We got some local coverage.
(there’s a paywall)
front page
Summer arts commune expected in Moscow -
(there’s a paywall)
Lookie here real tangible material Summer Commune postcards!
Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? -
But here’s what I believe it might just be called tomorrow, when the history books have been written, and the debates concluded: a Eudaimonic Revolution. A sweeping, historic transformation in what we imagine a good life to be, and how, why, where, and when we pursue it.
“Renters are experiencing especially tough times of late: At the same time that renters’ incomes have fallen 4%, money spent on housing has increased by 4%.” —
(Source: TIME)
The post that generated initial interest in Summer Commune from all the way back in June 10, 2011.
I was thinking about getting like one hundred cool young people to move to a small North American city for the summer. Move from Echo Park, Bushwick, The Mission, Wicker Park, Capitol Hill, or which ever neighborhood you are paying too much to live in to a designated locale. It’d be like a summer camp, but with more wine and potlucks.
You could use this time to save money while you: write your novel, record your album, postulate on 5th wave feminism, learn to grow food, practice sustainability, have fun, etc. I think we need to find a place that’s affordable, warm, close to nature, has a (small existing) community of sympathetic residents.
Is anybody interested? Does anyone want to join an exploratory committee on this idea? I am serious. Last year I said I’d be in Europe in 2011. I am writing this from London.
Here are some potential slogans: Occupy middle America. Gentrify the Midwest.
e-mail me joshuaheller [at] gmail.com
Hey remember that band you’ve been talking about starting since, like, college? Well Nathan has offered his home recording and editing studio to Summer Communers!
With Audiophile 192 24-bit/192kHz Audio Interface, a 49-key Axiom controller, a Trigger Finger controller, Live 8, Reason 5, and a studio mic. Yep.
Dear friend,
I’ve been burning to tell you this, with the hopes that you will hear your own story in what I say and then you’ll skip off into the sunshine puppy rainbow of love with me.
On paper, I am successful. I’m a graphic designer for a cool techy startup in Silicon Valley, I live in San Francisco, I regularly hang at NASA with really smart people. I have an iPhone and a pretty great vintage leather jacket, sometimes I play in a band.
But if you asked me, I’d have a totally different view. I am 30 years old, I have a job that doesn’t have any meaning or impact, I am in 6-figure debt for college and grad school, I have very poor parents, I own nothing, I worry about the future and I have no idea what I am doing with my life.
One day a few weeks ago, I was driving home from my boring job, and I was stressing out over making my grad school loan payments (they are 3 times my rent) and whether I could survive until my next check, and whether I would have time that evening to finish the moonlit freelance work I was doing to pay off the $1500 in taxes I owed…from being a freelancer. Heady shit! And then suddenly, somewhere in the back of my head a voice that seemed not quite like my own said
.
—and I physically felt all the stress leave my body, and I had this preternatural knowledge that everything was, in a very fundamental way, going to be okay. It wasn’t optimism that I’d find the money or that I’d find a job I could keep or that I’d buy my parents a house finally, because optimism is a coping mechanism for the stress that happens when your basic dreams and desires are on the line. This wasn’t optimism—it was peace. And the reason I experienced it (I was to figure this out later) was because at that moment I realized that the only peace I would ever know is the peace I made for myself.
I’ve been a restless spirit for a long time. I’ve had over 40 jobs in my 30 years here. Even in school, I’ve had 5 majors for only 2 degrees. I do new things and when I figure them out I get bored and look for a new challenge. Nothing can sustain me. I mean, I really wanted to be a ballerina as a kid, but then I stopped growing at 5’2” and the Boston Ballet wasn’t having it. It’s really been downhill ever since.
Anyway. If you have student debt, and a job you don’t like that kills you, and bills you can’t pay and a future that’s so fucking fuzzy and distant that it’s a bitter joke you share with your friends, then maybe I can help. I hear this same litany of misery from close friends and strangers so often that it feels like I must be listening for it. Like when you try not to think of your ex and then it’s all you can think about.
Well I want you to know that you are free, and that another world is possible.
The way I try to explain it is this: imagine that everything you know about the world—how to live and succeed in it, what its values are, what your worth is, how you are to treat others, the “system”, the “man” whatever you call it—all those things are a giant ROCK that everybody lives in. So, to make a change, we don’t need to destroy the rock; we just need to pitch a tent somewhere near it, make an awesome campfire, and maybe those who are stuck inside the rock, looking out for another way of life, will see our light and come over. From our metaphorical nature-y campfire party, we can watch the system destroy itself. It doesn’t need us to destroy it.
(In a more academic way, what I’m trying to say is that capitalist ideology does not posses the language [nor the imagination] to create a world outside of itself. Everything must reference its value system of productivity or profit, including ‘alternative lifestyles’—just think about that language! It implies “an alternative to X” where X can be any facet of capitalist society, therefore, still in the same framework. Does that makes sense? So what I’m proposing is not an alternative lifestyle per se, but a world that we must actively IMAGINE into existence outside of anything we were exposed to growing up. That’s hard! I believe it was best described as “be the change you wish to see in the world.” Dude. I know. Our models for self-sustaining communities are disappearing rapidly; perhaps even our children will never know anything outside of Western civilization, can you imagine that?)
This idea, it turns out, kind of pisses people off. The ones who have worked so hard, and who are working hard now, the ones who still buy into the system and hope it will work for them. Everybody tries to reason against the message that THEY ARE FREE. They’ve reasoned with me that it’s irresponsible, that I should change the system from the inside, that I am turning into a hippie (totally true, by the byyyyy) or they’re angry that I took out loans for school but refuse to be enslaved by them (that’s what you call paying back more than you can possibly afford to pay, for 25 years). Yet, the master plan we’ve been indoctrinated into leads many more people to misery and poverty and destruction than to prosperity. (It did so under the guise of communism for my parents, too, in case you’re about to cry liberal epithets.) I think that if we peer quietly behind our individual fear of “failure”, we’ve known all along that things aren’t right. Here’s the thing: YOU DON’T HAVE TO FIX IT. You can’t put a bandaid on a fire hydrant, y’all. All you can do, and all you have to do, is live lightly on the earth, in a community of similar values. That’s love guys, that’s the answer to capitalism. *dies a thousand treehugging deaths*
And what does this have to do with Summer Commune? I believe that Summer Commune expresses a new kind of consciousness that we can hardly articulate, that we barely dare to imagine. It’s just a small gesture of people trying something new. But it will create a fissure in what people believe is possible. For me, if I can convince even one person that giving this a shot is more important than worrying about bills, and that their life is more than the measure of their productive capacity, then I will know that anything is possible.
Love,
Sofya
“Online is a revolution. The Internet is a revolution. And we should be revolutionary in the content that we put on it, rather than derivative. And rather than mimic the shit of TV and make it worse, let’s say ‘fuck it.’ The Internet isn’t TV, it’s different, it’s better. Let’s make content that young people actually give a shit about.” —
(via heller)