TECHNO VIKING

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http://www.moli.com/p/moliview/1_197741/article
(all rights on the text reserved by Jana Martin/MOLI)

REAL MAN CATEGORY #2: PRIMAL MAN
By Jana Martin/MOLI
Who is Technoviking?
Second in my categories of so-called Real Men is the Primal Shirtless Pale-Skinned Western European Tribalesque Tripped-Out Viking Guy.

This is a real category. We all know one: That larger-than-life male who somehow reminds you of the illustrations in your elementary school history books. Maybe it's the cheekbones, the deep-set eyes, the scraggly beard, the biceps as big as hams on a tavern table. The last time you saw him was on page 43 in the chapter on European invasions. He was wearing a helmet with horns, wielding a spear as he ran towards a village. He wore a codpiece, some leather necklaces, moccasin boots that went up to midcalf, and some kind of waistband/thigh-band contraption that held a knife sheathed at his side. Everything else was pretty much bare and rippling with muscles. Wasn't he labeled: Typical Viking warrior, circa 800 AD?

And now here he is again, making the rounds on the Internet. In fact he really stomped his boots on the ground in the year 2000 in the city of Berlin during a festival. It just took this long to get him out there. In the few weeks he's been online, he's attracted millions of hits, tons of blogging, and comments from inane to ridiculous to adoring.

His name is Technoviking. He was filmed in his pale, shirtless glory by a German media arts student (real name Matthias Fritsch) whose handle and website is Subrealic. Fritsch does a lot of beautiful, evocative, funny pieces, but this one is different. This one transcends any kind of pretense by virtue of its undeniable Warrior Star. In the way funny labels can be achingly true, he is, in fact, a Techno Viking. I'd argue he's way more Viking. The techno may have helped him fit into the archetype, but he didn't get that way without genetics and a whole lot of Barbarian time with weights.

In 2000, the filmmaker was at the Fuck Parade in Berlin. The Fuck Parade is a very serious parade, an in-your-face response by the serious German electronic music community to the Love Parade, which had started in the early days of yahoo electronica as a great coming together of people and streets and beats. That was back when people thought techno could save the world, in 1997: At the first Love Parade, the organizer, DJ Dr. Motte, led everyone in a yogic chant, "I am all quiet inside." But Western European capitalism reared its Teutonic head and the Love Parade was swiftly coopted by corporates. Now it's sponsored by a fitness company that chooses all the music and brands of beer.

And yet by far the strongest, fittest marcher was over on the other side of town marching in the Fuck Parade with the ragtag bohos, shuffling and jerking to the great techno filling the platzes and strasses. How the young, artistic Matthias with his "kneecam" (apologies but I could not verify if the kneecam was really a camera strapped to his knee) came across his Conan is a mystery, but on his website, the filmmaker insists that reality is stranger than fiction.

The scene begins like this: In a group of dancers, one blue-wigged, tripped-out fraulein in red pants is dancing even more so, her cerulean pageboy flipping as she turns. Suddenly there's a drunken idiot doing a bumrush. He grabs her, lets go, and lurches away. Girl keeps on dancing. Her friends keep on dancing.

But suddenly into the frame (we're watching a movie here) comes a giant, shirtless, muscle-bound, blond-haired, bearded guy, built on a scale that seems like he's from a different race than those around him. With a dead-serious look in his eyes and guardian's vigilance, he grabs the drunk's arm, says something we don't hear, and sends the guy back in the other direction from where he slovenly indicates he was headed. And then our enormous hero stands stock still, looking like a stallion protecting his herd, and lifts up his giant stevedore's arm and points at the drunken idiot, who is now behind the camera, and keeps pointing.

The giant then begins to walk. The herd around him follows. Someone hands him a water by placing it directly in front of his eyes. One sip and the Viking begins to dance, a crazy, goofy, techno dance, but wild and strong as if there's a campfire burning inside his head. Primal Man has come to the e-parade, in the day when an e in front of a word referred to ecstasy, not electronic as in e-mail or e-commerce.

Since his first appearance online, Technoviking has been dubbed, captioned, tracked to Michael Jackson, and thrown up on the U.O. "blog" site as if he was just discovered by that particular poser conglomerate. Technoviking has now made it to the mainstream. But why is he so popular? He's hilarious on some level, but he makes people think (or not think). He's a shirtless giant with an eight-pack, Clydesdale thighs, a bizarre Nordic-tribal assemblage of necklaces, very 13th-century hair, and a clear sense of right and wrong. That sense may be muddled by the chemicals he may have ingested, but he's the only one who reacts to the wrongdoer. And then he marches in mismatched socks and old combat boots and knee pants down the gray Berlin street, surrounded by skinny Germans. Most of the guys in the group are about half his general width: Their chests, tucked into drab T-shirts and hoodies, are about as wide as his thighs.

Tomorrow: So what's Technoviking's appeal?

Jana Martin is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Fashion & Design.

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Technoviking