Oscar the Grouch: I Hate Christmas [youtube].

Eric Idle: Fuck Christmas [youtube].

Fear: Fuck Christmas [youtube].

The Attery Squash: Santa’s Laughter Mocks The Poor [youtube].

The Rudy Schwartz Project: A Sandwich for Adolph [youtube].

Current 93: Happy Birthday Pigface Christus [youtube]

Rex Martin – Holidays are Coming [vimeo]

See also our extended Story of the First Christmas from 2009.

Those who long to live in 1911 choose that year – really any year from 1890 to 1914 would be equally ok – just because it’s safely in the middle of that long lingering last “decade” of the long 19th Century – which was also the first heroic decade of true modern radicalism – e.g. – the Wandervogel, Stirnerite anarchism, the IWW and Jim Larkin, Ascona, Sex Radicals & Nudists – etc.  And still far removed from the future of total war & totalitarianism to come – a time of utopian revolutionary hope.

Also of course it’s the Age of Decadence – final year of the Manchu Dynasty – opium ten cents a bottle at any country store – the Paris of J. K. Huysmans.  Gaslight.  Also: the last gasp of true agrarianism in the USA – age of Populism, the Grange, Farmers Alliance – the last rural decade.

But there’s another reason we choose 1911 (or thereabouts) for our little Golden Age. It has to do with technology. In 1911 almost all the actual conveniences of modern tech already existed: the car, the telephone, the electric bulb, the phonograph… Now we Luddites do not approve of cars or any of these inventions, which all subtract from the quanta of Imagination available to individuals & to the Social. But we have to admit – they’re convenient. In their primitive forms they’re almost likable. The only real convenience invented since then – the electric refrigerator – can be replaced by an Amish-built propane refrigerator – OR – we could re-invent the ice-box. We hope someday to learn to sing again, but till then we can accept a few hand-cranked shellac records (but no radio or TV). Computers are NOT in any way part of a revived 1911 however. It’s time to wake up & smell the rot of technopathology.

The telephone easily corrodes social presence & reduces selves to disembodies “voices of the Unseen,” as the Arabs called the invention. But again the primitive version, with its “party lines” & snoopy local Operators, had a social aspect now completely leached out of the medium. If we must be thus haunted let it be via one of these elegant sinister objects – a real murder weapon.

Full play of Imagination becomes possible only without modern technology, because tech has become the heartless operation of Capital, which hates all forms of sharing. Let’s work for a secular Anabaptism, bold enough finally to refuse everything back to the steam engine – at least. Whereupon we may resume human life.

Recorded music realizes a dream of pure magic – but at the same time the end & even death of music itself. A Blakean paradox or mystical dialectic: every phenomenon had a “good” & a “bad” (in some rough sense), an Emanation & a Spectre. When I worked in radio (on WBIA-FM, The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade) & played rembetica, Ottoman marching bands, Irish music composed by supernatural beings (the Tuatha De Danaan, aka the faeries), Anglican church music from the 15-20th Century, etc., I & my listeners (I hope) experienced the first Emanational aspect of recording – its magic.

But as the MUZAK company understood, recorded music eventually loses its presence – and in its state of absence or deprivation it becomes a potent subliminal form of anxiety, often alleviated by a shopping spree or food binge – perfect capitalist behavior.

Thus music becomes background – in expensive restaurants one is expected to listen (but not pay attention) to music appropriate to a honkytonk whorehouse: rock’n'roll, which should be a highly presentational dionysiac experience – becomes aural vanilla for jaded yuppies. Youth buys its latest “rebellion” from the world of commercial greed & adult condescension called the Music Industry. With headphones & computers everyone composes a soundtrack for their own stupid boring movie, their life as “student” or wage slave & consumer – music as anodyne for the constant immiseration (as the Sits used to say) of Too-Late Kapitalismo.

Finally – recording replaces our own voices with dumbness. We let stars sing for us – we let machines come between us & the divine musician within us. Music attains Spectral status. It haunts us with its own non-presence reduced to residual noise pollution.

I had to give up radio (both as producer & consumer) & get rid of all recorded music in my sphere of influence (basically my house) in order to preserve my relation to music. I don’t dare sing in the street (as everyone did until about 1979) and there is no amateur communal music anymore (recording killed it) – no “music bees” so to speak. Music now lacks all sociality except the ersatz of mass consumption to hear live music sometimes. Usually now when I hear any decent live music I burst into tears. I give it my attention – a process that produces a kind of high or rausch.

If we have to hear a recording let it be a 1911-style shellac disc or even wax cylinder, cranked up by hand, not electricity – a magic music box to baffle the dog with its master’s voice – a cabinet of aural marvels. If we have to be haunted by music’s non-presence (every recording is the tombstone of a live performance) let it be by one of these (see above) graceful ear-shaped or seashell-shaped machines, a Surrealist’s delight (Leonora Carrington’s “ear trumpets”) or Spirit Trumpet for a charlatanesque medium…

Acoustic Amplifier for MP3 Player. Prototype. Plastic bottles, foamcore, glue, mp3 player, headphones. Works better than nothing.

I often record my environment for source material in audio collages and for cassette correspondence. The portable recorder I use has a pause button that slurs when turned on while recording. I decided to see what it would sound like if I turned the pause on and off rapidly while recording. The results cannot be explained by someone who wasn’t there. The sound is alien and familiar at the same time.

My home recorder has a pause function that is exact and without slurs. Using this deck, I fragmented sounds from the radio (mostly classical music and speech), other tapes I’ve produced and sequences programmed into my synthesizer. I also tried unplugging and plugging in the power cord to the tape deck while recording, but the results weren’t satisfactory.

I believe the best fragmentation comes from speech. One can recognize voices and an occasional word, but the overall effect is the destruction of language. Words are cut apart and re-combined in new and unpredictable ways.

Fragmented tapes are very easy to ignore. If you set your mind to something else while listening to a fragmented tape you will find it easy to block out. It is the kind of destroyed sound that you hear when there is a television on in the next room, or when a radio is playing in a passing car. This background noise effect and the ease of creating fragmented tapes makes them ideal audio accompaniments to performances or exhibits for those with limited access to expensive recording equipment.

from OVO 1 (1987)
reprinted in Sound Choice issue 5.

ANTARCTICA ant0010 October 2000: mp3.com
01. Antler King – Hammond
02. I Am Robot And Proud – Satellite Song One Stars Come
03. Ewmyren – Chomsky
04. Eucci – euphoric
05. Triptic Of A Pastel Fern – triptych 3
06. [unknown] – Tiny Shattering Rede Mix
07. Electric Rain – the.ouster
08. Prolefeed – Nebenstelle
09. Flu – alien brasil
10. Audionil – Broken01
11. Jet Jaguar – Loose Circuits
12. Lonny Lord – lowerpowered backpack mutant c
13. mdk – vi
14. Sister Friction – Love At A Distance
15. HX16 – Track265.45
16. Obadia – Lounge
17. Trikband – Drool
18. Triptic Of A Pastel Fern – Spark Bibo
19. Triptic Of A Pastel Fern – Dynadialadream

ANTARCTICA ant0011 November 2000: live
01. Severed Heads – Lower than Grave
02. Large Hot Pipe Organ – Pyro Tango
03. Gary Numan – Down In The Park
04. Ultravox – Liquid
05. Blondie – Fade Away and Radiate
06. GADGETTO – Defeat for Germany
07. Throbbing Gristle – Discipline (Reprise)
08. Units – Warm Moving Bodies
09. Units – High Pressure Days
10. Units – Cannibals
11. Screamers – The Scream
12. Screamers – Thru the Flames
13. Screamers – In a Better World
14. Screamers – Sex Boy

ANTARCTICA ant0012 December 2000: love & power
01. John Foxx – He’s a Liquid
02. The Cure – Love Will Tear Us Apart
03. Scorpion Wind – Love Love Love
04. Snake River Conspiracy – Casualty
05. DEVO – Fountain Of Filth
06. Nervous Gender – People Like You
07. Atari Teenage Riot – Death Star
08. John Foxx – Blurred Girl
09. Depeche Mode – Puppets
10. Garbage – The World Is Not Enough
11. Lords of Acid – Rubber Doll
12. Bone Thugs-n-harmony – Thug Luv
13. Women of Sodom – A Valentine for Jesus
14. John Foxx – 20th Century

ANTARCTICA ant0101 January 2001: beautiful
01. Depeche Mode – Any Second Now
02. Severed Heads – We Have Come to Bless This House
03. Severed Heads – Fever Has Robbed Her of Milk
04. Severed Heads – Gashing The Old Mae West
05. Thomas Dolby – Leipzig
06. Ultravox – Vienna
07. Throbbing Gristle – United
08. Yello – No More Roger
09. Severed Heads – Twenty Deady Diseases
10. Depeche Mode – Ice Machine
11. Severed Heads – Nature 10
12. Snake River Conspiracy – Casualty
13. Danielle Dax – Sleep Has No Property
14. Komputer – The World of Tomorrow

ANTARCTICA ant0102 February 2001: human/machine
01. Vangelis – Main Titles
02. Gary Numan – Are ‘Friends’ Electric?
03. OCCUPANT – Robot Girl
04. Gary Numan – Do You Need the Service
05. solenoid – Man Machine Reprise (KRAFTWERK)
06. Gary Numan – Me! I Disconnect From You
07. Atari Teenage Riot – Delete Yourself
08. Gary Numan – We Have A Technical
09. The Normal – TV O.D.
10. Ultravox – Artificial Life
11. Units – Digital Stimulation
12. Gary Numan – Remember I Was Vapor (live)
13. OCCUPANT – Media World
14. EBN – Electronic Behavior Control System

ANTARCTICA ant0103 March 2001: DEVO
01. DEVO – Can U Take It?
02. DEVO – Softcore Mutations
03. DEVO – I Don’t Know What I Do Do
04. DEVO – Death of Lt. Casanova
05. DEVO – In Heaven
06. DEVO – Total Love
07. DEVO – Hubert House
08. DEVO – The One that Gets Away
09. DEVO – Hobnob with the Snobs
10. DEVO – Nutty Buddy
11. DEVO – Those Darn Girls
12. DEVO – All of Us
13. DEVO – Huboon Stomp
14. DEVO – Frauline
15. DEVO – Red Shark
16. DEVO – Rhythmic Itch

ANTARCTICA ant0104 April 2001: loops
01. Philip Glass – Opening
02. Renaldo & The Loaf – Frass
03. Negativland – (untitled)
04. The Residents – Dumbo the Clown
05. Renaldo & The Loaf – Hats Off Gentlemen
06. Residents – Beyond the Valley of a Day of a Day in the Life
07. Severed Heads – The Monkey Is Safe
08. Negativland – Clutch Cargo ’81
09. Severed Heads – Gashing the Old Mae West (EP)
10. Renaldo And The Loaf – A Critical Dance
11. Renaldo & the Loaf – BPM
12. Renaldo & the Loaf – Melvyn’s Repose

ANTARCTICA ant0105 May 2001: mp3.com #2
01. UNWOMAN – Subsistence
02. Battery – Nevermore
03. Green Army Fraction – Faithfully Storm Ulster
04. GADGETTO – She Don’t Know Us
05. Green Army Fraction – Western Failure
06. Chiasm – Liquefy
07. Green Army Fraction – Wolves of Wotan
08. screenlit – Serenity (Nuremberg Stomp Mix)
09. Green Army Fraction – Agrarian Übermensch
10. Battery – Deluge
11. UNWOMAN – A Futurist Dreams This
12. Green Army Fraction – A Man of Steel
13. Battery – Never Left

ANTARCTICA ant0106 June 2001: Ralph
01. Residents – Constantinople
02. Snakefinger – Jesus Was A Leprechaun
03. Renaldo And The Loaf – A Critical Dance
04. Snakefinger – The Man In The Dark Sedan
05. Residents – Hard and Tenderly
06. Snakefinger – The Golden Goat
07. Renaldo And The Loaf – Green Candle
08. Residents – Rest Aria
09. Residents – Fire
10. Snakefinger – Magic And Ecstasy
11. Snakefinger – Picnic In The Jungle
12. Residents – Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life
13. Renaldo And The Loaf – Bearded Cats
14. Snakefinger – Kill The Great Raven
15. Renaldo And The Loaf – Lonely Rosa
16. Residents – Sinister Exaggerator
17. Snakefinger – Living In Vain

ANTARCTICA ant0107 July 2001: Video Game Themes
01. unknown – Pac Man Remix
02. Betty Boo – Doing the Do (Magic Pockets)
03. Trent Reznor – Quake Track 6
04. Nation XII – Into the Wonderful (GODS)
05. Trent Reznor – Quake Track 7
06. Bomb the Bass – Megablast (Xenon 2)
07. Nation XII – Speedball 2
08. Trent Reznor – Quake Track 5
09. Jean Michael Jarre – Captain Blood
10. Bullet Proof Sounds – Bubble Bobble Speed Mix
11. Bomb the Bass – Megablast LP
12. Trent Reznor – Quake Track 3
13. Barry Leitch – GODS Remix
14. Astroboy – Bubble Bobble Jungle Mix

ANTARCTICA ant0108 August 2001: Covers One
01. Soft Cell – Tainted Love [Standells]
02. solenoid – Bike [Pink Floyd]
03. 300000 VK – Kometenmelodie [Kraftwerk]
04. solenoid – Blurred Girl Inst. [John Foxx]
05. Terri Thaemlitz – Mensch Machine [Kraftwerk]
06. solenoid – Man Machine [Kraftwerk]
07. solenoid – Metal Inst. [Gary Numan]
08. GADGETTO – Warm Leatherette [The Normal]
09. Strelnikoff – Man Machine [Kraftwerk]
10. Veruca Salt – Somebody [Depeche Mode]
11. Karl Bartos – Computer Love [Kraftwerk]
12. Glen Gregory – Wichita Lineman[GlennCampbell]
13. Martin Gore – Yesterday [The Beatles]
14. John Oswald – Sir Jim Moron – o’hell [Doors]

ANTARCTICA ant0109 September 2001: GADGETTO
01. GADGETTO – Ether Ore
02. GADGETTO – YDH
03. GADGETTO – Interuption
04. GADGETTO – Murder City Devils Lemuria Rising
05. GADGETTO – Solfeggio
06. GADGETTO – Subject #2
07. GADGETTO – A True Story
08. GADGETTO – I’m the One Who Did It
09. GADGETTO – 10,000 Lemonades
10. GADGETTO – Hello – A First Attempt
11. GADGETTO – Pray for These People
12. GADGETTO – Hanger
13. GADGETTO – Nothing At All
14. GADGETTO – Defeat for Germany
15. GADGETTO – She Don’t Know Us
16. GADGETTO – Krq
17. GADGETTO – The Talking Book
18. GADGETTO – Stand Back

ANTARCTICA ant0110 October 2001: 1970s 7″s
01. Ultravox – Crossfade
02. Cabaret Voltaire – Is That Me
03. Thomas Leer – International
04. Thomas Leer – Private Plane
05. Cabaret Voltaire – The Set Up
06. Human League – Being Boiled
07. Cabaret Voltaire – Talkover
08. Cabaret Voltaire – Do the Mussilini Headkick
09. Ultravox – Dislocation
10. Cabaret Voltaire – Nag Nag Nag
11. Human League – Circus of Death
12. Ultravox – Slow Motion
13. Cabaret Voltaire – Here She Comes Now
14. Ultravox – The Quiet Men

ANTARCTICA ant0201 January 2002: Scott and Rockmore
01. Raymond Scott – Hostess Twinkies
02. Clara Rockmore – Rachmaninoff Vocalise
03. Raymond Scott – Domino
04. Clara Rockmore – Song of Grusia
05. Raymond Scott – General Motors Futurama
06. Clara Rockmore – Saint Saens The Swan
07. Raymond Scott – Good Air
08. Clara Rockmore – De Falla Pantomime
09. Raymond Scott – Bandito the Bongo Artist
10. Clara Rockmore – Achron Hebrew Melody
11. Raymond Scott – IBM Paperwork Explosion
12. Clara Rockmore – Wieniawski Romance
13. Raymond Scott – Manhattan Research, Inc.
14. Clara Rockmore – Stravinsky Berceuse
15. Raymond Scott – Nescafe
16. Clara Rockmore – Ravel Piece en Forme de Habane
17. Raymond Scott – Ohio Bell Thermo Fax
18. Clara Rockmore – Tchaikovsky Berceuse
19. Raymond Scott – Ohio Plus
20. Clara Rockmore – Tchaikovsky Valse Sentimentale
21. Raymond Scott – Rhythm Modulator
22. Clara Rockmore – Tchaikovsky Serenade Melancoli
23. Raymond Scott – Twilight in Turkey
24. Clara Rockmore – Glazunov Chant du Menestrel

OVO: What is the main source for the information that you publish?

VALE: We never tire of saying that our main influences were surrealism and situationism, and surrealism as you know placed a great deal of influence on objective chance and randomness and insanity and systems for deciphering the world that are a-logical systems We will admit that a lot of it is just purely chance. But of course through the years we have friends and our friends really help us. For example, the film book [Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films] which was actually the first book that broke out of our small industrial music underground audience, that was done just because we got a letter from Jim Morton, who had been collecting these incredible films all his life but particularly since the advent of VCR. He wrote us, and then we went over to his house every Saturday night for years and watched two or three of four movies there and ate popcorn. It took four or five years he guest-edited the Incredibly Strange Films book and we put it out. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known Jim Morton, let’s face it.

OVO: What is the purpose of Re/Search?

VALE: The surrealists had a slogan, something like “Matter Over Mind,” but what it meant was it is a mistake just to assume that one proceeds from the idea to the material reality. Very often its just the opposite. You might say the material reality suggests the theory, shall we say, and frankly I got started publishing back in ’77 because of punk rock. Of course it wasn’t called that then but it was very exciting, as undifferentiated and undefined and unlimited as it appeared to be because it was revolt, it was the youth revolt or revolution (if you dare to use that word) of the ’70s. And I was involved right from the very beginning before it had become codified and more or less set in amber. And so for me it was like a vehicle, it was an opportunity to… I don’t know, I just did it. My main motivation was kind of anger at the status quo. I’d always been angry at the status quo anyway, but, you know, what do you do? A lot of people just become criminals or whatever, or drug addicts, or they just can’t cope for a lot of good reasons. Society gives us all plenty of reasons but it also provides the narcotics in the form of television and actual narcotics so that we can “adapt,” shall we say.  And so yes, it’s definitely a struggle against mind control, against conditioning, against banal information.  We were born with the birthright of curiosity and there’s nothing more natural than to be curious, but of course this faculty is extinguished early in life.  It seems like society does everything it can to either extinguish this faculty or to channel it only along channels of consumption rather than you yourself doing something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.  I don’t think society can really handle that, because it’s too destabilizing.  It’s like we’re in a vast consumption machine, we’re part of it, and society would function (it thinks) better if we would just go along with the programs.  And so obviously anyone who is a lover of freedom is going to go against that in all its manifestations.  And yet it’s not just enough to fight, whatever that means.  You have to eventually start doing something.  And in our case we more or less accidentally discovered that we could do something and sort of realize our own identities and destinies by becoming publishers.  Re/Search however is not the same as Search and Destroy.  Re/Search happened when I met Andrea [Juno] back in 1980, after we’d been very depressed for a year by what we thought was the death of punk rock.  It was certainly the death of punk rock as we knew it, that is as a viable underground, a microcosmos of society.  We were depressed for a year but then realized that this shouldn’t be the end of publishing.

OVO: Are the Re/Search archives open to the public?

Vale: No, because we’re not public figures.  If all we were to do were to run a library we’d never get any work done, and obviously our work comes first.  It’s hard enough as it is right now just to deal with all the business aspects let alone function as some sort of archive.  It so happens that we’ve been attacked by Jesse Helms [R-NC] and Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA] and entered into the Congressional Record because they don’t like our book Modern Primitives, which is yet another Re/Search publication which is advocating a certain theory of self-liberation or exploration.  That’s all it was intended to do, provide theory for this kind of activity, but apparently the powers that be would like to have this kind of theory and information repressed.

OVO: What kind of trouble have they been giving you?

VALE: Actually we should context this in a much wider overview that obviously America right now is under (thanks to less than probably one-tenth of one percent of the population) which is these very organized fundamentalist Christian fascists who have nothing to do with their lives but write letters all day to their congressman and call up advertisers threatening to boycott things like The Simpsons.  In other words, a minority group trying to pretend and camouflaging themselves as some kind of vox populi majority, which they are not. They’re mostly these very ignorant people in the South, people who have long since shut off any creative potential in their lives.  They’re just consumed by envy and they want to control all the rest of the population, who might be having more fun than them in some way. The Reagan agenda was to turn the country back to the McCarthy ’50s, since he was an informer for McCarthy, and to take away all the gains of the ’60s.  That complex agenda is still being realized. Every day there’s some new article in the paper on page 40 how 160 stores in the deep South took away Playboy Magazine from their stands. Little things like that don’t even get reported here on the West Coast. Thing like that are happening all the time but the more you find out about it the scarier it gets.

OVO: Yesterday a group called AIDS Response Knoxville had their office fire bombed. I just found out about that this morning.

VALE: If you could send me the clipping… see, that was not in our paper today. It doesn’t surprise me. So what you have now is a great deal of information containment going on. We’re living in the illusion that all the information is available, that were living in a global village and all that, but most people get their information from TV news, which is of course extremely compressed and bowdlerized and operates by omission. We should all be subscribing to our own little clipping services I suppose to get the kind of news such as the incident you told me about just now.

OVO: I didn’t find out about it from the paper. I found out about it from a friend and he said there’s only a tiny article about it.

VALE: That’s perfect, that’s exactly the way things happen and are happening. The propaganda techniques which Hitler initiated in terms of mass media control of the population, they‘re real good now. Helms is a master of negative campaigning, in which life gets simplified down to whether you’re for child pornography and obscenity or… Helms’ voting record is incredible, he’s a madman, the total enemy of liberty. But even when Helms is gone there‘ll always be someone to take his place. This kind of control mentality will apparently always be with us but yet we’re trying to do a small campaign so that all the minority papers across the country will at least have a copy of his voting record and also start to get a larger overview of all these isolated little incidents that’ve been happening, which together paint an extremely depressing picture of the abridgment of our freedoms.

OVO: Have there been specific incidents of you having trouble with Modern Primitives?

VALE: Knock on wood, no. We had two art shows based on the book, and that‘s how it started. If you don’t have any information on this I’ll send it to you.

OVO: No, I don’t have any.

VALE: Okay, I’ll send you the whole little press packet on that, with all the articles that’ve come out. See, that’s what l mean, someone as relatively hip and aware as you don’t know. Multiply this by about a thousand for all the little environmental groups all over. Their little news things never get reported. I just found out today that all the searches that the FBI did of all these Earth First houses, the people involved with Earth First because of two people blown up by a bomb, the FBI keeps reporting to the news that they blew themselves up rather than what they should be doing which is trying to find out who really did it. I didn’t realize until I read the paper today that all the searches the FBI did of people who deal with Earth First were all warrantless. To me that is really frightening. Did you know that? Do you think that means anything? And we only found out because our good friend Jock Sturges, a photographer, got busted recently. We’ve known Jock for years. For the last twenty years he has specifically focused on, shall we say, beautiful adolescent girls who are developing. But they are not pornography, he’s not the head of a kiddie porn ring by any means. He’s got the most incredibly beautiful negatives you’ve ever seen, eight by ten inch view camera negatives blown up to twenty by twenty-four inch prints that have a million gray tones in them. And we only found out from him that basically the First and Fourth Amendments are dead. The Fourth Amendment is unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the FBI just busted into his house without a search warrant. And this was all done, as Burroughs has kept us appraised of and warned us against all these years, in the name of fighting the “drug problem.” Because here’s what they can say now: they can come in because (a) they have a reason to believe you are about to destroy evidence and (b) they have a right to watch you because they have reason to believe you might try to commit suicide or commit harm to yourself. Isn’t that nice?

OVO: They’ve certainly got our best interests in mind.

VALE: Yes, of course.

OVO: How do you prevent Re/Search from becoming a part of the process of -

VALE: – co-option and assimilation? You’re dealing with what McLuhan called a very cool medium (or is it hot, I can never get that straight), but you’re dealing with a medium that is a book, and do you realize how few people read anymore? The numbers are incredible, how much reading has declined even though the population has doubled. When people do read, what do they read? They mostly lead these airport kind of books. It’s really frightening. The reason most people avoid books is because, let’s face it, there’s only a minority that reads any more, almost everyone else watches television and gets their information from TV. And in order to read effectively I find that l must have complete silence, as much as possible, and this is not the modem way. A lot of people these days, it’s like a conspiracy to keep them from thinking. As soon as they get up in the morning they have their radio blaring or put on a tape or something. We’ve all known people who’ve had the TV on eight hours a day. Of course we don’t know people like that any more, but they’re out there, like zombies or something. And so I still think that if you’re putting something out in a book you have more of a chance of making it with some kind of integrity. Because books aren’t you, Re/Search is not me or Andrea; it’s on its own. And if it has some ideas that light up your brain and catalyze in some way, which is the best that one can hope for… the books really do have a life of their own. And we’re just putting out a combination of information, images and ideas, hopefully, as well as trying to direct people to other books, which continue the same kind of inspiration.

Re/Search
20 Romolo Street #B
San Franslsco CA 94133 USA
http://researchpubs.com/

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Update, February 2011
Jim Morton writes about films, pop culture, and advertising.
http://popvoid.blogspot.com/

Boyd Rice was formerly credited as guest editor for Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films.
http://www.boydrice.com/

Andrea Juno founded Juno Books.
http://twitter.com/AnimaJuno

Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr. died in 2008.

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for California’s 46th Congressional district.

AIDS Response Knoxville served at least between 1987 and 1999 and may still exist.

Jock Sturges’ studio was the subject of an FBI raid on 25 April 1990. Accused of child pornography, a Grand Jury did not bring an indictment against him.

Wikipedia, Judi Bari Car Bombing:

In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari’s car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.

I know that you don’t like to think this, but we are much like humans. We are subject to the human frailties. We forget. We get slip-shod. We fall short of our disciplines. You have selected me to be the family coordinator and I agreed to be, at least until someone better comes along. So that’s why I’m now reminding you of some of our basic principles for handling slaves.

Our slaves can get bored easily. When bored, they get restless. They start thinking, and questioning order. Therefore it is necessary for us to direct their thinking into areas which keep them dependent on our leadership. We must make them feel dependent on society for all their needs. Make them feel important to the Great Whole to which they belong. Keep them too deep in debt to have any spare time to experiment with principles of self-sufficiency, or even just getting out of hole.

A few of the slaves who refuse to conform are squatting in various places and planting their apple seeds, plum pits, grape seeds, avocado pits, orange seeds, nuts of all kinds and vegetables. They are not using our hybrid seeds. They found organic natural seeds more productive. They are creating Gardens of Eden, with free food, no rent and and acceptance of the Golden Rule instead of Government. So far, only a few of the smarter nonconformists are doing this. This gets them off our case; however, we must not give them any publicity, as it might encourage more our workers to not conform.

The family came up with a great innovation when they first decided to “allow” the peons to “own” land. Ownership gives them roots ties them down and makes it a easier to find them. It also gives us a classification of slave known as landlords. They serve us by forcing people to pay them rent in order to have a space to sleep on this planet. Thus they all work for us for the rest of their lives. We must always make them think that this is normal and that everyone has always had to pay rent and that they always will.

If the slaves deviate from present thought patterns, they might think it strange that they “agree” to work for us for 30 years to buy a place to sleep. They might wonder why some “primitive” people are able to build their homes from the material at hand in a couple of weeks and have no mortgage to pay. They might even find it simpler, more enjoyable and even more adventuresome to walk to where they wish to go instead of working for us to earn money to make perpetual car payments to us, so that they can get to a job to make the money to make their car payments. To say nothing of the car maintenance costs and depreciation. We must constantly entice them to buy. They make much better workers if are always in debt.

If we allow them space to think, they may question the vehicle with which they are killing themselves: 50,800 persons dead and 1,900,000 disabled in 1981 in the United States alone.They may see how machines and their present manufacturing processes are destroying their life-support system. They may see that all the processed junk food we’re selling them is making them sick and costing them more; see that their boring, unsatisfying jobs are driving many of them crazy. They might even discover the simplest unprocessed foods which are cheap and healthful.

As it is recorded in our family archives, one of our forefathers, Galus Julius Caesaer once sald: “Give them breed and circuses, to keep them from rebelling.” It is a simple matter to give them food, but it takes a little more imagination to give them circuses. I guess this is the creative part of being slave masters – to create diversions to keep their gullible little minds busy.

Our Watergate Scandal was a fine circus. It kept them thinking and talking along safe lines for years. We are still getting some mileage out of the Kennedy Assassination and they still aren’t sure whether we shot the real Kennedy, his double or a dummy. We have fine show going on Central America and in the Middle East, some still lingering in Germany, others in Vietnam, the USSR and China.

We may use the recent invasion to start another World War. It will be a challenge to attempt to involve our sheep in another big war, so soon after the last one. However, we may be able to pull it off, to get them angry enough to fight. We wouldn’t need to use the older nuclear bombs, as they could be dangerous to our families’ health. We might use a few of our cleaner H-Bombs. It will be a creative, fun time for us. Wars are truly the sport of kings. They are more fun to stage and run than chess games, or are hum-drum activities of production or politics.

Creating straw men for slaves to knock down is one of our best numbers. We set it up and let them tear it down. It diverts much of their creative energy. We create another excellent diversion by resisting their efforts to tear it down.

We learned long ago that people can think only one thought line at a time. We feed them thoughts and they either fight them or go along with them.

Music has always been an effective tool for setting their moods, their pace and leading their thoughts. While dancing they learn to step to the beat of our drummer and keep the pace we set. This teaches them to obey orders. The drum has always been useful for this. We let them touch each other during the dance. They seem to enjoy touching and they feel successful when they keep in step, so this training process becomes self-perpetuating. It also serves as an excellent distraction.

They must occupy their minds with keeping in step to the beat and with how they are going to entice their partners to deb. If they are constantly bombarded with distractions they will have no time to do any real thinking. They will only be aware of that which we make them aware.

Our closest guarded secret is the fact that slavery still exists in every country on this planet.

Laborers, farmers, traders, professionals, managers, directors and presidents – all take pay, so they must obey our orders. They are not aware of their bondage. Some are vaguely aware of the idea that “big money” runs everything. But they are unable to relate to the idea that they are part of that “everything.”

They think that they are free people, making all their own decisions We allow them to make the unimportant ones. The important ones we cover in their laws, and in their customs and religious and moral codes. We have even trained them to punish their own kind when they do not conform.

We have been masters for a long, long, time. We teach kids how to work, to be submissive and to obey orders. These kids grow up to he good slaves, like their parents. Most of the parents even go so far as to break their own kid’s spirits. So by the time they are of work age, them are docile, gullible and easy to manipulate.

Through all our media, including books, we give them a substitute for living. For example, we encourage them to live vicariously through the exciting adventures of fiction. This puts their fantasy life through an exciting energy drain which seems to satisfy some of their emotional hunger.

This substitute fills one of those spaces in time which they might have used to go out and experience life first-hand. Distractions keep them from discovering the bondage they are in. We must continue to titillate them to want to watch television and movies, to read newspapers, magazines and books to listen to radio and music.

We use the mass media not only for a distraction but also to help create their basic beliefs and expectations. Of course, the schools and churches serve this purpose too, as do popular songs and music. We use the media to create the desire to buy. In this way we motivate them to work for us.

They continue to administer to our needs as they did to Caeser’s and as they did for the priests in the time of the great pyamids. Our ancestors really knew how to handle people! As slaves get more education it takes a little more finesse to keep on top of them; however, it’s basically the same even today. Keep them fearful; fearful of death, fearful of pain, fearful of each other. Always encourage competition: it’s like fighting, separates people and keeps them fearful of losing.

We have made them afraid of death by telling them that they have spirits which live on after their death. If they obey our rules, which we tell them were inspired by God, their spirits will be assured entrance into Heaven or reincarnated into a better existence, depending on which of our religions they have chosen. This makes them afraid to die, because they know they haven’t obeyed all the rules (which we deliberately made too difficult to always be obeyed). If they can be kept afraid they are more easy to manage. Then they look to us for guidance and protection.

Promoting fear of pain is another distraction we have always used. We must not give them time to discover that pain is their body’s method of alerting them to the fact that they are doing something wrong to it. So before they can check out the reason for the pain, we channel them to a doctor who will attempt to numb the pain. The doctor will take up time and money doing so. It creates a great diversion, and debt. Some people talk about their pain constantly. The patients’ pain will usually return (sometimes to a different part of their body) after their cure. Doctors usually don’t remove the cause of pains. This would put them out of business.

We hire some of the slaves to act as police and soldiers so that we can threaten to inflict pain and imprisonment on the others. They literally enforce their own slavery when they take jobs in law enforcement and the military. We keep them too busy and too broke to realize this.

Sports and gambling have always been good spectacle. Sex may rate second place, drugs third. We have achieved a sort mass hypnosis by using movies, TV and music, with which we have been able to implant suggestions and beliefs without their being aware of it.

We may need to give our ecology program front page coverage again soon. It can take up the Slack to hold their attention in case it is untimely to start a war now.

Remember, the Warbucks family has ruled on this planet for six thousand years, so it is our right and destiny to continue doing so. Keep up the good work and if you have any problems, contract Alexandria or Ernest, as I’m taking a little vacation.

- Cleopatra Warbucks

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

See also:
OVO 2 (1987)

Multiple name identities are co-incarnations, individuals who exist in more than one body at the same time.

A few multiple name identities can be found in academia. Nicholas Bourbaki has written several influential papers on mathematics since 1935.  A number of men were Nicholas Bourbaki.  The theologian Franz Bibfeldt was also a number of men.

Most multiple name identities are found in the arts. No one knows who is the author of the 1930 book The Little Engine That Could.  The story is attributed to Watty Piper, which was the house name of publisher Platt & Munk.  Many men and women wrote under the name Watty Piper.  

Kenneth Robeson was the creator and author of the Doc Savage character, who first appeared in 1933.  Lester Dent and a number of men wrote the stories, all of which were published under the Street & Smith house name Kenneth Robeson.

Three German men were Stefan Brockhoff, author of mystery novels from the 1930s to the 1950s.  

Kilgore Trout is a science fiction author who first appears in the 1965 book God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut.  Trout is modeled after the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who in turn was born with the name Edward Hamilton Waldo.  Philip J. Farmer wrote the 1974 science fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell and attributed it to Trout.

Since 1968, films which the director wishes to distance themselves from are attributed to Alan Smithee. The Internet Movie Database lists more than seventy titles attributed to Alan Smithee.

David Agnew is a name used by the BBC as a shared scriptwriting credit since the 1970s.

Bruce Lee died during the production of the 1978 film Game of Death.  Two other actors took on the role of playing Bruce Lee playing the character Billy Lo and the film was released.

V. C. Andrews’ 1979 book Flowers in the Attic was so successful that authors have published dozens of books under her name since her death in 1986.

Between 1988 and 1994, the Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer wrote the score for Zbigniew Prisner’s films.  den Budenmayer was several men working under one name.

Nicholas Palmer wrote the 1990 book Fuck Yes! under the pseudonym Rev. Wing Fu Fing.  On a lark, author Tom Robbins signed a copy of Fuck Yes! when a Robbins fan handed it to him.  This started the rumor that Robbins was the secret author of Fuck Yes!, a rumor which helped Palmer sell 50,000 copies of the self-published book over the next four years.  Fuck Yes! tells the story of a man who says ‘yes’ to every circumstance that life presents him.  In 1996 Palmer sued Robbins, who agreed to never sign another copy of the book again.  Palmer said: “It’s not just Robbins, the book is good. It has allowed him to take advantage of my anonymity.”  In 2008 Jim Carry starred in the film Yes Man, which tells the story of a man who says ‘yes’ to every circumstance that life presents him.  Yes Man is based on the 2005 book of the same title by Danny Wallace.

Actor Heath Ledger died during the production of the 2009 film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  Three other actors took on the role of playing Heath Ledger playing the character Tony Shepard and the film was released.

The author Wu Ming is several Italian men who have published books since 2000.

There is a species of human behavior that is not quite art, not quite politics, and not quite as presumptuous as all that sounds. I prefer the term pranks. I first learned of multiple name identities from pranksters. Rrose Sélavy was an an artist and model in the 1920s, associated with a number of dadaists.

In 1960 the young Kerry Wendell Thornley worked as a desk clerk for the United States Marines.  As a prank, he entered a false name in the training lecture roster: Omar Kayyam Ravenhurst.  Over time Thornley and other Marines completed more paperwork for the non-existent Marine, giving him an IQ of 157 and fluency in 17 languages.  Ravenhurst then got the blame when Thornley or one of his friends made a mistake on base, making Private Ravenhurst a multiple name identity.

A free music festival was held near Stonehenge in 1974.  The audience decided to squat the location at the site after the performance.  Eviction laws required naming each of the squatters, and so the squatters all adopted the same name to make the job of the police more difficult.  Thus several dozen people became Wally.  One of the Wallies, Wally Hope, was sent to a psychiatric institution for possession of LSD in May 1975.  He was unable to detox from the forced drugging of the institution and died in September 1975.  His free-spirited life and oppressive death was a central inspiration for Penny Rimbaud to form CRASS.  Unrelated is the Stonehenge built by Wally Wallington.

David Zack has written about Monte Cantsin, who appeared in 1975:

Maris [Kundzins] and I were in Portland [Oregon]. We’d been working with a Xerox 3107 that makes big copies and reductions. We were making giant folios; monster folios and dinosaur folios we called them. And one night Maris started fooling around with the tape recorder, singing songs in Latuvian about toilets and traffic. Well, we decided to make a pop star out of Maris. But it had to be an open pop star, that is, anyone who wanted could assume the personality of the pop star. This open pop star would be the most talented in history, better than Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Sal Mineo and even Ry Cooder all rolled together in one. Pop stars have always been special to me, growing up the son of a symphony conductor the way I did. To me they stand for rebellion and acceptance, revolution and success and a whole lot of other things at the same time. We were mouthing Maris Kundzins’ name, and it came out Monty Cantsins. Then we got to saying can’t sin and can’t sing and quite a few other things to give the impression that this pop star could be a thief as well as a saint.

One thing I definitely did invent is “Monty Cantsin,” the open pop star. I did not do this alone, I did it in Portland, Oregon with the very first Monty Cantsin, an artist named Maris Kundzins. Maris and I sent a card to Kantor in Montreal, you are Monty Cantsin, the open pop star. Well Graf I have to assert what Kantor did with this simple postcard belongs in any history of art and also any history of the world. The idea that people can share their art power is a very good one I think. My own understanding of Neoism is that it is about sharing, about bash: cooperation between people, putting egos and tempers aside. Though not always seeming to. [1][2]

Stewart Home has written about Karen Elliot, who appeared in 1985:

Karen Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren’t. Smile is a name that refers to an international magazine with multiple origins. The name is fixed, the types of magazines using it aren’t. The purpose of many different magazines and people using the same name is to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth.

Anyone can become Karen Eliot simply by adopting the name, but they are only Karen Eliot for the period in which the name is used. Karen Eliot was materialised, rather than born, as an open context in the summer of ’85. When one becomes Karen Eliot one’s previous existence consists of the acts other people have undertaken using the name. When one becomes Karen Eliot one has no family, no parents, no birth. Karen Eliot was not born, s/he was materialised from social forces, constructed as a means of entering the shifting terrain that circumscribes the ‘individual’ and society.

The name Karen Eliot can be strategically adopted for a series of actions, interventions, exhibitions, texts, etc. When replying to letters generated by an action / text in which the context has been used then it makes sense to continue using the context, ie by replying as Karen Eliot. However in personal relationships, where one has a personal history other than the acts undertaken by a series of people using the name Karen Eliot, it does not make sense to use the context. If one uses the context in personal life there is a danger that the name Karen Eliot will become over-identified with individual beings. [3]

I published work by Karen Elliot in OVO 3 (1987)

Stewart Home, in turn, has seen publications under his own name that he did not write.  These include the books Stone Circle, Harry Potter and the Quantum Time Bomb, and essays including “Anarchism is Stupid: How Luther Blissett Hoaxed Bakunin’s Idiot Children,” “Communism or Masochism? An Appeal to All Revolutionaries Concerning the Rubber Slave Larry O’Hara,” and “An Open Letter to My Avant-Garde Chums by Stewart Home.”  Someone anonymously suggested the (then) anonymous blogger Belle de Jour was Stewart Home.  Not necessarily with his cooperation or consent, Stewart Home has become several people.

Luther Blissett (born 1958) is a professional footballer, manager and coach.  His name was adopted by the Luther Blissett Project as an open reputation in the 1990s.  Blissett the footballer is aware of the other Blissetts and has taken his open reputation in stride.

I enjoyed several people being me in the early 2000s.  A number of my friends in Portland were on a site called irreality.  They encouraged me to join, but I had enough internet time in my day and didn’t want to.  Some time back I’d heard that David Bowie had hired actors to play his press agents, and Bowie confirmed whatever exaggerated claim they made about him.  Inspired by this story I encouraged 2-3 of my friends to set up an irreality account for me and post to it as if they were me, promising I’d confirm anything they posted as my own.  For a year or two these friends would mix some of my own writing (from ovo127.com) with original writing of their own and post it at irreality.  When I’d meet up with those who thought I’d posted what they read at irreality attributed to me I’d confirm it.  Some of the friends I made on irreality are friends to this day, perhaps only now learning I wasn’t necessarily who they thought I was at the time.  Irreality closed shop in 2008.

The second-most influential multiple name identity is Anonymous.  Although Anonymous began as an internet meme around 2006, Anonymous is also the name of many individuals who have appeared in public.  Inspired by a scene in Allan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Anonymous appears in numbers wearing the mask of Guy Fawkes.  As of December 2010, Anonymous is conducting successful attacks on major credit card and communication companies around the world in retaliation for slights against wikileaks.

The most influential multiple name identity is St. Nicholas / Father Christmas / Kris Kringle /  Santa Claus.  Every December for over a century, Santa has appeared around the world, wearing the same clothes, carrying out the same actions, exhibiting the same demeanor, claiming the same home-base and promising to return at the same time next year.  A significant part of the world economy is shifted when Santa Claus comes to town.  In the late 1980s the Orange Alternative of Poland held a parade of seventy-seven Santas as part of their absurdist protests against Communism.  The SantaCon / Santarchy tactic appeared again in 1994, carried out by Suicide Club of San Francisco.

“You should never run out of people to be.” – Genesis P-Orridge.

My Struggle is a book of 280 pages measuring 5.25 x 4.5 inches, written in 1975 and printed in a single edition of one hundred copies in 1978. These small thick books have red covers to make them look the same as Chairman Mao’s Book of Quotations. Some red cover copies had red ribbon page markers, and some had yellow covers and no ribbon. The pages of the book book are bound by two large staples and the cover is glued to the spine and inner edges of the first and last pages.

Almost every page of My Struggle has an illustration with a numbered caption, usually having nothing to do with the surrounding text. Most of these illustrations are clip art but some are collages or drawings by Mothersbaugh. There are also a few photographs of DEVO. The text of the book is a continuous flow of words, occasionally knotting itself into an essay but usually stream of conscious rambling. The text is presented without hyphens and in full justification. It reads as the work of someone who doesn’t understand what the bell on a typewriter is for.

My Struggle has the same concerns as the lyrics, music and films of DEVO: mutation, medicine, eugenics, potatoes, de-evolution, tyranny, corporate culture and sex. The chicken-winged chimponaut seen on the dust jacket to Duty Now for the Future and in the film Love Without Anger appears here, as does the beaker / man / atom logo. The warty-faced man described in the film The Men Who Make The Music as the work of “God in his Picasso period” is in My Struggle. Boojie Boy appears throughout the book, as does Chinaman. Chinaman is seen stroking a coathanger in the film Secret Agent Man, is described as giving the papers to Boojie Boy in the film Jocko Homo, and is mentioned in the song All of Us. The Chinaman’s glasses, minus their ‘velly clevah’ slanted eyes, are the glasses Mothersbaugh is wearing on the cover of Oh No It’s Devo. These words, images and concepts show a continuity of work by Mothersbaugh that lasts decades.

Some of what appears in My Struggle didn’t appear in any other form for many years. On pages 108 and 109 are the lyrics of the song All of Us, a song which was distributed only in bootleg form for decades. In 1977 the song was performed in Minneapolis as Soft Core Mutations, and in 1981 the song was renamed Going Under for the LP New Traditionalists. Only in 1990, on the CD Hardcore DEVO Volume 1, was the original All of Us released. fifteen years after appearing in My Struggle.

My Struggle gives much attention is given to the Huboon, a type of low-grade Beautiful Mutant. Hardcore Devo Volume 1 mentions the Huboon in the song Soo Bawls. The song Huboon Stomp was performed in the first few years of DEVO but was not released until the 1998 CD Chef Aid. The lyrics to The Last Time I Ever Seen St. Louie and My Frauline Done Told Me (the first song performed at the first DEVO concert) are found in My Struggle but have yet to be released. My Struggle is written in a sing-song style and many more lyrics may yet be harvested from it.

My Struggle was published in a format that was made to last, and proves an unbroken line from the earliest DEVO to the DEVO of today. This book is nearly impossible to find. I’m fortunate to have a copy signed by Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, Jim Mothersbaugh, Gerry Casale and Bob Casale (the original line up and the band as represented in the book), General Boy and (separately) a signature from Chuck Statler, the primary director of DEVO’s earliest video work.

from OVO 8 (May 1991)
re-written December 2010