Paging Dr. Frankenstein: The Volta Labs recordings

They just keep on unearthing these unearthly sounds from the past, recorded on everything from warm candle wax to mucilage applied to cereal box cardboard. Of course we know all about that Au Clair de la Lune breakthrough going back to 1860, a "recording" etched on soot-covered paper with a stylus and never intended to be played back. But nowadays it seems we can play back anything. It's like Pogo: Albert the Alligator would open a closet door, bellow "Wheeeee-hawken" or something like that, slam the door, then next time anyone opened the closet his voice would come booming out again.


I love the name VOLTA LABS: it reminds me of old Frankenstein movies and mad scientists with their hair all fuzzed up. Sudden explosions and weird sounds from who-knows-where. "He's ali-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ive!!", and all that. Well, you have to admit these voices from the past do seem to be raising the dead.

For some reason early sound creeps me out way more than early photography/movies. We hear in the womb, long before we can see. Alfred Hitchcock once famously said that the shower scene in Psycho was terrifying mainly because of the relentlessly repeated sound of the knife entering Janet Leigh's flesh. Not to mention the shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek, shriek of the sound track.


I have no doubt they're going to keep finding these things now, old discs and stuff locked away in dusty drawers that no one paid any attention to before. Scientists are notorious for being competitive. "My discovery is better than your discovery, nyahh nyahh nyahh." The Volta Labs recordings weren't done earlier than the Au Clair de la Lune stuff (more like 1880), but they're still significant for representing the endless experiments these fellows had to go through to try to get it right.

As soon as somebody did, who knows who, some lackey who was paid 50 cents a week, Edison snarfed it up and got it patented under his name the same day. Which is how he became the Greatest Inventor in Human History.

Funny how many of these early technological researchers were French. Going back to the Montgolfier brothers and their hot air balloons, which enabled "man" to fly long before the good-ol' American Wright brothers, we had the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies doing all sorts of phantasmagorical things with early film. And Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville (whose name would fill a whole disc back then), singing the third verse of Au Clair de la Lune in a wavery, creepy voice that could be played at two speeds, both of them unsettling.

I always think these things are hoaxes. In fact, I had a lot of doubt about Martinville because I couldn't see any physical evidence that computers had extracted that sound from what amounted to an old piece of tar paper that had been folded up in a drawer for 150 years.

Twenty years ago or thereabouts, I heard about a hoax perpetrated on the readers of a classical music magazine. I even heard the recording myself: a CD transcript of "Chopin playing the minute waltz", recorded in 1840 or thereabouts on a revolving drum and stylus. On black sooty paper. Just like the Au Clair thing. It'd been buried in the fellow's garden somewhere, then unearthed during construction in Paris. At some point someone saw the catalogue number on the disc: 123456hahaha, and the jig was up.

People still don't get the fact that "minute" refers to the other meaning of minute: small. Miniature. Petite. NOT played in a minute, like Liberace with the big vulgar clock ticking audibly away on the side of his piano. With either the clock slowed down, or the piece vastly abridged.

Pretty soon you'll be able to snatch atoms out of the air and play them back like fireflies. It's all going too fast for me. But I like to see how all this started, and I love it when I find something like this. Volta Labs! Paging Dr. Frankenstein.



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It's alive! It's ali-i-i-i-i-i-ve!

This thing looks like it was recorded on a circular saw that had seen too much hard use. The only good thing about it is its brevity. But just what the hell were these guys trying to do?


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Obituary Blues (short fiction)

Late December. Maybe it wasn’t the best time of year to be looking for this. But after her mother-in-law’s death at the first of the month, something happened to her that she didn’t expect: she began to be curious about her own mother, who was about the same age.

To say that there was family estrangement was like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak. It had gone on for years, but over time the smoking ruins seemed to be farther and farther behind her.

Over forty years, her husband’s family became her family. And she was welcomed in. His mother became her Mum: honest, practical, funny, and in her own no-nonsense way, accepting and loving.

When she died at age 96, a peaceful death that almost anyone would envy, it caused a strange reaction in her. She wondered where her own Mum was. Meaning, the one who’d given birth to her and raised her with sublime indifference while favoring her eldest two siblings.

All through her childhood she had been haunted by the feeling that her parents had not wanted her, that she had been a mistake, someone they were ashamed of and would rather not have around. Later, her feelings of estrangement were vigorously denied and shouted down as “wrong”. It simply did not happen. She had wonderful parents. What was wrong with her? She had to stop feeling this way, now. This was true of most of her feelings, which apparently she was not allowed to have.

Then there was Garth, her older brother, a brilliant person who became more and more odd as years went by. He ended up on the streets of Toronto, a schizophrenic, and died tragically young in a fire. 

Garth had been the only one who had listened. But then, there was something wrong with him too, something the family just couldn’t acknowledge or forgive.

It probably wasn’t a good idea to google her mother’s name, particularly since her obituary immediately sprang up like a ghost from the grave.

Remembering her Mum-in-law’s gracious, inclusive obituary, she wasn’t expecting it to be anything like that. But she couldn’t in her wildest dreams have imagined  what she now saw in front of her.

She read it.

She read it again. Then, again.

She wasn’t in it.

Wasn’t there, wasn’t there at all, no nor any of her kin (no husband, no kids, no grandkids): so apparently she had never been born, never been raised, didn’t in fact exist at all.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Garth wasn’t there! Garth had been stricken from the record as well. Photoshopped. Edited out.

One wonders how anyone can possess the ruthlessness to pretend that two of their children never existed. Perhaps her elder sister had written this (but certainly not against her mother’s wishes), and surgically removed Garth just to devastate and wound her further. Her two oldest siblings were proudly mentioned, along with “two grandchildren” (though she really had four) and no great-grandchildren (nicely negating the four of them, too).

She could not think of one single thing Garth had done in his whole life to intentionally hurt the family. For that matter, her own attempts to try to explain the abuse that had nearly destroyed her had been completely subverted, turned around, and treated like a mean-spirited attack on them with absolutely no grounds: a pack of lies told to deliberately damage and destroy them.

I did it just to make them feel horrible, she thought. I was like that, wasn’t I? Vindictive, hurtful, a destroyer of family happiness and harmony. It was intentional meanness, complete fabrication. I was the perpetrator of horrible, unforgiveable abuse.

If even one of them had taken maybe one minute, one second to listen to me and try to understand, would my frantic efforts have escalated the way they did?

When everything is turned upside-down like that, and inside-out, it can make you feel a little crazy. To say the least.  It was a craziness that took a devastating toll.

And now. . . now, well, it looks like that particular problem is neatly solved because I’m not even here!  But Garth makes me feel so much worse. The only thing he ever did to the family was to be ill, with an illness that surely must have been caused by the twisted reality of a family who lived in its own little universe of truth and lies. In a moment of rare vulnerability, I remember my sister once said, “Garth went crazy for all of us.” What had happened to that tiny crack of openness to the truth? Why did it slam shut with such vehemence?

I always suspected my parents were ashamed of him, ashamed of his illness and of what became of him, and secretly wished he would just disappear. And now their most fervent wish had come true. If you can pretend the problematic elements in your family never existed, if you can apply an eraser to the parts of it you are uncomfortable with, it’s ultimate power, kind of like God: bringing people into the world; taking them away again.

An obituary is a public life-record, an attempt to encapsulate many decades into a single paragraph. My family must have a very strange notion of economy of expression.

There is NOTHING my children could do to make me erase them like this: if my son were an axe-murderer serving a life sentence, if he had accused me of being a heroin addict or a whore, if he had attacked me and hurt me in the worst way he could think of, I would never pretend he had never existed, never erase him from the permanent record of my life.

Because he is my son.

She looked at her mother-in-law’s obituary again, wondering if there was such a thing as Providence, after all. It was just possible. She had been thrown out of the family – no, unmade! – but landed safely in another family where that kind of insanity didn’t exist.  No, not “landed”, but walked out of one, and into the other. Of her own free will.

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Copy the penguin!

Let's copy the penguin!

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"Nola! Please stop! I'm a broken man!"

Never thought I'd hear this one again!


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A perennial favorite

. . . featuring a local hippo.

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Be thou my vision

I looked for a long time for this one! I went through innumerable YouTube videos of this hymn, many of them excruciating. It wasn’t just the bad amateur sound quality, which was jarring enough, but the arrangements, most of them syrupy and overdone, with those godawful flutes like in thatTitanic song.

“Celtic” has been completely deformed in the last couple of decades. An example is that stuff you see on PBS. This kind of music was NEVER meant to be sudsy and sentimental. Listen to real Irish music sometime, with that dark urgent drumbeat, the edgy ancient-sounding pipes with a hint of English horn in them.

This arrangement by Phillip Stopford is tender and melancholy (Irish!), the arrangement unhurried and uncluttered, devoid of disco or other gimmicks to twist it around and "update" it. The flute is REAL flute. I love the lack of unnecessary adornment or hokiness. And it’s beautifully conducted, sung by the Belfast Cathedral Youth Choir. Youth! They pust most "adult" choirs to shame.

So, until I can find a decent arrangement with real Irish pipes, I’ll take this one. (The shots of Belfast Cathedral are a nice addition.)

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Miracle on Rae Street

Only at this time of year can you get away with this kind of display! This incredible light show blazes in my neighborhood every Christmas on Rae Street, Port Coquitlam, collecting donations for various charities.

If you think it's all a little too much, especially as you approach the house nearly blinded by the brightness, just try taking children there. It becomes a whole different scene.

That's not a real Santa, though you'd never know it by the kids' reaction. And he moves!

The display includes an incredible array of figures: Rudolph, Frosty, various Disney characters, and just about every other Christmas figure ever known, all lit up like brilliant candles in the dark.

NOEL!

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Turtle race!

The First Annual Puerta Vallarta Christmas Turtle Race: flappy little, flippy little baby turtles set loose by Caitlin and Ryan! Caitlin embraced the process (she loves sea turtles), while Ryan had an "ick" look on his face through most of it.

This is the first time I've uploaded home video, so I hope it works.



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The emotional curve-ball

I don’t know if this qualifies as Grinchitude or not. Probably not, because it’s all about a phenomenon – a social quirk, or something – that I’ve hated for a very long time.

Hard to know what to call it. The curve ball? The sucker punch? The corkscrew?

How about “turning it around”?

I know a few people who are masters of this subtle torture. Their usual method is to needle you, and needle, and needle, and needle, finding the raw unprotected areas of your psyche and drilling into them with incredible accuracy and skill.


This needling goes on and on and on until you finally just have to protest. Finally, you say something. The needler then gets all trembly and woeful and wounded, and accuses YOU of being abusive. "How can you do this to me? I was only trying to help you!", and all that crap.

One person, who for some unknown reason shall remain nameless, was the undisputed master of this technique (for that is what it is, a “method” or even a way of life perfected over many decades).

Over a period of many years, she found those tender spots and jabbed them ruthlessly. Having chosen a sad parade of losers to be intimate with, she was unmarried, and the fact that I married so young caused her to make remarks like, “So I guess you think you’ve got your whole life figured out now.” This was a nice substitute for the usual response to a wedding: “Congratulations!”.

There were others, and they went on for years and years and years. Preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving, my mother said, “Look what it says on the label.”

My sister looked. “A young hen. (Nudging my husband) Well! Bill, you sure know about young hens, don’t you? Why don’t you tell us all about it?”

Since she was thirteen years older than me and clearly superior to me in every way, I said nothing.

More volleys were to come. When she visited us in Alberta while my kids were small, she kept shooting me exasperated, incredulous looks whenever they acted up in the slightest. Then she said in a voice laden with judgemental pity, “I’m just trying to imagine what your days are like.”

I was supposed to be OK with that one, really I was, and I guess take it as advice to throw out my current life and get a new one, preferably exactly like hers.

Anyway, it went on and on and on.  Her pet names for me were “weird” and “crazy”, said in a lilting, shrugging, I’m-writing-you-off sort of way. When I said I was nervous about moving to Vancouver and wondered what would happen if I couldn’t adjust, she did her finest cool, I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you shrug and said (I’m not making this up):

“Oh well, then I guess you’ll just self-destruct.”

The fact that my brother was seriously mentally ill and died tragically young on the streets of Toronto was all part of the equation. It was meant. Believe me.

I made the mistake of writing her a letter once, an enthusiastic letter about how my life really seemed to be coming together. Bad mistake. Her reply seemed to weigh 5000 pounds in my hand. It was eight pages of advice. Advice telling me how I SHOULD be living. How I SHOULD be going to university and getting past my basic illiteracy and freeing myself from the “backwater” of the small town I was living in (and loved).  How I SHOULD be joining the staff of the local newspaper, “even if you’re just covering the junk items like weddings” (weddings!). Was I supposed to just walk in and join?

That was that, and I had had it with the completely gratuitous advice, the “correction” of my happiness to suit her rigid agenda, not to mention her totally fucked-up life. I was going to tell her what my days were like. I still don’t think it was a nasty letter, but I pointed out that I never told her what to do (true, I was afraid to), so why did she feel so free to plan the entire rest of my life, which I was obviously wasting on a happy marriage, good friends, raising children, doing volunteer work and community theatre, teaching part-time at the pre-school, etc. etc. etc.?

I don’t know what happened, but something about trying to finally make myself heard brought forth the most poisonous, twisted reply I’d ever received.

“Don’t pay any attention to me, I’m just an old person and obviously I don’t know what I'm talking about. I can tell you don’t care about my feelings at all and you don’t care if you absolutely devastate me with a letter like that, but I don’t mind because it’s obvious I don’t know what I’m doing and will never tell you anything again.”

It was a torpedo.

It went straight to its mark in my solar plexus, and lodged there, leaking poison.

What happened? I wrote back and apologized!

Apologized for finally telling her how I felt, for telling her how the layers of raw irritation from being slighted over and over and over again had finally become intolerable.

I had hurt her, obviously. Devastated her! I felt awful, like a terrible person. She was just trying to help me! Wasn’t I living in a useless backwater? Wasn’t my marriage really a sham? Wasn’t I weird and crazy, and why couldn’t I just take those nasty names in good humor? (By the way, in a typical example of refusing to take responsibility for wounding me, she later claimed those labels were “compliments”).

OK, then, finally we come to it: the curveball. The way cruel people jab and jab and jab, and then when you finally hit back, their faces crumple and they lower their heads and begin to whimper with well-timed tears spilling down their quivering faces:  how could you do this to me? How could YOU be so cruel as to wound a person like me, who only has your best interests at heart?

She turned it around on me, made ME the cruel, unforgiveable abuser and herself the baffled, wounded victim whimpering and slinking away.

Why the hell do human beings do this? It’s called “not taking responsibility”. It’s called being twisted around like a corkscrew, and maybe not even knowing it, or wanting to know it (just a little thing called denial, a thing that destroys lives).

I could go on and on, but someone is reading this, maybe, and thinking, “poor soul, she’s full of bile, what’s the matter with her?”, or, worse yet, “Why isn’t she being more positive?” Especially at Christmas.

Oh, yes. Christmas. The detonator of emotional landmines.

There’s one more example of a really weird emotional twisting that I still can’t figure out. Maybe 25 years ago I was in the washroom of the local high school (probably while working on a community theatre project), when a woman with an English accent came tiptoeing up to me, and in a soft, almost apologetic voice she said:

“Sometimes, from many, many years ago. . . “

“Excuse me?” I was barely aware of who this woman was, let alone what she was talking about.

“From many, many years ago, someone says something that can be. . . “

“Who? Saying what? What do you mean?"

“I just don’t want you to be hurt by it.”

“Hurt by what? What are you talking about?”

“You mean you didn’t hear it? Oh, all right then, forget about it.”

“Forget about what? Why don’t you just tell me?"

“Oh no, if you didn’t hear it then I won’t tell you.  Believe me, it’s better that you don’t know.”

I felt like screaming by then. “Someone” had said “something” about me, “something” very very hurtful apparently, based on "something" from many many years ago, and this woman, whoever she was, was convinced that I had heard it. Or maybe she wasn't, I don’t know. I had no idea what she was talking about or who might have said something about me, but by now, of course, I was dying to hear it. Who wouldn't be?

“Look, I wish you’d just tell me what the person said. I really want to know.”

“Oh no, no, no, if you didn’t hear it – "

“But I think I have a right to hear it!”

(A wounded silence; tears slowly filling the wide, Bambi-like eyes.)

“I was only trying to protect you from the truth. People always say you’re an unkind person. And now I know why.”

Exit, stage left (via washroom door).

And that was the end of the exchange.

Some sort of double-whammy: dangling this unknown bafflingly nasty thing in front of me, pretending to be sympathetic, snatching it back, then acting all wounded when I insisted she TELL ME what this remark was, neatly turning the hurt around and jamming it forcefully up my nose.

Does anyone know how to stop this shit before it becomes totally toxic? Does anyone know how to neatly intercept such crap and hurl it back at them where it belongs? Is there even a name for this? The only one I’ve found is “turning it around”. But that sounds too mild for something so twisted.

Honestly, I’ve had enough. I don’t care if it’s Christmas or Columbus Day, I need to get this out of my system. There, I’ve done it, and I hope you see yourself. You know who you are.

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The most romantic kiss in screen history!

The most romantic kiss in screen history. . . not Scarlett and Rhett. . . not Rick and Ilsa. . . not Bonnie and Clyde. . . but. . .

HAROLD AND JOBYNA!

Having written a novel about his life, a novel which I hope will find wings in the year 2013, I feel like I know Harold Lloyd personally sometimes, and I certainly know the course of his career. He probably made a couple hundred movies all-told, starting in 1917, but his classic films came out in the early-to-mid '20s. In rating his best pictures, most silent film buffs would probably name The Freshman (which is about . . . a freshman, a nerdy overaged college boy desperate for popularity) and Safety Last, in which safety comes last as Harold climbs up the side of a dizzyingly-tall building and hangs off the hands of a huge clock.

I like those, yes, love them in fact, and never tire of watching them (in fact I may watch them again tonight), but there is more pain and poignancy in The Kid Brother, and more still in Girl Shy, in which his characters are passive, even downtrodden youths who haven't yet discovered their manhood. This revelation/transformation always happens through love: Harold Lloyd's films are among the most romantic ever made, and none more romantic than my personal all-time favorite. . .

Why Worry?

This movie has the best title ever written, since it essentially means nothing and signals the fact that we are about to watch the very first screwball comedy. Never mind that the actual first screwball comedy would come out more than ten years later.

Against type, Harold plays a wealthy idler with all sorts of imagined ills who escapes to a tropical island with his gorgeous nurse (played by the sad-eyed, kewpie-lipped Jobyna Ralston). Said nurse is madly in love with Harold, who doesn't even seem to see her except in moments of unexpected contact: i.e., when she trips and falls into his lap as he sits in a totally unnecessary wheelchair. The slow-blooming smile on his face before he dumps her onto the ground communicates a subtle but very real sexual tension that will permeate the whole film.

She pines for him, he ignores her: it's the antithesis of practically every other Lloyd film, turning everything on its ear and releasing a madcap energy that outstrips anything in his other comedies. To add a little excitement, a dangerous anarchist plans a revolution on the island, causing all sorts of feverish violence that makes Harold exclaim, "You fellows must stop this. I came here for my health."

This shot illustrates one of the best Harold Lloyd gags ever: mountain-climbing up the side of a giant to try to remove his rotten tooth. (Never mind, you had to be there.) Wacky gag follows on wacky gag as Lloyd reaches a sort of fever pitch of brilliance and mad originality. At one point his nurse, dressed as a boy (a most unconvincing disguise) becomes furious with his self-centredness and hypochondria and begins to cuss him out as only one can in a silent movie. She's standing up, he's sitting, in the passive position, and once again that dreamy smile begins to play across his face before he tells her she has very beautiful eyes.

This comedy breaks every convention of the era, including the rule of the silent screen kiss: almost always quick, comedic, and preferably behind a screen. When Harold suddenly realizes he is madly in love with Jobyna, he doesn't just peck her but seizes her in his arms and kisses her with ferocious passion, something I've never seen in any other silent film, not even The Sheik. She resists for a second, then melts into his arms with a subtle leg-pop that conveys complete surrender.

How many takes were required to capture that volcanic kiss? I wonder. In any case, I envy Jobyna. There are murmurings that they were "involved", as he was involved with so many women in his lifetime. There was something seductive and bedroomy about his eyes (along with the canny intelligence and a touch of wildness) that was there for a lifetime.

And so: today, after literally years of searching, I've found a picture of that kiss! I can't find a video of it, I'm sorry, so you'll just have to watch the whole movie. Better yet, buy the DVD set, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, superbly remastered with charming, energetic scores by Robert Israel and Carl Davis.

Harold, Harold, you have basically ruined my life! I have probably gained 25 pounds because of you, due to all my fretting, my unproductive fuming. I need to tell your story so badly I ache with it. I KNOW I can do this, I feel it! I have it in me, I have the goods. And I'm not always this confident about my work. 

What is it about a person who has the power to wreck your life from this distance? We were alive at the same time, yes, but he died when I was just a teenager. We were on the same planet together at the same time. Aieeeeeee! My heart! When will this hopeless yearning end?

SYNOPSIS: THE GLASS CHARACTER  by Margaret Gunning

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. This was a time when people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day - with one very significant exception.

 

Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd. He hid his leading man good looks under white makeup and his trademark black-framed spectacles.  Nearly 100 years later, an iconic image of Lloyd remains in the popular imagination: a tiny figure holding on for dear life to the hands of a huge clock while the Model Ts chuff away 20 stories below.

With his unique combination of brilliant comedy and shy good looks, Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford, desperate to escape a suffocating life under her cruel father's thumb, one day hops a bus into the unknown, the Hollywood of her dreams.  Though  the underside of her idealistic vision is nasty and fiercely competitive, she quickly lands extra work because of her Pickford-esque ability to smile and cry at the same time.

When her idol Harold Lloyd walks on the set, her life falls into a dizzy whirl of confusion, attraction, and furious pursuit.  Muriel tries on and sheds one identity after another: bit actress, waitress in a speakeasy, "girl reporter", script writer - while Lloyd almost literally dances in and out of her desperately lonely world, alternately seducing her and pushing her away.

While researching this book, I repeatedly watched every Lloyd movie I could get my hands on. I was astonished at his subtlety, acting prowess and adeptness at the art of the graceful pratfall. His movies are gaining new popularity on DVD (surprisingly, with women sighing over him on message boards everywhere!). The stories wear well and retain their freshness because of the Glass Character's earnest good nature and valiant, sometimes desperate attempts to surmount impossible challenges.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Buy The Glass Character from Amazon NOW!

Elf Yourself: you know you want to!

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Go ahead. . . it feels so-o-o-o-o-o good!

Exclusive: Watch the First Annual Mad Men Christmas Hoedown!

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