The Beast 666

I've been reading about Aleister Crowley and his cult, Thelema, and his harem of followers, all very intriguing stuff even if you don't buy a word of his occult beliefs. So intriguing that by Edwardian standards, Crowley was "The Wickedest Man in the World" -- in an era that's seen Jonestown, David Koresh, and the Manson Family, it's almost quaint to think of some oversexed crowing rooster like Crowley as being the wickedest anything, ever.

While we're on the subject, my man-creature introduced me to Raymond Pettibon's "The Book of Manson", all of which is on Youtube. Pettibon is an artist and the brother of Greg Ginn of the punk rock band Black Flag; "The Book of Manson" is a movie he made with some of his punk rock friends playing the part of the Manson Family. It's very much in the Mel Brooks tradition of getting revenge by making your enemies ridiculous. Pettibon portrays the Manson Family as the dirty unwashed pack of psycho-hippies they were, allowing us to laugh at them and thus strip them of their power to terrify us. The scene where the male acolytes of the Manson Family dowse for the dead body of one of their victims in what is clearly some random person's backyard is hilarious -- they keep stumbling around the same 10 foot by 10 foot area the entire time in a zombified drug-haze, complaining that they "work harder than the Marines."

But my favorite is the scene where the Manson girls ask Charles Manson (played by weedy-looking punk rocker Robert Hecker of the band Redd Kross) for a miracle to cure their crabs. He goes into a deranged rant about how he never had a father because he's Jesus Christ, at which point some actress with the best comedic timing ever indignantly pipes up with, "Fuck Charlie, I'll just keep on scratchin'." Genius!