FlamingText

Barbarian Love

  So I'm sitting at home after rehearsal on Saturday when the phone rings. It's Emperor Norton:
"You want to go see a midnight movie of Conan the Barbarian at the Egyptian tonight?"
"Hell yes."

   Because what else am I going to say? I had mostly fond, though admittedly vague memories of the movie. Fond memories dating from the point in my life when I would gladly pay cash money to see any movie that featured a protagonist who wore a loincloth and wielded a sword. The fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't act and barely seemed able to speak English wasn't really a problem, because he didn't really have do a lot of acting in this movie. He just had to wave a sword and look scary, which was pretty much a slam-dunk. *

   As it turns out, Mr. Norton knows the dialogue and narration of this movie by heart. I know this because on the way to the theatre he was reciting it with perfectly reproduced accent and inflection. It didn't really strike me as all that strange. I mean, if it was the Music Man or something that would be weird. Anyway, after a brief, fully narrated walk in the rain, Mr. Norton, Mr. Galt and myself found ourselves in the Egyptian (located in what appears to be an old Masonic Hall) at midnight, surrounded by a packed house of drunken nerds* , listening to the bombastic, distorted strains of Basil Poledouris' score as Mako narrates in solemn tones about of "Age of High Adventure."

   Now I know I always say that I'm not going to review a movie and then I go ahead and say a bunch of stuff about it until it basically amounts to a de facto review, but I'm not going to do that this time. If you're the sort of person who would enjoy a movie like Conan the Barbarian, I trust you to know that about yourself. Nothing I could say will change that one way or the other. But what I will do is describe my favorite part of the movie. It goes by so quickly that it's easy to miss, which is probably why I didn't remember it from years ago when I last saw it. It's in the middle of the sex montage.

   At this point in the movie Conan has encountered Valeria, who is a warrior- woman and a badass. She is played by Sandahl Bergman, looking an awful lot like a very buff, oiled Lita Ford. She and Conan are clearly made for each other. They like all the same things: Robbing, pillaging, swordfighting and slaughtering the minions of Thulsa Doom. It's a match made in barbarian heaven! * So after stealing an enormous jewel from the Temple of the Serpent they get drunk together and end up in some kind of boudoir (it may actually be a tent) surrounded by candles and braziers, getting down to business on a giant bearskin rug.

   The scene starts out about how you'd expect. Like every scene in this movie the camera lingers rather lovingly on Arnold's taut and burnished musculature, although this scene spends a little more time on his taut and burnished ass than many of the others. As with any sex montage in an R-rated movie of the era there are a lot of fades between cuts of entangled firelit bodies, the actors arching their backs and making sex faces, and slow pans upwards into the flickering candle light that gradually go out of focus. Standard issue stuff. And then, right in the middle of the montage, there is a shot of Conan and Valeria, sitting next to each other on that same bearskin rug, eating a whole chicken. They are just gnawing on big ol' hunks of chicken bone right there in bed with no plates or silverware or napkins or anything. Because they're barbarians! And sometimes, to keep their strength up, barbarians have to eat a chicken in bed. That's just how they roll.

And then they go right back to fucking.

  Like I said, it went by pretty fast, and I wasn't sure if I had just seen what I thought I had just seen. Sometimes I imagine things. So I leaned over and asked the Emperor:
"Was that a chicken? Did they just eat a chicken?"
"Yes. Yes they did."
"Huh. You know, you don't see a lot of that. I mean, in regular movies."

  The next week I went with Krebsy to see the symphony. This has nothing to do with Conan, I'm just mentioning it to show how I like to mix it up. I go between highbrow and lowbrow so fast sometimes, I'm worried I'll get the bends! It can't be helped.

Nobody at the symphony ate a chicken. There was no sex montage. In case you were wondering.

"And we will continue to devote our tireless efforts towards one day bridging the gap that divides fish from squirrel."

"Daring to envision a day when fish and squirrel can swim and scamper their ways, respectively, across the rocky crimson beach of animosity to reach blissful Unity."

"It has been brought to the Council's attention that a rival order has recently been making inroads."

"Immediate action is required on the part of all our membership to prevent further incursions. Remember that the true enemy is complacency, for when the members of the Order of the Three Waving Severed Right Hands act with one will and one accord, there is no Earthly power that can stand against us."

"This meeting of the Order of the Bescarfed Fence-trotting Weasel will now come to order"

I'm On Fire

Because of my unusual screen name I sometimes get asked if I'm a gay banjo player. In actuality I'm neither of those things (well, I do play a little banjo.) Mostly I picked that name because it was a random pairing of two funny words that, put together, made for an interesting image. It wasn't intended to be self-descriptive.

Even so, last night I accidentally lit myself on fire. I was standing near the mantel when I noticed an odd smell and heard a sound next to my ear that reminded me of that sort of sizzling sound that pop rocks make when you first pour the package into your mouth, and I had a second of thinking "what's that strange sound?" before I realized that my hair was smoldering because I'd leaned too close to a candle.

No serious harm done. The worst part about it was the smell. Still, inadvertently setting fire to myself is pretty much right in line with the week that preceded it.