I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AVI BUFFALO-“What’s In It For” (2010).

I received an email from Amazon telling me that their top 50 CDs of the year (so far) were online.  The second disc was by Avi Buffalo.  I’d never heard of Avi Buffalo, but they were on Sub Pop, so that’s a good sign.

I was going to listen to a sample, but saw that they had a video for “What’s In It For” on the Avi Buffalo page.

Avi himself looks about 12, which is disconcerting.  But his voice is really angelic (he sounds like one of those high voiced singer like from The Shins or Band of Horses or, indeed like Grant Lee Phillips) In fact, this song could be a B0H outtake.   And as such, that’s a good thing.

I’m not sure just how original the band is, and I’m also not sure if they are tagging onto this high-voiced folkie bandwagon (he doesn’t have a beard at least, so that’s a relief; of course, he may not be old enough to grow one).

A sampling of the rest of the songs shows more diversity than the “single?” indicates.  And, indeed, this looks like a great, quirky summer release.

[READ: July 20, 2010] “The Last Stand of Free Town”

Even though I read all the articles in The Believer, I don’t often talk about them, mostly because they are non-fiction, and I don’t tend to talk about non-fiction articles for whatever reason.

But anyhow, I’m mentioning this because it ties pretty directly to the Insurgent Summer story Letters of Insurgents that I and others are reading.

This article is about the pacifist commune that has existed in Christianshavn (part of Copenhagen, Denmark) since 1971:

That year, a group of squatters overtook an abandoned army base east of Prinsessegade, barricaded the roads, outlawed cars and guns, and created a self-ruling micro-nation in the heart of Copenhagen. They called the eighty-five-acre district Christiania Free Town, drew up a constitution, printed their own currency, banished property ownership, legalized marijuana, and essentially seceded from Denmark. The traditionally liberal Danish government allowed the settlement at first, dubbing Christiania a “social experiment.” Then it spent the next three decades trying to reclaim the area. Thirty-nine years and a dozen eviction notices later, the nine hundred residents of Free Town represent one of the longest-lasting social experiments in modern history.

Note that Christiania was founded in 1971 and Letters is from 1976, so something must have been in the air.

Fox notes that:

From its inception…Christiania was…a response to a collective yearning.  In 1971, a group of locals broke down the wall to Copenhagen’s abandoned, and increasingly derelict, Bådsmandsstrædes army base.  One hundred and fifty squatters followed, making homes in whatever spaces they could find.

Police tried to overtake the commune, but they were “overwhelmed by their numbers.  Looking to avoid confrontation, Danish officials gave Christianians three years to try their ‘experiment'” (5).

The experiment has been quite successful, no one is allowed to buy or sell houses, which has led to some truly innovative architecture.  And they have formed cooperatives to assist drug addicts, the handicapped and the poor.

The government had tolerated them (because they pay their bills on time) for decades.  But Denmark was taken over by a wave of conservatism around the turn of the century.  And the conservative government vowed to eradicate Christiania.

Porter Fox went to Christiania in 2006 because a new law promised to evict everyone by 2007.   And he experiences everything–the pros and the cons that the city had to offer.  For yes, despite the idyll, there were cons too.

Resident Richard Lionheart said that even before the government got involved the free town was, “evolving into the sort of free-market community it had been founded in opposition to.”  He had moved there in 1972, but by as early as 1984 there was discontent (his brother was going to be evicted if he didn’t pay his rent), a few years later a Swede was forced out when her Danish husband died.

And it’s Lionheart’s quote that I think is at the heart of the problem with Letters of Insurgents:

“Anarchy is a beautiful thing is people have very fucking high morals.  If they don’t, then it’s lynch mobs….  The same with consensus democracy.  You have to have very high morals to make it function.  You have to have a very high level of energy as well” (9).

By 2009, it looked like the free town was going to be done.  The court has sided with the government. The only hope is that Christiania’s lawyers have appealed, so the ruling is postponed until 2011.

It’s fascinating to have a real-world accompaniment to a fictional action.  I wonder if Letters will end in the same way that Christiania might.

For more picture from Christiania, click here.