Call out the instigators, because there's something in the air

Hand out the arms and ammo

We’re going to blast our way through here

We’ve got to get together sooner or later

Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right

And you know that it’s right

We have got to get it together

We have got to get it together

Now…

- “Something in the Air” (LP: Hollywood Dream) by Thunderclap Newman (1969).

They eats chicken, don’t they? - Colonel Harland Sanders, asked his opinion of “the hippies”.

How do you serve this goddamned slop? With a straw? - Colonel Harland Sanders, asked his opinion of the “gravy” substituted for his own by the “McDonalds-like supercorporation” to which he sold his recipe and franchises.

Wendell Berry, Kentuckian elder statesman – belated Happy 75th, Wendell! – of the post-1960s agrarian strain in American letters, has the long cover story, “Inverting the Economic Order,” (read the teaser, stay for the full version) in the September number of The Progressive:

A society in which every school child ‘needs’ a computer, and every sixteen year-old ‘needs’ an automobile, and every eighteen year-old ‘needs’ to go to college is already delusional and is well on its way to being broke.

Russell Moore, influential Southern Baptist theologian, calls it “characteristically provocative”:

It made we wonder if the editors understood what he was writing, or if they’re just open-minded enough to include this perspective, one that skewers a leftist vision of big government just as surely as it skewers a corporatist view of big business.

Over at Common Dreams, Chris Hedges, author of War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, has a Berry-flavored post, “Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us.”

Michael Pollan, marquee author of the current phase of the real-food revolution (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), says People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That.

A review of Berry’s new essay collection, Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, to which Pollan’s essay serves as introduction.

A special issue of The Nation devoted to food:

Why Cooking Matters

Dan Barber : The campaign for food democracy needs to start with boning knives and cast iron skillets.

Detroit’s ‘Quiet Revolution’

Grace Lee Boggs : How we came to see vacant lots not as blight but as opportunities to grow our own food.

Wendell Berry’s Wisdom

Michael Pollan : Today’s conversation about food was started by dot-connecting writers like Berry in the 1970s.

Mississippi Growing

Habiba Alcindor : An African-American community with New Deal roots finds some hope in a farmers’ market.

Ten Things You Can Do to Start a Community Garden

Band together to gain control of your own food

Cornucopia Blues

Brent Cunningham: How will the good-food revolution move beyond its evangelical phase?

Our Krazy Kulture: one of the richest sources of merchandise imprinted with old-time pop-culture Americana.

Barrel of Funkys: Gun owners of America, disunite – you have nothing to loose but your vast white-wing conspiratorial stereotypes.

Documentary, “Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa”:

“Twenty-Five miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of eco-pioneers, teenage runaways, war veterans and drop-outs, live on the fringe and off the grid, struggling to survive with little food, less water and no electricity, as they cling to their unique vision of the American dream…”

How To Live Freegan and Die Old.

An oral history of The Whole Earth Catalog, courtesy one of its influential editors, Kevin “Cool Tools” Kelly, also a Wired alum, who supplements his account on his own web site.

Exponents of parkour take the entire topographic urban landscape as their loose-limbed jungle gym, and give ol’ Spidey a run for his money.

A Montessori school in my onetime city of Charlottesville, Virginia, gets its young charges up to their elbows in Another Green World just outside the glass and steel of golden-rule days.

Another amazing pop-culture site, this one more purely eye candy than merchandising, heavy on fare familiar to all who ate cereal and/or candy, drank soda, watched cartoons, or sent off boxtops since the Eisenhower years. Grab the Kleenex, you’ll need it. If we disappear from blogging for days on end, you’ll know where we are.