Living Storybooks?

The other day my friend Aurelia and I started working on our new project, mapping out a social genealogy of our local "scene" (however you want to define that. We are interested in seeing how all these people we know met, why they are here, what their goals are, and how they interact with each other in order to gain a better understanding for ourselves and our community of the interconnected nature of human interactions in an intentional microcosm. How we learn to define ourselves and our world in relation to each other. Our approach to this seeks to be multidisciplinary, drawing from socialogy, psychology, anthroplogy, etc... interviewing people about their lives and experiences here and eventually creating a multimedia art exhibition drawing in objects writing diagrams music etc... After one meeting it's obvious that what we're trying to do is big, complex and is going to take a lot of work to pull off, even if it will hopefully continue as an ongoing effort to keep drawing this place tighter. We figure the best place to start is interviewing each other and just working out the connections from there.

For me of course, there is a not so hidden agenda in interviewing all my friends. Have to get that research down for character studies for my next novel (based off of the local arts scene and its response to the rapidly deteriorating state of the world), and if there's any defining mark of our scene here it is that it is a community of extreme individuals. Talking over it neither of us are sure how this could have happened, so many people trying to live their own lives in their own unconditional ways and all working together to find a place where these diverse goals and lifestyles can intersect and encourage new growth, somewhat stigmergically. The question is, what events in people's lives could have led them to reject the mundane standards of their parents and society and forge out into new territory of creativivty? To some degree this city is an example of one aspect of that, the major industry here collapsed 30 some years ago and it still has a cultural image of being a dead burntout steel town where nothig's going on. According to some people, that's exactly why there can be a rennaisancce of art and music, precisely becasue it is invisible to the greater public eye, which leaves room for us to work within and redefine our lives as we choose. As the city fell apart some people decided they needed to respond to this by creating viable alternatives, which is a microcosm of what's happening on the global scale as the capitalist agenda of consumer monoculture reaches it limits and exhausts its resources, leading many to seek these alternatives and an ultraculture which can actually survive whatever transition will rock the face of humanity.

But even still, what led these people to attempt to lead such revolutionary lifestyles in the first place? Something that Aurelia and I considered is the cultural factor of growing up exposed to literature and film and music that encourages that kind of approach, from the rebel alliance of star wars to the rebelious stance of punkrock, taking the stories and scripts presented in their youth and choosing to live them out as reality. This is somewhat opposite of the magical technique of hypersigils, by which someone creates a work of art (often a fictional tale) which portrays how they want to live in order to change their lives in that direction. Instead, we have kids taking all previous works in this light and growing up with the understanding that they really can be anything they want. For example, our friend Spat grew up reading the beat poets and listening to rock and roll, and now is living out that tradition of being a hard edged poet and rock star. We see this time and time again in our community, people living their stories as musicians, artists, writers, anarchist organizers, djs, withces, etc, the romanticization of living a particualr life, even down to one girl whose life long dream is to be a punkrock dentist. And she's doing it.

But turning to the internet to find a better understanding of this phenomenon we've had no luck whatsoever. We don't even know how to frame our search query. So, a question to toss out into the greater hinternet, has anyone else had experience with this type of thing, or know of any articles in relation to it that we might peruse to gain a better understanding of where we're trying to go? Any help would be much appreciated, for the sake of curiosity and human understanding.