Kurt Weller: Your life story is rather complicated, before we begin, could you give my readers a brief overview of your life and works?
Bob Dobbs: Gerry Fialka’s site has a useful summary:
[ROBERT DOBBS, poet and politician, is a seminal lecturer on Joyce and McLuhan. He was the hit of last year’s McLuhan International Festival of the Future in Toronto, and his appearances at Columbia University, University of Toronto, among others, have generated fresh new insights and new metaphors. He was born in Paris in 1922 and after World War Two worked with international intelligence agencies for many decades. He surfaced in 1987 on CKLN-FM in Toronto and began whistleblowing. Two interpretations of Dobbs are circulating in the popular media: one is through the Church of the SubGenius that Dobbs inspired in 1978 in Dallas; the other is on two CDs, Bob’s Media Ecology and Bob’s Media Ecology Squared, put out in 1992 by Time Again Productions, early students of Marshall McLuhan. The best presentation of Dobbs’ work is in his book, Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs (1992). Today, he travels the world explaining the Android Meme, and the tracings of these activities are featured at [his site, FiveBodied.]
I am confused, because during my preparations for this interview I have seen you referred to as not only Bob Dobbs, but also as Bob Marshall and, by the members of the Church of the SubGenius, Bob Dean. What is the relationship between Bob Dean, Bob Marshall and Bob Dobbs? I have heard a recording of a man referred to as Bob Marshall and his voice sounds very similar to yours. In the Bob’s Media Ecology record you tease him for not having what it takes to express himself in the new environment. Are these other men still around or are they a part of you in a trinity-esque manner, like some sort of evolutionary process, from Dean to Marshall to Dobbs?
Bob Marshall (not his real name) lives in Toronto. He keeps a low profile. He’s an actor. He was young and impressionable when he worked with me at CKLN from August, 1984 to 1989, and acquired a voice like mine through natural osmosis due to my charisma and his excellent miming talents.
People in Toronto thought his real name was Bob Dean. This is the root of the confusion around the “Bob Dean-Bob Marshall-Bob Dobbs” sequence. He and I have no knowledge of “Bob Dean”.
He stays with Connie and I, also, when he visits New York City. We are still close friends.
No, there isn’t any “evolutionary process” to it, in fact. But I make fun of the urban legend around this sequence in the right-hand column of my Tiny Note chart. [see page 30]
Did Bob Marshall ever get any work after he was let go from CKLN?
He got no more work on the radio but he became a salesman for a magazine distributor.
When did you construct your charts?
1995.
I enjoyed last October’s episode of the International Connection where Bob Marshall phoned up CKLN. He stated that he had been possessed by Bob Dobbs. Do you do this sort of thing on a regular basis?
No, I did it on that particular day because I knew it was going to be the last show. Daniel, the cohost, always claimed I was Bob Marshall. So I thought I’d humor him. It was successful. He genuinely fell for my “mistake” – as you
can hear.
In my copy of Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs, the copyright is attributed to Robert Dean but this is pasted atop the original page with a label. Is there a reason or did I get my used book from a disgruntled SubGenius?
That was pasted on by my former butler, Tom Touché. He stole some of the five hundred copies of my book. He also registered it at the ISBN under “Robert Dean” to sow a tiny controversy. Another reason he’s my ex-butler.
When I first announced that you had agreed to participate in this interview at the Plaza of the Mind I received many comments from people stating that you were a fraud. Is this sort of scrutiny something you have had to deal with for quite some time from people that you attempt to share your ideas with?
Yes, in terms of how I’m perceived in the electrified media. But anyone who encounters me in person invariably likes me, or at least finds me amiable and of a pleasant sunny disposition. However, one is never recognized as a prophet in one’s hometown, and the present global theater has been my hometown.
Historically, one who offers deep perception of the present environment – in other words, offers a perceptual anti-environment to the PRESENT situation – has always been interpreted as pointing to the “future”. Such a response is an anodyne for what is painful to behold. I am liked in private because being an anti-environment, today, is merely a hobby for me. For others, it’s a “day job”. As a matter of fact, the role has been unionized.
The last I heard you reside in NYC, is this the case?
Yes.
Do you plan on staying in NYC permanently?
I’ll always have a residence here but it won’t be my only one. I will be travelling a lot.
Is your citizenship Canadian or US?
I have 3 citizenships: French, Canadian, and one I’d rather not disclose
What is a day in the life like for Bob Dobbs?
Part of my day is like that of an office receptionist. I take many phone calls. Nobody would believe who calls me. Even those who have my phone number would be shocked at who else has my phone number if they knew.
When I’m living a regular routine, I generally don’t get up until around 9:30am. I don’t get to bed until around 2:30am. However, this changes occasionally. I try not to turn on any electric mixed-corporate media (including the stove but not the light switch) in the morning until noon. This is often impossible because of the phone calls I get. I use an old analog phone and avoid the cellphone as much as possible. I schedule the reception of my incoming phone calls. But this is often interrupted. I can honestly say I’m about 4 degrees of separation from anyone that has a public profile in any medium (except speech) in any country. This is due to my intelligence work over the last 65 years. I’m also 4 degrees of separation from very influential people who have no public profile.
As for meals, I do “preventive eating”. I don’t own an automobile. I use the subway, taxis, and airplanes. I walk for at least 40 minutes every day. I don’t ride a bike. While I’m eating around noon, I jump around on the radio dial. I take in all niche markets. As for music, I presently like JACK-FM (“playing what we want”). I try to catch Dan Romanello’s Group Harmony Review oldies show on WFUV-FM on Saturday at midnight. I don’t have physical sexual affairs but I am metaphysically promiscuous in the extreme. I almost never watch television. When someone told me around 9:45am on 9/11 about the airplane hitting the World Trade Center, I watched for 45 minutes, then turned the TV off. I haven’t turned it on since. I do have to be on my MAC computer throughout the day so I can assist in protecting New York City from a terrorist incident. And I try to check out FiveBodied at least once every 24 hours because I enjoy the “youtubes” the members post. Since I’m on the phone so much, I pace the room frenetically to keep limber. I don’t jog but I have strong legs.
Why am I on the phone so much? Because the Market demands the metaphysical Word.
Do you have your groceries delivered?
No. I pick them up where they’re delivered. I don’t shop in regular supermarkets.
What does ‘preventive eating’ consist of?
It means eating nutrient-supplement powders like PROVIDE. The idea is to eat to strengthen one’s immune system and increase energy.
I have seen images of you and you appear quite youthful for a man your age. What is your secret?
It’s probably partly genetic, but drinking Joe Dun Sloan’s D-Cell water since 1969 has been an important factor.
I have never heard of Joe Dun Sloan. Could you give a little background?
Joe Dun Sloan was born around 1908 in Chicago, I think. He eventually moved to Los Angeles in the Thirties or Forties. He got involved with the metaphysical circles around Gina Cermina and the medium, Mark Probert. He also worked with Bob Beck back in the Sixties. He became the third human to make D-Cell water – after John Brown (in the Fifties) and Hilary Dorey (in the early Sixties).
I first discovered your works when a college friend gave me a cassette tape of the Bob’s Media Ecology Squared record. I have often referred to it as one of my favorite records of all time. In interviews you have stated that the record was actually Nelson Thall’s take on your work and did not necessarily reflect what you would have put into an album. How much involvement did you have in the project?
I was on CKLN-FM in Toronto every 2 weeks from June 17, 1987, until August, 1991 (with a 2-month haitus between the end of April, 1988, and the end of June, 1988). I said from the beginning that what I broadcast could be used by any listener in any way they wished. I didn’t put any copyright restrictions on use of what I uttered on the air.
Nelson Thall took advantage of this opportunity and asked Dave Newfeld to make an album from audio tapes of my mouthings. I wasn’t aware of Nelson’s request until Newfeld told me in early 1991. I told Dave I wanted nothing to do with the project. The rest of the story is found in this thread from FiveBodied, It goes like this:
[… between Dec. ’90 and late ’93 or early ’94, Dave Newfeld was successively contracted to make 3 albums for Nelson Thall. Not all 3 at the beginning, but the success of BME1 led serendipitously (for Newfeld) to BME2, and then to the McLuhan album. Thall dreamed their existence and Newfeld manifested his wishes and was remunerated accordingly by Thall. For me, they’re all the product of Dave’s imagination with a few peripheral suggestions from Nelson thrown in.
I personally, if I had produced the albums back then, would have done them a lot differently, I suppose. For example, the phrase “everything’s disappeared” would not have been presented as an ideology that I promoted or believed in. I would’ve presented it as the forlorn complaint by an advertising executive…
However, in early ’93 Nelson asked me to produce the video for the song, “Everything’s Disappeared.” I did that without any payment from Thall. I took the opportunity to put my charts into the video. Two versions were made…
…And the video is a classic. Thall should put it “up” on YouTube.]
Dave Newfeld and I are still close friends and you can read lots about Dave’s work with Broken Social Scene by googling him in that context.
Dave stays with Connie and I when he comes to New York City.
Your co-host at the time was Mike Dyer and he also appears on the records. How did you get involved in the radio show?
Myke Dyer was a programmer at CKLN who offered to broadcast my tapes of Mae Brussell who had a show on a station near Carmel, California in the Seventies and Eighties. Myke did this in the 1985-86 period. At that point Myke and I were mere acquaintances. In June, 1987, at a CKLN meeting introducing the new station manager, Punam Khosla, I got talking to Myke. He asked me if I had heard of the Church of the SubGenius. I said yes and pointed out how the J.R. “Bob” Dobbs logo was based on a picture of my father. He was a bit surprised and subsequently asked me to come on his show and prove it. I took up the offer on June 17, 1987, and we never looked back. We became close friends. The show stopped in 1991 when he moved out of Toronto. It was never my show. I was just a guest for 4 years.
Here is the transcript, from my diary entry, of the opening banter on our first broadcast together on June 17, 1987:
[Myke Dyer: As regular listeners to my show here at CKLN know, I have been playing tapes from the Church of the SubGenius the last few weeks. At the same time, listeners know that Bob Marshall’s show, The International Connection, has been taken off the air here at the station. Well, surprise, surprise, the two seemingly unconnected events, unbeknownst to me, have a meaning none of us could have foreseen. It turns out that J. R. Bob Dobbs, the mascot of the Church, was not assassinated on January twenty-first, nineteen eighty-four, has left Dallas, has resurfaced in Toronto, and is sitting across from me in the studio. Good evening, sir.
Dobbs: Good evening, Myke… good evening, Mr. Mulronrey… good evening, Mr. Bobby Fulford. In the broadest sense your introduction is true, but in the particulars I want to make a few adjustments. I am Bob Dobbs, not J. R. Bob Dobbs – J.R. is a cartoon version of me that I inspired back in February of 1978. I have nothing to do with the creation of the Church of the SubGenius per se, nor with any of its commercial activities such as the tapes you’ve been playing.
In fact I left Dallas in nineteen eighty-two after the failed attempt to start Nuclear War One. I’ve been skulking around Toronto for about four years now spending more time with my wife Connie who has been living in Toronto the last
nine years.
Dyer: And you know Bob Marshall?
Dobbs: Yes, after I met him here in Toronto, I encouraged him to create a show on CKLN. I continued to advise him behind the scenes as his show became a success and assumed a high profile in Toronto. But thanks to the Iran-Contra hearings in Washington and other events, I decided that Bob Marshall should step aside and I make my move to reveal my long-planned agenda.
Dyer: And because you’ve impressed me over the last week with your credentials, I’ve made a tentative commitment to assist you with your plan even though I don’t fully understand it, yet. I am not guaranteeing you anything. We’ll just see how it goes. I’m as curious as the listeners probably are.
Dobbs: I sincerely appreciate that, Myke. So let’s get the ball rolling.
Myke then played some excerpts from one of the Media-Barrage audio tapes composed by Church members and at various points Myke stopped the tape and allowed Bob to explain the real knowledge that inspired these hallucinated interpretations of Dobbs.]
Myke Dyer and I are still good friends, and he stayed with Connie and I when he ran in the New York Marathon in November, 2006.
How did he place?
I don’t know specifically but he accomplished his goal which was to do it in about 3 hours, I think. He says he certainly had the greatest place to recuperate – namely, our Dobbstown.
Bob’s Media Ecology Squared seems to be quite a rarity. In fact, I have never even seen the cover for the Bob’s Media Ecology Squared record. I do, however, own the first Bob’s Media Ecology and have the full paged add from Mondo 2000 in a frame in my office. How many copies of each album were printed?
I don’t know. Perhaps 500 to a thousand. Newfeld might know. When interviewed at the time, I often said that millions were exchanged. Counting the copies duplicated, I am probably correct. I think it is the greatest album ever made – if there can be such a thing. It’s even better and more comprehensive in concept than Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy (1967). This fact will be obvious in 500 years. Newfeld still balks at this boast but he thinks my Memo to Prince Charles in the booklet might qualify as the greatest liner notes. Let’s check back with him in 2020 to see if he would include the soundtrack in retrospect.
You mention that in five hundred years your record will be regarded as the greatest one ever recorded. What do the next five hundred years look like?
In one hundred years, every tool or artifact you see around you today will have disappeared. Poverty will be gone and so will disease. We will have made contact with the Booteans in the mid-2020’s and that will accelerate progress wildly. There will continue to be wars and the final Armageddon will happen in 500 years when we will have invented a device that will erase everything we knew up to that point. We will fight over whether to implement that technology. It will hyper-crystallize what McLuhan meant when he said “the medium is the message”. This will be the time when BME illuminates.
You have expressed an appreciation for the works of Frank Zappa. Are there any other musicians that you hold in high esteem?
None as high as Frank Zappa. I think it’s because he wasn’t limited to his role of “musician”. I only purchase his CDs and videos. I haven’t bought any other music in 35 years. But living in Manhattan for 14 years has given me access to a tremendous variety of radio stations. I’m a glutton for all kinds of music. I love them all according to my moods. Any music is easy to enjoy if you have my kind of quadrophrenia. But I have never worn a Walkman or an iPod. I want to be aware of my responses to the environment when my Chemical Body walks through it.
I quit the Walkman seven years ago around the same time that I quit wearing logo t-shirts. What would your albums have sounded like had you been the producer?
I didn’t and don’t think about it. I was too busy to make albums. Through the years since, Newfeld has expressed an interest in doing one with me. It hasn’t happened yet but he’s the man if events lead to such a project. We have
similar tastes in music. And he’s much improved in his studio skills. I do like the input I injected into the video, “Everything’s Disappeared” (Jan. 1993). It might make the short list for greatest video in the far future, too. The technicians who made that video went on to huge careers.
I’ve always gotten a kick out of the ‘don’t bring that television into the house’ sample. Is that an electroquote of you from your show?
That’s a quote made by Bob Marshall (born 1949) before a taping over the phone of a segment in an audio series on Marshall McLuhan. This series was done for the University of Toronto’s CIUT-FM in 1987 by Dave Newfeld with Nelson Thall and Bob Marshall co-hosting. Newfeld did this for CIUT (they initially were going to do it for CKLN) after he was unfairly fired by Adam Vaughan (CKLN’s station manager at the time and presently a recently-elected Toronto City Hall politician) in July ’86. Adam Vaughan later fired Bob Marshall (host of The International Connection) in May ’87 in revenge for losing the McLuhan series which he deeply wanted to be associated with since he and his family had been friends and neighbours of McLuhan. This was when I entered and got on Myke Dyer’s show a month later. Bob Marshall did not know I had arranged for him to be fired since I had to get on the air to manipulate the elections for Chairperson of the Secret Council of Ten in Feb.’88. The movie MAN OF THE YEAR (2006) xenochronously replays the actual events that helped me win that position in early ’88.
Later, when I told Bob Marshall why he was really fired, he was very upset. It took many years for him to understand why I had to do it and for him to forgive me. We can laugh about it now. As we all know, this is always the way life’s memory works. Forgiveness is an essential human trait – but only for the past.
On Bob’s Media Ecology, who performs the Grammar Rap?
Some teenager that Newfeld found in Toronto. I never met the boy.
How many ‘Reverse Radio Show’ calls did you do? I’ve always loved that opening track on Bob’s Media Ecology Squared where you call that pleasant lady and explain the discarnate experience to her.
We only did it once – the evening of “Black Monday”, October 19, 1987, at Dave’s apartment in Toronto.
David Newfeld’s take on your radio show?
You can hear it at [a recording of Mr. Newfeld’s call to the International Connection in October of 2006 – see Appendix A–.]
Otherwise, he’s one of its greatest fans. So much so, that he discovered “Bob’s Talk Show” broadcasting from the astral plane, discussed on Art Bell’s show about five years ago. Only Dave could have the xenochrony to catch that one.
I have a hard time getting my head around the meaning of that word xenochrony. Could you give a brief explanation?
Today we all experience synchronicity more and more. If one decides not to identify with the experience – which I would recommend doing, one will find the synchronicity increases no matter how much one tries to play down its personal significance. This insistent “strange synchronicity” was called xenochrony by Frank Zappa.
About six years ago there was a site called MediaGuru that I believe was run by Nelson Thall, it was the first I had heard of him. It seems that you no longer are collaborating with Mr. Thall. Did you ever have a creative partnership? Do you know what happened to it?
In the Nineties I helped Nelson write a column for a Canadian publication called Adnews. He started the website, MediaGuru, with Robert Apple in the mid-Nineties. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I enjoyed many creative conversations with Nelson during those years, up to and including my 4 months as co-host with Nelson on the Cloak and Dagger show on Toronto’s MOJO radio station from July 7, 2002, to the first week of November, 2002. I didn’t like the direction he was taking the show so I dropped out. I am even more disappointed with his web version of Cloak and Dagger.
I have not spoken to Nelson since the first week of November, 2002.
There have also been several other sites pertaining to your work that have sprung up here and there and then vanished. How deeply involved are you with these sites based upon your work? .
I was aware of them as they were created and offered old written materials of mine as they were requested but I have no other involvement with them. The creators of two particular sites, Marc Free (posi-tone.com) and Scott Norris (xenochrony.com) from Los Angeles, have been good friends of mine since 1995.
I feel as though I am peeling away the layers of an onion the more I discover about your works. It started with the one cassette tape, several years later I discovered about five hours worth of radio mp3s on line and now at five bodied there is twenty seven hours worth of audio available. Is this all part of the plan you mentioned earlier, your campaign to let people know that you have been running the show all along?
Yes.
Are you familiar with the Panawave Laboratory and its leader, Yuko Chino? Do you have any insights into the type of meme they are trying to create? I am drawn to them quite strongly and yet I cannot tell why, other than the sheets and uniforms.
I have never heard of Panawave Laboratory and its leader, Yuko Chino.
The Panawave Laboratory are a group out of Japan that shield themselves from electronic waves by draping themselves in white sheets. they claim that old soviets are attempting to give their leader Yuko Chino cancer through radio waves. I am drawn to them quite strongly and yet cannot tell why, other than the sheets and uniforms. This seems to be a metaphorical process, and I have two questions. Is this sort of behavior necessary in today’s world?
Yes, if one finds purpose and meaning in paranoia. It’s not necessary otherwise.
Or does it reflect an archaic school of thought?
Yes, it does, just as Orwell’s book, 1984, reflects a pattern from long ago.
Do you have any insights into Soviet mind control techniques from the fifties and sixties?
They, like the CIA, found their techniques didn’t work.
What is the story concerning 2012, the end of the Mayan time cycle?
The Mayan’s knowledge of cycles was useful up to 2012 C.E. They couldn’t understand what came after that year. The frictionless-based society that would be made possible by the coming cold-fusion battery was incomprehensible to them since their knowledge, like that of all cultures before the coming post-2012 culture, was based on friction-based paradigms. They stopped the calendar at 2012 because the implications after that made no sense to them.
Should I be worried?
Not in the least. The Evergreens have predicted that the most popular T-shirt slogan in 2013 will be, “I survived 2012”.
I have been profoundly inspired by the works of Doris Cross and Hannah Darboven. Do you have any insight into their works?
I have never heard of them. But I might have insights into their works if I studied them.
I have listened to your interview with Nardwuar and have found it to be quite informative because you are able to spend some time detailing your life history. However, I was troubled by the way Nardwuar treated you for much of the interview. I am not familiar with Nardwuar so I do no know if that is just his style or if he was really trying to make jokes at your expense. How did you end up on the Nardwuar show to begin with?
In the summer of 1998, he emailed me and requested an interview. I had never heard of him. I knew nothing about his show. I think he was interested in my take on the Church of the SubGenius’ X-day (July 5, 1998).
Did you find that broadcast to be satisfying?
Yes, because I quickly realized at the beginning of the interview that he was very silly. I thought this will be a good opportunity to show how I can handle any style of communication and still get my message out. Subsequently, anyone who heard it and was in touch with me, said I “won” because he didn’t throw me off my game. I wasn’t trying to win but I enjoyed that interpretation. Nardwuar enjoyed it, too, because we did a second one a short while later when he guest-hosted an Internet radio show. I don’t know if he was able to make a copy of that one. It’s not in his archive.
In it you revealed that your father was the template for the Dallas based Church of the Subgenius. What are your fondest memories of you mother and father as you grew up?
My father’s storytelling about his employers, their employers, and THEIR employers – going way back, and my mother’s deep, sunny disposition while all around her others schemed and plotted incessantly.
You grew up in France in the years just before the second world war. what was your childhood like? Do you have any fond childhood memories you would care to share?
Those memories are scattered throughout at FiveBodied, You will find diary entries for my encounters, between 1935 and 1945, with Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, G. Gurdjieff, Fritz Kraemer, Aleister Crowley, T.S. Eliot, etc. I feature them because they were to become well-known figures later but, being young and sheltered at the time, I didn’t fully realize who they were. However, I remember them because they triggered “psychic” flashes in me at the first meeting. These flashes would mean a great deal to me decades down the road.
As for my domestic situation, I had the best parents one could have in the days when parenting was relatively possible. (Today, parents aren’t needed, technically.) It was a Harry Potter life squared (as I have merely suspected since I haven’t read the books or seen the movies) because I was living with the magicians now known as the Priory of Sion. In a way, it was the “center for culture and technology” – a power vortex worthy of Lucifer. Alice in Wonderland… The Wizard of Oz… You name it. Basically I was constantly “drunk” in my kid years. I never went to public school. When I met Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) in the late Fifties near Lancaster, California, I recognized in him a kind of replay of a similar effect of being “unschooled”. However, in the late Forties (in my late twenties), I was abruptly sobered up.
But a persistent memory is the smell of Paris in the evening. This is my instant door to quiet ecstasy.
What sobered you up?
Helping re-position Nazis in intelligence agencies around the world after World War Two. The American branch of the operation was called Project Paperclip. You can now read books on it.
How did you meet Connie?
I first saw her in a nightclub in Paris in 1944. In December, 1944, I got to know her better as we worked with Fritz Kraemer at the Ardennes Battle of the Bulge.
How long have you been married?
We started living together in 1966 and got married on June 9, 1970. So we’ve been cohabiting for over 40 years.
How far back can you trace your ancestry?
I’m aware of about the last 300 years. We were mere servants. I guess the remarkable thing is we remained in that role for so long – like aristocratic families, only upside down.
You have never mentioned siblings. Do you have any? I myself am an only child so I was curious.
I have 2 younger sisters. They wanted nothing to do with our parents’ world and left it after 1960. They have quiet lives.
What made you choose Toronto as the city to start whistle blowing in?
Because Connie moved there in 1977. And she was in Toronto because at that time Canada was going to become the “Switzerland” of the Solar Government in the Eighties.
Toronto is a great city, I visited many times as a child. I’m from Michigan originally and it was a six or seven hour trek. I was always impressed by how different it felt from my home town. It seemed somehow crisper.
I recall Bucky Fuller, in the Seventies, saying Toronto was the best-designed city in the world. Toronto may not give off that vibe today (since “everything’s disappeared”) but in the Seventies and Eighties it had all the amenities of the North American discarnate, “virtual” society with a juicy patina of human scale. Your youthful intuition was not inappropriate.
I just picked up a book by Buckminster Fuller. I find him to be fascinating on many levels. He almost seems like a rockstar as opposed to an architect, sort of like McLuhan. Did you ever meet him?
Yes, many times. He had been a good friend of McLuhan since the early Sixties. Here’s a secret about Bucky: he kept his hearing aid turned off during the question period of his marathon lectures.
Why aren’t there many well-known men like Fuller and McLuhan these days? You are the only one who fits the bill.
People don’t have the attention spans for logocentric monologues anymore. That’s why I went for the talk-show phone-in format. I have good ears and would never turn off
my hearing aid.
Besides the frequent trips as a child, my image of Canada has been greatly influenced by the early films of David Cronenberg and your recordings. Crimes of the Future, The Brood and Rabid resonate with me in that they represent an existence that I yearn to inhabit. Have you seen these films?
No.
Is this image of Canada still a truthful one or is it merely a retrieval of the ‘way it once was’ before everything disappeared?
Canada disappeared in the Nineties like everything else. Any sense of Canada, past or present, is retrieved and propped up now for those who refuse to believe its hologram has disappeared. Check out Bruce Powe’s book, TOWARDS A CANADA OF LIGHT (2006), for an understanding of Canada based on McLuhan’s notion of tactility.
Should I just make due with the electronic retrievals or should I actively seek this ambience out?
You can do both. There’s room for every meme. The best definition of Canada when it existed was: Canada could’ve had American technology, French culture, and British politics. Instead, it got American culture, French politics, and British technology.
Did you ever get a chance to visit Rochdale ?
Yes.
Why do you think that Rochdale ended in such a way?
Because the community there did not understand their neighbour down the street, Marshall McLuhan.
Rochdale was the largest co-op residence in North America. Rochdale occupied an 18-story student residence at Bloor St. and Huron St. in Toronto. It was situated on the edges of the University of Toronto campus and near Yorkville, Canada’s hippie haven in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Rochdale took its name from Rochdale, a town in north-west England, where the world’s first cooperative society was established in the 1800s.[2]
What mistakes were made and what could an aspiring Utopian do differently {or is the idea of the utopia already obsolete?} to ensure that the same end did not occur?
McLuhan liked to point out that the word “utopia” meant “no place”. As McLuhan’s widow, Corinne, says at the end of the recent NFB documentary on McLuhan (McLUHAN’S WAKE, 2002): “Marshall was completely right intellectually but his work cannot be applied practically” (or something along those lines). With McLuhan, one escapes into understanding.
You are often described as a McLuhanite. How do you feel about this label?
I don’t mind it at all but it isn’t true. Just ask the McLuhanites. They say I know nothing about McLuhan and do him a disservice. One cannot categorize me because I’ve experienced too much.
How well did you know McLuhan?
Very well.
What kind of guy was he?
He was a “gerk gawk” – a guy who gives jerks a bad name. But very kind and generous, full of energy. He often changed in different circumstances so you couldn’t predict what he’d do or say next. With him, the medium was the message and the user was the content.
The Evergreens (6500 astral entities channeled for 30 years through the deep-trance psychic, Michael Blake Read) said Zoroaster was the first human to completely wake up. If one knew McLuhan like I did, then one would have no hesitation in saying that McLuhan was the “second coming” of Zoroaster. He woke up to something Zoroaster could not have known.
The Evergreens and Zoroaster ‘waking up’ sounds much like the concept behind the Matrix. Who are the evergreens?
The Evergreens are 6,500 to 7,000 astral entities that are channeled through the deep-trance psychic, Michael Blake Read. Michael’s mediumship began in August, 1974, and completed in October, 2004. He did over 10,000 one-hour sessions (private and public) and had clients in 19 countries. Every session is on a master audio tape. Call 604-536-7402 and order their catalogue. I recommend their Millenium series.
Are they related to your own posthumous interviewing techniques?
Yes, it was through Michael Blake Read that I interviewed, over a 16-year period (1988-2004), “spirits” claiming to be Marshall McLuhan, Marcel Duchamp, Jiddu Krishnamurti, President Eisenhower, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Nelson Rockeller, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, The Nazarene (The Evergreens’ name for Jesus Christ), Norbert Wiener,
“Captain” Al Hubbard, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Dr. Peter Beter, Mae Brussell, Garrett Deane, my parents, and a few others.
Can you describe Garret Deane?
Garrett Deane may be the person I had the most fun with, next to Connie. He was born in Hopewell (near New Glasgow), Nova Scotia, in 1907. He grew to about 6’3″, and was thin. He arrived in New York City around 1927. He was a model at first but quickly got into theater. In the Thirties he was asked to be a member of Eva Le Gallienne’s repertory theatre group. He turned her down. He later said that was a mistake, perhaps. He also knew Mae West and many other New York actors who went on to work in Hollywood.
In the Forties, he had an antique store where the Hilton New York is today on Sixth Avenue and W53rd St. People who visited him at this store ranged from Marlon Brando, Salvador Dali, through to diplomats at the United Nations. It was very difficult to get him to sell you something in his store. He didn’t like what the Rockefellers did to Manhattan so he eventually returned to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1967, and began to spend more time at his deceased parents’ old home on Queen Street. He would still visit Manhattan once a year until the late Seventies.
I met him in Dartmouth in the mid-Fifties. He had an amazing projection in his voice. You could hear it through the telephone from across the room but it didn’t hurt the ears of the one who had the receiver in their ear. Hanging out with him was like living inside James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. But he was also a one-man Salvation Army for the marginalized. He died on November 2, 1993. I have hours of him on audio tape. Perhaps he should be in the audio archives at FiveBodied.
I recently vacationed in Nova Scotia and enjoyed it a great deal – especially the Cabot trail. Did you used to visit Garret there?
Yes, after we left Nova Scotia in 1977, I visited him every Christmas from 1979-1985. I talked to him on the phone regularly but didn’t see him again after 1985. When he died, I wrote an obituary for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald in the November 25/93 edition which inspired a local CBC audio documentary on him that was subsequently played every Christmas until around 2000.
I just received my hardcopy of Phatic Communion after years of searching for it. There is some thick stuff in that book. I have found the audio commentary that you recorded for it to be an indispensable companion piece to it. How did the commentary come about?
Last spring I was doing an audio commentary on my charts with a person. That’s about 22 hour-long sessions. Another person living in Portland, Oregon, heard about this and suggested he and I read through the whole Phatic Communion book and have a dialogue. We started last summer and have now done about 35 ninety-minute audio recordings. We are halfway through the book. We intend to post the whole series on FiveBodied.
Who did you record it with?
Scott Norris.
Are there plans of releasing all fifty hours of it?
It may turn out to be 100 hours. We will post all of it.
Since I enjoy your outpourings so much I hope that this resource is not too limited.
Not to worry. Even the Astral Plane will have access to it all.
Sleeper is the one who pointed me to the FiveBodied message board. Does he run the site? What is your relationship to him?
Yes, he runs FiveBodied. I met him through Nelson Thall in ’99 or 2000. He had a business building websites in Toronto in the mid-Nineties. Nelson needed a web designer, met Sleeper, and hired him a while before I met Sleeper. Sleeper acquired this moniker when he took a role on our MOJO radio show in July ’02. He sympathised with my goals and later defected from Nelson Thall to create FiveBodied in August ’05.
I know you are a fan of the Parallax View and the Manchurian Candidate, you’ve also done a brilliant interview about the Matrix. Are there any other films that you feel are must sees for aspiring media ecologists?
First off, analyse the effects of any movie one is fascinated by – as if it was one’s soul (or what Gurdjieff termed one’s “chief feature”). Then check these out:
ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998), THE SEARCHERS (1956), RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), “RAMEAU’S NEPHEW” BY DIDEROT (THANX TO DENNIS
YOUNG) BY WILMA SCHOEN (1974), LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966), TWIN PEAKS: FIREWALK WITH ME (1992), GREASER’S PALACE (1972), THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE (2004), PUTNEY SWOPE (1969),
GODFATHER: PART III (1990), SECRET HONOR (1984), MR. HULOT’S
HOLIDAY (1953), DONNIE BRASCO (1997), THE LAST OF SHEILA
(1973), BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), VANILLA
SKY (2001), SECONDS (1966), MAN OF THE YEAR (2006),
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1972), YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT (1968),
THIEF (1981), NETWORK (1976), WILD AT HEART (1990), THE
QUIET EARTH (1985), THE FORMULA (1980), FINNEGAN’S WAKE
(1966), KING OF NEW YORK (1990), REACH FOR THE SKY (1956),
CASINO (1995), BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955), THE PLAYER (1992),
GIRLS TOWN (1959), DIVA (1981), GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD (1970),
OLD YELLER (1957), BARTON FINK (1991), THE BLOB (1958), THE
PASSENGER (1975), BLUE COLLAR (1978), BEST SELLER (1987),
MORE (1969), MINORITY REPORT (2002), 200 MOTELS (1971), LOST
HIGHWAY (1997), JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), THE GREAT
ESCAPE (1963), BLOWUP (1966), EASY RIDER (1969), CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), THE KING OF COMEDY
(1983) – the last five are in the far left-hand column of my
Tiny Note chart (1995).
[See Page 30]
I enjoy using film as a sedative. I feel it helps my dreams. Do you have any insights on this?
Movies were an extension of the dreaming function in the central nervous system. TV was an extension of the fantasy function in the central nervous system.
It’s interesting that you’ve included several Lynch films. During his new ‘Inland Empire’ I found myself drifiting ‘back to sleep’ [as you describe in BME] How does Lynch, being so abstract, end up resonating as truly realistic?
Lynch combines the movie and television functions as defined in the previous answer. This approach will always appear to resonate as realistic because it’s an exact replay of our recent perceptual lives over the last 30 years.
There is a film called ‘The Day that Time Ended’. I believe that it somehow captures childhood in a manner unparalleled in most film. Have you ever seen this film?
No.
Have you ever seen the film Tron?
No.
It’s a film centers around a programmer who is zapped into the computer world and he must fight through video games to get his way out. The film also has a subtext of Christian imagery. The programs that believe in user’s are put to death in arena sports, and the programmer who got zapped in has almost god-like powers in the computer world. This seemed to be a metaphor of something that is going on though I am hard pressed to know what.
It sounds like a metaphor for what I talk about – the pentad manager. When you complete your studies with me, you will understand why I say this.
The electronic composer Wendy Carlos scored the film – she had earlier done the score to A Clockwork Orange as Walter Carlos. Are you familiar with her work?
Heard of her but don’t recall her music.
I enjoyed the film I, Robot but regretted the fact that the robots were not allowed to rule the earth. I think they would have done a much better job. Could you give me a media conscious analysis?
Our robotic memes have replaced the robotic extensions of our Chemical Body.
What do you make of the flood of documentary films that have come out since Bush became president. Everytime I go to the video store there’s a new one about something. I don’t watch any of them.
On the Forever Changes album, Arthur Lee sings “the news today will be the movies for tomorrow”. Since television created news as fantasy, movies then gave people a sense of reality documented. But in the present
post-information society, documentaries satisfy the nostalgia for fantasy.
You’ve also appeared in a film yourself, Def Con Bob, by Eli Elliot. How did you meet Eli?
He is a friend of Gerry Fialka in Venice, California. Gerry introduced us a couple of years ago.
What’s the story behind that film?
I visited Los Angeles in February, 2005, and appeared at several venues and on one radio station where I was interviewed. These events were organized by Gerry Fialka.
You also did a video concerning UFOs a few years back. I never got a chance to see it. Do you have any other videos out?
That UFO video is from a UFO conference in Mesquite, Nevada, where I spoke for almost 3 hours on August 17, 1999. It’s called BOB DOBBS: ANDROID MEME’S XENOCHRONY. It should be available from Bob Brown’s company, The International UFO Congress.
Other videos include:
1. Two interviews with Ted Loman on his UFOAZ television show in Tucson, Arizona, recorded in May, 1999. I review the history of the Illuminati and its fate during historical
media phases.
2. I’ve done about 8 one-hour dialogues with Harold Channer on his Manhattan Neighborhood Network show, CONVERSATIONS WITH HAROLD CHANNER. Channer has done about 2000 interviews since 1973 with everyone from Sanford Weill to Bucky Fuller.
I have always been fascinated and comforted by the situation comedy. As a matter of fact I am now producing one entitled ‘Look Out Below!’ I was wondering if you could explain to me why I am emotionally comforted by situation comedies and why I enjoy them much more than watching the news?
Because they show the drama of cognition for life under electronic conditions.
Are you familiar with Bob Larson and his exorcisms? I had the chance to witness one last summer and it was quite the experience.
I don’t know Larson’s work but I consider myself an exorcist of the Android Meme’s xenochrony.
I used to be enthralled by the backlit screen of my parents magic chef stove. Why?
It’s the glow of light-through rather than light-on. All Americans since TV are fascinated by a form that contradicts the educational establishment’s preference for light-on, i.e., the structure of the printed book.
Are you familiar with the works of Paul Laffoley?
Yes. And I met Paul at the Disinfo.com conference in Manhattan in February, 2000. I participated in his channeling of “Tesla” the next day (a Sunday). When I arrived at his hotel room (apparently the actual final
residence of Tesla), I told him I had talked with “Tesla” through the Evergreens. So he asked me to lead the session. I did so for the first hour or so. Also attending were Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press and Adam Parfrey of Feral House. They left before the long session was over. I heard they were not
impressed. About eight months later I had the opportunity to ask the Evergreens
if Tesla was coming through Paul and they said yes but he was filtered strongly by Paul’s mind and/or projections.
Are you aware of the hollow earth mythology? Any insights?
Yes. But apparently it’s not true. So an insight into the meme would be that it’s a product of the transparency of biological and geological forms when we are permeated by the discarnate, electronic form. It anticipates the memes of “black holes” and “dark matter”.
What would you consider to be the top ten ‘must read’ books for this time and place?
Try these:
1. THE APES OF GOD (1930) by Wyndham Lewis
2. AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN (1948) by Wyndham Lewis
3. GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
4. AMERICAN TABLOID (1995) by James Ellroy
5. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND (2001) by James Ellroy
6. THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST (2007) by Norman Mailer
7. TAKE TODAY (1972) by Marshall McLuhan
8. DATA TRASH (1994) by Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein
9. TRANSFORMING HISTORY (2001) by William Irwin Thompson
10 BEYOND THE WORD (1995) by Donald Theall
or, for the eager reader in a hurry, my PHATIC COMMUNION WITH BOB DOBBS (1992).
Do you play video games?
I played a Pac-Man game one day in 1980.
I was eight or nine when the first video games came out and I have pretty much played them daily since then. A friend of mine used to say I was addicted to Pharmatronics. Is there any danger with an addiction like this?
No. Distraction is the lifeblood of our physical world.
There is a game called Shin Megami Tensei out of Japan. It deals with people who can summon demons from all the mythologies and use their powers. This really speaks to me for some reason. Any insights?
The movie medium contained all media. That was 80 years ago. Today, the Android Meme allows YOU, the user, to contain and edit all media. The Shin Megami Tensei game translates this new fact (or figure-ground relationship)
into familiar terms for you.
I have often enjoyed reading articles about artists and architecture more than I enjoy poetry. I read them like poetry actually, repeatedly, and your articles are no exception. Any insights?
As visual space and its pleasures of linear thinking recedes into our perceptual unconscious, it acquires archetypal status. This means any act of reading seems “poetic” to anyone who gets insights from it.
Do you think that the decrease in the human attention span is something that will continue to dwindle or will we see a resurgence of Victorian era attention to detail once the over-saturation has completed?
The so-called “decrease in the human attention span” only applies to the older consumerist media forms. As people moved into personal producer modes via the interactive, digital forms, they applied their attention more and more to THEIR particular interests. Some call it “narcissism” or “solipsism”. Be that
as it may, they certainly have strong attention spans when it comes to their personal virtual worlds. The Android Meme only encourages this.
I’m into kung-fu, what do you do to maintain the chemical body? I briefly saw your wife’s website and it seemed quite informative, it reminded me of my relationship to my wife. she helps me maintain my chemical body.
I want to have my head frozen when I die to have it potentially rewired into a robotic body or clone when the technology catches up. My wife says that this is a step in the wrong direction. Any insights?
She’s right. We will eventually have 50% of our bodies made up of “metal”. However, your understanding of death will be quite different in 50 years, so you will adopt a different approach to immortality.
Your statement about Nardwuar was quite telling and in that you wanted to communicate in any style and still get your message out. I would say that you succeeded. What made you decide to go into broadcasting to begin with. What was, after a life of espionage, the straw that broke the camel’s back and made you decided to start whistleblowing?
I went into broadcasting DURING my espionage life. I had to do it in order to direct the Android Meme in my favour via its xenochrony. The straw that broke the camel’s back was stopping Nuclear War One on September 17, 1982, with Dr. Beter.
Are you ever fearful for your safety or are you protected?
I’m protected but that’s ultimately limited since we live in a world of free will. So I keep aware.
Are you familiar with the works of Philip K Dick? If so, could you explain your take on his VALIS experience?
His VALIS experience was common in the early Seventies due to the effects of the holeopathic computer/satellite environment (see my Tiny Note chart). As a writer he had a “visual-proprioceptive bias” (in McLuhan’s sense) toward that surround and this caused him to project a paranoia into that phase of the Android Meme’s unfoldment – as so many others did at the time (think “Watergate” and “Comet Kohoutek”). I think Robert Anton Wilson handled the effects better. But perhaps the most mature response was David Worcester’s.
Comet Kohoutek is a long period comet, with an orbital period of approximately 75,000 years. Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the “comet of the century” because scientists theorized that Kohoutek was an Oort Cloud Object. As such, it was believed likely that this was the comet’s first visit to the inner solar system, which would result in a spectacular display of outgassing. However, Kohoutek’s display was considered a let-down, leading some to nickname it “Comet Watergate”.
Because Comet Kohoutek fell far short of expectations its name became synonymous with spectacular duds. However, it was fairly bright as comets go and put on a respectable show in the evenings shortly after perihelion. [3]
Did you ever meet Robert Anton Wilson and what is your take on his Illumanatus trilogy?
I first met Wilson when he gave a talk at the Metro Library on Yonge Street in Toronto in 1985. My next encounter with him was on May 29, 1993, when I was a guest on David Porter’s show on KPFK-FM. He called in and I discussed his flaws. He eventually fainted and dropped the phone. This is what actually happened and we have it on audio tape. The writer, Robert Guffey – a young fan of Wilson – couldn’t believe what I had done. He became an avid student of my radio work and eventually wrote the great article on me and the Matrix film for PARANOIA magazine in the Winter, 2000 (#22) issue. I next saw Wilson speak at the Disinfo.com, New York, conference in February, 2000. I decided to leave him alone since he was still grieving over his wife’s recent death. I did meet some of his disciples, such as R.U. Sirius, at that event. As a result of our crossing paths, Sirius and I decided each other was a “schizo”.
As for The Illuminatus Trilogy, I put it in the Holeopathic Satellite Squared quadrant on my Tiny Note Chart because the narrator is a computer. That work intuits the computer facets of the Android Meme.
I am not familiar with Worcester? Could you describe his works briefly?
David E. Worcester was born in Kansas in 1928. He was the second channel for Cosmic Awareness. Ralph Duby was the first channel from November, 1962, until January, 1967.Worcester studied under Duby and worked as a channel from Summer, 1967, until August, 1974. The third channel for Cosmic Awareness was Paul Shockley from 1975 until 1995. Paul is the most well-known and passed away in May, 2006.
Before channeling, Worcester had been in the American Navy, a draftsman, a disc jockey in Hawaii, a musician, and a rare coin dealer. He lives in Everett, Washington, and knows too much.
I have been conducting my own experiments in astral communications – any pointers?
Always remember “astral communications” are puny today compared to a telephone conference call.
Then is there any point in pursuing astral communications?
Every action approaches the point. Keep at it. Call 604-536-7402 and ask for the Evergreens’ audio tape series on the Chakras.
Are there any machines that can enhance this ability?
No. Machines obsolesce this ability.
Any good books on the subject?
D. Scott Rogo’s PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD (1979).
I have found the Jane Roberts Seth books to be interesting.
Yes, she’s OK for novices. Post-graduate work comes with the Evergreens. My friend, Harold Channer, made the first videotape of “Seth” around 1971. Harold and I once did a one-hour Manhattan Neighborhood Network TV show where we played and discussed the Evergreens (audio) and Jane Roberts/Seth
(video).
Is the human being evolving or are we still running in place, since 1945, as you stated on the record?
We are evolving and our Chemical Bodies will eventually be half-flesh/half-metal. We haven’t been “running in place, since 1945” since Y2K.
I just researched Dr. Beter and found an amazing collection of his recordings.
Where did you meet Dr. Beter and how long were you colleagues?
Here’s my diary entry on our first meeting:
[July4/65 (Washington, D.C.)
Dobbs: It’s an honour to meet you, Dr. Beter. My Japanese friends tell me that you saved their lives.
Beter: How do I know your Japanese friends?
Dobbs: Through your work at the Export-Import Bank.
Beter: Ah, yes. The Japanese applied for loans from the Bank, but the generals on its board wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I was the only one who understood the Japanese couldn’t go home empty-handed. They would have killed themselves if they stopped applying. Now they think I’m their saviour because I convinced the Bank to give them some loans.
Dobbs: I’m curious now to see how they do in the global market.
Beter: How are you involved with them? Not many people know my role in these areas.
Dobbs: I work in intelligence.
Beter: Aha. Then we must talk some more when we are alone.]
I worked with Beter until he died on March 14, 1987. During his last months we were engaged in a massive gold deal.
What kind of guy was he?
He was very serious but tempered it with a sly sense of humor. He was a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church but studied Vedanta. Very open-minded and regularly read the Revelations of Awareness newsletter featuring Paul Shockley. I’ll tell you a secret: his audio-tape series was modeled on the gods of Hindu mythology. None of his listeners picked up on that. But then again, how could they?
He was a very significant verbal artist. Note where he is positioned in my Tiny Note chart.
How did you two stop Nuclear War I from happening?
Here’s how Beter reports it in a section of Audio Letter #79:
[… The straw that broke the camel’s back came at almost the last possible minute on Friday morning, September 17. At about 8:30 A.M. here in Washington a well-known national newspaper reporter was interviewed on the Washington NBC radio station WRC. The reporter, of the Washington Post, called attention to my war warning for that day contained in AUDIO LETTER No. 78. He reportedly outlined the plan briefly for everyone listening in the Washington Metropolitan area, and he added that if the Pentagon did have such a plan, public exposure through my tape had probably reduced the chances that it would be carried out.
My friends, that radio report here in Washington about the war plan on the morning of September 17 was seemingly a small thing, but our Lord Jesus Christ can always use little things to produce big results–and that is what HE did on that morning of “Z-Day”!
Thanks to those of you who had written to editors, Congressmen, and officials of all kinds about the war plan, the Pentagon was becoming edgy. The last thing they wanted was public exposure of their war plan. When they heard the report that morning over radio station WRC, they quite
simply panicked. They had no way of knowing just how widely their
plan had become known, and so shortly after 10:00 A.M. Washington
time, Friday, September 17, 1982, the “PROJECT Z” first strike was
called off. With less than five hours to go, the countdown clock for NUCLEAR WAR ONE had finally stopped ticking!…]
I was the one who made it possible for audio tape #78 to be mentioned on the radio that morning. But important supplementary details are too complex to go into here.
I have been thinking that the SubGenius all disappeared on their appointed X-Day of July 5th, 1998. At least, the Subgenius meme seems to have vanished. Do you feel that an end will eventually come to FiveBodied as well?
No, it won’t disappear because there’s too much resonance on/in it. It transcends the effects Paul Virilio describes in THE AESTHETICS OF DISAPPEARANCE (1980).
An end to the android meme?
At the deepest level where effects precede causes, the Android Meme ended in 1990 and its after-image ended in 2000. The Android Meme is still here in the lagging perception of most humans today, but that’s natural. It takes a lot of work to touch the actual Present. One of my roles is to encourage that great labor.
And if so, what will it be replaced with?
The frictionless energy-based society thanks to Pons and Fleischman’s “cold-fusion” battery. See my UP THE ORPHIC ANTI article.
Are the Booteans related to the Xists you mention in BME?
I used to play tapes of my conversations with the Evergreens on CKLN with Myke Dyer. I wanted to protect the identity of the deep-trance psychic who channeled them, Michael Blake Read. So I claimed that I was talking to the Booteans – but I often called them “the Xists”. The context for the Xists was that they had landed in early February, 1988, and they had helped me win the top position in the Secret Council of Ten in late Feb.’88. So for me, X-Day had
happened 10 years before the Church of the SubGenius’s projected date – July 5/98. But it was actually the Evergreens who helped me become Chairperson of the Secret Council of Ten.
Could you describe the actual X-Day as it happened to you in 1988?
It happened in February ’88. The month started gloriously with my and Connie’s attendance at three consecutive Zappa concerts in Manhattan with his “best band you never heard in your life” – the beginning of his last tour. Frank’s music always gets me in shape so I was ready for the election later that month on Feb.26. I did one show on CKLN before that day and prepared the circuits for what unfolded. As I said earlier in this interview:
“I was able to create a virus while on the air that tweaked the telecommunications network that the members of the Solar Government used for conducting the election for Chairperson of the Secret Council of Ten in February, 1988.”
Also, as I said earlier, when I discussed the “Xists” on the radio, I was actually referring to the Evergreens. But in February ’88, the Evergreens gave me information on how the Booteans were going to make physical contact with Earth’s inhabitants. That for me was X-Day. But it was for my ears only at the time. It still is. As a result of what they told me, I was able to keep my cool as the UFO/MKULTRA/Abductee meme escalated in the Nineties. I’ve got a world monopoly on understanding what’s been happening and will happen.
The Evergreens also gave me information that helped me win that February election. It was an eventful month.
How do you feel about the side effects of your work since 1988?
Life couldn’t be better for my colleagues… well, maybe it could, but for them, it’s sufficient to have ecstasy. More to come. It’s plenty enough, but it’s all we’ve got.
What about the cargo-cult church that sprang up around your works?
If you mean the Church of the SubGenius, they aren’t consciously plugged into my effects. They have to constantly play catch-up. It exhausts them. They are like the “large grotesque pods that grow under the leaves and flop off on the ground near the big switches and into the canyon” that Zappa mentions at the end of his story in the booklet accompanying his Uncle Meat CD.
Are the Booteans human in nature and are they behind all of the ET imagery that has pervaded pop culture since the fifties?
The Booteans live in our universe so they are physical like us but they aren’t human. They can adopt any shape that’s appropriate for their contacts with us. They are the real UFO sightings that have increasingly occurred in the Nineties which have been videotaped by many, and they make some of the crop and ice circles. They have only abducted about five people in the last one hundred years. Barney and Betty Hill were two of them. The others haven’t told anyone. I wouldn’t say the Booteans are behind the ET imagery we’ve had for sixty years. President Truman knew of the ET bodies at Roswell. President Eisenhower saw them.
In Bob’s Media Ecology you state that the alien’s are having an identity crisis and that is the reason why all of the crop circles have been showing up – to sort of remind everyone that they are still out there.
That was a probe. Since we mere humans, under electronic conditions, had become “superangels” (simultaneously everywhere at once), then perhaps UFOs, or angels (can be anywhere they want sequentially but not everywhere simultaneously), would be challenged by our new capacities – perhaps even have an identity crisis. Hence, the many sightings of ET’s over the last half-century.
They’re here now because they’re puzzled by our new inscrutability.
Do you have any notions on what a frictionless energy society will look like?
Money won’t have as Leviathan an effect on social relations. The global economy will eventually feed on a constant turnover of new ideas and inventions for the generation of wealth. It will be an endless Olympics for national identity and prestige. This will become even more intense after the Booteans make official contact around 2026.
What is the name of the current meme? or is there not one meme that covered all as the android meme did?
“The Age of Terror” – which I say reflects our present hyper-discontinuous, post-information society with its retrieved neo-Paleolithic patina.
Do you plan on writing any other books?
Not immediately.
What about a biography or autobiography?
Not yet. I’ve just begun my project. Like Moses, I was a “shepherd” for 40 years before I was given the nod.
Are all of your writings available on FiveBodied?
Yes, but not all the transcripts of my dialogues with various people.
Is it still important for man to fall back asleep, relax and play jazz? I love that analogy – it has helped me a great deal – especially with all of these internet dealings.
Yes, but it must be applied to all four bodies. Perhaps today’s situation means it takes a little longer to fall asleep and a little more longer to wake up.
Will there ever be a point of stasis? When change will finally become obsolete? It seems to me the lack of friction might lead to this.
Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable.
Could you explain the four bodies and where the term fivebodied comes from?
The Chemical Body is what most people consider to be their “physical body”. The dominant model for this is the product of Western science since the telegraph.
The Astral Body is what pervades all cultures – the belief there is more to our makeup than the Chemical Body. It is a huge storehouse of religious and spiritual
energy.
The TV Body is the repository of historical one-way broadcasting.
The Chip Body is the mutating warehouse of digital omni-directional media.
The Mystery Body is what we’re still excavating and whose lineaments we cannot fully assess yet, if ever. We know it’s made up of the previous four bodies but we don’t know what more we will discover about its constituents, affects, and effects.
The Android Meme is the resultant of the interplay, violent and joyful, of the first four bodies. I claim this five-body paradigm is a lot more useful or comprehensive when applied to our post-9/11 scene than Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” probe.
When did you receive the title as the Worlds Greatest Artist?
Nelson Thall pronounced that in the late Eighties. He had experienced enough of me to know it was a sane wager.
How long of a history did the secret council of 10 have until the virtual disbanding in 1991?
Technically, since 1694. But its modern form was established on July 17, 1945.
What exactly is the nature of that organization?
The phrase refers to the Solar-Government committee that managed Bucky Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth” after World War Two.
How were you able to manipulate the elections through your radio broadcasts and why did Marshall need to be fired?
As in the movie MAN OF THE YEAR (starring Robin Williams), I was able to create a virus while on the air that tweaked the telecommunications network that the members of the Solar Government used for conducting the election for Chairperson of the Secret Council of Ten in February, 1988. This is why Bob Marshall was removed from the electrified air.
Are you still a member of the council?
Yes, but I, as its Chairperson, dismantled the committee in 1990 so it has been dormant since then. I still get phone calls from former members and we occasionally have reunions to see if we are needed. So far, no dice.
What is Echelon?
The infrastructure of the Solar Government:
ECHELON is a name used to describe a highly secretive world-wide signals intelligence and analysis network said to be run by the UKUSA Community (comprised of intelligence agencies of five English-speaking nations), that has been reported by a number of sources including, in 2001, a committee of the European Parliament (EP report[1]). Its existence was first revealed by Duncan Campbell in a 1988 article, “Someone’s listening,” published in the New Statesman. According to some sources ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts.[2] The EP committee, however, concluded that “the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed” (EP report, p. 11).
^ European Parliament Report on ECHELON (July 2001). Retrieved on 2006-08-14.[4]
You mentioned to one of the FiveBodied members, in a reply to one of his posts, that ‘you are ready to get on the bus to Toronto’. How does one go about getting an invite?
Keep monitoring FiveBodied, all invites are posted there.
Can you briefly describe the role that artificial humans will have in the coming century?
The same roles that today’s “artificial humans” have. But by the middle of this century, children will be raised in virtual-reality “chambers” where they’ll think they’re living in their bodies but will, in fact, be in their “minds”. They’ll be able to exchange their experiences with others in the same condition. This “medium” will be implemented first in Australia.
Have you found your percepts have evolved over the past several years or has there been a stasis?
Only to the extent they’ve been confirmed – as is shown by my charts. Now I wait to see how the hexadic (pointed to by my charts but not in them) unfolds. How and if that happens may force me to “evolve” my percepts in unforeseen directions.
What do the next few years look like?
Chaos in extremis.
What do you plan on doing until the beginning of the frictionless society?
Prepare to be President of the United States.
