The following is too delicious to resist. In Rapid Evolution, I wrote about the importance of finding your community. This takes community one step further. So, with credit to NYC’s Neal Goldsmith, I am posting his email with very little editing:
Intentional-but-temporary communities, such as music and art festivals, can be incubators of new ways to live together as a society. What can experimental utopias tell us about ideal society - and about how to implement and test our grand hypotheses of civilization?
NYC’s Poetry Science group will present a July evening with the midwife of magical gatherings, producer of large, under-the-radar-screen events, adventurer and entrepreneur, Kevin Balktick, on creating the future of society, one event at a time.
(Kevin Balktick’s) “Creative Communities and Temporary Utopias is a four-year journey of personal development and adventure through creative event communities in New York City.
Kevin will describe how to get away with un-permitted street parades for thousands of people, convince churches to let you hold symposia on psychedelic drugs and fictitious gay wedding parties, attract a thousand people to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere without advertising, take over sports complexes and small islands for artistic purposes, turn the Manhattan Bridge anchorage tunnel into temporary autonomous zones, use derelict buildings on the Gowanus Canal for renegade poetry readings, spend New Years Eve in jail, and realize other feats of imagination, risk, genius, foolishness and hard work.
“The aforementioned escapades will be neatly woven into the history and future of art, culture and community, in order to illustrate how such shared experiences of joy and sometimes insanity are essential for the development of a better society.”
“From 2006-2008, Kevin was the producer of Decompression, New York City’s annual 3,000-person Burning Man community gathering and multimedia art exhibition, now in its ninth year. He is a co-founder and ombudsman of FIGMENT, a free weekend-long participatory arts event held on Governors Island every summer. In 2009, over 13,000 people attended and over 600 artists participated.”
In the “fly-over-zone” of Colorado, another party is gearing up. Mid-August the City of Boulder launches TheHillFlea.com as another way to build community on a city-wide scale. The 10-week Sunday event will be an artful blend of performance, arts, music, re-skilling workshops, philosopher’s roundtable, non-profit connections, and flea market.