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

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

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

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Johnny Depp: the ultimate swinger

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

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Adele's doppelganger: she's a Lulu!

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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

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I heart gifs

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Wear your heart on your. . . head?

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!

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Adele: Grammy loves her!

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!

                                                         

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Whitney Houston: broken butterfly

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.

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The park, the Cowsills and me

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.

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Rocky's last stand

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.

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