For a stretch in the mid- to late 1980s, Satanism was almost an everyday topic in the media. Future “Second Lady” Tipper Gore founded a group called the Parents Music Resource Center (shudder), which spent its days lobbying Congress for increased censorship of rock albums—two groups that attracted its scrutiny for its “occult” content were Venom and Mercyful Fate.

In 1989 Dr. Jerry Johnston published a book called Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism in North America, and this video—also with Johnston, I believe—must date from about the same time. (in this video he is unidentified; I’ve consulted pictures and videos of Dr. Johnston from more recent years—it’s probably same guy but he’s softened his preacherly accent quite a bit.)

Today Johnston’s focus is on more mainstream subjects like teenage suicide, and the tone is a lot less doomy. I would venture that he’s been influenced by someone like Rick Warren, who (like him or not) has given evangelism a more compassionate face. Anyway, in this clip the preacher is in full Satanic alarmist mode, speaking with such great understanding about the presumably hundreds, if not thousands, of teenage Satanists he’s met—“some of them, I noticed, on the little web between the thumb and right index finger was a Satanic emblem…. They had the pentagram tattoo and some of the girls were dressed in black. Closer looking at their fingers, I noticed they had skull rings.” In a troubled teen’s bedroom he spies “the decorative heavy metal rock posters of Venom and Slayer and Ozzy and a few others.” (His account of the Satanists he’s met for all the world sounds like something he read in a book or just made up.)

And I haven’t even gotten to the part with his impression of a teenage Satanist luring his would-be victims into undertaking human sacrifice with promises of drugs and easy sex…...

At the end of the video a number is given to call if you think you know of a teen who has fallen or is on the verge of succumbing to the allure of Satan—it’s 1-800-SV-A-TEEN. I called it the line is dead.
 

via William Caxton Fan Club (a.k.a. John Darnielle’s Tumblr)

 
I don’t know what genius came up with the idea of putting inspirational fitness slogans about “never quitting” over people who have consumed waaaaaaaaaaaay too much alcohol, but I do appreciate it!
 

 

 
With thanks to Eve Lee, reddit and Imgur. 
 
More after the jump…
 

 
In what could be construed as an effective warning as to the risks of cognitive impairment that can accompany long-term ecstasy abuse, Happy Mondays vocalist Shaun Ryder has traveled the world seeking evidence of UFOs. His travels were documented for air on a forthcoming new program, Shaun Ryder on UFOs, for the ever-increasingly misnamed History Channel, TV home of God, Guns and Automobiles, Storage Wars, and Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy.

In advance of the show’s debut, Ryder spoke to The Guardian about the close encounters he believes he experienced in his youth, his ongoing passion for UFOlogy, and his most recent sightings:

His sentences become disjointed. “Well, all I’ll tell yous, right, is that I’ve seen one, really close up, about 50 foot above, and it looks like a cartoon. It doesn’t look real. It looks like it’s made out of Airfix kit. They look like toys. When you’ve seen something as close as I’ve seen – and bullshit drink, drugs, bollox, none of it, absolutely normal and straight – and you see it and you know they’re here … “

Tell me more, I say. “I can’t go into any more detail, apart from that it was literally 50 foot above me.” Did he have any contact with it? “No, no, but the thing is I wasn’t frightened one bit. I was very peaceful and placid when I was looking at the thing.” He says it happened after he finished making the documentary series.

Well, there you go, someone call SETI and tell them to turn off the machines that go ‘ping,’ England’s most wasted saw it with his own bleary eyes, so clearly the matter’s settled.

(Before any believers go all berserk on me in the comments, I’m not dismissing the likelihood of life elsewhere. I just think it’s telling that the world’s best and most dedicated scientific minds have thus far located none, despite decades of rigorous search, but we’ve got plentiful anecdotal testimony from hayseeds, drug and alcohol casualties, the mentally ill, and profiteering charlatans. In a universe as vast as the one in which we occupy a pitiful little corner, it’s incredibly unlikely that self-reproducing organisms and sentience are unique to Earth. But it’s even less likely that whatever technologically advanced E.T. life as may exist has made it its mission to traverse the vastness of the cosmos and stick things in our butts.)

Truth is, though, it’ll probably be a vastly entertaining show. Ryder is a gifted bigmouth. I was so fortunate as to interview him face-to-face in the late ‘80s, and though he was only just barely coherent from God knows what he and Bez were dosed on, it was massively enjoyable - captivating, really - just to be in a room with him talking. The sheer force of his lively personality is nothing to dismiss, which is why he’s lately experienced a career renaissance as a UK reality television personality. If his show turns up on Hulu, I will most certainly check out an episode or two. After all, the Mondays were basically a rickety band whose sheer energetic joy pushed them into transcendental greatness, maybe Ryder can tap that magic again on television? Failing that, he’ll still be himself, merrily opining, a sort of lumpen, less-literate Julian Cope. And that’ll be fun, too.

Enjoy Ryder in his prime, in 1989 on BBC Four’s “Club X”
 

 
Acid evangelist Timothy Leary was born on this day in 1920. Aside from being one of the prime movers of the sixties counterculture—and a cheerful revolutionary dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon—Leary was an early cheerleader for cyberspace and computer technology in the 80s and 90s.

In the curious video below, Leary discusses drugs on a Pepsi-produced 80s “college cable” program with an “all star” panel that includes Dr. Andrew Weil, Papa John Phillips, motivational speaker John Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica-Parker(?) and Richard Kiel, “Jaws” from the James Bond films(???).
 

“Ma’am, what primary factor would you attribute your astonishing longevity to?”

A new study published in the American Journal of Medicine finds that heavy pot smokers tend to be slimmer than former marijuana users and non-smokers.

In the abstract, the researchers went into the background of the study:

There are limited data regarding the relationship between cannabinoids and metabolic processes. Epidemiologic studies have found lower prevalence rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus in marijuana users compared with people who have never used marijuana, suggesting a relationship between cannabinoids and peripheral metabolic processes. To date, no study has investigated the relationship between marijuana use and fasting insulin, glucose, and insulin resistance.

They concluded:

We found that marijuana use was associated with lower levels of fasting insulin and HOMA-IR, and smaller waist circumference.

This would suggest that cannabinoids have a positive effect on metabolic processes.

I’m not a scientist, but the first thing that occurred to me is that this doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that bigtime potheads tend not to drink alcohol very much, if at all. I wonder how many of the non-smokers control group were in fact drinkers? I’d like to see a study pitting the physiques of big stoners versus moderate to heavy drinkers.

Bela Lugosi plead…

You probably recall the trouble Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy got into back in March when he was arrested in Glendale, California for driving under the influence of drugs, hit-and-run and possessing crystal meth. Police reports said he appeared confused and even had difficulty recalling what day it was.

Although the goth legend initially pleaded not guilty to all three charges, he changed his tune when he was sentenced on October 10 in a Los Angeles court. Murphy plead no contest to misdemeanor hit-and-run driving and guilty to the methamphetamine possession charge, as reported by Glendale News.

The singer must also attend 45 days of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, perform ten days of community service and submit to random drug tests.
 

 
What do you get the Beat-lit enthusiast who has everything? How about one of William S Burroughs’ prescription methadone bottles, filled with rocks from his grave and a shell fired from one of his guns? No lie, this is a thing you can actually obtain. San Francisco’s PBA Galleries are auctioning a MASSIVE collection of books and memorabilia, including, among many wonderful books, a first edition hardcover of Dune, a signed 1959 copy of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind, a complete run of all 14 issues of Avant Garde magazine, an original drawing by Charles Bukowski, a collection of Henry Miller vinyl records, and a William Burroughs grocery list, disappointingly bereft of ammunition or narcotics. Plenty of marvelous old comics and pulp mags, as well, but nothing else in the auction even comes close to the methadone bottle in terms of sheer what-the-fuckness. Bidding opens on Thursday, October 10, at 11 AM Pacific Time.

While you’re browsing the lots and drooling over the temptations contained therein, enjoy Destroy All Rational Thought, the Burroughs/ Bryon Gysin documentary that includes one of Burroughs’ final interviews.
 

 
Here we have Pee-wee Herman’s contribution to the War on Drugs, in the form of this doomy public service announcement. Tell it, Pee-wee:
 

This is crack. Rock cocaine. It isn’t glamorous or cool or kid stuff. It’s the most addictive kind of cocaine, and it can kill you. What’s really bad is nobody knows how much it takes. So every time you use it, you risk dying. It isn’t worth it. Look, everybody wants to be cool. But doing it with crack isn’t just wrong—it’s dead wrong.

 
It’s something of an Internet mystery when this was actually made. Many people seem to take it for granted that this was done as part of Paul Reubens’ plea bargain agreement after he was arrested for indecent exposure in Sarasota, Florida, in 1991. But I’ve seen 1980 and 1985 mentioned as well—1980 is clearly out, as The Pee Wee Herman Show first aired on HBO in 1981, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse didn’t get onto CBS until 1986.

However, the mid-1980s are a far more intriguing possibility, because if that’s true then it means it was a good-faith effort by ... somebody ... to use Pee-wee’s overwhelming moral authority to get 11-year-old TV viewers to stop using crack cocaine. Somehow I think other approaches would be more effective. Does anyone remember seeing this during the Reagan years?

To paraphrase the question asked by the top YouTube commenter: Did anyone else half-expect the trademark Pee-wee snicker at the very end?
 

 
(Thanks to Mark Davis!)

 
The explosive success of Breaking Bad was bound to generate some copycats shows, but Spanish language media company Univision took it a step further, decided to cut out all those pesky middlemen (I think they’re called “writers”), and do a direct Spanish language remake. The Univision version will be set in Colombia and called Metástasis, the term for the spread of cancer- I assume “breaking bad” doesn’t really translate. The project seems intent on keeping every iconographic piece of the show they can, down to “Walter Blanco” (yes, really) in his famous white briefs. They even named his wife “Cielo Blanco”- “Cielo” being Spanish for “sky.”

Of course, some things will have to change to make sense to Univision audiences. The RV that houses Walt’s first meth lab will be replaced by a school bus, since RVs aren’t common in Colombia. Honestly, though? I feel like the context of the show is so American that an RV is going to be the least of their plot problems. Colombia’s relationship with drugs is, to say the least, very different from drug culture in the U.S. So much of the show’s premise is based on U.S. drug wars, especially our border with Mexico and our DEA. Colombia has already decriminalized cocaine and marijuana, and are arguably on their way to doing the same with meth.

Still, I’m really curious about how this will turn out. I may have to tune in just to see a Colombian Saul Goodman!
 

 

 
Via A.V. Club

“Bill Burrough’s Recurring Dream,” David Wojnarowicz, 1978

I think it’s safe to say that many, many more people have heard William Burroughs’ 1990 Dead City Radio album than have ever picked up one of his books and read it from cover to cover. I don’t feel this way at all, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that they think it’s the best thing Burroughs ever did.

Ignoring that uniformed sentiment and moving on, for most people, seeing the “A Thanksgiving Prayer” video every year on bOING bOING is practically the only exposure to Burroughs they’ll ever get and so therefore Dead City Radio assumes an unwarranted, out-sized importance in his body of work. (Personally I don’t find it that satisfying. Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, a selection from Burroughs’ archive of his occult reel-to-reel tape-recorder experiments, is 100x more interesting, but would be of no use whatsoever to most people who might profess to like “weird” stuff and just sound like someone messing around. That’s the material they should’ve slapped the Sonic Youth music over.)

Ultimately what can be gleamed from this is that it’s more Burroughs’ “image” than anything else about him that has so much continuing—and even widespread—iconic currency in popular culture.

Timothy Leary? Abbie Hoffman? Younger people hardly have any idea of who they were or what they were all about. William S. Burroughs on the other hand? Well, do a search for his name on Tumblr and you’ll see.

He’s well on his way to becoming as iconic as Che Guevara, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. Give it more time, he’s only been dead since 1997. In terms of ready-made rebellious iconography for the Facebook generation, William Burroughs is the ultimate semiotic symbol for a truly dangerous mind.

So let’s celebrate him today, with a selection of lesser heard Burroughs-related musical material that’s not from Dead City Radio:
 

 
“T’aint No Sin” from The Black Rider
 

 
“Sharkey’s Night” from Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak album
 

 
Burroughs reads poetry by Jim Morrison over music by The Doors on “Is Everybody In?”
 

 
Guesting with Ministry on “Just One Fix.”
 

 
“Star Me Kitten” William Burroughs and R.E.M. (This comes from the Songs in the Key of X-Files album. It’s terrible. Loutallica terrible!)
 

 
“What Keeps Mankind Alive?” from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, as heard on September Songs