New Buffalo: Journals from a Taos Commune (Counterculture)

Rating:
Summary: Communes coming again ?
Review: After reading New Buffalo By Art Kopecky I was relieved to find it more of a documentary than one persons quest . My generation seemed to be inbetwix any real cause or reason for anti-anything !and his book brought me to a time that was for me , A mythical time where quests for a better way of living was read about not went for . . I now have a view not biased by media , ego , or fuzzy recollections . Although the later may be in dispute . I enjoyed looking into a culture that I was not yet old enough to be in , but had siblings in the middle of . It allowed me to go where I was , I suppose , Embarassed to admit that I had no knowledge of . Art's description of putting up (finally) a wall , or getting proper drainage around the garden area , The gatherings around supper time and his introductions of all the different people put a vivid picture of exactly how it looked and felt right down to the many aromas waifing about !I think it's a great time to read how we can survive together and keep the environment in which we all depend on healthy for a few more millenia . One more thing , Peter Coyote's intro was a pleasant surprise and he's not the only person who pops in either !!! Sincerly , Samuel E.

Rating:
Summary: History or Harbinger?
Review: For those who believe that the prosperity-driven individualism, materialism, and (dare I say it) Calvinism, always present though rarely so triumphant as in the last general election, may have become a permanent American cultural monopoly, I have two recommendations. The first is "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, author of "Guns,Germs and Steel", who describes the demise of cultures whose citizens may likewise have thought their material success permanent, and "New Buffalo" by Arthur Kopecky, who chronicles as a Principal and key participant, the everyday experience of "Aquarian Age" communards who prophecied an alternative future, and labored mightily to master it's challenges. This group of uprooted young adventurers were linked with thousands across the country and the world,who committed themselves to a life of struggle, of voluntary renunciation of luxury, of fun and high times too, and they hoped for, and many worked hard for communitarian self-sufficiency. In part the movement was a rebuke to the smug and thoughtless triumphalism of capitalism and its depradations of the human soul, partly it was a search for a practical alternative, and partly it was a journey of discovery, blasting away the race, class, regional, cultural, boundaries between people, getting pretty "blasted" in the process,(positively and negatively) but living intensely, and experiencing intimate human relations not available under the protections of ordinary life.

I knew Artie in those days. He and I often disagreed. But in the end I was not prepared to make the sacrifices he and his core "bothers" and "sisters" made routinely, without feeling themselves anything but blessed (most of the time) to be able to make them. These were some people!

Artie's rock-steady and selfless devotion to a beautiful ideal, his careful, diligent, daily account of the experience of his community, are no mere memoire or hippy-dippy nostalgic indulgence. They are,in my opinion, a unique contribution to the sum of human experiential learning and were made at some considerable cost. It may be that some time in the future the experience of New Buffalo, so honestly presented here, will prove to be more precious than a memory. We all may yet need those skills, we all may yet need that mind, to master what may come.

Dan Cohn



Rating:
Summary: My history
Review: I would like to thank Arty for putting my history in print so that people can better understand a time in America that is worth writing about.
Reading this book gave me a better realization of the life i have lived.Learning certain accounts of my life through another's perspective has given me greater appreciation of the lifestyle I was born into. This journal gives accounts of the day to day life of communal living.

Rating:
Summary: An Accurate Representation
Review: I'm struggling my way through this book, determined to read it all as a tribute to the people that built and lived at the New Buffalo. The daily struggle that these folks went through to attempt to invent a better way of living is apparent in the journal entries reproduced here - a statement on joy, boredom, love, angst, fear, loathing, peace, and happiness. It clearly was not a piece of cake nor an always fun adventure - neither is this book, but ultimately those that lived it, and those that read about it will be richer for the experience.

Rating:
Summary: An Accurate Representation
Review: I'm struggling my way through this book, determined to read it all as a tribute to the people that built and lived at the New Buffalo. The daily struggle that these folks went through to attempt to invent a better way of living is apparent in the journal entries reproduced here - a statement on joy, boredom, love, angst, fear, loathing, peace, and happiness. It clearly was not a piece of cake nor an always fun adventure - neither is this book, but ultimately those that lived it, and those that read about it will be richer for the experience.

Rating:
Summary: The Real Communes -- Boredom, Mud, and Effervescence
Review: These are on-the-spot journal entries from the serious, day-to-day heart of life at New Buffalo -- lots of names, lots of memories, lots of inspiration, and a real picture of the interrelations within the early to middle years of the rise of the adobe, pot, and peyote counterculture. No index, but it's not hard to read for information, and the memories, especially in the excellent selection of photographs of departed friends and long-departed youth, which can communicate both strength and poignancy. Peter Coyote's introduction is a terse well-written musing about both his and Kopecky's contributions to the burgeoning secular literature of the counterculture movement. Mr. Kopecky,a guitar player himself, and a one-time Chinese language student at Columbia and Berkely, has a a sincere musical ear for digestable writing. This book rings true. Right Arm! Good book!

Rating:
Summary: Threads of Gold
Review: This book is unique. It is like nothing else you are likely to read. There are incidents, anecdotes, and life situations that have much in common with other chronicles of the times, most especially, *Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie* by Iris Keltz. Indeed, the latter work makes a splendid companion volume to this one because it mentions many of the same people, places and events of the time. Does it with engaging interviews and an overvoice that glues it all together.

Arthur Kopecky's faithful recording of life at the New Buffalo commune from 1971 to 1976, however, is unique in that it is a true journal with the energy and immediacy of real-time events.

The commune itself is the narrative voice. During the times when Kopecky left to visit other communes or to go hunting with other communards or to bring his own mother from New York, other people took up the journal and filled in the gaps of day-to-day existence on the scene. Sometimes they left their names, sometimes not. Sometimes they agreed with Arty (or An Swei as he called himself then), and sometimes they struck chords of dissent and argument. But it's all here.

Here you will find accounts of making adobe bricks to add on more rooms to the pueblo, accounts of their problems and successes with their many farm animals - cows, pigs, chickens, goats, mules - their craft activity to make money on the side - jewelry-making, candle-making, weaving, carpentry, bee-keeping, cooking, canning, drying, storing and harvesting their crops, stories of their wild parties with music and dancing, chronicles of the peyote meetings at and around Buffalo, accounts of cooperating with locals for their water rights for irrigation, their relationship with other communes in the area (Morningstar, Reality, Lama, Five Star) their struggles with taxes and with making New Buffalo a legal corporation (finally successful), diaries of their children and home birthing, their famous hospitality to so many visitors from all over this country and other countries, their problems with outdated machinery and vehicles. All this and still there are introspective passages about their lives, the war in Viet Nam, and their marriages, love affairs, births, and deaths.

Various entries speak for themselves of the life and flavor of New Buffalo.

"We got a refrigerator out of the dump for a smoke house. Pepe taught me to cut a hole in the bottom, connect with stovepipe to a covered fruit wood fire twelve feet away. This provides cold smoke for best taste."

"Larry started hooking up the new hot water tank to run off the wood cook stove. He worked all day on it. The thirty-gallon tank sits behind the firebox, the smoke goes where the insulation used to be, and a water pipe goes right in the fire and back out. If you were on a colony spaceship, you'd want this guy with you."

"Full moon. Wild party here started in the afternoon. Mick butchered five chickens. Jason from the Hog Farm helped do the cooking. We had cars, trucks, longhaired hippies, dark-skinned gypsies and big-chested, long-legged dancing girls getting it on in the front yard. Guitars, a banjo, three or four drums, a saxophone, a clarinet, and perhaps 80 people here. Fire in the courtyard at night. Joseph Cruz from the Pueblo came with Phil, Joe, Henry and Benjamin, all local Indians. They sing really fine. I went to bed early in the moonlight, under a cedar tree on the hill, listening to their ancient songs."

"Yesterday we stepped into a Van Gogh painting and cut the golden wheat field. Five sickles and two stackers worked much of the day. Incredibly beautiful. Also weeded and watered the cornfield. We have a pretty good harvest."

"County Fair tomorrow! Carol baked coffeecakes for the contest, and she's really got a chance to produce the best. Kim is bringing fresh carrots, beets, onions, yellow squash, and lettuce. He is already putting carrots away - colors so lush in the humid air - beautiful produce. John intends to enter cheese, butter and maybe some goats."

"This mudding we can do. Old way good way. Basically grab a handful with the straw and some sand mixed in, and slap it on the wall. Next smooth it out a bit. To keep the clothes clean, it's best to take them off."

"We live in such abundance. A bunch of poor people, we are still able to scrape up what we need to patch and glue this scene together."

"Recommended: Don't store the apples and rutabagas in the same cellar."

"Mercy mission to Lama; they have some sick ones. We gave them a five-pound cheese, elk meat, candles..."

"The huge teepee is up and the floor is covered with sheepskins, blankets and rugs. Tonight we go in to pray for a good spring and for this place. New buffalo was started with a peyote meeting. The ceremony joins the spirit of the new arrivals and the Indians, and gives thanks to mother earth, father sky and Jesus, for our life."

"The commune is a natural alternative to the lifestyle of consumption. I've still got a notion in the back of my head that this may play a role in the future of this country's economics. With roots in the soil, with people being close to some essentials, there would be less insecurity about the often-slipping number of jobs. With more working people not so dependent on the jobs offered by the big corporations, we would perhaps be able to depose those people who guide our economy into such conspicuous consumption."

Even though New Buffalo is no longer a commune, its legacy and vision continue. In my experience, it takes a long time to read a journal. It's different from a story, since there's no narrative thread per se. But the time is well worth it. The threads you do find are of solid gold.