Millennia later, across agriculture and space shuttles, once again I fly South on concrete superstructures under an abalone sky streaked with cerulean ozone and chem-trail clouds. I reach Huntington Beach ahead of traffic, that monstrous coalescence of endless automobile snakes stretching as far as the eye can see, suffocating time. San Juan Capistrano greets me with her warm green hills, deep blue Pacific depths…breezing past, San Onofre passes fast, the mountain gates of Marine bases hiding clandestine military secrets. Before long downtown San Diego rises to scrape the sky, its glass towers and sharp angles, far away at first, soon swallows me as I am dumped off the freeway and into the maze of one-way avenues and towering Spanish hacienda facades. The Gas Lamp district greets me with a cocktail of rustic French charm and futuristic escape. Restaurants repose with department stores and music factories and dance clubs. A throbbing urban heartbeat fibrillates as the sun slips below the lip of the world.
I sit with old friends on the patio of the House of Blues, in the heart of faux New Orleans, ordering Karl Straus Red Trolley and calamari. We have not seen each other in some time; we have all changed and simple questions give me great pleasure, the contentment of reconnection. One couple, two of my good friends, may try for a child. Another couple is engaged to be married, and another has moved in with each other. Positive energy overwhelms me and I bless them all, wishing for the best. Other stories abound of work and barbeques and surfing. As we drink together, prepare for the show ahead, we all wear one collar, a swirling marble cake of sky and clouds.
Doors open at eight. We stroll through the bar, under massive mosaic tapestries of dead artists. Ray Charles bleats out silent blues as his arachnoid fingers striking the same chord into perpetuity. Diego and Frieda stand with their arms around a massive, impeccably decked skeleton, smiling with the knowledge that he will soon claim them both. But if death if close to us, we do not notice, trading our tickets for entry into the San Diego underground. As we descend a wide staircase, russet walls offset amber murals saluting music, embodying this incorporeal force into glyphs and dream creatures.
A band has already taken the stage, the Revents. They are young, college age, a new generation of rockers unrecognizable to hair band fanatics of the last century. They wear plaid shirts and glasses—in short, they were dorks. But their rock is solid, and though most of their songs sound the same, at least they seem to have discovered the five catchiest notes on the scale. Besides, their music embodies that mixture of angst and passion that is the promise of youth. Like recently distilled whisky, they were undifferentiated and naïve, but full of promise and fun to imbibe. Still, as my friends and I wander about the floor, buying drinks, testing out the sound from different angles, all we can think of are two words: Critical Me.
While we wait through the next band, I recount to those around me the first time I saw them: a dive called Dream Street in Ocean Beach. Shortly after they took the stage a raunchy melee erupted; fists flew, heads bashed against wood. The details are fuzzy--this was over four years ago. But this lashing, the violent explosion of rage convinced me that these guys were true punks. Well, that and their driving, pelting drums, their screeching, melodically screaming guitar, their genuine lyrics reflecting the injustice of the world. None of your clean-cut hipster wish-I-were-an-American-Idol jams at The Gap. Critical Me is the real punk of the streets, the backcountry, the common man.
Over the next few years I had seen them play all over Southern California, but the House of Blues was among their biggest gigs. And having recently signed with Magnitude 6.19 Records, they were poised to be heard. One more band to wait, we said, laughing about the past. Looking around, we were surrounded by a throng of young rockers, punks, metalheads.
Across columns ringing the bar and a ceiling tiered to enhance acoustics, circular designs abound, primitive symbols, squiggles inscribed in abstract curves. It was as if our visionary sage ancestor had guided shamanic artists to enhance the delivery of music by symbolizing its fey effects. Suddenly, theories funneled through my head, linking up with prior thoughts and future visions.
Where there are symbols there is ritual.
There was ritual embedded in this event, and thousands of events like it every day in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Memphis, Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, London, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam, Prague, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Johannesburg, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney, and ten thousand other cities. Ritual creates the gates ushering in a spiritual quest for transcendence.
Of course, what type of transcendence the musician’s ritual uncovers is partially dependent on the genre, and this was a rock show, pure and simple. The band on stage before Critical Me was hardcore metal, the primordial noise of tectonic plates scraping together. They were actually quite talented, if the listener was into that strain of music. As their bassist and drummer pounded flat cake beats their vocalist jumped down from the stage, wandering the crowd with his cordless mic, searching with the audience for meaning. Gimicky, we thought, though I’m sure the intent was genuine.
There would be no such a division of band by Critical Me. Their style always was a synergy of four elemental forces quaking from the stage. This show was different only in the size of the audience, in the critical mass of bodies. If before we had hung back, waiting, now we were all up at the stage, our fists in the air. Opening with “Promise Land,” a polyrhythmic monstrosity climbing chord progressions at warp speed, vocalist Caleb Bedsole trumpeted a call to an awakened awareness of all the false hopes of our modern age. “Armageddon” recalled the truth of American political leadership over the past twenty years; perjury, corruption, unfair taxation, and an endless war machine were raged against from within a cocoon of off-beat bass drum and raunchified shredding. “Halfway Home” reminded our proletariat masses that hope still exists in the human heart, ascending in electronic wails writhing in unrequited dreams. “Waiting In Line” was a simple plea for matriculation from the artists and dreamers of the world. And the undulating punktronic bass intro to “Same Old Bullshit” was a frank recognition that this end stage, this evolution, this final messianic transcendence is at best temporary, the frustration of returning to the dull, soul-stifling drudgery of the nine-to-five salve trade embroiled in a tornado of a swirling electronic banshee. The critical crowd forgot their egos, forming a moshing metaorganism, a slamming human vortex praying to lasers of oscillating punk.
As I trucked back from San Diego the next morning under a clear sky with pristine air and rolling hills, I couldn’t help smiling, the memory of participating in that punk ritual fresh grain harvested from my mind fields. But the instant I passed Los Angeles International Airport, traffic congealed again, as if the megalopolis was a passion play to congestion, an ancient dormant god of resuscitated suffocation. Lining the sides of the sardine-packed freeway were car dealerships with lots packed full of gas-guzzling SUVs promising to escalate the congestion tenfold, caught in the Neolithic postmodern struggle for increasing revenue and the fickle fashions of shareholder perception.
Watching this ballet of cyclical self-imposed destruction, lyrics from “Same Old Bullshit” resounded between my ears: It’s the same old bullshit every day/ It’s the same old dark cloud coming my way/ It’s the same old game that I’ve gotta play/ And I know it’s not the way that life’s supposed to be.
The poetry resounds, striking chords of rightness and nightmares. But perhaps that’s because nothing is supposed to be anything…
To wit: our brain is neuro-physiologically the same as that which sat in that visionary sage, having adapted in a different world, a wild world, a world in which the specter of death was a cloak that kept Cro-Magnons warm. Adorned with vast grassy veldts sparking maddened mating lust, miraculous firecracker birth bred brief flames of the hunt before endless tempests of the gods annihilated all. Our natural world, our womb mother remains, and though we drain it of life force our lineage is not so easily denied. Even were we to become gods of destruction ourselves, to wipe the planet of life until life was naught but dust, acid rain and vast human cities, our origins would be preserved. Within every one of us, from the most power-hungry political maverick to the most disenfranchised HIV refugee, our ancient genetic code preserves the proteinacious foundations of cellular life. This Garden of Eden remained secret for millennia between four golden rivers.
We have only just begun to peer back behind our own skin. We have only recently rediscovered the view from beyond God’s retinas.
Yet modern man began millions of years ago, when mutations and genetic translocations resulted in our ultimate genetic weapon, the forebrain. This wetware led our ancestors to become capable of the ultimate abstract power, the creation of symbols. Symbols enabled language, that near-telepathy blasting thoughts across space into each other’s minds. Symbols lined the foundation of mathematics and the sciences, using observation, recorded in experimentation, to predict the future. I won’t even begin to attempt to navigate the sulci-slash-gyrii labyrinth of how these premonitions transitioned into the ordered reality that we have created today. Becker, Watts, Persig, Jaynes, Jung, they’ve all been there before…
Suffice to paraphrase, however, that there transpired as a result of the newfangled adaptation of the disproportionate forebrain, some compelling developments between the life of our visionary sage and his multitudes of genetic variances (read: all your brothers and sisters). Recorded history. The progression of logical thought. The creation and widespread implementation of the scientific method. Mercantilism. Capitalism. Industrialization. Imperialism. Globalization.
World war.
Space travel.
Gone are many of the widespread fields and forests of this ancient one. Gone are the mysteries, the magics that ruled the winds and the tide. Gone too are plenary manifestations of sinister gods demanding sacrifice for their pleasure. Or are they?
We are certainly made to think these vortex vertices of our evolutionary past are a well-worshipped fossil, an understood mistake before the coming of Great Thought. Thus, our chief concern here is the illusion of order that is overlaid on our lives to bind us to a reality that profits authority by exploiting the masses and risking the future of human survival.
Again, all these words and implications have been crafted before, on any number of momentous occasions. The Communist Manifesto comes to mind, of course. History has shown all the rotting corruption that Communism afflicted on a generation denied equal rights and quality of life for a philosophy promising exactly those dreams. Cold War historians might suggest that it was Capitalism itself, not politics or military might that defeated Communism, outlasting its enemy and left it to be eaten alive by internal parasites. One grand experiment failed, the other wildly successful, conquering the world one economy at a time, elevating the risk of alternative to a new level of terror. To be left out is to be left behind, to risk becoming the next powerless people to be trampled upon. Ever expanding, the human virus (to paraphrase a great quote) has infected our planet.
Let it not be thought, above all, that Capitalism is not an intensely empowering concept for mankind. Milton Freedman has expounded far more eloquently than I the freedom and individual enfranchisement provided by mercantile exchange. The invention of money and currency have greased the wheels of the scientific machine, enabling new discoveries, a vast tower of knowledge explaining the mysteries confounding the fruition of human cultural evolution. After all, we are a tool-using species, and damn good at it. Scientific innovation enables the creation of new tools so we can lead longer, more self-satisfying lives. Rewards abound for those who play well the games of trade and innovation, for they have shaped our world, molded it to our own liking, driven by our own demands be they enlightened or ignorant, twisted at such an obtuse angle that we have lost our natural cunning. Cunning, like most sweetener these days, is artificial. Coincidentally, the prevalence of cancer and diabetes is also skyrocketing, but correlation does not imply causation.
On very basic levels, recent transformations of culture has been directly related to the progression of scientific development. So much has been written already on this subject it seems futile to even bore you, dear reader, with ancient formulas. Yet there may be a thought to add, a rambling fire trail crushed under brambles beckoning future human starships careening under freeway arches, a supernova at the center of the universe so distant from our lonely satellite galaxy we will never even see its light. Or at best, that primal conflagration seems but a tiny white pinprick in the velvet night faxing us illegible messages. We know it means something; the knowledge is in our gut. The question, though, is what?
So then this is where we must begin, in first principles. The subculture is the infant response to modernization, a countercurrent force reminiscent of our ancient sage, that cave-painting shaman reading the stars as the great wheel of history rambles down the hidden path. If we are willing to explore our origins, then we may begin to see the keys to our evolution…
