Thursday, September 11, 2014

This Is Your Life, Harold Lloyd!




This isn't the best material to make gifs out of, but I thought I'd try a few.




Footage of the older Harold is rare. Someone finally found this TV broadcast from some time in the 1950s, Harold being celebrated on This Is Your Life. He looks a little uncomfortable, would probably rather not have the attention, but goes along with it graciously. I love the instant when he looks into the camera. Same old seducer.



His wife Mildred Davis still carries that aura of glam. But what I love is the sweet way they embrace. Harold is much more of a toucher than I thought he'd be and often touches people's faces affectionately. His hug is enfolding and warm. You can't fake things like that, it can't be done. Though they certainly had their problems, it sure looks like they loved each other. If you watch his right hand very carefully as they embrace, you'll see the damage from the accident  which he somehow managed to hide in plain sight. No one expected it to be there, so it wasn't.




For all his sweetness and charm, there was a lot of shrewd businessman in Harold. One can imagine him at those Shriners conventions, where the women were there for the having. And he had them, not innocently of course, though one gets the impression he was good to them, liked them. That was the way of Hollywood then, and is it any different now?


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Spent all morning on this. . .


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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

On World Suicide Prevention Day




. . . let's remember a fallen comrade.


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No, not horrible at all




Just enjoying this on a day that is not horrible, no, not horrible at all. Not particularly good either, but then, why are my expectations so high anyway? Saw a poignant but disturbing retrospective of Robin Williams' career (not his life, his career only) on PBS last night, and was affected by it. Not by his talents, gifts, etc., but by the loyalty and insight of his friends. And at the end, Pam Dawber, looking not much older than in her innocent Mork and Mindy days, asking, "Why? . . . Why?", with one more distraught, disbelieving "why?".

It still bothers me that he hanged himself with a belt, it just does. One of the best-known, and blah blah blah. It means nothing, I know, but I guess I always wanted to make a name for myself somehow, and now I know it's not going to happen. Did it save me, after all?

So sometimes all you can do is listen to Mahler, and in spite of its long, pensive, sometimes dysphoric and grief-stricken third movement, this is probably his most buoyant and life-loving work. But he was only on the planet for 53 years or so, anyway, so needed to get his joy in as quick as he could.

As do we all? I'm not sure about that. They showed a scene in Good Will Hunting that scared the jesus out of me, where he grabs Matt Damon by the throat and says something like, "I will end you." His eyes are this glacier blue, ice and stone, not sweet or loveable at all, not even sane, barely human, almost reptilian. A killer, after all? He did kill someone, so he was capable of it.

Everyone else has moved on, I am sure. After all, nearly a month has gone by! And I didn't even know him. Didn't even know him at all.



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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Cat Puts On Bunny Hat (cute cat video)




I try to resist cute cat videos/gifs whenever I can. but it's been a hard week, and it's only Tuesday. I literally have a pain in the ass - it hurts when I sit down- probably one of those nuts things of old age. But I loved this one, most especially the way the cat lies back at the end, displaying the elegance of the hood with an attitude of cattitude.




I just find this one aesthetically pleasing, the border around it and stuff. Cute cat, too.




AWWWWW poor dog. If I liked dogs, this would be the type of dog I'd like.





Incomprehensible, but fun. Kind of like life itself.




I ain't gonna work on Meow-ggie's farm no more.




What if the cat jumped off? Don't jump off, kitty.




Cat doesn't like dogs either.




Observant Muslim cat mauled by cat from Westboro Baptist Church


 


 Can anyone read cat lips?




Little Miss Sparkle-Whiskers with a bibby-kins and itty-bitty mitty-gloves!





Way down upon the Furball River. . . 




 How I love the smell of Meow Mix in the morning!



Persian with the pink dress, pink dress, pink dress, Persian with the pink dress on. . .




Mlamm, mlamm, mlamm, mlaam. 



Cat gives papal blessing to watermelon, 




Himalayan on peanut butter sandwich floating in space.


 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look





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Dirty poems




That's what they are. Dirty poems. Funny, though. Probably go back a long way.

http://www.horntip.com/html/books_%26_MSS/1920s/1928ca_poems_ballads_and_parodies_(HC)/index.htm
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"Out, out, into the storm!"






This is a most inferior way of making a point. My book The Movies, which I just received yesterday and disappeared into (I don't want to get dressed, go out, etc., but why should I anyway? Give me one good bloody reason to get dressed), has yielded up some photographic treasures, along with some duds. This was a tricky one, as it involved a classic scene from a silent movie called Way Down East. Believing she has had an illegitimate baby (and of course, she hasn't - she has been secretly married to someone the family doesn't approve of), Papa throws Lillian Gish out into the storm. I am not sure this caption even appears in the movie - I didn't see it when I watched it for the first time on TCM fairly recently. But perhaps it should.






The point is, however, that only a bit of tinkering brought out a startling amount of relief (meaning detail) in this smudgy old photo. This is only fully visible when the photos fill the screen - in fact, I realize now you can hardly see the differences and this whole enterprise, which took me about five hours, was an almost complete waste.

But never mind, the differences are there, if more subtle in this reduced size. Compare the sepia-toned original with the black-and-white "corrected" version. Faces which were an overexposed wash now have some features, and some expression. Every fold of clothing is visible, such as the wrinkles in Lillian's sleeves and the folds around her waist. The tooling at the top of Papa's boots is now plain. And so on. Were all these details buried, embedded in the original? They can't have been created by a primitive scanner and ridiculously simplistic photo program. Uncovered, perhaps?

I've spent the morning on this, not even eating, my back aching. I am in somewhat of a slump. Call it "white depression" rather than black (it comes in all colours, did you know that?). So I bury myself in this. There are other surprises: how stunning some of the minor stars like Mae Marsh and Dolores Del Rio were.








A different style of beauty, of course - and they all had those "bee-stung" lips, carefully made up, bowed and tiny, so unlike the blown-up blubber-lips of the collagen-injected stars (or is it fat from their butts?) that it's downright refreshing. But you sure would not be able to eat or drink. 




I also notice just now that Del Rio resembles Jobyna Ralson, one of Harold Lloyd's leading ladies (though I wasn't even going to mention Harold - we're divorced now, did you know that?)




This is a beautiful photo of early cowboy star William S. Hart, whose Westerns may have been the most realistic ever made. My Dad loved to do facial impressions of him, pulling his face down into a stony expression.




Tom Mix's wedding ceremony, on horseback. Mix ws the Roy Rogers of early cinema, slick and glamorous. His movies were as addictive as those old Zane Grey novels I used to read.




One of those old theatre signs, similar to "Ladies, Please Remove Your Hats" (with a picture of a man climbing a ladder behind the offending hat) or, even better, "If You Expect to Rate as a Gentleman, You Will Not Expectorate on the Floor." As for being annoyed at the theatre, let's bring those signs back, shall we?





This was startling. One of my first silent movie obsessions, back when I was a kid I mean, was Rudolph Valentino. Can't tell you why. I decided not to include Sheik pictures because there are approximately one billion of them on Google images. But this quaint shot is sweet, and brings me to one of my Separated at Birth thingies: to me, he looks quite a lot like a very young version of a well-known leading man.

There are lots of other shots, but I'm too tired to dig them up.


 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Monday, September 8, 2014

A fizzing fountain of joy




Close your eyes, keep them closed, and this is great. It's mane-tossingly European as it clip-clops by the glittering Rhine, and all that jazz, but the person who posted it has not provided any identifying information, nor have they given us anything to look at but a smudgy, distorted painting, presumably of Schubert.

Schubert isn't always my favorite, but there are moments. That awful one about the little boy and the father and the black demon - oh God, this will start me on a wild goose chase to find it for sure. With Schubert, only a melody comes into your head, you don't know where it's from, but then it plays and plays and just won't leave.

I remember a tenor - God, what was his name? - it was on CBC Radio, I was on one of my endless walks with my headset on, and the guy comes on and sings some Schubert and it is simply heartbreaking. He breaks it wide open in one of those scary moments in which an artist exceeds himself, does better than he knows how to do. Does he borrow power from the work itself, the composer, or from heaven above?

Ah yes, this. I only remembered "Schubert, Rosamunde," no details, and it took some clicking around -  not much, in this magic age. And it was in my ears once again, some of the most life-loving music I have heard in a very long time. Music that is supremely joyous in the moment. Life eats us, all of us, don't you know that? But some few leave something behind that buoys up the survivors, just for a little while. Which is all we have, anyway.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .



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A fool there was. . .




In other words, I just got my library copy of The Movies by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer. I've barely leafed through it, but already I've found some things I remember from when I was a child. I was movie-hungry even then, and this book was an excellent primer, especially about the silent era. It fairly radiates excitement and boyish enthusiasm. My only problem with it so far is the near-drooling about Chaplin, about whom he writes about twenty pages, while Harold Lloyd gets maybe two. No clock-dangling, no nothing. Here's a sample which I also remember:

“Intellectuals lured into the movie houses in search of the source of his fame found that this world hero was a homeless tramp whose shabby elegance and careless poverty bespoke a spirit equal to life’s cruelest and most humiliating blows. They found in him as many things as have been found in Hamlet. They found him sly, cruel, pretentious, disdainful, crude, witty. They found a touch of madness in him, and a bottom of hard common sense. And behind this urban lover of nature, this hopeless, hoping lover who snapped his fingers at the universe, there was something that hurt.”




Oh yes. I suppose that's the common point of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd: not just that they were superb and superior comedians, unique talents that would never come around again, but that they came from deprivation, pain and shame. It could be argued that Lloyd got off the easiest, since he never lived in hovels or was thrown across the stage like some inanimate prop. But the family moved every year or so, and his father was shiftless and unreliable - not quite a crook, but seen as a charming failure. Finally his parents divorced, which was nearly unthinkable then, no doubt causing people to murmur that Harold came from a "broken home". Even worse, his mother had to work as a milliner to help keep the family afloat. Tension must have abounded, and Harold went out and worked three or four jobs at a time, furiously trying to make up for the awful abyss at the core of his childhood.

"The Vampire" poem at the start of this post is loosely based on a Kiplng poem, which in turn inspired a wildly-popular movie starring Theda Bara in 1915. That long ago. There's no credit for the delicous and memorable parody, so it likely came from a movie mag of the period. 













































The Vampire

A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair
(Even as you and I!)

Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand,
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand.

A fool there was and his goods he spent
(Even as you and I!)
Honor and faith and a sure intent
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(And it wasn't the least what the lady meant),
(Even as you and I!)

Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned,
Belong to the woman who didn't know why
(And now we know she never knew why)
And did not understand.

The fool we stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside --
(But it isn't on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died --
(Even as you and I!)

And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame
That stings like a white hot brand.
It's coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing at last she could never know why)
And never could understand.

-- Rudyard Kipling 


Bonus verse, gleaned from a 1928 newspaper whose name I have forgotten. . . 

 A fool there was and he saved his rocks
Even as you and I;
But he took them out of the old strong box, 
When the salesman called with some wildcat stocks,
And the fool was stripped to his shirt and socks,
Even as you and I.

 I want to say to the poet: stick around another year, and you'll lose your shirt, too.




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Steal this book (no, I mean it!)




I will tell you what I'd like to see.

Go to the library to read The Glass Character. Don't pay. Borrow it from a friend. Kindle it because it's cheaper and can't be pulped (or at least I don't think so, though no doubt it can be terminated somehow). I prefer the idea of Kindle now because Kindle never seems to be outrageously discounted - it's worth something to them, I guess. Though I hold my nose to say this, you can buy the paper version very, very cheap on Amazon now - I can do nothing to change this. I would prefer you buy it at the sane price offered by Thistledown Press or even the retail stores, who can't afford to sell a new book for four dollars a pop. I'd say, don't support these capitalist pigs. On the other hand, you can get it way cheap, four for the price of one, and give three away to friends. Or resell them: they ARE yours, after all, aren't they? And that means more people will read it. It's all I have right now. 




It amazes me how often this is seen as pure ego. You mean she wants someone to READ this? Isn't the process of writing its own reward? If you cooked a great dinner and no one ate it and it sat there and rotted, ask yourself if preparing it was "enough". If a concert pianist, after 20 years of training, had to play in an empty hall that he had to pay to rent, well. . . you get the idea. I hope.  Not only that - the passion and excitement I felt around this era and Harold Lloyd himself led me to the false conclusion that my enthusiasm might catch fire somewhere. Wrong.

If nothing else, my link tells people how to get their hands on my backlist, and tells them there IS a backlist, that it didn't disappear altogether. If this story gets into people's hands, I don't care whether there is money attached to it. There isn't going to be, anyway. The only review I had, after waiting half a year, was an evisceration by a standup comic from Winnipeg, and I wasn't supposed to say anything: in fact, I was advised to thank him! The whole system is so bizarre and sick, no one else would put up with it, but there are always a few who are fat and happy and thriving and very quick to tell you what you are doing to bring this on yourself. 



So go ahead, order it from Amazon. I can't stop Amazon, and I can't stop you. It means you get the book and hardly have to pay anything. In an economic sense, it's a fantastic deal. You, the consumer, the potential reader, will benefit. So will Amazon, but what's it to them? Used marbles would garner them more profit. They told me the writer still makes the same royalties, though I don't see how that could happen. So why aren't I happy? Everybody seems to be really puzzled. Hey, it's on sale now! More people will buy it! Isn't that a GOOD thing? Who cares about prices anyway?



Meantime, my copy of The Movies, my cinematic primer from when I was a kid, just arrived at the door. I never thought I'd see it again, and in fact for many years I thought I had dreamed it, like a lot of those old TV shows buried in the grainy vaults of the brain.

Go on and have a good week. No, go on.

 (News flash: today I noticed that Amazon has just knocked another 20 cents off the price of The Glass Character! Go buy it, no, I mean you really SHOULD buy it now, because at these bargain basement prices, they'll really go fast.)



Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .



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