I may have actually bought some of these, or one, back in the '60s, but only so my brother Arthur and I could make terrible fun of them. It wasn't hard to do. Never mind the sociological significance of these things. They're FUN, and that's all I care about at this point! The "catfight" scenes could not be cropped exactly to match the others (perfect squares), so I had to fiddle around with them a bit on white backgrounds, but it was worth it, they are just SO cool. The "jailbird" one is a favorite, as are the "nurse" specialties (nurses being especially hot). One thing I didn't realize - and this is illustrated in a couple of the pictures - some of these comics were done in duplicate for two different markets: white and black. It's eerie to see the exact same backgrounds, clothing, captions, etc., but with women of different races.
Those issues are, of course, completely settled in 2016. Aren't they? We honestly thought we had fixed it once and for all, and things would only get better. NEVER did I EVER hear so much about racial hatred and violence and murder and strife back then, during the height of civil rights fever. It's worse now, much worse. This is but one of the things I must contemplate as I keep on chugging and blogging. As W. H. Auden put it: "Life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless."
In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."
Not at dawn, but at morning coffee hour, I get up and find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.
Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.
I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.
At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.
At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.
There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.
At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.
It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.
That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.
Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"
The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially in The City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?
Ah yes, Georges Melies. I keep encountering him, this odd little Frenchie/genius. The other night (I still have a hangover from it), Turner Classics had a special on him. Sixteen short films. Sixteen. Ay-ay-ay. These are hallucinatory otherworlds, the strangest things I've ever seen.
He started in France, a hotbed of early film, around 1896, when the medium was so new it was mostly seen as a form of amusement, a toy. No one saw the potential in it. An accomplished magician and visual artist extraordinaire, Melies began to film some of his more potent stunts. Audiences loved it: and to this day, more than 110 years later, they still ask themselves, "How did he do that?"
This weird and funny business with the heads, technically remarkable for its day, was made (incredibly) in 1898, back when a sneeze or an unromantic kiss was considered filmworthy. The unbelievable split-exposure film in his one-man band was later ripped off by no less a personage than Buster Keaton, who was credited with inventing it. Much, much later, Oscar Levant tried the same thing in An American in Paris. Ho, hum.
The Melies experience last night wasn't entirely pleasant. Those early, quick, magical stunts were fun, though filmed in a static manner, with one camera in long shot pointing at a stage. (Please forgive the horrible cropping and truncated music in this clip: it wasn't me.) This seemed to indicate that Melies' imagination sometimes ran ahead of his skills as a cinematographer/director, so that he never attained the revered status of a Fritz Lang or a Murnau.
As his films evolved, florid sets made of cardboard and papier-mache seethed and quivered visibly in the background. Leaping devils (a Melies favorite) appeared and disappeared, and lovely maidens in white gauze tiptoed in and out (or flew through the air in a way which seems to explain the inspired lunacy of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. I don't know how much Melies Gilliam watched, but maybe he was infected with the same moonstruck folly.)
Or folie. These little weirdies had little or no discernable plot, to the point that a man with a French accent thicker than mayonnaise had to narrate the incomprehensible action. While we listened to his bizarre Clousea-esque pronunciation, with the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble, we (or I) became more and more disoriented. Things were blowing up. People were winking out, or jumping out of things. Man went to the moon in a giant bullet, landing in the eye of a nasty-looking guy with white icing all over his face.
I didn't last the full sixteen films, but kept fast-forwarding my PVR recording, skipping over some florid hand-colored things in which the color wavered and strobed like some sort of acid-inspired hallucination.
Obviously, this fellow colored outside the lines of reality.
I don't know a lot about Melies, and right now I'm too exhausted to find out. Robert Osborne, who must be very ill because he is 50 pounds lighter and could barely speak, told us something I had already read somewhere.
Most of Melies' 500-or-so films were destroyed, and for a very practical reason. His studio went bankrupt in 1913 (for Melies had lost his audience, too baffled to sit through all that escalating strangeness), and his movies were stashed away, only to be confiscated by the French government when World War I broke out.
His films were made of celluloid (or -lose, can't remember which), a substance that had real value to the army: they were melted down to make boot heels for the soldiers. So all those men, dying in the trenches and singing "inky binky polly voo" (just kidding - that was the Americans) were literally walking all over him.
A sad and ignominious end for a unique and very strange artist, who seemed to want to do Spielberg-esque effects with cardboard and smoke bombs. But these two little gems are enjoyable and, in true Melies style, a little bit creepy.
