Just cute

What a hokey, impractical idea!

I was completely gobsmacked - though perhaps I shouldn't have been - when I found this tidbit on the Turner Classics site. Along with everything else, Harold Lloyd was a visionary who had a way of piercing the limitations of technology, simply because "no" wasn't in his vocabulary. Even if his view wasn't quite "yes", it always had the spirit of "let's try". He was the perennial boy genius who never stopped tinkering and exploring in every medium he could get his hands on: microscopy, oil painting, stereo sound, and the primitive 3D photography of the era. Speaking of which, his favorite photographic subject was buxom, Jane-Russell-like nude women. Harold always loved his work.

Many fans of Harold Lloyd think of him simply as one of the very talented founding fathers of cinema.  This is true, but Harold was ALSO one of the first proponents of 3D motion pictures!  In 1923 an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times visited Harold on the set of Girl Shy and they discussed Harold’s interest in 3D.  During this interview Harold is quoted as saying “I believe that the man who invents a means of producing a perfect stereo motion picture will have accomplished the greatest achievement since the first motion picture.”  He went on to say “Today, the motion pictures projected on the most perfect screen are lacking in solidity and relief.  If the characters could only be made to stand out as they do in stereopticon pictures, and still retain the action of motion pictures of today, I think the ultimate would be reached by the cinema.”

In his Columbia University interview in 1959 Harold discussed the early attempts at 3D movies.  Many in the industry had given up on the medium, as the results had not been great and 3D was viewed mostly as a passing fad. In the interview Harold says “I think if they’d handled [the transition to] sound as horribly as they did three-dimension, we wouldn’t have sound today.”  After this, he goes on to explain technically why the earlier 3D attempts had not been successful and how the technology would have to advance before the medium would take off.  He was absolutely convinced that once the technological advancements were made, the transition from 2D motion pictures to 3D would be unavoidable and all encompassing.

Harold’s interest in 3D manifested itself in his passion for stereoscopic photography.  From 1947 until his death in 1971, Harold Lloyd shot over 200,000 3D slides some of which featured celebrities of the day, scenic views of the United States and various countries around the world.  He was a member of the Photographic Society of America and served as the Inaugural President of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society.

The magnificent library of Harold’s 3D photography remains mostly unexposed to the public.  Suzanne Lloyd has published two books containing some of the images, but most of the 200,000+ slides have not been seen by anyone outside of the Lloyd family.  

(From the Turner Classic Movies web site)

Covers

Just kind of a blah day, Christmas coming at me like a freight train (though the actual day is usually quite wonderful - so why?). Frustrated at the breakup of a 20-year friendship which had become irretrievably sour, unwilling to be a dumping ground for misplaced buckets of bile. The assumption being I was always ready and willing to receive, infinitely patient, accepting and understanding.

Life is just sour sometimes, it sucks or is boring, and the nice parts fly by so fast you don't even know how good they are. None of this is new. None of this is dramatic or suicidal or even really depressive, just fed up and uninspired.

I make Facebook covers of Harold Lloyd, obsessively, usually late at night (and when did I start staying up so late? For years and years I went to bed at 10:00 and got up at 6:00), and lately they are becoming more florid. Just for fun. I like the candy-colored tinted photos that were often used for promotion, and they lend themselves to florid backgrounds.

But in the final analysis, it's boring and I still feel chronically left out. It's no use, after all these years, to learn to skip Double Dutch or any other way. So I am left standing on the sidelines, or behind something. Bored.

Forever young

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.

Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden


Sometimes I actually do this: I take my morning coffee and curl up on the leather sofa next to the Lazy Boy my husband has preferred for something like 30 years. And I tell him. In the manner of nearly all dreams, these will soon sublimate into the air like so much night frost and disappear, though I sometimes try to get them down on this blog (i. e. Whatever Happened to the Wildwood Flower, about a young Sissy Spacek-like woman preparing to get married in a church where no one knows her). I tell my dreams as an attempt to fix them in time and memory, and mostly it doesn't work, leaving Bill with the usual baffled look on his face.

This one, well, it was even stranger than that.

Like Bob Dylan, I think the eternal question "what does the dream mean?" wrecks it more often than not, like analyzing poetry until it's nothing but fragments of phrases and unmoored words. But it's interesting to behold what bin-ends of thought and experience re-emerge in scrambled or rearranged form, unrelated jigsaw pieces suddenly revealing a picture you never thought of before.

I was in some sort of big theatre, a movie theatre I would guess, and it reminded me of the theatres of my childhood in Chatham. We had two, the Capital and the Centre, and I remember we felt considerable civic pride in the fact that we had more than one. In the dream the theatre was huge, cavernous, more like the Orpheum in Vancouver, though I am sure the Capital and the Centre were rather puny and not grand at all.

There were only three people in the theatre: myself, Hassan (a colleague of Bill's from 30 years ago, a fellow engineer relocated from Saudi Arabia) and Paul, a spiritualist medium I have known for many years. He was sitting facing away from the vast silver screen at some sort of monitor, and without saying it Hassan and I knew he was going to tell us what would happen to us, what our future would be. He seemed, in retrospect, a little like the "man behind the curtain" in the Wizard of Oz,  except that there was no curtain.

He worked away. Apparently he was "doing" Hassan first, and I was rather jealous. All the while, ghostly images appeared, more on the ceiling of the theatre than on the screen, giant people, like blowups of characters from silent movies, though I didn't recognize who they were.  I wish I remembered the middle of the dream, but most of it has already faded and gone all patchy and jumbled like a poorly-restored movie from 1915. He finally did tell Hassan his "fortune" in a fairly straightforward way, and he listened intently, obviously taking it very seriously.  But it seemed to me that time was running out, that there would be no time for my own fortune and I would be left hanging.

It was true. As Paul began to pack up his things (what things? His henbane, his Merlin hat?), he told me I would have to "wait until next time" to hear my fortune. I was frustrated by this, and even wondered if something would happen to me if I had "no future", if it had not been laid out for me.  Then I realized he had been using something that looked like an old overhead projector to "see" and project that seeing into the future, and I wondered how that worked.

Then I had this bold idea. Since I couldn't wait for my fortune, I would write it myself. So I started writing it down on something unusual, maybe on an old piece of parchment, but it flowed easily. And I have almost no remembrance of it, though it struck me as quite specific and in detail. I do remember one line, something like, "Sometimes friends will be the greatest comfort and help to you, and sometimes they will vanish and you will be left completely alone." I had a sense of a lacuna or a round hollow space in some sort of rock formation.

Sometimes this, sometimes that: it was a bit like Ecclesiastes and "to every thing there is a season". But when I came to writing the last line, it reminded me strongly of Bob Dylan's most heartfelt song, "Forever Young".


May God bless and keep you
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

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Christmas gifs: cookies that fly!

.Cement cookies and other harbingers of the season

After re-reading yesterday's cricket rant (and it truly was a rant, but wasn't it fun? For me, maybe), I felt I needed something to balance it out.

Yes, I know it's a TV ad, and I know it's a month 'til Christmas, but when this came out three years ago (three - I cannot believe this!), I thought it was magical. I was going to try to make gifs out of it, but the images flash by so quickly that I am not sure I could manage it.

Yesterday we made cement cookies, or rather, cookies made out of salt dough that hardens into something you can paint up and use as ornaments. It went so well that I want to try it with the other two grandkids. It's not that I don't get into the spirit - I do - but most of what passes for "the spirit" is a cash grab. "Black Friday" is a case in point. 

Until a few years ago I didn't even know what it was, and in any case it sounded horrible and ominous. Gradually I twigged that it was the day after American Thanksgiving, when everyone stampedes to the mall to buy more things, no doubt so they can be even more "thankful" in the coming year.

Now I'm seeing Black Friday ads in Canada, when our Thanksgiving is at the PROPER time, in late October, not so close to Christmas. And yet, our BF is going to be on the same day as in the States.

Oh well, I'm ranting again, and I do love the actual day when we all seem to have a wonderful cozy time. Four kids running around, I ask you - even though they are growing up alarmingly fast - and then what? Old age, and - ? Life is a rapid, confusing deal, and all we are left with is the day - the elusive, flashing-by, bittersweet day. 

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By Jiminy - it's a fake!

Y'know, it strikes me, when it strikes me at all, that Dorothy Parker was right when she wrote,  "this living, this living, this living/was never a project of mine", but let's put that aside for a moment.

I had a Facebook page for almost a year before I did anything with it. For the most part, it struck me as idiotic. The posts had about as much content and meaning as texting (and what DO people text about anyway: "I'm going to the bathroom now. . . grunt. . . grunt. . ."). It was one big bulletin board of meaningless gossip, interspersed with sappy personal philosophy along the lines of  "Let a smile be your umbrella" and "Always be nice, and others will be nice to you."

But the links are the best, or the worst.

EVERYONE takes the links at face value. No one realizes that many of the pages are satirical, because they don't know what satire is. Or irony. Plus if it's on Facebook, it MUST be true, hey?

The crickets are a case in point. God's Cricket Chorus is a mysterious recording that everyone is raving about, playing it in the basement while stoned, sniffling over it while remembering Rover who died seven years ago, etc. It's transcendent. It's amazing. It's CRICKETS, by Jiminy, slowed way, way down, and it sounds just like a chorus of angels! Here's the ad:

"Want to hear something magical?
Experimental director and playwright, Robert Wilson, caught a hauntingly beautiful piece of music one night, a recording of crickets.
That part is common enough, but then he stretched out the sound as much as one would have to stretch the life of a cricket to equal that of a human, and the result is truly wonderful.”

Clicking that website’s link takes you to Acornavi – Robert-wilson-crickets-audio

No one stopped to ask why, when the cricket sounds were slowed down so much, the pitch was actually higher than the gritchy sound crickets actually make. These were high floating harmonics, likely made with a synthesized choir. BUT HEY. What's the matter with you, anyway, to piss on our party like this? What's the matter that you doubt such beauty, such magical spirituality (because we're spiritual, not religious)? 

To put the cherry on the sundae, gravel-voiced blues singer Tom Waits (referred to below as "Tom Waite") endorsed the cricket oratorio as a "swaying choral panorama" that he shared with his dope buddy, Charlie Musselwhite. This was good enough for Baptist churches to begin to use it in their weekly prayer services.

When something is that wildly, stampedingly popular, it's a pretty safe bet that it's bogus. So somebody had to do it: test the method of recording and prove or disprove its authenticity. It wasn't that difficult: the technology is actually there. Just take a recording of crickets, then play it at slower and slower speeds, trying to reproduce the original, magical, spiritual-but-not-religious sounds that had everyone bawling into their cornflakes.

Want to hear it?

https://soundcloud.com/darangatang/dawkins_chorus_of_crickets

It turns out we don't really need that angel chorus to make our hair stand on end. The recording of real crickets is actually pretty freaky in itself, getting stranger and stranger as it is gradually elongated, almost disappearing as it drops below the threshhold of human hearing (though perhaps a whale could hear it). 

To quote Dave D'aranjo, cricket-chorus-buster extraordinaire:

Look, Mr. Wilson’s original is no doubt relaxing and sounds pretty and I used it to help me sleep once. But it is undoubtedly a human singing, or perhaps a manipulated choir loop. It’s not cool to spread around incorrect info and then call it some miraculous evidence of divine intervention in nature. To me, the sound of the crickets are wondrous enough! C’mon folks, let’s try and be less gullible!

But who wants to hear this? It's no fun. It doesn't emanate the secrets of the cosmos (and what a mystery, that a mere cricket could "know" like that? But aren't we all one, and aren't crickets just as enlightened as the typical stoner on a Saturday night?) People prefer the hoax to the real thing, and pledge themselves to it as solemnly as if they're joining eHarmony. In the face of scientific fact, how could anyone think - ? But they DON'T think, and that's the point.

If something like God's Cricket Chorus gets around, if it goes viral or gets on YouTube or the "What's Trending" part of the news (which used to be called the Lighter Side), a zillion people not only watch it/listen to it, they accept it at face value and without question. If YOU don't believe it, you get that turned-off face, that "I smell garbage" or "I see a homeless person and want to get away" face.  You're refusing to join the Holy Church of Oh Wow!

I don't know if you've heard the original, but it's nothing like this. In fact, I think this is infinitely more mysteriously, and genuine into the bargain. You could still smoke up and cry over the dog here, it wouldn't make a big difference, but I guarantee you'll get a big kick out of the very last track.

(P. S. As awareness of this "alternate" recording spreads, many have gone on record to say things like, "OK, so the God version isn't really crickets, but that doesn't take anything away from how beautiful and transcendent it is." Some doubt has also arisen as to whether Tom Waite (sic) was clean and sober when he made that claim about a pulling a leprechaun out of his pocket.  As P. T. Barnum liked to say, there's one born every minute.)

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It's the Black Bottom!

 

Chairman Mouse

Painted dolls, Harold Lloyd and other miracles

OK, children: who do you think this is? In light of what I posted yesterday, rare photos of Harold Lloyd in his Mack Sennett/pre-Glass-Character days (hell, even before Lonesome Luke!), you might think this is the same guy. Particularly since he's dressed like a minister, and appears to be wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

It ain't.

I don't know who this guy is, but he isn't Harold Lloyd. Not by a long shot. That scares me, because one would think his face and demeanor would be practically trademarked by then.

These few grainy shots, one of them blown up to make it more discernible, are from an atrocious but interesting early talkie, in fact the first "all singing, all dancing" musical, the notorious Broadway Melody.

It wasn't called the BWM of 1938, or 1947, or anything like that, because there had never BEEN a Broadway Melody on film before, and though audiences loved the novelty of sound numbers with chorus girls flailing all over the place, it's a good thing this particular movie never happened again.

The musical numbers, though bizarre, aren't so bad. My favorite: Wedding of the Painted Doll, a quirky little number full of xylophone music and a tenor singing in the high, wavery voice favored in the 1920s. For this musical came out in 1929, just at the turning point of sound films. Whenever  one of these early talkies comes on Turner Classics, I watch it, no matter how atrocious. In fact, the more atrocious it is, the more fascinated I am.

It's a sort of sociological exercise which tells us where audiences were in 1929: mostly confused. The studios were even more confused, panic-stricken in fact. The minister in this oddball wedding scene is an acrobat who flips and cartwheels onstage as if he's made of rubber. I doubt if Harold Lloyd could do as well. But he's not billed anywhere, and I'll be damned if I'll try to look it up and turn into one of those 93-year-old silent film afficionados who remember exact statistics and scream at you if you misquote them even a little bit, as if it's a mortal sin to forget what Louise Brooks had for breakfast.

So I won't even take a stab at it, though knowing these folks there's probably a whole blog about it: That Minister Guy Who Turned Cartwheels On Stage in Wedding of the Painted Doll from Broadway Melody.

Likely he was pulled out of the chorus of some obscure stage musical, or even taken from a circus. He had his thirty seconds of fame, and that's it.

But doesn't he look a whole lot like Harold Lloyd, and is there a reason for that? Lloyd was just releasing his own first talkie, the abominable Welcome Danger, which I've tried to like but can't. My stomach keeps rejecting it like some food I am violently allergic to. It's an ugly, ugly picture, full of thumps, thuds, bad and mis-dubbed dialogue, and even a mean main character I can't warm up to, as if Harold's personality and charm had to change along with the times. 

But it didn't matter then. Maybe this minister in his frock coat was a stock figure, much like the minister Harold played for Sennett in 1915. Strangely enough, there is a connection: the movie was called Her Painted Hero.

Who knows what else lurks in the dusty, fusty vaults. I am sort of hoping nothing, because I am really getting obsessed here and soon have to leave it alone. My manuscript has gone to the proofreader now, meaning the galleys will soon come back to me and I will have my last chance to correct small glitches. For the past few days, all I can think of is a possible mistake I made in continuity, but I am afraid to look at the manuscript to confirm it. I think if I look at it one more time, I'll simply expire.

POST-SCRIPT. Let's do a little comparison, shall we? One of my famous "separated at birth" things. Might be fun.

  

Harold.

Not Harold.

Harold.

Not Harold.

Just a coincidence?  I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!

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His face at first just ghostly (or, the unknown Harold Lloyd)

In HER PAINTED HERO, Lloyd plays a minister who arrives at a mansion (in reality A.G. Schlosser’s Castle San Souci, the same location used in TILLIE’S PUNCTURED ROMANCE and several other Sennett films) to preside over a wedding. This was actually the second time Lloyd had played a minister at Keystone—the first time had been in THEIR SOCIAL SPLASH, made the previous month.

From Mack Sennett: A Celebration of the King of Comedy and his Studio, Films and Comedians

Whew.

I never in a million years thought I'd find anything like this. Goes to show that no matter how many times I go to the well, I always seem to dredge up something of interest about the elusive, enigmatic Harold Lloyd.

And this time, it's a bucket of gold.

I'd heard the story - heard Harold tell it in an archival clip on the bonus disc in the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection DVD set - but never thought I'd find any evidence. Back in 1915 - 1915! - Lloyd had a little disagreement with his director Hal Roach about pay. He was getting paid something like $5.00 a week to run around and play any and ever part necessary, but when he found out this other guy (who? Who cares) was getting $10.00 a week, he "walked". I don't for a minute think this is true - he was probably butting heads with Roach in his typical temperamental (some say childish) way, and went stomping off to Mack Sennett for spite.

I don't think Sennett had to think very hard about hiring Harold Lloyd. He had talent shooting out of his fingertips and charisma oozing out of his pores. So for a year Harold went to comedy boot camp, and probably learned a lot of skills (the pratfall being one of them) that he would take back with him when he and Roach kissed and made up.

This is one of many examples of how and why Lloyd became so famous: he made gravy out of everything, squeezed advantage out of disadvantage, learned like crazy, and had the kind of determination it was impossible to knock down. And there was another factor: Fate just kissed him on the forehead and said, "Mein boy." The rest is history.

But look at this! There are actual photos here from one of his Sennett films. He plays a minister in this, which is weird because Muriel in The Glass Character describes him as being "more like a minister than a comedian". I think he may have been slotted into straight-man roles mainly because he just wasn't funny-looking enough for Keystone, though he did an inevitable stint as a cop running frantically around and waving a nightstick.

These photos are ghostly, out of focus, dreamlike, almost unreal - and Lloyd was only 21 or 22, a mere stripling. But take a look at these and tell me they AREN'T Harold Lloyd. Stripling he may be (or strip loin, whichever), but in some ways he is full-blown, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. (I try to work that phrase in whenever I can.) His body posture, his face, even the way he wears the costume - all are Lloyd in embryo, a man who had no idea how famous he was going to be, or what it would cost him.

(But can you tell me, please - is he wearing glasses here? There are so many conflicting stories of the provenance of the glasses that one wonders. Too blurry to tell, but I'd say not. Wait a couple more years for the lightning-stroke.)

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Gates of Eden

Mark Brown, arts correspondent

The Guardian, Tuesday 24 September 2013 16.13 BST





Bob Dylan works on one of his iron gates, which will feature in the Halcyon gallery's Mood Swings exhibition. Photograph: John Shearer/Rebecca Ward/PA

Come writers and critics who prophesise with your pen and keep your eyes wide … because Bob Dylan is welding gates.

The Halcyon gallery in London has announced plans to exhibit ironworks designed and made by the musician as he continues his career reinvention as an exhibiting visual artist.

Seven iron gates Dylan has welded out of vintage iron and objects including a wrench, roller skate, meat grinder and lawn tools, will go on display for the first time, in an exhibition opening in November, alongside his paintings and signed limited editions.

Dylan said: "I've been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I've always worked with it in one form or another.

"Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference."

Dylan would say he has been a visual artist most of his life but it is only in the past six years that he has been exhibiting and selling work. His first museum show was staged in Chemnitz, Germany, in 2007.

He has had success and the National Portrait Gallery is at the moment showing 12 pastel portraits of his in a small display which will stay until January.

The Halcyon's forthcoming show, entitled Mood Swings, will "be the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Bob Dylan's art to date", said the gallery's director, Paul Green.

Green added: "While Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more than four decades, this exhibition will cast new light on one of the world's most important and influential cultural figures of our time. His iron works demonstrate his boundless creativity and talent."

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when ’neath the trees of Eden

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs ’neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

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