Comune di Sanbernardo

 
Gli amici del SubGenio nonostante la labilità delle loro menti subgeniali (o forse proprio per questo) non ci hanno dimenticato: di seguito un report trovato sul sito di Dalliance.

Post by pre - Wed Jul 26, 2006 2:15 pm

Hallelujah Praise "Bob", yet another successful European X Day celebrations have passed, we had fun, we had dancing, we had wine and women and song, we had brave subgenius men and frightened subgenius babies, we praised "Bob" and we brought the Subgenius religion to yet another new country. Oh yes. Oh yes.

Rev Nobby Styles and myself landed in Pisa a full twenty minutes early and sailed past customs like we were the indisputable representation of God on Earth which meant it was a surprise to find a welcoming committee of subgenii waiting for us rather than having to wait around for 'em being late as you'd have expected.

We were whisked away in the SlittaMobile to the Italian Subgenius head quarters where Rev Slitta had agreed we could store our stuff, and from there the whole European Subgenius End Of The World Committee walked towards the most holy site inside the city walls.

Pisa is a very old town. The Streets are so narrow the cars just can't drive down 'em. The buildings are all packed close together, dilapidated, in urgent need of repair, covered in left wing political graffiti, delightful, magnificent, beautiful. One of these streets, which looks much like any other to the uninitiated, runs down to a building that from the outside looks pretty much the same as all the others. However, thanks to some kind of strange Time Lord technology, it's bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. Indeed, Inside it's also an amazingly old church with ancient frescos painted on the ceiling and the walls. Abandoned for years by the council and so squatted, repaired and loved, by Saint Bernardo's saviours. A holy, Subgenius Affiliated, Dobbs-approved Cabal of Pisa's most holy. This is truly a place veritably filled with the Dobbs nature, and is to be the venue of the first Subgenius Show and Devival of the weekend.

There we waited on Archbishop Rombo Baak and his lovely lady, and then retired to the local pub for much drinking and fun while the local sympathisers got the venue together.

Now I was tired, dog tired. It had been more than a month since I'd had a week with a whole seven nights sleep. My stamina was failing me, my legs failing me, my FAITH failing me as I lolled on a bench outside the bar and gibbered. It was clear that alcohol was NOT going to get me out of this mess. Luckily, "Bob" provided a holy sacrament for each of us which promised to rescue me from the clutches of evil sleep and everyone else from the evils of sanity. "Bob" took LSD; and blessing it, he split it and gave it to us, and said: Take it. This is my body. It is well trippy.

And well trippy is exactly what it was, stronger than your average blotter, more than enough to keep me awake and even those on the half dose found it more than enough to scare them away from doing any preaching tonight.

We wondered down to the church, and back up to the pub, and back down to the church a seemingly unending number of times in various combinations of ministers and quests. Fleeing and chasing whatever it was we flew from or chased. Eventually, Rev Slitta forced us to make a line up of who was on stage when and then from what I could tell tore it up and went with making it up as we went along instead.

As divine and sacrosanct as that church obviously was, it was also obviously way hot. Spending more than a few minutes inside led quickly to sweat dripping down inside my shirt and trousers and thus led almost as quickly to me wondering back out again to where the alternate Lucy-Soaked devival was going on with several subgenius ministers from all over Europe sitting on the steps of the local Evangelical church and preaching at each other, the choir, anyone but pinks and normals -- though I have to say there were very few of those in evidence.
The narrow streets of Pisa were swaying and up and down, warping and glowing and changing colour as if the city had sunken link Atlantis into a rainbow sea, yet the only liquid in evidence was the copious bottles of beer, wine and spirits plus the sweat dripping from my nose. Rev Mickey Finn and Rev Blue Rabbit agreed to do a Japanese Bondage act, then realised what they'd agreed to and started to back out. I said that maybe I'd be ready to play by midnight but this was ruled out as impractical for some reason and I was encouraged to have false faith in myself (imagine that, at a Subgenius party too) and to get on stage with the guitar anyway to see what happens.

So some of us escape, run away back to the pub only to drink and then have our own Subgenius nature drag us back to where the action was in time for me to find myself in my preaching jacket being handed a guitar and pushed out onto a stage with a rapt audience of non-English speakers all looking at me expectantly.

I strum the guitar, it squeals discordantly. I try it again, it crashes noisily and the microphone feeds back. Ouch.

"Some might say," I find my mouth babbling, "that to arrange an End Of The World Celebration a full three days AFTER the End Of The World is foolish!

"Further, some may say that taking too much holy sacrament and ending up practically unable to perform is stupid and insane. However! No matter how crap my performance, no matter how poor, we in the church at least have an Excuse, and all I can really be arsed to do for you today is play that."

Well, that's what I meant to say anyway. It started well, faltered badly and ended incoherently I'm almost positive. By then the faces in the audience had started to melt slightly form the heat, or the something anyway. My fingers felt much as an elephant's front toes no doubt do. If you've ever seen an elephant try to play a guitar you may have some idea how easily my fingers slipped over the fretboard and into distorted and ungainly faux-chord shapes as I strummed and just shouted out the words in some rough approximation of "The Excuse" again. It might have helped if I'd practised it more than twice in the last six months. Probably not though, time and space are distorted like I'm flying at light speed and playing the guitar requires some idea how those two things work for rhythm and pitch respectively.

As I'm singing I can see water dripping down from above me, what looks like a cascade, a waterfall, dripping down constantly in front of my face. It's reflecting the light as it drops and I wonder what the hell it is. It's not even raining outside, there's no roof-leaking problems I'm aware of even if it was. There's no rain anywhere, what the hell IS this weird rainbow torrent in front of me?

"He's got the LSD excu-ooo-oo-oo-se" I sing giving my arm a few moments to stop strumming and push my hand into what I assume will be the cooling flow of water that's running in front of the stage.

It's far from cooling though, the heat and feel of it tells me exactly what it is in fact. Wax, dripping from the candle chandeliers above. Ouch.

The song draws to a close and I think I even said all the words in the right order, but can't be entirely sure that time itself has a chronological order so it's hard to be sure."Do you want to pay another one?" Slitta asks me from the side as the audience stares blankly back at me.

"Oh God no, take this thing off of me." I say, handing the guitar back.

My preaching jacket is so hot that I get that off damned quickly and am back to drinking in my less "Bob"-ridden clothes. I watch as much of the rest of the show as I can stand to be indoors for. Rombo ranting in Spanish, one of the Pisa locals dressed as a Friar speaking what could have been Italian, could have been Japanese and he later tells me was just a made up nonsense rant. Strange singers and some guy with a dart-board hat throwing darts at his own head. Pope David Lee Black ranting in English (well, American at least) but the timbre and tone perception slipping so wildly that half of it might as well have been Italian too. But the message is clear, the moral of the whole show and every performer is being shouted as loudly as if it were in English or C++ or one of those languages I actually speak. This is what's so good about OUR church. It's all lies, so it doesn't really matter if you understand it.

Course, that's true of all the other religions too, but try telling THEM that.

As the show wound up and the sky flickered with bright forks of lightning away over the mountains, we considered what to do next. As spacious as the Italian Subgenius Head Quarters is, it's not got room for all the many devoted followers that have come to visit this weekend. Rev Mickey Finn and some others argue for going up to the site of tomorrow's show already and camping out in the excitement of a large thunder storm.

Pope Black and I are less keen. I've done thunderstorms in tents, one just twelve months before; a Glastonbury Storm that delivered three months worth of rain in an hour and flooded some camping fields to chest height. Ideally, I'll be in somewhere brick and solid. Frankly, this ancient Italian Architecture is starting to look seriously shonky.

So it's decided that we will split and a few of us stay over in the Italian Subgenii HQ while the rest take the stuff out to camp in the holy site of the next show.

The Italians are all partying in the street as we walk back from the Church. I'm told that this is because the law has recently changed to ban alcohol sales after midnight since some people got drunk and had a fight. So nobody can be in a bar so they're all on the streets. Still drunk, of course, mainly now drinking wine from bottles and no doubt ending up more drunk than they were before the bars were closed.

Ah, the conspiracy, it's everywhere and it always makes things worse for itself as well as for us.

The next morning, the few of us that stayed at the SGHQ get up late, shower and eat and then wonder around Pisa for a while waiting for the amazingly good host Rev Slitta to come pick us up and take us on to the camp site.

Rev Self Slayer has never been to Pisa before, and has promised someone a photograph of him humping the leaning tower. This is clearly the pinkest thing I have ever been involved with, and I'm glad to say the photograph didn't come out right at all.

The tower itself is beautiful though, a tribute to stubborn engineering. By the time the first half was built it was already leaning so they just carried on building trying to straighten it up as they went. The result means that not only is the recently-repaired (for some definitions of repaired) tower not straight, the floors are all at different angles and the church behind is also a bit crooked with few actual right angles anywhere.As usual with these things, the whole effect is ruined by the presence of the pinkest most tacky tourist-gunk selling market stalls you can imagine. Only the faux native American Indians dancing to bad covers of modern western pop hits ameliorated the conspiracy confusion.

Stone busts of many famous religious icons turreted the tops of the chapel buildings, yet none of them were smoking a pipe full of 'frop. An omission I'm sure the Pisa authorities will not allow to last much longer. They are STILL working on the tower, eight hundred years old and still not finished.

Soon we were collected by a newly ordained subgenius minister and driven through miles of bright sunflower fields to the most holy site outside the walls of Pisa: A large neo-pagan temple set in it's own grounds on a farm overlooking a magnificent valley.

The local sympathisers had done an amazing job here too, decorating the temple with Dobbsheads and lighting it, wiring it for sound and setting up a canvas kitchen and swag store. Sterling work from those, mostly still unsaved, latent Italian subgenii.

And once again, they also provided most of the entertainment while practically every subgenii other than Pope Black got their slack from sitting about drinking and bathing in the Italian Squat Scene rather than actively preaching or performing in any way. There was strange and absurd music, a kazoo orchestra, a man in a pigs-head and underpants dancing with large fluorescent pink horse-whips, a rock band, costumes, more preaching, a head-launching, karaoke dominatrix, many beautiful mutants and more drinking than is really wise before I collapsed into a tent somewhere to sleep it off.

I awoke the next morning to the incessant and loud braying of the insects chirping noisily from the trees and the slightly less noisy sounds of the party being taken apart and cleaned up for us by those wonderful Italian Squat Scene "Bob" sympathisers.

Now it seems that day there was some sort of sporting event going on. Despite my usual ignorance of Conspiracy trivia, even I was vaguely aware of the fact an international football competition had been running and that the last game in it, the final, featured Italy and France on this fine Sunday evening. It's the End Of The Word! Well, the end of the World Cup at least.

So watching that match seemed to be the generally agreed correct thing to do that evening, even I reluctantly agreed that we might as well drink somewhere we could see the game as somewhere we couldn't. I don't have to look, or care of course.

So after some slacking, some breakfast, some more slacking, some driving back though the fields of sunflowers and yet more slacking we got a taxi out to the Communist Party's screening out in some park where they'd set up a screen and some tents and some hippy markets and stuff which was fine, great. A wonderful place to watch the match I'd say because I could eat nice pasta and sausage style food and then wonder aimlessly around the markets buying a couple of bits of hippy tat for friends and still monitor the score by the screaming and cheering coming across the fields. All while other Subgenius Ministers did similar things or watched the match.

After the game there were Communist Bands that have to have been as bad or worse than my pathetic LSD-enhanced performance on Friday night. They were singing Communist Songs about a Communist Utopia where everyone gets what they need and they all work as hard as they can.

I'm still not a communist. Mostly because I don't WANT to work as hard as I have the ability to, and frankly want more than my basic needs satisfied. Talk about "from each according to how much he can be bothered and to each according to his every whim" and then you might get me interested.
Italy won on penalties in the end I think. Certainly Italy won, because it meant that everyone got really happy and partied on the streets unable to buy late-licence alcohol and so sitting about in parks and squares all night long drinking store-brought booze and smoking 'frop and playing guitar and practising whipping things with fluro horse whips and listening to us rant occasionally about "Bob" until the early hours.

And so to Monday, the day I flew home to London and had to accept that once again the world hadn't ended, that life will continue much as before.

But frankly, I still love my life. I'm off to The Glade festival tomorrow. And FIB in Spain the weekend after that. The whole summer has been, and will be, full of slack and fun and "Bob" and sometimes I think maybe I was ruptured up into a space-ship full of love goddesses years ago and just didn't notice.