Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

Missive from an anonymous playa bard, swiped from the Playa Info Bulletin Board

So! Before I begin this, I suppose I should address those of you who showed up a while ago expecting a little bit more information about Adrian Roberts and RE/Search than you ended up getting. I’ll just explain the situation, one I fully intend not to revise, and then move on to less difficult subject matter.

So I did a brief interview with Adrian this past Tuesday, as I was shopping at the Highland Park Farmer’s Market, where he insisted I only print his rather vague quote, after which he went into further depth. Now anyone who’s ever read Piss Clear knows that Adrian, as warm and personable as he is, ranks as the Perez Hilton of the playa, so there was plenty of dirt, but I figured I’d stick to the facts for what I printed. However, he says all of this stuff this stuff was off the record. I can tell you right now that he never at any point in our discussion used that statement, or otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything in the first place. So I’m not beating myself up for what was originally posted.

That said, Adrian’s in a difficult position right now, and I’m not about to make it moreso, so I took thee offending info down. This doesn’t stop any of you from digging up a cached version on Google, nor am I interested in stopping anyone from doing so. But if there’s anything that I’ve learned from this, it’s scriptor caveo. And let’s hope homeboy makes his skrilla back.

Right, so onwards and upwards!

This year, I was camped at Entheon Village, the playa’s foremost repository for psychedelic thought. We’re known primarily for our lectures, which this year focused on the festival’s theme of evolution, natch. Traditionally, the village’s emphasis has been on psychedelic discussion – the academic advocacy group MAPS routinely camps with the village – and some people, most notably MAPS head Rick Doblin and self-styled Aussie gonzo journalist Rak Razam, spoke to these issues. But a lot of talk centered, oddly enough, on 2012, the latest endpoint to this version of civilization, and the leap in evolution some anticipate once this milestone is passed.

Truth be told, I only got so much from these discussions. Many of them focused on the temporary city and how different/better it is from the world outside. The Q&A after one panel ended up getting a little ugly when some women in the crowd criticized the lack of female speakers, and it devolved into a shouting match between her and magazine-journalist-turned-New Age-pundit Daniel Pinchbeck. Kinda sad, when you’ve just heard how special and unique the community you’re part of is, only to see that it has yet to eliminate some core grievances burners feel about the larger society we’ve attempted to escape. But it’s hardly surprising.

I probably learned more from the personal interactions I had with some of my campmates, most notably UT-Austin sociology professor and “psychedelic satire” author Tony Vigorito and Origin Press publisher Byron Belitsos. About Vigorito I will have more to say in an upcoming post, but his fiction sounds intriguing – at least intriguing enough for Harcourt to pick him up after his first book, Just A Couple Of Days, built up a rep in the small press circuit.) I had a long talk with Byron where he expressed great dismay at the Google/Authors Guild settlement, and the unintended consequences a privately owned corporation could wreak upon the entire published output of human civilization, not to mention the 23 titles (funny thing, that number, how it always crops up) he’s already published. Perhaps he should have taken it up with Google co-founder Sergei Brin, since his 200 “yellow bikes” (painted green for some inexplicable reason) he donated to the playa for bikeless citizens to ride at will were present at the burn. Maybe Brin was, too. But it was only me that Belitsos could get at such short notice.

Belitsos came to the playa with quite a few books from his Press, and hearing about my blog, he handed me a book called “Conversations With Paul,” LA Times editor Philip H. Knapf’s memoirs about transmissions he received from a guardian angel named Paul. No less than Love Sex Fear Death’s Timothy Wyllie (whom I wrote about a few weeks back in the Process Church General Assembly post.) lent his name to a promotional blurb, so I figure this is something I was meant to read. So I’ll let you know what I got from it.

I also ran into Raymond Soulard, Jr. of Portland, Oregon’s Scriptor Press, who has routinely given away pamphlets of fine literature from writers like William Burroughs and Flannery O’Connor – not to mention several compilations of writings on psychedelics – at Center Camp for years. I once discussed “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” with him once, but this time around, I just took two psychedelic pamphlets, Octavio Paz’s “Sunstone” and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” to add to my playa gifts.

I do want to say that in 10 years of attending the festival, I’ve gotten more than just some nice conversations and some great reading recommendations (two of note were Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker” and David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” which I have since passed down to many others since.). There’s a lot out there that can expand one’s horizons as a person, and indeed, part of it is written. But part of it is painted, part of it constructed and the rest directly lived. That realization is what has stayed with me and influenced me most directly ever since my first solo trip 10 years ago, and it’s what I have attempted to emulate in my own creative written works ever since, starting with four “interactive books” I’ll one day share with you on this site but hardly stopping there. I like to think that an experience like this can bring the exact sort of unique inspiration to anybody, so wherever it is you find it, just go, follow up on what it gives you, and if it makes people stop and stare, then you’re headed in the right direction.