Harold Lloyd: it's play-time!

If I may repeat the obvious, this blog, formerly titled margaret gunning's house of dreams, has been renamed after Harold Lloyd's famed movie character. For reasons unknown, Harold called his screen persona the Glass Character, which is nice because it sounds so romantical-like and is also a great title for a novel.

Which I have written. Which came out in spring 2014 with Thistledown Press. Watch for it!

Meantime, the search for Lloyd curiosa is endless. I just keep finding things. He was the Star Wars or Sponge Bob of his day, spawning an entire industry of Harold "stuff". Back then the stuff was mostly tin, plastics being pretty much uninvented. These are toys that you just don't see any more, toys that in fact baffle me because I don't know what they frickin' ARE.

Harold Lloyd Long-Leg, Long-Arm Sparkler

 Description

Harold Lloyd Long-Leg, Long-Arm Sparkler Moving arms and legs. Still emits sparks when plunged. Made by Isla in Spain. Circa 1925. Very rare. From the collection of Gary Selmonsky. Tin. 9". (Excellent).

About this, I can only say *WTF!?* a few hundred times. I have no idea what a sparkler is, so I've had to come up with a guess. Judging by its arms and legs, which appear to be jointed, this thing must have had a sort of seizure while you "plunged" it. Plunging implying a sort of pumping up and down, as with those old spinning tops. Why would it throw sparks? No doubt the grinding of metal on metal, meaning it might also have made a hideous noise. In the wrong hands, this thing seems dangerous, perhaps a forerunner to the cigarette lighter or barbecue starter. Certainly it should never have been given to children. As for the eyes, or lack of them, I'm glad I don't have one of these around the house because it might turn out to have "powers", I fear of the wrong sort.

Harold Lloyd Bumper Car

Description

Attributed to Gunthermann, c. 1926, clockwork driven, famed character sits at amusement bumper car, very colorful tin lithography, extremely hard to find, scarce version. 51/4" h x 3 1/2" dia.

Now THIS is cute, and I wouldn't mind having one, especially if it still functioned, twirling all over my desk. The depiction of Harold in tin is nicer than most. It reminds me of the movie Speedy and various others in which he hangs out at Coney Island. Imagine if you had a whole lot of them: you could play Harold Lloyd bumper cars all over your desk! 

Harold Lloyd Mechanical Bank

Description

Tin. Saalheimer & Strauss, Germany. Circa 1920s. Pull the lever down. The mouth opens and the tongue sticks out. Place a coin on the tongue and release the lever. Provenance: F. H. Griffith, Stephen Steckbeck. Condition Near Mint.

This is also cute, and very fine because Harold looks a whole lot more like his sweet self, except that the eyes are brown which is wrong. Harold had black-Irish or Welsh/Celtic coloring, very black hair, blue eyes and fair skin with copious freckles, which never completely faded with time. No one got it quite right in tin. But  this contraption seems all very charming, until you read the description of what it does. 

It eats money. Pull a lever down and he sticks out his tongue, and you put a coin on on it and he - oh I don't know, I guess a lot of mechanical  banks worked that way back then, and a child might find it enchanting. But it bizarres me out big-time. I hope they didn't have to smash him like a piggybank when he was full. 



Harold Lloyd Scissor Toy

Description

HAROLD LLOYD SCISSOR TOY Die-cut tin scissor-hand held and operated toy with great lithography

Oh Lor', oh Lor', I'm going back to bed now. This is a NIGHTMARE. Harold has a frog on his hat and looks like a dead thing. He isn't even scissors, not actually, though you stick your fingers in those round things (I guess) and work them like scissors. Maybe he lifts up his frog hat or something?

Harold Lloyd Whatever-it-is

Description all written in German, but presumably it's one of those wretched walking windup toys that grimaces and rolls its eyes. 

POST-BLOG. While scrounging around for Harold toys, I found this. It's not a toy, and not even an antique, but a darling little glass Christmas ornament made for "the new millennium" (remember that? The big date that completely fizzled?). Probably worth gazillions of dollars, because extremely fragile. My cat used to knock glass ornaments down off the tree and play cat-hockey with
them, stick-handling them under the sofa where they would moulder for years, or (more likely) batting them against the wall and breaking them. Let's just be
grateful he never got his paws on Harold.






ITEM DESCRIPTION


Collect this Golden Age of Hollywood, Christopher Radko "Millennium Clock" Harold Lloyd, mouth-blown and handcrafted Polish glass Christmas tree ornaments, 1999, 99-980-0, 99980.

Produced only for 1999 as one of the millennium exclusives, this European hand blown gl ass ornament promises to endure through the generations! Hard-to-find and sought-after!

The depiction of Harold Lloyd holding on to the clock handle draws upon the famous scene in 1923 film, "Safety Last". Classic ornament that combines the famous clock hanging scene with the onset of the new millennium!

Wearing a green check jacket, brown pants and his trademark hat, Lloyd hangs precariously from the hands of a clock, high above the street where spectators gasp with surprise and horror. Will he fall? And how did he get there?

The death-defying scene, one of the most famous in silent movie history, is taken from "Safety Last", released in 1923. After taking one dangerous step after another to scale the department store in which he works as a low level clerk, his straw hat falls away as he desperately holds on for dear life. However, he wins the $1000 prize by attracting the most ever attention and business to the store, fulfilling his promise to his girl to make good.

On the back of the clock, written in white and surrounded by confetti, is, "Happy New 2000 Millennium". Almost a century later, Lloyd continues to be remembered as one of the great Golden Age of Hollywood greats!

More information about Harold Lloyd:

Along with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd revolutionized screen comedy, becoming one of the most respected stars of Hollywood's Golden Years, He began his film career after tossing a coin that pointed him towards Hollywood and became the lead in over 200 films from 1915 to 1947. He was the #1 box office attraction from 1927 to 1928 and won an Honorary Academy Award as "master Comedian and Good Citizen" in 1952.

Approximately 4 1/2 inches tall, the ornament has outstanding promise and is a "must have" for the Hollywood Golden Age collector.

CONDITION OF ITEM:

Mint collectible with original Radko hangtag and Radko gift box in excellent condition. Stored in a smoke-free environment.

Listing ID: 64681





(Imagine finding THIS under your tree!)

POST-BLOG BLATHER: I nearly forgot the best part! There's a YouTube video of one of the best Harold windup toys of all. It's pretty hideous, as they all are, but damned if I didn't make them into gifs anyway.

 

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%

Harold Lloyd: the graceful ghost

Like so many things, this piece has a history.

God knows how many years ago it was - could have been 15, could have been 20 or more. It was on the radio, so I didn't know who was playing the piano. It was one of those scenarios where I was stopped dead in my tracks. The armload of books I was carrying slid onto the floor, and my knees unlocked.

This first performance of a piece that I didn't even know the name of was something that grabbed my gutstrings and never quite let go. It was a long, long time until I heard it again and could put a name to it. I just sat there in a strange altered state, wondering how mere chords could stir emotion from the very bottom of the glass.

I never heard the piece played that way again. That first version was played smokily, stealthily, the chords impossibly elongated, with mists rising from it, a black cat sneaking along a midnight fence, or some melancholy gent in an expensive, rumpled suit walking home alone from empty revelry in a nightclub.  

Yes, and years and years and years blew by, as years always do.

When I found it again and found the title and the composer (Graceful Ghost Rag by William Bolcom), I was unsatisfied with every version I heard. Everyone played it too fast, too jauntily, almost player-piano-style, when the original was (I thought) meant to be interpreted with indigo sadness. At one point I found a YouTube version with a kid playing it, and it was bloody good, if lacking polish. For a while, it was my touchstone. Then I found this one, beautifully rendered by Barron Ryan. Not quite like the first, smoky midnight version, but lovingly approached with a tender melancholy that evokes a certain familiar presence.

When I began to write The Glass Character, my lovesick paean to Harold Lloyd, this piece became its theme song.  It somehow perfectly captured Muriel Ashford's hopelessly-fated passion for a man she could never have, a genius who did not portray so much as embody his character and evolve, quicksilverish,  from "knockabout" comedian to superb tragicomic actor. While Muriel watches in blissful, agonizing erotic thrall.

I like to say I loved writing this novel, and that's true. But it was also anguish. The writing took 18 months - and just about every day, I couldn't wait to get to the computer. But that, as they say, was the easy part. Getting any attention for it at all took three years. Three years of being told it was too melodramatic, too boring, too irrelevant. I've heard many a comment about my work and have learned to roll with it all, but the fact nobody wanted Harold was a misery to me. Why had I been lifted so high, only to be dropped with such a sickening thud?

The truth is, at some point I had become Muriel. The more I watched those incredible movies, the more enthralled I became. There is a surrealism in some of his earlier films in which he becomes a sort of cartoon cat-figure, impossibly agile and fast. Then as time goes on, his plots become infinitely more complex, deeper. Those who criticize his work for being too surface or "mechanical" haven't seen him weep in Girl Shy or The Freshman, haven't seen his tender yearning as a male Cinderella in The Kid Brother, haven't even seen his clock-climbing epic, Safety Last!, in which he does everything for love.

And he does. Everything. For love. He singlehandedly invented the genre of romantic comedy, and indeed, there is something romantic about him, the tightly-wound, impossibly agile body, the thick black head of hair, the eyes a little bedroomy behind the glasses with no glass in them. This is why Muriel's heart gets torn apart, and why she keeps coming back for more. There was an eleven-month period during the three years that it took me to get a contract that I just stopped. I quit Harold altogether. I stopped watching my favorite YouTube videos and perusing Google images for choice photos and even watching those DVDs I had become so addicted to.

I just stopped. I couldn't stand it any more - I was dying inside. Perhaps part of me hadn't quite given up, but I was trying to. I knew the novel was good. Why would I waste my time (or theirs) if it wasn't? But even when The Artist won Best Picture, editors were telling me things like, "The public isn't interested in silent movies."

Well.

I have a contract now, I'm with Thistledown and I will publish in spring 2014. I wanted to do it the traditional way, because to be honest I don't have a clue how to self-publish and hate taking "writer's courses" (when I could probably teach most of them, so there). I'm too old to go back to square one, and besides, I still believe in the process. So I told myself, "Just get the book out there. Then we'll see what happens." Would Harold back me up on this?

I have written before about Lloyd synchronicity, the eerie way in which the name Lloyd would come up four or five times in a day (and I devoted a whole post, which I might re-post along with some of my other Harold pieces, about "the church at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd", a huge brick tabernacle standing in the middle of nowhere). There is much more, of course, but I have been hesitant to put it out there, some of it is so odd and unbelievable. Throughout my life I've known mediums and spiritualist healers, and while I do not quite ascribe to all of it, I don't throw it all away either. 

So if any of it is true, I have been in touch with a ghost who is graceful indeed, and his music still plays in  my head on a continuous loop that might just last forever.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

Separated at Birth, Part 956: Helga and Anne

And now comes perhaps my strangest Separated at Birth of all.

From the first time I saw National Velvet, I noticed a remarkable resemblance between Anne Revere, the actress who plays Velvet Brown's mother, and Andrew Wyeth's legendary Helga.

I don't know why others don't see it. The hair is different, and Revere more prone to smiling, but surely the features are very close. 

Put aside the differences in wardrobe and hair, and focus on cheekbones, lips, nose, chin.

Even the rose-colored skin is a match. It's just one of those strange, strange things.

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

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

Shatnoy on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

William Shatner, dishy but just a touch swishy, getting drunk "pre-Trek" in a scene from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (not to be confused with T. H. E. Cat). But who's that cat on the left? Soon he'll turn
around. . .

. . . and we'll know.

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

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

Creepout of the Day: Sonovox!

Hey, everybody . . . it's HILDA!

Meet Hilda, the creation of illustrator Duane Bryers and pin-up art’s best kept secret. Voluptuous in all the right places, a little clumsy but not at all shy about her figure, Hilda was one of the only atypical plus-sized pin-up queens to grace the pages of American calendars from the 1950s up until the early 1980s, and achieved moderate notoriety in the 1960s.

"She’s a creation out of my head. I had various models over the years, but some of my best Hilda paintings I’ve ever done were done without a model,” veteran artist Duane told the online pin-up gallery Toil, Despite being one of history’s longest running calendar queens alongside the likes of Marilyn Monroe, even the most dedicated vintage enthusiasts probably won’t have come across Hilda before.

(Blogger's note. Every once in a while I find a link on Facebook that I actually like. Unfortunately, I understand why Hilda fell out of favour. She's simply too fat. It's ironic, because the average woman is now a Size 14 - 16, and in the 1950s, when she first appeared as an exuberant, full-bodied calendar pinup, the average size was an 8 - 10 (and sizes were much smaller then). Now that "thin is in" and standards of beauty are much more stringent, Hilda somehow just looks too fat. Could our society be any sicker or more twisted?)

Anyway, here are a few choice calendar-girl poses. What I notice is her exuberance, her joy in being alive, and her utter lack of self-consciousness. 

Hilda loves the great outdoors and enthusiastically partakes of its many pleasures. These are just two of her more Rockwellian poses. She wears a bikini well (and I love that little dog!) Somehow these pictures manage to be both wholesome and sexual - though that makes me wonder why those two things are seen as poles apart. Does sexual mean unwholesome? And what does unwholesome mean? Tainted and dirty, I guess. We still want our women to be virgins, or at least not interested in sex. I think Hilda would be interested.

The livin' is easy.

Some of these have a luminous, almost Maxfield Parrish-like quality, not to mention rosy red-headed skin tones. 

Was she the object of male fantasy, do you think? Duane Bryers obviously knew and enjoyed the voluptuous contours of the zaftig woman and celebrated her with whimsy and even respect.

Why can't we?

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

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My dancing Harold doll

DON'T listen to your body!

As is so often the case, this post is something I adapted from my personal journal, which I will admit often amounts to a load of complaining. But keeping a journal is one of the sure symptoms of writerhood. I have had many a person sit down with me over the years saying "I want to be a writer", meaning they want to make effortless money and be an instant best-seller (it can't be that hard, can it?). One of the first things I ask them is, "Do you keep a journal?" Normally I get a blank look, a why-would-I-want-to-do-that expression, as if a journal must be written on pink Hello Kitty stationery with scented lavender ink.

Mostly people merely take stabs at writing, brief ones. Then they sort of run in terror, realizing that they will actually have to put their work "out there". As a friend recently told me about her own former ambition to write, it just got buried under the mundane tasks we all must undertake in the course of a day.

All this leads to something else. (Which is what I seem to do in this blog, though I can't tell you why. Steinbeck leads to Travels with Charley leads to why people treat dogs like babies.) So this is about my never-ending, awful sort-of-relationship with doctors, who have been poking and prodding my sagging old body for a year now trying to figure out why I am having this persistent, nagging, sometimes severely disabling pain.

It's getting in the way of jumping in to preparing my novel The Glass Character for publication (which I wish I could enjoy more). This is what I wrote this morning:

"I want to get the medical stuff over with, which it should be next week when I get told there’s nothing wrong with me again. I have a theory it’s a low-grade infection, but I doubt if he will give me anything for it, will likely say “it’ll go away on its own” when I have been in pain for nearly a year now. They said the same thing about the infuriating ear symptoms which I’ve now had for 13 months. Things do NOT “go away on their own” in many cases, but doctors now let things fester for so long they become ingrained and chronic and really WON’T go away. We then have a "nuisance patient", a hypochondriac completely obsessed with imaginary illness. But someone has commanded doctors from “on high” not to prescribe antibiotics. They’ve swung from one ridiculous extreme to the other, and in both cases it’s to get you out of the office FAST."

So how many specialists or procedures HAVE I been exposed to? Let me count the ways. Gastroenterologist (God, these things are hard to spell). Gynecologist. Ultrasound. Colonoscopy. Ultrasound again, because they couldn't find anything the first time, and now urologist/cystoscopy (can’t ever remember how to spell that one). I have also been to a nephrologists and an otolaryng-whatever-it-is. All uselessly. Each person takes a part of the body, and they are never co-ordinated or put together in any way. They’re not supposed to be. Each body part must get sick in its own way, and if it gets sick outside of certain strict boundaries, then you’re not sick, or at least that part of you isn’t. If you have a condition such as a bladder infection and only have three symptoms out of five, then you don’t have a bladder infection and will not be given antibiotics.

Oh, antibiotics! Like Valium in the '70s, doctors handed them out like candy until relatively recently. Patients wanted something to relieve their fear and distress about being sick. They wanted to come away with something. Doctors wanted them the fuck out of their office so they could go on to the next patient. So they went home with a prescription.

Then all of a sudden, we are being told WE were wrong to accept all those prescriptions for all these years. WE were wrong to seek a fast and easy way out of disabling symptoms. We should have just put up or shut up, because there was probably nothing wrong with us anyway.

Suddenly, in spite of everything our doctors had been telling us for decades, antibiotics were just wrong.

It still comes at us from every side, ads on TV with cute but shaming slogans like, "Not all bugs need drugs." It's a kind of finger-shaking admonishment to the public, because for God's sake didn't we create this situation to begin with? The public, being weak and self-indulgent, demanded antibiotics so vociferously that they created a race of Superbugs which are now resistant to medication.

We have rendered antibiotics almost completely ineffective. How does that make us feel?

Doctors had to stop acting like free vending machines for this seductive candy because "someone" ordered them to, some medical association or other. "It will go away on its own" became the new mantra. This got patients out of the office nearly as fast as "Here, take this prescription for amoxycillin".

Now, you can have pus running out of you and feverish red inflammation and strep throat (and my granddaughter, then three years old and running a fever of 104, might have died from it: my daughter, a dragon when she needs to be, INSISTED she be prescribed antibiotics, which cleared it up completely in two days), and the doctor will not prescribe antibiotics. Once again, the crushing weight of shame is applied to us as she tells us something we have already been told 100 times. "Patients ruined antibiotics by taking them too often. It will go away on its own."

There are two things my doctor never prescribes: antibiotics and pain relievers. When I told her I'd had significant and even severe pain for a year, pain that sometimes prevented me from functioning well, she said, "Advil is the drug of choice."

"But I've been taking Advil for a year now and it has no effect at all."

"Try Tylenol."

"I've tried them all. None of them work."

"Advil," she said, a little testily.

"Can't I have anything stronger?"

Oh, it's the facial expressions, the bodily shifting, the "I know I'm dealing with an addict cadging drugs" manner that gives it all away.

"Advil is the drug of choice." (Meaning: if Advil doesn't work, I am having the wrong kind of pain and need to set it straight. Or else I'm lying.)

Another time she asked me the doseage I was taking and I said something like 800 milligrams. "That's too much," she said. "But the lower dose doesn't do anything." "Always take the correct doseage or you'll damage your kidneys." But the "correct doseage" wasn't doing any more than the so-called overdose anyway.

I have enjoyed good health for most of my life and have stayed away from doctors whenever possible, so I can hardly be called a hypochondriac unless such a damning stereotype can develop in a  few months. I hate taking pills, and it does not occur to me to abuse prescriptions. I have dreaded developing some sort of vague but persistent, painful medical condition that no one can get to the root of. And now it's here. My own theory - and who gives a shit what I think anyway, it's only my body - is that this is a low-grade bladder infection which has been flying under the radar for a year. But doctors refuse to see it that way. "Your urine test is normal," my doctor said, furrowing her brow and sitting back in that "get out of here and go directly to the psych ward" way. If my urine test is normal, I cannot have a bladder infection and have to go home and behave myself.

Over and over again I hear/read the same advice from people: Listen to your body! If anything feels amiss, go see your doctor immediately! I am here to tell you that you won't be in her office for long. Your symptoms will have to escalate until you are in severe enough pain to wait months to see a specialist, who will tell you there's nothing wrong anyway. The cancer diagnosis won't come until it is far too late to treat it. Then you will be asked, "For God's sake, why didn't you DO something about it?"

Is there nothing you can do? Why are you stupid enough to ask? Take Advil, which should get rid of all your symptoms. It's the drug of choice.

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

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