Blasphemy Day is a new internet-spawned holiday like Talk Like a Pirate Day or CAPS LOCK DAY. I’m not surprised that more people added typing like a pirate to their holiday calendars than typing in all capital letters, but I would have thought more people would have gotten into Blasphemy Day.

Blasphemy Day is set for September 30, as a tip of the hat to the riots caused when a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. According to the anonymously-run Blasphemy Day web site, “International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism . . . The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.” Noble aspiration, although I’m not sure a mean-spirited cartoon really advances human knowledge. Slaying sacred cows can be humorous (Heck, even the existence of the idiomatic expression sacred cow is pretty funny), but I have yet to hear anyone explain what the joke was in the Danish Muhammad cartoon, except maybe that it would piss people off.

I used to feel like each person’s individual relationship with their deity or deities or lack thereof was . . . well, personal. I am a fan of analysis and critical thinking, but I pretty much don’t discuss religion. I lived in Israel as a teenager and all major religions go there for debate. Or it being the cradle of three of the major modern religions. Or something like that. While living there, someone I knew complained to me about an agnostic debating him on his Christianity. He said he felt it was wrong for someone undecided to try to convince him that his religion was predicated on something he couldn’t be sure of because, if the undecided agnostic won the debate, they would have stolen his faith. His position was that his faith was valuable to him and being undecided meant nothing to the agnostic. I just did a quick Bing on the person who said that and he apparently is still losing and rediscovering his faith on a regular basis, so maybe he was actually the agnostic. Whether or not the person, who made the point on the value of faith for the believer, was an idiot probably doesn’t make the point invalid.

But then I lived in Georgia. And that totally changed my views on religious tolerance. I experienced countless people who considered themselves religious use their status as a person of faith to behave in incredibly bigoted ways towards those around them. Including me. I literally had door-to-door religion salesmen defecate on my porch. I had bakers ask me if I drank baby’s blood when I was trying to buy a bagel. (No, I eat bagels. Duh.) I had come across bigots before, but I’d never seen this level of intolerant, assumption-making, busy-body, beating-down of anybody different. I had a pretty normal punk reaction to Southern oppression in that it made me want to jump up and down on the tables, yell, and rebel. Blasphemy became utterly hilarious to me.

While kind of doing the couch tour in between Atlanta and Los Angeles, Forrest Black registered the domain BarelyEvil.com. (Do not click that link if you are at work, unless your office is totally cool with viewing naked blasphemers while on the clock.) He was amused by the idea of satanic teens and I’m a big fan of putting a site on a domain, once it is registered, so Forrest Black built Blue Blood’s Barely Evil, and we did kind of a lot of shoots involving crosses, fetish nuns, and devil girls. They were fun and creative. BarelyEvil takes a light-hearted approach to the subject matter. You can see a free devil girl gallery Forrest Black and I shot here and both those full series, in all their glory, are available in the Blue Blood VIP members area. We’ve shot a lot of different styles of devilgirls, but we did this style first with Dana Dark and later of Szandora, Scar 13, Masuimi Max, Lori the Gory, and Nina Sin, among others.

So, is blasphemy funny or mean, uncalled-for or needed, or some gray area combo of the above? Is slaughtering sacred cows a good thing or is the very expression “slaughtering sacred cows” hate speech? Are you ready to celebrate Blasphemy Day?

Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in the UK upon its overseas release in 1954. Ben Maddow, one of the writers on the film, went uncredited at the time, probably because he was blacklisted due to McCarthy era paranoia. So the movie is about rebellion. It inspired generations of rebels. The bike Brando rides is apparently his own personal Triumph. Even one of the writers on the movie was an outlaw. So it just seems like the movie should feel truly menacing. But it honestly feels more filled with innuendo and symbolism than menace.

Rebel Johnny has a second place trophy strapped to his bike, which has given thousands of film students what to talk about for half a century. Chino keeps stressing that he really misses Johnny and really wants to “have a beer” with Johnny to the point where the viewer becomes certain there is some sort of homosexual code in the invitation. The man driving the car which injures one of Johnny’s motorcycle club followers is said to be hopped up on vitamin pills and overstimulated. Were they prescribing Dexadrine to seniors in the fifties? I have no idea, although I’m terribly curious. I think of leather jacketed bad boys as being feral and rail thin grifters, but the BRMC or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club guys all appear to be gainfully employed and capable of paying for their beer and coffee and maybe a nice sandwich.

Johnny Strabler and the guys just don’t seem that dangerous by today’s standards. It is hard to tell how much of that is attributable to the times or the intentions of the moviemakers. Sunset Blvd. for example is a far darker movie and it predates The Wild One by only three years. Perhaps McCarthyism lead to a lamer approach to cultural danger in movies. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to create something camp, although this seems unlikely for a director like Laslo Benedek who first became known in America for doing the first movie version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, also a darker movie now that I think about it.

But maybe in 1953, a large group of guys dressed all freaky in leather and what my grandmother used to call “dungerees” were just terrifying. I certainly know some people in the here and now whose posturing for what they perceive as the normal folk makes me roll my eyes. And would probably come across campy in a movie. Yet a group of thirty or forty of them dressed to kill would probably frighten most small town dwellers. Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strabler is easily grabbed and beaten by the proper men of the town. This would probably be the same fate that would befall a lot of people whose eyeliner and hair frighten and horrify even now. You really can’t judge who will be dangerous by what they wear. A leather jacket or colored contact lenses might make a person doable, but it doesn’t make him dangerous. The same can be said for a suit. You just can’t tell what a cornered person will do by the cut of his gib. Actually, liking the cut of someone’s gib is a nautical reference, but doesn’t it seem like it should refer to haberdashery?