Cohousing-L Mailing List: Tonight in SF: Communes, the Commons and Utopia: A Conversation w/Iain Boal (CIIS) (CA)

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

Social historian Iain Boal, co-editor of West of Eden: Communes and
Utopia in Northern California (hot off the presses - published just
last month by local radical-alternative house PM Press), speaks with
broadcaster Sasha Lilley about efforts to build utopia in the here and
now, drawing on the rich history of Northern California commoning and
communes, both urban and rural. West of Eden is an act of reclamation,
intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find, in the
rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use-indeed one they
will need-in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism
to an ample life in common.

[ I just spotted this event in the paper today and thought it could be
relevant to area cohousers' efforts to build a shared vision of our
own utopian communities in the Bay Area. Perhaps see some of you there
tonight? It's near Civic Center subway station. Let's learn from the
past so we don't have to make the same mistakes -- we can come up with
new ones all our own! -- Raines ]

This event is part of the "Dialogues and Interrogations" series,
hosted by Sasha Lilley (host of KPFA's Against the Grain).

Organized by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at CIIS.

Location: Room 607, CIIS Main Building, 1453 Mission St. in San Francisco, CA

"The counterculture -- from the North Beach Parnassus to the
underground press-and 'the Movement' -- from Marxists to anarchists --
all of it depended on a magnificent base, and here it is described,
magnificently: the [Black Panther Party's] Oakland breakfast program,
the [American Indian] Alcatraz occupation, the Mime troupe, and pot
farms, the communes, the collectives, the co-ops of California during
the 1960s... With roots in previous decades of struggle by trade
unions, ethnic enclaves, religious breakaways, and nineteenth-century
dreams, and with branches in the lore of our own contemporary
foodways, child-rearing practices, decision-making and meeting
protocols, sexual politics, and DIY culture, the California communards
cleared the path. Both veterans and young folk, grey hairs and newbies
will find beautiful memoire, authentic experience, and brilliant
analysis in these pages West of Eden."

-Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto

"As a gray army of undertakers gather in Sacramento to bury
California's great dreams of equality and justice, this wonderful
book, with its faith in the continuity of our state's
radical-communitarian ethic, replants the seedbeds of defiant
imagination and hopeful resistance." -Mike Davis, author of City of
Quartz and Magical Urbanism

"Utopias-we can't live without them, nor within them, for long. In
West of Eden we see California, an earthly utopia, and the Sixties, a
utopian moment, in full flower. Brave souls creating a heavenly host
of communal spaces on the edge of America, hoping to break free of a
world of capital, sexism, oligarchy, race. An amazing place and time
that, for all its failures, changed the world-and which finally gets
its due in this marvelous collection." -Richard Walker, UC Berkeley,
author of The Country in The City (and my favorite Geography professor
-- Raines)

About Iain Boal
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science and technics,
affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley and Birkbeck
College, London. He is associated with the Retort group, and is one of
the co-authors of Retort's Afflicted Power: Capital and Spectacle in a
New Age of War (Verso). He co-edited with James Brook Resisting the
Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights),
and is author of The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions), a brief
planetary history of the bicycle.

Optional RSVP to link with other East Bay Cohousing folks going there:
http://www.ebcoho.org/events/59397482/

Main event page:
http://www.ciis.edu/News_and_Events/Event_Calendar/Communes_the_Commons_and_Utopia.html