More Lloyd synchronicity: brought to you by your Uncle Marty!

(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)

LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How did it affect comedies?

SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the freedom after the war.

LEACH: Two foils.

SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era, it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.

Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it interesting. And they do.

LEACH: I’ll bet.

SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound came in, it changed again completely.

LEACH: The movie industry is America’s greatest presentation to the world in terms of public diplomacy. For instance, Charlie Chaplin was truly universal. You didn’t have to translate it into any language.

SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could identify with it.

LEACH: Well, we thank you.

SCORSESE: Thank you.

(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)

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

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

Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

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

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

Something indecent

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

Ars Poetica Czeslaw Milosz

Something indecent. The writer (particularly the poet) sneaks over the border into territory unknown, territory best left undisturbed. The writer (particularly the poet) has a way of seeing through the veils. Veils which are there for a reason, to protect us from reality, from the monstrous reality which lurks inside all of us. Watch your daily news. Be honest about your purest rage. No, don't, because even though we feed off it in other people, it's not socially acceptable and we can't stand to look.

Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother…the true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self which mothers and society instruct us to assume, is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors.

Jeanette Winterson

Is this true? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, I don't mean Facebook. I mean a real mirror, in someone else's eyes, someone who doesn't mind paring you down to the seedy core of your soul.

Art has quite a pair of hips and is barely contained by that dress. Art slinks. Art bites rather than kisses, draws blood. Why?

Theft, armed robbery, not pleasing your mother! Which is worse? Which is more heinous? Are we aggressive, rude, dirty, disorder. . . wait. No, that only applies to "them", the ones who have all the "nervous breakdowns", the ones who don't even earn a decent living wage but spend all their time screwing around with words.

Then why do so many people aspire to something so useless? Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing. Anyone can "epublish" and call themselves an author. But why?

Most of what they turn out is dishwater and requires no risk. They want the revelation without the "nervous breakdown", which is just a polite term for why doesn't she just pull herself together dammit.

Nobody wants human vulnerability shoved in their faces. Nobody wants these predatory females who not only want, but insist on sex. They're dangerous because they want want want want want so much.

There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

C. G. Jung

It's rude and not decent to climb into these caves, to curl up inside yourself, to listen. It's narcissistic to pour your lifesblood out onto the page in the full knowledge that because you will never make a living at it, it's a complete waste of time, not to mention mad.


Why's it so good, then, to have that "creative fire"? Why does everyone want to be Hemingway when Hemingway blew his brains out? Even Hemingway wasn't Hemingway, which was perhaps why he blew his brains out.

Art wears a triple-D cup and smokes too much and demands happiness and demands orgasm and demands Truth. It's much too much too much too much, much too much of everything and more, and more, and more.

"You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

And thus Virginia Woolf loaded stones in her pockets and waded in, convinced everyone would be better off without her. Was she right? Why does every source continually mention her multiple "nervous breakdowns"? What is a "nervous breakdown"? It's nothing, it does not exist! It's a delicate lace-doily term for somebody who just can't cut it. Who is so pale and weak that they can't poke their head outside the door, who lives on tea and those brown digestive cookies. A nervous breakdown is an indulgence, a choice, something weak people embrace when they just want a little time off. Nothing to do with raging, wrenching, gut-hollowing, soul-haemorrhaging manic depressive illness which is infinitely worse than all the cancers of the human body put together.

It was not her choice to enter the cauldron, it just happened, she had that awful stamp of greatness on her which in her case meant unbearable pain and death. She knew how indecent and disorderly her soul was. No doubt this "drove" her mad. Would it have "driven" her to heart disease or cancer? Of course not. Madness is somewhere between self-indulgence and demonic possession. This is why we tiptoe around it so delicately.

Aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Burning/bright

“In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.” Czeslaw Milosz

“Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother…the true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self which mothers and society instruct us to assume is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors.” Jeanette Winterson

“There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” C. G. Jung