I often use rabbit holes and wardrobes as metaphors for my underground nights. I once described the legendary MorYork Gallery as Narnia so often that my companion thought it was actually titled so. Last night, the rabbit hole metaphor hopped off the page to pummel our brains with flamingos, whacking reality through croquet arches poised on a well-manicured mental lawn.
Our twin top hats tipped to the night, we drudged through the stale tediousness of Hollywood to the Mad Hatter's Art Party. Storybook characters, fully animated, intently strutted down concrete corridors; a mouse scrambled by with a huge tray of sandwiches. A rabbit clad in a red jacket, pocket watch and hot pants disappeared around a corner, the white puff of a tail perched on perky booty luring us obviously into metaphor manifest.
I spend my Saturdays submerged in costumed parties, yet was still surprised by the sense that everyone there had a full Wonderland wardrobe.
"Honey, what should I wear? I simply cannot decide between Queen of Hearts and Mad Hatter tonight."
"Why don't you wear the Cheshire cat lingerie, it will nicely compliment my hookah caterpillar."
"Splendid idea, dear!"
And if these ornate Wonderland wardrobes had a purpose, the red-lit lounge suggested it was to entice and be removed. The space seethed with the seedy vibe of kink, perhaps a very specific Alice in Wonderland fetish. The uncomfortable overabundance of whips and lip-locked pairs suggested a secret we missed. Was it not on the evite?
Moving from the warm odor of nag champa and other people's sex, we wandered deeper into the Wonderland warehouse. Freaks scattered across the pink dance floor, taking advantage of the ample space to dance like you do alone in your underwear. Transvestite Alice graced the decks, a dark beard poking out from under a crooked blonde wig. A goddess in pink playing card bikini tangoed across the floor with a plastic flamingo. The he-she-dee-jay spun tracks and minds, twisting breaks with salsa, rap with 80's love songs, NiN mashups with the Backstreet Boys. While not particularly conducive to establishing groove, the musical mess was the perfect auditory accompaniment to the visual freakfest before us. A Spartan warrior glided by, his armor made from decks upon decks of cards.
Bjork played; interpretive dance broke out like an Icelandic tarantella. Contemplating Tweedle-dee in headstand next to me, I poured the last of my Drink Me vial into my mouth. The potion's potency was not enough to keep me afloat, thus we retreated giggling back into the night, awed and awkward. Was it the environmental mindfuck that left me confused? Perhaps it was the fun and weird mixed with striking feelings of inadequacy and otherness. Typically, my descent to the underground is filled with a sense of magic, culture, knowing and debauchery; rabbit holes and wardrobes allude to the hidden wonder, as if I needed to explain that. Yet just as that last sentence insulted the metaphor with its obviousness, the literalness of Wonderland manifest suffocated its mystique.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Electric Daemon Party - 5.15.07
Imagine for a moment being struck by a bolt of lightning. A terrifying electrical storm rages across dark clouds surrounding you. Peals of thunder explode, rattling your eardrums. For a moment time drags and in the calm you almost sense it coming, fine hairs springing erect on the back of your neck, a subtle scent of ambient phosphorous. Gravel by your feet seems to levitate slowly as the world fades to white, deconstructing into light. Time snaps, and CRAKOW! One-point-six million raw volts surge through under your flesh, through your bones, up your spine and into every cell in your body. Your muscles are flash frozen, immobile. You cease breathing as your skin fries. Yet for some strange reason, you don't die. Instead, you become a charged particle, an entity of pure electric energy expressible only by mathematical formulas half a blackboard long. Accelerating ever faster, you approach the speed of light, and as your form drops away your essence dissolves into spiraling galaxies as you unify with all.
Your eyes droop open; clouds above have cleared into lavender dawn. Sitting up, you realize you're covered in burrs and thicket grass. Your shoes are smoking. (They weren't doing that before.) You raise your muddy hands to your frazzled hair as you realize that holy shit, yes, you have in fact been flattened by an immense rushing river of electrons. Contemplative as you rise, you realize that the hand of God has been upon you. You have been chosen to receive a vision and have lived to tell the tale.
The question, spirit siblings, is what do you do now?
This is the question embedded in every inch of my reality these days, as I reflect on The Do Lab's 2007 Lightning in a Bottle. If there was buzz going into it, upon its conclusion the Blogosphere became a charged ball bursting with one over-arching question: "what happens when you catch lightning in a bottle?"
The answer, for me it least, is that raw energy is harnessed to forge a magic key.
But as usual, I am ahead of myself. When all memories occur in an endless moment, it can be difficult sometimes to willingly adhere to the illusory linearity of time. Fuck it; it's the journey that's important anyway.
It had all started some weeks earlier, on our sober trip along the synchronicity highway. We had seen something, or rather, it had seen us, its cosmic eye branded across our foreheads. "It," was the Tao, Sitari's souljoynektarflow, and we had become drunk on its revelatory rush. Knowing from prior meditations the value of "structioning" (to mangle a Jaynesian term) as a means to conjure forth the Tao into our consciousness, we set forth a grip of guiding principles, as blasted over email to guide our journey through Lightning in a Bottle:
Guiding priciples
1) Instantly upon arrival at Lightning in a Bottle, our minds open; we become hyper-aware of the current of Tao (a.k.a. joysoulnectarflow) flowing all around, and realize that it, in fact, is also conscious of us. It welcomes us into its amphitheatre of meta-awareness, and we instantly know that we have entered a safe harbor of expression from which to forge a magical artifact encapsulating ancient power...
2) Surrounding our amphitheatre of meta-awareness is a ring of doorways, leading to every and any destination imaginable. At one point during our sojourn, one of these doors will bloom into warm radiant light. As we approach it like moths to a flame, we see it is locked, and requires a key. As we pull out our spiritual keychain, we see that indeed, one key among the thousands we possess is also glowing. Though we did not realize it before, this key has imprinted upon it a glyph of a Sphinx, and as we match key to keyhole the glowing door dissolves, bathing us in the evolution beyond...
3) In this space beyond we see a vast plane of clouds and sea beneath our feet. Above this plane, in the middle of a deep, blue sky, is a hunk of burning ore surrounded by a ring of fire. We know we must forge this ore on this plane before it cools, so we plunge it into the current of joysoulnectarflow, which forms and cools the ore into our artifact...
...It is this artifact that will become the platform of our memetically-engineered construct.
“fanfuckingtastic,” Sitari responded, “but we need more, I argue that's one extended principle…” (And thus she replied with even more)
2.) Tickle the rabbit and you will see....
3.) Employ Sitari’s 2 rules of the playa: smile; do everything you are invited to (except drugs) even if, especially if, it scares you.
4.) At one point, we will realize we are not breathing air, but breathing in the taosphinxysouljoynectarflow. We will be able to see, smell, taste, hear, feel, sense, feed and fuse with it. In that moment we will ascend and find a new key for our spiritual keychain, that with the ble-BEEP of a fob can transport us back to this hyperconnected state at any moment.
5.) At one point, someone will offer you a delicious recipe for chocolate chip ragamuffins with cream cheese icing.
Knowing that it is better to be prepared, we also concocted a multifaceted camp of collectively complimentary elements. Aside from the usual tents, air mattresses, lanterns etc., we had lugged along Sitari's costumes and growing quiver of staves, some bongos, a boomerang, enough food to feed five elephants for fifty minutes, and a healthy assortment of beer, wine, and of course, tequila.
Riding the 101 up the coast was satisfying as always, and I was glad to escape the metropolis for a few days. Ours was a trail through a golden land, dry grass hills the color of exotic spices interspersed with lush greens worshipping a scene only a pagan could appreciate, brilliant Apollo rising on a chariot of cherubim clouds, heating the endless salty sea. Soon enough we blew past Camarillo, then Santa Barbara until we hit the 154 and turned inland into the Santa Ynez mountains. Vistas became breathtaking. The land was a patchwork quilt of amber fields and thick deciduous forest, rolling in lazy peaks and valleys. Smaller and smaller roads siphoned our car from the freeway, leading us into a vale nestled between groves of oak. As the festival had commenced the evening previous, hundreds if not thousands of cars were already there, stacked in snaking lines across a wide, flat grass lot. Red-tailed hawks danced lazily in the sky, skimming currents of air. They were everywhere as we unpacked our ensemble, laying out bin after bin of equipment and food. It didn't take us long to realize that we had a lot of stuff. Perhaps too much stuff for just our humble camp. Fortunately for us, however, festivals often support healthy barter economies. We had lots to trade, and we were searching for something very rare and valuable in return: an ephemeral ideal.
Other times, I might have had the inclination to worry about how we were going to move all of our crap up into the camping area. But that day, exercising the guiding principles, breathing in Tao with every inhale, it did not concern me in the least, nor was I bothered when the truck taking camping gear into the festival had just come and we did not know when it would return. The sky was as pure and light a blue as on the cosmic color wheel, and surrounding us was the warmth of a natural oasis, a haven for spirits to gather and play in meta-awareness.
It did not take us long to make friends. Three rustic souls had parked nearby and had approached us, sniffing out like minds. Flower power radiated from Jenna, Eric and David, and it was clear that they were experienced festival hoppers. They, like many others, and us had come from far and wide to witness a live set from Bassnectar, musical shaman of the underground breaks scene. Though they were only staying the day, they kindly offered to wait with us for the truck, and to help us take our ridiculous train of containers to our as yet unknown camping spot. As we moved our bags to the interior of the parking lot to be in a better position for the truck when it did finally make its return, the conversation turned to boomerangs, Santa Barbara, other excellent festivals attended in the past. Knowing no reason not to start the party though we were far from set up, we opened several Sapporo tallboys, and soon, as it would many times over the next two days, conversation soon morphed from words into music. The travelers had brought a wooden recorder and fife, and combined with bongos we held an impromptu parking lot party powered solely by human fuel. Hawks circled overhead as we pounded out an ode to confluent flows.
It was at that point, solely content we were, five fated amateur musical expressions, that we first met Baz the Prophet. He appeared innocently and coincidentally enough in his cultivated afro and indigo bandana, a small, lanky fellow with a radiant aura. Actually, it had been us who had stumbled onto his territory, drinking and making our ruckus right near his black sedan. He and his two friends soon sauntered by, and, since like-minds agglomerate (as like-substances dissolve), Baz and his companions soon joined our impromptu party as well, commenting on just how ridiculously much Sitari and I had lugged out to Santa Barbara for a scarce three days. Once again we laughed, replying that the food and drink was for all to share.
Perhaps it was the critical mass or mystical significance of our three tight bands rolled into one, perhaps it was the presence of such raw potential bringage (a term coined by Sitari), but finally the truck came to ship ourselves, our friends, and of course, too many material goods out to the campsite. Yet our sojourn in the parking lot was fortuitous, for Baz kindly invited Sitari and I to join their camp. So it was that piecemeal we lugged our various containers to a shaded glade nestled against the edge of a hill surrounded on one side with hedges of poison oak. The glade was a perfect camp, secluded, overlooking the workshop stage, just hidden enough to envelope us in a safe haven, yet readily accessible to several of the main stages--the very main stages where, at the peak of break-beat eruptions, we would see visions.
But first, walking around, gathering our bearings, Sitari and I stumbled onto a pack of roving festival hoppers, and all of us rather simultaneously spied a stack of perfectly cut blocks that suspiciously mimicked – no, they were! – giant Jenga blocks. The six of us could hardly believe our eyes, but in a culture founded on participation, there was only one path for us to follow. Sensing the flow of the Tao trickle between nine-inch blocks, round after round passed where all six of us successfully outwitted gravity, eager to punish us if we were too brazen or crass. It was a welcome exercise in acting upon the wu wei, the effortless path of the Tao, finding secret intersections of space were we could insert our essence and surgically re-organize potential energy. As often occurs in Jenga, eventually it was not the removal of a block but the careless replacement of it on top of the pile that caused the tower to fall (another profound lesson!). And when our experiment finally crumbled, something special happened that proved we were no longer trapped in the metropolis. Not a single player decided that they were exempt from replacing the displaced; every one of us helped rebuild the tower to its original specifications, a theme that would be echoed again and again before our sojourn concluded.
Before the night culminated in the awesome thunder of Bassnectar, in the velveteen caress of wooded twilight, I confess I experienced deep moments of intense displacement. While not a professional festival hopper, I do enjoy a good festival from time to time, camping in the wilderness surrounded by artistic evolutions. But here, looking around, every individual I met seemed to achieve an incredible peace, an engagement with the mystic currents that glided invisibly between the oak groves. Uncertainty proliferated in my gut, and for a few brief moments I doubted whether as a neophyte I was worthy to share this place with the evolved spirits surrounding me on every side. I wondered whether we would find that ideal we so hungrily hunted. Then, as if in some synchronic answer to my questioning, a lone hawk suddenly swooped down, talons spread, into a tall tree growing before me. Almost invisible between silhouetted leaves, I watched it nestle into comfort in the woodland paradise it called home. Just like that, riddling my bongos to the beat of a nearby drum circle, my doubt subsided. I knew then that if I had the opportunity to share a place of mystic peace with creatures of such pure magnificence, I had absolutely nothing to fear.
And besides, monkey chant was calling.
I had never witnessed the monkey chant prior to that night, but as I sat at the edge of the circle with Sitari, watching those in the center whoop, deep, bop, sowang and fawoosh their way into humorous communion with ourselves in the rings, I witnessed one of the most pure examples of ego synergy I had ever recalled. Heretofore I've primarily addressed my theoretical concept of ego synergy in fiction, but the concept is a traditional one in the study of organizational behavior, based on observations of how individual humans tend to blend their egos in communities, generating a collective mental state reflecting the cultural dynamics of their overriding environments. Sports arenas and corporations are two Petri dishes of ego synergy we witness every day, while underground parties another example seen by those of us lucky enough to experience such raw displays of power. Monkey chant impressed me greatly, separated as it was from any infrastructure, sound system, architecture or history other than our own primal human need for communal expression. As we formed torso waves, brought our energy to a crest in hooting joy reaching for the sky, we sang out a chaotic prayer welcoming the descending nocturne.
Monkey chant died in reverent silence and the crowd dispersed, so Sitari and I made our way to where Glitch Mob had begun amping up their set. Sitari and I see members of the 'Mob fairly regularly at Space Island, and are continuously impressed and driven by their mad bringage (there's that damn word again!). But here at LIB, edIT, Borreta and the rest of the posse must have implanted auditory cybernetics and fired their laptops in platinum, because every syncopated break lashed out in angular electronic tongues. Floor space became packed under a white parachute canopy intertwined with plastic branches, as a central circular dais sprouted jitterbugging limbs. The gyrating crowd was wrapped around their turntables. From the breaking storm, tweaking samples recalled a mantra of Rage, and hundreds of fists shot out in defiance. Though I've since seen it all again on YouTube, nothing can quite compare to being there and hearing "killing in the name" tear robotically through the air. Apparently Glitch Mob felt the same, evidenced by edIT remarking as their set died down that we had been "the illest crowd they had ever slayed." No doubt – they had pureed our physical forms into cyclone energy, and we were just getting warmed up.
As Glitch Mob departed, leaving a hive of festival hoppers waiting for the main event, a surreal performance manifested on stage. Spontaneously, hundreds sat, echoing the same theme from our earlier Jenga game: a profound and universal acceptance that the joy of the crowd depends on the attitude and behavior of every individual. Respectful, reverent, we sat, hushed, waiting for what was next.
Metallic antlers were implanted into the central dais. A fair brunette drowning in flowing white fabric was chained to its twisted iron spires. Before the imprisoned maiden, a treasure chest glowed eerily. Soon a trilled aria sprang from the woman as two strongmen wearing leather, covered in ink, huffing, licking flame, lit the tips of the metal antlers on fire. An androgynous, angelic figure pirouetted on stage and swooped towards the glowing chest, producing a giant brazen key. Guiding principles sparked in my mind as the Angel unlocked the lid and retreated at the escape of another dark-haired vixen, this one dressed lasciviously in leather. Curvaceously entrancing the audience, she pivoted her hips to the cadence of the soprano's melody. As the angel retreated into the glowing chest, one archetype of floating holiness was replaced by a lusty symbol shedding clothing as her dancing became increasingly frenzied under an undulating opera climaxing in spewing flame. Then, darkness.
We had hardly noticed the new setup on stage through the applause, but as thunder dropped from surround sound, there was little doubt that we had hit the core of the night, the headliner in all his shamanism, Bassnectar. There was a faint, brief whiff of smoke, a remnant of the trail of slaughtered sub-woofers piled neck deep from previous gigs. But neither Sitari, nor I, nor any of the other hundreds there felt too much pity for the fallen as over the next two hours and change, boulders of broken bass were hurled upon our eardrums. Sampling profusely from both Mesmerizing The Ultra and Underground Communication, Bassnectar conjured hurricanes of alto force summoning a grass roots nation to incant its sublime inner essence. Cisco, my spirit siblings, rhymes with muthafuckin' disco. The crowd in that tiny parachute room tripled, and our bringage intensified tenfold. Over the waving heads of dancing fools I spied a troop of roving giraffes, inebriated and grooving in their rave gear between pure white mushroom men and burners decked in dark fur. Above the plastic branches and parachute roof, the sky opened, raining sparks of bolted protoplasm down, energizing hundreds of naked cortices. Heaven and earth merged, ambient ghosts harmonizing on compressed wings, dancing between crystal caverns exhuming a deep, abdominal war cry emanating from the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
In the middle of raving masses, between groaning Richter vibrations, a vision: around my solar plexus shone a fragile yellow ball containing flakes of ultra-purified compassion.
Sitari, dancing yards away, was given a vision as well, but while mine was simple, humble, private, hers encapsulated the vast rush of humanity surrounding us, commanding air molecules being battered about by hammering woofers. Above our heads bloomed billion-watt comets of joysoulnectarflow sweeping over the crowd, floral indigo entities caroming in and out of existence like electric break beat daemons born from one raw source.
After that rush, sleep came easily, with fleeting, elusive dreams.
Awaking in the misty morning, we campers desired only two prizes. The first, a new day every bit as transcendent and explosive as the solar cycle prior. The second, perhaps even more aggressive and aspirational: clean portipotties. But then this second desire came true and the spirit of the forest ( i.e. solid forethought by The Do Lab) allowed us to devirginize fresh holes with processed camping food! We knew then that nothing was impossible, that if a satisfying shit could be had in the woods, surely we bears had tapped deep into the synchronicity highway, that reality was ready to be remolded like wet clay.
And clay our reality became as Sitari and I journeyed past faeries workin' it on the workshop stage, swirling in satin hues, past breaks already pouring from genie-bottle stages. Running into Christian the Blacksmith fiddling with about twenty pounds of potter's clay, we eagerly took the reigns on an art project he had begun earlier. Soon, as others joined in, Christian's diorama of a well and barren trees became surrounded by high walls on which glyphs were etched, idols set, faces weaving into windows, naked bodies swimming through solid walls.
Satisfied momentarily with our contribution to the communal artistic landscape, we wandered aimlessly, drinking tallboys, dancing to breaks, napping in one giant mesh hammock, but it wasn't until the afternoon that our creative energies were able to fully merge into the fast lane. "Hobo is the new tribal!" random psycho clowns shouted, running across the grassy fields around where we had been dancing to the crazed funk of Wazulu the Ill Dravidian. On the sandy dance floor, we again ran into Baz, gettin' busy, poised for ridiculously deep drops with his finger pointed towards the sun, proclaiming the party. Too soon the set concluded, and we three famished travelers headed back to camp headquarters ready for more tallboys and gourmet sandwiches.
As we ate, neither Sitari nor I suspected that what we had been searching for was also hunting for us. It began innocently enough. As it often does, the conversation naturally turned towards ragamuffins. We mentioned the Devil, and though it's cerebral trip was too intense for what either Sitari or I really wanted, it happened (coincidentally?) to be exactly the type Baz favored. And of course, Sitari and I were on the lookout for synchronic ragamuffins on which to meditate, since the last batch had been bunker than a Las Vegas virgin escort. (Coincidentally?) Baz just happened to possess precisely this strain of ragamuffin, and, being in a barter economy, we did not hesitate to trade assets and consider ourselves quite clever in the process.
But when you ride synchronicity, it always rides you back.
As we gathered on grass to perform the exchange, a friend of Baz came to chill as well, a girl named Dorothy, whose spacey façade couldn't hide a worldly, perceptive introspector. Conversation morphed from our current deal to the mali that was running rampant around the campground, to the mystic fluid atmosphere surrounding us as we reclined on loamy cushions shaded by oak. As hawks circled above a fifth person joined us. He seemed to float in from nowhere, to materialize on the wind. One look at our new friend and we instantly recognized an enlightened spirit, his heightened senses, a true hypermage. In his presence, the five of us vibing off of each other, the conversation evolved, jumping frequencies, existing between dimensions. Great works of literature emerged in our shared mental space – commentary of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and associated Robert Anton Wilson adventures bled into Andaraeon Theory, a rare tome of great wisdom. Talk of illumination and poetry sifted into a true connection, and in that pure space, a sharing of mysticism. As we spoke of experiences in which we had touched the divine, it was this magus who managed to trip us out the most. Once, he confided, he had mistakenly ingested over a hundred tabs of LSD; in this altered state of consciousness he crossed a doorway and witnessed the world break apart before him, atomized into ever-smaller bubbles, endless units of infinite.
And so, without consciously searching for it, Sitari and I had found our ideal, hyperintelligent communication with other individuals. True, awake, aware, the afternoon glowed for us as shadows slowly drifted into evening. All revelations end, and perfect moments eventually digested by the samsara of reality. But with the festival still alive and the Tao wrapped around us in a mystic afghan of empowerment, it was impossible to feel anything but the most sublime joy as our small band broke apart. "Thought club" had snuck up on us, we realized, as Sitari and I monkey chanted our little lungs out. Only instead of us holding it, it had held us in its blessed outstretched palm.
Once again monkey chant ended, and once again we trucked to that same parachute room replete with plastic branches, the decks nestled in the trunk of a pretend tree. This time, however, it was StarFire pounding the decks, placing breaks around the bounding banging of his electronic drum and fat piqued bass. Then Freq Nasty took the stage; if Bassnectar had dipped his spindly fingers across the soundscape, Freq Nasty drilled deep, spiraling inward, reversing his flows into slow, methodical stomp diving like cannonball waterfalls off cascading bass scales. Around us danced hundreds of past and future friends, all divine and glowing. One girl waggling adjacently with mischief in her eyes dared us to circle the packed dance floor, and there we went! Bobbing, weaving, flowing our energies around gyrating burners slowly dissolving into deep freaky bass, we reached the front, dwarfed by the energy of the magicians on stage. Indeed, Freq Nasty's progressions were symbolic of the spirit of the festival itself; every time we thought we had reached some core mantra--
womp…womp…womp…womp…womp…womp
--new eruptions of force exploded into
FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH!!!
So it was that after two hours (and two days) of such continuous mindfuckery, we were spent, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Sated on visions, our skin still tickled and tingled with electricity. Though sound systems had subsided at midnight, festival hoppers still swarmed everywhere, gathering in small groups playing instruments, mastering flow toys, dancing under distilled constellations. A few of us gathered around the fire pit, warming our hands and faces, basking like charged cathodes. Suddenly, a bizarre, Italian-accented laugh leapt from the dark, as one unmistakably outrageous demon burst into the circle in tracksuit and voluminous mullet. Mojo Mangina! Scourge of the seven festivals, Mojo cackled and enumerated all the pleasures of owning (and being?) a mangina as he bounced along the stone border caging our fire. We laughed in our illumination, warm and content.
The next morning, after leaving no trace of our presence in that shady green glen nestled under gliding raptors, Sitari and I crept back towards the vortex of Los Angeles. Before submitting again to our modern madness, however, we stopped for burgers at a small joint in Carpinteria overlooking the ocean. As we reclined against boulders, digging our toes into fine white sand, we re-examined again our guiding principles. Sitari had discovered a spiritual toolkit, an indestructible Swiss army knife constructed from a lack of expectations and a daring will to exploit every inch of opportunity to which one is invited in this world.
For me, the vast quantities of mystic electricity that had raged across my system spontaneously congealed into a simple realization. If we are able to breathe, see, hear, taste and feel the Tao, if we can backstroke through its river of awakening, then what is to stop us from being the Tao? What is to stop us from disintegrating our limitations into its molten flow and unifying with the divine on a daily basis? By distilling our powers of compassion we might see that, on a very basic level, we exist as a part of a larger consciousness that can open any door we choose. This was my key, forged from energy of captured lightning catalyzing a monumental shift in perspective. Above our default world, our salty sea of conditioned systems and pigeonholed existences, there floats an primordial orb of fire. It is infinitely aware, and waits patiently for us to embrace it, to spurn the default and customize our own personal surreality. All we have to do to access this ancient power is just lift our eyes towards the light.
Your eyes droop open; clouds above have cleared into lavender dawn. Sitting up, you realize you're covered in burrs and thicket grass. Your shoes are smoking. (They weren't doing that before.) You raise your muddy hands to your frazzled hair as you realize that holy shit, yes, you have in fact been flattened by an immense rushing river of electrons. Contemplative as you rise, you realize that the hand of God has been upon you. You have been chosen to receive a vision and have lived to tell the tale.
The question, spirit siblings, is what do you do now?
This is the question embedded in every inch of my reality these days, as I reflect on The Do Lab's 2007 Lightning in a Bottle. If there was buzz going into it, upon its conclusion the Blogosphere became a charged ball bursting with one over-arching question: "what happens when you catch lightning in a bottle?"
The answer, for me it least, is that raw energy is harnessed to forge a magic key.
But as usual, I am ahead of myself. When all memories occur in an endless moment, it can be difficult sometimes to willingly adhere to the illusory linearity of time. Fuck it; it's the journey that's important anyway.
It had all started some weeks earlier, on our sober trip along the synchronicity highway. We had seen something, or rather, it had seen us, its cosmic eye branded across our foreheads. "It," was the Tao, Sitari's souljoynektarflow, and we had become drunk on its revelatory rush. Knowing from prior meditations the value of "structioning" (to mangle a Jaynesian term) as a means to conjure forth the Tao into our consciousness, we set forth a grip of guiding principles, as blasted over email to guide our journey through Lightning in a Bottle:
Guiding priciples
1) Instantly upon arrival at Lightning in a Bottle, our minds open; we become hyper-aware of the current of Tao (a.k.a. joysoulnectarflow) flowing all around, and realize that it, in fact, is also conscious of us. It welcomes us into its amphitheatre of meta-awareness, and we instantly know that we have entered a safe harbor of expression from which to forge a magical artifact encapsulating ancient power...
2) Surrounding our amphitheatre of meta-awareness is a ring of doorways, leading to every and any destination imaginable. At one point during our sojourn, one of these doors will bloom into warm radiant light. As we approach it like moths to a flame, we see it is locked, and requires a key. As we pull out our spiritual keychain, we see that indeed, one key among the thousands we possess is also glowing. Though we did not realize it before, this key has imprinted upon it a glyph of a Sphinx, and as we match key to keyhole the glowing door dissolves, bathing us in the evolution beyond...
3) In this space beyond we see a vast plane of clouds and sea beneath our feet. Above this plane, in the middle of a deep, blue sky, is a hunk of burning ore surrounded by a ring of fire. We know we must forge this ore on this plane before it cools, so we plunge it into the current of joysoulnectarflow, which forms and cools the ore into our artifact...
...It is this artifact that will become the platform of our memetically-engineered construct.
“fanfuckingtastic,” Sitari responded, “but we need more, I argue that's one extended principle…” (And thus she replied with even more)
2.) Tickle the rabbit and you will see....
3.) Employ Sitari’s 2 rules of the playa: smile; do everything you are invited to (except drugs) even if, especially if, it scares you.
4.) At one point, we will realize we are not breathing air, but breathing in the taosphinxysouljoynectarflow. We will be able to see, smell, taste, hear, feel, sense, feed and fuse with it. In that moment we will ascend and find a new key for our spiritual keychain, that with the ble-BEEP of a fob can transport us back to this hyperconnected state at any moment.
5.) At one point, someone will offer you a delicious recipe for chocolate chip ragamuffins with cream cheese icing.
Knowing that it is better to be prepared, we also concocted a multifaceted camp of collectively complimentary elements. Aside from the usual tents, air mattresses, lanterns etc., we had lugged along Sitari's costumes and growing quiver of staves, some bongos, a boomerang, enough food to feed five elephants for fifty minutes, and a healthy assortment of beer, wine, and of course, tequila.
Riding the 101 up the coast was satisfying as always, and I was glad to escape the metropolis for a few days. Ours was a trail through a golden land, dry grass hills the color of exotic spices interspersed with lush greens worshipping a scene only a pagan could appreciate, brilliant Apollo rising on a chariot of cherubim clouds, heating the endless salty sea. Soon enough we blew past Camarillo, then Santa Barbara until we hit the 154 and turned inland into the Santa Ynez mountains. Vistas became breathtaking. The land was a patchwork quilt of amber fields and thick deciduous forest, rolling in lazy peaks and valleys. Smaller and smaller roads siphoned our car from the freeway, leading us into a vale nestled between groves of oak. As the festival had commenced the evening previous, hundreds if not thousands of cars were already there, stacked in snaking lines across a wide, flat grass lot. Red-tailed hawks danced lazily in the sky, skimming currents of air. They were everywhere as we unpacked our ensemble, laying out bin after bin of equipment and food. It didn't take us long to realize that we had a lot of stuff. Perhaps too much stuff for just our humble camp. Fortunately for us, however, festivals often support healthy barter economies. We had lots to trade, and we were searching for something very rare and valuable in return: an ephemeral ideal.
Other times, I might have had the inclination to worry about how we were going to move all of our crap up into the camping area. But that day, exercising the guiding principles, breathing in Tao with every inhale, it did not concern me in the least, nor was I bothered when the truck taking camping gear into the festival had just come and we did not know when it would return. The sky was as pure and light a blue as on the cosmic color wheel, and surrounding us was the warmth of a natural oasis, a haven for spirits to gather and play in meta-awareness.
It did not take us long to make friends. Three rustic souls had parked nearby and had approached us, sniffing out like minds. Flower power radiated from Jenna, Eric and David, and it was clear that they were experienced festival hoppers. They, like many others, and us had come from far and wide to witness a live set from Bassnectar, musical shaman of the underground breaks scene. Though they were only staying the day, they kindly offered to wait with us for the truck, and to help us take our ridiculous train of containers to our as yet unknown camping spot. As we moved our bags to the interior of the parking lot to be in a better position for the truck when it did finally make its return, the conversation turned to boomerangs, Santa Barbara, other excellent festivals attended in the past. Knowing no reason not to start the party though we were far from set up, we opened several Sapporo tallboys, and soon, as it would many times over the next two days, conversation soon morphed from words into music. The travelers had brought a wooden recorder and fife, and combined with bongos we held an impromptu parking lot party powered solely by human fuel. Hawks circled overhead as we pounded out an ode to confluent flows.
It was at that point, solely content we were, five fated amateur musical expressions, that we first met Baz the Prophet. He appeared innocently and coincidentally enough in his cultivated afro and indigo bandana, a small, lanky fellow with a radiant aura. Actually, it had been us who had stumbled onto his territory, drinking and making our ruckus right near his black sedan. He and his two friends soon sauntered by, and, since like-minds agglomerate (as like-substances dissolve), Baz and his companions soon joined our impromptu party as well, commenting on just how ridiculously much Sitari and I had lugged out to Santa Barbara for a scarce three days. Once again we laughed, replying that the food and drink was for all to share.
Perhaps it was the critical mass or mystical significance of our three tight bands rolled into one, perhaps it was the presence of such raw potential bringage (a term coined by Sitari), but finally the truck came to ship ourselves, our friends, and of course, too many material goods out to the campsite. Yet our sojourn in the parking lot was fortuitous, for Baz kindly invited Sitari and I to join their camp. So it was that piecemeal we lugged our various containers to a shaded glade nestled against the edge of a hill surrounded on one side with hedges of poison oak. The glade was a perfect camp, secluded, overlooking the workshop stage, just hidden enough to envelope us in a safe haven, yet readily accessible to several of the main stages--the very main stages where, at the peak of break-beat eruptions, we would see visions.
But first, walking around, gathering our bearings, Sitari and I stumbled onto a pack of roving festival hoppers, and all of us rather simultaneously spied a stack of perfectly cut blocks that suspiciously mimicked – no, they were! – giant Jenga blocks. The six of us could hardly believe our eyes, but in a culture founded on participation, there was only one path for us to follow. Sensing the flow of the Tao trickle between nine-inch blocks, round after round passed where all six of us successfully outwitted gravity, eager to punish us if we were too brazen or crass. It was a welcome exercise in acting upon the wu wei, the effortless path of the Tao, finding secret intersections of space were we could insert our essence and surgically re-organize potential energy. As often occurs in Jenga, eventually it was not the removal of a block but the careless replacement of it on top of the pile that caused the tower to fall (another profound lesson!). And when our experiment finally crumbled, something special happened that proved we were no longer trapped in the metropolis. Not a single player decided that they were exempt from replacing the displaced; every one of us helped rebuild the tower to its original specifications, a theme that would be echoed again and again before our sojourn concluded.
Before the night culminated in the awesome thunder of Bassnectar, in the velveteen caress of wooded twilight, I confess I experienced deep moments of intense displacement. While not a professional festival hopper, I do enjoy a good festival from time to time, camping in the wilderness surrounded by artistic evolutions. But here, looking around, every individual I met seemed to achieve an incredible peace, an engagement with the mystic currents that glided invisibly between the oak groves. Uncertainty proliferated in my gut, and for a few brief moments I doubted whether as a neophyte I was worthy to share this place with the evolved spirits surrounding me on every side. I wondered whether we would find that ideal we so hungrily hunted. Then, as if in some synchronic answer to my questioning, a lone hawk suddenly swooped down, talons spread, into a tall tree growing before me. Almost invisible between silhouetted leaves, I watched it nestle into comfort in the woodland paradise it called home. Just like that, riddling my bongos to the beat of a nearby drum circle, my doubt subsided. I knew then that if I had the opportunity to share a place of mystic peace with creatures of such pure magnificence, I had absolutely nothing to fear.
And besides, monkey chant was calling.
I had never witnessed the monkey chant prior to that night, but as I sat at the edge of the circle with Sitari, watching those in the center whoop, deep, bop, sowang and fawoosh their way into humorous communion with ourselves in the rings, I witnessed one of the most pure examples of ego synergy I had ever recalled. Heretofore I've primarily addressed my theoretical concept of ego synergy in fiction, but the concept is a traditional one in the study of organizational behavior, based on observations of how individual humans tend to blend their egos in communities, generating a collective mental state reflecting the cultural dynamics of their overriding environments. Sports arenas and corporations are two Petri dishes of ego synergy we witness every day, while underground parties another example seen by those of us lucky enough to experience such raw displays of power. Monkey chant impressed me greatly, separated as it was from any infrastructure, sound system, architecture or history other than our own primal human need for communal expression. As we formed torso waves, brought our energy to a crest in hooting joy reaching for the sky, we sang out a chaotic prayer welcoming the descending nocturne.
Monkey chant died in reverent silence and the crowd dispersed, so Sitari and I made our way to where Glitch Mob had begun amping up their set. Sitari and I see members of the 'Mob fairly regularly at Space Island, and are continuously impressed and driven by their mad bringage (there's that damn word again!). But here at LIB, edIT, Borreta and the rest of the posse must have implanted auditory cybernetics and fired their laptops in platinum, because every syncopated break lashed out in angular electronic tongues. Floor space became packed under a white parachute canopy intertwined with plastic branches, as a central circular dais sprouted jitterbugging limbs. The gyrating crowd was wrapped around their turntables. From the breaking storm, tweaking samples recalled a mantra of Rage, and hundreds of fists shot out in defiance. Though I've since seen it all again on YouTube, nothing can quite compare to being there and hearing "killing in the name" tear robotically through the air. Apparently Glitch Mob felt the same, evidenced by edIT remarking as their set died down that we had been "the illest crowd they had ever slayed." No doubt – they had pureed our physical forms into cyclone energy, and we were just getting warmed up.
As Glitch Mob departed, leaving a hive of festival hoppers waiting for the main event, a surreal performance manifested on stage. Spontaneously, hundreds sat, echoing the same theme from our earlier Jenga game: a profound and universal acceptance that the joy of the crowd depends on the attitude and behavior of every individual. Respectful, reverent, we sat, hushed, waiting for what was next.
Metallic antlers were implanted into the central dais. A fair brunette drowning in flowing white fabric was chained to its twisted iron spires. Before the imprisoned maiden, a treasure chest glowed eerily. Soon a trilled aria sprang from the woman as two strongmen wearing leather, covered in ink, huffing, licking flame, lit the tips of the metal antlers on fire. An androgynous, angelic figure pirouetted on stage and swooped towards the glowing chest, producing a giant brazen key. Guiding principles sparked in my mind as the Angel unlocked the lid and retreated at the escape of another dark-haired vixen, this one dressed lasciviously in leather. Curvaceously entrancing the audience, she pivoted her hips to the cadence of the soprano's melody. As the angel retreated into the glowing chest, one archetype of floating holiness was replaced by a lusty symbol shedding clothing as her dancing became increasingly frenzied under an undulating opera climaxing in spewing flame. Then, darkness.
We had hardly noticed the new setup on stage through the applause, but as thunder dropped from surround sound, there was little doubt that we had hit the core of the night, the headliner in all his shamanism, Bassnectar. There was a faint, brief whiff of smoke, a remnant of the trail of slaughtered sub-woofers piled neck deep from previous gigs. But neither Sitari, nor I, nor any of the other hundreds there felt too much pity for the fallen as over the next two hours and change, boulders of broken bass were hurled upon our eardrums. Sampling profusely from both Mesmerizing The Ultra and Underground Communication, Bassnectar conjured hurricanes of alto force summoning a grass roots nation to incant its sublime inner essence. Cisco, my spirit siblings, rhymes with muthafuckin' disco. The crowd in that tiny parachute room tripled, and our bringage intensified tenfold. Over the waving heads of dancing fools I spied a troop of roving giraffes, inebriated and grooving in their rave gear between pure white mushroom men and burners decked in dark fur. Above the plastic branches and parachute roof, the sky opened, raining sparks of bolted protoplasm down, energizing hundreds of naked cortices. Heaven and earth merged, ambient ghosts harmonizing on compressed wings, dancing between crystal caverns exhuming a deep, abdominal war cry emanating from the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
In the middle of raving masses, between groaning Richter vibrations, a vision: around my solar plexus shone a fragile yellow ball containing flakes of ultra-purified compassion.
Sitari, dancing yards away, was given a vision as well, but while mine was simple, humble, private, hers encapsulated the vast rush of humanity surrounding us, commanding air molecules being battered about by hammering woofers. Above our heads bloomed billion-watt comets of joysoulnectarflow sweeping over the crowd, floral indigo entities caroming in and out of existence like electric break beat daemons born from one raw source.
After that rush, sleep came easily, with fleeting, elusive dreams.
Awaking in the misty morning, we campers desired only two prizes. The first, a new day every bit as transcendent and explosive as the solar cycle prior. The second, perhaps even more aggressive and aspirational: clean portipotties. But then this second desire came true and the spirit of the forest ( i.e. solid forethought by The Do Lab) allowed us to devirginize fresh holes with processed camping food! We knew then that nothing was impossible, that if a satisfying shit could be had in the woods, surely we bears had tapped deep into the synchronicity highway, that reality was ready to be remolded like wet clay.
And clay our reality became as Sitari and I journeyed past faeries workin' it on the workshop stage, swirling in satin hues, past breaks already pouring from genie-bottle stages. Running into Christian the Blacksmith fiddling with about twenty pounds of potter's clay, we eagerly took the reigns on an art project he had begun earlier. Soon, as others joined in, Christian's diorama of a well and barren trees became surrounded by high walls on which glyphs were etched, idols set, faces weaving into windows, naked bodies swimming through solid walls.
Satisfied momentarily with our contribution to the communal artistic landscape, we wandered aimlessly, drinking tallboys, dancing to breaks, napping in one giant mesh hammock, but it wasn't until the afternoon that our creative energies were able to fully merge into the fast lane. "Hobo is the new tribal!" random psycho clowns shouted, running across the grassy fields around where we had been dancing to the crazed funk of Wazulu the Ill Dravidian. On the sandy dance floor, we again ran into Baz, gettin' busy, poised for ridiculously deep drops with his finger pointed towards the sun, proclaiming the party. Too soon the set concluded, and we three famished travelers headed back to camp headquarters ready for more tallboys and gourmet sandwiches.
As we ate, neither Sitari nor I suspected that what we had been searching for was also hunting for us. It began innocently enough. As it often does, the conversation naturally turned towards ragamuffins. We mentioned the Devil, and though it's cerebral trip was too intense for what either Sitari or I really wanted, it happened (coincidentally?) to be exactly the type Baz favored. And of course, Sitari and I were on the lookout for synchronic ragamuffins on which to meditate, since the last batch had been bunker than a Las Vegas virgin escort. (Coincidentally?) Baz just happened to possess precisely this strain of ragamuffin, and, being in a barter economy, we did not hesitate to trade assets and consider ourselves quite clever in the process.
But when you ride synchronicity, it always rides you back.
As we gathered on grass to perform the exchange, a friend of Baz came to chill as well, a girl named Dorothy, whose spacey façade couldn't hide a worldly, perceptive introspector. Conversation morphed from our current deal to the mali that was running rampant around the campground, to the mystic fluid atmosphere surrounding us as we reclined on loamy cushions shaded by oak. As hawks circled above a fifth person joined us. He seemed to float in from nowhere, to materialize on the wind. One look at our new friend and we instantly recognized an enlightened spirit, his heightened senses, a true hypermage. In his presence, the five of us vibing off of each other, the conversation evolved, jumping frequencies, existing between dimensions. Great works of literature emerged in our shared mental space – commentary of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and associated Robert Anton Wilson adventures bled into Andaraeon Theory, a rare tome of great wisdom. Talk of illumination and poetry sifted into a true connection, and in that pure space, a sharing of mysticism. As we spoke of experiences in which we had touched the divine, it was this magus who managed to trip us out the most. Once, he confided, he had mistakenly ingested over a hundred tabs of LSD; in this altered state of consciousness he crossed a doorway and witnessed the world break apart before him, atomized into ever-smaller bubbles, endless units of infinite.
And so, without consciously searching for it, Sitari and I had found our ideal, hyperintelligent communication with other individuals. True, awake, aware, the afternoon glowed for us as shadows slowly drifted into evening. All revelations end, and perfect moments eventually digested by the samsara of reality. But with the festival still alive and the Tao wrapped around us in a mystic afghan of empowerment, it was impossible to feel anything but the most sublime joy as our small band broke apart. "Thought club" had snuck up on us, we realized, as Sitari and I monkey chanted our little lungs out. Only instead of us holding it, it had held us in its blessed outstretched palm.
Once again monkey chant ended, and once again we trucked to that same parachute room replete with plastic branches, the decks nestled in the trunk of a pretend tree. This time, however, it was StarFire pounding the decks, placing breaks around the bounding banging of his electronic drum and fat piqued bass. Then Freq Nasty took the stage; if Bassnectar had dipped his spindly fingers across the soundscape, Freq Nasty drilled deep, spiraling inward, reversing his flows into slow, methodical stomp diving like cannonball waterfalls off cascading bass scales. Around us danced hundreds of past and future friends, all divine and glowing. One girl waggling adjacently with mischief in her eyes dared us to circle the packed dance floor, and there we went! Bobbing, weaving, flowing our energies around gyrating burners slowly dissolving into deep freaky bass, we reached the front, dwarfed by the energy of the magicians on stage. Indeed, Freq Nasty's progressions were symbolic of the spirit of the festival itself; every time we thought we had reached some core mantra--
womp…womp…womp…womp…womp…womp
--new eruptions of force exploded into
FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH FWAH!!!
So it was that after two hours (and two days) of such continuous mindfuckery, we were spent, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Sated on visions, our skin still tickled and tingled with electricity. Though sound systems had subsided at midnight, festival hoppers still swarmed everywhere, gathering in small groups playing instruments, mastering flow toys, dancing under distilled constellations. A few of us gathered around the fire pit, warming our hands and faces, basking like charged cathodes. Suddenly, a bizarre, Italian-accented laugh leapt from the dark, as one unmistakably outrageous demon burst into the circle in tracksuit and voluminous mullet. Mojo Mangina! Scourge of the seven festivals, Mojo cackled and enumerated all the pleasures of owning (and being?) a mangina as he bounced along the stone border caging our fire. We laughed in our illumination, warm and content.
The next morning, after leaving no trace of our presence in that shady green glen nestled under gliding raptors, Sitari and I crept back towards the vortex of Los Angeles. Before submitting again to our modern madness, however, we stopped for burgers at a small joint in Carpinteria overlooking the ocean. As we reclined against boulders, digging our toes into fine white sand, we re-examined again our guiding principles. Sitari had discovered a spiritual toolkit, an indestructible Swiss army knife constructed from a lack of expectations and a daring will to exploit every inch of opportunity to which one is invited in this world.
For me, the vast quantities of mystic electricity that had raged across my system spontaneously congealed into a simple realization. If we are able to breathe, see, hear, taste and feel the Tao, if we can backstroke through its river of awakening, then what is to stop us from being the Tao? What is to stop us from disintegrating our limitations into its molten flow and unifying with the divine on a daily basis? By distilling our powers of compassion we might see that, on a very basic level, we exist as a part of a larger consciousness that can open any door we choose. This was my key, forged from energy of captured lightning catalyzing a monumental shift in perspective. Above our default world, our salty sea of conditioned systems and pigeonholed existences, there floats an primordial orb of fire. It is infinitely aware, and waits patiently for us to embrace it, to spurn the default and customize our own personal surreality. All we have to do to access this ancient power is just lift our eyes towards the light.
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