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.
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.
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.
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?”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 