Nomad Codes

musician, leads a drum procession through the crowd. We press in as the diabolic crew forms a circle. Blazing torches whip past our ears, illuminating the drummers, their wet skin glinting in the firelight.
    There is no order to the memories that follow: a skinhead bathed in blood, the smell of sulphur, the touch of damp fabric and damper skin (mine? his? hers?). A half nude female fire swallower toasting her nipples onstage, where the only constant is a single red bulb smoldering like ancient embers. The sudden thought: “Shit, is that something burning?” Like no one since the Butthole Surfers, Crash Worship bring fear and disorientation back to the concert hall. What are fire codes compared to the atavistic fete that has circled around this globe since the first hairy wizard beat time with a bone? What is danger in the face of surprise?
    You might think that Crash Worship, who got their start in San Diego in 1987, would have a tough time translating their chthonic tantra into plastic, but Triple Mania II (Charnel Music)—the first all-studio long-player in the band’s eight-year history—is a pretty fine slice of hyperspace. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an individually tweaked Independent Project Records-style cardboard folder graced with stunning screen-printed copper plates and art “blatantly inspired” by Henry Darger, an insane gutter-culture saint known for Dick and Jane-style drawings of skewered and exploding children. Though the band pin themselves with an obvious badge by covering a Manson Family tune, other songs like “Wild Mountain” and “Vitamin K” are fresh, serving up wah-wah incubi, beached whales, wheezing Moogs, Spanish poets, and mad clarinets. And through it all, from ambient pitter-patter to chunky protofunk, the drums, the drums, the DRUMS!
    1995

THE ALCHEMY OF TRASH

    West Coast Spiritual Collage

    You have probably already heard the one about the yogi huddling in his mountain cave who believes he’s finally cracked through the cosmic egg. Having reached enlightenment, he decides to clamber down to the village below and spread the love. As he wanders through the town’s crowded market, some poor slob jostles him; without a thought, the holy man turns on the guy with anger. The point is that it’s easy to get clear on a mountaintop, but much tougher to manifest the light in the messy world most of us actually live in. But the tale also makes an ecospiritual argument, of sorts: mountains are the sites of mystical transcendence, while the human towns below embody the ordinary grind of the world.
    The art and spirituality of California in the twentieth century subtly undermine this polarity between mountains and towns, transcendence and immanence, high and low. In “Time Is the Mercy of Eternity”, the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth—anarcho-leftist, Buddhist, and proto-Beat—describes his own mystic moment in the Sierras. This opening in time does not put him in touch with God or cosmic forces, but with the simplicity of ordinary material life: “The pale new green leaves twinkle / In the rising air.” What he sees is the “holiness of the real,” an experience he contrasts with the faraway city, “burning with the fire of transcendence and commodities.” In a key Californian insight, Rexroth recognizes that the urban market, rather than the Zen mountaintop, is the zone enflamed with transcendent desires—or rather, that the desire that enlivens the commodities of the urban milieu is, at its essence, a desire for transcendence. Arising from the core of human suffering and dissatisfaction, the essential energy of desire is not separate from the sacred, even through it gets funneled into the secular and frequently crass fantasies that drive city life: lust, entertainment, distraction, power.
    By the same token, spirituality takes place in the midst of the market and its commodified fantasies. This feedback loop is especially true in California, where esoteric spirituality has long been a part of a feverish and mercantile popular culture rife with trash. What religious seeking and California culture share most essentially is an investment in fantasy—fantasy not simply as illusion, but as the forms that fuse imagination and desire. As both ironic and populist fans of low-brow culture can attest, the ferocity of fantasy can lend a delirious dreamlike power to corny things like UFO cults and commercial entertainments like B-movies or comic books.
    This paradox