“The high point came in 1961, when an Italian artist name Piero Manzoni sold ninety cans of his own feces (each weighing thirty grams and marked ‘Made in Italy’) to art patrons willing to pay the same rate as the current price of gold” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 288).
But What a Choice
Marvin “Gaye is a special case, of course. But the same forces that propelled this troubled artist into the ooze made ‘love men’ out of many other talented musicians . . . The assumption was that any woman in her right mind would prefer the love man’s smooth-talking, satin-sheets-on-the-waterbed approach to the ear-blistering screeching of …
Pseudo-Satanism in the Hedge Row
“In their ongoing effort to be naughtier than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones began making satanic allusions in 1967 . . . Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin, was a Crowley fan even before he accepted the Lucifer Rising job . . . By this route Satanism became heavy metal’s semiofficial religion, observed …
In Other Words, Not Breaking On Through to the Other Side
“Morrison never made the sustained effort needed to write even passable free verse, and his emotional range—from petulant narcissism to dead-serious angst—is far narrower than that of the least of his poetic idols . . . booze became the formaldehyde in which his adolescent hangs-ups were preserved” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 238).
Bureaucratic Bishopric
“This is the besetting sin of American presbyterianism. When an association of independent churches, or the representatives of presbyterian churches, makes the mistake of establishing a permanent headquarters somewhere (minium requirements: one desk, one phone, on file cabinet), a certain type of bureaucratic mind is immediately attracted to the important task of getting the papers …
Ain’t It the Truth?
“Like free jazz, art rock proves once again that total freedom is enabling for a handful of geniuses, but disabling for everyone else” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 222).
Labels and Bottles
“Having gotten this straight, we must then factor in the problem of labels and bottle contents. In a perfect world, things would be what we called them — health food would be healthy, guaranteed savings would be, and so on. But this is a fallen world, and we can find, for example, both ‘independent’ and …
Idol Place
“If the desert is the place of demons, the city is the place of idols” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 54).
That, and Singing Through Your Nose
“The truth is that Dylan, like most of his generation, learned most of his folk music from records . . . But to folkies bewitched by the blues, roughness epitomized authenticity” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, p. 212).
Aluminum Discipline
“We must beware of a too great reliance on a systematic reconstruction of the various references to discipline in the New Testament. matthew 18 is not a paint-by-numbers kits, and we should not assume that when we get to ‘stage two’ in a discipline process that we are at the second rung of a metal …