An(other) Ecstatic Journey w/ The Museum
A weekend of collective-defiant joy with SGM and Friends.
January, this month of breaking hearts and bruising souls. I am struggling to write and to feel rested. Much of this is understandable. But my students are reading poetry and drawing some inspiration from it. It is awe-inspiring. That’s another longer story. We all take energy from fandom, friendships, and our artistic obsessions, too. I told them I saw my favorite band two nights in a row last weekend. Their eyes lit up. Loving the art that recognizes us is a method of endurance.
One student said: you got greedy! Indeed I did. And also I’m proud of myself for pulling it off. We should draw strength from the strenuousness of our joys, I think.
In November of last year, I told myself I’d find a way this month to attend two nights of concerts by a favorite musical-artistic-mystical group, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
This group has appeared in many of these musings here; they are an electrifying caravan of energies and visions that have accompanied me through many adventures. Their ethos of communitarian art-making and chaotic-symphonic world-making feels ever urgent. Their music embodies a kind of living avant-garde organism always pressing us to see deeper and think deeper and become different. They are experimental musicians and they are also totally rocking metal performers. And they are ecstatic theatrical geniuses. They are also hilarious and solemn in equal turns. Their shows partake of a mystical, shared cathartic togetherness which is the source of the collective joy whose memory has sustained me this week. Overall they encompass a universe of boundary-pushing art-sharing that is rooted in our most pressing ecological concerns, strivings, and stories.
But these are generalities written by a tired fan whose been having a hard time writing lately. I hope to sharpen them, add nuances and associations and make this a longer, more detailed appreciation. Indeed, the zine or tiny book I have been planning. As I’ve been planning many things.
When they announced a small two night tour, one show in LA on a January Friday, and one show in Berkeley the Saturday after I bought the tickets for both. I’ll figure it out later, I said then.
And this last weekend I did figure it out, and was so lucky and thrilled to have a weekend of collective and insurgent joy with beloved artists I’ve followed for so long, and in a current sociopolitical space-time when joy seems minimal.
Yet I’m believing what many are saying, too: that we must protect our joys and creations, the simple ones we share with others, the ones that give ourselves enough light, the ones that are only embryonic. Music is one such expansive joy that gives so much cleansing energy in times of ongoing disaster. So we try to protect. And try to give. SGM has been giving for two decades, in spite of a long hiatus. Disaster Relief artists. Catastrophe ecologists.
I don’t have a lot of friends here in SD who are Sleepytime fans. This is true of my several other, perhaps incongruous interests, when combined can seem confusing, including Sufism, queer studies, Thoreau, and animism. But these two nights in LA and Berkeley I met many devoted SGM fans and marveled again at the loving-strange, welcoming, idiosyncratic inclusive range of SGM enthusiasts.
Idiosyncrasy is a word that suggests one aspect of this group’s beauty. A word, too, that connects them with a rebellious youthfulness or greenness that can be kept alive at any age, under whatever oppressive conditions.
That night in LA last Friday I recalled the first time I saw them live, in the early 2000s, and how their almost unbelievably intense and stirring live shows evoked a strange art ritual for some misfit-wayfarer faith. Yet I also hesitate to mention religion in this context, despite my own religious strivings. For their art is firmly rooted in the material and elemental, in the collision of cities and wildernesses. The mud and the blossoms and the oceans. As well as the steel and the exhaust and the rebar. Their art is political in the sense that their songs confront so much of the grueling struggle of enduring and flourishing as ecological citizens when multispecies decline, systemic brutality, oppression, and soul poisoning are the norm
Their songs are alive with animals and creatures, all ensouled and full of desire and conflict and ethical principles. One could write a whole bestiary based on these animal-centered hymns! Their music transmits wisdom graciously borrowed from indigenous lifeworlds and traditions —and their playfulness pays homage to the Dada and absurdism of the 20th century which still speaks to we are beholding (and complicit in) the human death drive in action. In January it seems to be in hyperdrive, at the hands of technological fascists and racists.
The opening acts on both nights were also sublime: the throat singing musician Soriah and the amazing Oakland band Gumby’s Junk. I felt a tenderness knowing I had seen them all one incredibly cozy night in LA’s Highland Park, at the Lodge Room (a former masonic lodge I was told), and had driven, perhaps in their wake, the 5 hours north to see them another night in Berkeley at the UC Theatre (where I had seen Sleepytime for their last night on their reunion tour last April). I had only once before seen the same band two nights in a row (Gogol Bordello, early 2000s, Slim’s SF) but this was the first time I had followed the band from one location to another. The sets were also slightly different each night.
Regardless of whether religion is applicable, live rock music has always served as a mystical-like, cleansing, transcendent experience for me. Nothing compares to how live rock music can take me out of my head for several hours into a somatic, vibrational space of sensation and impressions. But with Sleepytime, it’s not only that, but also a deep feeling of participation in mystery, of being swept up in rites of incantation, and even being included in a collective exorcism of our internal psychic foes. Where the cacophonous rock music and the art experimentation and the hermetic evocation come together.
From last April’s post:
“I’ve seen Sleepytime Gorilla Museum perform live 4-5 times, over a probably 15 year period. When I saw them in San Francisco — at The Pound, The Independent, and Slim’s (I think) — it always felt I was participating in a complex ritual that epitomized my vision of an inclusive, creative, boundary-pushing, misfit-mystic community. The feeling was euphoria; a deep aesthetic and emotional fulfillment. Their complex, emotionally intricate songs inspired by modern poets and anarchists and folk tales and indigenous world views and ecology and critiques of civilization and progress were the weirdest yet most rocking and metal sound-sculptures I had ever witnessed. Seeing them live, with the added flourishes of humor and theater and invented instruments and sweaty crowd-bliss — as well as just the kinetic acrobatics of their live musicianship — was a comprehensive art experience. This was the kind of subversive world making I wanted to emulate in my own projects. When they broke up, I was very sad until, over a decade later, seemingly out of the blue, they announced their reformation, a new record, a new tour, and new projects. It was as if the intervening years hadn’t happened. And it was just beautiful luck that I was able to see them on my spring break time off this year.”
More to add and elaborate on later. A few more things: I got to meet the band here and there over the two nights and some of their family members. They tend to bring the family on the road with them. They travel in a big green bus and their tour last year was crowdfunded. I appreciate the grassroots and expansive kinship-centered vision of their music and all their side-projects, as well. There is an radical ethos and a universe of liberating implications to keep exploring, a place where different traditions and inklings come together, whether they are from indigenous worlds, anarchist traditions, art-worlds, experimental music worlds, or the vibrant underground communities of art and writing.
But now I am off to teach ideas of poetry and the poetic in film, especially surrealism and dreams. My students are feeling particularly low and fatigued because of the current abominations controlling this country and brutalizing its citizens. So hoping, too, in the midst of this difficult January leading into February, to make and share some joy, ones as well that can return to us later as sources of some renewal. They also want to watch some Sleepytime videos.
