He stares off into space. He knows his ego is probably as responsible for his upset as the political vulnerability of Earth Girl's glamour image.
''It's a matter of fine balance. I really believe that if it had gone other ways, that FDA loophole wouldn't even be in question. I think we'll still manage to keep it open, maybe we have to do some repair work. It should never ever have been this way. It's just my stupidity to allow it to happen.''
Maybe he should have taken more smart drugs.
PART 3
Technoshamanism: The Transition Team
Chapter 9
Slipping Out of History
Much more than arenas for drug activism, Toon Town and other ''house'' events are Cyberia's spiritual conventions. House is more than a dance craze or cultural sensation. House is cyberian religion. But the priests and priestesses who hope to usher in the age of Cyberia have problems of their own.
We're at an early Toon Town – the night Rolling Stone came to write about Earth Girl and the Smart Bar. It's their first party since one fateful night three weeks ago when their giant, outdoor, illegal rave got crashed by the cops and they lost thousands of dollars. Preston is still a little pissed at Heley over that mishap. The English newcomer got too ambitious, and now Preston and Diana's baby, Toon Town, is in serious debt. They may never recover, and all Heley can think about are his damn cultural viruses. This used to be a dance club!
Heley's in no mood for arguments now. It's 11:00 p.m. Earth Girl hasn't shown up with her bar – correction: with Toon Town's bar. She isn't picking up her phone. The laser is malfunctioning. It's still early, but it's already clear that either the owners of this venue or the hired doorpeople are stealing money. A Rolling Stone reporter is on his way to write about the Smart Bar, which is nowhere to be found. R.U. Sirius and Jas Morgan, the editors of Mondo 2000 magazine, arrive with about forty friends whom they'd like added to the guest list. Tonight is supposed to be a party for the new issue, but, on entering the club, R.U. Sirius announces that the real release party will happen in a few weeks at Toon Town's competitor Big Heart City. Tonight is ''just a party'' that Mondo is co-sponsoring. News to Heley. News to Preston. News to Diana.
Bryan Hughes, the virtual reality guide, is setting up a VR demo on a balcony above the dance floor. Along with his gear he's brought a guest list of several hundred names. Cap'n Crunch, notorious reformed hacker and the original phone phreaque, and his assistant are trying to hook up his Video Toaster, but the projector isn't working. The place is buzzing, but Heley is not. Perched on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, he looks away from the confusion, takes off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. He's angry. Chris – the future nutrient king – mixes Heley a special concoction of pyroglutamate to take the edge off the apparent conflux of crises.
Diana and Preston are running around with wires and paperwork, arguing about the limits of the building's voltage. They perform much more actual physical business than Heley does, but they know, even begrudgingly, that he's engaged in an equally important preparation, so they give him all the space he needs. Heley is the technoshaman. He is the high priest for this cybermass, and he must make an accurate forecast of the spiritual weather before it begins. He is guiding the entire movement through a dangerous storm. But instead of using the stars for navigation, he must read the events of the week, the status of key cultural viruses, the psychological states of his crewmembers, and the tone and texture of his own psychedelic visionquests. Tonight, most of Heley's calculations and intuitions indicate doom. He brought cyber house to San Francisco and was willing to man the helm, but now it's getting out of control.
''I brought the house thing to Mondo, I did their article, and I introduced them to it.'' Their disloyalty, Heley feels, has undermined his efforts to bring real, hard-core, spiritual, consciousness-raising cyber-influenced house to America. "Sometimes I just feel like there's only fifteen of us really doing this. There's Fraser Clark in England, who does Evolution magazine, there's me, there's Nick from Anarchic Adjustment, Jody Radzik, Deee-Lite. I don't mean that we're creating it, but we are painting the signs. We're indicating the direction.'' Heley looks down at the confusion of people, machinery, and wires on the dance floor and sighs. ''God knows what direction this is pointing in.''
It was about three weeks ago that things began to get messy. Heley, Preston, and Diana had arranged a huge ''rave'' – a party where thousands take E and dance to house, usually outside, overnight, and illegall – at an abandoned warehouse and yard. A club competing for the same business on Saturday night found their map point (a small hand-out circulated through the underground community indicating where the party was to be held) and notified the police, who were more than willing to shut it down. Heley recounts the bust with the conviction of a modern-day Joan of Arc.
''They arrived and they only saw people having a good time. People having a party. There's no rational argument they can make against us. They smell it. They smell it and they understand.''
Heley swigs down the rest of his pyroglutamate and soon appears to have gained a new clarity and, along with it, a new reason to fight on. ''This is not a countermovement. It is the shape of the thing that will replace them. But it will be painless for them. It's not a thing to be frightened of. If you're frightened of acceptance, yes, be afraid because this thing is a reintegration. The trouble is that it just dissolves the old lies – all the things you just know are untrue. We're not living that life anymore. You can only live the old lies when the rest of the paraphernalia is in place. Really, house just destroys that. It's not a reactionary thing.''
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at the history of this thing called ''house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse) began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that – like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant – was called "house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop – influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called ''bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called ''acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast, high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labelled ''acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music – tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
''When I heard acid house music would be playing, I figured for sure they meant it was a psychedelic dance club – music to take acid to,'' explains Lyle, an ex-punker from Brixton who has followed the house scene since its beginnings in the suburbs of London. "It began on an island, Ibetha, off the coast of Spain. Everyone goes there on holiday, does Ecstasy, and stays up all night. We got back to England and decided we didn't want to give it up and started raving on the weekends.''
Lyle's explanation is as good as any for how raves got started. These Woodstock-like fests begin on a Friday evening and carry on through Sunday afternoon. Dancing is nonstop. They became most popular in the late 1980s, when thousands of cars could be seen on any weekend heading toward whichever suburb – Stratford, Brighton – was hosting the party. Police began cracking down on them in 1990 or so, but then they went legit by renting out permitted club space. News of raves eventually rebounded to the United States, where the original house clubs began to incorporate the British hallucinogenic style and substances. San Francisco, where psychedelics are still the most popular, was most receptive to the new movement, which is why Heley and other English ravers wound up there.