Last Saturday night my boyfriend and I went to Mysore Woodland to stuff ourselves on South Indian carbs with a friend who’d just lost a swank job involving something I can’t talk about because she signed a confidentiality agreement.
“Let’s try to find proof that infinity exists on earth tonight,” she said.
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Technically, I guess, it was a benefit–for Bop Camp, a local “sport, art production, healing therapy, and performance” collective that plays a sort of jousting game involving long PVC poles padded at one end with stuffed animals. They were raising money to finance their camp at Burning Man, which starts in a couple weeks. The rave was billed as a copresentation by them and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit whose mission is “to sponsor scientific research designed to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines” and “educate the public honestly about the risks and benefits of these drugs.” Performers included the omnipresent absurdist-anarchist marching band Environmental Encroachment and Spunn, a group of fire- and light-spinners who host drum jams at Foster Avenue and the lakefront on any Friday when there’s a full moon. (August 19 is the Full Sturgeon Moon, and weather permitting, they’ll be there a little after dusk.)
I wandered around the cavernous space, following the sound of live bongo drumming to another floor where I found the Chilluminati, a local group that, according to their Web site, promotes “psychedelic trance and Goa music and culture.” A young woman in a halter top rhythmically swung glow sticks on ropes for a captivated audience.
“It is not unusual for us to use our wall spaces for noncommercial work when there is downtime on a wall,” Noah Shapiro, cofounder of the New York-based promotion company Critical Massive, explained later. (The less controversial graffiti-style Axe ad on the 2000 block of Division is now a graffiti-style ad for the new TLC reality series Miami Ink.)
The rockabilly couple has since been replaced by a groovy psychedelic piece where blobs with eyes and a disapproving bird dressed like Sherlock Holmes hang out with a heavy-lidded guy who appears to be riding an invisible bike. It’s a memorial to local graffiti writer Depte, who was fatally shot in July. Slang is the main artist behind it; his son helped. Like its predecessor, it’s signed “Thanks 2 Critical Massive.”
