Colin Marshall — Alan Watts Brings Eastern Wisdom to American TV Viewers in 1959 (Complete Episodes)

Nearly forty years after his death, the words of Alan Watts still generate excitement. Fans trade them, in the form of texts, radio broadcasts, recorded talks, and television programs, both online and off. The British-born interpreter and popularizer of East Asian Buddhist thought generated most of his media in the San Francisco of the 1950s and 1960s, and his televised lectures, produced for local public station KQED, must have offered many a San Franciscan their very first glimpse of Zen. Now that episodes of his series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life have made it to YouTube (season one, season two), you can see for yourself that Watts’ then-cutting-edge delivery of this ancient wisdom remains entertaining, informative, and striking in its clarity. Begin with the introductory episode above, “Man and Nature,” in which Watts calmly lays out his observations of the ill effects of Westerners’ having grown to distrust their human instincts.

Open Culture
Alan Watts Brings Eastern Wisdom to American TV Viewers in 1959 (Complete Episodes)
Colin Marshall

Alan Watts exerted a huge influence on the Beat Generation of the Fifties, like poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, as well as on the development of the counterculture of the Sixties. His work is relevant today in light of the similarity of the times. He is a cultural icon, a harbinger of spiritual awakening in his era, and it is nice to see this appearing on YouTube. Many of the issues he addressed and things he had to say are just a relevant today. What strikes me as a participant at the time is how much richer the cultural revolution was at that time than the one now underway. Maybe it is still early.

The morphing of Occupy into an alternatives countercultural movement — Back to the Sixties

Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social. 

The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.

Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.

Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.

“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”

The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”

truthdig
One Year Later: Lessons Learned From Occupy Wall Street
Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law

Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art?

There has been so much art centred around the Occupy protests that it is beginning to feel like a new artistic movement. What defines it, and could it supplant the world of the galleries?

We get in the van and speed along to Bed-Stuy. It is the New York equivalent of London's Shoreditch or Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, a hipster sub-metropolis, but with cuter beards.

I am with The Illuminators - a group of performance artists whose art is to shine revolutionary logos onto buildings in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest, including one that has become iconic - the 99% logo, known to protesters as "the bat signal".

In the van is not just a projector and a laptop, but also posters, a mobile library, and a whole vat of hot chocolate. The woman controlling the projector is a union organiser. The man vee-jaying the video is - well, a vee-jay (video jockey) in real life, but for corporates, fashion shows and the like.

And Mark Read, the driver and instigator, is a college lecturer in media studies.

Read the rest at BBC News
Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art?
By Paul Mason | Economics editor, Newsnight
(Watch Paul Mason's Newsnight film on Occupy art in full)

This is a fun story, but it is also the story of something really, really big happening. Genuine art, based on true feeling rather than for position in the galleries — as has often happened in the past at such cultural turning points.

Kulendran Thomas [artist and curator] tells me that if Lehman Brothers announced the death of neo-liberal economics, and the decline of the West, it would be logical for there now to be the death of an art that celebrated the freemarket age and the dominance of America:

"I can't see what will emerge afterwards, anymore than I can see what the world economy might look like after Western dominance, but Occupy art can be seen as foreshadowing what replaces Contemporary Art.

"Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things. The realisation that Contemporary Art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment. But it's an idea that's gathering momentum.

"I can't see what will emerge afterwards, anymore than I can see what the world economy might look like after Western dominance, but Occupy art can be seen as foreshadowing what replaces Contemporary Art."