POWER OF THE POSSE PART 2: All Hail the Apartment Festival

Note: looks like I've kicked off a blog meme! Here's Dan's response to my first salons post, as well as something parallel posted to Key23 re: the emerging "ultraculture" movement.

This weekend my roommates and I threw a huge party, with a twist. Along with the usual booze and live DJ, we opened our basement to some structured creative exploration by our guests. It's amazing what setting up a drum set, a mic, a keyboard and a guitar, along with some giant pieces of paper on the wall with plenty of tempera paint and markers, will facilitate the creation of. Following the debut performance of my band, a rotating line-up of cover artists, a hip-hop duo, and even a hippie noodler kept the music going as various impassioned visual artists added to the mural (photos to be posted soon if my roommate gets around to it). Another large piece of paper, with the words "Once Upon a Time" written on the top, developed into an odd, participatory narrative about riding cross-country with a dozen people on one "chopper", while the third piece of paper was covered completely in short reflections in answer to the question "Where's The Most Fucked-Up Place You've Had Sex?" (to which my brother wryly replied: "Sex?").

It was all a semi-conscious attempt to construct a "situation for live experience", as the Situationists (theoretical provocateurs of the May 1968 near-overthrow of the French government) might have said, or an "apartment festival" to the Neoists. And while it didn't necessarily fit the relaxed intentionality of our main focus in this series -- salons -- it did show that with a little foresight and design, party "energy" can be diverted towards constructive (rather than just self-destuctive) ends.

A second emergence of the previous weekend proved a similar point. A friend of mine who works at a local coffee shop organized a poetry reading with an anti-war theme when she discovered that a poet friend was visiting Boulder from Italy. Located in the spacious downtown living room of a wealthy Boulder family and including copious amounts of wine and cheese, the event was headlined by the Italian, who read several of his published pieces (most of them in both Italian and English translation) and opened up to anyone else who wanted to read. While there were a few original works devoted to the theme at hand (including this monstrosity of obfuscation), where the party really picked up is when people read the works of dead poets, many of the selections having nothing to do with anti-war. Rumi, Neruda, Homer: books were passed around and passages read, a completely spontaneous guesture which, though it diverted from the night's intended focus, brought real life to what I've typically believed to be a dead, tedious medium. (And for a similar realization in book from, check out Camille Paglia's new book Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems.

What both events had in common, besides copious amounts of alcohol and groups of strangers coming together, was a loosely-held intention, combined with a few, carefully placed artifacts which anticipated and augmented the incoming energies of those in attendence, a sort of "social feng-shui" which erupted into spontaneous collaboration. They were also both singular events intended to guage communal response to similar offerings in the future ("Yes!" to both, it seems) without in any way obligating people towards future involvement. One could see a similar model being applied to something of a more intentionally "integral" nature.

In response to Dan, then, who argues that the energy and leisure time needed to create a salon precludes its coming-into-being, I say: hey, lighten up! Instead of seeking to establish long-term, nose-to-the-grindstone regular community gatherings (often with an intimidating intellectual superstructure binding it together), let's shoot for single events. Much the same way the travelling alternative music festival has given way to the weekend rock fest (Coney Island's Siren Festival, California's Coachella, etc), perhaps its too much to ask to put all of our efforts into continual, repeating affairs, and easier just to play with and organize local social forces into brief concentrations. Salons give way to cabarets, study groups to theory bashes, meditation gangs to ritualistic retreats.

The task of a would-be salon instigator, then, would be to ascertain "weak points" in society's brick wall of anti-conviviality (i.e. the EPA shutting our party down early due to "noise pollution", which actually happened) in the hopes of at least creating a one-time breakaway social excursion. A confluence of the myriad forces required could be broken down a bit into 1) Intentional: (i.e. giving your gathering a theme--one broad enough to interest a variety of people... it might also help to latch on another event, i.e. the occasion of someone's birthday, or visit from Italy), 2) Behavior (i.e. setting up activities to engage in, whether its just eating food or on up to musical collaboration), 3) Culture (i.e. establishing relationships, introducing people to each other, making everyone feel welcome), and 4) Social Structure (i.e. finding a good location with multiple rooms, ease of access, places to smoke). Most importantly: invite more than just your "integral" friends (how integral could they be anyways, if they don't want to hang out with "green" people?). A little luck doesn't hurt either, but the point is: ignore any one of these facets and see your gathering fizzle away.

And so perhaps all this talk of integral salons is besides the point. We need constellations of happenings, events, ceremonies, single chaotic puncture-points in the vast blank sheet of boredom draped over all of us. Ken Wilber study groups will emerge on their own (how could you even stop them?), but perhaps our efforts are best spent aligning and mixing together the curious desire people have to make the most of being together.

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