On a recent late Tuesday night I found myself alone on the roof of a former methadone clinic, gazing down at the lights of Tacoma.  Behind me, on Tacoma Avenue South at the edge of the Brewery District, a van caught fire.  Flames.  Smoke.  Sirens. 

I thought of a passage I’d read only moments before in a strange, thin book I’d been handed:

Finally, however, it will become necessary to leave this city which hovers immobile on the edge of sterile twilight … Perhaps other cities exist, occupying the same space & time, but … different.  And perhaps there exist jungles where mere enlightenment is outshadowed by the black light of jaguars.  I have no idea — & I’m terrified.

The occasion was Tacoma’s first ever Artlatch, a come-one-come-all creative gathering based on the Native American potlatch.  The place was Tac 25 Collective, a low-rent, live-in artists’ community that has sprung up from the Asarco-tainted soil of T-town. (Note to developers: Please don’t read the following sentence as “Build condos here!”)  Now nearly one year old, Tac 25 is helping transform one of our city’s ghostliest zones into one of its most vibrant. 

My night had begun in the same place it ended — on the roof.  The sun was slowly descending.  An oily glove lay in a pool of stagnant water.  Gray ventilation boxes.  A capsized FOR SALE sign.  There were no guardrails, no barrier at all.  The roof just ended, and the great, sprawling view began.  Buildings, cranes, highways, cars, weedy vacant lots.

I sat on a white plastic bucket.  Across from me, Weekly Volcano writer Paul Schrag sat in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette and alternating between a gallon jug of water, a Coke and a ROCKSTAR energy drink.  Beside Schrag, on a bucket of roofing tar, sat another Volcano luminary, artist and designer Mary K. Johnson, blinking slowly in the amber light. (She has designed many of this rag’s most memorable covers, including this week’s truly amazing effort.)  Both have been instrumental in getting and keeping this uniquely Tacoman experiment going — Schrag as an administrator and Johnson as the collective’s original resident and foremost advocate.

A passage I read later in the strange, thin book seemed as though it were written about them:

Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc., but privately we will create something else ... something with no commercial potential but valuable beyond price, something occult but woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives.

“Tacoma is a city of producers,” says Johnson.  “I moved here for that vibe.” 

A little over a year ago, she quit a cush corporate design job to become a full-time artist.  Tacoma, with its tight-knit artists’ community and penchant for grassroots movements, seemed the best place to put down roots.  She admits quitting wasn’t the wisest thing to do — not in this economy — but it seemed, at the time, the only thing she could do.

“Fluorescent lights were kind of killing me,” she explains.  “When I got out of school, I thought I’d spend a lot more time in the fire (working as an independent artist), but I was spending a lot of time in the frying pan.  So I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

The greater portion of my life that can be wrenched from the Work/Consume/Die cycle, and (re)turned over to the economy of the ‘bee,’ the greater my chance for pleasure. 

So far, she told me, she likes the fire.  She loves the thrill of living on her own terms, even — and perhaps especially — when that means being broke and tired and scrambling to survive.  After all, that’s what brought her to Tac 25 and to this beautiful, ragged evening on the roof. 

Tac 25 is a place and a community.  More importantly, it’s a phenomenon.  The old concrete building is cold and impersonal — still recovering from its dark past — but the hard work, talents and personalities of the dozen or so artists who work and live there make it feel warm and alive, as though creative energy alone powers the lights and the boiler.   

Out of nothing we will make something … Out of nothing we will imagine our values, and by this act of invention we shall live.

A giant junk robot greets arrivals at the entrance.  An old television simulates a glowing fireplace.  Art adorns the institutional walls.  Lining the halls are unique, unexpected spaces — the messy, happy, sunlit rooms where residents and studio renters live and work.  Friends share a kitchen.  Friends trade food, art supplies and advice, and often work side by side.  During the summer heat wave, when it became too hot to work comfortably during the day, Tac 25 residents took to the sidewalks at night, setting up lights and easels and blaring klezmer music through a big Peavey amp.  The cops came by, worried for the artists’ safety, but Johnson says bad guys weren’t a problem, despite the neighborhood’s less than good reputation.

“I think the klezmer got ’em.”

“It’s just this strange alchemical reaction,” says Schrag, summing up how the environment at Tac 25 spawns a kind of mysterious invention, by which the created transcends the creators — the art, certainly, but also the moment of its making.

The sun surrendering, we returned inside for Artlatch, an effort to share that moment with the public.  Downstairs, a guy in a beret baked desserts and a writer worked at a desk on the sidewalk.  Easels were set up upstairs in the wood-paneled day room.  Food and wine sat on a table.  Music was piped through the Peavey from a laptop, lurching from ambient to rap.  I sat in a soft chair, watching, taking notes.  Someone — Schrag — handed me a book: Immediatism by Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), an anarchist theorist and poet.  I’d never heard of Bey or the book. 

I read a random passage:

Ontological anarchy proposes that we wake up, and create our own day — even in the shadow of the State, the postulant giant who sleeps, and whose dreams of order metastasize as spasms of spectacular violence.

“I had a dream about cooked squash last night,” someone says, the Artlach in full effect.

Let me be your wandering bishop …

Suddenly, everyone is eating dates: “They look like poop, but they’re delicious.”

In effect, chaos is life.  All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement — is chaos.  From this point of view, Order appears as death, cessation, crystallization, alien silence.  

Immediatism, in Bey’s writing, means unscripted, unmediated creative experience — art, music, food, dance and poetry lived as it’s being made; spontaneous beauty allowed to occur; anarchy shared and nurtured and embraced; chaos kissed.  It’s a warm night on a rooftop with a glass of wine.  It’s a van on fire in the street.  It’s the right book at the right time.  It’s painters painting and philosophers philosophizing and writers writing and someone opening the door to say, “Just warning you guys, I’m letting a rabbit loose.”  It is everything Johnson’s old job was not and everything Tac 25 Collective is. 

It is Tuesday night in Tacoma.