Something funny going on (weird-ass gifs)

Somethin' funny goin' on!

35 words for magic

I have no time, I'm tired, need to go to bed. . . This process I'm in. This editing, re-editing, is far deeper and more challenging than anything I've experienced, I mean ever. Writing novels isn't for sissies (even if I feel like one), and editing definitely isn't. I'm currently in my third round just of my OWN revisions, never mind the editorial ones I'll be working on all next week. And I'm not through yet.

So what has happened to my passionate, stormy, sometimes-troubled but always compelling relationship to Harold Lloyd?

I'm discovering something shocking. I should have realized this before. The book isn't even about Harold Lloyd. It's about Muriel Ashford, the woman who pursues him obsessively over several decades. Harold is just her projection, her idee fixe, and exists only in her eyes. So how did I get on to this idea that I'd written a Harold Lloyd novel?

I couldn't approach him any other way. I too was "enmagicked" by Harold, got swept up. It's easy to be: the man gave off excitement and fizzing, popping sparks of charm. There was a rude obnoxious edge to him when he was a young knockabout, and I am not sure it ever entirely went away.

In the novel, I have to keep surgically removing certain things that crop up with alarming frequency. One is the word "magic", which, my editor tells me, I used 35 times. Nearly every time I see it now, I chop it off like a stalk of celery, and either come up with a decent synonym or just chuck the sentence out.

Did writing about Harold render me cliche-ridden?  I wonder. I don't remember falling into those things before. But never before did I take the risk of stepping over the boundary into that smudgy midnight phosphorescence, a reality in which everything subtly jerks up and down and runs at the wrong speed.

The things I've been going through just lately have been extremely emotionally draining. I'm shedding yet another skin, but only because I have to. The urgency is coming from within. She not busy being born is busy drowning in her own bile. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's my destiny to peel back my own skin, to persevere.

So the covenant remains, the initial passion now shading into stamina, the need to continue.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

When all the joy within you dies

It's not often I find something this good on Facebook. In fact, it's not often I find anything at all. I have learned to "unfriend" boring, draining and/or toxic people, but you can't see their ugly insides, at least not until much later, when they post something so casually offensive it makes your hair stand on end.

There's a special circle in hell for people with toxic relatives. These are practiced happiness-suckers who siphon the life out of you, then ask you why you look so drawn and tired.

These are the twisters - the emotional corkscrews who have a phenomenal way of turning their abusiveness around and insisting that you abused them. How dare you accuse me of being abusive!  Obviously you're vindictive, heartless, and a liar to boot (they inform you, while you slowly bleed to death from the corkscrew stuck in your heart). 

Oh. The happiness-suckers. Schoolteachers: you couldn't get away from THEM, could you? Their shaming tactics, their favoritism (merely a weapon to make the marginalized, persecuted kids feel even worse) their petty dictatorship to make up for the complete lack of satisfaction in their lives. 

Spouses. This can be exquisite torture that goes on for decades. I've known more than one widow who could barely disguise her glee at her husband's memorial service, then immediately booked the cruise she was never allowed to take while she was oppressed by a sour old tyrant.

But the worst is. . . this.

When it's your friend. A close friend. A friend you used to share so much with, it seemed you could almost read each other's thoughts. It can't go on that way forever, can it? It can't. Worlds go by, days and nights, and at some point, one of the two begins to fade.

Something is happening, a growing joylessness, a caving-in. The desperately hoping friend (thinking, surely if I just try harder I can re-set this) just amps up her attempts to connect, scouring the internet for links to things her friend used to be interested in. But there is never a response to any of it. If they connect at all it's on the phone, and those calls are nothing like the soul-deep, stimulating discussions they used to have. They're perfunctory, and the passive friend asks all the same questions over and over again, ostensibly to display her interest but in actuality so that she never has to talk at all.

But then there are the longer emails. What are these about? People she does not know and does not care to know, the small-town small minds. Her friend frankly hates them, rants and seethes and spews bile, yet insists that she is always friendly with them and never says anything critical to them at all. Then signs off with, Thanks for listening, I feel so much better now!, the perfect hit-and-run.

The choked-off conversations become chronic, her acid criticism of everything and everyone acting like so much weed killer, destroyer of all enthusiasm.
Does she even realize what is going on? It might be like the proverbial frog in warm water, who does not notice the gradual increase in temperature until it is cooked.

Why does someone give up? Why does someone just accept their discontent and not fight against it, or not even acknowledge it or believe it's real? More to the point: why is this so draining to be around? Why is there a sense of a dusty drawer with nothing in it? 

Dead dreams are awfully inert, and posing is hollow. You can't hitch a Clydesdale to a race horse. But why does the race horse feel so bad? There is nothing more pathetic than a one-sided conversation, with one person running frantically back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net. It is humiliating; desperate. While the other person says nothing: not so much not caring as not even even noticing what is going on.

When you have been raised with silence and rejection as the norm (and by the way: the opposite of love isn't hate, as most people think, but indifference, just not caring one way or another), returning to it is agony. They say (and just who are "they" after all, a bunch of executioners?) that you invariably recreate the dynamics of your childhood in your adult relationships.

For years you play along, because for years you really did have a wonderful connection, but it dwindles and dwindles, and you feel a certain expectation to dwindle along with it. And you won't, because you can't. And then, when you finally do say something because you can't keep it to yourself any longer, you are subjected to disbelief (what are you talking about?), guilt, a sense of betrayal, a wounded (though perhaps never uttered) "how could you?" Or, even worse, an awful, artificial attempt to get the thing going again, inventing a sense of interest, asking after your dentist or the guy who fixes the roof. 

Life seems to kill some people, to steamroll them, but then again, some people's courage just collapses, and from then on they do life by rote. Risk nothing, gain nothing. And you realize you can't do it any more, especially not after you find out that your friend's husband casually hacked your emails and has been reading what you've been sending her. 

Friendship can be thrown into reverse, and it's an awful thing. It just hurts like hell, and of course YOU are seen as mean and selfish for claiming things are no longer satisfying. Bob Dylan said a couple of things - how is it Bob Dylan always knows how to hit it brilliantly on the head?: "He not busy being born is busy dying." And another one: "Her sin is her lifelessness."

After being destroyed in the fire of religion, I have no God left except life. But I know now that if you sin against life, there will be a cost.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I wish I had a friend like me

In middle life, I've come to see
I wish I had a friend like me.
To gather flowers constantly,
I wish I had a friend like me.

The game of life is rough and long
My self-worth fails, I'm not too strong
But when a friend seems right and true
I'll give my all, compassion too.

I don't know why it twists around
These so-called friends are blaming-bound
They muss and mangle with my head -
Abandonment's my daily bread.

I've been assured, you didn't make
These people sour, it's their mistake
But friends are chosen, after all
You did this, see, you took the fall.

But when I watch while souls implode
I think I've hit the mother lode:
Like nomads in the desert sun
I'll pack my things, and wave, and run.

Blogger's note. It's hard to go through things like this and not write about them, but the person involved either won't look at it or, if she does, won't recognize herself. Funny how the hurt party suffers even more by feeling like a fool for trying to make the whole thing work. Twenty years is twenty years. But all this "God has a purpose for all things" and "everything happens for a reason" and Hallmarky sayings about people growing in different directions and it's no one's fault are BULLSHIT because real damage was done over a long period of time, not only unacknowledged but unrecognized. Martyrs can do no wrong; they inflict suffocation and guilt on others, and get their jollies from it because no one can reply in kind. My part in all this is that I fell for it.  I wish I had a friend like me.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Transfigured night

This is either Salvador Dali painting the night sky in phosphorescent ink, or a silverized elf who has forgotten where he left his head, or an Edison ninja glimpsed through the lens of a fever dream, or an exploding dwarf caught in a time drift, or a bright-white light night being, or a horizontal moon-powered chopping device, or an experimental human  prototype God misplaced in the laboratory, or a jumping-jack blurcast vision of the Dalai Lama, or a moving silverprint of an idea of interpretive dance, or 

I have nothing to say about this

Who ARE these people? The first motion picture ever made

This is truly one of the great motion pictures of all time. That's because, at one point, it was the ONLY motion picture of all time. It fascinated me so much that I just had to make a gif of it (an easy task, given the length).

This is about 2 1/2 seconds of film, just a couple dozen frames, but it attempts (valiantly) to tell a story. The woman in the long grey dress walks in one direction, abruptly turns around and heads in the other direction. An old lady on the right moves forward a step or so, then suddenly disappears. We see the back of a man in a long overcoat who looks to be walking around the old lady, but then he disappears into a blackened unexposed bit of film on the right and emerges for a billionth of a second, having changed direction. People are changing direction forever in this thing.

The only person really doing anything is the fellow on the left, who walks purposefully off-screen from left to right. But he too appears to have just walked around the woman in the long grey dress. Everybody is walking around everybody, maybe to create maximum action with only four players. 

Who were those players, and did they know what they were doing? "We're creating film history today". But what is "film"? Wasn't this just another contraption for people's amusement, kind of like Bell's hand-cranked telephone which turned out to be such a dud? In 1888, women still wore long skirts, corsets and heavy, elaborate hats, their hair piled up with combs. Even breathing must have been difficult. By 1920, clothing would be loose and covered with bugle beads and fringe, with hemlines above the knee. 

I don't know who shot this film (now titled Roundhay Garden Scene), why it was so short, why it survives to this day and is still all over the internet. Maybe SOMEBODY realized the significance of it, even in 1888. Now that I look at it for the hundredth time, I realize the "old lady" is probably an actress, someone pretending to be an old lady for effect. Why do I say this? The way she walks (if it IS a she) is stagey and exaggerated. She rocks back and forth like a ship in dangerous waters.

I am full of questions: who directed this thing? Who was the cameraman? Was this the only take? Why an old lady in the first place?

If she's really a fake, she must be the first film actress ever, or at least the first actress ever to appear in a 2 1/2-second film. She should have earned a microscopic Oscar.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The First Movie

World's Oldest Motion Picture (1865) and Oldest Sound Recording (1857)

First of all, the entire premise of this thing is bullshit. This is NEVER the oldest motion picture ever made. The real oldest motion picture ever made is a few frames from some garden in England somewhere.  I'll try to find it, but I know I have seen it. Who knows who this is, but he looks like some guy from the Civil War spinning around and around, which I guarantee you they did NOT do during the Civil War. 

And the recording, that's bogus too, though it's a pretty old one, made before Edison came along. It was recorded by Thomas Lambert in 1878 on a lead cylinder and has some barely intelligible human speech on it, somebody counting and missing a few numbers. That's why Lambert never became an Edison, see. 

The REAL "oldest sound recording" is a phonoautogram, which is a tracing of lines on sooty paper that somebody folded up and used as a bookmark. The name of the guy is too long to pronounce, but he was French, like all these innovative guys. He yelled into a horn and a little stylus etched sound wave patterns into the paper as it revolved around and around on a drum. Then he put it away, experiment over.

For you see, this guy, de Martinville or whoever he was, did not even intend to play the sounds back! He wanted to see what sound waves might look like if they were traced. I don't think it even occurred to him that sound reproduction might be possible.

Today we can feed that creased-up black paper into a computer and light beams read the bumps and scratches and turn them back into music. So you can hear this wobbly, wavery singing of the first two bars of Au Clair de la Lune recorded in 1857.  Hey, it ain't exactly the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser, but it's a start.

World's Most Primitive Record Player

Things of beauty come in many forms, and are usually the works of a mind that can leap over conventional beliefs, such as, "Youcan'tdothatyousonofabitchitain'tpossibleitcan'tbedone". 

Somebody decided to make a record player out of a chopstick, a plastic cup and a pin. The result sounds a bit freaky, but what can you expect when the recording is the sound of canaries singing? 

This is technology pared down so far that it barely exists any more. We should pay attention. It could come back, once the power grid shuts down forever when the whole earth melts down and comes apart because WE HUMANS are so evil and have put so much plastic into the water. When that happens, you won't just have anarchists with tattoos and rags around their heads like in Revolution. It will also be a resurgence of all the geeks who could never get anywhere while the computers were still running. 

I guess I'd better go to bed. . . I don't know, I shouldn't write when I'm in this state. But I just love these things, have waited all my life to have a blog so I can celebrate them. I'll never be that clever.

Jumpin' Jesus: I think I've figured it out!

Just when I think I've seen it all. 

I. 

Find.

Another.

One.

ANOTHER photo of Harold Lloyd that unsettles me, both thrills and makes me a little bit uneasy, because in that gaze, that gaze I've tried so hard to capture in my novel The Glass Character, there is that slightly unmoored quality, the compelling, disconcerting eyebeam/high-beam of a genius.

And other things. Lloyd telegraphed superbly with his eyes. Hurt. Seduction. Goddamn ferocious intelligence. And in this one, it, yes, I confirmed something I've denied for a very long time, something I've seen and seen in his lovely gorgeous movies, something I cannot deny now and which undoubtedly added to his cockeyed charm:

He's cross-eyed.

Well, only a little. Half a bubble off plumb, he might call it, with his wonderful earthy Midwestern way of expressing himself. Just a tinch, but enough to give him that quality. Can't even describe it. That, and the hair, are what make him so devastating. The hair, well, I don't mean when the hair stood up, magnetized by some sort of electric charge (imagine electrocuting your lead actor just for a gag!) -  it's the uncontrollable bushyness of it, the forest. In many of the early ones he's slicked it back with half a pound of pomade, as men did then, but when there's a chase scene or a rough scene or even a love scene of any note, his hair springs out into wild black waves, and we then see the other side of him.

The side I wrote about the other day, that fierce erotic clinch with Jobyna Ralston, that - who knows what to call it! When lions make love, which they do for days on end, the male lion grasps the female by the back of the neck and holds her there. Not that she tries to get away, but if she tried, she probably couldn't. It's no doubt like the grasp a mother lion would use on her cubs to carry them around - not meant to draw blood, but still, firm enough that they can't escape.

So what's the point of all this? God if I know, but I do know I am captured, perhaps for good.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The perks of working at CTV

Multiple Webster Award-winning CTV News reporter (and daughter) Shannon Paterson has a taste of the high life, all week long! This is the week she got to ride in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Ghost and a private Lear jet (the perks of buying a condo in the not-yet-built Trump Tower). . . and then, in another story, drive a Lamborghini! As Coleen Christie remarked after the piece aired, "I don't think I've ever seen Shannon smile quite so broadly." Oh yeah.


http://bc.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1013110&binId=1.1184759&playlistPageNum=1


http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1009759&playlistId=1.1467826&binId=1.810401&playlistPageNum=1


(Note. These videos may or may not play. They ARE live links, I know this, because sometimes they DO play. Other times you get a black screen. Other times you get an ad, but no video! Keep trying, maybe something will work.)

OMG, this is really HOT. . .

My new Facebook cover. OK, it ain't much from here, but it feels like a find to me.

My favorite Harold Lloyd film of all time is a relatively obscure one called Why Worry? 

This is the only Lloyd film  I know of that ends with a truly passionate kiss. It just goes on and on and is very convincing, making you wonder if the rumours about Harold and his sultry co-star Jobyna Ralston might have been true. Up to now, this is the only photo I have ever been able to find of that memorable clinch.

But today I found this. At first glance it looks like the same picture, but look a little more closely and you'll see that it was taken a few seconds earlier. Jobyna has yet to do the subtle "leg pop" which may in fact have started the fashion. She also hasn't yet hooked her right arm around his neck, but appears to be resisting him (rather feebly). In the next shot her body is subtly closer to his, NOT at a decorous distance which is the usual silent film rule (along with hiding behind a screen). The camera pans away for a second during this sizzling kiss, perhaps for the sake of modesty, then when it returns its gaze, they are STILL KISSING in that same furious way.

Whew!

I haven't been able to find a video clip of this breathtaking scene, and it puzzles me that so few film people even mention this picture, as if it's somehow inferior. To me, it's Lloyd's funniest and most quixotic, with some of the best gags he ever accomplished. But the kiss is what makes is all worthwhile. The clip may not exist. . . but then again, it took me four years to find the first picture, and another two to find the second one!

I won't re-write about this at length because I'm suddenly caught up in a deep edit of The Glass Character, my novel featuring Harold Lloyd, which will be published by Thistledown Press in spring 2014. Believe me when I say, the initial writing of a book represents only about 15% of the work. But here's the link to a long piece I did, quite a long time ago.

And I will keep looking for that video clip.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2011/12/harold-lloyd-ive-been-looking-for-this.html


Post-blog note. Just dredged up this gif from the sumptuous romantic dramedy A Room with a View. It sort of portrays the kind of lip-lock these two enacted for the cameras. Come to think of it, the more you look at the photos, the more obvious it is that they were "seeing each other". The body postures, the way he seizes her, the way she melts into him. . .His character has been sort-of asexual up to now (not that we're buying it - he gets palpitations every time he sees her, and not just in his heart), so it's like a jack-in-the-box jumping out. . . in a manner of speaking. God, I wish I were Jobyna. . .right now. . .

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

David Gilmour GIFs: he moves! He speaks! He repeats himself!

David Gilmour is verbose. When he's not telling us all that he doesn't like to teach novels by women, that he doesn't go for writers who are gay or from cultures other than white-bread, and that he hates hanging around Canadian writers (assuming he isn't one himself),  etc. etc., he is vigorously denying that he made any such statements, claiming he was "misquoted".

So here's your chance to get it right: three gifs you can caption which will clarify, once and for all, what he really means when he says women, gays and  people from diverse cultures aren't worth bothering with! You'd better jump in right away, however, because it looks like he's prone to repeating himself.

"How much do I hate Canadian writers? Let me count the ways."

"If I talk fast, it's because I have so much important stuff to say."

NOW IT"S YOUR TURN. . . 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Miss Chatelaine and other illusions

Would you have a little trouble believing this is k. d. lang? I do. It's from her infamous Ingenue album, which still ranks as (I think) the best of its kind (as if there is anyone else in that category).

Here she looks like an unusually attractive man in drag, or maybe a transsexual. She always did have aspects of beauty that she played on, like great cheekbones and a smile like the sunny slopes of her native Alberta. She could flip back and forth from exotically androgynous to just plain butch.

Here she reminds me, bizarrely, of January Jones in Mad Men, girl-next-door with a bit of sultry glamour thrown in. She could almost pass as Audrey Hepburn's aunt.

And here she is playing Loretta Young, probably the only time she has ever worn a prom dress.

Now comes the hard part. Here is k. d. performing the same song, Miss Chatelaine, a few years ago in Dublin. The raucous crowd sings along with her as she camps it up in a baggy white suit that really does resemble Wayne Newton's pajamas. 

\

Turn, turn, kick, kick!  k. d. has always danced during her songs - if you can call her boisterous knee-lifting and uninhibited little-kid-on-the-playground twirls dancing. But here she looks like a whole thundering herd. It's unfortunate.

I don't like to see great performers become parodies of themselves. All that thudding around barely resembles the girlish whirling-dervish moves of fifteen years ago. We don't expect time to stand still, but couldn't someone (for God's sake) dress her once in a while, or at least show her a video of herself? Beyond the screams and catcalls from the audience, I was deeply dismayed to hear that she wasn't singing very well. She was flat. This was something I hoped I'd never hear.

OK. So maybe she's Wayne Newton's. . . great-nephew?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

POLLYANN!

Kind of a crap day, got nothing done, can't win 'em all. Then there was that entire bag of Sweet n' Salty popcorn. Scarfed it in five minutes. Why do I do these things?

But then, this.

I remember this from an old VHS tape I used to watch to distraction, called Harvest of Seven Years. It was, well, the harvest of the first seven years of k. d. lang's illustrious career. I could've seen her, see, I mean I could've seen her live, but I didn't because I didn't know who the  hell she was. She came to Hinton, Alberta while I lived there, and as with the Supremes coming to Chatham in 1963, no one knew quite how to respond. This was Something Different, a strange boyish figure in a cowgirl skirt and cutoff boots. And without the voice, I suppose she would have odded herself out a long time ago.

Here she plays a demented crimplene-clad housewife proclaiming the virtues of a bread called Pollyann. The thing is, I know this was real. Because I lived in Hinton in the '80s, I knew about Pollyann white bread, squishy enough to be a pillow (except it didn't bounce back). It came in a plastic bag, like every bread did by then, but somehow the bread tasted more like the plastic than it was supposed to. Pollyann in its poly bag was advertised on the radio, and I remember it being sold at the Tom Boy store, 3 for $1 or something. The Beach Boys Greek chorus is a bonus.

(For some reason my Giffinator isn't working very well today and is rejecting most of my videos. These were the only k. d. lang ones it would spit out. Here the youthful k. d. strongly resembles Tobey Maguire.)

Compare and contrast.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm