Party Theory in Hurqalya

“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 20^th 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!