"If you were at the first Esozone it will be impossible for you not to compare it to this year." - Dead Letter B
When I first heard of Esozone it was still just an idea and a desire. The idea was simply the event itself. The desire, for me, had more to do with the ephemeral community seeking to give birth to the event and in a sense to itself. A community I often find myself at odds with, but with which I am deeply in love. The great magic of Esozone 2007 was not that it happened at all, but that when it did happen the idea and the desire became inseparable. The manifestation of Esozone 2007 was the transfiguration of the transient into the transcendent and I am blessed to be able to say I was there when the word became flesh.
Esozone 2007 was a life changing event for me. Realistically I wouldn't even be writing for this site if it hadn't been for Esozone. I think there are some folks who felt irrevocably changed by Esozone 2008. I know there were, at the very least, people who had a time the likes of which they had never experienced before. So, while it's absolutely unfair for me to expect this year's Esozone to stack up to 2007, having been at both, I have to compare them. For me, in 2008 the idea and the desire were on wildly divergent paths and it came as no real surprise that there was a fair amount of turmoil, even predictions of catastrophic failure leading up to the event. Because the idea and the desire were so wildly divergent it is perhaps best for me to treat them separately in this review.
Despite an "edgier" venue with a more underground feeling the event itself was decidedly more polished and less fringe than 2007. A great many of the topics covered were crowd pleasers but were also well covered terrain; the eight circuit model, canonical futurist pablum, and well tread conspiracy theory for example. The speakers themselves were often another example of this trend. Speakers like Ben Mack and Antero Ali who I enjoyed speaking with when things were casual often irritated me (in the case of the former) or bored me (in the case of the latter) when they adopted their predictable stage personas.
There were also moments that were painful for me to watch; moments that came across as perverse attempts to steal last year's magick. Portions of the mass, as an example, that seemed in some way to be seeking a lineage with Dead Language, a lineage they had absolutely no claim to. The mass in many ways is a symbol of all the things I hated about Esozone 2008; from bad acting where I would have expected magicians to be inflamed in invocation, to a focus on completely unmoving lecturing intellectualism, and a seemingly out of place eulogizing of authors and artists halfway through. The latter requires a special bit of attention.
This portion and indeed the whole of Esozone once again showed a distinctive lack of women, something I found heartbreaking after some of the discussions and events that occurred in 2007. This section too was symptomatic of the tendencies toward a cult of personality and enshrinement of ego structures that hamstrings magick today. Many of the ideas these people had are good and useful ideas but they are also dead horses I'm tired of seeing beaten to fierce applause. Enough with the third generation Crowley and Leary clones. Enough with the artists. It is the art that matters.
Perhaps the most disheartening trend was the way the I saw the people and ideas that made the first Esozone possible pushed aside in favor safe bets. For me the standout example of this was watching Philip K Nixon and Ikipr (representing the multi dimensional open source art entity Man Machine Drum) pushed off stage for a local act. That act while clearly a tight outfit who had put a lot of work into what they do, was not doing anything I didn't see every Friday night in art school. In contrast, as anyone who has seen them can attest, Philip K Nixon and Ikipr are at the forefront of the exploration of the magical potential of soundscapes. Really that sums up a lot of what left me wanting at Esozone, a lot of very tight, very dedicated, but ultimately uninspiring and unmagical acts.
There were some great things too of course. Ikipr's EEG workshop was a stand out and luckily is available in full here. Many of the less structured conversation based workshops evolved into sometimes inspired round tables that caused me to fall in love with the community all over again. In the end that community was Esozone's saving grace. Despite all that was bad about the event, I had one of the best times of my life. I was afforded the chance to speak with magician artists whose work I have a profound respect for, like Lillizen. I met folks like Chris Titan, Brenden Simpson, and Duncan whose passion and irreverent probing made me realize that despite the backdrop I was around my kind; a feeling I'm not often afforded and so treasure when I find it.
Like a band whose first album made you fall in love with music, but whose sophomore release was only tolerable because of the ways it kind of reminded you of what they were capable of, Esozone stands at a significant point in its development. When 2009 rolls around Esozone will have to make a decision; push forward further into the fringe that made it stand out out as something special in 2007, or abandon its core audience for the glittering possibility of becoming a respectable money making occultnik happening. While I don't suggest that one choice will be better than another for those holding the egregore's reigns, I do know which I'm pulling for, and I am certain it cannot survive another year struggling with that choice.
Recent Comments