OUTER LlMITS

Why Is This
Aristocrat out Flacking

for Psychic Mavericks?
By Jerry Stahl

A son of a count in praise of altered states

Micropollution . . ."
Brando Crespi, Continental gent,
Cutting Edge entrepreneur and psychic sympathizer, runs one manicured finger up the belly of a white vase on his office coffee table, contemplates the black grit on his digit and, in a gesture of New Age irony, holds the grime up to the light. "Mi- cropollution," he sighs again, grinning his gentle grin, asprawl on his couch like some long-legged David Steinberg, a Sherman MCD dangling loosely between his teeth. The rich grime, reminiscent of the residue that once stained the drapes in eastern mill towns, is fallout from Crespi's negative-ion dispenser. The ionizer, a black plastic cylinder the size of a submarine sandwich, sports a patch of copper frizz bushing Harpo-style from its slanted top.

It purifies the air even as we speak. But all progress has its drawbacks, and the price of this fresh, cheer-inducing oxygen is that nasty sheen on the finger. As it happens, Crespi himself is a principal in Energaire, the firm that markets the antipolluters. He's also involved in Samadhi, a business that sells and operates sensory-deprivation centers. Samadhi has now sprouted three outlets-in San Francisco, L.A. and Tucson. All push what might be called the caviar of contemporary tranquillity, the peculiar, spaceyweightless bliss lurking in a pool of quasiplacental brine. Recently, Michael Crichton claimed that ftoating in the tanks even helped him conquer dreaded writer's block. After a crucial plunge, apparently, he bounced back to knock down a cool million-five with Congo-not bad far an hour spelli imitating a cognitive pickle. There's free tea, too!
 
(For first-time seekers, eager to summon their own alpha waves, a float runs approximately $20. San Francisco's center, which boasts a sprawling 25 port-a-wombs, offers a spacious, dimly lighted lounge far postfloat recovery. L.A.'s branch operates behind a beauty salon on Wilshire, just off La Cienega, and makes do with five chambers. Down bere, though, the lights are kept a little brighter.)
 
Along with these futuristic endeavors, Crespi will soon be marketing ReSeal containers, innovative little items capable of storing perishable food for six months without preservatives-plus a not-yet-public, self-generating energy source still too secret to talk about. All this while he leads the way in the field of corporate-oriented psychic consulting. (It worked, you may recall, far ABC until that network fired the soothsayer . . .)
Strange stuff for the son of an Italian count and an American Vogue editor. But Brando Crespi seems to have carved a career and a life out of the more unlikely corners of contemporary culture. It is not enought, apparently, to be smart, in possession of large sums of inherited wealth and class and to look leading-mannish. These days a fellow needs more. It's true! Though his name sounds like a jet-set breakfast cercal, the man himself is an even more unlikely product. When he arrived in Los Angeles five years ago, Crespi says, it was as an an-thropologist and as an artist. His paintings had already been the subject  of eight shows in Europe. He had also written a book ("a personal manual for transformation"), called Riding Dragons, and served as political editor to Momento Sera (Rome's Herald Examiner). Once in L.A., Crespi founded his namesake PR firm, with simple La Cienega Boulevard offices, that handles Third Wave visionaries like Samadhi, along with more overtly chichi Italian designers, such as Gianfranco Ferre, Fendi and Laura Biagotti, whose Rodeo Drive representation Brando helped nurse into existence.

 
But Crespi's real interest resides in the fringier domains of consciousness. We're not talking Uri Geller here. Twisted dinnerware is not part of the program. Instead of nightclub acts, Crespi and his cohorts have sought out a more low-key breed of intuitive power-men and women whose lives (or careers) do not revolve around their remarkable abilities. With their help, the forward-looking fellow is struggling to transform the scarcely comprehensible into the supremely profitable. On some level, all of Crespi's work revolves around this central effort. Whether harnessing psychic prowess to discover oil or to unearth lost civilizations, the real purpose is to make lucrative the seemingly miraculous but not far any obvious reasons. The real motive is more subtle than fiere baksheesh. "A few years ago a friend and I had a revelation," he explains. "In this culture things are not real unless they make money. It's a rough definition, but a working hypothesis. So we decided to explore the practical applications of intuitive functioning psychic functioning, if you will. "It can," he continues, "be profitable without being negative. The insight carne to me one day when I realized that God is also in Swiss bank accounts. Much of my work has been to get serious researchers more sophisticated about the marketplace. This has to do with changing your perspective about money. It's part of my own transformation." He dishes out a characteristic Crespi koan: "You always end up teaching what you need to learn." This is heavy material, and the source is as intriguing as the content. As the scion of bona fide Old World royalty, Crespi represents that much-maligned breed most often associated with the earless antics of J. Paul Getty Jr.: the frivolous sons of fabulous wealthy parents. His early years, in fact, were spent prepping at Le Rosey, the Swiss spot Life dubbed "School of Kings," where his roomie was none other than young Winthrop Rockefeller. All grown up, he now exists as a veteran of lnterview interviews-high on the index of world-class cool and his face pops up regularly in photo spreads depicting eligible bachelors. (Divorced three years ago, he has a daughter, aged four.) But Brando lets none of these aristocratic trappings hold him back. At 32, he has virtually defined the field of New Age marketeering, setting up Brando Crespi and Associates as the liaison between outré experimentalists and mainstream moneymakers. Even prior to his status as avant-garde entrepreneur, he managed to avoid the sort of superrich, clichéd dissipation that keeps the shelves stocked in airport bookstores. While others of bis ilk were off frying their septums on the Riviera or denting dad's Duesenberg, Brando was most likely boating up the Amazon, playing free-lance Stanley and Livingstone, trying not to let piranhas get hold of his hangnails. (He left Italy, he says, when it became too ludicrous for his bodyguards to follow him to his gestalt sessions.)
During a three-and-a-half-year stint in South America, the future bliss distributor spent a year on Morro, a tiny island off the coast of Bahia, and then took off on a jaunt through the Colombian jungle. With the affable flourish of an '80s Marco Polo, a dandy explorer in the grand Italian style, he spins gracious, colorful tales of his time in the bush. His jeans and tasseled loafers, his bottled water and computer watch somehow heighten the effect of his eventful saga. No slave to civilization he! "I spent three months in the Amazon," Crespi begins, "living with a tribe called the Ash People. As the legend goes, when they were attacked by their enemy, the Black Penis People, the medicine man smeared ashes all aver their faces and they became invisible. When the Black Penis People would raid their maloca the communal hut they wouldn't find anybody. They'd just find ashes! Then they'd walk out again, saying, 'What the hell is going on here?' And the tribe would reappear and zap them." Here, plainly, is a man just as comfy with killer blowgun artists as international financiers.

And bis relentless equanimity suggests that the breeds are not all that different. Somehow, in Brando Crespi's peculiar synthesis, such worlds neutralize each other. "I was interested in shamanism. I was interested in the concept of magic and the reality of magic. I lived in South America long enough to get the sense that there is something very tangible. It's a system of the psychology and the technology of the paranormal and it works."

Needless to say, if the Black Penis folks ever want to open a shop on Rodeo Drive, the perfect PR man is already waiting. Straddling so many cultures, the count's san has shaped an existence that embraces a dash of each, like the buffet table at a UNESCO fund-raiser. Which has its advantages. "I came directly from South America to L.A., and I hadn't been in America for years. I had left a decade before, very angry. The Chicago convention and all that. But when I came back and arrived in Los Angeles, where I had never been before, it was so playful. The buildings are shaped like hamburgers, and they're there one day and gone the next. I came from an aesthetic background where everything was seemingly solid, where somebody would design a garden to look a certain way 200 years later. In Los Angeles, the illusion is so apparent that it allowed me to deal with this culture with a lot more humor." Well, why not? Here in Crespiland, the theories never stop. This anthropological perspective emerges as a sort of trademark, a verbal thrust and parry that works with enchanting effect. Listen to Crespi on "fashion victims," a breed with whom he has had some truck in Beverly Hills, where even the most enlightened, transcendent creature is likely beholden to fashion Molochs like Yves Saint Laurent and Halston. "These victims," posits the philosopher prince, "their mind set arises out of a sense of the uncompleted body, a sense that the self is not really in the body, so you need to take on all these symbols to complete yourself." What's most remarkable, perhaps, is that in this glazed-and-shallow stratum of L.A. Young Moneydom, Crespi and one of his partners, Stephen Schwartz, have managed to launch one of the modern world's more astonishing organizations, the Mobius Group. Mobius, a self-styled "independent research organization," is designed to facilitate forays into applied parapsychology and, by default, to rattle both scientists and laymen with the latest data. Since its inception in 1977, the group's batch of all-pro psychics have retrieved deep-sea booty off Santa Catalina. Using a chart covering some 1,800 square feet, the intuitives involved not only predicted where the sunken vessel would be but described the nature of the bounty aboard as well.  (Operation Deep Quest, it is dubbed in the Mobius fact sheet, lending the entire affair the feel of some Mission: lmpossible made flesh.) In a second operation, the Alexandria Project, the practitioners of "remote viewing" located Mark Antony's palace and parts of the Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the world, beneath a stretch of Egyptian desert the size of Manhattan.

 
In both cases, Crespi and his two partners passed out maps of the areas involved ahead of rime. The assorted psychics then marked the spots that made their intuition twitch. And the whole process was preserved on film far future docu-dollars. Each search, in effect, served as a triplebind experiment: situations where positive reults were irrefutable. No powers that we currently recognize could have tipped the team to the reallocations of Antony's hideaway or the sunken vessel. Where normal science had tried and failed, the Mobius boys used the paranormal to make their point. The witnesses, straight folks from the likes of MIT and the Bureau of Land Management, have all had to rethink their cosmic paradigms or else take two Valiums and pull the blinds. In the course of his role as maverick theoretician, Crespi has seen grown moo succumb to "reality vertigo," a sort of cerebral giggle fit induced when the very existence of what one is seeing is so startling, so devastating to the puny assumptions that prop up one's universe, that the only response is a helpless blast of laughter. However unseemly, such outbursts are surely justified. Indeed. After even a few hours of Crespi-isms, your plodding, conventional thinker may find himself facing similar short circuits. Crespi's, after all, is a realm of reasoned fantasy, where any attempt to explain the unknowable is shelved in favor of simply utilizing it. It's a far edgier way to go. There are certain quantum physicists said to walk the streets with a glazed, spiritual sheen in their pupils. And no doubt, whatever these fellows have seen, Brando Crespi has seen it, too; but instead of snapping out, the renegade jet setter has kept his cool. If anything, the knowledge of the Other Side has made him more funloving.

 
In Manhattan ali these magie notions would curl up and drop on contact with air. But in L.A., somehow, the atmosphere is more than ripe. It's positively nourishing. "New York is about money," Crespi says finally. "Los Angeles is about myth." Here on La Cienega, in the rarefied breeze of ions and microdust, it's tough to tell which makes the other possible.