I
had a very strange dream about Harold Lloyd. I was listening to some gospel music, or rather watching it performed live, and it was the anthem Jerusalem (a. k. a. The Holy City) being done in a very over-the-top way.
Later I was trying to find a recording of it because it reminded me of church, as if it was being sung by my former church choir, though nobody looked the same. At one point I was sticking a pencil in a vast machine-looking box to unlock it. In some way the music was supposed to come out of it, but the pencil kept breaking off, so I didn't get to hear it again. Then
I had a chance to meet Harold Lloyd. He looked like a slim, good-looking but otherwise unremarkable middle-aged businessman, from the era of his talkies in the mid-1930s (I was thinking The Milky Way where he plays a milkman boxer),
and he started firing questions at me: ten standard questions handwritten on a
piece of paper “just to get to know each other”. This was his usual method with
people. I took the piece of paper and crumpled it up and threw it away and
said, “Let’s just talk to each other instead.” He looked uncomfortable, but
seemed to come out of it and we talked. I don’t remember anything we said after that,
but he soon left, and as he went out the door I yelled after him, “Would you
like me to send you my novel?” He breezily said, “Oh, n-” (the “o” disappearing
as he vanished around the corner and was gone). No interest at all. Oh no, don’t send
it to me. No one even wants to READ it to find out what they think. "I already know I don't like it." Like a little kid with new food.
Oscar, reclining and reflective, begins to dream. He dreams he is in a vast concert hall. . .
. . . playing Gershwin's Concerto in F with his cigarette-stained fingers. . .
. . . and conducting at the same time. . . (and he was a real conductor so he isn't just waving his arms)
. . . and likewise the percussion, he's really playing (an early
example of cloning, or else he accelerates himself to the speed of sound)
My personal fave, cuz he looks so sexy. . .
Cute with a gong (and doesn't he look a bit like Buster Keaton?)
"Bravo! Bravo!"
(I stumbled on these while looking for gifs on Google. I keep looking for gifs on Google and finding MY gifs and thinking, why are MY gifs so much better than anyone else's? 'Strue, you know. These were made during my feverish Oscar Levant phase a couple of years ago. It was fascinating, and I am sure I could dig out more now if I wanted to. In fact, what brought me here in the first place was finding another Levant performance on YouTube. He shows up in odd places on Turner Classics and always adds something strangely appealing to otherwise-routine movies. He showed up in an abomination called The I Don't Care Girl, in which he played something so convoluted and strange that I couldn't guess who wrote it. Just ripped through it like chain lightning. He also wore a strange tiger-striped cat suit for one scene in which he had one line. There was nobody like him, and perhaps that was a good thing.)
Hello, and welcome to the silly hour. Or, at least, the silly story of the week. I didn't get to see this bear, and yet, in some remote spiritual way, I felt I was involved. I had just had my hair done, and my stylist told me, "my daughter just texted me that there's a 900-pound bear on the loose and the school is in lockdown." Alarmed, she cautioned me against walking home (which would take me right past Ground Zero, the bear's immediate vicinity), so of course I had to go and see this for myself. And yes - at Prairie and Oxford, the place was abuzz with TV cameras (CTV, CBC, Global and a couple of others), reporters, cops, conservation officers and numerous curious spectators.
It seemed I had come a little late and missed the bear. But it was all over the news that night, the top story. (Only in Vancouver!) On the CTV News report, a bystander makes a comment about the bear eating rotten apples and getting drunk, a completely bogus story designed to make it look as if he knew something. (Every crowd has its self-appointed expert/pompous asshole.) The media immediately seized this and ran with it. Now Buster Bear (or Busterina, as some people claim - but how can they tell?) is all over the internet, mainly because of that "hungover bear" angle and the "rampaging" description, which is just about as stupid as anything I've read for the past 2 or 3 hours.
From the footage, even when the conservation guys screamed and fired rubber bullets and "bear bangers" (don't ask) at it at close range, the bear only managed a lethargic trot. For the most part it just snoozed. I looked at a close shot of its face, and it's definitely a battlescarred old bear, with part of one ear missing and a face scratched up from many a battle in the bramble bushes.
The thing is, people have strange ideas about bears, thinking they run after forest animals and eat them, when not busy killing small children. Bears are foragers and eat fruit and roots and bugs and other stuff that comes out of the ground, with honey being their favorite. I rarely see bears on my walking trails, but I DO see great chunks of rubbed-off fur on tree trunks, and bear scat which is a tarry black and usually full of fruit pits. Salmon they like, when they can get it, but for the most part they're vegetarian. One cannot fault them for being attracted to garbage, but I think that is entirely our fault for being such filthy animals ourselves. No other species is as destructive as the human being.
Anyway, I wish I HAD seen Buster the other day, but I'll have to be content with these (what, you didn't think there'd be - ?) - these humble gifs.
I had almost forgotten about this monstrosity, yet another self-playing musical contraption from Siegfried's Museum in Rudesheim, Germany. Also known by its German name, Siegfried's Mechanisches Musikkabinett, but that's too hard to spell. This one is truly frightening. It seems to need to get up steam before it starts, then for the longest time doesn't seem to know what tune it's supposed to play. I'm not sure it ever sorts that out . The banjo and cymbal look like staring eyes, the keyboard a grinning mouth. Everything moves, and what comes out, if not music, is certainly something. I finally figured out that they have taken the back off this thing so we can see what's going on inside. The other side of it MUST look better than this.
Having finally found a much better video of the automaton-orchestrion from Siegfried's Museum, I wondered if I should completely rewrite my earlier post, but I don't think so. It's true people are not as drawn to this instrument because of its sheer creepiness, with gorillas in frilly dresses opening and closing their mouths as they jerkily play stringed instruments. The sheer size of the cabinet is intimidating, practically covering a wall. And the music is the strangest-sounding stuff, almost grotesque. But it's the primitive quality of the music that comes from these things that attracts me to them. If I want good-sounding music I can turn on the radio.
I have yet to see any really decent video of Siegfried's Museum of Mechanical Musical Instruments in Rudesheim, Germany. It looks like a fascinating place, with over 350 examples of antique self-playing instruments, some going back over 200 years, but all the videos are shot by tourists, raw footage unedited, with priorities that simply baffle me. Most linger for several minutes on a hideous thing that plays six out-of-tune violins at once, and a not-very-old gramophone playing Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera while everyone sways and sings along with misty eyes. All the items in the videos follow a certain sequence, so obviously this is an organized, preset tour, and only a few instruments are playable; most are probably too frail with age, which is too bad because the wheezy, sometimes off-pitch sound is definitely the best part.
But I'm quiffed at one thing. (Is that a word?) Squicked, too, but that's something I want. The last exhibit is simply spectacular, an automaton orchestrion unlike anything ever made before. And I really can't show it to you unless I post a very lousy video that only shows it from one side. The tourists all seem to wander away from this, uninterested, when it is by far the most fascinating and rare piece in the collection (which is doubtless why they save it 'til last). I don't know how many figures there are in this, but I think it's around 30, and they are each playing a musical instrument in jerky fashion while wheezy, creepy, circus-y music plays in the background. Just my cup of tea! But the fact that nobody seems to realize what a spectacle this is means no one has ever properly video'd it. You get, at best, 30 seconds shot from an extreme angle, or an annoyingly bobbing-up-and-down shot over a lot of bald heads, or the glare of the glass cabinet. I can't edit YouTube videos, and for once a gif just won't do it, so all I can do is. . . oh I don't want to do this!! But here it is. I'll explain later. . .
I wish there were a way to shorten or otherwise edit the boring parts, and take a decent shot panning this amazing, one-of-a-kind work of art character-by-character. As I will show you in the totally-inadequate stills, not all the figures are human, adding an extra dimension of creepiness to the thing.
What amazes me right away is what good shape these are in. They must have been extremely carefully-protected from dust, sunlight, dampness, over-dryness, and anything else that would bleach out colours and shrivel up fabric.
The automaton/orchestrion was created by one Bernhard Dufner, and so far I can't even find a date because there is NEVER any information on YouTube with the videos! This whole subject is thinly-documented, though there are many dry lists and catalogue numbers on lousy old sites that haven't been updated in 10 years, with links that don't work worth a hoot. With no photos or videos, these are obviously meant only for those auction-obsessed collectors who are trying to fill an abyss within.
The cabinet itself is exquisite, as is shown by long shots which seem to dwarf the creepy, crazy, magnificent dolls within. It's a pity we can't see each doll in closeup and even handle it. Come to that, I don't think I'd want to handle a gorilla in a dress. But here is where National Geographic needs to get in there and take extreme closeups of these things, because they are truly remarkable.
And creepy.
Dear God, I hope these are gorillas and not some hideous representation of black people! If it matches the caricatures of the day, it might be, rendering it even more creepy.
A long shot of the cabinet. Can you smell the old wood? Who was this made for? I must at least try to dig out some information. Imagine having this taking up half your living room. And wouldn't it be fascinating (another National Geographic special!) to see the workings of the thing, to take off the back and peer in? Imagine the feat of engineering that brought this into being.
And here he is, Siegfried, master of the House of Creepy Magic, looking just as strange and Gandalf-like as you would expect him to be. He didn't create any of these bizarre instruments, but merely presides over it all. Never mind, watch the video, start it at 2:12 and watch to the end. And try to image what it's really like.
Blogger's P. S.: a big aha, but at the same time a depressingly small one: I found a journal of mechanical instruments, music boxes and stuff, and the list of articles went back to 1978. Obviously I couldn't/wouldn't read the whole thing, but after some sifting I found the name of Bernhard Dufner. He was not at all who I thought he was: an American, for one thing, working in the late 1800s when these contraptions were at their peak of popularity. (Imagine how business must have fallen off with the invention of the phonograph, not to mention photography and motion pictures.)
So his magnificent moving-doll orchestrion was likely built towards the end of the 19th century, though the costumes look baroque. It explains the still-vibrant colors, when fabric dyes had become much brighter and more stable. One wonders if the style of clothing was intentional, a way of "antique-ing" the thing to look more valuable than it really was. And what was he doing in Buffalo, New York, if he did such fine, European-standards work? Or was it some other Buffalo? The article, with its flyspeck type, was in PNG and not reproduceable, so I literally had to print this, scan and crop it. But it looks mighty handsome, doesn't it? Dufner is still pretty obscure, and Google searches netted me exactly nothing. But he did produce one strikingly original piece, still exhibited 150 years later on the other side of the world. The story is so unlikely that it could only be true.
Welcome to my nightmare. One of my continuing feverish obsessions is with, what, old stuff? Old stuff connected to music, to musical instruments. . . to mechanical instruments, which fascinate me most of all. These were built to amuse the very rich in the days long before any sort of recording existed, and far exceeded the music box in out-of-tune-ness and general detestibility. But it is this that makes me love them so.
I would have included automatons, but I couldn't find any, which appalled me because I know hundreds of such videos exist. I can't find anything at all under "automatons" any more because it's now the name of some game or TV series or something, but I'm fascinated with them too because they combine music with jerky, macabre movements. Something weird going on here, too, because all of these instruments seem to be on fire, or about to put out a fire (the rackett at the top looks quite a bit like a medieval fire extinguisher) - the open-air calliope, designed for an old-fashioned riverboat, looks more like a giant out-of-control gas barbecue, and the bottom one, well. I guess we could call it steampunk. The awful camera work is for effect, I assume. These instruments were designed for old-fashioned circus wagons and were definitely made to be heard outdoors, at as great a distance as possible.
I shouldn't do it, I tell myself - stay up so late, get so engrossed - and find so many odd things, it's quite unbelievable.
Not long ago I posted a long screed about how horrible name-brand cheddar has become. Over the years, it's gradually morphed from something at least vaguely cheeselike to a decidedly unpleasant substance which tastes like the inside of a rubber glove after milking a cow.
We can't afford to scour the country to find just that right gourmet cheese shop for my cheddar fix, but everyone kept saying, "Oh, just go to Costco." Costco kind of reminds me of that silent movie Metropolis, except the cashiers are a little nicer, but I went anyway, desperate.
I was surprised at the variety, though the prices really weren't all that great. There were lots of good European and domestic cheeses, but I was bent on cheddar, a GOOD cheddar, edible, dependable, good for recipes, grating, melting, but most of all just EATING out of hand, maybe with a bite of apple now and then to cleanse the palate.
There were enough of them, the usual blandies like Kraft and Cracker Barrel, but also Irish cheddar in a weird opaque wrapping (cheese that felt hard as a brick - no rubber here), and a Welsh cheddar with a warning label: Powerful Cheese. This was what we used to call rat trap cheese, hard and oily. Not what I was looking for.
So we saw this Balderson cheese, had never heard of it, but noted it was NOT labelled "mild, medium, old, extra old" or, worse, "mild, medium, sharp, extra sharp," the "extra sharp" meaning sticking the streaming udder right in your mouth.
It was labelled according to years of ageing, and they had a two-year and a five-year. Armstrong cheddar, which I used to love and which has turned traitor and gone supermarket-bland, used to have a 5-year that I liked, though it was a bit hard, almost dry in texture. I went back and forth. Would 2-year give me that cheddar buzz, that rich flavour that just keeps developing in your mouth? The 5-year cost more, and I wasn't sure if it would have a too-firm texture (though anything would be preferable to the rubber lego-bricks I had been choking down),
I have to tell you, all the way home in the car I worried. It cost $16.00 for 750 grams of this stuff. If you live in the States, it'd probably set you back less than ten bucks. And this is a Canadian product. I was working my way into a lather as I wrestled the shrink-wrap off and plunged my knife in.
Yes. I knew at once. This is cheese. This is REAL cheese, and though the flavour is rich and mature and the texture almost fudgy, it's still creamy enough to melt in the mouth. It had little cracks all over it like marble where you bit it, a sort of "grain". So I kept eating it and eating grapes and yelling to my husband, "This is good, don't you want any?"
My pleasures in life are few, truly they are. Between our recurrent health woes and being strapped for cash, we don't get around much any more. Finding something like this - and it turns out there is a whole VILLAGE named Balderson in Ontario, prime dairy country, and a big store that would be heaven to skip around in with a cheese basket- it's significant. Hey, maybe none of my writer's dreams have come true (and for the most part, they haven't, the third novel leaving me with a sense of abject failure), but now I can lay my hands on some really kick-ass cheddar.
Local authors fume as Bezos holds secret Santa Fe retreat
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos watches a from the wings during the June 18 launch of the Amazon Fire Phone in Seattle. Bezos is hosting a covert gathering for the culturally elite in Santa Fe. Associated Press file photo (Blogger's note: this is an article from the Santa Fe daily newspaper, the New Mexican, in which we learn more than we ever hoped to know about Jeff Bezos and his happy little bonfire of exploited writers. I couldn't excerpt this thing very well, so I present it pretty much whole, interspersed with my usual nasty little images. Goody.)
A hush-hush, very private, under-the-radar, author-schmoozing affair for the creative elites is taking place in Santa Fe.
Nobody, but nobody in the know will talk on the record about Campfire, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ early autumn gathering of writers and other visionary types held in recent years at the Bishop’s Lodge Ranch Resort & Spa. It’s the local version of Northern California’s Bohemian Grove, although that all-male retreat is filled with politicians and captains of industry.
Everyone connected with the covert affair here is sworn to secrecy — hotels, restaurants, even those who handle staging and logistics. As one author who has participated in the past put it, “Campfire is a private event, and the sponsors prefer to avoid all publicity.”
As far as The New Mexican could determine, no local writers are invited this year, even though Santa Fe is home to many, including best-selling authors whose works are sold on Amazon.
But several Santa Fe writers were among more than 900 who criticized Amazon last month in a letter published as an ad in The New York Times. Santa Fe-based Authors United accused the retailer of targeting them in its long-running dispute with publishing firm Hachette over e-book pricing. The writers, many of whose works are published by Hachette, say Amazon is threatening their livelihoods by delaying delivery of their books and refusing to accept pre-orders.
“Every year, Jeff Bezos of Amazon invites authors, artists, musicians and other creative people for a secret, swag-laden get together called Campfire,” said Authors United organizer Doug Preston, a writer who lives part time in Santa Fe. “Meanwhile, for the past six months, Amazon has been harming the livelihoods of 2,500 authors by impeding and blocking sale of their books in order to gain leverage in its dispute with the publisher Hachette.”
Carol Armstrong, also known as Carol Held Knight, the widow of astronaut and moon walker Neil Armstrong, said in a brief phone interview this week that she attended Bezos’ secret Santa Fe gathering in 2011 and 2012. “It was very interesting,” she said. There were about 50 people at the event, which she described as “low key,” with talks by authors and dinner excursions.
Tours to nearby sites such as Puye Cliffs are arranged for the guests. One year, the event included a geocaching treasure hunt on the Plaza.
The invitees are all ages, all very accomplished and, most of all, interesting to Bezos. And they don’t exactly get here by bus. Pilots are warned about extra traffic at Santa Fe’s airport during Campfire weekend because of all the incoming Lears and Citations.
But even in the age of the Internet, it’s hard to find out much more about Bezos’ Campfire.
Only a few snippets show up online about the 2011 event.
Diversified Production Services, which produces special events, listed the “featured talent” that year as Neil Armstrong, Man Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), musician, songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart), street artist and graphic designer Shepard Fairey, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, Czech model and philanthropist Petra Nemcova and Pulitzer Prize Winner Alice Walker (The Color Purple), among others.
Publishers Lunch, a daily online report on stories of interest to the professional trade book community, confirmed Oct. 11, 2011, that a “select group of authors, performers, thinkers and others” were gathering outside Santa Fe for the second annual Campfire, where the theme was said to be “storytelling.”
Kurt Andersen, a former Time magazine writer, author and host of Studio 360, Public Radio International’s guide to pop culture, revealed in 2011 that he had attended the gathering in Santa Fe the previous year. His website says he “felt the company [Amazon] was trying to soften up the literary establishment as it moves toward publishing.”
Dennis Johnson, writer/journalist and co-founder of Melville House, the independent publisher in Brooklyn, N.Y., said on his book blog that year, “Well, now that Jeff Bezos is pretty much done destroying American book culture, he’s decided to spend some of his ill-gotten gains on … looking like a champion of writers. Or maybe he just needed to buy some friends.”
The item went on to say that the “Amazon oligarch” had flown authors Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini and Neil Gaiman, songwriter Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, and film directors/producers Jason Reitman and Werner Herzog, in addition to Atwood and Walker, to a “think-tanky” event he called the “Amazon Campfire.”
(Gaiman is in Santa Fe this weekend for a sold-out event with his wife, Amanda Palmer, at the Jean Cocteau Cinema called “Another Night of Random Stuff with Neil and Amanda.”)
Johnson’s blog quoted Publishers Lunch as saying that Bezos had paid for all the accommodations.
Johnson said in an interview that the event had been “hotly rumored,” but until the Publishers Lunch item, he hadn’t dared write about it. “Nobody knows anything,” he said. The invitees sign nondisclosure statements, and “they’re sticking to them.” Breaking the agreement would be taking your life in your hands, Johnson added, because “he [Bezos] will pursue you.”
Bezos, the technology entrepreneur who was born in Albuquerque and graduated from Princeton University, founded and runs Amazon, the largest retailer on the Web. Named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, he bought The Washington Post newspaper in 2013. He is also a member the Bilderberg Group, another super-secret assembly of 120 or more political leaders, and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media who are invited to take part in annual discussions about megatrends and major issues facing the world.
Preston, who said his paperback and e-book sales are down more than 60 percent since Amazon began its tactics to pressure Hachette, said the book retail giant should put more focus on the thousands of writers who supply works for Amazon rather than the elites he is hosting in Santa Fe this weekend.
‘These writers, most of whom are struggling, mid-list authors, have seen their book sales decline 50 to 90 percent at Amazon.com,” he said. “They are fearful about what this means for their future careers. If Mr. Bezos truly cared about authors, instead of inviting an anointed few to his little Campfire and handing them a bag of goodies, he would end the sanctions against thousands of authors and their books.”
Santa Fe author James McGrath Morris (Pulitzer) conceded that Amazon has done as much good for publishing as it has done harm and is “not necessarily a one-dimensional evil monster.”
But McGrath Morris still sees irony in the fact that Bezos holds his Campfire in “an artistic, creative city with independent bookstores who are suffering from competition with Amazon and Kindle Fire.”
To hold the Campfire here, and not to reach out to local authors and bookstores, he said, “seems a little lacking in forethought.”
One of those bookstores, Collected Works, has a sign in the window banning Amazon’s Fire Phone, which shoppers can use to order books by scanning their covers, automatically placing an order and bypassing brick-and-mortar stores.
Blogger's note: I can't tell you how relieved I am that all this crap is finally coming out. I suppose that up to now it's been justified by a "private little event" mentality, with high-profile writers easily seduced with lots and lots of candy. Otherwise it never would have gotten off the ground.
I said in my last post that silencing a group of people by coercion or veiled threats has another name: abuse. It also has the shameful stink of bullying, of casual manipulation through generating a nameless, formless dread. But I've thought of something else (there's always something else, as followers of this little insignificant blog will realize): it also has the flavor of "YOU can play in my tree fort (if you're rich, well-known and extremely malleable), but YOU can't (if you don't have high status and won't keep your mouth shut)". My mother used to sing an ancient song that now comes to mind: "I don't want to play in your yard/I don't like you any more. . .No, I don't want to play in your yard, if you won't be nice to me." "Nice" meaning, in this case, ultra-discreet, also known as "silent".
These writers had to sign a sort of oath of silence even to be let in. More tree fort mentality. It's like one of those really neat Captain Marvel clubs of the '60s where you sent away for identification papers, strict printed rules, and a badge. You're in; everyone else is out. Otherwise it just wouldn't be any fun.
Writers often take a vehement, even violent stand against elitism and the worst excesses of capitalism - well, some of them do, sometimes, when they're not out there spelunking or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, getting wrapped in vast polar bear robes that they get to keep in their Vespucci endangered-alligator suitcases. For all we know, they eat bush meat, capybaras and such, roasted komodo dragons, with spotted owl souffle for dessert. Anything to keep those pesky writers satisfied - and quiet.
I'm still not seeing very much coverage on this event - Bezos is still keeping a muzzle on those who attended, apparently - or has he managed to intimidate the media, too? (Does the name William Randolph Hearst mean anything to you?). It's been pointed out that Bezos has a fondness for fire imagery: Kindle, Fire Phone - and now, Campfire. Why is this? Oh, I don't know, it's "hot" maybe? Or maybe it will just burn up the competition entirely. It's a pretty alarming take on the word "campfire". This time, however, what with all that fuss about ebooks, we don't even need starter fluid. The conflagration has already begun.
