“To call a
feast a ‘convivium’ is to call it a ‘mystery
of the sharing of life’- a mystery in which the atmosphere of friendship and
gratitude expands into a sharing of thoughts and sentiments, and ends in common
rejoicing.”
-Thomas Merton
I have been
throwing parties longer than I have practiced my life’s trade. As art forms go,
parties and festivals have unique demands. By necessity, they all involve
collaboration, even if it’s the simple art of being a good guest. The greater
the involvement of the community for which the event is being hosted, the
livelier and more magical the result. Creative involvement adds deeper
dimensions to the event: preparing a dish to share at the feast, performing,
fomenting discourse, dancing, cutting capers, making decorations, sharing gifts…
Over time I
encountered different theories and philosophies of conviviality that refined my
approach and yielded greater results. At an early age, I was enchanted by my
father’s stories of the hospitable islanders of the South Pacific, people he
encountered as a 17 year-old Marine fresh out of the Boy Scouts. As we know
from accounts of the cargo cults, this cross-cultural magic worked both ways,
since many islanders cherished the ability of Marines and Navy communications
personnel to call chocolate and cigarettes down from the sky. As I know from a
festive proclamation found in my Dad’s last effects, the Marines hosted
parties. The Samoans rocked them. Here were people who knew how to take care of
their guests and have a really good time.
Situationist
International and The Temporary Autonomous Zone
At the Dawn
of the 1990s, Peter Lamborn Wilson penned an extended essay on the idea of
liberating space for festivity, and that doing so could be a transcendental
act, ”The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition
that certain events lie outside the scope of ‘profane time,’ the measuring-rod
of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the
calendar--intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of
the year was given over to holidays.” This essay sparked at least two notable
events. Its philosophy gave rise to the Burning Man festival which, for a
while, embodied many of TAZ ideals, while also igniting a Renaissance in the
anarchic and odd Moorish Orthodox Church of America, a Sufi-Beat fusion that
spun off from earliest African American Islam- the Moorish Science Temple
founded by Noble Drew Ali. Wilson-Bey summed his theory with regard to parties,
“The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their
efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance,
conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create
a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss.” Later, he
explored ideas, initiated by the Situationist International art movement, that
life has become mediated to a critical point which can only be relieved through
resort to Raoul Vaneigem’s “Revolution of Everyday Life,” and refusal of The
Spectacle. This idea is defined briefly by Guy Debord, “The spectacle is the
moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. The
relation to the commodity is not only visible, but one no longer sees anything
but it: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its
dictatorship extensively and intensively.” So through a variety of practical
methods, Situationists advocated escape from said Spectacle. Hakim Bey argued
that occasions as simple as dinner parties or quilting bees could be
revolutionary in our hyper-mediated era.
Situationist
theory, along with an aesthetic molded from years working in a theme park,
helped me to shape environments amenable to incredible experiences, unique
parties and life experiences. A phrase from Ivan Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary for a
New Urbanism’ is etched into my brain in letters of molten gold: “Everyone
will, so to speak, live in their own personal ‘cathedrals.’ There will be rooms
more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but
fall in love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.” Atmosphere
can be powerfully evocative to conviviality, romance, and levity. It can evoke
Mystery, too, as with old pagan temples, and provide an exotic course to any
imaginable feast of the senses.
Gymnasium
& Mysterium
Few people
have theories of hospitality. I was steeped in heady ideas from anarchic
art-freaks when I had the good fortune to meet Dr. David Hanson, a gifted
artist who is now a notable robot scientist. Prior to this, Hanson enjoyed his
own theme park experience as a sculptor, working in the medium of animatronics.
‘Gymnasium’ was a theory he perfected with fellow artists Ean Schuessler and
John Freeman, part Dada/ Absurdist game, part Nietzschean ordeal, and part
taboo-busting gross-out. This ‘naked room’ referred not only to large numbers
of nudist celebrants, but also to a state of psychic vulnerability during which
such a party could make a psychological or arguably spiritual imprint on its
celebrants. Around 1990, Hanson put his theories to the test, launching a
once-underground event that is still celebrated today, albeit in a radically
different form, years after his departure- the Disturbathon. Participants
navigated a maze-like environment complete with secret rooms, wandering goats,
immense mud pits, rooms requiring the removal of clothes for admittance, and
music that careened from the whimsical to the terrifying like the amped up
soundtrack of a perverse dark ride. At that time, it seemed to be a modern
incarnation of the ‘Outer Mysteries’ celebrated by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
It made me wonder about the inevitable ‘Inner Mysteries’ that such an event
implied.
When I met
Hanson, I was studying Alexander Scriabin’s unfinished ‘Mysterium’ symphony, a
multi-sensory phantasmagoria of colored lights, music, unusual stagecraft,
caresses, exotic incenses, and even the ringing of bells suspended from a
Zeppelin. Scriabin boldly asserted, before a lip ulcer turned him from
composition to decomposition, that his symphony would catalyze the ‘world’s end’:
art as apotheosis. A direct result of the ongoing colloquium of artists, musicians,
weird scientists, esoteric DJs, offbeat intellectuals, and occultists was the
birth of The Eulessynian Hot Tub Mystery Religion at an event (Scary Primitive
Jungle Bash) held in Hanson’s honor before he departed Dallas to study at the
Rhode Island School of Design, where his ‘Swampy Hot Tub Mystery Ritual’ made
waves in the days before he spent a short period designing artistic hot tubs,
including one in the shape of a bubbling yoni.
The Hot Tub
Mystery Religion, as the name was later shortened, hosted feasts and rites in
impromptu Mystery temples in Euless, Texas, at apartment complexes with well-designed
wet areas. While the pranks, culture-jamming, and street theater of this group,
carried to ridiculous extremes at the 1997 CESNUR Conference on New Religions
hosted in Amsterdam, make for interesting context, the HTMR’s theories of
conviviality and festivity concern us here. While some of these, by necessity,
remain secret, the general aim was to foster an atmosphere like that described
in Chtcheglov’s essay, on a smaller scale than urban design, “This new vision
of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions,
is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of
behavior has taken place… in addition to the facilities necessary for basic
comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic
edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come.…The
changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total
disorientation.”
Black light environments, op art, sensory bombardment or immersion
in information rich spaces, video cut-up collages, activities borrowed from 20th
century art movements subverted to initiatory or prankish purpose, impromptu
initiations created for the needs of unique individuals, and the eschewal of
popular electronic dance music in favor of experimental sounds and 1960s
Exotica, were all elements put into play. And play was best interpreted for the
love cult in the words of the German Romantic poet, Novalis, “Play is
experimenting with chance.” Untethered from any dogma, the HTMR offered spaces
for experimentation and creation of art in a playful funhouse atmosphere. And
all of this was crowned by the Rite of the Tub, relaxation or sport in a well-designed
Jacuzzi under the canopy of night. In addition to the template offered by the
classical Mystery Religions, as a personal transformation resulting from peak
experience or ordeal, we added a layer of social experimentation and a curriculum
(Philip K. Dick, The Prisoner, Illuminatus!, Dada, Freemasonry, the Gnostic
rants of Francis E. Dec, and Moorish Science) derived from the mutual
fascinations of the celebrants.
Ultimately,
my journey circled back around to an earlier influence. A few years later, I
edited a couple of ‘zines featuring the art of fellow Mysterians. Material from
them was picked up by the Moorish Science Monitor, the ‘zine of the Moorish
Orthodox Church. Ultimately, the Hot Tub Mystery Religion was recognized as a
kindred body and welcomed into the “church,” establishing the first such body
in Texas, and is today known as the Khalwat-i-Khidr. As such, it has continued
to foster DIY and experimental hospitality to this day. As I write, the first public
festival of the Hot Tub Mystery Religion in 13 years is weeks away, the
Disturbathon is celebrating more than 20 years of abrasive nastiness, Dr.
Hanson has created two Philip K. Dick androids, one of which went AWOL, and the
Moorish Orthodox Church continues its experiments with disorganized religion. At
the nexus of science, play, art, and love, there lies a pumping heart of
unusual fun, beating out one message over and over and over. You are invited!
