Written by the Hemingway of the hen house: Matt Paust's close encounter

Capt. Love's last command

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I stifled a curse when I heard the beep beep

beep.

Another traffic jamming electric cart. 

 I'd soon be upon the damned thing

 in my usual hurry

 to get the shopping done

 and get the hell out.

Someone less able than me,

self-destructive I guessed

in my least charitable way.

Someone stuffing greasy chips

into his or her face,

stuffing his or her beeping conveyance

with ever more bags of cheap deadly calories,

or shooting the shit

with another witless old fart,

both oblivious to me

as they block the aisle

in their GOD DAMNED ENTITLEMENT!

I round the corner and there he is.

Yes, a he,

a gaunt, tall ancient he.

Enormous bearded head,

white hair on top

and under chin,

milky eyes rolled inward,

parchment lips agape.

The head is erect,

but dead.

The old man is dead,

body propped in its cart

like the dead El Cid

strapped on his horse by Jimena

to save Valencia,

and yet...

Somehow the cart moves,

small, herky jerky moves,

forward and back,

and around,

this way and that,

beep beep beep,

as if its dead commander

still tries to drive.

I walk carefully around

this curious grotesque

to find the spices

and then the beans.

A couple more aisles

I must traverse

before I can leave

this crowded, cursed place.

Several more times

I meet the dead shopper.

Is he following me

or what the hell?

Each time we pass

I study him harder,

with quick glances

to catch a vital sign.

I wonder why he's alone.

If he's dead, how are the purchases

filling his cart?

A respect for him sprouts in my head.

There's no fear in his face,

nor defeat in his frame.

He's not dead but he's close

and it frightens him not.

He's an old sea captain I begin to think,

a mariner once,

an adventurous man,

who thrived on the challenge,

the danger of imminent

untimely death.

 

He's Eric the Red

returned from the dead.

He's Ahab and Blackbeard,

Morgan and Kidd,

the spirits of skippers

who handled the helm,

whose lives became legend

inspiring us still.

And that's when I saw her,

as I pieced it together,

this towering figure

nearing death in his cart,

refusing surrender

despite all the odds

overwhelming his body,

every breath that he took.

She stood there behind him,

far enough back so I couldn't be sure

she was with him at all.

She looked lost,

nearly helpless,

bent and frail thin.                                         

I studied her face,

but like his it was closed

to strangers it seemed.

She was looking at something

only she seemed to see.

I walked on past her,

wondering anew,

and that's when I heard it:

a murmuring sound.

It was her or him or both in tune.

I turned to look and sure enough,

she'd moved closer to him and was leaning in,

and I wondered if I could tell by the voice

or the voices if two,

what clue I could take from the tones I might hear.

Does she know this old warrior,

does he know her, too?

Would I hear impatience or grumble or scorn?

Would they speak at all, would their faces reveal?

I saw the cart move.

It turned toward the woman

and the old captain's spirit

I could see had joined hers.

There was movement, animation

in that bearded large face.

Her body was bobbing a little with life,

and I heard it then, the sound unexpected.

It was thin, it was fragile, but it held its own.

It chased away dread, frustration and worse.

Their doom imminent, the bodies for sure,

but their spirits were stronger than ever, I knew

when I heard it from her,

her giggle.


                                                            Matt Paust

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

                                                                  

Who's The Artist here?

The Artist is a 2011 French romance film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The story takes place in Hollywood between 1927 and 1932 and focuses on a declining male film star and a rising actress, as silent cinema grows out of fashion and is replaced by the talkies. Much of the film itself is silent; it is shot in black-and-white, and has received wide praise from critics and many accolades. Dujardin won the Best Actor Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered. The film has six Golden Globe nominations, the most of 2011.

Swashbuckling silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) attends the premiere of his latest film A Russian Affair. Outside the theater, Valentin is posing for pictures for the paparazzi when a woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), admiring Valentin while lost in a sea of adoring fans, drops her purse. She bends down to get it, but is accidentally pushed into Valentin. She ends up photographed, and the next day, she is on the front page of Variety with the headline "Who's That Girl?".

Later, Miller auditions as a dancer and is spotted by Valentin. He insists she have a bit in his new film, despite objections from the studio boss, Al Zimmer (John Goodman). Peppy slowly rises in the industry, her roles growing larger and larger.

Two years later, Zimmer announces the end of production of silent films, but Valentin insists that sound is just a fad. When Zimmer unloads all his silent stars, George decides to produce and direct his own silent film, financing it himself. It opens on the same day as Miller's new sound film, and Valentin is ruined.

His wife, Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), kicks him out, and he moves into an apartment with his valet, Clifton (James Cromwell). Miller goes on to become a major Hollywood star. Later, Valentin fires Clifton and sells off all his effects. Desperate and drunk, Valentin starts a fire in his home. His dog gets help and he awakes in a bed in Miller's house.

Clifton is now working for Miller. Miller insists that Valentin co-stars in her next film, or she will quit Zimmer's studio. After Valentin learns that Miller had purchased all of his auctioned effects, he has a nervous breakdown and returns to his burnt-out apartment. Miller arrives, panicked, as Valentin is attempting suicide.

Peppy and George reconcile, and remembering that he is a superb dancer, she convinces Zimmer to let them make a musical together, and the picture ends with the implication that Valentin will return to fame again. In the final shot, the sound finally comes in as the film starts rolling. Afterwards, Zimmer calls 'Cut! Perfect. Beautiful. Could you give me one more?'. Valentin, in his first audible line, replies in a clearly French accent, "With pleasure", revealing the reason he refused to speak on camera.

OK then. . . Wiki has spoken.


I watched this movie last night, but only because somebody I know had a copy of it. (Never mind.) The premise seemed strange, especially in light of the fact that movies have already thoroughly covered this ground (most notably, Singin' in the Rain, often called the best movie musical ever made.)

Expectations were high, because I can't seem to find a bad review of this thing anywhere.  Critics are falling all over themselves calling it a masterpiece. And it is "different", for sure: at first you think there's something wrong with the sound track, that they've left out the vocal element (and believe me, I've seen that before), creating a very frustrating scenario of mouths moving without any words.

This Valentin guy (and by the way, his obviously-French name immediately gives away the "secret" of his having an accent and thus being unable to speak in a movie, ha-ha) sort of looks like a lot of other people, including one of the best dancers in human history. The final dance sequence in The Artist reminds me of two dinosaurs lumbering around. Anyone familiar with "real" musicals of the '30s will wince at this.

Or maybe they won't! Sometimes I wonder if critics get together on this and just decide they're going to rave, no matter what the quality (or lack of it) of the movie they're reviewing. Then the public, embarrassed that they might look like they're not "getting" it, do an "emperor's new clothes" thing and pretend like mad that they love it.

This thing was pallid and uninteresting, and very predictable. The plot was maybe five minutes' worth of ground which had been covered many times before. I got tired of seeing Valentin's impressive but obviously tampered-with set of teeth as he constantly grinned and laughed, then watching his increasingly-threadbare suits as his career hit the skids.

What could be more cliched than this story, I wonder? I've been watching a lot of Harold Lloyd lately (again!), and once more I've been amazed at his versatility, at the many different Harolds he played, all convincingly: the country bumpkin, the rich hypochondriac, the girl-shy tailor's apprentice, the timid department store clerk scaling the heights of a tall building, the movie fan trying his luck in Hollywood, the Chinese missionary, the . . . but we'll stop there.

This is real movie magic. 

Ironically, not unlike Valentin, Harold Lloyd struggled to find a place for himself in sound film and made several movies that did well, but never equalled the dizzying box-office heights of The Freshman or Safety Last! His was a 1920s character, one who (in the words of his longtime director Hal Roach) "couldn't age". In Movie Crazy, he played a 40-year-old man living with his parents. His voice wasn't awful, but it was nothing special and had no resonance, sometimes making him sound a bit like Jiminy Cricket.

Obviously, The Artist is a sort of smudged photocopy of this story. You may have figured out by now that the photos in the first half of this post aren't all of the same man. Can you guess who's mixed in with Valentin? If you stirred them all together, might you have something like his character in The Artist?

(Sorry, I threw Ernie Kovacs in there because he had nice teeth and a moustache.)

This is just one of those cases where I don't get it. The thing may well get Best Picture this year, and then even more people will flock to see it and declare it a masterpiece.

But why not rent The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and see some real silent classics? And if not Harold, get hold of some Douglas Fairbanks or (OK, I won't give the last one away, but he sure did know how to dance).

The Artist is a gimmicky thing without much substance to it. Yes, it looks good, but why not watch Top Hat and see some real choreography (by Hermes Pan!), some glorious costuming and splendid art deco sets?

Don't people know the difference any more?

And since silent film is so frickin' hot right now, when is Hollywood going to take a serious look at The Glass Character and make a real movie out of it?

I'm just sayin'.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Νάνα Μούσχουρη - ΚΑΘΕ ΤΡΕΛΟ ΠΑΙΔΙ

This has a history, too, a very long one. I loved this song for years, at least since the late '70s, but had no idea what the words meant. On the British Concert Album, Nana Mouskouri announced the title as "Wilderness", so I assumed it was about a long, lonely walk through a barren landscape, or perhaps through a dark forest full of frightening sounds. Turns out it has nothing to do with any of that! 

Since I am having trouble seeing the subtitles, I assume you will too, so I will transcribe:

That daybreak
I said good morning to him, oh, oh.
That daybreak
I said good morning to him, oh, oh.

Every madcap young man
is holding in his hand
a kiss given by Virgin Mary
and a knife

and his mother doesn't sing
and his mother doesn't sing.

When someone's slaughtering two doves
the night is burning in his two hands
and the girl doesn't speak

and the girl doesn't speak.


It's a strange, spare, paradoxical and somewhat frightening poem about the duality of humankind, the beauty and the violence of youth, and the ways in which people are silenced by fear - or does it mean something else? What's a madcap young man, anyway? Now that I finally have the English lyrics, it's more mysterious than ever. (I did find the composer's name - Manos Hadjidakis - vaguely familiar, though I don't know if he also wrote these incredible words.) 


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

A closed-circuit electronic playground

I sort of remember this,  just like I sort of remember our first VCR and not knowing how it could record shows when the TV set wasn't even on.

It was Beta.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Let's play. . . spot the photo!

I love love LOVE Victorian and Edwardian photos. The black-and-white is crystalline in detail. People really knew how to dress then. They got around by horse. It was wonderful.

I recently found two gorgeous, authentic photos from the era that looked so much like paintings, I had to mix them up with some actual paintings by Victorian artists Tissot and Hassam. I hope their ghosts will forgive me for making their pictures black and white, just for the sake of confusion.

Can YOU tell the difference?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Do you call that thing a book?

The novel, the novel! Why do I set myself up like this? Why don't I just let it go?


I'm like a person who has had seventeen failed relationships, but keeps trying for more, keeps hoping for that one, elusive, "right" man who will change her life.

For more than a year now I've been trying to get someone in the publishing field interested in my novel about Harold Lloyd, The Glass Character. It occurred to me yesterday that I've been going about it all wrong. Why am I acting as if I've never been published before?

Here is a small sample of the reviews I got for my first two novels. This represents maybe ten per cent of them. Only one was strongly negative.

                            

Reviews of Better than Life (NeWest Press, 2003)

and Mallory (Turnstone Press, 2005)

"Gunning manages to illuminate that which is dark and secret with that which is rich and riotous in colour. She is an author able to open up the world of a fractured but seeking people and bring them into light, healing and hope." - Edmonton Journal

"As Anderson-Dargatz did with her town of Likely and Stephen Leacock did with Mariposa, Gunning has created a fictional place that's recognizable to anyone who ever lived in a small town. This delightful novel looks like a contender for the Leacock Medal." - Vancouver Sun

"Margaret Gunning writes with uncanny grace and unflinching clarity about what it is to be a young girl forgotten by the world. The ominous feeling that underscores much of of the novel is remeniscent of the best work of another Canadian author, Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose girl heroes seem to inhabit this same dark world." - Montreal Gazette

 

"Her expressive turns can spur shivers of pleasure. There is a contagious energy to Gunning's prose which often - and accurately - delineates Mallory's intense emotional improvisation, child-like perspicacity and surprisingly mature realizations." - Globe and Mail

"Better Than Life is fiction at its finest." - Edmonton Journal

                              
One of my editors phoned me after this outpouring and claimed it was "a miracle". She saw all this praise as some sort of supernatural event, not as the result of years of hard work, persistence, trudging along, heartbreak.

I sent out queries this time and did not even get responses, or else the response was no (a form letter, always) without even wanting to see the novel. The larger presses will not even consider submissions from the likes of me: you have to have an agent. The response from agents was even more miserable: nothing, or form letters, or even (the worst one yet) my own query letter back, in my stamped self-addressed envelope, with a rubber stamp on it that said LIST IS FULL.

In no case did anyone actually read my novel. It was dismissed out of hand.

I should have done it differently, but didn't even realize it until yesterday. I have two novels out already, for Christ's sake.  I'm not a novice. I'm not starting at the beginning. Why can't I jump over some of those early, sieve-straining steps?


So I've started to. And nothing definite has happened yet, but the energy seems to have changed.

I will never, NEVER learn how to do this, how to hawk my wares. I love to write - somehow it has survived the wars - but after 30 years of attempts, I still can't seem to figure out the elaborate, paradoxical, ever-changing games I must play to get my writing noticed.


If it weren't for you, Harold, and my love for you, I would have given this up a long time ago.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Celebrity Wife Swap: it can't be true!

To what lengths will some people go to resurrect their careers?

I mean, careers shattered by their own stupidity, selfishness and horrifically bad judgement?

Here's how far.

(from an entertainment site)

Reality TV will have another proud moment Tuesday night when disgraced pastor Ted Haggard and unstable one-time Oscar nominee Gary Busey trade spouses for ABC's "Celebrity Wife Swap." To promote their appearance on the show, Busey and Haggard appeared via satellite earlier in the day on Fox's "Good Day LA."

"Steve, do you remember the last time we talked?" Busey started the interview, then recalling for host Steve Edwards the interview they had after Busey's Oscar nomination in 1979. "You were very much a gentleman and very nice to me, and I've never forgotten that moment. You inspired me."


It's unlikely Busey will have such warm memories of this interview.

What followed was an awkward nine minutes of live TV that featured Haggard engaging in a contentious discussion of gay marriage with Jillian Reynolds, a virtually ignored Busey seemingly amusing himself in the monitor off camera, and a series of pauses caused by some kind of audio lag that seemed to affect only Busey.

Haggard seemed put off by the intro, in which Edwards described Haggard's scandal involving a male prostitute who claimed to have had sex with Haggard (which Haggard denied) and doing drugs with him (which Haggard admitted to). The scandal led to Haggard resigning as pastor at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and as head of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. Amazingly, he's remained married for the past five years and he's willing to let his wife spend a week with Gary Busey.


Shortly after the introduction, Haggard turned to Busey and commented, "That was a jumbled group of facts they had."

The rest of the interview is worth watching for Busey's facial expressions and occasional asides and for his reaction to Edwards' concluding suggestion that he say, "Amen!"


Chances are that ABC's "Celebrity Wife Swap" episode will be slicker and probably less entertaining than Tuesday morning's chat.


As for the wives who actually did the swapping? Barely discussed.

I don't even know where to start here. With his drippingly oily manner and rectangular smile, Ted Haggard seemed like the natural successor to Jimmy Swaggart, whimpering and slobbering with insincere apology after being exposed (though he denies it) having sex with a male prostitute.

They didn't have sex, Haggard insists. They just did drugs together. Is all.

I watched a rather pathetic documentary about how the disgraced pastor was trying to resurrect his church in what looked like a tool shed in the back yard. A ramshackle group of people showed up, probably spying the camera crew and yearning for a moment of reality TV fame.

Gary Busey, well. . . do we even need to get into it? Where did they dredge him up, and why? I know most reality shows seem to recycle '80s whatever-happened-to's and revolving-door rehab dropouts. But this pairing is particularly bizarre. Why is a so-called Christian evangelist engaging in wife-swapping (even the sanitized version we see on TV), especially with this loser? Why is he callously exploiting the wife who stood by him while he "didn't" have sex with a male hooker, though he admitted to lusting for him in his heart?

If you're truly heterosexual, it doesn't occur to you to hang around using recreational drugs with a gay prostitute. It just doesn't come up. So OK, we've exposed this Haggard guy, but he must be pretty desperate for the spotlight if he's willing to do this.

Maybe he's trying to start a new church: a congregation of evangelical swingers. When they pass around the collection plate, will they throw their keys into the basket?

Or maybe it's just another desperate attempt to convince the world that he's NOT homosexual. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

This weird press conference is enough of a taste of the impending carnage to keep me away, so I probably won't be able to watch.  I was most repelled by the fact that these men's wives weren't even mentioned in the interview. That's because they are nothing but pawns in this disgusting game of opportunistic narcissism.

It's "wife swap", not "couples swap" or "husband swap". That tells us all we need to know about the balance of power here.

Besides, the wives aren't "celebrities", so who who gives a shit about them? Instead, we're supposed to care about a morally bankrupt hypocrite and a mediocre actor with a horrific reputation, so washed-up I had pretty much forgotten who he was.

What was it Saint Paul said in the gospels? "Wives, submit to your husbands." But does this still apply if your husband is a revolting crackpot masquerading as a man of God?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

Stupidest computer problem EVER

Yes, I know I should go to a new layout or format or whatever, but I don't want to. Don't want to! I liked the one I had, but the blog title only showed up properly (in white lettering against the backdrop of the photo) on the home page. If you read an old post or if I emailed a single post or anything like that, the lettering came out BROWN.

Brown on an outdoor photo? It doesn't work. You can't see it.
I tried and tried to get rid of this. Finally I decided it was time for a new photo anyway. This one took a lot of retouching, but I love it.

For a couple of hours, I felt like I was on the verge of bliss! The whole thing had worked out so well. No more brown titles blending into the background. It was all fixed. It looked wonderful!

Then I looked a little more carefully.

ALL the titles of my posts were in white. WHITE, the color my blog title should have been in (except it was in shit-brown). White on light beige isn't legible. So I had to hastily fix that, but as soon as I did, my blog title had flip-flopped back into brown again.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID problem.

I did try to alter this. Supposedly you can place your blog title and description UNDER the photo. It says so. Easy, so I did that. They disappeared. They were just gone.

So what the fxxx am I supposed to do now???
No one is going to have a clue what this thing is even called. It's going to look stupid, unlike the original which I absolutely love (the lettering looks a bit like a chalk board) and which basically took me the whole morning to set up.

I hate changes, hate them so much I try to avoid them because everything goes away. It just does, it goes away and never comes back again, EVER. I don't want that.

I have to fix this, have to, can't, can't even get my son to fix it and he's a computer genius and he doesn't know what it is, some bizarre unwanted default device. But why brown?????

p.s. I diddled around and added a gadget (who knows what that is, maybe something like a gidget, but I added one) which at least provides a backup for the title. Best I can do. It's embarrassing to have so little skill in these machines: I do what I can, but it's like learning Italian when you're 97 years old. The whole world changed right out from under me. My life is speeding along. . . Individual days often seem to drag, but months and years fly by, which is some sort of indication that I'm getting closer to the end.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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