Keep your eye on the . . .

Should that be plural? I'm not the only woman who has noticed Harold's "attributes" (plural!) under those tight little pants he wears. A fellow fan I "met" via YouTube traded photos with me of Harold sporting The Bulge, and someone else on Facebook (completely independently) noticed the same thing. Could be just the fashions of the day, or. . . God, was the man wearing any underwear?? 

Whatever the case, Bebe Daniels looks to have reaped the rewards.

The art of logo

Anything old, anything strange, I automatically love, or almost. Which is why I've been married to the same man for 40 years, and why I guess I can stand to get up in the morning and face myself. Old and strange just about describes it.

I have my frustrations, such as getting all involved in technology I barely understand and which only seems to make me increasingly miserable. Do I need to be reminded that my life is unexciting, that nothing ever happens to me, that I've failed in almost all my life's endeavours? If I forget these things, all I have to do is go on Facebook. (Actual comments from recent posts: "Modelling my awesome new bikini in time for Barbados trip. Does this make me look fat? I. . . don't. . . think. . . so!" "My friend made a joke today and told me my awesome new hair style makes me look 15 years younger! At least I THINK she was joking. What do all of you guys think? A few thousand likes ought to do it, lol/lheart!" "This is the fabulous dress I will be wearing when I win my Oscar for pain-in-the-ass-of-the-century." Oops, made that last one up. In fact, I made them all up. Fuck 'em.)

And so I turn to this blog, which is nearly not read at all except for the odd freakish post that has gone into the thousands, even tens of thousands. I swear I got in excess of 100,000 views on one quirky post that I took down by request of a man whose photos I had used by mistake. My one chance at glory.

So I tell myself, just do what you want to do. Don't worry about being "popular" or even being read or any of that will-the-world-ever-understand-me shit. It's about time I gave it up anyway. It's really very adolescent and a waste of time.

I have a book coming out in the spring (The Glass Character), a new novel written around the life and career of silent screen legend Harold Lloyd, and it terrifies me to think how I will go about trying to promote it. I am not one of these people who is good at networking, though some seem to have a positive genius for it. I'm shy and introverted, that is the cloth I am cut from, and trying to turn myself inside-out for the sake of popularity alarms me no end.

At any rate, the point I am working up to so feverishly is that I don't want to try for anything any more. I'll do this for fun, my own fun. Harold will sink or swim - I still think he has the potential to go "big" in the right hands - but the unstable and even wildly wonky world of publishing can't and won't guarantee me anything at all. What I really want is to try to salvage the original joy I felt in writing and pursue THAT rather than some bizarre notion of "fame". If I lose money, it won't be anything new.

So! This is why the logos, which are my newest obsession. I think gifs were made for this, because logos are mini-dramas only a few seconds long, moving signatures/trademarks of film and TV studios past and present. The past few gifs  illustrate the evolution of the MGM Lion, who at first was merely the Goldwyn lion and who didn't even roar, just sat there looking confused.  In the first one he looks neurasthenic and twitchy. The third one gradually works up to it with a series of facial twitches - surely they must've given "something" to these lions to make them so docile. The final one is so handsome I can't stop looking at it.

I think this all started with Universal logos, which I have always particularly loved. This one from the '30s is almost hallucinogenic, with a 3D effect that predated even those goofy 1950s horror movies with the cardboard glasses.

Don't look at this one too long!

For some reason this one reminds me of the first King Kong movie. I think just the idea of a plane flying around the world appealed to audiences' sense of adventure and escape.

These are beauties, early Paramount logos from the silent/earlie talkie era. I love the dreamlike quality and the way the writing and the mountain evolves. No "A Gulf/Western Company" either, to spoil the effect. This is pure shimmering magic, making me glad I am alive in the time of YouTube!

Old film has a powerful transportive effect on me, which is how I happened to get involved with Harold Lloyd (the rat!) to begin with. But can you see why? It's stepping over a threshhold, spooky and seductive, and I want to go, I really do want to get out of here and go somewhere else where it's warm and people are kind.

Now this is beautiful, and strange. The Pathe logo comes up on all of Harold Lloyd's early movies, a production company no doubt, and I do remember a rooster logo, but this! It's almost shocking because it's so unexpected. Pathe still exists today, in what form I don't know. It's sort of like the Benz automobile, a ghost that never goes away. Was the rooster a way of trumping the seedy-looking lion that lay there looking confused? If so, it worked. Nice idea: the chicken outroars the lion.

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

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

Early Disney: plenty weird shit

I've never been able to draw or paint worth a shit. Never been able to "get a likeness" or anything else. I did go through one manic phase of thinking I could paint. Plenty weird, or what - because I couldn't; they were merely brush-stroke experiments, but at the time I felt like an undiscovered genius.

Right. So now I content myself with the fun and simple quasi-art form of the gif or GIF (pronounced "gif" as in "gift", "jiff", or Gee Eye Eff, depending on who is right on a particular day.) The gif has entered the culture to such an extent that Kmart has made a whole series of ads of people endlessly freaking out in 2 or 3-second, repeating, shrieking flails, something to do with finding a great bargain at Kmart. Which is about as rewarding as going to that red-and-white, sterilized mausoleum known as Target.

But I digress.

Making these funny little endlessly-repeating doodles got a lot easier for me when these YouTube-to-gif sites sprang up. The one I'm using now - (please don't crash, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease - if I say this too loud it'll hear me) - is called Gifsforum and will actually make a decent-length gif that can tell a tiny story. (The best example is yet to come.) 

The farther back you go in the supposedly-divinely-inspired Disney oeuvre, the stranger it gets. They're pretty primitive, these early Laughatoons or whatever they're called, even predating the long-running Silly Symphony series. In this one, Disney the shameless thief steals Fleischer's invention of combining live-action with animation. Doesn't do it nearly as well, either - the little girl in this bizarre hallucinogenic version of Alice in Wonderland is smudgy and sooty and indistinct. And the animals in these early things, I don't know, they don't look very real to me - their movements are wooden and jerky and often plain ridiculous. This cartoon came out in about 1923, meaning it had no dialogue, and no real story either. It wasn't until the early '30s that animators began to think in terms of story. 

From the infamous Bugs in Love. I remember this one so well! I was over at Ann Peet's house after school, and the Mickey Mouse Club came on and they showed this. Ann and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes and groaned, "Oh nooooooooooo. . . Bugs in Love." We hated it. Now that I actually watch it, it's innovative, even takes stabs at characterization, and beats the hell out of  the gimmicky and rather stupid Alice in Wonderland. 

This might just be the most beautiful gif I've ever made. YouTube is such a mixed bag that along with the usual smudgy, surreal, dredged-up-from-a-bad-dream copies of copies of copies, you once in a while get a pristine example of early animation like this, looking probably better than it did on the movie screens it was originally seen on.

God knows how much later this one came out, but much has happened in the interim: the passersby have a sort of attitude, not just trudging or juddering along stiff-legged, though a couple of things give away the '30s vintage. Mickey isn't in his final form, not yet, still looks a bit snouty, wears a weird sort of  two-button diaper along with his enormous white gloves, and looks flat, like three dinner plates stuck together. The horse pulling the sleigh in the background has the clumpy feet and enormous nostrils typical of early Disney animals. But then there is that holy, Christmas-cardy background, with its mysterious 3D effect. Wonder where he stole that from.

Postlude: just dredged up this very tasty quote from Wikipedia! Taken from a German newspaper during the Third Reich:

"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed...Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal...Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!"

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

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

The Greeks had a word for it (and we don't)

Creepy Santas. . . OK, this is the last one

It's just that there are so MANY of them! I feel as if I'm walking through the Louvre. The Louvre of bad Santas in really bad cartoons/Christmas specials. This one is from a monstrosity called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, rumored to have Pia Zadora in it (and whatever happened to - ?) This scene is as inexplicable as all the rest of it.

Worst of all. . . Santa is SMOKING!

Bondage. From the Howdy Doody Christmas Special, 1957.

Clarabelle and The Man in the Stripes. And incidentally, why was a male clown called Clarabelle?

From an insane puppet Christmas special, 1950. The marionettes in this thing are Stepford-esque. Santa has a manic quality about him.

Not "ho-ho-ho", but "heh-heh-heh-heh-heh".

Santa's boogaloo.

Not a show exactly, but an artifact, a battery-powered moving Santa with death rays coming out of his eyes. But it's even worse when he's turned off.

Let's call it 'Twas the Night Before Solstice

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

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

Creepy Santa Smackdown!

Yes, it's here again - the competition of a lifetime, or at least this week. Back when I could make really great gifs on the new program, Gifsforum (I mean last night), I did some kick-ass weird Santa ones from old cartoons and childrens' programs. Oh, and then guess what? The whole thing shut down. It stopped working. I can't find anything on the internet to explain this, as it does not seem to happen to anyone else. There should not be a quota! Gifsforum, when it worked (last night!), would do a 15-second video of pristine quality in less than half a minute. Well, back when it was working. Now it has stopped.

Like my mouse. Something supernatural is happening with my mouse. Or mice. A few mices ago, my mouse just conked, and I finally had to put a new battery in which seemed to solve the problem. A week or so later, it conked. Bill gave me a brand-new one, I put a battery in, and a week later it conked. On the THIRD mouse I began to suspect supernatural forces, or a batch of bad batteries. My son the computer genius, who has NEVER been stumped by a problem, has no idea what this is. Like people who can't wear a watch because it stops, I get huge, searing, visible electric shocks off car doors, and I don't know of anyone else who does. I have to literally ground myself with my elbow when I get out. What the fuck?

Perhaps that's the price of toying with supernatural forces. Never mind, here are the few I made before this disaster took it all away from me again.

The first Santa looks like something from the Third Reich: the Hitlerian gestures, swaggering and head-shakes. This was part of an archaic Punch and Judy show that was indescribably violent.

And this one. Just what is Santa doing under the bedclothes? At one point he appears to give himself a narcissistic kiss. I don't think children should see things like this.

Santa in blackface, looking menacing during his yearly break-and-enter. In the old cartoons, his bag always has patches on it. Obviously he is from the Al Jolson school of chimney-sliding.

Santa burns his ass off.

Ummm. . . 

The strangest video, a movie shot in 1898 when most movies lasted a minute or so. Here Santa is wraithlike, carrying something like a bush (a Christmas tree?) This was one of the 15-second ones that I'll never make again because it has all STOPPED WORKING.

And here he is. . . winner of the 2013 Creepy Santa Smackdown! Are those his teeth that he is baring under his moustache? If so, he also wins the Evil Santa award. The things you find on the internet. Until Gifsforum stopped working.

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

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

Joys of the season: creepy old Santa cartoons

As everyone is aware, now is the season of love, laughter and creepy old cartoons. The best ones come from the 1930s, early '30s if possible: there are examples from the '20s, but to my taste they're a bit primitive. Who knows whether this one, Toyland Premier (a direct ripoff of Disney's Mickey's Premier, full of moving celebrity caricatures) was in color originally, or if someone filled in this gory and somehow voluptuous red.

The point is, my favorite YouTube-to-gif site, Y2gif, has gone bust, or at least catawampus. It won't do anything for me. If you enter the info, the web page code, as you're supposed to, this little thingie swirls and swirls forever, until it "times out". The fault is theirs, so the page tells us. So fuck 'em. I CANNOT wait any longer to make holiday gifs!

The search was on for an alternate, and fortunately there were several, because the first one I tried was so shitty it made me want to scream. The videos could be barely 5 minutes, the gifs were no more than 5 seconds, and it took at least 10 minutes for your poorly-made gif to be finished. So it was with a great gasp of astonishment that I found Gifsforum.com: not only did it take much longer videos, upwards of 15 minutes or maybe longer, it would also produce a large, high-quality video of UP TO 15 SECONDS  in a very short space of time.

Thus the dancing clowns, moving in a seemingly endless loop. I'm wondering now whether to remake all of my Harold gifs, but the thought of it is exhausting. Harold makes my heart ache these days, like a lost love or someone who has gone overseas to fight. You don't know if you'll ever see him again, and you never did get as close to him as you wanted. You got close enough to notice he always smelled good, and that's a rare trait in a man. Nothing special or fancy, just a tinge of tweed or saddle leather or even fresh hay.

I yearn because even though the hard part is supposed to be over, it ain't. If no one is interested in my work-of-the-heart, something is going to die inside me forever, and I know it. So I keep the home fires burning.

And just look at these gifs! Juicy, long gifs. I compare here the same logo on 2 different programs:

I think Gifsforum does something to these pictures, sharpens or crops them or something, because they lack that muddy black-barred quality. My favorite Harold reaction, the incredible 15 seconds while sitting in a chair 20 stories high, giffed up beautifully with no problems. Gifsforum also has a lot of alternate settings for size, speed and even color effects, though I have no idea what they mean. (They'll also run backwards.) Y2gif had only one real advantage: a feature that made them much harder to set up, but often produced the best effect. You could literally set the video for hundredths of a second, so that there would be no extraneous material to mar the little gems, the micro-videos these things truly are.

I've never been a filmmaker before, and this is likely as close as I will get. But goddamn it! These things are fun. I can spend hours doodling and diddling with them. I know some people can't stand them, and most of them seem to last less than a second so that the effect is stupid and jerky. Now that they're getting longer, who knows. All that needs to happen now is that someone will post Why Worry? in parts, so I can take Part 3 and excerpt the final, sizzling-hot kiss at the end, the only truly passionate Harold Lloyd kiss  in his repertoire (and rare in the entire silent comedy ouevre). Given that Harold had just started his first serious extramarital affair with his co-star, I think this kiss speaks volumes about where both of them were emotionally and sexually. Imagine having to take and retake, over and over, the way he seizes on her, catlike, like a great lion grasping a lioness by the back of her neck while they mate.

Enough of this, I've got to go trim the eggnog or whatever. I have seriously mixed feelings about this time of year, can be as fatuous as a puppy-dog when the lights start to ring-ting-tingle (or is that the bells?). Then I just sag into this morose mood that seems to have no end. My dreams seem to be slowly washing downhill, eroding like a sand cliff eaten by waves.

Never mind, everybody,  Santa's coming, let's all cheer up!

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

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

Are you in Crimbo Limbo?

Today I mistakenly or accidentally stumbled across the term Crimbo, then when investigating it a little more, the expression Crimbo Pressie. First I thought it was a gaming expression, and it might be, but who gives a fuck about gaming, we spend our lives doing MEANINGFUL things.

So now I know TWO new words. Oh happy, joyous Crimbo!

(For an added thrill, click on any or all of the hip words below. Check out related terms like Crimbabwe and Crimbo Limbo, as well as British slang variations such as Crimbles. This opens up new worlds.)

• bitchy resting face
• poopsock
• control shift n
• thot
• swag
• cenosillicaphobia
• selfie
• morning hitler
• troweling
• lunk

• crimacious
• crimaliens
• Crimanity
• crimansqua
• Crimany
• Crimany-A
• crimate
• Crimax
• crimbalba
• Crimbaloid
• Crimble
• crimbles
• Crimbo
• Crimbo Limbo
• crimbo pressie
• crimbo (short for Crimbabwe) also kno...
• crimbot
• Crimbus
• Crimcheck
• Crimdalf

• 1. crimbo pressie

British slang for "christmas present"

I'm only getting one bloody crimbo pressie this year!

SQUIRREL!!!!!

Not much a-happenin' in my brain these days, nor will be 'til well after Crimbo (just learned that expression, and I love it! From here on until eternity, it replaces Christmas or even Xmas.) So in lieu of anything intelligent, here's something I love.

La maman toujours prête

And here's the French! The Quebecois casting isn't quite as effective however. The Mom doesn't have that vulpine, three-cornered smile with the slitty Satanic eyes: GOTCHA, you bleepin' bleep, you are NOT going to get away with one-upping me by appearing like a saintly surprise-giver while I stand there with my mouth open, thrown off-balance in that oh-fuck-she's-given-me-something-which-leaves-me-in-a-total-state-of-embarrassed-chagrin way. Yes, ***I*** have triumphed, conquered, VANQUISHED you, I have my foot on your neck in the snow, winning the mean little battle of the gifts with one lousy under-$5-gift from Jesusly WALMART.

And that's the spirit of the season! Wonder if this is available in Lithuanian.

The Always-Prepared Mom

Most ads blow the big one, and most Walmart ads blow Moby Dick as far as I'm concerned (though I'm not quite sure what that means). But this one comes on, and I like it because of the slight hostility implied by "oh, I know we're not exchanging gifts this year but - " (pulling out the "surprise" gift which is about as welcome as a hurled Clovis point, the implication being, HA, got you, sucker, now you're going to feel guilty and as if you have to reciprocate for the next year!), countered by the even-more-devastating "as a matter of fact, it just so happens. . ."

These are stealth gifts, and I am sure a lot of them are exchanged at this time of year. They mean nothing. Each lady gives the other the exact same box of cheap licorice All-Sorts from Walmart (for less than $5!). Is anybody further ahead? Of course not. They have cancelled each other out.  In the great holiday gift-giving joust, which is usually a battle to the death,  it's a draw. Praise the name of Walmart.

But the real reason I love it, it's that music. Whatever it is, it drives me crazy!

It's a Wonderful Life: is this supposed to be a family show?

This thing comes on every year and I get caught up in it, even worse than Taxi Driver. And I forget every year that it's the longest, most suffocating piece of drama ever created. A festive favorite about a man who wants to commit suicide because his life has been an exercise in futility and failed dreams, capped off by a totally unfair charge of bank fraud.

Ah! It's a Wonderful Life. Ringling, tingling Christmas trees, Zoo-zoo's petals, bleeding lips, newel-post knobs nearly hurled across the room. Chickens on a spit, bar brawls on Christmas Eve, irrelevant songs about Buffalo Gals, and wild-eyed overacting all around.

Dis guy, see, he's like, um. Kind of disillusioned, like, cuz. His Uncle Billy, who's half nuts but was the father in Gone with the Wind so sort-of famous, has lost the eight thousand dollars that the Bailey Savings and Loan has earned in the past fifty years or so. He sort of dropped it somewhere and the Big Fat Man, the Bad Man, Lionel Barrymore in his most Grinchimous role, went and spent it on a hooker or something.

So da guy, this George, he decides he's worth more dead than alive (do I hear silver bells?), and stands there not jumping off a bridge. Then this old guy in a nightgown jumps off the bridge, and. . . the rest is history.

Oh, I shouldn't be so cynical, but this thing - this long thing, this three-hour marathon of hopelessness and small-town suffocation - it's about the farthest thing from festive you could imagine. Even Scrooge has glimmers of hope in it, but this - . George acts like some sortofa downtrodden saint for two hours and forty-nine minutes, then he kind of explodes and screams at his wife and family and tells them he basically hates them for holding him back and completely destroying his life.

His . . . wonderful life.

OK, I have a few problems with the logistics of this thing. When they get married and have to give all their money away to save the bank, Donna Reed gets chickens going on a spit in this old ruin of a house, the one they use-da throw stones at for luck. And they move in to it? make it habitable? On his salary of $2.70 a week or whatever-the-frick-it-is? Raise a family? George wears the same suit for 17 years, for God's sake.

Jimmy Stewart overacts. I'm sorry, but he does, he overshoots. He smears his facial features around with his hand, his hair is wild, he looks like a candidate for the psych ward, and finally he mumbles to his hokey old guardian angel (the guy in the funny shirt that ties up in front because buttons hadn't been invented in the year 1300) that he wishes he'd never been born at all.

Kind of the ultimate in nihilism, wouldn't you say? Jimmy Stewart, the guy with the 6-foot imaginary pet rabbit, the guy in whatever-else-he-was-in, all those Westerns and Mr. Smith and whatever, attempting to annihilate all traces of his existence on earth. A holiday special?OK, another big problem. He has this obnoxious friend named Sam Wainwright who keeps saying, inexplicably, "hee-haw". A dumb-ass par excellence, he lucks into a strange new business just before the war breaks out:  plastics. This assures he'll be obscenely wealthy doing no work at all.

He's George's best friend, for blippin' sake, and George is all stressed out and wanting to kill himself over 8 thousand dollars when 8 thousand dollars isn't even POCKET CHANGE for Sam Wainwright. In the dramatic ending when everyone turns their linty little pockets inside-out for George, he gets some kind-of-a cable from Wainwright saying, in so many words, "your measly little problem that you were willing to die over is peanuts to me. I'll give you three times that amount and change. There, feel better now?"

I doubt if he would. But think about it. Would Wainwright ever let George be dragged off to jail for such a shabby little amount? Money is power, right? Wainwright could make Old Man Potter dance like a jerky little marionette on a cold winter's night, and George is all stressed out about jail? (I liked his idea that Uncle Billy should go, instead. Made sense to me.)

But hey. He might get conjugal visits from that, who's that little floozie anyway? Jeez, what's she doing in this thing? Spozed to be a family show?

Oh, oh, and I just thought of this: it gets me every year. Why is it that after George yells at Uncle Billy that he's a mental defective, a moron and a lunatic, a squirrel jumps up on his arm? What the - ?? a squirrel? Up to now we've only seen ravens, tortoises, cows, etc. Could this be a foreshadowing of the squirrel from hell in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? (Actually, it screams of "cut the animal scenes, this thing is running too long." But for some reason they left in the squirrel.)

This time around (when as usual I kept saying, "OK, I'll turn it off in another 5 minutes" for 6 consecutive hours), I noticed a few other discrepancies, such as George's mother (Beulah Bondi) bawling and dabbing at her eyes during the final cash-spilling orgy in George's living room. Well, about ten minutes ago when George was on the phone with his brother Harry in Washington, where he just got the Congressional Medal of Honor for filing his nails or something, George repeats to the listening crowd, "Mother had lunch with the President's wife."

Not only do the writers of this thing obviously not know who the President was then, but Mother must be able to teleport herself from Washington to Bedford Falls in a matter of seconds! Hey, lady, tell me how you can be in two places at the same time and I'll buy the patent.

But I gots-ta confess to one thing. No matter how I prepare myself for it, no matter how cynical I try to feel, no matter how cornball I know it will be (and it is), that final scene has me bawling every time. Just bawling. I don't know what it is. The generosity of the people. The look of astonishment on George's face. Zoo-zoo. Beulah Bondi, beamed down from the planet Zargon.

I remember a superb SCTV satire of this scene, in which a succession of ever-more-notable people kept sweeping through the door, from George's brother to the President of the United States to, finally, His Holiness the Pope. It's a potent fantasy, all right - one we wish would come true for ourselves. That one day, in spite of futile sacrifice and grinding toil and zero recognition, something wonderful will happen to make us see that it has all been worthwhile.

This has something to do with the American work ethic, always handing the glory to someone else like that ratfink brother-who-got-the-Congressional-Medal-of-Honor-while-we-got-stuck-with-goddamn-rubber-drives-during-the-freaking-war. Let's face it, there are more Georges than Harries in the world. We all have our lunatic uncles, our goddamn rubber drives. Our eight thousand dollars.

And if George hadn't-a saved Harry when he slid down on that slippery old thingammy on the ice, why then -

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
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Barnes & Noble

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

Thistledown Press

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

Chapters/Indigo
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