{"id":77,"date":"2006-05-31T08:16:06","date_gmt":"2006-05-31T16:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=77"},"modified":"2009-04-17T08:16:37","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T16:16:37","slug":"george-clinton-and-p-funk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/31\/george-clinton-and-p-funk\/","title":{"rendered":"George Clinton and P-Funk"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

[Art 1982 by Pedro Bell \/ Splank Works]<\/p>\n

In September, 1992, I was in emotional turmoil. I’d just lost my job as a programmer at Autodesk, and our last child was leaving the nest for college. I spent a night at the Mondo 2000 house in Berkeley and experienced some disturbing hallucinations (see the end of Chapter 8 of The Hacker and the Ants<\/a><\/i>).<\/p>\n

The next day, drag-assing along Telgraph Avenue, trying to get it together, I came across a used copy of George Clinton’s 1982 record Computer Games.<\/i> George’s picture on the back seemed to speak to me. He knew where I was at. He’d been there from the beginning. Everything was gonna be okay. I got into the record, especially, “Atomic Dog”. What a great song. I’d never realized all along that Zappa and the Stones were imitating the George Clinton funk style, I didn't know what real funk was.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]<\/p>\n

Last night we went to see George Clinton<\/a> and the P-Funk All-Stars at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz. It was so positive, such a great bouncy endless boogie. George like a shaman, like a happy tot, coaxing the maximum roar from the band (18 people strong at one point) and the crowd.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]<\/p>\n

A guy came out in a diaper and a floppy red hat made of maybe four yards of Chinese silk. He looked serious and craftsmanlike nonetheless. For a second I thought he was Bootsy Collins<\/a>, but I don't think that's right, I don't think Bootsy is on this tour.<\/p>\n

Quotes from GC and the show: “Yank my doodle, it’s a dandy.” “Harder than steel, still gettin’ harder.” “We tested positive for the P-Funk. I’ll pee in anybody’s cup. May they cup runneth over.” “We are all trying to straighten out a serious situation with faulty equipment.” (Last two quotes from the “Hiphop” entry in Mondo User's Guide<\/i>, which I edited with Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius, Harper Perennial 1992).<\/p>\n

I’m thinking I can use George as a model for Lama Jawobul in the Mirrorbrane, who has Ond Lutter imprisoned in maybe a Klein Bottle, and who’ll pass Higgs RAM to Thuy Nguyen to bring back to turn Earth into a conscious quantum computer without having to actually change anything, like, no grinding things up into nants.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Oh, I bought George's latest album at the show:
\n
“How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?<\/i>”<\/p>\n

On stage, George said the answer to this question is
\n
“4:21.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Art 1982 by Pedro Bell \/ Splank Works] In September, 1992, I was in emotional turmoil. I’d just lost my job as a programmer at Autodesk, and our last child was leaving the nest for college. I spent a night at the Mondo 2000 house in Berkeley and experienced some disturbing hallucinations (see the end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}