Crying in the wilderness

I made this giffy slide-show thingie to illustrate a piece of music which I can't include here, 'cuz it ain't on the internet anywhere. It's from an old Paul Winter album called Canyon, and it consists of a cello playing doomy, moody arpeggios while a man sings like he is hanging off the edge of the world.

It's a wilderness wail, a come-to-the-end-of-everything howl of sorrow and grief that is quite extraordinary, because it has no words. Not many could do that. In fact, I don't think I've heard ANYONE do it besides this guy, whoever he is.

This gif didn't turn out great. It purposely runs quite slowly to try to match the music. I cropped the 46 frames totally wrong, should've gone for widescreen and instead chose something closer to a square. I found some great images, but the gif program spat them back out at me with white margins, which they never had going in.

The photos are a collection of private and public ones, all on the theme of - what - angst? Aloneness? Mortality, and the great unfathomable? Maybe all of those things. 

I look at other people, and it's not that I think they're necessarily richer or smarter, but don't they just have it "better" than me in some indefinable way? Such as being a famous writer. There's one. No one knocked her guts out as much as I did, for so little reward. It just wasn't in the cards for me.

Other things worked out, but how mortal are we? We all hang by a spiderweb. We had a death in the family on Friday, not really close family but very much a part of the circle for years. He had been off the scene for several years when his wife became estranged from my daughter-in-law. But family is family, is it not? - the only glue I've had in my life. Oh, yes, I know these are universal things, we all die, but isn't it terrifying just the same? We don't know when or how, or who. I would like to go first, but I see how selfish that is, and how unlikely.

So if you watch these images, sort of badly-cropped because I wasn't thinking, try to imagine a man crying in the wilderness, his voice rising and falling, lamenting in grief, while a cello moans and keens in the background.

It's how I'm feeling right now.

POST-BLOG. OK, it's the next day and I see these images totally differently. I think it's one of the best gif slideshows I've made. Who knows how I will feel about it tomorrow. 

Is it Friday yet?

Though I swore I wouldn't post any more Harold Lloyd gifs, here I am doing it again. I'm making my own now, along with Facebook banners (yes, I am actually dipping my toe back in the poison waters of Facebook) and stuff. And this one turned out so well, after about a billion tries. As the rain teems down - no, not rain, but a sort of solid jelly of water suspended in the air which seeps into every crevice of your being, including your ass - I find I don't want to go out, don't want to hope, but somehow Harold has jumped up again.

I just miss him, is all. I fell deeply in love with him while writing The Glass Character, and never got over it. Nobody else gets it, apparently, or cares. I have this awful feeling that if anyone else had written the exact same novel, tlhey'd be at the top of the bestseller list. There's something about me. It's bad. Karma? Karma always reminds me of Carmen, a girl in Grade 5 I couldn't stand.

Harold Lloyd actually lived. He wasn't a fictional character, so making him into one took some doing. I wanted to capture all the paradoxes, the apparent contradictions in his personality. He came from this hayseed rural Nebraska background and was a hard-working, uncomplaining, roll-up-your-sleeves type, yet at the same time he could step out on the town looking as elegant as any leading man. When he took those glasses off (and by the way, he was the one who invented the term "glass character", though everyone else said "glasses'), nobody recognized him, and far from being insulted by it, he liked the fact that he could go about Hollywood and remain in cognito.

I am in danger here of telling his whole life story. I couldn't, there's too much of it, some of it kind of loony. There is no doubt he was eccentric, and became more that way as he got older. He fancied his Greenacres mansion was a sort of Heffneresque retreat for curvaceous young beauties whom he photographed in the nude (in 3D! Harold was always ahead of his time.) They were all there to sample like so many chocolates in a box. Meantime his wife suffered from loneliness and depression. How much do we pay for fame?

Hmmm, these gifs ain't bad. I spent a long time on them today. For almost a year, I turned away. I turned my back on all the failure, having my work thrown back in my face, or (worse) totally ignored. It seems I wasn't going to make a go of this, after all. The angel cake fell flat, the elation that had lasted a year and a half just died.

So why is it returning now?

I have this relentlessness in me, but I am not sure it is good. It's this inability to give up, even when I probably should have long ago.

I tell myself, look, I proved to myself that I can be published. So that must mean that it can happen again.

Even though this is bullshit, part of me must believe it.

It's not in the cards for me to be successful, or so I tell myself. I had that one little taste (well, two. But as with any peak time in life, did I really appreciate it? I assumed it would be that way "from now on".) But I realize this is just a load of complaining and I have to get on with the task of writing.

I cannot imagine writing another novel, but I couldn't imagine Harold until he jumped into my head. I thought researching a novel would be agonizing, but it turned out to be the most enjoyable part. I wanted to use everything I could get my hands on. Natural curiosity became obsession, the most enjoyable obsession I have ever experienced. 

I could lose myself in that world. My own world is boring and frustrating and I am left with the feeling I will never get what I want. 

But why did I think I could buy my way into happiness with a book? Aren't writers just about the most wretched people on earth (next to actors)? As for success, can't I be just as unhappy without it?

It bears thinking about.


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

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

Is Don Draper really a vampire? and other depressing questions

It's not every day, well, it's almost every day but never mind, that we find, that I find I mean, uh. Let me start over again.

I don't even know how I YouTubed my way into this one. Every once in a while I profess my rabid, tree-scratching, hide-tearing, rubbing-salt-into-my-private-areas LUST for AMC's Mad Men. It's the smartest show I've ever seen, even though, at the base of it all, it's nothing more than a sexy and well-acted soap opera.

Angst rules supreme. Nobody is ever really happy. This makes us all feel better about ourselves, because, you see, WE'RE never really happy either. Or at least, I'm not.

Privately, I believe that happiness is for idiots, or at least for people who don't think or don't notice the intractible mess all around them. I have moments of it, of course. Even serious upgusts. But angst remains my prevailing mood, and that's when I am not downright depressed.

So Mad Men cheers me up. The way the characters hurl themselves at their fate, impaling themselves on ill fortune, screwing around madly just to forget. They beat their fists on reality. They don (!) mask after mask, phony disguise after phony disguise, hoping THIS one will be the charm, and it never is.

And saaaaaaaay, isn't that some coincidence that we have a character named Don (as in Don Quixote; as in Don Juan; as in The Godfather; as in "don we now our gay apparel") Draper, as in let's throw a tarp over all this mess before anyone sees it (too late!). And that's not even his real name: he has "donned" it like a "drape" over his somewhat vampirish personality. His real name, Dick (!) Whitman, does not need to be examined (though Walt Whitman may sneak in there somewhere: but hey, wasn't he queer or something?).

We could sit here and analyze every character's name - Jesus, Roger Sterling?? - Lane Pryce?? - but I'm getting very tired. I am so addicted now that even when whatsisname, that Weinerhead guy, spews out a substandard episode, I still watch it at least three times. Then I go on the message boards and see what arcane, cabalistic meanings the fans have squeaked out, adding a few of my own ("hey, Cool Whip isn't real whipped cream!"). When I found this video I thought, great, I get to see Don's new sexpot wife Megan make a total fool of herself (again) and be the only person in the room who doesn't know. But then. . .

Then I realized that my two greatest loves, Mad Men and Mr. Trololo, had somehow met and blended, had fused together and become one, and it was magical!

There is a certain affinity between the two songs, after all, a certain bouncy optimism. Surely Don needs this sort of frisson of joy, this gasping souffle, this seething birthday pie that he can stick his thumb in any time he wants to. Megan may have big scared eyes and teeth that are completely over the top, but she's HAPPY damn it, and is going to make DON happy ("yes, master!") too, even if she won't eat the orange sherbet at Howard Johnson's.

Ye-ye-ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, ye-ye-ye, o-ho-ho-ho-ho!


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

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

This life is bittersweet

 

Now all of the planes have landed
The soldiers are in their beds
 

Smoke rises from their clothing
And sweet dreams through their heads

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet

 

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
 

The boy with the bloated belly
Hears today's trucks arrive

 

He puts down his baby sister
And makes his way outside
 

 

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
 

 

Everyone's a novelist
And everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on...

 

 

The lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled
Dark clouds filled the sky

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet 

 

Moxy Fruvous