian worlds, who will tell them just what to do because they don’t want to risk making mistakes, and they want infallible guidance from a superhuman authority. People will always be able to choose what they want most in life. Some will want a strong authority to obey, and others dream of better relations between free and equal people.

In your book Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story you have a chapter called “Correcting Respect for Women.”  What can you tell us about why Christian politicians in American in 2012 would be pursuing an agenda that has been called “the war on women?”

Well, if your main religious question in life is “Who’s the boss?” then issues of who ranks higher than who will seem to be crucial values questions. And when people argue for their own people being on top, they know to make it seem like a question of what’s good for everybody. In terms of racial segregation they said it was better for black people themselves if they were separate. In terms of superpower status, they’ll say that either the good guys stay on top, or else it will be the bad guys. And they’ll say it’s best for women themselves if they stick to traditional female roles, with the traditional powers that go with that. There’s still a sense in Christian history that compassion is for women, and it’s not a manly thing. For example, James Dobson, a founder of “Focus on the Family,” wrote an article called “Gender Gap?” which listed “the countless physiological and emotional differences between the sexes.” Perhaps most importantly, Dobson explained that for women, love is a primary need and a “life-blood,” while men have less need for love. And it seemed clear to Dobson that this made men more fit to serve as Christian leaders. Compassion seemed an effeminate virtue, which rendered women unfit for leadership. And of course this is close to the strangest twist you could possibly put on what Jesus’ taught.

Written by Tamra Spivey

Newtopia staff writer TAMRA SPIVEY is a founding member and primary singer of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War and Exile Nation, and associate producer of The Gits documentary. She was art editor and west coast editor of Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation, collaborating on in depth interviews with whistle blower Michael Ruppert, ACLU and record business honcho Danny Goldberg, and grassroots political strategist Larry Tramutola. Follow her on twitter @MongrelPatriot.