Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Am I blue? Not any more!




Oh Lor', I've had another one of my famous sojourns into 1929-land. Turner Classics has started showing a lot of (very) early talkies, most of them fairly unwatchable except for the novelty. It's strange that there are silent films right up to 1927, then an abyss in 1928, then a veritable explosion of cheap entertainment in 1929 which drew crowds like flies because, gee whiz, Mabel, these pictures can really TALK!

I suffered through a good chunk of Street Girl, which is not as racy as it sounds and is just a thinly-disguised attempt to showcase the talents of a passably-good dance band. But it's not the musical numbers (and some of the music was written by Oscar Levant) that intrigued me.





Early talkies are hybrids (see the related phenomenon of "goat glanding", below), most with at least some subtitles, and often major glitches in synchronization that give you an odd disjointed feeling. The static nature of these things, with everyone sitting around a table or on a sofa talking into a potted palm where the microphone is hidden, seems to suggest a badly-transcribed stage play. But that's not the weirdest thing: it's that damned infernal noise you keep hearing. It's as if someone is working heavy machinery outside.  It was worse in Street Girl than in any I've seen, with a whirring, vibrating hum alternating with a low rushing noise, and, sometimes, a grinding sound like a garburator.





I think it was the camera. No, really. I think I read this as a movie-curious child in that big coffee table book we kept in the den (I think it was called "The Movies" or some-such, and yes, it did have a full-page spread of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock). The noise of the camera was such a problem that they had to stuff the camera and the cameraman in a soundproof booth. Every few shots he'd come lurching out of there dripping wet and ready to pass out. At some point somebody must've said, gee, wouldn't it be better if we just put the CAMERA in the box? Inventing quieter cameras was an even better idea (though nobody had bothered to think about that before). It's a mystery to me why no such noise-dampening method was even attempted in Street Girl, unless it was made on a budget of 49 cents.





The other one I saw, or semi-saw because I can never get through them all, was called On With the Show, and predates even 42nd Street as a hat-check-girl-becomes-a-star vehicle for some nascent starlet. In fact it seems like a sort of prototype for the whole genre. I was nearly halfway through it and getting bogged down in a sort of bizarre fashion show (which didn't seem to fit in with the fox hunt with real horses that preceded it) when I realized I'd seen the whole thing before. I remember because I thought the women all looked like drag queens, and who knows, maybe they were!





But then. 

Seems a shame that she was required to come on with a bale of cotton under her arm, dressed vaguely like Aunt Jemima, but being the fearless artist she was, Ethel Waters overcame every conceivable stereotype the minute she began to sing. All the flailing around without a recognizable theme didn't matter any more: as they say, she owned the stage, or, more accurately, owned the whole show. 





The best singers sing as if they're enjoying the hell out of the song, but the truly great singers somehow bring you on-side so that YOU are enjoying it at least as much as they are. This joy and sunniness and self-possession and the warm earthy quality of her voice almost, well, yes, they DO erase the mediocre acting, bawling sopranos and flailing choreography of a really bad show that probably drew them like flies. Calling Busby Berkeley! We need you! But then, it wouldn't be too many years before he rushed into the void. 





And now, beloved reader, just because you are you, I have a few luscious factoids about this sweaty transition period that might just interest you as much as it interests me. Well then, here it is anyway.


Goat gland (film release)


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Goat gland was a term applied c. 1927–1929, during the
period of transition from silent films to sound films. It referred
to an already completed silent film to which one or more talkie
sequences were added in an effort to make the otherwise
redundant film more suitable for release in the radically altered
market conditions.The name was derived by analogy from the
treatment devised by Dr. John R. Brinkley as an alleged cure
for impotence


This "goat gland" succeeded mainly in causing previously sympathetic audiences

to abruptly lower their opinions of the characters' personalities

and level of intelligence.


Monday, March 17, 2014

Friday, March 14, 2014

Best restaurant review I ever read


“I think it closed”
Review of Pane Caldo

72 E Walton StChicagoIL 60611-1420 (Gold Coast)
312-649-0055
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Ranked #2,429 of 8,187 restaurants in Chicago
Price range: CAD 46 - CAD 89
Cuisines: Dessert, Italian
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Vero Beach, Florida
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105 reviews 105 reviews
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“I think it closed”
3 of 5 starsReviewed 5 November 2012
I believe it is closed, and was a good place when it was open, a well-located good Italian restaurant. I tried to book a table last week and no answer
  • Visited November 2012
    • 3 of 5 starsValue
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    • 3 of 5 starsService
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Thursday, March 13, 2014

Kitsch from the Bitsch




It's oh so late, I am bloody tired, but this is when I do my major blogging. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been to try to set up the launch of my Harold Lloyd book. It just isn't coming together, and now I realize it's been ten years since I've even done one of these! Never mind, let's bury ourselves in some enjoyable imagery from one of my fave FB pages, The Kitsch Bitsch.




Strange woman in bra and girdle talking on a lot of blue phones at the same time. Oh, those cords.




I don't know about the food on this page. It's almost like the dog had an accident on the rug. Nearly everything is jellied, held in suspension and quivering. This has a little moat in the middle, holding the Lord knows what. So long as it isn't moving.




As the immortal KB says, you can't make this stuff up. I devoted a whole previous post to the Munsingwear men, gleefully bantering back and forth about the state of their underwear. These undies look sort of like girdles and feature the patented "stretchy seat" that these fellows just love to dish about. Munsingwear also patented the kangaroo-pouch fly, which I can't look at for very long if it's on a certain kind of guy, because my body just sort of does this "thing" all by itself. Some sort of primitive reflex, no doubt. A hangover from my reproductive years.  Ye gods. . . time for bed. . .

https://www.facebook.com/thekitschbitsch


Wednesday, March 12, 2014

This coffee made my brain explode!



Usually you can't copy and paste gifs from online articles, but for some reason these worked. It was an article about the effects of caffeine on the brain, and the illustrations moved, wiggled. This one, if you really look at it, is kind of disgusting, though it's something we all do many times a day.




Now here is an interesting thing: brain as neon sign. Before you have your coffee in the morning, your brain is, well, sort of greeny and dull red. After you have your coffee in the morning, it turns blue. And kind of black. I have never seen the inside of my brain, which I know is defective anyway, so I can't say for sure this is accurate.




This one's way cute. Little brown coffee beans are throwing things up in the air, things that look sort of like tiny Milk Bone dog biscuits (which, as a kid, I used to eat).  I know about caffeine, though I have to strictly limit my intake of it to keep from flipping into hypomania, but adenosine? Sounds like an ingredient of a household cleaner or the byproduct of a lab experiment gone wrong. Harsh.




Now we KNOW adenosine isn't a good thing, because it's full of spiders. Not only that, we seem to be looking at the insides of a twitching, jerking frog. Maybe this is a vivisection. But it ain't very attractive.




Quite simply, this is disgusting. I feel like I'm watching a remake of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum. And what are those two little chocolate things on the fly's face? Deformed frogs? This is a still picture rather than a gif, and it's just as well, for if this started wriggling and squirming I'd feel pretty sick.




I feel an attack of Ricardo Montalban coming on. Pre-Wrath of Khan, he moved a lot of Maxwell House. He had that smoooooooooth voice. It made you want to drink some. "Arabicas!" I look forward to the day when your Facebook profile picture can be animated like this. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.



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Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!


Let's not "reduce" the stigma: let's throw it out!



Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself. 

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?




So the name itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. "Mentally ill" is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.





I hate stigma. I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away. 





"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.  

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"?  Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the 'poor soul" attitude that prevails?





But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior". 





One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.





Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark.  I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?




Monday, March 10, 2014

Bursting Blings and Beta: the lost art of the basement tape




The past swims before my eyes. Or rather lurches and jostles, violently, in violet colors, with that grainy, almost sparkling lower frame which is the telltale sign of the 30-year-old Beta-format videotape. Something happens to these tapes when allowed to stew in their own nitrates in somebody's basement for two or three decades. A chemical change comes over them - an alchemy - and like a good friend going through a bad divorce, they come out Different. They go bad, actually, denature and denitrate (though they're probably not made of nitrate at all but some cheap acetate like a whore's stocking), but in some brilliant way they also spring into unique works of moving art. Thus Rich Correll, as he forever bounds on to the stage with his gigantic Citizen-Kane-sized name in lights, seems to strobe jubilantly as he saunters towards the towering structure that is the Squares, his appearance evanescent, almost incandescent as the Beta tape catches that fleeting second, that instant in time which is the Hollywood Squares Leave it to Beaver Day.




And here, a brilliantly-striped, strobing Rich sounds forth on something, the contents of which we will never know, but how beautifully he does it, in his violet/magenta/chartreuse/indigo tones interspersed with gaudy flashes of carmine. Beyond graininess or distortion, this thing has just gone all to hell with color, a striated peacock-tail of almost indecent hue, as if the colors were leaping and strobing right out of Rich Correlll's own creative head as he sits in that square behind his name. I wish there were some sort of magic crayon or acrylic or whatever that would paint in jostling, violently jiggling multicolored lines like that, for then I might be able to make something resembling art. The closest I've ever come is the Blingee, and to be honest the Blingee is not a very satisfying art form unless you sign up and pay for all those extras, like exploding flamingos and such.






But in a vain attempt to recapture the psychedelic, even hallucinogenic atmosphere of the aforementioned Hollywood Squares Beta clips, here are a couple of Blingees, I mean the kind you get if you don't sign up or pay, which look pretty low-res to me. The graceful fireworks I saw when I made this thing have sort of gone all to pot and turned into three-frames-per-second jerks. Oh well, chalk it up to low technology, which can, after all, have a beauty all its own.







Sunday, March 9, 2014

Horrific medical practices: even worse than now!






I guarantee you will find this photo gallery both horrific and fascinating. Most shocking are the attitudes behind each practice: a woman with an artifical leg hides her face in shame. Mental patients are wrapped mummylike in wet sheets and laid out in corpselike rows. "Female remedies" (for what??) imply that femaleness itself is a disease.




Come along if you dare.


http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/83858344/



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