Pretty poison

Maybe I should title this post "nasty behaviour from nice people". Or at least, people who truly believe they are nice, and who have convinced everyone around them that they're nice.

But what's that smell?

I'll tell you. They exude just a trace of toxic fumes, just enough to unsettle those with a good enough olfactory sense to pick it up. This is confusing because it doesn't match up with their social gloss.

Sociopaths? Of course not. This could be your Aunt Edna - in fact, it probably is your Aunt Edna.. Do these people even know they are taking people by the nose and twisting it as hard as they can?

Probably not. Their self-awareness is close to zero, whereas their ability to size up and minutely analyze their prey is astonishing.

The better to eat them with.

The first example, which is often quite subtle and usually happens over the phone, is one I call "and how is". This person incessantly asks after others. Your husband, your brother, your children, your gynecologist, your garage mechanic. You sort of go along with it, feeling increasingly squirmy and not knowing why.

I WILL TELL YOU WHY.

When a person incessantly "asks after" people, it makes them look super-polite and interested in other people, which is always a good thing, isn't it? Admirable, isn't it? Then why does the person posing all the questions never actually SAY anything? And why, when you finally hang up after 90 minutes of "and how is", do you feel like you could drop dead in your tracks?

Because they have siphoned you, that's why. Pretty Poison people are emotional vampires, and they know all sorts of subtle ways to suck your vital energy so that it becomes their own. "And how is" means they never have to say anything, so YOU have to do all the talking (read: self-revealing). After a while you realize you can't get out of this. You are forced to tell, tell, tell, until eventually you're telling them things you never intended to reveal to anyone.

Meantime, the person on the other end remains in a secure and invulnerable fortress, completely safe from any kind of probing. He/she has just laid the other person open, even gutted them, while remaining completely defended and protected. Genius, isn't it.

Oh God, we're just starting here! I'll never get them all in, but I'll try. Turning it around. This was a favorite ploy in my family of origin. I knew I had been emotionally abused as a child, and my sister even acknowledged it years ago. But when I stated it a little more firmly in a letter, there was a huge outcry that I was being horribly abusive. How could I even think of accusing anyone in this family of anything except loving kindness? My Dad's alcoholism, which my sister had clearly acknowledged on paper, was suddenly sucked back and no longer existed. The wagons went in a circle and I was shut out. Later I discovered that when my mother died, my name was casually left out of the obituary as if I had never existed. The record had been wiped clean.

That's what you get for messing with such "nice" people.

I'll make this one short, but it's especially awful: a thin girl says, "oh, I'm so FAT" in front of a girl who truly is fat. I don't need to add more to this one, as it happens all the time, with adults as well as children.

"You're too sensitive." (Corollary, kicking it up a notch: "You're crazy.") This too-sensitive amateur diagnosis means the other person has license to treat you like shit stuck to somebody's shoe. If you react at all, you're obviously fucked up. Another nice way of abdicating responsibility and making the injured party the source of the problem.

There's one I call "vague-ing". Pretending not to remember things, commitments, messages, etc. and claiming these things either never happened, or were so insignificant as to not even register. Often these are related to having your basic needs met in the relationship (chief among them acknowledgement that you exist). This involves ignoring, consistently losing or "misplacing" important things: "oh, did you send me something? It's just that I get SO many emails, maybe yours just got lost."  But if you call them on all this toxic swill, suddenly YOU are being unkind and hypercritical. "Why are you picking on ME for something so petty? I really think you need to work on your abandonment issues." (Assuming the role of "healer" when you're hopelessly fucked-up yourself deserves a post of its own.)

Dumptruck Syndrome. This occurs especially after a breakup. The phone calls gradually escalate and become more and more one-sided, but it is impossible to get away without just hanging up. Winding it up is agonizing, and the call "ends" about fifteen times before another freshet of self-pity cascades down and washes your vitality down the drain. These can also come by email, usually from the person who completely ignored your messages because they "just get so many emails, they can't keep track of them all" (see above). And yet, strangely enough, they suddenly tell you that "you're the only person in the world who understands me" (often accompanied by vague threats of suicide). So how can you fail to support them in their hour of need? What's the matter with you - how heartless can a person be?

A related syndrome is Human Vacuum Cleaner. Often you don't even know you're being sucked. This is usually an especially nice, compassionate person who is essentially alone except for her cats. Every time you try to have a conversation with her, it immediately slides into "drone mode" - endless chains of boring drivel about her Grade 10 biology teacher and the color of tie he wore to school, or the symbolic dream she had last night about her cats standing up on two legs and walking around, or New Age crap books you wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. (Later she will press one of them into your hands, leaving you with the uncomfortable feeling that you "owe" her, and ask you incessantly "how much you liked it".) You start to feel an actual, physical sucking sensation, being drawn into her astonishingly dull orbit, and on the phone it's so bad you disappear into the receiver and can't be found. She never states outright that you are her only friend, but one day she unleashes a torrent of dark childhood memories and recounts all the gruesome forms of self-mutilation she has never told anyone else about. This is just before referring to her cat as her "spouse".

If one of these parasites saw this article, they would probably say, look, you'd better read this one, it sounds exactly like you.

Jesus! It sucks.

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Ducks blown off their feet by the wind

Magic

Bigfoot ROCKS! (or: you can hardly see the zipper)

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Harold, mon amour

In the clutches of a nightmare

My gif-making hobby appears to have hit a new low. For years I told my children about a bizarre cartoon series called The Adventures of Clutch Cargo (with his pals, Spinner and Paddlefoot). They not only doubted me, they thought I was totally loony.

This series had absolutely no animation in it whatsoever. In an evil process called Syncrovox, a real person's mouth was superimposed on a still picture of what might be a face.

The characters were basically cardboard cutouts mounted on a stick, and were moved along realistically by some poor sod in behind that bush-looking thing.

No one can quite guess the identity of this odd jungle-dwelling creature with the W. C. Fields nose and top hat. The horn-rims do look a mite familiar.

I used to wonder why you never saw their feet. Now I realize they had no feet. They had STICKS.

And now comes the uncomfortable issue of the relationship between Clutch Cargo and Spinner. Clutch isn't Spinner's uncle or Dad or anything, just some guy who wants an eight-year-old boy with him when he goes on his adventures. His name, too, is problematic. Just what does it mean? And why is Paddlefoot a dachschund instead of, say, a black lab or a Doberman pinscher? The mysteries just multiply with time. 

Clutch Cargo DID pass on a certain legacy. One of the strangest feats of animation I've ever seen is The Annoying Orange YouTube series, featuring a throng of loquacious fruits and vegetables (with the odd marshmallow thrown in). Obviously it uses the same Syncrovox technique, only with more prominent teeth (and the addition of eyes, even creepier than the mouth). As with Clutch and the gang, these characters can't walk and have no feet, though I suppose they can be thrown. With great force.

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This one doesn't move (but I wish it would)

From Margaret's Studio of Unoriginal but Well-Intentioned Photoshop Art.

Should I go gay?

. . . because that's what I think of doing when I see these incredible photos of Liz Taylor in her prime.

The headgear impresses me especially. Kind of like balancing an entire set of encyclopedias on your head.

She always gave off a sense that something almost unbearably exciting was about to happen.

Such as. . . 

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New and improved!

From the trailer for the Blu-ray re-release of Safety Last! For a gif, this is a revelation. You can see every little car down there.

The sugar daddy ambush

Do you know what I shit-hate these days?

Stupid people. Or maybe I always have.

We had a nice time at the Canada Day celebrations yesterday at Coquitlam Town Centre Park. Yes, a very nice time looking at displays, sampling food, listening to multicultural music, watching kids on climbing walls, and all those Canada-day-type things.

Then as we were walking along, just walking along in complete innocence, a woman, low to the ground and of indeterminate age, literally ran at us and pressed a booklet into my hands.

“This is a book that’s very helpful for seniors with issues,” she chirped.

I stopped in my tracks.

“Give it to him,” I said, pointing to my very grey, very-much-older husband.

“Oh, that’s what they all say,” she twittered. “I won’t admit to my age either, sweetie.”

My mouth opened and Bill tugged me onwards, sensing a coming storm. “Thanks a LOT,” I yelled back at her as we walked away. “Oh, don’t mention it,” the woman tweeted, obviously delighted she had snagged another victim.

I mean, Jesus!

She RUNS up to people whom she has decided are “old”. Old enough to qualify as “seniors”. This includes women. Last time I checked, most women are not thrilled and delighted to state their age if they’re, say, over 50. Not that it’s a bad thing, but let’s not jump the gun.

We all sort of hope we look at least a few years younger than our chronological age. I thought this was nearly universal. Isn’t it? If not, when did it change? (If you think this is the first time seniors' propaganda has been pressed on me, guess again.)

And to have someone RUN at you because you look like a suitable pigeon for a book on “seniors' issues” is atrocious. “Oh, look, some fossils walking along! I’d better catch them before they fall over.”

My husband thought I was overreacting and said (as I dumped the goddamned ripped-up booklet into the garbage: I glanced at it and it said, among other things, “Where to meet seniors”, so it was probably publicity for a disguised escort service), “It was because of me.”

Well, maybe it WAS because of him. He’s greyer than me, mostly because I color my hair. But please, no running after prey, especially not older prey! They might not be too thrilled to be recruited for the ranks of the over-65, particularly if they are a good many years younger.

And don’t tell me, as I am always condescendingly told, “Oh, don't feel bad. 'Senior' begins at 40”. That’s a load of bullshit and you know it. Would a 40-year-old woman, still deluding herself that she can have another baby like all those Hollywood stars, welcome a booklet on how to pick up a doddering old sugar daddy?

Oh, and. This is even worse. It’s those people who miss irony, and think YOU’RE dumb.

I had a recent attack of this on Facebook. Somebody named a scientific principle, one often quoted on The Big Bang Theory (which is my religion), and I riffed on it in an ironic manner.  The person posted a “now, now, now, that’s not what it means at all” sort of reply, telling me exactly what the principle was and why I had gone so wrong in misinterpreting it.

Why are people so thick? Why do they always turn it around so that ***I*** am the stupid and/or ignorant one, and that I need to be immediately set straight? Whoever these people are, and most of them wear penises to work every day, they do not “get” irony, have perhaps never heard of it, and take absolutely everything literally.

In other words. . . they are men.

It’s not too nice when a joke falls flat, but when the other person has no idea it IS a joke and corrects you for your misinformation, it’s worse than annoying and leaves you with an insulted, put-down, even pitied feeling. Meantime you know you are skating rings around this dullard in wordplay skills and subtlety, not to mention basic intelligence.

But who wins in the ignoramus sweepstakes? Who comes out looking far more clever and erudite?  Could it be me? Are you out of your freaking MIND? Never mind that I’m invariably right, because being right has nothing to do with it. It's all about power and putting so-called "ignorant" people (usually women, assumed to be about as smart as Kha Kha Kardashian - oops, her name is Khloe - I'm so sorry - I got it wrong!) in their place.

Do I think I am smarter than other people (a sin worse than murder)? I don’t just think it, I KNOW it, and Facebook proves it to me every blessed, persecuted day of my life. (Oh, and. This deserves a post of its own, but I will mention it here. Someone will refer to something atrocious, destructive, and categorically WRONG. Then someone else will say, "Oh, it's always been like that." Some people, fancying themselves to be historians because they watch the History Channel, will say, "People have done that since the Etruscans in the year 14 billion B. C." The fact that "we've been doing this for a long time" is supposed to end the discussion. Suddenly, now the most heinous behaviour is OK and acceptable because we've been doing it forever! Make sense? 

Add to this one another ludicrous fallacy. I call it "men do this too!". Anything men do automatically justifies whatever negative, weak or shameful thing women are doing. It renders their sins more acceptable, though only a small percentage of this filters through to women. But at least they aren't seen as the snivelling bitches they were before. . . because after all, "men cry at the movies too".)

(I have to confess something really awful. I think that picture is really Khim Kardashian - or is that Kim - oh, will someone please set me straight here? And my much smarter boy friend just told me that the Etruscans didn't really live in 14 billion B. C. because the theme song of The Big Bang Theory says that that was when the universe was created. Why do I bother keeping a blog at all? I'm just a silly little girl.)

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Nice horsy: funny, surreal gifs from old cartoons

Whoah.

Happy Canada Day!

Dogville (don't ask me to explain)

Was there a down side to Harold Lloyd?

A down side? Whaaaaat?

Why, certainly.

We could start with the talkies. Like every other huge star of the silent screen, the advent of the "talking picture" (originally called "talkers", a more logical term) traumatized Lloyd to the point of forcing him  to seriously regroup. Eventually he came to realize he was under immense pressure to let all the old pieces go and start from the ground up.

He found it nearly impossible. My feeling is that he stubbornly held on to aspects of his past filmmaking success, certain in his mind that at some point, things would turn around and the old visual style of comedy would return.

Though sight gags never entirely disappeared and still figure large in a lot of comedy, an actor's signature phrases ("I'm sorry, Ollie", "My little chickadee", "Hey, Abbott!") became essential for moving a comic persona forward. Another dimension had popped out, the other half, so to speak.  You didn't have to have a "great" voice or even a "good" one. You just had to have a memorable voice that expressed the character in no uncertain terms. (Perhaps the acid test was this: could you recognize it on the radio?)

Garbo made it because her dark, velvety voice startled people and dovetailed beautifully with her smoky, exotic looks. Can you imagine W. C. Fields without his whiny and irritating, carnival barker's delivery? And with their endless eccentric bantering, Laurel and Hardy were reborn as huge stars. But these were the few who lucked out. 

At the beginning, almost no one knew how to use the voice to best effect. Early "talkers" were pretty atrocious (I just saw an unintentionally hilarious one called The Vagabond Lover on Turner Classics, in which the hums, buzzes and crackles on the sound track nearly drowned out the dreary, colorless delivery of the lines). It didn't matter much, because the public flocked to them anyway.

It took a few years for things to settle. I always see 1931 as the year that things began to really work. An actor's voice became his calling card, and it didn't have to be conventionally audiogenic. Those actors in the gangster pictures had nasty snarly voices to go with their nasty snarly personalities. Vocal sneers.  But this non-law also applied to leading men. Think of Jimmy Stewart with his high, wavering, stammering delivery which somehow, almost magically conveyed integrity. Now how did he do that?

But Harold, now. Harold somehow didn't get it. After so many years of mastery, of innovative film-making, he didn't see the train coming.  When all this mayhem was going on, he was making a silent feature called Welcome Danger - an awful one, as it turned out, which is puzzling because he had never done anything like that before. It was 1929, everything was changing, and like Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd was stubbornly hanging on to what had worked for him before.

A critic named Welford Beaton, whose very name suggests doddering and fustiness, had some decided opinions on what was happening at the time: "The silent drama has become a great art and I hope the advent of sound is not going to arrest its development." Sidney Kent of Paramount (and who knows who the fxxx Sidney Kent of Paramount was, but hey, it's a great quote) wrote, "Personally, I believe the time will never come when the outstanding silent pictures will be out of the market. We are trying to work out the best possible combination of sound and silent."

This reminds me of nothing more than Martin Short's insanely hilarious character Irving Cohen, a doddering old Hollywood relic: "So I walked into Jolson's office, at that time, and I said to him, Asa, this talking picture business will never get off the ground!"

As for that "best possible combination,"  such an unlikely hybrid was bound to fail, as Harold found out with his ill-conceived Welcome Danger. Legend has it he watched a movie short full of "punk gags" like whistles blowing, fire engine sirens, etc. - anything involving sound - and the audience was laughing uproariously. Shocked out of his denial about talking pictures, he suddenly decided to graft a sound track on to his partially-completed movie, with awkward, badly-dubbed results.

I have seen Welcome Danger one-and-a-half times, forcing myself to stay with it after bailing the first time. I was watching it in a hotel room with my husband a few years ago. "Look! There's a Harold Lloyd movie!" (He thought we were in for a couple of hours of enthusiastic squeaking and ahhhh-ing.) The first time Harold opened his mouth, I said, "Oh nooooooooooo." Midway, I sadly turned it off. "He didn't have a good voice," Bill said. But it was much more than that. 

I still don't really know what Welcome Danger is about. It goes on far too long, though the original cut was an astonishing two hours and forty-five minutes. Why was Harold making so many mistakes, even before this disastrous failed transplant? Only one picture ago, with Speedy, he was at the very top of his game. Now this. To me, it's an indication that Lloyd was profoundly spooked and had already lost his way. 

Harold's character in this mess, a man with the hideous name of Bledsoe, is some kind of botanist trying to break up a Chinese opium ring while pursuing a girl dressed like a boy. But when he opens his mouth to speak, he sounds like Jiminy Cricket on helium. That fussy, strident quality is an immediate turnoff. Whatever emotional appeal he had in his silents - and in most of them, his character was vulnerable enough to have it - evaporated, and sadly never really returned.

I don't like Richard Schickel's book about Harold, don't like his lack of respect and assumptions about Harold's personal life, but I have to agree with him that in his sound pictures, his voice was "inescapably colorless and flat - prissy would be the best way to describe it." The voice isn't just pitched too high (though at moments of stress it shoots up into the stratosphere until he sounds like a hysterical girl) - it has a lightness and lack of resonance that doesn't record well.  And for some reason, the delivery is unnatural, awkwardly hokey. Of course a comedian can sound weird as all get-out and still make it, but whatever he's doing, it doesn't work. All this from a man who began his career as a stage actor,  believing it was his destiny.

Ironically, when you look at interviews with the ageing Lloyd (and like a lot of good-looking men, his looks wore well as he evolved into a twinkly old charmer), his voice has dropped considerably, relaxed and mellowed into something you could easily listen to for two hours. It still isn't particularly deep or resonant, but it has a great raconteur quality, and an expressiveness that never came across in his post-silent films. The odd Nebraskan inflection pops through to charming effect: "While we were working on that picture, I think it was Girl Shy, the fire hose flew up and struck me on the foah-hayyd."

There were so many more after Welcome Danger (which, ironically, had better box office than any of his other movies due to his fans' curiosity about his voice), and I have tried to like them, believe me, I've tried. And the problem isn't just his voice. Though individual scenes work, something just isn't right. Hal Roach, his friend and longtime director, put it this way: "His character couldn't age."

No matter how good he looked, and he did look good even with the slightly higher hairline, you can't slip The Boy into a middle-aged body and work it like a puppet. A scene in Movie Crazy really does drive me crazy as he parodies the melodrama of the talkies: his voice soars up and up, growing more strident by the sentence. Feet First is even worse: he does an aerial stunt (and that's another water hazard of the new era: repeating gags, which most comedians had to resort to), yelling in that shrill near-falsetto for about 15 minutes as he scrambles agonizingly up the side of a tall building. The surreal, thrilling climb that worked so well in 1923 is just awful with grunts, yells and traffic sounds added, and some theatres did their audiences a favor during the sequence by turning the sound track off. 

Is there any good news here? Unlike most people, I did sort of like The Cat's Paw, in which he played a missionary (of all things!), but again the high light voice evoked a kind of virginity that had been kept in a glass case. Everything I've ever read about Lloyd indicates exactly the opposite: women loved him from the start, and he was not about to turn them away. Harold lived large, and never wanted just a little of anything.

j
The classic musical  Singin' in the Rain (often called one of the best movies ever made, which is strange because I hate everything about it) dealt with the revolution in sound film, as did the more recent The Artist. (Ditto. I did not like any of the characters, from that ditsy little girl Blinkie or whatever-her-name-was to the strange Douglas Fairbanks-looking guy or that wretched dog lifted from The Thin Man, or perhaps Frasier.) As everyone predicted, all the actors from that much-touted movie disappeared without a trace, which is probably good for my mental health.

The Jazz Singer  supposedly began the revolution in 1927, even though it wasn't even a talkie - my ass it was a talkie, it had titles all the way through it, and only had sound during Jolson's blackface songs about tootsie rolls or whatever. What most people don't realize is that sound could have been introduced several years earlier - the technology had been basically worked out - but the industry dug in and resisted, and viewed from today's perspective, it's easy to see why. 

Harold kept at it, ending his movie career in 1947 with an ill-advised comedy called, variously, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and Mad Wednesday. Even the wildly-popular director  Preston Sturges (with a nudge from producer Howard Hughes) couldn't save this one. Harold was 54, still playing boys that hadn't quite grown up. I find it excruciating to watch this so-called extension of his legendary The Freshman: he plays a man stuck in his dead-end job, stuck in his lonely life. He hasn't grown up at all. There is a scene where he is obviously deeply depressed, and I just didn't want to see it: his Glass Character never stayed down for long, but this fellow had been down all his life.

How could a man lose such great acting chops after all this time? Maybe he just didn't know how to apply them in an unfamiliar medium.  Though Harold went charging forward into a million other activities that he kept up for a lifetime, including a tremendous amount of philanthropy, the loss of his celestial career was sad for him, sad for movie posterity, sad for us all.

Post-blog:  There's one movie I've never seen, a mid-'30s Lloyd talkie called Professor Beware. All the evidence I've found that it ever existed are some stills, and all I know about it is that Lloyd didn't like it. He may have done something to the negative - Harold was even closer with his movies than he was with his money - or else it's just hiding in an old tin can in a basement somewhere. There was a rumor it was shown on Turner Classics, but only once. I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE. Not that it will necessarily be better than the others. It's the fact that it's not available. Is someone, perhaps the mysterious, unknowable Rich Correll, keeping this thing banked for a rainy day?