Nomad Codes

don’t claim any powers,” he says with a grin. “I just keep reading, keep taking it in. I figure I’ll remember it when I need it.” Along the way, he also started collecting esoterica, and for years he has made a most modest income buying and selling items like Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal , Michael Allen’s The Cult of Kumari: Virgin Worship in Nepal , and the 1913 edition of Budge’s Book of the Dead .
    Rick is very much a younger brother. Though friendly, he is more reserved and pensive than Alan, and dresses in a surprisingly slobby manner that the wag behind the great Blastitude webzine compared to a high school basketball coach. What’s going on inside is clearly what counts. There is a curious humility about him, as if he lives in the awareness that, as he said at one point, “if certain things didn’t happen in the past, I could be working at Wal-Mart now and going to church on Sundays.” Instead, he lives in a freak scholar bachelor pad above the band’s rehearsal space. Django CDs are piled next to a collection of goofy ithyphallic monsters from Bali. A futon lies near a shrine filled with exotic personal power trinkets and bookshelves packed with esoterica. The front wall of his office is lined with tactical pilot maps of Assam, the northeastern Indian province that is his next travel destination. He wants to visit the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati, a Shakti hot spot where the yoni of Shiva’s dismembered first wife was said to have fallen. He hears that tribal witches gather there, near a cunt-shaped cave that regularly “ bleeds” rust-colored water.
    Rick, you see, is a devotee of Kali, the black tantric goddess often pictured with a protruding tongue, a necklace of human heads, and the lingam of Shiva erect beneath her femme fatale thighs. Images and statues of Kali saturate his space. “She kinda lives here,” he says, a little sheepishly. “The whole tantric thing interests me, not just the sexual symbolism but the graveyard symbolism. There’s something about the gore of it all. I’m not into going out and hacking up people, but there’s something about that imagery that’s really powerful.”
    Rick got his best hit of that gore when he visited a Kali temple outside of Kathmandu. The priests chopped the heads off small goats, hugged the bodies like submachine guns, and directed the spurting blood onto the statues of the goddess. Soon the floor was covered with blood. “It smelled kinda good actually. In the corners where the blood would roll off there were all these marigolds that were blocking the drain and these dogs came up and licked up all the blood. These beautiful little five- or six-year-old girls in solid white just walked in the blood. Then they hauled the rest of the goat off to the family and they ate it. It’s a whole family event.”
    Bishop reminds me that, to the people who know her, “our lady of the cremation ground” also serves as a compassionate mother goddess. But the eldritch dark still sets the dominant tone of Rick’s spiritual universe. “I’m fascinated with the demonic,” he says. “Demons get a bad rap, but they’re real. That’s the key. I believe that spirits and demons are real, in whatever abstract or physical sense you want to put it in. Nobody gets that much publicity if they’re not real. Demons are everywhere. I think I’ve been a demon before. I bet you have too. I bet we’re all demons.”

    Rick Bishop may have made his pacts with the beyond, but the question before us now is how such activity informs the music of the Sun City Girls. As Rick talked about his devotion to Kali, I asked him about the ritual practices he undertook—always a tricky issue for Westerners.
    “I can’t approach it like a Hindu because I haven’t done the studies a Hindu would do,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. There’s still a connection. So if I want to worship Kali—and it would be bad for me to say that I never do—I’m gonna do it when I know I have to do it. And I’m gonna improvise. It could be silent inside, it could be through her images, it could be with incense or whatever. There’s no order to it. I don’t do it three times a day because, well, I don’t have to. I don’t have to do it at all. But sometimes I do.
    “It’s kind of the same way with our music. Sure we don’t always improvise, but if you’re gonna play music and improvise, just like you might perform a ritual, you’re gonna try