An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Literary Labyrinth of Stephen T. Vessels
Posted on November 27, 2022 | No Comments - Indigenous Voices from the Northeast: Past, Present and Future
Posted on November 26, 2022 | 1 Comment - Microplastics Are Everywhere: What’s The Risk?
Posted on November 22, 2022 | No Comments - Solving the Climate Crisis Through Global Soil Health with Didi Pershouse
Posted on November 20, 2022 | No Comments - Visionary Art of Lakota Sundance Chief Marvin Swallow
Posted on November 14, 2022 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
documentary Archive
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Buckminster Fuller’s World of Sustainable Design
Posted on July 27, 2014 | 2 CommentsBuckminster Fuller, architect, engineer, geometrician, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, put forth an original form of sustainable living for humanity. He posited that systems thinking helps us understand our connectedness and dependence on our local biome. Watch the 1974 film "The World of R. Buckminster Fuller." -
“The Great Invisible” Surveys Deepwater Horizon’s Impacts
Posted on March 17, 2014 | 2 Comments"The Great Invisible," the winning documentary at the South By Southwest film festival, tracks how everyone from wealthy oilmen to impoverished fishermen were affected in the Deepwater Horizon aftermath, the Transocean-owned, BP-operated oil drilling rig, that exploded 50 miles off the Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010. -
Climate Change: Marching for a Future in Los Angeles
Posted on March 15, 2014 | No CommentsCarrie Lederer of Carrier Pigeon Films captured the zeitgeist of the March 1st launch of the Great March for Climate Action, heading 3,000 miles to Washington DC over eight months. -
Banksy: Satirical Outlaw, Graffiti Bomber, Mockumentarian
Posted on February 10, 2014 | 3 CommentsHiding in the back alleys and behind a hoodie, he stencils freehand Gorillas in Pink Masks. An international art sensation makes a film about making a film about a guy who wants to become an international art sensation. The pseudonymous street artist Banksy has turned his well-marketed cultural irreverence into a boom time in the discontent industry. -
Pamparios: A Trip with the Huicholes to Collect Peyote
Posted on December 16, 2013 | 6 CommentsWatch the full documentary on the Huichol journey to Wirikuta, where they travel every year to collect peyote. The pilgrimage take place with the intention to return to where life originated and heal oneself and the community. -
Dogtown Redemption: Urban Poor Survive By Recycling
Posted on December 1, 2013 | No CommentsA documentary film, "Dogtown Redemption," delves inside the lives of West Oakland's poor and homeless recyclers. While California must deal with its urban poverty problem, and rogue recyclers steal from recycling funds, overall the state's Bottle Bill has significantly reduced waste. -
Welcome to Loliondo: Maasai Struggle Against Game Hunters for Land Rights
Posted on November 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA), one of Tanzania’s most well-known Maasai community concessions and wildlife destinations, is in the spotlight as local stakeholders and outside financial interests clash over its natural resources. Watch "Welcome to Loliondo," a documentary on how the Maasai confront the threat of safari tourism taking away their land. -
Argentina: The Second Conquest of Patagonia’s Indigenous
Posted on September 29, 2013 | No CommentsDocumentary film on indigenous communities in Chubut province in Patagonia, Argentina, their struggle over land rights and the threats from mining its mineral wealth, cutting its trees and development by other multinational interests. -
Legong Film: Balinese Dream Dance of Nymphs in Heaven
Posted on August 17, 2013 | No CommentsFilm and music of shimmering yet jarring beauty play together on a South Seas beach in "Legong: Dance of the Virgins." It's a rarely screened 1935 silent movie, shot entirely in Bali with a Balinese cast, mixed with a new score by Club Foot Orchestra and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Presented in a crude but rich two-strip early Technicolor process, one of the last silent films made by Hollywood, it depicts Bali as Westerners idealized it at the time. -
Ayahuasca: Fake Shamans and The Divine Vine of Immortality
Posted on July 18, 2013 | 8 CommentsEvery day, more and more tourists arrive in Iquitos, Peru, seeking spiritual enlightenment or a psychedelic experience first made popular by William Burroughs and the Beatniks in the 1960s. Unfortunately, some well-paid "shamans" lack the experience or understanding of the powerful and sacred botanical brews used for thousands of years for healing and divination. And the gringos-on-holiday often get over their heads in the wilds of the Amazon. -
Sharkwater: Sea Shepherd Battles Shark-fin Poachers in the Pacific
Posted on July 15, 2013 | 1 CommentRob Stewart's beautifully shot documentary "Sharkwater," set in the Galapagos and Isla del Coco of the Pacific Ocean, refutes those who vilify the shark as a killer of humans, insisting they do not wish to eat us. He also films Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson's attack on the Costa Rican shark fin poachers, which has led to international charges for the famous defender of the sea. -
Diane Arbus: A Privileged Voyeur of Life on the Margins
Posted on June 17, 2013 | 1 CommentIt's been 42 years since the troubled US photographer took her own life, but her images continue to reveal the camera's predatory nature. Watch a documentary made in 1972 that examines her photography and her methods. -
Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
Posted on May 19, 2013 | 2 CommentsIn 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961, finally distributed in his native land the book promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now, the "controversies" dominate his legacy, including issues of censorship, obscenity, misogyny and anti-Semitism, clouding the import of Henry Miller's words. "Tropic of Cancer" broke literary ground, mixing novelistic forms with autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, and surrealist free association. -
Haitian Vodou: Summoning the Spirits
Posted on April 30, 2013 | 2 CommentsLike several West African religions, Vodouisants believe in a supreme being called Bondyè, from bon "good" + dyè "God." Because Bondyè is unreachable, Vodouisants aim their prayers to lesser entities, the spirits known as Lwa (Loa), contacted and served through possession. In turn, the Lwa confer material blessings, physical well-being, protection, abundance. -
Overcoming Cultural Colonialism: Journey to Understand “Ikland”
Posted on January 12, 2013 | 2 CommentsIkland recounts a quest to re-connect with the Ik people. For producer Cevin Soling, they represented the last outpost of imagination in a world devoid of myth. Soling and his crew risked their lives by traveling through war-ravaged northern Uganda to reach them. Their experience was alien and surreal in ways only Jonathan Swift might have imagined... -
Who Bombed Earth First! Organizer Judi Bari?
Posted on November 29, 2012 | No CommentsOscar-entry documentary chronicles the unsolved mystery of the car bombing of Old-Growth Forests Activists and their later arrest by the FBI for their own injuries. The film also illustrates the Redwood Summer movement to save the Headwaters Forest of Northern California and Judi Bari's victorious 1st Amendment lawsuit. -
Midway Atoll: The Plastic Plight of the Albatross
Posted on October 9, 2012 | 28 CommentsA short film follows artist Chris Jordan to investigate the thousands of albatrosses dying from ingestion of plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. The Albatross journey across the sea takes them over the world’s largest dump: slowly rotating masses of partially-submerged trash between San Francisco and Hawai’i. -
Edward Abbey: A Solitary Voice in the Wilderness
Posted on October 5, 2012 | 7 CommentsThe Monkey Wrench Gang is the wish-fulfilment dream of eco-Luddites everywhere. Civilisation violates the land, so Hayduke ("a good, healthy psychopath") and his pals violate civilization. -
Federico Fellini: Intuitive Visual Art
Posted on October 3, 2012 | 4 CommentsFellini in the 1969 experimental documentary on US television opines on his Felliniesque creative process: "I think almost exclusively in images, which explains why an actor's face and body are more important to me than plot structure . . . . The key word to understanding my kind of cinema is vitality. What I seek is to live the expression itself." -
Food Labeling Monsanto’s War on Life
Posted on September 23, 2012 | 1 CommentYou are what you eat...but what if you don't know what you are eating? This November, Californians will vote on "the right to know" what is being eaten. As well, "The World According to Monsanto" looks at the risks of biotechnology to our environment and food supply. -
Detropia: Detroit as Utopia or Dystopia?
Posted on September 18, 2012 | 3 CommentsCaroline Libresco: DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. -
Stories of a Maya Rebirth: Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth
Posted on September 8, 2012 | 1 CommentThe documentary "Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth" presents an alternative worldview to industrial capitalism consuming the earth, following six young Maya into their daily and ceremonial life, revealing their determination to resist the destruction of their culture and environment. -
Dirty Realism: The Anti-Social Satire of Charles Bukowski
Posted on August 18, 2012 | 4 CommentsI go outside - and all up and down the street - the green armies shoot color - like an everlasting 4th of July, - and I too seem to swell inside, - a kind of unknown bursting, - a feeling, perhaps, that there isn't any - enemy - anywhere -
Gonzovision 1970s: Hunter S. Thompson on the American Dream
Posted on August 11, 2012 | 1 Comment"America could have been a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race. Instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails. Everybody wants power over a country that's had it's day." -
Jack Kerouac’s Lowell Blues: Cast-off Boots of Time
Posted on July 1, 2012 | 2 CommentsJack Kerouac wrote in 1950: “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America–for reasons which are never deeper than the music. Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of a country.”
