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?
Next Thursday, Poetry Science will present an evening with the midwife of magical gatherings, producer of large, under-the-radar-screen events, adventurer and entrepreneur, Kevin Balktick, who will share with us his view that, like TM, when done on a massive scale, partying can transform the world.
(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."
West of NYC … in the “fly-over zone” called Colorado, entertainment diva Hillary Griffith has gained city support for a 10-week Sunday-on The-Hill party: TheHillFlea.com – Beginning mid-August, the City of Boulder is sponsoring an on-going party that includes performers, art, education, single focus flea market (furniture, one Sunday, housewares the next…music and musical instruments the third week, etc). The Hill Flea will be a zero-waste zone, also funded by the city. That means all waste will be separated on-site for future recycling or composting.
How well do you party? In community? Please share your ideas for others here.
Since you mentioned it, Alexia, there was a large assembly of more than 7,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program (approximately the square root of 1% of the world's population) from 17 December 1983 to 6 January 1984 to create the Global Maharishi Effect, effect of improving trends and social indicators in society, thus creating a strong influence of harmony and positivity, named after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who predicted this effect, and give the world a sample