WHY DIDN'T WE GET SET UP TO TAKE CREDIT CARDS BEFORE????
It sure makes a dif at the sales table.
Speaking of sales -- before I forget -- we got the CDs in, finally -- the CD of the Madison Slack Crusade Devival with Dr. Legume, Sister Velveteen Sly and yrs truly. $14.95, and you'll LOVE the sleeve.
We also sell Bill T. Miller's amazingly PACKED CD (ONLY $7!!!), "OPEN YOUR EARS." AGAIN I CANNOT SUFFICIENTLY STRESS THE MAJESTY OF THE BREADTH AND VASTNESS OF THIS CD!!
AND!! -- NEW PRODUCT -- "TIME CONTROL" CD by THE KLINGONS of Berlin, Germany! As heard a lot lately on THE HOUR OF SLACK. Excellent rock & roll with femme vocalist, several SubGenius-specific psychosongs.
AND our latest Kook discovery, Joe Aufricht, finally came through with the cassettes of his ugly monologs and songs, "Mockery and Perversion."
Don't forget to throw in $3.50 for postage and handling.
The swag sales from the Drill and Starwood allowed us to print the remaining 2,000 Interim Stark Fists... we'll be mailing those soon to the western side of the country and overseas. Unfortunately, the Post Office now demands NOT ONLY zip-plus-four (your One-World-Gov't. Citizen's ID number) but also A BAR-CODED ADDRESS on anything bulk-mailed. You can perhaps imagine what a hassle the ConVersion of our mailing list is gonna be for Jesus and me. The worst part is, we have to remove all the secret buried codes in our list that tell us all the secrets about YOU -- because the data must go through THEIR SYSTEM!!!! Yep, in one fell swoop They managed to KILL bulk mailing for little old computer-illiterate preachers and militia founders all over the country. Luckily we are computer MASTERS and will be able to CONFOUND Their auto-spying while continuing to enjoy bulk mail privileges.
The Devival(s) at the Starwood festival at Brushwood in Sherman, NY (sponsored by A.C.E. of Cleveland) went very well despite the loss of Dr. Legume. Legume got there Thursday night but left Friday morning after burying a mysterious blue cylinder with red blinking L.E.D.s under the spot where the giant bonfire was to be built. I assume that it was a special effect of some kind -- Legume won't say, of course -- but apparently the timer was fried by the bonfire before it had a chance to trigger. Bummer. The bonfires at Starwood are always pretty spectacular -- literally as big as a large house, surrounded by hundreds of naked pagan drummers and dancers, and hotter than a witch's teat -- and this one had fireworks pincussioning it , but I'll bet it would have been a lot more spectacular had Legume's little surprise worked out.
I got to Brushwood at 7:55 pm Friday to find the organizers a bit agitated, since I was supposed to "go on" at 8 pm. I was not conducting a devival so much as MCing, introducing bands and doing sacred shtick during set-ups. Mostly winging it, with the "Involuntary Slack" rant thrown in. Two real famous Wiccans said they were converted.
It looks like I'll be saving souls at "Witchfest" or "Witchstock" or something like that, a big street fair in Columbus, Ohio around Oct. 24-25. You don't see CHRISTIAN preachers getting PAID to SAVE SOULS at WITCH fests very often, now DO you!?!? You hear me, Bob Larson? You hear me, WV Grant?
I also got to meet the famous druggee, Jonathan Ott, very briefly. He seemed like a regular redneck, for an "author." He was on a chocolate kick.
Jesus and I both spent most of our Starwood time WORKING... either running the Sacred Sales table, or in his case babysitting and in my case videotaping. (I'm the official videographer of the larger A.C.E. events). Poor Jesus. He had to watch over the TEENS at the event... as they swam nekkid in the pool, or underwent their weird "initiations"... I feel so sorry for the guy.
Lonesome Cowboy Dave and Papa Joe Mama were at their first Starwoods and I got to watch.
The main SubGenius event was an HOUR OF SLACK live show taping on Saturday morning. Mighty soundman Regis (who has BY CHANCE and DESIGN run sound at most of the SubGenius events in Ohio) set us up with a tape deck and mixer and 6 mikes so that we could "do show" in front of the crowd. Tag-team preachers included Papa Joe Mama, Lonesome Cowboy Dave, Bleepo Abernathy, Sister Velveteen Sly and occasionally Jesus. The edited version was turned into HOUR OF SLACK #539 yesterday. It is the greatest Hour of Slack ever produced, so you should definitely buy it. Between ranting we played "Dad" Townsend's mixdown of his pals doing THE PLEDGE OF THE SUBGENIUS, and a tape of L. Ron Hubbard himself, SINGING, a song called "Thank You for Listening" which Nenslo sent me. Nenslo's chipper instrumental collections were running in the background during the tag-team preaching which forms most of the show. $6.50 for the 60 min. cassette. The Face Fucking Bat discussion is not on the radio tape.
HOUR OF SLACK #540 is a solid uncut recording of an ESO Radio show with Einstein's Secret Orchestra. Every Thursday night at 11 pm, on WCSB in Cleveland (89.3 fm), Chas Smith, violinist/effects-mixer Michelle, Lonesome Cowboy Dave and various other band members do a couple of radio hours that rival God. I join that show every chance I get because each one is, like this one recorded just before Starwood, the greatest Hour of Slack ever produced.
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Every year at Starwood, the good A.C.E. guru Jeff Rosenbaum organizes a little rotating group of players called THE FIRESIGN CLONES, and we do stage radio-play renditions of old Firesign Theater bits. This year we did Temporarily Humboldt County, the one about the Indians, from their first album. I was Indian Two, Wagon Boss, and Government Agent. It's like playing air guitar.
It's weird, I can't remember my own rants well enough to work without notes, but I'll bet I could recite the entirety of I THINK WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS. That's really SICK.
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Any of you Macintosh users out there familiar with a graphics program called FLYING COLORS? It's generally considered a kids' art program, like Kid Pix. My daughter Sivet bought it by mail. It features painting tools and "rubber stamp" art pieces that cycle through color changes. Most of the examples of what you can do with it, shown in the instruction booklet, are pretty lame. However, Wei got to monkeying around with it and discovered that one may create EYE-PIERCING shifting-color mandala effects with the thing, if one but ABUSES IT SEVERELY. I wanna post some of these files on SubSITE, but... dang it, they're between 250 and 500k, and they only "read" like they're supposed to if you look at them in the Flying Colors program -- which I SUSPECT is Mac-only. If I'm wrong, let me know. I would generally like to hear from anybody else who has discovered the secret charms of this FLYING COLORS program.
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I am about to edit the X-Day Drill video footage down to a 2-hour tape. Tonight, in theory. This will NOT be a slick edit. I am using home equipment, which puts faint rolling color bars at some of the pause-edits. Hopefully, within a year or so, I'll get copies of the videotapes shot on other cameras and perhaps that'll justify spending money on a for-real edit session. This'll be what we call a "rough cut." REAL rough.
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TWO DAYS LATER
X-DAY DRILL EDITED DOWN TO 2 TAPES
I wanted to end up with one cheap tape, but.... it was a failure of nerve. I didn't have the heart to cut the Human Cartoons of the drill as brutally as I should have. (Besides, one can's really only afford to TWIDDLE with questionable projects like this for more than a DAY or two.) It's down to 4 hours. Two VHS tapes.
The new Part 1 has much "backstage" tomfoolery, Friday night's devival, and ends with a truncated version of the Scourging of Jesus and Crucifixion of Dobbs on Saturday evening.
Part 2 starts with the COMPLETE Scourging/Crucifixion and covers the Saturday night devival.
I generally left ranters and scenes of sex or violence intact, but cut the band performances down by half. I removed most of my and Bill T. Miller's intros.
$25 for the set. Later on, when I get footage from the other shooters in, maybe we can hack it down to a final single 2-hour tape. Maybe. Don't hold your breath.
This editing was not done on a fancy professional editing system, but with two nice 4-head home decks and a pause button. The edits are FAIRLY clean, MOST of the time, techno-wise. Timing-wise, pause-edits aren't exactly frame-accurate so... well, just try to see the choppiness as somehow DELIBERATE and "SubGenius-like."
Likewise the camera work is about what you'd expect from a Handycam atop a lightweight tripod being operated by a living person only about half the time. Thus you'll get 5 minutes of a band in locked-off wide shot, then another 5 minutes where the camerastang has returned and is grabbing close-ups.
In other words, HOME MOVIES, but on a tripod.
All copies have stereo sound.
******
Then I got to messing with a whole lot of demo and shareware programs that came in a free promotional CD ROM.
BRYCE 2. Must have BRYCE 2.
Then I answered the Foundation email. Push send and it said "57 messages."
I'll tell ya, Sunday is a busy day for a preacher. Gotta do the IRC services in a couple of hours. Somebody was suggesting we use DALNet rather than Undernet? Does anybody know of these things? Are we TO know?
Tonight Jesus is directing the process of moving the SubGenius Foundation Mail Order and Manufacturing divisions to our new factory building down the road. This has meant a fleet of trucks constantly coming and going between the corporate headquarters here and what will be the manufacturing plant. Not only is this a wise move re: taxes, but we feel that employee morale will be improved if we more office-bound white-collar executive types here in Management no longer have to, eh, interfere with the, shall we say, perhaps more "earthy" blue collar factory worker types over there in Manufacturing.
Original file name: Starwood Update
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