"Can we pull it off?"
An ode to the creative energy of Mt Caz
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This week on my Migration Tour, what gets us from Oregon back down to Southern California is two zine fests, which I thought would be an essay about the energetic differences between the two states…but it turned into an ode1 to Mt Caz instead, which is the fuel I need this week amidst the heartbreak. (Which is also to say this is a prayer and an ode to the refugia of the people’s universities and autonomous zones across college campus encampments, in demanding accountability for American complicity in genocide as Rafah burns devastatingly and senselessly.)
In spring 2023, I get into both Southern Oregon Zine Fest and LA Zine Fest. Every time I tell someone I’m planning to table at 2 fests in 2 different states in as many days, I can’t help grinning really big because I get that soaring flying feeling from the absurdity of trying. This feels different than the squirrel brain puzzle (fueled by anxiety) of trying and failing to buy a car because this puzzle (fueled by audacity) is undergirded by a confidence that I’m pretty sure I can pull this off — and that the fun is in the trying.
It’s a feeling that I haven’t felt steeped in since the heydays of Mt Caz, and I miss it I miss it I miss it. Once, Alisha described the culture of Mt Caz as “can we pull this off?” Once, Matteo described Mt Caz as a place “where dreams come true.” We co-produced and collectively manifested what most people only ever talked about doing, idly in daydreams and smalltalk.
DIY artist residencies in a spare bedroom dubbed Terra Incognita by our first accidental artist-in-residence? Why not.
A weekend Wander Conference where the participants were also the speakers as we hiked? Done.
Two seatings of a Cajun Vegan Pop-up Restaurant in The Grove? Did that.
A Yogurt Coop to foment culture and practice sharing resources? Twice.
Mermaid butoh performance for 30 people in our living room? Midnight Snack Society? Microvariety Show? Check check check.
To the untrained eye, Mt Caz was just a humble house in the burbs of a college town of 60,000 in Corvallis, Oregon, on land that was stewarded by the Mary River’s Band of the Kalapuya people before the settlers came and stole and displaced and violently erased.
But Mt Caz was also a renegade community art space run by Albert and Christina, two radical weirdo’s who believed in sharing the excesses of having TWO(!) living rooms and a WHOLE guest bedroom. In 2017, we had moved to town from the Bay Area after living in crammed Bay Area rentals2 on stolen Ohlone lands. We were coming from a place alive with so much creative activity yet too little access to free-enough spaces for play, hospitality, or the magical combination of both. We wanted to change up that equation. If you offered up free space, would the creative energy come? Mt Caz proved yes. Our community proved yes.3
We said some version of these same introductory bits at the start of all our events:
Welcome to Mt. Caz!
Some logistical notes: there are emergency exits from the door you came in or through the door in the Swampy Bog. All-gender bathrooms are through the Stream over there.
We want to begin by honoring where we are. There is a Lakota tradition of acknowledging the four directions, the land, and the people living here -- past, present and future. We would like to acknowledge that Mt. Caz sits on the ancestral lands of the Kalapuya People, who were forcibly removed in 1855. They are now members of Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. We speak these truths and honor these complexities in order to move toward full truth, continued relationship, and reconciliation.
You are sitting in the Grove at Mount Caz, which is many things collectively. Some of these things it is already! Some of these things it is because you are here right now.
Mount Caz is a renegade community arts space, built on the principle that we have abundant resources when we share those intangible parts of ourselves, like our creativity, our space, and our energy. That social capital is self-generating, that by participating in community, we generate exponentially more value for the community (the network effect, look it up). We wish it to be a free venue, a coworking studio, a potluck restaurant, an artists’ Third Place, a subversive classroom, a weird library, a home for artists, and more!
Thank you for joining us and showing up today. If you’d like to contribute to Mount Caz, you can sign up for our mailing list over there or consider donating in the box. But more than that, think about how your living room could do the same thing, and invite us to your next weird event!
Enjoy the show!
Mt Caz was a testament to the energy of believing we could, of never asking for permission. To the compounding of abundance that grows from sharing from a place of abundance. To the catalytic spark of collaboration when there is enough trust to play.
That “can we pull it off” energy was ultimately a casualty of an enduring global coronavirus pandemic. Though it didn’t go away completely, just rested buried underground for some seasons.
Here is what I am also coming to see: Mt Caz was also evidence that foundations of safety can be(come) catalytic and transformative — because those foundations are necessary for play.
A foundation of relationship we could trust: Secure-enough attachment(s), that our energy was freed up to be playful and creative instead of constantly tending to, wondering about, or testing the relationship(s) at play. Trusting that someone else would be in it with you, committed enough to try, so that you could also risk trying.
A foundation of space we could trust: Roots that were ours-enough and cheap-enough that we weren’t expending excess energy worrying about survival or stability. (We didn’t own the house, but Albert’s parents did. As our landlords, they didn’t much care what we did, and so we also didn’t have to be precious about the space.)
It’s amazing how much mental and emotional and CREATIVE energy this frees up in one’s life4 — to have these foundations of safety to ground in.
This is especially apparent to me as I walk through a season of much the opposite in 2024. Seeing how much anxious energy I spend worrying about roots and housing and relationships, and clocking how much time I spend then managing that worry energy, self-soothing and re-calming, it’s no wonder that I have less access to my sense of power and my creative faculties.
If you haven’t already gotten the impression, Mt Caz was extraordinarily silly5 — and that was our fuel.
Part of the work is to (re)build the foundations of safety in our lives — to provide for each other out of abundance instead of scarcity, solidarity instead of extraction. But/and part of the work is to practice the muscle of absurdity to remember that you can.6
No one has to give you permission to do nonsensical things.
Two zine fests in two different states in as many days? To pull off the heist of getting Christina’s body across state lines with the exact right timing of packing up and rental car returns and catching the only flight of the night? Just so that she can table at LA Zine Fest in Long Beach merely because she wants to do it? Because LAZF will kick-off the Southern California leg of her Migration Tour and Healing Pilgrimage?
Did done.
Check.
Why not?
I’m reading Ross Gay’s The Book of (more) Delights. Little odes, little gratitudes, little thanks, that we share, with each other. In the beginning of pandemic, I tried to write a series of ‘elegies for place-based living’. Maybe writing odes would be more nourishing.
In my last stable SF apartment in the Castro, the living room WAS my bedroom. But we still hosted plenty a popup potluck!
The freespace movement also proved this years before Mt Caz. A freespace in SF was how Albert (and Albert) met Norna. Years later, Norna eventually forwarded Albert’s newsletter to Christina, whom Norna had met separately years earlier at a Dr. Sketchy’s event by borrowing an eraser. So that is one version of an origin story where an anarchist space and an artistic space effectively used some human friendships to birth an anarch-ish artist space, named it Mt Caz, and made it seem like it was all the humans’ idea in the first place!
Robin Sloan writes about the parable of the X-Men character Cable: “‘[Telekenetically] you could extinguish a star,’ but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.”
Silly is sacred because silly means blessed, one’s giddyness a sign in olden times of being touched in the head, touched by the divine. (h/t Anthony and Danielle)
Also: Anarchist calisthenics