Where to find the Happy Mutant Handbook [Update]

On October 14, 2010, "friends of the San Francisco Public Library" uploaded The Happy Mutant Handbook to the Internet Archive for all the world to borrow. See, the Internet Archive's text library is mostly titles that are beyond copyrights, but that's not to say all are. For those newer titles that are added, there's a collection of books available for "controlled digital lending." So those titles work like physical books in a library—only one person can check out the title at a time. Many digital library collections work like that to, which is why you have to wait to see what is basically a fancy webpage. 

It's nice to say that information wants to be free, but the creation, collection, and distribution of information costs something to someone, in terms of time to create the thing, or the cost of buying and maintaining servers for digital goods, and the electricity to keep it all powered.

But sometimes people decide it's a good time to bend the rules, like on March 24, 2020, when the Internet Archive announced a National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public. They removed the borrowing limit on 1.4 million books through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

Feedback was mixed, between those (including librarians) who were thankful for this increased access, at a time when millions of physical books were now inaccessible to the public. Others saw this as piracy. (Here's a conversation of this sort, with links to author and agency comments, which also fall on both sides of for and against the NEL).

Really, this is a lengthy way of saying that if you sign up for a free Internet Archive account, you can read all of the Happy Mutant Handbook, without restriction, from the comfort of wherever you are, with a digital device in front of you.

And wherever you are, may you be safe. 

Invasion of the Paper Smilies

This is a one-page local oddity story that feels so much like an old zine article. "Imagine a smiley-face drawn on a paper plate with a thick black marker. Now imagine seeing hundreds of them plastered on street signs, telephone poles, bus benches, and other city fixtures. The strange smiles greet you every day for weeks, even months. When they are torn down by irritated city workers, they are replaced by fresh ones overnight. A year later you still spot these eerie happy faces staring down at you as you speed along the freeway. Anxiety sets in. Where are these generic smiles coming from? What do they mean? Who's messing with your mind???"

That's it. Someone or some group puts up smiley faces around Los Angeles, circa 1995. Carla Sinclair and others even reached out to "the Cacophony Society and other prankmasters, but to no avail. Nobody seems to know where these devilish smiles are coming from. We are baffled."

When I looked for any local news stories about this years ago, I couldn't find any online reference to this low-key prank. I still can't find any online reference to smiley faces in Los Angeles in the 1990s.

This isn't "ever dream this man?" spookiness. It's not the cheeky-quirky Hello? Is it me you're looking for? This is basic— roughly drawn smiley faces on paper plates, stuck onto things, in one city.

Which is a lovely little reminder to make a bit of nonsense. Confuse people, but don't annoy them. All you need is paper plates, an inky pen, and some adhesive. You don't have to make the next Andre the Giant has a Posse (which became the Obey [Giant] marketing/ brand*), just make nonsense and share it in your neighborhood.

* The Posse shifted to Obey/ Disobey in 1994/95, according to a member of the original Posse. "When OBEY started, we did it in two stripes. One was OBEY. The other was DISOBEY. It was the same imagery. But one set said OBEY, and the other set DISOBEY. Here's why: The message was the medium. Let me put it even clearer: It didn't mean anything. The apparent message is ironic and counter-culture. In fact, it's not."

Which brings this back to those paper smiley faces. My take-away? Have fun. Confuse the normals. Be baffling. Let that be enough. 

Do-It-Yourself Radio & TV

"It's fun sharing information. That's why people publish minicomics, form Internet mailing lists, and produce electronic zines. If there's a way to report something interesting, enterprising folks have figured out how to do it, and do it cheaply."

So far, so good, Jared Pore*. He warns that making your own transmitters is risky, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking for pirate radio stations. Or not, if you're keeping it small and local and aren't interfering with legal stations.

Enough of the legal warnings**, onto the links for resources! Sadly, within the last 25 years, a few things have changed. So first, I'll note that digital switchover (DSO) or analog switch-off (ASO) has changed the reach of TV transmission, and it's almost 5 years since the effective date of the 2006 Geneva Agreement. That's the bad news. The good news is that FM radio hasn't gone anywhere, and the miniaturization of equipment has allowed reduced power systems (QRP) to flourish. The list of QRP resources for kits, bits, and supplies is lengthy in 2020, more than the three direct points of contact listed in 1995. But where are those now?

Ramsey Kits called it quits in 2016, and Panaxis Company was bought by Progressive Concepts in 2007 (PDF). Mycal is still online (and the source of that retro FCC van graphic), but as a snapshot of personal views on FCC and the law, frozen in 1995. I'm not sure if it's an accurate view of current and past Usenet, but Google Groups has a window into alt.radio.pirate and rec.radio, and both look pretty quiet.The two FTPs (dg-rtp.dg.com and crl.com) are long gone. dg.com is now owned by Dollar General, and CRL looks to be owned by Charles River Labs. Archive.org captured some early days of both sites: Data General (1996) and CRL Network Services (1997), but no archives of the FTP contents. Digging around further, you can find archived discussions of the Ramsey archives from Data General, and Radio Free Berkeley. 

Digging around, you can also find that "The ACE" was The Association of Clandestine (radio) Enthusiasts, mentioned by Gareth Branwyn in a short online article titled "People's Radio." Free Radio Cafe, still rocking the flaming title GIF, notes that ACE lasted from 1982-2005. FRC transitioned to new social networks where ACE did not, though it looks like Free Radio Weekly stopped in early 2018, and the last activity on their forums was in 2019. 

One bright spot is that Radio Free (Berkeley) is still around and selling kits, but for educational purposes only, of course. And if you can find a VCR (the last one was set to be made in July 2016), you can still turn it into an RF or A/V Transmitter. Or you can distribute your voice and videos world-wide for free, on Soundcloud (founded Aug. 2007), Mixcloud (f. 2008), YouTube (f. Feb. 2005) and Vimeo (f. Nov. 2004).

* Jared Pore's work has been buried in modern Search Engine Optimization, but dig far enough, and you'll find traces of the oldweb lurking around. Zine Wiki has a short but positive page on Jared, and has more information than I was able to find anywhere else. 

** I shouldn't be flippant. Don't piss off your local authorities.

Reality Hacking

It's time for an ...

"Reality hacking—designer lifestyles and pranks that playfully interrupt the scheduled programming of the masses—is a way of life for Happy Mutants."

R. U. Sirius continues from this definition to muse on the history of the term, from his re-branding of his own magazine High Frontiers to Reality Hackers, which was re-branded as Mondo 2000 (you can find digitized copies of all three magazines via Anarchivism). He looks farther back, to cave paintings, which used the "power of symbols [to shape] the viewer's perception of reality. The big shots of the cave clans used symbols not only to change the way their minions perceived the world around them, but also to convince them that imaginary things, like gods and demons, existed." Transmission of signals followed, from smoke signals to television.

R. U. Sirius notes that signal transmission used to require lots of money. "But in the last decade or so, media technology has become so cheap that almost anyone can buy a modem, publish a zine, or set up a pirate radio station and get in on the reality hacking business."

Oh, the 1990s were an idyllic, hopeful time, weren't they? Before national and political disinformation campaigns became the norm, when the power of distributed and decentralized communication was re-claimed by people in power, for a fraction of the price of prior signal transmissions.

But enough of this bleakness, let's look back (and look around) for low-cost, DIY reality hacking adventures!

[Source of the graphic above: Anti-Film School's blog post on drive-in intermission bumpers]

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - William M. Gaines

"There are certain Americans, dead or alive, who are regarded as National Treasures: John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Louis Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Joe Louis, Babe Ruth, and of course, Alfred E. Neuman, this fictional face that launched 35 years of Mad Magazine. You might have thought with all the electronic diversions available to kids today, you would think something like Mad would be, if not already dead, then certainly dying. But nope, Mad is alive and kicking. Kicking at everything sacred. Still the brainchild, if that's the right word, of this man: Bill Gaines." Helluva intro by Morley Safer for 60 Minutes in 1987, opening this clip:

Carla Sinclair notes that William Gaines was the son of Max Gaines, a pioneer in the comics industry. Where his father's company, Education Comics, focused on syndicated funnies, as well as stories of science, history, and the Bible, Bill re-branded EC as Entertainment Comics and turned to horror, suspense, and crime fiction. As Sinclair notes, "EC's grisly tales clutched the imaginations of American youth, and comic book sales boomed at an astounding rate. Unfortunately, the media was already worshiping a name-calling, finger-pointing morphine junkie by the name of Joe McCarthy,
who flew into a fanatic rage over these grisly tales."

William pivoted from horror back to funnies, but with a satirical slant, and Mad was born. First as a comic, but then to side-step the Comics Code, Mad became Mad Magazine, giving birth to the satire magazine. Carla credits Gaines' magazine with having a "dramatic impact on American humor [that] influenced bigwigs such as Saturday Night Live, '60s cartoonist Robert Crumb, satirical films like Airplane and Naked Gun, and my own bOING
bOING magazine."

Bill Gaines "left this planet in 1992," and in 2019, Mad was also dead ... mostly. Instead of publishing new issues, it would be a re-issue magazine, with sporadic new content specials, as reported via bOING bOING (the website, not the zine).

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

Dr. Betty Alexandra Toole, credited simply as Betty Toole in the Handbook, has written extensively on Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, as noted in this article on The Well (more on The Well in a later post), and here wrote a brief overview of (one of) the first computer programmers, who saw the promise of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proto-computer from the early 19th century.

Here's Betty Toole speaking at the University of Oxford's Ada Lovelace Symposium in 2015, 20 years after the publication of HMHb, and more notably, the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace's birth. You can find more materials from this symposium at the Internet Archive, which also hosts a digitized copy of Lady Lovelace's 64 page write-up on the Analytical Engine, including the first published computer algorithm. There's also an hour long BBC documentary on the Countess of Computing from 2015 (YouTube copy). These resources weren't available online in 1995, so now you can learn much more about this fascinating computer pioneer from the comfort of wherever you happen to be. And through a computer, of course.

Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Sun Ra

"Erroneously reported by the straight world as having been born on May 22, 1914, as Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, [Sun] Ra was actually born on Saturn "around 5,000 years ago—give or take a few minutes"—as he was quick to point out." Will Kreth is good enough to present the truth of Su Ra as (stellar) gospel.

Sun Ra made glorious noise, and a LOT of it. Will covers the Arkestra's wailing brass polyphony over a bed of Afro-Latin percussion, call-and-response chants, and his role as an early musician to embrace the Moog synthesizer. But there's also stellar performances of jazz standards, space-age jazz, and avant-garde space funk.

In 1995, finding Sun Ra's music could have been a bit of work. Originally, Ra's music was pressed in limited runs, sometimes 75 copies, other times 150. And sorting out the history of the Arkestra's recordings was complicated by Sun Ra compiling albums from various recording sessions, or delaying releases a few years or more after recording. And many tracks didn't find their way onto official releases until decades later, after archivists tracked down the history of recording sessions.

But now in 2020, we can enjoy the work of those archivists, and platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp, where you can find not only most, if not all, of Sun Ra's recordings, but also with extensive liner notes. I geeked out about Sun Ra's life and extensive recording history a few years back, linking to official audio as much as possible, and much of it available to buy and stream from Bandcamp (see Sun Ra Music and Sun Ra via Strut).

Sun Ra's work to make this world a better place lives on.