Chris Carlsson is a San Francisco-based writer, designer, and producer whose books include The Political Edge, Reclaiming San Francicsco, After the Deluge and Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today. Recently I spoke with Carlsson about Nowtopia, zine culture, punk music, Burning Man, creative use of public space, and the projects Shaping San Francisco and Ecology Emerges. 

DG: I enjoyed reading "Nowtopia," it's a great book. How did you come up with the idea?

CC: I've been around radical labor politics since my late teens, and in particular, I helped co-found Processed World magazine in 1981, "the magazine with a bad attitude." It was founded on the bifurcation our lives suffer, divided between doing pointless work for money on one side, and working quite hard at interesting, worthy activities in the unpaid rest of our lives. Over the decades, my thinking kept evolving and it eventually led to writing Nowtopia.

DG: In the "What You See Me Doing, Isn't What I Do" chapter, you write about about the Dadaists, Surrealists, Beats, and other art movements that provide an historical context for contemporary DIY culture. Would you comment more about this historical context, as it relates to contemporary efforts?

CC: There is a lot of historical continuity between various undergrounds stretching back to the 19th century. Each has made contributions, and today the Nowtopian undergrounds are standing on those foundations, as well as extending the creativity and experimentalism that characterized much of those earlier efforts.

DG: As you write about DIY culture in the book, you talk about punk music -- as one compelling manifestation of DIY culture. What would you say is one important aspect of punk music, as it relates to some of the other ideas you present in the book?

CC: Punk was the ultimate DIY phenomenon: it exploded in response to the tepid corporatization of rock in the early-to-mid 1970s and rejected all types of "professionalism" in favor of a raw, experiential, passionately expressive style. The content was often quite political too, and on top of all that I could dance to it! 

DG: DIY cultural is one important theme in "Nowtopia." You write about zines, as an example of DIY culture. What you find interesting about zine culture?

CC: I'm attracted to things people do when they're self-motivated and self-directed. Zine publishing is quintessentially about writing/designing for oneself, and not really for an audience, real or imagined. Nevertheless, the chords struck by zinesters are often quite profound, and resonate with people well beyond the terrain in which they're operating. As an unmediated expression of the publisher and writers, using various artistic skills as designers, illustrators, writers, photographers to produce a statement about life and the world at large, it captures something essential about the Nowtopian spirit: making life better right now through direct creative experience, but also producing something that helps knit people closer together in new kinds of communities.

DG: One thing that you talk about in the book is creative use of public space -- such as guerrilla gardens and the People’s Park in Berkeley. How can the creative use of public space be liberating and empowering?

CC: In a society that depends on hyper individualization, anything we do that brings us together in common places with common experiences is both liberating and empowering, at least potentially. The atomization of modern life leaves most of us with the strange sensation that what's happening to us is somehow unique, while it's really usually the opposite: our individual problems are social, and shared predicaments. Moreover, the lack of public space makes it more difficult to verity this truth, and when we take public space and use it, part of what happens is we short-circuit the amnesiac culture, a culture that continually separates us from our past and the truth of our present.

DG: In the "Vacant Lot Gardeners" chapter, you include a quote by Peter Lamborn Wilson, in which he says that gardening is “….an art form, an area of creativity as rich and promising as any symbolic activity, and one which can roughly but easily transpire beyond the realm of representation and mediation.” What did you like about this quote, that inspired you to include that in your book?

CC: It's smart and added philosophical and political depth to the argument about gardening.

DG: It was was interesting that you wrote about how the federal government encouraged American citizens to plan gardens during World War I. Do you think there has been a resurgence of this, in recent years? For instance, the White House has expanded the size of its garden, and that Michelle Obama has been advocating community gardens.

CC: Yes, there's a huge movement going on around food, and urban gardening is a major element of that. Michelle Obama is decidedly a latecomer to this phenomenon.

DG: In the chapter entitled "Burning Man: A Working-Class, Do-It-Yourself World's Fair," you write, “Art is alienated from everyday life by being commodified and separated, but Burning Man places art at the center of human activity. Burning Man slips an exciting notion in the back of its participants’ minds: our greatest collective art project is living together.” How can that approach be translated into everyday life outside of Burning Man?

CC: How can it be translated into everyday life outside of Burning Man is the $64,000 question... the question of revolution, of radical transformation... somehow it seems possible that we could choose to live well, cooperate in producing a world of common wealth, and figure out how to share that with everyone on the planet, IF WE CHOSE TO... but we don't, at least not yet, and mostly we don't even talk about it. BM is one cultural space in which such thinking rises to the surface and is even discussed from time to time.

DG: What are some projects that you’ve been working on recently?

CC: I've been working a lot on the wiki-version of our 15-year history project Shaping San Francisco, which is at foundsf.org. I also recently completed two complementary projects: a new book Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78 (City Lights Books, forthcoming 2011), and a series of 23 one-hour oral histories with pioneers of ecological activism in the Bay Area called Ecology Emerges.

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