Here comes Bentley Claus!

A montage of Bentley Christmas Blingees!

Globe of Christmas Past

Smoking Santa

Bentley destroys the Christmas tree

Cats for Christmas

Christmas cat gifs? Oh my, yes. Always, but especially when the season and the ridiculousness of the human condition makes me owly and disillusioned.  Our first cat Murphy pulled the tree over - that was before we had video, sorry - but it must have looked something like this.

Short takes. I would imagine if you had a multiple-cat household, nothing would stay decorated for long. The cat is a creature of chaos. It's what we love about them. They rip apart the tinsel and gaudiness and expose it for what it is (tinsel and gaudiness). Now give me my fish.

Here is where it really heats up. 

Ni-i-i-i-ice.

Videos of  kids getting kittens are totally different from videos of  kids getting puppies. In the puppy ones, the kid ALWAYS cries, usually hysterically. I've never seen a cat one where anyone cries. Just an observation. But no one ever talks about a "faithful cat", do they? Cats are anarchists, they're subversives and never "obey". They allow you to dwell in their presence. You can't cry over that.

You can go "eeek! Eeek! Eeeeeeeeek!", however.

How to wrap a cat. I'm going to try this with Bentley. I am. He loves his carrying case, so who knows. This may be a ragdoll cat however, and you can do anything you want to a ragdoll cat. The gif logo says "Flippycat.com", which may be significant.

NOT how to wrap a cat.

Taken from an ad, so cheating a little, but still pretty cool. Since no one has ever trained a cat, the camera must have waited for them.

The Jingle Cats are very stupid, and I have the original CD and play it every Christmas. To date, no one has liked it.

Ginger terror!

Meowy Christmas.

Harold Lloyd's Christmas: take 76!

                                     https://vimeo.com/113520933

https://vimeo.com/113470172

Merry Christmas, Harold.

SQUIRREL!

He is born

"I'll take care of the baby, Mary. Now get some rest."

Christmas, a long time ago

I don't know where to begin to write about this photo. It isn't even a photo: it's a crop, only a tiny piece of a much larger picture that featured all my siblings, plus my sister's boy friend Derek. We were all in wacky positions on the sofa beside the Christmas tree. 

It didn't occur to me until just now to crop out the part with Arthur and me. And it jumps out at me now, startling: so there we are. Arthur influenced my childhood, not to mention my life, more than anyone. Arthur was crazy. He was a flutist, a musician, a ne'er-do-well and very very smart. As time wore on, it became more and more evident that something was "wrong with" Arthur. In his early 20s, a few years after this photo was taken, he was diagnosed schizophrenic.

Whatever that means. But in an odd way, he embraced it. His life was hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto, though I did get to see him once in a while. He was a beloved figure, always, even if he did not always make much sense. The family tried to help, they really did, but he was hard to keep track of. He was in and out of hospital, and once when he described a hospitalization to me, it was as if he were telling me about his vacation in Acapulco. It was a grand adventure - no kidding! None of the bleakness, the shame that a "proper" mental patient should feel.

Though he did "mental patient" with great style and verve, he really was mentally incapacitated at times and found it hard to get along. Practical things were difficult. Because he was naturally appealing and very spiritual, various religious groups adopted him, literally took him in off the street and gave him food and shelter. First it was the Buddhists, then the Sikhs, and I don't know who else. I am grateful to them now.

Arthur died horribly, in a fire, in 1980. It was the same year John Lennon was shot. I don't know how I got through that year. Everyone said things like, oh, it was smoke inhalation and probably a painless death. Then I found out what death through smoke inhalation is really like. Everyone said things like, well, at least now you know where he is. They even said: maybe it was for the best.

It wasn't for the best, not anybody's best, and certainly not his. He had his life, odd as it was. He influenced me enormously. I can't even describe his sense of humour. It was bizarre; he could be bizarre. It wasn't always pleasant being with him.

My second novel Mallory has a character closely based on Arthur. It was important to me to write that novel, but like everything I have ever published, hardly anyone read it. I try not to dwell on the sense of futility that gives me.

When my brother died, I rather bitterly thought: now I get to inherit the mantle of family fuckup. And I did, to a large extent. I wear a "diagnosis" too, though a different one. I take "meds" too, though different ones. I don't like jokes and cartoons about meds because they are not funny, though I see them everywhere. If I mind, I'm told I have no sense of humour.

But Arthur was good at his diagnosis, he usually wore it lightly. He told me about a time in hospital when they had a "patient's night out" and went to a pub. When it was time to order a drink, one of the guys kept calling, "Oh, nurse!" He thought that was very funny.

I don't wish to paint him as this jolly schizophrenic. There was that time he tried to exorcise a demon he claimed had taken over my body. And he often smuggled hashish into his bedroom, where we smoked ourselves senseless. I was only about 15.

I wasn't popular as a teenager, at all, and was often miserable. Oddly, Arthur WAS popular. Strange as he was, he always had friends, and they came to him. He never did a single thing to attract them.

I will never figure out the riddle of him.

If you've had a brother, and then you don't, it leaves a hole, a brother-shaped hole. It leaves you wondering why you had to inherit this mantle, this "not right in the head" stuff that is supposedly so important. I am NOT "right in the head", but that doesn't matter so much because I have my life. And I suppose it's nothing special, except to me.

How to wrap presents (NOT)

Happens to me all the time. I've also had tape stuck in my hair or on my knee (!?), and of course cut the paper so it's too short and won't go around the gift. Or discovered I left something out, and very carefully tried to open up the paper along the seam, and rrrrrrrrip. 

This is one of the rites of passage of Christmas, and every year I say "this time it'll be different". It isn't. It's just as sweaty, tiring and tedious as every other year. I somehow established a custom years and years ago of making pompoms and other yarn designs (twisted, braided) instead of ribbon, and God. It uses up VAST amounts of wool, and leaves, always, mats of yarn-bits and ends caked onto the rug.

But we do this, we do these things. Even if it's all thrown away, ALL of it, even (especially!) the elaborately-made pompoms which no one appreciates.

They don't appreciate it because they speak a different language, because they don't know what the hell this is all about. Their accomplishments shine in the eyes of the world. Mine don't.

But I keep on doing it, because - because it's what I do, and I know I will continue.

Rockin' with Santa

Caitlin is out front at the start, then on the left side from 0:26 to 0:52. After that, you can follow her easily because she is the BEST DAMN DANCER UP THERE!

Scary little Christmas: violence on the puppet stage

This has to rate, if it rates at all, as the most violent thing I've ever seen on a puppet stage. It's shocking not just for its casual and gratuitous violence, but for the stunned looks on the faces of the kiddie audience, held captive by the most un-jolly Santa I've ever seen. Most Santas just don't have it down, in particular the laugh: it comes out ha-ha-ha, or, as in this case, an evil little chuckle. There are moments when this guy is lecturing the kids in which his gestures are like something from the movie Downfall.  But that's nothing compared to the puppets, who rip into each other with heartless, sociopathic glee. There is a very fake soundtrack of forced children's laughter layered on top, which does not match the help-me/get-me-out-of-here faces of the kids at all.

There is no shorter version of this that I could find, or I'd post it. Eight minutes is just too much of your life to waste on something like this. And yet, it's fascinating. Here Santa is the ultimate authority figure. You WILL watch this puppet show, and you will like it.

Bentley's Christmas

Bentley is a Christmas kind of guy. Just tonight I caught him skulking around under the Christmas tree. When I tried to take a picture of him, he lunged at me, but it was a friendly lunge.

The gangsta look suits Bentley just fine. 

Scary Christmas!

Bentley roasting by an open fire.

Is. . .is there a cat in there somewhere?

A Christmas cuddle.

Bentley has brought me so much joy!

AWESOME images of Christmas!

Boy did it take me a long time to make this! I had to assemble some of my favorite Christmas images, but then the gif program didn't want to accept them, or even acknowledge them. They seemed to have disappeared in a puff of smoke. I kept working at it, found a better gif site (they are everywhere now), and lo! Here they are. These are things that remind me of the comfort, coziness and awe of the season. The Christmas squirrel is especially meaningful, reminding me of the squirrel in my favorite Christmas movie, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Enjoy! (You know as well as I do that the "awesome" is clickbait.)

A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

A Margaret Atwood Christmas

Atwood is a great subject for my PicMix art because every one of her images on Google is a posed, professional author photo. That means lots of blank space in behind - either that, or walls of books, and both of them gif up really nicely. As it turned out, there was a minimum of silliness in these (a little disappointing, really, but these aren't meant to be mockery). At the same time, the greatest weakness of these photos is that they are posed, professional author photos, meaning they are virtually interchangeable.

You have to try on all sorts of background effects for these things. One of them had her entire library in flames, and her in it. I didn't use it. This has some sort of vibrating Santa in the background, but that part doesn't show. The feverish, shifting stars are a nice touch. The animation is so bad in these that it's a kind of poetry.

Atwood as Santa was just too tempting to resist. 

In this one she looks uncannily like Barbra Streisand. I think the background of exploding roses is, if anything, restrained, so I had to use puppies and kittens to balance it.

This will cause seasickness if viewed for longer than ten seconds.

Jinglebell rock.

Bentley does not want to be wrapped for Christmas.

Christmas waterfall

The most amazing light display at Lafarge Lake was the waterfall, reflected in the lake. I've never seen anything like this. I want to go back just to see this again and get a better shot of it.

Christmas Wonderland

This video does not begin to reflect the beauty of the light display at Lake Lafarge. We nearly froze to death, but it was worth it. No longer do we need to drive all the way in to Stanley Park to see an impressive light display! The reflections in the water were particularly beautiful.

Cats versus Christmas trees!

Saaaaaaay  - I was about to post some swell gifs of cats in Christmas trees (and I might still post a few of them) - then I found this! Probably the best compilation to date.