"What did you do to his eyes?"

This is not the best gif technically, but it will do: it captures the "reveal", the most sublime moment in Rosemary's Baby, which I watched for the third time last night on DVD. 

Though this hardly seems possible, I saw it on TV in about 1969 - I know it's true because I watched it in the den when I was sleeping in the pull-out bed, and we  moved away later that year, so there were no more late-night fright nights. Back then, it usually took quite a few years for a movie to go from theatrical release to television, and then only in adulterated form. How could it have shown up on TV, pretty much intact, in only a year?

Then the movie completely disappeared. It never came on television, not even on Turner Classics. It was never re-released. I could not find a trace of it anywhere, so was finally forced to buy a rather shitty DVD with grainy quality, perhaps a knockoff.

43 years had gone by, but what I retained from that night in the pullout bed was amazing.

I remembered so much of it, in fact, it became apparent on second viewing that it had burned itself into my brain. Some movies barely register, but this one became part of my neural network.

Why? IT'S BLOODY GOOD. Everything about it is enthralling and strange, especially the dream sequences. Mia Farrow is excellent in it, creating sympathy while at the same time setting up doubt that any of this is real, that it isn't just a product of her fevered "pre-partum" brain.

And John Cassavetes - HE is the devil, as far as I am concerned. He is evil incarnate, far worse than the dotty old people chanting about Lord Satan. One of the creepiest scenes is when he tries to justify to Rosemary the sacrifice of their child to Satanic forces:

"Think of all we're getting in return."

Roman Polansky's reputation was forever besmirched by a statutory rape case, though the victim came out a few years ago and (bizarrely) came to his defense. That aside, there is no doubt that this is an inspired work. The sense of weirdness, of the world slipping sideways, the eerie tension juxtaposed with normalcy, does not let up for a second. It pulls tight and lets go, taking us with it.  That horrible sense of "they're all in it together", a prime feature of paranoia, plays on our fears of surrendering control. And having one special, beloved ally, one person who "gets it", then losing him to those dark forces,  is heartbreaking. 

OK, so then, why did I watch this masterpiece again? Because one of the networks decided to do a remake, which was so atrocious I only watched it to see how truly bad a remake could be.

In stark contrast with the original, nobody was good in this, and they changed all the best parts, including that astonishing "reveal" (one of the great moments in the horror genre). 

Leave it alone, I tell you! But nobody does. Did they think they could make this any better? They even wrecked the quirky charm of the short-skirt, go-go '60s by trying to "bring it up to date". 

But we've lost the ability  to make movies like this, that ruthlessly pull and claw at the emotions.  All is slash-and-splatter now, and somehow or other it does not have anywhere near the impact of a 98-pound waif  wielding a butcher knife. Married to Sinatra, in the bargain.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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Goosey Goosey Goslings!

No matter how hopeless

"This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain."


I didn't write that, troops. It was that Steinbeck feller, you know, the clever one. And I don't know for sure why it leapt into my mind at this late hour, or how dissonances are going to relate in this-hyarr particular post.

It all goes round and round. You put a book out, it has taken you years and years to get to this point, it's suddenly "out", and you're sitting there waiting for something to happen. It doesn't transport your life or change the fact you need to lose weight or even lift your intermittent depression interspersed by Walmartian visitations of euphoria.


No kidding. Right in the middle of Walmart, the retiree's home away from home, looking for an economy-size sack of birdseed for my bird, I am hit with blinding euphoria: MY BOOK IS OUT. Harold, we made it! After six years of wandering around the desert, of having him roaming around in my head, he is "out", he is the word made flesh. And for that sublime, dazzling moment, I crest the top of the rollercoaster.


By the time I get home my pants are too tight and it's starting all over again. The divine/obscene comedy.

I've been obsessed with Don Quixote. Everybody is obsessed with Don Quixote because he makes them feel better about their own lives. At least we aren't some nut case crashing around with a lance. But we love him at the same time, for he takes the fall. He dies for our sins. There is something Christly about him, and Cervantes knew it. The holy fool. A sort of gaunt, underfed anti-clown. I started listening to the mind-lurching, emotionally-intoxicating Richard Strauss tone poem recently, with Yo Yo Ma on cello as the voice of Quixote. Oh God oh God oh.


And yes, you don't even need words to see and hear him. Then of course I had to go on YouTube to look up that documentary, that Terry Gilliam thing I watched when it first came out. Years ago. How he tried to make a film, an update of Quixote, and everything fell into the shit to a monumental, even Biblical degree. Everything was literally swept away until there was nothing left but rubble. This film made EVERYONE feel better, but everyone, even heroin addicts on death's door! But seriously, schadenfreude aside, what people were really reacting to and feeling deeply was the courage it takes to let your dream fall apart in full view, though thank God WE don't possess that kind of courage and never will.

We say failure is good, but it isn't. Failure is just failure. I guess it's inevitable, but who likes it, who really embraces it? Those motivational speakers are so full of shit their eyes are brown. In spite of Walmart birdseed raptures, my book likely won't go very far. It won't do a Quixote swandive either, but them's the breaks. I don't think Terry Gilliam lost out in the end, for somebody made soup out of the whole thing, and it was fascinating soup.


Most of us have had times when things have seriously fallen apart, when there's nothing we can do to hold it together. Might be serious illness, or a whole lot of people suddenly die in a row, like fucking dominoes. Or a job just falls out from under and there's nothing to dive into, no safety net at all. Or the safety net throws you up in the air so violently you wish you'd landed on cement.

So I hear this burningly idealistic, almost indecently gorgeous Quixote music by Richard Strauss,and then of course I must look up that song, you know, the one that was so popular in the '60s that everybody recorded it, even Liberace. Or Liberace's horse, I forget which. But I found, on an old kinescope of The Ed Sullivan Show, an 11-minute segment, a live, un-lip-synched slice of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, when it was brand new and still wet. And I found Richard Kiley singing it with heartbreaking devotion, just beautifully. I found a studio recording of him singing it with much more polish, but I never want to hear that one again. In this one he's standing in front of an audience, garish stage makeup all over his face, and every phrase is shaped as if with his own hands and ends with a little sigh. There's a catch in his voice here and there, as if it's almost too much for him, and the timbre of his voice is like a trumpet or trombone, the burnish and generosity and flash of the vibrato, the chest tones. This is coming from a human being. And I'm thinking.

The song is very short and compact, two minutes, and the lyric simple. The tune is something that sounds like it has always been there.


Dissonances relate. This is all about impossible quests, longing and questing, and holy idiots falling down into the mud. I feel like a goddamn fool sometimes, as if I'm on my fourth marriage and it's coming apart, as if I fell for it again. Haven't learned a thing. I remember when the idea for The Glass Character first leapt into my head. Now he is a book, he's outside myself. He lives, and he's in other people's hands, even if they aren't reading it! He's probably in Rich Correll's hands and Kevin Brownlow's hands, even if THEY aren't reading it. Today in Walmart, with the bag of birdseed in my hand, that was a glorious thing. Though at this moment, sitting here, I am not sure why.

A lot of people identify with Quixote because he is seemingly crazy, but everybody loves him anyway and he never has to go for shock treatments or be in the hospital. It's a freedom not granted to many. A lot of people like Quixote because humanity is very dark indeed, and we all want someone to take the fall for us. That's what drama is all about. Fiction is about trouble, poorly resolved or not resolved at all, and no matter how shitty our lives may be, they're a damn sight less shitty than Ahab's over there, he can be counted on to act it all out for us, to bear the brunt, to be humiliated or even killed in our place.

Sort of Christly, wouldn't you think?

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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TAXI DRIVER: all you need to know

You talkin' to me?

New giffinator?

Happy Mother's Day

It was a long, long time ago, I was an overwhelmed young Mom (just a baby myself), and I'd just had my second child. We lived 900 miles away from all our relatives. Though Bill did everything he could, he worked long hours and just couldn't... be there when I needed him. And the new baby screamed and screamed, and I didn't sleep. . .

And then my mother-in-law called and said she was coming out to help. I was too dizzy with fatigue to say yes or no. When she arrived, she said, "you look after the baby, and I'll do everything else." And she did, from spending time with dazed little Jeffy (only18 months old and a little traumatized at having a new sibling) to making meals to keeping the place clean to baking a cake. This was intensive homemaking and grandmothering, and though I am sure I did not fully appreciate what she was doing, it was lifesaving.

But it was the way she did it - with such joy - bouncing Shannon around to relieve her colic, sitting on the floor playing with Jeffy, taking him outside to play in the snow - that I marvel at now. And it hit me with an absolute shock today that she was probably younger than I am now. She became my Mum over the years, filling an awful gap left by an indifferent mother (my name did not appear in her obituary), and what I marvel at most is her sense of gratitude for everything she had. This was rarely spelled out, because it didn't have to be. Her passing was as graceful and as gracious as she was. I will remember her every day of my life. 

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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This is why Jake should play Harold. . .

I've got to go to bed, it's very very late, and this old blog is getting out of hand.

My blog is an anachronism. Looks like a piece of old brown paper. Everyone else is going all slick. Picturesque, even. Mine is butcher paper tied with string. OK.

This is why Jake should play Harold.

At first glance you'd think not. WHAT? People mention Johnny Depp, who's 50, and even Tom Hanks who must be 60 by now.

Jakey is 33, just ripe enough. The shape of his head is perfect. He has a long, clean, handsome jaw, a long narrow nose and bow-shaped lips.

Heartbreaking blue eyes. Little-boy eyes. The eyebrows.

A big head on fairly small shoulders, compact body, wiry, restless, intense. A three-cornered, vulpine smile.

A sense that anything could happen, and is about to. A sense of a storm breaking out, of rain in the air, of horses whinnying along the ridge while clouds go scudding by.

And he's a good-smelling man, I know he is. And I know Harold was. I just know.

That's why he should play Harold.

Don't give your heart

You must know this: it's not too goddamn smart

To give your heart.

To let some boy just trifle, a-la-carte

It's not too smart.

If you want to go there, go there,

And if you want to stay here, stay here,

And if you want to just pop la balloon

With la railroad-spike -

Do what you like.

Stupid to throw so much of yourself away

Stupid to realize it's past that day

(Way past that day!)

But haven't we always been the railroad type?

Love is a gutting kind of a thing

Doesn't make bells and banjos ring

and in the end, who's gonna sing? 

(Say, sing!)

When it almost works, it's such a shame,

And shame can feel much worse than pain

(and wedding rain)

When it almost works, the shock is deep

When it almost works, it shatters sleep

And pride and other things

The dream is stolen in the night
But you left it in the open, that wasn't too bright!
Not too bright.

When magic misfires too many times

and when all this stuff no longer rhymes:

Quelle horreur!

But it can't be worse than misfired art

And it can't be worse than knowing

You made this whole mess start -

You gave your heart.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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Duckie-wuckies up the stairs!

Goosey goosey gosling

To their surprise and delight, Caitlin and Ryan discovered a family of geese outside their condo in Palm Springs.

Fuzzy widdle goslings. . . ahhhhhh. . . 

Palm Springs. Holiday. No, we're not there. . . 

But it might be nice (if we had the $$). . .

 This isn't a selfie, so what should we call it: a footie?

James Cagney and other cool cats

I promised you gifs, and here they are. It's a treat to watch Cagney dance like a cat, in a sinuous manner that is nevertheless always intensely masculine. Nobody else had a style even remotely like his, lending itself naturally to alley-cat leaps and predatory slinks. I see traces of his carnivorous style in Gene Kelly, who purposely seemed to take a step away from the elegance of Fred Astaire. Instead of whirling his gorgeously-gowned girl in the air, he'd lift her up by the inner thigh and let her slide down his body. (Gifs to follow. I promise.)

Ruby Keeler was always the star of these extravaganzas. It's strange, because she isn't nearly as beautiful as some of the other dancers - she's more sweet or cute than beautiful, like the girl you'd take to the drive-in (if they had them back then). She couldn't act, and her singing voice was pretty awful. But she could dance. And there was something about the way she inhabited her body, some indefinable quality. (Or maybe Busby was banging her, who knows.)

I love the choreography in the early musicals - it's about as hokey as it gets. How I wish I still had my YouTube video of Broadway Melody, the first big all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza of 1929. There was a luscious number in it called Wedding of the Painted Doll, and if I had it now I'd gif it to death.

Meow-meow-meow, chow-chow-chow. . . 

Classic Busby Berkeley. Imagine smiling like that for 17 takes.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

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Just sittin' on a back yard fence (meow)

Though I wasn't able to find the whole thing, this is a substantial chunk of my favorite number from Footlight Parade, the quirky Busby Berkeley musical I watched for the second time last night. Though the movie runs the gamut from water ballet to gangster drama to pre-code titillation, this is the one I love because it's so damn quirky, and Ruby Keeler looks adorable in a fluffy tail.

I PROMISE I will make gifs of this. The only reason I am not making gifs of this right now is the fact that Gifsforum isn't working - it's "down" - and as usual, Y2GIF is WAY down, permanently it seems, though it used to be the one I liked to use.

This is, by the way, a Spanish version, a strange thing sung by men that has little or nothing to do with the original music. And don't ask me why Ruby dances around on a big face. I'm not sure if it's the moon or what.

Oh, and - in other news - today I walked into Chapters, where I was afraid my book would never be sold, and went through the d's, the e's, the f''s. . . ga, ge, gi. . .gr (lots of gr's) - then (angel chorus) - there he was on a high shelf: HAROLD!! It was an incredible feeling to see that book (or books, 3 whole copies) up there, for the first time in 9 years. I had thought I would never write seriously again, and certainly never publish again. So no matter what happens from now on, we have crossed some kind of threshhold, Harold and I.

The Glass Character will be sold in eight Chapters stores in Vancouver and area, and though that may be the extent of my exposure there, it's better than the nothing I had before. My other two experiences with publication taught me to cherish the sweet moments, someone coming up to make a comment to you in the drug store, seeing the book on a "local authors" shelf, being invited to speak at a book club where you used to be a member - just things you dreamed about, in your hand for one fleeting moment.