Tag Archives: rock

Jun 5 2013

Burning ‘Bob’: Cacophony, Burning Man, and the Church of the SubGenius

by Whatsblem the Pro

The Holy Seal of the Church of the SubGenius -- Image: CotSG

The Holy Seal of the Church of the SubGenius — Image: CotSG

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

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

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

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

Read on, if you dare.

Image: CotSG, via Jack T. Chick

Image: CotSG, via Jack T. Chick

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

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

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So it comes down to pranks.

PHILO DRUMMOND: Yes.

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

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

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

Philo Drummond -- Photo: SubGenius.com

Philo Drummond — Photo: SubGenius.com

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Pink-souled?

PHILO DRUMMOND: Pink-souled. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ivan Stang -- Photo: Scott Beale

Ivan Stang — Photo: Scott Beale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IVAN STANG: No, I’m Spartacus!

PHILO DRUMMOND: I’m Spartacus!

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: I’m Spartacus!

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

IVAN STANG: We’re Spartacus!

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

Photo: CotSG

Photo: CotSG

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

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

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

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: So, “re-bunking?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: They have a certain truthiness.

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

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

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

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

PHILO DRUMMOND: Other projects. . .?

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

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

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

Buttons for 'Bob'

Buttons for ‘Bob’

PHILO DRUMMOND: Putting stickers on stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro Tip: Nuke Buddha from orbit -- Photo: CotSG

Pro Tip: Nuke Buddha from orbit — Photo: CotSG

PHILO DRUMMOND: That’s right.

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

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

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

Dr. Hal does TWO weekly shows.

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

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

[shouting] BUG PORN, ONE DOLLAR!

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

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

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

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

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

PHILO DRUMMOND: And hard to endure.

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

All aboard! -- Image: CotSG

All aboard! — Image: CotSG

WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Is it growing every year?

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

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

PHILO DRUMMOND: Until July 6th.

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

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

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

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

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

PHILO DRUMMOND: Yeah, that is the bright side!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

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

SubGenius commercial from MTV, circa 1991:

May 18 2013

HOWTO: Make Your Own Smoke Bombs at Home!

by Whatsblem the Pro

Image

While it’s an amazingly bad idea to fool around with making your own fireworks in general if you don’t happen to have a knowledgeable qualified pyrotechnician on hand, there are some fireworks you can easily make yourself, safely and cheaply and without the risk of losing any extremities.

Smoke bombs top the safe ‘n’ sane list, and in their own way they can be just as fun and useful as even the more extreme blowy-uppy and melty-throughy varieties of recreational DIY combustibles, like tannerite and thermite.

Don't try this at home. Or anywhere else.

Don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else.

Like thermite, smoke bombs are very easy and cheap to make quickly at home, and almost as safe to manufacture, store, and transport. . . but unlike thermite, which is horrifically dangerous once ignited, and shouldn’t be meddled with even in small quantities unless you know exactly what you’re doing, smoke bombs are safe enough that ordinary common sense will prevent you from suffering any serious consequences. Please note that while tannerite is only a little bit tougher to make at home than smoke bombs or thermite, tannerite absorbs water from the air over time and, in the process, can become unstable enough to self-ignite. In other words, if you don’t have someone qualified around, you might want to limit your pyro DIY to smoke bombs.

I’m going to divide the making of smoke bombs into three categories: Basic, Advanced, and Kit. Basic smoke bombs are minimalist things; the Advanced instructions will take the Basic smoke bomb and add various fancy-lad options; Kit smoke bombs provide the best of both, offering ease of manufacture with tons of options (especially for colors).

BASIC

The most basic smoke bomb of the variety we’re going to discuss requires only two components: ordinary refined white table sugar, and potassium nitrate, aka ‘saltpetre.’ You’ll also need a skillet or frying pan, and some aluminum foil.

Check the label; use 100% potassium nitrate

Check the label; use 100% potassium nitrate

You can buy the sugar at any grocery story, obviously, but where do you get saltpetre?
At the store, of course! Maybe not the supermarket, but Lowe’s or Home Depot or the gardening center at any number of big box stores will usually have it, as will some feed stores and farm supply outlets (potassium nitrate is a fertilizer). Ask for saltpetre or potassium nitrate by name, or look for Spectracide brand Stump Remover or similar products. . . but check the ingredients list on the label, and make sure it says “potassium nitrate,” “saltpetre,” or “KNO3.” Spectracide’s product is 100% potassium nitrate; don’t settle for anything less!

You can also buy online, at any number of places. Check Amazon, or try a chemical supply house. Skylighter.com is a pretty comprehensively-stocked distributor of pyro supplies, and can furnish you with everything you’ll need, including saltpetre.

You can also just make your own, if you really want to go to all the trouble, by reacting ammonium nitrate with potassium chloride. . . but we’ll leave those instructions for another time.

So, you’ve got your sugar, and you’ve got your potassium nitrate. You’ll also need a nice big skillet (teflon-coated or other nonstick, if possible), and a range to cook on.

Break up any clumps in the potassium nitrate and the sugar; you want them to be free-flowing, finely-divided powders. THIS IS CRITICAL, as even a small amount of clumping will cause your smoke bombs to be hard to light and prone to going out. Run your ingredients through a sifter if necessary. Once you’ve got them both finely divided, mix them together in a 3:2 ratio. It’s not a critical ratio, so you don’t need to weigh them out; just measure by using a spoon or a scoop of some kind; three scoops of potassium nitrate to every two scoops of sugar.

Warm the skillet over low to medium heat, and put the sugar-saltpetre mixture in it. Stir continuously with a wooden spoon (so you don’t scratch the pan’s nonstick coating) until the mixture melts together and the sugar begins to caramelize; it will resemble smooth, light-colored peanut butter when it’s ready.

I repeat: STIR CONTINUOUSLY, AND DO NOT leave the pan unattended on the stove; this isn’t a terribly dangerous procedure, but if it does catch fire you may not be able to find it to put it out before it fills your entire house with smoke and burns the place to the ground. Even if all you do is smoke up your kitchen, it’s going to attract hordes of flies the next day, so keep stirring and don’t let it catch fire!

Don’t worry about contaminating your skillet; clean-up can be accomplished with nothing but water. Also, potassium nitrate is often used as a food preservative, and this mixture you’ll be working with is entirely non-toxic (but avoid breathing the smoke when you set it off). Eating it isn’t recommended, but it won’t hurt you a bit, and any residue left in the pan after washing is ignorable.

Once you’ve got a nice smooth brown mixture in your pan, treat it like cookie dough (but don’t bake it). Spoon rough spheres of the hot mixture onto a sheet of aluminum foil, and let them cool and harden. Done! Peel them off the foil, take them outside to an appropriate spot, and hold a lit match to one until it catches. Smoke bomb!

ADVANCED

Perhaps the most obvious option would be to add a fuse. I won’t go into the intricacies of rolling your own fireworks fuse in this article (maybe another time), but it is doable if you don’t want to simply buy it online. Again, try Amazon, or Skylighter.com. The type of fuse known as ‘Visco’ and sometimes referred to as “cannon fuse,” “fireworks fuse,” “safety fuse,” or “wick” is ideal, but it’s not critical, as a smoke bomb isn’t going to blow your hand off no matter how iffy the fuse might be.

Adding a fuse can be as simple as shoving a length of your preferred fuse into the smoke bomb right after it leaves the pan, while it’s warm and soft. For best results, poke a hole in the cooling mixture with something rigid that is bigger but not too much bigger than the diameter of your fuse (an ordinary pen works well). Wait an hour, drop the fuse into the hole, then push a small amount of cotton wadding (tear apart a cotton ball) down into the hole alongside the fuse to secure it.

If you want to do the job extra neatly and also make your smoke bomb last longer and give off smoke a little more effectively, add some containment. This can be as easy as filling a section of cardboard tube from a toilet paper roll, paper towel roll, or frozen “push-up” confection with the warm mixture of saltpetre and sugar you’ve prepared, inserting the fuse, and wrapping the whole thing tightly in duct tape with the fuse sticking out, leaving a small open space around the fuse to vent the smoke. Packaging your handiwork this way is also helpful if you intend to store or transport smoke bombs, and don’t want your storage area littered with detritus. Instead of using a cardboard tube and duct tape, you can just wrap your bombs in aluminum foil; this will, however, leave more mess to clean up after the smokeration is over.

If you want to get really super-fancy about it, you can press the hot mixture of sugar and saltpetre into a mold, for a decorative look that says “I buy all my fireworks from Tiffany’s, peasants,” or perhaps a nice hand grenade motif.

Another option: Right after removing your skillet full of fun from the heat, add baking soda to make your smoke bomb burn more slowly and evenly. The proper ratio of saltpetre to sugar and baking soda is 9:6:1; nine parts saltpetre, six parts sugar, and one part baking soda. Mix the baking soda in quickly but thoroughly just before removing the mixture from the pan.

Aniline-based dyes for the win

Aniline-based dyes for the win

What’s more awesome than a homemade smoke bomb? A COLORED homemade smoke bomb! There’s a whole range of colors you can add to these little gems, but you’ll want to be picky about the dye you use. Don’t use water-soluble dyes, like food coloring. These may (or may not) change the color of the flame, but they won’t give you the bright-hued smoke you’re looking for. Aniline dyes, sometimes sold at art supply/craft/hobby stores as “powdered organic” dyes, work well, and you may even be able to find them in the laundry section of your local supermarket. Check the ingredients list on the label carefully to make sure you’re buying an aniline-based dye!

Just after removing the pan full of sugar-saltpetre mixture from the heat, and after mixing in the optional baking soda if you choose to use it, it’s time add the dye. The optimum ratio of saltpetre to sugar to baking soda to dye is 9:6:1:9, so the amount of dye you add should be equal to the amount of saltpetre you used. Again, make sure the dye is finely-divided and free-flowing before you mix it in, and not a mass of lumpy, clumpy, chunks. You should be able to manufacture a huge variety of colored smoke bombs this way, although blue and orange work best with this type of smoke bomb.

KIT

Sure, take the easy way out. . . and why not? You can still say you made your smoke bombs at home, and you’ll avoid having to make multiple trips to different types of store to obtain your materials. Smoke bomb kits are an ideal combination of convenience and DIYitude.

Skylighter sells a reasonably stunning array of smoke bomb kits in a whole rainbow of colors (even pink!) that you can put together at home, but they are often out of stock, so you might have to sit on your hands a while before you can get started. Take note: these kits use a different mix of chemicals than our sugar-and-saltpetre concoction, so you’ll want to set this article aside and follow the instructions that come with the kit instead. On the plus side, this different type of smoke bomb offers more vibrant colors than the saltpetre-and-sugar variety.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: BE CAREFUL. Smoke bombs are relatively harmless little beasts, but anything that is on fire poses a hazard, and you do want to avoid inhaling the smoke, although a little won’t hurt you. You can also create quite a hazard by setting these things off in the wrong place; the middle of the freeway is a poor choice of locales for creating a giant opaque wall of colored smoke. Use common sense; it’s nice to stay alive and enjoy your shenanigans without falling into the rookers of the millicents for it.

Burn on!

Apr 26 2013

A Matter of Control

by Whatsblem the Pro

The International Arts Megacrew is a crew of builders that has earned a massive amount of respect from the citizens of Black Rock City, in particular with the success of their very ambitious and brilliantly executed Temple of Transition in 2011.

The IAM has announced their project for 2013, a mysterious structure called THE CONTROL TOWER. I met with Irish, one of the group’s leaders, to find out more.

Whatsblem the Pro: Welcome back to the States! Tell me about the IAM.

Irish: Thanks. IAM is a loose collective of people from over twenty countries, of which the core group is based in Reno. The crew initially grew from a group that knew each other from working together at the Black Rock International Burner Hostel (BRIBH) camp from around 2005 onwards, particularly members of the leadership team: Kiwi, a master carpenter and general contractor from New Zealand, myself, an artist from Dublin, and Beave, a notorious international man of mystery from England. IAM has since expanded to include many other people, including our architect Ken Rose and a wide diversity of crew from Reno and further afield.

The BRIBH was a camp that sought to provide burners from overseas a means to integrate faster at Burning Man by providing a surrounding community and a shared project – camp construction – for them to get involved in, even in their first year at Black Rock City. Attending Burning Man from overseas is a daunting task, both psychologically and logistically, and the role of the Burner Hostel was to make the journey easier, allowing international participants to spend more energy on really getting stuck into Burning Man while knowing they had a sweet home base to return to whenever they needed. . . and this philosophy of providing accessible experience to international burners continues in our art projects today.

IAM crew distribution -- Image: Josh Simmons/IAM media team

IAM crew distribution — Image: Josh Simmons/IAM media team

The first big project we did, Megatropolis, grew from a whiskey-sippin’ conversation at Kiwiburn 2010 between Kiwi and Otto Von Danger, there at the time to build his Cow with Gun project. Too late to apply for a grant that year, we hustled, begged and borrowed to raise the funds required and drove to the playa on fumes, where, over the course of twelve hotdog-eating days, twenty-five of us managed to pull off a pretty big and popular project. Black Rock FX came in at the end to help us with an epic, pyrotechnics-intensive burn.

Our crew that year included people from New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, Australia, the USA, Hong Kong, Canada and Germany.

Megatropolis went so well that at some point during cleanup, Kiwi jumped to the next logical conclusion: building a Temple.

Megatropolis burning -- Photo: Chris 'Kiwi' Hankins

Megatropolis burning — Photo: Chris ‘Kiwi’ Hankins

This was a very different project – much bigger, far more complex – and being the Temple, required a lot more sensitivity and thought. With a crew that topped out at just under 400 volunteers from over twenty countries at Hobson Square, an awesome warehouse complex on 4th Street in Reno, we spent an extremely intense four months pre-building, then had an even more intense time with the on-playa build. . . so intense that we needed a year off to recuperate in 2012.

The Temple of Transition appeared to be well-liked by the community; afterwards we heard estimates that there were around 45,000 people at the Temple burn, which hopefully means it was a special place for a lot of people and that it performed its intended function effectively. The Temple is a well-understood, well-developed concept that had been explored and clarified over the preceding decade by David Best and other Temple architects and crews, and we tried our best to create and honor that same experience and feeling on our watch.

The IAM's Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011 -- Photo: Scott London

The IAM’s Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011 — Photo: Scott London

Whatsblem the Pro: Well done, it was a great Temple.
What is the Control Tower? What does it signify artistically, and what do you hope to achieve with it?

Irish: Where the Temple was serious, the Control Tower is designed to be fun, both for participants to interact with and for us to build!

Sensible grown-ups that we are, we realized that the theme is likely to inspire all manner of bizarre air and space craft, no doubt operated by a babbling smorgasbord of unlicensed, cantankerous, and demented pilots, all buzzing around Spaceport BRC in the most uncontrolled, abstract, and fundamentally irresponsible manner. Very dangerous! Very haphazard! So we figured we’d step up to do our civic duty and provide some modicum of air traffic control, provide landing clearances, define flight paths and so on. . . all of which can only realistically be achieved from sixty feet above the playa, high atop a flaming, laser-shooting Control Tower.

Aside from selflessly providing this vital public service, of course, we wanted to focus on two key principles this year: interactivity and collaboration. So every system on the tower – flames, lasers, lighting, sound – will all be interactive via a number of secret game-like methods which will have to be discovered upon visiting the installation. Many of these systems will be built by a rapidly expanding list of awesome collaborators including UV99, Mischief Lab, BambooDNA, Audiopixel, the Media Architecture Institute, Ideate, Play)a(skool, several 2012 CORE crews, and even some peaceful, softly glowing visitors from the Fractal Planet, so the project is shaping up to be a collaboration of epic proportions. We strongly believe that collaborations yield the best Burning Man projects, so we’re really excited about where the Control Tower project is going to end up by the time we actually get to playa!

The Control Tower. Not pictured: your mind exploding -- Image: IAM

The Control Tower. Not pictured: your mind exploding — Image: IAM

Whatsblem the Pro: What is the Org’s involvement in the project? Does it meet your expectations?

Irish: Sadly, we did not get a grant from Burning Man this year, which makes our lives a little more difficult. It’s hard to know exactly why they chose not to support a project that delivers so much interaction, collaboration, visual impact, and fire in a theme-appropriate way. The community as a whole clearly likes the idea very much, as shown by the massive wave of support we’ve experienced in just three short weeks since we launched on Facebook, and since we like those people so much, we HAVE to move ahead, grant or no grant! We built Megatropolis without a grant, so we know it can be done, especially with so much support gathering around the project already.

It’s also important to note that Burning Man supports its artists in more ways than just via grants, and this non-monetary support can be just as – if not more – critical to making a project happen successfully. Now that we have been given a very clear mandate by the community itself to build their Control Tower, it will be interesting to see how the Burning Man Org supports the project as it evolves. The fact of the matter is that we love building awesome projects at Black Rock City, and Burning Man loves awesome projects too, so I’m very hopeful they will work with us closely to ensure the whole community gets to enjoy the full, ridiculous magnificence of the Control Tower.

Whatsblem the Pro: What’s the plan for actually getting it built, and when and where will everything happen?

Irish: Well, we hope to start building in early May at the Generator, a new art space in Sparks, NV. Matt Schultz of the Pier project has very generously offered us space there, and we’re hoping the space will be quite the hive of Burn-related activity for the summer. We’re way into the family vibe that comes from working side-by-side with other projects, and it allows us to share our experience and infrastructure with smaller or less experienced crews. Our actual start date – indeed whether we start at all – will depend a great deal on how fundraising goes over the coming four to six weeks.

Whatsblem the Pro: What does the project need in order to succeed?

Irish: Like any other project, we need to assemble a mixture of four key resources to make the whole thing come to life: materials, funding, people, and clever ideas. We think it’s important to list materials ahead of funding because in the end, funds get used to buy materials anyway, and we really try to find free/cheap/donated material, equipment, and tools rather than spending on new stuff. However, even being super-proactive about using second-hand gear, we still think we need to raise just under $50,000, and we’re going to try to raise at least half of that on Indiegogo.

Equally, if we can come up with clever ways to avoid spending money by finding unexpected solutions to technical or organizational challenges, this helps reduce the fundraising load too, and that’s where the whole community comes in; we are always open to volunteers and new ideas. Across a community as big as Burning Man, we know there are people who have already developed a lot of the solutions we need to make this project go, and we’d love to hear from anyone who wants to get involved!

Whatsblem the Pro: How do people contact you to get involved, and how do they donate?

Irish: The easiest and fastest way to support the project is via our Indiegogo campaign.

We are fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, an umbrella 501(c)(3) that provides tax-deductible status to qualifying art projects. This means donations of money, materials or equipment to the project are all fully deductible to the extent permitted by law. A list of materials and equipment we need is available here, and we can pick stuff up in both Reno and the Bay Area. We will work with donors to determine a fair valuation of their donations for tax purposes.

To volunteer, collaborate, contribute ideas, or get more info about the project, just visit our Indiegogo page.