Protean Dreams

Moonshine in Mal Pais

2010-02-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

Moonshine in Mal Pais

Mal Pais, Costa Rica. 01.30.10. On a day that will live in synchronicity, basting in pure silver light from Luna, the Earth froze into a timeless stream of subatomic particles levitating in their waveforms.

The truth is I never intended to write another entry in this blog. Burning Man 2007 seemed like the perfect climax, the summit reached, the navy blue astral stratosphere inhaled in deep gulps of evolution. Lightning in a Bottle 2008 was almost as beautiful as it had been the year before, surrounded by family, friends and gifts of the earth, including a bonus lead on the blue tea of Chinatown. Labor day 2008 and 2009 came and went, the Burn sadly traded in some of life’s more difficult moments for transcendent professional impact and spirit travel, including a romp through England and Spain this past October. After each adventure I deliberated whether to write it all down for posterity. All duly noted and disregarded.

Until this week, when I returned from the Manifesto Gathering in Mal Pais, Costa Rica, a loose leafed gathering of tight families. Five years old, the Gathering is the farthest I have traveled to participate in the premeditated underground, yet in eight short days it has launched onto the short list. You know, the one ranking the all the crazy shit in order of descending awesome. And when I witnessed the world freeze, I knew had to write it all down.

Manifest Destiny

I knew none of the peeps I met last week: Mary the fashionista mastermind behind Manifesto, her husband Marty Party the slick crunkslinger and the rest of the Brooklyners, the salty sweet SLC crew, Chrispy and Jamie and the whole lot of crazy kids that ended up watching the moonlight driven tides tear up the beach on Sunday morning. My whole mission began haphazardly when I noticed a Manifesto ad on a Frisco newsnet and made an offhand joke to friends over Christmas that trekking out to Costa Rica for a party sure would push the envelope. I never expected they would call my bluff.

But once the banner was raised there was no backing out. Plans were drafted, logistics plotted. Stars aligned to land my friend Michelle, travelling from Boston through Orlando, and I from SF through Mexico City, to San Jose Costa Rica within ten minutes of each other. It was a hint of the synchronicity to come. One GPS-equipped 4X4 later, we were on our way trekking out from the center of the country, winding up lush picturesque roads surrounded by grass veldts and palm fronds and crisp blue sky.

The town of Puntarenas was a grungy mishmash of steel sheets and litter and houses with wrought iron gates stretching from their foundations to their roofs, living in constant fear of thieves. Suddenly from the jungle it had emerged in ranks of shacks wedged in uncomfortably close, pinned up against the gulf. Concrete walls, broken trellises, dirty CentroAmerican commerce flanked us from all sides, railroading us out onto artificial landfill, until we reached the ferry landing and the long line of cars that stretched from it like a dead centipede. I met a man there, a brown surfer with tangled frizzy hair and scars. He told me that he lived in Mal Pais, where we were headed, and that he used to work for the ferry company until a nasty surfing accident made him unemployed, working for tourist tips he earned by leading the grumbling 4X4s waiting for passage across the water. I tipped him well. It wasn’t until later I learned about con artists pretending to work for the ferry company, getting cars close to the transport for cold cash. Fortunately, Puntarenas was short lived. Just before the ferry departed into the Golfo de Nicoya, Michelle spied a fellow Burner and future Manifestian, a lanky quasi-giant with an unruly blonde fauxhawk and disarming smile. Chris. Sauntering over in the wind, he was as warm and confident as the setting sun. I actually met Jamie first, Chris’ girl, as he parked the car. Petite with smooth angles, Jamie’s energy belied her small stature. Energy flooded her aura like the corona of a young star.

Over the next hour, as the ferry pulled away from the dirty port and brush fires of mainland Costa Rica, and mountain ranges and volcanoes surrounded us on the horizon, Michelle and I shot the shit with Jamie and Chris. They lived in LA, near my old haunts. Though younger, they knew the scene well—better than I do, no doubt. We didn’t know it then but our fortuitous meeting would be the beginning of a winding adventure. We talked of small, burnery tidbits: the upcoming Lightning in a Bottle, which DJs were still underground, whether the teenyboppers sneaking into massives would ever know that the charlatans they worshiped had once been prophets, turned zombies by a toxic lust for fame. But our words were only secondary. The sunset and humid equatorial air had surrounded us in a warm blanket of whispered mischief and atmospheric flame.

When we reached the far shore, the peninsula of Nicoya was already dark. Over roads carpet bombed by neglect and shoddy paving we followed our high beams. Michelle and I ruminated on frameworks for categorizing genres of electronic music. It was a lengthy debate about tempo and syncopation and sampling and the ability for humans to ever truly verbalize synthetic collections of auditory stimuli half magnetized into non-linear distributions like Rorschach tests of soul. Whatever. I’ve always enjoyed a challenge.

We arrived at our spot for the week, La Hacienda in Mal Pais, about an hour later. It was a great little B&B right across the street from the beach and near the center of all the action that was to come. Surrounding a pretty little pool and garden of bougainvillea and chili peppers and cacti and palm fronds was a collection of simple rooms speckled with charming replicas of Mesoamerican art. Our bathroom was special, too. It came with its own scorpion.

We ran into Chris and Jamie again later at a local restaurant serving Costa Rican casados and falafel and staffed by Argentinean runaways. I caught little snippets of the lives of Chris and Jamie growing up in Cali, lives not altogether unlike my own had been, and felt a growing camaraderie that perhaps these cats were genuine, the real deal. Mary came over to our table with her knowing smile and funky earings to welcome us, give us tips about the local scene and lay out the schedule. I appreciated the personal touch. It’s not often that the architects of underground epicenters will proactively introduce themselves to make their guests feel at home. Her effort was charming and hinted at the openheartedness we would find at Manifesto under the Mal Pais moon.

Later Jamie, Chris, Michelle and I found our way to D&N, the main nightclub in Mal Pais. Out past its wooden bar and upstairs bamboo VIP lounge and sandy lounge chairs, we found on the beach some surfer kids who had ignited a roaring bonfire. We fed the fire and drank beer and roasted marshmallows and talked in hushed semioptimistic tones about the curvature of the earth and the malleability of time, and I felt all the machinations and chains of ordinary life slip far away with the tide.

The next morning while Michelle slept I wandered the beaches of Mal Pais. At first I wandered south from La Hacienda into a field of lava rocks. Their lips formed wide tide pools of clear seawater. The tide pools were sparse, with a minnow here, a shell there. It made me appreciate the beaches of California, where tidepool terraces create thousands of microniches with anenomes, crabs, barnacles, urchins and all manner of aquatic wildlife. By comparison, the tidepooling in Mal Pais would have been drab if not for the azure sky and turquoise ocean stretching out to infinity. Since the surf was clearly the entre of choice here on the Pacific beaches of Costa Rica, I headed north, out to where the sand was free of rocks, softer than white bread powder. Out in the surf, beautiful lithe human creatures floated on steady waves. I dipped into the warm water, finding it highly superior to the cold California current. Bodysurfing was like hang gliding on thermals. At the edge of the beach more of the lithe beasts lazed in the palm trees, reading or laughing or laying in hammocks or polishing their surfboards. Few times in the English language is there a word that so perfectly describes the gestalt of the perceivable universe at a given point in spacetime. Fortuitously, this was one of those moments. It was straight chill.

Thursday afternoon, as the sun set into the darkening waves, I met Alekkai and Kimiko and Marty and Sonny and Ross and Josiah and a number of other kids from all over the States who had descended on Costa Rica. We converged on the Palapa, a freestanding sukkah-like structure composed of palm fronds draped over tree trunks wedged in the sand. It was perhaps portentous that the central trunk was braced on an empty bottle of liquor, as after the sunset, our bonfire extinguished, we ventured into town in the everlasting quest for beer and the perfect tacos de pescado. We feasted and watched Ross’ band from Philly play their acoustic guitars and drums with a local chap who had mastered the art of playing floor cymbals with a cowbell and drumstick rigged into his shoes. Craziest of all was Mais, firedancer extrodinaire.

Friday was the pool party at Beija Flor, a resort less than a klik down the dusty road from La Hacienda. While it continued the highly chill vibe, in the words of the Beasties, the beat was pumpin and the girlies was hot. Listening to Marty spin downtempo dub step, I sipped on my beer and wondered at the jungle surrounding us just beyond the boundary of the neatly trimmed cabinas, a tangible reminder of the primal tendrils of our subconscious wriggling just behind our domesticated egos.

As Marty cycled through tracks, Chris was refining his own, an infant sound, dark and deep that had never been unleashed on the churning masses. Michelle had the honor of hearing them first, and once she did couldn’t stop babbling about Chris being the next Ooah, whatever that means. I’ve always been of the mind that artists, and indeed everyone, should be judged by their own merits. I nodded anyway, happy that she was happy. But then Chris gave me the same honor of a preview, asking for feedback, his work all potential, raw and untested. I could only listen for a few seconds before I had to throw the headphones off – the tracks were so good that I was literally ruining them by listening to them for the first time on anything other than massive speakers. I told Chris as much, and he hinted with bright eyes that he might have a chance to play the pool party. He had told me earlier that he had lugged two computers, several midi panels, a keyboard and however many wires and other accoutrements across international lines on the off-hand chance that he might hook up his first real gigs. Now it looked like he would get the chance. I told him I had only one request. Por favor, bring the womp.

His set launched softly, as downtempo as Marty’s had left off, but slowly picked up with heavy slices of bassy goodness deftly stacked, wobbled, tweaked, wavering the frequency and pitch of the dub increasingly erratically as the set powered on. Yet it hung together, progressing, arcing into the transcendent dimension of well crafted electronica. From my vantage point in the pool I could only smile in amazement. The peeps were into it, wiggling their butts and bobbing their heads. Chris had dipped his craft into our minds and infected our reality. Yet though we basked in the aura of his performance euphoria, none of us expected him to be invited to play again at D&N.

That night, Govinda was spinning his own melodic brand of breaks, fairly standard except for his electric violin that wailed and whined beautiful ghostly tones. He was supposed to open for Rabbit in the Moon, but Rabbit apparently had a personal emergency at the last moment and was unable to show. Govinda played everything he had, but several hours later he was dry. At that point, the story holds, Mary asked Chris if he wanted to spin again. The eager lad nodded furiously, only to find out that instead of playing for an hour as he had suspected, he would be playing for more than two, closing out the club. Apparently some chick asked him as he was setting up if he could do her a favor and play hip-hop or regge. After painting her with an incredulous look, he said that he’d do her one better and play both, at the same time, fused together at a molecular level. Perhaps I embellish. I promise it’s the first time.

I gave Chris a request too, mostly because I knew of his loathing of them and just wanted to mess with his head. For the love of all that’s holy, I implored again, bring the womp.

Apparently Chris does grant requests, if they’re the right kind. His set launched into uptempo breaks from the get go, the dubstep thick and meaty. From almost that first moment people flooded the dance floor, kicking off their sandals to get better traction for twists and pivots, not giving a fuck about the gnarly seams in the pavement, the dirt and grit baked in the concrete by the hot Costa Rican sun. As the set progressed it dove deeper, darker, harder, off-tempo snares complimented rolling bass pushing the floor of the musical scale into the realm where the ear can hear only a fraction of a note, the rest penetrating the listener’s viscera with scintillating body highs. Chris bounced around as hard as his audience, a jumping bean tweaking levels, tapping the midis in tune, mixing and matching beats with eclectic ambient samples, even a Brittany ditty which womped surprisingly hard. As the night wore on and the moon sank off its peak, his prepared set ran dry. Yet the energy of the club was vibrating so electrically that to just put on the brakes would have been a travesty. So Chris improvised, pulling out tracks from left field, glitch hop and dub step and acid crunk, weaving the bass of the last few tracks around poignant female vocals and melodic samples reaching out to the dark ocean horizon.

When the club owners finally shut him down around 2:30 am, the charisma radiating off his bright eyes could have powered New York City on New Year’s Eve. He had brought the womp, and the people loved him for it. Several times people approached him wanting to know his handle, moniker, eponym, logo – what the hell was he called and where could they pick up his demo? At this he lost a bit of his luster, and replied that it had been Chrispy, but that this was taken apparently by some even younger, even more currently prolific bastard abroad (whose tracks now definitely warrant a microscopic scrutiny). Alternatives under consideration were Aphrodesiac, Lewd in Public (which I still think makes a really good collaboration label) and my own contribution to the clusterfuck of titleage, Red Shift. The name came to me during his set, when it occurred that the crunkforce escaping his towers could have been singlehandedly responsible for forcing the universe to expand. As we walked to the beach to admire the moonshine, Chris seemed thoughtful about which he would adopt, conscious of the power of names.

Infinity Pools

Jamie drove up to La Hacienda the next morning alone. We had scheduled four for a canopy tour in Cabo Blanco, one of Costa Rica’s oldest nature preserves, but Chris was recuperating from the craziness of the previous evening. After brief instructions at the canopy site, Michelle, Jamie and I began our ascent into the trees. The first platform was dizzying, the trees towering above the forest floor. Hooked in, Jamie went first, and within an instant was a speck flying out over the lush vegetation, harnessed only by pulleys on a metal wire. When my turn came I looked down, watched the flimsy metal wire dip and sway, felt the wind on my face stinging my eyes as the gnarled branches of the surrounding canopy flew by in blurs of lime and chartreuse and hazel under the ozone. It was exhilarating.

For a few platforms we zipped above the canopy, flying hundreds of meters at once, admiring spindly trees with yellow flowers that bloomed for only a few weeks in the final days of the dry season. Soon we zipped down a wire that descended into the canopy. Feel the leaves brush inches from your face, dive feet first through a narrow gap in the crisscrossing leaves, a secret passage into ancient vegetation, a lost continent of dizzying photosynthesis. From one platform just under the forest roof we marveled at orchids hanging upside down and lazy beehives and howler monkeys climbing over each other through the treetops. As we descended further down the skyscraping canopy the zips became more forgiving and we were able to perform aerial tricks, dangling upside down, heart racing, watching the bowl of the sky ascend into roots of green. Or spinning around and letting the soft undercurves of Jurassic palms caress our skin as the world whirled toplike. We ended the canopy tour with a bonus zip over the falls, dry until the monsoons come again, a beautiful arid irony in the lush forest reminding me that reality is curved, that the journey of our lives flows in waves.

After remembering that we hadn’t been born to fly, we set out on the search for Chris, with refreshing pure magenta beet juice and creamy iced coffee. We found him at Beija Flor, by the pool. The four of us wandered over to Vista De Olas, where Michelle had stayed for her 2008 Manifesto experience. A beautiful villa on the mountains overlooking Mal Pais, the hotel pool was an engineering marvel, complete with an aquatic bar and tile stools. The curved edge of the chlorinated water seemed to flow uninterrupted into the far reaches of the distant navy ocean. There we rested under broad leaves and sipped our drinks as we watched the sun grow an angry red and sneeze rosy hues across distant cirrus clouds before sinking beyond the lip of the visible world.

We ate in a local soda with smorgasbord nachos and delectable Costa Rican pockets that uncannily resembled tacos, filled with fresh fish and chicken. Around nine we ventured out to a local house right off the beach, sitting under balmy palm trees. There I met another gaggle of kids. Several of them got off on worshipping Chris, which was highly entertaining and well deserved. He danced their dance beautifully, lining up promises of further gigs Stateside, slipping his heat through gaps in their puny burny pedestals, penetrating his viral psychonucleicacid into the mental slipstream of their crew. I watched detached, an obvious outsider, with a silly little smirk on my face as I sipped on the wash.

Soon we were back at D&N, collecting our wristband entry keys to the VIP lounge above the floor. There we sat on plush benches watching visual fractals project on the wall behind the first DJ, Lauren Urroz, as she dropped dirty belly breaks that cracked the superego between us. Soon the party spiraled out, launched into the stratosphere. Under the interlocking A-frame bamboo roof Manifestians gathered in their bellbottoms and afros and tribal tattoos, dancing with such synchronized rhythm that the whole VIP lounge wobbled precariously around the axis of kinesis.

I was suddenly overcome by fearful visions of the VIP lounge crashing down and killing hundreds of people. I had to get out. I descended the stairs out to the dance floor but that was overwhelming too, bodies warping weaving twisting in the undertow of dub. Stumbling now out to the beach, I sought solace in the soft sand, sinking into the lotus position. People gathered around me on the beach, eerily reminiscent of my vision in Red Geminis, in gatherings of twos and threes and fives, staring out as if summoning some great force from the unfathomable depths to sear the Pacific and Milky Way together in a thin chalky membrane of waving surf. All around me the sky was falling in waves of collapsing stars. The protoplasm of the night turned a bloody purple, collapsing in pixels into the raging sea. I was sucked inward, closing my eyes, remembering a prebirth nightmare of demons and chaos. There I floundered, falling falling down down into myself into the dark into the unknown of choice and the inability to return to the purity of origins.

Just when it seemed I would fall forever I landed with a soft slow levitation. It had been years since I had found this place of peace, perhaps not in the same manner since in a previous life. A spear of light descended through the crown of my head down my gullet and into the well of my spirit, somewhere beyond my organs. At first it seemed as if the light would fade into the infinite black, but in a single moment it filled up the very core of my being. Anthroglyphs of human contour resembling Mayan pictographs danced around the circumference of my well of light, and I knew that I had hit center.

Meditating in my well of light, I opened my eyes to Luna. Its contour was a perfect white elipse of pearlescent light. None of that grease-fat orange moon hanging bloated above the horizon, or the emaciated skeleton crescent floating ghostly overhead, barely visible. No, this moon was an old moon, an equatorial moon, tearing the fabric of spacetime and beaming its perfect platinum rainbow of alien energy upon my chakras. Surrounded by a thick, reverberating purple-yellow-white aura, the satellite blinded from view all but the most brilliant constellations. Those few visible encircling stars seemed columns in a celestial palace holding up the dome of heaven. The sky became a Moon Temple, a place of knowledge to worship the subtle wisdom of a conscious self spinning the wheel of fortune.

When I returned to the moon party, I found a maelstrom of rushing current, the human beasts pulled by the same force as the tides. The maddened primates were gyrating, crawling over each other with brown flesh and tank tops and bare sandcarved soles and arms reaching out toward the column of light shining directly from the perfect circle of platinum overhead. As the hours wore on and the dark breakbeat of Urroz gave way to the meandering womp of Flook (apparently not to be confused with Fluke, of redonkulous old-school breakbeat fame) to the bouncy Latin-laced bass of El Papachango, the crowd grew increasingly volatile, corrosive waves of acid and base, male and female, potential and kinetic energy crashing and washing out, reanimating in stomping heels and slapped asses and funky freaky hip grinding booty shaking sexy supplication to the gods. Marty Party closed out the show in an epic journey mixing steady hip hop basslines through a rollercoaster of ambience, weaving the flailing poltergeist heartbeat of the hive buzzing across the feeding frenzy concrete dancefloor. In the thick for part of it, I watched from the VIP treehouse above as the waves of human muscle undulated before the astral projections of Jacobeye. Holes of psychedelic fractals tunneled through seemingly solid buildings with floating cubes of gilded textures above intricately filamentous stained glass and divine symbols rotating in neon-traced primordial polygons and landscapes of branched vegetal tentacles reaching out like dendrites sparking electrochemical collective consciousness. Drenched in sweat and womp, I spread my arms and embraced the sheer energy of the Earth’s magnetic poles and the body heat radiating into the musty sea air. The world disintegrated into its constituent particles, the subatomic colors and flavors of quarks airbrushing an impressionist matrix of relativity, and for one immeasurably small moment everyone in Mal Pais froze in the wave of time.

The club closed around two, and following a haphazard exodus we Manifestians reconvened at the Palapa. As Michelle and I trekked down the beach, Mary suddenly crashed through the bush atop on a white mare, immortalized in sycophantic film as she galloped towards the gathering. Catching up at our snail’s pace, we found the Palapa battered by a full moon tide, scooping up the sandy foundation with a splash zone dousing those close to the shore with the rush of saltwater. Wet droopy cigarettes.

Our crew sat in the throne of a twisted tree trunk, its pretzel branches curving off its trunk around our sated forms. I was transfixed by the moon, still commanding its celestial palace, still a disembodied prophet, the harbinger of shadow transformed into a lighthouse, a reminder that human beings have walked on worlds beyond our own and possess the power to transcend our primate ancestry. Cosmic boulevards of silver light arced out to the horizon, allowing us to witness the charcoal underbelly of the dark matter lighting the way to unknown frontiers. Luna enjoyed toying with us, her light licking at the surrounding clouds with a powerful gravity well. A vortex formed in the water vapor, with wriggling tongues pulled inward in a psychedelic spiral towards the hole in the sky. Waves crashed in like liquid droplets of entropic mercury.

Fire shows in the surf were born against the soft crash of the shore, worshipping the ephemeral flame in the moist morning air. As the horizon lightened with the soft dawn, colors came off the waves in metallic royal blues and butter yellows and emerald turquoises flickering in luxurious pastels.

At one point I asked Jamie when the moon was supposed to sink beneath the waves. Alas, she informed me, moonset was an unrealistic expectation – nothing in the night sky would be bright enough to be seen once the sun had reasserted its lordship. Yet no moonset could have been as epic as the shift from charcoal night to the rosy azure equator day, a smooth soft caress shifting almost as fast as thought.

Tarantula hawks buzzed about the extinguished fire pit ash as the air warmed, with their telltale fluorescent orange wings and wicked black abdomens. As the sun rose higher, Michelle and I wandered back down the beach, across the lava rocks to our hotel. I sank into beautiful dreams.

Cabuya, Montezuma, Tortuga and The Winding Road Home

Apparently there was once this cat named Newton, who posited that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I had always observed this law of motion to be true for people as well as planets. Even times of unparalleled synchronicity, where wavelengths in the universe are aligned to the point of freezing completely into particles at the peak of their potential, inevitably lead to disharmony. It is no fault of any being that this should be the case--it is merely our waveform nature, the peaks and troughs of relativity, our spirits traveling at slightly different frequencies. According to Newton, the action of aligned synchronicity must cause a reaction of misaligned discord. Such is the balance of the universe.

So, in retrospect, after serendipitously discovering the Moon Temple I suppose I should have expected all of my preconceived notions about how the trip would end to be shattered.

Two days later Michelle and I traveled to Montezuma the hard and beautiful way, over the rough roads traversing the rocky spine of mountains between Mal Pais and Cabuya. Circling wide along the beach, I felt at peace, watching the clear blue water play over the reefs. The Manifestians met at Playa de los Artistes, a quaint little award-winning restaurant on the sand. Just before we ate we saw a woman heft a giant fish (a tuna perhaps?) by its broad, open gills past the bar and into the kitchen. Michelle and I split orders of the requisite shimp ceviche, followed by succulent filleted dorado with potatoes in a tomato reduction, as well as jet black polenta, the corn having been mixed with squid ink and topped with calamari. Our meal was delicious, the ingredients fresh, the company engaging and the acoustic set overlaying a sweet pairing of Pink Floyd and Radiohead covers. So distracted was I by the beauty of the moment that I blinked and missed when my fate became inextricably tangled with Chris and Jamie.

Over lunch, we learned that the SLC crew was planning a day trip to Isla Tortuga for some much hyped snorkeling. Jamie and I had been jonesing for a snorkel since before the full moon party, and with logic and luck managed to twist the arms of Michelle and Chris to join us. The plan was elegant: a private boat would be rented and would jet us out to Tortuga for a few hours before returning us in the nick of time to catch the ferry at Paquera back to Puntarenas and our last night near the airport before the first flight out. What I hadn’t counted on was the hand of chaos.

Stopping by a local market to stock up on beer for the coming evening, when we returned to the car it had died, twiching in the throes of rigor mortis. A herd of locals and Manifestians gathered around, working together trying to fix the withered battery (and likely alternator) of the sorriest 4X4 ever to successfully traverse the four rivers on the winding mountain road to Cabuya. Neither set of jumper cables, rusty axel nor new hotness, could spark the car back to life. Now, normally being stranded in a foreign country might grate on a man’s patience. One might expect him to trend toward panic, and run screaming through the streets like a gringo psychopath wailing for help from cartographers and travel agents and shady back alley bankers on the unforgiving path back home. Instead I was calm, medicated by the knowledge in the core of my abdomen that I would find my way. Fuck it, I said, and hopped in Jamie’s caravan to the mansion atop the hill.

Anayama resort appeared out of the jungle like a temple from the mist. After meeting the hospitable proprietors we trekked around back and took stairs down a steep ravine to a pristine river cascading over boulders in a series of waterfalls. Jumping off the baby cascade, a mere twelve feet into the cool pool was almost as liberating as swinging Tarzan-like off an overhanging rope into the mountain lake.

Soon it became too dark to distinguish color, and my retinal rods worked overtime as I scaled the stairs back up to the resort. Anayama truly was a beautiful place, a cohesive abode of stucco geometry that hung on itself, relaxed and powerful above the overgrown Costa Rican biomass. A columned wooden porch overlooked the nocturnal jungle and the silver ocean. The moon was no longer full, already waning, wasting no time on its cycle. A palatine with a fringed russet curtain, hammock and comfy chairs kept a small infinity pool company. Inside, a fabric platform for aerials tumbled down from the vaulted ceiling and grew a gaggle of shimmying acrobats. Over a dinner of delicious noodles and wraps we decompressed and listened once again to the stylings of Chrispy and Marty in our own private party.

Chris confessed to me that he hated the set he played that night. I don’t know how much of it had to do with the fact that few peeps were dancing--most had chosen to watch Mais and the other fire dancers juggle and spin flame on the lawn behind the wooden balcony. That would have been the part to irk me, had I been him, after the raucous Friday night explosion of dub. For my part I thought his tracks had promise, driving a continuous midtempo acid crunk. Still, he was right, in a way. The set was uninspired at times, disconnected, sputtering out a half eaten story. And while it powered the rhythm of the firedancers, let’s face it: pyromaniacs will spin flame to goddamn fast food jingles. I couldn’t help ruminate on the labyrinthine truth of his self-fulfilling prophecy. Chrispy was dissatisfied with his set, and thus his set was dissatisfying. When Marty followed him, not many people were on dancing either (at times I was the only one for either DJ), and while I don’t know Marty, it didn’t seem to bother him – his set was well constructed, playful and dynamic. It seemed that the very energy that had launched Chrispy into rock stardom for his prior two sets now became a pitcher plant dragging him down and digesting him in gastric juices of overextended tweaky restlessness. The guy just seemed burnt out. I guess three unscheduled shows can do that. Basking in limelight, sourcing the excess electric heartbeat to the clutching masses hungering for their fix will wear anyone thin eventually. Even a rockstar.

The next morning we got our inevitable late start after the hotel Chris and Jamie were staying at spontaneously decided that they could only be paid in cash. I took the time to call the car company and told them that they had rented me a lemon and that they were now my sworn enemies and then asked politely how I could help them recover their vehicle. Though not the first time we had the pleasure of experiencing the cash-only culture shock for us American credit card addicts, this wrench was damn inconvenient. More of the inescapable reactive disharmony equalizing the universe. We lambasted the Costa Rican shell game as Jamie sped us out to Montezuma again to meet the SLC crew. We got there just under the wire, and I had just enough time to check on the car. It was still there, caked in mud and still dead but otherwise unmolested. Satisfied, we left Jamie’s car full of our gear, prayed to the Costa Rican thievery gods to take a break for one day, and hopped on a boat out to Tortuga.

Forty minutes later we passed through rock overhangs into the turquoise waters surrounding the Isla Tortuga. Slipping on my snorkel gear, amped for a bit of ecotourism, I dipped into seawater that was swirled between lukewarm and refreshingly cool. Rainbow-colored fish in huge schools swam around me, their navy stripes and citrus scales wavering in the clear cyan sea. Angel fish with black and white stripes picked at each other in the rocks. Pouty-mouth groupers and yellowfin tuna floated bulbous and bobbing through the water. Electric blue mollusks were painted across the reef in the same color as the Mal Pais surf in the waning hours of the full moon. Tiny brown minnows nipped at each other in the current between feathery coral and sea cucumbers and clams and beams of sunshine. Several of the SLC crew said they had seen stingrays and Jamie claimed to have even seen a sea turtle! Truth be told, Hawaii has better snorkeling, but citing Polynesia as the bar for fish is like calling Bassnectar the yardstick of bass, the standard by which all other crunkitects are judged. Fair or not, I suppose their proximity to the epitome of excellence means that mere comparison is highly complementary. By that token, I suppose Manifesto, and indeed the entire trip to Costa Rica was a microcosmic Burning Man, a transformation camouflaged in the swirling primordial mix of joy and struggle, a path to human liberty, love and evolution.

At the airport the next morning, ready to board the plane to Arizona that would hook me into my San Francisco return, we sat and shot the shit with Matt, a supercool Brooklyner, friend to Mary and Marty. He made an astute comment, that at no point in the course of Maniefsto Gathering was there an explicit purpose, the way, say, the anthromorph gets torched at the Burn. No clear symbol or mantra to act as guiding principles. I replied that perhaps at Manifesto, as with all endeavors in life, the purpose is self-determined, the ending only as powerful as the energy invested. Value in, value out. For those of us that came with a purpose, Manifesto Gathering was the ideal environment to hone our talent for manifesting reality. As I meditated on our conversation, it struck me that no example of this was more tangible than the rise to instafame of DJ Chrispy. The man had a mission, came prepared, saw his fate and leapt from the cliff into what will hopefully be a wildly successful and prolific career. My own path was far less dramatic, yet the travel and meditation had been genuinely rewarding, exactly what I was looking for, a potent brew in my heart and mind gestating a presynthesis of future magik.

Epilogue

Sixty hours later back in San Francisco at the Chinese New Year party at 1015. Squeeze my way through furry felines and slim burners dressed like trees and pimps and pirates into the main room. Vodka soda in hand. Kraddy on the decks already, belting out syncopated womp like he’ll never have the chance again. Seamless mixed Luda into innovative constellations of bass bent sideways and percolating through the towers in tweaked arpeggios levitating among the Chinese lamps hung from the dark ceiling, red velvet columns, silk drapes, blue lasers streaking divergently against the backdrop of paper screen tigers curled up with delicate calligraphic claws and open maws. Ten foot tall golden Buddha in repose above masses gyrating to the breakbeat. Too soon Kraddy’s bass slows in maddeningly deep trenches and fades out to a thundercloud of drums. Processional of toms and snares and bass drums stomp a manic arachnid of percussion. On the drummers’ heels rolls an orange sequined oxen. Six foot at the shoulder, Ox is topped by freaky jiggers and surrounded by burner babes on stilts. Ox rolls past the center of the dance floor as the drummers line up on stage opposite the DJ’s nest. There must be twenty of them keeping semiperfect time as the halogen lights twist onto three then four then eight dancing babes strutting swimming twisting skipping twirling wiggling in orange sequined leotards and thighhigh lace. Sweat to the drums, match the rhythm of their bodies. The line of them bows deeply and is replaced by twin golden dragons from Leung’s White Crane, the troop gracing this celebration with authentic Chinese ritual. The furry gilded dragons bounce twirl curl hop hope roll on their dangling legs to the crash of cymbals and the cascade of gongs and leather bell drums. A second procession of drums heralds White Tiger rolling the path of Ox before it, the endless cycle of seasons, the spiraling zodiac. People ride it, pimp with a tigerprint brimmed hat and cape, out to the center of the floor. A new dragon floats on stage, crimson pink swimming with electric blue rivulets speckled with green. Mouth open, vertebral spines, teeth like paper knives, curling around itself, flapping its body, undulating in an infinite sine wave, the spirit of time. Too much, sensory overload. Escape to the front room is no escape. Duv on the decks blasting the melodic crunkalicious, a cosmic metronome jacked into my autonomic nervous system. Get freaky, let loose the liquid. Sweat with the baking human beasts all around with their curving spines and limbs linking into the waves of surround sound. Turn around to get a better back look drink my vodka soda and who do I see but Chris! Reaching out with those long orangutan arms. What are you doing in Frisco, I ask, come to see the sickest epilogue to Manifesto? He shrugs, nods. Says he only has one request: bring the womp. We laugh and wander into the main room to watch Ooah slip into the nest. I squeeze past speaker towers overgrown with dried orchids into the center of the pit, surrounded on all sides by bodies bending to the slow and steady beat molasses, sticky brown rivers of bass, predictable at first but then evolving ribs of staccato samples flitting above the alto ocean like flocking pixies caroming off the walls. White Tiger crouches in the center, mounted by a rainbow witch clad in tie-dye and feathers. From her waving arms spread the burners clubbers dancers breakers dubbers hipsters like the scales of liquid dragon wings curling over the surface of the Earth. I’m sure it’s all on YouTube by now, go snack on it if you hunger for a taste. Nothing compares to the feast of being there, writhing with life in the year of the tiger.

Burning Green: An Initiate’s Perspective (9.3.07)

2007-09-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed that the beige carpet in my room was alkaline clay gravel; my bedroom had been reconstructed in Black Rock City, and outside my window I could see cranes planting pine trees on the barren playa.

It’s been twenty-four hours of striking, driving, unpacking, cleaning and bathing. The revelation of Burning Man has burrowed deep in my spleen, releasing spiritual spores infecting every cognitive joint I once so carefully constructed. I doubt I will ever be the same again.

Thank you in advance to all the people and sites supplying the pictures for this perspective. It’s hard to believe that a week ago we drove to Reno under pastry-shaped clouds. We spent Sunday night there, holed up at the Sands, buying water and gathering our strength for the week ahead. Gilded signs and deteriorating casinos created a tinfoil illusion over the timeless race to find meaning in easy-won money. Lonely-hearted wanderers were on their last legs, those who could not be bothered with Vegas, crouched under smoke and craps and one-arm bandits wrapped in the glittered refuse of Americana.

Still, Reno was filled with honest, hardworking people, waiters, hostesses, clerks who witnessed the yearly migration of freaks through their gilded paradise into the deep Nevada desert. Who knows how they viewed us, counterculture hoodlums strutting about, greasy with crazed anticipation to go squat in some alien mind state. As I wolfed down the last vegetables that would fortify me for a week, my friend Sitari and I wondered if citizens of Reno imagined life out on the playa. Perhaps it was similar to how I wondered about it myself. After all, the anticipation of my virgin Burn was possessed with a jittery poltergeist of the unknown. I had managed to subdue my expectations, but not my hope.

We arrived in Black Rock City Monday as the sun climbed past its apex. Locating our camp, the Bouncy Bouncy Club off the 4:30 keyhole, Sitari and I set to work constructing the BBC bar we had been planning, and as the heat dissipated in twilight, we saw her initial vision come together, a turqoise shell of protective fabric contrasting against the endless yellow-brown clay lakebed. Fireworks sprang over an Esplanade dotted with theme camps, and I was struck with a deep sense of celebration. We had made it, arrived to witness the Man burn green.

It was in those first few hours that I also met Pan. Or rather, the pagan deity’s current incarnation, a contractor from Portland named Dr. Lem. Those of you who know him know his wild hair and nappy beard and Komodo dragon tattoo crawling across his leg and up his shoulder blades, his warm heart and extroversion. More than likely you’re also familiar with his pierced penis and his penchant for playing with it. He showed me what was to become a mainstay of playa hospitality. No, not aerated genitals—though those were abundant—but a big hug, and a heartfelt “welcome home.” Yet as soon as he welcomed me, he disappeared, running across the playa looking for his dome, which had been shipped to BRC as he flew in the night before.

With Pan gone, Sitari tired and the rest of BBC in lay-low mode, I rambunctiously journeyed out onto the playa alone, eager to play with my new reality. And play I did. That first night any preconceived visions were annihilated as I raced back and forth across the deep playa on my bicycle like a puppy with oversized paws. While the Esplanade by center camp had been constructed the weekend before, the deep playa remained dark. Geodesic domes and art structures embracing the far arms of the city were still skeletonized, and scattered lights blinked out beyond the Man standing below a bloated moon. In the distance, a few of these lights twirled around each other, floating across the darkness. Intrigued, I had to know how light could levitate across the desert like gyroscopic polypeptides. I raced past the man bestriding his pavilion in neon green, and saw they were bicycles leading lures of swinging neon orbs. The poignancy of design and effect was the first of an awe-inspiring week, and I waded farther in my new fascination with this surreal landscape, farther out into the dark desert.

A towering beacon magnetized me, and I drew near the Temple for the first time, with its giant ivory crossbeams, stacked circular windows and twin arms spreading concave bellies under muted stars. Approaching closely, I saw the intricacy of woven wooden lattices climbing up screens and supporting beams, radiating Shinto purity across the playa, piercing my heart with wonder. My virgin eyes began to open to the incantation cast upon the land by Black Rock City. It was a binding creative vision that gripped my mind as a shadow began to fall across the moon. As this lunar splotch expanded, the Temple tied an invisible tether to my belly, attaching me, tracking me. Knowing I would be back, I pedaled away, one man biking across a dark mystic sea, comforted by waves of novelty in my gut, by lights blinking around the circumference of the horizon.

I went to Opulent Temple, a party space by 2:00 that sported giant circular screens sandwiching a mesh egg encapsulating the DJ booth and supporting a giant double flamethrower. Seriously. Blasts of flame scorched the sky. Progressive trance danced in thin desert air, and the vibe was filled with ecstasy euphoria and the molded meanderings of psylocibin. Burners howled wild calls in the throes of ensuing transformation, prancing and praying to aligning synchronicity as the dark shadow of the earth eclipsed the moon in maroon.

But these mystic forces and the intense inertia of prior burns had caught up with the community. Under darkness, guerrilla agents infiltrated the Man’s pavilion, setting him ablaze almost a week before his scheduled pyre. One BBC devotee saw tufts of smoke bloom into tongues of flame from as far away as the steam-powered Tree House rising just beyond the Esplanade. Soon fire-trucks blazed towards the pavilion and those watching held their breath; even the premature burning set aside, people had crowded under the pavilion’s tent, standing by the wooden beams supporting the statue of the man; if the structure had gone up in flames or collapsed, human casualties could have resulted. Fortunately the first responders controlled the fire, squashing it before it could do any serious damage. Still, as the eclipse waned, we realized that the man had been charred, the pavilion blackened by rogue forces threatening our serenity.

As the hot sun rose on Tuesday and we witnessed the charcoal Man, we learned later that the man responsible was a performance artists named Paul Addis. An ardent burner in the infancy of the event, Addis had become misanthropic to Burning Man, complaining during his subsequent incarceration that the Burn had become too commercialized, that its appeal to the green left was a ploy to alleviate environmentalist pressure away from the, well, metric tons of immolated gasoline. Though the prank was ostensibly a protest, I couldn’t help but wonder at the arrogance needed to endanger the community for the benefit of a single individual. Individual artistic expression was one thing, but this single act was clearly anathema to the spirit of the event.

Or was it?

As the day progressed and we continued to evolve our camp as more BBCers arrived, inflating our bouncy castle and dome, and erecting our secret tunnel, the distinction blurred between acceptable individual expression and that which impinges on the health of the community. The repetitive clang of my mallet on rebar was meditative, and I could not help but play devil’s advocate with myself, questioning where the line really lay. If forced to choose, which should drive our behavior, our individualism or commitment to our community?

It was a question that haunted me as we rocked out at the Deep End, watching giant smoke rings curl up over the fat moonrise, channeling the energy of the new Burn into a serene state. But afterwards, as we listening to bagpipes and drinking Guinness at the newly opened Irish playa pub Paddy Mirage (yes, a real, two-story wooden pub), my warm, germinating illumination had grown hairline fractures. After the sun set these cracks bloomed into jagged cracking spears of uncertainty. Still, I subdued these doubts, preferring the route to fun. Tooling about the playa in Loki’s artcar “Cloud Nine,” which had the most comfortable damn cushions my ass had the pleasure of kissing over the whole week, we traveled to see Glitch Mob, incredible as always, tear apart the 4:30 keyhole. Syncopated breaks from the Space Cowboy’s platform were techno-futuristic breakbeat, generating a cloud of playa dust hazing over rhythmic joints framing melodies that popped squealing samples in creaking angles like circus contortionists slaying our brains.

Yet as danced, the questions in my head were exacerbated by a strange vibe. The vibe tasted like one related to the euphoric collectivism of my involvement in the rave scene but was flavored by a dark and frustrated egotism that I had found pervasive in the violent punk rock underground. It took me several tracks to put my finger on it, but when I did it stank of judgment, of individuals emanating condescension towards others, of those with fancier costumes or more friends bathing in elitism. This scent was very subtle, and at no time did I ever feel threatened or unwelcome, but the vibe was there, and it announced that some individuals were more important to the burn than others. As the BBCer Bebop put it, they were ‘burnier than thou.’

Now, such conceit is logical. Clearly, in the middle of a desert wasteland, self-reliance is the minimum threshold for survival, and those who drive the party, or the ritual, or construct the city from personal resources, are in fact contributing more and are more “important” to the functioning and success of both Black Rock City and the Burn in general. But the concept of importance is a slippery slope. For if the common BRC resident is undervalued, if at some level the community of people hard core enough to just be there and participate is not embraced, then for me at least, Burning Man would never achieve the evolved state of collective human illumination I had found so fulfilling in other undergrounds. Furthermore, such elitism is the source of, and only a few psychological steps (albeit large steps) removed from the arrogance and irresponsibility required for obsessed individuals like Addis to declare the superiority of their truth over the collective, and attempt to destroy the Burn by pre-empting its defining ritual. As I crashed Tuesday night it seemed that the very transcendence I had been hoping for would be illusory, and my heart was filled with doubt.

But Wednesday was a new day, and filled with adventure. Mid-morning a bunch of us BBCers biked over to the Golden Café laden with alcoholic gifts. For those of you who don’t know, The Golden Café supplies drinks to all, as it must in a gift economy; but only those who bring alcohol in quality and quantity are treated to medallions signaling the wearer as being worthy of better drinks. Well, we received those excellent medallions, but I was treated to an additional surprise. The Café was barely populated, its musicians not ready yet to take the stage, and so Bebop and I were able to borrow a guitar and base respectively, and jam out. Between work and writing and life I had forgotten the simple joy of playing music with others. The playa now gently reminded me of creative pleasures, and even though our session lasted less than an hour, I felt rejuvenated. A child-like happiness percolated up through my blood, and I felt alive, more alive than I had in many months. Elated, I itched to try my hand at the flimsy rock wall constructed across the street. Scaling it and standing upon its rickety structure, feeling a hundred feet tall, I gazed out at the massive circle of cars and tents extending back towards the airport and the black mountains beyond. I could not comprehend how many masses had migrated to the beacon of Burning Man within the last forty-eight hours. They now surrounded the alien planet of the Burn like rings of playa dust encapsulating a crystalline spirit.

Exhausted, I took a siesta to hide from peaking heat, and woke up in a different burn, an evolved era. The BBC camp itself hummed with excitement as our dome finally arrived and was inflated adjacent to the bar. Pan had returned, towing Little Orphan Annie and the towering, truck-sized Tonka. Sitari and I joined them, stocking up on booze and venturing out to Tao-surf (to cite the coined currency of Sitari) on artcars. I could never have predicted how the Burn would evolve.

As we snuck out our secret tunnel onto the keyhole and peered beyond the Esplanade, the playa had exploded in light. Where before there were sparse art installations scattered about the Temple in moonlight, now tens of thousands tromped across miles of clay, on foot lighted by glow sticks, riding bikes outfitted with el-wire, crowding art cars, and the collective neon glow outshined the full moon. The first vehicle we found was a two-story boat with mast and rigging. The five of us climbed aboard, and I watched in awe from the top deck as we sailed across the dry sea, past flaming cacti, bushes of bouncing Christmas lights, fire dancers pushing flaming flow weapons in trailing arcs, costumed bunny bikers, mirror-portals, giant bus-ships with party decks playing looped porn, glowing butterflies and ants and elephants trolling about the playa on mechanical chases, torch towers spewing gas-flames, lovers kissing on deep playa. Oh, and let’s not forget the guy who as far as I’m concerned wins the prize for the dopest costume on the playa with his bejeweled, head-to-toe armor complete with visor and lantern to light his resplendence. In the center of it all, the Man’s pavilion and the Temple were dressed in their formal symbolism. Black Rock City had hit critical mass, its residents crisscrossing each others’ paths ten thousand times per minute, making the playa light up like a giant pinball machine cranked on crystal meth. But the chaos, while wild and churning, was infused with spirituality, a conscious excavation for a buried holiness. As we hopped from the first boat to a glowing bus blasting trance, it at first seemed like the largest, most obscenely ridiculous rave I had ever witnessed, and its scale blew me away.

But as we neared Cubatron, that three-dimensional array of glowing orbs that blinked into and out of colored light, shifting patterns from rotating wheels to white snowstorms to sweeping rainbows to rotating light effigies of the Man, I started to see the burn as something like a rave but not a rave. And as we hopped to other art installations, and Tao-surfed over to Entheon Villiage to revisit epic Glitch Mob breaks and later the dark hammer of Bassnectar wrecking samples between gears of hard womp, the phylogeny of Burning Man began to clarify in my mind. Grooving to arrowheads of piercing bass, watching animated visuals twist on hexagonal cells of the giant dome, ideas began flooding my brain, inundating it with a deluge of realizations answering questions I had been struggling with for months. And one of these insights was a hypothesis on the phylogenic nature of sub-cultures.

After participating for years in various sub-cultures from the rave scene to the punk scene and several in-between, there were certain themes that seemed related, but not identical between these subcultures. This seems logical, because each subculture has certain values that drive the behavior of individuals and groups who participate. Some of those values are similar between subcultures, and some of them are different, but ultimately, since shared values often derive from the same ideal, the subcultures upon which shared values are based are related at a very basic level.

For example, if drug use can be considered a value in certain subcultures because it is practiced by, and drives behavior of participants, then one way to think about the relations of subcultures is to consider which drugs are valued. In the rave scene hallucinogens are valued, ecstasy being paramount to the pervasive “peace, love, unity, respect (P.L.U.R.)” mentality of the scene. Conversely, the punk rock scene values amphetamines more than hallucinogens, and the psychological analysis of why could be the subject of a whole perspective in and of itself. Clearly individuals from both scenes may use any host of narcotics, but when classifying a subculture it may be useful to assess what values the majority shares, because it is through these shared values that the culture is sustained. So given that the value of doing drugs is shared across the rave and punk scenes, but the value of the types of drugs is different, the rave scene and punk scene are related but distinct in a potential social phylogeny of subcultures. Furthermore, part of this difference stems from the mental state induced by these drugs, and the emotional connection between these drugs and other key values such as music. Indeed, the gestalt identity of any subculture is derived from a confluence of these values, from drugs and music to fashion, degree of sexual promiscuity, relationship to religion and politics, etc. For such a schematic to be totally accurate requires a comprehensive analysis of the derivation of subcultures that is far beyond the scope of this perspective.

However, observing the result of this confluence of values is straightforward if we consider the patterns of how individuals and groups behave. In many underground subcultures, the confluence of values produces behavior that often transcends individualism, and directs the group in a chaotic but harmonious dynamic. The Jungian concept of the collective unconscious is useful to understand this dynamic, in which individual behavior converges towards psychological archetypes across the whole, producing singular behaviors across the entire collective. It’s apparent in a number of mainstream and underground cultures, including not only the rave and punk scenes, but also mainstream sporting events, political rallies, religious rituals, etc. The origins of such behavior are a hot topic in many academic disciplines, but it seems intuitive that collective behavior is based on at least collective values, and likely even a collective mental state, which Jung talked about as a collective unconscious, and which I for shits and giggles have started calling “ego synergy.” The difference is that Jung’s collective state exists constantly, a deep psychological ocean of magma difficult to access, except in dreams or other transcendent experiences, upon which our individual cognitive identities float like tectonic plates upon the magma “reservoir of the experience of our species.” Ego synergy, on the other hand, describes the phenomenon whereby those tectonic plates fuse, creating a pangea of conscious collective identity.

The implications of ego synergy are far-reaching, and its study reveals insight into our origins as social animals, our current human condition, and, I believe, the psycho-spiritual evolution of humanity.

Ego synergy is fascinating in its capacity to exist cohesively in different states of free energy. Definitions can be based on these states to further breakdown facets of ego synergy and elucidate the phylogeny of subcultures. If chaos is the result of, or dictates ego synergy, such as in the rave scene where law and rules are avoided, the mental state could be called chaotic ego synergy. If order and structure are the result of, or dictate ego synergy, the mental state could be called orderly ego synergy. Many other distinctions could undoubtedly be made, but I find this one additional variable very useful to turn the abstract idea of cultural phylogeny into a useful analytical tool. With these two variables, 1) ego synergy vs. ego isolation (or individuation, as Jung would have it), and 2) chaos vs. order, one can construct a two-by-two matrix, with synergy vs. isolation on one axis and chaos vs. order on the other axis.

Any old scenario could fill the orderly ego isolation quadrant where people are individuals in structured situations such as taking a math test, and the chaotic by situations like an isolated mugging or a schizophrenic ambling down the avenue. The punk scene, I think, also falls within this quadrant of chaotic isolation, for though it has elements of synergy in it, even in the collective anarchy of the mosh pit individuals are out to quench their own frustrated thirst for aggression. The rave scene, conversely, falls squarely into the chaotic ego synergy space, freaks gathering in cuddle puddles, dancing till dawn together as one. Ego synergy derived from religion and political rallies seem to fall neatly into the orderly ego synergy space. Actually, it often seems to me that both religions and nations support a phylogeny model of evolving cultures. Initially every established religion and nation was comprised only of individuals on the fringe, revolutionaries challenging the safe conventions of their contemporaries. Only after the initial explosive revolution and ensuring chaotic growth did order seep in to maintain the reinvented reality that those first pioneers had created.

Indeed, applying this hypothetical matrix to Burning Man illustrates its complexity, because the Burn could be argued to exist in all four quadrants simultaneously.

Last Wednesday night, when the five of us Tao-surfed on art cars, took in the shiznitobam-Glitch and eventually wound up on the giant pink birthday cake floating out deep by the Temple blasting the ambient drum n’ bass stylings of Guitari, we witnessed a chaos, a wave of both individual expression in terms of costumes and fire dancing and explosive personalities such as our dear friend Pan. Yet we also participated in synergistic expressions such as the massive parties held in geodesic domes and on artcars, and the collective solemnity and purity radiated by those at the Temple.

But Burning Man also has intense order involved in it, much (to my understanding) that has evolved as the population of Black Rock City has exploded from a few thousand ten years ago to over fifty or sixty thousand at the Green Man. Not only are there the Ten Principles guiding both individual and group behavior, there are a number of ancillary proscriptions implemented to make the Burn safer and more enjoyable for the increasing masses. Examples are the outlawing of firearms, dogs, and types of motorized vehicles, prohibitions around which were not present when the burn began. Burning Man features its own special contingent for principle enforcement, the Rangers, registers vehicles and operates an airport. All of these elements of order seem not to derive from the original spirit of the Burn, but to be necessities that have come from the explosive growth of Black Rock City.

There is, however, another element of order that permeates the very soul of Burning Man – tribes. An invention more ancient than even agriculture or writing, humans have long cohered in tribes to survive in the wild, and so it is in Black Rock City. And the very fact that tribal organization are so prevalent on the playa, combined with the infusion of ritual, hints that the phylogeny of Burning Man goes far back before San Francisco first foundations, before the ravers or hippies or beats or any of our modern protests against the amorphous shadow of unconsciousness that plagues our modern society. It goes back to the days of the Druids and their solstice festivals at Stonehenge, back to the raving orgies in olive orchards where Grecian fornicating worshiped Dionysus.

Indeed, such an ancient origin, with roots back to the ancestry of our evolution suggests several truths. Humans will always have a need to congregate in freeform chaos, to bask in ritual and marvel at the awesome power of nature both externally in the world around us and within the deep psycho-spiritual well of our identities. But as the truth and meaning and power of such rituals draw in ever-greater numbers of devotees, the leaders of such movements will react. Many times they react by withdrawing, by secluding themselves and barricading the demanding world from their secret revelation, just as the Essenes hid their leaf metal scrolls in Dead Sea salt caves. But other times such revelations evolve, introducing order to maintain the cohesiveness of the revelation in larger populations. Thus do the social forces of the Burn ebb and flow in undercurrents of chaotic waves crashing upon white cliffs of order.

But such analyses were academic, and did not relieve the same question that still gnawed at my tendons: what happens to a society based on the love and beauty of chaotic expression when it, out of the very need to adapt to survive, imposes order upon itself?

As I wondered, and we wandered from Entheon village across the deep playa once again, Pan became ever more coherently insane, peaking on mushrooms. We ranted about nakedness and portipotties and art cars powered by the energy generated from the vibrations of dancing. And as bass slithered into us from all corners of the playa, something else struck me as I strutted, letting the Tao flow from my pores, directing my steps. There was something unique and snowflake-like about this desert oasis of art we tripped across. Something had made me ethereally happy—not, as we so often envision the concept, artificially filled by the achievement of illusory goals—but truly sated, sanguine, downright bouncy. And when I searched for the source of this joy, it was unmistakable. It was this effervescent spirit of the burning playa. Like the incarnate god Pan, it was totally, wholeheartedly, irreverently unapologetic. For everything. There were no pleas for permission, no supplications for attention. Its vibrancy was its own, for no other purpose than to writhe in its own orgasmic creative pleasure. Naked, clothed, chaotic, orderly, synergistic, isolationist, none of it mattered next to the hard truth that it was. Perhaps I realized this in the moment that one sculpture of fluorescent lights broke, crashing down upon one participant, leaving live wires exposed as we went to inform the Rangers of this hazard. The art itself had no remorse for breaking, for living and dying in the flatlands. What was would simply be, quiet in moments just before dawn sang hymns of fiery rebirth over the lakebed.

That Thursday, everything changed. Again. The first half of the week had seen stale air, and except for winds early on Monday the playa baked under an oppressive heat. But now, Thursday early afternoon, gusts kicked up while we were out getting hammered at Damn Texans. Plywood was pried off metal scaffolds, sarongs were long gone and hats didn’t stand a chance. And as we barhopped, benevolently hammered from bourbon and tequila (and as Sitari got her mack on) I was amazed at how quickly the weather pirouetted. Uncertainty was everywhere, and as I rode out after dusk, once the wind died down, exploring alone felt like Monday, but twisted another level up the spiral stairway. The Man had been making its way back up to its perch on the pavilion in pieces; I ventured to the Temple again, feeling its tug on my solar plexus.

Unlike on Monday, when the Temple’s interior was roped off, now people congregated inside, crying, whispering, praying. Wooden latticework was covered in scrawling marker, and my eyes fixated on a hundred supplications and bon voyages and gratitudes and frustrations and dreams. But there was one saying that caught my eye, worming its way behind my retinas. “Our greatest fear is greatness,” it said simply, sandwiched between crossbeams. I could only sit and meditate on its profundity, and with each attentive breath I heard an undeniable suffering emanating from myself and everyone else there, hurting from the knowledge of how far the path is separating us from our dreams, and how painful each step is on the torn, cratered earth. But in that suffering, I also heard an air-raid siren of honesty, a pinhole path to the heart.

Later, I popped to breakbeat at the edge of the earth underneath metallic monkeys swinging in strobes, my light saber flowing with endless Tao, my soul content to forget my questions.

Friday the weather continued to whip us with dust and leather, but we were granted a morning reprieve to retrieve some filmy goodness. Bebop, Pan, Sitari and I wandered out to the Playa on foot to snap pics.

From under the Bone Tree we entered the pavilion, learning about at least an attempt at exploring the potential for green activism and engineering, and even though Burning Man itself has to be possibly the most un-green, abusive waste of gasoline I’ve ever witnessed, the waste is a logical exuberance of celebratory survival, and the pavilion was at least one step toward suggesting another way. Somehow this reconciled in my mind, because if there was one tenet that had planted itself in my head ever since arriving on the playa, it was that only vision has the power to transform reality. This was evident on the Man itself, which had been finally completed back atop its perch, the emblem of a phoenix branded on its face as a mark of its resurrection.

Though the weather soon became intermittently inclement, I had managed to grab my bike and witness the beginning of critical tits, a parade of thousands of topless women proud of their breasts. Interestingly, as one who’s always been a breast man, I was less turned on than I was inspired by the confidence and empowerment against the cages of modesty.

Soon the trail of nudists moved on, and I was determined to see one statue before its scheduled destruction. Huffing over near 2:00, I gazed at five metallic worshippers. One mohawked man sat in the lotus position with his hands to his heart, figures bowed and several iron women gasped and clasped their hands above their heads in reverence to that which was before them, a 90-foot oil derrick. The symbolism was simple, and it challenged me. It challenged all of us, and the very fuel of the Burn itself. I could not look away.

Finally the strong winds mutated into harpy dust tornadoes tearing about the playa, churning from the dry lakebed to a sea of evaporated water and dust above. White tsunamis crested from nowhere and blinded us from seeing three feet, caking alkaline microns into our skin that only vinegar would remove. Later I heard the story of one girl who became disoriented in the whiteout, and wandered about until she found a Ranger. “Fuck!” she told him, “Am I glad to see you! Do you know where center camp is?” And the Ranger pointed over his shoulder and said, “it’s twelve feet that way.”

But I had my bandanna and my goggles and I wasn’t about to let a little dust keep me from my trip. I hopped on my bike and rode out to the Deep End again. Only this time, instead of a magnificent sunset, the world was coated in ash. Not that it mattered. The Deep End was packed, partiers all there with the same coconut shavings of dust smeared over tinted UV-lenses, bandannas and dust masks tied tightly across their faces. The vibe was fierce, an epic battle against the elements that raged around us like the throbbing of bass and boots pounding against clay. A primal perseverance whirred from the crowd like generator electricity caught in a cable array ripping apart a rushing river of electrons.

Eventually it became too much for me, though when I left, the Deep End was still explosive, refusing to die. I spent a bit of time in the Paddy Mirage again to escape the worst of the storm, but then was back across the playa again, soon back at camp as the whiteout blew over. Then, suddenly, drizzles of drops plummeted, practically evaporating before they sizzled on the hot ground. We barely had time to jump out from our shelters and spread our arms welcoming the rain. But when we did, the sky cleared to reveal a colossal rainbow arching across the clouds--and then another one straddling its twin. We stood as tall as ants, peering up at these twin rainbows, this omen of Mother Earth once sent to Noah in cycles of fury and welcoming bosom. For a brief, fleeting moment everyone on the playa held their head high, humbled by rays of diffracting light.

Friday night was fun too, riding Cloud Nine out to Root Society, checkin’ out Rabbit in the Moon over at Opulent Temple and letting Freq Nasty bring in the new dawn. But the rest of the week was prologue to the day that that dawn started – the day of the Burn. No really, for real this time.

The day was hot again, but by now I was used to the extreme heat, the pervasive sweat stagnating in this city of ambient ever-present dust. To pass the day, Pan and Tonka graciously invited me over to the airport around high noon. We biked out behind Black Rock City across a flat and dusty expanse of playa, where they showed me around the tiny air traffic control center. Pan showed me simple memorial, impressing upon me the sadness afflicting the community for the loss of one of the greatest burner pilots, Berk, who died in Idaho as I’m sure every hardcore burner dreams of dying, in a three-hundred-mile-an-hour fireball detonating into pristine mountains. Pan, intensely emotional, was insistent that I knew that this man, whatever his flying acumen, was responsible for more gifted flights in 2006 than all other burner pilots combined. Truly, it is an enlightened society that judges a man well for his selflessness.

They also introduced me to the air traffic commander, Hoot. Now, I don’t know if they call him that because of his keen eyesight, his nocturnal nature, or his constant humor, but I found the man both hysterical and genuine, ready to please a complete stranger, filled with stories of near misses and aeronautic mishaps and mile high clubs. Out on the airfield sat reconstructed Russian biplanes and World-War II style prop planes next to the latest and greatest in single-person jet screamers. Over 150 planes had been registered for the Green Man, a significant increase from the year prior, further proof of the explosive growth of the burn.

As I took my daily siesta, the sun sank behind the western hills. When I woke up, Burn night beckoned, the center of the playa tugging on the hook it had planted that first night when Luna escaped the pounding sun in the shade of planet Earth. Cloud Nine was our constant friend again, its comfy cushions escorting us out onto the playa. But if Wednesday night was madness, Thursday night schizoid freakism and Friday pure cracked-out reckless abandon, at least then the masses seeking hot times and enlightenment could amble freely.

Saturday night, on the other hand, was dense.

The most tightly packed, in fact, I had ever seen such a chaotic gathering of people. Around the man they gathered, pink flamingos and fire spinners and metal rhinoceros and elephant artcars, double busses sporting DJs, and thousands upon thousands of glowstick-wearing, fur-sportin’ lunatics babbling in tongues and jitterbugging in caffeine and cocaine and speed, their skulls disintegrating, their neuroganglia spilling out all over cold lakebed in anticipation. Right on playa-time, the fireworks started. There had been ad hoc rockets blasting in the atmosphere all week, but now the explosions really began, sparkling in the hundreds against the stars. And suddenly, they stopped. The Man glowed neon Green for one second more, before a plume of fire immolated him, roaring up in a gurgling feast of gasoline. He burned and burned, and when he fell, the masses rushed in, trampling each other in violent passion to caress the scalding wood and metal, to unify themselves with the fallen spirit of Burning Man. Distinctly unsynergistically, I stood back and watched, basking in revelation.

All week I had been thinking about the nature of the burn, how at its core it’s a celebration of both creation and destruction, of alpha and omega. We revel in our survival against the harshest of climes, ascending an arduous path in the face of fierceness. But this fierceness is surrounded by art, music, psychotropic insight and beautiful friends, and is an awe-inspiring celebration, a mystic dance that untangles the path before us. We celebrate in tribes, chained by organization to have the freedom to get beyond constant survival tasks, to bask in creation and illuminate ourselves in immediacy. But though the burning of the Man can be interpreted in a thousand ways, it said to me that the immolation, the destruction, of the stationary body, even the active participant with his arms raised, is necessary for growth. As many have observed before, death yields evolution. In this case, it is an evolution of the spirit, a growth spurt for the purity of society as we search, unsure of our identity in the turbulent adolescence of our species.

Indeed, it is those who are willing to look the inevitability of death in the face, those who peer into the existential mirror of mortality with unapologetic fatalism who will shape the future landscape of the underground. Whether in the past it was the devotees of Dyonisus, the revolutionary Buddhists chanting in the face of castes, the occultists summoning demons at the peak of the industrial revolution, the beats, hippies, punks, ravers or burners, each underground must seek the figurative pyre to find themselves. Only those with nothing to lose, or at least, who recognize the illusion of everything we seem forced, against our better judgment, to gain, are willing to tear it all apart, to sear the flesh, to burn the body and release the spirit by whatever means necessary.

All week I had wondered: where is that line, where the worship of the self becomes less important than that of society? Where do orderly and chaotic ego synergy dissolve? Here, in wake of the Burning Man, I had two answers.

1) One interpretation: death. Our human nature dictates that in our destruction our isolated exuberance is diluted with concern for the community. It is through our community, through our children and our impact on society that we achieve some modicum of immortality. Is such genetic and memetic ingenuity not amazing? Only in a universe of utter abundance can such immortality be achieved for rotting flesh. In building our ephemeral Black Rock City, distilling into focus and then disintegrating in a matter of days, we both embrace our wandering souls of expression and also recognize the need for something greater, for a memetic ocean of humanity, a metahuman archetype of Jungian proportions.

2) Another interpretation: the Esplanade. Both Black Rock City and the deep playa are synergistic in nature, but it can be argued that BRC is inherently orderly, with its clockwork streets, its ice vending, its gifting economy, its Ranger station, its airport. For fuck’s sake, it even has a central decision-making system in center camp, the quintessential sign of sociological organization. But the playa…the playa. Art placed at random, tree houses near satellites adjacent to metallic giants with exploding heads, crisscrossed by art cars, bikers, footpads obeying no lanes. All radiate from the Man, but in no set pattern, the only organization the burner’s path under the constantly shifting sun and moon. What a sensation it was, and will continue to be, to stand at the edge of the Esplanade, that narrow strip of middle ground between growing organization and exploding randomness. What a feeling it is to contemplate its interwoven spiral, hinting that all distinctions between order and chaos, individualism and synergy are but illusions, artifacts of neural nets and dualistic thinking camouflaging the truth of evolution.

In both answers I saw kaleidoscopic reflections of evolution. Myriad vicissitudes crossed my mind, and though many I had pondered before, one was new, and put down roots. I had seen it subtly in every sight in the default world, but there was a shift here, symbolized by the Burning Man and explicit out on the edge of the world. It was a shift in perspective, a deep awareness that worship is an action, and requires both a subject and an object. Too often in our lives we are taught that it is the object that is holy, and that we, the subjects, must pray or beseech an other to bestow holiness and worthiness upon us. So it is in many overarching societal structures: major religions, political hierarchies, corporate cultures, family values. But out here, the spirit of the playa reflected that falsity with an unalienable truth. We, each and every one of us, is the source of holiness, and the objects of our worship exist only to focus that illuminated energy towards whatever end we choose.

On we walked. And I wondered, perhaps ego synergy evolved in the tribal history of humanity as a lens to multiply and focus our innate holiness on a massive scale, thus enhancing the inspiration and connection resulting from spiritual meditation. And if so, perhaps chaotic ego synergy was more ancient than orderly synergy, more resonant with our primate instincts that ruled social structures at the dawn of man.

But my philosophizing was cut short for the night’s main event. Pan, Tonka, myself, Sitari, Shirley and two of Sitari’s friends came to the oil derrick and parked ourselves hundreds of feet away to witness fireworks spewing, tearing apart the night sky in weaving, sweeping artillery conflagration. Thousands of rounds exploded in golden phosphorescent shells that wove a net of light. I could describe it, but not my awe, not the sparks that filled my spine as the sky ignited. Just go on YouTube, or transport yourself back in time (it’s just like walking backwards, only four-dimensionally). A pillar of fire exploded into a mushroom cloud, consuming the derrick, leaping up to the cloud line. We watched, mesmerized. Gasoline pumped along the wooden derrick and fueled the intense flame, eventually disintegrating the base and bringing the structure crashing down.

The structure having crumbled, we strolled towards El Cirqo to catch Bassnectar, and midway there the thought occurred to me: If the Burn must become more orderly in order to fatten itself on more chaos, so be it. Would there be less space for wandering? Perhaps. Would the stars be drowned out by neon light pollution? Almost certainly. And if the burner population continues to explode, and the burn splits regionally, what then? Will we have the same cohesive, centralized spiritual journey? That is a question only time will answer. But one certainty is clear. If ticket sales had been capped at twenty-large, neither I nor tens of thousands of others would ever have seen this underground dawn. And if the goal of the Burn is not to seclude itself in secretive elitism, but to be a beacon of illumination for any willing to brave its hardship, then it would be the height of hypocrisy to deny those wish to partake of it, even if the population of burners encompasses the entire human population of Earth.

What then of the “burniers”? What fate is in store for those that would deprive the scene of its change, growth, evolution? What of Paul Addis, the arsonist who tried to maim a vibrant underground and underestimated its internal treasury of symbolism? For you, Addis, I’m so very sorry the world cannot remain as small as it once was. I’m sorry that you have to share an incredible life changing experience with more people, and have an even greater world impact. I have only pity for you, for you are a mother hen, fretting when your chicks leave the nest and learn to fly. Go hide in isolation, by all means, never bask in the gleaming heaven of ego synergy or experience spiritual growth beyond conditioned prisons masquerading as unbending ideals.

Those willing to look in the mystic mirror cannot deny we stand at a crossroads of humanity. Our global population grows exponentially, draining resources. We still battle amongst each other as tribes, letting nationalism interfere with common human goals. Unlike Burning Man, our world does not have the option to cap ticket sales (or if it does, that is a topic for a future polemic). Thus, we must adapt, we must consciously and systematically redefine and implement our values if we are able to survive as a species. More thought must be devoted to this, but for now suffice to say that Burning Man can be a microcosmic experiment, if we choose it to be, an ephemeral diorama of how human society, at its heart, wants to function. If we learn from it, adapt to the evolving nature of the Burn, perhaps we can expand that knowledge to our world so that future generations practice rampant selfless expression instead of the egotistic avarice.

So let the biggest ups, the most love and respect be had for hardened, crusty burners teaching virgins the ways of the playa, showing them this new frontier with open hearts. For such growth, though painful, can only lead to the transfer of memory and energy beyond the body, and grant immortality of the spirit.

A few of us converged with the larger crowd at El Cirqo to witness the man, the myth, Bassnectar, mashing samples, bashing bass, tweaking pitch, seeking newness in every tempo, in every shift between flipping switches and fader pedals. Everything from 80’s beat to hard metal to drum & bass was woven together, a synergy of genres that formed a new identity of sound. It was music without borders, beat without labels or pretension, only utter hard shagging of eardrums and rampant burner joy.

Later, as his set faded into that of Antennae and Freq Nasty rounded out the night, I stepped out onto the playa, the beats to my back. At peace, I practiced my tai chi, watching as the statues that previously prayed to fossil fuels now surrendered to the black mountain and the majesty of the rising sun warming their metal bellies. That silver Sphinx artcar was there, eyes blinking blue and green. Any familiar with my previous blogging know the significance of the Sphinx as a personal symbol for the quintessence of Tao. It stood there, judging me, judging us. All I know is that it found us worthy. Of what, I’m not sure. This kind of truth takes its own time to be revealed.

Sunday was a chill day, sleeping, eating pancakes to Wilson Phillips, striking our sapphire bar. But as night fell, we saddled up Cloud Nine one last time to travel to the Temple. Sitari and I got close to the fire barrier and sat, feasting on the last visuals of the shrine as a soprano sang arias of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and then “Redemption Song.” A procession of torchbearers brought the death pyre to this Temple of holy forgiveness. Tens of thousands sat, unflinching, as a flaming beam was placed in their soul center. Soon ivory wood was engulfed, the surfaces of the narrow perpendicular beams black against white licking flame. Heat scorched the playa, raising the wind profile, kicking up dust. But nobody moved. Virtually all were seated, meditative. As the Temple continued to burn and burn, a kite ghost of the Burning Man flew overhead, lifted by fiery winds. Though the body had melted, the spirit remained. I found nothing but answers, and though I knew that more questions would inevitably arise, I did not fear them. One disembodied female voice suddenly split the silence. “We are so blessed!” she sang.

And the Temple toppled, pouring to the ground.

A singular peace had encapsulated the spirits of the Burn. From the silence, a shrieking voice cried out, but this was not the isolated voice of one individual. It was the cry of a synergistic ego, a massive ring of bodies acting with one mind, our shrill voice circling round and round the central burning detritus that was once whole and remained holy. It was the voice of a metaorganism, a primal portal into our future.

At dawn we left, braving exodus, the sierras, mediocre Chinese food and too many hours of driving to return to our modern megalopolis. It chafed, this structure, this illusion of permanence after so many hours of freedom. But it also glowed from underneath, and everything was connected. If this is what it takes to transform, to see ourselves for the men and women of divine choice and creativity that we are, then I say set fire to every sense of permanence. Do no damage, harm no individuals unwilling to participate. Let the eternal fire burn internally eternally, and let it burn from the center of each of us.

Let us sleep on down pillows and eat omakasa sushi and drink dirty martinis from crystal goblets and spill out in Jacuzzis and recline in box seats and relish every minute of our obnoxiously wonderful and luxurious lives as if we had just departed from the playa. Let us make every moment the object of our worship. Let us pursue hedonism not for the illusion of material possession, but truly for sensation itself as our playa-selves lather in prismatic immediacy and wonder.

If we can do that, if we can become conscious of what is true and what is truly illusion, then maybe, just maybe, one day we’ll have the courage to burn it all and rebuild our selves like a phoenix from the ashes.

I can’t wait to bathe in vinegar.

Guest Blogger! Sitari -- "Mad Hatter's Attack Metaphor"

2007-06-18T22:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Electric Daemon Party - 5.15.07

2007-06-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2007-05-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

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…

Towards an Ultimate Origin Theory for Underground Subculture

2007-03-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

Tripping kaleidoscope dreamtime. Rays of first light shine into a stone cave altar. One night prior a vision was had under a sky the color of crushed plums. Pictures were painted with nothing but ochre, iron oxide and ash blasted by angled spittle. As the makeshift paint dried, great hunts had been chiseled in time. An emerald soul was flown on eagle chariots.

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…

Guest blogger! "Creature of the motherfuckin' night" by The Artist Futurely Known As Scitari

2007-03-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

I am a creature of the motherfuckin' night. Come fly with me for a
weekend and I'll take you from nirvana to Narnia and back again. My
playground is the places your mommy told you never to go. From urban
deserts of condemned warehouses and decrepit carnicerias springs the
nightlife you dream about, the dream life you can step into.

On warm and windy fall nights, the air fills with electricity. The
wind whispers to you, stirring soul, suggesting that the city
breathes. I found its lungs. Wash off the shallow dirt, peel back the
celebrity skin, pluck past the thick veins of traffic and crawl
through the constrictive social muscles.* On a street so abandoned it
is void of trash and bums, the space between the new warehouses on the
left and the old on the right is filled only with the orange-purple
street light and a distant hum. I look up the street, I look down.
There is light and laughter pouring out of a single open door. While I
intended that last description literally, I am pleased with its
metaphorical power. Inside, friendly faces smile, bathed in red and
pink and yellow light. There is disproportionate amount of women
wearing catsuits this evening. A fervent blues band wails away, led
by a short, mod-clad Japanese man, featuring Captain Morgan on the
synth. We plod up an ancient staircase approaching a gallery and I
flashback to several months ago when this same space was bathed in
blue light and filled with writhing ravers. Ascending to art, I am
pleasantly surprised, as usual. The faces of my fellow patrons snap
into recognition: I know him; I recognize her; oh hello love, how have
you been! This industrial abyss fosters and feeds the love and
creativity of this community, perhaps the urban equivalent of our
primordial playa.

I spent that night, as I am spending many more, flitting between
forgotten brick oases and nondescript storefront portals- rabbit holes
and wardrobes. Each externally desolate and internally, home. I am
submerged in the underground Angeles bloodstream, learning its flow
and suckling its spiritual nourishment.

* I'll constrict your social muscle, baby.
_________

It starts as a normal night in a club: I arrived too early,
cologne-drenched men asked my name, I simultaneously gagged on and
celebrated the bartender's generosity with bitter well vodka. But
this is no ordinary scene. There were fifteen fellow patrons in the
red-glowing cavern and I knew someone, someone I admired for her
independence and absolutely fucking contagious spirit. She hugged me
hello and hugged my friend nice to meet you. We didn't make small
talk- we talked about real things. My companion stared, befuddled by
the embrace of a stranger. "Oh shit, I have to dance to this" and
bounce bounce, she was gone, a solo pillar of soul swaying in the
middle of a floor for fifty.

Live vocals and guitar melt through wires and cords and illuminated,
silver-bound fruit. Bodies fill the room as the bpm slowly increases.
My foot starts to tap, the last of my drink chills my throat, my ass
starts to shake on my stool. Pop! the music had penetrated. I am
lured into the vibrating arms of the speakers, to the fluid spaces
between babes with pink mohawks and software engineers wearing shorts.
And black socks. And white sneakers. I'm wearing black socks… on my
arms… which are making hindi swirls around my head. Djs evolve from
tattoos to green fedoras to um, that hood that Death wears. The music
ebbs to a near halt, then rises slowly taking my emotions on its
thumping roller coaster. Just when you think that, just when you're at
the edge, it takes you higher. The fucking Dj grins in delight, he
knows you wanted it. Then he unleashes the drop upon you, the
sustained audio-orgasm filled with glee and energy. I jump, sweat from
my hair line splashes. Gepetto on the tables swings his free hand over
his earphoned head, manipulating the crowd like a master puppeteer,
strings of soul connect his groove to the limbs of enthralled dancers.
I'm powerless in his scratching hands, having reached the state of
clarity that only hours booty-rockin' breaks bring me. Recently, I
spent two days at a Buddhist monastery in a Japanese holy land. Every
time we meditated, clearing my mind only filled it with luscious
pornography. But make my body shake with bass dirty, bass gritty, bass
wompy- and it's the only time my stewing mind is clear. It slows down,
purifying to slutty wompy bass and the occasional lick of sampled
lyrics. It feels like the deep bass notes of the universe are being
blasted upon (unleashed from?) my soul, it makes me smile and sweat
and my ass gyrate near the floor. Each inhuman lyric repeats
occasionally, with long strands of undulating non-music noise between.
Each repetition of words sends me further into nothingness. Om
shanti, meditating deeper with each evolution. Om shanti, body and
bliss alone. Om shanti, womp.

Microspaces

2007-02-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Space: the first frontier. As time was born, a cosmic explosion enabled space in that first infinitely small eon between nothingness and universe. Sub-atomic massless particles formed from pure energy synthesizing into electrons and quarks, then protons and neutrons, and finally atoms, which, even at their nanoscopic cores, are vast empty landscapes of energy. Through their fusion and division, all existence as we know it was formed.

Then too, billions of years later, on a small blue planet on the outskirts of some wayward galaxy, space becomes the first frontier for life. Some ascribe to the theory of that random meteor which brought with it the first polypeptides and ribozymes which self-catalyzed and found solace within the micro-nodules of self-assembling lipid bilayers, thus creating the first cells housing genetic material, the basis for all earthly life (at least as how science defines it). Even those preferring some theory of self-assemblage must agree that without the compartmentalization provided by the lipid bilayer, without the three-dimensional folds of enzymes, without the linearity of DNA and RNA helices enabling the subsequent placement of codons directing protein synthesis, life as we know it would not exist. Further even, billions more years down the evolutionary chain, complex life forms require space not only for nourishment of natural resources, but also for gestation: plants from seeds; fish, amphibians, reptiles from eggs; mammals from wombs. Truly, it is space that defines us, that molds the parameters of our physicality. Compared to more subtle dimensions of our humanity such as the emotional and psychospiritual savannahs unfolding inversely behind our forms may flux with the personal growth of change and fate, our bodies remain relatively static in space, and while we may suffer age and disease shifting our shape, we remain corporeal organisms until our death and disintegration.

Thus, it is also sensible to argue that, while our aforementioned subconscious grasslands and oceans may create the artistic expression that fulfills our transitory lives, the subjectivity of our organismic tangibility necessitates a similar corporeality for the ultimate manifestation of art. Even symbols, the most basic artistic manifestation linking perception to shifting abstract concepts, require space for representation on our physical plane. Furthermore, literature, painting, sculpting, installation, theatre, pantomime, opera, and any other manifestation of artistic expression similarly require space to provide art’s inherent value, that connection between artist and audience, the communication of identifiable expression.

Some may see these as obvious points with little potential for provocative discussion. Still, such mental meanderings are fertile ground for me to begin a new discourse on my most recent travels to Montreal, Quebec. A kaleidoscope of cultures, languages and histories, Montreal is truly a jewel of metropolitan expression. My purpose there was to conduct a market research workshop with some of the finest, most influential minds writing and re-writing the healthcare policies that impacted the lives of millions of Canadians. Having some Canadian heritage myself, the very idea of this workshop gave me immense satisfaction: the fulfillment that comes from knowing that hard work and toil results in a greater good.

To collect the opinions of these fine minds, we required – what else? – space! A market research facility in downtown Montreal was the perfect place to hold our day-long conference. Left to itself, the facility was nothing but tables and laptops and wires and chairs, separated by vast molecular quantities of nitrogen and oxygen. But the potential that this space provided was invaluable housing for their decades of government and private industry experience. While not a large market, Canada is strategically critical in many industries because of its immense natural resources and its proximity to the United States that often results in cross-cultural, -economic and –political dynamics that cannot be ignored in successful product launch planning.

Canada’s healthcare system, for those of you who are unaware, is far more akin to that in the United Kingdom or Australia than it is to our principally commercial insurance landscape here in the U.S. For decades now, this universal approach has clashed with skyrocketing healthcare costs resulting from aging populations, innovative new pharmacotherapies and rising salaries. If it allowed access to the most innovative new medical therapy without cost controls and intelligent access management, the entire government of Canada could go bankrupt.

As such, the government of Canada, like those of the UK and Australia, has increasingly relied on the concept of pharmacoeconomics to guide which people can have access to certain drugs. Without delving into the nitty-gritty, around which whole careers and government beauracracies have been based, pharmacoeconomics essentially weighs the cost of drug therapy against the indirect cost-savings of other reduced healthcare costs. For example, if by publicly reimbursing a drug for diabetes, a number of amputations are prevented, then depending upon the price and volume utilization of the drug, the government might save money on the hospitalization and rehabilitation due to disease.

It has been accepted by modern medicine for a few years now (about 10,000 years after traditional and shamanic cultures recognized the same fact), that unhealthy lifestyles lead to disease. For example, people with diets heavy in saturated fats and sugar tend to develop cardiovascular problems and diabetes; people who smoke tend to develop certain cancers. While genetic variance differentiates those more susceptible to these risk factors, at one level or another they impact everyone.

Because treating diseases such as hypercholesterolemia and cancer and diabetes are very expensive, government and commercial private payers have incentives to implement what are affectionately known as disease management programs. In these programs, which currently exist in the U.S. and other nationalities, the third-party payer creates a program, which may include mandatory pharmaceutical use, diet and exercise regimens, and stress control. A future step then, once these become the standard of healthcare management, may very well be for payers, both private and government alike, to deny reimbursement of treatment to people who are put on, but do not follow, disease management programs. These practices may be draconian, but are also arguably necessary for the solvency and continued operation of healthcare systems worldwide. Still, such pre-determined living does not reconcile well with our needs for space.

At the time, even upon completion of the workshop, the philosophical connection of these discussion to the concept of space had not yet touched upon my mind. Truthfully, I was merely glad to complete this culmination of months of preparation. But as I transplanted my travel bag and laptop carry-on from the hotel to my good friend’s apartment, vacationing as it were, for a day in that Canadian city of integrated dualism, I had a few moments to continue my reading of Aldous Huxley’s “Island,” his last novel. Contrasted with “Brave New World,” in which everyone’s existence was pre-determined from birth depending upon their genotype, “Island” relates a South Pacific Utopia, isolated from the worlds of capitalism, industrialism, militarism, religious idealism, nationalism, and above all, unnecessary suffering. This society is steeped in Buddhist tradition, but has a healthy skepticism of religion, intriguingly juxtaposed to a deeply spiritual and mystic culture balanced between meditation, physical exertion, psychotropic mushroom use, and tantrik sex. These cultural staples are counterbalanced by science and logic, and the synergy of ancient and modern wisdom enables as perfect a society as mankind might expect, in which personal choice and harmony enable everyone an extremely high degree of happiness and personal fulfillment.

One core concept to Huxley’s Utopia is that of population control, which he similarly stresses in “Brave New World.” Unlike in “Brave New World,” however, in which population control is achieved through the pre-natal sterilization of embryos and controlled factory growth of human beings of different genotypic destinies, Huxley’s Islanders achieve population control through sensible living. As an isolated island with no petroleum reserves and no good port, the Utopia Pala was spared the religious rhetoric that has demonized our freedom of choice with regards to birth control. Combined with the institutionalized teaching of tantrik sex, couples only conceive when they want, and no couple has more than a few children. Thus, the natural resources of the tiny Palanese state are more than sufficient for all, and even parents with young children live in relative peace.

Contrasted with Bangalore or New York City or Mexico City or Shanghai or Rio de Janeiro, Huxley’s paradise seems enticing, and underscores the importance of space in society, in stark contrast to the realities of modern living, where overpopulation creates extreme competition for the most basic natural human needs such as food, shelter and sanitation, let alone living wages and material luxuries and retirement. In most of these cities, however, the wealthy still commandeer space for another of mankind’s needs, or, if not needs, at least strong desires – artistic expression. For what good is material luxury if one’s soul is not nourished as well?

Montreal encapsulates an interesting compromise not entirely unlike Huxley’s Pala. Except for being half-way around the world and despite having a massive bureaucratic government, and even with its strong French Catholic population, Montrealers remind me of the Palanese. Though in much colder climes than Huxley’s Islanders, Montrealers emanate the warmest of vibes, a similar energy signature to that which I have found exuded by residents of other mid-sized, affluent Western cities. A lack of over-crowding has resulted in space for the luxuries of life, most particularly art and culture, which is evident everywhere. But unlike some cities, in which this appreciation of art is brutally juxtaposed by massive impoverished slums and the despair of the destitute, downtown Montreal, at least, seems amazingly clean and well integrated.

This integration is so expansive that underground graffiti art melds in the cityscape with centuries-old religious and colonial architecture and vast new corporate skyscrapers symbolizing commercial power. I am a huge fan of graffiti art; not monochrome tagging, but rather the beautiful angular loops and whorls of shaded outlined color that encapsulates a human being’s identity. When a street artist takes the time to explore the space of some empty brick or concrete façade, a certain spirituality seems imprinted in the construction, and suddenly the line between our physical and divine selves seems less defined, healthily blurred, a throwback to ancient cave paintings. My tour guide informed me of an annual graffiti party, in which, in a certain district, artists from all over Montreal gather with ladders and spray cans, and decorate public spaces with their monikers. In addition to the multihued lettering we saw emerald dragons in flight, faces flowing into each other, grenade-spraycan-men threatening perpetual artistic explosion…the images flow through my mind now, too many to describe. She described to me how, as this annual ritual commenced, b-boys and -girls gathered around DJs to show off their latest breaks. Having experienced so many cities intent upon marginalizing rich counterculture, I felt a deep appreciation for any government willing to allow its people such alternatives of expression. As she led me around, drinking in rare sunshine that separated weeks of slate gray, I was amazed by the visual richness of graffiti soul imprinting, and by the pride which I felt flow from the city’s denizens as they saw me gawking in awe.

But if merely walking through downtown impressed me, my joy reached its pinnacle as my friend abruptly turned portside (to be nautical about it) and led me through a building entitled (something like) “Galleries d'Art Contemporain.” The space had clearly been newly refurbished from some previous factory or industrial building, with slapdash wood flooring that barely hid warping and that toxic stench of newly applied synthetic white paint. Piping snaked along the ceiling, and the whole building was filled with unused nooks and hidden secrets that emptied out into vast glass windows and views of downtown superstructures. Needless to say, we explored the building from bottom to top.

From hall to hall and floor to floor we walked, on that beautiful cerulean Tuesday, pausing only to venture into artist studios promising the latest in contemporary abstract symbolism. In one gallery, portraits of famous leaders included conspicuous rodents-–flying squirrels squatting on hairpieces, albino animals bearing buck teeth, tails raised and scampering across the shoulders of world leaders, encapsulating the skittish instinct of despotism. My personal favorite, of course, was one gray chipmunk smoking a Castro cigar – on Castro’s lapel! In another gallery, we perused the most recent prints from Quebec’s newest generation of print artists, some already gaining fame and touring their exhibitions throughout Europe. In still another gallery, a massive symmetric assembly of miniature picnic tables rose at least 6.5 feet off the ground, and was approximately 5-6 feet wide. It was tucked in a corner, but if one looked behind the massive obelisk of picnic tables, between this monstrosity and the wall sat one lonely picnic table with a doll of female figure, turned to the corner, her head pushed against the wall in isolation and despair.

But the gallery we explored first, and was most meaningful to me, as well as the theme of this ridiculous diatribe, was the spacious gallery of a truly exploratory artist. He had hooked common household plants up to an electromagnetic pulse emitter, which, when applied to the plant tissue, caused micrographs of plant cells to emit a sort of cosmic light in response to this energetic salutation. Plugged in to electric grids, these micrographs hung on walls reflecting the cosmos (which, coincidentally was the title of almost all the works). In the basic tissue of the plant, one could see the truth of stars.

Upwards and upwards we climbed, exploring galleries, noting offices of conservationist groups, architects and multimedia consultants, until we reached the roof. Climbing up and out, peering up again at ozone, we were amazed to see an asphalt roof, covered in thin gravel circles painted turquoise and azure and indigo. These flat Venn diagrams became a backdrop for my brief fleeting glimpse of the spirit of Montreal. Panning upwards from the gravel circles were rooftops of modern shops plastered in colorful graffiti; just a few degrees skyward in my visual field was an old chapel, its columned roof shifting into tall tan spires cut exquisitely in gargoyles and pious geometries. And then, further back, blocking the horizon, the monstrous skyscraper of KPMG, a testament to the pretend permanence of corporations, with an apex pyramid of sleek glass reflecting pale blue sky. Never before had I witnessed a city so welcoming to its many personalities, and so accepting of the natural schizophrenia that manifests when urbanity creates polarized lifestyles.

Yet the most interesting aspect to my mind was that the geographic borders of the city, sandwiched, as they were between ports and mountains, necessitated a certain density of construction even without an immense density of population. As such, though some art in Montreal is imported, the Art-with-a-capital-A of Montreal seemed birthed from the people, from a new synthesis of ancient traditions. And, in truth, though Huxley’s Palanese live in harmony, they live predominantly without art, without literature, without all the symbolic contrivances man has created to process or escape samsara. In this way, maybe, the citizens of urban areas are more fortunate, and though we pay a price for our exposure to the collective field of expression, perhaps our existence is enriched to appreciate disharmony and chaos. Perhaps a commitment to urban artistic space, even at the expense of other human needs, enables our evolution further, beyond organisms defining existence in terms of birth and death, to a single synergistic entity transcending the dictations of nature. Though Huxley is undoubtedly correct that balance is critical to our ultimate human potential, perhaps those of us in the adolescence of humanity can learn to tie our roots to our future from the adaptive spatial vision of cities like Montreal.

Homegrown Blends Release Party - 10/22/06

2006-12-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

Last night the Homegrown Blends release party at the Kava Lounge opened a portal into a counterculture nightlife. I had known the guys throwing it for some time, and was stoked to find a custom digital airbrushed invite to their first organized gig. It also so happened that there was terrible air quality in Los Angeles that week, it was a haze malaise, some hellish stagnant well. I had to get out, go hide out for a day somewhere a little more real than LA. San Diego's the place to be for just that sort of thing, and driving down was a bit of a dimensional warp, if you will. It had been congestion free, nothing but open road and endless sky, but somewhere around Camp Pendleton and the Dolly Parton monument, a strange fey fog drifted in from the sea. Traffic clogged, and I was compartmentalized into self-reflection. I decided that the best thing for me, really, was to go get extraordinarily faded with my boys and help build a breakout party for new artists.

There was a point after sound check when we all decided that it could go either way. There was a brief warm-up, hinting at a lack of prior practice - a good thing for chaos, which is critical in all good parties. But the beats already seemed golden improvised experimental trip hop, components building on each other. And as I said, I had seen these guys do their shit before, albeit in a helter-skelter manner, and reasoned that at the very least I would get good and drunk listening to dope turntablism. Sitting back at the bar, polishing off my third organic beer, I knew I’d probably get in some drunken philosophizing, while I was at it.

Sipping sake on a lounge couch, I watched seekers hungry for solid tunes trickle, flow, flood through the front door. By 10:30 there bar was packed; the party was a hit. Who knew? I mean, sure, the demand was there, the demand is always there. Underground scenes feed off people's need for new art, but to be both art and popular is difficult in these days of corporate-made artificiality. Yet this scene was truly both: as the well-dressed and restless lined up outside, hungry for beats, the painter Romali sublimated bass into an abstract acrylic (?) - laden ode to the all-seeing eye (or all hearing ear, perhaps? This was when he wasn't scratching, of course). Either way, the people were there because they were drawn, trajectorizing along invisible information-age bonds. In other words, if the tracks had been lame, the party would have shared that fate.

Instead the very concept of lameness ceased to exist within the Kava Lounge; dope ass old school wove through new beats. It was probably the first time I was ever sorry I didn't know more about hip-hop, hadn't followed that culture as much as I had others. Watching Homegrown Blends, I was reminded of old Picklz videos as they fed off of each other, syncopated drum machine bleats accentuating whining scratchtasticness. As each member of Homegrown Blends took the stage, loops fed revolutions that piqued the beats with hues of melody. And 'cause the track selection was dope, something in it for everyone, every song truthful, honest hip-hop, the effects morphed through each other, creating layers of sound that grabbed one's sense of space, making everything closer to the center. At some point those in the audience realized that we were in for a show to remember. It was all over everyone's face, the vibe was solid.

Later, in the weeks following the party, my philosophical curiosities were still unsatisfied--I couldn’t help but wonder whether ancient symbols mapping human evolution would encapsulate what I witnessed over the course of the evening. Taoist wisdom has always appealed to my sense of connective synchronicity, so I peered through the printing of the I Ching sitting atop my bookshelf, flipping pages in search of the hexagram symbolically representing that precise moment in the unraveling path of the artistic maverick when success is first tasted. After all, what use is a divination system without the capacity to capture any concept of human cyclical progression? As Jung wrote of it, asking himself his own question from the sage’s perspective, “Don’t you see how useful the I Ching is in making you project your hitherto unrealized thoughts into its abstruse symbolism?” If nothing else, I reasoned, the search for this hexagram might help sate my curiosity to explain the phenomenon of “blowin’ up” from the psychological perspective of the masses crowding this small bar in the industrial outskirts beyond Gas Lamp.

Eons ago in ancient China, millennia before the Ming Dynasty integrated the Great Wall, sages compiled the I Ching in the misty beginnings of recorded history. Attributed to a number of contributing authors including Confucius, the I Ching is a system of the exponential evolution of broken and unbroken lines, capturing the essential changing duality of a world filtered through the perspective of mortal, subjective beings. 64 (i.e. 2^6) hexagrams shift the linear order of these broken and unbroken lines, and every hexagram is constructed from two primary trigrams, one sitting atop the other, defining the symbolism of the push or change, the central meaning of the hexagram. The progression of hexagrams, then, exhibits multiple dimensions of action and reaction, chaos and order, failure and success, destruction and creation. Feudal warlords would have their sages consult ‘the oracle,’ as the I Ching is known, to ascertain how the vicissitudes of government and war might shift in their favor.

Wandering from hexagram to hexagram, a few caught my eye as having the potential to encapsulate the first success of the artist, but upon further examination, symbol 35, Chin, or “Progress” hinted at the mysterious subtleties hinting at these truths of development. Chin manifests as the trigram Li, or “Fire,” atop the trigram Kun, or “Earth.” This arrangement invokes the image of the sun rising above horizon silhouettes at dawn, spreading fingers of warmth across shadows. The judgment of Chin, as translated in Wilhelm’s Third Edition, reads:

Progress. The powerful prince

Is honored with horses in large numbers

In a single day he is granted audience three times

That is, a warrior rallies his fellow lords around the cause of their sovereign king, who rewards the warrior with access to power. Wilhelm observes that such warrior sages have the foresight to use whatever power granted not for their own selfish gain, but for the purposes of their leader. This may sound obscure and esoteric, and the feudal badlands and Confucian moralities of the Chou dynasty may seem like a different world from today’s Southern California underground, but perhaps ancient wisdom can illuminate lessons about the rise of talent and the evolution of underground art.

Taking massive liberties with my amateur analysis of this millennia-old mysticism, it seemed to me that the lines of waiting hip-hop aficionados trailing out the front door did signal some sort of progress. Their gathering implied a basic shift in the ordinary musical fare so often played, mundane and lacking, at clubs throughout the nation. Homegrown Blends had a commitment to transcending the oversimplified sluggish beats and base lyrics of Top 40 sludge with a shiny novel sound influenced by the great unsung DJs and MCs of the last three decades. Perhaps this hexagram Chin hints at how Homegrown Blends and the other artists at the release party, as leaders and evolvers of music, called to the hungry masses, attracting their gravity to rally around beats with poetic depth beyond bling and ‘hos.

Snapping some infinite imaginary rubber band back in time, as DJ Jo Ill's fifteen-minute extemporaneous techno-optic wordless flow fatefully receded, the first vocal act climbed the short dais and grabbed their microphones. Leadership Crew was wicked. Four vocals acting synergistically, their lyrics rhythmic and contemporary, they were humans beyond borders, opening inward doors. And with Jo Ill as their DJ, they rocked the fuckin' house. It was all ad-libbed, the beats behind the interweaving vocals; there were sloppy transitions, but hey, that’s what makes a live show honest. So here you go: Jo Ill was the cornerstone, driving the music, expanding the beats and progressing the flows. After 35 minutes of rapping messages of global awareness, Leadership left me wanting more, which I suppose is the mark of potential.

When Son of Ran and Cypheroptics took the mics in front of DJ Virus, these were no kids starting out on stage at their first packed gig. They were seasoned veterans - you could see their egos in their eyes. Which was initially irritating from Son of Ran, since his shirt displayed a KKK emblem without him realizing it (at least, I hope he didn't realize it. I'm not sure the Klan would envision Son of Ran a fellow knight). Then again, he earned a certain right to egocentricity over the course of the next forty-five minutes. His flows were smooth, the cadence of his voice shifting, syncopating which the beats, trading off with Cypheroptics. If Son of Ran focused his rhymes on a harsh examination of identity and success in a modern urban jungle, Cypheroptics verbally scaled spiritual rungs towards new planes of truth. The crowd was gripped, feeding off rhymes, bobbing their heads, waving their arms. Virus stole the show, though, when juggling ol' Missy with deep off-tempo beats. There was no repetition in the auditory Jacob’s ladder that self-assembled underneath his magic fingers. Syncopations caromed between each other building and halting, shunting and jarring and shifting until...suffice to say, it was sicker than Dahmer on ipecac.

Still, as Homegrown Blends took the stage again and spun beats closing out the night, Jo Ill was the name of the early hour. His scratching was unmatched; it was an alient tongue, sparking off phonemes indecipherable by human ears. One had to shift one's perspective at just precisely the right angle in order to hear its tripped-out words of wisdom, playfull and biting, transforming the steady drum machine beat of DJ Pauze into some sick solved equation evaluating reality from beyond. His technical proficiency enabled him to go solo, build hip hop layers with the other 'Blends, and work behind vocalists, evolving their rhymes into music. As the last few stragglers met up at Taco Fiesta, a tiny added benefit of San Diego, we paused briefly between bites of delicious carne asada and looked back to the crazy party that had burned itself into our memory banks. For me at least, it was an illuminating lesson that hard work and good karma can help an artist achieve a dream, and that dreams are better achieved in the company of friends.

One unsolved question in my mind is the identity of ‘the leader,’ the sovereign king bequeathing power and duty to the warrior sage for leading the masses into a new era. One could argue this leader was the headliner, Son of Ran, and on some existential level, all the headlining artists of future blow-out shows, whose audiences Homegrown Blends will depend on to reach for the next level.

But while this explanation is logical, I prefer another perspective. Perhaps the sovereign granting access to Homegrown Blends is “Hip-Hop with-a-capital-H” itself, an amorphous genre deity existing in the minds of music lovers everywhere. If so, the bar is set high, accentuating a need for iconographic underground artists who can invoke genuine inspiration. For those willing to rise to the challenge, the remaining poetic visions of the hexagram Chin suggest many keys to overcome obstacles and taste the massive success of Kaui – hexagram 43, “breakthrough.” Distilling these keys down refines a lesson both simple and timeless: by remaining true to the spiritual center of their music, by aspiring to ascend to a higher plane of hip-hop and by bringing beats that shift perceptions and move souls, Homegrown Blends may continue to enjoy the light of progress.

On the evolution of subcultures - 9/15/06

2006-12-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

After attending last night’s 2006 Burning Man Decompression Party, a friend asked me how similar I thought the festivities were to the peak of the rave scene. You have to understand, the larger posse remarked all night on the similarities, and the afterparty, a sick little shindig in some loft off downtown was straight-up time travel back to 1996 or so. The techno had regressed in its evolution, had climbed another iteration of some upward spiral path. The tracks blended into each other, syncopation left to a minimum. The crowd dug it. There was some booty-shakin’, I don’t have to tell you. But anyway, I digress...

So there I was, eating chorizo and pondering the ol’ ‘compare and contrast’ third grade assignment in my mind. What intrigued me most was that for every similarity, I found another difference. Or, not so much a difference per se, but truly an evolution, a paradigm shift in underground culture. And the first example I could think of to support this sudden theory got down, for me, to the bottom of the whole underground phenomenon to begin with. Organization.

There are likely those out there who know far more than I about the politics and economics of rave promoting in the late 1990s. But it always seemed to me, on the “demand side,” that because of the embedded competition in capitalistic party promotion, competing parties were thrown that all took advantage of the culture. That is to say, the culture was there, it had developed independently, and as the parties got bigger, the market demanded more, and enterprising personas rose to fill an unmet need. So no one party ever formed the backbone of the culture, it was a powerfully amorphous spiritual trend across location and time. But the Burning Man phenomenon is different. One party to rule them all, one party to find them. Yes, well, you know how the rest of that goes. And yet that after-party, the remnants, the folk on the fringe, was the same as the ghost party memories in my mind…

But again I chase my tail. So: the differences first. Burning Man is a phenomenon all on its own. Oh, the scene was influenced by several subcultures, rave culture being but one, but the experience of Burning Man has elevated the culture to something more, or at least something different. Something shifted to involve an element of pilgrimage, of inner faith. Plus, the rules are different, out there on the playa, and people return to their lives a little more sure that every perception is subjective, that rules are of our own creation, and that the world is as malleable as molten gold.

So the costumes, for one, are a bit crazier, as if every event were truly Halloween, to be gone all out for. Though, I must admit, having never personally been to Burning Man as of this moment, I will not A) say that I can comment on the extent of costumes nor B) compare the costumes to the rave scene. But I will say that when, driving around, trying to find parking, one friend said to another, ‘any moment now you’ll see a bunch of people dressed up as freaks, and you just follow them,’ or some such comment, I smiled as I thought back to The Magician, written well before my recent acquaintance with the decades-old Burning Man tradition…

Another difference: no friggin’ drum n’ bass. Let me caveat the following rant by reiterating that I thought the Decompression Party was bad ass, a massive eerily reminiscent of old times and a beautiful wonderland world, a portal into an ancient and future realm opened in the center of a sprawling megalopolis. Never had I been to a party of that size with the downtown skyline glass as my constant silicon backdrop, silent bridges and condemned avenues supporting jumbotrons, turntables and art cars, and a party populous as friendly, rockin’ and beautiful as any scene before it. Still, no scene is perfect, and for all the sweet industrial techno and throwback house that was played, not a one DJ pulled out the funky Jungle.

I don’t know if Junglism is supposed to be perceived as raver business, or some off-beat slanted path running at crooked angles to the whole shebang. But I do know that deep, dark Jungle is some of the freak-damn hottest sickest shit around. And, I don’t mind telling you, it broke me lil’ heart not finding just the smallest art car with some DJ breaking out some new synchopations…

…Rambling and ranting aside, the similarities before I just get fed up with trying to define the indefinable by compartmentalizing two independent phenomena, or perhaps even one overriding gestalt…

The similarities between rave culture and Burning Man are the similarities between all underground cultures, and, if I were a bit more metaphysical, the similarities connecting all perceptual reality. 'Radical self-reliance, radical self-determination, radical self-expression.' In the raver days it was always ‘peace, love, unity, respect.’ The two credos sound different to the ear, they emanate superficial differences in my mind. But in my soul I know it all stems from the same place. Inside the core, beyond our egos, our primal need to evolve drives those who are aware, who have shaken the burdens of their conditioning to reveal the sky abyss of choice. And why not? The rave scene peaked and valleyed, and though it seems resuscitated recently by the renewed interest in underground parties, this new life seems in large part due to Burning Man, which is, in all fairness, the new hotness. Which makes my heart warm, if honesty is what you require, because if the key to evolution is that the same undercurrent forces manifest structural changes over time, then no subculture ever dies. As long as future generations delve into themselves, beyond any stale realities imposed upon them by sinister forces, then we might wonder at some distant future in which that mystic tolerant underground pervades all human interaction...

Ramblings - 8/31/06

2006-12-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

I just want to warn you, before you read to far, that this is where I get to ramble. All the structure helix bullshit went into the book, the philosophies trimmed and tidy, the sentences nice and short. But ultimately, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg pyramid, so a longer explanation of the philosophies expounded is really in order, in my own head, in order to put this whole thing to bed. Don’t be surprised if it’s science that warps into weird mysticism whenever my poetry tangles. See, there, I rambled already…