Oh rapture!: New Images of Milky the Clown

It's not every day I find a  new image (new to ME, I mean - these were likely taken 50 years ago) of the source of my childhood nightmares, Milky the Clown. Milky was the surreal symbol of Twin Pines Dairy, sponsor of Milky's Party Time and other lactitious Detroit children's programs.

This one I haven't seen before. Like a nun's habit, Milky's costume covers everything but his face, which is thickly plastered with white greasepaint like something from a movie made in 1917. And his hat. . . his hat isn't like any other clown's hat, unless you look back about 100 years.

Milky wasn't a clown of his times. This was why he was so scary. He seemed like the nightmare reverse negative of an old Betty Boop cartoon, jumping not out of an inkwell but a vat of Twin Pines milk.

Was this magic, or a form of sorcery? Was his baggy monochromatic white costume and dead-white face a deliberate attempt to mimic the ancient itinerant carnival clowns depicted by Leoncavallo in Pagliacci?

Well, maybe. Except for the pompoms.

And this one is no less than Enrico Caruso, the most famous tenor of all time. Wearing Milky's costume, or a close approximation of it.

What's the magic word? . . . Twin Pines! ("But that's two words," I used to protest, provoking offended stares.)

And never mind that Pagliaccio, upon whom Milky based his classic white pointy-hatted costume, murdered both his wife and his romantic rival, leaving a pile of bodies on the stage. The little tykes won't know anything about that, will they?

We hope not.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

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Barnes & Noble

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Thistledown Press

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Photos from hell: could they be real?

Subject: AIR FRANCE CRASH PHOTOS

The world saw the disappearance of an A330 Air France during its trans Atlantic flight between Rio to Paris.
Here are two shots taken inside the plane before it crashed.

The two photos attached were taken by one of the passengers before the aircraft crashed. This extraordinary photographer kept his cool, even in his last moments of life, to take these photos. The photos were retrieved from the camera's memory stick. You will never again see photos like this.

In the first photo, there is a gaping hole in the fuselage through which you can see the tailplane and a vertical fin of the aircraft.

In the second photo, one of the passengers is seen being sucked out of the gaping hole.

The photos were found in a digital Casio Z750, amidst the debris. Although the camera was destroyed, the Memory Stick was recovered. Investigating the serial number of the camera, the owner was identified as Paulo G. Muller, an actor of a theatre for children known in the outskirts of Porto Alegre.  It can be imagined that he was standing during the turbulence, he managed to take these photos, just seconds after the tail loss and the aircraft plunged. The structural stress probably ripped the engines away, diminishing the falling speed, protecting the electronic equipment but unfortunately not the victims. Paulo Muller leaves behind two daughters, Bruna and Beatriz.

(The truth, I think): The above article and the photos taken from inside the plane were on a site called Rumor Mill News, making them suspicious right away. One of the comments was "these were from the first season of Lost"; another claimed they were photoshopped.

Probably, but such a thing is possible. Some day it will happen, or perhaps it has already and was suppressed for the sake of surviving family members.

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Good Night!

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Star Trek Follies: some choice bloopers (again, and again, and again)

And so. . . good night, good night, good night.

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Don't ask, don't tell

 

 

It's late, I'm tired, my eyes are burning with allergies, but there's this doll. . .

 

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Yes, Master

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"WHALES, Mr. Melville?" - Part II

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/03/the_future_is_no_fun_self_publishing_is_the_worst/


The above article in Salon by novelist Ted Heller was a real eye-opener for me, and I recognized many of the toils and snares he writes about. I sent the following response to my good buddy Matt Paust, and I think it's so blippin' brilliant that I just have to post it here!

Wow. This is one of the best things I’ve read on the subject of trying to straddle the Brave New World and the Sucks-to-high-heaven Old World of publishing. He sounds bitter and extremely hurt, and is so raw emotionally he’s like an open wound. 

But this is the trouble with writers, myself included (of course). A real business person rolls with the punches. I look at my daughter, who is a tough-minded TV journalist who does NOT take things personally. On her first day on the job as a reporter, a producer came up to her – oh goody, a producer, maybe she’s going to praise my first story – and said, “Shannon. Someone has to tell you this. Your makeup. It’s way off.” “Way off?” “You look like a ghost on the screen. Your face is disappearing.” “What should I do?” “Really trowel it on. I mean it – way thicker than you think you need.”

What was her response? She told me, excitedly, about her first day, the challenges, etc. Then she said – and she was not kidding – “God, I’m glad they told me about the makeup. My face was totally washed out. I fixed it today and it looks way better.” I mean it. Her makeup. Most women would whimper in the powder room, and she took it as useful advice.

Another thing – she applied for a consumer advocate job and a colleague kept saying, “You’re going to get it. You’re going to get it. You’re the best one for the job.” She didn’t get it. Instead, they hired someone from Toronto (the big bad city around here) named Linda Steele, who has since become a kind of superstar on the channel. I asked Shannon gingerly what she thought of Linda. “Oh, she’s great. I’m a big fan of hers. You know, she really is the best one for the job.”

Then I look at the cringeing and whinge-ing writers do, the minute injustice-collecting (this guy remembered every slight in gory detail) – and no one is a worse offender at it than me – and I wonder, are we really good business people? The topic of failure once came up, and Shannon said, “Yeah, lots of things have happened, but I don’t consider them failures.” Perhaps as a result, she has stayed afloat like a plucky duck and will probably go on to other things when she’s ready. (The other thing is, she is NOT married to her job and often says, “God, I hate being on television. The only part I like is the research and the legwork” – in other words, what most people would consider the drudgery.)

All this going on and on about my wonderful child (and I learn from her much more than she ever learned from me) is just to say, it’s hard for most of us (including Ted Heller? By the way, is he any relation to Joseph Heller?), because we DO put our nerves and flesh into the job and have no objectivity. I guess if we DID have objectivity, we wouldn’t have the sensitivity to be writers. These novels, they’re our babies. If someone dissed my makeup, I’d run home and go into a depression.

Another thing I notice – he wrote a great article, by the way, and I do see myself in it in many places (if on a much-smaller scale) – he does not mention social networking. He goes on and on about newspapers. He probably does network, because we all do, but it isn't uppermost in his article. Getting newspaper reviews and contacting editors seem to be at the top of his list. It's been my experience that after a couple of weeks, glowing newspaper reviews are fairly good for wrapping fish and almost never lead to decent sales. 

Sorry if this is wordy. I worked for newspapers for many years (reviewing – I did well over 300) and noticed the assignments were dwindling. Book sections were withering away, to be replaced by wire service "canned” pieces that had the flavor of “this guy got paid off”. If he is still thinking newspapers, he’s drilling a dry hole. I lost my Edmonton Journal position (and it actually was a position – I was with them more often than not for nearly 30 years) when my editor phoned me and said, “We’ve tanked, there’s no more books section. Sorry to see you go.”

Well, I couldn’t take THAT personally.

I think what you’re doing is really what you need to do. Get on the internet, use it, get on social networking wherever you can. Don’t wait for editors to email you back because they won’t. They’re inundated. Paper books are on the way out, and authors (even well-established ones) are getting desperate. Agents have gone over to non-fiction and children’s series, because that’s where the money is. They can’t afford to starve representing “literary fiction” or even fiction-fiction because it’s too dicey.

Nobody ever mentions this, but the real money is in celebrity memoirs. I watch some of the entertainment shows (blush – it’s professional development!) and in EVERY case Deborah Norville or whoever will say (i . e. about Amanda Knox or whoever is the narcissistic ditzhead of the week), “In her new book, to be released June 1. . . “ Billboard, billboard! Flashing phosphorescent billboard! And yet, I think these books also have a very short shelf life. I just stumbled across my copy of John Edwards’ memoir. John WHO?

In spite of the fact that Amanda Knox received an advance of something like $2.5 million, these books are nothing but literary porn which is all written by the same person anyway.  The flat, cliched style reveals the fact that they're clones churned out by drones. (Now there is a lucrative field! Ghost-writing. Can you imagine how much you’d make pretending you’re Amanda Knox?).

This is getting very long, but I’ve been ruminating on all this for a very long time now. Everything has shifted seismically, and to be honest it doesn’t look like I’m going to get very far. I’ve tried a few less-orthodox things lately, but since I think it won’t happen if I talk about it, I’m not talking about it. The thing is, if a writer DOES think outside the box, they’re often humiliated for being arrogant or unrealistic, but if they don’t, they’re “-------".

This is why writers go crazy. Or is it the craziness, the abnormal empathy and sensitivity (and how often have I been accused of being “too sensitive”, as if it’s a crime) that makes us write? Most of us need to write. It’s what we do AND who we are. It’s that last part that does us in. To refer to my illustrious/practical daughter again: it’s really NOT who we are. It’s a job. Our work is a commodity that can be bought and sold. In fact, in being published, we are turning our work into a commodity. This is what we want, isn’t it? So over and over again, we’re going to get some version of “Whales, Mr. Melville?” It comes with the territory.

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Good Lord, it's the Rabbitville Gazette!

GOOD LORD! It's the Rabbitville Gazette!

This is one of those oh-no-it-can't-be-so things, something dredged up from so far down in the well that I just assumed I had imagined it.

When I was in Miss Wray's class at McKeough School in Chatham, in Grade 3/4 (taken in one year so I could go to a special Grade 5, one of those '60s educational experiments that led to total chaos and zero learning), sometimes we had a bit of free time. We could read whatever we wanted. I remember reading something called the Rabbitville Gazette, in some magazine or other. In fact, I liked the Rabbitville Gazette so much that I pawed my way through stacks of magazines to find issues that had the Rabbitville Gazette in them (because I soon figured out that it didn't appear in every issue).

Even then, I was ruthless in my digging around. Even then, I was a bloodhound. I WOULD find every issue of the Rabbitville Gazette, and I would read them all.

For some reason the name popped into my head today, I googled it, and. . .

YES! It really existed. It appeared montly in Jack and Jill magazine. I didn't subscribe to Jack and Jill, but it was common in classrooms. (I got a very strange magazine called Wee Wisdom which seemed to come out of the 1890s.)

I can see why I liked the Rabbitville Gazette. Though I can't read very much of it, it's funny and charming  (I mean: Zoo Gnu News? A column called Useless Information?) And the Halloween "ghost editor" is best of all, though of course it would sail over the head of the average kid.

I like to picture a magazine run by rabbits. There would be no shortage of staff. Around March or April, everyone would suddenly disappear. Strange thumping noises would be common. Every once in a while there would be a sharp crack, followed by a piercing shriek.

Columns would be written about the atrocity of the lucky rabbit's foot, cautioning readers to count their feet every morning.

Not a lot of work would get done, rabbits being mostly concerned with other things. This is why they had to call in that "ghost editor".

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

Order The Glass Character from:

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

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

The ultimate writer's rejection

"Whales, Mr. Melville?"


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Just a little something I threw together

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Jake and Harold: could they be blood kin?

Writers love to do this. They love to cast their own movies. The movies that won't be made out of the novels they will never publish. It sustains them, somehow.

I've posted on this before, but it's time to revisit. I have a couple of candidates in mind for the role of Harold Lloyd (and guess how I'm going to audition them. The casting couch is still very much in operation.) One was Zachary Quinto, until I realized his energy is all wrong (just too self-contained and subdued, though he made a marvelous Spock in the latest Trek movie). Then I went and saw something with Jake Gyllenhaal in it - he doesn't look like his photos, you know, but has a sort of a strange, vaguely cockeyed look and in some angles is almost nerdy. He has a much beefier physique than Harold, who did 85% of his own stunts and was made of springs and rubber bands. But he could capture Harold's energy, I know he could, and he has those puppy eyes and that tinge of love-me narcissism (just a tinge).

No, I wouldn't say they look alike because Harold's face is much more aquiline, if that's the word - narrow of face and nose, with a classic jaw that kept him handsome until the end of his life. And that three-cornered smile could be a trifle vulpine, evoking a forest faun or perhaps the Great God Pan.

But what about the vulpinosity (or vulpitudinousness) of this shot? There's more than a hint of it there.

Jakey Boy loves to seduce the camera, at least in his still shots. I still think his looks are kind of unorthodox, almost as if one side of his face doesn't quite match the other.

He has that bow-shaped-lips thing going on which can transform a man's face, giving it an appealing androgynous touch. But here it is on someone else.

(Hard to believe this is a goofy comedian, with that super-serious look.)

Somebody's rockin' my dreamboat. . . 

But what could be dreamier than this shot of a very young Harold, looking awfully satisfied about something? In this shot, I think I see a blood-kin kind of resemblance. In fact, it's quite startling.

Yes, the breathtaking Jake can be a bespectacled nerd, reminding you of your Grade 9 Physics teacher. The glasses suit him, somehow.

But they suit him even better.

POSTSCRIPT. Do you think I spent hours finding these? I found these two in fifteen seconds. I am not kidding you. The photos just glom together magnetically. I don't know what's going on here.

'Yeah, I always loved Uncle Harold. . . people used to say I looked like him. . . "

And just one more pair (I promise) just to prove they were both. . .

CROSSEYED!

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