Another karen eliot

--- In subgenius@y..., "karen eliot" <karen_eliot@h...> wrote:
> I guess in the early daze of the Church I took all the capitalist
rhetoric as being satirical in nature. When I realized Stang really intended
to make himself rich in this manner I lost interest (tho my understanding is
he was fairly well off to begin with). While there'snothing inherenty wrong
with making m0ney off yr own creativity, there is IMHO something wrong
with making $ off other's creativity. Stang and a few others have taken
all the credit and proceeds for the creative work of many others. I became
involved in Neoism partially as a result of my disillusionment with the
manner in which the Church grew. For those old-timers still out there, compare
the attitudes expressed in the early xeroxed Fists with what they had
become by the time the Book was released. I'm well aware of the major amounts
of time and $that Stang and his boyz put into creating this thing and it
could be argued that they deserved to profit financially from this, but I
would again contrast this approach with that of the Neoists who certainly
invested just as much in the creation of their movement with no real thought of
finacial gain.

This guy should get the Sherlock Holmes Award for genius-level detective work. With so many facts and figures at his fingertips he sounds like he could write the true History of the Church of the SubGenius even better than Buck Naked or Bob Black.

I would like to know any specifics about ideas I might have not credited to somebody. As for collecting proceeds from the creative work of many others, I did actually ask each of them if it was okay if that happened.

Also, we do actually pay royalties to contributors when there are any. For instance, whenever I got one of those gigantic checks for 3 Fisted Tales of "Bob," I had to write 23 smaller checks to each person who wrote a story.

The Book of the SubGenius has 40 names in the credits, even though all but 12 of those people contributed maybe a paragraph or two. The 12 who did actual TOIL still are mailed tiny tiny little checks every year, to this day.

Revelation X has more like 70 names in the credits, and I have a copy of the manuscript with each and every single sentence delineated as to who "wrote" it (though much is actually transcribed from audio tapes.) Each of those persons was paid an actual check according to what percentage of the book he or she wrote. They all even got a xerox of the hand written calculations. For instance on Revelation X I actually wrote 41 percent, G Gordon Gordon 14 percent, Philo Drummond 11 percent, Sterno 6 percent, and so on down the line.

Needless to say I have the paperwork to prove it, or you could ask any single author of any of those commercial books we did how they're doing regarding royalties. Good luck finding a couple of them though.

You could also tune in any given Hour of Slack and note that not only do I give credits for everything, I give out the CONTACT ADDRESSES. And a great deal of what I play is stuff mailed in by total strangers who thought their stuff might be weird or funny enough. MOST free college station shows don't play self produced music and they certainly don't bog down their shows with ADDRESSES.

I could also point out that charging for the materals we manfacture and send out is what keeps us in enough existence to still be giving upcoming amateur artists their very first slight barest brush with "being published," such as it is. Having been -- let's face it -- a struggling nobody my whole life, I appreciate how important that one first airplay moment is to a beginning band or arteest or whatnot weirdo.

People who have never had an original thought in their lives often think ideas should be shared for free, and also tend to make assumptions based on what they themselves would do in what they envision as the situation. Luckily there are plenty of actual working artists and writers around who have only nice things to say about The SubGenius Foundation's treatment of them.

I should also point out that nowhere in our or any other holy instruction book does it say that money is evil. However, the point is repeatedly made that humorless, overzealous assholes ARE evil, and that if they can't take a joke, fuck 'em running.

I would like to hear more about how well off I was to begin with. My ex wife, oddly, seems to have a rather different perspective on these fortunes and riches than does the daringly named karen eliot.

This rumor mongering, I should remember, is the kind of thing that's worth its weight in gold p.r. to the greedy SubGenius art bum. The more conflicting gossip shit one has going around geek circles, the more likely that some enterprising Hollywood fuck will eventually make a movie about you (which benefits one's KIDS, you see). About 10 years ago I asked Legume to start lying about my sex life, tell everybody a different outrageous story, and by Gobbs I have gotten some hearty laffs when the results eventually come boomeranging back now and then.

Like anybody I am sensitive to criticism, but looking at this guy's Bob Black derived story of my life, particularly the crap about not paying people or giving credit where credit's due -- well, this is somebody who hasn't done any homework but instead went for the knee-jerk approach: assuming the tritest possible scenario, based on how he himself would handle things were he in my shoes.

Sorry karen, but I actually AM the kind of person I'm preaching to, unless I'm preaching to you.

Not only do I pay people, I MAKE ENOUGH MONEY *TO* PAY THEM.

Every now and then.

Probably a shitload more than you have paid struggling artists. How many unknown bands do you expose on 15 stations every week? How many totally unknown artists' work do you display on the web AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, FREE to the PUBLIC, NO PAY INVOLVED ON ANY END -- except that I have to pay for the bandwidth. AND do all the html. EH??!?

Lazy fuck. The more I think about these knee jerk pussies the less time I spend actually doing shit. So with that I shall take my leave.

((Warner Brothers cartoon sound effect of bongo riff followed by "whistle-zing" noise denoting "running off at explosive speed"))

ONE MORE THING!!! ((Stang is still hanging around, ignoring his chores, huffing and puffing with high blood pressure and righteous indignation, probably the troller's goal in the first place)) To give you all an idea of the size of our evil SubGenius corporation, let's take our latest Bobsongs CD release, which has great music by like 15 different nobodies. It's been out for a few months and so far I have sent more copies to the contributors than to customers. Whether this says something about the god-awful nature of the product, or my lack of attention to advertising and marketing, or what, is for Dobbs to say, but the plain fact of the matter is, we're so small time that any talk of money 95 percent of the time is so laughably moot as to actually be pretty sad. Luckily for me personally, though disastrous for the company, I am practically the opposite of what this Slack-radiating individual envisions, and am satisfied with our modest artistic successes, rather than letting myself fixate morbidly on the sorry financial status we actually enjoy, represented by outstanding financial debts, mostly to places like T-shirt silk screeners.

Basically, I work my ass off making sure that the Church of the Subgenius, or at least my little corner of it, gives every TALENTED mutant an even break, while NOT GOING TOTALLY BROKE and thus VANISHING like most of our 80s weirdo-club peers did. One skim of SubSITE's online Fist section or an Hour of Slack log is instant proof of that. Don't get me wrong, that's how I get Slack! I'm not complaining. It beats the hell out of an office job and I get to do things like gripe about the government on the radio while playing really cool shit that nobody ever heard before. And then making it downloadable for FREE. (That actually is largely thanks to Rev. Prostata Contata and Sensory Research, who "own a printing press" so to speak and are incredibly generous to us.)

I will own up to the fact that I edit what I permanently archive on SubSITE to remove the WHINING HUMORLESS KNEE JERK ANTI-TREND-TRENDY POMPOUS KNOW IT ALLS who also post to alt.slack, because they are always the same, and just tiresome.

***

I should also point out that THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS is composed of the same material that was in early xerox Stark Fists that this foo claims we somehow departed from. What didn't fit into the Book was later used in REVELATION X. I was going through those oldest Fists just recently trying to figure out whether to try an Internet-published "Old Fist Reprints book," but there is very little that was not already used in either BoSG or Rev-X, albeit with slicker layout. Layout which the actual publishing world considered to be insanely anti-commercial (and they were right).

Our bulldada only PARTIALLY intersected with his schizophrenia, and now it's sour grapes, because he missed out on the X-Day Drill/Sex Cult aspects of this nutty bunch of fuck-ups. He probably works for his dad. That's my theory.

Yes, Us and All Our Friends ARE So Fucked Up. That's a SubGenius campfire sing-along by ESO. Audience participation. karen eliot would probably think it was too commercial since it was somehow benefitting that cigar chomping Pink mogul, Ivan Stang. Also, we use capital letters in the lyrics, a sure sign of capitalism.

Amateurs... Commies... PHOOEY!! Why am I even wasting my time with this. Oh that's right, I'm an egomaniac. The fucking frop keeps making me forget that. God damn, sleeping on the job.

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Original file name: karen eliot rant - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44