An Easter Parade of Jesus gifs

Jesus is pretty big business at this time of year. As in: let's go to church on Easter Sunday, because aside from Christmas Eve we never go, and if we go twice a year at least we can say we're "churchgoers".

I myself, a recovering churchgoer, have found much that's interesting about the Jesus Industry. In fact, it's hard to find a Jesus without a sense of industry, in these days of universal commerce.

Hey, I wouldn't even DO this, I wouldn't "make fun of" the Holy of Holies (and I'm not, just displaying some of the more interesting representations of him in a new medium) were it not for the fact that my former church went a certain way with things. They decided to try to dispense with their stuffy, outdated image, not to mention the sinking-ship feeling that accompanied all their efforts, and came up with a hip new web site. I will not and cannot quote it here, except to say that it was the first place I encountered Bobblehead Jesus.

Why did I feel this awful sinking in my gut, this anger, this fuming feeling, this desecration, this - hey, what's the matter with you? What ARE you, an old lady (and obviously not welcome)? Everyone else either accepted this atrocity without question, or laughed at it. Aren't we generous, don't we take it on the chin for Jesus, proving we really ARE relevant, hip and leading the way in modern attitudes?

Spare me.

Having dispensed with that odious topic, let's get on with something more sincere (and I mean this! These gifs, tacky and strange as some of them are, were made with sincerity. None of them reflect the jeering satire of the "sendup" ones. Hey, we're on holy ground here.)

This group of gifs represents what I call the "walk with Jesus" collection. Though he walks, he doesn't walk very smoothly. In the walking-on-water ones which I decided not to include (hey, I can't do everything, can I? And it's Good Friday, a day off work, for God's sake), he seems to slide on ice, saving him energy to pull Peter out of the soup.

Minimal walking in this Blingee, but you can see his foot moving. (Didn't know he smoked. He should've given it up for Lent.)

Love this one. If it doesn't work, just click on the image and he'll come a-slidin' down.,

I don't know if these are supposed to be stairs or not, or an old rope bridge. I wonder why they can't just have him sit on a sled?

Now we're getting into the black-lit Disco Jesus images. There's something a wee bit Satanic about the spiky background, which I suppose is meant to represent the crown of thorns. But don't look for this one for too long, or you'll be seeing a spiky-looking skull (meant to represent Golgotha, perhaps?) all day long.

You gotta wonder about this one. Jesus seems to be flashing back and forth (and let me ask you: what WERE those little images that flashed back and forth between two religious scenes called? Why hasn't anyone else ever heard of them?) The background is the color of Kraft Dinner, pulsating wildly around a nasty-looking Christ who suddenly turns into a negative, a la the Shroud of Turin. Colorful.

This is Migraine Christ. Meaning, you'll get one if you look at him too long.

These are just icky, except for the hair blowing in the second one and the fact that he looks sort of like Richard Gere.

There's only one way he could've gotten out to that rock, if his clothes are this dry. But the graphics are gentler in this one, and the reflection rather effective. The probably-unintentional seagull is a nice touch.

This is Ghost Jesus: the best of all the gifs, and for some reason, after one cycle (if you're lucky), he often disappears. (Hint: try clicking on the image and see if you can bring him back from the dead. It worked before, didn't it?)  This could represent a number of things:

The attendance in this church has hit a new low.

They don't pay their electric bill.

They wouldn't know Jesus if he showed up in their own sanctuary.

God left this place a long, long time ago.

Marlon Brando's Home Movies (or: Wild Kingdom)

Before Sacheen Littlefeather, before being hung upside-down in the bathroom, before turning into something that could be rolled down the street like a 300-pound hula hoop, there was This, this rare footage cutting up with Monty Clift that does make you wonder about both of them. It's a little heartbreaking however, for the scalp-prickling Look of Eagles that Brando had in his youth eventually collapsed into a macabre death- mask. He became tiresome, even boring, obsessed with his own legend. The nasal voice that worked so well as the adenoidal Terry Malloy made him sound as if he had swallowed a pound of guppies. The world is still obsessed with Brando because it loves decay, and it loves decay because it makes us feel A WHOLE LOT BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES.

Why I won't think about Marlon Brando

I am not reading Brando, the behemoth biography by Peter Manso which I somehow stumbled through (I think) back in 1994. I am not reading it because it is too big. I can't accomodate it in bed, which is where I read. It slides off my lap or collapses on to my knees.

When I don't read a book, which happens quite a lot, it's an interesting process. I guess you can say I connect the dots. I keep coming around to the same parts again and again. By the end of it, I know almost nothing about my subject matter.

Having been a book reviewer for approximately one billion years, I got myself into this habit of Reading Critically. Kind of like fucking critically, when you think about it. I had lost all the pleasure. Wrestling around with this beached whale of a book, NOT reading it, is a guilty gratification.

Nobody cares what I think about it anyway, which is good. Frankly I think Manso could've cut about 850 pages out of it. A judicious little trim.

Of course there are a million stories, many of them pretty unsavory. But my favorite anecdote (and I'm going to have to transcribe this out of the book, which I hate, and I can't even use my little paper-holding frame because it would fall apart from all the weight) concerns itself with Brando hanging upside-down.

"Marlon, in one of his frequent attempts at losing weight, decided to try the current fad of hanging from the ceiling. He had already purchased a rotating hoop-frame device and special hooked boots, but because of his girth, he found that he was unable to flip himself over in the frame. He sent Papke and two other assistants out to the garage for a winch that had been mounted on his truck, then had them bolt it to the ceiling of his bathroom.

After six hours had been spent locating the jousts in the ceiling and
setting up a twelve-volt power supply for an on/off switch, the homemade apparatus was in place and the mounting had been tested.

Soon, using the shoes from the discarded store-bought machine, Marlon was hanging in the air. A new problem quickly became apparent, though. "He was hanging head down," Papke explained, "and because of his weight, the blubber started to roll forward, almost choking him. He was coughing and muttering, unable to speak."

They immediately lowered him to the floor. Brando, however, was determined to stretch, and the solution he proposed was to try to use the winch and frame horizontally. The assistants fixed another heavy screw eye into the wall of the bathroom opposite the doorway, and once again, Marlon readied himself."

For what? Whale-stretching time? Why would anyone that fat want to hang upside-down anyway and how could it possibly help him lose weight? Maybe none of it even happened. The book begins with a long quote by Primo Levi about how most writers are bullshitters, making half the stuff up or whatever. Maybe he stretched way out about a mile thin and then snapped back like an elastic band. Maybe he turned into Rubber Man, or a giant condom, or Gumby. And who's this Papke? Sounds like a Hungarian dish to me, or half of one.

I won't be able to sleep tonight, with this vision of a 380-pound man being dragged up to his bathroom ceiling with a winch.

I coulda had class: gifs from On the Waterfront

"Things are looking up on the docks!"

"You don't remember me, do you."

"You wanna know my philosophy of life? Do it to them before they do it to you."

"I ain't no cheese eater."

"Shut up about that conscience!"

"Edie, you love me."

"I didn't say I didn't love you. I said STAY AWAY FROM ME."

"All you have to do is walk."

"Am I on my feet?"

Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.

Things I would like to do (including George)

Faugh, frick and frack, and other bad words: I just finished writing a tasty little commentary to go with this WONDERFUL essay (or shussshhhh-ay, or whatever sound the Hawaiian surf makes) which Shelley Fralic wrote, all about returning to Hawaii after 40 years. Somehow as I sought to attach the piece, my commentary appeared in a little box that scrolled down, but would only display about a paragraph at a time. Not exactly deleted, but completely inaccessible. It was hiding behind something, and it would not come out. 

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

So I gave up, and (as I have had to do so many times in my life) started over.

Husband and I have been slugging it out over Where we're Going to Go This Year, that is, if we "go" at all, if we even have sufficient bucks scraped up. But haven't we been to Hawaii six times already? Five, only five! But we've seen everything already, haven't we? Besides, what IS there to see? How many mangos can you eat in a week?

Oh, but Hawaii stirs you so much more deeply than that. Along with the jolly jiggling passionate Polynesian papaya and the matrons letting it all hang out in two-piece bathing suits because after all, THIS IS HAWAII AND IT'S ALL RIGHT, there is that whispering low of nearly-extinct tradition. The remnant is in the music, the crazy guys with the ukeleles singing the songs with all those syllables. The less-jolly ones are full of mourning and a loss we can't ever know about. And there was that movie, that gorgeous movie with George Clooney in it - what was it called? 

As if George Clooney weren't breathtaking enough, we had Hawaii towering and crashing in the background, and music which was simply hypnotic.  It's a spooky place: once on my first trip, which was not 40 but closer to 30 years ago, I glimpsed a young Polynesian woman with long, flower-garlanded blue-black hair and forever Island eyes, and thought to myself: that's the most beautiful human being I will ever see.

I don't know. I ramble, I digress. I've been all over the place lately, writing shittily or not at all because I was preoccupied with health concerns that, as usual, have turned out to be groundless, footless, bootless, artless and pennyless. (I told you I was writing shit.) In other words, like everyone else in my family it looks as if I'm going to live to be 90. I am mostly OK with that, though I do wish I had more control over the circumstances.

So NOW can I go to Hawaii? Now can I flip-flap along the beach, eat hot batter-dipped mahimahi with my fingers (standing up, wearing my beach coverup for a dress, my beach coverup that is all covered with lemon juice and grease and I don't care), now can I listen to that severely soft ssssssssssssss-ssssssssssss of wind combing through brittle palm fronds, now can I - I wonder, if all this tastiness and sensual beauty is peeled back, if there isn't something else here, some sense of an Eden we lost, but can magically return to. If we have the $15,000.00

Shelley Fralic: Coming home to memories of paradise

A holiday romance with Hawaii lingers long after the scent of hibiscus is gone

By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun columnistMarch 25, 2013

Vancouver Sun columnist Shelley Fralic in Maui.

Photograph by: Shelley Fralic , PNG

It has been 40 years, and you don’t remember much, except the wide swath of pineapple plantations clinging to the rich red earth sweeping up to the edges of the Jurassic-like volcanic ravines as you drove a rickety rental to the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina because, back then, it was pretty much the only place to stay on the west coast of Maui when you were barely 20 and hadn’t thought to make reservations.

You remember, too, the naked hippies camping to the south on Makena Beach, a motley crew that caused much controversy with the locals but have since grown up to return decades later to same spot as moneyed tourists, clad in the capitalist regalia of polo shirts and spiked Nikes to play 18 holes where they once smoked grass instead of riding on it in shaded golf carts.

And, despite the time away, you have never forgotten the smell of the air, the heat and humidity that warms your face the minute you step off the plane, the dense fragrance of lush decay and the flowery heaviness of plumeria, hibiscus and jasmine floating on the trade winds.

You are surprised that so little has changed on the island. Oh, there’s a Costco now, and a clutch of strip malls and fast food joints near the airport, and the wild west coastline that was once so bare of settlement is now often obscured by the hotels and condo developments lining the gold-sand beaches.

But there are still aren’t many dogs, or traffic jams, or people for that matter, and much of the island is still open-faced land. Out in the sea, the magnificent humpbacks still beguile on their age-old migration, breaching and slapping their flukes as if they know they are the greatest show on earth. The reefs remain natural snorkelling aquariums, and the berry-brown locals still stick their boards in the strong surf in the mid-day sun, mindful of the sharks below and the big sea turtles above.

It isn’t long before you find yourself truly on vacation, reading by the pool, bobbing in the waves, tucking into macadamia nut pancakes topped with fresh-picked bananas for breakfast, pineapple upside cake served with warm ripe papaya for lunch and anything fresh-grilled for dinner. Early in the evening, you sit on the beach-front lanai, the ocean breezes cooling the heat as you work on a bag of chewy sugar cane.

You know you are truly on vacation because the cockroaches, which are the size of the average spinster’s brooch and roam freely about your seaside complex, are less a bother than the discovery that the coconut vodka you stashed in the freezer is just about gone.

You know you are truly on vacation because you are virtually unplugged, your hand-helds mostly gathering dust on their chargers, manual dexterity required only for the zoom function on your camera and the slippery neck of a cold bottle of Corona spiked with a slice of lime.

You know you are truly on vacation because the modest amount of poundage you had purposely shed to avoid looking both pasty and pudgy in public, like a beluga stuffed in a bathing suit, returns to your backside within hours of discovering a gourmet coffee shop that makes fresh coconut macaroons the size of baseballs. Dipped in chocolate.

You know you are truly on vacation because you don’t care about much of anything, except whether or not your grandchildren need a bigger boogie board or more sunscreen on their cheeks, or if you’ll ever get the sand out of their ears.

And even though you are really, truly relaxing for the first time in a long time, there comes the moment when the invigorating feel of warm sand under your feet and this most charming of vacations give way to yearning for your own house and your own bed, and so you gladly head back to the land of the cold.

And you know you have truly been on vacation because when you return, the pile of newspapers that awaits reveals that, as you suspected, nothing much has really happened. There’s a local dust up over whale bone porn and a stolen meat shop sign, and the world is feting a humble new pope (aren’t they all humble?). Tiger Woods is seeking redemption with a reinvigorated swing and a new blond. One famous Justin has shorn his thatch of luscious locks in a quest for crowning, another is reclaiming his throne atop the pop music charts and yet another, the youngest of the triad, is dog-paddling through the quicksand of the celebrity meltdowns. The hockey team still sucks, and social media is still irksome, and it’s still getting easier/harder to buy a house in Vancouver.

As for you, your nose is still peeling and the soothing sound of Hawaii’s rhythmic crashing waves still echoes in your ears, all of it a lovely reminder that no matter the enticements of a far-off paradise, there really is no place like home.

P. S. The movie is called The Descendents and I must see it again. On a big screen, if possible, the bigger the better. Raging, rushing, sighing Hawaii, that crazy music you can't get enough of, and. . . George Clooney.

GIFs from Hell: or, My Visit to the Doctor

Sick

I am one of those people who never gets sick. Almost.

Or should I say: I am almost never one of those people, or I am one of those people who almost, or – never, or -

I don’t know what happened on March 12. It felt like a cold. Just a nuisancy thing, a premature summer cold (like the viral bout of what-I-was-sure-was-flu last July). One of those gummy-throated, slightly raw, uneasily sneezy – but you already know what I mean.

I don’t know when it pounced. Maybe the next day. Suddenly a lightning bolt slashed across my chest, my throat became so raw I couldn’t swallow, my eyes were sealed nearly shut, I shivered, I sweated, I ached, I couldn’t breathe, and I came to the conclusion that I had one of those nice little summer colds I had last July.

How do I know? My doctor told me so.

It doesn’t matter what you “have” now. Your doctor listens to your back (never your chest), then, even if it’s pleurisy or pneumonia or bubonic plague, says “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

This thing has been “going away on its own” for ten days now. I won’t get into the digestive problems. Oh yes I will. I have abdominal cramps, gas, diarrhea and it takes days to digest anything. (I am totting up all these “symptoms” just as I think of them.) Last night, trying to sleep while listening to a rhythmic bubbling, creaking groan in my chest, a sudden freshet of blood shot all over my pillowcase, presumably a nosebleed, the first one I have ever had in my life.

Nice little summer cold.

I have had the aches and the shakes. Bizarre gushing sweats alternate with freezing shivers. And twitches, very strange ones, quite violent, almost like little seizures. I get six or seven of them, one right after the other. Why? I couldn’t eat and couldn’t throw up and suffered one of those migraines that should have its own postal code.

It was the usual thing, where it would seem to get a little bit better. One day I went for a drive, came home, lay down for a moment, and lifted my head 90 minutes later, my face stuck to the pillow with God knows what.

I don’t know what got me onto the cough syrup, because I hate the stuff. Maybe it was the groany deep quivering vibrations in my chest that seemed almost like whales talking. Maybe it was coughing up all that unspeakable “stuff”. I took a shot of it once, I swear, just to put myself under. It didn’t work, because cough syrup has all sorts of stuff in it that causes a frightening rebound effect. You lie there in the dark with jangling alarm-bells going off in your head, sure you will never feel any better. Ever.

Funny sounds began to issue from my body. The first funny sound seemed to be coming from my larynx, which was as swollen as a golf ball and almost wouldn’t let me swallow. When I tried to sleep, I heard a noise like an old rope being sawed back and forth on one of those ships, you know, like on Popeye. Then, to my horror, I heard a little “hoo, hoo!” sound, as if something were alive and swimming around in there. It was the first time my larynx has ever talked back to me.

It’s a choir, of sorts, a chorus of mucus and phlegm and other disgusting fluids no one would want. My sinuses crackle and make a sound like a balloon being squeezed. When I sit up in the morning, a huge windy wheeze gusts up out of my windpipe, sounding like an old pedal organ or air brakes on a bus. It scares the shit out of me.

“You HAVE to go to the doctor,” my husband says. “What did the doctor say?” my friend asks me. She must come from the school who still believes “going to the doctor” actually has a point. I have come to believe that doctors do absolutely dick-all these days except listen to your back and push the little button on the machine that says, “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

I know that for a long time, doctors prescribed too many antibiotics. These same doctors would have us believe that this was all the fault of the patients, because they refused to leave the office without that little piece of paper.  After moaning and groaning and begging and pleading, they went home gaily waving a prescription, feeling oh-so-much-better-already. And eventually, when these drugs stopped working from overprescribing, GUESS WHOSE FAULT IT WAS?

The doctor’s? Don’t be ridiculous! Doctors are fountainheads of Wisdom and Truth. They would NEVER prescribe anything unless the patient absolutely needed it, or else got them down in a choke-hold on the floor and refused to release them until they had that little piece of paper.

The patients, self-indulgent, weak and soft in the head, DEMANDED these prescriptions. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that doctors wanted to process patients in and out of the office at light speed, and the best way to do that – the best way to get rid of them fast – was to hand them that little piece of paper.

NEXT!

As with most things, the situation has swung wildly from one stupid extreme to the other. From handing EVERYONE a prescription for banana-flavored Amoxicillin or whatever it's called just to get them out that revolving door as fast as possible, doctors now Do Not Prescribe Antibiotics. EVER. For anything. Antibiotics no longer work, you see. The reason they no longer work is that YOU asked for them all the time, you self-indulgent little whiner! You spoiled it for everyone, so now we can't prescribe them at all, or we'll Look Bad. Some big doctor, some high-up doctor, some Great Agency in the Sky that tells doctors what to do, has now told doctors Not To Prescribe Antibiotics.

EVER.

Which is why I will clearly die, rather than disgrace myself by crawling in to the doctor's office and asking please, please, PLEASE may I have some of that banana-flavored goo with the capacity to save my life.  It's been a privilege whining to you.

Best role models for kids in the '60s

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


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html