Clearly Kabouter: Chronicle of a Radical Dutch Movement, 1969-1974, by Coen Tasman
Price: $24.95
“With Coen Tasman’s Clearly Kabouter: Chronicle of the Dutch Counterculture, Autonomedia adds yet another valuable publication to its series on the history of Holland’s radical ‘mythical’ era (between 1965 and 1974). From the Provo Movement and the artists and freethinkers who launched the Assault on the Impossible, we turn here to the countercultural Kabouter Movement. Coen Tasman offers us an authentic account of the collective effort to create a greener car-free city center, shops with pesticide-free food, resistance to the developer-generated housing shortage, and many other innovative ideas that came to public attention in exuberantly playful ways, both within and outside the City Council. The Kabouter Movement’s legacy remains highly relevant today.” — Annemarie de Wildt, curator, The Amsterdam Museum“The essential sourcebook for all Kabouterphiles past, present and future, finally translated into English by Jordan Zinovich!” — Ron Sakolsky, author, Dreams of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams: Adventures at the Crossroads of Anarchy & Surrealism
“Coen Tasman gives us a first-hand account of a unique and daring attempt to create a joyful society. The Kabouter Movement mushroomed half a century ago in the Netherlands and its spores are now more pertinent than ever.” — Hans Plomp, founding squatter of Amsterdam’s Ruigoord Cultural Free Port
“As a cultural critic of sorts, I find that my writings often concentrate almost exclusively on negative critique. Not so for this exploration of the Kabouter Movement! Coen Tasman’s Clearly Kabouter documents gnomish dances in hallowed Amsterdam streets. In response to the old Cherneschevskian question (What Is To Be Done?), it guides us to the mycelium that will power future clashes with Miserabilism. Break out the nose flutes. All Power to the Nature Spirits of the True Revolution!” — Hakim Bey, author, TAZ
Ten Little Anarchists, A Novel, by Daniel de Roulet
Price: $14.95
Switzerland, in the late 19th century. In the village of Saint-Imier, residents live between misery and exploitation, between ancient stables and a watch industry still in its infancy. Then a visit from Mikhail Bakunin, full of the ardor of the recent Paris Commune, awakens the idea that another life is possible. Ten young women make the crazy bet to build, on the other side of the world, a community where “pure anarchy” would reign. Valentine, the last survivor of the “ten little anarchists,” narrates for us the story of this utopia, in action which takes them from Switzerland to Patagonia to Buenos Aires, via the island of Robinson Crusoe.Based on actual historical events, this is the extraordinary epic of women united by a fierce love of freedom, who chose to “rejoice in the unexpected without losing the strength to rebel.”
Ruminations, by Kirkpatrick Sale
Price: $13.95
“I was born at a time when humans were demonstrating their ability to fashion and use weapons of destruction and death and were not averse to using them on nature and all of its species, including their fellow creatures. I grew up at a time when it became clear that in fact humans were on a path to cause the fundamental altering of the planet, or what a new word invented then called ‘ecocide.’ And halfway through my life the world realized that ecocide was shockingly near at hand, through human causes, and that civilization itself was the culprit.”“Kirkpatrick Sale is one of those writers whose pen will always set the imagination alight regardless of his topic.” — Fourth World Review
“The author’s lucid, rigorous prose is a delight, whether he is narrating perilous passages… or steering us through the hazards of learned disputes.” — The New Yorker
“His topics of concern are broad and expansive, just as they always bring the reader back to basic valuing of community, nature and sustainability. Honest, forthright, and so clear in his perception that you can’t help but be affected by them.” — Chellis Glendinning
“Sale is an invaluable guide and teacher.” — The Economist
“Work of haunting attraction, of splendid magnitude, illuminating scholarship, and compelling strength of imagination. I find it a stunning achievement.” — Jospeh Heller
“If it’s radical and leading edge, Sale probably wrote about it sooner and better than anyone else.” — Utne Reader
The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground 1961-1991, by Kaspar Opstrup
Price: $24.95
A counterculture history of art and experimental politics that turns the world inside out.The Way Out examines the radical political and hedonist imaginaries of the experimental fringes of the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991 By examining the relations between collective and collaborative practices with an explicit agenda of cultural revolution, Kasper Opstrup charts a hidden history of experiments with cultural engineering, expanding current discussions of art, medias, politics, radical education and the occult revival. Even though the theatres of operation have changed with the rise of the Internet and a globalised finance economy, these imaginaries still raise questions that speak directly to the present.
Here we encounter a series of figures – including Alexander Trocchi, R. D. Laing, Joseph Berke, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge – that blurred the lines between inner and outer, the invisible and the material. Four singular forms of speculative techniques for igniting an invisible insurrection with cultural means make up the central case studies: the sigma project, London Anti-University, Academy 23 and thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.
Contained within these imaginaries is a new type of action university: a communal affair that would improvise a new type of social relation into existence by de-programming and de-conditioning us without any blueprints for the future besides to make it happen. Instead of being turned upside down, the world was to be changed from the inside out.
Bio: Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher of radical culture, specialising in concatenations of art/literature, radical politics, and occultism as counter-culture and underground phenomenon. Currently he is working on a book examining aesthetic undercurrents of mystical utopianism from surrealism to the contemporary tentatively called An Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real – on Art, Esotericism and the Politics of Hope.
Out of the Clear, by Erin Manning
Price: $23.00
Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movement-tendencies before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start writing. Clearing’s best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of any tangle. The motif of the clearing weaves through Out of the Clear, a book written in the first year of the 3Ecologies project’s land-based site....
Read more about: Out of the Clear, by Erin Manning »Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Roadblocks
Price: $23.00
In 2001 a mass popular uprising overthrew the neoliberal government in Argentina: thousands upon thousands of people, both in organizations and on their own, took to the streets, defying the government’s curfew, shouting “they all must go” until the president was forced to flee by helicopter. The uprising, a response to years of economic and political crisis, cannot be understood without understanding the broader ecology of movements and what Colectivo Situaciones defined as “new social protagonists”: the unemployed blockading highways, neighborhood residents coming together in assemblies, vast segments of the country surviving through alternative currencies and barter networks. This work, translated into English for the first time, brings together the conversations and theorizations of two key participants in that environment: militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Movement of Unemployed Workers of Solano. The encounter and writing in common constituted a formidable experience for all those who participated, bringing to life a novel form of relation between thinking and doing,...
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