BECAUSE THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

This is kinda long, but when our pals at Delancey Place dropped this clip from Timothy Beal’s book The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected  History of an Accidental Book into my inbox I was intrigued. Over the years I have listened to so many idiots spouting so much nonsense and using The Bible as the ultimate authority because it was supposedly written by their monotheist God (above). The truth now emerges that a large number of the aforementioned idiots and their ilk haven’t even read the damned book and are devoid of too many clues as to what they’re talking about. 

"According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 78 percent of all Americans say that the Bible is the 'word of God,' and almost half of those believe that, as such, 'it is to be taken literally, word for word.' Polling data from the Barna Group indicate that nearly half of all Americans agree that 'the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings' (88 percent of all 'born-again' Christians believe the same), and the Gal­lup Poll finds that 65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible 'answers all or most of the basic questions of life.' These statements are shorthand descriptions of the idea of the Bible as God's magnum opus, the first and last word on who God is, who we are, why we're here, and where we go after this. ...  

"Yet ... recent polls and surveys offer these biblical revelations:

"Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis, in Hebrew Bereshit) or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

"More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Chris­tians believe that "God helps those who help themselves" is a Bible verse. ...

"More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and one in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. (Those two must've been multiple-choice questions.)

"Almost two-thirds of Americans can't name at least five of the Ten Commandments. Some of these people, moreover, are outspoken promoters of them. Georgia representative Lynn Westmoreland, cosponsor of a bill to display the Ten Com­mandments in the chambers of the House of Representa­tives and Senate, could remember only three when Stephen Colbert asked him to recite them on The Colbert Report (Col­bert, who I hear teaches Sunday school at his church, would probably have done considerably better). ...

"Even among the majority of Christians who identify themselves strongly with the Bible, Bible reading is a rare activity. In a 2005 nationwide study of religious values, practices, and behaviors by Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, more than half of those identifying themselves as 'Bible-believing' said they had not participated in any kind of Bible study or Sunday school program at all in the past month. ...

"While biblical literacy is about as low as it can get, Bible sales have been booming. The biggest Bible publishers in this highly competitive business guard their sales data closely, but reliable industry sources estimate that 2007 saw about 25 million Bibles sold, generating revenues of about $770 million in the United States alone. That was an in­crease of more than 26 percent since 2005, which saw U.S. sales of about $609 million. In fact, the Bible-publishing business has been enjoying a healthy compounded growth rate of close to 10 percent per year for several years. Even during the high point of economic crisis in late 2008, when other book sales were hurting badly, Bible sales continued to boom, with an estimated $823.5 million that year. ...

 "So biblical literacy is low to zip, even while biblical reverence remains high and Bible sales rise. What's going on? Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today's consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of con­sumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It's gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, 'I shop, therefore I am.' Today, it's closer to 'I shop for what I am.' "    

Click here for Siouxsie and the Banshees

The secret word is Writ

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Labia Frozdick generated her own subtitles.

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

THE DECREPIT WARRIOR POET IS AT IT AGAIN

The write up reads…

"Legendary writer, singer and provocateur Mick Farren is due to perform a one-off spoken word show in Brighton this Friday (June 15th). Farren will headline the Midsummer Poetry Ball at Brighton’s 100-capacity Westhill Hall, reading from his recently-published collection of verse, Black Dogs Circling (Sea Urchin Editions), among other work. The counter-culture veteran will be backed for the occasion by guitarist Andy Colquhoun and percussionist Jaki Windmill, both current members of Farren’s recently-reactivated proto-punk freak band the Deviants." (Click here for more)

Tickets are just £4.00 and the really good news is that you can bring in your own booze. (And the post code is BN1 3PS)

BUT THE REST OF THE DAY MAY POSE SOMETHING OF A COSMIC CONUNDRUM

Click here for The Tornadoes

The secret word is Brane

GRATUITOUS LATEX

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

Whatever today’s repast might have been, it wasn’t preceded by a lude or a mandy. Mandrax in the UK, Quaaludes in the US, they made you horny, cosily stupid and the world turned very slowly and every casual contact was beautiful. They were adored by tattooed love boys, party girls, and Elvis Presley. And, many a morn, if it hadn’t been for the coke, you might next have risen from the bed, and even then it was only to stagger out for a wobble and if one wobbled in the direction of some alcohol the God Lord save us all. Wikipedia rather stiffly recalls…

“Quaaludes became increasingly popular as a recreational drug in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The drug was used during sexual activity because of heightened sensitivity and lowered inhibition coupled with relaxation and euphoria. The drug was often used by people who went to glam rock clubs in the early 1970s and at discos in the late 1970s. (One slang term for Quaaludes was disco biscuits.)” 

The drug was methaqualone and its vogue was sadly short if intense. It was just too much fun for the authoritarian squares. The global drug enforcement industry leaned heavily on the big pharm to simply stop making ludes and mandies. Big pharm instantly caved despite the popularity of the product. The seductive white pills just plain vanished. Bootlegs are manufactured in Mexico but they were powdery rubbish. Large sections of hedonist/airhead drug culture were bereft and distraught. Some expressed their distress by becoming full blown junkies. I joked in my 2001 novel Darklost that Robert Evans had the very last Quaalude on the planet in his private safe,  

“Gene Haislip, the former head of the Chemical Control Division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), told the PBS documentary program Frontline: “we beat 'em.” By contacting governments around the world and manufacturers of Quaaludes, the DEA convinced them to halt production. Haislip said “we eliminated the problem.”

Bah!

Click here for David

The secret word is Stumble

MARILYN SEZ

“I’ll take twenty!” 

AND SINCE WE’RE TALKING METHAQUALONE LET’S POST ANOTHER TERRY RODGERS ORGY

GRATUITOUS EMMA PEEL (after)

(see last Friday)

AYN RAND WAS A SPEEDFREAK (Shock! Horror!)

I had assumed Ayn Rand was merely dangerous and maybe self-obsessed to the point of psychosis. As it turns out – and according to Robert Anton Wilson in his book Cosmic Trigger Vol II -- she was consistently loaded to the gills on amphetamine…

“The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) _The Fountainhead_ had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) Like most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’

“Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison. “I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”

Click here for Motorhead (I wrote the lyrics to this, BTW)

The secret word is Bomber

“BIBLICAL”

The torrential rain in Wolverhampton – described by Russell Hunter (above) as “biblical” – cut into the size of the crowd, but those who were there at the Robin 2 were seriously hardcore. A Facebook pal calling himself Turner D. Century describes the show below. (Although we do have one memo to Turner. We like our guitar solos! We like them a lot.) 

“No encore and a singular failure of the White Panther massive to materialise in Bilston couldn't diminish the realisation that Mr. Farren needs only to BE to send a ripple across the seismograph of the underthecounterculture; the fella sucks up kulturpolitik and expels greatness like a wide bore blazooka spraying archly considered shrapnel into the underbelly of the beast. New tune Cocaine and Gunpowder hardwires the band into nostalgia-shucking nowness and sits well next to the undeniably anthemic wade of Billy The Monster. Where were you the night The Deviants rolled into town they'll ask...and if you can't show the seat-mounted imprint of the size 12 of legend, the nametakers and ass-kickers will laugh you straight out of Valhalla...”

BUT WE ALSO HAVE BAD NEWS

Next week the Deviants were supposed to play the Shepherds Bush Empire along with our old pal John Sinclair, Howard Marks, and the lovely Sonja Kristina (below), among others. A couple of days ago, however, we were informed by promoter Ian Grant – without any real explanation – that the show was cancelled. This was the second time Ian’s shot a show of this kind from under us, and, just to compound our dissatisfaction, we had actually learned unofficially of the cancellation from our friend Yukiko in Tokyo a week earlier. It all makes me wonder about bloody promoters. As artists, we work very hard, we create, we rehearse, we do everything we can to improve our work. To stick something up on the web with a Facebook link and hope the crowds will flock seems hardly promotional. Maybe the secret word is lazy.  

DO YOU WONDER WE WERE DISAPPOINTED?

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

In her youth Simone Frozdick had posed nude to unsettle the squares.

UNCLE JOE WAS IRRESISTIBLE TO GIRLS

GRATUITOUS EMMA PEEL (before)

(Image from HCB)

I BIT THE HANDLER (but I did not bite the Deity)

I have tried not to think too much about Pentecostal snake handling. I preferred to pass by on the other side, accepting that, like The Rapture, it was just another obscure biblical reference blown out of all proportion by folks who’ve been drinking corn squeezings out in the hills for far too long while simultaneously immersed in a diminishing Deliverance gene pool. It also seemed like one more unfortunate conformation of that theological view of the USA as the four century dumping grown for all the religious nut, obsessive and psychos from the Old World. When, however, our buddy Richard at Dangerous Minds tells us a snake has turned around and bitten the handler, I sit up and take notice.  

“Mack Wolford, a flamboyant Pentecostal pastor from West Virginia whose serpent-handling talents were profiled last November in The Washington Post Magazine, hoped the outdoor service he had planned for Sunday at an isolated state park would be a “homecoming like the old days,” full of folks speaking in tongues, handling snakes and having a “great time.” But it was not the sort of homecoming he foresaw.

Instead, Wolford, who turned 44 the previous day, was bitten by a rattlesnake he owned for years. He died late Sunday. Mark Randall “Mack” Wolford was known all over Appalachia as a daring man of conviction. He believed that the Bible mandates that Christians handle serpents to test their faith in God — and that, if they are bitten, they trust in God alone to heal them. He and other adherents cited Mark 16:17-18 as the reason for their practice: “And these signs will follow those who believe: in My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

Click here for Bo

The secret word is Slither

LOST IN TRANSLATION

STILL LIFE WITH A MACHINE GUN

(Image by Geliografic) 

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSICS #102

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

It’s been a short week on Doc40 as June busts, the tuna in the Pacific turn radioactive, the relentless Jubilee grinds on with all the false luster of a counterfeit gem, and hiding under the bed is a cheap but easy metaphor in a world where greed-driven and wholly unprincipled market manipulators and petulant bankers yet again run us into the ground and Goldman Sachs have the gall to actually advertise their spurious wonder on my Gmail page. While, at the same time, a constant media drumbeat of evil tidings drive the already daunted to depression and worse, and I worry that, even in my decrepitude, I am not able to more which is why, when the following showed up on Facebook from a friend called Nick I felt considerably cheered…

"From the comforting/alarming presence of the Deviants back in the day to the aspirational ID with the DNA Cowboys whose jouissance pierced the gloom of the merseyside methadome in which we dwelt (courtesy of the DHSS) - a simple message of thanks. You gave us (what's proved to be well-founded) hope that our creativity could be more than a source of shame."

But if you believe I’m drinking lady-looking mimosas for breakfast, please think again.

Click here for Torn & Frayed

The secret word is Continue

MARILYN SEZ…

“Something totally weird has happened to my hair!”

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Daisy-Mae Frozdick came third in the Miss KKK beauty contest.

WHAT MORE COULD A POOR BOY NEED?

AND DON’T FORGET, WOLVERHAMPTION...

Wednesday June 6^th – the anniversary of D-Day – The Deviants (amazing survivors of the original Deviants and Pink Fairies) will be playing the Robin 2 in Bilston. Click here for details and tickets. 

I NEED A DAY OFF

But you can click here for Heathcote’s diatribe on the monarchy. (Sent by Bernard)

Or click here for Queen.

The secret word is Later 

JUST ONE LOOK…

I could write paragraphs but why the hell bother? One look should be enough to confirm that these dubious fools should never be permitted to run our world. Personally I wouldn’t trust Trump or Romney them with a street corner hotdog stand.

Click here for Aretha

The secret word is Arrant 

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW (THE DEVIANTS RIDE AGAIN)

Yes, friends and neighbours, on Wednesday June 6^th – after the tiresome jubilee and on the anniversary of D-Day – The Deviants (your actual amazing survivors of the original Deviants and Pink Fairies) will be playing the Robin 2 in Bilston. It’s our very first show in the UK Midlands so click here for details and tickets. 

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSIC # 102

And now, following a theme…

GRATUITOUS VAMPIRES

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

So we’re all still here and the world didn’t end (see last Friday) and it’s an unusually sunny day here in Brighton and there’s really nothing to laugh at all except that Ronald Weinland is an idiot. Now on to December 21st. 

Click here for Jimmy Cliff

The secret word is Survival 

MARILYN SEZ…

“Can someone please get Mickey Rooney off my ass?”

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

TARDIS TO GO

GRATUITOUS SOPHIA

ENTIRE WORLD ENDS SUNDAY

At least, that’s what’s this geezer Ronald Weinland claims. Russell, my brother Deviant, sent this over. Me, I’m just going to wait and see what comes to pass. Click here to read all about it.

Click here for Jim (obviously)

The secret word is Bated

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Chicago pigs whup on anti-war demonstrators. Now where have I seen that before?

Click here for MC5

THIS MAY BE THAT LAST THING YOU SEE (under slightly different circumstances)

MARILYN SEZ…

“You shouldn’t have pissed her off.”

HIP-HOP CONSPIRACY?

Our good pal Peromyscus sent us the link to this quite astonishing missive that’s been making the rounds. My first reaction was that it was a piece of wholly spurious but highly creative paranoia, but having now seen a dozen years-worth of 21^st century capitalism at work, I could be about ready to believe anything, no matter how heinous and certainly pass it around for all to see. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite…

“The subject quickly changed as the speaker went on to tell us that the respective companies we represented had invested in a very profitable industry which could become even more rewarding with our active involvement. He explained that the companies we work for had invested millions into the building of privately owned prisons and that our positions of influence in the music industry would actually impact the profitability of these investments. I remember many of us in the group immediately looking at each other in confusion. At the time, I didn’t know what a private prison was but I wasn't the only one. Sure enough, someone asked what these prisons were and what any of this had to do with us. We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons. It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares. Most of us were taken back by this. Again, a couple of people asked what this had to do with us. At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons. Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I remember looking around to make sure I wasn't dreaming and saw half of the people with dropped jaws. My daze was interrupted when someone shouted, “Is this a f****** joke?” At this point things became chaotic.” (Click here for the rest.)

Click here for NWA

The secret word is Yo

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Christopher Robin Frozdick was never seen again. 

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSIC’S #101

GRATUITOUS TWIGGY