Here is some email I got this morning:
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 13:37:11 -0700
From: "Dr. Ginsu" <jch1@voicenet.com>
Reply-To: newlandj@wharton.upenn.edu
Organization: Lippincott Library of the Wharton School
Mime-Version: 1.0
To: i.stang@subgenius.com
Subject: You stink.
I hate you Ivan Stang. Your miserable little life would have been
worth twice as much as it is now if you had only stuck with that clown
job. You have a crappy religion that wishes it could be the Eleusinian
Mysteries but is about as mysterious as a Nancy Drew novel. In fact,
that's who you look alot like...Nancy Drew. With that faggy haircut its
no wonder you like to run around with that butt-fucking pansyboy
Legume. How's that hairgel situation? Ever mix it with your 'frop? I
bet you do. I hate you. Because of your little "love-fest" I gave up
half of my dreams. I actually expected all of those promises you made
about Slack to come true. Now that I know better I find that I gave up
my only chances of ever being more than a two-bit, never-was
nine-to-five whore, with Dobbs' cum dribbling out the side of my mouth
as I bend over to the queers on top of the Conspiracy pyramid. Thanks
alot I. Stink, you made my crappy life even worse. Fuck "Bob."
*********
That letter is, of course, the work of Dr. Legume. Has to be. His style is unmistakeable.
I PITY THAT SWEET CHILD, REV. SUSIE PENZ!!! FOR TOMORROW NIGHT (FRIDAY NIGHT) SHE BECOMES THE BRIDE OF THE MONSTER!!! DOBBS SPARE HER FROM HER MIDNIGHT MATING WITH THE BEAST THAT TOUCHES THE MOON!!!
For little Susie Penz and Dr. K'taden Legume will be united in HOLY LEGAL MATRIMONY in a midnight ceremony in a cowchip-filled field in the boonies, presided over by Rev. Wilbur as the minister, god damn it, I'm getting all teary-eyed just thinking about it, I wish to god I could be there to SAVE HER!!! FROM HIS GROSS CLUTCHING PAWS!!! My god Susie WHY are you DOING it?? I know what it's like to be groped by his rough mitts. He is PURE EVIL. He is a RAPIST -- a BUTT PIRATE! You could not possibly be doing this of your own free will. BREAK FREE FROM HIS HYPNOTIC MIND CONTROL!!! He is a CULT LEADER! He's like Jim Jones! The rest of us are just kidding but Legume is the REAL FUCKING THING, and he's DANGEROUS, and you're about to COMMIT YOUR BODY TO HIM FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE??? SUSIE DON'T DO IT!!! THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO HAVE A REAL LIFE!!! Do you know what's going to happen tomorrow night? He's going to want to have his way with you. He has never had a wwoman before -- this will be his first time. You will not be able to deny him. He will put his DISEASE in you!! Do you WANT THAT??!? Susie... when the preacher says, "Do you take this man...," -- PLEASE DEAR GOD SUSIE FOR YOUR OWN SAKE --
JUST SAY "NO!"
*************
Meanwhile there is TERROR APLENTY on THIS end. It was SCARY AS HELL but I DID IT! I installed new RAM memory chips in my computer without breaking anything!
I haven't monkeyed with the hardware innards of computers much, and am filled with superstitious fear regarding things like static electricity, etc. I was aware that a dumbshit can serious damage its machine, wreck the chips, zap the hard drive, etc. I did everything by the book, but the new chips didn't want to snap into place easily, and by the time I was finished FORCING them into place, my hands were shaking like leaves in a high wind and my scrotum had shrunk down to the size of a B-B.
Works, though!
The suspense was purely self-induced; before I did this, I copied my entire hard drive to a SECOND 1G Jaz disk. I'm a real paranoiac about backing up. -- there are copies of all our important data in several states, in every possible format. There's a copy of our mailing list stashed in THE MOST AMAZING SECRET PLACE... a "Zipped Tattoo" on a certain FORESKIN... HELL, we've coded the whole first BOOK into COCKROACH DNA!! Even if ALL HUMANS were killed and all computer disks were erased, THE BOOK would still be extractable by aliens in the far future.
I suppose I could have just taken Muleskinner to Comp USA or some place and had them put in the new brain, but it would have cost twice as much, and it was time anyway for me to get used to working under the hood. I aspire to being one of those guys whose computer's guts are always exposed to the air, with wires running in and alligator clips holding everything together. Also, it has become obvious to me that I'll have to do upgrade routinely, forever. Next I'll need a new processor, more VRAM, 5 MWOWM units, a cultful of programmers, etc. etc. I had 16 megs of RAM, which was GREAT for awhile, but I'm trying to build whole porno religious scenes using multiple human figures in 3D, and with 16 megs (6.5 mb of it going to the System), you can't even make a simple Bronze "Bob" statue in Bryce, much less one that's aboard a flying saucer, surrounded by Sex Goddesses and giant Prairie Squids. Now I have 48 mb RAM. (The machine I started SubSITE with didn't have that much in its whole hard drive!) After I post this I'm gonna see how many Dobbses I can pack into a scene before it slows down to a crawl, and how long it takes to render. I got ONE Dobbs into Bryce, but without the paint job; he's carved from marble.
He needs work. Needs the Grin, BAD. And his hair... ugh. BAD hair day.
Getting past these technohurdles provides me with major Slack. Some guys like to work on cars. Some like to fish. I like to fish in illegal binaries newsgroups. I also enjoy MANUALS, no shit. One thing I like about computers is, there's ALWAYS A FIX. It's only a matter of how methodical you want to be in solving a problem, plus I guess maybe how much you can AFFORD.
Jesus and I, of course, make huge salaries, but we deliberately choose to live and work on very low budgets, so as to not lose sight of the travails of all you "little people". (We are veritable SAINTS, you see.) So I sympathize with those who just can't afford fancy computer shit. 48 mb RAM is actually nowhere near as much as I could use, and for that matter, if I had my druthers, I'd have Silicon Graphics workstations littering the office, wall sized screens, and would be mixing Hour of Slack digitally instead of on cassette decks. Also I would be surrounded by sex slaves. This SubGenius Internet Shit is my actual JOB, though, and just like many people must have a CAR as part of their job, I have to have a fairly fancy computer. HAVE to. "Bob" said so. Philo agreed. As it turned out, I traded in the car FOR the computer. Luckily there's a 7-11 within walking distance.
MEANWHILE -- the Interim Stark Fist goes out in bulk mail this Friday; should be in mailboxes next week. Like last time, we'll probably have to mail the overseas ones separately. (The overseas mailing -- about 500 pieces -- is EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE even with special bulk air rates and we have tradionally parceled those out over a 2 month period.) This one is more of a magazine and less of a catalog. Only one page of Foundation swag ads. Some of the art reproduced beautifully, some was a little disappointing. I'll know how to tweak better next time.
The Foundation also just purchased a Sun SparcStation10 (I think -- it's in Chapel Hill NC, in the hands of Id McConville.)... this doohickey will soon have SubSITE on it, splurting out of a T3 (45MBit) line. No longer will the taxpayers of North Carolina be footing the bill for our little website. This process has been dragging on, mainly because it's an on-the-cheap, back-burner kind of a deal. I still don't know jack shit about servers, but I copped a demo of Timbuktu yesterday and I guess I need to just START PUSHING BUTTONS.
While SubSITE won't change much initially when we move -- it'll just be FASTER -- the folks we're working with, Mind In Motion, plan to use SubSITE and Dobbsian imagery as a testing ground for the rather high end VRML and other 3D world stuff they're specializing in. (They're a design company primarily, not a server company. They did the Jack Keruoak CD ROM for example.) This suits me FINE since there's nothing I want more for SubSITE than a shitload of PSYCHEDELIC virtual rooms and worlds with various interactive gimmicks in them, preferably full of monsters, gods and devils that talk. That technology is still very glitchy and buggy on the Web, but by the time some standards gets ironed out, we should be right up there with the big boys in terms of KILLER VR GRAPHICS. Something to shoot for anyway. My timetable has us completing the Virtual Dobbshead Oracle by X-Day. JUST FOR YUKS. JUST BECAUSE. But he's not just a flashy toy, he's a whole AI package that talks back and argues with you and sells you shit.
I made several QuickTime VR experiments last year, and some folks enjoyed swivelling around in them, but just as many were unable to get them to work. For months now I have had plans for much more specifically designed QTVR sets for SubSITE, with imbedded links and little 3DMF objects you can pick up and rotate and click on and link from. I can see these scenes in my head and can even draw stick figure versions of them, but my graphics knowledge just wasn't up to snuff, so I've been spending every spare minute brushing up on art programs like Photoshop, Painter, etc., and their zillions of plug-ins. The QTVR stuff has a COOL look to it, but I imagine I'll have to work with some other, lower res type of 3D format.
I can't draw worth a hoot, but this is more like arranging little blocks and toys on a tabletop.
The 3D Dobbs, the AntiChrist, has several people besides me working on him, people who actually can draw real pictures. Poindexter gave me some crucial tips, The Prophet Jim is working on a bump map, and Rev. Krueger is trying to form a Grin. Once Dobbs's fleshed out physically, I figure we'll start on his personality. Robert Carr wants to help on the AI script... if you've ever tried his MacJesus program, you'll know why I'm excited to have this fiend helping.
When he's finished, THE COMPUDOBBS WILL BE THE VIRUS THEY HAVE FEARED!!!
The Steve Jackson Games thing is still slowwed down due to the break-in at their offices, I'm still just gearing up for that one, staring at hundreds and hundreds of pieces of art. Just getting a GRIP on what's ALREADY DONE is a job unto itself.
In the meantime, though, if you want to see a 100-card SubGenius trading card set, in full living color, hit alt.binaries.slack! In fact, you should download EVERYTHING on alt.binaries.slack now. Atom Funway designed 100 count 'em 100 SubG cards, Fernandinande is still cranking out several great sickening pics a day, Poindexter plonks out a new 3D scene every few days, and there's a whole slew of relatively new artists like "iguana," "Gurgle" and "Hitler." It's ASTOUNDING. Once again, copies of all this art are stacking up around here, and will be uploaded and linked in to SubSITE eventually, but it'll probably be a while before I get to this monstro task.
In the meantime, scope out a.b.s.! You won't be sorry. Download EVERYTHING and then set your graphics browser to "slide show."
Other news: Rev. PAUL MAVRIDES has finally got himself online and has been sending me JPG copies of COLOR versions of art he did for Revelation X and the old Stark Fists. You'll SHIT!! LIKE ME!! He's as leery of newsgroups and websites as a paranoid little old lady, though -- he'll get over it eventually, and I eagerly await the day that he starts posting this stuff in public rather than just sending it to me. Maybe in a couple of days I'll have some new opening pages up at SubSITE that show off this old/new stuff. It would be great if he got involved with alt.slack too; he's a hilarious writer, cantankerous as Nenslo and even meaner than me, but I ain't holding my breath.
**********
Did I mention the Face Fucking Bats at the Atlanta Devival? Susie the Floozie had a dozen REAL FACE FUCKING BATS... at one point she had a dozen victims spazzing on the floor, bats on their faces, and she was doling out sips of Antidote Pudding from a TEST TUBE HELD BETWEEN HER AMPLE BREASTS!! GOD what a woman. Her HAIR!!!! Her BUST!!! Her... her... what's that smell??
Susie also constructed a HAIL "BOB" COMET out of foam core and glitter; she made a Pulpit from an OIL DRUM on which she painted the logo, "DOBBSTOWN HELLTON"; she provided TIKI STATUES, FAKE PALM TREES, a WORKING VOLCANO courtesy of Rev. Rock In Hand, AND A SILLY RUBBER LOBSTER COSTUME!! And the contortionists did a hula dance. I'm telling you, the Flooze does NOTHING halfway. All this for the theme, "KRAKATOA EAST OF DOBBSTOWN".
Not to mention the MUSIC TAPES she compiled for this show. Those familiar with her radio show know that Susie is a connoiseeur of weird flaky old musical bulldada. You might call her The Mastress of Space Age Bachelor Pad music. So the SOUNDTRACK of the devival was cool.
The band, PEE DOG NIGHT, 3 local WREK guys, was GREAT! Sounded like a cross between Quicksilver Messenger Service and Negativland. I told 'em that and got a blank look regarding Quicksilver, but they were happy to be compared to Negativland. Might be described as "Ugly Psychedelic Style" -- guitars and a sampler, plus the inevitable Theramin. I have seen more Theramins this year. This one made some great sci fi sounds when Susie waved her chest around it.
We have had GREAT local doktor bands at the last few shows! What a REFRESHING CHANGE!!
GOOD NEWS regarding the ATLANTA DEVIVAL -- we'll get a decent audio copy. One of the band guys had a video camera on the stage itself, getting sound off the monitors. The video PICTURE sucks -- it's just the backs of heads -- but the audio on it is good. That was a concern... the DAT recorder broke. There's at least one other video of the show, shot by robocam from the sound booth up high, but that probably has abysmal audio, as Jesus and the other engineers were in the booth with it, muttering and cussing about their technical problems.
Papa Joe Mama will be very glad to hear this news. He has no recording gear of his own and hasn't had access lately to anybody else's, and this Atlanta devival was his ONE CHANCE to get his new rants recorded. Legume did all-new stuff off the top of his head, so did Susie the Floozie, so did Dynosaor, so did Rev. Rock-In-Hand, and so did I for that matter, and it looks like we'll have a decent copy for the radio show. I wish it was better than decent.
It should not be such a struggle to get a recording of preaching. I used to tote tape decks and mikes with me to all the shows for that very purpose, but I've sworn off trying to do everything. 99% of these recordings will never be heard anyway, but you never know when that magic 1% might happen.
That CD of a devival that we sell, from the Madison show last year, that's a GREAT recording technically, and the performances by Legume and me are OKAY, but if I'd had my druthers it would have been the Boston show, which had Brother Cleve on keyboards. Also the Madison thing was in a small club and you can hear audience chatter a lot of the time. But beggars can't be choosers. I would KILL for a decent recording of Rev. Susie the Floozie. NONE of her stage rants have been recorded right. The Club No video and the X Day Drill tapes are OKAY but again, it's rinky-dinky uncontrollable sound off a cheap cassette deck and a half-broken mike. And Dynosoar's songs, same thing. It's a dreadful shame that our tapes of these wonderful moments always suffer from non-budget. Trying to gussy up these recordings for the Hour of Slack, with equalizers and so on, is like trying to scrape the sound off the walls of the studio using paint remover and a trowel.
It's not like the world will end if we don't have good preaching tapes. It's just a bummer that something that SHOULD be so EASY always seems to evade us.
***********
Pardon me if I sound sometimes like I'm bragging about my cool job. But I AM. Part of my JOB DESCRIPTION is to be some kind of SLACK ROLE MODEL. Says so right in the contract. I bitch and gripe all the time about my work load and the Bobbie Squabbles and suchlike but obviously, I'll stop when they pry it out of my cold dead fingers. A guy in Atlanta told Jesus, "As long as I know you guys are doing this, I can tolerate my shitty job and my shitty life. Just knowing that you and Rev. Stang and Rev. Legume, are out there getting Slack, that keeps me from going nuts. At least I know that somebody is beating the Con. You guys do make a lot of money at this, right? And get lots of girls, and the best 'Frop and stuff?" Jesus wasn't ABOUT to tell this guy the truth, which is a bit less glamorous than the poor bastard was envisioning. Although....
The Lord and I, and someone else discussed this at length. Hell, it's our DUTY to our FLOCK to get the kind of ultra-Slack that that guy was talking about. You SubGeniuses don't want some LOSER preacher representing your faith in public. You want people who LOOK LIKE THEY'RE HAVING A BLAST. Dobbs himself, no problem, everyone knows he's rich and has the best looking, sexiest wife in the universe. But we mortal preachers keep falling back into this self-effacing, falsely modest, falsely humble bullshit image of "poor little subgenii fighting hopelessly against all odds." The fact is, the fight is far from hopeless. First off, the reality of X-Day renders ALL this moot.
But also, god damn it, we AREN'T losers! We are in fact THE ULTRA COOLEST OF THE COOL! Sure we aren't as famous as Generic Rock Band X, and have to deal with senseless harrassment from peanut gallery dwellers, and there are such things as creepy Bobbies, but Jesus fucking Christ, I ACTUALLY GET A SALARY FOR WORKING ON BIZARRE-ASS SUBGENIUS WEIRDNESS whether the specific PIECE in question is profitable or not! I sleep and rise WHEN I FUCKING WELL PLEASE! I get PAID to BULLSHIT! PRAISE FUCKIN' DOBBS!! I DO INDEED have the option of getting involved with BEAUTIFUL WOMEN all over the country! DON'T THINK I DON'T APPRECIATE IT!! I live in a BIG FANCY HOUSE (compared to what you'd EXPECT, anyway) and my wife looks like Holly Hunter! (That part has nothing to do with "Bob" but what the hell, I can still use it.) My teenage kids are NOT A WORRY. On a daily basis I get to recall the multitudinous assholes who mocked me and the Church in the past, who now work for their Dads while I jetset around signing autographs... and yes I do indeed SMIRK PRIDEFULLY. And the funny thing is, this is not for some lame-ass audience of dumbshits. This is for the most discriminating, literate, creative god damn target audience market block of co-collaborators on the planet! Well, maybe that's going a bit far. No it's not. Ya'll ARE the greatest. We are the FUCKING BEST!! Best SUBGENII, anyway.
I used to be a terrified, weak-kneed, insecure fat nerd with a quavery voice and drug problems, and now, though no less of a CHINLESS WONDER, yet now I can stand in front of ANYBODY OR ANYTHING and FEARLESSLY BOOM OUT HICK WISDOM or at least some hearty bullshit that sounds good! I SHOULD brag. I SHOULD be full of myself! I'm the Sacred Scribe of the Church of the God Damned SubGenius! Two steps down from Dobbs himself! (Well five anyway. Six at most.) And if a fucked up geek like me can yank himself off by his bootstraps like this, then YOU PROBABLY CAN TOO... if you WANT to, particularly. Not every SubGenius is desperate for attention.
I'll grant that I'm an Emergentile, a permanently agitated individual with a chip permanently implanted on my shoulder, extremely ambitious/insecure due to horrendous childhood and teenage accidents, unable to truly relax in the way that most people know. Me relaxing is like The Elephant Man trying to sleep lying down. It's a senseless attempt to be like normal people, and is potentially fatal. A REWARDIAN (or as I call them, "LAZY") SubGenius, with far less motivation, would probably wonder why in hell I even BOTHER. Would in fact think that the life of Stang sounds like a HELL of uberwork. But Slack takes many forms...
Caving in is an attractive prospect at times; I am tempted every single morning. I DO cave in every morning. I succumb to despair and hate EVERY SINGLE MORNING. But I then drag myself through my various rituals that I use to dispell or rather redirect, rechannel and transmute the Hate. I NEVER think they're gonna work, but they almost ALWAYS DO, and by noon I am no longer a depressed loser. It's a GOOD WORK HABIT to DISPELL YOUR CHRONIC DEPRESSION every morning. If you can. It could be that not everybody has to undergo the psychological equivalent of an Indian sweat lodge every weekday morning just to STOP FRETTING and SCHEMING.
So stick with it, kids. Try and try again. Straight ahead. Keep it up. If something doesn't work right the first time, try and try again. Keep a stiff upper lip. Don't let the bastards grind you down. It's that THIRD or FIFTH try that people seem to blow off. I'm a believer in SEEMINGLY INSANE TENACITY. When I first sent out the PROPOSAL/QUERY for THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS to 150 publishers, all at once, and got 150 resounding rejections, including rejections from all the publishers we now work with, do you think that stopped me?
Well, it DID. I gave up. You'd have to be NUTS to keep at such an obvious wild goose chase.
BUT! -- nonetheless, weeks later, the right guy found the right pamphlet at the right time in the right backseat of the right car, in New York. WHY? Because DOBBS WANTED TIM MCGINNIS TO FIND THAT PAMPHLET even though his SECRETARY had TRASHCANNED it. But also because I had gone to the trouble of mailing out all those hundreds and hundreds of copies of the proposal/pamphlet DESPITE THE HUMILIATION, so that the damned physical object was there to be found. (Paul Mavrides fished his out of a publisher's trashcan, too.)
God only knows what manner of FUCK-UPS I did, that I'll never know about. There's just NO TELLING. Thank Dobbs. Naturally, I prefer to think of the success stories, like Pee Kitty and Unibomber.
Once you see that you fucked up, though, you also have to admit responsibility for it. That seems to me to be the key to all this. If only I could admit to myself that I was fucking up, WHILE fucking up -- then I might not fuck up in the first place! But that's the whole problem, I guess. About the best you can do is go ahead and fuck up, THEN try to correct your technique. It's like the Face Fucking Bat Sperm Antidote Pudding. If only we COULD just go straight to the Antidote Pudding without having to endure the face-fucking and the poisonous bat sperm!
But you can't sit there believing in magic, waiting for shit to happen. Real magic only happens when you don't believe in it. Except that ONE time.
What prompted this outburst, I cannot say. I am as crazy as a bessy bug.
***********
Went to the Circus Re-Dick-U-Less last night, at a club in Deep Ellum (the Generation X part of Dallas, where all the "punk clubs" are)... a troupe of weirdos mostly from San Francisco but accompanied by my pals Mandy and David Apocolypse from Pittsburgh. Rev. Groovy G was in Dallas too, it was a whole caravan with Jesus and Nickie and Matt and Demonica etc. . This small world became even smaller when the Circus Re-Dick-U-Less VIDEO was played, interspersed with a puppet show. I was surprised to discover that the video section of it was put together largely with PUZZLING EVIDENCE, DR. HOWLL and ED 'St. Stupid's Day Parade/Bishop Joey" HOLMES. It was DIMENSIONAL. Synchronicity heaped upon synchronicity as Jesus discovered that Ed Holmes on screen there was the DAD of Jesus's email pal JENNIFER.
Dr. Howll appears in this video wearing DEVIL MAKE-UP, and DAMN if he isn't the most DISTURBING looking Imp. Vreedeez sent a photo which will appear on a.b.s. and SUbSITE.
DAMMIT THE WONDER DOG was an audience-pleasing part of the show. David Apocolypse did more or less the same fire-breathing, strait-jacket-escape act that I've seen and taped many times when we were touring together, but this was my first time to see Mandy sing her torch song DUET... she sings both the man and woman parts, alternating voices and PROFILES, since she's in a half-and-half HERMAPHRODITE COSTUME. Her left half looks like a man, in a business suit, and her left half looks like a women, in a a dress. David Apocolypse hovered around her, holding a half-wig on the female side. (Mandy's pate is shaved totally bald.) When the man's parts of the song were called for, she'd sing with her left side facing the audience, and would switch to the other side and direction for the woman parts.
Mandy should have her own sitcom. David Apocolypse and Andrew the Impaled could be regular side characters on it.
NOTE: we HAVE to do an X-DAY PUPPET SHOW!!!! GREAT cheesy concept.
***********
I've been turning into an all-out B-3 level Kook on Hendrix lately. Studio out-takes are starting appear, some of them with PERFECT sound. I just heard 4 takes of RED HOUSE when he first recorded it, and all 4 start out COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY... the opening bars sound drastically different from take to take. Take 4 was the final one, which is on a number of old albums like Smash Hits. What's interesting is that after Take 4 was decided upon, he always played it that way subsequently. I must have over a dozen live recordings of RED HOUSE played in concert and they all start more or less like that original take 4.
VOODOO CHILD (slight return) with its very distinctive intro is also very different in all the initial studio takes, then relatively uniform in all versions after that.
Hendrix never played any song the same way twice -- which is why collectors like me keep digging for concert recordings -- but the variations are in the solos and the lyrics. He didn't seem to mess with the intros to songs once he'd decided on a good one. I imagine it was tough enough on his side men already.
Incidentally, Billy Cox, the bass player during Hendrix's last year or so, is an unsung hero of Hendrix recordings. So I'm singing him up. Noel Redding -- the bass player of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, prior to Band of Gypsies -- gets more credit but really, Cox is the man on the majority of the live concert bootlegs and also the two or three albums worth of songs that were released posthumously. He was an old Army buddy of Hendrix and one gets the impression that above all he was Jimi's FRIEND. He's also a HELL of a creative bass player. He's still alive and occasionally performs with Buddy Miles as "Band of Gypsies" at retrospectives and suchlike.
None of those guys in Hendrix's two bands ever made a penny off the albums after their initial work-for-hire fees. Lawyers made all the millions that the Hendrix estate still generates, although the rights have reverted to the family (Jimi's sister being the main executor) and now we're all waiting to see if they hurry up and commercially release all this killer stuff that's been circulating as bootlegs. So far, they seem to be planning just more re-releases of the classic albums. I read in a trade mag that the 4th member of Hendrix's band, the studio engineer Eddie Kramer, has been remixing those from the masters, with the improved range of CDs in mind. (The versions on CD now are identical to the LP master mixes, which Hendrix was never happy with, since back in the day LPs just couldn't handle nearly the range of sound that was on the masters.)
What's ironic is that those MASTERS themselves were recorded on 4-track quarter-inch reel to reel decks, 2 of them slaved together... hardly any more sophisticated than what I edited the Media Barrage tapes on! (The Beatles albums were also mixed using similarly primitive gear.) I think they were getting up to 16 tracks about the time that Hendrix fucked up.
What this has to do with The Church of the SubGenius or my RAM installation, I have no idea, but I needed a break from "Bob," I think.
********
I have to tell ya'll something FUCKED.
Jesus shaved off His facial hair. He still has the long straight Jesus hair but NOW HIS LOWER FACE SHOWS. And it's bumming me out. He looks like any human hippie now, NOT like the Calendar Jesus that He used to resemble. In fact He looks uncannily like Rev. Toth Wilder of Akron -- nice looking guy, but utterly nonJesoid looking! I have prayed to Him to get a fake beard and glue it on until His real One grows back.
*********
David Apocolypse went to a party here in Dallas last night, where a kid soberly explained to him that Buck Naked actually wrote "MOST" of The Book of the SubGenius, but that Stang ripped Buck off and took all the credit.
It's so nice to know that people are still talking about me.
Although I think that Canadian, Bob Dean, might have a bone to pick with Buck, since Dean claims Buck and I both ripped HIM off, him really being "Bob" and all.
You ever read THE THREE CHRISTS OF YPSILLANTI? It's the nonfiction story of an experiment in which psychiatrists found 3 guys who all claimed to be Jesus, and put them all together at one state mental insitution. Everything the three Jesuses said to each other was recorded, and this book is mostly transcripts of their dialogs. It is one of the funniest books I have read. One of the loony Jesii even starts ranting about a "Sister Yeti Woman" that he imagines himself married to.
I've lately been thinking of a Convention of The Unjustly Treated SubGenii. Put all six or seven of these godlike beings in one place and hit "record." It's terrible how I (and you too, probably) wrecked their lives simply by minding our own business, but heck, that's what Dobbs would have done too, I'm pretty sure.
Goes with the territory. Could be worse. THEATER, or the film business. There are things worse than the religion biz.
********
Speaking of nut cases, I am very sorry to hear that cuthulu is shutting down rlabs, which has been truly a wonderful case of nuts for many months now. He got stuck in an awkward position, I guess. I know exactly how that position feels, myself. Pinned between two or more Hitlers. I'm one of the Hitlers. I'm not sure what the rumors are, but no, I didn't ban or kick or crush anybody. I did tell Iceknife that I do not want him calling himself SubGenius Publications and Comix. Iceknife can do anything the hell he wants as long as there's no risk of him being mistaken for The SubGenius Foundation or the Church at large. But that has nothing to do with business; it's STRICTLY PERSONAL.
Cuthulu says this will be a gradual shut-down, and that the IRC will still be open on weekends WITH NO OPS (PRAISE FUCKING "BOB"!!!!). Any remaining kick-happy powermad bozos will just have to shriek impotently at each other in capital letters now. And Modemac's #slack on anothernet is always good. When SubSITE gets moved we'll try to get some kind of IRC running there. I've experimented with some web-browser based ones, which we could install now, but they appear to suck so far. Things change fast in compuland, though.
Many of you have small websites at rlabs which might eventually be orphaned. Now, I can't make the amazing offer that cuthulu did -- "A FREE WEBSITE FOR ALL SUBGENII!!" -- because, well, space at SubSITE is NOT unlimitted, ANY MORE. (It practically WAS for awhile there.) But the ones that are there already, we can probably find room for, if you can't find another home for it. I'm already doing that with several websites by long time pals. I would PREFER you found your own home for yours just because it's less hassle for me. Because you won't have a password -- any changes would have to be funnelled through Jesus or me, and we're BUSY. But we won't leave you high and dry. High maybe. Or dry, but not both. My complaining to cuthulu about other folk's manners was one of the things that deSlackified rlabs for him, so I feel partially responsible.
God damn it. But I'm just a stickler about manners. In fact I get downright rude about it. I can't help it, I was raised that way. I'm a victim -- pay me. Will hold sign for money. The whole universe is completely insane! Praise Fuckin' "Bob"!
Original file name: Nut Wrenching Terror
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.