Saturday, August 28
Place: Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Rd., Guilford, Vermont
5:30 pm: Potluck Barbecue
7-ish: Film screenings
The pandemic is not done with us, but we’re not done either. We’re cautious—no camps for the second consecutive summer—but not cocooned. So we’re celebrating persistence. We’re celebrating survival and solidarity. Recalling Gramsci: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions, without becoming disillusioned”.
To live.
No cut-and-dried business that, as the “Scenes From a Pandemic” that ran here and in The Nation between April 2020 and concluded a couple of weeks ago attest. Those 61 pieces—scroll down if you missed them—along with Bonuses, which highlighted what some of our people were doing and thinking during this long, strange time, were a means for Kopkind to live in the present when objective conditions foreclosed our traditional work. John Scagliotti likes to say, “The best way to deal with change is to become part of it”: the reports, observations, analyses, emotions, musings, etc. that we published each week stand as a record of people dealing with change, or trying to. A huge thanks to The Nation for being our collaborator on this project.
Still, there’s tradition. So, as promised, we’re having a late-summer party—outdoors, in the great green of Tree Frog Farm, on Saturday, August 28, four days after what would have been Andy’s 86th birthday.
We’ll supply the grilled fare; you can bring a covered dish!
After the feast, we’ll have a very special film screening—also outdoors, under a tent.
(In an earlier post here, we promised a talk on the same weekend, but decided it’s more prudent to scale back.)
Film screenings have become a Kopkind tradition, and this one’s a knock-out. Please come!
We’ll start with a sneak peak of Charles Light and Daniel Keller’s work-in-progress, Far Out: Life On & After the Commune.
Blending contemporary interviews, remarkable archival footage collected over decades and documentary material from the time, the film traces a period from 1968, when Total Loss Farm and its sister commune Montague Farm, were founded, to the present, exploring not just an era’s history but broad themes of how we grapple with idealism, relationships, morality, spirituality, civic engagement and finding home. Chuck will be there (as, we hope, will be some folks featured in the film), and we’ll pass the hat to help him get the film to the finish line.
Our feature presentation is Annie Berman’s new film, The Faithful, which explores the public’s connection to and veneration of pop icons (in this case Elvis, John Paul II and Diana); what such enthusiasm says about memory, identity, culture, modernity. More than 20 years in the making, The Faithful was workshopped in 2010 at Film Camp, Kopkind’s collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary, and we are thrilled to welcome Annie back with us to show it to you now in its full fabulousness. “Ruminative, haunting, and strange”, said the Boston Globe. Strange as life, as faith, as almost all human efforts to make meaning when so much seems absurd.
So please join us on a late summer’s eve for these great films—and of course great food and camaraderie!
RSVP to stonewal@sover.net; or to jwyp@earthlink.net.
Let’s love life whenever we can. For Kopkind,
JoAnn Wypijewski
Kopkind Colony 
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