More of Less / Megalomania

IN THE FUTURE...

1. ...I will write more IN THE FUTURE posts. I can't promise they'll be good or interesting or even worth the minor wear 'n tear on your monitor screen [the you in "your" is only hypothetical, mind you], but there "you" have it: I shall be productive! Even if I am yelling, Tourettically, in an empty cyber room, my "voice" reverberating like so many wanton pixels. I shall embrace the new ascendent ethic: MORE!!! MORE!!! MORE!!! Who cares if it's any good? How many Police Academy movies were there anyway? (If you know the answer to that question without further research, you should be promptly cudgeled with a multi-fuction universal remote.)

2. ...they shall construct a massive monument in my likeness on a moderately-traveled numerical interstate highway. Perhaps there will be an adjacent gift shop and, I dunno, a chocolate-covered banana stand. For a frame of reference, imagine--if you will--the statue of Thetis in her temple in Joppa in the early-1980's mythological adventure film Clash of the Titans by the stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen. Dame Maggie Smith (one of the few broads in acting who actually deserves her title) plays Thetis with supercilious aplomb here, but let's face it: she's slumming it in this flick. Yet, I won't cast the first stone because she's in boffo slumming company; we've got Sir Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Sian Phillips, Ursula Andress... oh, and the remarkably large-nippled Harry Hamlin and the terrifically out-of-place Burgess Meredith, too. Apparently, the Royal Shakespeare clique needed some quick g's for nose candy or amphetamines... Whatever. I won't judge. Anyway, Thetis (Smith) is pissed--I'm talkin' Tonya Harding-grade pissed--that Andromeda has broken her engagement with her son, Calibos, who, not incidentally, has been turned into a brown-skinned reptilian sort, who (I hate to say) resembles a souped-up nineteenth-century Semitic stereotype, right down the Jewfro and the bling. So Andromeda, being a hardcore shiksa from way back, says, "Awwww, hell no." She opts instead for Perseus (Hamlin: togaed, sandaled, and square-of-jaw), who will surely yield better wedding gifts since his pops is none other than CEO of the gods, Zeus himself (Olivier). (This is one hell of a digression, by the way. Feel free to run off, get some snacks, power wash your vinyl siding, clip your toe nails, and come back later when I tearfully reunite with the point of this story.) But Zeus tells Thetis, who is only a minor goddess and hasn't earned full vengeance privileges yet, to step off because his large-nippled son shall pluck of yon cherry tree, and Thetis and Calibos can go, jointly, bite it. Well, Cassiopeia, Adromeda's mother, (played by the wonderful Sian Phillips) majorly goofs while she is officiating at the wedding in Thetis's temple. (Thetis is the patron goddess of Joppa, you see.) It's fortunate, however, that Cassie does what she does because otherwise there would likely be no pretext for the remainder of the film. Cassie proudly remarks that her daughter is "more lovely than the goddess Thetis herself." Woops. This boo-boo essentially gives Thetis carte-blanche to meddle, and meddle she does. Her statue, which is, like, Statue of Liberty-height and, oh, by the way, standing right behind the wedding party, starts hella shaking, like 6.4 on the Richter scale, and the head--the fuckin' head!--breaks off and lands in front of the couple: she, dewy and virginal, and he, yet large of nipple. And then... how's this for showbiz? The statue opens its eyes and starts talking. (Let's see Cirque de Soleil pull off that kind of shit. I think not.) Anyway, Thetis says, in one of the all-time wedding day announcement bummers, that in thirty days Andromeda must be sacrificed to the "Krakken" [basically, the Creature of the Black Lagoon on steroids] (and furthermore that she must be a virgin because the Krakken is on a strict slut-free diet) or else all of Joppa will be destroyed! As you can guess, this is strictly an Austin Powers "Let's give the hero enough time to get out of the fine mess" scenario--because, after all, why can't Thetis be all "Zap! You dead, bitch" anyway? I'll tell you why. It comes down, yet again, to a little something I call Entertainment Value. Sure, Andromeda could have been instantly zapped leaving behind only a white robe in need of dry cleaning and a pile of virginal ash, but that isn't going to get your average Gentile adult to pay $4.00 to see a sword and sandal flick, even if the horned Jew is the villain. (This was the early 80's, remember? $4.00 is nowadays what they charge for an extra dollop of flesh-scalding butter-flavored topping.) One of my favorite stupid lines is when Thetis (as the statue head) says, with imperious hauteur, "[Andromeda] must be unknown to man." Then she pauses a beat and clarifies the euphemism: "A virgin." When I recite this line randomly in Real Life, I like to add more technical clarifications afterward, like "A man's erect member, in other words, must not have been inserted and removed repeatedly from her lubricated sugar walls until the aforementioned schlong ejects a viscous wad of love cider at high velocity into the inner, yearning depths of her Carlsbad Caverns." After this explanation, then Thetis could resort to graphs, charts, and Power Point presentations if necessary. So what does all of this have to do with anything, you might justifiably ask. Well, let me refresh your memory if you haven't lapsed into a semi-conscious state: In the future, they shall construct a massive monument in my likeness on a moderately-traveled numerical state highway, and it will be a lot like Thetis's statue in Clash of the Titans, which is to say that when people take a breather at the rest stop where my statue is located, take a sip from the drinking fountain in my left pinky toe, and say or do something that severely (or only minorly) offends me, my head (as in cranium) will break off, my eyes will open, and I will say something like: "Eat shit, you turd decanters. Oh, and by the by, one of you needs to have lunch with Krakken at, say, the Ivy next Thursday." Did I mention by any chance that the statue of me will enhanced somewhat? I figure if I had a larger proportional penis on the statue, then maybe kids and sad cripples and stuff could go up a corkscrew escalator in my leg and, when they reach my groin, descend a slide to the tip of my (other) head, through the window-hole of which they can look out over the majestic countryside (at $10.00 a slide) and maybe even buy a t-shirt or keychain fob. (Plus, in my statue version, I want my nose to be smaller. Not Diana Rossish, you understand, but a little less Eastern European.)