Conan the Barbituate

And then there was the other night when I had the dubious honor of watching the remake of "Conan The Barbarian", an experience from which there is no recollection of the names of actors , directors or the gaggle of scribes who cobbled together the flimsy, inferior script. If there is such a thing, the film is a species of inept mediocrity, as there are examples of unstellar film making that at least have a level of technical acumen on display; "American Gangster" , directed by Ridely Scott and starring the quizzically droning Denzel Washington in a portrayal of an African American mobster, had at least a good look and was paced to the degree that one stayed in their seat, kept their eyes on the screen, curious to see how the other wise melodramatic tangle of film cliches turned out.Plus, New York City was used well in this movie. Lovers of architecture got an eyeful of vintage skyscrapers; "American Gangster" was mediocre drama, but it was a first rate postcard. "Conan", on the other hand, achieves only the least likely outcome, making you sing the praises of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the original film. Arnie's Conan was a lumbering force of a nature, a hulking mass of perpetually raging masculinity that slayed, raped and pillaged with the singular emphasis for hurt and destruction that the new Conan, by an actor who's name I cannot (or refuse to)remember, does not. The new Conan looks like a beef fed River Phoenix, with a face that is inward looking mass of narcissism; his two expressions are a smug leer and a grunting face that resembles nothing so much than a five year old boy's impersonation of The Hulk roaring "SMASH PUNY HUMANS". The violence, if one were to advance a theory as to how on screen dust ups, slashings and unrestricted carnage are a needed purgative for an audience's pent up aggressions, is piecemeal , weak, knock-kneed and , really, stupid. I felt stupid for watching it. I still feel stupid. That admission, of course, only confirms what some of you think of me and the long sentences I fill these posts with, but so be it. Alas, this time I am the fool for thinking that once, just once, I could appreciate this kind of movie as though I were still ten years old watching the after school action movie on Channel 7, wedged between dialing for dollars and the 5 o' clock local  newscast. It's way past 5 o'clock.

On the Golden Days of Rock Criticism

There was a vast and intimidating pile of rusted bed springs crammed into a cold cement room in the basement of my frightening apartment building that I was told to get rid of in order to satisfy some delinquent rent hanging over my head from six months ago; to help me do the job I decided to contact J.R. Young, a former writer for Rolling Stone who had been living in total obscurity in a town in Oregon whose name cannot be divulged due to profound lack of interest.

Young responded immediately and promised to come right down. My call had been the first he’d received since Walker Hickel had resigned from Nixon’s cabinet. “You called at the right time,” he said. “I’ve been trying to write about the new Leonard Cohen album and it’s been driving me insane for about four decades. Can you send bus fare?”

I was standing like an extra from The Road in torn blue work gloves, a filthy pair of industrial overalls and goggles in front of the room full of bed springs when Young arrived. We stared at the red flaking coils in endless rows before us – they extended outwards like teats on the belly an enormous metallic sow. Our slightest movement forward sent greasy dust motes dancing in the air – motes like notes from a fuzztone guitar played by some stoner nobody who got to make an album for Warner Bros. in 1971 because his manager also had a piece of Edison Lighthouse’s publishing, we both thought simultaneously.

We both lifted a set of bed springs out of pool of slimy standing water, producing a piercing shriek from the shivering coils. “So…what about Leonard Cohen,” I said, picking up the thread of an ancient conversation that, in fact, we had never actually had.

“Cohen is a serious writer,” Young began after a slight and rather formal throat-clearing. “His lyric exhibits the discipline and economy of academic poetry, which is both a hindrance and a virtue to his work in the folk-pop music idiom. A lot of people place what he does in opposition to Dylan, which I think is something of a mistake. When Elena Dilbaum finished her master’s thesis on the latter works of Swinburne, she thought of calling up her ex-boyfriend Seamus so she could listen to his copy of Songs of Love and Hate again, but she knew it would only throw her into a spasm of existential self-dissection…”

I knew Young had fallen into his zone of rock criticism-as-fiction, that discursive, absurd yet unmistakably sweet place where the early school of Rolling Stone writers sometime lingered to shake off the confining effects of commenting on the aesthetics of guitar solos and drum fills – a development I expected and in fact thought would aid us in clearing out the filthy, tentanus-infused bed springs by virtue of the wry, tongue-clicking humor they would bring to this fundamentally unpleasant activity. I realized that mulling over these unsolvable critical issues involving criteria of a hopelessly insular nature would slow down our efforts to clear out all the junk in the cellar but quickly reminded myself that I would have probably done nothing to remove it at all without the ability to simultaneously follow Young down the labyrinthine twists of his mind in pursuit of that micro-inch which separates brilliant insight from utterly useless grad-student mind-wanking dross. That’s just how it was.

“Seamus cracked open a bottle of Boone’s Farm and poured two shots into juice glasses he’d "borrowed"’ from a McCarthy for President fundraiser at some professor’s house a couple of years ago,'" Young continued as if reading from an invisible sheet of paper held in front of him."‘I don’t think we are quite ready for Leonard Cohen today,’ he told Elena with the serious mien of a Pulitzer Prize committee member or a dog show judge. ‘Each line in every song is the wrung of a ladder taking us down into the Uber-Canadian angst of Cohen’s soul, informed by the Franco-Anglo tensions of his upbringing not to mention the Hebraic cantorial tradition of perpetual expiation…’

“’…Can’t we just dance by the light of the cracked Philco like we used to?’ said Elena in a voice pitched somewhere between a plea and a grumble. “Aren’t I still your Sister of Mercy and aren’t you still the Stranger with the hand full of the Holy Game of Poker?’

“’Outside Seamus’ window, a hysterical sneer poured out of a dented AMC Javelin. They both recognized Dylan’s “I Want You”: “…your dancing child with his Chinese suit, he spoke to me, I took his flute…”’

“‘Dylan kills everything!’ Seamus erupted. ‘He’s a punk playing a man’s game! He’ll have to live ten thousand years to be able to find the garbage OR the flowers in Cohen’s back yard…’”

Young continued on in this vein for a long time, enough time for the Earth to revolve around the sun and the sun to spin in the galaxy and the universe to reach some sort of reset point in the great wheel of cosmic existence. God was slamming the typewriter keys and whacking the return bar hard; we were a footnote in an endless review that was in fact Existence Itself.

We piled the rusted bed springs in a dumpster and watched the car styles and hemlines changed around us. The Soviet Bloc fell and the Republican Party developed paresis. And still Young went on, skating on blissful shoals of parable…

“’Dylan went country, got domestic, raised a litter of kids and still couldn’t give back that Chinese flute,’ said Elena, sitting on the side of Seamus’ bed at 5 in the morning as he slumbered like wet laundry on laudinum. “’I’m gonna put on some Cohen and put on some coffee and burn some toast as black as the heart of pure hopeless martyrdom…’”