Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin's comedy always had a melodramatic element. (Buster Keaton made purer comedy.) He grew up in a London slum and became the most famous man in the world in his twenties, like the Beatles.  He was one of silent cinema's great artists.  He was also a fine composer, writing musical scores for his films.

I saw several Chaplin movies for the first time when I was twelve and the showed them on the CBC on Sunday nights.  The Gold Rush and City Lights and Modern Times are amazing.  His sound movie Limelight isn't as great, but it does have a great moment where the music hall star brings down the house, comes out to take a bow but sees an empty theatre. (A succinct conveying of becoming a has-been.)

I saw one early film where Chaplin's stunts included running up what almost looked like a vertical wall!  He must have kept very fit.

Chaplin directed A Woman of Paris, a silent movie he didn't act in (except for a tiny cameo as a porter).  It isn't well known but I found it compelling.  I want to see it again someday.

Robert Downey Jr. played the title role in the biographical movie Chaplin.  The film itself is rather pedestrian, but Downey's performance is uncanny!

Nostalgia

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be"--Simone Signoret

Ever watch the TV show Mad Men?  That series reminds me of everything that was wrong with the early 1960s:  the littering, casual sexism and racism. (One character says, "I have nothing against Negroes, but I worry about my car.") Yet while watching it I still feel the pull of nostalgia for that time.  Go figure.

I grew up in a small town and one thing I miss is the grey hoarfrost on the front lawn in the early autumn.  I also miss the big vegetable garden we had in the back yard!  I grew up in southeastern New Brunswick, where nearby tides are among the highest in the world.  I remember how after spring tides in March big pieces of dirty ice would wash up on the tidal flats!

I don't feel much nostalgia for the past, though I miss Phil Donahue's talk show.  And I have a soft spot for the cheap local TV shows of the past, since everything is so slick these days.  And I remember when they delivered milk in bottles, and on an early winter morning the milkman would leave frozen bottles where the ice at the top would form a little hill!

Curls

I can't think of much to say about curls.  My hair's always been straight and I couldn't imagine it any other way.  Curling is a sport I've never played.  I've eaten curly fries a few times.  I remember Paul Robeson's song "My Curly Headed Baby."

And there was the time that these hillbillies took Rocky and Bullwinkle to see Devil Dan, who turned out to be Boris Badunov, pointed a rifle at them and sang, "On top of Old Smoky, all covered with curls, I'm shooting with rifle at mooses and squirrels!"

One of the Three Stooges was Curly.  And one of the first movies I ever saw was The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.  By this time Curly was dead and had been replaced by Curly Joe.  The plot had something to do with a time machine taking them back to ancient Greece, and there was a chariot chase at the end. (I also saw Snow White and the Three Stooges on my local TV station's Saturday morning kiddie movie.)

Cartoons

I loved Warner Brothers cartoons when I was young! (Still do.) When I was a kid my favorite Warner Brothers character was Bugs Bunny, but as a grownup I prefer Daffy Duck, especially the curmudgeonly later character. (My favorite Daffy Duck cartoon is Duck Amuck, where the cartoonist keeps changing the scenery on him!) My favorite Warner Brothers cartoon of all is One Froggy Evening, in which a man finds a singing frog but gets nothing but grief.

My favorite Disney animated feature is Lady and the Tramp, which is romantic in a nice '50s way.  I don't care so much for the later Disneys:  the only part of The Little Mermaid I thought truly worthy of Hans Christian Andersen's story was the melody of her voice trapped in the bottle!

I like quite a few Japanese anime. (Twenty years ago the series Sailor Moon got me into it.) There's a really compelling anime, Grave of the Fireflies, about two Japanese orphan children trying to survive in the last days of World War II.  The whole world should see it!

I have never been in a...

I've never been in a helicopter or an airship. (I imagine they're pretty noisy anyway.) I've never been in a submarine, but I don't want to do that! And I've never been in a desert or a jungle.

I've never been in jail, but I'm young yet.

I've been to China and Japan, but I've never been to India, not that it interests me that much.  Is seeing the Taj Mahal in person so much better than looking at pictures of it?

One place I haven't gone to that I do want to go to is the Prado art museum in Madrid, Spain.  That place is on my bucket list:  Velazquez and Goya are two of my favorite artists. (Another place on my list is Greenland!)

I haven't been to Russia either. (My sister Moira spent about six months there just at the time of the Chernobyl accident.) Lately I've been having this repeating dream of visiting Russia, which is odd because when I'm awake I don't have any conscious desire to go there!

The Trans-Siberian Railway does appeal to me slightly, as does St. Petersburg's Hermitage art museum. (Kandinsky is another artist I like.) I saw this documentary about it a while ago that talked about how the paintings were removed for safekeeping during World War II and the tour guides would continue to show people around, pointing to the empty frames and describing the pictures that had been in them!  How Russian can you get?

Surprise

I'll admit that Donald Trump's election surprised me.  It wasn't that I had so much confidence in Hillary Clinton--I'd just given up doubting.  It's like this psychologist I knew who was a Croatian Serb before fleeing to Canada.  She told me that when the war broke out nobody could believe it:  they all thought someone would stop it!  It only takes a few true believers to ruin everything.

One cliche in TV and movies that annoys me is people pulling a surprise on you just because it wouldn't be as dramatic if you were forewarned.  For example, if someone disappears and gets reported dead, but later turns out to be alive after all, he won't phone ahead before returning to you; he'll just show up unannounced. (See Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, directed by cliche-master Michael Bay.)

I remember this cartoon where Bugs Bunny served the Tasmanian Devil something called "wild turkey surprise." As he served it he sang this song "Atsamadda for you?" in an Italian accent.  The Tasmanian Devil travelled in this cyclone that made all the other animals run away.  I've read that real-life Tasmanian devils are endangered because of an epidemic of this cancer of the snout.