Ginger ninja

 

 

Mad About the Boy: the lost lyrics

SOCIETY WOMAN:

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 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 quite 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 school-girl
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

SCHOOL GIRL:

Home work, home work
Every night there's homework
While Elsie practices the gas goes pop
I wish, I wish she'd stop

Oh dear, oh dear
Here it's always, 'No dear
You can't go out again, you must stay home
You'd waste your money on that common Picturedrome
Don't shirk—stay here and do your work.'

Yearning, yearning
How my heart is burning
I'll see him Saturday in Strong Man's Pain
And then on Monday and on Friday week again

To me, he is the sole man
Who can kiss as well as Coleman
I could faint whenever there's a close-up of his lips

Though John Barrymore is larger
When my hero's on his charger
Even Douglass Fairbanks Junior hasn't smaller hips
If only he could know
That I adore him so

Mad about the boy
It's simply scrumptous to be mad about the boy
I know that quite sincerely
Houseman really
Wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy

In my English prose
I've done a tracing of his forehead and his nose
And there is, honour bright
A certain slight
Effect of Galahad about the boy

I've talked to Rosie Hooper
She feels the same as me
She says that Gary Cooper
Doesn't thrill her to the same degree
In Can Love Destroy?

He meets with Garbo in a suit of corduroy
He gives a little frown
And knocks her down
Oh dear, oh dear, I'm mad about the boy

COCKNEY:

Every Wednesday afternoon
I get a little time off from three to eleven
Then I go to the picture house 

and taste a little of my particular heaven

He appears
In a little while
Through a mist of tears
I can see him smiling
Above me
Every picture I see him in
Every lovers' caress
Makes my wonderful dreams begin

Makes me long to confess
That if he ever looked at me
And thought perhaps I was worth the trouble to
Love me
I'd give in and I wouldn't care
However far from the path of virtue he'd
Shove me!

Just supposing our love was brief
If he treated me rough
I'd be happy beyond belief
Once would be enough

Mad about the boy
I know I'm potty but I'm mad about the boy!
He sets me 'eart on fire
With love's desire
In fact I've got it bad about the boy!
When I do the rooms
I see his face in all the brushes and the brooms!

Last week I strained me back
And got the sack
And had a row with dad about the boy
I'm finished with Navarro, (He thrills me to the marrow)
I'm tired of Richard Dix, (I sit through all his tricks!)
I'm pierced by Cupid's arrow
Every Wed-nes-day, from four to six!

'Ow I should enjoy
To let 'im treat me like a plaything or a toy
I'd give my all to 'im
And crawl to 'im
So 'elp me God, I'm mad about the boy

TART:

It seems a little silly
For a girl my age and weight
To walk down Piccadilly
In a haze of love

It ought to take a good deal more to get a bad girl down
I should have been exempt, for
My particular kind of fate
Has taught me such contempt for
Every phase of love

And now I've been and spent my last half-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 may be 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 enchains me

But I can't because I'm mad about the boy

Words and music by Noel Coward

Cartoon Harold Lloyd!

A few snippets from cartoons, previews and other animated features.

Bottoms up!

Harold toasts the New Year. What will 2019 bring? Walls or bridges?

Christopher Walken Lost Cartoon - He sings! He dances!

As a neophyte Walkenite (almost), I found this animation both entertaining and mysterious. This may well be a rotoscope, a technique by which a live subject can be traced or filled in (somehow) with animation. Rotoscoped Walken? Why not. I'm finding out more about him, and it's a weird enthusiasm because I am not entirely sure I like him. There is this tough-guy shark-eyed quality there, though who knows how much of that is the actor in him. His dancing can be inspired, but it's more often loose-shanked and spread-eagled and not always very graceful. His incredible spin in Pennies from Heaven is not quite matched anywhere else, and too often he does a cornball '70s shuffle with disco arm-rotations, as in the ludicrous alien-dances in Communion.

That said, he has a seductive side, eyes that almost seem to be kohl-rimmed like Valentino's, which usually indicates uncertain sexual orientation. No one ever says this of Walken, but how can you miss the arrows of intimacy firing out of his unsettling Nordic-looking gaze? Death-rays or love-rays or something-rays seem to emanate, with the sense he could pull you in if only he wanted to.

It's said Walken works too much, and I think it's true. He does not save himself, and in fact I sometimes think he will appear in any old crap because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. The "accent" - his odd way of speaking - can just about disappear, as when he narrated a quite good piece about his idol Gene Kelly for TCM, or just sproinggg out of control like a defective door-hinge, as in when he's improvising on the creatures in his back yard - the "grahndd-hahhg", the "yewje ruc-coons", the "hum-ming-baeds" (and if you slow down Walken's speech, as I have often done, you notice an odd precision of consonants, a very clear and almost crisp punctuation which is one of the things that makes his slice-and-dice style of speech so unique).

Then again. He's not ageing very well, and looks loose and jowly, as most heavy smokers do when they age (yes, he's one of those, I'm afraid). The very young Walken looks like a freakin' girl. I mean it! He couldn't help it, I guess, but he looks like somebody's jailhouse punk with those Clara bow bee-stung lips and the big, innocent eyes. Makes you wonder about him, it really does. He has one wife, that anybody knows about, one house, never goes out (except to look at the hum-ming-baeds), makes movies and makes movies and plans to keep on making movies until he dies.

So do I like him? Do I find him shocking when I dredge up yet another clip of him blowing somebody's face off? Does it get tiresome to see him interviewed one more time with all the same questions and all the same answers, safe, safe? And playing crappy old Grandpa shit? Like has nothing to do with it. I sort of fell in. It was fascination, I know.

Je t'ai rencontré simplement
Et tu n'as rien fait pour chercher à me plaire
Je t'aime pourtant
D'un amour ardent
Dont rien, je le sens, ne pourra me défaire.
Tu seras toujours mon amant
Et je crois en toi comme au bonheur suprême.
Je te fuis parfois, mais je reviens quand même
C'est plus fort que moi… je t'aime !

Lorsque je souffre, il me faut tes yeux
Profonds et joyeux
Afin que j'y meure,
Et j'ai besoin pour revivre, amour,
De t'avoir un jour
Moins qu'un jour, une heure,
De me bercer un peu dans tes bras
Quand mon cœur est las,
Quand parfois je pleure.
Ah ! crois-le bien, mon chéri, mon aimé, mon roi,
Je n'ai de bonheur qu'avec toi.

Turkey trot: Harold walks his prize turkey home

 From the delightful domestic comedy Hot Water.

Abbey Road: the animation

"I've made a huge mistake"

Walken dance in 24 frames

Mad about the boy

Snowball fight, Clydesdale-style

Hark the Harold

. . . in a winter wonderland. . .

Alternative lifestyles: the gingerbread house revisited

Who says the roof has to be pointy? This one might be harder to construct than it looks, however. It has a certain house-of-cards look to it. But it's fine if you REALLY like graham crackers, and want to do it on the cheap.

A pizza house! Or pizza hut, or whatever you want to call it. But you'd have to eat it pretty quickly, as it wouldn't do well at room temperature.

I am not sure, but I think the roof is made of shredded wheat. It might have been more effective to use frosted Mini Wheats, but who am I to argue?

Milk carton house! You can even see the carton on the inside. How innovative - just pull the graham crackers off and eat them. 

I saw a car like this once, with all sorts of tchotchkes (?) on the outside. You could spend days picking the candy off this one and eating it before you got down to gingerbread. 

Pretzel-roofed house, with jellybean and gumdrop walls and marshmallows stuffed into the door. I think. The roof is topped with M & Ms.

Cookie house! Now this might really be good. Chocolate and pretzels and some sort of candy feature here. Gingerbread is crap anyway, like roofing tiles, so this is much more edible.

A low-lying graham cracker bungalow. Graham crackers being a solid, yet lightweight building material. Note the yard covered in coconut snow.

Now this is interesting: pecan roof, pine nuts on the sides, and some sort of edible walkway - granola, maybe? The underlay seems to be cream cheese, but I don't know how the whole thing is put together/held up. I hope those green things aren't brussels sprouts.

TOTAL pretzel house! Or thin breadsticks? I see Chiclets in the windows, masses of jellybeans for the chimney. This is stolen (stollen?) from the Gingerbread Journal, but right now I don't give two hoots. It's Christmas, so lay off.

Matzoh house! Very small, but nice, and you could consume it in one sitting with a cup of tea.

SQUIRREL!!

Harold Lloyd, the Christmas fanatic

When I began to research Harold Lloyd to write my novel The Glass Character, there was almost nothing about him on the internet. The photos were tiny, grainy old black-and-white things, likely scanned out of books. Believe me when I say, there were hardly any books about Harold, let alone novels (and mine is the only one I know about, though the reading public doesn't even seem to know that). 

At any rate, this set of family photos is kind of nice. This one depicts, left to right, a grinning Harold, his devastatingly handsome son Harold Jr. (a. k.a. Duke, or as he was familiarly know, Dukie), and the lovely Mildred Davis. The three family cocker spaniels figure large in this, BUT - what about that Christmas tree? It looks nothing like the pregnant-looking, ornament-stuffed, legendary tree he became known for. But knowing Harold, he'd have trees all over the place, so this is likely not the main one.

This is more like it, though the tree is still in a state of evolution (you can actually see a bit of the branches). I don't know who the two people on the right are - family friends, likely. The little girl in Harold's lap is his granddaughter Suzanne, now the keeper of the Lloyd legend. 

Mildred looks lovely in this, as usual. Again, I wonder if this could be the main tree. The dogs are simply gorgeous.

Here we have the tree in all its bulging glory. The tall man in back is family friend and Lloyd bit player Roy Brooks, who's in my novel, with Dukie and Suzanne and Mom. 

If I am cracked down upon for daring to share these photos (which are reproduced many thousands of times on Pinterest, Twitter, and countless other pages), no one will be surprised. It is well-nigh impossible to find the provenance of internet images, though I have squeezed the Google and TinEye reverse image sites to no avail. It's my fate to be made an example of,  I guess, though I have to take consolation in loving Harold and being fascinated with him for all these years. He's the reason for the season.

And he belongs to everyone. Remember that.