(OR) WE CAN ROCK THE LOCKS BUT CAN’T BUY ANTON LA VEY’S FURNITURE
I was coming out of my daily space out session on the tube when after lifting my head my half-awake eyes began to focus on some big chunky words on one of the tube ads lining the roof right in front of me:

“WORKED FOR ME!”

There’s a little white pointer coming out of the W and leads to some indiscernable point in the background photograph. I guess this point is supposed to be the person that it all “worked for”. The ad was for London Metropolitan University. The background photograph was a red, hyper-saturated, blobby image of young, school-going types rocking out hard at some anonymous concert. Oh I get it, the person being pointed at is a student and she went to school and got into the music business. Clever.

As big as the title of the ad was, the thing that immediately caught my attention was the large percentage of collegiate rockers raising their hands in the air to create the devil horns, “rock lock” motif. And with this photo being super saturated and red, the image comes across like some twisted still in a Kenneth Anger film — those raised arms could be giant, angered horn-ed serpents rearing their scale encrusted heads out of primordial magma churning at the center of the earth. Around their necks could be chains fashioned into leash — chains held by Beelzebub, taking these enraged serpents out for a morning walk after coffee in the infernal chambers of hell.

Wait a minute! What’s this blasphemous scene doing in an advertisment for a prestigious educational institution such as London Metropolitan University? Surely the white collars on the University board are writhing in their guilt of sin, darting off to the confessional booths after the morning lecture to wash their souls of this filth!

But instead I marvelled at how a few decades of youth culture and it’s roaring guitar feedback, midnight bong tokes, and interest in the occult — anything that was opposite of the drab status quo of society for the greater part of the 20th century — have permeated in the media-saturated culture of the naughties. The same young kid caking his/her mohawk in Knox gelatin to circle mosh to the Dead Kennedys in the early 80s are now running a hedge funds investment portfolio in the 00s, but still likes to pull out those records once and again. These images and ideals of those times when things were new and frightening to the generations before have organically been sort of welded into the society that we see today. Universal symbols passed through documents and writings over centuries — the pentagram, the swastika, the ankh — change meanings or reputation based on usage, translation, or misuse in different societies and cultures. Anyone these days can find out as much information they desire about these symbols and meanings as the research is right there before them but perhaps with the over-use of shock and awe as a communication/consumer tactic these things no longer command as much power in the big, flashing, sex-soaked neon cauldron of culture and art around us in this day and age.

Rock out to some metal, mildly annoy your co-workers, get really wasted on Friday and Saturdays. Things may have lost some power but on the other side of the argument, perhaps more than ever people are actively seeking out education about the world around them and things less known previously — on things that were never as readily available or accessibly appealing as they used to be.

Neverless, I don’t think most of these horn-throwing folks are gonna be out checking out the works of Anton La Vey anytime soon, or more so even going out and buying any of his old furniture. I bring this point up as somewhere in my hazy memory I was once in a conversation with a member of a band at a show years back and he stated he lived near La Vey’s old place in San Francisco and bought some furniture and/or bric-a-brac from his place when he died in the late 90s. I would imagine that would add some seriously twisted “feng shui” to any apartment.