magick author, neuro-linguistic programming licensed trainer

Phil Farber is a postmodern magician who conceived the future of initiatory ritual. Part of a revolutionary cabal that includes Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurence Galian, Peter J, Carroll, Phil Hine, and Antero Alli, Farber has updated Aleister Crowley's definition of magic ("the art and science of causing change in conformity with Will") for the contemporary environment. His unique and humorous synthesis enables the individual to manifest hidden desires, discover their True Will, and experience Mastery of the Self.

He updates ritual techniques derived from Middle Ages daemonology and Enlightenment Rosicrucian schools with insights gleamed from Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener) Psycholinguistics (Alfred Korzybski, Noam Chomsky), NeuroLinguistic Programming (Richard Bandler, John Grinder), and Hypnotic Trance (Milton Erickson).

In FutureRitual: Magick for the 21st Century (Eschaton Productions, 1997), Farber applies Occam's Razor and dazzling wordplay to a frequently misunderstood (mind)field. He explores how tools such as bio-feedback, chaos theory, meditation, mind-machines, psycho-active drugs, and "therapeutic metaphors" (Erickson) can radically restructure our subjective experience of the cosmos.

"The genius of Farber's open-ended and constantly evolving framework is that it is about decoding and changing meta-patterns and systems, not simply content: the practitioner can substitute preferred personal aesthetics for Farber's evocative neo-Pagan deity encounters. Thus, Farber nimbly avoids the twin errors of rigid adherence to an atrophied tradition, and becoming ensnared in an infinite regress of mirage-like goals. Farber's framework can also be employed for everyday trance occurrences, such as overcoming phobias and improving personal relationships."

-- Alex Burns, Disinformation

author, alleged founder of the church of the subGenius

Rev. Ivan Stang was born Ivan Romanov Rasputin Stankovich in St. Maarten, Dutch West Indies, in 1951, although his parents shortly immigrated to Texas where he was raised in a Ft. Worth suburb.

He is credited with founding the Church of the SubGenius in 1979, though Stang himself denies this and claims the organization was founded in 1953 by J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. "Even as a child I was obsessed with four things," he said in a David Letterman interview. "Monster movies, strange girls, a crude concept of pure physical Slack, and an unrelenting disinterest in everything normal. "Bob" Dobbs' Church of the SubGenius seemed to me to offer the perfect combination of all three."

Before being recruited by J.R. "Bob" Dobbs and Dr. Philo Drummond to run the Church public outreach, Stang worked as a film editor (on "business films," he insists) and part-time claymation animator, garnering awards, debts and public condemnation for his early "underground" 16mm films. What qualified him as Church Scribe, however, was not his communication expertise but his large collection of kook literature, which impressed Dobbs.

Stang has ramrodded to completion five books: The Book of the SubGenius, High Weirdness by Mail (an overview of rival cults for which Stang received a degree in crackpotology), Three Fisted Tales of "Bob" and Revelation X -- The "Bob" Apocryphon, all for Simon & Schuster. In the multimedia arena, Stang produced ARISE, The SubGenius Video (dist. by Polygram), a "SubGenius commercial" for MTV, numerous noncommercial SubGenius videos, and, to date, 1041 episodes of the ongoing SubGenius radio extravaganza, The Hour of Slack (heard on 17 broadcast stations and uncounted pirate and Internet ones). Stang's most recent book, this time for Thunder's Mouth, is called The SubGenius Psychclopaedia of Slack -- THE BOBLIOGRAPHON.

The official Church website at www.subgenius.com has been growing, more or less out of control, since 1994. Stang preaches irregularly at SubGenius devivals held at music festivals, neopagan consortiums, night clubs, colleges, strip joints, sci-fi cons and parking lots. Every year since 1996, The SubGenius Foundation sponsors an outdoor festival in New York called The X-Day Drill, where SubGeniuses practice for the prophesied End of the World -- the end of the NORMAL world, that is.

Stang claims he owes everything, including a second mortgage on his house, to "Bob" - and also to the hundreds of SubGenius collaborators. But more than anything else, however, Stang attributes the incredible tenacity of the Church of the SubGenius to the efforts of the thousands of anonymous lone SubGeniuses, howling lonely and alone in the wilderness, each and every one of them taking another chink out of the brick wall of the Conspiracy of the Normals, dismantling it piece by piece, each in their own inscrutable and untraceable ways. 

WORDS OF PRAISE FOR THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS!  

This is the most authentic American religion...passed down from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twian, The Marx Brothers, and Lenny Bruce. The SubGeniuses have made the last, best joke about the pathology of our young civilization.   –Paul Buhle, The Village Voice

"Finally, a religion even I can believe in."  –R. Crumb

"'Bob' is an enema for a constipated society. 'Bob' has come to help a constipated society blow it out their ass." –MARK MOTHERSBAUGH, Devo

"This is either a sleazy fly-by-night scam, or the most incredible work of art I have seen in ten years. "–DOUGLAS ST. CLAIR SMITH, Tomorrow '86 

author, novelist, researcher, psychedelic adventurer

David Jay Brown is the author of four volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers, Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. He is also the author of two science fiction novels, Brainchild and Virus. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Southern California.

David was responsible for the California-based research in two of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s books on unexplained phenomena in science: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At. David has been conducting workshops (sometimes with his colleague Dr. Annie Sprinkle) on combining sex and drugs for around five years now, and he has collected a wealth of information on this subject from his workshop participants.

He is currently working on two new books -- a book with Annie Sprinkle called Sex on Drugs, and a new book of interviews for St. Martin's Press entitled Renaissance of the Mind.

To find out more about David’s work visit his award-winning Web sites: www.mavericksofthemind.com and www.sexanddrugs.info
 

WORDS OF PRAISE

 "In print or on the web, David Jay Brown supplies the right combination of thought and information. Frequently useful, always interesting..."   –R.U. SIRIUS, editor Mondo 2000

"David Brown should not be considered a fantasist ... I would rather call him an Evolutionary Meterorologist, carefully scanning the latest scientific read-outs and forecasting the 'weather' right ahead of us."   --ROBERT ANTON WILSON, author of Illuminatus!

"That our perfected selves whisper to us from the future is but one of David Brown's fertile insights.   --TERENCE K. MCKENNA, author of Food Of The Gods

[sub]culture critic, independent scholar and tech-gnostic

Erik Davis is a San Franciso-based writer, culture critic, and independent scholar. His book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information was released by Harmony Books in the fall of 1998. It has been translated into five languages, and has achieved, in certain circles, the vaguely enviable status of a "cult classic." His most recent book, perhaps destined for a similar fate, is Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum). His essays have appeared in over half a dozen books, including Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle), The Disinformation Book of Lies (Disinfo), Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press) and Paul "DJ Spooky" Miller's Sound Unbound (MIT). He has contributed articles and essays to a wide variety of publications, including Bookforum, The Wire, ArtByte, the LA Weekly, Gnosis, and the Village Voice. His articles have been translated for publication in countries ranging from Japan to Brazil to Hungary.

Davis has taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen, and was one of the organizers of Planetwork, a conference on information technology and global ecology held in San Francisco in 2000. He has been interviewed by CNN, has popped up on radio shows internationally, and appeared prominently in Craig Baldwin's underground film, the SciFi media critique Specters of the Spectrum. His in-depth studies of the science fiction author Philip K. Dick have been acknowledged by the New Yorker. Davis has also lectured internationally on topics relating to media arts, contemporary electronic music, and spirituality in the postmodern world.Davis is a fifth-generation Californian, and is currently working with the photographer Michael Rauner on California Visions, a photo-essay travelogue through the Golden State's landscape of alternative spirituality.

"If the relentless vector of technological development embodies a heroic narrative of power, mastery, and self-definition, what does it mean that this ultimately phallic quest now finds itself in a chaotic postmodern techno-jungle characterized by the massive and impossibly tangled intersection of networks? The networks that have come to dominate so many technological, scientific, and cultural discourses and practices — communication webs, cognitive neural nets, interlinked computers, parallel processors, complex institutional frameworks, transnational circuits of production and trade — are not linear vectors or stable expressions of control. They are complex weavings, criss-crossed webworks, complex fabrics of unpredictable and semi-autonomous threads. The network is a matrix, a womb, the mother-matter that spawns us all. But the matrix was always wired. Despite its biological roots, the word itself came to denote a host of technological tools and practices: a metal mold or die; a binding substance, like cement in concrete, or the principle metal in an alloy; a plate used for casting typefaces; a rectangular grid of mathematical quantities treated as a single algebraic entity; of and, of course, the dense pattern of connections that link up computer systems. The matrix forms the context for emergence; it is the medium, the motherboard, through which events, objects, and new linkages are grown."

- excerpt from TechGnosis: Myth, 
Magic, and Mysticism in the 
Age of Information