margaret gunning's house of dreams

Tin Man: I'd oil him any day

2012-03-05T10:14:00.002-08:00

Does tin really rust? Do we really care? As a kid, I was pretty fascinated with this guy. He was my favorite character, and I loved that scene where Dorothy oiled up his arthritic joints and set him free.

The Wizard of Oz came on TV once a year, and everyone looked forward to it with rabid anticipation. Even though we had to watch the whole thing on a small screen in grainy black-and-white (in fact, I had no idea most of it was in color until decades later), the so-called-blase kids of the '60s clamoured for this kind of fantasy, which was already 25 years out of date.

What the hell WAS a "tin man" (or "tinman", as he was more properly called) anyway? A lion you can understand. Even a scarecrow. But here was this mysterious metallic guy, who rusted solid while trying to chop some wood in the rain. He made squeaky little sounds that only the Scarecrow (who was really smart: hehheheheheheheheh) could understand.

(Causing my brother to say, on at least one occasion, "He-e-e-e-e-y! The Scarecrow's not supposed to be smart!" Another time, he even said, "That guy was already on. At the start. You know, on the farm." Weird.)

But it gets stranger: in the original L. Frank Baum series of kids' books, he was called the Tin Woodman. Even more confusing for kids in a relatively high-tech era. I have to confess I am still not sure what a woodman is: someone who chops wood for a living, or lives in the woods, or is made of wood like Pinocchio (no, strike that)?

But listen: this isn't where it started, at all. Back when I was trying to find images to illustrate the Dylan Thomas poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, I found myself in strange and disturbing territory.

There are some pretty gruesome images in the poem of bones cracking and people getting stretched on a rack. (This must have been written during one of his rare sober periods.) So I found myself wandering into the dark territory of Medieval torture and the Spanish Inquisition.

No, I won't get into that Monty Python sketch (though I was tempted: but it's Monday, and it would be too much work. Another time.) But when you see these things - do I even need to tell you what they were for? - it's enough to put you off your breakfast.

(Hint: this one opens out like an umbrella.)

Right. So what's the connection to the Tin Woodman? Not much, except they all seem to be made out of metal (and rusty metal at that).

I can see one of the King's lackeys oiling up this head-smasher so it would work more efficiently, or perhaps take longer.

I cannot tell you what I saw in this picture at first glance: suffice it to say that I never knew Woodie was so well-endowed. Oops, that's his arm, isn't it?

There were a lot of early stage productions (and a few silent film versions) of this story before it became a bouncy, quirky MGM extravaganza in the 1930s. Here the Straw Man, somewhat resembling a chemo patient, greets the Tin Woodman with immense affection. The two share the common trait of being inanimate, after all.

The original illustrations by W. W. Denslow portay the Tin Man as a reasonably friendly figure (despite his lack of a heart). A little on the skinny side, but MGM got that empty barrel chest just right. (Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. . . "What an echo!")

But then I found this one, which looks more like something out of a Whitley Streiber book. Is that big-headed, obviously alien figure putting his heard in, or taking it out? The tin guy's immobile face reveals nothing.

And this one, well, shit, he's a ROBOT and couldn't be anything else. I don't know how you could warm up to him or even want to apply the oil can to his seized joints. He's all cogs and gears and iron-clad Uggs, and if you look closely, he has a moustache. A sort of oven door on his chest should bear the inscription, "Insert heart here."

People made out of tin. The Borg on Star Trek. That hideous moment at the end of The Fly (the one with Jeff Goldblum) where he fuses together with the teleporter and emerges dragging chunks of machinery.

I don't know what it all means either, but it's cool.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

How Wilma Flintstone invented agriculture

2012-03-04T17:41:00.001-08:00

I have always had a horror of what I call "we-think". I triedto impress on my kids that it was crucial that they learn to think forthemselves. This involves developing discernment and critical thinking, but to do so, you have to stand up to a tide of resistance: ourculture now thinks that to be critical is "bad". It's "negative", andthat's especially bad. Always.

In fact, lots of things are bad, and none worse than trying to control our reality. We constantly hear truisms like, "The only thing we can change is our attitude."(Which is the hardest thing to change: in fact it is practically impossible, for we are alldeeply programmed by the culture we grew up in, and very few of us even knowit). This is to drive away the panicked powerlessness that would probably subsume us if we really gave in to the truth.

Dogma and isms rule our lives, and hardly anyone is aware of it oreven wants to be. Instead they regurgitate undigested mini-bites ofunexamined philosophy to reassure each other that they're doing OK, that they're followingall the (invisible) rules. If you follow these rules to the letter, you're"in". If you object or, worse, point out to others that you think they arein error, that they are merely following the herd without questioning itsscrewed-up non-values, generally speaking you are lambasted or even shunned.That is why, I think, people are such conformists.

We evolved to follow the herd (literally, herds of prey animals) insmall tightly-knit bands, and woe betide anyone who was cast out of the band.They died slowly and horribly, or were simply eaten. Someone was always incharge, probably the largest and scariest male (no matter what feminists sayabout Amazon goddess-figures who ruled everything in deepest antiquity, like in that Star Trek episode).

Have we changed much? From what I know of evolution from all thoseanthropology courses I took, men's stone tools (which last forever and arestill around) were always considered the hallmark of evolution and proof that"man" developed "technology" hundreds of thousands of yearsago. But ancient human societies are described as hunter-gatherer. The meat source washighly prized but sporadic, and the rest of the time everyone subsisted andsurvived on nuts, berries, roots, etc. that the women gathered every day inleather pouches that quickly rotted away, leaving no trace of theircontribution to human survival. (Women still carry them, no?)

Incredibly, for many decades anthropologists didn't even seem to seethis contribution, assuming the nuts and berries just rolled into the caves allby themselves. After all, didn't their meals appear on the table (firstfrom Mom, then from Wifey) in the same way? Obviously no work was involved.

Without those nifty little purses, you'd be looking at an empty screen because there wouldn't BE a screen because there wouldn't BE a human race, and thus there wouldn't be a you. None of it ever would've happened because Ugg and his gang of pinheaded proto-hominids didn't bring the musk-ox home in time and everybody would have starved to death.

But it didn't happen that way: the supply of nuts and seeds and berries always held, mainly because the women were on their hands and knees for ten hours a day scrounging them up even under the most dreadful conditions. A baby in one pouch, the trail mix in the other. Eventually this led to women realizing that they could bury these nuts and seedsand have the plants grow wherever they wanted. Surprise of the day: Women invented agriculture!Not Fred Flintstone, but Wilma. But you will never hear about this in theanthropology books, cuz they're too busy postulating that it was just Ugg hankering after some radicchio to go with his braised shoulder of ox.

You mean you haven't heard this theory before? That's cuzzada-fact thatyou were too busy following the herd.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You have GOT to read this!

2012-03-04T08:46:00.000-08:00

Sent to me by Matt Paust, Hemingway of the Henhouse: so I don't have to write anything today!

http://open.salon.com/blog/con_chapman/2012/03/04/the_sylvia_plath_foreclosure_sale

Funny, funny. . . chicken gifs (they move!)

2012-03-02T19:45:00.000-08:00

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Poem of the Day

2012-03-01T15:46:00.002-08:00

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Apple's. . . NO WAY!

2012-03-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

This clip proves, once and for all, that I did NOT hallucinate Apple's Way. It's just as smarmy as I remember it: the good little wife trotting out to the picnic table with a platter of fried chicken, grinning so hard she might split her face; the eager kids gathering around, Papa in a checked shirt at the head of the table, all that shit. Grandpa eating corn with a "mmmmm, MM!" sort of look on his face is. . . I won't make the obvious reference, but it's not "asparagus-y".

My favorite part (which you don't get in this version, but it's in the http://www.televisiontunes.com/ one I posted below) has at least one dog barking. Reminds me a bit of National Lampoon's Vacation.

I wonder what Apple's Way would be like brought up-to-date. The references to Apple are just too obvious, of course. Nobody knew what the hell a computer was in those days, except maybe a sinister force that took over the U. S. S. Enterprise or cut that poor astronaut loose in 2001. No, today George Apple would be just getting out of detox after embezzling money from his waterfall company (or was it an orchard?). His wife would reluctantly forgive him for having an affair with his secretary, Ronald Pear (a dwarf who runs his own pit bull escort service) until she finds him looking at homosexual porn when he's supposed to be creatively reworking the company's profits.

But certain things would remain the same: she'd do all the housework, and they'd have at least one dog.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You have GOT to try this!

2012-03-01T09:52:00.004-08:00

http://www.televisiontunes.com/

Your very own time machine! This site has EVERY TV theme song ever written, from Donna Reed and Perry Mason right up to current hit sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory (in case you think I was born in the Cretaceous Period. I was, but never mind.) It even has Apple's Way, a series from some time in the '70s that I thought I had hallucinated.

I remember only one scene from Apple's Way, and I don't know why. George Apple, played by Phgkdlslslmbbkb (who cares?), is the loving patriarch of a family that runs some sort of waterfall company, or maybe makes apples. The family is facing an aching crisis like Betty Jane losing her Brownie uniform. We see George and his wife (played by Blfhdkdkdk) in the bedroom. She's sitting up in bed with an angst-ridden look on her face, her brow puckered. George brings her a cup of tea. There follows a bit of dialogue that will be with me until the day I die:

Wife: How come you always know just what to do when things are not-so-good?

George: Isn't that what it's all about?

I swear, I remember nothing else from the series, but that was enough.

http://www.televisiontunes.com/Apples_Way.html

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Wizard of Oz as you never wanted to see it

2012-02-29T15:01:00.000-08:00

j

It was very strange to see these again. This is a bizarre take on The Wizard of Oz, with everything turned upside-down: Rusty the Tin Man really is heartless and nasty; Socrates the Straw Man (straw man? Just what IS a straw man, anyway? Sounds like something out of The Wasteland: "We are the hollow men, head-piece filled with straw") is really brainless; Dandy the Lion (an interior decorator who has definite "tendencies") is scared shitless of everything. So the weird twist in the original, i. e. that the characters already possessed the things they wanted, is twisted the other way. Nobody has any good qualities at all. The result is. . . pretty twisted.

You can find virtually pristine-quality videos of this 1961 series on YouTube, but for some reason the opening and ending sequences have been cut. When I look at them, it's very strange: I originally watched them on a grainy b & w set, so seeing them looking so brand-new and vividly, even garishly coloured is disconcerting. Almost hallucinogenic. Were the animators dabbling in exotic '60s substances, I wonder?

I wanted to include those opening and closing sequences, so I had to use this faded, slightly blurred cartoon as an example, even though it doesn't include all the characters (i.e. the Wicked Witch, who has a voice that could shred steel). There are other oddities, such as teardrop-shaped munchkins that seem completely expendable (i.e. they are casually killed in nearly every episode), a Wizard that talks like W. C. Fields, a dragon that pops up now and again (scaring the shit out of Dandy), and a land where everything is upside-down.

I can't find any one cartoon that gets all this across, so I chose this one where the main three characters demonstrate their "special" qualities. When I was about seven and watching these for the first time, I just sucked it all in like Jell-o or Junket or Cream of Wheat, without analyzing it. It's only now that I see how very strange and even disturbing it all is.

(Post-script: someone posted a comment on YouTube claiming that these cartoons were made in Canada, and I wondered: could it be? They were produced by an American animation giant, Rankin-Bass, best known for their cheesy-but-beloved Christmas specials with stop-action figures that reminded me of that annoying little Alka-Seltzer guy. (And Davy and Goliath? We'll get into that later.) This series isn't stop-action, in fact it falls under the category of hallucinogenic art. But when I began to probe, some familiar names popped up. This series was apparently created by the '60s entertainment impresario Budge Crawley. Among the voice actors were Bernard Cowan and Carl Bana: I remember Cowan as an announcer on game shows or something. All Toronto guys. Well, why not: Spiderman was voiced by Paul Soles, a veteran Canadian jack-of-all-trades actor and entertainer, and where would we be without catch-phrases like "Walloping web-snappers!" and "My spidey-sense is tingling." There's just something about Canadians. Strange people.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The best TV theme song of all time!

2012-02-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

No doubt about it. Superchicken has it all over Quick Draw McGraw and Deputy Dawg and even Cool McCool for great theme songs, summing up all that was super-cool about that era in animation.

"That" era being the '60s, which immediately gives away my age. Good thing I don't give a rip about it.

It's not just the lightning-fast delivery, it's the split-second montage of images - not equalled or even approached until The Big Bang Theory - that makes this theme song memorable.

I found a clip of Jerry Seinfeld singing it once. I can't, but it's still fun to watch.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Now, why doesn't this work for me?

2012-02-28T22:27:00.000-08:00

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Angelina's Leg: can you say "Pilates"?

2012-02-27T10:23:00.001-08:00

I don't know what it is about the Oscars. All right, I do: it's kind of like Christmas, with a huge buildup that lasts weeks or even months, and a lot of attention paid to tinsel, glitz and appearances. The other common point is money: the whole thing is so bloody expensive. And over so soon, leaving a sort of hangover, ashes in the mouth, a "maybe next year" feeling.

Last night I was looking forward to Billy Crystal's return as emcee: he was boffo in the '90s, after all, riding in on a horse the year City Slickers came out (but then I realized, with a twinge of shock, that it came out in 1992!). His much-celebrated montage of Oscar-nominated pictures at the start fell flat, lacking the full-tilt craziness of his former. . . scratch that, it's unfair. "Former"
means 20 years ago, the guy's about 68 now, and to be honest a lot of the younger viewers didn't even know who he was. And I could have done without that strange-looking shoe-polish-blackened hair. Give me a grey head, or even a bald head, over Hair in a Can.

But we don't watch the Oscars for the host, his hair or any other sort of content, not even for the actual awards. I groaned when The Artist grabbed some of the biggies, including That French Guy (who honestly creeps me out with his greasy smile) getting Best Actor for leaping around and not saying anything. I live and die for silent film, but maybe that's why I just couldn't warm up to this now-Best-Picture, which failed to capture the intimacy and magic of that flickering black-and-white world.

So why do we watch this 3-1/2 hour parade of show-biz superficialtiy and blatant narcissism? It comes down to one question: "Who are you wearing?" Not "what". Now we wear a person, evidently. Octavia Spencer even said that her designer "did" her, which sounded a little off . It's fun to watch these mostly-slender, mostly-young women slink around in gowns that look too tight to sit down in (and how on earth do they go to the bathroom?). But some can pull it off (or put it on), and others can't.

To quote the title of one of the nominated films, Hollywood celebrates its war horses, which is not to say they can't be handsome. Meryl Streep has won the right to wear anything she damn well pleases, and if she wants to drape herself in gold lame, so be it. And this made her third Oscar a nicely-co-ordinated accessory, if a little hard to slip into her clutch purse.

But early reviews of this lumbering ceremony complained that the heavy-looking metallic dress, combined with an acceptance speech that conveyed more embarrassment than gratitude, just added to a certain awkwardness that pervaded the evening. Meryl, after 16 nominations, made the trifecta, but seemed to wish someone else had won instead.

The most elegant Oscar gowns always seem to strive for a retro flavor, but if Hollywood really looked back, it would be in for a few surprises. Not that the gowns this year weren't elegant - there were a few that I loved, including one that stuck up for us war horses over 50. But there is something - what, tasteful? What an awful word, but that's it - about Old Hollywood that is never matched in the new, no matter how retro the designers try to be.

That ubiquitous Mother Courage/Mia Farrow stand-in Angelina Jolie has never been one of my favorites: she emanates a certain brittle sense of entitlement that turns me off. But this dress was. . . no, it was not the dress, it was the way she wore it, or rather didn't wear it, thrusting her leg out so far that everything showed, not just up to but past crotch-level.

One cannot imagine Grace Kelly ever doing that.

The fact that the leg screamed "Pilates" didn't make much difference, because the sinewy Jolie has the kind of lean-to-the-point-of-painful look required in order to have these bizarre creations painted on.

Who designed this thing? Did they forget to sew a seam at the front? To use a haute couture expression, who gives a rip. Let's move on.

A dress should not embarrass or frighten an audience, but this one did. Again, it wasn't the dress, which is the standard skin-fitting thing with all sorts of busy starburst details. It was the way Jennifer Lopez wore/didn't wear it. As I was watching her up there on live TV beside Cameron Diaz, I said to my husband, "Isn't that her. . . " "No." "I see it, though, just the edge of it." "No, they put tape on them." "But if the dress moves 1/8 of an inch or

something. . . " "Then yeah."

It was a nip slip.

Or at least it came perilously close, and some Tweeters and Woofers out there insisted they did see the edge of the little nipper just peeking out. But why wear such a risky dress, unless you want to create the kind of suspense that makes most people cringe?

But there was someone who knew how to wear Old Hollywood and bring it off with stunning style. Wearing an Oscar gown requires runway skills that many actresses just don't possess: sticking your leg out (or your nipple, for that matter) just doesn't cut it. But Milla Jovovich posed with elegance and class, while avoiding the self-absorption rampant among these celebrity clothes-horses. This was one of those gowns that reminded me of Ginger Rogers in movies like Top Hat and Flying Down to Rio.

But I've saved the best 'til last. Oscar usually gives "older" actresses (i.e. over 50) short shrift in the Best and Worst-Dressed departments. I always watch out for Helen Mirren and Judi Dench, whom I didn't see last night. But Glenn Close swept in and mowed them down like a row of dominoes.

I've sometimes had the thought - one of my stranger thoughts, admittedly - "if I ever had to wear one of those really chi-chi gowns, would I have to expose that much arm and shoulder?" How good does the average 50-year-old look in those stiff strapless stand-up-by-themselves things, unless she Pilates-es like mad for months before?

Voila: the solution. A jacket! I have always loved jackets anyway, but to make one work with a gown this dramatic is true genius. Everything comes together here, the intense evening-green (and green is not usually one of my favorites), the satin lapels, the flared-out mermaid hemline. I only wish I could see the shoes.

The hair and the smile and the utter confidence and joie de vivre of her stance made Glenn Close the queen of the evening. Even if she didn't win anything, she nevertheless carried it off to perfection.

(Post-script. I just looked up Glenn Close's birth date. Let no one ever again make snide remarks about senior citizens! At 65, Close swept the field and left all those skinny little fillies in the dust.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Harold Lloyd: the ghost behind the wall

2012-02-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still

Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a “ghost sign” for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

By John Mackie, Vancouver SunFebruary 23, 2012

Ghost signs from Vancouver's past spring up to haunt us still

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, PNG

VANCOUVER — Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a "ghost sign" for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

The demolition of a few buildings in the Granville/Robson block has unveiled a "ghost sign" advertising a Harold Lloyd movie at the Capitol Theatre.
The sign promotes the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma's Boy, which played at the Capitol theatre Oct. 2-7, 1922.

The sign is painted onto the north wall of the Power block at 817 Granville, across the street from where the Capitol opened in 1921. Hence the sign includes a red circle reading "Capitol over there," and features a wonderful disembodied hand with a finger pointing across the street.

The sign reappeared during the demolition of the three-storey Farmer building at 801 Granville. The Farmer building was constructed in 1922, so the Lloyd sign would have been covered up almost immediately after it was painted, and hidden for nine decades.

Signs like this are called ghost signs, because of their ghostly faded beauty and/or because they advertise long-dead businesses.

Several ghost signs have cropped up in recent years in Vancouver, including a lovely ad for Shelly's Bakery on Victoria Drive and a bunch of long-hidden painted signs on the Woodward's building. Part of an old painted sign for the Pantages theatre showed up on the side of the Regent Hotel when the 1907-08 theatre was being torn down.

Still, heritage expert John Atkin says he's never seen a painted sign for a movie, which would have had a short shelf life.

"You can certainly see movie posters and billboards [in old photos], but not [signs] painted on the wall," he said.

"I think the management of the theatre took advantage of the brief period when a building [on the corner] was demolished and before construction started on the new one."

Harold Lloyd is largely forgotten today, but he was one of the giants of the silent screen, a comic genius whose popularity once rivalled Charlie Chaplin. Like many silent stars, he cranked out movies at a breathtaking pace - he made 205 films between 1913 and 1947, including 40 short films in 1919 alone.

By 1922 he was doing longer features such as the 60-minute Grandma's Boy, which an ad in the Oct. 1, 1922, Vancouver Sun called his "first five-reel comedy."

The movie was released a month before it hit Vancouver, and was already a huge hit. The Sun ad boasted Grandma's Boy "holds the world's record for continuous comedy run in one theatre - over 450,000 people have seen it in one house in Los Angeles and it's still running!"

It played the Capitol for only a week before moving to the Dominion for a week and then leaving town. A painted sign would have cost the owner of the Capitol much more than hanging a poster, but would have grabbed attention away from competition like the Tom Mix movie The Big Town Round-Up that was showing at the Rex, or the Cecil B. DeMille movie Manslaughter at the Dominion.

The full glory of the painted ad for Grandma's Boy may be unveiled over the next few days as the building that covered it up comes down, brick by brick. But it won't be visible long, because the building it's on is also coming down, save for the facade.
The Power block dates to 1888, with a distinctive art deco facade that was added in 1929. It originally housed a saloon, later became a bank and in recent years was the location of Charlie's, a used CD/DVD dealer.

Both 801 and 817 Granville are being redeveloped into a five-storey building that will have two floors of retail on the bottom and three floors of office space above. The new building will have a contemporary glass facade, but the deco facade from the Power block will be incorporated into the new structure, because the facade was designated on the city's heritage register.

The rest of the Power block will come down, however, including the wall with the ghost sign. The city will be documenting the sign with photographs.

Another historical quirk unearthed during the demolition is an old "areaway" under the sidewalk along Robson. An areaway is a room under the sidewalk that merchants used to expand their premises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can often tell where they're located because there are small purple glass bricks in the sidewalk that were installed to bring light into the space.

The original Capitol theatre was torn down in the mid-1970s and replaced by the Capitol Six multiplex. That in turn was torn down in 2006, and replaced by a condo tower, the Capitol Residences.

jmackie@vancouversun.com

OK. With considerable weariness, I write about Harold Lloyd once again: in a startling bit of synchronicity, a painted sign advertising one of his most popular movies has been uncovered in my home town. Up to now it was covered up by a brick building. Everyone's scratching their heads over the fact that a mere movie would warrant an ad painted on a brick wall, but though the writer insists HL is "largely forgotten today", he was HUGELY successful back in 1922, to the point that it would not have been surprising if someone painted a bloody canvas and hung it in the Louvre every time a new Lloyd movie came out.

I don't know if this is synchronicity or not. For a long time the name Lloyd was coming up two, three, even FIVE times a day under different circumstances. Like the Gloria Baptist Church, situated at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd (Gloria was the name of his daughter). Like the movie with four different Lloyd references in it. I was going insane, and I'm still going insane.

I became so possessed by HL that I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and though a sane person surely would have given up by now, I haven't: I just hate myself too much, I guess. I want to see this published before I die.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Flying Down to Rio, the hard way

2012-02-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

Just discovered this at the end of an otherwise-unremarkable old '30s musical, Flying Down to Rio. I started watching it coz it had Fred and Ginger in it, but as it turned out they were only in it for about 3 minutes, doing one dance number that wasn't anywhere near their best. This was their first movie turn however, and they stole the show.

That said, I was about to ditch the thing in boredom when THIS incredible sequence came on. It's almost surreal in its gleeful beauty, with sexy but innocent young women cavorting on the wings of planes. If you look closely at 1:33, you'll notice some of the girls suddenly lose their dresses in the breeze and continue their wriggly dance, apparently, in their birthday suits. At 1:45, you'll see that their shirts are practically transparent, no bras on underneath. We'd call that a "nip-slip" and cut the scene out of network TV. This was pre-Code Hollywood, obviously, before the bitter repression of the Hays Office took all the fun out of everything and sex had to be implied with a raised eyebrow and a crooked pinkie.

Maybe this was all done on a sound stage, but it looks pretty good to me. Even the music is free-spirited and energetic, a touch wild, foretelling the delightful Piccolino number at the end of Top Hat (my favorite Fred and Ginger movie: oh, that dress made out of feathers!). There's a sort of vibrating hum in the background suggesting, I suppose, plane engines or - vibrators?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The world according to Mediocrates

2012-02-22T17:12:00.002-08:00

Mediocrates

Mediacrates

Soakcrates

Sackcrates

Snakecrates

Spacecrates

Bureaucrates

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

If there are no mistakes, then why am I such a screwup?

2012-02-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road totruth: not going all the way, and not starting.

Buddha

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue toreach out.

Benjamin Franklin

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage toadmit them.

Bruce Lee

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events areblessings given to us to learn from.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doinganything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden

Making mistakes is the privilege of the active. . . Onlythose who are asleep make no mistakes.

Ingvar Kamprad

OK THEN! I've been wanting to write about all this for some time now, and it seems even more relevant in light of some recent events.

I am constantly coming across quotes about how desirable it is to make mistakes. We should make lots and lots of them, or else it proves we aren't doing anything. These quotes can come from business wizards like Steve Jobs, or spiritual bigwigs like Buddha, or meatball-eating furniture magnates like Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad (whom I always thought was an actor in one of those . . . movies . . . you know the ones I mean).

The reality is somewhat different.

I think people say these things to try to alleviate the excruciating embarrassment and even humiliation that can arise from a single mistake. They're trying to make themselves feel better, not just you, and not just for past or present-day mistakes but as a sort of immunization against the humiliation of mistakes as yet unmade.

People are fired because of a single mistake, and their careers and self-esteem sometimes never recover. People lose their spouses because of a mistake (an affair? It happens, believe it or not), changing not just the course of their lives, but the lives of children and grandchildren and all their friends, who may not know on which side their loyalties should fall. (It's always one way or another, folks.)

One mistake, even one clumsy social error, can lodge itself in people's memory like one of those sticky-burr thingies. If you are kind and gracious 99% of the time, and fuck up 1% of the time, guess what people will remember?

I won't mention any names here, because I can't, but I once worked with an agent who ran into some problems approaching a publisher. The managing editor said, "I hate Margaret Gunning!" When asked why, he said, "Because she panned one of our authors." Something like eight years earlier, I had written a "negative" review of one of their books (I had certainly not trashed the book but felt it didn't cohere, which matched the opinion of the majority of other reviewers).

Was it a "mistake"? I was just doing my job, which is NOT to write synopses or dishwater generic non-reviews providing no critical analysis whatsoever. But even if it wasn't a mistake, it seemed to have created a rancor which would live forever. To that particular publisher, no matter what else I did to redeem myself, my name would always be mud.

So imagine what would have happened if I HAD made a mistake, even a little one!

I've misfired on emails before, sent them the wrong way. Doesn't everyone do this? I thought so, until I did it myself. Again, it was a publisher, and it was a mistake, and no one said "it's OK to make a mistake, it's the way we learn" or anything like that. Instead I got an email back saying, "Do you realize what you've just done?" You could hear their gasp of horror. According to them at least, I had done so much damage with a single click that it turned out to be irreparable. Those people will never forget. And there was nothing vindictive in my email, nothing abusive, just information they should not have received.

I goofed. I clicked. I was dead.

Is it just me? If it's just me, I might as well commit suicide right here and now. If I am to believe all these wonderful quotes and the people who insist you should make as many mistakes as you possibly can in the course of a day (and maybe they mean "mistakes" like borrowing someone's pen and forgetting to give it back), then perhaps it's true. Perhaps I'm the only one who suffers massive repercussions from a mistake, hostility, rancour, and the feeling that what I've done is totally and permanently unforgiveable.

So OK. Let's take a look at these quotes that everyone finds so comforting: Kubler-Ross for a start.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Kubler-Ross became world-famous for her "stages of grief" theory, which automatically found near-universal acceptance with therapists and clergy and every other type of counselor until someone decided, many decades later, to do some research on the subject. They discovered that there are no stages of grief, and that everyone processes grief differently. The original premise was "stages of dying", so Kubler-Ross was not entirely responsible for this misinformation. Her theory applied to people who were terminally ill and trying to come to terms with approaching death.

I don't think she ever intended these stages to be lodged in neat compartments, to be worked through sequentially over a set period of time, but that's what happened. Therapists began to require patients to "go through the stages", and if they didn't, they were pushed to do so. Come on, it's time for the anger stage now! Why aren't you angry? And how about some bargaining? You can't go on to acceptance until you do.

So what was the mistake here? The biggie was universally embracing an untried idea just because it sounded good. Her theory was appealing because those neat stages helped to regulate and contain something that most people find overwhelming, a force of nature that seldom shows any mercy.

I'd like to believe - OK, I wouldn't like to believe, because it's too out of touch with reality - that "all events are blessings given to us to learn from". I know New Age people who believe this, but I can't. I can't because I have known people who have lost infants to disease and children to horrific accidents and had to try to pick up the pieces. I can't because I watch the news every day and see with what horrifying regularity people are casually slaughtered by crazed gunmen who one day decide they'd like to spill a little blood.

These are the extremes, but there are plenty of them. I can't believe "all events are blessings" when I watch a documentary about Auschwitz or Dachau. (Calling the Third Reich a "mistake" is the understatement of all time, but with neo-Nazism thriving and even considered "cool" by some young people, did we really learn from it?) I am still trying to figure out how an intelligent person can embrace this obvious fallacy. If your son commits suicide, is it a blessing? If you lose all your money and become homeless? I won't go on.

I can't compare events in my own life with tragedies of this magnitude. But I have experienced the alarming ways in which technology makes it even more costly to make a mistake.

I recently experienced one of those examples of the hellfire the internet can put you through. Because of something I wrote, I wasn't just roasted: I was mocked, excoriated, ridiculed, called nasty names, and made to look thoroughly stupid on someone's blog.

Obviously I had made a mistake. It was a bad one, I saw it quickly, deleted it and did what I could to make amends for it. I'd posted something that should never have been posted. Since I could not turn back the hands of time and un-write it, I could only do what I could do, and keep it brief, because over-apologizing is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

But I don't think it did one iota of good, and at best I was probably seen as covering my ass in a gesture of self-preservation. I realize now that this was a mistake that might just live forever. "Delete" doesn't do anything to erase people's memory.

It doesn't matter if I did 99 things right. That hundredth thing may spell the end of my perceived integrity and worth as a writer, and even as a human being. And now that we are in the age of blogging and internet and social media, one mistake can explode massively in a matter of seconds. It can go viral, reaching hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people in the blink of an eye.

Blessings given for us to learn from? By the time we get around to learning from them, we may be ruined. Human brains always retain the negative, we seem to have evolved that way, while positive and neutral events just sort of wash away with the tide. Combine that with the supernova-level, instantaneous communication that exists today, and you could have a recipe for disaster.

I approach Facebook and other such systems with leeriness now. If I try to "friend" someone and it turns out they are the friend of someone whose book I panned in 1998, might they diss me on Facebook, their blog or elsewhere for being an opportunist, rude or just plain stupid? Do I "friend" more than one publisher, or will that be a conflict of interest? If I ONLY friend one publisher, what sort of idiot am I who can't do business with social media, which is in large part what it is set up to do?

But if you admit that, oh boy. Embarrasment. Everyone looks away. Everybody knows Facebook is just a friendly chat over the back fence, and anyone who even thinks it might be a form of making business contacts is either gauche or completely mercenary. An elephant has suddenly appeared in the room and deposited 50 pounds of shit, and nobody knows where to look.

Maybe I was just behind the barn door when the rules were passed out. But it seems to me we'd all better watch our step. Making mistakes is a luxury which I think is the province of those alpha personalities who end up founding Ikea and changing therapeutic practice forever. The rest of us poor schlubs had better beware.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Big elf on a mayonnaise man

2012-02-21T22:25:00.003-08:00

Flee to me, remote elf--Sal a dewandesired;
Now is a Late-Petal Era.
We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose ofSharon;
Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
Wan olives teem (ah, Satanlives!);
A star eyes pale Roses.

Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man -
A tinsel baton-dragging nice elftoo.
Lisp, Oh Sibyl, dragging Nolaalong;
Niggardly bishops I loot.
Fleecing niggard notables Nitanames,
I annoy a man of Legible Verse.

So relapse, ye rats,
As evil Natasha meets Evil
On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculeda few) are late, pet.
Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
Alas--flee to me, remote elf.

S'kay, you don't need to go hide in the corner, it's called a PALINDROME. Kind of like "Pa's a sap" or "Able was I ere I saw Elba" and things like that. Can't think of any more at the moment. (Oh, thought of one! "Sex at noon taxes" and "I moan, Naomi" can be conflated to read, "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes,' I moan."

I don't know who sits around thinking up such bizarre things, but the imagery in this word wedding-cake is gorgeous: just the idea of a remote elf, sitting pondering the mysteries of the Universe when he should be busy in Santa's workshop making death destroyers, makes me sigh, as do the wan olives that teem (teem? In a stream somewhere, or maybe a giant martini), followed by the nihilistic statement, "Satan lives".

Elves (elfs?) teem too in this enigmatic miracle of a piece: the big elf on a mayonnaise man, who surely needs to lower his cholesterol, and of course that tinsel baton-dragging nice elf (can you see it? I can't). Certain lines are like self-contained poems: "Lisp, oh Sibyl, dragging Nola along" and (maybe my favorite) "I annoy a man of Legible Verse". I've wanted to do that many times.

I could go on and on, for each line of this amazing edifice is fat and juicy with strangely yummy poetry (the "wet, amaryllis-adorned log"!). Reminds me of drinking guava nectar on the lanai that time we went to Maui. Either this was penned by some evil genius, or an autistic savant who reads everything forwards and backwards at the same time, or Oliver Sacks, or Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. I certainly couldn't do it myself. . . being a backward child.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Hard, hard, hard

2012-02-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

This popped into my head for the first time in years as I had a phone conversation with a dear friend tonight. It seems we are both wrestling with similar things. It has become apparent to us how much easier it is (for some people) to be "benevolent", "socially conscious", sensitive to world issues and the "bleeding crowd", than it is to be vulnerable and caring and human on the level of one heart to one heart.

Easy to be hard.

This is the original cast version from Hair, sung by Lynn Kellog, and I used to listen to it obsessively in 1968 (OK, I hereby date myself as an ageing flower child). I had no idea how great her voice was because back then it all sort of washed over me in a pot-induced haze.

She sings it simply in a great contralto voice, but the emotion is tremendous and the lyric is delivered with devastating impact. Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needing friend?

I need a friend.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Tom Robbins on February: you may be little, but you're small!

2012-02-20T19:50:00.002-08:00

They say that February is the shortest month, but you knowthey could be wrong.

Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looksto be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard onbread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes – andyou’ll never catch February in stocking feet – it’s a full head shorter thanDecember, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up toApril’s nose.

However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look,February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon ofwinter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionallyfor hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spiticicles into every gullible face, behaviour that grows quickly old.

February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of rednumerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holidayreserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble inthe flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that ourancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough tohave a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Except to the extent that it “tints the buds and swellsthe leaves within,” February is as useless as the extra r in its name.It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding bothprogress and contentment at bay.

James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickensand Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings,although worse at knowing when to stop.

If February is the colour of lard on rye, its aroma isthat of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on asqueaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, youmay be little but you’re small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of uswould survive to greet the merry month of May.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I showed them. I showed them ALL! (bwahahahahah)

2012-02-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is one of John Candy's finest moments. He plays a giant, vindictive leprechaun wielding a shilellagh (sp.? Does anyone know how to spell this?) and pushing his special brand of "rainbow meat", chock full of chemicals. I miss John Candy so. In many ways he was the glue holding SCTV together. His movie career, while it had some great moments, never quite came up to the wild creativity of his SCTV days, with its multiple and often complex characters. This is just plain wonderful!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Unlucky Charms

2012-02-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

(I was going to save this for St. Patrick's Day, but couldn't wait. The video is the most bizarre representation of Irish culture I've ever seen, and the voiceover must have come at a bargain price because it sounds like he's from somewhere in the Midwest.)

Top ten reasons why some Irish Americans have no real clue about Ireland

Loud and too proud many Irish Americans make a very bad impression

By JAMES FARRELL,

IrishCentral Contributer

Published Wednesday, February 15, 2012, 7:23 AM

Updated Thursday, February 16, 2012, 4:48 PM

My American friends always tell me how they love

Ireland

. But when I stayed in Chicago in the 1990s they described an

Ireland

I never knew existed. On a recent visit back, it seems that little has changed.

Maybe a little self-awareness and education about how the Irish really live might help.

1. We don’t live in thatched cottages anymore -- get real. We’re an urbanized society and have the same living standards as the rest of the world.

2. We don’t say faith and begorrah or chase Leprechauns -- Hollywood has infected the brains of too many Irish Americans. We don’t believe in fairies, banshees, or leprechauns, unless it is for gullible Americans.

3. We don’t drink all day and fight all night. Too many showings of ‘The Quiet Man’ have pickled some Irish American brains. We like a drink but we rarely fight.

4. We don’t hate the British any more. Sure we did once, but we’re best friends for years now since the peace process, the Queen’s visit was totally popular.

5. We generally don’t like American Republicans. We are much more comfortable with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and their nuanced international world view than cowboys like George Bush and Ronald Reagan -- sorry all you Tea Party Irish.

6. We don’t really think you are Irish, the same way as us. If you are not born here then by our definition you are not Irish.

7. We don’t really like "Danny Boy" and all the sentimental songs. Sure, they are fine for a late night sing song for Americans but we are fed up of them.

8. We often tell jokes about you, usually about the phony Irish accents and Aran sweaters

9. We don’t know the Murphys from Cork or the Sullivans from Kerry, there are thousands of them.

10. We don’t want to hear any more Irish drinking jokes -- they are pathetic and demeaning to us for the most part.

*James Farrell is an Irish writer now living in Dublin

Yes! This just about sums it up. It must be irritating for the Irish to be stuck with these mostly inane stereotypes. (Thus the green background. Never mind how I did this.) As the illustrations prove, and by the way they are MEANT TO BE IRONIC, FOLKS, NOT LITERAL, SO DO NOT CALL ME AN IGNORANT RACIST, this sometimes took the form of a vicious discrimination so primitive it defies analysis. The infamous "no dogs or Irish" rule proved that white people could treat white people with the same dehumanizing cruelty as blacks and Native Americans.

My own family had a rather ludicrous pride in the fact that we were "Irish", having descended from the Pedlows, which is about as Irish a name as I've ever heard. My mother eventually admitted to me that my "Irish" grandmother had been born in Canada. Though she always said I was "one-quarter Irish", now it seems to be more like 1/8. Are my children 1/16, and my grandchildren 1/32? Am I doing the math right? As Jonathan Winters once said about his Comanche heritage, "One nosebleed and I'm out of the tribe."

I worked all this into my first novel, Better than Life, exaggerating it so that the Connars believed that even a drop of Irish blood (and what exactly IS Irish blood, anyway?) made you a son or daughter of Eire. Erin go Blagggh, and all that stuff.

I had a cousin Eileen, OK. And another, Deirdre, though that can also be English, I think. Or is it Celtic?

I'm not sure why no one thinks of William Butler Yeats or James Joyce when they're rhyming off these Irish stereotypes: the bleak, often hopeless literary genius, grimly foretelling an apocalyptic future, light years ahead of his time but hard to sit next to at the bar. No doubt they went for a pint at the end of a long day of dystopic anhedonia, but not with the suicidal fervor that killed off the Welsh genius, Dylan Thomas, at the age of 39.

(Sorry. I had to throw in a little Separated at Birth.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Can I retire from life?

2012-02-18T16:09:00.000-08:00

This has been brewing fora while, and whether or not anyone wants to “view” it is quite beside thepoint.

My husband recentlyretired from a 40-year career as an environmental engineer. This only happeneda few weeks ago, and since then it’s like the air slowly being let out of aballoon – not so much into depression as exhausted relief from a stress thathas dogged him for years.

Now he’s tinkering, thething he likes best in the world, fixing things in the garage, contemplatinghome renovations large and small, taking over all the cooking (to my endlessdelight – I am SO tired of fixing meals, and he’s a much better cook than meanyway).

And I am looking at myselfand wondering. A friend recently quoted an older woman she knows. “Theyretire. We don’t.” It made me think. It certainly would apply to the oldstyle of marriage where wife waited on husband hand-and-foot. Not being thehandmaiden type, I prefer a self-serve husband who heats up his own beansbecause I hate the things (and scrape the bean-scum out of that pot whileyou’re at it).

But still. They retire. Wedon’t. Or I don’t. Retire from what? From this miasma of desire, thisscrambling to try to get a foothold on something that will probably escape meforever?

Like a lot of people, Iwanted to be a published author. It too me oh, so long to get there. And I did.Supposedly.

But “published author” is a relative term. It'ssort of like saying “I have an income from writing”: which I do, andwhich I have had since 1984. But if you mention the size of the income(and you’d be surprised how many people ask), all you get is snickers or looksof amazement that you’d put that much effort into something that earns you lessthan the average paper boy.

I want to quit the wholething: I want to quit wanting. I want to quit having my work up there,or out there, where brickbats can be thrown at it. I recently was really workedover for something I wrote, and it was not very pleasant. She had a right to feel the way she did, because what I said was wrong and I will always regret it. I did not think it through at all. I think my attempt at an apology was only poked full of more holes, so I could not win.

This happens, a lot. Not just to me, though I've been reamed out many a time, often for no crime except being visible and expressing an opinion. I've seen commentary that is simply appalling all over the internet, including on YouTube videos of disabled children and babies with terminal deformities. People can be absolute shits, and they’re almost encouraged tobe. Ridicule rules the day. It’s easy, because nobody really knows who you are.

The internet and blogs andsocial networking have changed everything: it’s often said, but neveradequately understood. Everything is lived out in public. As the old Moxy Fruvous songsays, “Everyone’s a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when theTV’s on.” This all implies a certainamount of exposure. We’re all nude in front of the cameras, folks, in a waythat’s making George Orwell turn over in his grave.

So I was laid bare, peeled, not realizing what the full ramifications would be. The worst name I wascalled during that whole tirade was “amateur”. What does that mean? Isit tied to a certain amount of money? What amount? Is there a minimum? Could itbe ANY amount? Or do you really have to earn anything at all?

I want to quit this.Writing is what I do, and it’s hard for me not to do it. Blogging for the mostpart has been fun, sometimes exhilarating, with very mixed results in theviewing department. I have had thousands, and zeros, and everything in between.

But that’s just thetrouble. Views are like “friends” on Facebook. I know people with thousands of“friends”. How is this possible? How would you have time to “meet” all thosepeople and still hold a job, or even attend to your basic bodily functions?

How deep are thesefriendships, or do they just bump along the surface in a world that sometimesseems like it is ALL surface?

I tend to illustrate myposts, and some like this, and some hate it and think it is stupid. The titleof my blog was recently ridiculed: never mind that the person didn’t get it,that the intentional sentimental irony of it flew right over their head. Misinterpretation rules in the land of bloghood, does it not?

I want to quit. Quit this.Quit it, resign, retire, leave. Walk. I don’t know if I can walk fromwriting and I don’t know if I can quit blogging, or caring, but I want to. Idon’t want to send any more “queries” by mail. I don’t want to get any morestamped self-addressed envelopes in the mail, miserable little things with(usually) form rejections in them, or, once in a while, personal rejections, which are supposed to be better because they're not forms.

It’s great, in fact we think it’s apotential bestseller, but sorry, we can’t publish it because it doesn’t suitour list.

I’ve let this get to me,haven't I? Yes. I’ve let critics get under my skin. Shame on me. If I answer critics, I ampeevish and hypersensitive and can’t accept a constructive comment. If I don’t, I don’t care or amtoo snotty to reply. If I apologize for writing something that is out of line,the apology is never enough because I somehow have to reverse time likeSuperman turning the world backwards in that movie and unwrite what Iwrote. Anything less is cause for more jabs in my most tender places.

My so-called career, thething I feel so ambivalent about and now would like to drop like a whole bag ofhammers, is like a balloon just brushing the tips of my fingers. When I try tograb for it, it pops up beyond my reach. Stop trying then, they say.Just let it fall. Then I probably won’t want it anyway.

From worrying aboutwhether I will ever see my work in print again, I QUIT.

From wondering if writingthis will make one tinker’s goddamn of a difference to anyone, I QUIT.

From trying to entertain orplease, something I had to do to survive as a child, I quit. No more courtjester stuff, it’s killing me.

From trying to figure outwhether certain other (mostly scarily anonymous) people are human or reptilian, I most definitely quit.

The internet is ano-man’s-land, a bizarre wonderland/wasteland that nobody has figured out yet. It has its exhilarating aspects,connecting with strangers (who could be anybody, by the way, even psychotickillers), getting “support” from other people who are addicted to sniffingDrano or whatever, and glopping up moploads of information from Wikipediathat may or may not have any truth in it at all. Then there are the darkeraspects.

People are adopting babiesthrough Facebook, and selling them on eBay. Men look at internet porn at work:even cops (it happened here not long ago, and they got into a spot of trouble).Suddenly it seems like eroticism has become as ugly as a rhinoceros, torn looseand galloping free. Four-year-old girls are being dressed up like prostitutes andencouraged to act like them. Sometimes Iwant to bring back corsets, restraint, Sigmund Freud telling us that if libidois ever let loose, society will crumble in a matter of months.

But I digress. My work isnow out there where “some” people can “sometimes” see it, and in fact Iprobably have had more views in a year of blogging than I had readers in 15years of writing newspaper columns. I am still beavering away, and just gettingso tired. Just wanting to throw away something that feels like an arm.You can’t throw your arm away, can you?

I resign from the monsterI have created for myself, tugged and pulled by the nasty little bugger we callthe internet. I just want to write because I want to write, because I feellike it. It can be as dumb as dirt. I can call it Barbie’s Sparkle-Plenty Pink Plastic Dream House andlaugh if people take it literally and call ME stupid.

Wanting to be understood, wanting someone or anyone to "get" you, is the province of adolescence, is it not? But what happens when it never happens, when at the advanced aget of (blbblblb) you realize you're never going to be "got" so you might as well get over it?

From wanting too much,from wanting anything at all, I quit, I resign, I fold, I surrender, I submit!Submission is a wonderful thing, is it not? I do it all the time. Just ask myeditor.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

"I met him at the candy store": more dumb songs I like

2012-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Is she really going out with him?

Well, there she is, let's ask her

Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing? Mhmm.

Gee, it must be great riding with him

Is he picking you up after school today? Uh uh.

By the way, where'd you meet him?

I met him at the candy store

He turned around and smiled at me

You get the picture? (Yes, we see)

That's when I fell for the leader of the pack

My folks were always putting him down

(Down, down)

They said, he came from the wrong side of town

(What you mean when you say that he came

From the wrong side of town?)

They told me he was bad, but I knew he was sad

That's why I fell for the leader of the pack

One day my dad said, "Find someone new"

I had to tell my Jimmy, we're through

(What you mean when you say that

You better go find somebody new?)

He stood there and asked me why, all I could do was cry

I'm sorry I hurt you, the leader of the pack

He sort of smiled and kissed me good-bye

The tears were beginnin' to show

As he drove away on that rainy night

I begged him to go slow

But whether he heard, I'll never know

(Look out, look out!

Look out, look out!)

I felt so helpless, what could I do?

Rememberin' all the things we'd been through

At school they all stop and stare

I can't hide the tears but I don't care

I'll never forget him, the leader of the pack

(Gone, gone, gone, gone)

The leader of the pack, now he's gone

(Gone)

The leader of the pack, now he's gone

(Gone, gone, gone, gone)

The leader of the pack, now he's gone

(Gone)

The leader of the pack.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

"A car full of kids and snow cones": really dumb songs I like

2012-02-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

He's the 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

And you can see him every weekend

With a car full of kids and snow cones

And the people cross town don't know his name

But on Franklin Pike Circle, he's king

1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

Well, at five thirty-five at

The corner of Franklin and Warner

A blue station wagon comes

Sliding around the corner

And on down Franklin Pike Circle

All you're seeing is a streak of blue

And pulls in the drive at the address of 1432

And he says, my head aches and my back hurts

And I don't feel like talking

Don't wan go the show to see Doctor Zhivago

Don't wanna take the dog out walking

I wanna sit right here in this easy chair

It's been a jungle all day, you know

The 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero is home

He was out pitching ball with the

Kids in the neighborhood yesterday

And the old major leaguer had to quit

'Cause he said he threw his arm away

And the kids all hid behind the hedge

And laughed at him but wouldn't let it show

Because they love him so,

He's the 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

And you can see him every weekend

With a car full of kids and snow cones

And, you know people cross town

Don't know his name

But on Franklin Pike Circle, he's king

1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

Well, he won a little pony at the

Hill High auction just the other day

And he didn't mean to do it

And he wanted to give the pony away

When they called out his name

He tried not to claim it

But the kids started crying

'Cause they'd already named it

And who's up every Saturday morning

Saddling his new toy, you guessed it

The 1432 Franklin Pike Circle cowboy

He's the 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

And you can see him every weekend

With a car full of kids and snow cones

During Christmas, took the kids

Down to see the floats

When he wanted to stay home

And watch the Baltimore Colts

1432 Franklin Pike Circle Hero

Well, the ten-thirty news usually

Finds our hero is a sleepy head

And Peter's out somewhere wrecking the car

And the rest of the kids have gone to bed

So she takes his hand

They climb the stairs and he falls asleep

And she bends over him so tenderly

To kiss his cheek

'Cause she loves him so

And she's lucky, you know

To be married to the 1432

1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

He's the 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

And you can see him every weekend

With a car full of kids and snow cones

Christmas time, he took

'Em down to see the floats

When he wanted to stay home

And watch the Baltimore Colts

He's the 1432 Franklin Pike Circle hero

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Johnny Depp: the ultimate swinger

2012-02-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ecWQO4RtcM

I can't embed this for reasons unknown, but watch it, DO watch it, it's magical! I first saw this movie in 1993, and though it has some highly improbable plot twists (i.e. a young woman who just had a major psychotic episode suddenly being well enough to live in her own apartment ), Johnny Depp's performance, innovative and charming, holds up well and reminds us why he is the working-est actor in Hollywood.

The movie (Benny and Joon) came on again last night, with a very young Depp looking like a Botticelli angel, and I was reminded of how cleverly his character, Sam, had incorporated elements of the Big Three silent screen comedians: Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. He saved the best for last, climbing up a brick building and swinging from a window washer's rope with all the grace and style of Harold's character in Safety Last.

The scene where his schizophrenic girl friend, recovering from hallucinations and delusions in the hospital, sees him swing past her window (apparently she's the only one who can see him) is priceless. This performance presages his Don Juan de Marco turn, a wacky Fairbanks stunt that lands him, painfully, in the bushes.

I couldn't find a good clip of the Safety Last scene, the last few minutes of the movie where Harold swings like a pendulum, but I did come up with a few still pictures. About this picture: what would Harold say (WWHS?). You know, based on everything I've found out about him, I think he would really like and admire and be entertained by Johnny Depp. He appreciated actors who could play it straight as well as funny, and his quirkiness, bold risks and leading-man good looks are very Harold-esque. Harold loved Jack Lemmon, who also easily moved back and forth between comedy and tragedy. Johnny does it just as gracefully, and still makes us sigh.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Adele's doppelganger: she's a Lulu!

2012-02-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

s

My separated-at-birth post about Adele and Lulu got me thinking: I haven't heard her one hit (To Sir With Love) for a long time. Though this clip is badly-synched, it does bring home how startling the resemblance is: a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked, slightly chubby English girl with heavy eye makeup and a "flip" hairdo. Problem is, Lulu didn't win six Grammys at the age of 22, but never mind: she was a big star, if only for a moment, and very much a product of her times. The movie this belongs to is good, by the way, a little cliched but effective: and anything with Sydney Poitier in it can't be all bad.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I heart gifs

2012-02-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Wear your heart on your. . . head?

2012-02-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

These photos, taken with my husband's phone, are a tad grainy, but cute! This was a Valentine's/Grandma's birthday/Grandpa's retirement party dinner combination at Red Robin. The "hats" are Valentine purses I knitted for the girls. Have a happy!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Adele: Grammy loves her!

2012-02-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

I confess, I didn't know who this girl was until very recently: that is, until her face was plastered over every available surface. Predictably, this avalanche of hype ended up with an astounding Grammy win last night, something like six trophies. I didn't even know you could be nominated in that many categories. Busy girl. (And I say girl because she's barely in her 20s: you'd better pray for her now.)

As you can guess, I'm not really in touch with all this, but when I saw her - really saw her on TV, not in her carefully-lit, cheekbone-sculpted publicity photos - I was reminded, startlingly, of someone else.

I wonder if her image is meant to be '60s retro, as in Amy Winehouse's famous towering beehive. Whether it is or not, I'm going to mix up some photos here.

Just a coincidence?. . . You Tell Me!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Whitney Houston: broken butterfly

2012-02-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

This was a jolting shock, even though I had never been a particularly big fan. It was one of those, "no, no" moments.

It was sickening news, though there had been plenty of - what? Warning? How can we call it "warning" when someone's life has been spinning out of control for years?

The first time I ever heard of Whitney Houston, even before the movie The Bodyguard catapulted her to fame, my sister, never one to be positive about anything, said, "Oh, she's just a second-string Tina Turner."

Whenever my sister said things like "oh, she's just" ("just" being her favorite diminishing term, purposely busting down anything I loved), I had to sit up and pay attention. It meant something extraordinary was about to happen. And then that incredible song began to appear on the radio, all the time, everywhere.

It had the simplest lyric of all: I will always love you. It was not the words,
but the way she sang them, releasing those pure arcs of sound and sustaining them beyond our capacity to believe what we were hearing.
Back then she was slim and deerlike, wide-eyed, and though I don't know if she was really innocent or not, she looked like she must have been.

She was charismatic, her voice soared almost supernaturally, and she seemed to have everything. a person could possibly want. Then reality caught up with her: the awful, devouring reality of "making it" that seems to eat so many stars alive.

I just can't take it this time, I'm angry and I feel like crying. It's just too much. On the eve of the Grammys, when she was likely to take part as a presenter dressed in a gorgeous designer gown, she lay dead in a hotel room. Efforts to resuscitate her were in vain: this time it really was too late.

One wonders if it was a Michael Jackson scenario, or maybe Heath Ledger, where people did not call 9-1-1 right away because they were afraid of scandal. I am convinced this is what happened to those other two: shame, denial and a sense of "let's keep this hushed up" may have cost them their lives.

And what about all the people who partied hard with her, knowing she was vulnerable and unable to take even one drink or snort or shot without falling into the abyss? Her many trips to rehab left her in a fragile state, and though she often claimed, sometimes with a touch of belligerance, that of course she was sober and anyone who thought she wasn't was a liar, soon we'd hear that she was in rehab again.

Reports from earlier this week revealed that Houston was particularly out of control, flying on God-knows-what before her spectacular final crash. I don't know why someone (anyone!) didn't take her in hand and put her in the hospital to detoxify. It sickens me, because when I looked up her Wikipedia entry I was dizzy and overwhelmed at her accomplishments on every level. I won't even attempt to list them here, but they were formidable.

In yesterday's post I tried to make some sense of the phenomenon of huge stars plummeting in flames: just what goes on here? Addiction can happen anywhere, but it's often the product of early damage. This can lead the survivor into damaging situations later in life (Bobby Brown!), fuelling the need for oblivion. Having unlimited money is a factor, but the most destitute addicts always find a way to feed the dragon which consumes them.

Does lofty fame convince some stars that they are immune to the horrendous long-term damage of drugs and alcohol? Why did her "friends" party with her, which made about as much sense as helping her play Russian roulette? Are these really friends, or just parasites, sucking at a star's vital force and even trying to steal it for themselves?

I know I'm not saying anything very original, but this one just sickens me and I can't keep silent. We watched Houston's self-destruction in slow motion over many years, and the media feasted on it. We wanted her to win, and yet we didn't. We wanted proof that fame, which so many people lust after, isn't really worth a damn because it swallows people whole. Which it so often does.

But does this stop people from lusting after it and climbing on other people's backs to get it?

The Grammys tonight will be shadowed by this horrendous event, and if it were up to me I'd cancel the whole thing. But the industry juggernaut must move forward, like the great pyramid stone that nearly crushes the old woman to death in that Cecil B. deMille epic. "She's just an old woman. Not important enough to stop a moving stone."

I sometimes hate the dynamics of the human condition, the games we're forced into if we are to survive. The smiling through our anguish, pretending we're all right when inside is nothing but a howling wilderness and a brokenness which is beyond repair. At the Grammys, people will say comforting things like "we know she's with us tonight," because they don't know what else to say. People are afraid to give in to grief, afraid it will demolish them. And sometimes it does.

I don't know why Heath Ledger had to die that way, or Amy Winehouse, or even Michael Jackson with his bizarre addiction to hospital anasthesia. I won't mention all the others because I can't get started or I won't be able to stop. They all missed decades of life that might have been rich and fulfilling, or maybe even painful and desperate, but, at least - life.

A line from the 16th-century poet Alexander Pope springs to mind: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" It's a question, not a statement, and it hangs there, implying crushed beauty and arrested flight. But who? Is it you over there, press agent - or you, entertainment reporter (just doing his job, after all, perhaps a job he loves), or you, the much-demonized paparazzo? Or you, the fans, clamouring for her as she mounts the stage to that exhilarating roar?

But the same fans are eager to eat her alive, and it will happen now, with rotten jokes about her dying the night before the Grammys. I don't leave myself out of this equation because I too often see huge stars as commodities, and am quick to hurl criticisms, knowing they can't hear me.

There are no second or third or twentieth chances for Whitney Houston now because she has been broken for good. This is disturbing, but there will inevitably be a certain amount of "what can you expect" sentiment along with the praise tonight. I don't know why she didn't make it. I don't know why Billie Holliday didn't make it. Winehouse. Garland. Let's not add more to the list.

We're left with that incredible song from The Bodyguard, the one that made people say, "Hey, who's that?" They had never heard anything quite like that before, and I hope they paid attention, because they never will again.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The park, the Cowsills and me

2012-02-11T22:21:00.000-08:00

Where did all this start? I guess I was watching Entertainment Tonight, which is my religion by the way, and an item came on about The Cowsills. Jesus, God, the Cowsills, who had all those wholesome hits way back, like Indian Lake, the Flower Girl one, and this (which I used to call "hey you on the ground!" after my favorite line in it). The Cowsills were the '60s in many ways, bubblegum pop that somehow made you feel better about being alive, that made you want to go to Fred Collins Park and hang out with your friends, except they weren't really your friends but your brother's friends, your cool stoned brother with all the girl friends who didn't want to talk to you and you were fat anyway and and. But back to the Cowsills.

According to ET, there's a documentary out (somewhere: not here, for sure, and it has about 67 release dates) called Family Band: The Cowsills Story, and I waaaaaaaaant to see it so badly now, I ache for it, I'm not kidding, because any documentary about a '60s band makes me roll on the floor with delight. This one, though - I don't know why this is, that misery must so doggedly, howlingly follow in the wake of success. The Cowsills, that wholesome family of seven talented kids upon whom the even-more-bubble-gummy Partridge Family was based, suffered the same kind of misery and humiliation at the hands of their father as the Jacksons. And I just now found out about Whitney Houston - my God, Whitney Houston, another one gone, and why? Where does all this wretchedness come from?

So this bubbly bright music, the kookiness of Indian Lake and that I Love the Flower Girl one, came out of fear and anguish and - What is it about show biz? Everyone seems to want to be famous, it's seen as the Ultimate for some reason, and American Idol has made it even worse. But those who get there often go insane or drown in alcohol (Amy Winehouse) or kill themselves in some other way while the rest of the world gapes at them in horrified amusement.

I want to see the Cowsills story because I'm shallow, besides being enthralled by all that sort of thing. I want to watch while all that appalling stuff happens to someone else. Apparently the band, what's left of them, still performs, and I always find it kind of embarrassing when that happens, ancient hippies with beer bellies and grey-haired women strumming on guitars and singing, usually off-key, while an elderly audience cheers madly.

Anyway, I'm geez-tired and whipped after getting involved in a sort of controversy over a local dead celebrity, and I guess I shot my mouth off about him and later thought, hm, he's not even around to whip a CD at me and cut my throat, so I better lay off. So. . .sorry, Lloyd. And, good night.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Rocky's last stand

2012-02-08T09:09:00.000-08:00

Dreams are strange things - no, scratch that, MY dreams are strange things. Slippery, often incomprehensible, with imagery out of some Salvadore Dali painting (or sometimes Van Gogh), they usually defy any sort of interpretation and soon recede into the thick fog from which they presumably came.

Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious", but what did that doofus know? He hated women, said they were incomplete creatures, just castrated men, and couldn't even breathe properly because they breathed upward into their chests. Brilliant doctor that he was, he didn't notice that all his patients were wearing extremely tight corsets (see my corset post, which so far nobody has even looked at).

So Freud was full of shit. Where does that leave us? With the jumble, the ragbag: seeing a giraffe in my back yard (or at least, seeing its head and neck as it leaned over the back fence); going to meet myself at a train station (I never got there); and, last night, something that reeks of significance even if you don't believe in dream symbolism at all.

A dead horse.

It must have been Rocky, my shaggy friend, a non-prepossessing but game little creature with whom I had an intense bond. I've written about Rocky before, and he was an extension of my childhood, the factor that made my pre-teen years bearable. Before we sold him when he got too old and expensive to keep (both boarding and farrier/vet bills were starting to pile up), he was my comfort and solace. I'd longed for a horse as a young girl, and here he was, not exactly a snorting Arabian but nonetheless sweet-natured and dependable.

So when I had this dream, this horse lying on the ground shuddering and apparently breathing his last, it must have been Rocky: I knew that sorrel coat with white stippling through it (for he was a true strawberry roan, just like in the song). I was sitting on the ground leaning over his head and stroking his neck, knowing that a downed horse wouldn't last long and probably should be put to sleep.

Some anonymous people were around (and just who ARE these anonymous people in my dreams? I don't know, they're just there), and I asked them to call a vet. The time had come. His eyes were milky and fixed, and he only breathed once in a while, if at all.

And then.

A big shudder ran through him, and he performed that motion that horses have been doing since time immemorial: starting with his front legs, he began to heave himself back on his feet.

Foals do this when they are born, if awkwardly. It's a practiced movement, and kind of impressive to watch. But this was like literally watching a horse come back to life.

He seemed fine. His eyes were warm and bright again (Rocky always had what horsemen call "a kind eye"), and he started wandering around looking for stray wisps of hay. Soon he'd be lipping them up and chewing with that gratifying hollow crunching sound. All seemed well.

And then: the vet arrived, a woman in a white coat literally wielding a giant syringe with squirts coming off it. "Don't kill him, he's fine!" I protested. She looked at him, then looked at me as if tempted to use the syringe on me instead.

Then the dream sort of wandered into weirdland: the vet hitched up a crude sort of wagon with chains instead of reins. Then she made another one for me, but the chains were all wrong, different lengths, and I had no control. There did not seem to be a horse involved, so I am not sure what was supposed to propell this ersatz chariot. She fixed the reins/chains, so it all worked, but WHAT worked? Where were the horses? Why were we doing this?

And that was the end of it, or at least the part of it I remember.

OK then. . . let's get symbolic, shall we? I know it's early in the morning. The dead horse which is not really dead is my "dream" - in another sense (and why do we use the same word? I've never been able to figure that out), my dream of being published again, of feeling like an author instead of a near-totallly-unread blogger wasting my time every day.

It's Rocky, not just any horse. And I had author dreams from the very beginning, from the first time I realized, with a shock of wonder, that someone actually created these magic carpets I held in my hands.

It amazes me how little support I've had, as my parents wanted me to be a musician and were automatically disappointed by anything else I did. Now people try to talk me out of wanting to do more. Just be happy with what you have. At the same time, they are constantly saying, "Well. . . ?", a sort of "what have you done lately" thing. What have you done lately to justify all this time and grief?

I learned today that a publisher I had completely given up on is still "considering" my novel. I don't know what to think about this. It's distressing because it has been a very long time and I had almost given up, to the point that I sent them a very strongly-worded email yesterday. I got "a" reply, but nothing definitive. This is not a hand-cranked press, but one that is larger than anything I would normally deal with.

Will the horse stand up again? Walk around and snuffle for food as if nothing happened? I don't know. I bounce back and forth between excitement and depression/despair. I tell myself not to hope.

The picture of Rocky and I at the top of this post was taken in our front yard in Chatham in about 1966. It has a misty surrealism that I love. The four corners of the original, which is one of those old Instamatic things that's barely 2" x 3", were cut off, maybe to fit into a small frame. I know almost nothing about photoshopping, but in this case I really wanted to restore it. If you look very closely at the corners you might see evidence that I didn't know what I was doing: the program was a strange one that plastered "cloned" material on the photo surface like a paint roller. But when I was done, it seemed to pop out at me in 3D in the eerie way of very old photos (such as the header on this blog, also taken in my front yard).

Rocky didn't like being tied in the back yard - in fact, I didn't tie him at all, just left him loose without saddle or bridle or anything - and while we were having dinner he nudged the gate open and took off. Never had he run at such a clip. He galloped all the way back to the barn while we feverishly pursued him in the family station wagon. I remember my father saying, "I never knew that horse could run so fast."

When he reached his destination (the barn) with unerring accuracy, he stopped dead as if putting brakes on his hoofs and moseyed on over to a bale of hay.

What does it all mean? Oh, probably nothing. I'm just trying to make my Wednesday a little more bearable.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Chicks swinging swords!

2012-02-07T15:45:00.001-08:00

This clip from the Italian film Beautiful but Dangerous has to be the ultimate cat fight: Gina Lollobrigida in the tightest corset ever made, somehow able to fence well enough to beat the crap out of her female adversary. She even bags a "trophy" at the end. It's not in English, but who cares? A good cat fight transcends all language.

RiARRrrrrrwwwwwww!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Moannn. . . it's Joan

2012-02-07T15:45:00.000-08:00

Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom! Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom!
"Ayyyyeee. . . maahhh-reeed Joaaannnnnnn. . . "

No, I did not imagine this show, though the memory of it seems to reside in the deepest synapses of my brain along with a fear of monsters in the closet. In other words, I was probably a baby when this came on, or else it was already in reruns. I remember the "doo-WAH, doo-WAH" chorus which you heard even during the show itself, as a segue to the next scene. I don't know if any other show did this. I kind of hope they didn't, because it was putrid, but IMJ was fascinating for revealing classic '50s mores: a cute little housewife, half out of her tree with absent-mindedness and spinny '50s incompetence, having to be married to the dull Jim Backus who only really came into his own years later as Mr. Magoo (and then there was Mr. Howell, but he was pretty dull too).

Old shows scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I didn't understand them and they seemed to come from a million years ago. Topper was horrible, hats and gloves and things moving around by themselves in mid-air. December Bride seemed to come out of the medieval period. Really, these shows were maybe about ten years old when I saw them, and I don't know why they seemed so ancient. Then there was "YE-E-E-SS, it's Pete and Gladys!"

I think it was this: in the early '50s, TV was just radio with pictures. Sometimes there was even a stage with curtains and an audience, as in Jack Benny. Shows were loudly, formally announced in the same way: "The Jo-o-o-o-oan Davis Show! America's favorite comedy show! Starring America's Queen of Comedy (what, no Lucy?), Joan Davis!" There was something smudgy and dreamlike, even nightmarish about the old shows. TV screens really did flicker then, which people still refer to, incredibly ("the flickering blue screen"). It's like asking, "Do you dream in colour?" Well, why the hell WOULDN'T you? Why are people so damned stupid?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Simple physics

2012-02-06T15:30:00.000-08:00

David Hykes is one of the world's masters in the art of harmonic or overtone singing. He has trained his voice in such a way that his chanting breaks the spectrum of sound apart into its component colors, much as a prism explodes white light into rainbows.

The sound is very very strange and it scares me, because it's a sound that really doesn't exist. It should be contained, one tone inside the other, like Russian dolls, but somehow through a trick of the human voice the individual sounds have popped out. To call the sounds eerie is an understatement. Not whistling; not humming; a little like a theramin, and yet not; and most definitely, not of this world.

Overtones are everywhere: most singers produce them once in a while, so that you suddenly hear a silky trilling an octave higher that seems to burnish the phrase. Just as you focus on it, it melts away. I once heard them on a bus. The hummy roar of the engine kept producing a much higher, parallel sound, eeming up into the stratosphere in that same eerie way.

Did we invent music, or only discover it? I think it's the latter. There are laws of music, just as there are laws of physics. Our Western scale has seven notes, corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow. (Middle-Eastern scales have quarter- and half-steps that we can't manage: I tried to play a computerized piano on this setting and my, did it sound strange, all flattened. I couldn't get a song out of it at all.)

Humans seem hard-wired to interpret musical sounds in certain ways: we often hear music in a minor key as "sad". It's hard not to immediately recognize celebratory music, military marches or music expressing passionate love.

Anyway, this brings me around to why this music scares me. I can't locate in my mind another sound like this: it's not beautiful in the normal sense, and when it hits that extreme shattered-crystal high, it's almost ear-splitting. It has a consciousness that is separate from the vocalizing that is producing it. It's saying, look, here is the physics of music, and isn't it strange? Do you want to hear any more?

I am fascinated, yet want to turn away, to stop listening. From what I have heard, when someone is chanting in a big resonant space, the overtones dwell way out somewhere in a little spinning vortex of their own. There's a sort of blank indifference to the notes. Simple physics. Why does this disturb me? Because I now believe that this is the true nature of God.

God is indifferent, doesn't love or care, just goes on producing life, masses of it. If there is to be love, we must produce it, must care for each other. There is no freestanding love, no Love, except perhaps as a principle. Where all this life came from, why it came, is a deep mystery that will never be solved by the likes of us. Why we were allowed to come this far is a mystery too, for we hold within our hands the power to destroy the entire thing.

There was a time, a very long time, when I believed in a benevolence, a personal God that loved each of us individually, had in fact loved us into being. I can't sustain it any more: I had a massive, shattering experience, an experience in fact in which I believed I actually stood before God. And God was not Love. God just "was".

I stood before a dazzling indifference.

That ended it, ended my Christianity and all that went with it. This music is disturbing because there is no emotion in it whatsoever. It's like a machine. It's like something turned inside-out that shouldn't be. We don't want to know that the Universe is indifferent. We want to be loved. We don't want to know that we are responsible for the whole damned thing.

It's not even music, it's just a sound. Simple physics.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm