Tag: Crash Worship

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

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.

Murshid on right

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?”

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:

There are multiple inaccuracies here

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.

RIP RAMBO

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.

2000 was the year for this

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.

More on Bhagavan via Chris Woo

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”

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.

Photo by Chris Woo

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?”

San Diego 2004 : “Let me rephrase that [grabs baseball bat]”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I just watched a documentary about the mid-nineties San Diego underground music scene called It’s Gonna Blow! that I would definitely recommend checking out if the subject at all interests you. I just about missed out on everything featured in the documentary – I wouldn’t have been old enough to go to The Casbah but there were most likely all ages opportunities I didn’t take advantage of.

Most embarrassing is the fact that my friend Kevin who would later form The Beautiful Mutants invited me to come see Crash Worship at The World Beat Center but in my infinite fourteen year old wisdom I thought it “sounded like a stupid hippy drum circle”.

Around the time that I was in Ninth Grade friends at school would show me CDs for local bands they were into: Three Mile Pilot, Heavy Vegetable and Blink before they had to add the -182. For whatever reason I never asked to borrow or get a copy of any of it. The closest thing I did to checking out the local scene that year was accompanying my parents and grandfather to see the folk group The Electrocarpathians at the soon to be shuttered Better Worlde Galleria.

Not long after I started going to a tiny spot in El Cajon called the Soul Kitchen to see the punk bands forming out of SDSCPA – an arts focused high school that my sisters and most of my friends went to but my mom wouldn’t let me because I had to do the IB program at San Diego High. This included a precursor to The Beautiful Mutants called The Mutant Turtles, Diana DeLuna’s group The Vendettas and the late Nick Galvas’ project Wingdilly.

Many of the groups featured in the documentary also would have played there but they didn’t share bills with my younger friends and El Cajon was too much of a haul on buses to just check out casually. In the end the closest I ever got to the Golden Age of San Diego Alternative and Post-Rock was watching Lucy’s Fur Coat at some kind of free Balboa Park event and the two years where the former bassist of aMiniature was my High School Physics teacher.

One thing that they talked about for a lot of the documentary that I definitely did not miss out on was San Diego’s endemic violence – a result of the proximity to USMC base Camp Pendleton and the long term popularity of the skinhead lifestyle. Luckily for me the Marines almost exclusively frequented over 21 drinking establishments so in my teenage years I almost never came into contact with them. I say almost because I did have an unpleasant run in while riding the trolley.

Once I started going to school downtown and got my hands on a bus pass I became a dedicated thrifter and a bit of a clothes horse. On this particular day I was wearing a cheap costume style black bowler hat, blocky laboratory safety glasses with translucent red frames and a snap up black vest of an almost plastic like synthetic material over a red turtleneck. A large group of Marines thought I looked like a member of the band Spacehog and wanted to kick my ass because of it.

If anything my outfit on that particular day was more influenced by Devo but I didn’t press this detail. I got the fuck off the trolley and considered myself fortunate that they were too concerned with reaching their destination, most like the Tijuana border crossing, to follow.

In contrast the skinheads were a constant fixture in environments that I was spending a lot of time in – third wave ska shows. Judging by what people were saying in the film Nazi Skins, also known as Boneheads, were a significant threat at San Diego live shows in the Eighties but I can’t remember ever seeing any. Many of my friends would talk about how red and white laces in Doc Martens were code for Nazis and white supremacists but despite constant vigilance I never ran into anyone rocking these colors – the skinheads around were mostly Sharps.

Sharp is an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice and they typically wear yellow bootlaces although black laces also seemed to be popular. Ostensibly they were supposed to fight and defend the scene against Nazi skins but if these clashes ever happened I never saw them. I would say they liked to fight but I never actually saw them fighting either – they would just typically look for a defenseless target to beat the shit out of.

I decided not to use his name but the one Black guy in the group of gutter punks that hung out with my sister later morphed into a Sharp Skinhead. He also got really muscular around this time – I remember somebody saying that he looked like a Ninja Turtle. One night at a party he got into some kind of disagreement with a wispy little indie rock looking guy and broke the dude’s fingers.

The person in question immediately started screaming out the N word so it was hard to feel too bad for him but the entire situation just felt sad. Besides being unpleasant to be around this kind of violence could often get a show or party broken up by cops – and if Skinheads were around it was nearly an inevitability.

We also had the militant straight edge flavor of Skinheads in San Diego. Not long after Off The Record opened it’s North Park store by 30th and University a local ska band called Unsteady played a free afternoon concert there. Francois was living about a block and a half down the alley and had just gotten into wearing a little crocheted cap in the signature Rastafarian colors,

The straight edge skins decided he looked like he was stoned and were threatening to beat the shit out of him. This was especially ironic as Francois and I were essentially straight edge ourselves at the time – we just didn’t write X’s on our hands or refer to ourselves as such. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with either of us being stoned but at that point in time neither of us had tried marijuana or a single alcoholic beverage.

My father was also at this show and seeing how the music was essentially a form of reggae he decided to spark up a joint and offer it to anyone in the crowd that might be interested. Actually he did this at every live music event regardless of genre. The straight edgers shifted their violent overtures to him and unlike the situation with Francois they were not about to be redirected.

We had to slip him out through the alley and wait a while in Francois’s apartment because they even tried to follow us.

So many things about this are infuriating: the fact that a group of muscle heads would feel justified in ganging up on a single good natured and diminutive hippy man with visibly graying hair, the fact that they unironically considered themselves fans of a music form from actual Jamaica and didn’t see the contradiction in their actions but most importantly the fact that this behavior constantly went unchallenged in all of the spaces throughout our community.

That was San Diego though – I’m not sure when it first started and couldn’t say whether it’s in the past now but now that I think about it nearly every time I’ve been physically assaulted has been in my home city. I might have missed my chance at seeing early Three Mile Pilot and Crash Worship but this was one aspect of San Diego’s underground that was simply unavoidable.

This next incident took place on Valentine’s Day of either 2004 or 2005. It was during the period of time when I was with the girlfriend I’ve referred to as a “New England Pedigree Girl” and after we’d started using heroin together. She was working late somewhere, most likely a night game at Petco Park, so I went to this party without her but not before leaving a Valentine’s Day gift on the kitchen table of our apartment.

I had made a heart shaped card out of construction paper with two rattlesnakes facing each other and the message Fangs for being my Valentine. The inside said Happy Valentines Day Let’s Get Stung – a reference to both a colloquial expression for venomous snake bites and the second part of the gift: two capped syringes loaded up with black tar heroin resting in a champagne flute.

This is mostly not relevant to the story that is about to follow except for the detail that I would have been on a small amount of this drug when the ensuing events took place – but not to the extent of nodding out or anything.

The party was at a house that my friend Bryan Welch had just started renting with some other kids from the scene I can’t remember the names of. When we were still in High School he lived with his mother in Mission Hills and was clearly in a higher economic bracket than my family. The first time I ever went to his house he put on the Laurie Anderson song O Superman and while I immediately dug it he was already a bit of a music snob and I was nervous to display my ignorance by asking the name of the artist.

This resulted in me mistakenly buying the Barbra Streisand Superman album the next time I saw it in a Thrift Store and being severely disappointed when I got home and put on what I thought was the same song.

Anyway this new house he was living in was super fancy. It had a vintage Malm orange metal fireplace in the center along with some other mid century furniture and an actual bar that was very much in use. I can’t remember if it was just a rent party or if they were raising money for some other cause but they were slinging an assortment of fancy cocktails including one that was served in an actual coconut.

I should mention that this last beverage lost quite a few points in presentation due to the fact that somebody had forgotten to pick up straws and this detail was only divulged the moment the drink had already been paid for and was being deposited into the buyer’s hand.

Anyway some Skinheads showed up – I’m not sure if they called themselves Sharps but they definitely weren’t straight edgers or Nazis. As they always do they searched the party for somebody to beat up on and selected a pair of French guys most likely because they figured they wouldn’t have any friends there. To reiterate I have never once seen a skinhead looking for a fair fight.

One of the French guys got sucker punched and things were about to get uglier. While everybody looked unhappy about this turn of events nobody was actually doing anything about it. I am absolutely not a fighter but after dealing with this shit since my teenage years I hit a breaking point where I wasn’t going to just powerlessly watch it happen. I placed myself in front of the next targeted French guy and addressed the skinhead preparing to swing on him:

“You can’t fight here. Fighting is gonna get the party broken up. If you want to fight you have to take it somewhere else.”

I am fairly tall at six feet and four inches but I’ve always been thin and gangly. I should also mention that I had dressed up for the holiday: a pink pair of Gloria Vanderbilt twill jeans and a floral printed button up in pinks and purples. My hair was long and I was most likely wearing heavy eyeshadow in complementary colors. I might not have been as bold if I didn’t figure that looking stereotypically effeminate might have a protective effect.

With this first guy it basically worked the way I had planned. He tried to shove me out of the way but I’ve been in my share of mosh pits so I planted my feet and did not waver. He tried a couple more shoves but I remained steadfast and repeated what I had just said. As I was hoping he didn’t look at me as a person he could actually swing on so he finally growled in disgust and angrily stomped off.

Unfortunately one of his companions had no such compunctions. This skinhead was a Mexican guy with the body type that basically looks like a bowling ball with arms and legs sticking out – he probably wasn’t as tall as me but it wasn’t a big difference. He had watched everything that just transpired and now placed himself in front of me:

“Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

“I wasn’t talking shit. I told him there’s no fighting at this party because there’s no fighting at this party. Fighting brings cops.”

Without a word he turned and walked over to the back of a pickup truck with camper shell that was parked at the curb about fifteen feet away. He lowered the tail gate and then rubbed his hands together with glee like he was about to eat something delicious in a cartoon. He then pulled out a wooden baseball bat, hefted it over his shoulder and strolled back to where I was standing with a newly smug and self satisfied expression:

“Let me rephrase that. Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

I should clarify that I am well aware that not every person that dresses or identifies as a skinhead is like this. The first time I ever met my friend Lil Four she looked like a skinhead. It was 10th Grade and she was going to a dance at my school with me and a girl named Anne Gregory. We had taken the bus to where she lived by the beach with her mother to pick her up.

The movie The Nutty Professor had just come out and her mother evidently had a crush on the fat suit version of Eddie Murphy. She had cut multiple pictures of this character out of newspapers and framed them around the house. Lil Four, or I should say Danielle as she was going by her original name, seemed a little embarrassed by this.

She had a bleached Chelsea cut and wore a green bomber jacket over her dress. The dress was red because the three of us had coordinated a red and black theme for our outfits. I wish I still had the photos but they disappeared when I lost the box of papers going back to Kindergarten from my parents’ house. Anyway I’ve known plenty of other perfectly charming, pleasant and not especially violent skinheads.

But then there are the ones like the guy who is threatening me with a baseball bat. He’s already three times my size, I’m clearly incapable of fighting and I’m dressed like a stereotypical pansy. He could probably seriously injure me with one arm tied behind his back but that isn’t good enough for him. He needs a vicious weapon too so he can not just completely dominate me but put me in the hospital while he’s at it.

I remember feeling disgusted but I forget if I actually said anything or not. I turned my back on him and slowly walked back into the house. Of course I was worried that he could easily swing at the back of my head but in the moment it felt like the best available course of action. I tried to project certain things: disdain, an absence of intimidation and dismissal in the proper balance so that he would feel too foolish to retaliate in force.

Once I got inside my sister helped to find me a ride to get out of there. Just like I had done with my father years before I was smuggled out through the back. A friend pulled a car to the side of the house and I climbed into the back seat so I could lay out of sight and he drove me home to my girlfriend who was waiting for me to come do drugs with her.

I don’t know what happened with the party or the French guys after that. Maybe the skinheads renewed their attack on them or found a new target or simply left. I felt a bit disappointed that nobody had stepped up to back me up in the moment, after all there were so many more of us than them, but at the same time I understood. Everybody there had grown up with this exactly like I had and I had just stood by countless times before reaching a point where I had to stand up and do something,

Everybody had to reach this point for themselves and it may well never happen at all.

Nothing about it is easy.

As fate would have it this wasn’t the only time I got threatened by a skinhead with a baseball bat in San Diego. This other incident might have been a little before or after the one I just described but I feel fairly certain it was within a year. I was performing at the Che Cafe with Raquel – either as Sex Affection or right after we changed the name to Hood Ri¢h.

The show was sparsely attended and there were some especially aggressive younger kids there who kind of looked like skinheads and kind of looked like Circle Jerks era thrash punks. I can’t imagine who they would have been there to see as it would have been a mostly experimental flavored lineup – maybe xbxrx. Regardless they were lightly heckling us so I was heckling them back and said something about coming up so we could start a “big gay mosh pit”.

I confess it’s not especially clever. While the Che is officially an alcohol free venue I’d been drinking something, probably Captain Morgan and Vanilla Coke, from an innocuous opaque cup. I probably thought they were most likely homophobic and it would get under their skin.

Evidently it did.

A kid in a red and black plaid flannel ran up to the stage and started throwing punches. My friend Andreas later said it looked like I was expertly dodging every one of his swings but it was actually dumb luck. In the moment my first thought was that he was coming to dance with me and when I bobbed my head from side to side it just so happened to neatly avoid each successive strike. It caused me to drop and spill my drink which was probably for the best.

Andreas is an absolute teddy bear who I’ve never seen in another altercation but to his credit he sprang into action and quickly ejected my assailant from the side door and told him he wasn’t coming back in. Now that I think about we would have been sharing the bill with a short lived experimental band called Business Lady. The singer Mikey happened to have a similar build and was wearing an almost identical shirt to the kid who attacked me so for the rest of the night everybody would tense up every time he walked into the room only to relax when they saw his face.

If you’ve ever spent time at the Che Cafe you would know that there is a small circular table toward the rear on the parking lot side where attendees often hang out and smoke cigarettes. It sits in the shadows and due to this relative darkness is almost impossible to see from the inside even though it’s next to the window. Toward the end of the night I was sitting there smoking a cigarette and whoever I was with finished theirs and left so I was out there by myself.

I suddenly got approached by one of flannel kid’s friends. When I try to picture what this kid looked like the first thing that comes to mind is a baseball cap with the bill flipped up and tagged on in the style of Suicidal Tendencies. It actually doesn’t sound like these kids were skinheads at all – the connecting thread is more just the baseball bat as he was also brandishing one in a threatening manner.

He wanted to know why I had – in his words “gotten his friend kicked out”. The way he saw it the person who assaulted me was a hapless victim forced into action against his will by my uncivil and inflammatory provocation. Accountability was clearly wanting but it was difficult to focus on the exchange as a teachable moment when the surrounding circumstances necessitated that my thoughts pivot on how I might extricate myself while avoiding grievous injury.

I don’t know what I said but it isn’t so much about the what as it is the how. After a certain amount of time it becomes instinctual – you either learn how to fight or learn how to avoid fighting or join up with the people creating the situation in the first place. It’s something that marks every person who’s had to grow up there. I’m not saying other cities aren’t violent but just like music there’s regional varieties to everything.

I missed out on a lot of what was going on around me and experienced these things in other cities instead. The first time I saw The Locust was at 924 Gilman in Berkeley and I didn’t really get into hardcore or feel like I was part of a scene until I moved to Chicago. There’s a lot of San Diego bands like The Shortwave Channel that I didn’t start listening to until they’d already broken up.

But when I heard people like John Reis start talking about their experiences of inescapable violence, even though it was before my time in the ‘80s, at that moment I get a very specific feeling:

I was there…