The day I saw Harold's shorts

I want to tell you about a really bizarre dream I had last night. Let’s see if I can make the weird pieces of it fit together. Someone, maybe my mother when she was younger, was holding up a baby, swinging it like a prize turkey from the straps of a front-carrier. She said something like, “Do you want this?” I was a bit embarrassed because I wasn’t sure. Then I saw Suzanne Lloyd, Harold Lloyd's granddaughter, and it appeared that she was giving the baby to me. She was sort of bequeathing it to me in a way that was actually very tender. So I said yes. Then I realized the “baby” was a reborn doll, one of those silicone things that looks so real it’s creepy. Nevertheless, I began to take care of the doll exactly as if it were real.

This dream didn’t lead to anything, but, like most dreams,  just trickled away. In spite of how it sounds, it wasn't clear who the baby was supposed to be (though it was a boy with black hair). I was once told that baby dreams represent the rebirth of self. Hooey, really, unless rubber dolls express the soul. 

So what IS a doll, anyway: a representation, a symbol? We still seem to need them. Right now as I write this, a Harold Lloyd doll sits on my desk, perpetually smiling. I designed him a couple of years ago, stitched him together and made him saddle shoes and a little straw hat. A juju, no doubt, emanating a spooky black-and-white power. 

Which brings me to my central point:  yesterday, for the first time in my life,  I saw Harold Lloyd’s shorts.

Shorts. Yes. Specifically, these were his first popular films, made between 1917 and 1919. He had just latched on to his Glass Character (the eccentric name Lloyd used to describe the “glasses character” that made him famous), and was testing it out in one-reel comedies that raced along at a terrific pace.

Before these came on, I was having another attack of “Lloyd synchronicity”. I’ve written about this before: strange coincidences, encounters with the name Lloyd or even images of Harold himself. The other day, I could tell it was starting again: I watched a quirky show called William Shatner’s Weird or What?, an episode in which the name Lloyd appeared three times (two different scientists, and a producer). I thought to myself: OK, I’ve had the trifecta, so what if I had a fourth? You don’t need a fourth, a little voice in my head warned me.

Only a moment later I changed channels, and . . . there was my fourth. My hair nearly stood on end, just like Harold’s: it was a stylish little animated segment, only a few seconds long, of a cartoon Harold Lloyd swinging from a huge clock, the image that made him famous all over the world.

So my trifecta had somehow evolved into a quadrifecta. But this was before the shorts, which I encountered quite by accident the next evening when I flipped to Turner Classics, my default channel. (This is my sanctuary when “reality” TV and other mediocre programming becomes too much, or not enough.) There was Suzanne Lloyd, yes, the same Suzanne Lloyd as in my dream, talking to Ben Mankiewicz about the restoration of Harold’s early one-reel comedies.

The early comedies! I hadn’t seen them, because for the most part they weren’t available, or existed only in muddy unrestored versions. I had that pulled-back-and-forth feeling I always get when faced with a new Lloyd treasure. I wanted to see it, and I didn't want to see it.

I saw it.

The only reason I wouldn’t want to see it is the fact that a few years ago, I wrote a novel with Harold Lloyd at its core. At this point, editors and publishers are kind of looking at it and not seeing it. I even had one tell me, “I don’t think the public is interested in silent movies” (and this was right around the time The Artist, a silent movie about silent movies, was winning the Best Picture and Best Actor Oscars). What I`m getting now is, “The 1920s is too out of date, no one wants to read about it.” So the Jazz Age is boring?  I want to say to them: does the name Jay Gatsby mean anything to you?

Harold, Harold! If only you hadn’t smiled that way. I don’t know, he's contagious or something, and somehow (after all these years) he finds his way into your heart. This is why he got so famous to begin with (along with certain other things, like charisma, inventiveness, great stories, dramatic acting skills – and, to top all that – being damn funny!).

So what started all this? Why Harold Lloyd? I was initially led into this exploration by seeing his back. Not many actors can act with their back, but he could.  I had Turner Classics on and was half-asleep, when a “figure” appeared walking in a certain jaunty manner, walking away from the camera I mean. All we saw was his back. I found myself saying out loud, “That’s Harold Lloyd.”

I don’t know how I knew.

Of course I remember seeing the iconic photo of Harold dangling from the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up. It was in some big coffee-table book of my childhood, a book I loved – I think it was called The Movies or some-such thing. I don’t know if I ever saw a film clip of that scene – perhaps, in one of those awful compilations that used to appear in movie theatres in the 1960s. Awful because shown at the wrong speed, horribly edited, and scored with clangy ridiculous music, not to mention embarrassing narration which was completely unnecessary in an age when story was conveyed visually and didn’t need idiotic explanations.

Anyway, the hunt was on for YouTube snippets, and I quickly found them and became addicted. I didn’t even think of writing about him at that point because the task seemed too huge. I was digging around the internet and finding things, putting scraps together into a meaningful whole. I had ordered the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection on DVD, but I hadn’t seen it yet.

It was a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in my office not thinking of anything, in a sort of twilight state, when – something landed on me, “fell” on me like those big anvils in cartoons. BONGGGG. My next thought was, “Oh, noooooo.”

No, because an idea had fallen on me that I knew I couldn’t say no to. An idea that would probably kill me, or at least break my heart.

Then it was: you have to. No, no! You must have the wrong person.

Reluctantly, I rolled up to my computer. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to sketch a little, to get some ideas down.

Three hours later I looked up, and I realized I had the nucleus of my novel. Cells had begun to split and multiply like mad. I was powerless in the hands of Harold.

In spite of my early trepidations, this was the most enjoyable writing project I had ever undertaken. I couldn’t wait to get to the computer every morning, couldn’t wait to solve another mystery. The story evolved and evolved.  I became, I suppose, wildly overconfident, just certain that this novel would be snapped up somewhere, that someone else would feel the same way I did.

At the same time, that weird “Lloyd synchronicity” began, coming thick and fast. At the peak of it, it was averaging three or four times a day: a street sign, a name on the side of a train, an actor on TV, a  realtor, a bull terrier. One tiny movie, The Wrong Box with Michael Caine, had three (or maybe four) Lloyds in it. It was spooky, but I never figured out what it meant.

One day, driving towards North Vancouver on a busy highway, we crossed an ordinary residential street that intersected the road, leading to what looked like a pastoral small town. I was almost annoyed when I saw that it was called Lloyd Avenue. The town was like Brigadoon, weird and highly unlikely. I glanced to the right and said, “Oh, NO.” There was a huge church just sitting there as if it had popped up out of the ground. GLORIA PENTECOSTAL TABERNACLE. I saw two street signs intersecting: the church was at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd.

I guess I’d better tell you that Gloria was the name of Lloyd’s daughter.

And oh, there was more! Watching old Twilight Zone episodes, I always had an eerie feeling when the end credits came on. Well might I have felt strange: one night the name Suzanne Lloyd flashed on the screen. Not the same one, of course, but an actress with the same name. Not "close" but bang-on.

I won't count all those other strange things, such as pictures jumping off the walls or setting a knife down on the edge of a plate and hearing it buzz for about ten seconds (only to have it stop, then start again), or losing things and finding them in a different part of the house. No doubt it was seismic activity, or the weird energy that turned the TV on and off by itself when my daughter hit puberty (not a ghost, my medium friend assured me, but concentrated energy manifesting in all sorts of weird ways). I also can't explain why none of this scared me, though at times it could get annoying.

But publishers don't care about psychic phenomena, real or imagined. They want to make money, and one can't blame them. Though quite a few houses wanted to see the work, I wondered if they were actually reading it. I kept hearing that things were tough all over, that lots of writers were being affected by the economic downturn and the fact that “people don’t read any more” (a blatant untruth).

Battlescarred, I retreated. I retreated for a long time. About eleven months. I did not want to see Lloyd movies or read Lloyd material, and I certainly did not want to look at my manuscript. I assumed it was over.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a strange sort of thaw. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up and found myself back in Lloyd territory again, maybe looking at pictures at first. Throwing out a crumb about the novel. I posted something on Facebook, when my Facebook account had been dormant for a year. The Lloyd synchronicity that had come so thick and fast, then vanished just as quickly, started up again. Was I imagining the whole thing?

When I saw Harold's shorts, he came racing frenetically back into my life.

I don’t regret all of this, or maybe I do, or else I am just powerless. Whenever I am about to walk away, the path doubles back.  I am reminded of one of Harold's title cards: "Now then, everybody hold on tight, we're going around a curve." As the song says, there is always something there to remind me.

It’s kind of like a marriage that didn’t work out. Yet you can’t quite quit the person, still want to see him, DO see him and then sort of regret it. I saw Harold's shorts yesterday because I couldn’t get enough of him, this dazzlingly charming, rascally young man who probably had no idea how famous he was going to be (and for how long).  Along with everything else that was extraordinary about him, he was absolutely gorgeous.

At the same time, I felt like my heart was caving in.

Well, can’t I just enjoy his films and forget about the novel? Does the word “no” mean anything to you? The novel is my love letter, not just to Harold but to his times. Most silent comedies got buried: they rotted from neglect, burst into flames or were just thrown away. Was that OK, had they had their few minutes on-screen and in history? Were they even relevant any more, did anybody care?  

Why should we care? Those little flickers of captured magic will never happen again.  They cannot happen again because those times are gone, that style of comedy, that style of living and breathing and being, is long gone, and this is the only moving record we will ever have. And we will never have Harold again, because that kind of genius does not happen twice.

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Blogger's Post-post. Though I decided not to change or update this piece, written several years ago, there WAS a development about a year later: Harold got published, or I did, or, at least, The Glass Character did. Though it was a thrill for me to be in print again (I do have two other novels, dear readers, that you can still snag on Amazon if you really want them), I was to find out the hard way that publishing had changed in the few years I had been away: it got harder, a LOT harder to make a go of it. Sales weren't great, and unfortunately, in this age of likes and views and clickbait, the numbers are everything.

I get depressed about this sometimes, yes I do, but I have no regrets about my Harold journey. After much discouragement, I decided to keep up my Harold Facebook page, in part due to the sheer volume of material I collected about him over five years or so. It would be nice to share it with people who love Harold. So it ain't over yet. I still harbour this dream. . . every novelist has it, so please don't look at me that way! I want some Hollywood producer to see the light on this thing, and make it into a big-box movie.

What frustrates me is that I know such a thing is possible, in that I believe the potential is there - the quality is there. What would I be doing wasting my time writing junk? But it's a million light years away because I have no "connections". I'm a good writer, but a lousy hustler. So the book kind of went the way of my other two novels. 

Nobody warns incipient writers about this - that the writing is the easy part - and even getting a publisher, relative to the rest of it, is easy too. What's hard, and absolutely indispensible in the industry, is "making it", and that is ALL about numbers and nothing else.

But you know, people, you can still buy my novel! Just click on the link (above) to my Amazon Author Page. It's all there - all three of my novels, in fact. The flip side of the Darwinian ruthlessness of the internet is that nothing ever quite goes away. It just goes on sale. On Amazon.com.

 

Quite simply, the cutest video EVER SEEN!

My 40th anniversary: something you remember

The most momentous times in your life have a way of stopping you in your tracks.

Or is it like this? You never know how momentous those times are until they go rushing past you.

As Oscar Levant (or was it Oscar Wilde? Almost everyone gets them mixed up) once said, “Happiness isn’t something you experience, it’s something you remember.”

Ah, yes. Yes, once. Once I was happy.

What’s happy, anyway? I’ve never been one to experience long sweeps of unbroken happiness. I’ve always found a way to spoil it somehow. So much of life is lived in the middle, muddled through while you’re busy making other plans.

Once, forty years ago (today!), I was a 19-year-old girl, I was clueless, I was profoundly in love, and I got married. I have been trying to write about it ever since.

It’s impossible, like writing about God (though neither of us are remotely godlike). Somebody once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and that’s nothing to writing about a 40-year marriage. Which is not to say I've never tried: since 1973 I've written newspaper columns, blog posts, epic poetry, and even a song I recorded on a CD, all of which made him cry. But did any of it really express the truth?

I will say that this particular anniversary really bothered me. It’s that “forty” thing. It’s so foursquare, so cornery and table-like, so lost-in-the-wilderness-ish, so Noah’s-rainstorm-ish (though 40 days and 40 nights of rain is nothing compared to these parts). "Fat and forty". "Fifty-four forty or fight" (and what the hell does that mean, anyway?). It’s like no other number. Heavy, dense, blockish, a complete square, a cube of lead.

It makes me feel, not so much old, as abandoned by time. All the best times rushed by so fast that they barely left an imprint. It’s like that superb Truman Capote quote from a few posts ago: "Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented."

I had traumatic times that nearly finished me and left scars on my family, and now I know it was from an illness, not any cruelty or weakness on my part. If I had been weak, all that would be left is a tombstone. I won't recount them now, because I don't have to - living through them once was enough.

So why aren’t I writing about Bill? He's half of this, isn't he? This past year has brought great change, yet we seem to be getting along for the most part. He has retired, and that has been a huge thing for him. He’s the type of person who keeps busy, but his busyiness has no real substance to it intellectually. If it weren’t for my alligator-wrestling engagement with the writing process every day, I might be in the same place.

A small surprise, or maybe not so small, is the fact that I usually don't feel like killing him. He slips around and does his thing while I concentrate ferociously on my work or making stuffed critters for the grandkids. He comes and goes. We take walks around LaFarge Lake and look at the ducks (a favorite activity: the ducks are very entertaining). We eat cheap because we don't have a lot of money. 

I honestly wondered how it would be with his constant presence in the house, after all those years of having the place to myself. We fairly recently had one huge fight that I worked into a piece of fiction about my ambivalence over turning 40. Afterwards I said to him, “Do you expect us never to fight at all?” The same things always happen: God, are marriages stamped out with a cookie-cutter, or what? Why do fights always come out the same? Why is the same ammunition pulled out, decade after decade?  I know how much he has on me, and it terrifies me into keeping my worst objections to myself.

But he has rotten little habits too, the very worst being chuckling when I am really furious and have a serious, legitimate grievance. He doesn’t laugh out loud, just smiles and bobs his head. I could kill him at such times, and why not? Could anything be more soul-negating than having your partner of 40 years LAUGH when you are angry and hurt and desperate for understanding?

I have told him one thousand times how much this devastates me. And he still does it. Every time.

It’s  a way of slicking me off. One time he said to me, Margaret, I HAVE to ignore you or I just wouldn’t be able to stand it. That’s how I cope with you.

I’d say all the good things about him now, but it’s my party and I’ll bitch if I want to.

I used to go on and on – I don’t any more, cuzzadafact that now I know it isn’t true – about what a miracle our marriage was because our temperaments and our interests/proclivities are so different, so nearly the opposite, and yet. . .

I know now that’s complete bullshit. We are EXACTLY THE SAME.

We both have analytical minds. We are both intensely curious and need a great deal of mental stimulation. We are both ferociously loyal, stubborn, territorial, profoundly devoted to family, furious when faced with insincerity and other forms of bullshit, oversensitive, sentimental (he’s worse than me, WAY worse, and cries at commercials), opinionated, and doggedly, bashing-the-head-against-the-brick-wall persistent. We laugh at the same things, which is no small matter. We are two introverts, two INFJs, two cave bears who found each other and chose, without consciously deciding, to mate.

Similar enough for you? Why did it only take 40 years for me to figure that out? We even have a similar interest in science, though mine is just sprouting up due to the sometimes-enlightening things I see on what remains of educational TV. (Remember how TLC stands for The Learning Channel, and A and E is Arts and Entertainment? Like, Honey Boo-Boo is art.) He'll tell me, "There's a show on National Geographic Channel tonight about the Neanderthal genetic code." (He knows I'm crazy for anthropology.) I'll say, "Museum Secrets is all about the technology of medieval weaponry." We'll probably watch these shows separately, but isn't it nice we know each other's tastes?

Marriage is sort of profound, and sort of mundane, an arrangement. Even a deal. Sounds awful, but since it involves everyday routine, it’s true. Every deep relationship has rules. Yes, RULES. Try breaking them some time. Try stepping on your partner’s personal minefield and see what happens to you. And you never marry just one person. If you’re close at all, you drag your family history behind you like a five-thousand-pound circus tent. If you have children together, you literally mingle and commingle your genetic material into a new person. It’s fantastic, it’s incredible, and it happens every day.

We all live in the moment, but it’s something of a bubble, a fragile one that can be pricked by anything. The past usually comes back, not in a flood, but in scenes, parts of scenes, brief flashes. I am immensely gratified by YouTube, because my memory of all those moments from TV that I saw at age six are accurate down to the bone. TV themes, cartoons, Howdy Doody. . . PROOF! Proof that yes, this IS how things happened, see, see, I was right, my memory of things is crystalline and perfect, and you with your mossy-brained amnesia couldn't be more wrong.

I like this sort of thing, I like being right, but he never acknowledges it. He just goes about his business, frying eggs or doing something under the sink. This is what it’s like to be married for forty years, or maybe four minutes. And at this time of life, you begin to dread, absolutely dread being left alone. 

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The man who ate himself to death

TLC followed Ricky Naputi for years for their special, “900 Pound Man: The Race Against Time.” Naputi lived in Guam and had not been out of his apartment in years because of his weight. It was estimated he consumed about 10,000 calories a day and had grown in size to 900 pounds at one point.

He was cared for by his wife, Cheryl, who was loyally by his side through everything. She dealt with struggles, like not being able to consummate their marriage, but loved her husband.

He’d been told to lose weight before he could undergo a surgery that could potentially save his life. Unfortunately, Naputi didn’t make it to that. His wife was by his side and she was the one who found him and made the 9-1-1 call, which was played on the special.

“He was OK. I don’t know what happened,” she told the operator. “I was just laying here.”

Paramedics quickly arrived and tried to revive Naputi, working for an hour, but it was too late. The official cause of death was morbid obesity. Ricky Naputi was 39 years old when he died.

I have to confess I am hooked on "fat shows", even though I watch them through my fingers. What absolutely amazes me is how similar they are. This one was more disturbing than most, not just for the fact that this enormous naked man lay on a huge bed in the same room for years and years, but because SOMEONE helped him get that way, or even - it could be argued - actually made him that way.

There's always a wife, usually submissive, usually so codependent she seems to have no emotional boundaries at all. Since thousands of calories don't drift through the air and magically land in his mouth, "guess who" must carry them to his bedside year after year. And yet, this crucial issue is never addressed the way it needs to be. There is never a direct confrontation, just gentle reminders that maybe she should go out and buy some vegetables.

I watched this show, and I wanted to throw something at the screen. Ricky's wonderful, loyal, devoted wife who said she loved him more than anything in the world was murdering him, plate by greasy plate. She would cook and serve him literally anything he wanted, in any quantity, at any time. Her explanation was, "My husband wears the pants in the family" (ironic considering he was naked all the time, clothes that size being out of the question).

As usual, the wife cared for her husband's every need (except sex - he wasn't capable of that and the marriage had never been consummated), wiping his creases and washing his hair as if he were an enormous half-ton baby. After a while it became obvious that her need to do this was far greater than his need to receive it.

But I was even more furious at the way they pleaded for help, often in a whiny, weepy way, then refused help when it came, blew it off as soon as they were given an ultimatum or even mere instructions about the absolute necessity of losing some serious weight before having gastric bypass surgery.

Maybe because of all these TV shows, gastric bypass surgery is now considered the Answer to Everything in morbid obesity circles. There have been whole shows dedicated to it, and all the recipients seem to be success stories. But just lately, I've seen three shows where the results were not so positive. In each case, the "half-ton" subject (and TLC does like to use that term) died in their 30s before they could be helped.

Former pop singer and general professional whiner Carnie Wilson has made a side show of her own weight battles, having her bypass surgery broadcast live on the internet (and what if she had died on the table?), going blatantly public with her dramatic weight loss which she was apparently thrilled with (but I wasn't buying it: she did not look happy at all). Then came news the weight had started to creep back on. Then gallop. Next she was on Oprah, weeping histrionically to everyone that she was an alcoholic because of her "issues" (the main one being having Brian Wilson for a father). Then she was scheduling another bypass. Then. . . 

The bizarre world of "reality" TV has either spawned or showcased a new kind of narcissistic personality disorder characterized by a sense of entitlement. Fix me, or else. Ricky Naputi managed to attract the attention of one obesity specialist after another, some of whom flew halfway around the world to counsel him at his bedside. He sort of went blank during these sessions, not really looking at the doctor or responding, and at one point his wife grunted, began to text someone (a complaint to somebody, no doubt) and walked out of the room. 

And this after an Australian surgeon laid it on the line for them in a way which they might have seen as direct, respectful and a huge relief. I like directness, and hard as it is, I believe in taking responsibility for your problems, no matter how overwhelming or complex. This fellow was giving the Naputis a way out - you could be walking in a year, Ricky was told - and over and over again they sloughed it off and went back to their termite queen syndrome (which in this case, given the lack of sex, felt squirmingly like a feeder/gainer scenario in which one partner stuffs the other into complete immobility).

They wanted the problem fixed, but they didn't want to do anything. She in particular offended me with her vagueness, her claims to love him, and her bizarre 9-1-1 call at the end in which she seemed vague, slurry and stoned.

That may have been an underlying issue here. The fact that she did not even attend her husband's memorial service, not to mention her cliched statement that Ricky was in a better place where he could finally walk around, did not bespeak any genuine grief. There were no tears, there was no visible pain, only a sort of blandness. The fact is, one way or another, she killed her husband, maybe to lift an awful burden off her back. A burden she had aided and abetted for sick reasons of her own.

If someone is an accessory to murder, shouldn't there be some sort of penality? If you overfed a dog to the point where it couldn't walk, wouldn't the SPCA likely intervene?.

When I was a kid, we had a neighbor named Ruth who didn't have too many friends. Since my mother had caseloads instead of friendships, she took her into the fold in the most condescending way possible, but since Ruth was desperate, she took the bait. 

The reason Ruth didn't have too many friends is that she was fat. She must have weighed somewhere between 250 and 280 pounds, enormous by the standards of the day. 

The truth is, until the last decade or so I never even HEARD of anyone weighing more than 500 pounds, or cases of people being stuck to chairs or sofas, having to be cut out of their houses only to die in hospital, bloating up to termite-queen size as "someone", usually a wife and sometimes a mother, dutifully trotted to their side every day with heaping plates of fatal toxins. 

It wouldn't look so "loving" or "loyal" or "devoted" if a wife brought syringes of heroin to her incapacitated junkie husband, or bottles of scotch to fuel her alcoholic husband's oblivion and despair. Food is different, I guess. It's "love", apparently, or what passes for love in a culture that seems to be bent on self-destruction. Food is an obsession now, with bizarre competitive cooking shows proliferating, and - in spite of all the pressure to be thin and all the dire warnings about obesity - restaurants serving a whole cow on a bun or desserts with thousands of grams of fat in them towering to the ceiling.

Another curious thing - if this can be called curious, and not totally disgusting - it's been years and years since I heard a certain term which used to be universally applied to describe the greedy, excessive consumption of food. Hint: it used to be considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Can you guess what it is?

It isn't used any more because the super-morbidly-obese now have "issues" and can't be stigmatized by such awful labels. But why was gluttony, the constant, excessive cramming of food into the mouth, considered a deadly sin in the first place? Could it have something to do with the destruction of human life?

The Naputis may have asked for help, but when that help was offered, they pushed it away and went back to what they had always done. They are part of  a new phenomenon (for I truly believe this is new and not just "being reported more") that reflects a certain philosophy which is even more morbid than obesity. It is as if our main purpose in the 21st century is not to be productive or even to explore life's deepest mysteries, but to consume, consume, consume. 

The sickest, most destructive and unhealthy habits are increasingly becoming normalized. Kids are getting fat because they sit around eating and don't move. And food, the excessive consumption of the wrong kind of food, is evolving into a kind of sport.

If you can eat it all at once, you see, you can have it for free. How great is that?

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Brando's pants: how they changed the world

Maybe you remember, but probably you don't, the book I'm not reading on Marlon Brando, the thousand-plus-page leg-numb-er by Peter Manso, the one I read a million years ago and refuse to ever read again.
But somehow chunks of text are levitating off the page and insinuating themselves into my brain.

How could you not be interested in a man who, according to Manso, revolutionized not only American theatre and cinematic expression, but the way men wore their pants? Like Gable shedding his undershirt, Brando wearing crotch-huggers inspired a whole generation to follow suit. And they never looked back.

The wardrobe mistress for  Brando's breakout stage role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire knew she faced special challenges in dressing Stanley. Finally she decided to base his clothing on a crew of ditch-diggers she had seen in New York, their clothes so dirty "that they had stuck to their bodies. It was sweat, of course, but they looked like statues. I thought, That's the look I want. . . the look of animalness."

After shrinking his tshirts and dyeing them pink to make them look like flesh under the lights, ripping the shoulder to make it look as if some woman had attacked him, she came to the issue of his pants. This is where the magic happened. (I hope to Christ you can read this, cuz I'm not typing all THIS out no matter how interesting his pants are.)

In the late '40s, this was some big shit. Brando was still in his early 20s then, prime meat. 

It gets better.

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

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Dancing in the light: little ballerinas

Lauren and Erica Gunning (remember their names!) eagerly anticipate their dance recital on June 1. Their numbers are top secret, but I did sneak in on a rehearsal of Erica's spectacular turn as a jungle beast in Madagascar. The black tutu is a nice touch, but I am not sure the Monster High pink-and-black argyle socks quite match. As for Lauren, she's poofy pink sweetness (with sequins!)

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

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And now. . . for our National Anthem

Ô Canada!

Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

O Canada!
Land of our forefathers
your brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
Because your arm can wield the sword,
and it is ready to carry the cross.
your history is an epic
Of the most brilliant exploits.
Your valour steeped in faith

Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.

The Canadian National Anthem may be many things, but one thing it ain't is colorful.

It's all those endless "stand on guard"s. And that stolid bit about "true patriot love/in all thy sons command", which people don't understand at all and want to eliminate altogether because it includes the poisonous word "sons".

For those who've never encountered it before, here it is, the one we use now,  sung at sports events by people who generally forget the words:

O Canada

Our home and native land

True patriot love in all our sons command

With glowing hearts we see thee rise

The True North strong and free

From far and wide, O Canada

We stand on guard for thee

God keep our land glorious and free

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

That's three "stand on guards", but in an earlier version there were, I think, five.

Most Canadians are only vaguely aware that our national anthem was originally written in French. We "took" French in school - it was mandatory to "take" French, and one of the things we took was O Canada. We even had to sing it in French once in a while, as an exercise, but not once was it ever translated into English. Now that strikes me as completely bizarre. Didn't they want us to know?

Just from my sadly-limited French vocabulary, I had some idea the English words didn't match up, but this - this is a Grand Canyon of difference. Because you can't translate an anthem word-for-word and have it make sense, and because a more naturalistic translation won't scan properly and fit within the tune, the original lyric was basically scrapped. In English-speaking Canada, it has been virtually lost, though bits of it poke through when it's sung before hockey games.

Since Callixa Lavallee ( who wrote the original tune in 1880 to celebrate St. Jean de Baptiste Day) wasn't around any more, O Canada could be rewritten any way the minions of dullness wanted. Thus it was replaced by something about as glorious as a bowl of Cream of Wheat. To fit our stereotypical national character, it's kind of dull. Non-violent, of course! No hint of battles, of "the rocket's red glare", "bombs bursting in air" and all that stuff we say we hate in the American anthem. But ah, go back to the original and you'll find a bit of 19th century European poetry celebrating epic battles and glorious victories.

All that "true patriot love" stuff was originally "your brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers". I'd say that's a shade of difference. Giving the lie to the usual Canadian boast that OUR anthem isn't "violent like the one in the States", we have "your arm can wield the sword" (and, even more subversive, references to carrying the cross - how Papist!).

In fact the whole thing is so much more epic, on such a grand scale, with words like "brilliant exploits" and "valour" (and even, God forbid, "faith"!). But in English, those words just don't fit the musical framework. And there's something about them that's just a little. . . unCanadian. So we're left with an anthem that has all the character of a well-chewed piece of gum, something that is (to use Madonna's famous description of Lady Gaga) sadly reductive.

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

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

"Just the good parts": movies in fifteen seconds

It's here.
For the first time.
Masterfully edited to show you just the good parts.
So you don't need to waste time on the story (which who cares about anyway).
And you can text and tweet and talk on the phone at the same time, cuz there's no stupid dialogue to listen to.
Yes. . . it's the first in a series of, oh, maybe four condensed movies which I predict will take off in the public imagination, that is if they remember them! 

It's. . . 

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. . . in fifteen seconds!

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

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

EXPLAINED: why kids get ADHD

I don't know if anybody except me remembers a strange and wonderful show called TV Nation, Michael Moore's first foray into network television. This was before he became a self-important, helium-inflated buffoon who will do anything to call attention to himself.

We watched this show on (when else?) Friday nights, me and the kids. God, that was back when me and my kids watched TV together! We watched TV Nation, St. Elsewhere and (of course) SCTV. The kids were just pups then and I felt very close to them. Now they're practically middle-aged, and it's different.

Of course it's different. But what I wanted to point out with this dissertation is how much things have accelerated since the early '90s. TV Nation was considered cutting edge, hip, etc. (though watching some of the segments now makes me wince), and nowhere was this more evident than in the opening. It had rapidly-flashing images accompanied by electric guitar playing a sort of fluffy domestic tune. Later on I discovered it was almost an exact copy of the theme song to Rhoda. 

Look at it now, and bo-o-o-o-oy, is it slo-o-o-o-ow. Each image lasts a full second, an eternity in today's  air time. The theme lasts about a minute and a half, which was common then. Compare and contrast to what some call today's hippest sitcom, The Big Bang Theory  (which my granddaughter loves:  huzzah!):

And they wonder why kids get ADHD.

(Post-blog. Now I also know why I make so many gifs. I think they're magic, which probably reveals my age, but more to the point, who the hell is going to watch a 10- or 15-minute YouTube video to see the 5 seconds I'm referring to? Instead, here are the 5 seconds, endlessly repeated in case you (like everyone else) can't absorb a ton of information in a microsecond.

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

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