True Grit, by True-grit

Y'know, cowpokes, just about the last thang I wanna do right now is write a movie review. So I won't, even though I liked the new take on True Grit by the quirky Coen Brothers (previously known for putting characters through the wood chipper and stuff like that).

Like a lot of non-Western fans, I liked the old True Grit and wondered why it needed to be remade (though I was delighted to find that, even with all the changes, they retained one line, the immortal "Fill yore hands, you son-of-a-bitch!"). Jeff Bridges did a creditable (and credible) job filling the huge boots of John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, this old guy who likes-da shoot up people, like. So this little girl, this Maddie whose father got shot? She goes to him.

She isn't sorry, but that's not the part I liked. I liked the fact that nearly all the men in this thing were shaggy-like. They had long greasy hair and chin spinach and "mustaches" (the sheer size of them demanding a plural form). Just look at an old photo of Buffalo Bill Cody, will you (I mean, right now), and you'll see how awe-then-tick-lakk this-all is. No clean-shaven guys here, no razors on the prairies (or if they had 'em, they were just a-usin'-em to flick chickens). Even the eyebrows were different then, way out. They grew different, maybe it was the soil.

So this Rooster guy, he has this horse, and it don't look like any Western movie horse ever seen, not like Trigger or Silver or Desperado or whatever-else. In fact, all the horses in this movie look like real Western horses, a surprise that was almost a shock. Cowboys liked their horses compact, tough, low to the ground and savvy, none of this Arabian dish-faced mane-tossing bullshit. Just get the job done, and on the minimum volume of oats.

These horses filled the bill. They weren't showy, in fact some-o'-dem were sort of mingy little things, their necks straight, coats shaggy-like as if they lived outdoors, which back then they did. One of them was an Appaloosa, the kind with the dots on the butt, and the dots stand up like felt. Don't know where they got them, but certainly not from Horse Central Casting. Maybe they scrounged around to find them in the real West? Who knows, but these horses resonated with me and my former life rocking along the trails in a beat-up old Western saddle on a mingy but sweet little horse named Rocky.

Nobody knew his pedigree, because like a lot of horses he didn't really have one. Cowboys went on faith back then, and good trading. Their bloodlines were mostly mustang with a little bit of a racehorse that broke loose once by mistake. And Spanish Conquistador blood that went way, way back, so once in a while one of them, mingy or not, would start high-stepping all by himself. You'd hear a single, sad note of Spanish guitar, then he'd go back to lopin' on down the lone prai-ree.

I liked the horses and the chin-spinach and the foul talk in this movie (not really obscenity, just language snarled and spat and raunched, as if, in the words of Tom Robbins, it had been strained through Davy Crockett's underwear). I wanted to get on one of those horses, an easy climb. I could lean down beside his thick ol' neck and tell him things. He'd know what I wanted before I knew it myself. He wouldn't ask much, but would give all he had.

A horse gets ridden into the ground in this movie, and it's hard to watch, but it's only to save a little girl's life. The horse literally runs until it groans and staggers and collapses, and Rooster Cogburn shoots it in the head, a mercy. They don't make horses that game any more. They don't make horse casting directors that pick mingy little, game little, shaggy little mustangs that run 'til they drop, either.

I'd like to see more of it.

My favorite Christmas music of all time

Noel!

A Christmas Miracle

Below is an actual email, from an actual editor in a publishing house. A couple posts back, I went on a rant about the habit of some publishers of getting all the loose-end rejections out by the end of the year, so that they usually arrive a couple of days before Christmas. This reminds me of kicking Tiny Tim in the shins, and I wrote to him and said so. I was expecting either no reply or a blast, and got this instead!

Kind of gives me hope.

December 23, 2010

Margaret Gunning
3589 Chestnut Street
Port Coquitlam, BC
V3B 5V3

Dear Ms. Gunning,

Please accept my sincere apologies for the inconsiderate delivery of our letter. I very much agree with you that declining manuscripts in advance of the holiday season is an insincere act to those whose craft is an inconceivably laborious and passionate one. While sending rejection letters is a solemn task, I know it is incomparably more severe to receive them. We strive to be as sensitive to authors as possible in our responses, which means replying promptly, albeit not always personally. In this instance I made an accidental, thoughtless error that although was not malicious in intent, was cruel in its execution. I am very sorry.

Regarding your manuscript, The Glass Character, I thought your narrator’s voice was very strong, and I personally enjoyed the subject of Harold Lloyd himself. Douglas & McIntyre’s fiction program has refocused, though, with a vision to acquire books that explore the boundaries of genre, style as well as content. Our editorial board found your novel topically intriguing; however, we did not feel the setting, atmosphere, and narrative arc were entirely developed or successful. Notwithstanding, we think that you will indeed place The Glass Character, and wish you the very best in doing so.

Thank you again for advocating in defense of yourself and other writers. I have truly taken your advice sincerely, and will strive to be ever more conscientious and diligent in the future.

I wish you a very happy new year.

Best regards,

Ebeneezer Editor

Angel of grief

This angel has lowered her head in grief because she could not be there to save someone.

She could not be there to save a little girl, four years old, laughing and shrieking with delight as she sledded down a hill during a rare, thick Vancouver snowfall.

She could not be there to stop the truck as it rounded the corner, its driver blinded by snow.

Turn back time, turn back time. . . just take time away. Extract this sorrow from my blood, draw it from me now, for soon my heart won’t bear it.

I am only on the outermost fringes of this tragedy, and have no right even to speak of it, but it reverberates in me still. For this astonishing, unspeakable loss happened two years ago, on Christmas Eve.

Some say everything happens for a reason. I want to pin them to the wall and ask them to prove it.

Some say God never gives us more than we can handle. I want to take their hand and pull them into the suicide wards, the prisons. Just take a look.

I don’t know what potion can relieve such horrors, losses that can’t even be spoken, except that I can’t keep silent and make these cute and whimsical little posts forever.

Everyone assumes everything’s just fine with me because of that whimsy. They don’t see it as the smokescreen it is. The anodyne, the analgesic for a sometimes overwhelming grief.

I too must bear the completely unjust, undeserved and senseless horror of this, and keep on, though my grief is but a particle of her parents’, her grandparents’. Everyone’s.

Sometimes people say, when spared some dreadful calamity, “My angel must have saved me.” Oh yes. And this angelic little girl lost her life and her future in a snowdrift on the sweetest night of the year?

If you are reading this and if you pray, pray. Just pray, don’t even bother with words. If you don’t pray, try. Anything will do. Just begin.

Once more, into the void

You've got to ask yourself why you do this.

Why, when it's already happened two or three times.

It goes like this. After having published two well-received novels (though admittedly, no threat to Stephen King or J. K. Rowling), you write another one. One that you're proud of, one that you are sure will find a home with relative ease.

Surprise: it's punch, punch, punch in the face. Sorry, but that's what it is: all those rejections, as if your work never existed and never drew all those (now sadistic-sounding, hope-dangling) reviews.

Maybe it's all over. N'est-ce pas?

More than once - perhaps three times, since I began to send out fiction - I've received a form rejection at a certain time of year.

The week before Christmas.

This is a season of fizzy hope, anticipation of a wonderful holiday followed by a fresh start in the new year. So why do editors routinely send these things out NOW?

Well. . . like everybody else, they want a clean desk to come back to in 2011. A lot of loose ends in the form of rejected novels are lying around, and one has to be efficient, doesn't one?

Isn't it better to get the slight/damage over with now, rather than prolonging the illusion/delusion of acceptance for a couple more weeks?

Aren't you a real writer? Don't you know what that entails? Be a man! Suck it up, girl friend! It's just a rejection. At least the one I got today was a form letter, not my own letter sent back to me with a rubber stamp on the corner (which actually happened to me, and which I wrote about a couple of months ago).

One must never, never, never, never, NEVER answer a rejection. Don't express an opinion, or it will get around like wildfire that you are "difficult" and no one will want to work with you. Or at very least, they'll think you're oversensitive and probably shouldn't be working in the field at all.

So I answered the rejection. I just - told the guy. Told him, not that he shouldn't have rejected my work (which he shouldn't), but that his timing is lousy and steps all over the feelings of writers everywhere.

He will likely be angry, piqued, may even send me a blast I'll receive on New Years Eve or some-such. They always get angry if you say what you feel, or hope.

Especially, in the week before Christmas.

For Glen

We hardly knew you

Below is a reprint of a piece I wrote in 2005. I could not believe it was that long ago: I thought it was maybe a couple of years. I lost a lot that year, including my health, but this was a stunning blow.

When he disappeared, there was a police report describing Glen Allen as 6' 2", 150 pounds, with a front tooth missing. A recent photo revealed a gaunt figure with feverish eyes and an attempt at a smile. Except during crushing depressions, Glen had always fought his weight and was normally closer to 225. The way he died was eerily like the street people he knew and loved.

It was one of those longstanding correspondences. I suppose they happen now, electronically, with almost always a sexual connotation, a bartering, a price.

There was no price here. Only his life.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and, at the end, lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen - this guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail.

This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity.

He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?) He was concerned about his future once, and instead of seeing an investment broker or a psychiatrist, consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick. When asked to be a speaker at an AA meeting, he told me how he had shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Christmases, ten Easters. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, still preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love.

Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an amazing length of time, given the fact that Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a spiritual sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a homeless person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.
I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute to him quoting his witty and insightful prose, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

We will remember

The somnambulist

One of my fave-fave ads. Took me 2 years to find it.

Baby, it's not your sleigh ride

Don't know what it is, but me likes.

Used in an ad for, I think, Sear's, a few years back.

Don't say there's no original Xmas music.

This might even work!

A while ago I discovered, to my utter dismay, that the domain name for my web site had been stolen by a Japanese shoe company. (No, I'm not kidding.) I had gotten one of those renewal notices in the mail (!) that I assumed was, like 95% of them, phony, so I didn't do anything about it. I knew the site still existed, but didn't know how to access it.

Then I blundered on to these links! They seem to work. Perhaps you need only one of them, but just in case. . .

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/mallory.htm

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

(Is this a "sagn"? Is my wretched luck about to turn? Stay tuned!!)

Wonderful, but confused: It's a Wonderful Life, Part II

OK, I don't exactly expect you to read all this stuff. Most movies have little inconsistencies that only the most OCD-infested person would notice. We're willing to go along with the sleight-of-hand that is the movie world.

But it does seem that there's an unusual amount of hokery, or maybe plain sloppiness, in this classic film. No one else has noticed Beulah Bondi's amazing disappearing act, but when the same woman walks by on the street five times in thirty seconds. . . you've got to wonder what's going on.

Soooooo. . . let's play Spot the Capra Gaffes!

Continuity: Ol' Man Gower's cigar disappears when he sends young George to deliver a prescription.

Continuity: Just before George speaks to Harry on the phone, George removes a wreath from his arm and places it on a table. The wreath immediately reappears on his arm.

Continuity: George's pipe disappears when talking to Violet in his office.

Continuity: George and Clarence swap sides as they are thrown out of Nick's.

Audio/visual unsynchronized: George jumps into the river to save Clarence. As he is rescuing him Clarence is screaming "help" but his mouth is not moving.

Continuity: After George storms out of Uncle Billy's house, Uncle Billy lays his head on his arms. At first he has his arms crossed right over left, then immediately they are crossed left over right.
Continuity: When George and Clarence are drying off in the bridge keeper's shack the postcard hanging by the thermometer on the wall, next to the door repeatedly disappears and reappears between shots. When Mr. Potter offers George a job, the chain on the the skull and chain on Mr. Potter's desk changes positions repeatedly between shots.

Continuity: When everyone is jumping into the pool during the dance, the same person jumps in twice.

Continuity: As George approaches Bert and Ernie by Ernie's taxi, and then all three ogle Violet as she walks down the street, the same woman in a print dress, holding the brim of her hat, walks by five times in 30 seconds.

Continuity: As Violet walks away from George, Ernie, and Bert, Ernie watches her out the window of his taxi. He stops watching and moves away from the window. In the next shot, he is watching from the window again.

Continuity: Snow on Ernie's taxi disappears and reappears when arriving at George's dilapidated house.

Revealing mistakes: When Mary (Donna Reed) throws her rock at an upstairs window of the dilapidated old house, the rock disappears a split-second after leaving her hand, and then reappears in the distance just before crashing through the glass. The roof of the house was a matte painting, added after principal photography by the visual effects department. When Ms Reed threw her rock (and it was her throwing it, not a stand-in), the arc of its flight was a bit too high, and it crossed the matte line for most of it's travel. Consequently, it was covered up by the painting, which was added later. Appartently the live-action crew did not notice the potential problem when filming the shot.

Continuity: As George and Mary prepare to drive Martini's family to their new home, Mary (in a close up) is holding the goat's horn/antler. The scene cuts to an extreme long shot in which her hand is nowhere near the goat.

Continuity: When George wanders across the street (soon to be joined by Violet), the man approaching him with the pipe suddenly becomes a woman.

Continuity: After Clarence disappears while being wrestled by Bert the Cop, you can see the shadow of Ernie the Cabdriver, shaking his finger. However, when the camera shows Ernie, he has both hands on the tree, and then he begins to shake his finger.

Continuity: During the run inside the Building & Loan, the hat changes position on the coat stand outside George's office.

Continuity: A hat being held by someone donating money in the Bailey house first has a little snow then a lot of snow then no snow.

Continuity: Alignment of George's car when it hits the tree

Continuity: Standing position of Potter's bodyguard when Potter talks to Peter Bailey at the Building & Loan.

Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Mary and George are walking down the street after the dance, she asks him, "Well, why don't you say it?" The next shot George is heard saying, "I don't know. Maybe I will say it," but his mouth is not moving at all.

Continuity: When George arrives at home and finds Mary lying there, he puts his right hand on her right hand and kisses her. Next shot he is caressing her head with his right hand.

Continuity: When George invites Carter to come in and follows him, he is holding the pipe with his left hand. But in the shot after someone asks him about hang up the phone, he appears with the pipe in his right hand.

Continuity: When George crashes his car into the tree, there's not much snow on it, when he gets out of the car to have a look at the damage, there's lots of snow on the car

Continuity: When George and Mary are throwing rocks at the dilapidated house on the way home from the dance, when George throw his rock, the window that Mary is supposed to throw a rock at is missing. Then when Mary gets ready to throw her rock the window is there.

Anachronisms: Young George Bailey is shown working in a drugstore in 1919, but he's standing next to a Coca-Cola Silhouette Girl Thermometer which wasn't produced until 1938.

Continuity: When George visits his father in his office and finds him arguing with Potter, his father is standing behind his desk talking to Potter. There is a cut away form this but upon return George's father is now on the same side of the desk as Potter.

Revealing mistakes: In the scene where George saves Clarence on the bridge (or Clarence saved him), he is seen to be visibly sweating even though it is supposedly winter. This is because the scene was shot in warm weather.

Factual errors: 1919: No National Geographic Magazine mentions "Fiji" and "coconuts" in the same subject.

Errors in geography: At the scene showing the new houses at Bailey Park, California hills are visible beyond the houses. The film is set in New York state, which only has much gentler, rolling hills.

Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When George Bailey is arguing with Mr. Potter in the board room after Peter Bailey's death, George says to Potter: "What'd you say just a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home." But Mr. Potter never said this line.

Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): The medal is frequently, albeit incorrectly, called the Congressional Medal of Honor, stemming from its award by the Department of Defense "in the name of Congress". It is correctly the "Medal of Honor".

Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): At one point George (James Stewart) calls Violet (Gloria Grahame), Gloria.

Continuity: When Mary puts on "Buffalo Gals" on the phonograph, she starts a ten-inch, yellow-labeled record, but in the next shot, a dark-labeled record is playing. Also, when Mary breaks the record after the conversation with George, she breaks a twelve-inch, yellow-labeled record instead of the original ten-inch record.

Revealing mistakes: In the drugstore when Mary leans over the counter to whisper in George's ear, a piece of tape suddenly appears on the edge of the counter between George's and Mary's heads. This was most likely done as a reference mark for the young actors so the focus puller could accurately pull focus.

Plot holes: When George and Clarence go looking for his car which he had run into the tree, the guy George is talking to about the car and the man's tree smells his breath and says "that must have been those two other trees" implying that George's breath smelled of alcohol and the man thought George was drunk. But if George had indeed not been born, he would never have been at Martini's before that and had any alcohol at all. And this was before he and Clarence went back to Martini's so there couldn't have been any scent of alcohol on George's breath.

Revealing mistakes: James Stewart's toupee' falls off after he and Donna Reed fall into the pool during the Charleston contest.

Plot holes: When George goes to his Mother's house and she doesn't know him, he asks about her Brother, Billy. If Uncle Billy is his Mother's brother, why is his last name Bailey?

(Incredibly, there are more, but they're listed under "spoilers". I wouldn't want to give anything away!)