CHILD: Have you ever thought that a hamster might save your life?
I'd like to say that -- when pressed -- the child told an imaginative and brilliant story about a life-saving hamster, but instead he totally choked and couldn't provide any rationale for his statement.
But he was only about five years old and the statement was brilliant. The rationale will come.
Because I can't think of anything clever or historically-relevant to say about this particular Dr. Seuss cartoon, I'll simply ask: does anybody else have fond memories of Cheech and Chong's "Earache My Eye?"
He didn't mean to let that early morning grouch get the better of him...even if the coffee was cold. And now he's making amends by bringing her a box of Maillard's Chocolats Miniature.
Will this fix things? Will it bring to dinner the entente cordiale? You know it will!
Why does her picture remind me of that guy in "Seven" who'd been strapped to a bed for a year? Must be the raccoon makeup and the crazy-eye look.
Every day with Muffet is a new set of adventures and challenges. We're both training each other, and meanwhile she's adapting to her new environment AND growing into adulthood. She's bigger and heavier than before but still has the spindly, long-legged look of a furry spider.
Here are some scattered impressions from the past few weeks.
They say that "curiosity killed the cat," and now I understand why. Muffet wants to explore everything. She would climb into a running wood chipper if given the opportunity. When I washed my first load of clothes after her arrival, I went into the basement during the wash cycle and there was Muffet, sitting in the laundry tub and staring up into the washer's outflow pipe, wondering what would happen next. I removed her but there will surely come a day...
Yes, she has been scratching my wonderful new chairs. A liberal misting of cat repellent seems to have helped, and I've also been rewarding her each time she uses her scratching tray. As a result she spends much of her time scratching at her tray, staring up at me in confusion, and then scratching some more. It's our way of bonding.
Play...ooooh, play. Our morning and twilight involves burning off her excess of energy, which she signals by batting at my ankles. She doesn't care for balls or tiny facsimile mice, but she gets a kick out of a plastic spring that Delirium gal A. gave her, and she REALLY likes Zsa Zsa's old "feather snake," (see picture) though that game always ends with her hiding under the bed and just watching it go by, which is boring.
There was a time when I answered to her every beep and meow, which was a mistake. Now she's like the kid who stands at the bottom of the stairs and yells "HEY MA!!! I'M HUNGRY!!! COME HERE!!!" It will take some time to extinguish this behaviour, but until then my mornings are a little tense: she's a loud girl and talkative even at the best of times, and at 5am this is far from welcome.
Remember that Stray Badass Cat who used to terrorize Zsa Zsa? Muffet finally had enough of him the other day, and she squeezed under the patio gate and KICKED HIS ASS ALL ACROSS THE PARKING LOT. I had to stop her even though I was secretly proud of her, and that cat doesn't come into our patio anymore.
Zsa Zsa never noticed bugs, but Muffet hunts them relentlessly (except for bees, thankfully). Maybe this is something that cats eventually get tired of.
Muffet is no longer terrified of my bedroom and spends lots of time there, though she prefers to actually sleep in the living room. In the morning she comes up to meow at me, and when I finally say "Okay, time to get up," she walks over to me and lies down on my chest and then goes to sleep.
Shortly after she was spayed, Muffet became lethargic and very hot. Fortunately she had a vet appointment that day, and they diagnosed her with -- get this -- "Fever of Unknown Origin." This is apparently common in dogs and cats and not just a bad joke. She recovered completely in a few days.
Fans of yeast will remember that two years ago I printed the words of Parisian Dr. Victor Pauchet, author of that world-famous book "Constipation." That was from the October 16, 1928 issue of The New Yorker.
Lo and behold, here in the August 2, 1930 issue of the very same magazine, we find Dr. Alberto Catalina of Madrid...
...He is the author of an important treatise, "Constipation."
I guess it was a popular title for books at the time. Folks used to be awfully concerned with their bowels, after all.
BONUS FUNNY JOKE
Included here is the testimony of Mrs. Marguerite Falkenburg, who had intestinal trouble until she started eating Fleischman's yeast. Please note the name of her hometown.
It's outrageously hot here in Southern Ontario so excuse me while I try to sweat this one out. It's a shame, because...
...I'd buy absolutely ANYTHING by Talk Talk. I'd buy bootlegs. I'd buy T-shirts. I'd buy baseball hats, which I don't even wear. I'd buy clippings of Lee Harris' back hair, and I'd still cherish those clippings even if I later discovered that they actually came from some other drummer's back.
In short, I adore Talk Talk and no flippant post can adequately convey that.
Why do I love them so much?
The individuality. The uncompromising drive to do whatever the hell they wanted, while somehow having the credibility to do so. A serious and bombastic passion. A beauty.
For me, it all started when I rushed out to buy Thomas Dolby's "Europa and the Pirate Twins." The record store didn't carry the single but they DID have a 45 that featured four different artists. I bought it for Thomas Dolby, but I was amazed to hear the self-titled song by Talk Talk. I loved it but it was a bit too Duran Duran for me.
Fast forward to the title track of their second album -- c'mon, you know it, "Life's What You Make It" -- and I was somewhat hooked, but it wasn't until "Colour of Spring" that I fell completely.
Have you heard "Colour of Spring?" After shaking off their manufactured New Romantic style, and still retaining some of their sublime pop, "Colour of Spring" was an amazing fusion of Top 40 and virtuoso improvisation. Mark Hollis was still singing about the human condition, and Paul Webb's and Lee Harris were still laying down a solid groove, but suddenly all these other musicians were involved: Mark Feltham's overdriven harmonica, Robbie Macintosh and David Rhodes on guitar, Morris pert's percussion, Stevie Winwood's sublime Hammond organ, all of them given equal time and attention and yet somehow sounding great together!
And holding it all together was producer and unofficial fourth member Tim Friese-Greene. He helped make it all gel into some of the most unlikely songs to hit the charts.
I hope that the world hasn't forgotten "Life's What You Make It," which was the real baffling single off the album. But did you ever give a listen to "Living in Another World?" Here's a mostly-live performance -- I think only the drums are pre-recorded -- that presents a literal wall of perfectly-meshing sound. This was Talk Talk at their height.
I think we were all confused by what came next: "Spirit of Eden." Continuing their musical trajectory it dove almost completely into experimental rock-jazz, inspired by extended jams and ideas provided by all members of a huge collection of musicians. I won't rehash all the details of its recording, release, and commercial failure (read the Wikipedia article for that), but I'll be the first to admit that I didn't "get it." There were parts that I liked, but I missed the pop.
All that EMI could do was to chop up one of the most friendly songs and make a single and a video. Then they dropped the band.
I was even more at odds with their follow-up and final album, "Laughing Stock," which dispensed entirely with any pretense of commercialism and was a long, languid, meditative journey. What's more, Paul Webb had left and taken his amazing bass playing with him.
Mark Hollis eventually released a solo album that was almost entirely personal and impenetrable. Meanwhile, Harris and Webb had formed "O.Rang," a collection of musicians who performed a more raucous and percussive style of the "Spirit of Eden" phase. I didn't like Hollis' album but I did like most of O.Rang.
It took years for the world to recognize what Talk Talk had done with "Spirit of Eden" and "Laughing Stock." They're now considered to be revolutionary must-have albums, and I've happily jumped on that bandwagon: I didn't have the ears or the musical experience to appreciate those difficult albums at the time, but I do now. They're amazing.
I just KNOW that they haven't given up, and I live in hope that Talk Talk -- together or separately -- will release another amazing album.
Essential albums: "Colour of Spring" and "Laughing Stock." Albums to avoid: their first two albums of keyboard-heavy pop sound a bit dated to some, but I think they're fantastic in their own way...they definitely show the band's ripening potential. You really SHOULD avoid "History Revisted," a collection of terrible remixes and a blatant EMI cash grab which the band managed to actually withdraw and destroy with a successful lawsuit. For fans only: "Asides Besides" (a 2-CD set of rarities, demos, and remixes) and perhaps their "Live at Montreux" CD, which seems to suffer from poor production.
What if you create a monster that is too scary to even film?
If you create this monster from the mind of your wickedness and also the wickedness of mimes and gymnasts, and on the set when it's time to record the movie you say to your cameraman, "Film the creature!" and the cameraman says "It's too scary! I can't even look!" and all you see are the edges of the creature and maybe some flickery light?
It's no use! No matter how much you yell "To the left! The creature isn't what you're filming! That's a shelf in a gas station!"
And not to be sexist, if also you have a female woman with a camera, and you say to her "Film the creature, already! Be brave!" and she screams in fear and in the editing room the footage is shaky like shot by a schoolgirl, one too afraid, who becomes all a'shivery-shakey in the sight of your creature?
What do you do? You must simply make the movie anyway, as the "Splinter" director did, and perhaps you throw up your hands and say "You really should've seen that creature!" and laugh ruefully...the rueful laugh of an imagination too wicked even for horror films, the laugh of a man without footage. He wishes, we think, that someday in the future -- maybe even in a sequel -- his crew will be braver and will look his wicked creature straight in the eyes...then we'll see it and we will believe him!
Until that day the Splinter creature is something seen only with Pause, and even then when it is a blur of spinning in front of the shelves or sometimes beside the shelves. On Pause, the creature is almost caught in a perfect moment. On Pause you cannot hear the dialog of the characters who suffer horrific transformations: the wimp into the hero, the tough girl into crying and all a'shivery-shakey, the heartless brutal villain who is actually not understood by us or even by the writers until we find his whole purpose is to HELP PEOPLE, but we never understood, we didn't stop to wonder until his whole arm was gone, so now we must care?
A man puts a thermometer in his mouth and stumbles coldly in a parking lot for ten minutes with bags of ice against his chest, as a climax, and they sure got enough footage of that part.
I was going to mention "Madam Satan" when I posted about pre-code Hollywood last week, but because the film had come out in 1930 I figured the New Yorker would get to it soon enough. And here it is, in the June 26, 1930 issue, previewed in a short piece called "De Mille on the Flossy."
We await, with a kind of special breathlessness, the release of the new Cecil B. de Mille picture. Our eagerness is due to our knowing a little bit about the plot. It seems to us by far the finest plot we have ever heard. It is about a girl whose husband has been philandering, and the girl decides to be gay--abandoned, if you will. So she goes to a masquerade party aboard a dirigible (you can see that the thing is getting better already). The party, if we remember the story, winds up in a scene of great dissolution, in which the girl is sold on the auction block to the highest bidder, who is going to have his way with her. The highest bidder turns out to be her husband, but at that moment a Heaven-sent bold of lightning strikes the dirigible and all the guests have to make their escape in parachutes, including Ben Bernie and his orchestra, which has been playing for the dancing. The husband, floating gently earthward, lands in a bear's den in a zoo--and here we will leave him with the gentle reader.
If this EVER gets released on DVD then you really must see it. It's oddly-paced and hackneyed and meandering, but whenever it goes crazy it does so with huge spectacle, and the modern viewer can only sit in awed bafflement. It's nice to hear that the original audiences would have thought it equally fun and bizarre.
Amazingly there are no clips online of the more memorable "Madam Satan" moments -- the parade of showgirls singing "Doin' the Catwalk, Meooow!", the dance sequence meant to evoke modern machinery, the really spectacular blimp disaster -- but here's one of the sweet songs, "All I Know," featuring the two protagonists mentioned in the New Yorker writeup.
When I say repeatedly that the early New Yorker magazine didn't usually tackle serious subjects, I was obviously lying, because here is Dr. Seuss referencing the London Naval Treaty.
Okay, okay, the magazine HAD mentioned the treaty in the past, but only in the context of goofy wordplay or in "The Wayward Press," their semi-regular column about what OTHER periodicals were printing. Written by Guy Fawkes, this was a bitchy take-down of New York's newspapers, often criticizing inaccuracies, inconsistencies between papers, yellow journalism, or -- Fawkes' personal beef -- the misleading elevation of minor, trivial occurrences into headline-breaking NEWS!!!
So although The New Yorker never REALLY covered the London Naval Treaty, their treatment of it probably reflected the mood of the people at the time: that it was a blustery piece of diplomacy which never seemed to end and which would ultimately achieve nothing.
I particularly remember Fawkes' article about it, where he took newspapers to task for sending hordes of reporters over to London where they...sat around and did nothing. The conference was so long and clandestine that the London-based reporters would send back stories about the weather or about the niece of some minor figurehead learning to ride a horse, but the papers would trumpet this stuff as NEWS!!!!!!
Anyway, Dr. Seuss doesn't seem to be taking these issues on in his cartoon. He's just drawing funny Frenchmen. Bless him.
When I say repeatedly that the early New Yorker magazine didn't usually tackle serious subjects, I was obviously lying, because here is Dr. Seuss referencing the London Naval Treaty.