Plutopia News Network

Plutopian Maggie Duval interviews author, philosopher, and Burning Man champion Caveat Magister, in a wide-raging discussion about turning your life into art. Scoop and Jon are also on board in this conversation originally presented on the Plutopia Livestream. We discuss psychomagical experiences (a term first coined by Alejandro Jodorowsky), immersive art, how to engage and move the psyche, the role of magic and symbolism, the need for meaningful choice, and authentic engagement with the world.

Caveat is Burning Man’s Philosopher Laureate. A founding member of its Philosophical Center, he is the author of The Scene That Became Cities: what Burning Man philosophy can teach us about building better communities, and Turn Your Life Into Art: lessons in Psychologic from the San Francisco Underground. He has also written several books which have nothing to do with Burning Man.

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Last week Jon, while spending some time at SXSW 2022, took time to discuss the festival past and present with Scoop. We also took time to ponder Russia’s war on Ukraine 6,000 miles away.

Jon: The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has been sort of put up or shut up for people. There was a vote in Congress, I think for calling off U.S. trade [relations] with Russia. They were going to pass a law to that effect, and it passed almost unanimously. But there were eight people who voted against it. And those were all Republicans, and they were what we sometimes refer to as Putin Republicans, the far right wing people. People like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert – and, unfortunately, my representative in Congress, Chip Roy, was one of those people.

Scoop: You know, the whole thing is that suddenly we have some bipartisanship, and I think that’s scaring a lot of the Republicans, seeing that there are places where the Democrats and the Republicans kind of have to agree, to band together and show a united front, because it’s suddenly wartime. You know, it’s not us at war – but it kind of is. We’re trying to keep a nation in Eastern Europe afloat, and Russia is trying to sink them. So that’s kind of warfare, and that’s what happened in World War II. There was a lot of dissension between the Republicans and Democrats before World War II – but when war broke out, they kinda had to all band together.

Here’s a trailer for “THE MOJO MANIFESTO: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon,” the Mojo Nixon documentary screened at SXSW and mentioned in this week’s episode.

Meow Wolf at SXSW 2022, via KVUE:

(Here’s the link; the video is restricted.)

Also from KVUE: The Banksy Experience at SXSW 2022:

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Michael Tobis is a climate scientist and software developer based in Ottawa, Canada. Michael has joined us twice before to discuss climate change. In this episode, he joins Plutopians to give us his Canadian perspective on the recent trucker protest in Ottawa, Putin’s quest for power, the two party electoral system, nutty politicians, climate change, and the Texas electrical grid collapse.

About the trucker thing is, you ask yourself, “Why would you occupy Ottawa in January, I mean, what kind of crazy-ass thing is that to do?” This is a place which has serious winter. And it was a big logistic problem for them, they had to stay warm, they had to get a lot of propane. And they were miserable and uncomfortable a lot of the time. We actually had a pretty bad winter, global warming notwithstanding. And why are they doing it in January? If they had waited for spring, there wouldn’t be any mandates to protest.

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In this episode, Jon and Scoop discuss the subjects that have been keeping them awake at night, or irritating them during the day. We dissect medical care and doctor-patient involvement, news sources and newspapers, conflicted conservatives, nuclear war, and vegans vs. carnivores.

Scoop: “You really have to be a partner in your care. I’ve been an inpatient a few times, and I’ve always wanted to know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And you have a right as a human being to know that stuff. You’re not just checking into the hospital and saying, “Here’s my body, do what you want.” No. You need to ask questions, and you need to wait until you get the answers that tell you exactly what they’re going to do to your body.”

Jon: “Healthcare professionals should see the patient as part of the healthcare team. And when you do that, everything goes much better, generally speaking. Sometimes people aren’t really up to being part of the team, but in general, the patient knows the patient’s body and condition better than anybody, because they’re having the experience. They can contribute to the discussions parts that would otherwise be missed.”

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Kevin Driscoll is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. His research involves alternative histories of the internet, the politics of amateur telecommunications, and the moral economy of consumer software. In this episode, we discuss the history of the Internet, media’s impact upon popular culture, and much more. Kevin is author of The Modem World, which explores how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future.

Kevin Driscoll:

Before we really start any work in the class, I give out a very simple survey to students, it’s just a few questions. It says “What is the Internet?” “Where did it come from?” and “How do you know that?” We use that as a launching point for the class. And it’s remarkable, the kinds of answers that you get, because like you’re saying, they do shift over time. Everyone has this notion of what the Internet is, but it’s very unstable. In a way, the definitions are always being argued out, so that’s a really interesting place to get into, if if you’re trying to do reesearch… which is, “Here’s the thing everybody talks about in a casual way. We all are on the same page.” But in fact, when you scratch at it just a little bit, you find out that there’s a lot of disagreement, and that disagreement is then tied to power and politics and cultural values, and things like that, that are really compelling in a bigger picture sort of way.

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Net.activist, lapsed journalist, and content designer Todd Lappin joins Plutopians to discuss free speech, the Communications Decency Act, control of misinformation, his work at Wired Magazine, Facebook and the Metaverse, his tiny fire truck, and much more. Todd has for 30 years been fascinated by the Internet, its potential, and the impact it has on society and our lives. Starting as as editor at Wired Magazine in the 1990s, and most recently as a content designer at Facebook and Instagram, Todd has an inside perspective on the ways digital media reshaped our world — mostly, but not always, for the better. On the side, he also has a background in media history, the history of technology, the culture of both China and Japan, and a very deep, very geeky interest in transportation, infrastructure, and Japanese fire trucks.

“Essentially Congress passed a law, and President Clinton signed it – I think Clinton signed it not so much because he wanted to sign that, per se, but because he wanted to pass the broader Telecommunications Act and this happened to be stuck onto it. Which basically said that that kind of speech would not be allowed on the Internet. That was obviously a huge problem. And suddenly I found myself kind of playing an activist role, trying to basically raise the alarm about this. And my thinking at the time was that I would primarily focus on essentially trying to educate journalists. Because one of the most disappointing things that I found – by the way, hopefully we’ll get to this at some point, this hasn’t changed at all – it turns out that journalists have some of the most hazy and ill-formed understandings of free speech of any cohort I’ve encountered.”

Instagram: @telstarlogistics

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Gary Gach is an author, translator, editor, teacher and poet with a lifelong interest in Buddhism and meditation. He is the author of several books, including Pause, Breathe, Smile. Gary joined Jon and Scoop to talk about the life and work of Thich Nhat Hanh, who died on January 22nd. Hanh was a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, poet, teacher, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition. He’s recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism. Gary recalls his introduction to Hanh, and outlines his impact upon Buddhism. In this context, we also discuss the practice of mindfulness and the appearance and evolution of engaged Buddhism.

Gary Gach: “He was born in Vietnam. He went to live in a monastery at an early age. But this is kind of the beginning of modernism coming to Vietnam. He was one of the first of six monks to ride a bicycle, so he always had this kind of progressive viewpoint. Vietnam, as we know, had French occupation, then the American. And when he was a monk at one point he looked at everybody in the monastery and said, ‘You know, we could stay in the monastery, or we could go out and help the villagers. Or we could do both.'”

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Lex Pelger is a writer, scientist & lecturer on cannabis, psychedelics & the endocannabinoid system. Erik Davis has called him “a warrior of the weird.”

Lex Pelger: “It was only racism that drove the war on drugs from its very beginning. The very first anti-drug laws were anti-opium laws against the Chinese in San Francisco, and the very first anti-cannabis laws were in El Paso, Texas, right on the border. You couldn’t make Latino people illegal, but you could make their drugs illegal. And then Harry Anslinger, who was the one who kind of first weaponized the War on Drugs in the 30s with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he’s the one who’s behind the famous “Reefer Madness” campaign. But he has some quotes that are just hair-curling, about how weed makes low white women go for black men, and how it causes more mixing of the races. And he was actually censured for things he would say, they were too far out there even for the 40s and 50s. And then, by the time it got to Nixon, there’s an amazing money quote that Dan Baum found from Ehrichman, one of Nixon’s stooges. It’s a quote you can find all over the Internet now, because it says “We knew that we couldn’t make being black or being against the war illegal. But we knew that if we linked those groups to heroin and to cannabis, then we could beat them up every night on the Nightly News.”

Lex grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of the Amish. He studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Boston University, then worked in a mesenchymal stem cell lab at New York Medical College. He assisted in the discovery of a novel binding protein for the E2A protein using the Yeast II Hybrid system, co-authoring three papers about that research. He then traveled in India, where he worked on the March to Tibet (a four month protest march of Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople), but was ultimately deported because of laws against foreigners participating in political protests.

Back in the USA, he spent the next years hitchhiking around the States, finding “the weird & interesting around this country: a burned out old hippy who preached a quiet & powerful two minute sermon on the love of the Virgin Mary, an ex-Marine who creates beautiful pieces of jade jewelry & of course, a Keourackian figure who shared his father’s homemade sausage biscuit along with stories from a long life on the road.”

More recently, he spent four years on the road researching a graphic novel series about cannabis that eventually came to be based on Moby-Dick. It’s a work in progress. He currently works in the CBD world as a writer, scientist & lecturer on cannabis, psychedelics & the endocannabinoid system. And he has an interest in UFOs.

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In this week’s Plutopia podcast, poet Jane Hirshfield and writer Tiffany Lee Brown join Jon and Scoop to discuss creativity. Jane and Tiffany explain their individual creative processes and we discuss deadlines, blathering, confidence, fear of failure and Covid’s impact on Jane and Tiffany’s work.

Jane Hirshfield: “I simply wait for something that needs to be said or for something that comes into my mind and carries with it the kind of magnet of this needs to be a poem, and usually almost always this comes out of some fracture, some difficulty, some question, some perplexity. As I like to say, for questions that can be answered, you don’t need a poem. You only need a poem for the questions that can’t be answered, that have no solution.”

Tiffany Lee Brown: “On the WELL, in the writer’s group that Jane and I have been part of for many years, we sometimes talk about the not writing. And that’s part of my process as a writer, as well. So for me, I don’t know where and when it’s going to come from, and I have a lot of ideas and a lot of inspirations – so for me, that part is easy. The hard part is culling through all of that, figuring out what to work on, if anything, and trying not to completely overtax myself.

Tiffany Lee Brown, a.k.a. T (she/they), is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from the woods of Oregon. Author of a book of prose-poetry, A Compendium of Miniatures, she is creator of the Burning Tarot podcast. As a community journalist, she writes for a small-town newspaper in the middle of Oregon. T enjoys being a mom, wanderer of the woods, and creative coach as well.

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet, translator, essayist, and editor. She’s written nine books of poetry. Her latest book, Ledger, “poses meticulous equations of the self coping with doubt, hunger, age, and death.” (Donna Seaman, Booklist). Maria Popova at Brainpickings.org describes her as “a poet of optimism and of lucidity.” In our Plutopia conversation, we discuss the transformative nature and purpose of poetry.

A couple of books mentioned in the conversation:

The post On Creativity first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Maggie Duval: “I’m writing a lot about sense of place – like everywhere I’ve lived, and I’ve been transient all my life, because of my Dad, his work, but also my own moving around. But I’ve lived everywhere from a town of thirty to Austin, which is like a bazillion now, or whatever. And then the Bay Area, too, and everywhere in between. But everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve made it a point to learn everything I possibly could about the geology – like, what made this place? And then, who’s lived here? You know, from indigenous to pioneers or whatever…”

Our foreign correspondent Maggie Duval returns to the Plutopia podcast, updating us on her move from Austin to Taos, New Mexico. We discuss the differences in those two cities, also Covid, the invasion of New Mexico by Texas developers, and much more.

Maggie Duval has spent 30 years at the intersection of arts and technology within the industry as a manager, as a web developer, and as an experience designer. She was a witness to the birth of the Web as we know it today and was involved in the early days of the Burning Man festival as a media manager. Maggie is also a board member for EFF-Austin, the Austin chapter of the nationwide independent non-profit civil liberties organization. A year ago, she moved from Austin, Texas to Taos, New Mexico.

Relevant Links:

La Coalición de Taos’

The New Mexico Trilogy by John Nichols:

Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range by William deBuys

The Man Who Killed the Deer by Frank Waters

People of the Valley by Frank Waters

And if you want to know my family connection (via the Santa Fe Railway and the Indian Detours) – R. Hunter Clarkson – my grandfather’s work in helping to create a tourist mecca Southwestern Disneyland, check out this book by D.H. Thomas: The Southwestern Indian Detours, the Story of the Fred harvey/santa Fe Railway experiment in “detourism”

And this one:

Relevant videos:

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