This is Your Final Warning

GET EVOLVED
And get erect. Get your bad self out on the dance floor and shake your funky aspect. Get in line and make that stinky primate scene. Get rid of that hair and do the sex-is-a-beautiful-thing machine. Get your cool unit stirring up that mess and get out of that scummy gene pool before you start to regress. Get off that hairy bottom and do the low-down Pope. Get your primal horde together and do the don’t-use-soap. Get rid of that HAM BONE and let a man do the man’s man’s man’s world where a man is King. Get out of that red red robe and do the bare-naked holy-father thing.

HIT ME ONE TIME - YEOW!
But what about that littlest sex machine? Did he die and go to Heaven to do the smokin’ burnin’ mess day and night before the Stool of Glory? Or is he in the Bottomless Pit with his hot pants around his ankles and a swarm of fiery vermin swirling around his head?

AND WHAT ABOUT DARWIN?
Do you like the idea of your daughter mating with a lower form of life? He drives up to the house, dragging the curse behind at the end of a chain, blows his horn and does some kind of prehensile hand-jive. Out she comes, a vision in pink: your baby, your chattel, your little girl. And with a black blast from the tailpipe he’s whisked her away. You know it! You can feel it! In no time they’re in the back seat, grunting and snuffling and co-mingling their DNA. Do you really want her precious pink bottom on that cheap vinyl car seat? Do you want her coming home already half-devolved? Bristly black hair on her tongue. Walking bowlegged and gibbering like the Queen of the Mandrills.

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!
It doesn’t make a bit of difference if you go up or down the food chain, you’re still food. Sure, Little Hammy can get himself elected Soul Brother Number One. Okay, okay, the Reptilian Herod can fight for a hundred years to regain the seven-tiered crown of Gnegg. All right, the Piltdown Man can pick nits out of his fur for a dozen generations and end up the Pope on Easter morning in his flashiest robe. But they’re still on the chain gang and they still can’t wash off the curse.

GO AHEAD, ASK THE POPE
He’s awake every night, counting out loud until the sun comes up and the Renegade Apes go crawling back to their holes. He’s grunting and grinding his teeth and still he can hear them out on the perimeter, trying to dig their way under the chain-link fence. He’s sitting half-naked on the edge of the seat, puffing on a filter-tip “APE” - his brand of smokes. They keep away the smell, but not the sound. Even with Blessed Virgin De-Jinxing Oil and the whole College of Cardinals chain-smoking “APE”s, he still can’t get any relief.

FUNKY, BUT AMAZING, GRACE
I thought I heard Martin Luther shout: open the window, let the vile vapors out. I thought I heard Martin Luther say: Hey, Father Babylon, mend your way. Cold and lonely in that Borgia tomb. High above the Pit of Doom. Get rid of those relics and that holy grue. Get rid of those sainted corpses too.

IT’S A FACT
In Darwin’s day, mummies were looted from their tombs and carted off by the Sons of Ham. The Pharaoh’s dusty flesh brought a higher price than his hoard of gold, black pearls, and funeral goo. It was no more an agent of eternal life than pink lint or Monkey Lard, but it sure got eaten up fast, once the fad caught on.

BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS
At this very moment, there’s a family of missing links driving a late model Eldorado with the Infant of Prague resplendent in pink dashboard fur. They’re singing “An Infinite Number of Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and trying to find the exit for the Afterlife. But their search will go on forever. They’ll stop night after night at the motels that Time forgot: “The Serpent Mound Lodge,” “King Herod’s Rest,” and “The All-seeing Eye of the Baleful Uhunis Inn,” and they’ll find the gene pool getting scummy because the lower forms keep relieving themselves into it. And with all this going on, you might well be wondering, “How’s a true believer supposed to get any evolving done?”

CALL IT FATE
Call it Natural Selection. Call it anything you want. The awful truth remains: Primates descended from reptiles. Primates actually are reptiles! It’s no great leap going from slimy scales to nice pink skin, given a few million years of bad hygiene. Hot-blooded, cold-blooded, who cares? Reptiles once ruled the Earth and now their smarty-pants two-legged descendants have taken over. Primates rule the World by remote control! Primates invented soap. Primates invented the Great Chain of Being. Primates invented the LIMBO. How low can you go?

LET’S GET PERSONAL
You can hide inside that monkey-love arouser matrix all you want, but sooner or later you’re going to stand bare-naked and perfectly pink before the throne of JUDGMENT. You can expose your Hairless Wonder to the Dark Patriarch, but you’re still going to find yourself at the edge of the ABYSS, wishing you’d brought along some powerful deodorant.

ARE YOU READY?
In those last days, the Jet-black Pharaohs will rise up in the East to slay the Funky Primate. The King of the Hominids will break out of his tomb and conquer the Golden Crescent. The stone-drunk Noah will stand naked again to lay a final curse on his son, but Ham’s shake-shake-shaking it off and screaming “Me am bearing your Drooly Doom no more!” Even the Whistler and BOOK OF RULES will get down off their thrones and join in. And at the stroke of Absolute Midnight, the Ace of Popes will flash across the sky trailing a plume of black miasma. The battle will rage for seven-times-seventy weeks and the outcome may very well depend on YOU. The key to victory is in your hands. The time has come. You’ve got to take a stand.

Satellite of Love

The last man stepped off the Moon in December of 1972 and the space age ended. The ominous nights of Sputnik and Telstar, the luminous days of Soyuz and Apollo, were over. Yet the glam in glamor still out-glows Venus or Sirius (the diamond dog-star). We can catch a glimmer if we turn our gazes outward. Something is up there, just beyond sight, beyond understanding. Something glistens and chitters on the sidereal horizon. Sex-change in the sky -transgendered planetary crossings - the radiation of the occult spheres.

“I watched for a little while,” Lou Reed croons, like a junkie over his spoon, “I love to watch things on TV.”

Bowie saw it and knew it first. But it was Lou who gave it a name: the Satellite of Love. Lou Reed, late to glam, the most lurid and lucid of the seers, was the true voice of the celestial shine (one third heroin, one third mascara and one third high frequency spectra). “Satellite’s gone” Lou sings, both celebration and lamentation, “way up to Mars.”

Lou Reed’s move into the trans-orbital limelight came with his second solo album. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Transformer gleams with some Ziggy Stardust fallout. The monster hit off the album was “Walk on the Wild Side.” With this, Lou managed to produce queasy-making titillation for the AM dial - with its fairy tales of cross-dressing speed-freaks and crystalline violet sweet tooth. What really pushed the tune to the top of the charts was the great and mysterious Herbie Flowers on bass (doubling electric and upright - he later claimed - so he’d get paid twice). The revelation, however, came with the second single off the second album.

This Satellite of Love is Sputnik after the secret operation. It’s Telstar with one last mysterious TV message to relay to earth. Lou put a sleazy man-woman transformer on the back of the album cover, forcing the obvious transvestite pun. This deflects attention from the far more important electromagnetic phenomenon - AC transformed into DC in order to power the cathode ray tube that was the heart of every TV.

In ‘73, soaking in the magic transmissions still had a televisonary aura - late night flicker, the mystic fuzz and flare - the warm hum and cooked-dust scent of vacuum tubes. The tiny disappearing dot in the center of the screen as it goes dead. Static fuzz and stereophonic buzz.

A year later Lou was the self-proclaimed Rock and Roll Animal, with black bondage leather and amphetamine twitchcraft. But on “Satellite of Love,” he’s the wide-eyed sky-dreamer. At first listen, the cut is just a charming bit of throwaway pop filler. The trannies and druggies from the earlier hit got all the attention. Now they’re banal clichés. The light of metallic orbital orbs, however, blinking and beeping in the night sky, remains with us.

The ghost of Soviets’ first silver ovum-in-orbit still circles the globe with bright morning-star spikes, a medieval mace-head without the shaft. A steely ball of transistors and diodes, Sputnik spins in silent gyres. It transmits the crypto-hit-tunes, traveling around the earth, around our thoughts, like electrons around the nucleus which is the thinker of those thoughts.

The Soviet code name was Object D. But after launch in 1957, the satellite became Sputnik - the name meaning literally “traveling companion.” The word “satellite” too has a rich occult genealogy, signifying: minion, fan-boy, follower, acolyte, worshipper. In 1962, “Telstar” had thousands of devotees as a big radio hit: guitars, organ, and the sound of rocket engines instead of voices.

“Things like that,” Lou confessed ten years later, “drive me out of my mind.”

His “Satellite of Love” came together in its ecstatic four-chord coda. Silvery lounge piano, finger-snaps, horns added in layers and then Bowie’s fey background vocals. The gorgeous whoosh of his “Ahhhh!” - hitting a falsetto D above the operatic tenor’s high C. The gleeful “Ah - ooooh!” like a glorious gay werewolf howling at the artificial moon.