Winterstar Done, SXSW Next StangReport/Hour of Slack 569 -- ESO In Hell MAH GAWD, so much to do in 2 days. Good thing that for therapeutic reasons, I don't HAVE to do it all, and some folks may just have to WAIT, or NEVER HEAR BACK! Got back from the Winterstar fest/con and hit the ground running, since we have to immediately take off again for SXSW in Austin. If I get through last week's email before next week's stacks up, why, you'll know I Slacked through UberWork. If I get ANYTHING changed on SubSITE you'll know that prescription benzadrine was suddenly legalized. To tell the truth, even if bennies were legalized again, I'd have to eschew 'em, because they'd only make me want to SMOKE! On my third month now and I STILL WANT A CIGARET BECAUSE I STILL HAVEN'T HAD ONE!!!! I will have you know that I have not peed in 5 days. I'm quitting that too. I'm tired of the stigma, of having to go off to a special room, or outdoors, to indulge my filthy habit. Wish me luck. I'll probably gain weight at first but I am determined to lick this addiction. ** Jesus Christ and Nickie Deathchick will go to Austin too. Between the four of us we hope to keep the SubGenius Sales Booth in the Exhibition Hall open all day Sunday and Monday. Saturday will be devoted to important meetings between G. Gordon Gordon's reps, some arms dealers of Gordon's acquaintance, and Steve Jackson Games. Supposedly, Joe Newman and Sphinx Drummond's band BOOGER 9000 has some involvement...? I am supposed to be on a panel about implantable chips on Sunday, and I'm going to show VIDEOTAPES of the SubSITE art mines on Monday while bullshitting. !!!! I smell something burning. Jesus was cooking downstairs... this could be bad... ***** False alarm... just teenagers in my driveway working on a jalopy. Winterstar was tons of fun, mainly because I really didn't have to work very hard at all. The pagans do know how to party, and they actually APPLAUD when I yell at them about their superstitious nonsense. Sales were brisk but MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, better than immediate sales in hand, we recorded a new Hour of Slack during the ESO radio show on WCSB on Thursday night -- a really GOOD Hour of Slack that came out to EXACTLY 60 minutes, meaning I was able to immediately start dubbing the tape for sending out to stations the SECOND I got home. Keeping up with the radio show while travelling is tricky but MAH GAWD MAN!!! I sure do love spoutin' on the air with Lonesome Cowboy Dave while Chas Smith and his wife Michele jam on about 40 different instruments in the background. Michele plays electric violin and effects box, and can sound like Hendrix just about. Chas, who is a music PROFESSOR in "real" life, had a THERAMIN at the station this night! YES!!! A real THERAMIN, one of those Forbidden Planet era musical instruments consisting of an antenna which, when you wave your hands around near it, emits SPACE SOUNDS, warbles and hoots. And for lovely lilting and/or cackling feminine punctuation, Princess Wei "R." Doe was there to lend her Virtual Frop vibes. The Virtual Frop became one of the themes in perhaps the smoothest and most focused of chaotic Firesign-inspired improv/trance spouting sessions. Dr. Howll and Puzzling Evidence get to do SubGenius Trance Radio every week, but I only get to do it on the rare occasions that I can get into a studio with a Spout-Bro. Lonesome Cowboy Dave and I can't ACTUALLY read each others' minds, NOR do we even have a script, but when the Orchestra gets to jammin in the bg we get to daiarrheain' in the mics. Once again I got to torture various incarnations of Dave endlessly, first with implantable chips, then with drugs, then with Hell, and full circle again. I would have to call this show our most powerful antidrug statement yet. People who listen to this show while tripping will literally be scared shitless, when they aren't blind with the tears of cosmic terror laughter. Dave just makes such a good victim, it brings out the... the... the real PREACHER in me. Also, we have developed these themes before and I would imagine that by now, Dave feels like he really has been to Hell and back. If somebody called me today and said, "Man, I want to give you $2000 to manufacture 2,000 CDs of a radio show, but you can't fuck around being a perfectionist, because I can't PAY you to be one, you have to just HAND ME AN EXISTING SHOW RIGHT NOW," I might just hand him this one. It's one of our most multi-layered, trippy, cynical, complex yet rib-ticklin' and vulgar, YET, and BEST OF ALL, NONE of the "old time SubGenius radio guys" are on it, AT ALL, except for ME -- which means that I don't have to listen to them all WHINE about how that OTHER Doktor got more CD time than THEY did, blah blah woof woof, they'll only whine that I'm a fascist, which is true, and I can say well sorry man, but it's an ESO show and I was a guest and WHERE WERE YOU WHEN IT WAS TIME TO HELP ME EDIT YOUR OLD TAPES??? Watching the X Files NO DOUBT. Plus, there is not one second of sampled or ripped off or "appropriated" tape on it... it's ALL ORIGINAL. NO LAWYER NEED EVER BE INVOLVED. Anyway, this latest show with ESO in Cleveland was a KILLER tape if I do say so myself. The music is lusciously sinister and you'd almost think that Dave and me knew what the hell we were about to say at any given time, almost like there was a script. We'll have this show up in TrueSpeech and RealAudio in a couple of weeks, praise WANDARER!!! And WCSB will probably replay it in AudioActive 9pm EST Sunday night in a couple or 3 weeks? Or we sell the crystal clear stereo cassette tapes for I believe $6.50 plus a buck postage? I dunno, ask Jesus, I only do the LOFTY, CREATIVE work now; I leave the mundane frippery of the business world and its callous workings to the little Lord Jesus and His minions. Because there is a constant rug of background music (MUSIC -- not antimusic) this one may be ER, a CHALLENGE to hear in trueSpeech. RealAudio, who knows, depends on the weather. We OF COURSE recommend the tape. Jesus informed me that the last Hour of Slack like this one, with ESO, "HOUR OF SLACK 530" I think it is, has only sold 5 copies even though it's the only HoS tape that I SPECIFICALLY "PUSHED" in our recent mailings. Well, harumph to THAT! I MAINTAIN THAT THE EINSTEIN'S SECRET ORCHESTRA/STANGIAN COLLABORATIONS ARE THE FINEST MOMENTS OF BOTH PARTIES!!! So there. BUT I shall not drown my sorrows by peeing. Janor says he got 10 packages from SubGenii wishing him well. None of them containing money... I know how he feels. At least once a day, Jesus and I look at each other and say, "WHY CAN'T THEY JUST BUY STUFF?" Because it seems like every SubGenius has a SQUABBLE with some other SubGenius and they all want us to TAKE SIDES and god damn it, it's PERFECTLY NATURAL for SubGenii to hate each other and it just plain goes with the territory and I'm SORRY, but your LIFE OR DEATH DISPUTES are between YOU-ALL and DOBBS. Unless they involve intellectual property of The SubGenius Foundation Inc., which I'll admit DOES, in a legal sense, include not only all graven images or spoken words invoking "Bob," but also the actual "LIVES" of many of the individuals who frequent this newsgroup. SORRY KIDS, but if you're gonna make an omelette..... So enough of this "Dr. Bronner's Soap" Opera, this Bobbie Squabblin' and strife within our own species. Let us kill those with whom we disagree, and then move on to loftier pursuits. Well, I only stopped here to advertise this latest wonderful audio production and brag about how cool I am, while I can, before the next bout of depression hits, which could be any second now, when I'll feel like a pathetic loser who has to sell dinky little cassette tapes that he makes in his ROOM, like a horrible bitter little old militia nut. The funny thing is, if I keep in mind that I PROBABLY AM STILL JUST CRAZY, REALLY AND TRULY, I am better able to maintain a Hendrixian or even Stimpish attitude rather than my Rennish attitude of old. The cessation of desire is not the idea, NAY!!! That would be DEATH for a SubGenius. But certainly, a relaxing of ATTACHEMENT never hurt anybody. In fact it JUSTIFIES one's puffing up one's ego EVEN MORE. NOTHING wrong with that. Long as you can pull it off. HOUR OF SLACK 569. Remember that title. (Shouldn't be difficult.) Next time you want to die, CALL 1-888-669-2323, give JESUS your credit card # and say "JESUS, I want to DIE!!! QUICK send me Hour of Slack 569, the one with Lonesome Coyboy Dave and them. And forgive me, Jesus, for not doing this earlier." And Jesus WILL forgive you, IF YOU WILL JUST BUY STUFF!!! This has been my testimony. Now to check my 150 emails. Rev. Ivan Stang I HAVE THE GREY HAND P.S. Just remembered. Jesus has been talking to the folks at I-CHAT and as of now, for a month, at SubSITE, we in theory have a set if 5 or 6 "chat rooms" IN THE AOL STYLE. To distinguish it from standard IRC. This is something that JUST came up and was JUST installed and may STILL be totally buggy, but they offered it free for one month to see how we like it -- to KEEP it is a $1500 set up charge (one-time fee apparently). I haven't even been able to get through to www.ichat.com to download the plug-in. But Jesus hasn't had any trouble. It's IRC on the web using a plug-in for Netscape -- NOT regular IRC. It gives you little frames for artwork and supposedly will spew sounds and do all those other UTTERLY IRRITATING IRC stunts. It is completely and utterly divorced from the shameful shenanigans of the powermad groping clutching braindead Bobbies in the regular SubGenius IRC lands. I hope to get a chance to check it out before leaving town for Austin, though I suppose we could monkey with it there from GGG's outpost. I can't give you an URL for it yet because I ain't real sure it's running right myself. Jesus may make an announcement. He knows more about it than I do. We don't keep all our eggs in one basket, PRAISE FUCKIN' DOBBS!! PPS I wish we'd known about that bug in Explorer, earlier. OH what we coulda done.