Conan the Barbarian vs. Minnie Castevet - Round 34

Here are some random notes I found hidden in an old glove along with some tannis root and a 5 demon bag:
1. CASTAVET!

The trick when you realize you live in a world full of cults and Satanists is not to panic, man. Don't fall into the Satanic panic-- Instead, become the Buddha - it’s like surfing - become the surfer when frenzied doctors and concerned therapists are still not quite sure it’s an ocean. By the time they declare the waters safe for wading, you’ll be on the other side. (chorus)

Thought upon thought layered upon itself, ad infinitum, the big breakthrough, time and space echoing in all directions around you, like two mirrors facing each other, but they’re ONE!

2. CONAN!

Conan with your sword and German accent, be real unto the riddle of steel, cwush your enemies and hear da lamentations of der women. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, As far as Conan is concerned, the only thing to do with witches is make love to them if they are beautiful and to behead them if they are plain.

Now I think of those thickened Americans in the middle states, such as my Arizona-livin' brother, Fred. If times were different, would I not, for all my big city wickedness and forbidden knowledge, be killed by them?

I see them shrinking in fear from the terrifying darkness Polanski can dredge out of Ruth Gordon’s clown-cake make-upped old lady smile.

I see my Arizona brother wince when I make some smart-alecky intellectual remark about the repressed homosexual complexes underlying televised football.

You can bet my brother and/or Conan does not dig New York intellectual types and their fathomlessly evil complexity, but then again "evil complexity" is redundant, is it not?

Evil is complexity, Good is bland: long straight clean jaws and healthy diets, chomp chomp chomping on cigars, salads and steaks. I imagine Arnold as the Terminator Vs. The Old Jews cackling and summoning their ancient Satan in that big spooky upper west side Dakota building. Them drugging Mia Farrow and combining mental powers to blind competitors and Arnold, Governor of California, free of all mental powers, who would never dream of touching drugs, mowing them down with his uzi.

Arnold with his million swords and acre-wide white teeth - all the combined mental force of the Castavets would be a mere headache to mighty Conan. Panic attacks and paranoia are unknown to those who swing broadswords at mosquitoes and ask questions never.

3. Vacation is Nowhere

Average People go on "vacation" with their bodies but keep their minds safely a few weeks back in time. They use their bodies like NASA uses space rovers; as a combination camera and souvenir procurer. Once their mind catches up to the trip they experience it via sense memory as they gaze at/identify with the pictures they took from the safety of home.

Mom assumes a monotone when showing the pictures from the trip, delivering the tale of trying to order French fries in France; it’s intentional, the monotone, to make you bored, to not want to probe the discussion for little tidbits of detail which will not be there. Ditto the simplicity of Conan vs. the intellectual concealments of the Castavets.

The tidbits you might ask were “Why was she there?” What do we seek from foreign lands? Why do we go traveling when we can watch the travel channel for free and not get bit by mosquitoes or catch drafts in old hotels? Why oh why would we sign on to get our own wife pregnant with the devil just to make Tony Curtis go blind?

Conan travels, because he is mindless body. His brain never catches up with his actions.

Castavets do not travel, yet know all things and inflict harm from telepathic intent, their minds are already far ahead of you by the time you see their physical shells.

So, my dear reader, you do the math, oil the sword, feed the horse, and stay away from the upper west side.

Or would you rather be a duck?

Happiness is the Birthday of Dean Stockwell!

In honor of Dean Stockwell's birthday, some musings on my two favorite Dean performances (so far):

1. Dave in PSYCH-OUT (1968): 

For me, PSYCH-OUT is the best film ever about what it means to be a drugged-up hippie in a band in the Haight-Ashbury in 1968. Mind you, I wasn't in the Haight in '68, but I was born March 2nd in 1967, three days before Dean's birthday - and became a hippie musician while at school in Syracuse in '86 - which had then (and maybe still does) a huge hippie-deadhead counterculture, so dyslexics and the very very high will appreciate the similarities, which don't end there: As the "Syd Vicious/Barrett"-acid casualty bassist of my band (The Mexican Mud), I played the calm voice of artistic "integrity" to my practical band leader /rhythm guitarist Dave. Imagine my delight in finding my onscreen representation in PSYCH-OUT is named Dave, and played by a young Dean Stockwell wearing a gaudy Native American headband / hair wig (probably the closest thing he could find in the AIP costume closet) and playing the psychedelically enlightened no-longer-in-the-band shaman / Syd Barrett / Brian Jones / Pigpen / me to Jack Nicholson's fame-crazed lead guitarist, Stoney.

We first find Dave living inside a shed on some random downtown roof, where he sits in stoic contemplation of the patterns of light beaming through the box cracks. Free of desire and fear and money is he, hey immediately he starts coming onto Jack's deaf girlfriend, allegedly, the pretty tourist Susan Strasberg. She's come to town to find her brother (Bruce Dern), an early prophet of the sugar cube, lost in the candy-colored clown throngs of the Haight. Stony lays his rap about her brother on Dave, but Dave just keeps his eyes trained on the girl. She's what's important, and we dig the sublime way Stockwell manages to be sincere and moving while hip and disaffected at the same time. Nicholson never could handle that sort of duality, even back then, and his sneering disaffection hangs heavy on him in a straight hippie role. You can feel his revulsion towards it-- that's actorly "conflict" - but Stockwell is resolved --believably beyond pairs of opposites.

Later, after their band's first gig at the Fillmore, Dave shares his drink, liberally spiked with the chemical drug known as STP, with the broken-hearted Strasberg (Stony's left with another woman). Little does Dave know that she's not "experienced" and doesn't realize what she's in for! STP is the advanced master class to LSD's kindergarten, which itself is a master class for any first-timers, and Strasberg's never even taken aspirin! Man, in Corman's THE TRIP, Dennis Hopper knows a chick who takes it all the time, man. Can you believe that? I took it once in the nineties and it damn near killed me... okay I'll tell the story..

It was a sweltering 4th of July afternoon in midtown Manhattan. The street asphalt was melting and sticking to one's shoe. I spent a tiny bit of STP's legendary sixteen hour peak at a party with a guy I swore was Francis Ford Coppola. He thought I was nuts! Nuts like a snail... crawling along... the edge... of a straight razor... Later I beheld the sad soulful eyes of what I thought was an old portly Native American shaman woman, a blob of flesh and white braids poured into a prime real estate balcony fireworks watching chair like she herself was a massive bean bag or half inflated balloon. We shared a deep look and I thought I was some great shaman healer, so I touched the center of her forehead, hoping to activate her third eye with my waves of STP-fueled compassion. She grabbed my hand all of a sudden and yanked me forward and started making out with me! I ran off --in terror --to my host's bedroom --where the ladies' son, a then-relatively well-known lead singer for a white boy funk band (then all the rage) who'd just been signed to Mercury. I didn't know whether to taunt him with it, or just keep my mouth shut... if you know what I mean.

So "ahem"- yeah, no way a newbie like Strasberg could handle it and soon she's on the streets in a fit of hallucinatory insanity, trying to find her LSD-drenched brother Bruce. Before she can get hit by a car Dave gives up his life to save her and later casually notes, "I hope this trip is a good one," right before croaking.

He was some kind of a man.

For Dean Stockwell, at any rate, yes, it's been a hell of a good trip. This man's been in pictures since he was the baby of Nick and Nora Charles!

2. Edmund in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962)
Here Stockwell was a mere 26 (which lets you know, incidentally he was over 30 in PSYCH-OUT), but he holds his own against Kate Hepburn, Jason Robards and Sir Ralph Richardson as Eugene O'Neil's uber-dysfunctional family of Irish drunks, junkies and theater folk.

Luminous and gorgeous throughout, Dean's the vulnerable core of the film, holding back in group scenes, his eyes glistening with patient love or bewildered acceptance, but emerging in his tet-a-tets with the other family members as O'Neil's character, the young man whose own recently diagnosed tuberculosis prevents his willingness to pretend nothing's wrong, to look the other way at his mom's slide back into morphine abuse or his dad's miserliness. Stockwell projects an impressive mixture of tenderness and impatience, love and disgust, changing on a dime, and the poetic duality-transcendence to bind them all. It's the transcendence that comes as a reward to adults whose childhood was spend growing up around chronic dysfunction. They should show this movie in rehabs!

You can see Stockwell was profoundly influenced by James Dean, in only the best of ways, by which I mean he captures Dean's softness, his playful, gentle spirit and ability to method act from cuddly kitten to brawler on a dime, but adds it to his own lexicon. Stockwell's not the sort of actor to imitate via the superficial trappings (jacket, hair, knife), or to fall into the sway of even the acting titans he shares the JOURNEY stage with. Here he's like James Dean in that you sense the sweet inner child that the veneer of disaffected coolness protects, alternating in doses that show behind the character is the actor and behind the actor... genius.

I could of course go into detail why his role here reminds me of my own life too, but it's less glamorous than with PSYCH-OUT, and hell, well, there you have it. A toast of STP-laced Kool-Aid, to Dean! Happy birthday, magical survivor of the Hollywood grist mill, you perennial Midsummer Night bloom on the tempest-toss'd rosebush of the stars! See you "In dreams!"

Eastern Promises collage details

I had a very bizarre dream involving Eastern Promises symbolism the other night. Cronenberg's strange and savage world of Russian mafia and Britishness makes perfect dream language. I was basically shooting up a lot of heroin in a cabinet with Viggo Mortenson, who smelled terribly of cologne. A lot of other weird stuff happened and I awoke in a strange mood. I've never done heroin but my dream life is full of it - a fine symbol of fear of addiction and the falseness of memory - for I "remember" the joys of being on junk when I awake, though it is just from the dream. If I was even more pretentious than I am, I would declare that this collage "Speaks" to the falseness of memory.
As a tribute to Cronenberg's motifs, I turn every straight line into a squiggling sperm or rounded with a womb. The topogoraphy of PROMISES is all about gilded cages and pulsing red secrets. The restaurant where so much action goes down seems like a giant, voracious dragon, swallowing food, drink, people.

Eastern Promises collage