"The Dead stood for a freewheeling communalism in the public imagination, but by the early 1970's any vestiges of utopianism in their music and accompanying scene had been replaced by apolitical hedonism", said Robert Slifkin, professor of Fine Arts at New York University, who specializes in American art and culture.
Members are best known for sexual-liberalization events, including "Go Topless" protests, as well as for their emphasis on technological utopianism, particularly through cloning, which Raëlians see as the key to eternal life.
Members are best known for sexual-liberalisation events, including "Go Topless" protests, as well as for their emphasis on technological utopianism, particularly through cloning, which Raëlians see as the key to eternal life.
The juxtaposition is of planning and speculation, utopianism and commerce, and their results in the place's ease of living.
"In different ways," Mr. Pierson said, "all the composers in the show were dealing in their music with political issues, with utopianism, with imagining.
It's also an indicator of libertarian Silicon Valley utopianism where everyone pins their identity to the blockchain, eschewing the globalist banking Nanny State and spending the rest of their lives blissfully playing video games on a seasteader colony in international waters.
While "self-imposed alienation" was common among "drunk punks" and "gutter punks", there was always a tension between their nihilistic outlook and the "radical leftist utopianism" of bands such as Crass, who found positive, liberating meaning in the movement.
In retrospect, it is the utopianism of these films, perhaps more than their now-cheesy-looking special effects, that seems most dated.
Dikötter doesn't make the imaginative move into ordinary people's lives, their longings for stability and dignity, which Mao's utopianism so cruelly trampled.
The first part of the term seems right: with their sun-spangled arrangements and whiffs of New Age utopianism, the songs have something in common with the reveries Brian Wilson wrote for the Beach Boys.
