Circle of Friends – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America

San Diego 1999 The Loft Part Four : Brass Tacks for Budding Upholsterers

November 28, 2023December 21, 2023 berniebleakLeave a comment

[Link to The Loft Part One:]

San Diego 2000 The Loft part One: “That article will give you everything”

I’ve mostly put the whole project of writing about The Loft in the rear view at this point but I had a chunk of juicy information from the last long conversation with my primary source that is simply too good not to share. I’ve reached a point where writing new material has essentially become a form of procrastination for me so I can avoid editing my older stuff, pitching it to various publishers and banging my head against what I’ve been calling the “memoir problem”

In simplest terms that is the issue where what I’ve written most resembles a memoir but I’m exactly the kind of person who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Finnish sauna of selling one to anybody – that is to say nobody in particular. I could almost even pitch it as a “recovery” memoir like that guy who lied to Oprah about how cracked out he was except for the fact that I’m absolutely unwilling to pretend like drugs destroyed my life and would happily do more of them in a heartbeat if the good ones ever became available again.

One idea I have been playing with is restructuring my potential book as a document and celebration of the punk house, or artist’s collective living space, in it’s wide variety of shapes I’ve had the good fortune to experience. I always intended to make Fort Thunder, The Miss Rockaway Armada and The Bus the tent poles of whatever book I do end up going with and all of them fall under that particular banner. I’ve got plenty of stories from El Rancho, Apgar, Women House and a handful of spots where I never lived but spent some amount of time.

Assuming a pitch like that could sway a potential publisher The Loft would click in perfectly and of course I’d be doing a lot more interviews with former residents of the place including Branden Powers who I have yet to speak to but has expressed receptiveness to talking.

Anywho enough of the maybes – here comes all the good shit from my last talk with Rex Edhlund. First off I should address a claim I repeated in one of these earlier sections: that SIN magazine, later Hypno, was the first magazine in the world to be edited and laid out completely on computers. Besides not knowing what actual computer magazines at the time were doing Edhlund clearly recalled lots of SIN being done with good old fashioned pasteup.

Anyway I’m not bringing up SIN purely to chide them for what was most likely an innocent exaggeration. When I brought the claim up I had to rediscover where I read it and trawling my browser history brought me back to the impressive SIN digital archive:

https://www.think.cz/archives/sin-magazine-issue-01-index/

I didn’t really appreciate it when I first came across it but it really is an unprecedented resource. Every page of every issue of a counterculture magazine running from 1992 to 1993 is there for your perusal and enjoyment. You can look at that era’s local shows, reports on the growing rave scene and a really amazing collection of early digital art in one of the later issues.

I flicked around some at random and read about Pigface – an Industrial supergroup I’d somehow never heard of but have been blasting ever since. For anyone frustrated with my slowed down writing schedule and thirsty for content I guarantee this archive will leave you more than sated. Not much of 1992 internet is available anywhere anymore and this doesn’t even require The Wayback Machine – just click the link and dive down the rabbit hole.

A similar archive of Hypno is not available, not yet anyway, but could become a reality with enough renewed interest. As is so often the case with these things I was not the only person to suddenly hit up Edhlund about this era after decades of relative silence. One of the other ones had sent along images of posters and stickers created by Hypno magazine for use as background decoration in the movie Hackers.

I stuck those up top as the pull image for this particular entry. The point is the Hypno archives are probably bursting at the seams with those kind of surprises and with enough popular demand, or somebody around the High Desert willing to painstakingly scan everything, it could be just a click away as well.

***********************************************

Let’s start picking up the story on how The Loft came together. In the mid-‘80s there was a big collective party house called The Morgue on Texas Street between University and El Cajon Boulevard. The big claim to fame was that Christian Death once stayed over. Besides that there were a lot of after parties (I’m guessing mostly for Death Rock shows) and one of the housemates launched Black Market Fanzine which was Edhlund’s introduction to approaching the thriving subculture from a magazine angle.

After that he started and moved into The Store That Cannot Be Named – a screen printing studio and exotica shop. This has already come up in a previous piece but to recap it was directly next door to the famous Leather Bar Wolfs. It might be more accurate to say that it was in the same building as Wolfs and they were looking for any tenant that would be cool with the round the clock noise and everything else. Rent on the spot was 600 a month with all utilities included.

The deal included free beer at the bar which meant Edhlund was in there on more or less a nightly basis. The leather community also started working with him for all their shirt screen printing needs which both kept his business going and had him dropping off shirts in the middle of public floggings and similar events. Growing up in San Diego I heard a lot of stories about Wolfs and the leather or shirtless only room in the back but it was gone before I ever had the chance to check it out.

For a long time it wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say that North Park was the center of San Diego Leather culture. There was Wolfs, The Eagle, Pecs and a spot off El Cajon Boulevard I forget the name of. Some of these are probably still open but my strongest memory is taking a late night bus up University Avenue and looking through the windows of Rigoberto’s to see leather daddies and vatos peacefully rubbing shoulders as they waited their turn on a Galaga arcade cabinet,

I haven’t been back to San Diego for a bit but everything I see about gentrification and new parking garages in North Park makes me think it’s not like that anymore.

Rex Edhlund started advertising his store in SIN, helped find other interested advertisers from his store connects and eventually climbed the ladder to a regular contributor. For a minute the magazine staff were holding meetings in his store but three separate occurrences spurred the move to new quarters. First off the magazine was offered distribution – presumably by Larry Flynt unless there was an earlier deal I don’t know the details on. Next the store was broken into and a bunch of stuff was stolen. Finally somebody offered to buy all of Edhlund’s screen printing equipment.

Together this meant he was ready to work on the magazine full time in a space that was both bigger and seemed to offer more security from break ins – this turned out to be The Loft.

***********************************************

Some of this might be redundant but after going to check out the building at Sixth and Broadway Edhlund was able to negotiate a hell of a sweetheart deal. It wasn’t the first deal on the table – somebody else had worked one out that was far beyond what the young magazine could pay and Edhlund took the owners back to the table. He walked away with the unbelievable bargain of 600 bucks a month, a lot more space than the same 600 got by Wolfs, while the first six months were totally free.

The only thing I know about the owners at this time is that they were an architecture firm with ambitious plans to remodel the building that they could never actually pay for. I thought it might have been David Singer, my Sixth Grade Teacher’s husband, as we’d taken a field trip to a modern store rebuild of his on the same block but it wasn’t. Singer’s company was both well heeled and critically established – two things the mysterious young firm were not.

That 600 dollars included 10.000 square feet each on the second and third floors. If you’ve been paying attention to past chapters you already know the fourth floor was a boxing gym and the ground floor was mostly used for storage. The architecture firm did have offices on the second floor along with a stylist and photography studio but they must have just worked around each other. By the time the architecture firm moved out The Loft community was working with 20,000 square feet. The magazine offices were being built on the third floor anyway.

Edhlund has mentioned a couple of times that one of his magazine partners was being drawn into Murshid’s Circle of Friends cult from the moment they moved in and I haven’t pressed him for the guy’s specific name. Anyway it seemed like a reasonable assumption that this nameless person would have been the toe in the door that allowed the cult to move into The Loft. Interestingly enough it sounds like that wasn’t the case.

Circle of Friends first got all the computers and tech the way they got most things: a wealthy follower paid for it all who was no doubt feeling especially generous after Murshid convinced an attractive young female follower to use her body as motivation. The first incarnation of a computer lab was called The Liberated Technology Project at a retreat space Circle of Friends had in Rancho Santa Fe. If you don’t know where that is think inland from Cardiff. That didn’t work out.

It was Edhlund himself who saw the potential in the gear and convinced Circle of Friends to try their community computer lab dream again in The Loft. Of course this came with a lot of compromises: The Loft would now be the de facto home of Circle of Friends and a special room needed to be built for Murshid. He was moving in. Edhlund sounded fairly certain that one of the main reasons Murshid went for this was the hope that he could gain control of their magazine and turn it into a mouthpiece for Circle of Friends but he also felt confident he had the strength of will to ensure that never happened.

By this time a cease and desist had already changed the magazine’s name from SIN to HYPNO and the computers were a game changer for HYPNO. Now the only parts of the magazine not being laid out on computers were when advertisers who hadn’t caught the Digital Revolution yet sent their spots in on photographic slides. This was all around 93 and 94 – the salad days of the place.

I’ve got a few short anecdotes from this time I’ll throw in for color. His work on Hypno was earning Edhlund a reputation as somebody with a finger on the pulse of the underground and this was earning him a variety of consulting gigs. One day he got a call from a producer at the Leeza Gibbons talkshow because they were trying to do an episode on the archetype of the “slacker artist” inspired by the 1990 film Slackers and the general culture of grunge music.

The couches in The Loft were usually full of whoever had stuck around after the last party so Edhlund looked around and said he’d do a deal on a dozen. Along with his finder’s fee he’d negotiated to get everybody paid and picked up by a limo the show sent around. Predictably nobody cast to appear was awake when the limo driver arrived so Edhlund handled him a meter stick to go couch to couch gently poking everybody awake. Steve Pagan was the first to slowly open his eyes:

“Mister Pagan, your limo has arrived.”

The other story isn’t as cute and cuddly. I’ve written before about how important it is for collective spaces to have the person who vets newcomers and if necessary shows them the door. This task doesn’t always make this person the most popular but no space where nobody ever gets booted can truly be called “inclusive” because once the creeps, predators and racists start hanging out the most vulnerable within the scene can no longer feel safe there.

At The Loft this responsibility was one of Edhlund’s many “hats” – mostly because he didn’t want to live in a space full of dirtbags and shitheads and nobody else was stepping up. This story is about a guy named Shawn who was nicknamed GIC, or Gay Insane Contractor, because he constantly talked about being gay, was an insane meth-head and got his foot in the door by claiming to be a contractor.

It soon became clear that he couldn’t build shit, or effectively contract others to, which might have been fine if it wasn’t for the insane tweaker part. To illustrate his building skills he was attempting to construct a little shack for himself out of cardboard and blankets next to the yoga area on the day the shit hit the fan. Edhlund and others had been telling him to get the hell out for weeks but his attempt to build a slanty-shanty called for more direct action.

When politely reminded to get the fuck out of dodge he produced a letter addressed to himself at that address and started yelling about how he could prove residency and evicting him would require going to court and a year plus of red tape. Whether this was completely accurate or not was beside the point – nobody felt like dealing with any of it. Rex noticed he was using a flathead screwdriver to stick his blankets to the wall.

In a mix of instinctual rage and inspiration Edhlund grabbed onto the screwdriver and stabbed himself in the forearm. He got it in good enough to draw blood and immediately called 911 while yelling loud enough for the whole house to hear that “GIC” had flipped out and stabbed him. The one witness was a dude named Shifty who also worked on the magazine – he wanted dude gone as much as Rex did and was happy to confirm his version of events. Surprisingly enough the tweaker stuck around until the law arrived.

He was probably on a good one and thought that if he explained everything to the cops they’d have to take his side. His sped up rambling did not have the desired effect and the cops removed him from the premises to book at the station. He was never prosecuted as they only wanted him gone but that was the last anybody saw of him.

One person who was not going to be gotten rid of so easily was Murshid. Everybody needed the computers and as long as they were there so was he. While I’m on the subject of Murshid I should mention that in the photo I used of him last time the blond woman on his right was his first wife and a cult leader in her own right named Maitreya. The photo was from a webpage I found for her obituary.

She lived in The Loft for a bit herself and had a reputation for never wearing any clothes. Most of the culties wore big white diaper things that I’m sure there’s a specific name for but she chose to go with the outfit she’d been born in. It became a minor issue when a few UPS delivery guys got freaked out when she came to the door like that.

Anyway that’s nothing compared to the issues with Murshid. After his special room was built he began a constant campaign of pushing for additional space. I’m sure the space was for “yoga classes” and other things than benefited the community at large but it’s hard not to look at it as a push for control. It’s like the Board Game Risk! – once you control more surface area than any other player who’s in charge? You are of course.

There were meetings and arguments and shouting matches but eventually an agreement was reached. Murshid and Circle of Friends would pay all of the rent, $600, and Hypno essentially had free office space. As this translated directly to Edhlund having to spend tons of time putting out fires and mediating and generally dealing with new forms of bullshit it’s hard to say if it was a good deal but it was about to change anyway.

Everything shifted the day Matthew Gorden showed up.

***********************************************

Presumably the mysterious architecture firm was cutting their losses and putting the building up for sale. Gorden represented some invisible partners with money to spend – he had next to none of that but he did have feet on the ground and an eye for spaces with potential presumably. Edhlund was on site for his first walk through which would become important in future court cases.

Gorden’s partners did not sign a deed the day he arrived so for a while he began paying the rent. The $600 monthly was coming out of his pocket. The more interesting bit is what went down with Murshid and Circle of Friends. Murshid could clearly smell money and while Gorden had little the smell was on him from somewhere.

Gorden became a member of Circle of Friends – some call it culty coupling, flirty fishing or simply “the power of pussy” but once a hot young thing who ordinarily wouldn’t have given him a second glance started talking about being “soulmates” he was all in. Would this young woman have experienced such attraction without Murshid in her ear? The obvious answer is abso-fucking-lutely not.

The building at Sixth and Broadway was now a “donation”. Like most gurus Murshid was used to high value gifts from his adherents and probably thought very little of it beyond the relief that the space he’d been calling home was finally his. Around this time Gorden’s young companion turned down an offer to run away and see the world with him so he retaliated with lawsuits.

The crux of these suits was simple enough – as Gorden never owned the building he had no power to offer it as a gift to anybody else. Around this time Edhlund testified that Gorden had been asking from the very first visit if the structure would be a “good investment” for his partners. Edhlund also attended a Circle of Friends yoga retreat around this time and seemed to succeed in convincing the members that a gift from someone who doesn’t own it means very little.

His lawsuits also talked about mind control through tantric sex and brainwashing techniques involving calorie restriction and sleep deprivation. When I ran this by Edhlund he called bullshit as these last two things are bog standard for more or less any yoga cleanse. The other bits do look like the cult was working hard to ensure he never had much time to think about what was happening but given his status as financial non-owner this all feels fairly academic.

Gorden and partners did purchase the building for one million dollars not long after. I’m sure Circle of Friends were able to negotiate something like free rent while they were there but that wouldn’t be too long of course. Gorden and partners were looking primarily at flipping for profit which meant not leaving freaky cults in the building.

I wish I could figure out the name of the architecture firm and how much they’d paid and that sort of thing. There’s probably records of this stuff for anyone in San Diego who feels like spending a day or so in the property records area. Actually there’s a favor I wanted to ask of anybody down to hit up the county clerk’s office down there – hit me up for details.

The articles I linked way back in the first chapter of this story will give you more information on the court case between Circle of Friends and Gorden and partners but I’ve mostly gone over the particulars. I want to talk instead about what was going on behind the scenes between Gorden and Edhlund. It wasn’t always the most cordial.

By the time the court case was over and Gorden was ready to flip the building Edhlund had moved on from HYPNO magazine and was no longer living there. I often write about how collectives fail because a toxic individual or group somehow move in and then puff themselves up like a chuckwalla in a rock crevice: impossible to extract. In this case this would be Murshid and Circle of Friends but it might not be accurate to pin Edhlund’s departure totally on them.

He talked about being busier with a variety of business and artistic pursuits and not having time for the “herding cats” that came with being house dad for the kind of artist’s community The Loft was. He had launched a newspaper around San Diego’s downtown revitalization called D-Town and was married to a real estate agent. He used the knowledge of the downtown ecosystem he had built up over the last decade to give profitable advice to both his wife and Matthew Gorden.

Gorden was a real estate speculator/flipper and would have had more pots on the stove than just the building at Sixth and Broadway. Three years after launching D-Town Edhlund sold the paper, was going through a divorce, and happened to notice that Gorden had listed the building with an entirely unrelated listing agent. Considering how much money Gorden had made from both Rex’s information and his soon-to-be ex wife’s realtor business Edhlund was understandably upset.

He twisted Gorden’s arm and was allowed to share the listing along with his former wife who would have been the one with the license. He threw himself into showing the building as much as possible and was eventually the one who clinched the sale and got the commission on the three million dollar sale. A one to three million flip already sounds like a huge payday but you also have to remember that this was in 2000.

I plugged it into an inflation calculator and it looks like 1.78 to 5.3 million. I don’t know enough about how commissions work to tell you what Edhlund walked away with.

The final irony, in his words, is that the new owner’s contracted him to tear down all the walls and return the building to large open spaces. These were walls that he had bought the materials for seven years earlier and paid workers to help him put up. He essentially got his money back.

Of course I have no way to know this for sure but I like to imagine the new owners wanted the walls down because they were hoping to rent or sell the space as the yuppy version of an artist’s loft – the live/work loft. If this were true it feels especially poignant that they would destroy what actually was an artist’s loft to create a more stereotypical version of one. Of course it might have been something as simple as the walls not being up to code – I really have no idea.

This is where this story ends for now. I know the upscale restaurant called The Owl that took over the ground floor of the space has gone out of business and a recent conversation with a friend told me that downtown San Diego is flooded with homeless camps and starting to look more like it did in the ‘90s. North Park and South Park sound like the big destinations for developers now.

Gentrification has been happening for long enough now that the early 2000s version almost seems quaint and retro. We artists have a complex relationship with it to begin with – we claim to hate it but we are the very plague rats who bring it with us everywhere we go. Nothing like a bunch of (usually white) artists leaving their mark on a low income neighborhood to get the city planners drooling to turn it into a place where those artists, and more importantly their working class neighbors, can no longer afford to live in.

Rex Edhlund lives in the Joshua Tree area now where he crafts adobe bricks and runs a literacy program called Super Literate Project based on donated comic books.

https://superliterateproject.org/

Steve Pagan lives in Las Vegas and continues to keep the nightlife alive as both a DJ and Promoter. Murshid and Murshida seemed to be living in North County around Encinitas when I looked at their YouTube show but I can’t say what made me think that. I haven’t gotten in touch with any of the big names in Crash Worship yet – I reached out to M. Wolff and his Facebook had clearly been hacked.

https://www.adobeinaction.org/mud-talks/2023/11/29/mud-talks-23-rex-edhlund

I know there are many important names and figures for The Loft and its history that I have yet to touch on or talk to. In one version of my imagined book I’ll likely be tracking down a lot more folks and doing a lot more interviews. In another version this is probably it. Either way I am walking away from writing about it for now. Most of my big questions have gotten satisfactory answers.

There were so many artists, yogis, promoters, performers, hustlers and other species of hipster passing through it seems doubtful that anyone could furnish a full list. I did just hear a rumor that Coffee Shop King Jason Mraz was crashing there when he first came to San Diego. Is it true? Who cares, it makes for a good story.

Clearly there are many more questions that I know too little about to even ask and interesting characters that have yet to reach my radar. If anybody who was actually there feels inspired by all this to write about it themselves I implore you to do so. As relatively small as this platform is (it’s like a noise show where twenty to fifty people show up but it happens every day) I’d be happy to share it.

San Diego 1993 The Loft Part Three : The Gospel According to Rex Edhlund

October 7, 2023November 29, 2023 berniebleakLeave a comment

I hope to eventually get more information but I decided to write this up while The Loft story still has a little bit of momentum. My theory last time that typing up what I got from my conversation with Steve would possibly spur others to get in touch did pan out but not exactly the way I’d described it. Rex actually messaged me the moment I started typing the last chapter up as opposed to after I’d shared it – kind of like an invisible brain wave serendipity thing.

It seems like Rex and his partners primarily moved into the building because they needed offices for their magazine but it also doubled as a living space. Using the property as an event space for parties would have been a third concern but I doubt it was too far from anybody’s mind. What young artist would look at two floors and 10,000 square feet worth of space and not imagine throwing a rager?

Nobody’s given me an exact figure for rent but I’m sure it was relatively low. In the 1990’s Downtown San Diego was full of porn theaters, SROs and cheap hotels known as “flophouses”. The Museum of Death was still in the Gaslamp Quarter and the area toward 12th and Imperial had Sushi Performance Art and The ReinCarnation Project. Ironically the moment developers started calling this area the “East Village” roughly coincided with when a lot of it’s art spaces were being displaced by Petco Park.

[I actually just heard back about the rent and it’s pretty amazing. 600 a month for all 10,000 sq. ft. on two floors and the first six months for free. That wasn’t the initial offer but something Edhlund was able to get through renegotiation.]

Photo courtesy of now closed *Owl Drug Co. Restaurant*

Rex was able to tell me that the building had originally housed a location of West Coast retail and pharmacy chain Owl Drug with a third floor bowling alley and a fourth floor archery range during World War II. By the time him and his partners moved in the fourth floor had already been converted to a boxing gym. The second floor had been used as storage.

Before moving into The Loft Edhlund ran a store in North Park called The Store That Cannot Be Named. It sold underground comics, clothing, art books, spray paint caps for graffiti art and had a screen printing studio in the back. Ironically I had come across that name somewhere while digging around for clues on what I eventually found out was The Loft and assumed they literally didn’t want to mention a store’s name because of a legal or copyright dispute – I never would have guessed it was actually related to what I was searching for.

The store was on 30th Street next to legendary leather bar Wolfs and open in 1992.

https://dangerfactory.com/pages/about-this-thing

The magazine was called Sin until a legal dispute over that name necessitated changing it to Hypno. I read somewhere that it was the first print magazine in the world to be entirely edited on computers and have no reason to doubt that’s true. It made such a splash that Larry Flynt Publishing began distributing it almost immediately allowing it to reach the then-vital newsstand market.

The magazine was definitely ahead of it’s time covering a mix of underground music, comic books, both fine and street art, alternative cinema and things like car clubs and club kid fashion contests. They were the first to cover Shepard Fairey and the mix of graffiti and design work he was doing with Obey Giant. Sin, which started in 1992, and Hypno were no doubt influences on The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine launched in 1993 and the art publication Juxtapoz that began in 1994.

Here’s a reproduction of a 1995 article from Fairey’s website.

https://obeygiant.com/articles/hypno-magazine-things-october-1995/

A popular theme and style inspiration on the magazine and lots of art, music and comics of the ‘90s is the aesthetics of lounge/exotica music, tiki bars and Hot Rod/Kustom Kar design. I have a theory that waves in the tastes of young artists/hipsters are influenced by the die-off of older generations and the proliferation of their knick knacks in thrift stores. By the early to mid 2000s the hot thing was 1970s decor with owls and mushrooms.

Me and Francois used to play a game to kill time at San Francisco house parties called “find the owl” – it didn’t matter that we’d never met the hosts and knew nothing about them – we could always count on at least one being on display.

The Hypno guys were in cahoots with Fantagraphics and a lot of other small press comics people that were coming to San Diego for the Comic Con. When Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge did the Hateball tour together in 1993 The Loft hosted an after party for it and put on another soirée for Comic-Con that Summer. By 1994 there was considerable buzz around repeating the tradition and planned events for Roger Corman’s film studio and Danzig’s Verotik imprint wound up being lumped in and contributing to the growing snowball.

I may have mentioned this night in passing in at least one of the previous chapters but for the sake of expediency I will attach Edhlund’s account here:

The Infamous Comic-Con Loft Party

Most of the stories around this celebration center on Glen Danzig as the combination of his diminutive stature and outsized masculine bravado seem to bring something out of people. One person said he was standing on his tiptoes to take pictures with fans which might be possible but the rumor of a drunken scofflaw challenging him to an arm wrestling match seems unlikely in light of the confirmed reality that he was accompanied by an intimidating bodyguard.

I was able to find a photo of him with a bodyguard from 1990 that I selected as the featured image of this entry but have no way of knowing if it’s the same person who accompanied the singer in 1994. My more observant readers will notice that in this image he is unabashedly standing for this photo with universally taller fans and making no attempt to obscure their relative height differences.

I was curious about the earliest days in the building and how Circle of Friends came to be involved. I’ve attached a screenshot of a message below that sheds some light on the connection and what kind of work was required to create functional work and living spaces. I also read in the Union-Tribune article that the property’s actual owner briefly fell under Murshid’s influence but I don’t know if this predated the Hypno staffer’s involvement or if it was a later development.

Edhlund told me that in the year without water they could sometimes manage to get showers in the upstairs boxing gym. Another thing he clarified was that Hypno was the only business officially headquartered in The Loft and near-solely responsible for paying the rent and keeping the lights on. He broke down the relationships with some of the other entities I’d heard associated with the place.

Home Grown Video, the first major amateur pornography company, became involved because they shared a lawyer and interest in the art scene. When Lofties wanted video editing and duplication equipment for creative endeavors Home Grown bought the gear, housed it there and allowed shared use. They also hired roommates who wouldn’t have otherwise come up with rent for freelance work like scanning slides.

Edhlund described it as “symbiotic”.

Global Underground Network, the big rave promoters, was mostly Branden Powers who also called The Loft home for a while. Ideally Branden would be the next person I’d want to get in touch with for stories. Global Underground did run some things out of and hold meetings in the space and Powers also helped with raising money and organizing events like the big Comic-Con party.

John Goff had sent me a newspaper clipping that talked about a label called Lobecandy Records and someone named Gen Kiyooka. Gen evidently took over the second floor space with all the computers after Steve Pagan moved out – an era referred to as “Year 3”. He ran the space as an artist’s collective where anybody could access the equipment in exchange for paying monthly dues.

The recording studio was on the second floor and built by the Hypno guys and members of Crash Worship who lived nearby in the church next to Pokez. It was about halfway done at the time of the ‘94 Comic-Con party as Edhlund’s account mentions using the “shell” as Danzig’s Verotik stripper room. I’m not sure if Circle of Friends provided any of the recording equipment but considering the provenance of the computers and Murshid’s knack for attracting deep pocketed devotees it seems likely.

On the subject of Murshid I was able to find a picture of him after lots of digging. That was mostly the result of him having a primarily pre-internet heyday as opposed to any desire for anonymity – most cult leaders want to have their face on everything. It came from the obituary of the woman who made his wedding cake, seen here on the left, but unfortunately I captured the image without bookmarking the website and can’t recall her name.

Both Steve Pagan and Rex Edhlund talked about The Loft having weekly meetings like any collective punk house. Steve mentioned somebody at these meetings complaining about the associations and collaborations with pornographers and considering Steve’s Zone Smut work and Rex’s positive associations with Home Grown it seems like this had to have been the Circle of Friends folks.

The group most likely worried that breaking bread with a porn company might limit their ability to draw in young spiritual seekers which seems especially ironic considering that every single person that’s mentioned Circle of Friends has thrown out inferences of sex trafficking.

Edhlund said he left The Loft some time in the fourth year which would work out to 1997 according to my timeline. I also read something about Hypno eventually falling prey to a hostile corporate takeover and being published as a hollow mockery of itself with one sellout traitor sticking around. I seem to have misplaced my source on that as well but I think I pretty much got the gist of it – otherwise I’ll change it.

One thing I’ve noticed from my own time living in collectives is that they can be maddeningly ineffective at ejecting their most toxic elements. A full on eviction often requires a unanimous vote and it’s often easier to move out yourself than to try to band everyone against a common enemy. After a few years the members nobody wanted to live with are the one’s in charge as it’s always possible to move in new people who won’t rock the boat.

At The Loft this was undoubtedly Circle of Friends. I’ve been marveling at the seeming improbability that I never encountered this place but I think it comes down to timing – by the time I would have been interested it was called World Evolution Loft and wasn’t particularly interesting. Of course it seems odd that nearly every one of my friends has at least one story from the place but if I’d experienced it myself there never would have been a mystery and without the mystery I never would have written any of this.

That’s pretty much where I’ll leave things. Of course I’m still interested in hearing stories and talking to folks who were actually there but things seem to be winding down and some stories are best told by the people who experienced them. I’ll leave you with one last screenshot from my conversation with Rex:

[link to conclusion]

San Diego 1999 The Loft Part Four : Brass Tacks for Budding Upholsterers

San Diego 2000 The Loft intermission : “Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?”

September 23, 2023December 21, 2023 berniebleak2 Comments

The plot thickens.

When I first starting asking around in the Crash Worship group I heard an unfamiliar name in some of the comments – Zendik Farm. In the context it seemed like maybe this was another name for the apartments in an old church by Pokez where JXL and some other folks in the band’s orbit had lived. For the initiated you most likely already know what’s coming.

O oracle and miracle of modern technology I combined the relevant phrases in the search bar of the world’s foremost search engine and out comes a colorful video:

Side B is available from the same uploader

Cool, I thought, an all day festival and live album with some familiar and unfamiliar names. Crash Worship check. Night Soil Man check (a new favorite of mine that sounds a little like Comus). I was nerding out and clicking around on discogs, as one does, when I came to the name Arol Wulf. Expecting a band I next ended up on the entry for Wulf Zendik and from there an unexpected hop to a Wikipedia page.

Holy shit! Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?

If you’re in a live band you’ve probably played at least one or two shows for either dodgy promoters or as benefits for questionable businesses. PlywoodStock seemed to be an all day festival organized in the name of old fashioned Manson family brainwashing and coercive sex trafficking. I’ve heard a handful of things about Murshid and Circle of Friends over the last few days ranging from “flirty fishing” to “high end yoga escort service” but I was not prepared for what I was about to read on Zendik Farms.

For a sleepy and moderately sized military town San Diego has more than it’s fair share of cult and commune activity, I listed a modest handful in the last installment but you can add to that tendrils of Miracle of Love, The Church of Scientology, International Society of Krishna Consciousness and even a sizable contingent from the commune I was born on: a place In Tennessee called simply The Farm. To be entirely honest some of the things I read about Zendik Farms seemed unpleasantly familiar.

Life on The Farm wasn’t always idyllic as evidenced by the major exodus in the early Eighties that included my family. I found a FAQ from a former Zendik resident that echoed many of the grievances I heard from my parents and their friend circle: poor standard of living, malnutrition, lack of education and a clear hierarchy in what was supposed to be an egalitarian community.

https://emeraldimajia.livejournal.com/149140.html

On the other hand the title of this woman’s memoir is Mating in Captivity. While there was definitely social pressure at The Farm for men and women to pair up they weren’t told who they had to sleep with or expected to endure scrutiny into their sex lives the way this woman describes at Zendik. My mother certainly didn’t have to ask permission and get examined with a speculum every time she was intimate with my father.

Both communities could be stiflingly heteronormative.

I heard of gays at The Farm either living closeted or trying to force themselves into the more expected lifestyle only to realize their true tendencies would not disappear after years of marriage and children. I don’t know if Zendik created similar experiences but Wulf’s writings seem to have been overtly homophobic in a way I never saw in Stephen Gaskin’s (founder of The Farm)

I actually wonder about the possibility of some cross pollination between the two. I had a pair of childhood playmates, sisters named Jasmine and Jade, whose mother moved them out to Jacumba around the time Zendik Farms was in the area. I’d heard something about them having troubled adult lives and wonder if they might have been drawn in by Arol Wulf’s charismatic nature.

The larger coincidence is that Zendik Farms and Circle of Friends both had property in the same small town of Boulevard. I wonder if Murshid and Wulf or Arol ever met or how such a meeting would have gone. The timelines don’t perfectly line up though – while the Zendik’s were decamping to Austin by 1991 Circle of Friends seemed to arrive from Colorado around the same time.

It seems possible that Zendik Farms could have even sold their compound to Murshid and Circle of Friends or the specific owner of the land could have shifted loyalties between the two. For now it remains an amusing hypothetical as I need to return my focus back to the Underground Music.

Chris Squire of Crash Worship, Tit Wrench, Battalion of Saints, Heroin and a million other legendary bands kindly provided the above photo and some corroborating details:

Squire’s band *Lectric Rek* was omitted from the live album

I might have been overstating things when I described PlywoodStock as using the participants music for sinister purposes. While visitors no doubt got the standard invitation to join this 1988 festival sounds like a mostly innocent opportunity to cut loose, drop acid and rock out far from the eyes of SDPD and Vice squads. Squire definitely cited “frying at four AM and being a WRECK” as an explanation of why his band didn’t make it to the compilation cassette.

Also performing but failing to make an impression on the keen commercial instincts of the Zendik compilationist was a band called Monsters of Rhythm.

The thing that stuck out to me immediately was the clearly diverse lineup of Daddy Long Leggs while San Diego rock was predomimantly white. I found a Reader profile where the band talked about choosing to create a mix of funk, rock, punk and metal instead of emulating the far more popular ska trend at the time. This, and the slightly earlier lifecycle, would explain why I never saw them share the stage when two-tone legends like The Specials came to play at the second SOMA near Old Town.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/bands/daddy-long-leggs/

Members of this group combined with Pull Toys from the same festival to form Casbah legends Creedle and keyboardist Robert Walter now tours with Roger Waters lineup of Pink Floyd.

Moving along – when John Goff first sent me the links to the articles on The Loft’s impending eviction it caught my eye that the post was dated 5/5/2000. I was a bit of a sticker head in High School, cataloguing each new variant and color way of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers in a special notebook, and I remembered seeing cryptic stickers with the message “ACHTUNG 5/5/2000”.

This turned out to be an early ambient/noise/industrial project of Travis Ryan who is now best known as the vocalist of Cattle Decapitation. The name is based on a prophecy from the Mayan Calendar that the world would end on this date – possibly related to a rare alignment of the outer planets. That was especially interesting to me as I went to Palenque on 12/21/2012 for festivities around the end of the twelfth baktun of the same Calendar that was also widely prophesised to mark the end of the world.

While neither date brought about any particular apocalypse the first of them did mark the beginning of the end for The Loft. It is also interesting how numerologically significant and symmetrical both dates appear in the Gregorian Calendar as they were derived from an entirely different system.

I also thought I had seen the name on some kind of compilation CD which turned out to be In Formation: A Tribute To Throbbing Gristle which Ryan coordinated and released on his Attention Deficit Recordings label. I did have a copy of this CD and used to listen to it fairly frequently but can’t remember if it was given to me by John Goff in San Diego or by Deerhoof when we played together in Chicago.

https://www.discogs.com/master/53481-Various-In-Formation-A-Tribute-To-Throbbing-Gristle

A couple of interesting details on the artists: I was listening to a lot of Integrity that year after finding a pile of the …And For Those Who Still Fear Tomorrow records at a Maxwell Street creative reuse in Chicago. I literally couldn’t give them away to my hardcore friends at the time but I’d imagine they’d be worth a decent stack of cash if I still had them (there were like 30 on black vinyl). Anyway the point is I was listening to the TG tribute at the same time but had no idea Lockweld and Psywarfare were Integrity adjacent projects.

I also had a few Spacewürm records I’d picked up in discount bins but had no idea of the connection with Kid606 which I listened to a ton of soon after. There was no discogs in those days – I got this kind of information in bits and pieces from conversations with other encyclopedic music nerds. Thanks to the site I now know that Travis was also behind one of my favorite local bands Graveyard Whispers.

Goth was huge in San Diego at the time. I tried to go to Club Soil at the World Beat with an older friend but was denied entry because I wasn’t even 18. My mother had somehow convinced me that goths, or mods as she used the terms interchangeably, painted their faces white with a certain brand of Bag Balm she had in a crinkly old aluminum tube. There must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere but it looked and smelled ridiculous.

That was my only teenage foray into goth fashion paired with an oversized white button up and black leggings. I stood around the alley and listened to Vampire The Masquerade LARPers talk about drinking each other’s blood and witnessed the arrival of a high status scenester named Vlad dressed in Renaissance looking red velvet. I ended up drinking coffee at Denny’s then sleeping in the upstairs portion of Gelato Vero until the trolleys and buses started back up.

Anyway back to Graveyard Whispers – they were a goth parody band. I saw them at either Empire Club or Xanth depending on who owned it that year with my friend’s band Hide and go Freak. The members rode up on chopper bicycles with revving motorcycle sounds through the PA and all immediately lit clove cigarettes. As the set progressed the singer, Rozz’d “Stewart” Williams, was strapped up and hung upside down on some kind of BDSM apparatus.

I need to amend a couple of details now that clearer recollections have found their way to me from a certain horse’s mouth. The show I saw most likely predated Ryan’s involvement and the “BDSM apparatus” was simple exercise equipment. The bit was a buildup to a visual punchline of suddenly revealing ostentatiously sparkly pants under the vocalist’s somber black attire but this was either adopted later or didn’t have quite the “punch” they’d envisioned in a room full of smoke machine fog.

I’ve also learned that their were plans to do a “colonial goth” set involving George Washington (but goth – perhaps George Xymoxington?) outfits and an entrance on a rowboat. This was scrapped with the dissolution of the parent band – Upsilon Acrux. The plan seems almost prophetic with the present popularity of various goth “microgenres” such as the impressive niche Leafar Seyer and Prayers have carved out with cholo-goth.

It was a real hoot and a memory I’ve cherished often through the years. Apparently they released a tape but resellers are asking exorbitant amounts online due to Cattle Decapitation’s well deserved fame. It would be nice if somebody had one and felt like throwing the tracks up somewhere.

Back to John Goff – I thought it was strange that I never spent any time in The Way Out Sound record store if it was next door to Plasticratic. Thankfully Chris Woo came through to solve the mystery for me. According to this clipping it didn’t open until October of 1998 and I had gotten my diploma and run to Chicago then Oakland by that time.

If the quality translates you can even zoom and read this

As is common for intermissions this one will be something of a variety show. Turning back to the “No Roof Action” piece when I first learned that The Loft was at Sixth and Broadway I thought that it might be the same building as the Street Art Gallery show from that piece. It turns out I was extremely close. Here is the excerpt:

While I pride myself on the detailed nature of my memory the reality is that like anyone else’s it is entirely fallible. I am about to reveal the identity of “Featured Artist” in detail but first I need to correct myself on two points. First he picked up the hammer in self defense rather than over a name dispute. That argument was actually over the tag name of one of his friends and verbal intimidation was more than sufficient.

Second he may or may not have hit anybody with it but he was provoked, threatened and largely outnumbered. Some goons from a rival tag crew had shown up and were trashing the gallery and attacking him. Shepard Fairey would likely remember more specifics.

I am talking about Lance De Los Reyes who created his largest body of work as RAMBO but was writing CHIE at the time of this incident. I was recently reminded of Lance when I saw his cameo in a Safdie Brothers film coincidentally called Daddy Longlegs only to learn that he had tragically passed away.

At this early stage he made images of insect cocoons on scraps of rusted metal and other found object refuse that were displayed on the walls of Pokez before making the jump into Galleries. He had named this show Modest Behavior because Shepard had just introduced him to Modest Mouse and it was directly behind The Loft at 1027 Sixth Avenue.

This opening was about a month after the article about The Loft’s eviction and most likely after the legendary party era there had been over for at least a year. The other artist I really remember from the opening was Grimey aka Bhagavan or “Bugs”. He was good friends with Harmony Korine and the two of them got matching hand tattoos of his trident or pitchfork tag. I thought he might have gotten his name from Circle of Friends but it turned out to be a Hare Krishna thing.

He was very inspired by Norwegian Black Metal and made an entire installation in a recessed part of the space – a darkened area with candles and an atmospheric evil sounding soundtrack. I always think about how ahead of his time he was when I see environmental works from artists like Neckface and hope he is doing well. I was tagging WORM then as a kind of metal logo with a pentagram in the O and a lower case R as a candle so I felt a bit of artistic kinship.

Me and Francois had a bit of “fame” in the moment due to our highly visible pieces on the California Theater. When Lance learned our “street” identities he was impressed enough to invite us onto the roof and generously offered a pair of desirable paint spots. The show was in the building with the big glass “SPORTS CARDS” sign but we jumped over to the next roof to get at two pieces of wall.

The bit of red wall is The Loft building

Francois’ skills were well beyond mine so he got the cream colored spot visible from Broadway for a JUMP piece while I whiffed whatever I did on the grey wall invisible from this angle. In the course of the night we quickly went from elation at the connections we were making to dismay at the possible consequences of accidentally covering somebody or any other transgression. We quickly gave up painting.

When I started working at my alma mater San Diego High in 2003 or so I picked it back up as a way to connect with my students. I swapped out paint cans for streakers and shoe polish but my bigger focus at the time was on battle rapping and it’s covered in other chapters. I must have painted once or twice with Nick Feather – another friend that we lost far too young to an epidemic that’s only getting worse.

I could have never tracked down these exact details without the hard work of Eric Elms. Eric worked on Shepard’s street team at the same time as Lance and also used to do poster art under the name ADORN. I would always laugh to see the ones with giant pictures of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on electric boxes as the prevailing trend in youth fashion and music of the moment was called “Spock Rock” after the boxy black haircuts.

He now does a mix of fine art, design work and the considerable overlap between the two and occasionally uses the name ELMS. You can find his work at:

https://partnersandothers.com/

I will close this intermission with some thoughts from the as-yet-unidentified admin of The Loft at Sixth & Broadway Facebook group. While it doesn’t identify 9/11 as the official end of the era it does reflect many of my own thoughts of San Diego at the time, and it’s Downtown 81 vibe, as well as the “American Underground” as a whole. This is understandable as the developers were very much present and palpable and even if you’re living under it you simply can’t see the shadow of something that’s in the future.

If you could we’d have a word like “foreshadowing” or something…

[link to next part]

San Diego 1994 The Loft Part Two : “The Gospel According to Steve Pagan”

San Diego 2000 The Loft part One: “That article will give you everything”

September 22, 2023November 29, 2023 berniebleakLeave a comment

It’s coming up on, if today isn’t actually the exact date of, the one year anniversary of me starting this writing project. Unfortunately I obfuscated the dates of the first handful of pieces in an attempt to impose chronological order without having to pay WordPress for a table of contents plug-in. The site is as messy as ever but this will be the 135th post with total all time views inching toward 21k from viewers around the world.

Running the numbers that works out to one new post every 2.7 days which doesn’t seem too shabby but I’ll leave the judgements as to where this output sits on the quality/quantity continuum to others.

I’m no closer to my original goal of publishing a book unless you count having at least several books worth of unsorted material. What I view as the largest stumbling block remains stubbornly in place – what I intended to be an ethnography of underground culture is looking more and more like a memoir. As my only tool of documentation has been my own memories I’ve found it next to impossible to nudge myself out of the viewfinder of the camera of my mind’s eye.

As the character Chester Kent says in Guy Maddin’s criminally under-appreciated film The Saddest Music in the World:

“I’d say you qualify as the star of your own life.”

For any readers who share my concerns you’ll be relieved to hear that the central focus of this chapter is a nexus of culture where I never set foot at all. To get there you will need to accompany me for a text version of a now popular genre of YouTube video: an internet rabbit hole research detective story. The trail began when one of my earliest pieces dredged up a fragment of memory from an old acquaintance and intermittent mentor.

I’ve brought up Martin Bilben and his art space Plasticratic one or two times in passing but for this piece a closer gaze is appropriate. I forget what first brought me to his home and workshop but the most likely explanation would be that he hosted a group show that included some of Steve Lawrence’s paintings. At Fourth and Laurel it was just close enough to San Diego High School to come around during an open campus lunch or after school.

https://accretions.bandcamp.com/track/martys-sexual-organs-tarantula

He was best known for making colorful lamps with a retro futurist aesthetic but my primary attraction was to the hoard of audiovisual gadgetry he’d assembled. Although I don’t remember ever seeing a performance he collected electric organs and used them to create music roughly comparable to Mr Quintron from New Orleans and Providence’s John Von Ryan.

The fact that he tangentially figured into my experience with The Make-Up that I chose to highlight as origin story caused me to reach back out after decades when beginning this project. Without his encouragement, advice and occasional proofreading in those first weeks it is unlikely that these writings would have persevered to their present stage.

I will link the piece that triggered his recollection here but the relevant passage involved nearly dying to a booby trap as me and Francois were breaking into the shuttered California Theater to paint graffiti.

San Diego 1998 – 2000 : “No Roof Action”

We had gotten into a routine of chatting after I posted each new chapter, then a daily occurrence, and our conversation that night included this unassuming element:

San Diego has something of a reputation for cults – the world famous Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, UNARIUS and a chapter of Psychic TV adjacent Temple ov Psychick Youth are a few of the more famous examples. I hadn’t heard of anything like what Marty was describing though and the idea of an entire cult squatting the same derelict structure seemed fascinating. I tried to tease out more details or suggest that maybe he was thinking of the Jyoti Bihanga group on Adams Avenue but everything led to a dead end.

Here is a picture of Sri Chimnoy from Jyoti Bihanga lifting the FDNY

My next move was to go to Reddit. On r/sandiego I posted the scant details I had to see if anyone could fill in the the blanks. While I didn’t get anything concrete one commenter both reaffirmed Marty’s story and added new tantalizing details.

Thanks to u/satanic-frijoles for this vital clue

I now knew that not only was a yoga cult of some kind occupying a large downtown space, it was also filled with cutting edge computers and animation software. Amigas were of special interest to me as I grew up with a Commodore 64 and would drool over the box art of Amiga releases while renting software for my older computer at a La Mesa shop called The Commodore Connection. It looked light years ahead of the graphics on my friend’s Nintendos.

Unfortunately the comment also emphasized what was ultimately a red herring. The repetition of C Street kept my focus on The California Theater and the squatters that had inhabited it. The guy who chased us out and rigged up the fire escape had been playing a computer game the first time Francois and I tiptoed past his open apartment.

As unlikely as it now sounds I had convinced myself that the person I’ve dubbed “The Ogre of the California” once led a cult and attracted a gaggle of young attractive female followers. As is so often the case the truth proved to be far stranger than the fiction.

Without new leads and with other stories asserting themselves in my memory the mystery found it’s way to one of my back burners. I shifted focus to Fort Thunder, El Rancho and 134 other chapters worth of recollections but never quite gave up the chase. San Diego is full of intriguing legends: the story that finding all three troll bridges in a single night (there are only two of them) would cause an actual troll to materialize; the existence of a community of miniature houses built for actual dwarves and others I can’t think of at the moment.

Something about this story about a cult in an abandoned theater told me that it had to be based on a truth and when I found that truth it would justify however much time it took me to find it. In a strange way I could feel this story pulling to me, like the invisible forces created by a powerful magnet, even though I had never seen or experienced it’s elements in a physical form.

Things didn’t really change for close to a year. Every now and then something would remind me of this story and I’d start poking into it again. I found a blog called Hidden San Diego that had a piece on the California Theater. It had a lot of great pictures of the interior and some vague sentences and comments about squatters but nothing that sounded like either a cult or whatever I was looking for.

Old California Theater

A little over a week ago an unrelated Reddit post pointed me toward a documentary on the San Diego music scene called It’s Gonna Blow!. This got me thinking about everything I had missed out on from a combination of youth and questionable taste. Crash Worship sat at the top of this list – even at a time when my favorite book was the issue of Re/Search with Burroughs, Gysin and Throbbing Gristle and my favorite movie was Tetsuo: The Iron Man I somehow thought a Crash Worship show sounded like a “stupid hippy drum circle” and simply didn’t go.

With that fresh in my mind I stumbled across an interview with Alaura O’Dell – better known to fans of Industrial Music as Paula P-Orridge. I had actually managed to see Throbbing Gristle on their very last tour but some details in the interview reminded me that Temple ov Psychick Youth at least had members, if not an entire cell, in San Diego.

To be clear I never thought that the mysterious theater cult was actually TOPY but I did figure there might be enough crossover to get some solid leads on whatever I was searching for. I joined a Facebook group that used the acronym TOPI – my first assumption had been that the final I was adopted to distance themselves from Genesis Breyer P-Orridge but the opposite was actually true. Genesis had chosen TOPI after splitting with the first incarnation of TOPY but regardless of final vowel the group claims no affiliation or association with Gen’s controversial legacy.

A lead seemed to materialize but the person was actually thinking of an old church by Pokez where members of Crash Worship had lived.

At this point I thought to message a friend who still lives in San Diego. He had some interesting tidbits of information: a pornographic film most likely shot in San Diego by Sleazy and Monte Cazzaza included on a VHS called Psychic TV First Transmission; the as-yet-unconfirmed sculpture of a beetle outside The Natural History Museum with a Psychic Cross imprinted in it’s back (I’d appreciate a photo of this if accurate and someone can take one)

All roads seemed to be leading back to Crash Worship so I joined another Facebook group and posted there. I got some interested comments and compliments on my other writings but that was it. I decided to start writing anyone from San Diego that was older than me and involved in the Industrial scene. A message to Bob Barley from Tit Wrench and Vinyl Communications is most likely languishing in his requests folder as we aren’t Facebook friends.

That’s when I started getting replies back from John Goff.

I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that John had played in Crash Worship although it was something I knew. I had been a fan of Physics in my teenage years, I was a science geek and originally majored in it, and got to see them in Chicago in 1999. I had met John a good handful of times and even exchanged some messages ten years ago when I misremembered the name of his Wizards of War project with his brother as Bishops of Battle after watching the 1983 film Nightmares.

John said he knew exactly what I was talking about and sent me my own Reddit post from a year earlier. I started to feel a bit like a snake swallowing it’s own tail, like the only evidence for what I was searching for were my own digital footprints and Marty’s hazy memories were only the result of, in his own words “a vial of lsd, gallon of ghb, and a steady supply of tj pharms”.

Just as I was starting to give up hope John blew the whole thing open.

The building was never a Theater but a four story structure at Sixth and Broadway called at various times The Loft, The Hypnoloft, The Dildo Dave Loft and finally The World Evolution Loft.

The cult was a Sufi based group founded in Colorado called Circle of Friends which is almost impossible to Google unless you add in the pseudonym of it’s leader Murshid Van Merlin.

He dropped in this next link with the simple message:

“That article will give you everything”

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.meditation/c/xhMlihnMN0c

Since that first click the information and stories have been pouring in. From roughly 1992 to 2000 this building was home to more than I could possibly imagine: a truly shady sounding yoga cult, legendary parties in multiple genres of music, the world’s first computer edited magazine and the world’s first amateur video pornography studio, the biggest producers in West Coast underground rave culture and even the most infamous party in San Diego Comic-Con History with appearances from Roger Corman and Glen Danzig.

It seems ironic that the same year this place ended I travelled all the way to the other side of the country to see Fort Thunder while all of this was happening right under my nose and I wasn’t there for any of it. I’ve been collecting stories for the past few days and expect to keep hearing new things for some time to come.

I’ll get into all of that next time…

[link to next part:]

San Diego 2000 The Loft intermission : “Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?”