Bob's father appears in this image, Rene F. Dobbs, Birth: June 4, 1882 Death: July 5, 1976, age 94

The Rebirth of Bob Dobbs:
Man, Myth, Hologram

By Cihan "8Bit" Kaan

“Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development." - Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media, Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960.

Stragglers from the Porno Film Festival sipped Stellas and flaunted the latest retro-vaudeville thriftstore cocktail dresses. I met Bob Dobbs right before one of the flapper look-alikes began screaming at me for having the nerve to screen my short film for the second time in the evening.  The venue had double booked She’s Got an Atomic Bomb, my movie, and the Porno Film Fest, an apparant hobby of the organizer, a girl who conceived of it after years of being ignored in public.    Bob didn’t tell me he was Bob when he requested a second screening because he missed it, having been erroneously misdirected to the Porno Film Festival.  “Can I see that movie about the girl with bomb?”, he asked probably not knowing I was even the director.  Just like Dale Carnegie rule #2 of winning friends and influencing people, Bob Dobbs’ salesman face prompted me to want him to see it.  I’m not prone to do repeat screenings especially after a night of hard drinking and countless battles with out-of-state cinema egos.  A conflict ensued between myself, innocent renegade vigilante director and her, the overweight stressed out type-A estrogen-based robotoid.  All this leads to my eventual pissing onto the Porn Film Festival girl’s leg, not one of Carnegie's bits of friendly advice by the way.  Alas, Bob came to my defense when security arrived to extricate me.  “That girls a liar.  Let him put the movie back on!”, he demanded.  I later learned of my new defender's true identity on the subsequent walk through New York discussing how he influenced the Church of the SubGenius while being the archivist for media guru Marshall McLuhan and Prince Charles’ connection to Lofti, one of five pre-Lemurian deities he keeps in contact with through an alien species called the Booteans (with whom he manages to speak to through one of his many mediums).
         Bob Dobbs is not a slacker. He does not spout conspiracy theories from yesteryear or claim he is a minister, priest or imam.  He appears, by Homeland Security standards, to be normal.  I’m going to assume the reader is semi-familiar with the slacker movement of the Eighties that originated from The Church of the SubGenius and inadvertently led to films like Slacker (1991).  Church members derive super value from a picture based on one of Bob's dad, superimposed on an Illuminati pyramid.  During it’s heyday, of course, they were mostly college students ranting about UFO conspiracies tagging up bathrooms with stickers.  Their underground infamy was a result of their logo (Bob's dad retrofitted smoking a pipe as seen above) displayed prominently on all their swag from stickers, shirts, and videos to pamphlets. Like any great cult, SubGenius has names for believers and non-believers, subgenies versus pinks.  The church also has relegated a supreme godhead status to Bob Dobbs via the derivative J.R "Bob" Dobbs, who discusses how he got them started in the late 70s (read Conversations with Bob Dobbs: Part 1).
         One has to wonder why the leaders of the SubGenius Church have put a fatwa out on Bob claiming he is an imposter.  They accuse Bob Dobbs of being a poser ripping off what to them is merely a brand to cuddle. Bob claims otherwise, “I was in Toronto at CKLN in 1984 and some guy comes up to me and asks, ‘Ever heard about these guys, Church of the SubGenius?’ He handed me some booklet or something and I read it. Then I knew, I realized this is based on fucking me! They're describing the whole thing they got from what I told them.” SubGenius took their knowledge from Bob in the late 70s and packaged it. If a simple conversation in a bar led to a movement, imagine what kinds of conversations Bob is having today. He claims to be 83 years old, a possibility when your wife is a leading medical scientist, Connie Dobbs. He refers to time periods in his own terms.  The era we happen to have just come through circa 1993 to 9/11 Bob refers to as the Android Meme, which he defines as “…the ability of human-invented technology…to acquire the intimacy of speech and intuition.”  In other words, the Android Meme is technology that has the qualities of "being alive".
         The Android Meme wants to join with us in an unholy alliance of archetypal technology and human organism.  Imagine the scene in Matrix: Revolutions when the robots (Bob calls people that behave like robots organic robotoids) form a talking head that asks Neo what he truly wants.  The face is not human but instead a combination of all these shapeshifting robots speaking for the Architect. Similarly, the Android Meme is a cacophony of all media, all technology and all ideas of particular times, anthropomorphized, trying to make itself human.  There is no great architect of the Meme besides our compliance to feed it.  By Bob calling it archetypal he simply means there is no physical joining (like a true android who is made up of organism and implants) but rather, like mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime/behave cues from technology when it becomes used by a million people and becomes environment (morphic resonance).  Taking on a behaviour is not holeopathic enough for Bob.  We actually download the archetype of the Android Meme into our nervous systems through television and multimedia.  A perfect example is cellphone posturing and how that invades public space to create a socially free zone where those on the other end of a piece of technology are present to the caller while others in the three-dimensional space are invisible ( Derrida's "the absence of presence" ). Bob is one of a few people on the planet scanned daily by the Android Meme so that it can “…know deeply a human being who understands it to better gauge how to become more human. I seem to be the reference point it uses as a standard from which to create the lowest ‘human’ common denominator in its products.” All this is nothing though compared to where we are are now, how it connects to George Bush and where we are headed.  Through the cultural observations by Bob (which I’d like to call Dobbsologisms) we may begin to see and feel ourselves differently, particularly as organic robotoids.  We have unfortunately reverted to relating with others and ourselves, he claims, like these organic robotoids, thus forming the Android Meme rather than a collective humanity.  Don’t panic though, put faith in the artists, for as Bob says, “The Android Meme absorbs any response made to it. The artist's task is to understand and meditate upon the why's and wherefore's of its present techniques. This effort has nothing to do with how an artist survives economically.” Bob continues to say our consciousness will slowly integrate into a new type of environment (for details on the current time period see his breakdown) and one day we will never have to pay rent or walk around like programmed video game sprites!

         Much of what the real Bob Dobbs says can be researched at his forum site fivebodied.com or heard on his weekly radio show Building Organic Bodies (http://www.buildingorganicbodies.com).  Through a board-certified medium who channels 6,500 entities called The Evergreens, Bob Dobbs has maintained contact with numerous long-gone media figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary and even James Joyce. Joyce takes the lead when Bob talks about cultural etymology.  “Finnegans Wake is a map of world domination by a committee [brain trust] for the next few decades…how elites are able to tap into the process of controlling the central mystery of the creation of culture.  Eurocentric freemasons (sucking up to Joyce and his genius) told him some of their local secrets and codes. These are embedded in Ulysses and FW.” 
         Listening to his weekly radio show you may discover Bob joking with the ghosts of Western culture past about Apocalypse theories or discussing topics such as the Booteans, our alien compadres who are set to make a comeback in 2025.  Recently, when asked about Scientology, Bob commented,  “If Tom Cruise had paid attention to Connie, he would've never gone off on that month-long tirade”, referring to Cruise's interview fiascos for the War of the Worlds film, yet another movie that markets “end times” fears.  Whether we’re living in a culture of fear or a culture of androids, it seems clear to Bob that the end is not near.  While writing this interview I asked him, “Terrence McKenna claimed after 2012 that the Earth enters a huge shift in consciousness [according to the Mayan Calendar and McKenna's own theory of historical novelty], would you call this an apocalypse?” To which he responded, “’Apocalypse’ means ‘revelation, end of secret’. Since TV (the Fifties), the X-raying of all cultures and previous media has been apocalyptic. Religious visions of the ‘end times’ worldwide have been trumped by this technological effect. They have nothing left to do but to hope the previous sentence isn't true and ignore its implications.”
        My second meeting with Bob was at a screening for the French Situationist Guy Debord.  Seating seemed reserved for all sorts of Church of the SubGenius wannabes who peered at us through framed glasses and badly kept hair.  I doubt they recognized Bob.  They were looking because we had been ranting at Debord’s little movies (yelling in the face of the Android Meme's latest evening fare) which were purported to make important statements on culture.  I realized while heckling a white screen (Debord’s first film was 10 minutes of literally a white screen) that the man beside me, Bob Dobbs, was probably three times my age – an enigma, a western Lucretius who has his own version of The Nature of Things for the 21^st century. I was in an Ecstasy coma raving to electronic beats when Zappa passed away and McLuhan’s Understanding Media was a $2 book I bought from a homeless vendor along with a Mickey Spillane detective novel.  When Bob met Doug St. Clair-Smith (later Reverend Ivan Stang) in Dallas, I was being born there around the same time.  Bob dropped enough new science on Doug to leave a lasting impact that came full circle through my college years and finally back to the source. As an artist reinvents himself so does he give birth to thousands of little idea babies that multiply in droves.  Recently, I found myself "building" with an unofficial disciple of Hakim Bey.  I got to talking about the Android Meme, spewing Dobbsology like it was second nature, complete with negilisms, xenocronies and McLuhan references.

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