We just went to see that movie AMERICAN BEAUTY, which apparently happened to win some big award last night. AS WELL IT SHOULD!!! It's FUCKING GREAT!! Especially if you happen to be a 40-something father of teenagers trapped in the evil Con box of bad job, crumbling marriage and antislack, which probably describes quite a few of the lurkers on this newsgroup and one or two of the contributors. *I* certainly found it HILARIOUS. Twisted, yet moving. "Chillingly accurate," says Ivan Stang of The Hour of Slack. I got all choked up at the end, and I almost choked the chicken a couple of times in the middle. One weird detail about this film is that marijuana is used as a plot device -- but it leads to almost all of the GOOD things that happen to the characters. Kevin Spacey does an excellent Yossarian-like "hapless everyman" at the end of his rope, mired in Pinkness, grasping as straws until he finally repents, quits his job and slacks off.
Ahhh, Cleveland in wintertime! Everybody warned me that it would be terrible and I'd go crazy, but heck, this is NOTHIN' compared to the Winter of 1976 out on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota! And with nothing but buffalo hides, BUF Magazine and bear grease to keep warm, back then. We didn't even know what Slack was back in them days... all we knew was, there was something we DIDN'T HAVE.
I am preparing to totally revise SubSITE! But in the meantime I've also been preparing to release some EXCELLENT recordings that we made over the last two years of radio plays, devival rants and concerts -- PLUS a mighty shitload, as they say, of "digitally remastered" old tapes for CD rerelease.
This has all been spurred by TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS. Some days, there are solar flares and devils about, and the machines don't work well. Other days, the Good Gremlins come and everything works PERFECTLY. On such a day, after having discovered that WCSB's old reel to reel 1/4" tape decks were in WORSE SHAPE THAN MINE, almost, I undertook to REPAIR MY 4-track TEAC 1/4" REEL TO REEL... AND I SUCCEEDED!!! MAH GAWD!! DO YOU REALIZE THE SIGNIFICANCE!! THAT combined with the existence of my precious CD BURNER donated by RevDrJack! ALL the original key SubGenius "albums" were recorded on that old deck. I can now CONVENIENTLY and FREELY (the other two KEY CONCEPTS here) make PRISTINE DIGITAL COPIES of the ORIGINAL RECORDINGS that will sound 18 billion shit-load-times better than the tapes of tapes that we've had to mess with before! AIEEE! The first thing I represerved for posterity was the DRS. 4 "BOB" original tapes, of which *I ALONE* had a surviving sub-dub-master on high res media.
(pic by Funway)
I've also started on the old Media Barrage tapes... those'll all be available on CD soon, or at least the 4 main ones will. Except I'll probably change 'em -- remove the stupid shit and the severe copyright violations. Hmmm. That would only leave one 5-minute "track." Well. It's a start.
I just now finished a "STANG SOLO ALBUM" so to speak... it's a rant I did to a non-SubG audience, at Starwood 99. "Stang at Starwood." Designed to get me JOBS, see. (It's that time of year again, damn it!!) The tail end of it has various musical-yak collaborations that I did in years past with DK Jones, Bill T. Miller, The Rudy Schwartz Project and Mark Mothersbaugh. I'm about to add it to the online catalog.
Hopefully by next week we'll have yet ANOTHER CD album available, this one the XX-Day 99 Devival with Einstein's Secret Orchestra as "house band," recorded live at Brushwood. There's yet a THIRD ESO&me devival CD in slower progress which is a sort of "best-of" collection from numerous OTHER shows we did together, like Starwood 98, Winterstar 99 and the Pufferdome concert at Starwood 99. Thanks to Regis Sedlock of Soundz Gud Studios, and/or my Hi-8 video camera, we got good recordings of these shows.
That CD burner has been the greatest boon to productivity around here. A lot of it's the psychological boost of being able to "etch things in stone," that is, to be able to make *COPIABLE COPIES* that don't degrade horribly with every generation, or with each playing. And CHEAP!!!! AAAHHHHH!!!!!! Cheap as a god damn audio cassette made in China, in the 3-pack, but hold as much as a JAZ disk almost!! It's been a GREAT excuse to resurrect the old tapes and machines and to clean house generally in terms of intellectual properties. Not to mention the scanning and archiving of stuff like ancient family photos.
I now can't imagine life without that CD burner. THANKS AGAIN, REVDRJACK!!!
(Incidentally, for the geeks out there, I did manage to patch my old CD Rom player back into my SCSI chain, and have used it to copy CD to CD, but it's... UNDEPENDABLE. It only works at 2X speed and then only ONCE between total reboots. WEEEEEIRD. Just doesn't spew-through as fast as the JAZ or my hard drive does. PISSED ME OFF!!!
But at least I'm not STERNO!!!
***** Amusing Recent News
I think the Vatican ordered one each of all our stuff!
We got this mysterious $500 order off the web for one of EVERYTHING (all the videos, tape collections, etc.) from somebody in Rome, Italy. At first, this perturbed Jesus and me. The only thing we could figure was that some rich Italian sharpie had decided to cash in by systematically bootlegging all our stuff in Europe. But when I got to looking at the Rome address, I thought it seemed AWFULLY simple an address. It was basically a person's name at "1 Main Street, Rome Italy 00075." (Or something like that.)
The Vatican is said to have the biggest collection of pornography (and, I suppose, evil media in general) in the world. For NUMEROUS reasons, they certainly SHOULD have a complete collection of Church of the SubGenius material in their archives.
And think about the timing. It was the same week that J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' name was PRINTED in Time Magazine as people's choice of #1 Fraud of the Century.
Some Procurator for Decency Policing in the Vatican saw that and thought to himself, "MAMA MIA, this American charlatan has risen to near-Antichrist levels of charlatanism, and I have NEVER EVEN HEARD OF HIM!!! If my boss finds out, MY PIOUS ASS IS GRASS! I must immediately catch up on what is seducing the youth, NOW, using my Vatican credit card number and this infernal web browsing device! I cannot wait to evaluate the sin level of these videotapes featuring nude wrestling by that Teutonic Mother of Harlots, Friday Jones!"
I realize that the Vatican is its own country. But they wouldn't have their porn sent directly there; some dutiful, selfless monk would take that task upon himself or his anonymous office somewhere downtown.
****
OTHER NEWS:
WINTERSTAR SYMPOSIUM 2000
Feb. 24-27 -- Atwood Lake Resort, Dellroy OH
This is a large "pagan-con" at a very comfy hotel-and-cabins facility, which features a Devival (or at least a lecture by me) almost every year, and now also features a "Space Jam Cabin" manned by Einstein's Secret Orchestra and guest musicians like Ron Slabe... essentially a party room with killer ESO live music. I usually run the coffee machine at these things and function as the band's old faithful broken-down roadie. These Winterstar events are a lot like sf or comics cons, only some of the participants actually BELIEVE the fantasy books they read. A great place for SubGenii to pick up pagans for sex and then later conversion, although in some cases this has led to trouble. It's $75 by mail or $85 at the door for non-ACE members... for the whole 4-day weekend. See the slick ACE website at http://www.rosencomet.com/ws2000/index.html
DEVIVAL IN CLEVELAND AT THE EUCLID TAVERN, Friday March 3!
Starring EINSTEIN'S SECRET ORCHESTRA!!! REV. IVAN STANG! LONESOME COWBOY DAVE!
and special musical guest stars COBRA VERDE!
(Cobra Verde is the OTHER band that Dances with Rockets plays keyboards in -- recently voted "Hottest Band in Cleveland"! WHAT ARE THEY DOING AT A SUBGENIUS SHOW??!?!?)
This should be another of those classic, infamous Cleveland devivals. Hopefully this should make up for the last one, which as infamously BAD because of my SAD ATTEMPTS TO SING.
*****
WE NEED A GUY!
We need a guy who works at a PLACE!
A guy who works at a PRINTING PLACE.
Basically, we need COLOR COPIES as CHEAPLY as we can get them.
The color labels are for our videotapes and CDs that we sell, or plan to sell. I and the two unwitting a.b.s. arteests involved have made these lovely labels, and I've been putting them on all the new tapes and CDs we sell, but we're going broke(r) doing it. Wei and I have been using her primitive inkjet (Color Stylewriter 1500), and some coated paper, to print these labels, but we have found that a) they look like shit compared to the originals) and b) they cost too much apiece in inkjet cartridge use and paper. (We can get maybe 50 videotape labels per $30 cartridge.)
I have a paper cutter and can trim these things myself and insert them into the plastic boxes. I now know ALL the tricks for assembling a CD with label and jewel case, for instance. Hey.
But I just KNOW that there are SECRET SOLDIER SPY WARRIORS out there who work for evil giant corpos and who are ALREADY running off $5 poster sized blow-ups of frivolities for themselves. There might even be a 40-something business owner like myself, who can get a good deal on paper and ink and thus we could PAY them but at a GOOD DISCOUNT.
Just thought I'd mention it. The best deal I've found in Cleveland so far is 67 cents a copy for color xerox if you get 500. (I need more like 50 of each of about 10 different 8x11" items).
Also... DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE NAME OF THE LAST GUY THAT DONATED JAZ/ZIP MEDIA TO US? (Not RevDrJack, who was the FIRST of the two great Donators!) About 6 months ago somebody sent us some Zips and a JAZ and other stuff, which has REALLY come in handy, but the guy's letter had no return address or name, and we had tossed the box with the return address.
We owe that fellow at least some finished CDs!
**** MISSING ARTIST
Also, once again, does anyone know the whereabouts of the artist that once called itself Rev. "AMANN" or "AMAN"?? That guy sent some GREAT artwork about 3 years ago, two of which were wanted by a T-shirt company for the line of color SubG T-shirts that existed briefly.
I cannot find ANY record of him.
ABOUT THOSE SHIRTS:
The shirts (from in-line design) are not being sold any more by us; the company that was making them never was able to get them into any store chains, which blew the whole idea; we sold the extras through our catalog, but not many sold compared to the standard Dobbshead shirts, and keeping 3 sizes each of 7 designs took up way too much room in the Factory. About all anybody ever got out of it was a nice sample shirt or two, and I want to give this Rev. Aman guy at least a sample shirt before the very last ones are gone.
The only two shirt designs that we sell now are the "Bob"-AntiBob and the Dobbshead-on-black.
Dealing with royalties over products that barely existed or never managed to exist in the first place has become such a problem for us that my tendency nowadays, when picking material for commercial release, is to stick with stuff by myself or else by very close friends that I'm fairly sure won't suddenly decide that I've gotten secretly rich off them. And even then, hell, you never know when someone will see a SubGenius mug for sale in a joke shop and suddenly get it into their heads that the Church is a gigantic evil Scientology-like machine, which has exploited them cruelly by putting theirDobbshead-based art on our website, or some such.
FUCK!!!!GIANT HARD WHITE THINGS JUST SUDDENLY STARTED CRASHING DOWN ONTO THE ROOF!!! I BETTER SHUT DOWN!!!
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