I fight with technology all the time. It's a useful tool, but I don't "speak" it and never will. My son is a techie who speaks about 47 languages at light speed, and I can't even catch on to the English version. So near, and yet so far.
I've lost the title to this blog. It used to say margaret gunning's house of dreams, all nicely set up in title-sized font, then below that, in smaller font, Step into my dream. Now it's not there, except for some weenie thing in flyspeck type, in the wrong place. This was the best I could do to restore any title at all.
When I try to use the design feature, it all shows the correct headings in the right places. I assume something is checked or unchecked to not display the title, which is just about the stupidest thing going. Who wouldn't want to display the title of their blog?????
I've been tinkering with changes, mainly because I could no longer do the things I wanted to do. I hate change, especially this kind of change, because it makes me feel stupid and inadequate, and slow. No one wants to feel this way.
When I solve one problem, ten more pop up, even more obscure and hard to solve. I just don't have a head for it. I did fine for a whole year, now it's all screwed up. I want my blog back! Vindictive leprechauns are nibbling my toes. Help.
This beast of a machine is giving me trouble today, so I don't know if this is even gonna work. But I'll give it a shot.
Every so often I go on a Melies kick. Y'know, Melies. Weird guy from the early 20th century, actually the late 19th, a cinematic innovator who started out filming magic tricks on a stage in one shot, and went on to phantasmagorical fantasies with a lot of men dressed as wizards running around with telescopes.
His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a bizarre take on a Jules Verne classic (with lots of men in wizard costumes running around with - ). The moon is depicted as a big gooey cream-pie sort of thing with an actual face on it, and the space craft, a big bullet, hits it in the eye. The story is disjointed: I never did get how they (the scientists) got back to earth. But at that time, "pictures" were new and innovation was free and open. No matter what a filmmaker did, some audience, somewhere would be enthralled.
Eventually Melies' work went out of style, perhaps being just too weird for later audiences (and those quivering cardboard flats in the background didn't help much). When you look at Melies, you see where Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas. Bodies fly through the air, particularly semi-nude women's bodies in mermaid-like poses. Big puppetlike heads appear for no reason and open and close their mouths. Things drop out of sight in a puff of smoke, then pop back up out of thin air. It's a kind of fever dream mixed with an acid trip.
Sadly, once Melies' work went out of style around 1912, he went bankrupt and had to resort to selling toys in a Paris train station. The films were confiscated during World War I, the celluloid melted down to make boot heels for soldiers: so they were literally walking all over poor Georges. But a few fragments survive.
I don't understand this passage at all (an excerpt from a picture called The Eclipse), and it appears it might be cut off on the right-hand side. It's pretty gay, to be sure, but I'm not sure why. And I don't know why they're licking their lips like that. It's all too squirmingly sexual. Why not have a seductive woman as the moon, and a nicer-looking man as the sun who didn't look so much like freaking Satan? Never mind, I am somehow drawn to Melies and his strangeness and sat through the Turner Classics compilation for the second time last night. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. But I did.
