Would you let this man babysit your daughter?

Clair

Gilbert O'Sullivan

Clair
The moment I met you, I swear.
I felt as if something, somewhere,
Had happened to me, which I couldn't see.

And then, the moment I met you, again.
I knew in my heart that we were friends.
It had to be so, it couldn't be no.

But try as hard as I might do, I don't know why.
You get to me in a way I can't describe.
Words mean so little when you look up and smile.
I don't care what people say, to me you're more than a child.
Oh Clair. Clair ...

Clair
If ever a moment so rare
Was captured for all to compare.
That moment is you in all that you do.

But why in spite of our age difference do I cry.
Each time I leave you I feel I could die.
Nothing means more to me than hearing you say,
"I'm going to marry you. Will you marry me, Uncle Ray?"
Oh Clair Clair ...

  Gilbert O'Sullivan with the Girl who Makes Him No. 1 Today

Clair
I've told you before "Don't you dare!"
"Get back into bed."
"Can't you see that it's late."
"No you can't have a drink."
"Oh allright then, but wait just a minute."
While I, in an effort to babysit, catch up on my breath,
What there is left of it.
You can be murder at this hour of the day.
But in the morning the sun will see my lifetime away.
Oh Clair Clair ...
Oh Clair

OK then! Clair. Nobody seemed to object to this song at all when it first came out in the early '70s, but since then there are (clearly) two "Clair camps".

The first believes the song has a subtext of sexual attraction to a child which is kind of creepy. Or, at least, the language used to describe their relationship is kind of disturbing.

The other is utterly indignant that anyone could even THINK such a thing about a sweet, totally innocent song like this one. Such filthy minds! Such perverts! And now the grown-up Clair herself has come forth to insist that "Uncle Ray" is really the sweetest man, and nothing untoward ever happened between them.

Well, it's likely it never did. But let me go through this thing one line at a time, and it'll tell you why I am 3/4 in the first camp. Oh, maybe only half.

Clair
The moment I met you, I swear.
I felt as if something, somewhere,
Had happened to me, which I couldn't see.

These are lines which would be much more appropriate in an adult love song. Surely, they wouldn't fly today in the current atmosphere of sensitivity around child abuse. The third line MIGHT have a sexual connotation, though it's not clear (and Clair means "clear", after all). "Something, somewhere" - it's not spelled out, because it can't be, or shouldn't be? It's hard to tell. Anyway, it seems to bespeak something "deep" that would normally be associated with a traditional love song. How normal is it to dedicate such ambiguous lines to a small child?

And then, the moment I met you, again.
I knew in my heart that we were friends.
It had to be so, it couldn't be no.

Actually, these lines seem pretty normal. But then comes:

But try as hard as I might do, I don't know why.
You get to me in a way I can't describe.

Why do I find those lines so disturbing? They can't mean anything except "I'm trying and trying, but I can't understand why you're getting to me " - getting to me? A child, someone else's child? 

Words mean so little when you look up and smile -
I don't care what people say, to me you're more than a child.
Oh Clair. Clair ...

This is likely the most contentious verse in the whole thing. "More than a child" means - what? An adult friend, a soul-mate - a woman? It's ambiguous, but in my mind leaves a little too much space to be comfortable.

Even those who vehemently deny any sort of romantic subtext in the song have a hard time with this one."I don't care what people say" actually points to people's objection to him spending so much time with a little girl. By implication, at least, people are talking about him (and her). Otherwise, why would he have to deny that it bothers him?

Clair
If ever a moment so rare
Was captured for all to compare.
That moment is you in all that you do.

Again, these are love-song lyrics, bespeaking a relationship between a grown man and a little girl that just feels too close, too superlative, like the balladeer placing his love object above all else.

But why in spite of our age difference do I cry.
Each time I leave you I feel I could die.

Wow! Maybe THIS is the dynamite verse, and I don't see how the pure and innocent camp can defend a grown man, not even a relative, saying he wants to DIE every time he leaves her. And that mention of age differerence - how could this NOT be creepy?

Nothing means more to me than hearing you say,
"I'm going to marry you. Will you marry me, Uncle Ray?"
Oh Clair Clair ...
Well. Little girls often say they're going to marry their Daddies, but this isn't her her Daddy. And this has so much importance to him that he says "nothing means more to me. . . " Subsequent versions of the song substituted "Oh, hoo-ray!" in place of "Uncle Ray", but isn't that some sort admission that a little girl proposing to a grown man is - somehow inappropriate?

Clair
I've told you before "Don't you dare!"
"Get back into bed."
"Can't you see that it's late."
"No you can't have a drink."
"Oh allright then, but wait just a minute."
While I, in an effort to babysit, catch up on my breath,
What there is left of it.
You can be murder at this hour of the day.
But in the morning the sun will see my lifetime away.
Oh Clair Clair ...

Oh Clair

Then something interesting happens.The lyric switches to something as ordinary as that awful Bobby Goldsboro song, That's My Boy: "Gotta have a drink of water and a story read, a teddy bear named Fred, that's my boy." A standard story of babysitting with a girl he is deeply in love with. Or so it seems. And yet, and yet. The continued repeat of "Clair" becomes a sort of cry - of longing? Of the completion of some sort of emptiness in him?

And I've just counted. He speaks her name TEN TIMES. Ten! 

Creepy.

Do I think this song is supposed to be about a sexual relationship between a man and a little girl? I don't think so. But there's something seductive about it, a gut-lurching obsession that really shouldn't be there. The pro-Clair set insists that NOTHING is going on that shouldn't be, that it is all completely innocent. I think they mean "he isn't molesting her," which I don't think think he is. And they think anyone who even has a thought in that direction is a filthy pervert.

But is he obsessed with her? Is she "more than a child" to him? Does he want to die when he has to leave her? Does he wish they were closer in age, so they could try something more adult? All these elements are in the song somewhere, along with all the repeats of her name, and that delightful laugh at the end.

And the "real Clair" is trotted out again and again, insisting that "Uncle Ray" was perfectly lovely to her and never did anything he shouldn't. But that doesn't change the obsessive love and longing in the lyrics of that song. Nor does it change the fact that O'Sullivan - not Clair - became famous and made a lot of money from the song.

POST-POST. Clair reminded me of a famous poem by a famous man, about an even more famous girl. And no, I don't think they had a sexual relationship. And yes, I believe he was obsessed with her, throughout all of his life. It made him famous.

Child of the pure unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

I have not seen thy sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter;
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy young life’s hereafter –
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.

Lewis Carroll

And another post to the post. Take a look at the last photo of Gilbert O'Sullivan holding Clair. There's something odd about it. I don't know why it is, but some areas of his hand look as if they have been obscured. Why would this be? Every version of this photo that I could find had this weird sort of photoshop.

Go into the arts

Dad's pudding

Cat hugs salt rock - no, really

Ricola!!!

Strawberry cat

                             Rescuing Strawberry.

Uglify

I feel like crap today - I mean, REALLY like crap, to the point that my hands won't obey me and place multiple mistakes in every word.

There is a reason for this, but I don't want to say it.

What brought all this up was a "hello" from a new Facebook friend. An OK thing, right? He asked how I was doing. I was reminded of the line from Bob Dylan's Desolation Row: "When you asked me how I was doing/Was that some kind of joke ?"

No, he was only messaging me the way anyone would message me now that we have a sort of cheery Rocky-and-Bullwinkle relationship on Facebook.

I was supposed to say, "Oh, fine!", the way you're supposed to, but I felt too drecky to do that. I can't even TYPE this morning without making ludicrous mistakes (nine corrections in the word "can't"). But since he is a brand new 
friend, and just being friendly, I don't feel comfortable even implying how I actually feel.

It's the social media bind.

Really, all you can say is "Hi!', like on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Or you'll get a sympathetic,"Ohhh! What's wrong? Tell me all about it." Just being friendly, or concerned, the way you are supposed to be on social media.

Then you'll be totally stuck. It's not even appropriate to tell him how you feel, because the truth is, you don't know him.

I haven't yet found the expression that will encompass both "Fine!" and "I feel like shit today!' I realize I might even lose a few followers if I say what I really feel. One is a lie, the other leaves you wide open to someone you don't even know.

I have to assume I am not the only person in the social media world who has experienced this bind. If not, well, it's back to the playground , standing in the corner watching everyone else skipping, skipping, skipping. 

Norah Alice in the night

                      For she has seen Aurora

                      Borealis burning bright.

Mojo in chrome

                                          Moan, moan, moan.
                   
                   

Jane pushes the broom

This post was originally going to be about Tarzan and Jane, and how Jane's costume radically changed between 1934 (Tarzan and his Mate, with the infamous nude swimming scene) and Tarzan Escapes in 1936, in which she wore something like gym bloomers coming all the way up to her neck and all the way down to her knees. But I couldn't find a video clip that illustrated all that, so I couldn't make any gifs.

So I used Betty Boop instead.

Nowhere is the repressive, soul-deadening Hays Code more vividly displayed than in Betty's change from a hot little floozie to a housewife pushing a broom. I mean, LITERALLY pushing a broom! In Tarzan Escapes, Tarzan and Jane had enough physicality and emotional chemistry to somehow imply a sexual relationship - still pretty taboo, given the fact that they weren't married.

There is one gorgeous scene, which I can't find, in which Jane lies back langorously by the river, managing to look sexy in the unsexiest clothing imagineable. Tarzan gives her a tropical flower, towering over her as she looks up in a kind of half-frightened awe (and in case you haven't seen one of these for a while, Tarzan is quite rough on Jane and even overwhelms her). The way he silently falls to his knees says it all, as does her hand as it slowly and langorously lets go of the flower so that it slides into the current.

So they got around it, with the finest acting and directing, and the best body in Hollywood.

But poor Betty Boop. Just look at her! Navy blue dress, looking like some military surplus, skirt even below the knees and shoulders decently covered. She would never be the same. For she belonged to the boop-a-doop '20s and early '30s, before the forces of suffocating decency descended like a toxic cloud.

And yet, what she's wearing in the other three is - even by today's standards - kind of scanty. Hell, in that hula scene she's hardly wearing anything at all! She even breaks the sacred Disney blurred-nipple rule for a split-second. Would that be acceptable for family viewing today?

P., S. I found it! I found it! This is the most erotic scene in the whole erotic Tarzan series.  And yet, they get around the Hays code very nicely, flouting those repressive rules. Maureen O'Sullivan does it with her face, and Weismuller with that incredible body.

Chatty foal

 
  

        
          Watch with sound on!

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

There are days, and this is one of them, when I am totally fed up with the internet. What started off as a potentially invaluable source of information has become a vast juggernaut, with useful stuff increasingly buried by the crap that is posted every day (and hardly anything is ever taken down). The more this stuff accumulates, the harder it is to find anything, which is ironic but is never mentioned. I won't get into the racism, the ranting, the hiding in the bluff behind cover of anonymity, so you can say any damn hateful thing you want. 

But once in a while, you find the end of a thread, and you think,hmm, maybe it's not so freaking useless after all. The old magic returns, if only for a moment.

For years, a thought would come into my head, I'd rack my brains fruitlessly for a while, then give up and let the thought slide back into oblivion. It had to do with Tarzan. More specifically, Tarzan movies. More specifically than that, the Tarzan movies that used to come on TV on Saturday afternoons.

It was some sort of a Tarzan series, and I am sure the movies were badly butchered, but we didn't care because we had nothing to compare them to. Certainly we didn't get to see the erotic swimming sequence (did anyone? I find it hard to believe it wasn't cut from theatrical versions) from Tarzan and his Mate. They probably even censored the crocodile-wrasslin' scenes with their sped-up film and elaborate editing (to make it look as if an actual crocodile were involved) because they were too violent for the kiddies in the 1960s.

The series had some sort of title card with palm trees and birds and stuff on it, and there was this music. It was the weirdest stuff, because it seemed to have animal sounds in the background. Bird calls and stuff. There was very little actual music involved, just atmosphere. A piano was playing, and someone was rhythmically scraping something. You only got to hear a snippet of it while The Tarzan Show title card came on, but they'd also play a bit of it after commercial breaks (and there were a lot of them).

So was this, as they say, "a thing"? Did it still exist, could I find it?  How do you find something like this when the clues are so vague? I just started googling terms like "music with birds in background" and "bandleader who uses bird sounds" (for in retrospect, it's obvious this was some sort of lounge music). I was astounded at how quickly I scored a hit. Soon I was playing a video with this cheesy, lounge-y, '50s-style music, about as exotic as Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, which I had not heard in - um - four, or - seven, or - a lot of years. 

What made me laugh is the realization that those aren't even bird sounds - they're band members squeeee-ing and hooting and rattling to sound like birds. Could have fooled me. I have no plans to cultivate a taste for the genre, which is called exotica(and here I always thought that had something to do with sex!). But at least now I know what it is. The internet still has the power to inform.

I don't know if Martin Denny got any royalties for The Tarzan Show, but probably not - they likely just stuck the record on and hoped for the best. As is almost always the case, I can't find any information on the actual video, which I think is quite lovely. Who knows how many times it has been pirated and passed around. But isn't that what the internet is all about?

Please note. This is a summer repeat. I just saw a  couple of Tarzan movies and loved them so much that I just had to dredge up the gifs that went with this post. They took a lot of time, effort and love to make. Hope you enjoy them. I work hard at this, you know?

Trolls a-go-go

It's a most unusual view

Cat, I'm a kittycat