Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Real live girl. (Whistle) Real live girl. (Whistle)


 


(From a musical called Little Me, unknown.)

FRED

Pardon me, miss, but I've never done this
With a real live girl.



























Straight off the farm with an actual arm
Full of real live girl.




Pardon me if your affectionate squeeze
Fogs up my glasses and buckles my knees,








I'm simply drowned in the sight and the sound
And the scent and the feel
Of a real live girl.



SOLDIERS

Nothing can beat getting swept off your feet
By a real live girl.
Dreams in your bunk don't compare with a hunk
Of a real live girl.



























Speaking of miracles, this must be it;
Just when I started to learn how to knit.
I'm all in stitches from finding what riches
A waltz can reveal
With a real live girl.






[Whistle]
Real live girl.
[Whistle]
Real live girl.
























I've seen photographs and facsimiles
That have set my head off in a whirl,
But no work of art gets you right in the heart
Like a real live girl.








Take your statues of Juno,
And the Venus de My-lo.
(Me-lo.)
When a fellow wants you-know,
(We know.)




Who wants substitutes? I'll o-
Verlook everyone in the book
For a real
Sexy Sally or Suzabel.
Take your Venetian or Roman or Grecian
Ideal,
I'll take something more "uzabel."



Girls were like fellas was once my belief;
What a reversal, and what a relief.





I'll take the flowering hat and the towering heel
And the squeal
Of a real live girl.




























[Dance]
Real live girl.
[Dance]
Real live girl.

Go be a holdout for Helen of Troy,
I am a healthy American boy.





I'd rather gape at the dear little shape
Of the stern and the keel





Of a full-time vocational,
Full-operational
























Girl.






  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Who let the goats out?

Sky Ladder: Wowsy-wow-WOW!




Oh deer: it's PORNOGRAPHY!

 



Monday, August 10, 2015

Meow meow meow meow


 

Just a little diversion




Just a sweet little something to wash out your mouth after my bitter diatribe. Fuck 'em, I'm going to go walk in the woods.



The care and feeding of an Amazon author




Long ago, and oh so far away, I was a book reviewer. Books came out every season, and my editor
for whatever publication I was writing for (Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, etc.) would phone me and run some titles by me, or even send a few and let me pick. I did this for a shocking, disgraceful and deeply embarrassing 25 or 30 years, which I've been told I must take off my resume so it won't look "dated". But I loved the work and I suppose would have kept on with it.

I wonder what happened to it all.

Now it's slam, click, like, buy, gulp, consume, poop it out the other side, with normalized ADD as a laxative. More than ever, it's "product" like Dairy Queen soft-serve, only brown.




I got out of it, I had to, the last book nearly killed me because I didn't understand the language of barter: you give me five stars for MY book, I'll give you five stars for YOUR book, and neither one of us will have read the book because we're too busy turning out more slop and swill.

(The worst example of this was a published author who "friended" me, then immediately messaged me and said she had looked at my Amazon author page and noticed I "didn't have too many reviews". She said my work looked "great" and would love to rate it with five stars if I'd take a look at HER page, which "didn't have too many reviews" either, so maybe we could help each other. She said she'd try to take a closer look at my stuff - meaning, read it - if she had time. Her page had a sci-fi dragon/maiden-with-flaxen-hair/his-manhood-stood-erect series (oh, these endless SERIES - big sellers, I'm told) with approximately 200 reviews. OK then. The "unfriend" button is a Godsend sometimes.)

You can't say I didn't try, in fact I tried everything I could think of, but somehow the "everything" was always desperate, embarrassing and "wrong".  I just don't know the secret handshake, and as far as my self-esteem is concerned, I'm still being shunned on the playground because I just don't know how to do this. And PLEASE, don't anybody send me instructions, because that is not what I am talking about. 




Did I stop writing? I write for myself now, every single day, and it is intensely enjoyable, but I don't mean to show it to anyone. Ever. This is the only way I can maintain the purity of the experience and keep my sanity intact.

(A P. S. to the sci-fi dragon-lady story: she mentioned the name of a Hollywood producer who might be interested in looking at The Glass Character, deliberate catnip. I did a little research on this guy, and while he pretends to be a producer, he is a convicted felon who has never "produced" anything but a criminal record. If you're a serious writer, if there are any of you left out there, watch your back.)


Sunday, August 9, 2015

Upside-down and backwards




I love old film leaders, and they make swell gifs, so I've giffed quite a few of them. This is from an old Terrytoons cartoon from 1930, the kind they used to show on Saturday morning. What I love about this one is that, for some unknown reason, the countdown is UPSIDE-DOWN. I like the splashy effect from all the grease pencil notations, or whatever they are, and the general deterioration of the film stock, which I also love.




Made this one quite a while ago, when Gifsforum was still working and you had some flexibility in speed, etc. It's quite a long one, too. I've posted the slowest of the three versions I made, so you can see all those lovely fuzzy, blurry, scribbly details, along with the countdown that stops at two. I notice here that the writing is backwards, too. A film technician would know why.




This is a little bonus, one of my favorite old movie logos with a CHICKEN instead of a lion roaring. Well, a rooster. Still, it's pretty bizarre.



  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Friday, August 7, 2015

It's very clear




Rummaging through my files of scans - and of course I didn't find the item I wanted - I came across this, obviously scanned from a book. But most of my book scans turn out shitty, grainy or covered in criss-cross lines. That's partly due to the fact that my scanner costs  $14.99, but this - this actually came out nicely, with a lot of detail, a sense of infinity which lends it that lovely sense of certain doom.  I had to tweak it a bit to bring out the contrast, as Harold sort of greyed out and blended in to the building. These types of shots are posed promotional photos, nothing like screenshots, and there must have been tons of them, which necessitated hanging on to the wall and remaining absolutely still with the right facial expression. Some have noted that there is a naturalness to HL's stills which makes people think they were taken directly from the films. You find these little nooks and crannies of craftsmanship when you study Harold. He took the trouble, and whether his fans consciously knew it or not, it's one of the reasons they kept coming back for more.


One of the better gifs found on Facebook

 

Thursday, August 6, 2015

and death shall have no dominion.






Happy. . . birth. . .day. . .Mr. . . Pres-i-dent. . .

 








At least they don't melt












Every summer, we have a tradish - or I do - of knitting something for the girls while they're away on their camping trip, usually animals of some kind. Not sure when this started, but apparently it led to squeals of delight: "Look what Nanny made!'.

This is the first time I have knitted food for them (though I did an assortment of vegetables in a basket for their Mum): ice cream cones, and they're harder than they look. There are two components (I won't tell you what they are, eejit), the bottom half usually being harder. Displaying them without them falling over is a challenge. I used those plastic molds that you use to make juice popsicles. They had to be good for something.

The element of surprise in these projects is crucial, though I never get to see it. This all started small and escalated, a little alarmingly. A couple of years ago I made a tableau called Snail Valley (still reverberating in memory) that I am particularly proud of:






This is only a tiny percentage of it, as I photographed the snails before I knitted the leaves, branches, mushrooms, rocks, trees, etc. that completed the scene. I don't know how many snails I completed, probably at least ten, all different from each other.  I must say they're cool. The pattern had the snail's eyes in a jolly, winky position on their head. SNAILS DO NOT HAVE THEIR EYES ON THEIR HEADS. They loll out on gooey, freaky stalks, the ends of their slimy retractable antennae.




This is the Megasnail, about ten inches long, commissioned for an 8th birthday. 
The body was harder to make than the shell.

Oh well.



  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Tuesday, August 4, 2015

THIS is why I unfriend on Facebook!




This hateful meme showed up on my news feed, posted by someone I thought I knew. Not quite as bad as the Tea Party Republican I had to cut loose, in spite of the fact she was cozied up to the Lloyd family (though she cut all ties with me for no reason that was ever explained). Her meme stated that the wrong Democrat had been assassinated: it shouldn't have been JFK (which was a waste of a good bullet), but Obama.

It's been stated that mass shootings wouldn't happen if everyone in the United States was armed at all times. THEY could kill THEM first, solving the problem. We have no such problems in Canada, but we do have despair. There are guns, but mostly in the hands of gangs.

I have known, in my lifetime, two people with guns: a collector of antique rifles, and a cop. The gun didn't even belong to the cop.

I just don't see how this can work.



It's lies, I tell you! Dirty, filthy lies!




I will confess to one thing: I stay up late at night, and look for photos of - two! Two things I confess to. I stay up late at night and look for photos of Harold Lloyd - THREE! Three things I -

Sorry, I've just been in a Monty Python mood lately. It's the silly season, and I want to coast along and not put in the usual feverish effort that makes this blog so totally obscure, not to mention primitive to look at.

I found this lovely shot of HL, obviously a candid photo. I love the quality of light in it, sifting down as if some sun or moon dwells in the corner.  Someone is wearing a silk top hat, which is not something you saw every day even back then (likely in the  mid-1930s). Harold is wearing very fancy evening wear and, as usual, looks splendid in it (and as he said himself in his Nebraska-born way, "Well, some say I don't clean up too bad"). This was a  gentleman to the manor born, but what's he doing here? Who is the blonde, and why does Harold look just a tad guilty?




As you can see here, the private Harold looked very different from the Glass Character who propelled him to fame. He was better-looking, for one thing, with the clean Gregory Peck jawline that makes male movie stars so photogenic. He carried himself differently. He rocked a tux like no one else. But what's going on here - just the usual social whirl he was obliged to engage in (not always happily, as he was essentially a family man)? Then why does it look as if the attractive, willowly blonde, dressed to the nines, is signing a hotel register? Is it just too hazardous if HE signs it, even if it's Mr. and Mrs. Smith?  He might as well relax, because his fans won't recognize him anyway.

The faces in the background look vaguely familiar to me. Can you make them out? So could this just be one of those elegant Hollywood soirees that - no. Harold liked women, and he sort of liked them in bulk. Skimming through the photos, some of which I'd never seen, there were several of him as an older man photographing female nudes, his favorite of his many hobbies. Nudes, as in women decorously draped below the waist, but with mammoth breasts and considerable curves elsewhere. To his credit, Harold would not photograph a skinny woman and liked bodies that were not so much modelled on Monroe (whom he photographed, though clothed) as Jane Russell, practically exploding out of her Howard Hughes-designed bra.




These photos of the photographer make me uneasy, for obvious reasons. Some of them are plain bizarre, with oddball props that make you wonder just what is going on. The family released a coffee table book a decade or so ago featuring the best of these nudes, so obviously they're not trying to hide anything. Some of them are in 3D, a technology which Harold may not have invented (that was Grandma's old Stereoscope that you held away from yourself like a selfie stick), but developed from its primitive William Castle roots to something that could  be seriously used in theatres. In an interview late in life, he claimed that in the future every movie would be shot and shown in 3D, and the interviewer made sure he mentioned in his writeup that Harold had gone a little crazy in his old age.




Now there is a Harold Lloyd Award for Excellence in 3D Photography. Martin Scorsese notably won it for - ironically - Hugo, where the main character dangles off the hands of a huge clock. Since he was a humble man, I think Harold would have been pleased by the respectful quote.

But getting back to it: Harold was human, but did absolutely nothing to attract women. They came to him. Flocked. It was wrong to say he chased them. He paid his models a flat fifty bucks, and the lineup ran around the corner of the block. There is a lot of evidence these bodaceously curvaceous women were quite willing to sneak into bed with the photographer.




I read part of a disgusting book called The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart. I forget who wrote it. I didn't buy it, folks, I read the "Look Inside!" excerpt on Amazon. It's one of the sleaziest things I've ever seen, so of course I had to read it (given my insatiable appetite for the tawdry). Pure fiction, so I should not pay any attention to the fact that there was a tell-all passage about Bebe Daniels, Harold's first leading lady in the 19-teens. She claimed that Harold was "proficient and good at" the sex act - well, my goodness! Hardly sweep-you-off-your-feet stuff, but BD then claimed she could expect to have at least three orgasms during these sessions.




It's lies, I tell you - a pack of dirty, filthy lies! But with HL's Nebraskan' thoroughness and his propensity for studying every facet of life until he WAS good at it, it may well be true. "Good at" means "satisfaction guaranteed, Ma'am", among other things.

Or so my wicked imagination tells me.





  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!