Utopian Trace

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Peter Lamborn Wilson hosted a radio show on WBAI-FM in New York City. The publisher of Utopian Trace had saved some tapes of Wilson's radio show, one of which contained the broadcast of this paper, and gave them later to Wilson for his archives. It turned out that the broadcast featuring Utopian Trace had been lost. But, now found, it inspired the publication of this remarkable book.

The result is a kudos-proclaiming celebration of New York City's great and glorious Central Park, and those who created it, especially Frederick Law Olmsted, whom Wilson calls "a hero of the people." In elegant, pulsing, yet economically descriptive sentences, Wilson presents and comments upon, a lengthy letter Olmsted wrote in July 1862, describing a visit to the North American Phalanx in New Jersey, an intentional community founded upon the aesthetic communitarian theories of Charles Fourier.

This well-designed and well-written book deserves to be savored for its value as an artistic object and as a history itself. Its design features interesting multi-color use of fonts, and what they would call fine "production values" if it were a stage presentation, instead of a visual account of a radio talk. Kudos to Wilson, the publisher Logosophia, and to the great Central Park.

Ed Sanders is a poet, historian and composer. His most recent book isBroken Glory--The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy, illustrated by Rick Veitch. Charlie Says, a movie in good part based on his book about the Manson group had its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019.