Radzik leafs through the pages of his books, scanning images for his next promotional flier. ''The arcane and future groove in the now. It's like this fantastic coincidence. House culture is a meeting point for all these different things. Music, finally, is the universal language of love. The nightclub people are the ones who help manifest it into popular culture. What I do is creative anthropology. I observe what's happening in the house culture, and market it back at those people.''
It's important to realize that this seemingly mercenary attitude is not inconsistent with house philosophy – in fact, it's not considered mercenary at all. Marketing is merely one of the feedback loops that can promote the house philosophy back into itself, and amplify the experience. It does not suck from the system, it adds to it. Everything relates to house in a self-conscious or ''meta'' way. House music is not just music, but samples of music recombined into a kind of meta-music.
House is merely a construction – a framework – like language or any other shell. Once something is ''in the house,'' it has been incorporated into the fractal pattern of metaconsciousness, and is a subject of and contributor to the greater schematic. It has become a part of the self-similar universe – one with the galactic dance. That's why the mechanisms for change in house might be "in your face,'' but they are almost never confrontational. With no dualities, there's nothing to confront. ''House, like punk, is an anarchic, rebellious movement,'' admits Radzik "but it isn't a violent or negative one. If the planet's a living organism, then it doesn't make sense to fuck with each other.''
Nick Phillip, twenty-two, a recent emigre from Britain and now the designer for Anarchic Adjustment clothing, is one of Radzik's best friends and conspirators. He agrees wholeheartedly that participants in house are within a construct that allows for global change.
''The kids now are not going to turn on, tune in, drop out. They're going to drop in. They're going to infiltrate society and change things from within. They're going to use business, music, or whatever they can to change people. What we're doing speaks for itself. People who are involved in the scene are creating this stuff for themselves.''
Finally Going Mental
Nick has arrived at Toon Town tonight with a supply of his most popular jerseys to be sold at the club's small shop, and he senses that the crowd needs an infusion of life. Heley has moved down from the balcony and is making suggestions to Buck, the rookie DJ who will play until 2:00 a.m., when Jno, the technoshaman extraordinaire, takes over. Nick makes his way to the dance floor like a prizefighter taking the ring, and his pugilistic fury is more reminiscent of punk slamdancing than blissful house explosions. It's called ''going mental'' and it looks pretty intense, but his enthusiasm is contagious and others are either encouraged enough to join in or frightened off the dance floor altogether. Apparently, part of the reason for the evening's discontinuity is that the venue's previous event, a birthday party for a yuppie named Norman, had not been let out before Toon Town began. Diana and Preston have urged Buck to play the most brutal house music he can find in the hopes of scaring these people away.
Many house regulars have retreated to a ''brain machine lounge,'' where they smoke and chat like members of a bridge club. The room has been set aside for David, a distributor of the "light and sound'' devices, to demonstrate the new technology to house kids and maybe make a few sales. The machines consist of a set of goggles and headphones.
''No, it's not virtual reality,'' David says, probably for the hundredth time, to a newcomer to the room. "It's for relaxation and it can get you high.'' The goggles flash lights and the headphones beep sounds at exact frequencies, coaxing the brain into particular wave patterns. Ultimately, the brain machines can put the user into the brain state of an advanced meditator.
While the kids play with the machines, David is more interested in explaining to an attractive young woman who is waiting for a brain machine, an article he hopes to write for Magickal Blend magazine about the physics of David Bohm.
''It's all about discontinuity. Things that look separate in our reality, the explicate order, are all linked together in what Bohm says is the implicate order.''
David grabs a pencil and draws a picture on the back of his hand to make his point. ''If two positrons shoot out of an atom at the same time, and you shove one, the other will move, too.''
''How does it know to move? ESP?'' asks the girl.
''No. It happens at the same exact time.''
A couple of other kids perk up to hear the explanation. ''That's because on the implicate order, the positrons are still linked together.''
David is interrupted by a fourteen-year-old boy who seems to have a better handle on the idea. ''Bohm used the analogy of a goldfish and two TVs. If you put two cameras on a single goldfish, and connected them to two TVs, you might think these were pictures of two different fish. But when one fish moves, the other will move at exactly the same time. It's not because they're connected. It's because they're the same fish!''
''Right,'' David chimes in, eager to get credit for his knowledge before the girl disappears under the goggles. "The real goldfish in the bowl is the implicate order. The monitors – the way we see and experience it – is the explicate order.''
The young boy rolls his eyes. Clearly, David doesn't understand the implications of all this. ''Kind of, only, man. The implicate order is timeless truth. It's the way things are. The explicate order is the way they manifest for us in time and three dimensions.''
David gives in to the child's brilliance. ''Do you take smart drugs, or what?''
In another private room, actually a kind of DJ lounge, Jody Radzik, a DJ named Pete, and a more flamboyant crowd who call themselves ''personal friends of the DJs'' smoke pot and talk about similar issues. This is all very heady for a house club. The center of attention is a state-of-the-art transvestite calling "her''self Gregory, who is trying to understand the merits of trendiness in house culture.
Radzik takes a stab at a simple response: ''House makes the Golden Rule trendy. It makes spirituality trendy.''
''But is trendiness good?'' Gregory asks, her eyes shifting in that tweaking-on-psychedelics-paranoid way.
''The culture is just pushing a pseudopod into a new direction and that's a trend.'' Radzik says, using the biological metaphor to reassure her. "The ideas have a life of their own. They have an existence outside the human beings. The human beings receive the ideas, and that manifests them.''
''That's the implicate order being downloading into the explicate order!'' The girl from the brain machine room has a near religious experience in relating the two conversations. "We were talking about the same thing in there!'' She beams. ''Two conversations. Distinct on the explicate order, linked on the implicate order. I get it now!''