mutantfest.info

by David Bernbaum

This letter describes the events of several weeks ago, when I attended the 15th incarnation of the Autonomous Mutant Festival––that same anarchist techno party in the woods put on by several of my dearest and weirdest friends, an event of great magic and strange power, where much can and does befall anyone mad enough to show up…..

It is one of the more powerful celebrations of life that I know, as well as the occasion of my first encounter, two years ago, with a dead body.

I was unable to attend Mutant Fest last year, being gainfully employed in Great Britain at the time. As such, I was most enthusiastic about making up for lost time this year, going so far as to volunteer my time scouting possible site locations and the like. As ever, I am always on the look out for singular experiences. And in my admittedly limited exposure to it, Mutant Fest has seldom failed to be singular.
This year was no exception.
Indeed, I very much doubt that any of the three-hundred and fifty or so people who were present are likely to remember the events I am about to relate for anything less than the rest of their lives.

Friday morning in Shasta-Trinity national forest at the very upper edge of California on the third day of the Autonomous Mutant Festival––that annual experiment in self-assembling zones of shifting freedom, loud raver music and a journey well beyond the conceivable limits of responsible drug use, now in it’s fifteenth consecutive year––finding my tent too sweltering to pretend to be getting any more sleep, I got up, made my way to the kitchen camp of the Katabatik sound system collective (with whom I had pitched my tent), started a kettle of water, looked around to see if there were any spare eggs and butter, and sat for a moment to get my hung-over bearings and wondered what sick fucker was thinking it’d be a fun joke to blast field recordings of the sound of helicopters over whatever speaker system was set up across the road.
The thing was, there wasn’t any speaker system across the road.
The sound of helicopters was not a recording.
For the next half hour or so, bleary mutants stuck their fuzzy heads out of tents and shelters, many still tripping from the night before and looked up in stunned wonderment to watch the police helicopter that circled over the festival site. The helicopter circled for no less than a half an hour, making pass after pass, presumably relaying to its pilots’ unseen masters the exact nature and location of the various camps and sound-systems making up Mutant Fest, as well as photographing and video-taping as many of the license plate numbers of what vehicles were visible.
Within forty-five minutes rumors were flying up and down the roads, trails, creek beds and fallen tree bridges linking campsite to campsite that rangers, police, and possibly even heavily armed feds were massing at the head of the forest service road leading to the festival site.
Within an hour it was confirmed that federal agents had set up a road block, cutting us off from the outside world––a position being maintained by federal troopers in camouflage flack-jackets brandishing machine guns.
Machine guns?
Surrounding a peaceful assembly of unarmed civilians?
On public land?
In Obama’s America?
A half an hour or so later, word went out that law enforcement officials would be present outside the S.P.A.Z. collective sound system camp, that being as usual more or less the heart of the festival, and that any member of the community willing to show their faces at that place and time would most likely end up knowing a good deal more than then they did at present.
I was late for the meeting with the authorities. Like a great many other people around me, I first took the liberty of busying myself with a shovel sufficient so as to remove from my possession any and all material that might prove incriminating should the alarmingly likely possibility of arrest present itself. (As it turned out I was later very nearly arrested twice in the course of that afternoon, and in no less than two different cities, so it’s a good thing that my “bury-the-evidence” instincts were so clearly and presently functional).
By the time I got to the meeting a crowd of techno-elves, raver-goblins, nomadic-hobbits and a rich assortment of upset looking mutant-folk in rumpled costumes and orc-ish haircuts (all looking like 10am was way, way too early for this kind of thing) had gathered, facing a number of Sheriff’s department and federal agents. the “other side” were masked by enormous sunglasses, dressed in a variety of different uniforms, resplendent with side-arms and communications devices. I caught the very ending of the two sides’ closing statements, which went abstractly more or less like this:

“What you are doing is Illegal. You have four hours to Disperse.”
“…hmm. right. yes. look, if you’re saying that having over 75 people in any camp is illegal without a permit, then what constitutes a camp? I mean, we’re all just individual zones of influence here. We don’t have anything formal to do with one another. We all just showed up here. Technically we have nothing to do with one another. How far apart, say, would these camps need to be to be legal?”
“What you are doing is Illegal. You have four hours to Disperse.”
“…Freedom to assemble?”
“Illegal gathering. Over 75 persons. Against Rules and Regulations.”
“Look man, you’re talking about all of ‘us’ being over 75 persons, but to be precise there’s no ‘us’ exactly …nothing but unshackled and independent citizens here…every mutant band encamped beneath its very own banner…every man/ woman/other a campsite unto him/her/it’s self.”
“You have four hours to Disperse.”
“Are you mad? It took us over two days of solid work to set some of these camps up!”
“Four hours. Arrests and Citations.”
“…the Constitution?”
“Four hours. Arrests and Citations.”

This being a full and incredible demonstration, on the part of our heavily armed persecutors, of that segment of the American psychic landscape that the most sublime of poets, Allen Ginsberg, calls:

…the stupidity meanness self-serving cowardice and hollow vanity of bureaucratic personnel  from Harvard Yard to Washington to Mexico City, from the ignorant sheriff’s office in Dutchess County, NY to the inner greedy sanctums of the US Treasury Department in D.C., our whole  ‘establishment’ of civilization that defends us from knowledge of our own unconscious by means of policeman’s clubs, and would resist the liberation of our minds and bodies by any brutish means available including teargas, napalm & the Hydrogen Bomb.

Up to that point, I’d only read about them in books…mostly paranoid Sci-Fi paperbacks…counter-culture fiction classics and anthologies of banned poetry…but now he we were, face to face with The Man. The Pigs. The Fuzz. Baby-killers, back from the desert, with orders to subjugate their own citizenry…Besides flak jackets, opaque and enormous sunglass masks and the chilling posture of hands resting on side-arms during discussions with a weaponless community, what did these wrathful and demonic entities look like? Philip K. Dick describes the archetype as having: “…fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck into dough. And they stare at you all the time.”
Having issued their directives (i.e. having shat upon the liberties of free men and women and wiped their backsides with the constitution) the police then subsequently withdrew to their blockade, leaving only the sulfurous specter of Four Hours To Disperse lingering like a toxic cloud in the air. What members of the community were present began a rapid fire discussion on what to do.
Despite the fact that the philosophic foundations of the Mutants is entirely non-hierarchal and anti-authoritarian––concepts which tend to inspire devotion when theorized about but frustration when directly experienced––still a plan was put together in under a minute: “The feds say we have no permit. We must therefore stay not upon the order of our going but go at once to the nearest Ranger’s station and obtain one.”
Aaron Spaz (founder of the S.P.A.Z. collective, closest thing Mutant Fest has to a “leader” albeit one whose “leadership” usually consists of encouraging people to make their own goddamned decisions) announced that he would be doing just that. He needed back up, and Invisible Jim (my best and oldest of friends, the chief reason I am ever to be found among these crazies) stepped forward immediately.
“They are not going to shut down Mutant Fest,” said Aaron. “I have to go take care of my son, and then we’ll meet in my car in five minutes,” whereupon he rushed off through the extremely assorted collection of witches, hippies, techno-yuppies, human mud-monsters, bespangled tribal princesses and day-glo ravers to secure his boy.
Invisible Jim turned to me.
“Wanna come?” he asked.

Thus was born The Fellowship of The Permit, starring Aaron as some kind of enraged Hobbit chieftain, Invisible Jim in his all-but-official capacity as a crude-Gandalf-analogue (“the wizard of S.P.A.Z.”), in association with Meat-Camp Tony, a large and jocular black man with a bone to pick about guns being pointed at kids, and your reporter, (possibly in the capacity as bumbling human or Halfling comic relief).
Off we went to the forestry service to demand the impossible. It was a conflict which in some senses the Mutant community had been preparing itself for for years. Two years ago I wrote the following about Mutant Fest:

The counter-culture is vast and uncountable. How would the sheriffs clear us out of here? There are no leaders, no registers, no tickets, no rules. We’d be like water, like trying to pick up water with your hands.

Now it seemed, we were going to discover just exactly how much like water we were or weren’t. It had been one thing to imagine a frustrated Sheriff standing alone with an unsigned form while laughing freaks danced in and out of the shadows around him. We hadn’t expected the machine guns and the helicopters. I expect that generally, most people don’t.
We arrived at the ranger station where we were expected and immediately handed the address of another office, greater than the one we stood in both in terms of importance and of distance. We drove therefore to Mt. Shasta city, where usually at least once or twice a year I stop on some road trip to get a burger and ogle the small town burger joint boys.
Arriving at the main Forrest Service office, which featured prominently a fiberglass likeness of Smokey the Bear out front, admonishing us not to play with fire (too fucking late for that you rat-fink stool-pigeon shabby excuse for a bear, you). We handed the bouncy young she-ranger behind the front desk the name of the individual we had been told to contact. Oh no, they said. We’ve been told to expect you. You don’t want to talk to her, we’re going to have to make a call directly to the head office.
Within a minute or two, during which we muttered whispered tactical suggestions for negotiation and admired the framed posters depicting saucer-like cloud formations over the mountain, a woman in Khaki pants with a long sleeved shirt tucked into her belt arrived to deal with us. Hers was a face, like the faces of many administrators, that seemed frozen in a mask of pleasant reasonableness, and which maybe extended a few extra fractions of an inch away from the actual surface of her scull, so that the consciousness assumed to be operating within had a bit more breathing room behind which to retreat and completely mask its true nature. Her name was Priscilla. She was a bit like the domineering den-mother type. Outdoorsy, wearing make-up. Firm in policy and “safety first.”
Her (abstracted): “What can I help you with today? Oh I see. Well, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do these things, now isn’t there. Too bad you didn’t ask permission earlier [so that we could have turned you down]. I’m sure we know what’s best. Looks like maybe some people are going to need a little time out. Hmm?”
Us (nobody actually talked this way): “Request permit. Behold our impressively cited litany of all the times that this has been no problem before. Demand immediate removal of police-state thugs from the area. Machine guns surrounding civilians unacceptable legally, ethically, morally and possibly aesthetically. What gives? We are here in the name of the unfettered human spirit that shall respond ever thus to tyranny. Who the hell are you people anyway? Isn’t this the office where you come to get hiking trail maps and fire permits and stuff? Whence come forth your fascist goons?”
We were flatly told that the impossible was in no way going to be permitted. Ours was a basic failure to interface on several levels. For one thing, Priscilla demonstrated a basic cognitive inability to process “us” as not “being” an “organization.” On a strictly structural level her office, she stated, is unable to grant permits to leaderless entities.
thus:
We: “We have considered your arguments and banish them in the name of our pioneer ancestors as well as Common Sense. We are a cloud of self-empowered and self-motivated mutants, free and unincorporated individuals come together for the purpose of experiencing ourselves as being free.”
She: “If the numbers of camping individuals extend above fix limits [limits which it turns out are set by what is known as the “Anti-Rave Law,” created just for the purpose of denying freedom of assembly to people for the purpose of throwing big, free, parties] then the entire population is counted as an organization whether you call yourself that or not. Permission necessary. You should have come in before all of this and requested a permit, just like everyone else.” [Sweet smile. Frozen mask. “Reasonable Rules.”]
We: “Okay then, let’s get a permit together right now then.”
She: “No time. Not willing. Things to do. Very busy office.” [translation: permits would not have been issued for such an event in the first place]
We: “We demand that you define your terms, that we might adjust our preternaturally flexible typographies to flow around them. How far apart must individual “camps” be in order to count as separate entities?”
She: “‘Satellite-style’ camping would never be permitted in the first place.”
We: “Why are there machine guns menacing unarmed civilians?”
She: “You all are breaking the law and will have to leave.”
We: “Well, we’re not leaving this office until at the very least the agents with the automatic weapons stand-down.”
She: “In that case, I’m going to have to call an officer to come her and remove you.”
We: “Constitution? Freedom to assemble? Evacuation impossible under proposed ultimatum.”
She: “Our hands are tied. You should have gone through proper and permissible channels in advance.”
We: “Such goes against our most basic moral principles.”
She: “If you are going to persist in this useless display of doomed resistance, then it will be my great pleasure to summon the forces of darkness to remove you at gunpoint.”
We said we weren’t leaving until the machine guns and the civilians did not continence each other no more. She closed down the office (our promise to remain in protest constituting a legal threat) and made a phone call. We conferred amongst ourselves. Our conference consisted more or less of:
“Feel like getting arrested?”
“Nah…a charming notion, but hardly the best use of our time. Let us away under cover of broad daylight to seek return to our no-longer secret base and coordinate safe withdrawal of rebel forces…”
Thus, after a flurry of communications in the government parking lot we split. Along the highway, heading the other directions we passed the three police SUVs heading back into town from the blockade (to which all law in the region had been routed), presumably to arrest us––the terrorists in the office––who were officially menacing the smooth function of the machine: granting vacationers fire permits and passing out informational booklets to tourist families amidst the regional map dioramas and taxidermy wildlife.

What a disaster. Beatnik-pikey-carnival-punks versus the PTA. Hazy memories of communications failure and the abandonment of tactics which had been hastily sketched out at best. Result: global failure to achieve all goals, save for the un-sought-out goal of revealing the hidden face of power. Their position (unstated but firmly implicit): Although in theory you have the right to live, our policy will be to kill you by creating an environment in which you have no place, and will die out.
We should have come with a clown car full of lawyers. Instead we got an angry anarchist DJ, a magic-using anti-authoritarian troublemaker with a degree in environmental engineering, an angry black barbeque dad cutting in every other sentence to unfortunately disrupt any presentation of ourselves as a united front (albeit a presentation which had been pretty flimsy in the first place), and your reporter, deeply afflicted by a psychedelic hangover, who said little and––despite being there in theory to document events––wrote even less.
Clown car full of lawyers definitely indicated. Mutant methods are rendered useless once the unwary mutant enters the magic circle of bureaucracy and its officers. Within that circle, all power is predicated on mastery of the codes and systems of law-code and lawyer-magic. Lawyer magic is practically impossible to mobilize without having at least some form of officially recognized existence. Concomitantly, the production of the tools of office for lawyer-magic necessitates the ritual sacrifice of vast sums of money. The amount of their time––which is to say the amount of money they cost––it takes to mount, direct and persevere through the course of a legal conflict involving the right for blatant dissidents to play techno in the woods is going to be astronomical. Otherwise, “constitutional rights” are revealed as being about as relevant as a bad check.
This is one, among many reasons, that Burning Man is so expensive.

In the end however, the philosophical schism between grid style thinking and flow style action notwithstanding, it didn’t matter.
Priscilla was not going to back down or grant us any demands or concessions––because she couldn’t.
By the time we’d got there, Priscilla, was no longer in charge.
We’d had it from the horse’s mouth at the first ranger station (from whence we were first deferred).
“Machine guns? Civilians? Rights? Reasons?” we’d asked before being drawn a confusing map on the back of a yellow sticky pad and sent off chasing the wild goose of official permission. The individuals at the Ranger Station had been basically sympathetic.
“No clue you folks. Hell of thing. All I know is: orders from Washington.”

Washington!
Hardly is that name out before a vision of sinister legislative executive orders commanding wiretaps and shock-troops to be used on domestic populace is signed into law, an impossible to repeal law (any opponent obvious terrorist stooge) who’s hour come at last, slouches towards a prison camp to be born.

A few words about possible motives on the part of the federal agents and their forest service patsies:
(1) This year, Mutant Fest was a mere 15 minute or so drive from civilization. Somebody, possibly everybody, in sleepy little white-picket fenced McCloud may have seen a horde of crazies drive through and they didn’t like it much. [but then why a Federal response? Why not just the sheriff to check it out?]
(2) Earlier in the festival, trouble had been brewing between Mutant Fest and a Native American group camped quite near us who were conducting a Pow-Wow simultaneous to our rave and did not care for our intrusion. [ok, but did the Indians call the Feds? Would the feds, for that matter, send in heavy armaments to act on a privacy complaint from a minority group? Or is the issue not the Natives’ wishes, but the fact is that if they were made to get permits for their event while we got away with a shrug and an extended middle finger, then why should they bother with permits either…whereupon the whole system starts to crumble. Again, though, why not just show up, as rangers have done on and off for the last fifteen years, with a document and get somebody to sign it? Again: Machine guns? Heavily armed blockade? Anti-riot tactics?]
(3) [Here’s the one I personally think most likely]
The area we were in was due to be logged in several weeks.
The road to Mutant Fest turns right off of highway 13 onto forest service road 40N12, then takes a left onto 40N52 and there, at the corner of 40N12 and 40N52 was a fully operational lumber company, thundering through the underbrush, chopping down trees and moving them into big, industrial piles. Indeed, it was there, at the corner of 40N12 and 40N52, sitting right on top of the logging operation, that the law enforcement people parked themselves.
Did they think we were eco-terrorists? Tree-sitters? Log spikers?
Although from what I understood, our interactions with the individual loggers were mostly perfectly friendly, or at least cordial, nevertheless whoever it is that owns the power to chop trees down in that forest, and the powers behind the powers behind the decisions being made at the local level, could make a phone call to “their people” in D.C.     [let us close our eyes and imagine thus:] “That’s right…whole mad-dog pack of ‘em…rags and feathers…rings on their fingers and flowers in their hair… if we let the get away with this they’ll have our entire outfit neutralized in a matter of days…that’s right…force fully justified…you’re goddamned right it is!…what the hell do you think the fucking homeland security budget is for?…that’s right…glad you understand…etc.”[click]
Paranoid a little? Not so sure. According to local sources, the Shasta-Trinity National Forrest has (1) one Sheriff and (2) two rangers for all internal law enforcement purposes. Everything else came from Federal sources from on high and at tremendous tax payer expense (the Great Anti-Mutant Bust of 2011 may well have cost “The Man” something into the tens of thousands of dollars––the helicopter costs alone boggle the mind…).
We never did get a straight answer from Priscilla about it, plus check out this next item, which is frankly paranoid but totally relevant and, besides, isn’t it normal to be paranoid when you’re surrounded by aggressive, robotic armed troops?:
(4) Facebook has a page for the Autonomous Mutant Festival. No one created it. On Facebook, when any “like”-able ontological entity gets a certain number of “likes,” a page is automatically created for that person, place or thing. This page cannot be removed. This page is linked to everyone who “likes” it, and through them the larger statistical patterns of distribution of common interests and interpersonal connections can be assessed (“If you like this and this, you’ll love these!”). The NSA is on record as saying that Facebook is the best thing that’s ever happened to them. “Tell us who you are. Tell us who you know. Tell us you politics and your special interests. Tell us where you’re going this weekend.” The directions were posted publicly on Wednesday. For all we know, they could have been ready for weeks to move against us, just waiting for enough people to show up to make it worth it….
[this view I am willing to dismiss as overly paranoid, of the type smacking a bit of self-flattery. I don’t believe we’re at all that important to them. Or at least, I don’t believe that we were. Who knows? Maybe now the Invisible Hand and the All-Seeing Eye stretch forth. The name “Shire” and “Hobbits” and “Autonomous Mutant Festival” have come to take on a certain significance…]

Meanwhile––having utterly failed to reach Mordor, destroy the ring, or do anything much besides buy a bottle of gas-station Gatorade and send off a series of initially conflicting text-messages warning people to either stay away from the festival site or to show up en mass and shut down all the government buildings (too late for that. If you’re going to mobilize a demonstration, or shut some office down by group action, it’s best not to wait till 3:30pm on a Friday, when all the offices close anyway at 4pm)––the Fellowship of the Permit retreated in glum defeat.
The police we’d past on the highway had no idea what kind of vehicle we’d been driving, or even if we were still at the Forrest Service Office (all personnel had retreated behind closed doors, lest we overwhelm them with our abusive reasonableness). We had evaded arrest, which was a neat trick, and had not been difficult at all to pull off. As any magician will tell you however, it’s basically a foundation-level professional blunder to attempt to pull off the same trick twice. The first round had been frustrating but easy. The second time was anything but.
Racing ahead of the column of road dust we were kicking up, we came to the edge of Mutant Fest and found ourselves face to face with the police blockade. Heading out had been no problem. They’d glared at us and watched us drive out with naked hostility, but had neither spoken to nor accosted us. Trying to get back in was another matter.
Speech was too good for us at first. Orders were barked in body language. We slammed the brakes in the face of a wall of sports-coach style manual commands.
STOP YOUR VEHICLE AND WITHRAW. Scalding, blasting waves of unfiltered hostility, expressed in a brutal series of aggressive primate orders and no lip from you citizen.
WITH-DRAW. We report retreat to be impossible. Hostilities escalate instantly. All hands go to guns. All hands present on deck. Pear shaped law enforcement woman, Putty face with dull eyes concealed behind smoking mirror ray-ban mask of hate spits blatantly contradictory orders.
YOUR PASSANGERS NO SEAT-BELT. INFRACTION. CITATION. ARREST. WITH-DRAW. We’re all wearing seat-belts here. We have to get back in, if you want us to leave here at all.
YOU WILL WITH-DRAW NOW. we have to get back in. All our stuff is still in. cars. trucks. busses. We need break down campsite.
NOW YOU CHANGED STORY.  Boyfriends, girlfriends, countrymen, little children still inside. NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. Nine year old son is still inside. Not leaving. NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. You want us to get out of here or not? You want us go. We want us go. Current impediment to all parties’ identical wishes = you. Only thing currently keeping you getting what you want is you. NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. Not leaving here without my son. Look, the four-hour ultimatum isn’t even up yet. How do you expect us to do what you want if you don’t let us in? NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. NOW YOU CHANGED STORY. ARREST. ARREST. CITATION. ARREST.
Worst personal experience to date of countenancing robotic hatred fueled by an unreasonable and savage anger on the part of an authority figure of any kind.

We endured this gauntlet for some minutes before their hierarchy structures shifted and rotated, presenting to us the face of “good cop.” Kindly looking grandpa-type, the aura of a good hearted tough fellow, probably veteran (which war? Korea? Vietnam?). We argued that we hadn’t been told, upon leaving, that we would not be allowed back into the festival site. At any rate, no camping permit means ‘no camping,’ not ‘no driving in to get your kid and all your stuff.’
Good Cop Gramps was at least outwardly sympathetic. “Well, I suppose we can let you in under an escort. But you’ll have to be out in thirty minute before the time is up”     (still ridiculous as S.P.A.Z. really did take over two days to set up.)
Bad cop, heavy woman with a face like a steaming iron fingering her tazer. SURRENDER IDENTITIFICATION. POLICE ESCORT. NOT OUT BY TIME. CITATION. ONE FALSE MOVE. ARREST. CITATION. SURRENEDER IDENTIFICATION.
We drove down the .8 miles of 40N52 to reach S.P.A.Z., rendered invisible by the dust of the police SUVs following up and down the road. The barking of drug dogs in a fog of road dust.
“Just as soon as this car stops we all split separate directions”
“…”

A second community meeting was immediately assembled. First order of business: fuck their deadline. Everyone just look like you’re “making a good faith effort” to leave on time. They’ve said they’ll honor that, but we have no commitments from them and nothing binding. Witness here the consensus rituals of an undefined self-assembling community. Just the facts. Just the folks. And now let’s all make our own decisions.
I left as Aaron was calling for a “break-down the came as slowly as we possibly can but still be doing it” party. The idea was to outlast the law. Keep packing––that is to say, keep moving boxes of stuff from location to location, and wait for them to go home for the evening. Have one last dance party. Full moon. Then head out in the morning.

I don’t know if S.P.A.Z. managed to pull of their breaking-down-the-camp party. Probably not. Police harassment stepped up as stragglers struggled to get their gear together. By the time we were ready to split, the cops were starting to bring dogs through the camps, and search the tents and cars of people who were still packing down.

Everyone who was present I’m sure framed events based on their own personal imprints and favored lenses. In describing the scene to a long haired sound-tech friend, the pictures he conjured up in supposition were culled directly (by his own admission) from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Cartoon robot marching hammer cops savagely bust up cuddle-puddle of glow-in-the-dark-kitten party kids, whose L-O-V-E trip is fractured into shards and paint by jack-boots and billy-clubs.
Personally, and especially when faced with the flack-jackets and machine guns, I just thought of the news. I wonder where those federal agents come from. Not grown in pods, presumably. Back from the desert maybe, I think. Machine guns around unarmed American civilians and the whole things had production values of a disturbing CNN you-tube channel. If this is how they act at home, how do they conduct themselves abroad? Or even worse: Is the entire purpose of sending them out to Iraq and Afghanistan simply to create an armed force, conditioned to violently suppress their own citizenry without question?

I retreated to find my little brother who had elected to come to Mutant Fest this year, a fact which had caused me no small amount of anxiety that madness, freedom and psychedelics would open up experiences in him that I was sure as shit in no fit state to deal with. Also, I wanted to get fully psychedelic, and did fear that Jonathan’s proximity might send me off on inward oceans of guilt and self-castigation over the time ghosts of sibling conflict, ghosts which were well and fully banished in the face of our shared experience of immediate crises (nothing like being totally routed to get people to come together…).
We packed up left fled. We set out in caravans of two to three cars when we could, to minimize the chances of getting pulled over. In the road saw them frisking a young hitchhiker trying to get out. Little brother sat in the passenger seat next to me looking sick with worry and guilty as hell as we past the same sneering flotilla of armed, dangerous operatives of control, who’d abused the Fellowship of the Permit on the way in, and who had whipped our supposedly unstoppable community soundly and thoroughly, and who could still pull us over and do whatever they pleased to us so long as we were in their sights.
I waited until I couldn’t see the police in my rearview mirror anymore, then turned on the stereo to something appropriately tortured and operatic: O Children, by Nick Cave. Last words heard as we fled the ruins of the pagan party we could not save: Forgive us now for what we done / it started out as a bit of fun / here take these before we run away / the keys to the gulag […] O Children, / lift up your voice / lift up your voice. / O Children, / rejoice / rejoice…
I am a big fat softy.

So little Bro and I headed north towards the family wedding we would have had to be leaving the next day anyway. We arrived some many hours later. Drove all night to a place in Northern Oregon outside of the town of Bend. Family wedding at a “ranch” style gated community with swipe card barrier points and sterile, identical copies of identical condos available expensively for events and temporary habitation. The rewards of middle-class servitude, presented with a 25mph speed limit and cameras in the trees. Rooms made “cheerful” by walls full of books obviously no one had read and bad commercial airport-lobby art, hung proudly and displayed alongside smiling lily-white satisfied family photos in frames I had to turn over ‘cause I couldn’t stand looking at them.
Told the story to Mom over bourbon around three o’clock in the morning when we showed up. Empathic bonding. Wondering now about her experiences getting tear-gassed at civil rights and anti-war rallies. Heavily sedated. Sleep on the couch. The next morning mom expresses hope that I will be able to get some solace here in gated-“ranch”-community sell-out rat-fink cried-under-torture nature loving death-world. I kick table violently and spit the word PERMIT as a curse. Gotta have PERMIT here drive. Gotta have PERMIT here stay. Mom, who marched for civil rights and against Vietnam, and who got tear gassed for her troubles, held me while I cried.

Packed backpack with book of political poems and the transcript of a ten-year old  book-length series of interviews with old sound system traveler kids. “Movement Is The Key”––an oral history of S.P.A.Z. compiled ten years ago by a visiting German punk-rock academic passionate about sound system culture. Invisible Jim, of course, had one of the only originals left. I’d made a number of copies, and it had been my plan to distribute them at Mutant Fest in my role as budding young social historian. As Aaron however pointed out, ten years later not a single one of the individuals who had consented to interviewed for the book were still coming to Mutant Fest. I’d wanted to find one of them and ask them to re-read and then follow-up myself. Ten years later? Do you still believe in all this? Are you still in love with it? Do you still need it like oxygen? Like you said you did back then? Apparently on at least some level, the answer is a silent “nope.” All the extra copies lay undistributed in my back-pack.

Outside on fancy lawn the next day. All around me, normal families on vacation. Bike rental for little girl. Tennis match for mom. Ice cream for boy. Small sized bottle of beer for dad.
Opened bag. Got out book of political poems. T.A.Z. by Hakim Bay. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Book that started all this off. Invisible Jim, strung out in mid ‘90s, found xeroxed copy on the back seat of BART. Read.

Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.

“the closure of the map.” The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance–not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of “territorial gangsterism.” Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed…in theory.

Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. Freed of time and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci…

and so on and so forth.
Started crying. In public. First time in a long time. Didn’t give a shit about anyone on any level in a visible 360? radius. Just a grown man in a powder blue shirt covered in pink and purple floral prints, reading a home-made stapled together book and crying hard in front of vacationing families. With a little luck some poor kid’s summer will have been utterly ruined. Honestly hard to care. Fifteen years of the Autonomous Mutant Festival. Among the greatest experiments in freedom and love I know. Ripe with difficulties and disasters. They’re what make it alive. Last anything-can-happen-nomadic-space-time left in America (besides all the others…). Guess we’ll all have to go pay twenty dollars at the door of some dance club and show our i.d. if we want to go out now, huh?
Fifteen years. I’d only ever been once before, but that once was enough to connect me strongly enough that I felt like a friend had died, or at least been horribly crippled, kicked in the teeth. A fifteen year old friend at that. Scum-bag dangerous drug-fueled techno filthy glorious mean sexy confusing exasperating love-able like no other fifteen year old kid, to whom nobody in the straight/square/muggle world was going to extend sympathy. Cried, still decelerating from the stress of passing through the blockade on the way out…

Unidentified Awful Female Relative: “Well maybe you should have asked permission in the first place now shouldn’t you, hmmm?”
Unuttered response: “I think they made it perfectly clear there’d be no permits for  junkie nigger faggots like us lady. Them make that real clear real good.”
Actually Uttered Response: ‘suppose so…

Intense sadness.
Well behaved at the wedding reception. Responses limited to automatic scrip items.
Safe, clean, dead. This is your world, isn’t it?
Successful liberal relatives with money and no criminal records express worthless sympathy.
Unsuccessful yuppie relatives with debts and partners found on internet dating sites express distain and confusion.
Personal consumption of bourbon in large quantities.

However.

All was not lost.

The marvelous thing about a beast with a hundred kinky backs, and which has neither leaders nor rules–and therefore neither heads nor vital organs––is that there is no head you can cut off to kill it, and no heart you can impale to insure it will not rise again, behind your back, just the very second your attention is elsewhere and the moon has risen.
At some point the afternoon before the wedding–– as I sat staring at myself naked in the mirror of the awful condo, and noting how much weight I’d seemed to have lost, the mobile phone which died in the woods and now lay reviving via power slurping umbilical chord gave me two somewhat jarring buzzes to announce the presence of incoming messages.
The messages came to my phone as it did to the phones of innumerable others, connected non-publicly through untraceable networks. Different folks sent it out to people they new. Everyone used whatever info they had, and the full details of the branching trees of pass-it-on will never be known (not to us anyway, the NSA probably has a full three-dimensional hologram anti-altar set up in some office with everyone’s shit-smeared baby pictures and a photo of Derrick Jensen’s face up on a dart board.)
The text message read something like this:

Subject: New Location! Secret Directions! Do not put on internet! Coordinates as follows. After reading, destroy message and consume and if you feel like it. Might get you high…heh heh.

And so my brother and I quietly excused ourselves, gave love to our understanding parents, and left before the wedding ceremony had actually even begun.
The new location was the site that I had been involved with scouting. I recalled with great satisfaction Aaron saying, as we had walked around the thin pine forest and  high desert lake of that location about a month ago “well, I guess this would be a pretty good fall-back position.”
And a pretty good fall-back position it was.

And now, away from the busts and blockades, safe in our new position, and more than merely safe: installed! power up and generators going! The rave went on. The mutants have regrouped. You can take our crazy-ass LIFE party away when you pry it from our cold dead ability to think for ourselves and make our own decisions and choices.
Sung to the tune of The Partisan, by Leonard Cohen:

When they poured across the border / I was cautioned to surrender / this I could not do / I took my rave / and vanished / I have changed campsites so often / I have lost my weed and acid / but I must go on / the dance-floor is my prison

I am the great grand nephew of a Jewish Partisan, who fled to the woods of Poland to fight the Nazis. She had eleven siblings, one of whom was the mother of my grandmother. In a raid, when the Germans came through the woods, my great grand aunt found herself with a baby, who was beginning to cry. In order to survive, she had to smother the baby.
Comparatively, I’d say we got off wonderfully easy.
“When you think about it, I guess this is actually pretty classical in form and structure,” I mentioned to a number of people on separate occasions (it became my favorite trope). “Fleeing to the woods to regroup and fight the fascists. It’s practically historical!”
In terms of the whole fleeing to the forest to set up a bohemian frontier when the armies of the night show up and demand compliance and paperwork, well…many have come before us. I know that we are not new…however, I think it’s well worth pointing out that in human history our is the first generation to flee to the woods and live to fight another day with a number of high voltage diesel powered techno-rave sound systems in tow.
In the recognition of this, those so inclined can hardly be faulted for the pleasure they might take at finding themselves to be wonderfully singular.

The night Little Brother and I set up camp at AMF15 2.0., the S.P.A.Z. sound system hosted one of the most marvelous, ecstatic, effervescent, furious, defiant, sexy, vulgar, stoned-as-fuck raves I have ever been to. And all of my joy and sadness and the fucked up amazing events of…the week so far…the horrors back home…the shame and guilt of the past…the hope and ability to invest in the future…
Well, all of that went right in to the dancing.
By morning’s first light the bass tracks were still thundering through the high desert pines. On the S.P.A.Z. camp trampoline Lukas, a main S.P.A.Z. character was jumping up and down shirtless in a clump of others bellowing “WE WIN!”
I sat with a sad, happy, beautiful, drunken friend, showed her some special stretches for danced-out backs and walked off to circle the lake from which dead trees rose, standing on the far side on top of a lichen covered lava flow of broken volcanic rock to watch the sun rise over the water, hear the echo of the bloodied but unbowed beats, and fight off the army of mosquitoes and associated gnats which conspired successfully to snap me out of what otherwise probably would have been a bit to stupidly gorgeous a scene to want really to have to bother comparing to the rest of normal life.
Trudged home, caking my running shoes with a layer of mud and cow pie which is dried on them still in the (yet un-cleaned out) trunk of my car. I did a long hang over stretch. Encountered my tripping sibling––the situation I’d so feared––embraced him, told him that I loved him, took a pill and went to sleep.

As Ever,
David