058. Parade de Propagande
- the Sixth International Apartment Festival, the streets to Phillips
Square, Montréal, CacaNada
- Lundi, 21 Février, 1983
- Boris Wanowitch drove his car with the steam irons painted on it thru Montréal. Mounted on top was a P.A. system connected to a tape player & a microphone on the inside. Monty Cantsin/Istvan Kantor played a tape of some of his dramatic electro-pop music with sirens & such-like Apopolyptic sound effects & provided a voice-over of neoist slogans provided mainly by him & myself such as "We Are Not Subject to the Lies of Science" & "Neoism Now & Then!". We were stopped by the police & given a ticket within 20 minutes for some sort of noise violation. When we reached Phillips Square, we continued with our broadcasting & got out of the car to display the usual neoist eye-grabbers: flaming steam irons, the gold flag of near neologisms (not really called that at the time), etc & to promote the festival. Other participants included Alan Lord & Kiki Bonbon. The police eventually stopped this too.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
059. Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing
- the Sixth International Apartment Festival, Consulat Neoiste, Montréal, CacaNada
- Vendredi, 25 Février?, 1983
- I explained my purpose in English. After each of my sentences or phrases, Monty Cantsin/Istvan Kantor translated them into Hungarian & Mario Campo translated them into French. As the difficulty of translating my calculatedly fractured English became too ridiculous, Istvan's translation became more & more his own free-flowing (&, probably, self-promotional) statement & Mario took the liberty of changing "tentatively, a convenience" into "tentatively, an inconvenience". I explained that one could perform Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing on a potential assailant by astutely diagnosing whatever problem was behind their hostile aggressiveness & healing them before they could get to you. I provided a life-size acupuncture chart which Alan Lord then proceeded to blow a dart at by way of demonstration. Given that the chart was meant to be of a man but was lacking a penis, it was decided that this potential assailant's problem was fairly obvious & he was thusly given a PRICK.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
060. acceptance of CERTIFICATE OF MERIT & a red rose
- Best of Baltimore Ceremony, Pier 6, Baltimore, us@
- Thursday, August 11, 1983, 6:30PM
- Having been nominated as 1 of "BalTimOre's Best" by Dave Bakker, I was awarded, while wearing my Tim Ore clothes, at a mayoral ceremony. The mayor remembered me for years after this & presumably wondered what exactly I'd received the nomination for.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
061. "If You've Only Got a Moustache" in "Tim Ore Frames Himself as a Graffiti Artist"
- That Frame Place, Baltimore, us@
- Sunday, August 28, 1983
- Surrounded by the environment of my Tim Ore exhibit, I sang a 19th century american song about the wonderful socio-sexual advantages of having a moustache (ever notice how almost all the guys in porno movies have them?) while wearing the Tim Ore clothes I projected a slide show on general Tim Ore lore & the history of Famous Moustaches - including such figures as Groucho Marx, Hitler, Dali, John Waters, & Frank Zappa.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
062. Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation Ceremony
- 14BX Sub-Par/Con (The 3rd Church & Foundation of the SubGenius Convention), a Baltimore Train Tunnel, us@
- September 18, 1983, very early morning
- A wire was stretched across the train tunnel thru an eye hook & 2 partially truncated & mummified dog corpses that I'd found there that had apparently been run over by trains were hung from the wire on either side of the tracks. A metal sheet with instructions for using Black & Decker power tools with a No Copyright symbol spray-painted on it was suspended between the dogs. The dogs were painted white with the words "Poop" painted on 1 of them & "Pee" painted on the other & glowing cyalume light sticks were placed between their rear legs. The walls of the tunnel were spray-painted with non-intersecting (except for, perhaps, the occasional accident) squiggly lines which I associated somehow with native Australian dreamtime culture. A strobe light flashed, someone made the dogs dance by tugging on the wire, & Ron Cummings manipulated & played tapes that he'd made of him beating on the dead dogs. I was naked except for my shoes & socks & I had white squiggly lines painted on me. I danced & gyrated wildly & beat the dogs & the thunder sheet with a club. The dogs were on fire & exuded what one might call a "foul" smell. I had been entrusted with the sacred head of Arnold Palmer by a representative of the Bloody Head Launcher's Society which I had set on fire & which I was also beating about the tunnel. The title of this ceremony was a reference to "Pee-Dog" comix by Jay Condum & Gary Panter & "Poop-Dog" comix (which was a friendly rip-off of "Pee-Dog") by the Reverends Ivan Stang & Sterno Keckhaver. Eventually a large quantity of police came (from the railroad cops, the city police, & the nearby federal reserve bank guards) because 1 of the attendees reported having witnessed something "horrible & immoral" & I was arrested. When the "news" found out about this (it was done partially as a publicity stunt anyway) they "reported" that I was a "Cult Leader" who was "praying to the dogs" etc. Very little attempt was made to actually find out who I really was or what I actually was doing & when I was interviewed what I actually had to say was considered too weird to quote. I was quoted both in the newspapers & on tv as saying things that I hadn't said by people who hadn't even been present at the time when I'd supposedly said them. The cop who'd arrested me bought a photo of this ceremony from me. Another cop who'd allegedly been on the "force" for 26 years was quoted as saying in the newspapers "I'd rather run up against a man with a gun than a situation like that!" The beat goes on..
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
063. An Interweaving of Familiar & Comfortable Items (for the Collaborators)
- That Frame Place, APT 7, Baltimore, us@
- Thursday, September 22, 1983
- At Dave Bakker's suggestion he & I combined some of our generic motifs into 1 "performance". This took place in the space of the Tim Ore show. I was dressed in the Tim Ore clothes & Dave was dressed in an austere black suit. We began by dragging our way across the floor to each other from opposite ends of a rope that had strings attached to it that were attached to various objects in the room such as an approximately 3 foot tall inflatable "cave-man" & a table & chair, etc. Hence, when we pulled on the rope the objects attached to it moved. Dave was under a transparent plastic sheet. A tape played of muzak from an "easy-listening" radio station that ended with a news report about the Inauguration of the Bal Tim Ore Underground Club. When Dave & I met at the middle of the rope & the middle of the room, Dave came out from under the plastic & we toasted to each other with rum & coke. Dave stood on a table at 1 end of the space while a tape played with a simple Casio music-track & a voice-over of Dave's that began with "Sitting alone in an empty hospital room.." & included "Sitting & thinking about thinking about nothing..". The voice-over stopped & the music picked up speed. Dave removed his suit to reveal pajama bottoms with rappelling gear surrounding the crotch that may've seemed like some specialty sexual apparatus to the audience. His chest was wrapped tightly with wide clear plastic tape with some sort of medical device in the center. He started to rapidly wrap his face very tightly with more of the same tape so that his face became very distorted. He sat & pulled on strings that were strung thru the ceiling & down to inverted mannequin legs that were sticking up from the floor. His manipulation caused the legs to clack open & closed. I, as Tim Ore, performed the same "If You've Only Got a Moustache" presentation described in a previous entry. Dave laid down on a stretcher that he'd made that had a large, stitched wound in the middle of it. This stretcher was tied to the same rope used earlier. I dragged the stretcher & Dave across the room by pulling on the rope - knocking over all the objects that the rope was attached to in the process & various other objects in the way. When Dave reached a window, he attached a rope to his rappelling gear & climbed out the window still wrapped in tape & in his pajama pants. I jumped out another window which, unbeknownst to the audience, led to another room rather than to the outside. Dave's exit was so spectacular that no-one except Monty Cantsin/Istvan Kantor noticed me leave.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
064. Thanksgiving Day Parade
- Baltimore, us@
- Saturday, November 19, 1983
- A large group of people were organized by R.U.T.S/L.E.R. (Random Universe Tours & Services (Doug Retzler) & the League for Esthetic Research (Dan Carney & Alec Bernstein)) to add the unusual to the traditional Thanksgiving Parade. Many, many people participated. Some of the people like Laure Drogoul, Nancy Andrews, Liz Downing, & Gabrielle Hourticulon made floats relevant to Thanksgiving traditions. Gabrielle pulled a live turkey in a cage. This was considered to be so offensive that she was thrown out. Many of the floats were parodies of the military with camouflage & dancing missiles. I was wearing camouflage coveralls & a Reagan Mask. Strapped to my feet were baby dolls that made some sort of crying noise when they were squeezed (or walked on). I had a friend, Matty, wear another Reagan mask & we tied a long banner between us by attaching it to our necks. The banner had this "Thanksgiving Prayer" on it: "Give Us Today A Conquered Nation So Many More May Suffer Starvation". With substantial difficulty we walked the full 3 or more miles of the parade & with our arms outstretched "like Zombies" - much to the enthusiastic response of the crowds lining the streets. Our group was so large that the parade officials made us split up into 3 different segments to diffuse our potency. 1 of these segments (2 floats & miscellaneous other things) were thrown out of the parade for "getting out of order".
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
065. "Alternatives to Vicious Cycles: The Intermingling of Subcultures to Facilitate Understanding"
- Emergency Show, M.A.P., Baltimore, us@
- Friday, December 9, 1983
- I had gotten to know drunks that were squatting in the building next to where I was residing. Their form of squatting had an unhygenic destructiveness reflective of their alcoholic/economic hopelessness. They used their 2nd floor as a toilet/dump. The floor was covered with Thunderbird bottles, piss, diarrhea, & cigarette butts. They drank & fought & passed out on the 3rd floor.
Their difficulties in many ways paralleled my own & their proximate despair helped increase my own. Having been threatened by 1 of the more psychotic of the winos, I was totally paranoid 1 night that he intended to force me into a confrontation in which 1 of us might kill the other. I decided to use this crisis as creative fuel & conducted a "live" radio show via the telephone in which I gave a "blow-by-blow" description of the accumulating fear & my way of dealing with it - with music & effects mixed in by the WJHU "DJ" Ron Cummings. Eventually the situation calmed down & the drunks & I established a fairly stable & friendly relationship. Having been invited to participate in the "Emergency" show I decided to transplant the misery of my neighbor's & my life to the gallery. I partitioned off a 2 room space & covered the floor with T-Bird bottles. I offerred to pay the winos to participate in the "performance" simply by attending it & talking to people. On the day of the "show", there was a larger group than usual of alcoholics waiting to help me. Some of them I'd never met before. They had misunderstood me & thought that I needed to assemble a gang for some sort of rumble. When they finally figured out that they weren't there to fight some of them dropped out. By the time the "Alternatives.." started there were only 3 of them left. The space was crowded, the bottles were being kicked around, my "paranoia" tapes were playing, & there was an open mike that people were encouraged to use. The drunks were being very vocal - in some cases being political & talking about alcoholism & in 1 case just being "out-of-control".
The atmosphere was intense & claustrophobic. I was passing around joints the contents of which I wouldn't identify (it was oregano with perfume) to try to increase the paranoia.
After enough "joints" had circulated & the claustrophobia seemed strong enough, I had my father come in (none of my friends knew him), wearing a policeman's uniform with a german shepherd on a leash, & just walk thru the crowd. He's had a tracheotomy, so I didn't have him say anything to break the paranoid illusion of his being a "real" cop until he left the 2 rooms where the "Alternatives.." was happening. I'd originally tried to get the railroad cop who'd arrested me for the "Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation Ceremony" to do this but his commanding sargeant wouldn't permit it. My intention in creating this situation was to simultaneously make the gallery attendees more aware of the oppressive misery of the drunks' lives & to give the drunks a paid vacation from it where what they had to say was of primary importance.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
066. X-Mas in Lacquerland
- a house in Baltimore, us@
- December 25, 1983
- Deciding that it would be more fun to work than to spend Christmas with our relatives, Doug "Sumu Pretzler" Retzler & I once again recorded a visit to "Lacquerland" (see #s 17 & 23). It was decided that every day is February 29th there & that the pterodactyl seems to be the most common bird.
- recollections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
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