Baby Rose troll, my pandemic hair, and - don't despair!

My adorable new trollie, and a few observations on what we can do without during the pandemic - such as, trips to the stylist. I haven't tried to grow out my hair for 40 years, and have had it coloured for 30, so I had no idea what it would look like. I would call it "50 shades of grey", except that now I'm getting used to it and I don't think I want to change the colour. My new troll is very sweet, but my God, where does it end? When my office explodes from troll overload. 

BIZARRE Betty Boop Initiation Dance!😍

The Pogo Cartoon Special that Never Was

This is a strange, a VERY strange YouTube video with the cryptic title WHMTEAHIU. Make sense? It didn't to me, until I realized what I had here. To backtrack a bit, Pogo was wildly popular in the 1950s, but by the '60s times had changed and the long-running comic strip began to run out of steam. Warner Brothers somehow got a deal with cartoonist Walt Kelly to make an animated Pogo TV special - without any creative input from the man himself.

Chuck Jones took over, and though his animation could be inspired (think of the Road Runner cartoons and the Grinch), he just did not GET the eccentricities of Kelly's menagerie from Okefenokee Swamp. The result was simply atrocious, a slick, un-Kelly-esque travesty that just misfired on every level. Pogo's voice was dubbed by June Foray, making him sound like a slightly more precious version of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. The whole thing was a disaster and Kelly fumed, vowing to undo the damage.

Walt Kelly was dying of untreated diabetes by then, had had a leg amputated and was half blind, but was still determined to get his own vision of an animated Pogo on the screen. All we have of this project are preliminary sketches which he put together on his own, without the help of any studio - narrating all the voices himself and hiring his son-in-law to do the music. No one took him up on it, which is a tragedy, for this sketchy, several-frames-per-second story is a small masterpiece in which all his characters come alive. It's Pogo through and through, and gives us a taste of what might have been if Kelly had lived past 60.

I don't know how I ever even found this curiosity with its incomprehensible title. I couldn't find much about it at all, and in fact it was thought to have been lost for decades. It's called an "unlisted" video for reasons unknown. But the title stands for something: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us - probably the most famous Kelly-ism of them all. 

This curiosity is remarkable for yet another reason. Its message is environmental. We are ruining the landscape with our carelessness and our greed. At a time (1969) when the only environmental message was, "Give a hoot! Don't pollute!" - or, even worse, "Don't be a litterbug" - Kelly was way ahead of his time.  

YOO HOO, KILLED COCK ROBIN - ? (According to Pogo)

 

Poor Cock Robin

 

Who killed Cock Robin?

"Who killed Cock Robin?"

 "I," said the Sparrow,

"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."

"Who saw him die?" 

"I," said the Fly,

"With my little eye, I saw him die."

"Who caught his blood?" 

"I," said the Fish,

"With my little dish, I caught his blood."

"Who'll make the shroud?"

 "I," said the Beetle,

"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."

"Who'll dig his grave?"

 "I," said the Owl,

"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."

"Who'll be the parson?" 

"I," said the Rook,

"With my little book, I'll be the parson."

"Who'll be the clerk?"

 "I," said the Lark,

"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."

"Who'll carry the link?"

 "I," said the Linnet,

"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."

"Who'll be chief mourner?"

 "I," said the Dove,

"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."

"Who'll carry the coffin?" 

"I," said the Kite,

"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."

"Who'll bear the pall?" 

"We," said the Wren,

"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."

"Who'll sing a psalm?" 

"I," said the Thrush,

As she sat on a bush, "I'll sing a psalm."

"Who'll toll the bell?" 

"I," said the bull,

"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin

Poor Cock Robin.

WHO'S THAT BIRD?

It's a spotted towhee, which also featured in my CRAZY BIRD DANCE video in our back yard. I had no idea what species it was because the light was so low, and all I could see was a silhouette. These guys show up a lot in these parts. 

Spotted Towhee: CRAZY BIRD DANCE!

I'm both seeing and hearing these guys a lot lately - the spotted towhee, a very handsome bird that is easier to photograph than most, because it stays in one spot for longer. I also have a video of another towhee in a tree, singing its heart out.  Bird watching has been saving my sanity as things get worse and worse on the COVID front. We don't seem to be making any progress, and are in fact going backwards. My daughter's husband's family ALL tested positive, and some of them are quite sick. SO. . . we are left to commune with nature as a way to lighten and brighten the dark days. Hope you're doing better, dear reader. . . 

April on Burnaby Mountain

After a long, cold, lonely winter in lockdown, these daffodils with their burning throats are proclaiming SPRING to everyone who sees them.  Perfection DOES exist in the world, as does rebirth and renewal.

Dark enchantment: the bridge on the grass

 

I remember the date, May 1, 2005, because my father-in-law had just died and I had just returned from a soul-shredding trip back east for his funeral. I had nothing left in me, but was in that wild, I've-got-to-get-out-of-here state that always makes me slam the door behind me and travel.

On foot. I went off into the woods, and around here that means I went down the street and turned left, but these were public spaces, dog paths, old-lady-jogging places, and I needed far more surcease, more refuge. I needed to get away from the whole damn human race.

I kept walking, and once more turned left.

I was on a bridge. I was aware that a year or so ago, there was no bridge here, never had been. I had a vague memory of someone building one. Why? It led to nowhere.

Or had I tried it once, and found the rough path over the bumpety old tree-roots just too creepy and uncomfortable? I was on that path, and soon borne up by the rushing of streams.

These were hissing, shisshing, fish-and-glitter streams that rushed through my ear canals and rattled the tiny tympani behind them as if gushing through my skull. Suddenly I had the sense of smell of a horse, and, snorting, lifted my head.

The path led ever on. It twisted and wrenched. I was aware of civilization not far away, as if I could even see houses and hear lawnmowers through the cedars. But it couldn't be so, for these woods were primeval, pulling me deeper in. My feet were in a state of hypnosis. I could not refuse.

I went over bridge after bridge. Where had this path been all my life, I wondered  -  inaccessible to the dogwalkers, the granny-runners. Sealed off, yet here. One stream roared like traffic in a tunnel. It was awful, and I sped on.

As if pursued. But look. Here was the place I always turned back. Or not? I had never been on this path, so how could I remember turning back?  My scalp was electric. Beyond this twist lay the place of the faeries.

I can't describe how each tree seemed inhabited, not by a human or a squirrel but by its own fleshwood-spirit. I can't explain how each tree seethed, how burls swelled like pregnancies, wood cancer that somehow popped out of the symmetry of the trunk and made it look hideously deformed.

Then I stopped at the sight of a massive, salmon-coloured stump, the fleshy remains of a huge fallen cedar. It seemed to hum and swarm with life. I wondered where the tree had fallen, and when. And the sound it must have made, and what pushed it over. The tree-flesh seemed vital yet, not grey but livid red, full of ant-tunnels and probably housing one of those termite queens the size of a rat.

I walked beside a huge gully. I have always hated the word gully, it's ugly and hollow and hellish. I remember when I was about two or three, it could be my first memory, falling down into a gully in Delhi where my grandmother lived, and my sister, who was about 15 at the time, bending over me and saying, "Are you wounded?"

My feet slipped in spongy moss and slime. It was a pleasant day, but I was menaced. Something veered and eered. I could not see it. I turned around quickly, and it vanished.

Now strong cords pulled me, whipcords snaking out from under the ground to yank my feet out from under me. I burst into a clearing, and -

I stopped, then stepped, as cautiously as Pocohontas. The ground sank and groaned under me, giving way with each step and leaving a dark depression.  I stopped uncertainly and looked up and all around me.

I stood in an exact circle of tall cedars. I lifted my head and felt a crackling charge of energy whizzing clockwise around and around me. I chanted some sort of prayer that I wish I could remember now, something about my father-in-law. My temporal awareness had burned away like fog.

As I stood in the electrocharged circle I noticed a squirrel violently frisking its tail, jerkily making its way toward me. But it did not stop. It crept and stopped, crept and stopped until it was only a foot away from me. Then another squirrel appeared, and began to creep towards me. They sat up on their hind legs with their tails jerking and their beady eyes glistening in the sun, waiting.

I walked. Huge fallen logs, roots of trees just jutting up in the air: how had they been uprooted? Why were all these trees laughing at me? Then I saw or felt with my foot the weathered slat of an old ladder. Or something like it.

But it wasn't a ladder. It was a bridge. It was a bridge that lay flat on the grass. And it went on and on. I stepped on it and began to walk.

Perhaps the ground wasn't level here. But it was. Perhaps the ground was marshy here. But it wasn't. This thing was, it just was. I wobbled along on the rickety old slats, cursing the fucking little gnome who had put this bizarre useless thing here just to freak me out and make my hair stand on end.

Then. Then I did see something, a minor gully ahead of me where the ground fell away. But the rickety little bridge remained level. Like a horse stepping on a live power line, I jumped back.

Had I walked on it, I surely would have tumbled in.

This was some booby-trap set by a vindictive fairy tale witch, some Tenniel nightmare ink-drawing designed to scare the living shit out of innocent children. I wheeled and ran. And ran and ran, and it was a good thing that no bear ran after me. Everything unspooled and unreeled and unhappened, so that by the time I got home again, I was not even sure any of it had been real.




But I went back a few days later. I had to know. Yes. It was all there. I noticed a humming and a cracking. A subtle sizzling in the air, something that I picked up with the tip of my nose.

This was once a place deep, deep in the black-green uterine core of British Columbia, before the white man came and ripped the hell out of it, as he continues to do. It was a place where you had better not go, not even if you were indigenous and knew the danger. The place of Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and the Handless Maiden and all those other sweet children who started out innocent, but ended up lost and devoured.

Don't go there. Don't go there, my girl. This is a place of enchantment, but in the archaic sense, the faerie chant seducing you with coils of magic that will never set you free.

All is changed, changed utterly. I go to that place sometimes still, and like a soft drink left out too long in the sun, most of the fizz has gone out of it. But the trees are still murmuring to themselves, nasty little things they don't want me to hear
.

One day I realized the weird wooden bridge on the grass was gone: just gone, and then I wondered if I had imagined it. So I decided to go a little farther, clambered down and up that gully, and kept going.

A few minutes later, I had no idea where I was.

This was a profound disorientation. I couldn't turn in any direction. The view behind me was even more unfamiliar than the view in front of me. Panic crept up my scalp and I started running, desperately running. Like a hunger, like a thirst, like a stab of unbearable desire, I needed something, anything that looked familiar.

I ran until my lungs ached, and then: I burst out. Burst out of the forest, as if the forest had an actual door. I found myself on a road, a main road, paved, travelled, but completely unfamiliar. I had no idea how I would ever get home.

I walked and walked. I didn't have the nerve to flag a car down. Then I saw something. A bus stop. But I had nothing with me. I wriggled my hands into the pockets of my jeans and came up with a frayed yellow bus ticket that had probably gone through the wash.

I waited and waited. A bus came, a bus I had never heard of before, but it had to take me somewhere, somewhere familiar, somewhere in the civilized world! I made myself look normal, or hoped I did, and got on. I had the thought that I should have some sort of passport, to take me from one mode of being to the next.

I went home to recover, then as I was getting ready for bed I discovered a small bulge in my jeans pocket. I took it out and turned it over. It was a small stone in the exact size and shape of a cat's paw: neat toes and pads on one side, smooth elegance on the other. I didn't remember picking it up. For some reason I put several coats of nail polish on it. I have it still in a case with my jewelry, a bizarre trinket that wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else.

Go on Oprah? It's madness! No good will come of it

 

Go on Oprah? It's madness! No good will come of it: In the most revealing portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh you'll ever read, his friend of 40 years GYLES BRANDRETH says he sympathised with Harry and Meghan - but thought they were wrong

By Rebecca English Royal Editor For The Daily Mail

Prince Philip thought Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfrey was 'madness' and 'no good would come of it', it has emerged.

He also regretted his grandson's decision to quit royal duties and move to the US and said it was 'not the right thing, either for the country or for themselves'.

Ultimately, however, he accepted it and said: 'It's his life.'

Insights into Philip's thoughts on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's decision and the deeply acrimonious fall-out as a result of it have been aired by his impeccably connected biographer, Gyles Brandreth in today's Daily Mail.

His account comes as royal sources reacted angrily to the suggestion the Duke of Edinburgh would have been 'unbothered' by recent events. And one insider told the Mail they believed the schism created by the couple would take a 'lifetime' to heal.

In his account, Mr Brandreth described Harry and Meghan's plan to divide their time between the UK and North America in search of financial independence, while hoping to continue serving the Queen and the Commonwealth on their own terms, as 'naive'.

In the end the Queen, backed by Prince Charles and Prince William, made clear that this was impossible. Harry and Meghan would have to give up their official roles and would not be able to use their HRH titles for work purposes. Both the Queen and Harry were distressed at the outcome.

Mr Brandreth added: 'The Duke of Edinburgh was equally sorry 'that it should come to this'. Harry had only succeeded his grandfather as Captain General of the Royal Marines in 2017.

'Philip had done the job for 64 years. Harry had barely managed 30 months. The Duke of Edinburgh was not pleased, nor did he believe that Harry and Meghan were doing the right thing either for the country or for themselves.'

But Philip was sympathetic to Harry's distrust of the media and supportive of his desire to 'do his own thing in his own way'.

'He said to me: 'People have got to lead their lives as they think best',' Mr Brandreth said.

He added: 'I know from someone close to him that he thought Meghan and Harry's interview with Oprah Winfrey was 'madness' and 'no good would come of it'. I was not surprised because that is exactly how he described to me the personal TV interviews given by Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, back in the 1990s.'

There has been much criticism that the Sussexes insisted on their explosive interview going ahead last month despite Philip lying seriously ill in hospital.

But Mr Brandreth said of this: 'The fact that the Meghan and Harry interview was aired while Philip was in hospital did not trouble him. What did worry him was the couple's preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public. 'Give TV interviews by all means,' he said, 'but don't talk about yourself'.

'That was one of his rules. I know he shared it with his children. I imagine he shared it with his grandchildren, too.'

Ultimately, Philip loved Harry, admired him for his service career and thought him 'a good man'.

He chose not to get involved with the Sandringham Summit, when details of the Sussexes' departure were thrashed out last year. Mr Brandreth said Philip responded to the rift by saying: 'I'll soon be out of it and not before time.'

Buckingham Palace has confirmed that Harry will attend Saturday's funeral – the first time he has seen any of his family for more than a year.

The last occasion was when he and Meghan attended the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey in March last year.

Meghan will not be attending because she is pregnant, said a spokesman for the couple.

All eyes will be on the body language between Harry and his family during the funeral.

While many hope that the death of Philip may serve to build bridges between Harry and his family, others are more pessimistic. One senior royal source said the situation might take 'decades' to resolve.

However, former prime minister Sir John Major told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme that he hoped the funeral would prove an 'ideal opportunity' to heal the rift.

Olive Oyl's Beauty Treatment

 

Olive Oyl's beauty routine, which is as detailed and transformative as Cleopatra's. Well, maybe not. But she could lend herself out as a cooling device. 

DAM, I want this troll. . .

 

How To Walk Your Human

Why (so many) critics are full of shit

OK, so this is JUST ONE example of how full of shit critics can be. Being as how I am in yet another Dylan cycle, triggered by the album he released just last year, I've gone back into some of his classics, including one of the most atmospheric songs ever written, his paean to Sara Lownds (and if people still puzzle over "gee, who could he have written this for?", just insert a "la" in the middle of her name), and have been hypnotized and enthralled all over again. 

One does not "listen" to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. One is overwhelmed by it. It is a pavane, a stately, courtly processional that has just a hint of a nihilistic funeral march. It is relentless, and it builds on itself in rumbling, trembling piano chords that express a passion we can only guess at.  In Rough and Rowdy Ways, he similarly creates a world and pulls us into it - or we go willingly, captives with our hands tied behind our backs. But man, he was doing that back in 1966 at the age of 25. Already he had lived several lives as a dazzling creative artist and a Byronic, if not TITANIC figure in popular culture.

But let's get to the good stuff, that "critics are full of shit" part. I call this this little passage "HOW WRONG CAN YOU BE, YOU DUMB-ASS?", for want of a better term. In poking around in Wikipedia to find out more about the roots of Sad Eyed Lady, I found lots of commentary and analysis, much of it lame and completely missing the point. Here is how one self-proclaimed "Dylan scholar" described it initially, and how the scales fell from his eyes decades later - FINALLY - so he could hear it for the erotic masterpiece it is.

Dylan scholar Michael Grey expressed a similarly contradictory attitude to "Sad Eyed Lady". In his book Song & Dance Man III, Gray writes of the song's imagery: "Dylan is... cooing nonsense in our ears, very beguilingly of course. The only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title... It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings, and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune gives the illusion that things are otherwise."

In a footnote to this passage, written later, Gray adds: "When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it... When I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan's recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan's incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one."

"Masterpiece"! But one wonders if this bastard-piece (of shit) and his stupid assessment of a classic affected Dylan at all, if he was bruised by such inane and plain STUPID remarks about the most potent of the many dozens of heart-stabbing love songs he has written. Maybe yes, maybe no, but, relentless as that chord-rumbling chorus coming around and around again (much as Dylan keeps rolling like that Big Wheel that keeps on turnin'), Dylan kept on touring for concert after concert while the audience boo-ed him, literally threw things at him and swore at him for being a turncoat and a sell-out and a "fake". But Dylan knew he had it, whether they got it or not, and that is the true mark of genius.

So what happened to all those people? Who gives a shit! But they remind me of the time I soaked a carrot in bleach and pulled it out white and sickly, devoid of all colour, flavour, or meaning. It had lost its vegetable essence. These people never had it to begin with. Is it any wonder Bobby could be a tad bitter, to the point of writing the most genius lines of all:

"I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you."

 

It's all come back too clearly (Diamonds and Rust)

Well I'll be damned

Here comes your ghost again

But that's not unusual

It's just that the moon is full

And you happened to call

And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest

Ten years ago

I bought you some cufflinks

You brought me something

we both know what memories can bring

They bring               diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene

Already a legend

           The unwashed phenomenon

                                                                                                   The original vagabond
                                   
                           You strayed into my arms

and there you stayed

      Temporarily          lost at sea 

The Madonna was yours for free

Yes the girl on the half-shell       Would keep you 

                         unharmed

Now I see you standing

With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me     You're not nostalgic      Then give me 

another word for it               You who are so good with words        And at keeping things 
vague

Because I need some of that                         vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly                                                                 yes I loved you dearly

And if you're offering me diamonds and rust

I've already paid