Sober Trippin' on the Synchronicity Highway - 4/28/07

When you see the portal, my spirit sisters and brothers, when its siren’s call reverberates through your True Self, open the storm windows of your coelem, merge with that trans-dimensional membrane and adsorb yourself into the infinite…

…Once in a long while, a single day shifts all a human's perceptions. A single day that reveals the power of the mind to tap into reality and mold it, a puppeteer dancing to projections, sane, destructive, artistic, transcendent, all that we have in our hearts....

…by the way, if I've EVER wondered where all the burner drum n' bass was, no longer! At the climax of everything, in the hours treading murkily into a downtown dawn, I witnessed my first live drum n' bass set. Now, I've seen a lot of drum n' bass in my days; perhaps not as much as some, and certainly not as much as the man who shook Earth’s foundations with syncopated bassy bliss, but a lot, and certainly enough to have deity-be-damned skyscraper standards. Yet KJ Sawka was the single greatest live drum n' bass set I've ever seen, and his presence anecdotal proof of the power of synchronicity...

…but if I do this out of order, it'll never come across right. It's gotta be done from the beginning…

…as with many journeys, the origin of action occurs prior to excitement. The thursday prior I had gone running, and as I rounded out my route I had achieved a euphoric state of Zen. Suddenly, from the silence, a phrase materialized in my mind: "To the Sphinx go the Lava People." I had no idea what it meant. But that was okay, because Saturday I was slated to meditate on synchronic ragamuffins with my good friend Sitari (of prior blog fame). We'd been struggling with the purpose and format of a mental construct with which we had been playing. Not knowing what else to call it, we titled our cognitive experiment "thought club" (which we both concede is a terrible name). An alternative to the often mindlessly misunderstood aggression outlook of Fight Club, it was to be a method of more efficient and meaningful human communication. Hyper-intelligent communication, one might say. As in, the telepathy that hypermagi share while navigating dimensions beyond the Astral plane. This was one goal of our meditation, to discover the purpose to our cognitive meanderings. And in an attempt to direct our session I had sketched out some guiding principles:

1) There would be a magic word designed to bring us back to reality (as opposed to other realms we might be flying through.) The secret word was: “ragamuffin.”

2) At one point in the trip, we would see a key. At the right moment, a phrase would be recalled in our brains: “To the Sphinx go the Lava People”

3) The meaning behind the phrase would be one of three pillars of Thought Club…

…Morning mist greeted Los Angeles that Saturday morning as an extraterrestrial seductress, breaking early against a mountain of minds…

…I arrived at Sitari’s place around half-past the solar zenith to see the Brewery Artwalk, a semiannual event where a community of artists, living in a converted Pabst Blue Ribbon factory (of all awesome locales) open up their doors and welcome in the public. With over three hundred lofts to see, there was more than any one person could reach, but Sitari and I accepted this impossible challenge with childlike glee…

…From the first moment, walking into the factory complex, a giant Pegasus reared on hind legs above Mack trucks as if stolen from a monstrous Olympian carousel. Visual art of all shapes and sizes massaged our cortices, skateboards painted in black and white masterpieces, faces blending into faces; floor to ceiling with flamboyant neon in acute angles, crocodiles and mobiles professing grand adoration of L.A.; utter dead tech, chains and metal plates covering entire interiors, metal hooks piercing, blending galleries with a hot-tub, plasma screen, pimped-out bar, multiple make-out spots under a make-shift machine gun nest; birdcage with jawbones surrounded by surrealistic detail of ten thousand rainbow portals into Faerie; god lighting; giant bronzed, brazen cowboy remonstrating randomly; handmade stone jewelry and glass cases with taxedermic butterflies and dove feathers arranged in radial designs approximating pyramids of cloth and chains; Psycho Girlfriend, giant animatronic dolls with eye patches and backpack straps, spork dress, beaver computer, mannequins scantily clad in leather (nice…); The Church of Art, a loft tucked in a corner holding but one old man singing jazz, drumming a cacophony on a single instrument, a conglomerate of horns, toms and bass drums, lamenting the ghost of Hollywood, a specter haunting those failing at fame. Sitari sincerely wishes all of you spirit sisters, brothers, to become one-tenth as awesome as that soul, who, in the twilight of life, has ceased to find fear frightening, bathing and playing in humor ether.

Climbing into the interior of the superstructure, up steel stairs, we penetrated into a maze of art, one interconnected series of rooms holding oils of our executive branch presiding over a crumbling, post-apocalypse with roaring dinosaurs, descending aliens, fallen towers. Adjacently, a polychrome silhouette of Morrison looked appropriately profound drifting between lemon and lime, replete with lettering circling him, the quote his inspiration to challenge the boundaries of consciousness. "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to man as it truly is: infinite." –William Blake.

Then there was the brief respite from our overwhelming artistic tornado at our Bad Ass Friend’s downtown loft overlooking depot train tracks. (Do you know him too?) We ate Kahlua brownies and talked about tattoos. A little girl named Lux ran around rambunctiously, oblivious to the trappings of adulthood. But larger patterns pulled us into metascopic fates as the afternoon sun waned and downtown turned a faint shade of purple…

…Our meditation called, and we prepared. Sitari gathered her favorite books to visually peruse. She had never meditated on fractilized phychodublimatic ragamuffins before.

As they often do when synchronic ragamuffins are involved, things did not go as planned. We meditated, but very little happened. A modicum of low-level illumination, some silliness. Sparse sparklies, fluid tai chi. We tired, became sober again. She was disappointed but I told her that that is the way it goes with meditation sometimes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Hungry, we made noodles and tofu with garlic sauce and broccoli. We opened a bottle of chianti and had a quiet, simple meal, a platform from which to decide what to do next.

When in doubt, apparently, burners bathe in art.

What we didn’t realize was that the mental exercise we had conducted prior to our uneventful meditation would restructure the remainder of the night…

…Create: Fixate was bumpin’, an arty Hollywood hangout not quite underground in the metacurrent, not quite languishing in our pop-modern Xanadu. Incredible art, though, Alice's first apartment, magical surrealism snaking up the walls, across the floor, into speakers of breaksologists engineering miracles of sound. Next time you traverse the world’s galleries, spirit sisters and brothers, ask yourself, “how does the art feel?” You may be amazed at how some can tear at you with disturbed neuroses disguised as Mario heads wishing for forty-fives and clock towers, and other canvases squirm about as if animated, dancing with ambient humans to electronica…

…Classy elevators…Fedora is the password…

…Between stone heads curving and denying their own stationary selves, a circle of ivory polypropylene robotic claws curl inward over a garden of potted hand-cacti. Some distance away a switch in a frozen control panel, a bunk activator for this transporter to Moryork (a honeycomb art gallery web of alternate lands, cabinets to ancient empires, sky-scapes scraped from soda cans, waves of materials inundating each other into artistic samadhi. Truly, the gallery is too intense to not command an essay of it’s own. Consider the moment you read this sentence, spirit sisters, brothers, as the event horizon to a wormhole into some future where your soul feasts at Moryork’s table of the surreal)…

…And through this artistic cornucopia at Create:Fixate, Patricio sweeps his fingers along LPs as if they were supermodel clitorises. Dirty wompy breaks syncopate inside our brains and sucker-punch us into participation with the rest of the crowd. A burner girl with rainbow tassels peaking from her dark sleeves twirls the most graceful hoop I’ve yet witnessed. She’s feeding on Patricio as he spins the very track inspiring Sitari’s prior blog entry, and instantaneously we all transform into “creatures of the motherfuckin’ night,” descending into a dichotomous state of primal reflex and psycho-spiritual euphoria. Yet as transcendent as his breaks were as they were injected into our spines, sparking sympathetic neural ganglia like electric chairs, truly the most incredible moment of the day up until then was about to dawn on us:

There they were, a wonderful burner couple wearing black, both pierced to high heaven, sportin’ tats. She word glasses, he a shaved scalp. I think they saw me dancing, approximating inventive geometries, wearing a vintage fedora and my Aenema T-shirt with its dual-irised eye. Perhaps they recognized me as a spirit sibling. “I have something to tell you,” the burner woman said, drawing close enough for me to smell the metal of her nose ring. “An event you must attend. It’s called Lightening in a Bottle, and it will be an amphitheatre in which we spirit children may play in meta-awareness.” Okay, so I paraphrase.

“I’m already going, I say,” which derives a smile and a quick chat about how rocking LIB will likely be, and how sweet Tool already is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the greatest rock bands to grace our ear drums. But the most amazing part of the repartee is not the burner couple, though they are striking, nor the invitation to an event I eagerly anticipate, though I salivate, nor our mutual, genre-agnostic amore for syncopated music, though that especially is portentous. The most amazing part is that her name, her Playa name, is Lady Lava. His, if I’m not mistaken, is Mr. Molten Magma.

Effortlessly, we have met the Lava People. And they are going to the Sphinx.

Instantaneously Sitari and I are dumbfounded by the fact that we have located our spirit siblings through sheer coincidence in this giant cave of slumbering consciousness we call the modern metropolis. True, we were attending a burner-friendly event, so it perhaps was inevitable that we would have been invited to LIB, but meeting the Lava People themselves? I like to imagine that we set the stage for ourselves, programmed within ourselves a struction (as Jaynes would term it) that was mysteriously fulfilled…

…Visions multiply in our minds of Sphinxes stationary on the Nile Delta, deconstructed down to atoms and flowing in the vast joysoulnectarflow of connection between all entities of illusory mass. I realize later that what we have stumbled onto through our experimental combination of meditation, art and good old fashioned magic, is the Tao, that mystic middle path connecting ancient sages with a plane of reality which is not reality, but indeed a simple singularity window into the divine…

…Though the day transpired in a single instant, my paltry words failing to describe such intimate magnanimity must be linear regardless of how cogent my communication is. On we go, still gearing up, co-combustion engines defying the physics that will eventually wear our bodies into the ground. We must delay that inevitable impermanence and subsume ourselves in every moment alive!

Soon after, Create:Fixate is about to close but we are nowhere near any forks which might prematurely stick us into oblivion. We truck to Space Island. I wonder how this night can continue to escalate, but my doubt is short lived. We transform for at least the fourth time in twelve hours as we penetrate that nondescript warehouse door into some wonderland cross-section dissected from a future human age. Frosted film spread from the entryway into darkness is sated with glowing pictographs on cinderblocks, wrought-iron angels and ceiling canopies hiding fur-lined alcoves. edIT soon saunters on stage, maestro of a brigade of laptops, effects pads, etcetera. Powering amplified bursts of sonic breaks, two-step moves multiply as the floor crowds with other spirits unwilling to quit their journey at some arbitrary night’s end, preferring instead to watch the dawn slip up over the urban landscape.

As if a follow on to the sign of the Lava People, a dear friend of mine mysteriously appears from nowhere, converging in synchronicity. In the shadow of a painted fiery phoenix screaming across imaginations, questions are raised, and conversation abounds about the creative process, artists musing on the muse and the long, arduous process of sharing one’s artistic vision with the community. Sitari is elsewhere, and as is her seductress’ nature, has procured herself a momentary lover, macking inside the fur-line alcoves vibrating above speakers. These are precious quiet moments, separated from the driving, breaking bass but still near to it, just teetering on the edge of transcendence long enough to bask in the comfort of love.

Then, just when we least expect it, the culmination. All the proof has already been seen, integrated into our True Selves. But, as if a reward for our, not faith exactly, but perhaps trust in our own hypermage natures, we bear witness to the most purple-haired dope-ass D ‘n’ B set of my young existence. KJ Sawka, the man! This myth and new legend rises on stage! In flurried hours of fury he crouches above his drum kit as a warlock intent on sublimating the junglists’ alchemical quintessence: live drum n’ bass. For years I had dreamed of making, hearing, appreciating drum n’ bass not only blasted from speakers, but built from chords and toms in real time. Yet KJ Sawka did me one better: like a true musical grenadier, he blasted boundaries, a one man army simultaneously sampling junglist beats, pounding a confluence of syncopated drum rolls, fills, beats, progressions. His jungle was a cabal of ebony will-o-the-wisps tempting the freshly dead off the New Orlean’s bayou. Or better yet, an ancient seismic force ripping apart the crust of ego, threading new magma along our subconscious sea beds, conjuring forth islands of present awareness between the vast twin currents of memory and dreams. We hardy few surrounded the stage as the night unraveled before our tenacity and the sky paled, hidden behind cloth eraser clouds. In the dawn we drank in a new sun salutation, intoxicated by fermented beats and dank, dark agglomerations unveiling our hidden humanity…

…It was one of my most memorable meditations, that sober trip down the synchronicity highway. A scuttled ritual did nothing except cleanse our doors of perception, but that was enough. Our own expectations of spiritual transcendence evolved along a new order of magnitude, revealing infinite doorways open to any following the path of the Tao…

…And I can’t wait to travel to Santa Barbara, to immerse myself in Lightning in a Bottle, to bask with you, my spirit siblings, in our amphitheatre of meta-awareness…