Saturday, May 31, 2014

The best thing I've seen on Facebook



http://news.distractify.com/culture/x-history-photos/?v=1

I posted this, then for some reason unposted it, and I'm finding it on Facebook so much that I decided to post it again. It's 60 very interesting pictures - some historical, others poppish, most of them intriguing or startling. I've pulled out just a few that jumped out at me.




Most of these don't have dates, but I would imagine this is 1940s: the very first computer, filling a whole room. Intimidating, and ugly, without a touch screen. As the verse says (Ogden Nash, perhaps?): "Clack clack/went the Univac".




The MGM lion. He has his own hairdresser, obviously.




A teenage Bill Gates grinning after some minor driving infraction. The Biebs has nothing on him.




The Beatles clowning with Ali.




Brando with King. We made fun of him then.




I'd say these are photoshopped, except that they're not. Castro and Malcolm X.




Ali talking down a would-be suicide.




A partially-completed Mount Rushmore. (This one amazes me, but somebody had to do it - even if I can never quite believe it).




Shaken, not stirred. 




Robin Williams shows off his hairy chest, pre-Mrs. Doubtfire.




Amelia Earhart's last hair cut. Chilling.




Bill Clinton and JFK. Some similarities there.




So why would Audrey Hepburn be grocery shopping? It's even stranger than her pet deer. Obviously posed, but intriguing.




Pablo Picasso with Brigitte Bardot. Creepy to the max.




Drew Barrymore cuddling on Stephen Spielberg's lap. Well. . . a bit creepy now, but probably not then.




A young Hemingway's passport. It would take him far.




My personal fave: three of the four Beatles in 1958, barely out of their skiffle phase, dressed in natty three-piece suits for a wedding gig. Note John's Little Richard hair.



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Thursday, May 29, 2014

Searching for Rich Correll, take 2




(This post originally ran more than three years ago. Since then, a lot has happened - The Glass Character finally saw print! - and a lot didn't. It is of some benefit to realize there was a time, ONLY three years ago, when I didn't think I'd connect with RC at all.  I have his phone number in LA now, which would've seemed like a miracle then. So something must have happened in the interim. But I have no idea if he has read my book, if he even received it. By the way, back in 2011, I could not find a single up-to-date photo of Rich Correll, so had to use these grainy shots from when he was a child actor. I kept them simply because I like them.)


I can remember a time when I wouldn't touch a computer, afraid it would give me one of those searing visible cracks I always get on car doors. (No one else seems to get these, kinda like people whose watches stop for no reason.)


Then I touched one, though I know not when. There was no internet then, just a Tandy computer I lovingly called Jessica, a daisy wheel printer, and a fax machine. I don't remember my first foray into the internet, or even what it was called then. The Information Highway, I think, and if you tried to use it, some techie guy would brand you a "newbie".


For a long time I was afraid of it and was sure I'd never use it and that it would be daunting and impossible to use and I would feel bloody stupid if I even tried. My kids were printing stuff out on long rolls that you tore off like chunks of toilet paper, with a sort of perforated border with holes in it on the sides. They printed out arcane secret information about the X Files and stuff like that. It was interesting, yes, but intimidating, something for the young.


I don't remember when I found out what a download was, probably last week sometime. I was thrown into the water and swam badly, still swim badly for the most part, but here I am with, drum roll please, not only a web site (which is mostly an ad for my novels) but a blog.


Then, the other day something very strange happened. One second I hated the idea of social networking, knew nothing about it and felt like it was all written in a foreign language, like Armenian or something, then the next second I was "on" Facebook.



I still don't really know how to use it, because there are no instructions. You're just supposed to know. Once more I have that queasy feeling I got to the party late, too late to ever catch up. But I didn't do it to "network". I did it to find one person.





This person, rare as an exotic deer or a species no one has ever seen before, is so elusive I can't find an updated image of him. These pictures are from his child star days, when he had an ongoing role on Leave it to Beaver. There would appear to be no reliable information for contacting him, just a few wretchedly inappropriate mailing addresses, though the Lord only knows I've tried.


The two-and-a-half people who follow this blog might know that I kvetch a lot about the fact that I've written a novel about Harold Lloyd, the silent film genius, and so far can't get anyone in Canada interested in publishing it. People all over the place are telling me to self-publish, and I don't see how that would work if you had to book your own tours, readings, etc., do all your own distribution and promotion, get it in all the stores and on the net, pay for your own ads, etc. etc. and not go bankrupt.


\


I thought when you published your book, you made money. Silly me. But there's a book crisis going on, and no one knows quite where they stand. This means everyone's suddenly an expert telling everyone else what they should do. But paper books are  becoming obsolete, which means that the retail chains will eventually close (and let's not think about those small independent stores that have tried to survive a plague of almost Biblical proportions). Most if not all of the publishing industry will exist online. But when you're between systems, it's disorienting. Writers have to scramble, create their own books, or just endure the slammed doors that eventually lead to a bad case of clinical depression.





SOOOOOO,  to get to the actual point of all this, I'm searching for Rich Correll, the Hollywood polymath who co-invented the character/global phenomenon Hannah Montana and who has been directing hit Disney programs (the kind Caitlin slavishly watches) for years. He has done, and is doing, tons of other stuff in the industry as well, but that's not the real reason I'm looking.


I want to find Rich Correll because he was like a second son to Harold Lloyd: he knew Harold Lloyd, he loved Harold Lloyd, and he just strikes me as someone who might actually be willing to help me realize this labour of the heart, or at least to understand why I did it, and why it means so agonizingly much to me.




Or not. Maybe it'll just be the usual best of luck with this I've heard every other time I've made a "contact", which as far as I am concerned means about as much as a Facebook "friend".  Hard to say. Maybe he's too busy suing the Disney Corporation for $5 million (and imagine suing Mickey Mouse! This is both quixotic and admirable.) I don't know. I just feel at this point like I need to talk to someone who loves Harold Lloyd as much as I do.


It's funny to be in this position now. Everyone seems to be saying, "Accept less." Or even "give it up, it'll never happen". I know I can do this, I know I will do this, but I'm lost in a labyrinth. For this reason, to try to find Rich Correll whom I've been tracking like a bloodhound for months, I joined Facebook and found myself, once again, a stranger in a strange land.


As usual, as with everything I have ever done, I feel like a complete outsider. Some of my "friends" have over 1,000 names on their list, when I have more like nine or ten. It's high school all over again. I sort of blunder around and put up photos, not knowing what else to do. There's a place where you can say "what's on your mind", but judging from the comments, it looks like little snippets of whimsy, not requests for help or advice. Everyone is so cheerful, all day long, all the time. No one has a family crisis or an illness or a reversal of any kind. It's all good! Great things happen to the Facebook gang, non-stop, things so enviable you might  be tempted to wonder if reality isn't being bent just a little, mainly so you'll feel  a whole lot worse about your own life.





I guess I haven't learned Facebook etiquette, its invisible set of rules. When I post comments that are serious, especially about my work, I am usually made to feel like an opportunist who should just shut up and go away. Which I'm supposed to. And which I can't. Not this time.


Over the years I've seen Rich Correll all over the place. I am certain I saw him on Leave it to Beaver, but I was seven or eight years old then and didn't have much appreciation for these things. TV shows just popped out of the screen fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But every time there was a documentary on movies it seems he'd show up, and since I did not ever see them in chronological order he would get older, then younger, then middle-aged in the strangest way.

He figured large in the brilliant Kevin Brownlow documentary The Third Genius, a rich dense Christmas pudding of a film just chock-a-block with archival interviews, people who knew Harold "when". This was one of those times he mysteriously got younger, and the reminiscences flowed so easily it was probably one of those things where you could just turn the camera on.






Rich Correll also appeared on the bonus disc in the superb Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection DVD set. At one point, after all the reminiscences, suddenly there was pure magic, more magic than Harold ever pulled off in his entire life as a master conjurer.  He brought out a battered old suitcase full of treasures: Harold Lloyd's makeup kit, full of artifacts going back to the early 1900s. Old gloves (Harold needed a prosthetic glove because half his right hand had been blown off in an accident), tubes of greasepaint, a mirror with his name lettered on it. And pairs and pairs of horn-rimmed glasses. Harold Lloyd's glasses. Though Harold referred to his alter ego as the Glass Character, these were empty frames with no glass in them.


This is why I want to talk to Rich Correll. Harold Lloyd bequeathed this battered old case of magic to him. He has it in his possession. If Harold's spirit is anywhere, it's there, and Rich Correll holds it in his hands.

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Bizarre YouTube video of the week (if not the century)




Believe me when I say, I cannot find ANY YouTube video with Rich Correll in it. Hardly any, anyway. I mean, old Hollywood Squares episodes so compromised in quality, so melted of acetate that they look like bad trips. One sliver of a documentary about Stan Laurel from 20-some years ago. That's it. This is the same Rich Correll I wrote about in Searching for Rich Correll, a post from several years ago which I plan to rerun, if only to give me a sense of perspective. It's all about seeking the Chimera, the unicorn of good fortune, and seeing its ass bounding into the woods again.

Being of bloodhound blood type, I can do nothing but pursue: "I sought him, down the nights and down the days. . . " Oh, oopsy, that's "fled him", but it might as well be fled, for all it has netted me.

I don't know if he has my book in his hands or not. He has talked to me on the phone twice. Unexpectedly, for I wondered if he would be truly interested. I sent him 300 pages of loose manuscript, a truly dumb thing to do, then phoned him and told him not to read it. I wonder if we really got off to such a good start.




He hasn't answered my emails, but in this he's like 95% of other people. I wonder, am I cursed, or is this just the way the world is now? My world, anyway. I may never find out.

I can't say the visuals are too effective here, though right at the beginning you see Richard and Beav walking down the street talking, I mean just talking normal, and there are English subtitles. Then the camera sort of goes sideways, and stays there. Maybe this was shot by Antonioni or something, one of those cool directors from the '60s.



Maybe there's more, who knows. Maybe we will talk again, he'll actually read my book, or he won't, or he'll forget all about it. The mud puddles I step into always seem to be completely bottomless.


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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Harold Lloyd, Freemason: just a dull men's club?



I keep thinking I've gotten to the bottom of the barrel of craziness that surrounds Harold Lloyd. Not a bit of it. Here is a piece almost as strange as the "psychic bridging" site I found years ago while still writing the novel, then couldn't find again, ever. It disappeared in the night. The psychic bridging was some sort of time travel or remote viewing, where supposedly you could see into any era or period of time while remaining in the present. Harold Lloyd's name was mentioned in the piece in a most alarming way. The writer said he "became self-detached during filming" in the 1940s (he did make his last film in that time) and had to be hospitalized. But why, how - wtf?? 

Anyway, it all disappeared, and I never did find out if Harold worked for the CIA during the Cold War or what. Being as he was Imperial Potentate of the Shrine, Shriners being  Freemasons on steroids, there is much to indicate that he had more than a passing relationship with mysticism. That doesn't mean he appears in my living room at night (oh dang, I wasn't going to tell anybody).





I swear I didn't write the following piece, but it interests me, because with all his Masonic orientation (from his late 20s until the end of his life), there might be some sort of subconscious symbolism working its way out in this brilliant, but admittedly very strange movie with the oh-so-Lloydian title, Never Weaken.

Anyway, Just Wondering, whoever you are, I am lifting a piece of this article (which I have since realized has been reblogged all over the place, so who knows where it really came from) because I like it. I will offer my own interpretation shortly.



The Hanged Man Of Tarot In Popular Culture


What do Harold Lloyd, Ringo Starr, and Eddie Van Halen all have in common?

They've all appeared in movies or videos as "a man hanging upside-down from a rope by one leg and crossing the other leg".

That would be quite a coincidence if they were not all mimicking the same thing, The Hanged Man, which is the twelfth card in the Tarot deck.

Harold Lloyd is hoodwinked but then "enlightened" in the short film "Never Weaken" (1921).
 
Harold Lloyd's "Never Weaken" (1921) is full of masonic imagery.  He sits in a chair and blindfolds himself to commit suicide, but is lifted up through the air by a construction girder.  He hears harp music and takes off his blindfold to see a beautiful angel.  Only when he hears jazz does he realize that the angel is not real and he is not in heaven but high above the street and about to fall to his death.  He makes it back to safety.

In masonic terms, he is initiated by sitting in a throne, being hoodwinked, facing death, and being deceived.  He is a "hanged man", suspended on a steel beam between life and death.  He is then enlightened to a higher plane of understanding when the veil is lifted from his eyes and he perceives reality.






There is also a ring-on-a-string marriage ritual, a blood ritual, and a lot of focus on men's rear ends.

Everyone remembers Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock in Safety Last (1923) but nobody seems to remember the next scene where he swings upside-down from a rope by one leg:

Not bad stunts for a man who lost his thumb and forefinger four years earlier.




Harold Lloyd swinging from a rope with one leg bent in "Safety Last".

There are bank and stock exchange signs in the background, six years prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Get it?  It's predictive programming:  Safety Last-taking huge risks-bank-stock exchange-patriotic flag-nobody gets hurt-happy ending.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I think all that blindfold/shooting-yourself-in-the-heart-for-love stuff is darkly erotic, as is the long, funny but rather disturbing chain of suicide gags (in which he goes to the dictionary to check the spelling of a word - sepulchre - in his suicide note). The helplessness of the blindfold, his chair being suspended in mid-air, the stone angel and harp music, the ecstatic and almost orgasmic facial expression as he unmasks himself and reaches out for Eternity. . . well, it's all pretty sexy as far as I am concerned. Then that immortal scene of realization that he. Isn't. In. Heaven. At. All. 

There is blood in this, yes, actual blood, when he pricks his finger trying to impale himself on one of those spikes they used to stick notes on. Is this an unconscious (pun intended) reference to Sleeping Beauty fatally pricking her finger on a spindle? He does swoon in another scene, losing consciousness, almost falling out of his chair. If you want to look for Freudian flying/falling/bleeding/dying/surrealistic/Masonic/angelic/phallic symbols in this thing, you'll find them. It's chock-a-block.




As for being blindfolded,  Harold Lloyd was blind for a while, after the legendary accident which shaped the rest of his career/life. No one knew if he would ever see again, and one can imagine the terror, the helplessness of having to lie there, burned and maimed and blind. . . The joy and even ecstasy with which he reaches out for the Angel of Death in the movie might even reflect his profound desire to die and be done with this agony. Perhaps he even considered suicide himself: it's not a funny topic, but it somehow found its way into two of his movies. 

Well, why not a hanged man? He was into all that Masonic stuff, wasn't he? Magic shows, Tarot cards, deals with the devil? Haitian voodoo (no, that's me). God knows what else I'll find, that he was a polygamist or something, or worse than that, a Rotarian.

(Weird, weird stuff. . . I've been trying to post a gif of Harold suspended on the chair, and it keeps. . . disappearing. First it half-disappeared. This has never happened to me before, ever, in my entire career of fooling around with/making gifs. Then it just vanished, though a ghostly outline allows me to make it small, medium or large. BUT IT ISN'T THERE! I tried to put it back, and I can't put it back because, in fact, it is already there. . . I just can't see it.)




Further revelations on the Freemason Connection.  I decided to re-run this post because the subject is so fascinating, and I'm beginning to think it even has some truth in it. Harold was so deeply saturated in the ritual of the Shrine that they actually struck a coin with his likeness on it (don't worry, I'm not going to buy it, though it's tempting, only $35 on eBay). I also found, weirdness of weirdnesses, a whole lot of photos of an even stranger item, a Shriner scimitar - all part of that ritualistic stuff, and though it doesn't tell us what exactly the connection is, Harold Lloyd's name is associated with it. And it has a very strange handle. 




The flip side. We saw a picture of one of these on the bumper of a car recently, and I said, "oh look, a Freemason symbol," and my husband said, "no, that's an engineer's compass." So who knows. Who stole it from whom?



Kind of hard to believe all that evil conspiracy stuff when you see something like this.




I don't know what this is for sure, something painted on ivory or a plate or something? I forgot to keep the reference, and now I don't want to look it up again.




Harold having a whale of a time with Roy Rogers, Red Skelton and someone else famous, can't quite recognize him but he looks familiar. Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. Skelton. Hmmmm. Or is it Red SKELETON? (You decide.)




Harold as Imperial Potentate, the chief honcho/Grand Poo-Bah of the Shrine. Not too shabby. I can't quite figure out if that's his Dad, the beloved Foxy, pointing to something. 




The boot-handled scimitar. Now THIS is weird. Sado-masochism, a foot fetish, jackboots, what? Did anyone ever USE the scimitar, and for what? Did this really belong to Harold, and why did it have a foot on the end of it? The questions never end.






Yikes!




Hmmmm. This looks a little bit like a prosthetic leg. Harold had a prosthetic hand. Just a coincidence? 

I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!

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Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Geese What? Goslings Galore! (part 2)



Fun with the geese! This is part 2 of our short video of all those geese at Sasamat Lake. About 24 of them in total, though it's hard to count all those goslings running around. These came in various sizes according to when they hatched.
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Geese What? Goslings Galore! (part 1)




While walking on the shores of beautiful Sasamat Lake, we had a delightful surprise - three families of Canada geese with a total of eighteen goslings, in three different age groups (small, medium and large, but all of them still fuzzy and flightless). The peeping was something to hear. I already love this place, and now we have an incentive to come back. These geese are smart to reproduce now, as Sasamat Lake is overrun with people in July and August. We don't usually go near it then. Most years we don't see goslings at all, but this is the second time this spring that we've seen a lot of them at once (ten at Como Lake).
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Crafts with Caitlin: FAKE CAKE!




Making fake cake with Caitlin was tons of fun, and Ryan was a reluctantly cooperative judge. Now Caitlin wants her own YouTube channel! Caitlin Crafts, Craftygirl, or some-such. Something tells me Grandma will be involved.

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A few good fails: epic gif disasters




"Epic fail" gifs are kind of a cheap trick, but let's do some anyway. Fat guy falling through ice. . .




Some of them, you can tell, are kind of staged, but the sincere attempts at outlandish stunts are truly groan-worthy.




Horse fail!




This one looks real, for sure - some rotten little brother.





Real or faked? Could a golf club do this? You decide.




Now who is this - Rita Hayworth or something? I'd say it was staged, but the actor's lunge forward is so panicky that I don't think so (and such a stunt would be too hazardous for a star).




Hamster wheel fail.




Fat guys fall down funnier than thin guys, especially when spinning around on an office chair.




Dog fail!



"But the dog didn't get hurt. . . "




Stump fail! Again, suspicious, because that truck is such an old junker.




I've saved the best 'til last.
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