OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!-YEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAH!!!

Thanks to my old pal Stinky Weasel for bringing this to my attention. If you listen closely, you can hear the banjos a-strummin'..

ERROR IN ARKANSAS LAW LETS TODDLERS WED
By ANDREW DeMILLO, AP

Posted: 2007-08-18 04:09:33

Filed Under: Law News, Nation News

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Aug. 18) - A law passed this year allows Arkansans of any age - even infants - to marry if their parents agree, and the governor may have to call a special session to fix the mistake, lawmakers said Friday.

The legislation was intended to establish 18 as the minimum age to marry but also allow pregnant teenagers to marry with parental consent, bill sponsor Rep. Will Bond said. An extraneous "not" in the bill, however, allows anyone who is not pregnant to marry at any age if the parents allow it.

"It's clearly not the intent to allow 10-year-olds or 11-year-olds to get married," Bond said. "The legislation was screwed up."

The bill reads: "In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage."

A code revision commission - which fixes typographical and technical errors in laws - had tried to correct the mistake, but a group of legislators said Friday the commission went beyond its powers.

"You're either pregnant or you're not pregnant," Sen. Dave Bisbee said. "Rarely will that be a typographical error."

The Arkansas Legislative Council asked the independent commission to reverse its correction. Several lawmakers said a special session may be necessary.

"We need a special session to fix this," Sen. Sue Madison said. "I am concerned about pedophiles coming to Arkansas to find parents who are willing to sign a very young child's consent."

Before the new law took effect July 31, girls could get married with parental consent at 16 and boys at 17.

The Legislature formally adjourned its session in May and is not scheduled to meet again until January 2009, unless Gov. Mike Beebe calls a special session. Beebe said he wanted to look at all options for correcting the error before deciding whether to call a special session.

DOGORA (1964)

Toho Studios made more kickass and just plain downright entertaining giant monster flicks than anybody else of the planet, a genre that the Japanese have made uniquely their own despite us round-eyes getting the ball rolling with fare like KING KONG (1933), THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), and THEM! (1954), but when they tried to shake up the tried and true formula in questionably experimental ways the results could be disastrous. I mean, who in their right mind would think a fusion of the daikaiju genre and crime drama would be a good idea? Apparently the brass at Toho did and the result was DOGORA, an intensely boring, completely uninvolving waste of time, money, talent and celluloid that pissed off the 4:30 MOVIE generation whenever it was unwelcomely wedged into an otherwise watchable "Monster Week." No joke, it was so bad it almost made you pray for the advent of THE PEOPLE'S COURT and OPRAH. And the American distributors didn't even bother to spell the title right! (They spelled it "Dagora.")

Basically, a constantly mutating extraterrestrial life-form shows up on Earth and starts eating coal and diamonds, the ingestion of the latter causing much consternation to a bunch of inept jewel thieves. That's pretty much it, and way too much of the film's running time is spent on the crooks, a bunch of dolts that you just won't give a shit about, and in what's allegedly a giant monster flick that's an unforgivable flaw. In fact the film has only one sequence worth checking out, and that when Dogora, in its flying jellyfish-like form, sucks up a shitload of coal and rips apart a suspension bridge.

The puppet used for this is quite elegant and believable, its tentacles given life by cel animation and its body gracefully belying its enormity, truly a one-of-a-kind member of the Toho bestiary. But even that one moment of interest just isn't worth enduring the entire film. The attempted blend of city-destroying monster epic and jewel heist movie simply doesn't work, and the finished product can't have done well at the box office, not even in its country of origin.

And now this unholy mess is available on DVD.

Why?!!!? Even us giant monster diehards fucking hate this movie and wouldn't buy it, so who are they expecting to shell out even a nickel on this sorry black hole of entertainment? I was suckered by not having seen the film in over thirty years and hoped that I'd appreciate it as a grownup, but that was obviously not the case and I fear that other monster movie nostalgists may suffer in exactly the same way.

Bottom line: it takes a lot for me to flat-out pan a giant monster movie because even in the most pedestrian entries in the genre there's a slight chance that you might see something cool, but other than the maybe two minutes previously noted, and the presence of Akiko Wakabayashi — a sultry babe who in three years would go on to fuck 007 in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE — DOGORA is (to steal a line from the infinitely superior TOP SECRET) as worthless as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory.

If you never listen to me regarding any other film, TRUST YER BUNCHE on this one!!!

ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

Since the rock 'n' roll era dawned, each decade has experienced a youth-oriented motion picture that defined the zeitgeist of that generation; the 1950's had JAILHOUSE ROCK (1957),

the Sixties had A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964),

the Eighties got PURPLE RAIN (1984),

and the Nineties got COOL AS ICE (1991),

a stark cinematic statement that foreshadowed just how much the last decade of the twentieth century would bite the big one.

For those of us who came of age when I did — roughly between 1978 and 1983 — there was a lot going on in the pop music scene; arena rock like that wrought by the flatulent Kiss, the plague that was disco, and the punk rock/new wave movements all had their moments and to some degree each offered adolescents a sound they could call their own. It was twenty years past the birth of rock and over ten since the Beatles rewrote the genre, so what followed was a matter of everything getting hashed out as musicians were given more creative leeway in which to express their particular flavor of the form. The kids of my generation pretty much only had a choice of the rock camp or the legion of disco followers with which to stake our alliances, and the big movie for the disco contingent was the unintentionally hilarious SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1978), a film that made a gazillion bucks at the box office and transformed John Travolta from an amusing TV sitcom pretty boy into a bona fide superstar.

John Travolta shakes his booty into film immortality, while Karen Lynn Gorney gears up to sign 8x10's at the Howard Johnson's nostalgia expo.

Us kids what liked punk and new wave got 1979's ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, a perfect confluence of MAD magazine-style humor, teen fantasies of romance and rebellion, and the grotty three-chord majesty of the Ramones, unarguably one of the ugliest bands in the history of western civilization.

The Monkees they ain't.

Vomited onto screens from Roger Corman's New World Pictures and directed by Allan Arkush, ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL has only the barest of plots that serves as an excuse for silliness that makes it pretty much a live-action cartoon; Vince Lombardi High is a textbook example of an asylum where the inmates run madhouse, a place where the faculty can't cope with the exuberant, rock 'n' roll-loving students lead by Riff Randell (P.J. Soles, twenty-eight at the time and playing seventeen),

a blonde rocker-girl who's kind of the living embodiment of the spirit of rock. As the previous principal is carted away to the funny farm in a straight jacket, he is replaced by Miss Evelyn Togar (the incomparable Mary Woronov),

an over-the-top stern disciplinarian who looks like she could give Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS a run for her money.

The change in regime begins in earnest when Togar declares her intention of whipping the place into shape and banning all forms of that noxious rock 'n' roll music, a course of action that puts her at odds with Riff, and in no time the battle lines are drawn and a war of back-and-forth escalation begins. Riff's efforts are at first somewhat subtle, but as Togar's tyranny squeezes the school by the yarbles, Riff becomes a firebrand of humorous teenage piss and vinegar, going so far as to enlist the mighty Ramones as the shock troops for her takeover and ultimate apocalyptic destruction of Vince Lombardi High.

Thrown into the mix is a subplot about a preppy square (Vince Van Patten) who wants a date with Riff, while Riff's best friend, brainy Kate Rambeau (Dey Young), wants a date with the preppy stiff, but Riff doesn't even know the guy exists; her heart belongs to rock 'n' roll in general and the Ramones in particular, and there's an hilarious musical fantasy sequence where Riff sparks up a joint in her bedroom while imagining that the Ramones have come to visit her. Forest Hills' answer to the Fantastic Four serenade her with "I Want You Around," crooned by Joey Ramone, who looks like he was just reanimated by a particularly warped voodoo practitioner. Riff eats it all up, swooning in the presence of such a dreamboat, and when she's so aroused that she needs to cool off, she heads to the shower only to find songwriter/bassist/heroin addict Dee Dee Ramone strumming his heart out under the running water.

Yes, an electric bass in the shower. Don't quibble...

This scene is a triumph of sheer absurdity, turning such teen idol fantasies as seen in countless films since the 1960's on their heads and allowing the Ramones the kind of TIGER BEAT glamor-boy adulation that would never happen in a sane universe (and didn't). The only way it could have possibly been any funnier is if Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee had filled in for P.J. Soles.

And speaking of P.J. Soles, ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL would never have worked without her; her performance as Riff Randell, unattainable rock 'n' roll pixie, is peppy as a motherfucker and she embraces the film's cartoonish extremes with a completely straight face, yet while she went on to do STRIPES a year later, Soles never again had a role that turned her loose in the way that Riff Randell did. And that, my friends, is a cosmic injustice.

A cornucopia of truly silly sight gags and looney dialogue, some of ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL's highlights include:

• A ridiculous running gag about how loud rock music causes mice to explode.
• Miss Togar meeting the band and, utterly horrified, asking them, "Do your parents know you're Ramones?"
• Clint Howard's brilliant and enthusiastic turn as Eaglebauer, the school's most enterprising entrepreneur.
• The late Paul Bartel as stodgy but open-minded music teacher Mr. McCree, who at first thinks the Ramones are an Italian classical combo, and later becomes the one teacher who joins the rebellion and — with a completely straight face — declares the Ramones to be the Mozarts of the twentieth century.
• The three-day-long list of excuses Riff uses to ditch school so she can be first in line to buy tickets to a Ramones concert.
• "The Real Don Steele" devouring the scenery as DJ Screamin' Steve Stevens.
• The Ramones proving beyond all shadow of a doubt that they cannot act, a point that actually helps their performances.
• The filmmakers not pussying out, and actually blowing the high school into oblivion just before the end credits roll, a fantasy I had almost daily during my entire post-elementary school/pre-college education.
  

And the icing on the cake: a kickass Ramones concert staged for the film that captures the boys in their pre-Phil Spector prime, complete with a pinhead built and played by makeup genius Rob Bottin before he hit the big time with THE HOWLING (1980) and John Carpenter's THE THING (1982).

Gloriously stoopid, fast-paced, and balls-out fun, ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL is one of the last great 1970's B-movies and should be checked out by anyone with even the slightest interest in the Ramones. In fact, this would make the perfect top half of a double bill with END OF THE CENTURY (2003), and excellent warts-and-all documentary chronicling the history of the Ramones, a truly maddening case study of a pioneering band that never received the rewards that they were long due, despite influencing other musicians like nobody's business; it's a bit of a downer at times, but it offers the perfect counterpoint to ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL's ebullience and trots out the group's songs in a historical context.

Oh, and the only movie that nearly equals ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL in terms of outright lunacy and musical fun is 1983's GET CRAZY, also from New World and definitely worthy of a post all its own. (It also deserves a release on DVD immediately!)

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

"YOU SAYIN' HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME?"-ROBERT DeNIRO TURNS 64

Bobby D turns 64 today, so shave yer head into a Mohawk, curse like a sailor, and blast the living shit out of sleazy pimps and gangsters in his honor.

Or if you're too much of a pussy to do that, throw TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, GOODFELLAS, or MEAN STREETS into the DVD player and revel in his complete fuckin' excellence.

ELVIS PRESLEY IS STILL DEAD

Surprisingly, not a scene from a special episode of ACCORDING TO JIM.

It's the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the King, and I remember that day in 1977 like it was yesterday.

I had just barely turned twelve and was quite immersed in the history and music of rock 'n' roll, and although I had listened to a lot of Elvis Presley I just didn't get what the big deal was. I'd seen the footage of his appearances on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, suffered through a few of his (mostly) wretched flicks thanks to THE 4:30 MOVIE,

Elvis, about to molest a hand puppet in G.I. BLUES (1960).

heard the mothers of some of my friends describe how crazy and "naughty" he made them feel when they were teens, and witnessed the general public mention him with a reverence usually reserved for the Pope or some shit.

The "lost" Elvis movie, NUDE HAWAII (1961)

This across-the-board worship didn't sit well with me at all since I considered Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis to each be far superior in terms of both musical output and sheer showmanship — to say nothing of being balls-out crazy in the case of the latter two — and I scoffed at Elvis' Las Vegas career, a period described so eloquently in the film HEARTBREAK HOTEL (1988) as him "kissing the ass he used to kick," so I simply had no use for an icon that I felt was an overrated, bloated has-been in a Captain Marvel Jr. suit.

Think I'm kidding? Google Elvis Presley and Captain Marvel Jr. and see what you discover!

On the day Elvis died you would have thought the world had come to an end. The news was crammed with endless footage of beer-gutted, toothless trailer bunnies, their beehives practically touching the sky, bawling at the entrance to Graceland like they'd just seen their most beloved child shot through the head by a nude-from-the-waist-down Ronald McDonald with a bloody penis. Again, I just did not get it; this was the summer of 1977, the summer of STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a golden era twenty years after the heyday of the now-deceased hillbilly whose famous sneer sometimes made him look like a stroke victim. His music was now obsolete, dethroned by disco and the anti-monarchy vitriol of the Sex Pistols and things could only get better, right?

The Sex Pistols, aka Rock 'n' Roll Phase 2?

Well, all of that just goes to show you how little I knew in my twelve-year-old arrogance; the STAR WARS series would eventually turn to utter horseshit, the Sex Pistols fizzled out after one album — two, if you count the soundtrack to THE GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL SWINDLE — and disco, which started out annoyingly enough, would collapse under its own weight and played-out repetition (to say nothing of all that cocaine), and not long after that MTV would start the countdown to the death of not only rock 'n' roll, but pop music in general.

MTV: The future is now, and it sucks ass.

It wasn't until my college years that I reevaluated my opinion of Elvis and finally got why he was culturally important. For better or worse, the guy brought black music to the masses, had a look and a style that were totally unlike anything that white America was ready for at the time — or maybe it was ready and needed the boy from Tupelo to kick down the front door — could sing his ass off, irritated the shit out of parents everywhere while sending their innocent young daughters into fits of panty-drenching ecstasy, all of which is, as we now know, the very definition of what a rock star is supposed to do. Elvis Presley invented that shit. Let us review:

Sure, Chuck Berry was a born guitar-slinger who hauled underage white girls across state lines in order to violate the Mann Act.

Chuck Berry, about to duckwalk your little angel over to the Motel 6.

You're goddamned right Jerry Lee Lewis performed as if someone had hooked a high voltage power cable up his asshole just before he took a break to fuck his thirteen-year-old cousin/wife.

Is that the Mummy? Holy fuck! IT'S JERRY LEE LEWIS!!!

Yeah, Little Richard looked like the first contact ambassador from the Planet of the Flaming Hairdressers and shrieked like a Capuchin monkey on a fistful of Stud City animal stimulants.

"Tutti Fruity" indeed.

And not one of them would have made it onto the popular airwaves if Elvis hadn't blazed a trail of "unwholesome, race music filth" before them, and for that I could haul his mouldering corpse from the cold, cold earth and kiss him full upon his maggot-drooling lips.

The King relaxes between takes on the set of the stag reel masterpiece HOUND DOG HUMP (1958).

And as I got older I also found out about just what a twisted freak Elvis was in real life; all the creepy shit about his mother and her bizarre nickname of "Satnin," how he supposedly wouldn't fuck Priscilla anymore after she'd given birth to Lisa-Marie because her lady parts were now associated with motherhood (thereby driving her into the arms of Elvis' karate instructor), the escalating madness brought on by unimaginable excesses and prescription drug addiction, the deep-fried peanut butter and bacon and banana sandwiches, and all sorts of bizarro good ol' boy shit that the tabloid media still mines and we still devour, and probably always will. Plus, don't forget the religious-cult-like proliferation of Elvis impersonators and their oddball ilk, some of whom are actually legally empowered to perform marriage ceremonies, perhaps the ultimate white trash/kitsch statement.

But the crowning moment of Elvis lunacy can only be the time when the King, allegedly doped-up out of his mind on one of Dr. Nick's pharmaceutical cocktails, barged into the White House, presented President Richard M. Nixon with a gun in a beautiful wooden collector's case, congratulated him on what a great job he was doing running the country and asked to be appointed as an honest to Christ agent of the D.E.A., an event which, thank god, got photgraphed for posterity.

I swear on my mother's eyes that I didn't cobble this together with Photoshop. Tricky Dick meets Captain Marvel Jr., for fuck's sake! I mean, you just can't make this kind of shit up.

So I salute you, Elvis Aron Presley. King of Rock 'n' Roll, karate black belt, master of every field of human endeavour — if you believe his movies, anyway — and total maniac. I will remember you this evening when I get home and spin the bootleg compilation ELVIS' GREATEST SHIT,

an incredible compendium of the King's all-time worst efforts, including "Song of the Shrimp," "There's No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car," "Dominic the Impotent Bull," and his incredible rendition of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm," in which Elvis outlines how the animals on the farm had better stay in line or else he'll eat them in a variety of ways. I may also break out Turkish Elvis impersonator Emil Nargi's cover of "It's Now Or Never,"

but I'd really like to get my hands on this gem, perhaps the perfect album to play on this day of days:

Sadly, I don't have THE ELVIS PRESLEY SEANCE, so I may pop over to O'Connor's and down a couple of shots in Elvis' honor.

THE KING IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE KING!!!

IT JUST GETS BETTER

You may recall seeing my pathetic work space when I posted this pic a couple of weeks back:

Well, yet more construction crap is taking place at the design gulag and the already tiny corner of the photo lab that I occupy is now serving double duty as a storage area. When the renovations on the office are finished I'm told that I'll have a choice office with all sorts of amenities for a copywriter/proofreader, but the renovations appear to have no date for completion so until that blessed day this is what my work space will look like:

Claustrophobic it may be, but at least I'm provided with more camouflage for when I write this blog or peruse the latest issue of BANGKOK SHE-MALE SPELLING BEE with my pants off.

PATHFINDER (2007)

Surprisingly, not the cover of the new Manowar album.

Since the tried and true genre of Cowboys and Injuns has been pretty much played out, why not shake things up with a story about Vikings and Injuns? That's exactly what Marcus Nispel, director of FAITH NO MORE: VIDEO CROISSANT (what the fuck is that supposed to mean?) did with PATHFINDER, and while I found the results to be a bit uneven I was nonetheless intrigued by what he attempted.

Taking place roughly 600 years before Columbus set his greasy foot on this continent and fucked up everything, PATHFINDER tells the story of a young Viking boy, the only survivor of a raiding party to North America that somehow went awry — exactly what happened is never explained, but the kid is found in the hold of a half-submerged longboat, along with the bodies of shackled slaves and other Vikings — who gets adopted by a village of local Injuns and is renamed Ghost (we never find out what his original name was, either, but we don't really care anyway because it's irrelevant). The tale then skips ahead by fifteen years and now Ghost is a hunky, shirtless grownup played by Kiwi heartthrob Karl Urban, better known to fantasy film geeks as Eomer of Rohan in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (2002) and THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003).

Karl Urban does his part in the war against shirt-wearing.

Ghost's place in the tribe is pretty secure, but he won't be allowed to become a brave until he conquers his inner demons and determines his own true path; through flashbacks we find that he's still haunted by the atrocities committed by his kinsmen during the botched raid of fiteen years previous, a distinctly un-Vikingly state of pussifcation that causes his father to disown him. When another group of Injuns shows up, lead by the obligatory Yoda-like wise old dude — here played by the great Russell Means — this time named "Pathfinder," Ghost gets wood for the old shaman's toothsome daugher, Starfire (Moon Bloodgood), but the mushy stuff gets cut short when three Viking longboats show up, each filled with heavily armed and armored warriors out to kill anyone they meet, sell the survivors, and settle on their land, then moving on to do likewise to the next village and so on. The leader of the horn-headed heels is Gunnar (my man Clancy Brown, totally unrecognizable under makeup, beard, and helmet until you hear his distinctive voice speaking in subtitled Icelandic), a balls-out killer and all-around scumbag if ever there was one, and since the film is shot using a dark palette that almost renders the film black and white, he and his comrades have the aspect of horned monsters rather than men, a psych-out they use to great advantage when wiping out Ghost's village while he's off in the forest.

Clancy Brown as Hagar the Horrible, er, Gunnar the Viking asshole.

When Ghost twigs to what's going on and who these scumbags are, he takes the fight to them with a savagery he'd long repressed, thereby launching a feature-length hunt for his Tonto gear-wearing ass by his offended Norse brethren. During the harrowing journey Ghost kills a shitload of Viking douchebags, hooks up with Starfire, faces a lot of deep shit that heroes in this kind of story seldom address — unless they're in a Kurosawa movie — and eventually discovers his one true path and purpose, a revelation that's more of a surprise than I expected.

PATHFINDER isn't a bad movie, but its trailers are rather misleading, playing up the admittedly gory violence that isn't as omnipresent as advertised or gratuitous as a gorehound like me would hope for, not even in the "unrated" DVD that I can't believe was considered too extreme for a standard R rating. The film is instead an occasionally slow-paced (though not boring) and thoughtful warrior myth with a dreamlike/nightmarish visual style that reeks of the director's music video experience. The murky color scheme doesn't necessarily help matters and at time renders the black-clad Vikings nearly invisible during a film that takes place largely at night.

The much-vaunted "over-the-top" violence is admittely gorier than much of what's on screen these days, but that's not really saying anything since today's movies are mostly made by and for a bunch of pussies. It's a fucking barbarian movie, you big Marys — the presence of noble and cool Injuns notwithstanding — so it's SUPPOSED to be gory and violent, and by throwing in all that deep introspection at the cost of mindless limb removal and spewing plasma the creators have fucked the target audience (and themselves) in the ass. If you're expecting balls-to-the-wall sword-slashing, I'd suggest the LONE WOLF AND CUB movies instead, but if you keep an open mind and have an interest in the shirtless antics of a sword-wielding guy who looks like he should be singing Saxon's "The Power and the Glory" then you may just enjoy the offbeat charms of PATHFINDER. Basically SOLDIER BLUE by way of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, I kinda dug it, but it's bound to disappoint most true sword & sorcery buffs out there. In fact, in comparison against another warrior epic with a brain, I have to say I liked HUNDRA (1980) a lot more as a work of sheer entertainment.

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

GARNERVILLE GETAWAY 2007!!!

As stated a few posts back, I spent the weekend of the 4th upstate at my pal Jared's Rockland County abode for his annual birthday cookout.

Jared cruises the highway in search of some tasty roadkill.

Upon arriving in the deep woods where mountain man Jared lives, we immediately hauled ass to the local supermarket and stocked up on food and supplies for the next day's festivities. The usual burgers, hot dogs, Eye-Talian sausages, and nibbles were obtained, and Jared had pre-made two batches of his patented chili, while yours truly set to work on stuffing two five-pound pork shoulders with garlic and seasoning them for what would would become a sixteen-hour, in-oven slow-cook.

BONUS RECIPE SECTION!!!

The process is simplicity itself: poke holes into the meat to accommodate however many garlic cloves you like — crack the garlic open first on a flat surface with the side of a wide knife to smack over it — and once the stuffing is done place the meat into a deep roasting pan. Season as you like, but I recommend salt and pepper, liberal sprinkling with adobo and that orange seasoning in packets that can be found along with Goya products in the "ethnic" food section at the local supermarket, making sure to season both sides, add about an inch of water and then place uncovered in a pre-heated oven at 300 degrees for about two hours. Then take the pork out, add a few shakes of liquid smoke — found in the aisle with the barbecue condiments — then seal the roasting pan with a double thickness of heavy-duty foil and return the meat to the oven. Drop the temperature to about 210 degrees and forget about it for the next fourteen hours. I mean it, just ignore the fuckers. When all is said and done, your pork should look like this:

Actual shot of pork just of the oven in Jared's kitchen on Saturday morning.

The meat will be tender like you won't believe, and take care to peel off the skin in one piece if possible (more on that shortly).

With the skin removed, the pork will reveal a glistening layer of artery-clogging tastiness and it's up to you to decide how much fat you want to leave attached when you pull it into a form more conducive to eating in a shredded mound or on a sandwich. As anyone will tell you, the flavor is in the fat, so don't dump too much of it. But then again, if you're gonna eat this stuff you know what you're in for.

Once you've solved your fat issues, use a pair of meat tongs and grab the large bone that's visible in the pork. Grasp the bone firmly and tug; the bone will dislodge with the ease of pulling a finger out of a velvet glove.

Once that's removed, poke around with a fork to locate any remaining smaller bones and gristle and remove that stuff. Then take a sturdy fork like one of those big fuckers some people favor for the grill — I don't because poking meat lets the juices out; only use tongs or spatulas for grilling! — and gently swirl through the meat like you're using a frosting-spreader. The meat will fall apart like magic, and once you've made sure no excess bones or other such crud remains I would advise tasting the pork to determine if it needs any additional seasoning or tarting up. I'd go with some more adobo, salt, pepper, or sage, but only you can know what's best for your by now drooling audience. Serve as is with some sauce of choice — I recommend making some of my patented Barbecue Loooooooooove Sensation sauce — or throw that gorgeousness onto some white bread or a good potato roll and prepare to watch your guests go into spontaneous culinary orgasm.

And as for the previously set-aside skin, put it non-fatty side down onto a baking tray or cookie sheet and hit it with a little adobo and finely ground cayenne pepper. Heat the oven back up to about 300 degrees and put the skin there for about a half hour to forty-five minutes, checking occasionally with a spatula to prevent sticking. When it's crispy enough for your taste, take it out and cut into appropriate sizes for homemade pork rinds, but don't serve them until they've almost at room temperature.

Anyway, back to the narrative.

Along with the pork I also prepped some half-chickens and let them marinate for a couple of hours in lime juice, and as I was doing that the guests began to arrive. The usual suspects made it from various points in New York state and each came bearing food, booze, and prezzies.

I set to work at the grill, this time being able to say a hearty "fuck you" to Matchlight charcoal, that shit what gets chemicals all over food that you're going to serve to innocent people and children, because Jared got his hands on one of those fast-starting coal chimneys I'd heard about.

You stuff the bottom sixth of the tube with balled-up newspaper and then fill the upper portion with your coals. Set the paper alight, let it burn for about fifteen minutes and then you have a decent amount of ready to roll coals which you distribute by grabbing the handle (with a hot-mitt, duh!) and pouring out into your grill. I highly recommend adding one to your arsenal of grilling equipment, to be proudly stashed next to that most important piece of cookout gear, a really stupid hat.

Yes, horns make the grill sorcerer.

Over the course of the day I got to catch up with many folks I hadn't seen in at least a year, such as Jim Hoston, one of the other crazy Negroes from my years in the Marvel Bullpen.

Jim's an unfairly talented painter and is also funny as a motherfucker; remind me to tell you the story of his impromptu and incongruous tea party during the middle of the work day that caused our boss, Virginia Romita, hilarious and grievous mental confusion.

This assortment of louts all worked at/for Marvel over the years, and of note among them are legendary inker extraordinaire Bob Wiacek (the bespectacled dude in the Astro Boy t-shirt) and Julio "Hershey" Herrera, the guy on one knee who isn't Jared. Julio was a wide-eyed young intern when he landed at Marvel over a decade ago, and the Bullpen was bound and determined to destroy whatever innocence in him that we could, a campaign that has yielded spectacular and endlessly amusing results. Completely unfazable nowadays, Julio's first taste of the sick world of comics was me giving him directions about navigating "the Hershey Highway," a destination that he soon found out wasn't exactly a paradise of dark chocolate confections.

Eddie Murr, Hopewell Junction's answer to the kid from DELIVERANCE.

Eternal Never-Never Land ambassador Eddie Murr was also there in fine form, his sense of whimsy having diminished not one iota over the twenty-one years of our association. Ed is unique in his ability to reduce even the most somber of situations to a level of childish sophomorism that I treasure most dearly, and his ability to make me laugh my ass off has pulled me out of some of my darkest emotional states. Having the guy as a fellow Bullpenner was an epic gut-buster in and of itself, and someday I'll have to give you more Eddie stories than just the one about Chicken Slave .

Me and John Bligh, idioting it up for the camera as usual.

And lastly — but not leastly — here's Lia the K, who showed up at the ass end of things as nearly everybody had departed for home. I wish she'd been there all day, but it was nice to see her cuddly self even for a few minutes.

And she proves once and for all that chicks really do look cute in horns.

So that's it for this year's Garnerville Getaway! Wish ya coulda been there!

BARBARIANS ON THE SUBWAY

Conan the Cimmerian, as illustrated by Mark Schultz.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."
- Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix on the Sword," 1932.

The daily subway commute is the perfect time in which to catch up on one's reading, and I'm always nosy about what my fellow rail-riders are consuming. Every day I'm surrounded by straphangers whose awareness of the world is cut off and their full attention focused on ghetto romances — the covers of which invariably features photographs of nude black women tastefully seen from behind as they simper before some MANDINGO escapee with a "Body-by-Riker's" physique — the umpteenth STAR TREK novel, yet another V.C. Andrews captivity and incest opus, whatever book Stephen King's shat out in the last half hour, tomes that romanticize New York City to an antiseptic degree, Harry Potter doorstops, and current bestsellers, and while the predictability of fare is pretty much constant I'm sometimes thrown an unexpected curveball by a reader.

This morning as I waited for the R train to haul me to work I glanced to my right and saw a partridge-figured fifty-something blonde lady (painfully obvious dye job) reading a book that looked familiar, like one of the horde of esoterica found on the shelves in the Vault. I adjusted my glasses and took a good look at the book she was engroosed in, and my heart was gladdened to see this school teacher-looking woman devouring Robert E. Howard's THE COMING OF CONAN THE CIMMERIAN, a book for the lads if ever there was one and absolutely not what I expected to see in the eager hands of Mrs. Garrett from THE FACTS OF LIFE.

The lady noticed me checking out her book, which she then held up to display the cover and said, "Howard sure can write!" I smiled knowingly back at her, glad to see one of the minus 327 women I've ever witnessed reading such stuff. Women are no strangers to fantasy literature, but I usually see such readers engaged in Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, and other such "girly" authors, while a scribe like Robert E. Howard is more likely to attract men and adolescent boys with his dark, atmospheric tales of bone-crushing warfare, inhuman monsters, and lush-bodied women who think nothing of going an entire story clad in naught but a sword belt and buccaneer boots. I mean, the guy created Conan the motherfucking Barbarian, for fuck's sake! Short of Tarzan, does it get any more testosterone-ridden than that?

Frank Frazetta's "The Barbarian" (1966), the defining image of both Conan and an entire genre.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Howard did more than just spin yarns in which blood, gore and titties ran rampant; Howard's savage, manly worlds were rendered with care, believability and a compelling skill at storytelling that elevated his pulp material to the level of quality literature by virtue of his exceptional talent as a writer, a talent driven by inner demons that lead him to take his own life at the age of twenty-nine. Edgar Rice Burroughs may have been more prolific and infuential what with creating my man Tarzan of the Apes and all, but if truth be told Robert E. Howard left Burroughs in the dust when it came to the sheer artistry of writing. Where Burroughs could spin a rousing yarn, Howard was in all ways the very definition of an artist.

Robert E. Howard.

If you've never read any of his work, you owe it to yourself to take the lady subway-reader's cue and dive headfirst into just about any of Howard's stories, and if I may suggest you'd do well to get started with the book she was reading, and its followups, THE BLOODY CROWN OF CONAN

— containing the excellent "A Witch Shall Be Born" — and THE CONQUERING SWORD OF CONAN

which brings "Red Nails," maybe the most well-known of the Cimmerian warrior's adventures, back into print. Great reads all, and if you dig those I'd also like to steer you to THE SAVAGE TALES OF SOLOMON KANE,

a less-savage helping of Howard's patented, eerie Sword & sorcery only this time featuring a puritan swordsman's globe-spanning war against evil. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!