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Innovative Program
This nOde last updated May 13th, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(2 Ahau (Flower)/2 Junajpu (Marksman) - 80/260 - 12.19.8.4.0)

Pat Smear and Darby Crash of The Germs were both fortunate enough to be admitted to an experimental program, the Innovative Program School,  a satellite school located on the campus of University High in Santa Monica. Designed for students who  didn t fit in  to the regular curriculum, the student body included many outcasts and miscreants who would soon form part of the original L.A. punk scene. The regular campus included students like future Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler and Michelle Bell, who would eventually front Vagina Dentata, a post-Germs band which featured Pat on guitar. Uni High alumni from the past included such luminaries as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Kim Fowley and Frank Sinatra Jr.

Pat Smear: "It was like a combination of Scientology and EST Therapy. The first day called "Basic Training",  where they yelled at you and said you were assholes for eight hours, and you had to bring a parent with you. If you survived you got to this special school. The teachers were all LSD types, one math teacher was like one of the top mathematicians in the country, and he used to take students on camping trips and have sex orgies with young boys, all kind of stuff like that occurred. The big thing was that the teachers were right, you were never supposed to question anything that they said or told you to do, which of course, we did. We carried around copies of the book "Helter Skelter" like it was a bible, and told everyone I was jesus and he (Darby) was god. We had our little group of LSD friends, and Darby and I started convincing them that the teachers weren't right, and we got all these followers that rebelled. One of them was the head of the school's son, so that didn't help matters. Darby's deal was that he'd get his diploma if he never came back to the school, mine was to go to continuation school of campus. The student council just decided to kick us out of the program, and Lucky Lehrer was on the council!!!   He ended up drumming in the Circle Jerks and then for the Darby Crash Band, like he went full circle."

• descriptions of IPS (Innovative Program School) on University High  attended by Darby and a lot of youth during the initial L.A. punk movement.  techniques include L. Ron Hubbard's use of the dictionary in looking up ambiguous meanings seemed to have influenced Darby's lyrical prowess... one of the key factors of the legendary Germs is that amid all the kitsch and turmoil of early punk, Darby's lyrics are remarkably astute and poetic.
• While attending University High School in West L.A., Paul became interested in Scientology, the pseudo-religious cult founded by pulp science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. At the time, he and Germ-to-be George Ruthenberg (aka Pat Smear - later in Nirvana & Foo Fighters) were enrolled in the IPS (Innovative Program School), an experimental program for high school underachievers directed by Fred Holtby, who used Scientology methods as pedagogical tools. (Paul had met George, a socially estranged mulatto kid from the Pico-Bundy area of West L.A., in the seventh grade when they patronized the same speed dealer.) Spinning off Hubbard's "applied religious philosophy," IPS emphasized a screwy gumbo of EST, Scientology and applied rhetoric, while students were asked to devise their own curricula, stage their own exams and grade themselves. It was around this time that Paul, with lots of encouragement from his friend George, began experimenting with the mind-control techniques he'd cobbled together from these and other sources to try to get other Uni High kids to do his bidding.


Truth be told, Paul had always seemed more fascinated by Hubbard himself than by the militia he founded. Here was a darkly charismatic figure so persuasive that he could, as Paul saw it, order his followers around like so many sheep. At one point in his career, Paul heard, Hubbard had refused to speak to anyone except through messengers,  mostly regimental girls kitted out in hot pants and halter tops, sexy androids who were trained to relay his orders in exactly his tone of voice. To Paul Beahm's skewed sense of humor, manipulating people to do things for you like that was a hoot. How far could you go with that shit? "People are really stupid," he noted.  Paul would eventually claim that he had abandoned Scientology, having come to regard it as fatally "flawed." - Brendan Mullen - LA Weekly

• track _Lexicon Devil_ MP3 by The Germs off of _G.I._ 12" on Slash (1979)

I'm a lexicon devil with a battered brain
And I'm lookin' for a future-the world's my aim
So gimme gimme your hands-gimme gimme your minds-
Gimme gimme this-gimme gimme tha-yea-yea

I want toy tin soldiers that can push and shove
I want gunboy rovers that'll wreck this club
I'll build you up and level your heads
We'll run it my way cold men and politics dead...
(Chorus)

I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc on this rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something even if I'm killed...
(Chorus)

Empty out your pockets-you don't need their change
I'm giving you the power to rearrange
Together we'll run to the highest prop
Tear it down and let it drop...away...
(Chorus)

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