“Let’s say it’s 9:30 a.m. You’ve been awake for two hours, and a hundred things have already gone right for you. If three of those hundred things had not gone right—your toaster was broken, the hot water wasn’t hot enough, there was a stain on the pants you wanted to wear—you might feel that today the universe is against you, that your luck is bad, that nothing’s going right. And yet the fact is that the vast majority of everything is working with breathtaking efficiency and consistency. You would clearly be deluded to imagine that life is primarily an ordeal.”
An East Village dive bar is about the last place you’d expect a California astrologer to preach a feel-good message, but Rob Brezsny has been hitting a lot of unusual venues on the “Sacred Uproar” tour to promote his new book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. In the last few weeks, he’s come to New York City to read at a laundromat and an art gallery cum performance space cum meditation center called the Church of Sacred Mirrors, so the tiny stage of Continental isn’t such a left-field choice. Except that he doesn’t begin the show from the stage; he starts his exhortations from the back of the bar. “Change your name every day for a thousand days,” he says as he makes his way through the giggling crowd. “Remember, it’s bad luck to be superstitious!” When he gets to the stage, he fires up the music and starts chanting passages from Pronoia; the effect is like a Southern preacher who’s been slipped some acid and set loose with a trance groove soundtrack, and there’s even an “I Have a Dream” speech towards the end of the program. Of course, Brezsny being who he is, his dream goes along the lines of “Oprah Winfrey will buy up all the Pizza Huts on the planet and convert them into a global network of menstrual huts, where for a few days each month, every one of us, men and women alike, can resign from the crazy-making 9-to-5.”
It doesn’t take the crowd too long to get into it, and pretty soon they’re playing along with his call-and-response tactics. Sure, there’s a couple cynical hipsters who go through rituals like the “Unhappy Hour,” where participants get to bitch out loud to each other about everything they hate about their lives, with a smirk, but Brezsny just plays along. If you want to think it’s a joke, fine, but he’s going to never going to relinquish control of the pacing. In a little under an hour, he’s got the kids up front singing along as pretty as a choir—although, truth be told, that might well have been because they were Rev. Billy‘s “Stop Shopping Choir,” who knows? It doesn’t much matter: Brezsny’s clearly won over the crowd, and the line of fans hoping to get a signed copy of Pronoia after the show quickly stretches halfway down the long, narrow room. (If you want to hear for yourself, check out a Brezsny interview conducted by R.U. Sirius (MP3 link), as well as 22 tracks off his latest album.)
photo by Michael Amsler from this 2000 interview; see also this more recent conversation