A new Reverend Al.

Al Goldstein isn’t really relevant to a generation of people under the age of say 35 or so.

To a generation of people over that age though, Al was something of a pioneer in a lot of ways. People over 35 can still readily accept a world without cell phones, email and the Internet. In a world where easy access to pornography wasn’t readily available through the World Wide Web, the garish weekly Screw magazine and the late night cable show Midnight Blue were both forerunners of an underground scene that becomes ever more part of the mainstream daily.

“The World’s Greatest Newspaper” — was founded in 1968 by Al Goldstein. Begun as a response to a burgeoning sexual revolution and to the air-brushed soft-pedaled sexuality in magazines such as Playboy, Screw set out to be the most outrageous magazine of its type. Printed weekly in New York City, in tabloid form, it quickly succeeded, reaching a circulation of 500,000, and making armies of enemies among conservatives and the “moral hypocrites” in government that Screw had vowed to fight...

Screw is best known for its alarmingly frank representation of sex, in both lurid photographs and prose that has continually pushed close to the edges of protected speech. Founder Al Goldstein continually beat back the government forces that have tried to stifle him and has won a series of obscenity cases...

Screw is also legendary for its covers, which have featured a Who’s Who of American underground cartoonists, such as Robert Crumb, Vaughn Bodé, Wally Wood, and Danny Hellman.

After discovering Al’s blog, I find myself captivated by his take on the world - none of the piss and vinegar that made him such a charlatan back in those halcyon days has disappeared, if anything he is railing against the vagaries of life with an even louder and more indignant voice as exampled by this entry:

It has long been argued that only cowards kill themselves. The truth of that is self-evidenced by getting old and eating lunch at a senior citizen’s center. While slurping my pea soup along with these other dreadfully boring old fogies, death in my mind becomes an expensive cashmere blanket that will give me the peace and serenity I desperately long for. The greatest sin helps you forget everything you ever learned or read. I imagine the real joy is of it like a non-surgical frontal lobotomy that spares you the indignity of being discovered in a house of horrors.

If you have ever watched a loved one succumb to the vicissitudes of time, you can strongly identify with those words above.

The other thing I ran across when I was looking around for stuff for this entry was this: