Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Harold. . . are you there?




Do you see? Do you see now? Do you see why I'm going crazy?

Ever since I wrote my third novel The Glass Character, at the heart of which is the life and career of silent screen legend Harold Lloyd, I have been haunted. Or else enchanted.

I wrote recently about seeing a TV ad for Cover Girl cosmetics featuring a glamorous model hanging off the hands of a huge clock. Obviously a Harold Lloyd stunt.






And I've already told you, repeatedly because it scares me so much, about Lloyd synchronicity, the repetition of the name and image of Harold Lloyd which has been going on for a couple of years and is now a daily occurrence.

Just a little while ago I was meandering around in a good/bad site called, appropriately, So Bad So Good, mostly featuring oddball collections of photos. Boring, boring, flip, flip. I saved one or two. Then. My God.





It was a very strange, almost inexplicable picture of a man sitting on the ledge of a clock tower, with Harold dangling off the hands of a clock below. This was supposed to be part of a feature called 3D Images. The weird thing is, Harold Lloyd was one of the first 3D photographers, and in his lifetime took literally hundreds of thousands of shots (mostly of naked women). More convergence, or synchronicity, or whatever you call it.




But why. . . ? Is there really a Lloyd revival going on that I knew nothing about? Why does he so often pop up in pop culture, so to speak?

My knees have turned to jelly, and I have that plenty-weird, frustrated, almost angry feeling I get several times a day now. Tell me. . . what does it all mean?