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Tuesday, August 03, 2004

That Wacky Old-Time Religion!

Storm has the best, last word on the whole "Pope watched the movie, Ms. 45, one too many times" thing. Of course, if you want to understand the religious conservatives, it's best to hunker down and actually talk to them, one-on-one [via AllThingsCrispy].

I grew up in Smalltown, so there were always religious fundamentalists around, usually associated with the local Pentacostal Church. The kids who went to that church were the source of a wealth of novelty items, such as religious comic books about the Rapture, mix tapes that analyzed the hidden, backwards messages in rock music and fun games such as 'Stigmata': take your finger and scratch the middle of each of your palms one thousand times. Guess what happens?

Even as a kid, I was impressed by some of the creative cross-pollination the mix of fundamentalist religion and pop culture produced. Since much of mainstream culture was off-limits, it was appropriated in bizarre ways. The religious comics were more science fiction than religious tract (the exceptions being the occasional Chick tract that popped up from time to time), filling the craving for sci-fi since, as one guy told me, he wasn't supposed to see the Star Wars movies because they "weren't real".

Christian heavy metal bands were probably the weirdest product of the period, but for me the literal-thinking was best represented by an artist who visited our grade 6 art class. He specialized in painting religious scenes with all of the 'holier' characters represented as body builders. His reasoning? People who were closer to God would be more 'pure' and therefore, would have great, big muscles. He had a lot of paintings of Jesus with these gigantic, bulging pecs and quads. If that guy had directed the Mel Gibson Jesus movie, he would have cast Arnold as Christ. Even in grade 6 the whole thing seemed nuts to me.

Speaking of the "good ol' days":

Jen has a post about Detroit Techno over at Circadian Shift. We received the Detroit radio signals in Smalltown and I used to listen to the Electrifying Mojo from time to time. I remember once night he played a loop from B-52's 53 Miles West of Venus and spoke over it, saying things like, "If you are poor, you are somebody. If you are rich, you are somebody. If you are married, you are somebody ..." for an hour or more. He was always doing crazy stuff like that and he'd often ramble about whatever for long periods of time while playing really dramatic symphonic music in the background. They used to broadcast competitions between local high school djs and I think I even have an old mix tape of some of that hanging around here, somewhere.

The independent radio and tv stations in Detroit had a lot of creative energy in the 80s, even to this day Toronto's local media is dull in comparison. And I don't mean a little dull, I mean a lotta dull!
 

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