The STRANGEST "separated at birth" ever seen!

If you've been following my blog for a while now - and I just fervently hope SOMEONE reads this, at least once in a while - you will have noticed my recurrent series, Separated at Birth. Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. Harold Lloyd and Jake Gyllenhaal. That sort of thing.

Well.

I stay up way too late sometimes and just look for things to muck around with to use on my blog. I love diddling around with images that move, but I like images that don't move too. I also wanted to see if I could find a good YouTube video on the Hapsburgs, preferably a comedy: Take it on the Chin Charlie, Louie the Lip and Friends, whatever. An animated series on King Charles II of Spain, also known as El Hexado because he was so fucking ugly, would have filled the bill, but all I could find was a very strange 2-minute "reconstruction" of the face of Marie Antoinette. 

I could find almost no information about this, but it started with the standard portrait of her and slowly morphed into something a lot more realistic. Someone in the comments section said something about a death mask, so it may have been reconstructed from that, though death masks, I find, generally aren't very flattering.

But as it slowly morphed, I cried into the void, "Hey. That's not Ms. Let-Them-Eat-Cake at all. That's Kaley Cuoco!"

Yes.

The adorable female lead on the hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, which is now on so many times a day that my DVR just can't keep up. I think it looks EXACTLY like her, or at least close enough, though Kaley definitely has Marie beat in the cheekbone department.

The comments under the video mentioned Marie's "Hapsburg lip", so like all the rest of those aristocratic swine she must've been hopelessly inbred. I don't see the lip here, but the picture's not in 3D, is it? I don't know if Kaley has any Hapsburg blood in her, and to be honest I've been trying to figure out just what sort of a name that is anyway - sounds kind of Portuguese. So now I'm off on yet another search.

SPECIAL Bonus Creep-o-rama Link! One of the creepiest links I've ever found, next to Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. In fact, this one is worse.


http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/

It has got THE WORST pictures of dead guys' faces all melted down, or with their mouths tied shut. I don't know when they stopped doing this shit, but there's one of Alfred Hitchcock that's just ridiculous, it looks so much like him.
There's also one of Timothy Leary (but I forgot to save it). To be honest, I thought they froze his head. I saw a video once of a bunch of scientists carting his severed head around. It was too sickening.

Special Post-Post Bonus-Bonus: There are all sorts of these creep-o sites, apparently, for sickos who like to look at death masks. Nobody WE know. This one is a sort of Greatest Hits list. But I'm beginning to be suspicious. Some of these masks are of rather murky provenance and might have turned up in some third-rate history prof's cellar in 1980 or something. One site even said, astonishingly, that it was clear Abraham Lincoln "had not been assassinated". Gee, then I wonder what all the fuss was about?

http://oocradio.blogspot.ca/search/label/death%20mask

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Some weird shit goin' on. . .

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Harold gets jolted!

I TOLD you not to step on that wire!

Incredible word soup

Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond

Very pretty swimming round

The lion and the unicorn journey very far

The answers are the question, sir

The lady soothes the lion's fur

Meek as a lamb he follows her

Wherever angels are

Sing me something

I asked the ice it would not say

But only cracked or moved away

I thought I knew me yesterday

Whoever sings this song

Greetings on you kings in the sky

Who'll buy me a mynah bird

Play me a magic word

Speak of hopes with thoughts absurd

Thoughts floating by

Little ducks, pretty birds

Clouds across the sky

Moving pieces on the plains of Troy

Carving faces on the rocks of joy

Pretty lady washing the tiles

Soapy pictures like crocodiles

Chilly winds blowing

Lovely spring coming soon

I wear my body like a caravan

Gipsy rover in a magic land

Misty mountains where the eagles fly

Lonely valleys where the lost ones cry

I had a little letter full of paper

Inky scratches everywhere

Always looking, looking for a paradise island

Help me find it everywhere

Peacocks talking of the colour grey

Awaking soundly in darkest day

A howling tempest on a silent sea

Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree

Mad as the moon when Merlin falls

Silver castles and silver halls

Taking lessons from the piper's son

Learn to play while the world is young

Boys and girls come out to play

The moon doth shine as bright as day

Leave your sorrows and leave your sleep

And join your playfellows in the street

Come with a whoop or come with a call

Come with a goodwill or not at all

Up the ladder and down the wall

A ha'penny loaf will serve for all

Following my fortune now the Holy Grail is found

And the Holy Bread of Heaven it is given all around

Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door

I ain't got no home in this world any more

Poor as the birds but to give their song away

Gathering possessions round to make a bright array

Dark was the night, praise God the open door

I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

- Incredible String Band, Wee Tam, 1968

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Brighter every day

OK then, this is a mixup, but not really. All day yesterday (or I think it was the day before), I was thinking of that Incredible String Band song Ducks on a Pond. Makes sense, because all I did  that day was watch ducks/ducklings on a pond.

I wanted to post my homemade duckling gifs, video, etc. and wondered if the Ducks on a Pond song would be a good accompaniment. Well. . . I hadn't heard the Increds (as we called them back in 1968) for many,  many years, but I remembered they were best listened to when you were stoned out of your mind on hashish (with a side of cheap wine). I now see why. The Ducks song just goes on forever, and though it has some arresting images in it, it's just too crazy to include here.

But I found another one, much shorter and more - what, sprightly? Less stoner-rific? Like you can actually listen to it clean and sober. No ducks in it, but it's still a nice song.

So here it is. . . with ducks.

You Get Brighter

You get brighter every day and every time I see you

Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

In the morning when I wake I moor my boat and greet you

Hold your brightness in my eye and I wonder what does sleep do

For you get brighter every day and every time I see you

Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Oh, wondrous light

Light, light, lighter

You give all your brightness away

and it only makes you brighter

For you get brighter every day and every time I see you

Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you

Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you

(repeat and repeat and repeat)

You get brighter 

Every

Day.

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Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy ducklings: DUCKLINGS ON LAND!

Part 2 of our Duckling Adventure! The fluffies preen themselves on shore.

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Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy DUCKLINGS!

Such goings-on at the Duck Park! The Duck Park isn't really the Duck Park at all, but is properly called Coquiitlam Town Centre Park, and we walk around it at least once a week. The jewel of the park is Lafarge Lake, a former gravel-pit,  trout-stocked and serene. One day we discovered a tiny cove full of greedy ducks who were so acclimatized to humans that they literally walked right up out of the water and stood 2 feet away from us expecting to be fed. Soon we were saying "Let's go to the duck park" to each other.  For retirees like us, it was a cheap way to get out and have fun.

Then. . . come spring, the flock thinned out. There were fewer and fewer ducks waiting for us. Bummer! Then I had a thought. What if the ducks had other things to do in the spring?

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Such strange goings-on!

Is this Harold, or some fiend from hell?

Spastic meets Catatonic. . . a match made in heaven.

Harold's daily calisthenics.

The quickie of all time!

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And so say all of us (or some. . . )

I seldom post links, but I think this piece makes some good points.

http://laurenbdavis.com/2013/06/this-will-probably-get-me-into-hot-water/

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Harold Lloyd: you can't keep a good man down

Drink was, in fact, the curse of the family. Mildred (or “Mid”, or “Molly”, as Lloyd called her) had been an alcoholic from some time in the forties, when it is said she wanted desperately to divorce Lloyd. In her late years a full-time nurse was employed mainly to see that her perfume bottles did not mysteriously get filled with booze, that her habit of drinking Listerine did not get out of hand. In a pathetic family – “a disaster”, as even Lloyd’s kindly friend Simonton put it – she was perhaps the most pathetic member. One thinks of her – never a very mature, forthcoming or stimulating person – wandering the halls of the great house, her husband either absent or preoccupied by one of his interests, her children all gone, and none of them bearing her any very kind feelings, caring mainly for her two companionable poodles and her booze, and one sees the end results of the flaws that, almost from the first, people had detected in Lloyd’s art – its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth. It is all dreadfully sad.

Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter, 1974

This was one of the more disturbing passages I found in my relentless quest for information about Harold Lloyd. In fact, this whole book sells Lloyd short in just about every facet of his life, but never is it more hurtful than in this personal attack on his family.

One wonders, in fact, if he knew or cared about the surviving members of Lloyd's family, about their feelings for him. He seems to have assumed no one was left who cared two figs about him, or if they did, that they weren't significant enough to merit a modicum of respect.

At the same time, this critic - and I don't name him to cover MY ass, not his! - is one of those unassailable figures in "cinema" (a step up in snobbishmess even from "film") whom no one ever really questions. Even to this day, his work is hugely influential. What puzzles and offends me almost as much as his nasty cracks at his family is his description of Lloyd's art: "its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth."

This description seriously makes me wonder if he ever saw a Lloyd film, or if he perhaps only saw those "knockabout" one-reel comedies made before 1920. Harold Lloyd features like Girl Shy, Safety Last!, The Freshman and The Kid Brother are so far from "mechanical" that I cannot fathom his comments; Harold's films have moments of pathos and even tenderness that never fail to bring me to tears. The gags are graceful and ingenious, particularly in The Kid Brother where he plays a sort of male Cinderella, washing clothes in a butter-churn and hanging them out to dry on the string of a kite.

I did find out some things about Harold Lloyd and his family, in particular from a more recent bio written by silent film historian Jeffrey Vance in collaboration with Harold Lloyd's granddaughter (whom he raised), Suzanne Lloyd. The book is honest and forthright about the sometimes-serious problems the family had; it was hardly a snow job. But as with most families, the dynamics were complicated, and joy and celebration often ran neck-in-neck with sorrow. To call Lloyd's home life "dreadfully sad" is to miss the point.

Alcoholism is a family pattern, with stubborn roots deeply buried in the soil of generations. Though Harold did not drink, some of those around him did, and it inevitably did them harm. But it's absurdly unlikely that his former leading lady Mildred Davis spent her final years wandering around the halls of their mansion like a ghost. Moreover, "it is said" does not pass as a particularly reliable source of information, and in fact can often mean nothing at all. It's as bad as that godawful phrase "studies show", which too many people seem to swallow without question.

I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how things were at Greenacres, but I honestly don't think they were anything like this. I do know that the word "mechanical" stuck to Lloyd's films for decades, mainly because people seemed to take this critic's word as gospel. It did irreparable harm for decades and kept his movies buried for far too long.

There's a Lloyd revival going on, thank God, which proves that these descriptions are inadequate and highly inaccurate. In his Everyman's search for love (which is at the core of most of them), Harold Lloyd invented a new genre: the romantic comedy. It could even be argued that he broke ground in screwball comedy with the delightfully wacky Why Worry? I haven't seen every Lloyd film, but I've seen as many as I can get my hands on. The features he made after 1920 are nuanced and three-dimensional. His Glass Character tugs at the heart. But since that cold, abstract label was pinned on him shortly after his death and his work was either unavailable to the public or adulterated practically beyond recognition, it was accepted in the movie world without a lot of question.

This book ends with an acknowledgment section that I find almost harrowing. This is a direct quote:

When Time-Life Films, which will be re-releasing most of Lloyd's films over the next four years, invited me to attempt this critical-biographical sketch of the comedian, it had already commissioned a veteran correspondent of the Time-Life News Service to interview as many friends, relatives and co-workers of Lloyd's as he could find. His remarkably thorough dispatches were placed at my disposal for this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to him. I am sure he would like me to express gratitude to those who provided him information.

This means The Shape of Laughter (a bizarre title that basically means nothing) was not written from primary sources and in fact had "contractual obligation" written all over it. He simply took someone else's material, believed it without question, and wove it into a book. No doubt the correspondent's opinion of Lloyd's work, whatever it was, must have been mixed in to this rehash. It makes one wonder if Time-Life wanted the glossy seal and cache of this particular critic to boost book sales, even if he didn't really write the book. Or did he simply owe them one? Such things are known to happen, but if you ever raise it as a possibility, all hell breaks loose, along with a storm of vitriolic denial.

An even more intriguing clue to the near-disappearance of Lloyd's films after his death is provided by Kevin Brownlow, arguably the world's foremost expert on silent film.

Two years after Lloyd died in 1971, Time-Life signed signed a distribution deal for his films and handled them with a tragic lack of understanding. The shorts were packaged with a commentary in the style of Pete Smith ("Poor Harold! It's doom for the groom unless he gets to his room!"), which effectively sank them without a trace. The features were spared the commentary, but insensitive, honky-tonk scores and the elimination of entire sequences often crippled their effect.

May I add to that the constant, annoying, ridiculously exaggerated sound effects?

In spite of all the factors that came together to compromise the integrity of Lloyd's work, it remained intact in the vault, sleeping, awaiting a second life. No one could have predicted the huge advances in film restoration that would strip the grey veils off his masterpieces and reveal them clean as new. No one could have predicted that Turner Classic Movies would get behind this renaissance, drawing more and more people back to pictures that are so vibrant and well-made that tired old comparisons to Chaplin and Keaton no longer apply.

Lloyd only "comes third" in some people's minds because they weren't there, and because they have had their viewpoint skewed by outdated, poorly-researched critical commentary. The best remedy for this is to buy the superb DVD movie set The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and watch the hell out of them. I guarantee you, once you start, you won't ever be able to stop.

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You keep me hangin' on

I think if I showed this picture to you and said nothing about it, you probably wouldn't know who it is.

An old picture, for sure, very old, from early in the last century. It'd be around 100 years ago. And how old would this young man be - maybe 20?

Does he look like a young man who's going places, someone unstoppable, or do we only deduce that in retrospect? I can deduce one thing for sure - I know he wasn't short of girl friends.

The fierce eyes looking off into the middle distance also have a dreamy quality, even a kindness. I don't think this man was mean, for all his drive and occasional explosiveness. Could he help it if the child in him never really grew up? Was that, in fact, the source of his compelling charm and endless creativity?

The only thing I know for sure is that I will never root him out of my heart. He has been part of my life for some five years now, and for the most part the journey has been wonderful. I still keep making discoveries, like this magnificent old photo, just when I think I've come to the bottom of the barrel.

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Grandma's little bunheads: another triumph!

Could there be anything sweeter in  life. . . 

. . . than being a backstage Grandma to two little bunheads. . . 

. . . fresh from their triumphant return to the stage in the Mellado Dance Recital!

Jazz, tap, ballet, they did it all, they did us proud. . . 

. . . and they even kept their eyes open under a pound of makeup. . . 

(though we couldn't get shots of them in costume cuz they have to take them off right after the show. . . )

So what else is there to say?

YAY!

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