Radstorm: anarchist art awakening

II. At the Rad Pride March, I heard about the opening of Radstorm at 6050 Almon St. in the north end of Halifax. Radstorm is two collectives that came together to create a shared space for art, all ages music and radical community. Inkstorm is a printing collective, and SadRad is a performance art collective that creates shows for local bands. They combined names and resources and rented a space at 6050 Almon St., second floor, in what use to be the independent Islamic school.

The opening show is always the most powerful event in the life of these spaces. The crowd at Radstorm was a mix of gendernauts of all sorts, variously lesbian, gay, straight, bi, cis, and what have you. Genders and sexualities varied as often as hair dyes. The one common denominator: they all wore black, every shade of black on every kind of fabric, black mixed with browns and occasional maroons and dark greens, but mostly, obsessively, black.

I wore my black Kamalas t-shirt. The Kamalas were two women guitarists, Ellie and Ilisha, from Moncton, NB who played kick-ass punk rock a few years back. No one seemed to notice the giant double-headed axe labrys on my chest with “Kamalas” written on it. I once asked the women what “Kamalas” meant; they said they didn’t know. “Kamala” means “lotus”; it’s an epithet for the Hindu goddess, Lakshmi.

I had seen Eekum Seekum at the Rad Pride March after-party at Plan B. They played a low-key show in the tiny café at the back of a collective antique store on Gottingen St. I knew things were going to be different tonight. I biked home and got my earplugs. They were going to wail, use their sonic claws to tear through the flesh of patriarchy and neo-liberalism. “Fuck macho bullshit forever” is their band motto. Their last song was my favourite, F.U…N, about raunchy queer fucking, with its own anthem for the audience: “1, 2, 3, 4, put your fingers in my hole”, “any hole” shouts Emily the bass player. A hundred of us all scream off to “four” together, putting up one finger at a time, until we are in collective fisting mode, jabbing our fisting hands toward the great goddess in the sky (at least that’s where my fisting was going).

While Eekum Seekum is playing the loudest and most furious show of their lives, a writhing mass of black bodies is moshing in front of the stage, and I’m getting off on the energy. It makes me think of what DPR said about tantric practice, “Let go of seeing everything as solid; let go of what appears in front of you, and see things as they really are, as permeable space. Watch the play of phenomena.” So I watched the writhing mass of black bodies bounce and vibrate to the pounding punk rhythm of Eekum Seekum. I see bodies, arms, legs, heads, feet, twitching and jerking, melting into each other, into nameless, polymorphous-perverse, chaotic forms, self-immolating in a collective bonfire of hard-core passion.

After a bit of cool air out on Almon St., I came back in for the last band, 4-Lom from Halifax. I have no idea what 4-Lom stands for or what they’re singing about, but they screeched and vrommed through a 60-minute set of hardcore thrash, at volumes and temperatures way above the range of a nuclear meltdown. I thought to myself, “Why not meditate right now? Who’s going to stop me?”

I step outside the glass doors of Radstorm into the hallway and sit on one of the huge leather sofas at the far end. I pull the plugs out of my ears. I can hear every grinding bass line, every screeching feedback loop that 4-Lom cranks out. I can hear the drummer drop DNA-guided missiles at every piece of equipment within reach a hundred-thousand times. I put a second couch pillow under me to give me a lift, just enough to allow me to sit in some sort of posture. And I begin to stare at the wall. 4-Lom pounds away as the lead singer’s searing voice tears through the glass, steel and concrete building to make giant black holes in the night sky.

I sit and stare at the wall in front me. And there it is, the wall plug, the electric socket, at just about eye-level. I thought, “Perfect. I have an ‘impure object’ to meditate on.” It’s an ordinary, 2-outlet, three-prong wall socket. I sit relaxed, hands folded in my lap, not trying to look like I am ‘meditating’, just sitting there. Then DPR’s voice chants in my head: “Get out of the shrine room. You’re never going to become awakened there. Get out and go to a bus stop. You’re more likely to find awakening at a bus stop in Seattle than you will in some fancy shrine room.”

I sit and stare at the electric socket for about 15 minutes altogether. The band is careening through the fastest, loudest, most violent hard-core punk I have heard in decades. The kids in the mosh pit have vaporized into a swirling mass of particles spinning in the Hadron Collider. Two women are sitting next to me on the other couch chatting endlessly about their relationship problems. Queer punks are walking by in sprouts of rainbow-dyed hair above layered shards of black, coming and going up and down the stairs in a SadRad parade. And I’m staring at the electric socket in the wall. And I find myself in a state of pure meditative equipoise. My body is completely relaxed, liquid. My mind is still, in a deeper stillness than I have ever been able to generate in a five day retreat at a rural retreat centre. My breath is effortless. I am thinking nothing. Nothing. And it’s bliss. It’s tantric raging queer dharma punk induced bliss. I feel serene and energetic at the same time. I hear DPR’s voice echoing: “And when you finally become enlightened, come back and let us know how you did it.”