Sex kittens of the Edwardian age

Warning: this will scare the shit out of you

This is a nightmare on video, and I don't know why I have to keep going back and watching it over and over again, because it still SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME even though I know it's "nothing". It's really nothing, and a couple of decades ago it was something so familiar, you experienced it every day without thinking about it. Except now, it has been impossibly attenuated into an expression of doom so potent that it can make you lose all hope. So hey, why not watch this right now? Turn the volume WAY up.

Seasons change, and so did I

 

The Glory Is Fallen Out Of

the glory is fallen out of

the sky the last immortal

leaf

is dead and the gold

year

a formal spasm

in the

dust

this is the passing of all shining things

therefore we also

blandly

into receptive

earth, O let

us

descend

take

shimmering wind

these fragile splendors from

us crumple them hide

them in thy breath drive

them in nothingness

for we

would sleep

this is the passing of all shining things

no lingering no backward-

wondering be unto

us O

soul, but straight

glad feet fear ruining

and glory girded

faces

lead us

into the

serious

steep darkness

e. e. cummings

Hot pursuit

Bosley and Belinda, the Romeo and Juliet of Como Lake, get a lot of play on my YouTube channel. I've started editing the videos and setting them to music (though this one isn't - I didn't want to drown out the quacks and splashes). Belinda suddenly appeared in the spring, a medium-sized duck who was obviously a hybrid, with her cocoa-brown-and-white feathers, green bill and curlicue tail. But she has grown to near-gargantuan proportions, dwarfing even her goose-sized boy friend, Bosley. Our hope is that these two will stay together and produce ducklings in the spring. Oh joy - ducklings from Bosley and Belinda! I'd be tempted to take one home with me. But I won't.

This is a mini-drama in which Belinda decides she needs a little "me time", and swims off in a distant direction. It takes Bosley a minute to wonder where she is, but then he literally runs to the water and takes off after her.

Love.

The Mystery of Dunbrody

This blog carries me from obsession to obsession, and horses are definitely one of them. When I see an exceptional horse like this one, a Gypsy Vanner stallion named Copper Coin, it makes me want to go on living.

I never heard of the Gypsy Vanner until seven or eight years ago, when I found an incredible photo of a massive dapple grey horse and could hardly believe my eyes how beautiful he was. I don't know if the photo is still around the internet, but he was a legendary sire at a stable called, I think, Kintyre. It started in Ireland, moved to the States, and now I can't find a trace of it. I wonder what happened.

The horse, I can't find him now, but he looked sort of like this:

I just remember the cream-on-steel-grey dappling, the floaty feathering that must be murder to keep clean, and the unexpectedly tiny pink nose. The trailing Veronica Lake bangs are particularly fetching. This might also be called an Irish Cob horse, because the names seem almost interchangeable. The horse I remember - the picture I remember - was a legendary sire who had "stamped his get" down the generations, dozens and hundreds of prize-winning foals. 

(Later): I can't believe I found him! 

THIS is the horse that blew my mind back in about 2009, though of course it was a grainy photo of only a few hundred pixels. It turns out that this horse is called Dunbrody (of course! How could I have forgotten that?), and is associated with the name Clononeen and Kintyre, though I don't know how. The Kintyre web site stopped being updated six years ago, in that frustrating way they do. And Pinterest, the evil sorceress, has swallowed all his pictures without a trace of useful information attached (because who cares about THAT, eh?).

It's hard for me to believe this is the same horse, though he's called Dunbrody: his mane, fanning out like Farrah Fawcett's hairdo, seems ash blonde compared to the other photos where he's more ginger. But horses of the grey persuasion are somewhat like Lipizzans, in that their coat often begins dark and grows lighter and lighter with the years. It must be him, because of that grey crescent on his left nostril. Imagine seeing all that mane and feathering floating behind him as he trotted along!

I even found some video which MIGHT be Dunbrody, but as usual with older videos, there are no identifying marks on it. Here, his mane and tail (if it's him) are very dark:

I don't want to say with certainty, but this may be a juvenile version, a not-fully-grown Dunbrody. If I could see his muzzle and his nose up-close, I would know for sure.

Pulp Riot Hair Colour!

Though I don't think I'd ever have it done (conservative me), I was surprised to see how cool some of these are. The multicolor/rainbowy ones are most appealing, and some have a kind of silvery/metallic sheen to them. I'm most taken with the ones that look more like - well - hair. Long tumbly hair that has a kind of kaleidoscopic effect when it moves. Shaven looks have never appealed to me much, but even that grows out, doesn't it? I can see my grandkids getting into this, to the consternation of their parents. But it does wash out eventually, doesn't it?

UPDATE. Just went to spend Thanksgiving Sunday with my daughter's family, and saw Caitlin's new hair: strawberry pink! It looked lovely, with many different shades of rose, pink and auburn skilfully streaked and blended through her naturally chestnut hair. With her red-haired skin coloring, it looked great. Then Shannon told me the price tag - somewhere around $300.00. Luckily, she "knew a guy".

Stone soul picnic

Why it would be cool to be able to draw

I can't. I really can't draw, and I realize that what passes for animation on this blog is kind of like those flip pictures we used to make on note pads (sometimes only using two images). But I am still fascinated with making things move. It is all an illusion. If I see a series of still pictures, it just screams at me, make a gif! And the mind is so gullible, it will move from still picture to still picture, and fill in whole seconds in the middle.

I have always been fascinated by these things - "pencil tests" they're called, where I guess the animation is roughed out. You can see through all the characters, which fascinates me. It has an air of shifting, swarming unreality (just like my life). The smudgy grey-and-black is dreamlike, a nightmare in fact. This is a deleted scene, a nasty one, and it's a good job the kiddies weren't subjected to it. 

I have mixed feelings about Disney, the whole megalomonarchy. Of course I was saturated in it as a kid. There was no escaping it. Disney is like eating a whole cake at the same time, or going on a swell carnival ride that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards. There's a much-too-muchness about it. It's too good, somehow, or just a little fake, and then you feel bad that you were so taken in. I could never abide that falsetto-ish, diaper-wearing little snot with the round ears that always face to the front. Since when is vermin cute and appealing and something you want to welcome into your household? I was more of a Warner Brothers kid, with all those bizarre, smart-alecky characters like Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam. 

Good Christ! This is incredibly violent! Dwarfs punching each other's lights out. I thought those seven little men got along just great, though what their role in Snow White's life was, I never figured out.

At various points in my life, I've tried to draw something or paint or do SOMETHING artistic, because I just long to. I can't, because what I turn out is so mediocre it's laughable. I once painted a face of Jesus that set me back about six years. I thought I was a great artist then, which tells you something about my mental state. I kept sending scans of my paintings to people, then wondering why they didn't say anything. I truly thought a major new talent was blooming out of nothing.

I thought a lot of other things, but fortunately they didn't come true either. 

Here Yosemite Sam appears to be romancing Granny, who must have come in to some money or something. You can see what looks like fragments of dialogue actually written above his head. He is standing in the middle of nothing, not even blank but dirty brown. At one point he disappears except for his face. Fascinating. Maybe I really live inside an unfinished cartoon, but just haven't realized it yet.

I have watched people sketch who really know how to do it, and it confounds me. I watched a bit out of a movie where Terry Gilliam was sketching storyboards for his aborted Don Quixote movie. I just couldn't believe how he knew to do that, to make an image that was coherent and even vital and alive with one or two simple, even primitive strokes. Like an ear for music, I guess you have to just have it.

DIRECTOR'S CUT. That horrible Snow White scene in slow-mo. Note that various dwarfs appear and disappear as they annihilate each other.

Slow-motion Sam. Downright creepy, especially the way Granny vanishes when she is no longer needed. The one-frame colorization, or whatever you call it, is startling. 

Never look a gif horse. . .

Moon bug, golden sparkler, fire devil

Glow worm, lightning bug, firefly, fire beetle, candle fly, fire bug, bookworm, elaterid, pyrophorus nocticula, lampyridae, moon bug, golden sparkler, fire devil, Big Dipper, blinkie

Sea to sky majesty

A glimpse of our drive home on the Sea to Sky highway, Squamish.

Up a tree, in the dark

Kitty rescued in the middle of the night by Canopy Cat Rescue.

A remake of Safety Last? Here it is! (I think).

Safety Last - teaser from Philip Lee on Vimeo.

Safety Last is a remake of Harold Lloyd's 1923 classic silent film. While preparing to pitch this romantic comedy script to Dreamworks SKG, director Will Bigham couldn't figure out how to adequately describe this one scene. Figuring that "seeing is believing", we culled a bunch of favors and shot this on the Universal backlot with almost no money to demonstrate how this unusual scene could work.

The picture is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.

Directed by Will Bigham
Director of Photography: Philip Lee


Now this is a really strange one. Several years ago, I heard that the Lloyd family had sold the rights to Safety Last to Sony Pictures so they could do a remake. The whole thing seemed impossible, but then I found this little clip (on YouTube, actually - it doesn't seem to be there any more). I have to admit that I find the idea of a remake excruciating, and I have no idea why the Lloyd family decided to do that, how they could so casually sell the rights to such a masterpiece, which surely would receive a mediocre treatment at best. But there it is.

And to think, they could have had the rights to my novel and make a really GREAT picture! But I dream. . . I dream.

This video is the wrong size, of course, but I'll run it anyway just as a curiosity, and because I really didn't expect to see it again. I've mentioned it to a few people (Rich Correll?) and gotten the blank stares I so often seem to inspire when I know something they don't. 

For one thing, no one seems to believe the rights were ever sold or has even heard of the idea, or believes in the possibility of it. It's either an internet rumor or something I cooked up all by myself.  I'm in a different universe, apparently, but at least now I have some sort of proof.

Harold Lloyd, I LOVE YOU!

The last words of John Lennon

Borealis burning bright

Aurora borealis over Inuvik

Wiggle Wiggle Woo

 

A long time ago, I don't know how many years ago it was, when I first started making gifs for my blog (which now seems like a very long time ago), there was a fad: 3D gifs (or GIFs, as they are usually called - I just use lower-case letters because "GIFs" is so bleepin' ugly). The 3D gifs were just what you see here - two very slightly different views of a scene which were rapidly wiggled back and forth to make them sort of look 3D. Technically it's a gif, but a very inadequate one because gifs usually express movement, and these look like the participants are either experiencing a mild earthquake, or sitting on jell-o.

The 3D effect is there, kind of eerily, not unlike the stereoscopic images from my Grandma's old viewer (and didn't YOUR Grandma have one of those, too?). These are a little more disquieting because they just won't stop moving. I'm not sure of the age of them, but it's well over 100 years, so that the pictures would likely be hand-tinted. As a matter of fact, it's very likely these gifs WERE made from those old stereopticon cards with the double image on them. I'm not sure what else they would use.

So what does this prove? Anything? I just analyzed one of them using my gif-making/editing program, and they each have exactly two frames. I don't know why the eye is fooled into thinking it's 3D, when it most decidedly isn't. 

Then people started making their own, and this sort of thing was popular for a while, though I guess you had to have the right equipment to take the pictures. This one has not two, but six frames, but is still limited by that incessant (pointless?) back-and-forth movement which makes the subject of the picture seem so utterly frozen.

I had to try slowing this one down. Not very exciting, is it? But it's typical of the kinds of images I was seeing back then. I remember all sorts of excited entries on web sites with a kind of "WOWWWWW!!!" tone to them: NOW YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN GIFS IN 3D! Even ready-made ones were considered the marvel of the age. Look! Oh wow! They're in 3D! Just like in the movies! All I could see was a lot of jellylike shaking.

Speeded up, you can see that everything seems to be moving in the picture except the main figure, who is just hanging there. The effect is more disquieting than ever.

WOW.

Or. . . not.

This turned out to be a fad which fizzled very quickly, mainly because it just looks so DUMB and not really 3D at all, just annoying. All the images I've gathered here are from posts from 2011, so my guess is that 2011 was the height of the fever. 2011 now seems like approximately one billion years ago. Six years is a long time, and on the internet it is an eternity. 

I can't leave this topic alone until I present a couple of truly hideous historical ones I found. I don't know how these were made, but probably with a double-sided stereoscope image. I just wish they hadn't done it at all.

History comes alive.