Sunday, May 11, 2014

Happy Mother's Day







It was a long, long time ago, I was an overwhelmed young Mom (just a baby myself), and I'd just had my second child. We lived 900 miles away from all our relatives. Though Bill did everything he could, he worked long hours and just couldn't... be there when I needed him. And the new baby screamed and screamed, and I didn't sleep. . .




And then my mother-in-law called and said she was coming out to help. I was too dizzy with fatigue to say yes or no. When she arrived, she said, "you look after the baby, and I'll do everything else." And she did, from spending time with dazed little Jeffy (only18 months old and a little traumatized at having a new sibling) to making meals to keeping the place clean to baking a cake. This was intensive homemaking and grandmothering, and though I am sure I did not fully appreciate what she was doing, it was lifesaving.






But it was the way she did it - with such joy - bouncing Shannon around to relieve her colic, sitting on the floor playing with Jeffy, taking him outside to play in the snow - that I marvel at now. And it hit me with an absolute shock today that she was probably younger than I am now. She became my Mum over the years, filling an awful gap left by an indifferent mother (my name did not appear in her obituary), and what I marvel at most is her sense of gratitude for everything she had. This was rarely spelled out, because it didn't have to be. Her passing was as graceful and as gracious as she was. I will remember her every day of my life.
 




This is why Jake should play Harold. . .




I've got to go to bed, it's very very late, and this old blog is getting out of hand.

My blog is an anachronism. Looks like a piece of old brown paper. Everyone else is going all slick. Picturesque, even. Mine is butcher paper tied with string. OK.

This is why Jake should play Harold.

At first glance you'd think not. WHAT? People mention Johnny Depp, who's 50, and even Tom Hanks who must be 60 by now.

Jakey is 33, just ripe enough. The shape of his head is perfect. He has a long, clean, handsome jaw, a long narrow nose and bow-shaped lips.

Heartbreaking blue eyes. Little-boy eyes. The eyebrows.

A big head on fairly small shoulders, compact body, wiry, restless, intense. A three-cornered, vulpine smile.

A sense that anything could happen, and is about to. A sense of a storm breaking out, of rain in the air, of horses whinnying along the ridge while clouds go scudding by.

And he's a good-smelling man, I know he is. And I know Harold was. I just know.

That's why he should play Harold.




Saturday, May 10, 2014

Don't give your heart





You must know this: it's not too goddamn smart
To give your heart.




To let some boy just trifle, a-la-carte
It's not too smart.




If you want to go there, go there,
And if you want to stay here, stay here,
And if you want to just pop la balloon
With la railroad-spike -
Do what you like.





Stupid to throw so much of yourself away
Stupid to realize it's past that day
(Way past that day!)
But haven't we always been the railroad type?





Love is a gutting kind of a thing
Doesn't make bells and banjos ring
and in the end, who's gonna sing? 
(Say, sing!)





When it almost works, it's such a shame,
And shame can feel much worse than pain
(and wedding rain)

When it almost works, the shock is deep
When it almost works, it shatters sleep
And pride and other things





The dream is stolen in the night
But you left it in the open, that wasn't too bright!
Not too bright.





When magic misfires too many times
and when all this stuff no longer rhymes:
Quelle horreur!

But it can't be worse than misfired art
And it can't be worse than knowing
You made this whole mess start -

You gave your heart.


Duckie-wuckies up the stairs!


Thursday, May 8, 2014

Goosey goosey gosling




To their surprise and delight, Caitlin and Ryan discovered a family of geese outside their condo in Palm Springs.




Fuzzy widdle goslings. . . ahhhhhh. . . 




Palm Springs. Holiday. No, we're not there. . . 




But it might be nice (if we had the $$). . .




 This isn't a selfie, so what should we call it: a footie?


Wednesday, May 7, 2014

James Cagney and other cool cats




I promised you gifs, and here they are. It's a treat to watch Cagney dance like a cat, in a sinuous manner that is nevertheless always intensely masculine. Nobody else had a style even remotely like his, lending itself naturally to alley-cat leaps and predatory slinks. I see traces of his carnivorous style in Gene Kelly, who purposely seemed to take a step away from the elegance of Fred Astaire. Instead of whirling his gorgeously-gowned girl in the air, he'd lift her up by the inner thigh and let her slide down his body. (Gifs to follow. I promise.)




Ruby Keeler was always the star of these extravaganzas. It's strange, because she isn't nearly as beautiful as some of the other dancers - she's more sweet or cute than beautiful, like the girl you'd take to the drive-in (if they had them back then). She couldn't act, and her singing voice was pretty awful. But she could dance. And there was something about the way she inhabited her body, some indefinable quality. (Or maybe Busby was banging her, who knows.)




I love the choreography in the early musicals - it's about as hokey as it gets. How I wish I still had my YouTube video of Broadway Melody, the first big all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza of 1929. There was a luscious number in it called Wedding of the Painted Doll, and if I had it now I'd gif it to death.




Meow-meow-meow, chow-chow-chow. . . 




Classic Busby Berkeley. Imagine smiling like that for 17 takes.



Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Just sittin' on a back yard fence (meow)




Though I wasn't able to find the whole thing, this is a substantial chunk of my favorite number from Footlight Parade, the quirky Busby Berkeley musical I watched for the second time last night. Though the movie runs the gamut from water ballet to gangster drama to pre-code titillation, this is the one I love because it's so damn quirky, and Ruby Keeler looks adorable in a fluffy tail.

I PROMISE I will make gifs of this. The only reason I am not making gifs of this right now is the fact that Gifsforum isn't working - it's "down" - and as usual, Y2GIF is WAY down, permanently it seems, though it used to be the one I liked to use.

This is, by the way, a Spanish version, a strange thing sung by men that has little or nothing to do with the original music. And don't ask me why Ruby dances around on a big face. I'm not sure if it's the moon or what.



Oh, and - in other news - today I walked into Chapters, where I was afraid my book would never be sold, and went through the d's, the e's, the f''s. . . ga, ge, gi. . .gr (lots of gr's) - then (angel chorus) - there he was on a high shelf: HAROLD!! It was an incredible feeling to see that book (or books, 3 whole copies) up there, for the first time in 9 years. I had thought I would never write seriously again, and certainly never publish again. So no matter what happens from now on, we have crossed some kind of threshhold, Harold and I.

The Glass Character will be sold in eight Chapters stores in Vancouver and area, and though that may be the extent of my exposure there, it's better than the nothing I had before. My other two experiences with publication taught me to cherish the sweet moments, someone coming up to make a comment to you in the drug store, seeing the book on a "local authors" shelf, being invited to speak at a book club where you used to be a member - just things you dreamed about, in your hand for one fleeting moment.



Rob Ford calls rehab ‘amazing’, promises to return to election: report
Ford says he is enjoying rehab, is on the mend, and will be back for the election.
Rob Ford announced last Wednesday  that he would be checking into a rehab facility.


FRANK GUNN / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Rob Ford announced last Wednesday that he would be checking into a rehab facility.

By: Sean Wetselaar Staff Reporter, Published on Wed May 07 2014

Mayor Rob Ford’s exact whereabouts are still unknown, but according to a media report, he is enjoying his time in rehab.

“I feel great,” he told Joe Warmington, a columnist for the Toronto Sun. “Rehab is amazing. It reminds me of football camp. Kind of like the Washington Redskins camp I went to as a kid.”

Ford announced last Wednesday evening that he would be stepping down from his campaign and checking into a rehab facility to deal with substance abuse issues — though his statement focused primarily on alcohol use.



Though Ford would not lay down an exact timeline on his return, he was adamant that he will return in time for elections on October 28.

On Tuesday, Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong confirmed Ford is in rehab, but refused to say where he was.

“Councillor Ford passed me the phone because Rob wanted to speak to me,” Minnan-Wong told reporters

“He said that he was in rehab, he was working out. He asked how things were going at council.”

On Tuesday, The Globe and Mail reported that Ford voluntarily turned back from the United States after landing in Chicago, before he could be denied entry.




Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a supporter of the mayor on council, also chimed in Tuesday, telling reporters people deserve to know where Ford is receiving treatment so it can be verified.

“I think that, based on the mayor’s behaviour over the last number of years, because of the amount of opportunity he’s had to come forward and tell the truth and hasn’t on different issues. I would say to you right now that at the very least the city should know the city that he’s in for treatment, and with some verification that he is in fact being treated. And then I’d ask everybody to just leave him alone and let him be treated,” Mammoliti said at city hall during a break in Tuesday’s council meeting.

So far, the name and location of his rehab facility is unknown.

Council will resume at City Hall Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., without the mayor.



I just don't know where to start here. I might as well grab a random thought: addicts lie. It's what they do. Ford has been lying to the nation and to his constituents for years now, and in particular he has been lying to us about his addiction(s), consistently denying flagrant abuse of crack cocaine in public places. So why are people so easily duped? He's "in rehab" now (or so we are told). So doesn't that mean he's getting better?

If Ford is indeed in rehab, it sounds more like a luxury resort to me. If you're in real recovery, you don't feel "great". You usually feel totally wretched, either experiencing the horrendous effects of physical withdrawal or beginning to realize how your addiction has laid waste to your life and your loved ones. This isn't happening, folks, because RoFo is a shallow bastard with no capacity for real insight and self-reflection. He has never had ANY negative consequences for his appalling behaviour, and may even win the next election, not in spite of but because of it.



Ford will say whatever will get him out of trouble and/or call attention to himself. He's playing the rehab card to gain sympathy, and the appalling thing is, IT'S WORKING. He's a slimy slug of a man, repellent in every way, and the people forgive him over and over again, seemingly not caring that he has made a laughingstock of himself and of his entire country, fodder for late-night comedians and editorialists everywhere. This has gone global, folks, and his next escapade - leaving "rehab" early because he "feels so great" that his counsellors have said he can go - will only gain him more attention, the thing he thrives on. Fire up the crack pipe, Dougie - he's heading home.


Monday, May 5, 2014

SOLVED: the mystery of the laughing evangelist!




BAM! I solved the sucker. Ever since I saw a good chunk of video of this guy pushing people over while laughing maniacally, I HAD to find out who it was. Wasn't that easy to track him down. Had to keep looking under search terms like, "Evangelist who heals while laughing". Found out a bit about the phenomenon of "holy laughter" and "the Toronto blessing" (which I vaguely remember from years ago). It basically means laughing your ass off in the name of Jesus. Yeah, OK.

Well, this ol' guy, see, after years of a more-or-less Oral Roberts-like life of preaching with some head-pushing on the side, decided to get on the cackle-and-guffaw bandwagon, taking an entire congregation with him. This is the other part of the original video I saw from the compilation, with much better picture quality (aren't you glad?).

So I have solved the mystery. This is one Kenneth E. Hagin, who also made numerous videos of reasonably sane preaching along evangelical lines, so I am not sure exactly what it was that pushed him over the edge. And I was right, this was at some kind of conference in St. Louis, something called a Holy Ghost Meeting, with everybody all dressed up in suits and ties and lovely '90s dresses with puffy hair. Compared to earlier videos, Hagin looks bent and frail (he died in 2003, alas), and I've finally figured out why three or four guys had to hold him up: if they didn't, he would literally die laughing.




This holy laughter stuff induces a kind of oxygen-deprivation trance which, combined with a mass-hysteria effect, makes large groups of people stoned out of their minds and prone to completely wacky behaviour. To my eyes at least, the so-called convulsions are completely fake in almost every case, though the occasional genuine orgasm of faith might have squirmed through. (And you can't tell ME this stuff isn't pretty orgiastic in nature.)

Watching this again, though, even the laughter sounds extremely phony, and the expressions on people's faces are - oh, get real, people, this isn't funny! Hagin looks like he should be committed, and the guy in the red tie, well. . . If I was a standup comedian, which this guy is, I suppose, I'd expect better laughs than this, at least more spirited than the "AHAHAHAHAHA" I'm hearing. When the whole thing degenerates into moans and howls, with men in suits flailing around on the floor, it all gets a little tiresome.




I found a web page that has links to seemingly hundreds of articles furiously denouncing the holy laughter/Toronto blessing phenomenon as the work of the Old Scratch himself. I didn't read any of them because I was beginning to go totally numb. It's a defense mechanism, see, when things get overloaded. I just sort of short out. . .





. . .a. . .n. . . d.. . . . 






. . . excuse me.





Post-Blog Thoughts. Typical of me, since I am a bloodhound and a bloodthirsty busybody, I had to poke my nose into the subject of "holy laughter" in all its manifestations. It ain't a pretty sight. What I came up with was extremely polarized, both for and against. True, the "for" camp didn't seem to need much scriptural justification for all that screaming and rolling around: it was fun, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with fun so long as no one gets hurt. But I refuse to believe that no one ever gets hurt.

This doesn't appear on the videos, which are no doubt edited, but things MUST get out of hand sometimes. Out of hand might take various forms - flailing so violently so that you hurt yourself or others, peeing yourself, peeling off to get hot and heavy with a favorite flailing partner (for it's well-known that uncontrollable laughter has a sexual component, a slap-and-tickle effect), biting and scratching, unwelcome (or welcome?) grabbing of someone's none-of-your-business, and basically falling into a violent mass hysteria that has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality. The worst of it, though, is looking like a damn jackass (on YouTube no less), and not even caring who sees it.




Here is a partial list of "symptoms" of this phenomenon (and the more I read about it, the more I am dying to try this thing for myself). It's from a site called Unholy Laughter, one of the many purse-lipped, disapproving screeds which condemns all that carpet-lint-gathering-on-one's-Sunday-suit:

Some other phenomena that take place at these laughing revivals include: "shaking, jerking, loss of bodily strength, heavy breathing, eyes fluttering, lips trembling, oil on the body, changes in skin color, weeping, laughing, 'drunkenness,' staggering, travailing, dancing, falling, visions, hearing audibly into the spirit realm, inspired utterances--i.e. prophecy, tongues, interpretation, angelic visitations and manifestations, jumping, violent rolling, screaming, wind, heat, electricity, coldness, nausea as discernment of evil, smelling or tasting good or evil presences, tingling, pain in body as discernment of illness, feeling heavy weight or lightness, trances--altered physical state while seeing and hearing into the spiritual world, inability to speak normally, disruption of natural realm--i.e. electrical circuits blown, the 'fire of God' burning you that you have to remove some clothing, pawing people and roaring like a lion, walking like a chicken, howling like a wolf, digging the ground with hoofs like a bull while prophesying, flying like an eagle, throwing communion bread around to show your joy in the Lord, screaming AHHHHH as a mighty warrior to stop the preaching of the word of God during a service, incoherent babbling, pounding the floor with your arms while holding a conversation in tongues with the minister in charge of the service, feeling electricity shoot through your body, affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc."(22)

It's that (22) part that just devastates me. 



Listen, I've had my own strange experiences, things which I still don't understand, but they've never been communal. It's hard for me to believe I could experience real revelation in the midst of a cacophany of cuckoos. I'm of two minds about all spiritual experiences: they often seem dodgy because they're self-proving, i. e. it MUST be God because God's telling me it is; I don't need proof because I have faith, etc. But at the same time, the game could be vastly more complicated than we can even comprehend (in fact, this seems likely), in which case logic falls down like a house of cards, blown away by the howling winds of Pentecost. 

So it comes down to the question, for each of us: what is authentic and  important to ME? This is my sticky spot. All this guffawing and staggering around isn't individual; it's surrender to a bizarre group mood or group energy in which the participants dance around like marionettes controlled by some force outside the self. It's NOT coming from within or everyone wouldn't be goose-stepping to it so gleefully. These people have thrown their individual will away and surrendered to a sort of collective will, which is the most frightening force there is. Think how suggestible such a gibbering mob is. If half the "symptoms" I've listed above are real, there are aspects of the experience that are downright frightening. At very least, it's disturbing, especially (Land o' Goshen!) that "affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc." thing. 

They say "affecting", however, without spelling out exactly how. Could I disable the security scanners with the Holy Spirit and smuggle a 48-piece set of silverware aboard a plane, maybe hidden in the lining of my coat? Guess I'll never find out.

POST-POST Revelation! I just noticed something when making the gif of the poor bugger in the red suit: the seats have plastic on them! Maybe these people aren't so insane after all. Seems to me they must be ready for anything.



Where is God in all this?


I keep thinking I've hit the bottom of the barrel, then find something even more inexplicable. It's hard to imagine this could be satire: someone would be exaggerating just a bit, as if to say, "OK folks, you can laugh now". But they're all so earnest. I don't know if they belong to some cult, or what. The camera work alone is enough to induce vertigo.

When you look at Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar (whose wife has the lovely name of Taffi) and all those holy-roller types, the audiences are right there with them, falling over backwards into convulsions that almost seem real. Never mind that almost ALL these evangelical types eventually end up in some sort of scandal, financial, sexual, or (most likely) both. Even during the worst reputation-dragged-through-the-mud debacle, some faction of the church will choose to believe the media is spreading lies to discredit their idol. It always happens. A split, a civil war. No one wants to believe they were wrong, that they were duped. A mixture of pride and blind allegience keeps them on-board unto death.



I know all about these dynamics because I experienced it, not in some fundamentalist snake-handling setting but in the good ol' Charlie Brown of religion, the United Church of Canada. We were charmed and seduced into hiring (and WE made the decision over three or four other perfectly good candidates) someone who could not have been more unsuitable for the job, someone we knew did not have the proper credentials to lead us, and we proceeded to demonize him for a year, cornering him on some of his worst behaviour (and believe me, it was bad) while remaining oblivious to our own.

The church never recovered, and due to some personal issues both connected and not connected to the church, my old belief system fell apart. Actually, it sort of went back to the way it was before I joined. Not being so sure of things, but being VERY sure of the darkness at the core of the human heart.


I wonder at all this tribal caterwauling. I suppose it does no harm, and may do some good. Sometimes I wish I could join in, wish I wasn't so dead-bored with droning hymns that are 200 years old (and were not very interesting even then) and the blanding-out that has enabled even United Church moderators to be, basically, atheists. Let's open those doors so wide we might even be able to pay the mortgage this month.

My entire 15-year experience with the church was one of scrambling anxiety, not over the problems of the community or even faith, but one thing only: money. Every year we had an Annual Meeting that was nothing short of an exercise in despair. It might as well have been held on the deck of the Titanic. Yet if you didn't attend, you were frowned upon, excluded. If you weren't there to discuss our chronic financial dysfunction at the meeting, if you didn't have a ready solution to these insurmountable problems, you weren't allowed to state an opinion on any of it.


After several hours of incomprehensible, often wildly inaccurate and unspeakably dreary financial reports, we always came to the same conclusion. We're in the hole, we're sinking, we can't pay the bills, we've got to get asses in seats. We were visited in our homes and interrogated about how much we were giving, and if it wasn't enough by church standards, we were guilt-tripped. This was even true of people on fixed incomes. Later, we were guilt-tripped if we wouldn't tithe. What's wrong with you people, aren't you committed to your faith?

We were shown pie charts and Venn diagrams about giving, and it was explained to us how, if each of us gave 15% of our income, we could make our mortgage and building upkeep commitments with no trouble at all. All we had to do was distribute the burden fairly. So what was the matter with us, why weren't we doing it?

This was all about maintaining a building that in essence was used once a week for a couple of hours. The rest of the time it had to be heated, repaired, tended to and endlessly fed with OUR money. Squeezed out with guilt.


I've written a lot about religion on this blog (especially lately - God, when does it stop?), in some sort of attempt to come to terms with my role in it, my need for it, and how I outgrew that need. It didn't happen gradually and painlessly, but in a violent yank that shattered my world. Meantime the church goes on chattering about commitment, and it's not to Jesus. Though much is said about homeless people, we don't associate with them and don't want to have them around (in our big, warm, dry, empty sanctuary) because "those people" are offputting, too needy and too much trouble.

So where is God in all this? I don't believe in God any more, or at least, what I do believe is so far from my original concept that you'd have to call me a non-believer now. Atheist and agnostic are terms that piss me off and offend me because they are LABELS, because people affix them and feel sure they have drawn a bead on who you really are. I am not an "anything" except a human being, trying to figure it out as I go along. I suspect there are more of me than most of us care to realize.