by Whatsblem the Pro

As our regular readers will recall, Whatsblem the Pro attended the shenanigans at the Castro Theater in San Francisco last weekend, where Chicken John Rinaldi’s Institute of Possibility staged an unauthorized guerrilla book signing to celebrate the release of TALES OF THE SAN FRANCISCO CACOPHONY SOCIETY.

After being trapped in the theater and subjected to some sort of experiment at the hands of amateur scienticians, Whatsblem awoke, his memory mostly a blank, but his phone filled with unusual pictures, videos, and audio recordings.

I haven’t slept since I woke up in that alley in Reno after the Cacophony Society “book signing.” My hands shake as I pick up my mug to gulp down yet another sour mouthful of black coffee, but I dare not sleep until the work is done. My phone is full of weird and mostly inexplicable artifacts documenting the time I spent drugged and under some kind of alien control at the Castro Theater, and I know that I must warn the people of this planet of the horrors that threaten them from every side (but mostly from the in-side). The lingering after-effects of the drug are terrifying all by themselves: existential warts, intense olfactory hallucinations, fleeting involuntary glimpses into the raw minds of passing strangers. I look down, and see that my body is covered in sores and boners.

Among the relics of my induced fugue state I discover an audio recording in which I can hear my own voice – though weirdly altered – and another voice I recognize immediately: Ivan Stang, nominal head of the obscure religious cult known as the Church of the SubGenius. A careful listening reveals the identity of the other speaker as Philo Drummond, co-founder of the Church. Dr. Hal Robins, reputedly the true brains behind not just the Church of the SubGenius, but the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Rosicrucians, the Raptor Conspiracy, Opus Dei, and even the dreaded Fearrington Homeowner’s Association, was apparently lurking nearby.

Read on, if you dare.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Philo, how do you draw the Venn diagram between the Church of the SubGenius, the Cacophony Society, and Burning Man?

PHILO DRUMMOND: I would say they all represent a certain counterculture perspective that is an eccentric perspective, and then there’s a lot of pranksterism and creativity involved. That’s probably a good overlap, if you were to draw the diagram of intersecting circles.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So it comes down to pranks.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Yes.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: I think that’s a very major, possibly even main artery of burner culture, but it’s under constant assault by people who think Burning Man is a hippie festival, who go out there thinking it’s all about peace ‘n’ love. Do you struggle with that at all within the Church? I mean, not necessarily peace ‘n’ love types, but people coming in with assumptions about what you’re doing that aren’t necessarily valid or accurate?

PHILO DRUMMOND: Oh, we already knew in advance there would be those kinds of people. Any organization attracts those kinds of people. We tried it minimize it from the beginning by positioning ourselves as an organization of non-joiners, people who don’t want to be part of another organization. That helped limit it; it kept those people out of it.

The joiners that join – versus the non-joiners that join – they stand out like a sore thumb. We call them ‘Bobbies.’ Their money is green, and we like that about them, but they’re still, y’know. . .

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Pink-souled?

PHILO DRUMMOND: Pink-souled. Yes.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So they become a resource, really, and don’t do you any harm.

PHILO DRUMMOND: They don’t really do us any harm, no, except as part of the Conspiracy. . . but that’s what they are by default. They’d be part of the Conspiracy whether they joined us or not.

So yes, I think we have some of the same challenges as Burning Man, just not from a physical perspective; whatever it was, it isn’t the same thing now. . . but Burning Man has that continuity: it’s in the same place. People going out there and thinking that they have freedom.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: All the trappings of an Autonomous Zone, without the messy autonomy.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Right. It’s not autonomy out there. . . but it’s fun to think that it is. We like to fool ourselves into different types of allegorical scenarios, it’s fun to do that. We think we’re in this free society. It’s fun to think like that, like you can just go out there and do whatever you want, and everything’s going to be great.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: We have a lot of people who really guzzle the kool-aid and start thinking that the ten principles were handed down from God to Moses to Larry Harvey. They turn into burnier-than-thou “burner lawyers” on the Internet, chiding people about how they live because it doesn’t fit with their interpretation of this list of rules they’ve decided is sacred. Do you see that kind of thing happening in the Church as well? Is there actual Church dogma that. . . well, does anyone take any of it too seriously?

PHILO DRUMMOND: Oh yeah, there are wikis out there that try to take the Church apart. There are even college courses that try to dissect the Church and figure out what its true philosophical implications are, what its contribution is, from a cultural expansion perspective.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Given that art is sort of something that occurs in between the artist and the audience, what do you think of that?

PHILO DRUMMOND: SubGeniuses always like to blur that; they like to think of the audience and the artist as co-participants in a performance. The best SubGenius events are the ones where the audience is a full participant, or even transforms into the performance while the performers become the audience.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Very much a punk rock aesthetic as well. . . erasing the barriers between the stage and the crowd.

PHILO DRUMMOND: We actually had a band of about seven or eight individuals, and we’d invite members of the audience up to take over the instruments until we’d replaced every member of the band with members of the audience. . . without stopping the song! And so now the band is in the audience, the audience is on stage, and the song is evolving into something completely different and new from what it was.

IVAN STANG: I remember once sitting back with you, and we were feeling so proud because we’d finally done that successfully. We had left the stage, and everyone else was taking over.

PHILO DRUMMOND: That was a great experiment. We didn’t know those people on the stage personally, but we were like “that’s OUR band up there. We MADE that band!”

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So what has it been now, thirty-one, thirty-two years of the Church of the SubGenius?

IVAN STANG: Thirty-three years since Pamphlet #1 was published. I actually picked it up from the printers on January 2nd of 1980, so it’s really easy to date that stuff. . . although Philo first told me about ‘Bob’ a couple of years before that. It just took a while to figure out the right approach for public outreach.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Is there a bit of Philo T. Farnsworth in the mix? “An experimental television of his own design,” etc.?

IVAN STANG/PHILO DRUMMOND: No, no, no.

PHILO DRUMMOND: But television did figure largely in the whole Emaculation of the ‘Bob’ thing.

IVAN STANG: The number two man in the Illuminati, after Adam Weishaupt, was this guy named Philo Knigge.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Sort of. They had secret names. . . Adam Weishaupt’s secret Illuminati name was ‘Spartacus,’ and this guy Baron von Knigge had the secret name ‘Philo,’ after Philo Judaeus.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: That’s very telling, actually. I mean, aren’t we all Spartacus?

IVAN STANG: No, I’m Spartacus!

PHILO DRUMMOND: I’m Spartacus!

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: I’m Spartacus!

PHILO DRUMMOND: He’s– no wait, I’M Spartacus!

IVAN STANG: We’re Spartacus!

[FIFTEEN MINUTES OF A ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE SHOUTING “I’M SPARTACUS” ENSUE]

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So tell me straight. . . is it still fun?

IVAN STANG: Oh yeah, yeah! Although, I’ll tell you, I have as much fun being part of the Church of the SubGenius now as, as. . . actually, I spend about half my time now debunking the Church of the SubGenius. Or rather–

PHILO DRUMMOND: Trying to get the lies out of Wikipedia.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So, “re-bunking?”

IVAN STANG: The Wikipedia article is fine, except that they keep taking your name out, and I keep not putting it back in.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Not MY name; my Conspiracy name. They keep taking my Conspiracy name out.

IVAN STANG: Yeah, he wanted his Conspiracy name in there for some reason, and every time he puts it in, somebody comes along and takes it out. I fixed it once, but they keep taking it out and I keep forgetting to take care of that. I’m not a very good Sacred Scribe after all.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: There’s Truth with a capital ‘T’ and there’s truth with a small ‘t,’ and I think you’ve told the Truth with a capital ‘T’ here in these books, and they’re trying to tell the small-‘t’ version in the media.

IVAN STANG [sarcastically]: Yeah, and look how it’s selling! I brought four copies of THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS and there’s still four copies sitting here!

PHILO DRUMMOND: Truthish. They’re sort of truthish.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: They have a certain truthiness.

IVAN STANG: They’re truthier than they used to be because they now finally have the Cleveland address in them.

PHILO DRUMMOND [holding up samples of sacred Church art]: These were designed to be xeroxed onto sticker paper so you could cut ’em out and lick ‘n’ stick.

IVAN STANG: Sticker paper costs too much. They’re still in the membership pack, but you have to bring your own Scotch tape. Sad.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: What else do you guys do? Have you got other projects going on?

PHILO DRUMMOND: Other projects. . .?

IVAN STANG: Actually, I’ve got a SubGenius movie script and a SubGenius video game concept, and we did do another whole book in 2006, the Bobliographon.

PHILO DRUMMOND: It’s just too easy to do anything you want to do, and then hang the SubGenius banner on it.

IVAN STANG: I actually spend a third of my year now hiking in national parks and then mailing this crap out from hotel rooms at night.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Putting stickers on stuff.

IVAN STANG: Honest to God, my wife is retired and gets a pension, and as long as I keep mailing this crap, which I can do from the Internet as we travel around, well. . . I’m kind of partying my ass off, basically, after wasting my youth really working myself into illness on this stuff. Now I’m resting on my laurels and getting all the slack I deserve. . . but! There are all kinds of projects in the works; it’s just that we’re slow. We were always very, very slow. It’s ten years between those two books, and then the next book. . .

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: I was kind of thinking of stuff like HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL. I mean, I’m a member of the Flat Earth Society and have been for decades because of that book.

IVAN STANG: Well, the Internet kind of made that a redundant thing.

PHILO DRUMMOND: It wasn’t as overt, as far as being a SubGenius thing, you’re right about that.

IVAN STANG: You know what, though? It was really hard to be that sarcastic, it really was. When I was finished with that, I did not want to badmouth anybody’s religion again. In fact, that’s when I started badmouthing ours much more seriously.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: There’s precedent for that too. . . “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

PHILO DRUMMOND: That’s right.

IVAN STANG: Yeah, that was one of the first lines we ripped off. That was Philo’s thing, “if you meet Bob on the highway, kill him.”

PHILO DRUMMOND: We’ve killed ‘Bob’ so many times now, it’s amazing. It just seemed natural.

IVAN STANG: We do X-Day every year, and I do a new radio show every week, and he does a new radio show every week, so it’s not like we’re not doing anything. . . and a weekly radio show is a son-of-a-bitch!

Dr. Hal does TWO weekly shows.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: What a marvelous brain you must have. The three of you, I mean, together. Like, in a jar somewhere or something.

IVAN STANG: Yeah, if only Dr. Hal didn’t keep all the good parts for himself. He’s got most of ’em. . . but I’ve got the dick, and one of the balls.

[shouting] BUG PORN, ONE DOLLAR!

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Do you think there might be another revelation in the works? Something that might change the whole game?

IVAN STANG: There will be an announcement this summer at X-Day that will rock the Church.

PHILO DRUMMOND: It will rock the Church, that’s right.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Are you having X-Day in New York again?

IVAN STANG: No, we’ve moved it to Wisteria Campgrounds, in southern Ohio. It was in very rural New York. . . X-Day is always in a place that is very hard to get to–

PHILO DRUMMOND: And hard to endure.

IVAN STANG: It’s not like a sci-fi convention.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Is it growing every year?

IVAN STANG: No, it’s shrinking– or yes, it’s growing by one person every year. In 1998, like four hundred people showed up. . . and right after that, our business dropped by half, which made me think that maybe half of the people believed it, and were so disappointed afterward that they want away. So it’s like, that’s good, that we got rid of those assholes. Now, the real diehards come and wait for the saucers every July 5th.

It’s the only time of the year that I have to get up early. That one day of the year, July 5th, I have to get up at like six in the morning and go to work from like seven to seven-thirty. Then we go back to bed.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Until July 6th.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Do you feel some kinship with the Reverend Dr. Harold Camping over all this?

IVAN STANG: Well, really, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a longer track record of failed ends of the world than anybody, and they haven’t quit, so. . . one of our slogans is “we’re not going to let the Jehovah’s Witnesses out-kook us.”

PHILO DRUMMOND: Plus, we don’t necessarily think of failure as something to be sad about. It’s a learning experience. Failure is just success’s way of telling you that you’ve made a mistake.

IVAN STANG: We like to think of it as involuntary slack. If you lose your job, the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’ll get another job.

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: There’s a bright side, too: you might not. . . and you don’t have to go to work the next day in any case.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Yeah, that is the bright side!

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So maybe, sometimes, if you succeed while you were aiming at something you only think you wanted, your success means that you’ve failed.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Yes. Ordinary paradigms of success are highly over-rated. Turn those high hurdles into low hurdles!

IVAN STANG: We tell ourselves that a lot, anyway. . . actually, I wouldn’t mind having millions of bucks. Then again, I’m already living the same way I would if I did have millions of bucks, aside from some of the little things. I’d still wash my own car. I assemble these membership packs myself; I’d still do that. There are thirty pieces that go into one of these things; you would think I’d have some Chinese kids doing it for me, but I actually do it myself, and – honest to God – it’s the only time that I get to listen to music.

PHILO DRUMMOND: You two will have to have more Chinese kids.

IVAN STANG: I was saying to my wife one day “Christ, I don’t want to be doing this when I’m sixty years old,” – which is this August, by the way – and she said “why not?”

And it sunk in. I really shouldn’t complain; once a month I have to assemble a hundred of these, and I spend about an hour a day filling orders, and I have to do the radio show. . . but that’s it! I can sit around in my house in my underwear; I’d be listening to music if I wasn’t deaf.

[At this point the recording becomes unintelligible as Philo begins recommending various footwear options – mainly clown shoes – for working in a home office setting]

* * * * * * * * *

Ivan Stang delivers a rant on the subject of ‘Bobbies’ diluting and corroding the Church of the SubGenius, circa 1985:

SubGenius commercial from MTV, circa 1991:

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