Tag Archives for Shakers

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint: Scott Nearing

scottnearing

AUGUST 6 — SCOTT NEARING
Back-to-the-earth political radical, social drop-out.

wikipedia excerpt: “As the Vietnam War took center stage in the mid-1960s, and as a large back-to-the-land movement developed in the U.S., a renewed interest in Nearing’s work and ideas occurred. Hundreds of anti-war believers flocked to Nearing’s home in Maine to learn homesteading practical-living skills, some also to hear a master radical’s anti-war message.”

August 6, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
* Feast of Everything Green Except Money

Also on August 6 in history…
1637 — British comic genius and satirist Ben Jonson dies.
1774 — Religious-protesting Shakers arrive in New York.
1883 — Back-to-the-earth rebel Scott Nearing born, Morris Run, Pennsylvania.
1890 — First electric chair execution in U.S.
1945 — U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
1969 — Frankfort School theorist Theodor Adorno dies, Visp, Switzerland.
1970 — Yippies invade Disneyland. Social chaos in wonderland. (See AP account below)

yippieland

Rock My Religion: 9 minutes of conceptual artist Dan Graham's lo-fi video art rockumentary

9 minutes of conceptual artist Dan Graham’s 55 minute low-fi video art rockumentary Rock My Religion(1982-1984). A personal favorite-

Rock My Religion is a provocative thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the “reeling and rocking” of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock’s sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n’ roll music.

Original Music: Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth. Sound: Ian Murray, Wharton Tiers. Narrators: Johanna Cypis, Dan Graham. Editors: Matt Danowski, Derek Graham, Ian Murray, Tony Oursler. Produced by Dan Graham and the Moderna Museet.