Fun stuff which I post here for posterity, including a smiling Eye in the Triangle pocket patch which I promise to find some practical use for.
One of my favorite finds in the Discordian Archives is this letter from Robert Shea to Greg Hill sent the summer before the release of Illuminatus!.
The letter includes some great Erisian Mysteries insights. Such as Shea’s back-story on how cover artist Carlos Victor (Carlos Ochagavia) learned about Illuminatus! to create the individual book covers. I find this amusing as it must have been quite an endeavor by editor Fred Feldman and the interpreter to communicate to Victor such a strange and bizarre concept, which Victor nails solidly.
Another great nugget is Shea’s admiration for the latest in 1975 photocopier tech, provided by his employer, Playboy magazine, used to photocopy the Illuminatus! book cover proofs attached to the letter.
Photocopiers as hip-tech were something Shea and the Early Discordians used-well in the production of personal zines, like Shea’s No Governor mentioned in the letter, and various Erisian tracts, including the Principia Discordia.
The Eye in the Pyramid book cover
proof attachment, June 25, 1975.
Courtesy of bobshea.net
from the Discordian Archives.
The Golden Apple book cover
proof attachment, June 25, 1975.
Courtesy of bobshea.net
from the Discordian Archives.
Greg Hill had, by the time of this letter, long-ago hacked how photocopiers could be used with paste-ups to produce artwork that left no cut-marks or seams when reproduced and liberally employed this production technique for Third and Fourth Editions of the Principia Discordia. Eventually this approach was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late-80s zine scene explosion, no doubt also helped along by Kinkos’ great photocopier equipment and liberal policies of photocopy production (while looking the other way on copyright infringement).
One can imagine “Faster/Clearer/More Gradients!” as a mantra that Shea and Hill would have embraced in their pursuit of top-notch photocopier tech of the time.
More to come of such correspondences betwixt these Erisian Masters. Stay fnord!
And, if you’re wondering what the hell a blivet is, we refer you now to the ever-handy and never-wrong Wikipedia for its entry on blivets.
As a side note, there’s a weird online Flash game based on “The Hodge/Podge Transformer,” a demo associated with another game called Ossuary, which itself is based on Discordianism, though the game’s creator doesn’t necessarily want it to be known as “that Discordian game.” Here’s a puzzled review of The Hodge/Podge Transformer game demo which can be played online here.
Hail Eris!
Mae passed on a bundle of these beauties to me during a visit last year to Emperor Norton’s groovy grave site which she orchestrated.
In addition, Mae gave me a few Lysergide stickers that she and her crew created a while ago, which in short order I stuck on the back of my keyboard synthesizer, just because it looked cool there.
Lysergide, for those not in the know, was the trademarked name for LSD back when a group of someones were trying to market the drug before it became illegal.
The unique feature of the card is the backside that includes 5 privileges which, of course, correspond to the fabled Law of Fives.
Hail Eris!
Along the way, Fred made a pilgrimage to Emperor Norton’s grave and the rest, as they say, is history.
Afterwards, I got the notion to take said rubbing and combine it with some other Discordian Archives artifacts, which I only finally got around to doing the other day. Anyway, here ‘tis, including the third edition of Principia Discordia, flax notes from both Omar and Mal, not to mention a Hail Eris bumper sticker designed by RAW himself, as well as several fnords!
For your general amusement, here are a couple of rough sketches Greg Hill produced inspired by a Discordian Cabal that Kerry Thornley cooked up called the Church of the Laughing Christ.
Shortly afterwards, visual artist, psychedelic chronicler and all around multimedia magus Iona Miller posted the following images to my facebook page of which she has agreed to share here.
Though not the crispest images, they document the Illuminatus! Seattle production in all its chaotic grandeur.
As I learned from Iona, the Seattle stage production took place at The Empty Space Uncommon Theatre in 1978. At this link is a listing of The Empty Space Uncommon Theatre productions for 1978/79, listing Illuminatus! in three parts. Also listed were a couple other Ken Campbell productions with such interesting titles as Skungpoomery and Psychosis Unclassified.
“Nobody is going to believe this… I can’t recall ever sitting in a theatre sweating with suspense while laughing my head off…. here is Genius with a Gee!”
As Thornley told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution at the time, “I have a friend in jail who was a tattoo artist. He got into drawing pastels, and he drew a picture of Manson and sent it to him. And Manson wrote him back, and then he asked Manson to write me.”
During this period, one of Thornley’s Little Five Points friends from Atlanta, a young lady known as Molly, who Thornley characterized as “little brown-haired Molly,” traveled to Los Angeles where she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted.
According to Kerry’s friend, Chris Wilhoite, “Molly had a mental breakdown over that and ended up in a public asylum. She wrote Kerry, asking for help and we Xeroxed the Manson Xmas card and raffled off the original to free Molly.”
As Wilhoite recalls of Molly, “She turned out to be a handful and I remember babysitting her during a dissociative episode. Kerry eventually managed to reconcile her with her mum in Maine, so we sent her home…”
And Charlie bless us, everyone.
The old Kris Kristofferson song sums up Kerry quite succinctly:
“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
Or to quote Walt Whitman:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In the following passage, Barbara recalls how she first met Kerry:
“My friend was taking her children for the prerequisite visit to their father during summer vacation. He had kindly arranged for us to stay at Stone House, a Quaker Commune. I was trying to find my spiritual self I suppose & connected with Kerry on a very high level. I had never sat with someone & meditated in the purpose of the two beings focused together in meditation. For me he was very much the Indian Yogi walking a path of spiritual awareness. Sometimes he was a whirling dervish, others a Shakespearean bard, then Krishna with his lovers. He was asexual in that he made love with the world.”
Below: Letter from Kerry to Barbara Blackman dated January 1, 1971. Courtesy of Barbara Blackman.
