In a story about paradise, the complications inevitably follow, so perhaps a simple description first—Biosquat is three or four acres of scrub, a derelict tract of land in East Austin (itself a somewhat neglected section of the city) on which Dave Santos has established at least the rudiments of an eco-village. There’s a cattle gate and a mailbox out front, and a forked tote road leads partway into the property; from there footpaths wind through stands of juniper and oak and mesquite. Plants in this part of the country, baffled by the sun, seek and hide from it all at once, suffering a kind of conflicted heliotropism in which the branches of a dry fissured oak, for instance, grow up and out, turn back, go down, curl and twist, writhing so much that, even still, they seem in motion, snaking like the hair of a Gorgon. The heat in August is oppressive, and the umbrage these stunted trees provide is spotty, more shadow than shade, offering little relief. Underfoot, the blanched soil at Biosquat feels like crushed brick and hardly seems arable. I saw no wildlife other than a few lizards, although I was told rats and raccoons, as well as coral snakes, live in the area. Mosquitoes were plague-plentiful, and Dave Santos suggested, rather alarmingly, that the once-numerous crows were decimated by West Nile virus. In the distance you could hear the constant hum of cars, and while Biosquat’s ambitions are somewhat Edenic, at present it still retains the mood and look of a vacant lot; it has a spurned and forgotten quality, as if the world had, without warning or explanation, fallen in love with someone else.
Once inside the gate, along the paths, you find the first improvements, the nets and tents and bamboo beds, the solar panels and the cistern and the terraced gardens, a limestone megalith surrounded by rickety scaffolds and a series of unfinished structures, the ceilings of which are fabricated from bike rims and a cladding of placards and signs left behind by old political campaigns. There’s a pale green trailer and a toilet mounted on a tricycle and a trellis of unripe tomatoes hanging, again, from bike rims. There’s welding equipment, there’s rebar and conduit, there’s an anvil on a stump and a primitive garden hoe cleverly forged from a piece of pipe and a chain ring. The visual impact of the place is surreal and collagist, although, sprawling with junk, it also comes quite close in character to the sort of illegal dump site every city has, those wooded hillsides that mysteriously fill with unwanted mattresses and shopping carts and washing machines. Over the couple of hot August days I spent at Biosquat, Santos often spoke of “trash worship,” an idea meant to elevate debris into an aesthetic and invigorate refuse with a rarefied sense of social mission—something more high-minded and messianic than recycling, at any rate—and perhaps that’s what he’s up to, perhaps the bikes and the rebar and the bamboo aren’t haphazard, aren’t just old crap nobody else wants, but are instead the base materials for building the small, resonant civilization he imagines.
I, for one, was willing to believe. I was willing to believe that, on a warm fall night in the future, estivating frogs would bellow to life in ponds that, as of now, don’t exist. I was willing to believe that human shit is second only to bat guano as a nutrient and fertilizer, and that it’s entirely odorless when mixed with mulch. I was willing to believe that a recipe of soybean oil and chili peppers would eradicate the mosquitoes and make for an edible pesticide. I was willing to believe in things I did not understand, in Hilbert space and eigenforms and combinatorics, and I was willing to believe in houses that would someday look, fantastically, like big puppets. I was more than willing to believe in a world in which, quite beautifully, nothing was outcast or lost or abandoned, not people or things or ideals. I was willing to believe in all the enthusiasms Dave Santos believes in—the radical circus and the mutant bikes and the chicken tractor and the gnat goggles and the flying robots and the car that runs on rain. I was even willing to believe, in principle, that an earthly paradise, lush and complete, could be improvised and sustained with rainwater, PVC pipe, a homemade cistern, and a solar-powered bilge pump. I was willing to believe all of this and more—that human migration and nomadism make sense, that pedaling a bike a mere six weeks a year will keep you in an eternal spring, that Bucky Fuller once bathed a family of four with a single cup of water—but I was not willing to believe this:
“Ultimately, I think colonizing the atmosphere is the solution to a lot of ecological problems . . . [Uh-huh.]1 And it’s also more sensible than the space fantasies—the idea that we’re ready to build a bunch of rockets and blast off and live in orbit. [Right.] Engineering-wise, it’s much simpler to colonize the lower atmosphere. [Uh-huh.] And so we have the stratosphere, is where I started theorizing. I lectured at UT Aerospace on the subject . . . We could take carbon out of the atmosphere. We have excess carbon dioxide, we’d liberate oxygen to help us breathe up in the stratosphere, we could mix that oxygen in with our helium and live inside these huge cathedral spaces—we’d be talking a little like Donald Duck—but because of the solar energy coming in we’d have a shirtsleeve, close-to-sea-level-pressure environment, up above the weather [Uh-huh.], and totally reliable electric solar power. [Yeah.] And we could use that electricity for ion propulsion to crack the carbon dioxide, to regenerate the ozone, using the catalytic reactors of these ion propulsion engines, and get carbon credits, from, like, the nations that want to do something good for the environment. We could build this aerial civilization from the carbon we’ve dumped in the atmosphere. [Yeah, yeah.]
“And then go anywhere we want, like the round-the-world ballooners. By knowing, by being able to visualize the atmosphere, they can steer . . . [Uh-huh.] And they didn’t even have any propulsion except the ability to go up and down. [Right. Right. Right, right.] So we have these sites around the world that are like stratospheric elevators where prevailing winds hit a mountain and create a stratospheric mountain wave, and so those are places you could have gliders that soar up to your stratospheric cities. [Yeah.] Getting down’s easy. [Right.] You could just skydive. [Uh-huh.] Out of the stratosphere. [Yeah, yeah.] It would be the basis of an Olympian civilization, living up in the clouds. I’d like to see socially conscious hippies get there as opposed to some death star. [Yeah, yeah, yeah—so you see Biosquat in relation to everything you’re saying as . . .] As a stepping-stone. [Yeah—it also seems somehow, uh, it seems very fluid.]”
Dave Santos has some higher education, but essentially he’s a kind of autodidact. He went to Washington College (“a party school on the great waterbird migratory flyway of the Chesapeake”), dropped out, enrolled at the University of Texas, dropped out, matriculated, dropped out, whereafter he cut tuition costs by auditing classes or simply sitting in on lectures that interested him. (“I was able to lap up aura and knowledge from Nobel laureates and other legends in this way.”) In conversation he has that ravenous fierce range of the self-taught: Hilbert space, Foucault, ion propulsion, Hazlitt’s translation of Montaigne, heuristic programming, Rousseau in the original French (“It wore me out.”), matrix algebra, zines, Mircea Eliade, Radio Shack manuals, predicate calculus, pamphlets on composting. Without much lingering or elaboration the learned references pile up—some Foucault here, a little Rousseau over there—in an allusive, jumbled analogue to the vacant lot Biosquat is built on. For Santos—fringy, wandering outside the codes and canons of academe—every book he’s read is a perfect, remarkable objet trouvé, to which he brings tremendous zeal.
Like a lot of autodidacts, Dave Santos wants to outsmart you. His language sounds impressively academic but slightly forged. He favors, for instance, coinages (“biobikes,” “edjidotopia”), as if he were exploring the frontiers of a discipline, working a lonely terrain and discovering things for which, as yet, there are no names; or he dresses up a phrase for the scientifically credible sound it will make (“Arrest Proofing Protocols,” “Bivy Head Observatory”); and whenever there is an opportunity to swap in a complex word for a simple one, an elaborate construction for a clear explanation, Santos is there, substituting “rear-optics” for mirror, “microhedonics” for good fun, and “dive reflex” for hitting the ditch, creating his own taxonomy, a systematics behind which, I suspect, there is no system.
This makes him powerful and persuasive to a point, and never less than entertaining, but I think too that his showy, protesting intelligence masks an insecurity, a feeling, never entirely put to rest, that he doesn’t belong in the room. He talked about attending AI conferences with his home-built robots and being “respected by these people who, normally, without a PhD, you shouldn’t even be in the same room [with].” “Shouldn’t” is a curious choice—why not the more neutral “couldn’t” or “wouldn’t”?—in that the word subtly switches the speaker: it doesn’t actually belong to Santos but to the voice of an absent, unnamed, scolding authority. Here, then, is the central theme of paradise—banishment and exile.
And so in exile—let’s say—he elaborates his own thing. The various structures on Biosquat proper include the sleeping quarters, mostly tents and mosquito netting, and “the mother ship,” as Santos calls it, a travel trailer the color of canned peas that sits under a carport. The trailer is rough and shabby, the kitchen kind of a sty, ruling out any chance that Biosquat has a hidden desire for conventional uptight domestic order. All of this is fairly standard, and the cheap, sagging tents in particular give the place the familiar look and feel of a homeless camp. The chicken tractor is interesting—a low cage laid out along a footpath, with a plywood coop at one end. The idea is that the chickens, confined to a run, will peck and till the earth, kill the weeds, eat the insects, shit and thereby fertilize the soil, but just before I arrived they were depredated by raccoons (dramatizing a flaw in the curious harmonic stasis of Eden that I could never resolve in childhood: What would everybody eat, I’d wonder, if they couldn’t eat each other?) A homemade cistern collects water from the roof of the carport; the water is then pumped to the terraced gardens, and a solar oven, sitting on a shopping cart—a corolla of petal-shaped panels open to the sun—generates just enough heat to cook a pot of beans.
The most interesting structures at Biosquat are built with an armature of bike rims sheathed with corrugated plastic. The rims are fastened together with tie wire and arch nicely toward the sky, propped up from below by lengths of bent rebar or the trunks of scavenged trees. The chrome spokes make for exactly the kind of airiness Santos seeks elsewhere through elevated language; their thinness gives an otherwise stout ceiling a delicate appearance and, clad with the corrugated plastic, which is predominantly white, the rims and spokes together look, overhead, like a drove of gauzy parasols. The curving shape and the texture of the skin remind you of Gehry, as does the collagist sensibility and the use Santos makes of cheap-tech materials. At this point in their construction, somewhat unfinished, you feel like calling these ingenious, junky, Quonset-like things “pieces”—as you would a piece of sculpture. It’s one of the paradoxes I found most intriguing about Santos: that he’s a commissioned sculptor, working in an art form bound to materials and materiality while putting such a heavy, personal accent on ideas of ascent and the ethereal. This isn’t an ambition foreign to sculpture, for sure, and even straight verisimilitude is an attempt to lift life out of stone, transcending a basic, obdurate fact about the physical stuff. So the pieces are unfinished—although given their resemblance to collage and their use of trash they may always resist looking finished—and in their present condition they encapsulate the cosmology of Santos’s project as a whole. There’s the empyreal ceiling above, shaped like a parachute, and then, below, Santos is building rude walls from red clay that he digs out of the ground; in between, the walls will be reinforced using, of course, bike frames—a sort of colorful bike rebar that, at this point, remains exposed, so that the bikes emerge from the clay and sit at a sort of midpoint between earth and sky.
Flight is a leitmotif for Santos, and the theme reaches richly into all the word’s meanings, from flying to fleeing to the exuberances of fancy and transcendence to joyrides and quests. “You need that metaphoric inspiration to get a focus,” he says. And so when he talks of nomadism the idea veers from roving bikes to migratory birds and eventually melds into “a dream of autonomous migration in self-sufficient skybikes with ultralight amenities. It is a soaring of light spirits—dematerialized, floating, ethereal, intense.” A skybike probably should not “dematerialize,” not in flight, anyway, but it’s the turning of this kind of trope that marks for me the line between belief and disbelief, between accepting the visionary and balking at the vision. The movement from skybikes as an engineering feat to light spirits as a condition of the soul is purely metaphoric. It owes more to the Book of Revelation than it does to physics, more to the ecstatic tradition in poetry than it does to aeronautics. Looking around Biosquat, at the tangle of bikes or the hardscrabble soil, the effort of translating stubborn matter into an immaterial vision is evident. It’s slow going. And while the freedom described here is a spiritual event—an apotheosis—it’s also an escape from the poverty of the corporeal world, a gripe you always hear from lyric poets, saints, and visionaries.
This is tricky terrain, the transition from the airy intensity of the imagination to the denser inspissations of reality. In his writings on the web Santos so often leaves sense for sound, so often eases away from the meaning of a word for the music it will make and abandons practicality for the pleasing image, that his real project seems to be about the liberation of language, about words loosed from their context, about poetry. (In a passage I really like, he writes that the pilots of these skybikes “use dust devils as the lift of last resort. You kamikaze into them, treetop high, and hope to rise enough to catch a big convection cell . . . too big, you dement into a winged blue Popsicle.”) In this context Santos reminds me of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and both men are closer to the furor poeticus of Plato than they are to a hard-minded historian like Marx or a more sober utopian like Robert Owen. Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.” He believed there were 810 psychological types and organized his phalanstères to include two of each. He believed in nearly complete sexual liberation—sadism, masochism, sodomy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, and sex between close relatives—and he also believed that salt would one day leech from the seas and that those seas would in turn become oceans of lemonade.
Some of what Santos is up to might be called Art Brut, although in its American form, as Outsider Art, its appreciation contains a quotient of irony and class snobbery or condescension that has always bothered me. Plus, Santos doesn’t strictly qualify—too much training, as a sculptor and muralist, and too much savvy, too much awareness of his renegade role in relation to the gallery world. He’s something of a pisser, resistant to art rather than naïvely unaware of its trends, so perhaps the uppercase label that suits him best is Marginal Art. At any rate, Biosquat has some of the Art Brut stuff—its materials are humble, it’s the work of a solitary devoted soul, it’s eccentric and enigmatic, it’s being undertaken in near total disregard of public opinion—and one day it may resemble the Watts Towers or the Palais Idéal. Biosquat is packed with thought, text-like, and its themes—cycling, nomadism, trash worship, solar power—touch everything from the fences to the toilets. The toilet I used, for instance, is your traditional white porcelain seat mounted on a trike, and when you’re done, you toss in some mulch (not lime, which, Santos says, just turns the waste into a bunch of brick turds), and then periodically the whole contraption is inched forward, leaving in its trail a swath of fertilizer suitable for gardening. In a couple places around the property there were also pissoirs fashioned out of plastic Clorox bottles, from which the bottoms had been snipped, and black hoses that then ran into beds of wood chips, the exact agro-purpose of which escaped me, but had something to do, I imagine, with urine’s nitrogen content. The emunctory enthusiasms of people in eco-villages, always fiddling with their waste, might make for an interesting study, but meanwhile the tricycle toilet at Biosquat worked wonderfully. It didn’t stink at all, a claim I’d seriously doubted when Dave Santos first mentioned it, and crapping alfresco is always nice.
One of the laws of Biosquat, it seemed, was that nothing could be what it was originally. The gnat goggles were made from the screens of a tea infuser; to the fat ends of a set of chopsticks Santos had fixed, on one, a tablespoon, and on the other, a toothbrush. He called this general category of transformation “mutant technology.” Some of these transformations—especially the bikes—are right in the grain of a particular brand of American genius that flourished in the years following World War II. This genius centered around car culture, and the era probably reached its meridian in Southern California, in the fifties and sixties, waning somewhat by the 1970s. Dave Santos isn’t all that different in spirit from a SoCal gearhead like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, automotive designer and visionary, creator of Rat Fink, who pioneered the use of fiberglass in car bodies and was a guru/hero to the legions of boys who built scale models of his hot rods—the Outlaw, the Beatnik Bandit, the Mysterion—and any shade-tree mechanic who had an aesthetic bone aching in his body. Roth was celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s seminal early essay “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and even today his legacy of transformed, souped-up, mutant machines hasn’t entirely gone away. The idea of an utterly reworked kick-ass car is still amply evident among the Hispanic boys who cruise Hollywood Boulevard on Friday nights, although in the main that lexicon has gone out of the life of white kids (those who don’t live in Barstow or Bakersfield or Stockton, anyway).
Now auto shop’s dead, and probably hipsters study art, anyway, but back in the day a certain, perhaps limited manhood made its way into public by lovingly (and literally) deconstructing one of the culture’s main givens—the car—and metamorphosing it with saws and torches, complex paints and layers of lacquer, until it shed its dull utility and became art—primarily, as Wolfe says, sculpture. (Roth cast the bodies of his bizarro cars with plaster molds.) It’s no accident that this kind of revamping flourishes in macho cultures, since it’s so openly about the male need of outlets for sensitivity that aren’t permissible and are, in fact, studiously removed from spectacles like football. In an essay quite similar in gist to Wolfe’s, Dave Hickey argues that hot-rodding is about dissent, which I think is partially true. Hispanics in LA, for example, often favor hopped-up trucks, in part to recoup and then triumph over the denigrations of migrant labor life, spent riding around dusty fields, packed in the backs of pickups like loads of produce. The very qualities that make a truck functional for farmwork—beefy suspension, extra clearance, etc.—are completely subverted in a lowrider, which couldn’t handle even the slightest rut without high-centering or fatally bashing the rocker panels. Lowriders are so outrageously spiffy and cool—a new dandyism—they look like they’ve never done a day of work in their lives.
And just so, Dave Santos’s bikes are ridiculous from the standpoint of utility. Everything an elite rider might want for the Tour de France—lightness, strength, balance, low resistance—is out the window once Santos fires up his torch and begins to build a mutant bike for his migratory trips to Mexico: lengthening the seat tubes by a couple of feet, raising the bottom brackets, setting the chain rings and cranks on a vertical axis, chopping the forks, making the saddles cushy with wads of foam and a wrap of duct tape, improvising fairings of plaster and fabric. They aren’t conventionally beautiful, these bikes, and they don’t even seem roadworthy—they’re circus bikes for goofy, toppling clowns—but in their strange, abstracted state they’re definitely objects, maybe sculptures. Everything Dave Santos does at Biosquat is an attempt to render a vivid interior external, and as such, his bikes are primarily an index to the visionary mind of the maker. But the central problem with any visionary experience, plaguing all seers, is one of verification. I’m not talking about vision as an eyeball thing (Did you see that? ), but vision as imagination, intuition, revelation (Did you experience that? ), where issues of authenticity, truth, and validity (Are you nuts? ) become hugely problematic—for example, when you’re talking about winged bikes, fitted with feathers of old, still utile trash, that might one day carry hippies to the stratosphere.
At one point Santos said he was fascinated by “those little golden ages that are
gone before you know it.” But he also said: “That’s where I’m a little pessimistic,
because sometimes cultures reach a peak and they don’t just keep on going forever,
you know—then there’s ruins, and thousands of years, and, you know, after ancient
Greece, they had a lot of downtime, the action went somewhere else. So there’s a
lot of sadness, a lot of missed opportunities, a lot of mistakes.” Biosquat aspires
to get outside this story. It’s an attempt at creating some kind of suspension,
anyway—a world of signs and wonders, of marvels and revelations, of continuous amazement.
How? Every object at Biosquat is tinkered with until it’s an original, toyed with
until it resembles nothing else. Even Santos’s fondness for neologisms is a way of
wrenching old words into something new and unique. I’d never seen a toothbrush on
a chopstick—it’s so Dada and sensible at the same time—nor had I taken a shit on
a trike. Each object—like Big Daddy Roth’s hot rods or the Hispanic boys’ chopped
and channeled trucks—is an attempt to seize life at a moment of glory, to embody
an essence and hold it, stilling the ephemeral, apotheosizing what would otherwise
pass, as all things pass. The mutant bikes, the bamboo beds, the gnat goggles and
the Chicano robots and the corrugated plastic domes are all singular—freaky, a one-off,
an aberrance, a whole world of exceptions. All of it exists somewhere beyond sadness
or mistakes or missed opportunities, because, transformed, there’s nothing to compare
it to. It’s meant to speak to you in the language of the burning bush, it’s supposed
to be a walk on water, it’s all truth of another order, as William James says, like
the coin Christ pulls from the mouth of the fish to pay the temple tax. These are
called miracles, of course, and they break a lot of natural laws, but as transformations,
utterly singular, beyond argument, they too are meant to convince you that the kingdom
has already arrived, here on Earth.
1 My questions and exclamations—every noise I made—appear here within brackets.