Separated at birth: Rudolph Valentino and William Shatner

AFTERNOTES. I was going to run this with no text at all, but now I feel moved to Say Something. Anyone who follows this blog (me, maybe?) knows that I am nuts about The Shatman. To be 85 years old and have that kind of energy and passion is phenomenal. (And the horses, don't get me started!) But I am also finding out more about Shatner's roots. I found a very poignant story about his professional beginnings in Stratford, Ontario (a place I've been to many times) as a Shakespearean actor. I have seen clips on YouTube from Hamlet and Julius Caesar, and this so-called-over-the-top actor gives, if anything, restrained performances. The article - God, where did it go? I should've bookmarked it - talks about how insecure he was as a young man, and how much of a loner he was. Loner? Insecure? None of these match with the energetic dynamo-of-85, the Shatner of a thousand interests and enterprises (ch-ch-ch-ch - dry ironic chuckle). And yet, and yet.

I'm also finding all these things he did when he was much younger. The segment on the boxer was breathtaking, for he has the body of an Adonis. He is ripped. This powerful, grounded physicality is the foundation for his phenomenal longevity and vitality in his 80s: if you wreck your body when you're young, you're toast by age 60 (sorry, Carrie, I'm afraid it's true). 

As for Rudolph Valentino, he was perhaps my first movie star crush. As a kid, I saw pictures of him in a book we had lying around, a big coffee table book called The Movies. (I thought I imagined it, until I was able to buy a used copy from Amazon.) When I was ten years old I wrote short stories about him, set in the 1920s. Maybe these foreshadowed my completely obscure, mostly-unread novel about Harold Lloyd. Who knows. But I was fascinated with him. 

I am not saying these two are "alike", but is there not something - an elusive something, perhaps, in the exoticism of their eyes, the sensuous bow-shaped lips, the incredible facial structure with cheekbones to die for - is there not something almost Mongolian about Shatner's slightly slanted eyes, something Moroccan about Valentino's inscrutable gaze? 
He was, of course, a Latino from Spain, but Shatner is not the waspy, white-bread leading man people assume he is. He is a Jewish boy from Montreal, and no doubt carried that label and responsibility with a degree of pain.

The pain you can see in those incredible, unfathomable brown eyes.

Are you in Crimbo Limbo?

Well, ARE you? Myself, I am glued to my chair, when not eating macadamia nuts and Purdy's chocolates and feeling sick.

It is raining too hard to go outside. It is raining too hard to do anything.

I had never even heard of Crimbo (some sort of weird contraction of Christmas, probably British or maybe even Australian) until a few years ago when I stumbled across it on some site or other. Crimbo is also related to Crimbo pressie, Crimbot, Crimbus, Crimcheck, and no doubt thousands of others, many of them defined below. Some of them are nasty. Looking them up will give you something to do.

TOP DEFINITION


Crimbo Limbo

The period after Christmas Day and before New Year's Eve, mainly spent sitting down and eating leftovers. Many find it extremely dull.

I'm so bored. It feels like crimbo limbo's been going on forever...

ALTERNATE DEFINITION

Crimbo Limbo 

Crimbo Limbo is the time in-between Christmas Day and New Years Day, where you feel fulfilled, eat lots, and give yourself alcohol poisoning.

Ryan: Dude, I haven't done anything productive in three whole days, yet I still feel great!
Lewis: Well, that's Crimbo Limbo for ya!

RELATED TERMS (in alphabetical order)

Crimbo Limbo
crimbo pressie
Crimbo (short for Crimbabwe) 

also known as the Heart of Darkness
crimbot
Crimbus
Crimcheck
Crim Cram
Crimdalf
crim de la crim
crim della crim
Crimder
Crime
crimea
Crime-A-Dozen
Crime against Humanities
Crime against nature
crime-a-lator
Crime-Alert
Crime and Punishment
crimeaversary
Crime Bluff
Crimebo
Crimeboss
crimebridge
crimecation
Crime Community
crimed
Crimedale
Crime Dawg
Crime Deturent
Crimedicts
crime dog
Crimedotte
Crime-dotte County
Crimee
crime essam

It's also a game.

When Ballet Goes Terribly Wrong

Who knew? William Shatner, shirtless

how many o lord are my enemies what hordes attack me yet you o lord are my shield my glory you lift up my head with a loud voice I call out to the lord and he answers me from his holy mountain i lie down and i sleep now i wake again for the lord upholds me i fear not men in their thousands all around me or against me arise o lord save me o my god for you break the jaws of all my foes how many o lord are my enemies what hordes attack me

Unknown William Shatner

as the deer longs 

for the running waters my soul 

longs o God for you 

I recall pouring out my 

soul within me 

how I used 

to walk in the great procession 

leading to the house of God 

among the 

shouts of joy and 

praise in crowds keeping 

the feast day 

why are you sad my soul sighing 

within me deep call out to deep 

in the roar of your cataracts 

all your surges have passed over me 

all your waves 

my very bones feel 

the blow as my enemies mock me 

as daily I am taunted where is 

your God why are you  

sad my soul sighing within me 

hope in God for I shall yet praise him 

again he who saves me from shame 

my own God

Christmas at my house

Cow curls up in dog bed

It's a wonderful life? If you say so

This thing comes on every year and I get caught up in it, even worse than Taxi Driver.  And I forget every year that it's the longest, most suffocating piece of melodrama ever created. A festive favorite about a man who wants to commit suicide because his life has been an exercise in futility and failed dreams, capped off by a totally unfair charge of bank fraud.

Ah! It's a Wonderful Life. Ringling, tingling Christmas trees, Zoo-zoo's petals, bleeding lips, newel-post knobs nearly hurled across the room. Chickens on a spit, bar brawls on Christmas Eve, irrelevant songs about Buffalo Gals, and wild-eyed overacting all around.

This guy George, see, he's kind of, waal, waal, disillusioned. His Uncle Billy, who's half nuts but was the father in Gone with the Wind so sort-of famous, has lost the eight thousand dollars that the Bailey Savings and Loan has earned in the past fifty years or so. He sort of dropped it somewhere and the Big Fat Man, the Bad Man, Lionel Barrymore in his most Grinchimous role, went and spent it on a hooker or something.

So this George, he, waal, decides he's worth more dead than alive (do I hear silver bells?), and stands there not jumping off a bridge. Then this old guy in a nightgown jumps off the bridge, and. . . the rest is history.

Oh, I shouldn't be so cynical, but this thing - this long thing, this three-hour marathon of hopelessness and small-town suffocation - it's about the farthest thing from festive you could imagine. Even Scrooge has glimmers of hope in it, but this - . George acts like some sortofa downtrodden saint for two hours and forty-nine minutes, then he kind of explodes and screams at his wife and family and tells them he basically hates them for holding him back and completely destroying his life.

His . . . wonderful life.

OK, I have a few problems with the logistics of this thing. When they get married and have to give all their money away to save the bank, Donna Reed gets chickens going on a spit in this old ruin of a house, the one they used to throw stones at for luck. And they move in to it? make it habitable? On his salary of $2.70 a week or whatever-the-frick-it-is? Raise a family? George wears the same suit for 17 years, for God's sake.

Jimmy Stewart overacts. I'm sorry, but he does, he overshoots. He smears his facial features around with his hand, his hair is wild, he looks like a candidate for the psych ward, and finally he mumbles to his hokey old guardian angel (the guy in the funny shirt that ties up in front because buttons hadn't been invented in the year 1300) that he wishes he'd never been born at all.

Kind of the ultimate in nihilism, wouldn't you say? Jimmy Stewart, the guy with the 6-foot imaginary pet rabbit, the guy in whatever-else-he-was-in, all those Westerns and Mr. Smiths and whatever, attempting to annihilate all traces of his existence on earth. A holiday special? OK, another big problem. He has this obnoxious friend named Sam Wainwright who keeps saying, inexplicably, "hee-haw". A dumb-ass par excellence, he lucks into a strange new business just before the war breaks out:  plastics. This assures he'll be obscenely wealthy doing no work at all.

He's George's best friend, for blippin' sake, and George is all stressed out and wanting to kill himself over 8 thousand dollars when 8 thousand dollars isn't even POCKET CHANGE for Sam Wainwright. In the dramatic ending when everyone turns their linty little pockets inside-out for George, he gets some kind-of-a cable from Wainwright saying, in so many words, "your measly little problem that you were willing to die over is peanuts to me. I'll give you three times that amount and change. There, feel better now?"

I doubt if he would. But think about it. Would Wainwright ever let George be dragged off to jail for such a shabby little amount? Money is power, right? Wainwright could make Old Man Potter dance like a jerky little marionette on a cold winter's night, and George is all stressed out about jail? (I liked his idea that Uncle Billy should go, instead. Made sense to me.)

But hey. He might get conjugal visits from that, who's that little floozie anyway? Jeez, what's she doing in this thing which is supposed to be a family show?

Oh, oh, and I just thought of this: it gets me every year. Why is it that after George yells at Uncle Billy that he's a mental defective, a moron and a lunatic, a squirrel jumps up on his arm? What the - ?? a squirrel? Up to now we've only seen ravens, tortoises, cows, etc. Could this be a foreshadowing of the squirrel from hell in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? (Actually, it screams of "cut the animal scenes, this thing is running too long." But for some reason they left in the squirrel.)

This time around (when as usual I kept saying, "OK, I'll turn it off in another 5 minutes" for 6 consecutive hours), I noticed a few other discrepancies, such as George's mother (Beulah Bondi) bawling and dabbing at her eyes during the final cash-spilling orgy in George's living room. Well, about ten minutes ago when George was on the phone with his brother Harry in Washington, where he just got the Congressional Medal of Honor for filing his nails or something, George repeats to the listening crowd, "Mother just had lunch with the President's wife."

Not only do the writers of this thing obviously not know who the President was then, but Mother must be able to teleport herself from Washington to Bedford Falls in a matter of seconds! Hey, lady, tell me how you can be in two places at the same time and I'll buy the patent.

Another thing, and I noticed it again when I watched it tonight. This is the place where I'm tempted to think they're kidding us, just seeing how far they can go with George's personal hell, to the point of near-satire. It's the scene where George asks Clarence where Mary is, and he can't even tell him because it is just too horrible. Finally he pries it out of him. She's . . . she's. . . a librarian! Might as well say she's Bathsheba or something, or her body is hermetically sealed because she "never got married".  So out comes Mary from the library like some shaggy-eyebrowed vision of frumpster hell. It is the ultimate macabre detail in a movie which is somehow or other very dark indeed.

But I gots-ta confess to one thing. No matter how I prepare myself for it, no matter how cynical I try to feel, no matter how cornball I know it will be (and it is), that final scene has me bawling every time. Just bawling. I don't know what it is. The generosity of the people. The look of astonishment on George's face. Zoo-zoo's petals. Beulah Bondi, beamed down from the planet Zargon.

I remember a superb SCTV satire of this scene, in which a succession of ever-more-notable people kept sweeping through the door, from George's brother to the President of the United States to, finally, His Holiness the Pope. It's a potent fantasy, all right - one we wish would come true for ourselves. That one day, in spite of futile sacrifice and grinding toil and zero recognition, something wonderful will happen to make us see that it has all been worthwhile.

This has something to do with the American work ethic, always handing the glory to someone else like that ratfink brother-who-got-the-Congressional-Medal-of-Honor-while-we-got-stuck-with-goddamn-rubber-drives-during-the-freaking-war. Let's face it, there are more Georges than Harries in the world. We all have our lunatic uncles, our goddamn rubber drives. Our eight thousand dollars.

And if George hadn't-a saved Harry when he slid down on that slippery old thingammy on the ice, waal then -

Please note. This is a repeat. It's something I've run a couple of times now, but I just watched the movie again - or the last 45 minutes of it - by accident - and decided this piece is still relevant. Sort of.

Cats for Christmas

Christmas cat gifs? Oh my, yes. Always, but especially when the season and the ridiculousness of the human condition makes me owly and disillusioned.  Our first cat Murphy pulled the tree over - that was before we had video, sorry - but it must have looked something like this.

Short takes. I would imagine if you had a multiple-cat household, nothing would stay decorated for long. The cat is a creature of chaos. It's what we love about them. They rip apart the tinsel and gaudiness and expose it for what it is (tinsel and gaudiness). Now give me my fish.

Here is where it really heats up. 

Ni-i-i-i-ice.

Videos of  kids getting kittens are totally different from videos of  kids getting puppies. In the puppy ones, the kid ALWAYS cries, usually hysterically. I've never seen a cat one where anyone cries. Just an observation. But no one ever talks about a "faithful cat", do they? Cats are anarchists, they're subversives and never "obey". They allow you to dwell in their presence. You can't cry over that.

You can go "eeek! Eeek! Eeeeeeeeek!", however.

How to wrap a cat. I'm going to try this with Bentley. I am. He loves his carrying case, so who knows. This may be a ragdoll cat however, and you can do anything you want to a ragdoll cat. The gif logo says "Flippycat.com", which may be significant.

NOT how to wrap a cat.

Taken from an ad, so cheating a little, but still pretty cool. Since no one has ever trained a cat, the camera must have waited for them.

The Jingle Cats are very stupid, and I have the original CD and play it every Christmas. To date, no one has liked it.

Ginger terror!

Meowy Christmas.

Harold Lloyd's Christmas: take 76!

                                     https://vimeo.com/113520933

https://vimeo.com/113470172

Merry Christmas, Harold.

SQUIRREL!

Santa vs. Satan!

It just gets more incredible. I was SURE I was down to the bottom of the barrel with that Godawful Punch and Judy show with the Hitlerian Santa. But no! This is a truly unbelievable cinematic abomination starring, in one movie, Santa and Satan. They duke it out. They actually vie for ascendancy and control of the world, if not the universe, while little children look on. It's all extremely weird, even eerie. The movie was made on the cheap in Mexico and later dubbed into a kind of English.  I know Mexico is very big on all that Day of the Dead stuff, the sugar skulls, etc. But seriously? Here, the devil wears a skirt and dances badly. Santa just wheezily ho-ho-hos, as always.

I won't inflict the whole movie on you. I've made a few choice gifs, which were hard to make because the length of the movie necessitated very large gif files. So these may or may not download, may download slowly, or may play jerkily until they decide to play correctly.

If you watch the gifs, you will either find yourself wanting to see the whole thing, or sweating with gratitude to have gotten away singed, rather than roasted by this Yuletide atrocity.

Just the juxtaposition of the Devil with Jolly Saint Nick is grotesque. The pieces just don't fit. That's why I made these gifs, to get you to believe me. Santa looks catatonic and his suit looks like it is made of vinyl, but that is beside the point.

Here is where Santa begins to realize that something is seriously amiss. He lights a sort of firecrackery-looking thing (Mexico is very big on firecrackers, too, sometimes with tragic results), which spins around and around. So does the devil, going into a weird kind of choreography.

The thing about this devil is, he has a really shitty costume. Long red underwear, it looks like, and red body makeup, but with these really loose, rattly ears. Maybe so he won't scare the kiddies too much. But just having the Prince of Darkness in a Christmas movie is too much for me to wrap my head around.

This is where Santa demonstrates the principle of "love thine enemy" by firing a cannon at his nemesis. Ah, the heavenly peace of Christmas, where God and the Devil shoot it out in the living room! Santa cackles with glee at the direct hit.

In retaliation, the devil pulls a knife on Santa - no, wait, it's a pair of scissors - and punctures some sort of bag of water, or vodka or some shit like that. Santa turns around and spits on him.

And I can't go on here. Whenever I close my eyes now, I see red.

Bentley on the fridge

There is something about this cat, particularly in closeup. Something almost Zenlike. He came from a hard background, found homeless and skinny and wounded somewhere in Surrey (Surrey!). He has the duelling scars to prove it. It was a long and twisting path to the Gunning household, but he's here to stay. He will own me forever.

Deer on ice

He is born

"I'll take care of the baby, Mary. Now get some rest."

Christmas, a long time ago

I don't know where to begin to write about this photo. It isn't even a photo: it's a crop, only a tiny piece of a much larger picture that featured all my siblings, plus my sister's boy friend Derek. We were all in wacky positions on the sofa beside the Christmas tree. 

It didn't occur to me until just now to crop out the part with Arthur and me. And it jumps out at me now, startling: so there we are. Arthur influenced my childhood, not to mention my life, more than anyone. Arthur was crazy. He was a flutist, a musician, a ne'er-do-well and very very smart. As time wore on, it became more and more evident that something was "wrong with" Arthur. In his early 20s, a few years after this photo was taken, he was diagnosed schizophrenic.

Whatever that means. But in an odd way, he embraced it. His life was hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto, though I did get to see him once in a while. He was a beloved figure, always, even if he did not always make much sense. The family tried to help, they really did, but he was hard to keep track of. He was in and out of hospital, and once when he described a hospitalization to me, it was as if he were telling me about his vacation in Acapulco. It was a grand adventure - no kidding! None of the bleakness, the shame that a "proper" mental patient should feel.

Though he did "mental patient" with great style and verve, he really was mentally incapacitated at times and found it hard to get along. Practical things were difficult. Because he was naturally appealing and very spiritual, various religious groups adopted him, literally took him in off the street and gave him food and shelter. First it was the Buddhists, then the Sikhs, and I don't know who else. I am grateful to them now.

Arthur died horribly, in a fire, in 1980. It was the same year John Lennon was shot. I don't know how I got through that year. Everyone said things like, oh, it was smoke inhalation and probably a painless death. Then I found out what death through smoke inhalation is really like. Everyone said things like, well, at least now you know where he is. They even said: maybe it was for the best.

It wasn't for the best, not anybody's best, and certainly not his. He had his life, odd as it was. He influenced me enormously. I can't even describe his sense of humour. It was bizarre; he could be bizarre. It wasn't always pleasant being with him.

My second novel Mallory has a character closely based on Arthur. It was important to me to write that novel, but like everything I have ever published, hardly anyone read it. I try not to dwell on the sense of futility that gives me.

When my brother died, I rather bitterly thought: now I get to inherit the mantle of family fuckup. And I did, to a large extent. I wear a "diagnosis" too, though a different one. I take "meds" too, though different ones. I don't like jokes and cartoons about meds because they are not funny, though I see them everywhere. If I mind, I'm told I have no sense of humour.

But Arthur was good at his diagnosis, he usually wore it lightly. He told me about a time in hospital when they had a "patient's night out" and went to a pub. When it was time to order a drink, one of the guys kept calling, "Oh, nurse!" He thought that was very funny.

I don't wish to paint him as this jolly schizophrenic. There was that time he tried to exorcise a demon he claimed had taken over my body. And he often smuggled hashish into his bedroom, where we smoked ourselves senseless. I was only about 15.

I wasn't popular as a teenager, at all, and was often miserable. Oddly, Arthur WAS popular. Strange as he was, he always had friends, and they came to him. He never did a single thing to attract them.

I will never figure out the riddle of him.

If you've had a brother, and then you don't, it leaves a hole, a brother-shaped hole. It leaves you wondering why you had to inherit this mantle, this "not right in the head" stuff that is supposedly so important. I am NOT "right in the head", but that doesn't matter so much because I have my life. And I suppose it's nothing special, except to me.

Say Misty for me

How to wrap presents (NOT)

Happens to me all the time. I've also had tape stuck in my hair or on my knee (!?), and of course cut the paper so it's too short and won't go around the gift. Or discovered I left something out, and very carefully tried to open up the paper along the seam, and rrrrrrrrip. 

This is one of the rites of passage of Christmas, and every year I say "this time it'll be different". It isn't. It's just as sweaty, tiring and tedious as every other year. I somehow established a custom years and years ago of making pompoms and other yarn designs (twisted, braided) instead of ribbon, and God. It uses up VAST amounts of wool, and leaves, always, mats of yarn-bits and ends caked onto the rug.

But we do this, we do these things. Even if it's all thrown away, ALL of it, even (especially!) the elaborately-made pompoms which no one appreciates.

They don't appreciate it because they speak a different language, because they don't know what the hell this is all about. Their accomplishments shine in the eyes of the world. Mine don't.

But I keep on doing it, because - because it's what I do, and I know I will continue.

Northern Lights in Norway: beyond amazement

Man Possessed by Gay Demon on Live TV (Original)

One of my favorite videos.