and Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
Documentary of an art exhibition under the title of End of Industrial Civilization in the small former logging town of Willits, CA, with poems and paintings by Ferlinghetti; and collages, and photos from Indian reservations by Maria Gilardin.
The program opens with the Ferlinghetti poem: Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, written in 1974, about the mile high tidal wave that runs over Los Angeles which sinks like the Titanic, all lights lit; crosses the country to sweep Manhattan Island clean in 16 seconds. The washed land then awakes again to wilderness, and the Indians reclaim their canoes.
The poem was part of an art exhibition in Willits, CA, around the theme: End of Industrial Civilization, with poems and paintings by Ferlinghetti; and collages, and photos from Indian reservations by Maria Gilardin. The show also included a small library with The Airconditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller and Kirkpatrick Sale’s article: Lessons from the Luddites.
Sale had written in the Nation in 1995 that we need to set limits on technology: “As our own daily experience has convinced us, we in the industrial world are in the middle of a social and political revolution that is almost without parallel. ..This transformation is, without anyone being prepared for it, overwhelming the communities and institutions and customs that once were the familiar stanchions of our lives.
Resistors to industrial civilization, Sale said, .. could find their most useful models in the 19th century Luddites who fought the introduction of the huge mechanized looms and child labor. “It was not all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality,” as a March 1812 letter to a hated manufacturer put it.
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