The Back Side of Communiversity

 To find Communiversity, jump on your bike and follow the traffic, which may not actually be moving, but is generally pointed in the right direction.

Soon you will speculate that cars are amassed elsewhere because they have been displaced by a mass takeover of downtown streets by pedestrians.

At first ignoring the copious material and intellectual offerings of the booths, I wandered Nassau Street to witness the result of lengthy email discussions months prior about how to finally get recycling integrated into the festival. Initial observations were not promising. 

But over towards Palmer Square, the long-called for had finally appeared--well-designed recycling receptacles paired with trash cans.

On the university side of Nassau St., an a cappella group called the Wildcats took advantage of favorable acoustics at Pyne Hall, recalling a time when streets and buildings were designed to flatter the human voice.

Student guards were posted in front of the feline guardians of Nassau Hall,

perhaps having heard that there was a loose cannon in the vicinity. 

I used the map of the Battle of Princeton to tell a friend-of-the-battlefield about the hican trees growing near the battlefield's farmhouse.    

Some of the most interesting music was tucked in between the booths. There was some hot dixieland happening on Nassau, and then a jazz singer on Witherspoon St. who said he came because he's friends with the food vendor. He packed his big band in a box, his jazz standards in a tiny ipod, and was so hip

he even got the furniture to adopt jazzy pozes.

After this pleasant making of the rounds, I transitioned abruptly into the public library's showing of The Call of Life, a gripping documentary about mass extinction. Half of the earth's species could blink out by mid-century, never to return. The executive producer of the film was on hand, and shared his thoughts on the predicament while a seemingly endless stream of cars passed by just outside the window of the second floor Princeton Room.

That's the reality lurking behind the back side of everyday life, stored well back in people's minds. There is the pleasure and necessity of the present, and then there's the collective consequence of all that seemingly sensible human activity, steadily unraveling the planet that has so quietly sustained us.

Communiversity offered the full gamut, a full expression of the two worlds we simultaneously inhabit. It represents in name and well-organized deed a one day coming together of community and university. That's quite a feat in and of itself. But even as a festival prospers, a call gains strength from the back side, along back streets and in a darkened movie room at the library, how to fuse present and future, which seem on such separate trajectories. To be fully aware is to inhabit both worlds, the bright light of the present and the dark extrapolations of the future, and seek improbable reconciliation--an ongoing Presenture, Futurent Lifestyle Festival.