HEY! Meet the Swinger

This near-perfect advertising gem from the mid-'60s stars a shockingly young and fresh-faced Ali Macgraw, who would soon rocket to fame in Love Story only to plummet into total oblivion. Being married to Steve McQueen will do that to you.

But before all that, there was this delectable ad for the Polaroid Swinger: "it's more than a camera, it's almost alive/It's only 19 dollars and 95!" A yet-to-be-famous utility singer named Barry Manilow sang the irresistibly catchy jingle. And such a product! It was new, it was affordable, it was"right now". Instead of a red light going on when you were ready to shoot, the camera flashed a large black-and-white YES. In fact, it used only black and white film, which didn't seem to matter to the young and hip.

I remember Polaroid cameras, the very early ones where you "zipped it off" (ripped off a plastic cover after allowing the thing to "stew" for so many minutes). I remember my Dad taking pictures of me on my horse, and him getting this - stuff - on his hands, this caustic goo from the margins of the picture, chemicals for developing it or something. After the picture dried - and it had to dry, just like those old-fashioned photos you developed in a tray, then hung up with clothespins - you had to stick on an adhesive-backed piece of cardboard to keep it from curling. But once that backing was on there, you'd never get it off.

I still have some photos - OK, a lot of them - with thick plastic backings on them, tiny things about 2 by 3 inches. For a few years, this was all we took. They had the instant payoff factor, but unfortunately over the years they have become almost indecipherable. I scanned a few of them and blew them up, but the results were mixed. Some of the best shots of my kids growing up were taken with this low-tech method, meaning that most of them were lost. 

But that aside, this is one of the most perfect ads I've ever seen, second only to that first Maxwell House work of genius with the bongo-drum percolator ("tastes as good as it smells"). The Swinger embodies the '60s, beach life, freedom from responsibility, being young and attractive and with your whole life ahead of you. You could smoke then, and stay out late, and eat and drink whatever you wanted to, and still look great with no effort. Ali Macgraw had that earth angel innocence, the no-makeup face, the wash 'n wear hair. 

I made a ton of gifs last night from this, my all-time-second-favorite ad, but they somehow turned out to be unsatisfying. It's hard to extract a few seconds out of such a seamlessly tight work of art. The shots cascade and tumble into each other, creating a dizzy sense of freedom. And - click - click - every move, every pose, every activity is captured on film, in crisp black and white that develops right before your eyes.

So what was I going to focus on? Hair. Ali's hair, which is used in a particular way in this one-minute saga of '60s youth. It's very very fast, so you have to watch for it. Her hair whips around, tosses, flings, and is casually pushed back. I did gifs of Ali's hair, plus a few of her walking in delightfully washed-out light, so that she becomes virtually animated.

Since I can't leave anything alone these days, I mucked around with the speed/direction/order of the frames and made them do things. I don't know if this improved them or not. I had mixed feelings about it, but thought, damn, I made all these things. Might as well put them up, as is. Wash 'n wear.

There really was a Chef Boyardee

This has got to be one of my dumbest animations ever, but here it is anyway.  For God's sake, I could only find three pictures! Then they had to be worked on a lot to get them to match up. Pretend he is smacking his lips, or blowing on something to cool it off.

Like everyone else, I was surprised to discover there really was a Chef Boyardee, a renowned chef who owned popular Italian restaurants. This went on very nicely until World War II, when the nation desperately needed army rations. Voila - canned spaghetti! This had never been tried before, and it is said that soldiers went about with can openers slung around their necks to partake of cold, congealed ravioli and other gourmet delights.

This brought about a change in the product, of course, making it blander and more uniform. It was sturdy food that could provide quick calories and hold up in the trenches. But in the 1950s, when the good chef first appeared on TV, army-ration-style food was still very much "in". All those horrific Spam/gelatined table scraps/creamed everything recipes prove it. America still very much remembered the war as they entered that other war, the cold one.

And the cold rations went over well. I fed my kids Chef Boyardee ravioli (which my toddler son called "dabioti") because they ate it, and liked it, and it was easy. I guess they survived. I even ate it myself, but the last time I tried it, it tasted like nothing. I was shocked.

I find it interesting that, while he and the announcer both correctly pronounce his name "Boi-AR-di", it soon evolved into the supposedly-more-manageable "Boy-ar-DEE". I will never forget those pizza mixes, which for years and years was the only pizza we ever consumed: thin cardboard crust, non-zippy red sauce, and a little can of powder that passed for cheese.

Sweet surprises!

Some of my favorite Lucky Charms commercials from the 1960s. I especially like the fact that the "rainbow" colours all come out in shades of grey. This reminds me of Dorothy stepping into Oz. None of us knew that the picture turned to colour at this point, because none of us had SEEN it in colour. So he has to describe the colours to us. 

Lucky Charms has steadily escalated the number of marshmallow bits over the years, until the "cereal" is now nothing but a bowl of chemicals. North Americans are puzzled, with big question marks appearing above their stupid heads, as to "why" their children are so obese. How can they become obese from a cereal that's "magically delicious"? In recent years the leprechaun has become insufferable, speaking in an obviously phony Irish accent (I mean, even more phony than this one) while he rolls out the "new" marshmallow shape/flavour. The last one was in the shape of a silver Porsche.

Busy day: surrealism in advertising

Butt Out - The Life and Death of Cigarette Advertising on Television

One of the better YouTube docs about cigarettes and the way Big Tobacco fought the truth (and won, for a very long time: "A treat instead of a treatment!").

By the way, this was produced by A & E. I used to watch Biography every day, then it trickled down to three times a week, then one, then it was on another network - then it disappeared, to be replaced by "reality" dreck. A & E no longer exists as a producer of quality documentaries.

An exploration of the paranormal

I pared these down. No, really. There were about fifteen of them originally. I just couldn't stop.

This creepy little ad for Sugar Crisp (now called, I think, Golden Crisp) predates Sugar Bear and his cool, Dean Martinesque "can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" ditty.

There are three bears, of course. And you don't want to know these bears. They come swarming into your living room and cover your TV screen. They look like Ewoks, or, worse, something from the TV-movie version of Communion (remember Christopher Walken's dance?) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

My gifs have been slow and jerky lately. These are shorter ones, so I hope they do better.  For some reason the animation in this just begged to be giffed. It's the creepiness of those bears with their jerky puppetry and cold, sociopathic eyes.

The reactions of little Janie and Johnny are almost as squick-inducing as the jerky ministrations of the Sugar Crisp Bears. Note the segue here: girl eats cereal; bear figure with pitcher appears for a nanosection in the right side of the frame, looking - if you pay attention - incredibly artificial; then the bear and the pitcher and Little Janie's bowl are shown in a different shot, so that they never all have to appear together. This saves having to combine live action with animation. The continuity here sucks. It took me a long time to figure out that this is supposed to be the same bowl/bear.

Bear talking. Creepy. Its fur seems to creep and crawl, indicating that it has fleas, or perhaps has been moved around by somebody's greasy fingers as they take each picture and string them together.

It's that jittering, that nervous, diddery thing that makes them so unsettling. They almost seem to be on the wrong speed. That, and the big staring eyes.

"Faster, kids. . . eat FASTER!" That weird sparkly thing is a big chunk of sugar with paranormal powers which bends these children to the bear's evil will. These ads often bragged about how you could (and should) eat Sugar Crisp "like candy". This seems horrible until you realize that Sugar Crisp probably had a fraction of the sugar content of Lucky Charms or Obese-berry or whatever-the-hell they have today. 

Like I said. I boiled these down. I could have gone on forever. This is the sort of animation where you can repeat one frame. I don't know if this was stop motion or what, but it's motion that I wish would stop.

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All squirrelly

 

When you find a new way to make gifs, it's cause to celebrate. But what will our subject be? Rob Ford is just about crapped out.

This creature beating his knee with that strange pink cylindrical object looks even cooler with most of the color taken out. Gives it a sort of artsy look.

Can you read his furry little lips? What might he be saying, do you think?

Uhhhhhh. . . freaky.

Christmas gifs: cookies that fly!

My God. . . what's that in your pocket?

No, it's not the cute little green Geico Gecko with his Australian accent and ironic humour. It isn't the Aflac Duck, who seems to have broken a wing lately or something (but he only had one line anyway).

This is some sort of nightmarish mechanical squirrel that hands out pills.

Pink pills, Pepto-Dismal pills (as we used to call it). If they taste as sickish and paintlike as the original sickish pink liquid, then they'll make you throw up, which is one way I guess of relieving your stomach problems.

I heard once that during the war (and to my generation, The War meant only one thing) people used Pepto-Bismal as paint in a pinch, when nothing else was available. This tells me several things. One, that there must have been buckets of it lying around (why would it cost less than paint, or be more available?) Two, that there must have been a lot of sickish pink walls during the war. Three, that I think I'm going to be sick now.

And hey, waitaminute: the Pepto part I get, but Bismol? Does this stuff have bismuth in it? What the hell IS bismuth - isn't it radiactive, like Strontium 90? What's Strontium 90? Is that why it's pink?

(below. . . I hate to do this. . . I found out some facts about the bismuth, but could only post these few because I can't think about this any more.  I'm surprised this stuff hasn't been hauled off the market by the FDA.)

Dissolved Pills Mike Walker

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Most modern medicines are carefully synthesized organic molecules so potent that each pill contains only a few milligrams of the active ingredient. Pepto-Bismol is a fascinating exception, both because its active ingredient is bismuth, a heavy metal commonly used in shotgun pellets, and because there is a lot of it in each dose. So much, in fact, that I was able to extract a slug of bismuth metal from a pile of pink pills.

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Teeny tiny terror: the doll that pees!

My doll history: frightening.

Actually, I didn't have much of a doll history until now. Until I cracked the code, or something, and came to realize with a subversive little shiver just how pleasurable it can be to dress and undress dolls. . .especially with clothes you've made yourself.

As a kid, I was sullen, uncooperative, usually bad-natured and mainly interested in bugs and half-metamorphosed tadpoles, awful blobby things with legs that my mother wouldn't let me keep in my room. Murky jars abounded in the basement right next to the preserves.

I just wasn't a proper little girl. At all. My mother, at a certain point, noticing I wasn't Quite the Thing, pressed a doll on me. Her name was "Deb" and she wasn't even a real doll, not a baby doll or a Barbie. In fact, she looked a little bit like my mother, bland-faced, her hair a perfect helmet of black. Deb was short for Miss Debutante, and how an eight-year-old would understand that word or be able to prounce it is beyond me, but my parents howled  when I referred to her (coldly) as "Miss De-BUTTON-ty." She was quickly discarded along with the manicure set designed to make me stop biting my nails.

I don't know, I guess a Barbie or two drifted my way, I'm not sure I recall, though I do remember one of them ended up in a sarcophagus wrapped in perfume-soaked strips of white pillowcase. Most Barbies, no matter how impeccably dressed, always seem to end up at the very back of the closet, naked with their legs obscenely splayed, their hair in a feral, impossible frizz. No one knows what happens to the clothes.

Not long ago I became fascinated with the dolls of Marina Bychkova, a Russian-born Vancouver dollmaker who creates disturbing pubescent creatures that exude an air of captivity, their eyes often brimming with tears. Their alabaster skin suggests a strange sort of necrophilia, their identical bodies (all hideously jointed) a uniformity that is kind of scary. They're often naked, elaborately tatooed, with realistic genitalia and even pubic hair, or  else heavily costumed to the point of suffocation. Here is where Bychkova truly excels: it's hard to believe what she is able to create with beads and brocade. And those tiny, tiny shoes.

I couldn't own one of these dolls because they cost upwards of $10,000.00. But some time ago, a couple of years maybe, I was scouting birthday presents for my granddaughter Lauren, a sunny soul who so valiantly carries what might be the burden of Type 1 diabetes that she seems to send it whimpering into the corner.

Every year the family takes part in a jolly occasion, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure.  Our team is called Lauren's Ladybugs (or "wadybugs" as she used to call them), so anything ladybug-esque is of interest to her.

I was dithering around not finding anything, standing in an upscale toy store too expensive to think about buying in, when!

I saw THIS.

Me, who hates dolls? who never played with dolls? who thought dolls were dumb? who didn't know why anyone would even purchase a doll? let alone play with one? Oh my goodness. This was LOVE. Then I turned and walked away, talked myself out of the whole thing. Far too expensive! I was on the other side of the mall when I realized Lana Ladybug was only twenty bucks, and how could I NOT buy her anyway??

But that's not the last of it, or even the beginning, because as L. L. slept in my closet awaiting wrapping, "something" began to eat at me.

I WANTED that doll. I wanted to hold that doll, take its dress off and put it back on again, set it on my bookcase to watch over my most cherished books.

It took a while before I gave in, and even at that, it's only recently I've started to make clothes for it. Actually, not for mine (and I have two of them now - only two - so far, that is - ) but for my granddaughters'. They must have at least ten of these Groovy Girls stuffed in a box (and they're almost always naked, perhaps a sort of tribute to their ancestral goddess, Barbie).

 These little doll-smidgens are ideal to knit for: long, slim and tubular, so that you can make tops, skirts and dresses all along the same lines.

So that's what I'm doing, to surprise them. I had to try them on my own dolls, of course, and that's when I got this strange feeling. What was it? Intimacy? Can't be that. The doll's pliable arms and legs made it possible to bend her limbs in half. So she was malleable. Vulnerable. Recognizably human. Her face was sweet, her hair a tousle. I don't know! What's happening to me? Am I going all soft? Is this weird or what?

It feels good to dress these dolls, as if the little girl in me, the one who never had a chance to develop because she was too busy being a tough little survivor, is finally coming out to play.

I see my blondies, my grandgirls, all done up in their sparkly butterfly tshirts, their glittery shoes that light up when they run, fluffy little tutus, stripey candycane tights, and I think: I missed that. All that. I was all done up in my brother's castoffs. In some cases they'd been through two brothers, who were five and ten years older than me.  So those clothes were very old and very shabby indeed, usually held on me with big safety pins.

Is this Cinderella awakening in me, or what? Why now? I'm not happy, don't ever get that idea. I'm one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. But I'm not dead inside. Not quite. Bad mental health, rotten luck and being thoroughly cursed has not quite stamped out that tiny ladybug of joy at the centre of my heart.