DON'T LOOK DOWN!: Harold Lloyd short takes

Although it's late, I have a cold and feel bloody awful, and should've gone to bed a long time ago, an obsession is an obsession, n'est-ce pas? So, gentle reader, I made these few gifs, smudgy and surreal, Just For You. Enter his world at your peril, for you may never find your way home again.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

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Any good idea is worth beating to death!

Compare and contrast: one is dark and moody - in fact it's kind of broody - Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis. The anonymous worker helplessly grapples with the hands of a huge clock, a piece of machinery that seems to rule everything (including time itself). This is one of the film's creepiest and most disturbing images.

And then there's this guy who plays it for comedy - Harold Lloyd in his own masterpiece, the 1923 comedy Safety Last! But what sort of thunderbolt of inspiration gave him the idea to dangle from an enormous clock? If we free-associate, we come up with a few things: the hands on the clock/HIS hands on the clock, time running out, turning back the hands of time, the clock striking midnight, the crash of the stock market that ended the dizzy joy of the '20s: and who knew it was coming, who could hold back that inevitable stroke of doom?

This guy is also swingin', and it can't end well. The bizarre scrambled numbers on the clock face make no sense (for surely they ought to go to 11), and neither does the constant, frantic manipulation of the hands to avoid some sort of industrial disaster. The size of the clock doesn't quite square with Harold's, but the idea? Did it come to Lang in a dream? Was he thinking of Harold Lloyd at all?

Harold's fear is height, and the Metropolis drone's fear is immolation, a literal meltdown. In any case, they have to hold on, though the struggle seems hopeless. 

Exposed like the Wizard of Oz, here the clock becomes a bizarre mechanical wheel of fortune, its awful impersonal gauges and dials a reminder that technology is always in charge (and I have to say this, it also looks quite a bit like a banjo, a pie plate, or maybe even a tambourine). . .

. . . whereas Harold is just a scared little man trying not to die, a tiny surreal black figure swinging for his life. Is Lang's vision Harold turned inside-out or fed through the evil machinery of his imagination? Does Metropolis reflect the "mechanical" quality some critics claimed detracted from Lloyd's work? Are the cogs and flywheels that endlessly whirred in Harold's mind making themselves manifest in this horrorscape? Or is the whole thing just a big fat coincidence?

We'll never know now.

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Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

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Edward Snowden: fancy dancer?

This is the boy that talks and talks (and talks).

At first you think you're dealing with a high school kid, like in that movie, what was it called, Catch Me If You Can. He's sort of cute and unshaven, yet not unkempt, so he appeals to a wide spectrum of people. He comes across well.

It could be argued that he's only acting to expose a glaring social wrong that should have been addressed back in George Orwell's glory days. Like the frog in warm water that is gradually boiled, we have been anaesthetized by the religion or drug of galloping consumerism and the near-total dominance of technology. It's not that we don't care - we don't even notice any more that everything we say, think, eat, sleep or do is being monitored and manipulated ALL THE TIME.

It's just possible that somebody has to make us care.

But heroes have flaws. This guy, I swear to you - and this is purely intuitive - there's something wrong here, something "off", or at very least something so highly orchestrated that it bothers me. It takes a lot of work to appear so sincere, so articulate, so relatively casual. Not a trace of ranting or raving. But I think the truth is that he craves and even requires this sort of global attention to survive.

There is no way in the world Snowden could have done this phenomenal whistle-blowing all by himself: he would need a global network of assistants, accomplices, whatever. So why is he speaking as if he alone knew how to access a buried trove of forbidden information, taking a life-threatening risk in bringing it all to light?

Isn't he playing into the American ideal of the solitary hero, the lone cowboy who doesn't need anybody's help because needing help is WEAK?

Is he on "our side" or not? What exactly IS "our side", and why are so many right-wing pundits pounding their pulpits and denouncing him as some sort of devil-worshipping-pro-gun-control nut case?

What is it about him, besides the odd-sounding British name and the feeling he has dive-bombed down from out of nowhere? It's the eyes. They shift and shift. Is he just nervous? Why does the calm correct voice not match the face?

This is why I posted the gif, to illustrate the discrepancy. What can it mean?

My sense is that it will all come out over the next few weeks or months, and the truth will be layered and convoluted. Lots of people think he will be killed, but the truth is he wants us to think that. And when it comes to the movie deal, he can write his own cheque. Mission accomplished?

Oh, and. . . don't they say you can judge a man by the company he keeps?

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Can you see. . . in 3D?

And so say all of us.

What the hell IS this thing?

Book

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.

Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books (for example, biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.

A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published.

So that's what's cluttering up my house.

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You say vagina, and I say va-WHAT?

I didn't write the intriguing article below - it was written by Martha Kempner for an interesting site called RH Reality Check (RH standing for reproductive health). No discussion of reproductive health would be complete without a mention of education. This  makes the article's revelation even more shocking: Anne Frank's immortal diary is being criticized and considered "inappropriate" for adolescents, not for its stark description of life under Nazi oppression but because Frank includes an accurate description of her developing adolescent genitals. This kind of insane prudery is both headspinningly ignorant and groaningly typical in a culture that really hates women's pussies. 

I'm sorry, but it does. Hates them. Women (myself included) have been boondoggled into thinking they're abnormal, weird, bad-smelling, and shouldn't have anything "down there" but a neat slit or, like a Barbie doll, nothing. We should not swell or protrude or bush out in any way. If anything does, shave it, trim it, even cut it off (and labioplasty, incorrectly referred to by plastic surgeons as "vaginal surgery", is now becoming frighteningly common as young women seek the "perfect slit", free of mess, fuss or feeling).

---

Barbie - You Bitch!
Conforming to Sociocultural Ideals of the Perfect Vagina
A Public Health Issue

If this reminds you queasily of a slightly less-drastic form of female circumcision, then - you'd be right. That is exactly what it is. Cutting off parts of ourselves because they're seen as ugly, abnormal and (worse than that) sexually taboo is nothing more than socially-sanctioned mutilation. 

What else? Though we've supposedly outgrown the Freudian dinosaur belief in the "vaginal orgasm", "vagina" has taken over as the descriptive term for everything below the belt, obscuring and even denying the locus of sexual response and enjoyment for almost all women. The vulva. The pussy. The (if you don't mind the term) cunt.

If you don't like cunt, and some don't because it's also used as a nasty name for someone we don't like, then just come up with some other term such as muff (female masturbation is sometimes called "buffin' the muffin") or jellyroll, which was blues singer Bessie Smith's favorite euphemism. As with Mae West and her infamous "is that a gun in your pocket" line, the censors didn't even know what it meant.

Not so incidentally, vulva has a very different sound and feel to it, a different texture than the clinical-sounding vagina. It's voluptuous, is what it is. It sounds like Volvo, a luxury car. It has curves and folds. Vagina always reminds me of Regina, and I sure don't want to go there.

I think people are uncomfortable with the word vulva because it sounds dusky and erotic.  I think people are uncomfortable with the IDEA of vulva because it's so much simpler for women just to have a neat little hole.

The vulva is external, and yet at the same time fairly well-hidden, like a rabbit in the bush.
Female masturbation can also be called "petting the bunny", and we know what bunnies are like: not the Playboy type, but the sort that spring around in the lush woods, coupling joyously whenever the urge strikes. Once they get started, there's just no stopping them.

Take that, you Michigan mother!

Half the People in the World Have a Vulva—Can We Please Get Over Our Fear of the Word?

by Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check

A Michigan mother has become the latest person to complain that a blunt, accurate account of female genitalia—one that uses descriptive words and proper names—is too explicit for school. It’s an argument that we’ve heard many times recently about textbooks, sex education lectures, and even political speeches, but this one is a little surprising. This time the source of the “pornographic” material is the classic book about the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank. Are we really so obsessed with women’s body parts that one paragraph about them is enough to cause a panic even when it’s in a book about far more serious issues?

The book, as most people know, features the first-hand account of a young Jewish woman who was forced to hide in an attic with her family and others during World War II. A new, less edited version of the book has been released. It includes passages in which Anne explores her own body. In the passage in question, Frank writes:

Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.

The Michigan mother complained that this was far too graphic—in fact pornographic—and completely inappropriate for school. In an interview with the local Fox affiliate, she explained that her daughter brought this too her attention: “I thought it was because she was concerned about the depressing aspects surrounding Anne Frank and all that, and she said no it was because they were talking graphically about Anne Frank’s genitalia.”

Although it is 2013, and about half of the world’s population is female, our body parts seem to cause constant kerfuffles. Recently I wrote about a biology teacher in Idaho who is under investigation in part for using the word vagina during his lecture on human reproduction. (As I said at the time, I’m really not sure how one could give a lecture on human reproduction without using the word vagina, given how many roles it plays.) Last year, I wrote about a report on sex education in New York state and was particularly horrified to learn that one textbook used in New York and other states defines the vagina as the “organ that receives sperm during reproduction.” 


This description is inaccurate (it’s not an organ) and offensive (a part of the female body should not be defined exclusively in terms of what it does for men). And who can forget last summer when state Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the Michigan house floor because she used the word vagina in a speech against an anti-abortion bill.

Things get worse the more specific you get. The word vagina is often used to describe everything between a woman’s legs, because, despite the controversies surrounding the word, it’s considered more socially appropriate than accurate terms like vulva, labia, or clitoris. (Emphasis mine. This whole issue exposes the hypocrisy of supposed "openness" when referring to women's genitals: now it's almost OK to say "vagina", but the word is constantly being misused to stand in for all the sexually-responsive parts of a woman's body. The culture seems to prefer the less-threatening concept of an uncomplicated, functional tunnel.)

What struck me most about Frank’s description is just how accurate it is. Though she starts by laughing at her past ignorance, the passage provides a spot-on description of where everything is and what it looks like. She also knows all of the correct terminology (though obviously the book has been translated from the original Dutch). Frank was clearly a great writer, and her parents seem to have educated her well about her own body.

Unfortunately, many women growing up some 70 years later do not have this kind of education, at that, in my opinion, is what’s behind our obsession with female genitals. As Frank said, these parts are hidden between a woman’s legs. This makes them very different than penises and testicles, which are more visible and recognizable to most. If we don’t look at these parts and we don’t talk about them in any detail—or worse, if we insist on using nondescript or cutesy terms like “down there” and “vajayjay”—two things happen: ears perk up when you say vagina, and panic ensues if you even whisper the word clitoris.


My first reaction upon hearing this mother’s complaint was about perspective and priorities. The book starts conversations about a disgraceful chapter in human history. Kids ask questions about anti-Semitism, concentration camps, gas chambers, and the complete and utter disregard for humanity. On a personal level, they likely think about how they would react if their freedom was taken away and they had to live in hiding. How shallow do you have to be to be more worried about how they’ll react not to this horror and misery but to a description of some body parts?

In one way, the Michigan mother is right: Kids do not need to know about Anne Frank’s genitals to learn about the Holocaust, and they will likely focus disproportionately on this passage because they are in seventh grade and because they’re not hearing about this anywhere else. That said, had the passage been in any other book, be it a novel or a biology textbook, it likely never would have made it into a school in the first place.


The solution is not to ban this new version of Anne Frank’s diary. The solution is to make vulvas about as mysterious as elbows. No, I’m not suggesting that we walk around pantsless with legs splayed. I’m simply proposing that we do what we do with all other body parts: Call it by its proper name, define it clearly and accurately in school, and stop freaking out.


Half the people in the world have a vulva. Can we please get over the word already?

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Creepiest gifs you ever saw!

I gif too much. I'm just too much of a giffer in every sense. And now this new conflict comes into my life (as if I needed one): I'm finding out I pronounce the name of my beloved mini-vids wrong, or at least wrong by the reckoning of the geniuses who invented them.

I'm spozed to say "jiff", like the peanut butter. "Giff" like I've been saying it doesn't make it cuz it isn't correct. Even worse is the way I used to pronounce it, spelled-out-like: gee eye eff.

Why NOT gee eye eff? We say "pee en gee", don't we, not "ping" or "pinge"? The arguments about this on the internet are endless and truly heated. I'm going to have to come up with my own bloody name, but until then. . .

Creepiness delights me, always has, and even more as I get older and closer to my own inevitable creepage. When I found troves of Victorian automatons on YouTube, by yar, I was off to the races.

This is Nancy the life-size automaton, and she can knit and tap her foot and stuff, but who cares about all that when you have a face like this? Those shifty eyes are something to behold. Worse than human.

Was this supposed to be pleasant at one time, do you suppose? Or did people enjoy a bit of after-dinner queasiness now and again?

They don't know how to make dolls like this any more. It would be banned immediately.

This is a rabbit violinist, mighty ratty by today's standards. I wish he'd stop looking at me like that.

I call this one Hellhound.

Saving the best 'til last, this one was featured in my Dead Monk in the Middle of the Road post of a while back. I apologize for the teeny size and graininess, but it was all I could find. This astonishing artifact came from 1560 and represents a monk who looks diseased, if not demented. He seems to speak across the centuries.

But what is he saying? If we could hear his utterances from deep in the mists of antiquity, what would they be?

"Bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh!"

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I keep on dancin'. . .

I keep on dancin' (keep on)
Keep on doin' the jerk right now
Shake it, shake it, baby
Come on & show me how you work
Yellin' in motion
Keep on doin' the locomotion, yeah
Don't worry, little babe
Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, yes!
[Chorus:]
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
[Organ Solo]
I keep on dancin' (keep on)
Keep on doin' the jerk
Shake it, shake it, baby
Come on & show me how you work
Yellin' in motion
Keep on doin' the locomotion, yeah
Don't worry, little babe
Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, yes!
[Chorus:]
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
[Organ solo, temporarily fadin]
I keep on dancin' (keep on)
Keep on doin' the jerk right now
Shake it, shake it, baby
Come on & show me how you work
[Chorus:]
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
Keep on dancin' & a-prancin' (ah)
[Fade]