The Next Bardo

Every March, my old friend Mark Pesce makes a pilgrimage from Sydney to San Francisco to be a grand judge at the LAUNCH Festival, the world’s largest startup event. The plan this year was for Mark to stay at our house the couple of days before the event, so as to settle in and take some chill time before the festival. Well, no such luck — because Mark is due to arrive on February 28th, and as it turns out, February 28th is pretty special this year. And Mark has an important assignment.

It hit me just a few days after I unloaded about my undying adoration for David Bowie: February 28th is exactly 49 days after Bowie’s death, and according to Tibetan tradition as described in The Book of the Dead, a person’s soul remains on earth for a period of 49 days before being reborn in a new individual. After a frantic counting-on-fingers and with extra help from an online date calculator, I concluded that my math was correct and promptly texted Mark, “fucking call me.”

And thus we concocted our latest in a string of madcap mystical schemes spanning twenty years. On February 28th in San Francisco, we will perform a Book of the Dead ritual for David Bowie. The Book describes precise rituals for guiding one through the experiences that the consciousness has after death, in the bardo — the interval between death and the next rebirth. Mark, our resident high priest, will lead a group of Bowie devotees in reading from the Book, in a rite intended to guide The Thin White Duke’s soul to a good place. Bowie was familiar with The Book of the Dead, famously referring to it in the lyrics of one of his most mystical and beautiful ballads, Quicksand:

“If I don’t explain what you want to know, you can tell me all about it on the next bardo.”

Well, David, get ready for an earful. We still have many questions.

You may be wondering what qualifies us for such an audacious undertaking. First off, we’re Bowie maniacs. Personally I think that’s sufficient. But second, it’s not our first rodeo. Our initial five minutes of fame actually came not so much from VRML as from a Wired Magazine piece about the intersection of Wicca and virtual reality, and the somewhat-pagan roots of my first startup. You can read about it here in Erik Davis’ wonderful piece called Technopagans from a 1995 issue:

Tough act to follow, I know. But we have done just that at least once: in 1999, we collaborated with maestro Paul Godwin on DJ Christ, Superstar!, a rave reinterpretation of Andrew Lloyd-Weber and Tim Rice’s classic rock opera, performed one time only, ever, at that year’s Burning Man. It was an epic, magical evening that people still talk about to this day.

For DJ Christ, we refactored the Passion into a modern-day tale of conspiracy, Jewbu spirituality and rave culture. Paul remixed the original music out of its 70's jazz rock cliches into swirling electronic ecstasy. And we played to a packed house. 2500 people, most of them tripping balls, sat still for two and half hours while we rewrote 2000 years of history: our production ended not with a crucifixion but a birth, as the entire cast processed through a womb-like portal, marking a transition from eons of glum bondage-religion into a hopeful, 120 BPM new millennium.

So, we’re getting the band back together for Bowie Bardo. After Mark leads the ritual, my new musical collective Bluebird will do a short and rather unrehearsed tribute gig to honor Major Tom and friends. Paul will be on hand playing keys and re-envisioning some of the classic arrangements. Then we’ll party and remember Bowie once again… as his avatar passes on to the next adventure.

Interested? Great! Sordid details following. If you’re in SF, stop by. Doors at 7. Ritual at 8 sharp. We’d love for people around the world to take part, too, via #bowiebardo. Come join us.