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davemerrillFinally got to sit down and watch that SubGenius documentary that came out in 2019. It can be summed up in as two "How It Started vs How Its Going" images, from a 1984 San Francisco dance party to mock executions in a field somewhere in rural America. Seems like the whole thing took a dark turn in the late 1990s, as angry and personality-disabled personalities took Stang's "open source" concept and ran with it (always a problem with "open source"). It's worth a watch if only to put faces to names like Puzzling Evidence, Palmer Vreedeez, Philo Drummond, and Dr. Howl, who comes off as calm, intelligent, and unwilling to wander around campgrounds naked, watching SubGenius turn into an even whiter, moister, low-rent Burning Man.
Low point comes when one enterprising Sub-G preacher ("Papa Joe Mama") uses the Columbine shooting as an excuse to drum up publicity for an upcoming Boston gig by calling radio stations to say the Columbine shooters were SubGeniuses, how dare the Subs hold a rally in Boston, etc. Sure, he got a lot of attention, but his gig got cancelled, and if that's "slack" then I'm a Yeti. Taking the "fun" out of "funny religion" was always Mama's schtick; he's seen in the movie patiently explaining his desire to kill all normals, kill, kill, kill. What he CAN'T do is kill on stage; he managed a Janor Hypercleats appearance in Savannah that we heckled, and at the last Phenomicon, he helped to make the SubGenius stage performance last so tediously long that the other act - Man Or Astroman? - set up in the hall, played their gig, and left.
The doc avoids some of the Church's more scandalous moments - there's no mention of how one of the designers of the book sent a mail bomb to somebody who was zine-feuding with Stang, for instance - but it's a good overview of what artsy weirdos were up to in the 1980s and why their greatest influence might be the grab-bag cut and paste pop culture junkyard aesthetic of acolytes like Gary Panter and Matt Groening. Minus the clip-art, it's naked hippies in the woods pretending to kill each other every July.
My decision to not waste any more time on "Bob" and concentrate on comics and dumb-ass Japanese cartoons has brought me more slack than the Church of the SubGenius ever did, and the documentary only reinforces that. Praise something, I guess.
Low point comes when one enterprising Sub-G preacher ("Papa Joe Mama") uses the Columbine shooting as an excuse to drum up publicity for an upcoming Boston gig by calling radio stations to say the Columbine shooters were SubGeniuses, how dare the Subs hold a rally in Boston, etc. Sure, he got a lot of attention, but his gig got cancelled, and if that's "slack" then I'm a Yeti. Taking the "fun" out of "funny religion" was always Mama's schtick; he's seen in the movie patiently explaining his desire to kill all normals, kill, kill, kill. What he CAN'T do is kill on stage; he managed a Janor Hypercleats appearance in Savannah that we heckled, and at the last Phenomicon, he helped to make the SubGenius stage performance last so tediously long that the other act - Man Or Astroman? - set up in the hall, played their gig, and left.
The doc avoids some of the Church's more scandalous moments - there's no mention of how one of the designers of the book sent a mail bomb to somebody who was zine-feuding with Stang, for instance - but it's a good overview of what artsy weirdos were up to in the 1980s and why their greatest influence might be the grab-bag cut and paste pop culture junkyard aesthetic of acolytes like Gary Panter and Matt Groening. Minus the clip-art, it's naked hippies in the woods pretending to kill each other every July.
My decision to not waste any more time on "Bob" and concentrate on comics and dumb-ass Japanese cartoons has brought me more slack than the Church of the SubGenius ever did, and the documentary only reinforces that. Praise something, I guess.
