Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. by Owen Land

Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc.

by Owen Land

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16mm film, USA, 1965-1966
5 minutes Colour, Silent
Available formats: 16mm

This film takes the view that certain defining characteristics of the medium, such as those mentioned in the title, are visually "worthy". For this reason it is especially recommended. - G.L.

"The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements lines the beautiful whites, and reds and blacks... The kinetic and visual experienced produced by Landow's film is even more difficult to describe... There is humour in it (the blink); there is clear Mozart -(Mondrian)- like sense of form..." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice, July 1975.

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From Wikipedia 

Film in Which There Appear... is a six-minute loop of the double-printed image of a blinking woman; her image is off-centre, making visible the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the film. According to Land, there is some slight variation in the image onscreen, but "no development in the dramatic or musical sense." Land's intention was to focus attention on the components that film viewers are not supposed to, and do not usually, notice, such as scratches, dirt particles, edge lettering, and sprocket holes. For this reason, Land often scheduled the film first in screenings of his work.

Production

Land created the film to mock the idea of watching a film that doesn't change.The film began life as a 16 mm loop film of "china girl" test leader of a woman blinking, originally used by the Kodak company to test colour reproduction. The loop was intended to be played continuously for 11 minutes, and then, following a commercial break, for another 11 minutes. However, its initial screening was stopped short by a hostile audience reaction. Land printed the loop optically to create Film in Which There Appear.... He has confessed to feeling "very silly" about passively watching the film in a dark cinema, and occasionally stands up to point out details to the film's audience. Land later created a 20-minute split-screen expansion of the same loop, which he claims "looks better because it's more of a horizontal film than a vertical film; you look across it, not into it."

Reception

Film in Which There Appear... is considered an important work in the structural film movement. Fred Camper described Film in Which There Appear... as "a kind of Duchampian found object, a looped test film that focuses attention on the medium and the viewer." J. Hoberman called the film "blandly presented." Juan A. Suárez noted the film's unique element of "indeterminacy and open-endedness," remarking that the more the film is projected, the more scratches and dust it will collect.

BLOGGER'S BLAH: This is, of course, a piece of shit. Or, at least. completely nonsensical. Some of the critics seemed to be on to this guy. Sitting through six minutes of "this" (and you will note, of course, that there are minute differences in the thing from one minute to the next - I giffed representative samples from Minute One, Three and Five) must have been an agony of boredom, and then - to have to say something intelligent about it! As with the Emporer's New Clothes, no one wanted to admit that the thing is useless and completely naked of meaning. Oh, no - it's Mozartian, even Mondrian (but this from a critic who spelled the filmmaker's name wrong!). Then again, it's also Duchampian (and I won't even try to guess what that means, nor will I waste time looking it up on Wikipedia), and a "found object". But that's just it, it ISN'T "found", it was MADE by someone who had nothing better to do. I only posted this because it's an interesting example of the phenomenon of the China Girl, rendered (I am sure) much more scratchy than she originally was. It looks like it's raining, for God's sake. The rest of it is - shall I say, Warholian? - except that if it were a Warhol film, it would last six HOURS rather than six minutes. And I've only subjected you to roughly thirty seconds (a sort of highlight reel). Aren't you glad I furthered your film education in only thirty seconds?

No?

My China doll

China Girl (filmmaking)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A China Girl image, with explanatory labels.

In the motion picture industry a China Girl is an image of a woman accompanied by color bars that appears for a few frames (typically one to four) in the reel leader. A "China Girl" was used by the lab technician for calibration purposes when processing the film (with the still photography equivalent being a "Shirley Card").[1] The origin of the term is a matter of some dispute[2] but is usually accepted to be a reference to the models used to create the frames - either they were actually china (porcelain) mannequins, or the make-up worn by the live models made them appear to be mannequins.

Originally the "China Girl" frames were created in-house by laboratories to varying standards, but in the mid-1970s engineers from the Eastman Kodak Company developed the Laboratory Aim Density system as a means of simplifying the production of motion picture prints. Under the LAD system, Kodak created many duplicate negatives of a single China Girl and provided them to laboratories to include in their standard leaders. These LAD frames were exposed to specific guidelines and allowed a laboratory technician to quickly make a subjective evaluation of a print's exposure and colour tone by looking at the China Girl herself. If a more objective evaluation were required, a densitometer could be used to compare the density of the colour patches in the LAD frame with Kodak's published guidelines.

In keeping with changes to the modern laboratory process, Kodak also provide a "Digital LAD" to be incorporated in the film-out process to check the accuracy of the film printer and processor.

In 2005, "China Girl" images were the subject of an art exhibit by Julie Buck and Karin Segal at the Harvard Film Archive[3]

The "China girl" has occasionally appeared as a visual trope in experimental films over the years. Some experimental films which use "China girls" include Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66) by Owen Land, New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976) by Owen Land, Girls on Film (2005) by Julie Buck and Karin Segal, MM (1996) by Timoleon Wilkins, Standard Gauge (1984) by Morgan Fisher, To the Happy Few by Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs, China Girls (2006) by Michelle Silva, and Releasing Human Energies (2012) by Mark Toscano.

The narrator and main character in the 2013 novel The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner shared her experience as a China Girl model for a film lab in New York City.

I'm a travelin' man

I've made a lot of stops all over the world

And in every part I own the heart

Of at least one lovely girl

I've a pretty Seniorita waiting for me

Down in old mexico

If you're ever in Alaska stop and see

My cute little Eskimo

Oh my sweet Fraulein down in Berlin town

Makes my heart start to yearn

And my China doll down in old Hong Kong

Waits for my return

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea

I remember the night

When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki

And I held you oh so tight

------ instrumental break ------

Oh my sweet Fraulien down in Berlin town

Makes my heart start to yearn

And my China doll down in old Hong Kong

Waits for my return

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea

I remember the night

When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki

And I held you oh so tight

Oh, I'm a travelin' man

Yes, I'm a travelin' man

SUNDAY THOUGHTS. I'm fascinated, if not obsessed by obsolete technology, and my goodness. I keep learning new things. I collect film leaders because they are just so bloody cool, and I am finding out I am not the only one who really really likes them. Film students and amateur filmmakers use them to give their productions a "retro" look and atmosphere.

I remember them from my McKeough School days, because on Friday afternoons when we were about to be released from prison, we'd all be marched downstairs into the dank, dark basement of the school to watch a "fillum". That's what they called it. For a long time I thought that was the right way to say it. Usually it was some edu-ma-cational thing, a National Film Board movie about the Rocky Mountains, or even a hygiene film, though of course we didn't know what hygiene was.

The fillums, which were at least 20 years old, would always start with the countdown, but before the countdown was that explosion of grease-pencil writing and scratches and flashes of "things". It also made - well, that sound, you know what I mean, that snappy, gritchy sound. The picture was pretty gritchy too, and usually black and white. Colour fillum was a very big deal in those days.

We particularly liked it when the countdown was accompanied by beeps. These were more like boops, actually. We were not supposed to count along - no one ever told us this, by the way. We just knew. Our principal was an old army man who kept order; we even marched in to military music in the morning. My God.

I sort of vaguely noticed split-second flashes of human faces (not always girls) in my film leaders, but wasn't sure why they were there. So today (last night, actually, very late, when I do these things) I found out about China Girls. I'm not sure exactly where the name came from. The Wikipedia entry seems embarrassed by it, trying to avoid the possibility that there's something racist about it. If it's a reference to porcelain or even a mannequin, the name would not be capitalized, would it? But here they capitalize BOTH names, just to stay on the safe side.

It brought to mind Ricky Nelson's Travellin' Man, an incredibly racist thing that basically says he fucks them all over the world, assigning them pretty much equal value as far as nooky is concerned. Or is that spelled Nooky?

And there's this, from Moving Image Archive News, in case you'd like to know more (and more, and more, and more).

China Girls, Leading Ladies, Actual Women

Oh, and. . . this, from a Harvard magazine (still trying to find the name). Given my post from a couple of days ago, there are only a few degrees of separation.

"What is striking is how familiar some of the faces seem. When the exhibition was shown in New York, Buck says, visitors would swear that they had seen some of the women in old films, but that is unlikely. As far as Buck and Segal have been able to determine, none of the women in this collection ever made the leap from China Girl to film actress.

Julie Buck and Karin Segal, after an unknown studio cameraman, 2004. 'Girl # 62' image courtesy of the artists. (Test Strip 62)

In the end, the sense of déjà vu probably results from the combination of lighting, makeup, hairstyles, clothes, and facial expressions that suggest film actresses of a particular era. But the resemblance does raise questions about why our response to a famous face is different from our reaction to one that is eerily similar but which lacks the associations acquired through a career as an actress and celebrity.

Rumors persist, however. One that Buck and Segal heard as they were interviewing film technicians is that a teenage Joan Baez once stood in as a test-strip girl when her physicist father was engaged in making an educational film in the Boston area. But so far, the photo has not shown up." (Emphasis mine. This DOES sound like something the adventurous young Joanie would try, looking for her .001 seconds of fame. As it turned out, she had nothing to worry about.)

But there's a kicker. A kicker to the kicker!

My exploration of China Girls led me to something called the Shirley Card. Let me explain. There were pretty "girls" (young women) posing, perhaps professionally, though likely for a pittance, as a standard for colour tones in still photography back in the '50s and '60s. This is where all the aspiring models went, when they weren't out on the town as escorts. Most of this had to do with getting skin tones right - because, as we all know, if we get THOSE right the rest of the picture is OK. Problem is, all of them were young, gorgeous and - of course - Caucasian. Their hopelessly idealized beauty explains why Joan Baez got so depressed back then. But look at her now, eh? - and most of THEM are probably dead, or all wrinkled up. Or dead.

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"And I'm not gay!": or, begin the innuendo

Ah, those days: the days of  Johnny Larue and William B. and Dr. Tongue and all the other surreal characters taken over by John Candy. For the characters didn't take him over - it was the other way around. He invaded them and became.

Johnny LaRue, the chimney-smoking, booze-swilling, dame-exploiting would-be politician of Melonville was one of my favorites. In this clip he pitches himself as a candidate for City Council, and even that untidy flop of hair is reminiscent of Donald Trump, along with all the ranting bullshit.

But LaRue had a signature phrase he used in every sketch: "And I'm not gay!" I was reminded of this when I opened my email this morning and found a comment from someone about my Alan Gershwin post (which got a good response, believe me, in light of the 13 views I get for some of them). The reader vehemently denied any suggestion that either George or Alan Gershwin was gay. This is typical of the indignant, deeply insulted, even infuriated tone of people who perceive any such suggestion in biographies of famous (and usually it's) men.

Lost and Found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin

No one ever thinks - it doesn't occur to them even for a moment - that their fury reveals the slightest degree of homophobia. But even a suggestion the person in question MIGHT have been gay is automatically seen as vicious slander which has to be vigorously denied and argued into the ground. No, he was NOT "one of those". There is no EVIDENCE he was "one of those". He had hair on his chest, for God's sake! Don't defile his good name like that!

What???

I'm not defiling anything or anyone when I say there were suggestions that Gershwin might have been gay.  Most of his biographers (including Howard Pollack, who wrote a definitive 885-page doorstop) have pondered the fact without coming to any hard conclusions. In Gershwin's rarefied world, being gay or bisexual was not the big and horrifying deal it was in the general populace. Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and many other movers-and-shakers of composerhood were gay, some of them quite openly. It was an arts-saturated environment, and its most celebrated figures seemed to believe they were above convention.

It doesn't matter to me if Gershwin was gay, bisexual or a racehorse (though he was certainly that). But what interests me is the utter fury with which people deny and denounce such "accusations", even if they're stated as mere surmise. I'm apparently attempting to throw mud at an icon, drag him down into the slime.

Hey, wait a minute!

I did a piece on Nietsche not long ago, and the same "accusations" came up in his biographical material, along with that same strident, near-hysterical denial. It's a lie! He had a girl friend in university once and took her to the Philosopher's Ball! The implication is that I'm giving him a black eye just to be spiteful. And, of course, getting my facts wrong. All wrong. This reminds me of that classic Seinfeld episode where, whenever the issue of gayness came up, the mantra was, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Denial of the denial? Let's begin the beguine.

And Cole Porter? Are you kidding? And Noel Coward, let's not forget him. Gay! Gay! Yes, I'm going to ruin their reputations right here and now by saying they loved men (which is obviously a horrific crime - it goes without saying, doesn't it).

Huh??

Come on, people. The suggestion that some great literary or musical figure might have been gay is not automatically slander. In expressing that view, you're revealing a small and very homophobic mind. But your small-mindedness is such that you don't even see it, or at least won't admit it.

"Oh, I knew someone who was gay once and he was a real nice fella." But he's not Gershwin. Or Cole Porter. Or Johnny LaRue.

Imagine these same people were claiming, vehemently and furiously, "he was NOT black!", "he was NOT disabled!', "he did NOT have PTSD!", or any other sensitive categories, and these same people would be horrified. It's OK to be those things now - maybe - supposedly. Or not, but we have to say so, even if we don't believe it. (Though, think about it. A hundred years ago, would it have been acceptable to claim that some important/famous white figure "might have" had black lineage? Think of the outcry, the insistence he was blonde and got a suntan, or something equally ludicrous.)

But why then isn't it OK for Nietsche or Gershwin or any other major figure to be gay or bisexual (bisexual being a category that seems to have been lost in the shuffle, the implication being, for God's sake, make up your mind! Being on the fence like that is oh-so-politically incorrect, even disloyal to the cause.) Sexual orientation still seems to be fraught with confusion. If a man gets married at any time in his life, and (especially) if he fathers a child, he's "not gay". The assumption is, a gay man would not touch his wife with a ten-foot pole. She would remain chaste and pure for 25 years while he pulled out the bodybuilding magazines he kept under his mattress.

People's minds are still in brontosaurus mode. They're stuck, and their thinking is very dusty. Is social change just hurtling along too fast, or what? Is this trapped-in-amber mode of thinking just simple physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Whatever. They piss me off! So Gershwin was gay. Or might have been. Does that take away anything at all from his contribution to music? In some distant universe, not this one, we might even see it as a positive attribute, something that adds to the richness and complexity of that extreme rarity, the blazing miracle of creative genius.

BONUS POST. This is the piece I kept finding during my GershQuest of last year.

gramilano

ballet, opera, photography...

Michael Feinstein’s book on the Gershwins called, sensibly, “The Gershwins and Me” (Simon & Schuster) was published in October. While he was still working in piano bars, Feinstein got to know Ira Gershwin intimately, cataloguing his collection of records, unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in the Gershwin home over a period of six years.

The gay or not gay question has floated about George Gershwin even during the more restrained time when he was a young composer. It is an issue Feinstein tackles in his book. America’s National Public Radio asked him about it:

So many speculated that George Gershwin was gay because he never got married. And somebody once said to Oscar Levant, you know, George is bedding all those women because he’s trying to prove he’s a man. And Oscar Levant said: What a wonderful way to prove it. There have always been rumours circulating about George’s sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it’s important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it’s all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.

Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said.

Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George’s and whose husband Milton Ager was George’s roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay, and Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don’t know anything. But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t talk about it. So it still remains a mystery.

My own theory is that I think that the thing that mattered most to George was his music. I think he could have been confused sexually. I don’t know. I think that he had trouble forming a lasting relationship.

Kitty Carlisle talked about how George asked her to marry him, but she said that she knew that he wasn’t deeply in love with her. But she fit the demographic of what his mother felt would be the right woman for him.

This is an extract of NPR’s long talk with Michael Feinstein.

Photo: left to right, George Gershwin, Michael Feinstein, Ira Gershwin

NOTE: here is the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of innuendo:

(the making of) a ​remark or ​remarks that ​suggest something ​sexual or something ​unpleasant but do not refer to it ​directly: There's always an ​element of ​sexual innuendo in ​our ​conversations.

Here we touch on the interesting issue of "unpleasant" being juxtaposed with "sexual", which opens up a whole new can of worms: that there's something unsavory and reputation-destroying about sex itself, unless it takes place in the heterosexual/marital bed, infrequently, in the missionary position. And only when you want a kid.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Is it plagiarism if you steal from yourself?

I could (and do) watch old cartoons all day long. Now that I have YouTube, I am in fact good for nothing else. But it's an interesting thing to look at the really old ones, like these two. They represent the first entries in a very long series by Warner Bros:  Merrie Melodies. (Perhaps you've heard of them.)

The first one, Lady Play Your Mandolin, features a drunk horse, and the second, You Don't Know What You're Doin' (which some YouTube wag called Justin Trudeau's theme song) a drunk dog who must have had a genetic mixup with the horse or something. Or else the animators just got lazy.

I mean! This is Cartoon One and Cartoon Two of the immortal, incomparable Merrie Melodies series, and they're repeating themselves in the second cartoon. The shot of the character screaming at the camera is pretty much identical, except the horse is white and the dog is black. Even the dragon-ish looking thing is pretty similar.

They say Disney stole from everyone - I wrote about that once, and I may steal from myself and re-run it because I don't remember much about it. But on the second cartoon? I think they should've quit while they were ahead.

Actually, it was this documentary I was thinking about. (I can't believe I found it again! I had no idea of the title or when it came out or anything, but if you keep Googling, anything is possible.) It was shown once on CBC, years and years ago, and never again - in French, with English subtitles. There's no English in this version at all, so I didn't get very far. But hey, if you're French. . . It's an eye-opening look at just how much Uncle Wally got away with.

The pitfall trap

Have I been feeding this beast (my blog) regularly? Depends on what you mean by regularly. I usually consider that to mean "every day", but to my shock, I now see I haven't posted anything much all week. And I think I know why that is.

Something will sneak up on you sometimes, something that snags some issue from the past. Ten months ago I had a serious falling-out with someone whom I considered to be a reasonably close friend for a very long time (he was maybe 6.5 on my friend-o-meter). Then, this past Easter Sunday, and without any warning whatsoever, he died. I only found out about his death because I was part of a mass mailout: somehow I had been left in his email address book, maybe because he didn't bother to remove it.

What does it mean when someone dies, and there was unfinished business? Maybe it WAS finished, and that was the whole trouble. I ask myself sometimes: Glass Character, why is it that you seem to be cutting certain people out of your life? And I always come to the same conclusion. They're people who, for one reason or another, appear to have seriously lost their way. In particular, this applies to their personal integrity.

It happens. It happens that people begin to live in a way that is not only deceptive, but deceitful. It happens that a person who has been refreshingly tart turns irreversibly sour. It happens that people begin to use you as a dumping ground for resentments that they're too afraid to meet at the source. Or maybe it's just more convenient that way.

So what happened? It's not as if I have lost all my friends, but I will no longer give quarter to anyone who sucks my energy away, or demeans me in any way, or hauls their support out from under me and still expects ME to support THEM (i. e. act as a bottomless receptacle for their toxic waste).

This most recent shock - and shock it was - has had yet more shocks attached to it. When he suddenly died of a massive stroke, my former friend left his longtime partner completely in the lurch financially - not merely penniless, but in an abyss of debt that he cannot possibly cope with. This is so extreme that it's quite possible he will end up homeless and/or have to declare bankruptcy, not exactly a desirable legacy from a 25-year relationship. The community has set up a GoFundMe account for him which so far has only taken in a few hundred dollars.

How could he not have known they were in such dire straits? I don't believe he did. I think he just trusted his partner to take care of him. In some ways, he was like an old-fashioned wife who has no idea of the state of her husband's finances until he dies. Then comes the nasty surprise, and the crushing burden that accompanies it. 

An important aspect of love is financial responsibility, though many people would be incredulous to hear me say that. Or even appalled: dirty, crass money, attached to something as sublime and ideal as Love? Well, think of it. One must live - isn't that so? To live, one needs financial support of some kind. Unless you think you're going to live forever, you must make provisions for your partner, especially if that partner is more than twenty years younger than you (meaning he may have another 30 to 40 years left to live, with no significant means of support except a disability pension). If you don't make these provisions, if you don't think about it or bother about it, it's not only arrogant but thoughtless, ignorant, and - I think - cruel.

Ten months ago when we had our falling-out, I was reacting to something that I now see reflected this arrogance and thoughtlessness, well-concealed by his "sweet" public persona. I felt the ground being cut away under my feet, destroying what I thought was his support. But then, being truly supportive was something he did not seem to know how to do, or even have any interest in.

Suddenly I knew nothing, I shouldn't even be taking one step towards the issue at hand because I had not had the years and years of training he had, and blah blah blah blah blah. He had to be right, always, and his righteousness had to be acknowledged. That's the way it went, those were the rules, and I wouldn't play by them.

My reaction and throwing the friendship into reverse is only a particle, not even that, compared to what his partner is going through now. He has less than nothing: he's in the red, the minuses, though to what extent I don't know. How could this happen? How could two ageing men living quietly in one of Canada's favorite retirement communities get themselves into such a godawful mess? I have a bad feeling about it, and it seems to confirm some suspicions that there was a lot going on in this case that is deeply disturbing to contemplate.

But I can't write about it now.

When people die, they are often elevated to sainthood. I'm sure this will happen tomorrow afternoon at his memorial service. It's just something we do, a social custom, or else a superstition (don't ever speak ill of the dead or they will rise up out of their grave and fly around your house making pictures jump off the wall and going "Wooooooo!"). Suddenly we can't say enough about them, though it's not really about the person who died at all. It's to make US feel better about harbouring all those resentments and negative feelings, to pretend they don't exist at all. 

But sometimes they exist for a reason.

It's Friday now, and it hasn't been a good week for blogging because I just feel kind of flat. It depresses me when someone I respected turns out to be this irresponsible. Or should I say: this big an asshole. For that's what he was, or he wouldn't have held his partner hostage to a crushing, stigmatizing financial burden he can never repay.  At its worst, debt is dishonest. Even at its best, it's like living on top of a gigantic hole with a fragile floor over it (and there is a name for that, by the way: it's called a "pitfall trap") that will barely hold your weight. Sooner or later disaster strikes, and it all caves in. Then the person you supposedly love the most must fall into the abyss.

To quote Bob Dylan, whom I've been thinking a lot about lately: "But oh, what kind of love is this/Which goes from bad to worse?"

We carried you in our arms

On Independence Day

And now you’d throw us all aside

And put us on our way

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun

Would treat a father so

To wait upon him hand and foot

And always tell him, “No?”

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

We pointed out the way to go

And scratched your name in sand

Though you just thought it was nothing more

Than a place for you to stand

Now, I want you to know that while we watched

You discover there was no one true

Most ev’rybody really thought

It was a childish thing to do

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

It was all very painless

When you went out to receive

All that false instruction

Which we never could believe

And now the heart is filled with gold

As if it was a purse

But, oh, what kind of love is this

Which goes from bad to worse?

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

TAG-ON: Obsessed with Dylan again, and re-reading one of the bios, I had a bizarre experience last night. Didn't sleep worth a shit, didn't even think I WAS asleep all night, because I kept seeing or experiencing a long series of short films about Dylan. These were all from different times in his life/career and not in any order. They looked sort of like they were on panels or things like piano keys and I went from one to the other, and I didn't want to see them but couldn't stop. Sometimes I felt like I was IN the movies, but probably not. I wanted to get out of them and felt like the movies went on all night and I got no sleep at all. I was full of anxiety because I don't do well when I don't sleep, and serious sleep deprivation has been known to make me go completely crazy. But when I woke up, I said, Jesus, Margaret, don't you know those were dreams, and if they were dreams you must've been asleep?

TAG-ON TWO: While Dylaning around on the internet last night, I found a crazy and incredible speech he made at the Grammys in 2015, after receiving some sort of award. It just went on and on. Normally if he gets an award, he nods tersely, takes the award and goes home. In this case, God knows how long the speech took, but this is the part I want to share with you because it moved me so, and somehow ties in with the video I used to illustrate this post.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.

People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby little waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Love. And she's a free, independent spirit. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman with devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.

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Olive's beauty ritual

Hippo meltdown

 

Why was I always so terrified as a kid?

This is why. THIS would come on TV, probably when I was about 3 or 4 years old. Though I now think it's quite beautiful and use it as one of my signature gifs at the end of posts (and that's what those are, folks, in case you're thinking they're totally irrelevant), it petrified me then, because I had no idea what a logo was - or a network - or, frankly, even a peacock. I was a toddler, for God's sake, I was barely out of diapers, and permanently confused.

It's a strange sort of thing because it totally runs counter to the ugly, primitive-looking logos you saw for the other networks (and I have a gif for that!). It has a severe, harlequin-looking aspect to it and is quite complex, and when it goes from stark black-and-white to colour, you just don't expect it. It jumps off the screen, as they say. Someone designed this back in 1957, someone with real talent, and NBC then proceeded to dumb it down for the next 60 years. It's still used, only the peacock has something like four colours. Oversimplification. 

Like 95% of households in the '50s, we had a black-and-white TV, so what was the point of a colour logo anyway? And yet, and yet. The slightly disturbing quality of this early logo is what makes it so effective and such a piece of art. But it still creeps me out big-time. 

And the music, my God, the MUSIC on this thing - it still makes my guts cringe. It just scared me then. It wasn't friendly. At all. It didn't make you want to watch the show. It made you want to run screaming out of the room. It has a big gong and evil upward glissandi on dark woodwinds and a sort of dissonant non-melody that doesn't belong on TV at all.  I had not heard the music since probably 1957 or 1958, I had forgotten it even existed and had pushed the whole nightmare into the back of my head, when I stumbled on it on YouTube, and my God! I cannot even tell you how strange I felt. I was rocketed back in time, and let me tell you, it was not a pleasant feeling to suddenly find myself getting smaller and smaller and more and more frightened. 

Most of the "scary" logos on YouTube (and there are many compilations, all of which I watch obsessively late at night) really aren't that scary. If you turn the sound off, they aren't scary at all. The music is the main element of terror here - it's all hair-raisingly aggressive, with loud percussion like somebody hammering on railroad spikes, whining synthesizers, etc. In many cases it's more like noise. Why did they do this? You can look away - easily - but you can't keep sound out, even if you stick your fingers in your ears. This is why ads in general are so repetitive and shrill. Also why I find gif-making so comforting, because there is no sound involved at all.

BTW, this is the peacock logo only a few years later. It has been made a damn sight friendlier, with blurring Venn diagrams of colour rather than that odd black-and-white abstract net, and completely different music, with bubbly arpeggios on a clarinet and cheerful trills on a flute. All the threat has been removed. Gone is that King of Siam severe, exotic quality. But the final splash of pigment, the startling, paint-brushy effect at the end is still there. 

But look you here! as the ghost said to Scrooge. OK, it's fatter, has a shorter neck, but doesn't this partridge just a LITTLE bit resemble the NBC peacock without its tail feathers? It's facing the same way, it has a similar doohickey on top of its head, and - well. It could be I'm reaching here. But what network WAS that show on anyway? (frantic interval while she goes on Wikipedia - watch this in the interim!):

(gasp, gasp) I'm back. No, no, I was wrong, The Partridge Family ran on ABC, not NBC, and yet, here it is, this weird resemblance between the peacock and the partridge. Maybe it was one of those unconscious things (I don't mean as in knocked out), i. e. the artist or animator borrowing the image, or even sending it up: a fat, tailless NBC peacock equals a partridge! Any show that gave the world both David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce has a lot to answer for. So I'd say stealing a logo is the least of its crimes.

Badda-boom: Here is the logo NBC uses now. Compare and contast. At least the music doesn't scare me.