Queer Jungle Supermind


Wherein our author has an epiphany of mixes and beats.

Saturday evening - or, more precisely, very shortly after Easter Sunday began - with friends Chris, John and Lionel (the last two of whom seem to be turning into very fine friends indeed) - I got into a taxi and rode over to Kensington, which isn't all that far away - just a few Ks down the Anzac Parade - to a weird little restaurant known as the Grotto Capri. The Grotto Capri, it appears, is famed throughout Sydney for having a nautically-themed interior. And if you think that dining *inside* a coral reef is nautically-themed, well, baby, I have got the place for you. Stalagmites on the floor, and stalactites on the ceiling. (Or is that reversed?) All encrusted with an odd array of seashells, and some inset lighting in the floor, and supposedly, under glass, a stream. (We never saw it.) A few fishtanks. And so forth. It's the kind of place that a down-on-his-luck old-school Mafia don might pick for his headquarters, taking a corner booth, keeping himself protected by walls on two sides. That sort of place. It reminds me, in some ways, of the restaurants back in Massachusetts and Rhode Island - designed with the presumption of taste, and missing the mark by so wide a margin that it is immediately recognized and loved as kitsch.

I haven't had an opportunity to write about the Bad Dog party (grrr) I went to a few weeks back, which is a semi-monthly affair where the art-fag-queers-dykes-freaks of Sydney go out and dance to some fine music. On that afternoon at the Waverly Bowling Club I realized that I would have a place & time in Sydney - here, in my newly-adopted home - when I could cut loose. (Shirt off, of course.) I had a great time -- and wanted more. So when I saw John & Lionel on Friday afternoon - and got in my first swim at Bondi Beach (waves really too big to have fun, but that's something I'll get used to) - they mentioned that there was another party - "Evildoers" - which wasn't exactly a Bad Dog affair, but would be very much like one.

Sign me up, I said.

So we were not at the Grotto Capri to dine; we were there to dance. We got there shortly after midnight - fortunately, as it turned out - and took our time looking around at the strange decor, grabbed a drink or two, and waited for the mix. We didn't have long to wait. The two DJs - who are relatively well-known in Sydney - began to create a mix that I'd never heard before, taking jungle beats and the queerest of queer disco and slamming them together, like two overweight atoms only to happy to fuse into some super-heavy nucleus that gave off a shower good vibes. Queer jungle, I thought. This is it: I'm hearing something new.

It went on, and got better. There were moments when I felt myself opening up inside, and all of the happiness of yoga/alcohol/cannabis/ketamine/music/pretty-dancing-boys/smiles-on-the-faces/the-kitsch-surroundings took me into a transcendent space.

Flash back, now, to dinner with Rachel & Jeremy, earlier in the week. Rachel her normal ray-of-sunshine self, whinging about the slow death of civilization. Trouble is, she's smart enough that I can't easily coddle her with smooth words; she wants solutions. And even catastrophe, my final fallback solution to all problems, won't work for her. "Trouble is, Mark," she proclaimed, "the catastrophes never make anything better. They only make things worse."

Put that into your DMT pipe and smoke it.

And so, because she had saddled me with such a philosophical imponderable, I had no choice but to chew on it, ruminating about this and that, feeling the enclosing claustrophobic zeitgeist, and knowing that somehow, somewhere, there must be an exit.

Then, on the dance floor, in the midst of the mix, it all clicked: the opening is above, it is translinguistic, gnostic and experiential. It can't be bought or sold, it can't be recorded or reproduced. It has the absolute authenticity of the utterly ephemeral. It can not be touched, but it can touch you. In the humble surroundings of the Grotto Capri, the supermind was coming down to Earth and entering me, on that dance floor, filling me with the godshatter of ideas which I have only just begun to sort through. I know this: even in its articulation into the world of forms, it remains itself. Like the Tao, it can not be named, though its manifold forms can be observed, and their constant, changing glories keep the channel of communication open.

But I'll have to spend some more time dancing to understand it fully. Somehow the knowledge enters through the body - my body.

As is inevitably the case when breakthroughs happen, when you know that you're in the space where anything is possible - if only briefly - the police came and shut us down as an "illegal club" around 4 AM. All of us could have gone on till the 6 AM close - but this way we knew, beyond all doubt, that we had touched the magick beating heart of Sydney on Easter Morning, and, like Christ ejected from the tomb, walked the glittering pre-dawn streets back to our homes.

Posted: Wed - April 14, 2004 at 05:36 PM        

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