Pantsless Dance Party and the Pearl Harbor Theory of Funology
One of the most studied attacks in military history is the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 near the start of WW2. One of the often criticized aspects of this daring and hugely successful attack was the failure of the Japanese to launch a third wave. Had the Japanese hit a third time, they would have been able to destroy much of the pearl harbor infrastructure and would have set back the US pacific fleet from attacking Japan perhaps by years.
The USS West Virginia was one of many sunken ships at Pearl Harbor
Similarly, organizers of the great Acorn 20th Anniversary Land Day party needed an exceptionally successful after party, to both finish the beer left behind at the main event and to offer something wonderful but much smaller and more intimate to the people who made this large commemorative event happen. The pants-less dance party was everything it needed to be to deliver this critical third wave of fun.
Part of what made it tremendously successful was that it was organized in the highly organic, super low overhead Acorn style. [This is quite different for me than the Twin Oaks parties i have helped plan which have far more meetings and logistics associated with them.] For the Land Day after party the organizing went like this.
“We have two kegs of beer left over.”
“We should have a party and drink at least some of it!”
“What will get people to come to such a party?”
“We could have a pants-less dance party at the Rec Collective!”
That was it. No advertising (all word of mouth). No fancy decorations. No invite, you had to be at Acorn already to know about it to be there. Someone did put out a cool blue colored flashing light. i wore a skimpy green negligee, tho i changed dress theatrically a couple of times over the evening.
What made it an excellent after party (in my never humble opinion) is: It was quite lively. It was quite sexy without being raunchy. It was inter-generational. It had mostly people who knew each other with a handful of trusted outsiders. We practiced fabulous consent culture with lots of people asking to kiss or touch other people. There was a highly fluid mix of dancing, cuddling, chatting and making out. These things happened between the three spaces of the rec collective small dance floor, the newly constructed giant mattress in the rec collective and near by smoke shack.
It also felt like a gift to most of the organizers who had made the big land day event happen, who had to do next to nothing for this nice event.
Hooping on land day (including Feonix in the back)
Negligent Parenting Magazine
Willow’s first home schooling lesson from me was about swearing. I give him a dollar every time he can pick my pocket without me noticing, and he is getting pretty good at it. My son has a dreadful disrespect for the police. i totally forgot to get breakfast for him the other morning. And tonight his 17 year old friend Rowan turned down the midnight laser tag adventure we (Willow and i) organized, because it was going to be too exhausting (Willow is 11).
The joke is that my style of child care will get me to the cover of Negligent Parenting Magazine.
family negotiations
And it was charming working with him on this evenings activities. In a series of staccato conversations it came together.
“Laser Tag – let’s do it!” Willow wanted in on this new game
“We’ll drive in the Acorn car i have.” i offered
“I will get Rowan and Evan to come.” Willow offers
“I will call Craig about Adrian” i suggest
“Where will we meet?” Willow inquires.
“Let’s meet at MorningStar.” i propose
“At 10 PM, we will be ready.” And he turns and walks out of the dining hall with an air of confidence i find unusual in kids his age, but i don’t see him at all clearly.
So let the fine editors of from Negligent Parenting bang on my door. i am helping craft a curious titan, who seems unafraid to take on anything.
.
April is Manifesting Loud Love
What is important to me in this coming month is promoting the Loud Love conference and so we get a bunch of people to experience it. We have a good program and a great team of organizers (see below).
Loud Love is about exploring, expressing, exporting and celebrating your romantic identity and experience. There are a wide range of workshops offered from Blues Dancing (a non-sexual intimacy building skill) to Honest Seduction (yes, this is not a contradiction in terms) to Drag King 101, to Transcending Jealousy and building compersion (yes, people actually succeed in this) to advanced polyamory techniques.
Blues Dancing
Plus there is a days worth of open space technology which permits conference participants to present on topics that the group in interested in.
The New Loud Love Logo – art by Mac
At the end of our last organizers meeting Sky pointed out that we are not where we want to be for this Loud Love event, which is in two short months. And it made me realize that despite the good work we have done (securing a space, finding presenters, designing workshops, budgeting and more) there is more left to do to make this happen.
i dont usually ask things of my readers, but this post i will. Please think about a friend of yours (or possibly you yourself) who would be well served by this event. Then encourage them to register and attend or let us know who they are and we will let them know you recommend them for our event.
Here are the awesome folks i get to work with on this event:
Sky Blue has been experimenting with relationships since he was 8 years old and did his first
mediation with squabbling friends. He’s been in some form of open relationship for most of the last 14 years. A drop-out from UC Santa Cruz he’s lived and worked in cooperative and communal groups for most of the last 17 years. His purpose in life is to help bring people together to transform themselves, each other, and the world around them.
Kassia is a musician, activist, community builder and all-around nosey-parker. She h
as traveled the world, lived on a commune, toured the US with a klezmer band, and practiced Jewish Farming. After spending several years in Charlottesville helping start two small collective businesses (a hostel and a home-veggie gardening biz), she concluded that there is more fun to be had on the commune and recently moved back to Twin Oaks to work on her life-goal of conspiring with the universe to have as much fun as possible.
Angie Tupelo is a queer, anarchist, polyamorous, feminist, sub-identified, 
sex-positive gal. She recently moved back to the “real world” after living on a commune for 4 years, and is gradually adjusting to wearing shoes. She gives workshops on Polyamory, BDSM for Feminists, Honest Seduction, Kink for Abuse Survivors, and Intentional Community living. She blogs about life, love, revolution, mental illness, and how they fit together in her life, and really really enjoys bacon.
Ali has been bisexual and polyamorous since before she knew what those words meant. She languished in mainstream culture for several years feeling ashamed of her desires for multiple concurrent
intimacies with different genders before she found her physical and philosophical home at Twin Oaks. Among Ali’s many life goals is to make sex an acceptable form of social currency and move it from the taboo to appropriate dinner table conversation. She wants to normalize polyamory as a relationship model, move forward the idea of a mischief (group) of interconnected lovers taking care of one another, and to make group intimacy & sex as easily & openly sought as coupledom.
Paxus facilitates a workshop called “Modesty is Dangerous” and you can start fig
uring out who he is from there. Paxus self-identifies as a revolutionary, but more importantly he identifies you, dear reader, as a potential co-conspirator in designing irresistible ideas which will change the world (super memes). He comes to the Loud Love organizing team engaged, reckless, and feeling intensely daring. His tangled form of activism fuses direct action against those threatening the biosphere (Monstanto, Westinghouse, et. al) with actively fostering and building new income-sharing intentional communities with proselytizing for radical intimacy models (including Honest Seduction). Paxus is one of three parents in a polyamorous family. His biography does not make credible fiction and was thus rejected by Wikipedia. He co-founded and directs the Emma Goldman Institute for Theoretical and Applied Funology, an entity which there seems to be no proof actually exists.
MacGyver dumped her job in high end tine-share real estate marketing to live with her friends in the country and do righteous work for an organic seed company. She drives a tractor, works as cook and carpenter and tends chickens at absurd o’clock in the morning. She spends 97% less time worrying about things than the average US American. Some of her friends call her Surprise. She is not afraid to pick up a microphone and entertain without a plan as to what she is going to say or sing when she grabs it. Not a day goes by when she is not appreciative for ditching the mainstream life and moving to Acorn.
Feonix and Aries Bios to come
Cards Against Humanity
As a funologist, part of my tool kit is games. And i like games. And recently i have been laughing quite a bit over a game called Cards Against Humanity, which i had never even heard of a week ago.
Single question with multiple answers from Cards Against Humanity
The game is elegantly simple. There are black question cards and white answer cards. You get ten answer cards and replace one for each question card read. For each question card that is selected by each player in turn you provide your best answer card. ”Best” is defined perhaps as the one which the reader (who selects the winner) will find most funny or thought provoking or gross. It is a relative of mad libs and the card game Apples to Apples, if you are familiar with those.
When we first started playing the game i searched (as i oft do) for a political slant. The game authors make it a bit easy because they go after Glen Beck in a couple of the answer cards. And there is no shortage of scatological, sophomoric and off color jokes. It is also often funny.
i wrote 50 answer cards tonight for the new internal version we are creating. [The Twin Oaks internal version is called Cards Against Community. Acorn does not have a name for our game yet.] The internal version uses the same format and refers to things which Acorner’s know about like Daniel’s moped gang and bacon that got cooked for 12 hours. My favorite card of my design (which is unusually long) refers to something that has not happened, but many people could imagine.
GPaul ranting and gesticulating weirdly describing robots which can completely disassemble themselves and then put themselves back together.
Shagbark – a small and beautiful thing
“I am excited about your homestead and I want to help you find magical people to be in it” I messaged joan. I see myself as a recruiter not just for the communities I live in but for the movement in general. Shagbark looked to me to be a very promising project, and I wanted to help in this way. So it was doubly disappointing to get joan’s reply.
“we are not actually looking for anyone else, we are going to be small for a while at least.”
What makes communities thrive is the people in them. It seems obvious, but when you look at the success rate of new communities, you know that it is going to take some pretty extraordinary people to make them work. joan is like this and then some.
Henna artist, reluctant geek, pocket philosopher, social networker and cute animal magnet, joan underhill Shagbark is one of the tiny crew of pioneers of this 6 acre intentional family homestead, near the well established north eastern Missouri eco-villages of Dancing Rabbit and the income sharing Sandhill Farm. Shagbark is a pod inside the Red Earth community effort.
Shagbark is a careful mix of primativist and contemporary technologies. It fuses permaculture, and the desire to be comfortable with a conscious lifestyle. Shagbark rejects the current money system and touches it as little as possible in its daily operation. The project boasts a number of accomplishments, including planting over 1000 trees since it started in 2009. The culture they are creating is one with no formal meetings and work guided by the members deepest desires.
This homestead boasts an impressive number of projects and animals, but to me what is really impressive is that they are trying this at all. There are much more comfortable and easy lifestyles than this dark green farming practice.
You can help this impressive model of healthy holistic living by going to their indiegogo fundraising campaign. They have raised almost half of the $4200 they need for the coming year, stretching the few dollars they have very far. Please help them continue this critical work.
joan with Fred Muddstuffin the goat
Commune Snapshots
Darla Plays Accordion in Heartwood at Acorn
Behaviorism Lives!
i was an accomplice
Comparing Community Businesses – Twin Oaks and Acorn
Both of the intentional communities I live in have cottage industries. These are the economic engines which allow us to buy the many things we don’t make or grow ourselves. Most of Twin Oaks’ income comes from the hammocks business and the tofu business, over 90% of Acorn’s income comes from the seed business. I’ve been involved with tofu and hammocks for over a decade, but I’m just starting being involved with the retail part of the seeds business.
still weaving hammocks after all these years…
There are some highly desirable features to Twin Oaks’ Hammocks business, which i believe are part of the reason the community has been successful. The first aspect is that production is highly flexible. You can come in to the hammock shop at any time and weave or do other fabrication tasks.You can work for as long as you like, there is no “boss” telling you what to do although there are people who will train you and direct you, should you need it. You track your own hours on a trust-based system.
this pattern is called interweave
Shal doing Hammocks R&D
Despite there not being “bosses,” the hammock shop has a manager (my dear friend Shal) who is responsible for lots of things related to the work flow of the shop, especially ensuring that supplies are available when needed and that the multiple steps to make hammocks are balanced. If we need more harness makers, he encourages people towards that work (if they can do it), trains visitors to do it, and will bring in people to do it, if the group is falling behind. Twin Oaks uses behaviorist incentives during our busy season (which is the winter for production, because agricultural season is off, but we sell most hammocks in the spring and summer) — we set goals for production and we get rewards if we succeed and quota goes up if we fail. Hammocks management (which I was part of for some years) does not like quota increases being our “stick” to get people to work. We have tried several other approaches — treats, music and events in the shop, nice coffee — to get people to work in the shop and they have mostly been appreciated, but ineffective. Now we start with the behaviorist sticks pretty early and raise quota until we have filled the orders, then quota drops down.
Photo by Aaron Cohen
Photo by Aaron Cohen
The Twin Oaks Tofu operation is a much more classical assembly line structure. Frankly, I think we had to be a much more mature community to operate it. It has long been the case that a dedicated team of tofu managers (usually working quite hard in the tofu hut itself) maintain an esprit de corps for the large collection of workers in the hut. Unlike hammocks and seeds, the expectation is if you have a tofu shift scheduled, you will either go to it, or you will find someone to take your place. 
Because it is classical assembly line format, production requires at least one person at each of three stations and the pace of the workers influences the speed at which subsequent workers need to be moving. Specifically, a fast kettle worker (where the tofu management often works) drives the speed of the entire hut.
The Tofu Hut – a very productive place for its small size
For years I marveled at the effective anarchist chaos of the Twin Oaks hammocks business. Lots of workers, almost completely unsupervised, coming at all different times, leaving little to no communication for subsequent workers, working short or long shifts as they liked…seemed to get all the hammocks made.
It was not until I got to Acorn that I realized that there was an even larger step-up in the self organized workplace. The seed business also has three production stations, which are not a classical assembly line, because each step is temporally independent. Packing the seeds in little packets, followed by picking the seeds for each order from the storage room where all the varieties are represented. Finally, the shipper takes the picked order, checks to make sure it is correctly filled and then creates a mailing package for it (occasionally a custom one for oddly shaped orders) and puts it in the post.
Team Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
There are lots of other parts to the seed business work here at Acorn — processing back orders, dealing with customer calls, prioritizing orders when the customer has paid extra for this, contracting seeds with farmers, germination testing seeds, deciding which seeds to carry, attending trade shows and much more.
During the busy season what most of the people at Acorn are working on are these three order filling steps: packing, picking and shipping. Hundreds of person hours go into this work, and the amount of management, supervision, training and planning which goes into this process is the lowest I have seen for any of the many business operations i have ever been involved in. It is, as I have been slightly shockingly referring to it recently, an anarchist’s wet dream.
Because there is so little supervision/management instruction from above, combined with a very high feeling of affinity and connection to the business from the line workers, there is a high level of conscientious behavior on the workers to make sure that the right things get done, and that the right mix of work happens.
My personal experience is that I have come into the picking room, done a bunch of organizing, and taken over the management of that part of the operation without asking anyone. And we are definitely more on top of things than before I stepped into the picking room. There is better communication about out of stock items and back orders. But I hold no illusion that if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, we could not return to the old, less centrally-organized approach and things would function just fine.
And from an anarchist perspective what is most important here is that the line workers are empowered to take responsibility. They do not feel oppressed by supervisors or managers and they are happy and proud of their work. Something that exists far too rarely in my experience.
Only in Vegas
When i asked Abigail what she thought of the Cirque du Soliel performance we had just seen, she replied thoughtfully “it makes me appreciate Vegas.” The performance was amazing and CdS reliably delivers that. And what is true about Abigail’s observation is that this show will never tour and can only happen here. The multimillion dollar stage was built into this space and the complex show depends on it.
Love is CdS’s Beatles tribute
It costs 13.40 Euros to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They told us it would cost US$19 each to go to the top of the 1/3rd scale Eiffel Tower here in Vegas. Which means at current exchange rates it is cheaper to go to the real thing, than the scale model (though Abigail points out the lines are much longer for the real thing).
1/3 size is still impressive
Vegas is a symphony of distorted scales. There is a 1/2 size scale model of the statue of liberty here. There is a 3/4 scale model of the pyramids and a full sized Sphinx. And perhaps a half scale model of the Trevi fountain from Rome. And the odd thing is that i have seen the originals of most of these in the last 6 months.
comparison of Pyramids
Vegas is also the best case out there against humanity. If an alien race (or omnipotent being) were to show up and evaluate humankind based on the behavior of the strip, we would certainly be doomed.
Willow would have loved this
If you have been to a lot of tourist destinations, you will know that there are often street actors dressed up as popular fiction characters, so you can have your picture taken with them. Vegas has Freddie Krugar, and Sponge Bob and Vegas Show girls and a guy doing a pretty compelling imitation of Captain Jack Sparrow. What i have never seen in such quantities are people handing out cards with pictures of mostly naked women on them with phone numbers. These “clickers,” as they are sometimes called because of the way they snap their cards to get your attention wear vests that say you will have your girl within 20 minutes of making the call.
full scale minus the history
What is especially interesting to me is that prostitution is not legal in Vegas (other parts of Nevada yes, Vegas no). So everyone who is handing out these cards is an accessory to a crime. And thus Las Vegas is the largest display of routine lawlessness i have witnessed. And there is much more interesting and disturbing stuff to come on the sex industry in Vegas.
Trevi Fountain Rome
Willowisms
I’ve been telling stories about Willow the last couple of days.
At age 2 Willow said, in response to me asking where some toys were “i assume they are under the tower”
At age 4 when asked what he thought about having two dads he replied “i guess i lucked out”
Happy CoDads – 2012
At age 6 when asked what he would say to the police if the car was stopped and he was not in the required car seat “i dont have ID, i will just lie.”
At age 8 after i told him he needed to clean his room he replied “With what authority do you tell me this?”
At age 10 on Dec 21, 2012 at the mythical end of the Mayan calendar when was asked his thoughts on the pending end of the world, he responded “I am disinclined to believe any religious text that is found written on a wall”
Stars circa 2003 me, Hawina, Willow, Anissa and Sky
Minority Relationship Model
Crystal asked me to shock his Social Movement students at Cal State Monterey Bay. This felt like a high bar, so i offered to entertain them and provoke their thinking.
Crystal and fellow philosopher
i presented about all the folks who had said the world was going to end unless we dramatically change our behavior (Club or Rome, Carl Sagan and nuclear winter, Rio 1992 and sustainability, the Peak Oil kids and now climate change). i put them in small groups and asked them to discuss what things they could do a better job of sharing.
But it was (predictably) the second part of the class which got the most eyebrows raised. I talked about polyamory and the astronomy of the Star family (and bragged about various Willowisms). The group exercise was to talk about their relationship with jealousy and report back on if they liked it and how they might change it.
But the thing that Crystal was most excited about was the idea that polyamory was a minority relationships model and as such was discriminated against in most peoples thinking. i pointed out that if you get involved in a poly relationship and it does not work out, you are quite likely to say “Polyamory does not work” or perhaps “Poly does not work for me”.
But if you are on the other side of a failed monogamous relationship you are more likely to say “Joe is an asshole”. It is quite possible that your poly relationship failed because Joe is an asshole, or because Joe is not even poly. We rarely say “Monogamy does not work”
[80% of students reported being shocked.]
