Harold and Bebe: spinning or slow?

This little snippet from Harold Lloyd's Young Mr. Jazz (1919) is meant to be comic dancing, a whirling-dervish sort of spin satirizing the jazzy steps of the day (though in 1919, this trend had barely begun). The bit at the end hilariously exposes Bebe's Daddy in a huddle with a sweet patootie he just picked up, a woman wearing a bizarre striped ensemble and a tall feathery hat. 

I couldn't help but take this gif and s-l-o-w-w-w it down, just to see how the mad whirl might look at a much slower speed. And look at this!

This is just about the most graceful dancing I've ever seen, more typical of Harold's natural skill as a dancer. Really, it doesn't look silly at all, does it? He's sweeping her off her feet.

But then. . . then I noticed something. It's possible that the original dance has been "sped up" just a little, by something called undercranking (literally, cranking the camera more slowly so that fewer frames per second are exposed, thus making it play back faster). Just look at the piano player - he's a jittery blur! In the second version, he appears to be playing at a more normal speed.

Everyone else in the frame is either carefully still, or only gesturing minimally. What made me think of this tweaking of speed was a tiny video I just saw on The Freshman, in which Harold does a fast-footed "jig" that becomes his signature. It goes so fast you can barely see his feet. I found out, with a bit of disappointment, that this too was tweaked to make it look faster than it was.

Damn!

"Step right up and call me Speedy!"

"St-e-e-e-e-e-p  r-r-r-r-i-i-ght  up and ca-a-a-a-l-l-l me-e-e-e. . . not very Speedy."

I don't know why the use of special effects in a movie should bother me. It doesn't, except that dancing was one of Harold's natural skills, one of those things he didn't have to formally learn. To see it enhanced/messed with is a bit disillusioning, but Harold was a filmmaker, and the result was all. Harold's nickname (which I am sure he came up with himself) was Speedy, which kind of makes me shake my head a bit for obvious reasons. He always pushed himself to go farther, faster, longer, than anyone else, and was ferociously competitive. So if he couldn't dance fast enough to create a  blur, he would make it LOOK like he could. 

One has to wonder how much insecurity lay beneath that charming exterior. I don't think Harold was moody or broody (though his temper could be explosive), but for all his inspiration, I don't think he was introspective. He always moved relentlessly forward. At what cost, we can only guess, for the lives of his children were troubled. They had all the problems of rich kids who had come from desperately poor parents. Harold was determined to give his children "everything he never had", but was that what they needed? The question goes unanswered. We only know he could  dance. Reminds me of those old Westerns where some cowboy shoots at the feet of the town drunk, yelling, "Dance! Dance! Faster!"

Turtle rescue - BY TURTLE!

There's something uplifting about this.

Maid of Orleans/Cool Cat from Queens

This is my montage of early Christopher Walken/Joan of Arc gifs, the latter taken from the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Of course I do not mean to suggest they look alike, but there is something about the intensity, the luminous stare, the cheekbones. . . especially the cheekbones. 

These are the cheekbones of a saint.

Similarly, his Deer Hunter suicide scene with its implication of self-immolation/self-annihilation is Joan-like as he sacrifices himself to the dark forces all around him. I couldn't use later Walken, because later Walken is a whole different man. He looks like his own grandfather now, and it's kind of disappointing to me to see such a supernatural fox turn so weary-looking. Only the flashbulb smile with that searchlight sweep of the room is the same as before. But you don't see it often, and his face is so saggy and lacking in tone that he looks almost depressed. Most distressingly of all, he has developed a whistle in his speech, one of the most irritating things in existence. I have seriously wondered about him, since someone recently made a comment on one of his YouTube videos about how "the Alzheimer's is affecting him". He played a musician with Parkinson's a few years ago, and the nearly-expressionless, masked look of his once-expressive face made me wonder.

But perhaps we expect too much, expect a Dorian Grey-like supernatural beauty that lasts forever. This is, after all, a 75-year-old man who has given his whole life to performing. Perhaps it has cost him more than we realize. It amazes me how little vanity he has, how little sense of self-importance or entitlement (and he's refreshingly un-crazy for a child star). I remember the old-style stage performers of the past, Jack Benny and Ed Wynn and all those down-to-earth guys who'd come on Ed Sullivan, and he seems to belong to that old-fashioned era, just here to do his job, and always grounded by a sense of his own (human) limitations.

That said, early Walken is supernaturally beautiful, and so charismatic he leaps off the screen at you like a predatory animal. You simply cannot ignore or forget him.

I still feel that we are looking at two men, but that can't be true! I've read somewhere that Walken smokes, and that could account for the haggardness, which is surprising in light of his extreme early fox-hood. Hey, William Shatner is still a good-looking man (if a tad rotund - but who's complaining?) and surprisingly un-wrinkled at nearly age 88. And his energy, speech, and mobility (not to mention his unquenchable enthusiasm) belong to a much younger man. Maybe it's just a trick of genes, though Walken should have this advantage as well. He has gone on record to say his parents lived to be nearly a hundred. Who knows, maybe he's a living Dorian Grey, with his old self taking on all the slings and arrows his face never revealed when he was young.

POST-BLOG OBSERVATIONS. Because of the weird phenomenon of YouTube, with its vast bulletin board/everything-coming-at-you-at-once quality, it's possible to see Walken at every age, moment-by-moment or even second-by-second as you click from one movie excerpt or interview or hosting gig to another. There are some shocking entries, like this 1962 clip from the TV crime drama Naked City, and in some places he's even younger, not quite grown to his full foxhood because of his boyish softness of face. Here he looks as if he's not even shaving yet. This pastiche/jigsaw effect is relatively new, and in the past we had to go and see a whole movie at a time, or watch a whole TV interview, without this capacity to jump around. I LIKE jumping around, myself, because it satisfies my curiosity and lets the detective in me work fast. But it shocks me to think that I've seldom seen a Walken movie all the way through. I think Communion was one of the only ones, and I only stayed with it because I could not quite believe how bizarre it was.

POST-POST. I began to feel a bit guilty about Christopher Walken. Not that I know the man, or ever will, but I think I was a bit hard on the fact he has let his looks go as stringy and baggy as nature intended. I had thought of assembling a before-and-after of wretched plastic surgery among male celebrities, but ended up compiling this horrendous assortment of short gifs. You know who they are anyway, so I won't bother labelling them. A freakier lot you never saw, though they once all looked like human beings. I don't know who butchers these people, celebs who have all the money in the world to get it done right. Facial muscles get pulled so tight that as the person ages, everything starts to pull in the wrong direction. The face begins to fight itself and squirms weirdly as the person talks. Fixed noses shrivel and cave in, or go oddly sideways. Cheek implants threaten to explode, pushing out so aggressively that they show through the skin. Mouths slash horizontally across the face and look Muppet-like, and eyes sink right into the head.

It ain't working, folks. We're not buying it. You're old, and we know you're old. 

Christopher Walken, meanwhile, is jarring in another way, because in the past couple of years he seems to have aged about twenty. I didn't watch him as Captain Hook in Peter Pan Live (and a more miscast Hook never walkened the earth), but apparently he kept forgetting his lines, letting his Walken-ish pauses drag on forever. And that was five years ago.

Why should I worry at all about a celebrity? Who knows. They're like popcorn. We consume them, they amuse us for a little while, until we go on to the next one. That's just how it is. And they must always keep their shiny side out, the only side we can ever see. 

(Unless you're Alec Baldwin. Then you get to punch people.)

Cityscape montage

A montage of Blingees (back when Blingees were half-decent) that I put together into one long gif. This was done with a single photograph of a street scene. No sound, sorry!

"Is college bad for girls?"

So is this a real ad for a real booklet, or a parody? I was all set to believe it was real, until I found a second version of the photo. The girl is still flagrantly smoking, her hair wantonly tumbling down her back and her slip falling off her shoulder, with cigarettes scattered on the floor. But instead of the Police Gazette in the corner, we see - the Saturday Evening Post! Did they photoshop in those days, do you think? Or is this whole thing a clever fake?

A little foal with big speed

No one told him he couldn't run that fast!

Can't stop singin' that WRONG NOTE RAG!

Be Leaf

An unusual form of insect camouflage.

Kit Kat Kitten

Cats and toilet paper: this is the master

Vintage record labels (animation)

Harold comes calling

The unbearable cuteness of squirrels

Christopher Walken's cat

This really is Christopher Walken's cat. It appears at the end of a classic Walken video called Chicken with Pears. The gif has been slightly edited for length and speed.

SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO! Christopher Walken makes Chicken with Pears. Again.

Children of a brighter hue

Hand-tinted vintage photographs.

Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill

This was the #1 song in the USA December 1891.

"Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill" is an American folk song first published in 1888 and attributed to Thomas Casey (words) and much later Charles Connolly (music). The song is a work song, and makes references to the construction of the American railroads in the mid-19th century. The tarriers of the title refers to Irish workers, drilling holes in rock to blast out railroad tunnels. It may mean either to tarry as in delay, or to terrier dogs which dig their quarry out of the ground.

George J. Gaskin (1863--1920) was an Irish Tenor based in the United States.

Every morning about seven o'clock
There's twenty tarriers a workin' at the rock
The boss comes along and he says, "Keep still
And come down heavy on the cast iron drill."

And drill, ye tarriers, drill
Drill, ye tarriers, drill
For it's work all day for the sugar in your tay
Down beyond the railway
And drill, ye tarriers, drill
And blast, and fire.

(Unintelligible yelling and crashing noise)

The boss was a fine man down to the ground
And he married a lady six feet 'round
She baked good bread and she baked it well
But she baked it harder than the hobs of Hell.

The foreman's name was John McCann
By God, he was a blamed mean man
Last week a premature blast went off
And a mile in the air went big Jim Goff.

And when next payday came around
Jim Goff a dollar short was found
When he asked, "What for?" came this reply
"You were docked for the time you were up in the sky."

Tarriers live on work and sweat
There ain't no tarrier got rich yet
Sleep and work, then work some more
And we'll drill right through to the devil's door.

PLEASE NOTE. I wish I could find out more about this song, especially if it's spelled "tarriers" or "terriers", which DOES after all make a big difference.

What I love most about the recording is the (I assume) sound of explosions made by the piano. Like most early recordings, the speed is variable, which is another feature I love. Some early cylinder players were literally hand-cranked throughout the recording, before windup belt drives came into being. Though it's hard to make out anything approximating words, I think this version only covers a couple of verses. The limit for a song back then, whether on a disc or a cylinder, was just under two minutes. It was not uncommon for the song to suddenly speed up in the last couple of seconds, before the wax ran out.

I have barely gotten into my deep love for old, old recordings. Anything after 1900 is "too recent", too new to qualify. I love the way someone SHOUTS the title at the beginning of these, apparently as a way of labelling a cylinder recording which might otherwise become detached from its casing. But the same thing was done with the early Berliner discs, which were usually only recorded on one side. The title was often etched into the material by hand. I have seen only one of these, an awful old thing called A Cornfield Medley, in which the n-word is used several times.

I really thought "tarrier" was a specific name, like "farrier" (someone who shoes and otherwise looks after the feet of horses). This word is still in operation in the horse world. As per usual, the Irish were looked down upon, although I am still trying to figure out why. The fact that this was at the top  of the hit parade in 1891 is interesting.

Even more intriguing (to me) is that the folk trio named The Tarriers included a young and very dishy Alan Arkin. I've always been able to get behind him. I did a previous post about a compelling song he  co-wrote with his father, about the KKK and its chilling evil sweeping across America:

"Mother, I feel a stabbing pain,
Blood pours down like summer rain."

My brother Walt used to sing that one, along with a lot of others he didn't write. It was what you did, back then. Arkin went on to greater things, but I don't know if he wrote any more songs. Richie Havens recorded it, the only surviving recording I know about.

Excited Astronomers Exclaim: "The Earth is Doomed!"

The Milky Way Is Going To Crash Into Another Galaxy Sooner Than Expected 

By James Schlarmann | January 5, 2019 | Category Space Share and enjoy! 26 Shares 13 

Far be it for me to be an alarmist, but I have to relay some important news to you about our galaxy, the Milky Way. I hope you’re sitting down when you read this. 

It concerns all of us, every single life form on Earth. A new study is predicting that our galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy. This is nothing new; scientists have been predicting a galactic collision for awhile now. 

But here’s where you might want to brace yourself — the Milky Way crash might be coming sooner than was originally expected. Believe it or not, Marius Cautun, a Ph.D who helped discover the accelerated timeline for the galaxies crashing into one another actually said he’s excited about this!

“The discovery made me very excited!” says Cautun, whose team put a preprint version of their paper on ArxIV. “Initially, both my collaborators and I were surprised and, because we didn’t expect it, a bit skeptical. This happens many times with new discoveries.”

And what, exactly, is Dr. Cautun so hyped for? Well, we’re not exactly sure what the impact on life on Earth could be, but we do know some of the details, and they don’t bode well, necessarily. 

Two things will happen when the LMC runs into the Milky Way. As it moves, it will pull other stars away from their normal orbits around our galaxy and set them on less predictable courses — possibly one headed for our Sun. 

And if another star passes near our Sun, the orbits of the planets will shift. The entire reason we have life as we know it here on our planet is that we’re situated in a perfect spot — not too far or too close to the sun. 

But if the Milky Way colliding with another galaxy pulls our planet closer to, or further away from the sun, it doesn’t take a genius to see there could be potentially catastrophic impacts on terrestrial species.

“Any such change is very dangerous for life, since even small variations in the distance between the Earth and the Sun can move our planet outside the Goldilocks zone and make it either too hot or too cold for life,” says Cautun. Cautun says there’s even a small chance that our solar system could be tossed right out of the Milky Way! 

If we are “unlucky,” he adds, there is also a 1-3 percent chance that the solar system might be ejected from the Milky Way entirely. If our descendants manage to survive that journey, Cautun predicts they’ll likely see a “very different night sky, much darker than currently with only a modest bright patch that will correspond to the Milky Way galaxy.” 

Well, I guess there’s only one thing left to do. Figure out how much time we all have left and hold each other tight, one last time. I’m sure that we’ll all take comfort in each other’s love as we watch what’s left of our existence fade away into the dustbin of time. 

I hope you all had a great life and — Anywhere from one to four billion years from now, study lead and cosmology researcher Marius Cautun, Ph.D., tells Inverse, the Milky Way could be smashed head-on by the the LMC. He admits the secondary effects of such a crash would be dangerous for life on Earth, but he’s more delighted at how much this discovery reveals about our own abnormal galaxy.

Oh gosh, I guess I should’ve read that part first, huh? I’m so sorry. This would’ve changed the whole tone of the piece too! Only having four billion years left to live is frightening! 

(Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter because he has a potty mouth.)

Please note. This excerpt from the intergalactic doom article is only partly satirical. I recently saw a post from a Facebook friend (not a real one) which was all about an exciting new book which is going to teach us all how to die.

Since the earth is doomed by climate change, North Korean nuclear bombs and terrorist atrocities, not to mention Donald Trump's hair style, there is no longer any hope for humanity. Any attempts at salvage are "too little, too late". It behooves us all to learn how to face the inevitable, lie down and die. Surrender to the void, and try to practice existential hopelessness with a degree of dignity and grace.

I exaggerate, but not much. This was a serious book telling us that since the end of the world as we know it is approaching at light speed, we must all learn how to "perish" (the actual word) with as much graciousness as possible. I couldn't read much of  the post. I couldn't get away from it fast enough. What galled me most was the inevitable Greek chorus of "friends" (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, THAT kind of friends) saying in the comments section,  ohh, I MUST get a copy of that book, it sounds wonderful!

NO, it did not sound wonderful. It was just a lot of angry-making, nihilistic shit to me. No one is more aware of the possible end of the world as we know it than I, yet I think lying down and rolling over before anything has even happened is just about the worst thing we can do.

I was part of the anti-nuclear/"peace" movement in the '80s, and now I realize I wasted a couple of years of my life in desperately futile protest while the earth kept merrily spinning and everyone else was having a good time. In contrast, I ran around screaming that the sky was falling, and lost all my friends. As with the Y2K bug and the phasing out of the penny, NOTHING HAPPENED, and I learned a lesson I will keep until the world actually DOES end. 

Don't believe shit until it comes. And listen, if and when it does come, NO ONE will have a CLUE how to perish with dignity or grace or have cat food on their face. No one will know shit! They'll either be dead, or running around screaming that the sky is falling. It's like that indispensible earthquake survival kit that lies buried under a thousand pounds of rubble.

This was a beautiful little article that I "borrowed" (since I can't link to most things), and it is a parable for our times. Don't  lie the fuck down, people. Get UP. Get up and walk around. Get busy, do some work. It's called life, and it hasn't ended yet.

"Take. . . him. . . for. . . a. . . ride": worst acting in movie history!

It took me a long time to find a whole version of Lights of New York, the first full-length, all-talking talkie, because it was pulled off of YouTube a long time ago and now does not even exist as those wretched half-minute clips. I had to find it on one of those video sites - can't remember the name of it, damn! - and pirate a little bit of it, for which I was dinged on my channel for violating copyright. Every time I turn AROUND I violate copyright, and since my views average anywhere from zero to seven, I do wonder why YouTube bothers to persecute me when multi-million-view types get away with anything they want. (Money may have something to do with it.)

This is just excruciating, it really is. It's SO bad, sublimely bad, you can't believe it, so wooden, so stilted, somebody's idea of Movie Acting with Sound. Most of the movies of the late '20s were lifted from the stage, to make sure they were chatty and yakky and fairly static in motion. The microphone would be discreetly hidden behind a potted palm. I love to hear the hums and whirs and THUDS of early talkies, the sound of the camera barely disguised by putting it in a huge box (where the cameraman would nearly die of dehydration and heat stroke). Finally some brilliant boy realized they only needed to put the CAMERA in a box, but by this time most of the cameramen were already dead. That's progress for you.

It's excruciating trying to watch this whole thing, and I confess I didn't, but even this one scene is so brilliant, it's worth getting dinged or even taken to court for stealing valuable material. I mean. The worst line delivery in movie history? It's pure gold.

(Vimeo. It was Vimeo.)

La Sylphe

COOT FEET!

This is the first time I got a good look at a coot's feet, which are big spongy things that are nothing like the feet of ducks or herons or anything else. They're just weird! But I like them, and I like the way they disappear into the water, the conviction with which they do it, the - commitment. The head goes down first, then - thwip! 

I haven't posted too many of my hundreds of nature videos - some of which I think are quite good - just because I seem to get side-tracked. This is all that is left of a "series" which just never happened. The videos are still on YouTube, they haven't gone anywhere, at least until they close my account for piracy (10-second clips of movies that have been in the public domain for 50 years). So my series will no doubt happen eventually. Or not.

HERE AT LAST: Harold Lloyd in PROFESSOR BEWARE!

It's pretty incredible to FINALLY see this movie posted when I have been snuffling around for it for something like eight years. (This is, by the way, the second version I found. The first one, taken from a Russian web site, had an annoying buzzing sound in the background all through the movie.) All I could ever find were publicity stills - LOTS of them, more than for any other movie Harold ever did. 

I haven't even looked at this yet, as I posted it very late at night. It gave me a surreal feeling. Harold himself didn't like this film, and I think it was made in 1938, his doldrums period when he nevertheless was not quite ready to give up. His "glass character" (his own name for his film alter ego) didn't wear well with time, not because he didn't look good - he looked good for pretty much his whole life -  but because it was a little uncomfortable to see a 40-year-old man acting like he was 25. With one exception, the ferocious kiss in Why Worry?, his alter ego was almost virginal, and a virginal 40-year-old (who in several cases still lives with his parents) is just kinda creepy.

How does it feel to have this lost treasure at my fingertips? I'm not sure yet, because I haven't watched it. And of course it's not like the wild curiosity of a few years ago. But something has changed.  I cannot tell you why, but after pushing the whole subject away from me for over a year, I am "into" Harold again. 

 

I found a stash of copies of my novel yesterday and was a bit relieved - I could only find one, and found it hard to believe that I hadn't kept more than that. I sent out SO many copies to people whom I hoped would be interested, mainly in the film industry, and Kevin Brownlow was the only one who responded, albeit with a very brief enthusiasm which has since died. Rich Correll's initial keen interest (he actually phoned me, gave me contact information and seemed genuinely interested in doing something with it) and subsequent cold and baffling dismissal was nothing short of devastating. I am not sure what happened, but I suspect someone was running interference, and I think I know who it was. When the movie gets made and all my ideas are in it, it's going to be pretty heartbreaking. But I digress.

I have no idea why more photos, posters, lobby cards, and other forms of publicity exist for Professor Beware than for (even) Safety Last or The Freshman, when it disappeared from view for so many decades. But here it is. Sampling through it, so far I notice Harold's shrill, strident voice yelling and screaming a lot, and maybe this is one reason it didn't go over well. I have no idea why he didn't just use his regular, jovial Midwestern voice with its delightful tinges of Nebraska. Comics often have a persona with an obnoxious voice - Jerry Lewis comes to mind - but this one is pretty hard to take.

If you're interested in this movie, please watch it right away! It could easily be taken down for copyright reasons. It was shown on AMC just once, some time in the '90s, and there's a rumor it was on YouTube very briefly in 2015, but I don't know about that. I think I would have noticed it. But the powers that be at YouTube will likely re-inter this gem just to make sure we are deprived of all the best things on the internet. 

BTW, aren't these gorgeous? I'm afraid I don't own them. It's just an internet image. But in this case, as with so many things, the buildup was much better than the actual event.

Freakin' SPIDERS on my blog - !

What Men Don't Like About Women

 

"It is unquestionable that. . . the remarks made by Thomas D. Horton are of the shock variety, but then the truth has always been so." - Bethlehem Bulletin

"There is not the slightest likelihood of any male ever reviewing this book before a women's club. The insurance premium would be prohibitive. Turn to any chapter, any paragraph and read it aloud in the presence of a female, and you'll have fury with its claws out." - Columbus News

The blurry lines at the bottom reveal the ruse: that this book is meant to be comedy, not misogyny: "Enjoy the most rib-tickling treat you've ever had or return in 5 days - for refund. Don't delay. A unique hilarious experience is yours! Send this coupon - TODAY!" Doesn't exactly match up with the hateful copy we've seen up to now. Or maybe it does? Too bad these books aren't still around. They'd be a unique, rib-tickling psychological illumination.

Starry Night comes alive (this actually works!)

Stare at the revolving circle for 30 seconds, then look at the painting. . .