Today's Topics:
More on the REAL Bob
Apology to Bob Black
Administrivia:
Things are getting out of hand.
Apparently messages from this list don't stay within the tidy confines
of the network, but make their way out into the wider world,
specifically the world of Bob Black. This digest contains a reply from
Black to some of the things that have been said about him here. Some of
those things shouldn't have been said so carelessly in what turns out to
be a public forum; and I have also enclosed a public apology for my
share of those.
I would like the issue to end here, at least as far as this digest is
concerned. Why? Two reasons:
1) The digest is for items that are funny or enlightening or both, and
petty sniping between radical cliques is neither.
2) more importantly, the list (and all recreational use of government
computer networks) exists in the network underground and will die if
exposed to the light of postal inspectors, the mainstream press, DARPA,
or similar public authorities. The Black controversy has become a
police matter and I don't want this list embroiled in it. The U.S.
mails are available for those who like this sort of thing.
-- Rev. Ped
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Message-ID: <9001271847.AA13450@css.itd.nrl.navy.mil>
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 90 13:47:48 -0500
From: Jim Hofmann 5577 <hofmann@itd.nrl.navy.mil>
To: SubGenius%mc.lcs.mit.edu@MINTAKA.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: More on the REAL Bob
POBox 2159
Albany, NY 12220
SubGenius as Fake Orgasm: An Ironic Cult is Still a Cult
by Bob Black (POB 1259, Albany NY 12220)
When a racket which boasts of being "insane" starts to use that word
to stigmatize its critics, it's washed up. SubGenius has been going downhill
at least since 1984, when the participatory format of the 1982 Con was
replaced by the _stage_show_ of 1984's Night of Slack and all subsequent
"Devivals." At the recent New York City show, the Bobbies -- the SubGenius
consumers in the audience -- behaved as if they were in church, with the only
interactive heckling coming from the anti-Sub Black Legionaire Tad Kepley.
In New Orleans last year, the conformists in eccentric drag actually lined
up to shake Ivan Stang's hand. Pazcal Uni put something in it and scared
the shit out of this upwardly mobile hip daddy . . . the Bobbies drew back
and security came closer! These days Ivan Stang is the Howard Hughes of
the lunatic fringe.
I'd like to get the credibility question answered once and for all.
I've met Buck Naked once -- he's one dumb cracker, let me tell you --
and Travers once (a do-nothing passive consumer like 99.44/100% of the Subs),
neither has any personal knowledge of anything he accuses me of. But Naked
surely speaks for the Dallas high command -- for Stang himself -- when he
calls me "insane" for reporting the bombing. I am quite happy for this to
settle who's lying and who's telling the truth -- I prefer honest lunatics
to sane liars when it comes to deciding whom to believe -- as would anyone,
I should think, interested in the truth.
GOBI, who snitched my home address to the Church hierarchs,
has snitched again -- to the postal inspector, and even to me. The mad
bomber is an inner-circle Sub, just as I surmised. He is John Hagen-Brenner,
who did half the layout and a lot of the art for the Book of The SubGenius.
He told her (they've conducted a long-distance flirtation for years, H-B
is in a sexless marriage and GOBI is a teen cocktease), "I did it for you,".
She says she gave him my home address but not Stang. I don't believe
that part, she told Tad Kepley she'd given the address to Stang (I introduced
them) and it is likely he circulated it to his inner circle. Just how
deeply he, and other Subs are involved in the hit remains to be determined.
But John H-B, judging from my hasty and incomplete scan of the Federal
statutes, is looking at a theoretical maximum sentence of 30 years, not
counting state charges like reckless endangerment. He won't get that, of
course, he's a first offender, but he is going to get something very, very
bad -- worse, probably than I'd wish on him, unfortunately the matter
is out of my hands, as it has been eve since the bomb arrived. Contrary to
"Fat" Lippard, I am not keen on getting anybody jailed, but that was
inevitable once a bomb I am incompetent to dispose of arrived in my apartment.
It was the Albany police, not me, who brought in the postal inspector who
regards mail bombs as attacks on the postal service, i.e., on his own outfit.
I'm going to lobby for leniency, but the state as usual is pursuing its own
interests, not those of the victim, and I expect to have little influence
on events.
The Forsythe Saga got bogged down in self-interested hearsay. Rev.
3.0 -- is that his IQ? -- amazingly has no idea what I'm up to whether in,
out or against the Church of the SubGenius. I've never heard of the "Employee
Resistance System," but I am the author of The Abolition of Work and Other
Essays ($6 postpaid from me), with an adulatory introduction by -- Ivan
Stang.
Lippard is a libertarian, therefore a dumbshit. He doesn't know me
and has no personal knowledge of anything he gossips about. Curious to
see a right-wing lib (he writes for _Reason_ where my publisher Loompanics
isn't even allowed to _advertise_) passing along Marxist fairy tales from
Processed World, which sought an injunction to forbid me "mentioning" them
in posters and which sent a martial arts thug named Tom Athanasiou to
assault me on the street near my Oakland home. The story is in my first
book, The Baby and the Bathwater ($6 from Popular Reality Press, 1264 Creal
Crescent, Ann Arbor, MI 48103). Oddly enough I am at large 4 1/2 years
after PW aired its accusation. Several days after the alleged arson attempt
I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association,
an academic group, in San Diego. After that I moved to Los Angeles where my
four month stint with the American Civil Liberties Union was commemorated
in a front page story in their newspaper. I signed off on two briefs
submitted in civil liberties cases which I authored. It was then that I
published my Loompanics Catalog review in the _LA_Reader_. And at
the Libertarian DagneyCon I was one of the five performers in a dramatic reading
based on Orwell's _Animal_Farm_ (my roles were Snowball and Benjamin) before
a large lib audience. If I was a wanted criminal I was the most publicity
hungry fugitive in world history.
I'm sure Processed World is still out to get me, but there is no
hint their accusations were ever taken seriously by the pigs. My crime against
them was the same as my crime against SubG -- to expose their scam. The
Subs, as we know only too well, have my home address. I am subject to
interstate axtradition. Why hasn't it happened? Why hasn't it even been tried?
Prominent Sub artist Paul Mavrides is also prominent PW artist Paul Mavrides.
Jay Kinney and Jow Schwind also have feet in both camps. I figure if they
could get me arrested they wouldn't have to bomb me. Now it looks like
they're the ones who'll be arrested. I'm no statist but pardon me if I'm
less than sympathetic.
My review of The Match was highly accurate, not highly inaccurate,
except for a 25 cent mistake on the price of a rag I made clear was no bargain
if they gave it away. Contrary to Lippard I never said the leftist crackpot
Woodworth was "an Ayn Rand follower," I merely noted their shared attachment
to outdated scientism and positivism. Woodworth's "crime," siding with PW
as it was using government and private violence on me, preceded by four
years my review of his wretched magazine, which was as impersonal as my
negative review of Stang's High Weirdness by Mail, which set off the recent
round of SubGenius hysteria and terrorism. My grievances against these guys
are irrelevant to the merits of my criticisms of their public praxis.
I'm curious that whereas I "fled" from California to Boston, in the
company of Donna Kossy, she didn't flee there, nor did Ken DeVries "flee"
from Colorado to Boston. Nor did I "flee" from Boston to Albany, I squelched
harassment by SubGenius types and their allies in Boston in summer 1987, a year
before I moved here to a job. I've often revisited, in several cases to attend
parties I dared the Boston Subs to come to. I come and go as I please.
Travers is a little shit who introduced Donna to SubShit, although
I was the one, much later, to get her involved in it. I was not ejected from
Boston Bobalon. I was one of the organizers of Boston Bobalon. I ranted at it.
I have never poured beer in any tape deck. The only person ejected from
Bobalon, to the lasting shame of Ahmed Fishmonger, was tENTATIVELY a
cONVENIENCE when he got bored and threw the cash receipts to the crowd.
I wasn't around, and the needledickheads like Fishmonger and Jehovah Ten
(the _dumbest_ Sub I've _ever_ met, the stage mismanager of the
fiasco) didn't even know who he was. This (is) the guy who in 1983 got
SubG more national wire service publicity than anybody before or since. For
the record, he's now anti-Sub
[I think Bob is referring to tENTATIVELY
a cONVENIENCE who launched a campaign against David Byrne, in I think,
1986, though I could be wrong - Jim]
At a post-Bobalon parter Travers didn't attend, a drunken goon
named Patrick got into a paranoid fugue because Trevor Blake (Revo,
Onan Canabiite) was going around with a recorder interviewing people and
collecting ambient noise. He confronted Blake and ripped out the tape and
stomped on it. he could do this because it was his house. I protested
and he roughed me up. I appealed to his housemate Jay ten Hove (Jehovah
Ten) who told me, "No, you're the asshole, Bob, he lives here." I
collected Donna and we left. At a later event, I argued with Subs Ahmed
Fishmonger and Jan Johnson (Zontar) about this and they defended the
assholes' property rights. I broke with them both, of course, on the spot.
Donna had agreed with me that Patrick's and J-10's behaviour was reprehensible.
But in the wake of my clash with Fishmonger and Johnson she left me. Only
six months later did I find out that DeVries ("Orton Nenslo") had been
undermining my relationship with Donna behind my back. Ivan Stang took
his side. Although DeVries made over 100 hang-up nut calls to me, Stang
hasn't retracted his snap judgement I was "insane" for reporting them,
although I sued DeVries and he admitted (a prudent move) making the initial,
threatening call, recorded on my message machine, the one Stang called
me "insane" for accusing DeVries of. Is it just me or does "insane" seem
to be the SubGenius rebuttal to the _verified_ abuses of its toadies?
I don't care to recount all I've done for SubGenius except to say it
surely surpasses the contributions of all my readers combined. My review of
the Book (included in my book) was officially proclaimed the greatest by
Stang in the Stark Fist. The Boston business established that longtimeloyalty
from a rather independent creator counted for less than sycophancy from
noveau riche followers. I don't conceal this aspect of my motivation, although
the campaign the ignoramus Travers pretends started immediately -- if there
is any campaign -- could only have started two years later with my review of
_High_Weirdness_by_Mail_ which hadn't been published in April 1987. And that
review, while critical of Stang, says little about the "languishing"
SubGenius joke except to remark upon the corruption of Stang's denigrating
the entire fringe except his business associates.
Travers was out of the loop all along, even parading the "alcohol"
bullshit although Fishmonger, ten Hove -- now Donna Kossy's housemate! --
and many other Sub bigwigs are mega-drunkards and Donna herself, in attending
the last Factsheet Five party stole bear (sic) from a friend of mine and
got sloppy-goofy sloshed, I am told. Stang himself is on Antabuse but
fell off the wagon at Bobalon until his wife arrived to whip him into line.
Let s/he who can pass a breathalyzer test cast the first stone, please.
SubGenius is a parody of cultism which became what it mocked. It's
a 99% passive consumption and 1% Jonestown; both pants are repulsive.
Stang makes self-pitying plaints about chimerical neo-Nazis - they don't
make Nazis like they used to, is all I have to say -- but the real
violence emanates from his most ancient and intimate followers. SubG
is somnolent and it's time to put it to sleep. Say goodnight, Gracie!
Or kill me.
(\)
Bob Black
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Message-ID: <19900128000019.3.MT@OUROBOROS.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 90 19:00 EST
From: Michael Travers <mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
To: SubGenius%mc.lcs.mit.edu@lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Apology to Bob Black
I owe Bob Black an apology for my note about him, which was not written
very carefully. It should have been prefaced with "the way I heard it
was...", because as he points out, I was out of the loop, and my
knowledge is all based on stories I heard from others. I also said that
he had been tossed out of the Devival, but as Black points out, the
events in question happened at a party afterwards -- this much even the
rumor mill agrees on. It was also inappropriate to call him an
alcoholic in public, and would be even if it hadn't based on hearsay.
My reason for spreading these rumors was that Black's point of view had
been introduced into this forum, and a sense of fairness compelled me to
present what I knew of the other side. This doesn't excuse my
carelessness however.
I hope Black gets his sense of humor back some day. His barbs at the
SubGenius establishment have more than an element of truth to them, but
mixed with so much bitterness that very few people are going to pay any
attention. It's a shame that he's wasting his satiric powers by
using them to perpetuate petty vendettas between hip cliques.
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End of SubGenius Digest
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