Is this Harold, or some fiend from hell?
Spastic meets Catatonic. . . a match made in heaven.
Harold's daily calisthenics.
The quickie of all time!
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
And so say all of us (or some. . . )
I seldom post links, but I think this piece makes some good points.
http://laurenbdavis.com/2013/06/this-will-probably-get-me-into-hot-water/
Harold Lloyd: you can't keep a good man down
Drink was, in fact, the curse of the family. Mildred (or “Mid”, or “Molly”, as Lloyd called her) had been an alcoholic from some time in the forties, when it is said she wanted desperately to divorce Lloyd. In her late years a full-time nurse was employed mainly to see that her perfume bottles did not mysteriously get filled with booze, that her habit of drinking Listerine did not get out of hand. In a pathetic family – “a disaster”, as even Lloyd’s kindly friend Simonton put it – she was perhaps the most pathetic member. One thinks of her – never a very mature, forthcoming or stimulating person – wandering the halls of the great house, her husband either absent or preoccupied by one of his interests, her children all gone, and none of them bearing her any very kind feelings, caring mainly for her two companionable poodles and her booze, and one sees the end results of the flaws that, almost from the first, people had detected in Lloyd’s art – its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth. It is all dreadfully sad.
Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter, 1974
This was one of the more disturbing passages I found in my relentless quest for information about Harold Lloyd. In fact, this whole book sells Lloyd short in just about every facet of his life, but never is it more hurtful than in this personal attack on his family.
One wonders, in fact, if he knew or cared about the surviving members of Lloyd's family, about their feelings for him. He seems to have assumed no one was left who cared two figs about him, or if they did, that they weren't significant enough to merit a modicum of respect.
At the same time, this critic - and I don't name him to cover MY ass, not his! - is one of those unassailable figures in "cinema" (a step up in snobbishmess even from "film") whom no one ever really questions. Even to this day, his work is hugely influential. What puzzles and offends me almost as much as his nasty cracks at his family is his description of Lloyd's art: "its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth."
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I did find out some things about Harold Lloyd and his family, in particular from a more recent bio written by silent film historian Jeffrey Vance in collaboration with Harold Lloyd's granddaughter (whom he raised), Suzanne Lloyd. The book is honest and forthright about the sometimes-serious problems the family had; it was hardly a snow job. But as with most families, the dynamics were complicated, and joy and celebration often ran neck-in-neck with sorrow. To call Lloyd's home life "dreadfully sad" is to miss the point.
Alcoholism is a family pattern, with stubborn roots deeply buried in the soil of generations. Though Harold did not drink, some of those around him did, and it inevitably did them harm. But it's absurdly unlikely that his former leading lady Mildred Davis spent her final years wandering around the halls of their mansion like a ghost. Moreover, "it is said" does not pass as a particularly reliable source of information, and in fact can often mean nothing at all. It's as bad as that godawful phrase "studies show", which too many people seem to swallow without question.
I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how things were at Greenacres, but I honestly don't think they were anything like this. I do know that the word "mechanical" stuck to Lloyd's films for decades, mainly because people seemed to take this critic's word as gospel. It did irreparable harm for decades and kept his movies buried for far too long.
There's a Lloyd revival going on, thank God, which proves that these descriptions are inadequate and highly inaccurate. In his Everyman's search for love (which is at the core of most of them), Harold Lloyd invented a new genre: the romantic comedy. It could even be argued that he broke ground in screwball comedy with the delightfully wacky Why Worry? I haven't seen every Lloyd film, but I've seen as many as I can get my hands on. The features he made after 1920 are nuanced and three-dimensional. His Glass Character tugs at the heart. But since that cold, abstract label was pinned on him shortly after his death and his work was either unavailable to the public or adulterated practically beyond recognition, it was accepted in the movie world without a lot of question.
When Time-Life Films, which will be re-releasing most of Lloyd's films over the next four years, invited me to attempt this critical-biographical sketch of the comedian, it had already commissioned a veteran correspondent of the Time-Life News Service to interview as many friends, relatives and co-workers of Lloyd's as he could find. His remarkably thorough dispatches were placed at my disposal for this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to him. I am sure he would like me to express gratitude to those who provided him information.
This means The Shape of Laughter (a bizarre title that basically means nothing) was not written from primary sources and in fact had "contractual obligation" written all over it. He simply took someone else's material, believed it without question, and wove it into a book. No doubt the correspondent's opinion of Lloyd's work, whatever it was, must have been mixed in to this rehash. It makes one wonder if Time-Life wanted the glossy seal and cache of this particular critic to boost book sales, even if he didn't really write the book. Or did he simply owe them one? Such things are known to happen, but if you ever raise it as a possibility, all hell breaks loose, along with a storm of vitriolic denial.
Two years after Lloyd died in 1971, Time-Life signed signed a distribution deal for his films and handled them with a tragic lack of understanding. The shorts were packaged with a commentary in the style of Pete Smith ("Poor Harold! It's doom for the groom unless he gets to his room!"), which effectively sank them without a trace. The features were spared the commentary, but insensitive, honky-tonk scores and the elimination of entire sequences often crippled their effect.
May I add to that the constant, annoying, ridiculously exaggerated sound effects?
In spite of all the factors that came together to compromise the integrity of Lloyd's work, it remained intact in the vault, sleeping, awaiting a second life. No one could have predicted the huge advances in film restoration that would strip the grey veils off his masterpieces and reveal them clean as new. No one could have predicted that Turner Classic Movies would get behind this renaissance, drawing more and more people back to pictures that are so vibrant and well-made that tired old comparisons to Chaplin and Keaton no longer apply.
Lloyd only "comes third" in some people's minds because they weren't there, and because they have had their viewpoint skewed by outdated, poorly-researched critical commentary. The best remedy for this is to buy the superb DVD movie set The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and watch the hell out of them. I guarantee you, once you start, you won't ever be able to stop.
Monday, June 3, 2013
You keep me hangin' on
I think if I showed this picture to you and said nothing about it, you probably wouldn't know who it is.
An old picture, for sure, very old, from early in the last century. It'd be around 100 years ago. And how old would this young man be - maybe 20?
Does he look like a young man who's going places, someone unstoppable, or do we only deduce that in retrospect? I can deduce one thing for sure - I know he wasn't short of girl friends.
The fierce eyes looking off into the middle distance also have a dreamy quality, even a kindness. I don't think this man was mean, for all his drive and occasional explosiveness. Could he help it if the child in him never really grew up? Was that, in fact, the source of his compelling charm and endless creativity?
The only thing I know for sure is that I will never root him out of my heart. He has been part of my life for some five years now, and for the most part the journey has been wonderful. I still keep making discoveries, like this magnificent old photo, just when I think I've come to the bottom of the barrel.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Grandma's little bunheads: another triumph!
Could there be anything sweeter in life. . .
. . . than being a backstage Grandma to two little bunheads. . .
. . . fresh from their triumphant return to the stage in the Mellado Dance Recital!
Jazz, tap, ballet, they did it all, they did us proud. . .
. . . and they even kept their eyes open under a pound of makeup. . .
(though we couldn't get shots of them in costume cuz they have to take them off right after the show. . . )
So what else is there to say?
YAY!
Friday, May 31, 2013
Burn the chair! Burn the chair!
This is a chairy tale,
but a nasty one, a Grimm with a bad ending.
I hate office equipment.
I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or
even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead
I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in
high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a
bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard. This incredible anachronism, still almost universally-used, was designed when the typewriter was first invented and was meant to slow
typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on
the page or cut the typo out with a sabre.
So. The chair. My office
chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always
something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my
husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my
shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one
for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The
proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and
fatigue.
Not to mention eyestrain.
Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit
manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer
copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to
hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.
God.
I hunched and squinted as
I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up abnormally high to make it just visible
while I shuffled papers. I got used to
agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just
didn’t know how else to do it.
“This thing is a piece of
shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So
once again we went through the old switcheroo.
This latest chair, a garage salvage with a nest of spiders living under it, created
more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the
same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do
you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I
might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.
Another switch of chair.
Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I
decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re
cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco.
Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just
right”.
Amazingly, it was the
second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I
know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my
back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded to match the curve
of forearm and wrist and hand.
I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the
evening, I loved it –
Then I got it home.
My keyboard rests on a
tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my
keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my
keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.
But it got worse. The new
chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her
feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO
DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a
six-foot man!” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”
I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store. My ass noticed it felt good, that's all.
I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store. My ass noticed it felt good, that's all.
The deluxe padded arm-rests were worse than useless: they were a hindrance. You don’t sit back and
lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse,
you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing.
That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over
the place. The casters made dents in it
that the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back
from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything
was wrong.
“So (sarcastically), do
you want another chair?”
Bastard!
He had groused and grumped
about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip
the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40.
00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the
rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five
minutes.”
I like my chair, I
really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all
around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a shelf sitting on it, an old shelf left over from one of those really
tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up
at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and
can’t be fixed.
Now I am nagging him to
PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over
hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving
look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t
even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.
He complains all the time
that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of
writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do,
and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks
I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So
how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come
out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?
To all but those two
people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even
having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And
didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a
special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little
dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?
While I sit there mousing and hurting.
Mousing and hurting.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Rock, Liz, and other oddments
Use-ta be, you had a junk drawer, or a bunch of old photos rattling around in a shoe box. They could be from any era, but usually all mixed up. Now we have files, but they are no less mysterious.
For obvious reasons, or reasons which should-all be obvious to you-all by now (just look up, stupid!), many of my junk-drawer/catchall photos are of Harold Lloyd. These have a magic that is surreal and dreamlike, in and of another era. What was it like to be there "in the flesh"?
A few aren't Harold. This must have been scanned out of a book. It's Bob Dylan and his first great love, Suze Rotolo, about whom he wrote "Girl from the North Country", "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "Ballad in Plain D". They seem to be made of pure mist. Hard to believe the dessicated old leather saddle that is Dylan ever looked like this.
A few blank greeting cards popped up. Since they were too pretty to send, I kept them.
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To think you could once get a FREE (While They Last) Harold Lloyd doll at the Piggly Wiggly!
These two, later to marry forever, remind me of salt 'n pepper. They just belong together. Both have a surreal, doll-like quality about them.
And speaking of misty surrealism. . .
Where did I GET these things?
A splendid Wesley Dennis painting of Misty of Chincoteague (who was a real pony!)
Harold meets the Woman at the Well.
This charming French poster for an early Lloyd film (called, I think, I Do) is notable for the bracketed word after his name: "Lui", his nickname in Europe, loosely translated as "him" (you know who I mean, THAT guy!). Imagine such ready identification, closer than Chaplin.
Compare and contrast! I just found this a minute ago and had to include it. What's that strange thing behind Harold, an oven or something? Couldn't be a TV. Note how they left it out of the poster, but included his right hand which was out of sight in the photo (due to his prosthetic glove, which always looked sort of weird).
D'yall need to have this one explained to you?
Didn't think so.
Everybody says don't (Harold Lloyd-style)
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't, it isn't right,
Don't, it isn't nice.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't walk on the grass,
Don't disturb the peace,
Don't skate on the ice.
Well I say do, I say,
Walk on the grass, it was meant to feel.
I say, sail,
Tilt at the windmill
And if you fail you fail.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't get out of line
When they say that then, maybe it's a sign
Nine times out of ten,
Baby you're doing just fine.
Make just a ripple, come on be brave
This time a ripple, next time a wave
Sometimes you have to start small,
Climbing the tiniest wall -
Maybe you're going to fall
But it is better than not starting at all.
Everybody says no, stop,
Mustn't rock the boat, mustn't touch a thing
Everybody says don't
Everybody says wait
Everybody says can't fight city hall
Can't upset the cart
Can't laugh at the King.
Well, I say do, I say,
Laugh at the King, or he'll make you cry
Lose your poise
Fall if you have to, but come on, make a noise!
Yes!
Everybody says don't
Everybody says can't
Everybody says wait around for miracles
That's the way the world is made
I insist on miracles
If you do them, miracles, nothing to them
I say don't...
Don't be afraid!
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