My favorite moment from Amelie

The hate crime no one talks about

Oh yes. Oh, yes, Captain Kirk, and his noble soliloquy in perhaps my fave original Star Trek episode, Miri. The one with all the kids on that planet, you know, all by themselves cuz the adults all died, and they get all gross when they hit puberty and Yeoman Rand's leg looks like a major cigarette burn. I watched it at 13, tape recording it as I usually did on our old reel-to-reel Webcor with the fan-shaped microphone. Kirk wasn't ridiculous then, he wasn't a joke, he wasn't a buffoon and to date, he had done no Loblaws commercials. Kirk was just Kirk.

But his immortal line, "no blah blah blah!" has taken on a special significance in my mind over many decades of observation.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Happens so often I want to yip with irritation. In fact it happened yesterday:  we're in Denny's eating our veggie omelettes with hash browns, when I hear a familiar drone coming from behind Bill's seat.

Umbumummm-bumbumbummm-bumdabumdabumdabuuuuuuuum.

I -

UMMM da bummada bummda. Mm-mmoom-dah! Da bomada bomadadamda bom.

A - 

Bum BUM DA dum dum, demda dum! Dem -

So you get the idea by now. It was one of those totally one-sided conversations you constantly overhear (without meaning to: this is hardly eavesdropping, as I would have loved to shut out all this blathering) in restaurants or theatres or other public places. 

One person is blathering on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and - sorry, my hand just fell off - but as this blathablathablathablathablathablatha goes on, all of it self-referential, all of it self-serving, all of it self-entitled, all of it related to the blatherer's intense suffering at not being treated like a crown prince/ss, I can sense the listener/receiver's blood volume being slowly, slowly, and surely sucked down and siphoned out.

When they leave the restaurant, the blatherer will be hugely inflated with self-righteous helium and all ready for the next deadly gas attack, but the victim (for that is what it is) will be but a pale shadow of his/her former self. She will be so anemic, you'll be able to see through her. She'll have to go home and lie down for a month or more, maybe get a transfusion.

But the thing is, they'll still go out again next week for lunch. The same thing will happen all over again. He or she will tell the same pompous, pointless stories, the same tales of persecution. No one even notices how soul-destroying the experience is. The entitled one will be bursting with hemoglobin by now, ready to explode like some honey-forced queen bee or ruptured giant termite. The victim will now weigh 37 pounds. Doesn't matter how many pancakes she puts away.

I heard it yesterday and I heard it at the mall food fair the day before with a similar booming, thrumming, droning male voice, this time with some sort of European accent. Bom-bomda-BOMmmdaa-bommmm-daBOMmada-bonga, etc. etc.

This is not a conversation. This is a monologue. The monologuist has no idea that it isn't a conversation and in fact thinks he's a very good conversationalist, very smart and sharp. His blathering about camping equipment or the plumbing in his house or his car troubles or the asshole at work who got the promotion he should've got (or his bitch of a wife, always a favorite) strikes him as scintillating discourse sparking a lively debate, an exchange of witticisms rivalling the Algonquin Round Table in sheer witti-blah-tudinous-ness.

He doesn't know, because his brain is made out of shoe leather and his psyche is about as penetrable as a block of obsidian. I would like to start carrying a baseball bat around with me to play whack-a-mole with these characters, but there are just too many of them, and besides, then *I* would be considered obnoxious and antisocial, hitting these poor innocent guys who weren't doing nothin'. 

This is abuse. The endless, boring, repetitive blathering with only the occasional squeak out of the audience/receiver/victim/codependent masochist.  This person NEEDS this sort of ego-stroking, this constant reinforcement of his (or her: one of the worst I've encountered is a her, droning on for 45 minutes about her Grade 11 science teacher and what he wore to class) innate sense that his every word is interesting and useful and even enlightening, when in reality it's a torrent of horseshit more horrific than the result of opening Mr. Ed's stable door.

There is nothing to be done. Stay away, that's all I can say to you, try to stay away and not call them friends. A friend does not stick a drinking straw in your jugular vein and begin to vigorously suck. Blatha-blatha-blathata-blah.

I don't know if this codicil belongs here, but I might as well tack it on. It's the self-proclaimed expert who charges into a room full of chemo patients and bellows, "TAKE MILK THISTLE AND YOU WILL BE CURED!" The person so sure of (his or her) convictions that they force them on others as absolute, unassailable gospel truth.

One doctor I know is a doozie. Educated, an "expert" on many things, in fact famous.

"Illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"No, you mean: I believe illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"There's no debate about this, it's simply true."

"So everybody else, everyone who believes something different from you, is completely erroneous and full of shit?"

"I didn't say that! Don't be so defensive. It's just an opinion."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Because it's an opinion that happens to be true."

"Jesus, don't you hear yourself? That's total arrogance!"

"Obviously you have issues with authority figures."

"No, just with YOU, asshole!"

(That last line was fantasized, but isn't it great?)

I once attended some sort of workshop (it had something to do with my sick and dying church trying to manage a last-minute, futile resurrection) where the facilitator said, "Tell me the difference between these two statements: Divorce is terrible."

(Slight tremor in the room, caused by minute vibrations from the divorced people trying not to spit at her.)

"MY divorce was terrible. Which statement is easier to accept?"

Wa-a-a-a-al.

But people don't do it that way! They stride in and say, "Everything happens for a reason/God never gives us more than we can handle/It's all in God's plan." This person has never suffered a major hardship, and in fact has led a charmed existence.  God's will has been, at least up to now, a piece of cake. (Secretly she/he thinks it's because she prays a lot and "surrenders", so God favors her.) But never do they say, "I've come to believe that - " or even, "It's my conviction that - ". No, they just take one of those thingamabobs they used to tamp down powder in a cannon, and casually shove it down your throat.

"I was about to die in a car crash, but my angel saved me."

"God must have intervened."

"It was meant to be" (but NEVER with reference to anything negative. Only positive things are "meant to be". No sense of entitlement here.)

"It was God's plan that little Timmy survive being run over by an express train 47 times."

Oh yes? What about this couple over here, dying of grief because God DIDN'T save their son? What about the man whose wife actually did die in a crash? Didn't she believe enough, didn't God love her enough, didn't she have the right mojo or put enough on the collection plate?

It's really just more BLAHBLAHBLAH, of a particularly toxic variety. It's toxic because it is so un-thought-out, so carelessly said. So smug. So entitled ("see, God loves me enough to pull me out of flaming wreckage. What's wrong with you?")

I wonder sometimes if even half of what people say is really considered, or if it just pours out of them like so much raw sewage. They snag on to jingles, axioms, homilies, catch-phrases, churn them around unexamined, and spit them in your face. They never preface these statements, just jam them up your nose as "fact".  It's easier than thinking, easier than feeling empathy or compassion or any of those dangerous things that require a little stretching of the soul.

The blatherers of the world are verbal thugs. When you see one, whether it's in Denny's or the hardware store or your local church or synogogue, whacking the palm of his hand with a lead pipe and wearing a smug self-involved smile, there's only one thing you can do.

Ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-n!

What I do when I'm not writing

Keep warm.

Just cute

What a hokey, impractical idea!

I was completely gobsmacked - though perhaps I shouldn't have been - when I found this tidbit on the Turner Classics site. Along with everything else, Harold Lloyd was a visionary who had a way of piercing the limitations of technology, simply because "no" wasn't in his vocabulary. Even if his view wasn't quite "yes", it always had the spirit of "let's try". He was the perennial boy genius who never stopped tinkering and exploring in every medium he could get his hands on: microscopy, oil painting, stereo sound, and the primitive 3D photography of the era. Speaking of which, his favorite photographic subject was buxom, Jane-Russell-like nude women. Harold always loved his work.

Many fans of Harold Lloyd think of him simply as one of the very talented founding fathers of cinema.  This is true, but Harold was ALSO one of the first proponents of 3D motion pictures!  In 1923 an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times visited Harold on the set of Girl Shy and they discussed Harold’s interest in 3D.  During this interview Harold is quoted as saying “I believe that the man who invents a means of producing a perfect stereo motion picture will have accomplished the greatest achievement since the first motion picture.”  He went on to say “Today, the motion pictures projected on the most perfect screen are lacking in solidity and relief.  If the characters could only be made to stand out as they do in stereopticon pictures, and still retain the action of motion pictures of today, I think the ultimate would be reached by the cinema.”

In his Columbia University interview in 1959 Harold discussed the early attempts at 3D movies.  Many in the industry had given up on the medium, as the results had not been great and 3D was viewed mostly as a passing fad. In the interview Harold says “I think if they’d handled [the transition to] sound as horribly as they did three-dimension, we wouldn’t have sound today.”  After this, he goes on to explain technically why the earlier 3D attempts had not been successful and how the technology would have to advance before the medium would take off.  He was absolutely convinced that once the technological advancements were made, the transition from 2D motion pictures to 3D would be unavoidable and all encompassing.

Harold’s interest in 3D manifested itself in his passion for stereoscopic photography.  From 1947 until his death in 1971, Harold Lloyd shot over 200,000 3D slides some of which featured celebrities of the day, scenic views of the United States and various countries around the world.  He was a member of the Photographic Society of America and served as the Inaugural President of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society.

The magnificent library of Harold’s 3D photography remains mostly unexposed to the public.  Suzanne Lloyd has published two books containing some of the images, but most of the 200,000+ slides have not been seen by anyone outside of the Lloyd family.  

(From the Turner Classic Movies web site)

Covers

Just kind of a blah day, Christmas coming at me like a freight train (though the actual day is usually quite wonderful - so why?). Frustrated at the breakup of a 20-year friendship which had become irretrievably sour, unwilling to be a dumping ground for misplaced buckets of bile. The assumption being I was always ready and willing to receive, infinitely patient, accepting and understanding.

Life is just sour sometimes, it sucks or is boring, and the nice parts fly by so fast you don't even know how good they are. None of this is new. None of this is dramatic or suicidal or even really depressive, just fed up and uninspired.

I make Facebook covers of Harold Lloyd, obsessively, usually late at night (and when did I start staying up so late? For years and years I went to bed at 10:00 and got up at 6:00), and lately they are becoming more florid. Just for fun. I like the candy-colored tinted photos that were often used for promotion, and they lend themselves to florid backgrounds.

But in the final analysis, it's boring and I still feel chronically left out. It's no use, after all these years, to learn to skip Double Dutch or any other way. So I am left standing on the sidelines, or behind something. Bored.

Forever young

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.

Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden


Sometimes I actually do this: I take my morning coffee and curl up on the leather sofa next to the Lazy Boy my husband has preferred for something like 30 years. And I tell him. In the manner of nearly all dreams, these will soon sublimate into the air like so much night frost and disappear, though I sometimes try to get them down on this blog (i. e. Whatever Happened to the Wildwood Flower, about a young Sissy Spacek-like woman preparing to get married in a church where no one knows her). I tell my dreams as an attempt to fix them in time and memory, and mostly it doesn't work, leaving Bill with the usual baffled look on his face.

This one, well, it was even stranger than that.

Like Bob Dylan, I think the eternal question "what does the dream mean?" wrecks it more often than not, like analyzing poetry until it's nothing but fragments of phrases and unmoored words. But it's interesting to behold what bin-ends of thought and experience re-emerge in scrambled or rearranged form, unrelated jigsaw pieces suddenly revealing a picture you never thought of before.

I was in some sort of big theatre, a movie theatre I would guess, and it reminded me of the theatres of my childhood in Chatham. We had two, the Capital and the Centre, and I remember we felt considerable civic pride in the fact that we had more than one. In the dream the theatre was huge, cavernous, more like the Orpheum in Vancouver, though I am sure the Capital and the Centre were rather puny and not grand at all.

There were only three people in the theatre: myself, Hassan (a colleague of Bill's from 30 years ago, a fellow engineer relocated from Saudi Arabia) and Paul, a spiritualist medium I have known for many years. He was sitting facing away from the vast silver screen at some sort of monitor, and without saying it Hassan and I knew he was going to tell us what would happen to us, what our future would be. He seemed, in retrospect, a little like the "man behind the curtain" in the Wizard of Oz,  except that there was no curtain.

He worked away. Apparently he was "doing" Hassan first, and I was rather jealous. All the while, ghostly images appeared, more on the ceiling of the theatre than on the screen, giant people, like blowups of characters from silent movies, though I didn't recognize who they were.  I wish I remembered the middle of the dream, but most of it has already faded and gone all patchy and jumbled like a poorly-restored movie from 1915. He finally did tell Hassan his "fortune" in a fairly straightforward way, and he listened intently, obviously taking it very seriously.  But it seemed to me that time was running out, that there would be no time for my own fortune and I would be left hanging.

It was true. As Paul began to pack up his things (what things? His henbane, his Merlin hat?), he told me I would have to "wait until next time" to hear my fortune. I was frustrated by this, and even wondered if something would happen to me if I had "no future", if it had not been laid out for me.  Then I realized he had been using something that looked like an old overhead projector to "see" and project that seeing into the future, and I wondered how that worked.

Then I had this bold idea. Since I couldn't wait for my fortune, I would write it myself. So I started writing it down on something unusual, maybe on an old piece of parchment, but it flowed easily. And I have almost no remembrance of it, though it struck me as quite specific and in detail. I do remember one line, something like, "Sometimes friends will be the greatest comfort and help to you, and sometimes they will vanish and you will be left completely alone." I had a sense of a lacuna or a round hollow space in some sort of rock formation.

Sometimes this, sometimes that: it was a bit like Ecclesiastes and "to every thing there is a season". But when I came to writing the last line, it reminded me strongly of Bob Dylan's most heartfelt song, "Forever Young".


May God bless and keep you
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

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

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

Christmas gifs: cookies that fly!

.Cement cookies and other harbingers of the season

After re-reading yesterday's cricket rant (and it truly was a rant, but wasn't it fun? For me, maybe), I felt I needed something to balance it out.

Yes, I know it's a TV ad, and I know it's a month 'til Christmas, but when this came out three years ago (three - I cannot believe this!), I thought it was magical. I was going to try to make gifs out of it, but the images flash by so quickly that I am not sure I could manage it.

Yesterday we made cement cookies, or rather, cookies made out of salt dough that hardens into something you can paint up and use as ornaments. It went so well that I want to try it with the other two grandkids. It's not that I don't get into the spirit - I do - but most of what passes for "the spirit" is a cash grab. "Black Friday" is a case in point. 

Until a few years ago I didn't even know what it was, and in any case it sounded horrible and ominous. Gradually I twigged that it was the day after American Thanksgiving, when everyone stampedes to the mall to buy more things, no doubt so they can be even more "thankful" in the coming year.

Now I'm seeing Black Friday ads in Canada, when our Thanksgiving is at the PROPER time, in late October, not so close to Christmas. And yet, our BF is going to be on the same day as in the States.

Oh well, I'm ranting again, and I do love the actual day when we all seem to have a wonderful cozy time. Four kids running around, I ask you - even though they are growing up alarmingly fast - and then what? Old age, and - ? Life is a rapid, confusing deal, and all we are left with is the day - the elusive, flashing-by, bittersweet day. 

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

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

By Jiminy - it's a fake!

Y'know, it strikes me, when it strikes me at all, that Dorothy Parker was right when she wrote,  "this living, this living, this living/was never a project of mine", but let's put that aside for a moment.

I had a Facebook page for almost a year before I did anything with it. For the most part, it struck me as idiotic. The posts had about as much content and meaning as texting (and what DO people text about anyway: "I'm going to the bathroom now. . . grunt. . . grunt. . ."). It was one big bulletin board of meaningless gossip, interspersed with sappy personal philosophy along the lines of  "Let a smile be your umbrella" and "Always be nice, and others will be nice to you."

But the links are the best, or the worst.

EVERYONE takes the links at face value. No one realizes that many of the pages are satirical, because they don't know what satire is. Or irony. Plus if it's on Facebook, it MUST be true, hey?

The crickets are a case in point. God's Cricket Chorus is a mysterious recording that everyone is raving about, playing it in the basement while stoned, sniffling over it while remembering Rover who died seven years ago, etc. It's transcendent. It's amazing. It's CRICKETS, by Jiminy, slowed way, way down, and it sounds just like a chorus of angels! Here's the ad:

"Want to hear something magical?
Experimental director and playwright, Robert Wilson, caught a hauntingly beautiful piece of music one night, a recording of crickets.
That part is common enough, but then he stretched out the sound as much as one would have to stretch the life of a cricket to equal that of a human, and the result is truly wonderful.”

Clicking that website’s link takes you to Acornavi – Robert-wilson-crickets-audio

No one stopped to ask why, when the cricket sounds were slowed down so much, the pitch was actually higher than the gritchy sound crickets actually make. These were high floating harmonics, likely made with a synthesized choir. BUT HEY. What's the matter with you, anyway, to piss on our party like this? What's the matter that you doubt such beauty, such magical spirituality (because we're spiritual, not religious)? 

To put the cherry on the sundae, gravel-voiced blues singer Tom Waits (referred to below as "Tom Waite") endorsed the cricket oratorio as a "swaying choral panorama" that he shared with his dope buddy, Charlie Musselwhite. This was good enough for Baptist churches to begin to use it in their weekly prayer services.

When something is that wildly, stampedingly popular, it's a pretty safe bet that it's bogus. So somebody had to do it: test the method of recording and prove or disprove its authenticity. It wasn't that difficult: the technology is actually there. Just take a recording of crickets, then play it at slower and slower speeds, trying to reproduce the original, magical, spiritual-but-not-religious sounds that had everyone bawling into their cornflakes.

Want to hear it?

https://soundcloud.com/darangatang/dawkins_chorus_of_crickets

It turns out we don't really need that angel chorus to make our hair stand on end. The recording of real crickets is actually pretty freaky in itself, getting stranger and stranger as it is gradually elongated, almost disappearing as it drops below the threshhold of human hearing (though perhaps a whale could hear it). 

To quote Dave D'aranjo, cricket-chorus-buster extraordinaire:

Look, Mr. Wilson’s original is no doubt relaxing and sounds pretty and I used it to help me sleep once. But it is undoubtedly a human singing, or perhaps a manipulated choir loop. It’s not cool to spread around incorrect info and then call it some miraculous evidence of divine intervention in nature. To me, the sound of the crickets are wondrous enough! C’mon folks, let’s try and be less gullible!

But who wants to hear this? It's no fun. It doesn't emanate the secrets of the cosmos (and what a mystery, that a mere cricket could "know" like that? But aren't we all one, and aren't crickets just as enlightened as the typical stoner on a Saturday night?) People prefer the hoax to the real thing, and pledge themselves to it as solemnly as if they're joining eHarmony. In the face of scientific fact, how could anyone think - ? But they DON'T think, and that's the point.

If something like God's Cricket Chorus gets around, if it goes viral or gets on YouTube or the "What's Trending" part of the news (which used to be called the Lighter Side), a zillion people not only watch it/listen to it, they accept it at face value and without question. If YOU don't believe it, you get that turned-off face, that "I smell garbage" or "I see a homeless person and want to get away" face.  You're refusing to join the Holy Church of Oh Wow!

I don't know if you've heard the original, but it's nothing like this. In fact, I think this is infinitely more mysteriously, and genuine into the bargain. You could still smoke up and cry over the dog here, it wouldn't make a big difference, but I guarantee you'll get a big kick out of the very last track.

(P. S. As awareness of this "alternate" recording spreads, many have gone on record to say things like, "OK, so the God version isn't really crickets, but that doesn't take anything away from how beautiful and transcendent it is." Some doubt has also arisen as to whether Tom Waite (sic) was clean and sober when he made that claim about a pulling a leprechaun out of his pocket.  As P. T. Barnum liked to say, there's one born every minute.)

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

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

It's the Black Bottom!

 

Chairman Mouse