[Bob has been explaining the origins of the Church of Subgenius to 8Bit while walking through the streets of the East Village. We enter the discussion as they are talking about an episode in Texas where Bob meets 2 college kids talking conspiracy theory and blows their minds. They would eventually use his fathers image and begin the Church based on his theories.]
8: It's connected to the 1978 discussion.
B: That's right, yeah.
8: A discussion which hasn't happened
much lately because people are in a culture of fear right now.
B: Well, there's no people. Everyone
disappeared they're cowering in...
8: Yes, sir.
[laughing]
8: Wow, so the professor who ran
Heavens gate...
B: I'll give you the place where
you can go read....The light of the subgenius was based on Hail Bob,
8: Those comet monkeys, Hail Bopp.
B: Hail Bob! It was projection in
1978 that just before the July 98 exodus, thats what I was talking about. Kind
of stuff like this,,,,all this organic robotoid, the whole fucking @!#$...they're
minds were exploding...so in the course of all the synchronicities that were
happening, all the xenocraties I pulled out a picture of my father. Well, they
wanted to know where were you from. Have you heard of the DaVinci Code?
8: Yea.
B: The priority of Ten. My father
was a member of that.
8: Oh.
B: Everyone's reading this book.
I was on the subway and I wanted to tell this girl who was reading it.
8: Just lean over and be like, "Hey,
you wanna know what really happened?" and she'd be like "Oh yea?"
[laughing]
B: Yea, you cannot do that in New
York because everyone there are so many crazies.
8: That was more for you than for
her maybe. More for you to see.
B: Because I have told people but
they get weird and run away,
8: Right, they just run away.
B: So what happens is I show a picture
of my father and I had been telling of the force of the number 22 and I pointed
out when my father died...
8: What about 23?
B: You know what, here's the synchronicity...we
were at 2nd and 2nd .... I walk by 1st and 1st at 6:00 to look at the room where
I was when I found out my father died on July 5th, 1976.
8: Really?
B: Yes. I looked at the building.
It was an art college. Nova Scotia Art College outpost in Nova Scotia Canada.
I knew ppl and I would hang out there. I put up paintings there the year before.
8: Nova Scotia Art College?
B: Yes, the college of Art and Design
in Nova Scotia Canada. They had a spot, a room for the students where you came
to New York because you had to come live in the artworld. I walked by and was
looking at that room and I said, @!#$, next I'll come by again and it'll be
30 years.
8: So he passed away in that spot?
B: I was there. He was in Paris.
It was the bicentennial sailing of ships up to Hudson.
8: Fleet Week?
B: No big ships -- they were sailing
boats. Well, now we're gonna go spiraling all over the place.
8: Wooo!
B: On July 4th I was standing on
the World Trade Center on the very top. I don't know which building I can't
remember. They were talking to people, famous people of America and all of a
sudden Marshall MacLuhan comes on. And I am the archivist, was going to be the
archivist. I'm the only fuckin person in the world that heard this and I'm standing
on the World Trade Center on July 1st walking around. I had just been with Marshall
two week ago in Toronto. All of a sudden he's there and they ask him, "What
do you see for America in the next 20 year?" One word. Apocalypse. And
I fuckin heard that standing on the place where the Apocalypse took place on
September 11th.
8: Was...Marshall was there?
B: No, he was in somewhere in a studio
somewhere. I hadn't seen him in 2 weeks. I'm here running around NYC and I happened
to be at the World Trade Center. Maybe he was in New York.
8: He was on Charlie Rose or something.
He was on some show.
B: It was ABC network feed coming
into the top of the World Trade Center. They have that TV needle up there that
is the broadcast antennea for all whole 5 bouroughs.
8: Not anymore.
B: Not anymore. So I'm standing up
there probably the only one who knew who MacLuhan was...
8: In the crowd.
B: Right, in the crowd. Just mingling
tourists and he comes on but I heard it. He ain't telling people everything's
gonna be great.
8: Ahhhh....
B: What's the future. One word. "Apocalypse".
8: One word.
B: Yea, one word. The important thing
is I'm the one that knew what was going on behind the scenes of September 11th
and I heard that 25 fuckin years later, the very place where I heard it cuz
I imagine Im the one with the TV head, I don't know I might of been on the other
one.
8: Did you write that in the article?
Did you touch on the fake professor with the phoney masters degree?
B: The point is I'm standing there and a quarter century later it's the site of the Apocalypse.
[continuation coming soon...]
[conversation treads back into Bob Dobb's explaining the meeting that inadvertantly began the Church of the Subgenius, a subcultural movement based on his ideas, numerology and fathers image.]
B: I'm showing the picture of my father to them and that he had died on July 5. Thats 1978. In 1982 I'm in Washington with my intelligence connection Dr. NAME WITHHELD and he hands me a fucking flyer and says . "Look at that", and I looked at it. I said, "This looks familar." He said, "Well, it's your father." Hmmmmm.... "You're right", I said. He knew my father. So I'm looking at it and I go, "What does it say..." Y'know, something bizzare. "[incoherent] will come July 5th, 1998" So I go, "Wait a minute." I'm thinking, "July 5th?" That's when my father died - 1998 is 22 fucking years later, that 76 and 98, 22.
8: From when you had that conversation?
B: No, from when he died. 20 years from when I talked to them in 78 but now its 4 years later in 82 and I'm getting a pamphlet. So I'm wondering what that was. This could be probably a day or so later. It [the picture] said 22 years later on July 5th 1998 the X's will align on the planet or something. I'm thinking thats my fathers birthday, its 22 years later. They put the two together. They put the dates and figured 22 and they didn't give me credit because I might have sued them. And what they did is they found a picture from the southern bell phonebook that looked like their memories of the picture of my father.
8: That guy on the stickers with a pipe.
B: The perfect salesman face.
8: That's what they remembered.
B: Yes. That's the way my father looked I can show you a picture of him with a pipe taken in the 30s and 40s.
8: So you gave them the inspiration to start this whole mythology. Whoa! This is how everything starts.
B: I know. The point is this is 1982. I didn't even know anything because they weren't anything at that point. By 1984 they get on the radio in Dallas at a college. I was in Toronto and some guy comes up to me, "Ever heard about these guys, Church of the Subgenius?" He handed me some booklet or something and I read it. Than I knew, Irealized this is based on fucking me. They're describing the whole thing they got from what I told them. [pause]
8: Oh my god. Damn.
B: I don't know where I'm going with this...but than I had a radio show and I left Toronto in the 90s. Foreign students loved my radio show, I told them it was free for anybody so they had taped parts of it and this very accomplished computer editor guy made tapes of my show and than made that album called 'Bob beat Malpy' and that went out. When that came to the Dallas guys, they wanted to sue the Toronto guys. They thought it was them but it wasn't. What happened when people in the states got the album on the AK press circuit they thought it was the same Bob, J.R Bob Dobbs. He said, "No, we didn't put this out." So he called the guy who made it and...
8: They were actually using your name?
B: Oh yeah.
[end of part 1 next in memetic transcription queue...]
[This is an actual article by Dobbs taken from the discourse "UP WITH SATELLITES MACHINES" edited and Interpreted by Nelson Thall. 8Bit prints this as an introductory reading and foundation for the upcoming conversations wherein Bob explains the intricacies of ideas laid out in this dissertation. By now, his vernacular and language style should be easily understood and his message clear. If you are having trouble comprehending please refer to the earlier conversations.]
*PART 1 of 2 -- Continued in Sept 98 CMS POST*
"In the 1945-98 period there were fast pace changes which were not visible to the ordinarily educated man. The alchemy in which Western man lived in requires more open expression. In the period following the last world war there was a necessarily 'archetypal' quality to the situation caused by rampant technological innovation innoculating a body-politic which was ignorant of the ecology of media effects. Since it was an ever-changing and ever-fluid context there was a complementary process of intensity creating what scientists term the holeopathic cliche-probe. These holeopathic cliche-probes constitute further refinements of the form and content of the newspaper, movie, radio/television, and computer environments and their interpenetrations of each other under the panoptical surveillance of the Satellite environment. Advertising and the Nielsen ratings were the gluons that simulated economic control of these media matings. Holeopathic is a word that combines the two processes of homeopathy and the hologram. Since the technologies of the industrial and subsequent electronic revolutions had been subsumed by the burgeoning television environment after 1945, one might as well say that 'everything had disappeared.' However, in homeopathic terms one should understand that 'everything' or at least the memory of it, was being diluted to ever more invisible and inaudible but potent EFFECT. This is a proven homeopathic principle. And this memoried 'everything' was a habitable environment as far as human beings were concerned even though only one-third perceptible to them because the effects of an environment always precede the causes. Hence the use of the term 'hologram.' The effects are the image of technological change and the causes represent the substance of that change. Because the effects precede the causes therefore it is synonymous with the hologram, a technology in which the image is created without any substance.
An example of where the effects precede the causes can be seen if one examines the television. The effects of television preceded it's cause. The new artform which was created by it's effects was Pointillism. This artform was first discovered circa 1850's long before the invention of television which was first publicly demonstrated on November 7, 1925 in Falkirk, England by it's first pioneer John Logie Baird. Pointillism is a technique in which the picture is made through the use of individual little dots being dabbed onto a canvas; there are no brush strokes. The discovery of making images in the mind through the use of dots is exactly the method employed by television. It seems that the engineers get around to inventing about fifty years after the artists' discoveries. Television makes a picture by the use of of electronic dots. Television is merely electric pointillism. After 1945, everything disappeared and all that remained was an after-image. In effect, since everything was subsumed by the television environment what was left to retrieve by mankind as an identity-image of itself were holeopathic cliche-probes of the past environment.
Thus people are forced to live in a holeopathic retrieval of the American Hologram - a condition most citizens in the solar theater are experiencing and living, although unconsciously. It is interesting to note that Baird's first television which had a green screen had a placard on it as a warning like present day cigarettes. It read that television was the magic of writing light. The Green Ray can read you like an open book. The electric pen writes your character. After 1945, since everything had disappeared, there was no basis for your subjective body and the image of the individual evaporated. Now everyone's mind merged with the collective electronic body. You could not possibly have or feel any sensation. You could only have the after-image of sensation through proxy prosthetics. Therefore the newspaper gave you the delicious 'feeling' of Paranoia; the television gave you Schizophrenia; the book, Hysteria; the movie, delightful Panic and the electric media of the Mixed Corporate (Collective) Media gives you Quadrophrenia or Ecstasy via the magazine/satellite. All these emotions/mental states had been reprised 'en bloc' and 'en masse' between 1957 and 1998 via all the technologies crowded into the stage of the global theater enunciated by the satellite environment. The satellite is an important marker in this evolution of mankind. The satellite as a new technology is an extension of man and thus is mankind's second nature. But what is unique alone to the satellite is this; if you consider every technological environment an extension of the human crowd, or social Nature, rather than of just biological Nature, or first Nature, then because the satellite is alone of all technologies a complete extension of the planet, or first Nature, by being the first man-made habitable simulation of our 'natural' environment, then the satellite is a simultaneous extension of both first and second Natures, and something unique and unprecedented has occurred. The satellite must be viewed as an artform and as an artform it anticipates discovery and invention. This merging (or fusion) of the two Natures 'anticipates' symbolically the bridging of the gap between humanity and the environment which is now actualized by 'Cold Fusion'. Also this 'frictionless' condition is anticipated by the satellite as a symbol of individual detachment from the historical prison of the crowd dynamic. We are literally 'out of town', and not just in another town, but 'off the planet'. Even though the satellite is a symbolic actualizer of this existential autonomy and solitude, its effect on the collective consciousness creates a purgatory of frustration like a Catch-22, because there would not be a complementary situation of freedom from basic food, energy, and shelter needs which still involve the 'money crowd'.
But, the "Cold Fusion" surplus energy source bypasses and resolves this Catch-22 dilemma by allowing the individual to live anywhere once he has a cold-fusion 'battery'. We will be relatively free of ground rent, or 'visual space.' So that when Rhyee (the original Separateness) returned to the Plane of Essence in February, 1967, the cycle of friction-based technological civilisation was kaput, and hence, aware and self-conscious of itself as a process. This meant that Rhyee ('earth') and its concomitant forces of Eloi ('water'), Tu ('air'), and Lofti ('fire'), were free to create their own spaces as anti-environments/polygons (cultural terrorists) to the imminent fusion. After 1967 when the satellite environment was subsumed and 'disappeared' by holeopathic electric autonomy, the holeopathic cliche-probe merged with its medium (in the style and method of all advertising advertises advertising) to simulate the Rhyee cycle of 'emanation and return'. And then took off again!! This process could be considered a laundromat washing the difference between a 'take off' and a 'put-on'."
[conversation continues as Bob Dobbs lays out the initial concepts behind his
greater philosophy and connects it to 8Bit's film, She's Got an Atomic Bomb.]
B: So the machine is dissapearing and becoming user-friendly. Now, if it wants
to be really good at this...
8: If it want's to imitate.
B: Right. If it wants to imitate because it's trying to figure out what humans are, why not scan one of the smarter humans to have a standard...see what this guy does...It scans me to have a standard of a basic human, I don't want to call it eloquence but some kind of good standard. "There's a pretty smart human who understands what we're trying to do to the humans so if we map him we can throw his mind back into the audience and keep them stupid while we keep making better technology". That's my main thesis, my theory on why it imitates me and it's an ongoing drama.
8: How is that connected to things getting smaller?
B: That's it. The machine wants to merge with us and make us feel it ain't there anymore because we've always been bugged by the machine, at least for the last 200 years. It ultimately wants control of us by saying "Hey, I gave up. It's your show, you run everything and I'm not even here. Do you see me?" I call that cloning esp. They're worried about cloning humans now but they've cloned esp already through television and it's even more refined now to prey on humans innate communication skills.
[4 people walk by us all seemingly in the same body position with the same cellphones]
8: Hmmm...that's a great statement on the clonification of society. It's funny because take those people on cellphones. They have the same cellphone with the same blue light. I've never seen that before. 4 people in a row walking in the exact same way with the same exact cellphone, one after another.
B: Those aren't humans, they're organic robotoids. They're probably scanning us right now.
8: Let's be careful what we say than. A new psychological term called 'the absence of presence' I was reading about says what cellphones create is a thing that now they're calling the absence of presence. So if your next to me and I'm like this [make body imitation of person on cellphone] you have a desire to connect with the conversation I'm having on the other end, but it's a false need to connect. It's my conversation.
B: Right. You're talking to thin air, an invisible presence.
8: So I'm saying into thin air, "No, it's alright. It might rain tommorow", really to the person on the other end but you want to respond to me intrinsically. I'm not looking at you or even talking to you for that matter. What that creates is this alienation called the absence of presence, a new bubblization of the other.
B: I've already developed that. That's where Bush came in on. From 1995-2000, within 5 years time more and more people have ignored public space matters. Yelling and screaming on the phone in a restaurant or something , "@!#$ you. I'm not even paying attention to you. I'm in the bubble in my head."
8: That's it. The absence of presence. You are here but you're not here. I'm in a bubble but you're the one who ends up really in the bubble because I have no desire to communicate with you. You're just longing to respond to an unknown on the other side of me.
B: It's the nihilization of public space.
8: Along with everything else.
B: Look at the president. The president is always the most avante-garde marketed image, the presidency that is. Here's a guy who does not communicate with the media, he ignores the media, and doesn't listen to the United Nations or anybody. He's unilateral -- he's ignoring public space.
8: Ohhhh....
B: That's the fuckin image reflected that we created on our cellphones. It's perfect! You see what I'm saying? And that's why the old media hates him. He's doesn't pay attention to us. He's so stupid he can't finish his sentances -- can't even finish saying his syllables.
8: But we manifested him.
B: We caused it with these cellphones which is the point. A new medium will create new social mandate and the White House will mirror it. Because the White House is a resident node that runs human consciousness now. We're in resident node culture.
8: That's a great allegory but what about his second term though? His words are a little more shaped, he's a little more confidant. He's not saying stupid @!#$ as much anymore.
B: Yes, but he's still scaring the @!#$ out of people. I hear so many people saying "These guys are Christian fascists" For 4 years we didn't know what the @!#$ this guy was doing and now we are realizing he has an agenda which is Christian fascism.
8: But people knew that.
B: Yes, but they didn't get it. They didn't believe it. They were confused by what was going on. There was nothing there.
8: The avante-garde...
B: ...nihilization of space. Once he...
8: The media creates the president as it has always.
B: ..was the absence of presence than he got public mandate by the non-public to say yes, you're a great guy, but he didn't tell us what he was about, which is his wifes agenda. The point is Laura runs the show now or at least her agenda or what she thinks...but than that's all fucking bullshit. What's really going on is a goddamn full on war among intelligence all over the planet and different industries -- all the old media fighting each other trying to deal with nihilization.
8: Berlusconi has not only been elevated to President [of Italy] but he's a media mogul who owns all of the media and on top of that he's President. Than look at Putin, he's totally clamped down on any indie media there so there is the centralization of media happening within each hemisphere around a single person.
B: Media, by the way, that does not represent a public face anymore, mind you like Stalin and those other guys did. It no longer represents the people. It represents the Android Meme, which is my term for the machine coming to life.
8: The Android Mean.
B: No, meme. M-E-M-E. Cultural imitation.
8: So in every culture there is a human vessel for this android meme that genuflects back whatever place it's representing or coming from or...
B: Right, Berlusconi is the Italian Meme. There's the Islamic Meme, the Christian Meme. That's why the Republican President has to be Christian because that's what this country was built on.
8: It can't be anything else. What's it gonna be? It can't be anything else. Navajo?
B: Another point is that as the meming face dissapears you're back to caveman reality where you get 20 people standing on the planet.
8: You mean if you were to make everyone else invisible and just look at the memes [android memes]?
B: As the technology dissapears there's no means of communication.
8: I see. If you were to subtract the Android Meme from peoples lives.
B: What do people say to each other than? It's another level of interaction and by the way, people who are meeting at that level already are meeting one on one. So you really have 10 or so people in the world; Putin, Berlusconi, Chris Carrol...
8: Rupert Murdoch.
B: Right, and so on.
8: Now would he be a sub-meme? He's not a President. He's had no political power, Murdoch that is.
B: He's the old fashioned media. The idea of communication media.
8: Which still exists.
B: Yes, yes -- you can't get rid of media [old media] but they become weaker and more diluted compared to the present environment. The present environment is people meeting with nothing in fucking common because there's no grounds to communicate.
8: Ha ha ha...
B: It's just "@!#$ you! I'll blow you up first." You know what I mean?
8: The mass of Presidents who centralize the media are manifest by this cellphone culture...
B: Right, what we have now is most humans are in this little marble, the controlled version of old media these days with cellphones, and yet those that are ahead of the process are walking around on turf or on land phones confronting each other literally like giants.
8: Right, that's what they're doing!
B: And it like your movie [She's got an Atomic Bomb]. One giant gets a fucking bomb and put's it in your neighbors yard who take it and put it in his yard and so on. What the @!#$ is that, who's the terrorist?
8: Ha ha ha...
B: Your movie is actually about what I call the renewed Anthropomorphic Physical [AP]. All media are projections of what we believe in and if media disappears we have to confront what we are and where the media came from which are extensions of ourselves. Our basic images project the anthropomorphic projection. So that's what you're movie is about, the Anthropomorphic rumplestiltskins with the political football which is the fuckin bomb. It's not one of these countries or Al-Qaeda either. Who's gonna do it? It's a little village with the the little robotoid Sheepshead people and the girl who is against the android mediums.
8: Anthropomorphic recognizant rumplestiltskins...ha ha ha.
B: A bomb has multilevels meanings too. It's like a cellphone.
8: [making pulsating sound effect] Yea, I used a whole bunch of sound effects on it to give it life. The fuckin' nodes, man -- resident node culture. I'm just over my Apocalypse culture thing and now this is completely throwing me for a loop. The next project I'm writing seems dated now -- it seems like I've been thinking like it's still 2000 and now you're bringing me to 2005 which is something warped...you just warped everything.
B: Enlightened you to the nature of Memes.
8: Right, My symbology is new.