On the Rocks • Fringe fest delves into the darkness

By anne marie distefano

The Portland Tribune, Oct 16, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ANNI TRACY / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Practitioners of ritual magic, mad science and occult art gathered in Southeast Portland for Esozone, a convention for fringe thinkers. The weekend included music, lectures and a Midnight Magickal Mass.

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I have some disturbing news: Somewhere in Portland, the Ragnarok Engine is under construction.

My informants, Klint Finley and Vincent al Keen, are the organizers of Esozone, a fringe festival that took place in Sellwood over the Oct. 10-12 weekend.

Along with lectures such as “2012: Forestructuring the New Aeon” and “Psychotronics with Bill Whitcomb,” Finley and al Keen scheduled one by Rex Diabolos Church, Portland’s most high-profile Satanist, and the creator of the engine.

“It’s a contraption,” elucidates al Keen, “that is supposed to bring about the end of the world.”

“That’s mad science,” Finley says. “It’s interesting to hear about, you hope maybe it works, doesn’t work, whatever. … I hope it doesn’t work. But that’s not really the point.”

The point, for Esozone, is to bring people with certain arcane, interrelated interests together.

“Mad scientists, occultists, conspiracy theorists, outsider artists, visionary artists and just sort of general weirdo intellectuals,” is how Finley describes them. Participants came from as far away as Austria, with quite a few from Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, because there are certain things you just can’t talk about around the water cooler at work. Like the fact that you’re a Satanist, for instance.

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When I arrive, about 10 on Saturday night, Dennis McKenna is lecturing on serotonin, psychedelic drugs and human-plant coevolution. About 70 people are seated in the main room of a warehouse called the Watershed Building. Young men with long beards and women in homemade clothing sit on folding chairs, secondhand couches and the floor.

A woman whose head is shaved, except for a small topknot, tapes a piece of paper to the wall. It reads, “This is a distraction.”

Later, she’s at the snack bar, asking a guy named Dead Letter about his project, Pirate Mail. “We take the fundamental framing that none of the mail should get there,” explains Dead Letter, who is a high school math teacher by day.

Stapled to a nearby wall are hundreds of envelopes, each with a skull stenciled on it. They are all addressed to someone: Badn at U.C. Berkeley Physics, Mike Martel at the Contour Nightclub, or Jamil, whose address is “the coop board, Arcata.” The idea is that someone will decide to write to one of these people, and then hand the letter off to someone else who’s headed in their approximate direction. Occasionally, a letter actually reaches its destination.

“It’s a joke about a game about a story about a sport,” Dead Letter says.

“Exactly,” replies the woman with the topknot.

Dead Letter runs the Watershed Building along with a partner named Wrench.

He’s a bit skeptical of Esozone’s open-minded embrace of ideas. “Esozone has a lot of ungrounded metaphor,” he says. “I hear a lot of speakers who could be translated into a truth by saying, OK, here’s this interesting metaphorical construct. … When they say this is reality it’s like, well, show me the evidence.”