Monday, December 26, 2016
Sunday, December 25, 2016
It's a wonderful life? If you say so
This thing comes on every year and I get caught up in it, even worse than Taxi Driver. And I forget every year that it's the longest, most suffocating piece of melodrama ever created. A festive favorite about a man who wants to commit suicide because his life has been an exercise in futility and failed dreams, capped off by a totally unfair charge of bank fraud.
Ah! It's a Wonderful Life. Ringling, tingling Christmas trees, Zoo-zoo's petals, bleeding lips, newel-post knobs nearly hurled across the room. Chickens on a spit, bar brawls on Christmas Eve, irrelevant songs about Buffalo Gals, and wild-eyed overacting all around.
This guy George, see, he's kind of, waal, waal, disillusioned. His Uncle Billy, who's half nuts but was the father in Gone with the Wind so sort-of famous, has lost the eight thousand dollars that the Bailey Savings and Loan has earned in the past fifty years or so. He sort of dropped it somewhere and the Big Fat Man, the Bad Man, Lionel Barrymore in his most Grinchimous role, went and spent it on a hooker or something.
Ah! It's a Wonderful Life. Ringling, tingling Christmas trees, Zoo-zoo's petals, bleeding lips, newel-post knobs nearly hurled across the room. Chickens on a spit, bar brawls on Christmas Eve, irrelevant songs about Buffalo Gals, and wild-eyed overacting all around.
This guy George, see, he's kind of, waal, waal, disillusioned. His Uncle Billy, who's half nuts but was the father in Gone with the Wind so sort-of famous, has lost the eight thousand dollars that the Bailey Savings and Loan has earned in the past fifty years or so. He sort of dropped it somewhere and the Big Fat Man, the Bad Man, Lionel Barrymore in his most Grinchimous role, went and spent it on a hooker or something.
Oh, I shouldn't be so cynical, but this thing - this long thing, this three-hour marathon of hopelessness and small-town suffocation - it's about the farthest thing from festive you could imagine. Even Scrooge has glimmers of hope in it, but this - . George acts like some sortofa downtrodden saint for two hours and forty-nine minutes, then he kind of explodes and screams at his wife and family and tells them he basically hates them for holding him back and completely destroying his life.
His . . . wonderful life.
OK, I have a few problems with the logistics of this thing. When they get married and have to give all their money away to save the bank, Donna Reed gets chickens going on a spit in this old ruin of a house, the one they used to throw stones at for luck. And they move in to it? make it habitable? On his salary of $2.70 a week or whatever-the-frick-it-is? Raise a family? George wears the same suit for 17 years, for God's sake.
Jimmy Stewart overacts. I'm sorry, but he does, he overshoots. He smears his facial features around with his hand, his hair is wild, he looks like a candidate for the psych ward, and finally he mumbles to his hokey old guardian angel (the guy in the funny shirt that ties up in front because buttons hadn't been invented in the year 1300) that he wishes he'd never been born at all.
Kind of the ultimate in nihilism, wouldn't you say? Jimmy Stewart, the guy with the 6-foot imaginary pet rabbit, the guy in whatever-else-he-was-in, all those Westerns and Mr. Smiths and whatever, attempting to annihilate all traces of his existence on earth. A holiday special? OK, another big problem. He has this obnoxious friend named Sam Wainwright who keeps saying, inexplicably, "hee-haw". A dumb-ass par excellence, he lucks into a strange new business just before the war breaks out: plastics. This assures he'll be obscenely wealthy doing no work at all.
He's George's best friend, for blippin' sake, and George is all stressed out and wanting to kill himself over 8 thousand dollars when 8 thousand dollars isn't even POCKET CHANGE for Sam Wainwright. In the dramatic ending when everyone turns their linty little pockets inside-out for George, he gets some kind-of-a cable from Wainwright saying, in so many words, "your measly little problem that you were willing to die over is peanuts to me. I'll give you three times that amount and change. There, feel better now?"
But hey. He might get conjugal visits from that, who's that little floozie anyway? Jeez, what's she doing in this thing which is supposed to be a family show?
Oh, oh, and I just thought of this: it gets me every year. Why is it that after George yells at Uncle Billy that he's a mental defective, a moron and a lunatic, a squirrel jumps up on his arm? What the - ?? a squirrel? Up to now we've only seen ravens, tortoises, cows, etc. Could this be a foreshadowing of the squirrel from hell in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? (Actually, it screams of "cut the animal scenes, this thing is running too long." But for some reason they left in the squirrel.)
Not only do the writers of this thing obviously not know who the President was then, but Mother must be able to teleport herself from Washington to Bedford Falls in a matter of seconds! Hey, lady, tell me how you can be in two places at the same time and I'll buy the patent.
Another thing, and I noticed it again when I watched it tonight. This is the place where I'm tempted to think they're kidding us, just seeing how far they can go with George's personal hell, to the point of near-satire. It's the scene where George asks Clarence where Mary is, and he can't even tell him because it is just too horrible. Finally he pries it out of him. She's . . . she's. . . a librarian! Might as well say she's Bathsheba or something, or her body is hermetically sealed because she "never got married". So out comes Mary from the library like some shaggy-eyebrowed vision of frumpster hell. It is the ultimate macabre detail in a movie which is somehow or other very dark indeed.
But I gots-ta confess to one thing. No matter how I prepare myself for it, no matter how cynical I try to feel, no matter how cornball I know it will be (and it is), that final scene has me bawling every time. Just bawling. I don't know what it is. The generosity of the people. The look of astonishment on George's face. Zoo-zoo's petals. Beulah Bondi, beamed down from the planet Zargon.
I remember a superb SCTV satire of this scene, in which a succession of ever-more-notable people kept sweeping through the door, from George's brother to the President of the United States to, finally, His Holiness the Pope. It's a potent fantasy, all right - one we wish would come true for ourselves. That one day, in spite of futile sacrifice and grinding toil and zero recognition, something wonderful will happen to make us see that it has all been worthwhile.
This has something to do with the American work ethic, always handing the glory to someone else like that ratfink brother-who-got-the-Congressional-Medal-of-Honor-while-we-got-stuck-with-goddamn-rubber-drives-during-the-freaking-war. Let's face it, there are more Georges than Harries in the world. We all have our lunatic uncles, our goddamn rubber drives. Our eight thousand dollars.
And if George hadn't-a saved Harry when he slid down on that slippery old thingammy on the ice, waal then -
Please note. This is a repeat. It's something I've run a couple of times now, but I just watched the movie again - or the last 45 minutes of it - by accident - and decided this piece is still relevant. Sort of.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Cats for Christmas
Christmas cat gifs? Oh my, yes. Always, but especially when the season and the ridiculousness of the human condition makes me owly and disillusioned. Our first cat Murphy pulled the tree over - that was before we had video, sorry - but it must have looked something like this.
Short takes. I would imagine if you had a multiple-cat household, nothing would stay decorated for long. The cat is a creature of chaos. It's what we love about them. They rip apart the tinsel and gaudiness and expose it for what it is (tinsel and gaudiness). Now give me my fish.
Here is where it really heats up.
Ni-i-i-i-ice.
Videos of kids getting kittens are totally different from videos of kids getting puppies. In the puppy ones, the kid ALWAYS cries, usually hysterically. I've never seen a cat one where anyone cries. Just an observation. But no one ever talks about a "faithful cat", do they? Cats are anarchists, they're subversives and never "obey". They allow you to dwell in their presence. You can't cry over that.
You can go "eeek! Eeek! Eeeeeeeeek!", however.
How to wrap a cat. I'm going to try this with Bentley. I am. He loves his carrying case, so who knows. This may be a ragdoll cat however, and you can do anything you want to a ragdoll cat. The gif logo says "Flippycat.com", which may be significant.
NOT how to wrap a cat.
Taken from an ad, so cheating a little, but still pretty cool. Since no one has ever trained a cat, the camera must have waited for them.
The Jingle Cats are very stupid, and I have the original CD and play it every Christmas. To date, no one has liked it.
Ginger terror!
Meowy Christmas.
Santa vs. Satan!
It just gets more incredible. I was SURE I was down to the bottom of the barrel with that Godawful Punch and Judy show with the Hitlerian Santa. But no! This is a truly unbelievable cinematic abomination starring, in one movie, Santa and Satan. They duke it out. They actually vie for ascendancy and control of the world, if not the universe, while little children look on. It's all extremely weird, even eerie. The movie was made on the cheap in Mexico and later dubbed into a kind of English. I know Mexico is very big on all that Day of the Dead stuff, the sugar skulls, etc. But seriously? Here, the devil wears a skirt and dances badly. Santa just wheezily ho-ho-hos, as always.
I won't inflict the whole movie on you. I've made a few choice gifs, which were hard to make because the length of the movie necessitated very large gif files. So these may or may not download, may download slowly, or may play jerkily until they decide to play correctly.
If you watch the gifs, you will either find yourself wanting to see the whole thing, or sweating with gratitude to have gotten away singed, rather than roasted by this Yuletide atrocity.
Just the juxtaposition of the Devil with Jolly Saint Nick is grotesque. The pieces just don't fit. That's why I made these gifs, to get you to believe me. Santa looks catatonic and his suit looks like it is made of vinyl, but that is beside the point.
Here is where Santa begins to realize that something is seriously amiss. He lights a sort of firecrackery-looking thing (Mexico is very big on firecrackers, too, sometimes with tragic results), which spins around and around. So does the devil, going into a weird kind of choreography.
The thing about this devil is, he has a really shitty costume. Long red underwear, it looks like, and red body makeup, but with these really loose, rattly ears. Maybe so he won't scare the kiddies too much. But just having the Prince of Darkness in a Christmas movie is too much for me to wrap my head around.
This is where Santa demonstrates the principle of "love thine enemy" by firing a cannon at his nemesis. Ah, the heavenly peace of Christmas, where God and the Devil shoot it out in the living room! Santa cackles with glee at the direct hit.
In retaliation, the devil pulls a knife on Santa - no, wait, it's a pair of scissors - and punctures some sort of bag of water, or vodka or some shit like that. Santa turns around and spits on him.
And I can't go on here. Whenever I close my eyes now, I see red.
Friday, December 23, 2016
Bentley on the fridge
There is something about this cat, particularly in closeup. Something almost Zenlike. He came from a hard background, found homeless and skinny and wounded somewhere in Surrey (Surrey!). He has the duelling scars to prove it. It was a long and twisting path to the Gunning household, but he's here to stay. He will own me forever.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Christmas, a long time ago
I don't know where to begin to write about this photo. It isn't even a photo: it's a crop, only a tiny piece of a much larger picture that featured all my siblings, plus my sister's boy friend Derek. We were all in wacky positions on the sofa beside the Christmas tree.
It didn't occur to me until just now to crop out the part with Arthur and me. And it jumps out at me now, startling: so there we are. Arthur influenced my childhood, not to mention my life, more than anyone. Arthur was crazy. He was a flutist, a musician, a ne'er-do-well and very very smart. As time wore on, it became more and more evident that something was "wrong with" Arthur. In his early 20s, a few years after this photo was taken, he was diagnosed schizophrenic.
Whatever that means. But in an odd way, he embraced it. His life was hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto, though I did get to see him once in a while. He was a beloved figure, always, even if he did not always make much sense. The family tried to help, they really did, but he was hard to keep track of. He was in and out of hospital, and once when he described a hospitalization to me, it was as if he were telling me about his vacation in Acapulco. It was a grand adventure - no kidding! None of the bleakness, the shame that a "proper" mental patient should feel.
Though he did "mental patient" with great style and verve, he really was mentally incapacitated at times and found it hard to get along. Practical things were difficult. Because he was naturally appealing and very spiritual, various religious groups adopted him, literally took him in off the street and gave him food and shelter. First it was the Buddhists, then the Sikhs, and I don't know who else. I am grateful to them now.
Arthur died horribly, in a fire, in 1980. It was the same year John Lennon was shot. I don't know how I got through that year. Everyone said things like, oh, it was smoke inhalation and probably a painless death. Then I found out what death through smoke inhalation is really like. Everyone said things like, well, at least now you know where he is. They even said: maybe it was for the best.
It wasn't for the best, not anybody's best, and certainly not his. He had his life, odd as it was. He influenced me enormously. I can't even describe his sense of humour. It was bizarre; he could be bizarre. It wasn't always pleasant being with him.
My second novel Mallory has a character closely based on Arthur. It was important to me to write that novel, but like everything I have ever published, hardly anyone read it. I try not to dwell on the sense of futility that gives me.
When my brother died, I rather bitterly thought: now I get to inherit the mantle of family fuckup. And I did, to a large extent. I wear a "diagnosis" too, though a different one. I take "meds" too, though different ones. I don't like jokes and cartoons about meds because they are not funny, though I see them everywhere. If I mind, I'm told I have no sense of humour.
But Arthur was good at his diagnosis, he usually wore it lightly. He told me about a time in hospital when they had a "patient's night out" and went to a pub. When it was time to order a drink, one of the guys kept calling, "Oh, nurse!" He thought that was very funny.
I don't wish to paint him as this jolly schizophrenic. There was that time he tried to exorcise a demon he claimed had taken over my body. And he often smuggled hashish into his bedroom, where we smoked ourselves senseless. I was only about 15.
I wasn't popular as a teenager, at all, and was often miserable. Oddly, Arthur WAS popular. Strange as he was, he always had friends, and they came to him. He never did a single thing to attract them.
I will never figure out the riddle of him.
If you've had a brother, and then you don't, it leaves a hole, a brother-shaped hole. It leaves you wondering why you had to inherit this mantle, this "not right in the head" stuff that is supposedly so important. I am NOT "right in the head", but that doesn't matter so much because I have my life. And I suppose it's nothing special, except to me.
How to wrap presents (NOT)
Happens to me all the time. I've also had tape stuck in my hair or on my knee (!?), and of course cut the paper so it's too short and won't go around the gift. Or discovered I left something out, and very carefully tried to open up the paper along the seam, and rrrrrrrrip.
This is one of the rites of passage of Christmas, and every year I say "this time it'll be different". It isn't. It's just as sweaty, tiring and tedious as every other year. I somehow established a custom years and years ago of making pompoms and other yarn designs (twisted, braided) instead of ribbon, and God. It uses up VAST amounts of wool, and leaves, always, mats of yarn-bits and ends caked onto the rug.
But we do this, we do these things. Even if it's all thrown away, ALL of it, even (especially!) the elaborately-made pompoms which no one appreciates.
They don't appreciate it because they speak a different language, because they don't know what the hell this is all about. Their accomplishments shine in the eyes of the world. Mine don't.
But I keep on doing it, because - because it's what I do, and I know I will continue.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Hula cats
Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas
will be green and bright
The sun will shine by day
and all the stars at night
\
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say Merry Christmas to you!
Monday, December 19, 2016
Bentley vs. Cyberpenguin!
Bentley is the first to admit that he is not good with technology. He prefers a warm lap, a Temptations cat treat, an ear scratch and a pinch of catnip.
But every once in a while, His Nibs comes up against some evil cybercreature. He usually wins by walking away, so it's not very exciting.
But hey - it's a cat video. It's a CHRISTMAS cat video, for God's sake - what more could you want?
Wild horse attack
Well, no. Actually, it's a lot of wild ponies from Assateague Island disrupting the peace and quiet of tourists on the beach. But I don't think anybody minds meeting Misty's descendents up close and personal.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Rockin' with Santa
Caitlin is out front at the start, then on the left side from 0:26 to 0:52. After that, you can follow her easily because she is the BEST DAMN DANCER UP THERE!
Drop dead. Plop. Flop.
I don't know how I get myself into these moods. Dragging bottom emotionally for no reason that makes any sense, except that it's December, I thought I'd look up some Christmas poetry. I found one by John Betjeman that was quite nice, if long - but it fell apart by going all religious at the end, with babies in stables, etc., and ending with "God was man in Palestine/And lives today in bread and wine". Way to wreck it, John.
William Topaz McGonagall's atrocities occurred to me, and I wondered if he had done any Christmas poems (for the only thing better than a good Christmas poem is a bad Christmas poem - but it must be monumentally bad, not just dirty or jingly or a stupid takeoff of Clement Moore). But I've already "done" McGonagall in past posts, and I'm a bit sick of him, to be honest.
I found a horrible Robert Frost poem in which a man pounds on his door of a snowy evening and asks if he can cut down all the lovely snow-sparkling pines on his property to sell as Christmas trees. And here Frost hums and haws over it, turns it over in his mind, thinking: well, here are the advantages in it; and hmmm, here are the disadvantages in it; and: AIIIIIEEEEEK! Cut down all your friggin' trees?? What are you thinking? I guess back then it must have seemed that there were trees enough, that they were endless, and just a crop to be managed like any other. But I was so upset at this point that I didn't even read to the end.
Discouraged, I threw away Christmas and widened my scope to include any old poetry that was sublimely bad, but it's hard to find truly awful stuff. I found articles quoting three or four weak lines in, say, Tennyson. Auden once used a bad adjective, and somebody found a pun in Shakespeare, comparing an orange to Seville (or was it servile?). Well, who gives a shit about that? I wanted bad, and I wasn't getting it.
Until.
Until I found. . . This.
A Tragedy
Theophilus Marzials
Death!
Plop.
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."
* * * * *
My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-topMy thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.
Flop, plop.
* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --
My Devil -- My "Friend"
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air --
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.
Plop.
As if this bounty weren't enough, I found these little notes attached to an article about him, claiming that Marzials, not McGonagall, was the worst poet in the English language:
"Theo Marzials, the last of the Victorian aesthetes, who lived on in rural retirement, addicted to beetroot and chlorodyne (morphia, chloroform and prussic acid), for two decades after the world thought him dead. In the 1870s, as a young man with long hair, flowing moustaches and a silk bow tie over his lapels, he worked at the British Museum. According to Max Beerbohm, the great Panizzi himself, founder of the round Reading Room, was one day surprised to hear a shrill voice crying from the gallery: "Am I or am I not the darling of the Reading Room?". . . Marzials almost outlived danger. "On the last occasion when I happened to catch sight of him, looking into a case of stuffed birds at South Kensington Museum, he had eaten five large chocolate creams in the space of two minutes," wrote Ford in 1911. "He had a career tragic in the extreme and, as I believe, is now dead." But he wasn't. He was living in a farmhouse room in Colyton, Devon. The bed, occupied day and night, had a saucer of sliced beetroot beside it, the smell of which mingled with the fumes of chlorodyne, the smoke of an oil lamp and the steam of a stockpot perpetually simmering on the
stove."
This is disjointed as hell because I've edited 300 or so words out of it, so who knows who "Ford" is, but then again, who cares? The important thing is that I have found a truly horrendous, a harrowingly bad poet, and this opens the door to all sorts of posts about him. Or not. Depends if I can find anything else. Oh, here's one -
by: Theophilus Marzials (1850-1920)
The wan witch at the creepy midnight hour,
When the wild moon was flying to its full,
Went huddling round a damned convent's tower,
From out the crumbling slabs or tombs to pull
Some lecherous leaf or shrieking mandrake-flower.
Beneath she heard the dead men's voices dull;
Around she felt the cold souls creep and cower;
In hand she held a grinning damned's skull!
Then through the ruin'd cloisters, strangely white,
T'wards the struck moon, all swathed in colod grave-bands,
She saw dead Love wringing his hollow hands,
And gliding grimmer than a dank tomb-light.
And with a shriek she rush'd across his path--
And now the hell-worm all her body hath!
The problem with this one is, as Zero Mostel says to Gene Wilder in The Producers: "Nah, it's too good." In fact it's neither good nor bad, and is as purple as most Victorian stuff was. But it strikes me as bargain basement Gerard Manley Hopkins, and even a pale photocopy of Hopkins has a certain power behind it.
I don't know what "colod grave-bands" are, but maybe they played gigs at the cemetary. Were they people of "colo"? We'll never know. (Could be a typo, also.) So even at being the worst, Marzials wasn't the best. Or the other way around.
MARZIALS DISH. This was all I could find about his sex life, and it came from Wikipedia so it MUST be true:
"The relationship between Marzials and fellow author Edmund Gosse is debated, with some claims that their relationship was more than platonic."
MARZIALS DISH. This was all I could find about his sex life, and it came from Wikipedia so it MUST be true:
"The relationship between Marzials and fellow author Edmund Gosse is debated, with some claims that their relationship was more than platonic."
But wait, there's more. . . a truly cheesy poem!
We have seen the Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees --
Or as the leaves upon the trees --
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled Queen of Cheese.
May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great World's show at Paris.
Of the youth -- beware of these --
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek; then songs or glees
We could not sing o' Queen of Cheese.
We'rt thou suspended from baloon,
You'd cast a shade, even at noon;
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.
I don't know what to say.
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