This adorable gif of the adorable Emmy, as in emmymadeinjapan,was going to be a short YouTube video until I flew into a panic. Usually I know when I'm going to violate copyright, and stay well away from it. Now I'm not so sure. I think a gif is OK (isn't it? Especially on a blog no one reads.)
The whole reason for this paranoia is the "strike" against my account I got from "violating community standards of decency" with my Eadweard Muybridge animation, the same animation that appeared on several other videos which were allowed to stand. The video consisted of seven or eight frames of nude women, mostly shown from the back, with one woman playfully dumping a bucket of water over the other's head. I was warned that this was considered filthy pornography, and if I got two more strikes against my account, I was "out". I mean, now and forever.
So now I'm freaked out.
Never mind the jaw-dropping and even horrifying stuff I see on YouTube now, including a recent one about a woman who "FUCKS A DOG!" (and this news screamed at us by some millennial loser). Horrible, horrible stuff, because it's ugly. It's cheap and doesn't accomplish anything. I'd rather watch a person shit. I don't look for others of this genre and don't want to find them, but I am sure there are some that are a thousand times more explicit than my two little frollicking Muybridge girls.
So at least we get this gif, this very cute snippet of Emmy looking at her peanut butter sandwich seven times. I'm not sure why seven, but it's adorable. Most of her stuff is quite watchable and relaxing. I like her respect for other cultures, other eras, and other ways. She featured a series on prison recipes, real ones I mean, from a cookbook written by a former inmate. The treatment was not mocking in any way ("Boy, all those guys in the slammer, they must get horny as hell" - I can just see it), or satirical or even funny, but respectfully fascinated at how people make do with limited resources. That's how Emmy approaches things. No spit-takes, no mugging (though she does put on funny accents once in a while and does a split-second "bit" at the very end), no screaming into the camera with her face half an inch away from the lens.
In other words, no cheap tricks.
I hope this is the new YouTube, but I fear not. She's considered old school now. YouTube has been hijacked by the gamers, loud millennial slackers with the IQ of a gnat. Almost all of them are young males who experienced failure to launch, and sit home alone in their Mom's basement all day, perpetually playing video games and "fapping" to pictures of their latest female android superhero.
This animation I made wasn't an animation at all, until I converted it from a series of still pictures from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.
THAT Eadweard Muybridge, the man who predated the motion picture by formulating the idea that a lot of still pictures shown in rapid succession would help us see exactly how people and animals moved.
Muybridge only toyed with the idea of looping all these pictures together to attain the illusion of motion. That came later, with the Lumiere Brothers, a few dozen others, and anyone but Edison.
Who ripped off ideas right, left and centre, but was quick on a patent like Billy the Kid was quick on the draw.
SO. I decided to try an experiment and just take a few seconds of video of my little animation. Which I did, and posted it on YouTube. Or at least I thought I did.
Next time I tried to get on YouTube, a stern full-page warning flashed on the screen telling me I had violated their Code of Decency and that my video had been censored/deleted. Forever. Well, maybe that was OK or maybe not - it seemed stupid to make such a fuss over a few seconds of educational material. But then they started talking about "strikes against your account". I already had one strike against my account by posting an obscene pornographic video of two women frollicking with a bucket of water (though obviously they saw it as the sort of explicitly sleazy garbage I see on YouTube every single day).
If I got to three strikes against my account, my days with YouTube would be over. Forever. All my videos would be gone.
I have something like 800 videos on YouTube, most of it personal stuff only meaningful to me, but I didn't keep 800 originals, I just couldn't. And over the years, I had no idea how much these videos came to mean, a record of my life, my pain and joy and discovery.
So to lose it forever. . .
But then I thought of something: hadn't I SEEN a Muybridge video not long ago, one which showed very similar scenes (motion studies!) which lasted four minutes and went into a lot more detail?
Of course! And it looks like this.
Not only that, but you can see MY animation at 2:23. Exactly the same thing, all two seconds of it. I don't know what is going on. I don't understand the double standard, or why Muybridge is suddenly such a threat to common decency. I find it hard to see these pictures of women as "dirty" or titillating - they weren't meant to be, though some say Eadweard favored comely young women over men for a reason. Be that as it may, THIS ISN'T PORN, it's nothing to do with it or even with sexuality or eroticism. If it's censored, what we are censoring are women's bodies. What we are saying is that the female body is inherently sexual, and sexuality is (of course!) dirty, bad, and wrong. We need to do this, to make sure our children get the message. Particularly our female children. The sooner they learn that their bodies are filthy, depraved, and slimily disgusting, the better.
These photos were taken in the Victorian era, but not much was said about their erotic content. As far as I know, NOTHING was said. The Victorians were quite OK with Muybridge because he was he was a scientist and educating the public in a fascinating way. He also provided work for young women who might otherwise have been shop clerks or chambermaids. When you look at how sick this all is, when you look at how contradictory - . The slobbering idiots at YouTube are the ones with the dirty minds, sexualizing something that's meant to be innocent and even has an important historic and scientific origin. But what's worse is that a much longer and more explicit version of MY VIDEO is still up, under someone else's account, someone who has no "strikes" against him and probably never will.
(Please note. Several paragraphs just dropped into oblivion, and I have no way of reconstituting them. Sorry about that - something to do with the photos).
Post-blog thoughts. I did contest the "strike", which you are allowed to do, by pointing out to YouTube that I had only used material already in a published video. I doubt if I will win this, however. Something about the way I presented the material, perhaps? I don't know. I hope contesting it doesn't count as another "strike". Sounds almost as bad as a stroke. On top of that, after perusing what passes for "commentary" on thousands or perhaps millions of existing videos, I see hatred, racism, white supremacy, the n-word, the J-word (Jews, universally evil and hated), and all manner of other vile ideologies, if you can call them that. Those people are allowed to say anything they want under "freedom of speech". Now I worry about my twobucket ladies (which, by the way, I had already posted on an earlier video) being censored by Blogspot, my reputation besmirched by posting utterly disgusting pornography. A bucket of water! Imagine. Maybe I should just join a white supremacy group. It would go down a lot better, and I'd have a lot less worry of being shut down.
Post-post. The offending nine frames. Cover your eyes if you're easily frightened, have a weak stomach, or have never seen a naked woman before.
Depressed post-script. Today I had one of those fantastic ideas, encouraged by someone who actually made a comment on one of my YouTube videos (something which is, to my astonishment, happening more and more these days). I kept wondering aloud "why isn't there a troll channel on YouTube, like all those reborn doll channels?", and this person said, "What a brilliant idea! You should do it."
I had almost 50 videos already in my troll playlist. My idea wasn't to run a serious collector's channel, which interests me about as much as worms. I don't care if the troll has a 456 stamped in its foot, or if it was made in 1959 in Oslo or wherever they were made. I care about whether it's "trollie" and FUN.
So I eagerly began to title the videos in my troll playlist as The Troll Channel. And I was all the way through adding this title (laboriously, one at a time) to all of them, until I realized -
There was a good chance YouTube would shut me down for it.
Why? Do I need to tell you why? Even though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of videos labelled The Troll Channel, MINE would be seen as "violating community standards" and outside the realm of common decency. They had already hit me in the face with that one. That one strike had made me vulnerable, bleeding on the jungle floor, a thing carnivores love.
So, very reluctantly, I changed the title to The Troll Doll Channel. I like the double-oll, the way it looks at least, but it lacks punch. And yet. When I finally looked up The Troll Channel on YouTube, I was horrified at how obscene, violent, and thoroughly awful these videos all were.
But it is also the fact I would have two strikes against me, you see. I am teetering on the brink. But now that I think of it - and I have been on a total rollercoaster about it all evening - I don't want a channel, or even a playlist, called The Troll Channel, not even with a museum called The Troll Hole somewhere in the States. (Now, just think if I started a channel called The Troll Hole. Probably there already is one, if not 4 or 500, considered perfectly acceptable. Who's doing favors for whom here?)
The word has been poisoned, and not by me. I don't want any idiot looking up obscene violent crap and finding MY little innocent playlist with its 47 videos, me playing Mama to a bunch of trolls.
It's really too bad that word got so poisoned, and I don't know where it came from - Lord of the Rings, perhaps? But keep my trolls out of it!
A lot of this was a desire to get out of those snotty Facebook groups that DO go into troll foot size, number of fingers, etc. Who gives a royal rip! Dates, times, and price tags mean nothing to me. And I found myself trying to get into their good graces, trying to get "likes", and hating myself for it.
So it's now The Troll Doll Channel, much as that takes something away from it. But I cannot afford to have YouTube squeeze me any further by using a title 5000 other people are already using withoiut penalty. I've learned a lesson or two about that.
(Wouldn't it be funny if I lost my account because my troll account was about TROLLS and not. . . trolls? We can't let the public down, can we?)
Worked on these, and worked on them, oh boy. To give you an idea of what I started with, here are the original images:
These had to be individually cropped apart, made exactly the same size, worked on to enhance to definition, then put through my gif program in correct order. Did it take a long time? Was it fiddly and difficult? What's good about all this is how completely absorbing it is. Donald Trump and climate change and jihad don't scare me any more than a package of Hostess Twinkies.
Is that good? I'm still trying to figure that out.
SOLVED! The mystery of how Muybridge took all those photos which created an illusion of motion long before motion picture technology even existed. It was pretty complicated stuff, involving a lot of tripwires and cameras set to go off in split-second sequence. Seems to have worked, though the documentary I took this gif from talked a lot about how Muybridge was a bit of a fiddle. He was an Edison figure, more of a personality than a scientist, and certainly a showman who knew how to present his "facts" to best advantage (as did P. T. Barnum). He killed his wife's lover and was acquitted because he convinced everyone he had the husbandly right to blow the man's weiner off. The guy looked half-crazy and never looked you in the eye and may have even had brain damage.
It's All Saints Day, the bellybutton of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration which lasts from October 31 to November 2. In celebration of which, I'm going to post something totally irrelevant: something I came across years ago and which fascinated me. As usual, it's attached to the idea of obsolete technology which was cutting-edge and even astonishing in its day. YouTube has graciously provided me with many clips of early gizmos which were meant to create the illusion of motion. I'm not sure if Eadweard Muybridge invented the idea or not, but his studies of horses and buffalo and giraffes in motion were groundbreaking. Somehow (I can't find out how because I have to get out of here in a minute), he had rigged it up to take a lot of photos of a moving object over a few seconds. Trip-wires, or something, except that then the horse might trip! (haha). However he did it, when the photos were shown in rapid succession, the horse or buffalo or Thompson's gazelle or whatever-it-was seemed to be running. (Until then, people were so ignorant that they claimed a horse always had one foot on the ground when it ran. Reminds me of what Ann Landers told teenage girls they should do when making out.)
It's really just the old flip-book idea in more sophisticated form, leading to the mutoscope - you know, the crank job with its 20-second-long, supposedly titillating scenarios. Meantime, Edison was experimenting with the kinetoscope, which used a kind of film - a quantum leap beyond these rapidly-shuffling leaves of paper - but still pretty primitive. Only one person could look at it at a time, creating the strange and steamy intimacy that made the church thunder against its wicked graven images. An experimental Edison film called Monkeyshines (in two parts) is especially strange and seems to reach out to us from some eerie dimension in the deep past. In the first part there are just flickers of what might be a human form. Part Two is a little more recognizable, but still weirdly primitive and low-tech.
(Wikipedia entry)
Monkeyshines (1889 or 1890), an experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope, is believed to be the first film shot in the United States. Monkeyshines, No. 1 was shot by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison labs. Scholars have differing opinions on whether the first was shot in June 1889 starring John Ott or sometime between November 21–27, 1890 starring G. Sacco Albanese. Both men were fellow lab workers at the company; contradictory evidence exists for each claim. Monkeyshines, No. 2 and Monkeyshines, No. 3 quickly followed to test further conditions.
These films were intended to be internal tests of the new camera system, and were not created for commercial use; their rise to prominence resulted much later due to work by film historians. All three films show a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and are only a few seconds long.
(NOT Wikipedia entry): I REALLY have to get out of here, I'm late for whatever it is I'm going to, which is none of your business anyway, but here are some bizarro Muybridge things I found along the way. And his name really was spelled Eadweard. Maybe his mother couldn't spell? (Oprah's real name is Orpah, did you know that? Now you do.)
POST-LEAPFROG OBSERVATIONS. This Muybridge guy was some character. His real name was Edward Muggeridge, by the way, but he didn't think that was colourful enough, so he kept changing it until he thought it was back to its original medieval form. It wasn't - just very hard to spell. And just how would you pronounce EADWEARD anyway?
I present this blog the way I dig out my facts: in jigsaw fashion, finding a chunk of valuable information, but later finding something else that seems to fit or, more often, just changes the whole picture. That is why I am so given to post-blog observations: it's to represent the process of discovery, the nosy eagerness and ferreting-out. Research is never a straight line, is it? (unless it's very dull research). Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write formal essays with all the loose ends neatly woven in. But such watertightness is, I've always thought, a great way NOT to learn, because everything is already neatly sealed. Much scientific discovery has been effectively choked off and died due to this approach.
So! Here is another nice nugget about Muybridge, whom I did NOT set out to talk about! At all! I was going to talk about Monkeyshines, and got sidetracked, but Muybridge is much more interesting than Edison because he murdered somebody:
His most famous work began in 1872, when he was hired by Leland Stanford (later the founder of Stanford University) to photograph horses. Stanford reputedly had made a bet that for a moment, all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously, and he hired Muybridge to take the pictures to prove him right. This was difficult to do with the cameras of the time, and the initial experiments produced only indistinct images. The photographer then became distracted when he discovered that his young wife had taken a lover and may even have had their child by him. Muybridge tracked down the lover and shot and killed him. When Muybridge stood trial, he did not deny the killing, but he was nonetheless acquitted. Muybridge left San Francisco and spent two years in Guatemala. On his return, Muybridge resumed his photography of horses in motion, this time far more successfully. He set up a row of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a split second as the horse ran by. The results settled the debate once and for all: all four hooves do leave the ground at once, as the top middle image in this sequence demonstrates.
". . . For which I will gladly pay you Tuesday."
*DISCOVERY!* I have made a discovery! More Muybridge dirty pictures, hitherto unknown to anyone, even Muybridge! (Taken from the Muybridge Institute for Pornography, Stagreel, Minnesota).
