The Glass Character

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Be patient with me today, for I am trying to put together something impossible. I recently watched the movie version of Misty of Chincoteague, my favorite "horse book" of all time, and was entranced. It was filmed on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands before they were overrun with tourists and roads, with just acres and acres of blazing white sand and aching blue sky and roaring surf. Picture the Chincoteague ponies ripping along that beach, their wildness, their horseness, and - . It's beyond what I can describe, and the YouTube videos were pretty lame. So I put together a few stills (less than ideal) with a piece of music that sums up horseness, wildness, and freedom. The real Misty - and yes, there really was a Misty - appears in an incredible photo where she's close enough to touch, with awestruck children watching her in the background.

More about Misty later. I have a lot to say.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

"It's Baxter!"

http://www.tvspots.tv/video/2666/RALSTON-PURINA--WEDDING

http://www.tvspots.tv/video/4556/RALSTON-PURINA--CHARTER-BOAT

Had to do some real digging to find any "Baxter" Meow Mix commercials, which used to be my favorite. No sign of them on YouTube, it's a pity, someone has to get going on this!

Flicka!

http://tvclassicshows.com/free-tv-shows/category/my-friend-flicka/

http://www.myfriendflicka.com/home.html

Oh, how I remember this: I'd be crouched on the floor in the den in our old house in Chatham, probably working on some project, plasticine or construction paper and glue. The TV would be on in the background, and I'd barely be paying attention to it: Fury was over, along with Sky King and Sea Hunt and all those other things that came on every Saturday morning.

Then I'd hear a familiar glissando on a harp, and a lavishly sentimental theme played by a schmaltzy orchestra. The title would flash on the screen, and I would be in ecstasy.

MY FRIEND FLICKA!

Flicka didn't seem to come on according to any sort of schedule. She was probably shoehorned in whenever there was a half-hour not accounted for by Bozo the Clown, Jingles the Jester, or Captain Jolly (the bizarre lineup of local kids' shows we watched from nearby Detroit). So that made her all the more special. I felt a kind of bliss when Flicka came on, and even though it was in black and white I could see the magnificent mare's sorrel coat burnished in the sun.

The show was all about Flicka, of course (in real life, a prize Arabian named Wahana), but it went deeper than that. This was a psychological Western, much soppier and more sentimental than Have Gun, Will Travel, but still full of significance. It was far more than just the story of a horse and the boy who loved her: it was a coming-of-age tale, sometimes painful, sometimes a little maudlin, but always fascinating to a horse-crazy girl like me.

Johnny Washbrook played Ken McLaughlin, a freckle-faced kid with an irritatingly high voice and a tendency to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. Since something awful was always happening to Flicka (she'd go blind, be stolen, run away, develop colic from a bad apple, or be wrongly accused of assault and battery), he cried a lot. His mother (Anita Louise, I think: a sort of cut-rate Dorothy McGuire) was constantly patting his shoulder and reasuring him, while his Dad, a sort of Dan Blocker stand-in who had played in too many generic Westerns, wanted to make a man out of him by subjecting him to all sorts of brutal trials.

Johnny may have been a soppy character, but he could ride, and he seemed as natural on that horse as a centaur. Flicka was one of those hypersensitive creatures who seems to know what you want before you do. Arabians can be mighty flaky, but also deeply devoted, an ancient trait from those nomadic desert days when a horse didn't dare lose track of its master (or vice-versa).

I knew this show wasn't recent: it had that muddy quality of something made in the mid-'50s. I sort of let it wash over me: I longed for horse shows, for horse books, for horse anything. And while I did finally own a horse for several years, a game and eccentric little trail horse named Rocky, the truth about horses never quite matched the dream.

For horses represented absolute freedom. Freedom from a family system that could be loving, then turn on a dime and be devastatingly abusive. Horses were a refuge for me, and I loved the sound of them, the whinnying and chuffing, the smell of their sweaty hides, the creaking of leather on a Western saddle.

There are strange gaps in my memory about all this, for I don't remember ever receiving any instruction in riding. To be honest, I had to pick it up myself. I was never told how to saddle or bridle a horse, how to curry it or look after its feet, but I don't remember not knowing. For a couple of years I went trail riding at a ranch called the Lazy J, and whenever I had the chance I rode a special horse who seemed to somehow teach me the basics. I never fell off, though Rocky had a tendency to dawdle on the way out and gallop on the way home.

This was a completely unguided trail. You were set loose after paying maybe $5.00. You could, in all honesty, spend hours on it, exploring its twists and turns, except that after a half hour or so the horses got fed up with all that and took off for the barn.

I suppose Rocky was no Flicka, but we knew each other well and were good companions. In truth, he was a replacement for the first horse my Dad bought me, a three-year-old mare who had no training at all. If I tried to mount her, she took off. She pulled like a train, and seemed to hate to have anything on her back. Dad knew nothing about horses and bought the mare for looks and status (his chief business rival had just bought HIS daughter a horse, a real looker named Apache). I was tearful and frustrated, my parents blamed me for not knowing enough about riding, it was touch and go as to whether I'd get a horse at all, and then. . .

"Mom, Dad, can I have Rocky?"

I suppose the story should end with me winning all sorts of prizes and ribbons and stuff like that. I didn't. Rocky loved walking through mud, he pranced ridiculously around the pasture when I tried to put his halter on, he stuck his head in the grain bucket (and wouldn't take it out), making that coffee-grinder sound horses make when they eat. A few years later he was slowing down - he must have been ten years old, at least, and had been ridden so much before I owned him, it was surprising he had any good humor left in him at all. The place where we boarded him with a lot of rangy Standardbreds closed shop, and everywhere else was far too expensive. My own interest was beginning to thin out as I entered high school and worried about a popularity that eluded me (and still does, I might add).

So we had to sell Rocky. Weirdly, I don't remember a tearful farewell, or any kind of farewell at all. Was that the end of my horse phase? Not really, for I still feel that kinship, and though I ride only occasionally, I always have a feeling of homecoming. A couple of years ago, feeling nostalgic, I tried to find some trace of My Friend Flicka on the net, and came up pretty much empty. There was some information about the lovely novel by Mary O'Hara, and a bit about the movies that were based on it. Nothing about the show. Even now, YouTube only has a horribly grainy, distorted picture of the opening theme, obviously taken by crudely filming a TV screen.

But magic things happen on the net. Suddenly there are entire sites devoted to this show, detailed lists of episodes (39 of them in one year: that was back when a "season" was more than 13 weeks), and all sorts of backstory, including what Johnny Washbrook is doing now (who cares??). Considering the show originally ran 55 years ago, it's amazing anyone's still alive. I found a site that offers streaming video of whole episodes, and that sudsy theme with the sliding strings gives me the same old feeling.

But I have to tell you, the show's a little slow. OK, a lot slow. When you watch so-called "classic" TV, you really do have to slow your brain down to a different pace of storytelling. There appears to be ten minutes or so of plot stretched over the 24 minutes or whatever it was. There's always at least one shot of Flicka galloping furiously, maybe to warn Ken that the mine has caved in (oops, that's Lassie), or to get away from the ubiquitous Bad Guys. There are also a lot of shots of said bad guys galloping furiously toward the bank, or away from the sherriff.

In other words, it's a normal Western except for that gorgeous Arabian, and the little boy with the irritating voice who never stops crying. But I'd watch it endlessly. It was a diamond unexpectedly dropped into my lap. It was my Saturday bliss. It was Flicka.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

And while we're at it -

OK, so this may be something in the nature of a rant. My second rant today, so this must be a bad day. (The last one was so bad, I deleted it. Hey, how about those Canucks?) But why is it that when you go on certain sites like the Huffington Post, sites that seem to have a category for every possible human activity, you see so much maddening contradiction?

The "health" section of this site is crammed with advice from experts on how to conquer that food addiction, once and for all. How to fill the empty void within, NOT with food but with improved self-esteem. How to lose 50 pounds by never looking at the scale. Or always looking at the scale. By trying the latest diet. Or not dieting. And so on, and so on.

After all this, I have to say that I was appalled to look on the food page and see items exactly like this. I could hardly find anything that wasn't empty calories, sugar-and-fat-laden carbs, total junk. We're being fed the wrong message, folks. You can't cultivate self-esteem and magically prevent a heart attack at 42. At some point you have to suck it up and, as they used to say long, long ago, push away from the table while you're still a little bit hungry.

I will admit I've had my innings, my bouncings up-and-down, and I don't think they're over yet. But the juxtaposition of diet strategies right next to recipes that contain a pound of butter is just plain crazy, and I'm fed up with it. If you have a weight problem, you'd better stay away from the "food pages" unless you want to see recipes for deep-fried beef burgers that are approximately 8 inches thick.

Kinda makes me want to put a zucchini in my hotdog bun.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Alas, poor Stanley. . .

Alas, Lord Stanley. . .I kneweth him well, Horatio. Then the great Bear from the East beateth the shit out of the mighty Orca, and we were smushed into the ice like a half-melted popsicle. Helas! and fooey, dear Horatio! - for long hath we watched these games where men pulleth each other's jerseys off to the roar of the crowd, while the great Potentate Cherry fills the arena with strange, hot gases. Let us not dwell on sorrow, but hope for the morrow! . . Hey, it's just one game, guys. . .the parrot said we'd lose one, remember? (and jeez louise, did we ever lose BIG!!)

'Psychic' animals: Do you put any stock in animal predictions? - Your Community

Will Jasper pick the winner? Which shoulder will he "splat" on? (Hint: the one with the seeds on it.)

Let us be thankful for the things that do not change

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Look, Mother, I'm making a few bucks off self-caricature!

A Cosmic Victory

Canucks win predicted by Cosmo the Parrot

Move over, Paul the Octopus (may his glorious FIFA World Cup predictions never be forgotten as he rests in peace). The Vancouver Aquarium now has its own eerily accurate animal prophet for the NHL finals: Cosmo the Parrot.

Amazon parrots are famous for their abilities to imitate human speech, and Cosmo, a 13-year-old, female blue-fronted Amazon, is often heard saying, “Come on,” and “I’m the bird.” Foresight, however, is a bit rarer.

Canucks win Game 1 in dying seconds But, according to Vancouver Aquarium staff, Cosmo has accurately predicted the outcomes for all five games when the Canucks played the Sharks last month.

“I didn’t teach her at all, I just basically held up two cards with pictures of an orca and a shark, and asked her, ‘Who’s going to win game one? Who’s going to win Game 2?’,” said keeper Grant Tkachuk, laughing. “I even shuffle them so they’re not in the same positions. She will look at them, and then she will walk away and she’ll come back, and look at it again, and she will pick one.”

Mr. Tkachuk said he didn’t think anything of it at first. Therefore, he was “quite surprised,” when, after the Canucks/Sharks series was over, he realized Cosmo had gotten all the match outcomes correctly.

Last week, Mr. Tkachuk created new signs for Cosmo, in light of the Canucks’ face-off against the Boston Bruins for the cup. So far, one of her predictions has come true:

Game 1: Canucks

Game 2: Canucks

Game 3: Canucks

Game 4: Bruins

Game 5: Canucks

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The New Canucks Logo!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

We lay down and wept

I am not good at loss. I don't know anyone who is. But I have a particularly hard time, especially when loss is layered on loss.

It becomes so overwhelming that I can't feel the impact of it until many years later.

Who died first? I think it was Ken, who was not a close friend but a loyal and true member of my church. He sat behind me in choir, sang bass, was one of the support beams and part of the underlying structure of our choir (which at that point was very good). He was always the first to arrive at the church to take care of the myriad tasks to prepare for worship, and the last one to leave.

Then I got a call from the minister's wife in the morning before church. She told me he was dead.

He was driving his truck, pulled over, got out, and hit the ground.

Ken was only about three days older than me. The funeral was huge. I was disoriented, in a teary daze that no one else seemed to share: this should be a celebration of his life, after all! Funerals now have the air of festivity of a carnival, with hand-clapping, rousing gospel hymns and much laughter as friends share the departed person's foibles.

Who went next? Maybe it was Glen. Glen Allen was someone I'd never met. We had corresponded in the old-fashioned way, pen on paper, for fully ten years, as he moved from one newspaper to another. An award-winning journalist, he struggled with alcoholism and mental illness for his whole life. People warmed to Glen, they loved him, for he had a compassion I'd never encountered before, a deep empathy for the down-and-out.

Then someone found him frozen to death by the railroad tracks in Toronto. He had taken a bottle of pills and wandered out of the psychiatric ward in the freezing cold, and at some point passed out. He died like one of the homeless people he loved so well.

Glen was dead.

Gerry went next, I think: or no, maybe it was just my awareness of Gerry, for I had lost touch with one of my dearest friends and didn't know if he was alive or dead. Gerry had cancer, and his passing was not entirely unexpected, but he had been one of my closest church friends for fifteen years or so. Well, he lived into his seventies, so we can't exactly cry at his funeral, can we? Let's put our hands together and celebrate!

I had to keep running to the washroom to cry. Alone.

And Peter, this - . This thing about Peter. I can't talk much about Peter, though I will post a photo of him. In 2005, he helped me through what was without doubt the most harrowing time of my life. When I look back at all those deaths, I wonder why I didn't see it. I thought I had dropped the ball. I thought it was -

I can't talk about Peter much, because he died. I didn't find out about it until very recently, though I suspected it. He has been gone for three years. I suddenly realized I still had all our emails, though I thought I lost them years ago.

I'm not good at death, and particularly not good at the hand-clapping and yee-haws of contemporary memorial services. I don't think we need to dress in black and sit there grimly, but do we have to pretend we don't really mind that the person is gone? Do we have to sit there holding back floods of tears, in isolated pain, a pain which can become badly infected and spread throughout the body and mind?

Oh no: if we feel such inappropriate things, we need "therapy". We need to see a "professional", because we are obviously too antisocial and fucked-up to get with it, to get on-board. So we pony up the $125 per session or whatever it is, and try to "heal", while our friends chatter and gossip and forget all about the departed. For after all, we must "move on".

So the therapist slots us neatly into the "stages of grief", asking us weekly, "OK, which stage are you in today? Denial? Anger?" "Ummmmm. . . how about total despair?" "But that's not a stage of grief. Besides, I think you might have missed one, the one that comes after bargaining. So you're going to have to back up a little."

But I don't know about the right order, because I don't know which person to grieve first. Four is a lot, you see. You fellows had better get in line.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

It's the Anthony Perkins Action Figure!

Goddamn it, I don't know how to get one of these, but finding a picture of one was ecstatic enough. It even looks a bit like him.

Too bad they didn't make a Norman Bates, complete with wig and a little tiny knife.

Gay? Okay.

What is it about a certain kind of man, a certain kind of gay man, a certain kind of closeted gay man, a certain kind of famous closeted gay man, a certain kind of feyly-beautiful-as-a-youth-but-ageing-into-skin-the-texture-of-chipped-beef famous closeted gay man, that - oh, shit, let's skip this and get into Anthony Perkins again.

Older women devoured him, as seen in the above shot with the frighteningly carnivorous actress Melina Mercouri. It's not often a person other than a dentist gets to see someone's entire upper teeth. There is no record of his response. He did live with older women, but completely nonsexually. He was in the closet, eh? Do you see the look on his face in most of these pictures? Was that closet the size of Hollywood, or the size of the entire world?

Hey, I liked him anyway, but it's too bad he couldn't just be, that he had to try to be respectable so he could have kids and a home. He thought he couldn't have kids and a home with the men he loved, so picked a slightly butch woman who came from money. Fortunately she willingly revolved around him as if he were a particularly strange, remote planet with a strong gravitational pull.

I like that coat with the stripes, I like it a lot, but he looks to be on the verge of hysterics. In most of these shots, he hasn't even played Master Bates yet (master of his domain, perhaps even Master of the Universe). That last one, well, I had to throw that in to demonstrate the fact that he was not only a famous closeted gay man with, etc. etc. , but that he had quite possibly the longest neck in human history. In later years, he wore a concrete brace with little, what-do-you-call-those-things, epaulets or something, to keep his head from falling off. It was only partially successful. His head had a habit of rolling down the Hollywood hills all the way to the East coast and landing in Stephen Sondheim's garbage pail.

Do you know the weirdest fact about Tony Perkins? During his five seconds as an action hero in Disney's limp space epic, The Black Hole, there was an Anthony Perkins doll which would probably go for thousands on eBay if you could ever find one. But I'll bet Melina Mercouri ate every last one.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

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

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Tinker, tailor, part 2

Yesterday I wrote about a strange connection I discovered when researching Irish gypsy/traveller culture: people referred to these often-reviled people as "tinkers", and I remembered that my Irish great-grandfather was a tinker/tinsmith.

It seemed unlikely he had anything to do with a culture that was looked down upon, until I remembered the greyhound cookie cutter he made, not a practical thing because the legs of the cookies always broke off. Then I found out in my research that these Irish "travellers" (tinkers?) traditionally raised and raced greyhounds.

The hair on my neck stood up. It was the weirdest feeling. Even weirder was the feeling when I googled "greyhound cookie cutters", expecting exactly nothing, and got at least a dozen images. Most showed the dog safely standing up, with only two legs (front and back fused together). This one came closest to my great-grandfather's tin artwork. Who knows what connection he may have had to greyhounds. Could it be that he was a "traveller", too?

Monday, May 30, 2011

Don't ask me why, but I love this

Tinker, tailor, bridesmaid . . . aieeeeeee!!

Please bear with me if all this is a little disjointed: I'm working from fragmentary information cobbled together from a "documentary" (read: TV sideshow) on TLC called My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

I don't watch bridal shows as a rule, mainly because they bore the piss out of me. (My own wedding was minimal, but lo and behold, we just celebrated 38 years together.) But here is a culture which seems to live for weddings and first communions, the recipients of these rituals so swathed in foamy tulle and caked-on makeup that they are barely recognizable as themselves.

This is all about "gypsy" culture, mainly of Irish descent, living in various parts of Britain in communities that resemble a typical North American trailer park. Strictly speaking, since they aren't Romany (the East European itinerant culture that has existed for centuries), they aren't really gypsies at all. Such a moniker is almost like using the n-word for black people.

They prefer to call themselves "travellers", though I didn't see much travelling going on in these first two hour-long episodes. Mostly I saw little girls in skimpy, trashy outfits gyrating and wagging their butts suggestively, brides so immobilized in grotesque, tacky gowns that they had to be carried, and matter-of-fact descriptions of a culture that oppresses women so completely that no one even thinks of violating their rigid, sexist rules.

I did a bit of digging (but only a bit: I was sent reeling backwards by these bizarre extremes, and several times was nearly convinced it was a TLC-perpetrated parody), and found out that, ye gods, me own Irish ancestors, bless their shabby little souls, might have been lumped in with these people. It seems odd to me that they're sometimes called tinkers, a term used in the most derogatory manner possible. Tinkers were tinsmiths who mended things like pots and pans (back in the day when everything wasn't just chucked out and replaced). They also made various kinds of practical, useful kitchen implements.

How do I know? At my grandma's house, my grandma on my mother's side, there were two blackened old cookie cutters made of ancient tin. One was a pig and the other was a dog, a lean stretched-out dog like a greyhound. I eventually found out from my mother that these had been made by my great-grandfather before the family emigrated to Canada (perhaps to escape the potato famine: I'm still not sure about that). Which means that my great-grandfather, a tinsmith by trade, was probably called a tinker.

It's strange, because my mother never mentioned any sort of prejudice against the family and talked about her grandfather as a good honest working man with a solid trade. Did he have an old wagon with pots hanging off it and banging together, and a "tinker bell" (yes, there really was something called a tinker bell, though I can't find a definition of it anywhere) letting people know that he was coming?

And what's so awful about that, I ask you?

I think in those days, and in these days too, people get lumped together. To say that "gypsies" or travellers or whatever-you-call-them were completely innocent of some of society's charges would be simply inaccurate. Though the first couple of episodes of this alarmingly extreme program were vague about it all, a little digging brought out the fact that many of these travellers are squatters, setting up their "caravan" communities on land that does not belong to them.

Wait a minute, isn't that. . . theft? But we can't say that about gypsies!

I have a few more problems with this program. OK, a lot more. Those hideous nuclear-explosion gowns and the black leather dominatrix outfits commonly worn at receptions are all custom-made and must be extravagantly expensive. So far we've been told that the girls, who marry at around age 16, must stick to housework and raising children. But what do the men do? How do they raise enough money from, well, probably not being lawyers or stockbrokers, to pay for all this superficial, ostentatous, ludicrous-looking shit?

My research on the careers of travellers seems to be a couple of hundred years out of date, stating that traveller cultures usually breed greyhouds or Gypsy Vanner horses, which is pretty hard to do if you're itinerant and don't own any land. I don't see how they can raise those big old draft horses in a trailer park (particularly if it isn't theirs). I'm looking forward to seeing how the show gets around all that (if in fact it does), as it has already decided to be completely sympathetic to these (probable) squatters who are refusing to pay rent, yet spending thousands on these eyesplitting explosions of tulle (some laced with flashing LED lights) that will never be worn again.

Though this is the kind of show you watch between your fingers, it may just shed a little light on a subculture which has seemingly been reviled since time began. I would be fascinated to see a program about real gypsies, the Romany people of Europe, and whether or not they insert their six-year-old daughters into stiff, scratchy gowns that cripple them and leave angry red welts on their bodies.

I don't understand all this superficial display, this flaunting of - what?, and the jaw-dropping bad taste that just keeps escalating until we catch sight of the mother of the bride, so caked with makeup that her face is brown, wearing elbow-length black leather lace-up armbands to her daughter's great moment: her bizarre funhouse-mirror Disney-princess moment that signals the end of girlhood and the beginning of a lifetime of oppression and servitude.

(Just had one of those creepy moments. Real creepy. I never wondered about the pig cookie cutter; the drunk lolling in the gutter with a pig for a companion was an awful Irish stereotype. But the greyhound? I can't imagine a stranger subject for a cookie cutter, with all those long slim legs breaking off. Didn't Wikipedia mention the travellers raising greyhounds? Is there something I'm missing here?)