MELTDOWN!!

When I don't have much to say, when I am embroiled in editing my next novel (The Glass Character!) and feeling like I'm in the trenches, there are always gifs.

GIFS (or gifs, or giffys or whatever-they-are) are easy to make, but tricky. Tricky in that you must literally isolate hundreds of a second to get the effect you want without extraneous material. There are other restrictions: on the program I like,  you have to use YouTube videos that are shorter than 10 minutes, and not all of them work.

 But the rest is done for you, so I don't really have to do anything very technical. My favorite site is Y2GIF, though GIFninja ain't bad for using your own videos or making montages of stills. 

http://yt2gif.com/

I am totally freaked out by this cartoon, as animation in the '30s was completely bizarre. Most of it was ripped off of Disney, and this one is no exception. There is this Oswald the Rabbit, and I can't find him because he looks like a mouse with long ears (IF that's him), a dead ringer for Mickey.

This cartoon even uses similar effects to the skeleton dance I made gifs out of a couple of posts ago, but very crudely: the skeleton leaping forward into the frame so that the camera passes right through his hollow body and out the other side. Stylin'. 

Walter Lantz was the animator for this one, and it ain't much for imagination. He went on to Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda and a few others I don't remember now.

But it sure made a few great gifs.

A dark and shameful secret

 

Readers (or should I say reader): I have kept this from you for lo these many, well, fifteen minutes or so. Let me tell you what happened.  My computer blew up about 5 days ago. Just exploded, melted or whatever a computer-s mind does when it has had enough. . . and for a few wretched days I floated, but not in the air. In sewage of some kind. My pessimist husband assured me everything in my beloved pc was lost forever, all my manuscripts, all my photos, every self-pitying poem and  Oscar Levant YouTube video. I truly and honestly wanted to die, more than usual I mean. I fled to Vancouver to solace myself with a bad movie, and while there I ran into my techie son who works in a big tower downtown. I told him my streaming tale of grief and he looked at me quizzically and said, oh, just give me the hard drive, I ll get all the info off it. CAN YOU DO THAT I asked him, and he said WE DO IT ALL THE TIME.

The bus home seemed to ride a giant cushion of balmy Hawaiian air. And I did get my stuff back.  But it is all subtly. . . different. It is a different reality. There are many losses, things I have not even discovered yet.  I can no longer manipulate photos at light speed the way I used to, because that wonderful Windows photo display thingammie seems to have disappeared. I can do it, very awkwardly, by shuffling my pictures around to another program, but damn it all and shit, it will never be the same, I will never be able to manage the blur of pictures shuffled as rapidly as a deck of cards in the hands of W. C. Fields. An era is over.

And my new computer, though it lacks the queer and complex  mental illness of the old one, canèt spell or canèt punctuate or somethingÉ As you can see. Most of the^^^^^^^ççÇÈèÇ;^^éé騨ÇÇÇ symbols are catawampus.

But thatès not what-a I-am-a tryin-g-t-a do here (though the Italian accent my new pc has is quite interesting). Ièm making a dire confession. After maligning clowns for some weeks or months (one of those topics I get stuck on like an old-fashioned broken record), I suddenly came to the realization that I was maligning a heretofore shadowy aspect of my own past.

*****I***** was a clown. Thatès right-a! A fuckin-è clown!

 

A guitar-playinè, bulbous-nose-wearinè, child-entertainè, stripey-shirt-nè-stuff-like-that-clad, real live authentic regular clown.

It was a different time, I was different, obviously I was, way thinner for one thing. God I was thinner, and so young. . . hard to believe I was ever so young, living in Alberta and doing a lot of community theatre which is the only thing that kept me semi-sane.

 

So you now see that I am a hypocrite. Or else I hate what I was. But I donèt, I donèt (sorry for the Chaucerian accent, I canèt seem to get rid of it cuz thereès obviously still some bugs in the system.) On the whole I think I was a non-threatening clown who at least didnèt dress like a KKK member or try to scare anyone. I didnèt go in for heavy makeup and the nose was only to break up the tedium of my very unfunny face.