Doctor please, some more of these

You know I love these things. Love them for their fascinating portrayal of womanhood in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond - some of these are from the '70s). This fascinating little gem is an ad for speed - you know, as in "speed kills", one of the better-known slogans of the '60s. "The selective cerebral action of Norodin is useful in dispelling the shadows of mild mental depression. . . Norodin can be used to advantage in achieving the sense of wellbeing essential to effective patient management in functional and organic disturbances. In obesity, Norodin is useful in reducing the desire for food and counteracting the low spirits associated with the rigors of an enforced diet." And oh boy, can she vacuum! It's all she does, when she's not walking rapidly back and forth on the ceiling. This peculiarly sedative-sounding drug, described as a "psychomotor stimulant and anti-depressant", is nothing but methamphetamine hydrochloride. Cooked up in a lab somewhere, no doubt. They don't tell you that if you come back in ten years, she will have lost all her teeth.

"She's anxious, tense, irritable. She's felt this way for months.

Beset by the seemingly insurmountable problems of raising a young family, and confined to the home most of the time, her symptoms reflect a sense of inadequacy and isolation. Your reassurance and guidance may have helped some, but not enough.

Serax (oxazepam) cannot change her environment, of course. But it can help relieve anxiety, tension, agitation and irritability, thus strengthening her ability cope with day-to-day problems." Just swallow this, dear, and while all your responsibilities and worries and your isolation and loneliness will still be there, guess what? YOU WON'T GIVE A FUCK because you'll be stoned out of your little mind!

"When 'change of life' seems the end of life. . . " Marplan. Not marzipan, not Martian, not maple, or Marple. . . No, this is something to chemically/hormonally jack you out of that deathpit, that slagheap of rotting femininity, menopause. "With the advancing years, woman's vulnerability to depression often becomes intense. The future looms insecure; menopausal dysfunctions spark somatic concerns. And as she faces losing a symbol of femininity, even suicidal panic may supervene.

"Menopausal depression has been lifted by Marplan - even when withdrawal and loss of affect were severe." There is also a brag that Marplan doesn't seem to cause hepatitis, or at least they don't think so. And maybe now that her hormones are juiced-up again and her husband once more wants to fuck her, she won't be holding on to that TV antenna to keep herself from jumping off the roof.

Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. blah. This is what doctors hear when some middle-aged fat lady comes in and tells them they can't lose weight. "Oh, dear, this diet is getting me down!"

"If she thinks it's getting her down what's it doing to physicians who have to listen to such explanations every day? This is especially true for the doctor who hasn't prescribed Efroxine Hydrochloride. . . It is more likely to produce cerebral stimulation with relatively few side effects." Cerebral stimulation. WTF??? This is a diet pill! What are the implications here? With your metabolism revved up to an unnatural level, the weight will drop off, but eventually, so will your sanity. But then, it's time for. . .

A woman just about my age loses a beloved relative to cancer, then starts having alarming abdominal symptoms. Doctor hands her Thorazine and tells her to go home and be quiet. It takes care of her cancerphobia, all right - so well that she doesn't go to the doctor and dies three months later from a tumor on her ovary. Case closed! Another success story from Thorazine, the wizard of antipsychotics.

Are YOU suffering from: 

sadness, 

crying, 

anorexia,

listlessness, 

irritability, 

rumination, and 

insomnia? 

Take this stuff, then. We don't know what's in it, and you shouldn't know either, or at least you shouldn't want to know. Don't you trust your doctor? Now get out of my office.

Oh but this one is good. Yet another ad for speed, which seems to be a cure-all that can obliterate menopausal dysphoria, snap a woman out of her deathward mood and make her thin while she's at it.

"Many women in the climacteric period develop a true reactive depression characterized by apathy, psychomotor retardation and despondency." Oh! What to do? Take bennies, just like the truck drivers do! Aaaahhhhh. . .  (headlights bearing down. . . crrrasshhh!) No, but listen to this. "Benzedrine Sulfate helps to reawaken mental alertness and optimism, and to restore the savor and zest of life - especially when administered in conjunction with such fundamental measures as ELECTRIC SHOCK (emphasis mine) and estrogenic therapy."

So if a woman comes into the doctor's office with "menopausal" depression, she's likely to get juiced up with a few thousand volts - but not before being stuffed full of bennies. Just what you need to restore the savor and zest of life.

Now this woman really looks psycho. If I saw that looking back at me in the mirror, I think I'd shoot myself. But it might be better than what happens to this lady: her menopausal symptoms, viewed and treated as a disease no less deadly than cancer, are "managed" by the miracle of Thorazine. That sense of "well-being" and "a sense of belonging" are miraculously restored - wha - ? Sense of belonging. Let's analyze this. She's menopausal, so believes she has become obsolete and her carcass has been thrown to the crows. Take a little Thorazine, lady, and you'll "belong" once again. We won't say where. The truth is, you'll be so oblivious to everything and everyone that you won't care if you belong or not.

Now here's a good one! Nembutal for little girls who are terrified of invasive medical procedures. Yes. That's right. These guys don't even wait until you're a grown woman. If you're female, you're a potential victim. The little girl with the zombie-looking doll is about to be zonked out, but good. "When little patients balk at scary, disquieting examinations (before you've begun). . . When they're frightened and tense (and growing more fearful by the minute). . . When they need prompt sedation (and the oral route isn't feasible). . . try

NEMBUTAL  Sodium Suppositories

With short-acting Nembutal, the dosage required is small and the margin of safety is wide. And - since the drug is quickly and completely destroyed in the body - there is little tendency toward morning-after hangover. Keep a supply of all four sizes of NEMBUTAL suppositories on hand. Be ready for the frightened ones before their fears begin."

I am reminded of women who have only the haziest memories of being sexually abused by doctors when they were children. "I don't know why my memory isn't clearer, it was so awful. It seems to just fade in and out. And I'm sure he was sticking something into me, some sort of drug. . . "

But I've saved the best 'til last. This is a truly incredible Valium ad from the 1970s. It's so good I've split it into two and blown it up so you can see it better (and I won't have to transcribe the bloody thing - arrrrggghh!)

At this point in time, Valium was a cure-all given to women mainly to get them out of the doctor's office FAST, and it worked. I never took it, but I heard it was better than alcohol for getting pleasantly, fuzzily stoned. Trouble was, it was about the most addictive drug that has ever been prescribed for anything. The use of Valium for romantic despondency and an inability to wear a vinyl mini-skirt convincingly was actually a misuse, or at very least an off-label use for Valium, which was originally a muscle relaxant. Think of it. It relaxes more than your muscles, I think. Most especially, it relaxes that muscle between your ears, the pesky one that keeps telling you you're alone, all washed up and will never relate meaningfully to another human being again for as long as you live.

But that's not the good part. This little photo album tells us the sad story of Jan's decline, from a young(ish) and attractive(ish), viable sexual object to a dried-up little old lady of 31.

Doctor, please. . .

The photo album which charts Jan's sad decline. Let's see, we have:

Jan and Dad on the tennis court, 1955
Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve at the hop, 1957 (like something out of an Archie comic)
Joey (?), 1959 - her first lover, perhaps
Jan and Ted (can't make out the background, almost looks like a bunch of Mickey Mouse ears), 1961
Jan and Dad (again), 1962
Jan and Charlie, 1964 (my, isn't Jan getting tawdry with all these boy friends, and
not married yet!)
Jan and BUNNY (emphasis mine - looks like a drunken middle-aged Shriner), 1966
Jan and Dad (a-gain), 1969 (old-maidenhood being marked by an abnormal attachment to one's father), and then. . . oh my God.

Jan. Alone. On a cruise. In 1970. In a tan car coat and a dated hairdo! Why doesn't she just jump overboard?

POST-SCRIPT. I just figured out something. This ad must have been made on the cheap. Joey and Charlie are the same person. Even his shirt is the same. In the beach shot it isn't tucked in and he has donned a pair of sunglasses, but other than that they're the same. Maybe this is Jan's pathetic way of making it look as if she has had more than one boy friend. And that Ted fellow? I don't know. I think maybe Jan is his beard. He seems a little too skinny, a little too pallid to be a Real Man. Like Max Bialystock in The Producers, he's wearing a cardboard belt. I don't know if the shot of her looking miserable as the leering Shriner gets his hooks into her is meant to be humorous or not, but her story isn't. It's sad. The ad is sad. The mentality behind it is disgusting, and created untold misery for thousands of people who became addicted to this stuff.

Do you ever get tempted to feel that the women's movement hasn't really made any difference, that we shouldn't have bothered? Just look at these.

Good grief, I nearly forgot the most important drug of all: Mornidine! As the copy says, "this is a new drug with specific effectiveness in nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Mornadine eliminates the ordeal of morning sickness. With its selective action on the vomiting center, or the medullary chemoreceptor 'trigger zone', Mornidine possesses the advantages of the phenothiazine drugs without unwanted tranquilizing activity." Oh yes. That means she can race around and cook breakfast and get the house clean nearly as lightning-fast as when she was on benzedrine, even though she's 9 months pregnant and should probably be lying down.

One thing they forgot to tell you, though. . . 

IT'S THALIDOMIDE.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Knit your own cat: the story of Mini Mia

This is Mini Mia, the replica in wool of Shannon's new cat. Nothing could quite capture Mia's charm, but I took a shot at it because it has become a family tradition for me to knit the cats. I gave this to Caitlin for her 12th birthday. I only lightly stuffed the tummy on this one, making it much more poseable.

To be honest, the only cat I haven't knitted is my own. Bentley's tabby-markings are even more elaborate than Mia's. But I've knitted Oscar, Shannon's old cat who died a year or so ago, and Tiger and Autumn, my son's cats, one of whom has gone to his reward. OK then, I wasn't going to do this, but here they are.

Oscar, in memoriam. This was the first, and may well be the best cat I've knitted, because somehow, like Pinocchio, he became animated and catlike and could be posed in a way that seemed realistic to me. I got the face right, too, which believe me is hard. Beginner's luck, or not trying so hard, or something. I never quite equalled this one.

Tiger, who is no longer prowling with us. He had fairly intricate mixture of tabby and grey/brown/white markings. I did the best I could with it. His body was also longer and leaner, which I tried to replicate. As he got older, the stripes on his body virtually disappeared, making him a little easier to knit. His personality wasn't so sweet however, and he was prone to hooking me savagely as I walked by him.

Tiger with his meow-mate, Autumn, also quite intricately-marked in tortoiseshell. I cheated a bit on the body and used a variegated wool that implied her tortie markings.

AMAZING TIGER STORY! Tiger was a one-person cat and jealously guarded my daughter-in-law Crystal all through her first pregnancy. When she went into labour, there was time for Jeff to go gather up some things while Crystal sat cross-legged on the floor to ease the contractions. Tiger walked very deliberately up to her, placed his paw on her belly, and held it there for a couple of minutes. Crystal yelled, "Jeff! Come quick, and bring the camera!" I am sure he misunderstood what she meant.

Autumn, a woolly and very sweet cat, still hangs in, but quite a lot fatter than this. It has been suggested I add extra stuffing, but I declined.

The real Mia poses with  Mini Mia. Crystal has told me that when Autumn goes to her reward, she plans on getting TWO new kittens. I told her, please, please, make them one black and one white.

On the edge

Sad, bad - glad? Cartoons that will make you very happy

The less you say about cartoons like these, the better, but since I don't want to look like a total slacker, I should say something. This is the infamous Magic of Oz that came out of nowhere, still impenetrable after years of attempted internet analysis. Who is Robert Capeheart, and how has he avoided arrest up until now? Probably he's dead, because this looks really old, maybe 1940s or '50s. There is so little point to it: it doesn't appear to be a Part 1 or part ANYthing of something. It has no story and no discernible action, but it does have some dreadful songs in it. The voice synchronization is almost as bad as in Paddy Pelican (which see). I have never seen a more irritating collection of characters, but (to make it worse, and I know I am not the only one who has said this) there is something disturbingly familiar about them. Where have I seen that lion before? The eyes seem to suggest anime, but it didn't exist back then. Or maybe this is where anime came from.

This is a Spanish cartoon dubbed into German, and only a little bit of it, but if you don't mind a very loud Spanish guy shouting on top of the very loud Spanish sound track, you can find the whole 55-minute thing somewhere on YouTube. This clip gives you a pretty good idea of what it's like. The question is why.

This is the one that spoils me for all the rest - The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican, an exercise in WHAT THE FUCK????? if ever there was one. It defies all explanation in its sheer badness. As far as animation is concerned, you might as well take two pieces of paper with different drawings on them and switch them back and forth. The vocal characterizations are just dung, that's all they are. You've got to see this.

Spunky and Tadpole, a not-very-seminal cartoon (in spite of its semen-al name) that was mostly just '60s schlock, though I think it came out around 1959. 1959 was a shabby, dog-eared year. It couldn't quite decide what to be. Personally, I think everyone is terrified by "9" years because they are scared to death of what the next decade might bring, or not bring. In this case, they should have been more scared. I remember the title Spunky and Tadpole and probably watched them when I was three or four years old, so didn't understand anything I was seeing (any more than I understood Ernie Kovacs, one of my first incomprehensible life experiences). But the title stayed with me. Did I think these cartoons were good? What's good when you're four?

And here is the unavoidable, Jesusly-bad The Adventures of Clutch Cargo and his Pals, Spinner and Paddlefood (in another exciting adventure called blah, blah, blah, etc.) This is the one where there is a real mouth superimposed on top of a primitive drawing of a face, There is no hope or fear of animation here: it's just completely static drawings that are occasionally dragged stiffly across the screen to represent "action". The mouths look to be infected with herpes or at least really bad cold sores, or smeared with lipstick that won't wipe off. Awwww, Clutch!

This episode, or minisode or sod-off or whatever-it-is, features a Chinese Eskimo (as the Inuit were called by racist Americans back then) speaking in some sort of slurred Japanese/Filipino accent. I will not try to analyze the significance of this.

When you think about it, though - Clutch - Spunky and Tadpole - how Freudian can it get. No wonder I grew up to be this way.

This is U. S. Army propaganda in the form of a hysterically jolly exercise video. I wonder if anyone ever followed it. I have no idea where these old films come from. One would have hoped they would be destroyed after 1949 or so. It even pictures tanks rolling along, so maybe it's a wartime cartoon. Kind of like Hitler appearing in that Donald Duck thing. I have to ask you, though - why do these things always seem so - ? Homosexual? There is a note of hysterical gayness here that I simply cannot ignore.

Bucky and Pepito. Mediocre, with moments of excruciating grace. I like the fact that you always hear the same background music in EVERY cartoon ever made in the '60s. It's like the sound of the horse whinnying that's always the same, the sound of the car wreck, or even the canned laughter used in sitcoms where you can hear certain laughs over and over again. Soundtrack Central or something. I probably watched this but was too little to remember, or it was just too forgettable. It just sort of came on as I sat there on the floor with my fat little legs splayed out and and ate my Junket pudding.

Pow-wow. It was OK to make fun of Indians back then because they weren't considered real people. They really weren't. They were extras and background and "filler" in Westerns, where they appeared in hordes, always wearing elaborate headdresses that were never used except in ceremonial occasions, and then only by Plains tribes. The best gig they could get was as the Lone Ranger's sidekick. Don't get me started on Jay Silverheels, because I think he was magnificent and made the Ranger look like a old queen in spandex pants. Most Indians weren't played by Indians anyway, which must have been depressing. Even if a Jew didn't look Jewish, he could probably get away with playing an Indian.

This wasn't really labelled except as Dementia 5, but I figured out that it's from a particularly trippy episode of Rocket Robin Hood. Must be from the early '70s then, when acid trips were common knowledge: but really, Robin Hood and pals, out in space, tripping on acid?

Eadweard Muybridge: HOW HE DID IT!

SOLVED! The mystery of how Muybridge took all those photos which created an illusion of motion long before motion picture technology even existed. It was pretty complicated stuff, involving a lot of tripwires and cameras set to go off in split-second sequence. Seems to have worked, though the documentary I took this gif from talked a lot about how Muybridge was a bit of a fiddle. He was an Edison figure, more of a personality than a scientist, and certainly a showman who knew how to present his "facts" to best advantage (as did P. T. Barnum). He killed his wife's lover and was acquitted because he convinced everyone he had the husbandly right to blow the man's weiner off. The guy looked half-crazy and never looked you in the eye and may have even had brain damage.

Next subject.

Monkeyshines: more creepy than Halloween

It's All Saints Day, the bellybutton of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration which lasts from October 31 to November 2. In celebration of which, I'm going to post something totally irrelevant: something I came across years ago and which fascinated me. As usual, it's attached to the idea of obsolete technology which was cutting-edge and even astonishing in its day.

YouTube has graciously provided me with many clips of early gizmos which were meant to create the illusion of motion. I'm not sure if Eadweard Muybridge invented the idea or not, but his studies of horses and buffalo and giraffes in motion were groundbreaking. Somehow (I can't find out how because I have to get out of here in a minute), he had rigged it up to take a lot of photos of a moving object over a few seconds. Trip-wires, or something, except that then the horse might trip! (haha). However he did it, when the photos were shown in rapid succession, the horse or buffalo or Thompson's gazelle or whatever-it-was seemed to be running. (Until then, people were so ignorant that they claimed a horse always had one foot on the ground when it ran. Reminds me of what Ann Landers told teenage girls they should do when making out.)

It's really just the old flip-book idea in more sophisticated form, leading to the mutoscope - you know, the crank job with its 20-second-long, supposedly titillating scenarios.

Meantime, Edison was experimenting with the kinetoscope, which used a kind of film - a quantum leap beyond these rapidly-shuffling leaves of paper - but still pretty primitive. Only one person could look at it at a time, creating the strange and steamy intimacy that made the church thunder against its wicked graven images. An experimental Edison film called Monkeyshines (in two parts) is especially strange and seems to reach out to us from some eerie dimension in the deep past. In the first part there are just flickers of what might be a human form. Part Two is a little more recognizable, but still weirdly primitive and low-tech.

(Wikipedia entry)

Monkeyshines (1889 or 1890), an experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope, is believed to be the first film shot in the United States.

Monkeyshines, No. 1 was shot by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison labs. Scholars have differing opinions on whether the first was shot in June 1889 starring John Ott or sometime between November 21–27, 1890 starring G. Sacco Albanese. Both men were fellow lab workers at the company; contradictory evidence exists for each claim. Monkeyshines, No. 2 and Monkeyshines, No. 3 quickly followed to test further conditions.

These films were intended to be internal tests of the new camera system, and were not created for commercial use; their rise to prominence resulted much later due to work by film historians. All three films show a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and are only a few seconds long.

(NOT Wikipedia entry): I REALLY have to get out of here, I'm late for whatever it is I'm going to, which is none of your business anyway, but here are some bizarro Muybridge things I found along the way. And his name really was spelled Eadweard. Maybe his mother couldn't spell? (Oprah's real name is Orpah, did you know that? Now you do.)

POST-LEAPFROG OBSERVATIONS. This Muybridge guy was some character. His real name was Edward Muggeridge, by the way, but he didn't think that was colourful enough, so he kept changing it until he thought it was back to its original medieval form. It wasn't - just very hard to spell. And just how would you pronounce EADWEARD anyway?

I present this blog the way I dig out my facts: in jigsaw fashion, finding a chunk of valuable information, but later finding something else that seems to fit or, more often, just changes the whole picture. That is why I am so given to post-blog observations: it's to represent the process of discovery, the nosy eagerness and ferreting-out. Research is never a straight line, is it? (unless it's very dull research). Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write formal essays with all the loose ends neatly woven in. But such watertightness is, I've always thought, a great way NOT to learn, because everything is already neatly sealed. Much scientific discovery has been effectively choked off and died due to this approach.

So! Here is another nice nugget about Muybridge, whom I did NOT set out to talk about! At all! I was going to talk about Monkeyshines, and got sidetracked, but Muybridge is much more interesting than Edison because he murdered somebody:

His most famous work began in 1872, when he was hired by Leland Stanford (later the founder of Stanford University) to photograph horses. Stanford reputedly had made a bet that for a moment, all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously, and he hired Muybridge to take the pictures to prove him right. This was difficult to do with the cameras of the time, and the initial experiments produced only indistinct images. The photographer then became distracted when he discovered that his young wife had taken a lover and may even have had their child by him. Muybridge tracked down the lover and shot and killed him. When Muybridge stood trial, he did not deny the killing, but he was nonetheless acquitted. Muybridge left San Francisco and spent two years in Guatemala. On his return, Muybridge resumed his photography of horses in motion, this time far more successfully. He set up a row of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a split second as the horse ran by. The results settled the debate once and for all: all four hooves do leave the ground at once, as the top middle image in this sequence demonstrates.

". . . For which I will gladly pay you Tuesday."

*DISCOVERY!* I have made a discovery! More Muybridge dirty pictures, hitherto unknown to anyone, even Muybridge! (Taken from the Muybridge Institute for Pornography, Stagreel, Minnesota).

Hitler's ventriloquist

The weird shit I find late at night! There seems to be no end to it. I'm now on a search for very early talkies, most of them made in 1929. That was the change-or-die year for most movie studios and their stars. Erich von Stroheim had a great villain's voice, heavily-accented, and would have come into his own and been a huge talkie star, except for the fact that he was (with the exception of Adolf Hitler) the nastiest man who ever lived. I think his personality was just too thuglike and violent to appeal to anyone. Even Peter Lorre wore eyeshadow, which seemed to soften him a bit.

I love the noisy soundtracks on these 1929ers, the thumps and thuds, the ringing sound (?) and whirring, no doubt the sound of the camera. To solve the problem, someone had the idea of enclosing the camera/man in a soundproof booth, with the result that he could only work for 10 minutes or so before falling into a gasping, sweating faint. When someone realized you only need to put the camera in the soundproof booth, it was a great day for technology.

I made a ton of gifs of this wonderfully awful thing because it was one of the first examples of that now-stock character, the devil-doll with a life of its own. This was imitated and/or elaborated-upon in various movies and Twilight Zone episodes. It has always puzzled me why a grown man wants to shove his hand up the back of an artificial boy and make his mouth move, but never mind. It is very late at night, so I should not get into how anatomically correct the dummy would have to be.

This ghastly phosphorescent image laid over an impenetrable hell-hole of black is like something out of your worst nightmare, the kind you can't wake up from. Then when you do wake up, something even worse happens, and you realize you haven't woke up yet. Then something even worse happens. . . 

And now it gets straaange. Here, the Little Wooden Boy discourses on something-or-other (who cares anyway? This would've been better as a silent), while at the other end of the table his master, looking like he's attending an SS banquet, calmly shoves food into his mouth. The marvel being that the little squicker can move his mouth and talk WITHOUT a hand shoved up his back. And can yatter on even though Stroheim is putting away the bratwurst like there's no tomorrow. So he can make his boy talk even with a sausage in his mouth. All done by mind control. They teach you this in Nazi training camp.

  

Yes. This guy makes Peter Lorre look like a pussycat. I can't think of anyone more evil in the movies. Not sure what happened to Stroheim - will have to look it up. He belonged to a certain time/sensibility, and reminds me of the German expressionists, Bertolt Brecht, and that infamous and oft-parodied painting, The Scream. Or maybe I just want to scream when I see him. I also think of Harvey Korman's dead-on impersonation of him in Carol Burnett's sendup of Sunset Boulevard (the last movie he appeared in, I think, in 1950). 

Ah, his love-hate relationship with his dummy, his Instrument, his thing. No doubt an extension of his poor nasty self. The dummy probably didn't feel very much, though he's the kind of conversationalist I'd like to sit across from at my next dinner party. Note that Stroheim's acting style is quite "silent film-ish", his punches very pulled. There is a slowness here too, with pauses that take forever. 

It took several years for Hollywood/actors to figure out how to DO sound films. Most pictures from 1929 were packed with high-kick, early-Busby-Berkeley-style production numbers, and this one is no exception. These have nothing to do with the main plot. Early talkies were very static in the dramatic scenes, the actors hunched around a stationary microphone hidden behind a potted palm. No one had yet figured out the concept of the sound boom. The dance numbers were no doubt added so the audience could see something MOVE once in a while.

The stars who burst to the forefront in this tenuous, genre-shifting era were people like Cagney and Garbo and Edward G. Robinson, with quirky voices that stuck in the head. Stroheim's voice was malignantly nasty, and creeped people out too much for them to pay to listen to him for two hours. He did however direct a monster of a film called Greed which, in its first cut, ran to 10 hours. I think Turner Classics is showing it next week in its entirety, with a 58-minute introduction by Robert Osborne.  (I plan to post my 90-second gif version in the very near future, or not, since I think my gif program just collapsed.) Having sat through 10 hours of Greed, one critic commented that Stroheim was "a genius. . . badly in need of a stopwatch." Or an on-off switch.

The dummymeister, predictably, goes nuts. My favorite part is all the chorus girls running away from him. The dummy swings from his hand like a useless appendage. In another scene he drags it around like Linus's blanket, the head bumping along behind him. This man is beyond unpleasant. He is EVIL, and though audiences seemed to dig it during the silent era, his talkies did not burn up the track. He went into a long and predictably bitter decline until Sunset Boulevard, which starred another great silent movie relic, Gloria Swanson, along with sad-faced Buster Keaton, who always seemed to be trying to make the best of a bad deal.

Zee end, meine liebchen.

POST-SCRIPT. And don't tell me he was Austrian. They ALL say that.

Betty White - all right (and Bill, you're my thrill)

I realize this blog, uneven as it is, has become dominated by the gif. The reason is this: I was born in 1954, and anything that helps me capture obsolete technology (particularly old TV) is magic to me. I can illustrate a point in ten seconds. And they're easy to make, boyo, even though I have come to the conclusion that my beloved Gifsforum is no more. 

What's even more curious is the fact that I can't find ANYTHING about it, not even on one of those message boards that has been pretty much been replaced by Twitter. Where did it go? It had infinitely more flexibility than Makeagif, though I will have to admit it got the proportions wrong and stretched a lot of them. They weren't nicely cropped like most of these are. But it was fast, and you could make things run backwards.

Anyway, enough complaining. Along with William Shatner, Betty White is the only living/actively performing person who remembers/was working in TV in the 1950s. I think this is pretty astonishing. Though Betty looks like a well-preserved older woman, Shatner looks about 65. You have to wonder what these two did, what sort of bargain they struck, and with whom.

Quite a fox, he was, and well before Star Trek, versatile, fit into any show, could play just about anything, and always worked. When the work fell through after Star Trek (type-casting: he is one of the very few actors who beat it), he lived out of his truck for a while and did Loblaws commercials in Toronto, some of which survive (we'll get to them later! He still does ads which I enjoy watching, but now he doesn't need to.)

Note from his  manner of speaking that he already has the Kirkian sense of drama. Jeffrey Hunter was the original Captain Kirk, and he was let go and replaced: too dull by half, I think, and he couldn't do those wrestling moves that became his trademark. Without the histrionics that made him famous, the show would have crashed and burned before it got off the launching pad.

The stag in the cathedral

This is worth watching on YouTube because it's high-res enough to watch full-screen. If you do, you will feel that you are there in the cathedral. It's eerie and very beautiful. The stag moves as easily and naturally as if he's at home in the forest. I'm not sure of the circumstances of this because there was no narration. Let us hope he walked out of there and found his way home with the same grace and ease.

WAAAAAAAH! Mockingbird - Carly Simon & James Taylor

Compare to the original. This is more Motown-flavoured, and it works for me, but there are no visuals so it's hard to make a comparison. It's the WAY James and Carly perform it, with such exuberance, sexiness and joy, that makes it so irresistible. But it's nice to have the two of them to compare and contrast.  Inez and Charlie Foxx were a briefly-famous brother-sister act and had a couple of hits.