Sunday, November 16, 2014

And the wheels in my head started turning







I'm Lookin' Up From Somewhere Below
The Atmosphere Is Warm And They've Got Plenty Of Coal
Maybe Someone Above Can Hear My Story
How A Fool Lost His Soul For A Moment Of Glory


Chorus
And That's All, That's All, That's All
THAT'S ALL THAT I CAN REMEMBER


Now Bill Was My Friend, Throughout My Short-Lived Life
'Til I Caught Him Out With Mary, My Wife
Then The Wheels In My Head Started Turnin'
A Death Plan I Made Up For Both Of Those Concernin'


REPEAT CHORUS


They Took Me To Prison And They Locked Me In A Cell
They Gave Me My Last Big Meal Then Strapped Me To A
Chair
Then They Turned On The Juice, And I Felt Somethin' A
Burnin'


REPEAT CHORUS TWICE.



SPECIAL NOTE... Alternate First Verse exists... it was
only ever used in Burl Ives' rendition of the song...
Neither Lefty Frizzell nor Cowboy Copas used it in
their renditions. Frankly, I like the first verse in
the Frizzell and Copas versions better... however I
have printed the alternate first verse below:


Come Listen While I Tell You 'Bout A Man That's Gonna
Die
Be Patient With Me Won't You Please, If I Should Start
To Cry
Maybe One Of You Can Understand My Story
How A Fool Lost His Soul For A Moment Of Glory...



As usual, this came in the back door.

 My dear friend David West is facing a medical crisis, will soon be having what amounts to emergency surgery to install a pacemaker, mainly because his pulse is dropping to as low as 30 beats per minute. He needed a ride from Abbotsford to Vancouver and back, had no prospects, but suddenly after a Facebook request, two people stepped forward who are happy to be of service.  I pray this is a good sign and that he'll come through it and feel better than he has in a long time. 

 Pooh and Piglet can't be separated.

 At any rate, in the midst of all this, David finds a skinny little stray cat hanging around his place, obviously direly cold and hungry. He took it in and began to plump him up, though Kitty is still understandably wary. In reading about all this on Facebook, suddenly a song sprang into my head, a song by Burl Ives that is lodged in my head forever:



Well, here it is! A few months ago I looked for this album and couldn't find it. When we first got our cat Murphy back in 1990, I kept singing this song, and my kids kept saying, "That's not a real song. You're making that up." I got most of the lyrics wrong, so they were almost right. But here it is! And it's about someone finding a stray cat and taking it in.

 But that led to something else, and I still can't find it. On one of his more obscure, darker albums, Ives recorded a song called That's All I Can Remember. It was sombre and almost sinister, with Ives singing in a very low-key and almost resigned voice. Very spooky. It reminded me a bit of Long Black Veil, and the story is essentially the same except that in this one, like in a gangster movie from the 1930s, the guy gets "the chair". One can almosts see him screaming and convulsing and clutching the arms of the chair as the plumes of smoke rise above his head. 



I can't find the Ives version anywhere, though I know it will sneak onto YouTube some day. There are only a couple other versions, and this one is nice, but a little too cheery and Latin-sounding. There are some variations in the lyrics, with Ives introducing and setting up the story in a more dramatic fashion. Understandable, since he was such a kick-ass actor.

 Ives was supposed to be folksy and recorded lots of children's songs, but in his soul he was Big Daddy, surly and menacing, with a sense of restrained power that might fly out and do terrible destruction. As in this song. It's literally sung from the pits of hell, where he will fry for all eternity. Not exactly a song you want to sing for the kiddies.

 Look at the little kitty cat
A-walkin' down the street
I bet he's got no place to go
Or nothin' good to eat
Look at the little kitty cat
With tiny tired feet
He ought to have a place to go
'Cause he's so very sweet

 Here kitty, here kitty,
Here little kitty, here little kitty
Here kitty, here kitty,
Here little kitty cat.



I'm gonna ask my mama
If she'll let me take him home
Where I can hold him close to me
So he won't have to roam
He oughta have a lot of milk
And lots of fish and meat
Instead of finding what he can
In the alley or the street

(Musical interlude)

Now look at the little kitty cat
A-sleepin' in his bed
He's got a place to rest his feet
and lay his weary head
I'm going to see that he will stay
As happy as can be
And now when he goes walking
He'll go walking next to me

 Oh kitty oh kitty oh how I love my sweet little kitty
Oh kitty oh kitty 
Sweet little kitty cat.




 


Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look



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Saturday, November 15, 2014

The quiz show that ate my brain





There's something fascinating about worsts, especially when they think they're pretty good, or at least passable. God knows how I fall into these things, but it had something to do (as most things do) with Harold Lloyd, and somehow landing on a site full of FREE old movies (and another sister site with hundreds of FREE old TV shows), and finding myself at the very bottom of the failed-TV-pilot barrel.

I quickly discovered that this had been on YouTube all along, though I was the first to leave a comment. I think everyone else was just too stunned. This bizarre thing is an attempt to cash in on the wild popularity of quiz shows in the 1950s: To Tell The Truth, I've Got a Secret, and I forget the rest. These involved people like Gary Moore and Durward Kirby making quips and holding up pieces of cardboard while a bell went DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING (I never could figure out if the DINGDINGDING was good or bad, but maybe that's because I was two), while Kitty Carlisle snuggled in white furs and rattled her jewellery. 




In other words, panel shows, the good ones at least, were popular, all in good fun, and even, sometimes, had a touch of class. Bennett Cerf might show up, or Noel Coward, or - oh no, not Noel Coward.

So someone - someone had an idea, an awful idea, for a quiz show that was such a mess that after three or four viewings I still can't figure out what it is supposed to be about. Really, it's about nothing, and about five minutes in, the panellists begin to realize this fact and laugh wildly and make lame remarks to cover the awkward silence. Never has a 26-minute show lasted so many years. 




As far as I can make out, the host of the show has brought in his next-door neighbor, probably for free, so that he can function as an Artist. The Artist is supposed to draw a picture in only ten lines. He draws a line, then gives it to the first panelist who copies it, who then hands it to the next panelist who copies it, who - yes, I know it sounds pointless because it is. It is just jeezly bad, from the outset. 

Eventually you end up with an incoherent mess of bad drawings with dumb captions. The panelists seem to have been chosen at random - a horse-teethed woman with an ear-shattering laugh, a guy who looks like he's straight out of an SCTV parody, a - but,  my God, who's this sitting on the end?




As with so many of these ancient TV treasures, there is, after all, someone on this dog of a show who would go on to be world-famous. And I'm not going to tell you who he is, so there. You have to watch. His presence seems to float, Buddha-like, above the seething swill of bad TV brewing below. He says some truly funny things that drop like shot pigeons because no one is paying attention to the budding comic genius in their midst. They're too busy screaming with fake laughter and making ugly and meaningless squiggles on sheets of paper.

It becomes truly dada-ist at the end of the show when the loser of a moderator starts yammering about how the folks at home are going to want to participate in this fiasco. Sitting there copying a line, then handing it to someone who copies a line, then. . . until no picture is produced. He displays special pads of paper the audience is supposed to buy for this purpose, which they are supposed to then "scotch-tape to the TV screen". You may scream now.




The sight of the (inexplicable - why is he there?) gum-chewing piano player, the awkward crowd standing around as if at a surreal cocktail party, and the producer - I guess that's who he is - nakedly pitching the show to sponsors in the ugliest manner possible - what can I say about this? I think it was Jackie Gleason, about whom I have mixed feelings, who hosted a game show that lasted exactly one episode. It too was about "art", but was called, I think, You're In the Picture (I'll try to find it, I'm sure YouTube has it somewhere). Celebrities had to stick their heads through holes in a fake painting, then ask panellists questions about what painting they were in - or something. Awful, awful. 




At least Jackie had the magnanimity to come on the air the next night and offer an apology that lasted one hour. He felt really badly about You're In the Picture and wanted everyone to know it. That kind of candour is rare now. Whatever you do, you cover your ass. You "lawyer up". If you fail, you go around saying "there are no failures" and "failures are the only way to learn". No one picked up this pilot, and I am sure very few potential sponsors even watched it all the way through to that tacky pitch at the end. I can see them puffing away on cigarettes and watching five minutes of it and saying. "OK, Mel, we're done on this one" or something, or "Next?" I can see the panellists slinking away without saying anything, or maybe making fanning motions to each other as if to dispel a particularly sulphurous fart. I wonder if I could get into the head of that unrecognized comic genius, what he really thought of the whole mess. I have a feeling he saw it as just another gig, a way to get some exposure so that maybe, one day, he could do some real television.




Which, I assure you, is what finally came to pass.


http://free-classic-tv-shows.com/



 



Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


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Friday, November 14, 2014

Mad about the boy




I met him at a party just a couple of years ago,
He was rather over-hearty and ridiculous
But as I'd seen him on the screen he cast a certain spell.
I'd basked in his attraction
For a couple of hours or so.





His manners were a fraction too meticulous,
If he was real or not, I couldn't tell,
But like a silly fool I fell



Mad about the boy,
I know it's stupid
To be mad about the boy.
I'm so ashamed of it
But must admit
The sleepless nights
I've had about the boy.




On the silver screen
He melts my foolish heart
In every single scene.
Although I'm well aware
That here and there
Are traces of the cad about the boy.




Lord knows I'm not a fool girl,
I really shouldn't care.
Lord knows  I'm not a schoolgirl
In the flurry of her first affair.




Will it ever cloy
This odd diversity of misery and joy
I'm feeling quite insane
And young again
And all because
I'm mad about the boy.




It seems a little silly
For a girl of my age and weight
To walk down Piccadilly in a haze of light.
It ought to take her a good deal more
To take a bad girl down.




I should've been exempt for my particular kind of fate
As taught me such contempt for every phase of love
And now I've been and spent my love torn crown
To weep about a painted clown.




Mad about the boy,
It's pretty funny
But I'm mad about the boy.
He has a gay appeal that makes me feel
There's maybe something sad about the boy.




Walking down the street
His eyes look out at me from people that I meet.
I can't believe it's true,
But when I'm blue, in some strange way
I'm glad about the boy.




I'm hardly sentimental,
Love isn't so sublime.
I have to pay my rental  and I can't afford to waste much time.
If I could employ a little magic
That would finally destroy
This dream that pains me and it shames me




 But I can't because I'm mad about the boy.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Christian Ventriloquists




Since those strange and tawdry days of Charlie McCarthy and (shudder) Jerry Mahoney, ventriloquism seems to have gone underground. It still shows up  on novelty shows like America's Got Talent (or Britain, or Ukraine, or Mongolia or wherever), an update of the old vaudeville show glorified in the '60s by Ed Sullivan.

Though the ultimate ventriloquist was Senor Wencez with his "hand puppet" (literally, a puppet made out of his hand, which is a device that still delights toddlers), I found a particularly juicy sub-genre of the art in Christian ventriloquism. Perhaps dogma sounds better coming out of the mechanical mouth of a wood-carven mutant.




Most of these poses are from record albums that enjoyed huge popularity (I nearly said "pup-ularity") in the 1950s and '60s. No doubt these were small labels, for how else would "Do You Know Jesus?" starring Uncle Les and Aunt Nancy Wheeler (Featuring Randy) find an audience?  Quite a few of these acts proclaim family relationships, mostly uncles and aunts who somehow produced a ball-jointed wooden robot with their contribution of DNA. And I have never been able to figure out how it is that a ventriloquist's dummy would work on a record album. It wouldn't matter if you moved your lips, for sure.




I can't help but notice that all these dummies look suspiciously alike. Creepy, I mean. That mausoleum look on the puppeteer's face is mighty strange, as if she's taking a day off from Madame Tussaud's. Both dummy and "manipulator" (the technically-correct term) seem to have the same hairdresser. (By the way, like harness-makers in the early 20th century, did the dummy-maker go into decline when audiences became more sophisticated? Or did they all flee to Bible camp?)




Then we have squicky little Marcy, who has so many albums that I had to pare it down to a couple. I can imagine she had a squeaky irritating voice as she prattled on about Jesus and salvation. The manipulator has perfect helmet-like Mary Tyler Moore hair, placing this somewhere in the early 1960s. I wonder if these records were discounted at Bible camp. I know they still show up in garage sales and thrift shops, eagerly snarfed up by collectors, else why would we be enjoying this display right now?




Marcy sings some more. Yikes. We see her standing up here, which is odd for a dummy, but I'm not sure the puppeteer has so much skill as to make her mouth move without any physical contact. That WOULD be squicky, if not downright supernatural.




Obviously a bargain basement record, with an incomprehensible cover. Why is it that all these things exude so much guilt? I guess because that's what religion is all about. There are many red arrows that say "AND" on them, and many grainy b + w photos of dummies, plus choirs. And, as it says in the upper left corner, it is all FUN.




Maybe the ick factor never even occurred to anyone back then, but the thought of Uncle "D" with a girl on one knee and a boy on the other, a huge Bible in front of them and stained glass in the background is alarming today. The "D" seems to indicate a suspicious anonymity, like something from an AA meeting where people are afraid to give their last name.




Oh, rapture! Grace and Wilbur Thrush have a whole family of gaudy dum-dums, not to mention furries such as you'd see in one of those bizarre conventions (and you can't tell ME that funny business doesn't go on in those). What's that on the left, a chess game? I'll have to blow this one up and try to get the details.




Woah.




This is a very odd kind of biker ventriloquist act, with Butch and Suzi (both girls, I assume) sitting on Maralee Dawn's lap. This is an obvious pseudonym to hide her Angel Mama past. They all sit precariously atop a cardboard-cutout Harley, with the caption Featuring The Country Ridin' Preacher, which I won't even try to explain.




It's Sunday School pageant time, with a man dressed in his wife's bathrobe and a kitchen towel. His little disciple is no doubt meant to represent a shepherd boy of some sort. The title is hard to read, but it goes (as they say) something like this: Dan Butler and Louie tell the Bible Classics, Volume III.
No shit, VOLUME III! Volumes I and II must've been hot sellers at Bible camp, or maybe they gave them away free. I must try to track some of these down on YouTube. I need some religion about now to salvage this bizarre day before it sinks in a quagmire of wretched depravity.




I've saved the best until last: the inimitable Erick on the Rainbow label, which (believe me) does not mean the same thing now as it did then. Or maybe it did, who knows. Erick's routine is called Pastor Pickin', which sounds so sinister I don't want to go into it. 




My personal favorite. The seeming eroticism of this, the way their foreheads touch, the way they lean into each other, suggests a love that dares not speak its name, because it's not just interspecies, it's - well, what DO you call having a thing for a ventriloquist's dummy? I'm not sure there is even a word for it. It took me quite a while to realize that Erick and his manipulator Beverly Massagee are PRAYING together, that's all. I mean it. And it's on the Rainbow Label, too.


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Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Circus accidents



The Wallendas and the queer melancholy that trails behind the circus performer seem to be a recurring obsession. I hate circuses. As a child I hated them, and was thought odd. It was that smell, the smell of shit and failed animals. Living in a small town, the circuses I saw were moth-eaten and tawdry, which is perhaps what it's all about anyway. Elephants tied up. Lions waiting for a lunge that never happens. Mean alcoholic clowns. Oh, the clowns especially - they are a nightmare.

There is YouTube footage of Karl Wallenda falling to his death from a tightrope suspended between two high-rises in Rio de Janiero or somewhere, I mean the real thing - it couldn't be faked, he falls. It's the end for him. And his grandson or great-grandson Nik Wallenda keeps on trying for it. One wonders at the symbolism. Trying for a fall, or, like a compulsive gambler, going on and on until he loses everything.  Craven cowards that we are, we still risk death each time we walk out the door. Or don't walk out the door. We don't test it, don't push the risk, unless you count too many sour-cream-and-onion chips or hours spent sitting in a chair.




"Fails" are great tests, tests of character I mean, and most of us fail them. It's just too painful, everybody watching. Everybody has their own particular bag of fails. Mine is my writing. After years and years of refining my craft, publishing hundreds of book reviews and thousands of newspaper columns, my dream "came true" and I published a novel - then two - then three - and then - they didn't sell. Nobody told me, you see, that the novels had to SELL, because part of the dream for every writer I know is automatic Fame and Fortune. Surely this just happens all by itself?

Fail.

 It's sad, and infuriating sometimes, but it's not going to happen for me - the movie version, I mean, because luck just does not stick to me. Like Peter Pan's shadow, it keeps coming unstuck just as I start to get somewhere.  Real trauma is something quite else, and I am able to put this aside and enjoy my life to a degree I never thought possible a few years ago. So is the fail entirely a fail?




Nothing can take away from me the bizarre and ongoing discovery, the process, the burrowing in. Now that I have YouTube and Wikipedia and cool things like that, it's unending. It's labyrinthine, and more odd than the human condition itself, which I both love and loathe. I am drawn to those on the fringes, because I have bloody well given up on being acceptable to anyone but myself (so there), even while seeing that other people's oddness, like mine, might be offputting. As Steinbeck used to say, it's shrimp ice cream.




I saw someone's blog the other day - God, it was beautiful and elegant, like the rooftop penthouse of some gleamingly expensive apartment building in Manhattan, all sort of skyline-y, and the entries were all so gracefully ordered. It just had Professional written all over it. The screaming harridan in me, the rotten mother I carry around in my head, began yammering, "WHY CAN'T YOU BE MORE LIKE YOUR SISTER?", or words to that effect. In other words - your blog sucks, Margaret, stop pretending, start writing like a grownup and maybe THEN you will sell a few copies.

Oh really?

29 rather than 24?

I might as well do whatever the hell I want. Yes, and while still admiring someone else's truly stunning masterpiece of a blog, full of beautifully polished entries on topics of major interest, instead of quirky things on circus accidents and other stuff that usually involves making a lot of gifs.




You shouldn't go on YouTube late at night and watch circus accidents.  It's not fun for all ages. It's not fun for anyone. You'll find falls and wipeouts and awful cat maulings (serves them goddamn right, I'm for the cats). You'll find some where you're not sure the person even survived. After one particularly awful motorcycle crash, the emcee pleads in a nakedly urgent voice that if there is a doctor in the house, PLEASE, come forward NOW. "This is not part of the show." Then he dismisses the crowd, who are almost completely silent.

Is it something Roman about us, a colosseum leftover, something untamed, do we like a thrill, do we like to watch a thrill, THEIR thrill, or do we secretly hope in the most shameful part of ourselves that something in fact will go terribly wrong? For in a circus, it's hard for things to go just a little bit wrong.



Then there is the sideshow. These still exist in the small backwoods circuses that probably operate on the fringes of the law, though they supposedly emphasize feats of strength or daring rather than freakish characteristics. If we see someone walking on his hands now, our response is  likely to be, "Wow, that's pretty amazing," marvelling at the fact that his disability really isn't very disabling after all. But back then. . . back then, when "abnormal" children were generally not allowed to draw their first breath, when people afflicted with "madness" were "put away" so we wouldn't have to see them, the freak show must have been a visceral nightmare.




This is two or three seconds of Todd Browning's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks. For years I avoided it because I was put off by the title (which makes better sense once you've seen it - it's more of a quote, something screamed at the performers by the prima donna aerialist) and was a little frightened of the whole concept because it starred REAL circus performers, "human oddities" - but then one day curiosity got the better of me.

When you see Freaks, you enter a strange world. Fully half an hour was edited out, or censored out, so as rich and strange as it already is, it might once have been much more rich and strange. You have to see it more than once to really appreciate the fact that it's about a community, a very tight-knit one where there is solidarity and protectiveness and intense loyalty to one another. All the things we're lousy at in today's fragmentary society. There's oddball humor, scenes which are not so much meant to shock as to inspire a headshaking wonder, and - as with most great movies, up to and including Gone with the Wind - a love triangle.

I could do a whole post on Freaks, in fact I might at some point, and I was not even aware until just now that my recent viewing of it on TCM probably triggered this whole awful doomed circus search. Unlikely as this seems, the movie isn't "dark" or "disturbing" or "macabre" - none of those terms apply, as most of the troupe are good-humoured and seem to enjoy their work and each other. I will say though that it is plenty weird and a little crazy, demonstrating an over-the-top exuberance unfettered by any bounds of propriety. Only the ending turns dark, terribly dark, and only because somebody dared to mess with one of their own.





 



Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


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