The Glass Character: Blingees

Showing posts with label Blingees. Show all posts

Sunday, April 6, 2014

My fave Harold Blingee to date

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.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Saturday, February 15, 2014

I've gone Blingee!

For a long time, before I even knew what a gif was or figured any of that out, there were these sparkly things that you could find on the internet. Sparkly like old greeting cards with that sandlike stuff stuck to them. Mostly they were puppies and kittens and things. I hated them.

When I was swallowed up by the enchantment of the World of Gif, I turned disdainfully away from sparklies. To hell with them! I was a Giffinator now. That is, until my favorite gif site just pulled the plug on me. It doesn't work for shit now and turns out these small stretched uglies that I won't post.

While throwing together bad valentine verses that turned into a dissertation on writer's groups and why I hate them, I wanted to illustrate my points (and break up monotonous blocks of text, which is the main reason I use images) with tacky Valentine sentiments. It wasn't hard to find them. Nearly all of them, the really tacky ones anyway, were Blingees.

Something had happened in the interim, and now these were interesting. Tawdry, most of them, but in a good way. Some of them were wildly creative, just flashing with crazy energy. The animation had improved substantially to allow dancing figures and even, in one case, a walking one.

The hunt was on! I wanted to find them ALL. I wanted Bigfoot, I wanted Bob Dylan, I wanted William Shatner, Jesus, and everything else. What really triggered this search was a Blingee of a squirrel with a bottle of Jack Daniels beside it. WTFFF? It was so nonsensical, so incomprehensible, it was beautiful.

Blingees have been taken over by the cool element, the gangstas, though there are still lots of glittering ponies and bleeding Christs. Jesus probably accounts for 85% of Blingee images, a sort of modern update of the old lenticular pictures that flashed back and forth between the Crucifixion and the Last Supper.

I confess that I lost my virginity not long ago and Blingee-d the cover of The Glass Character (which I am not quite allowed to show you yet, but it's a doozie!). I had to keep the blings to one side to avoid covering Harold's face - but strangely enough, at the bottom of the cover, the author's name turns out as Margaret Blingee.

I like that. It could be a pseudonym. I could at last be Cool. Margaret Blingee could wear things that Margaret Gunning couldn't get away with. Margaret Blingee could write cool things and win swell prizes. It would be a different life.

Puppy, don't chase that squirrel! "Dis muh nutz, you can't have em!"

Beautiful images that evoke Bob Dylan. Note the walking cat, and the angel perched on the roof playing a violin that releases a cascade of gold shimmers. The second one is Slow Train Coming.