Gloria Swanson on "Queen Kelly" (1966 on '28 film)

Part 2 of Gloria Swanson interview re Von Stroheim's 1928's "Queen Kelly" (1966 on NYC's WNET)
Despite her getup: She's actually really attractive and well-spoken!
Love also the funny comparison between tobacco spittle being dropped on her hand early in the morning versus after 5pm...

Time to Get Clean?

I had a horrible dream last night where some low-key creepy man gave me a supposedly recreational drug that swelled up my face and stomach horribly and caused the edges of the swellings to turn orange.

I haven't been feeling that well recently because I've been smoking too much: 10 years ago, I could wake up after a night of heavy smoking and drinking and have no after-effects---but today, I'm hacking like all of the 50-somethings I used to see/hear hacking years ago. I'm embarrassed for myself to have found myself hacking JUST LIKE THAT.  Just a recent thing, maybe started 2 months ago. I'm smoking no more or less than I have been for the past 30 years... Yet all of a sudden, the results are much more obvious and dire, both inwardly and outwardly. Obviously, I've got to stop what I'm doing (said as I suck on the 20th cig of the evening). In the past, it was always reading/hearing "Smoking is not good for you." And the warnings not meaning anything. But recently: Smoking has really been affecting my health---for the first time ever.

Tonight while on the Internet, for instance, I thought about it ahead of time and planned to only smoke one cig per hour... Wound up ignoring that and smoking as I pleased. Knowing that I'll feel like shit in the morning.

That's the dilemma: When you drink and smoke in the evening, you're feeling great---but then there's the morning to face. I understand that fresh-and-clean mornings can have a purifying effect---but then beer/cig-fueled evenings-into-late-nights can also be even more inspirational. Mentally, the booze/cigs win (drinking and smoking is fun). Spiritually, the clear mornings win. Physically, obviously my body is telling me something: Stop doing what you're doing. I can't just yet, but I get it, I get it.

Longview/Texarkana/Shreveport

Nostalgic for my youth and my roots. Have disliked Austin for a very, very long time; wouldn't mind going back here to live when I retire, or even before I retire.

As of my 50s, I've felt drawn to three geographical places in my life: East Texas, northern Germany, and New York/northern Jersey (specifically Weehawken).

I highly doubt that I'm, at this stage, going to make the effort to learn German and move there (though I do have dual citizenship because of my German mother); and Germany today is as ignorantly left-wing and Marxist as the US.

But East Texas and Joisey: Still possible! :)

 

No Longer Attractive

Boo-hoo! In my looks-prime (12 thru 40), I often felt annoyed by male attention---often self-conscious because I was being stared at and thus unable to be myself (much as my cats, when I look at them, will suddenly stop whatever activity they're doing and start cleaning themselves).

In my 20s and 30s, I often longed to be able to just go into a bar where music was playing and sit, anonymously, and enjoy the band. I saw guys doing this, and I wanted to be able to do this, too, so I tried it from about '95 thru '00. It never quite worked out.

Usually the band that I was seeing had some guy singer that I was attracted to. (I wasn't just going out randomly.) So if I went to a place and sat there by myself (which guys can do but girls can't), male patrons of the club would come up to me and sit down and chat, which was OK. But then when the guy I liked from the band would take a break and come over, and I'd be paying more attention to him, the "regular" guys would get pissed off. I wasn't trying to "score" or anything---I did go home with the "guy from the band" exactly twice, but this one particular guy was on heroin and disappeared into his bedroom, leaving me to chat in the living room with his roommate. Or else there was a minor "scene" when the guy, flatteringly to me at the time, DEMANDED that I come over when I was about to go home. At other times, when I followed this guy to his gigs around town, he ignored me or else asked for money (!).

So that was a side-note to my past early life, when a bunch of weirdness usually prevailed.

But my original point: From about age 12 to age 40, I had a bunch of guys constantly looking at me. Which made me uncomfortable at the time, but which I partially miss now, in my 50s, just in small ways.

Today, I drove across town to have an ID made for work. One of the two ID-making guys was VERY good-looking (the other a sniffling hippie-looking guy who went on a search for Kleenex at some point), and, yes, I hoped I'd get the good-looking guy instead of the sickly hippie! I DID get the good-looking guy---but when I commented right before my photo was taken about "How does my hair look?", I got a shock: "Sandy silver---some people would pay for that."

I was making small talk! I mean, his response was "kind" and all, but... It's the kind of thing this good-looking 30-something man would say to his elderly aunt! :)  OMG---reminds me of when I was in NYC as a 42-year-old and was in a store buying jeans---the young, friendly sales-girl said something like "I wish my mom looked as good in those jeans!" (And she was trying to be nice, not bitchy---it's just that I was still thinking of myself as a younger person, whereas younger people were/are, inadvertently and honestly, telling me that I was either middle-aged or old!) :)

What does it take to get a "professor" fired?

This adjunct professor wasn't fired because of her attack on this student table. She was only later fired from Hunter College after holding a knife to the neck of a New York Post reporter.

Sick to death of these "DEI" hires.

George Jones: I'll See You While Ago (1968)

George Jones: Things Have Gone To Pieces (1965)

And why Finland and Sweden should not join NATO.

Who the hell am I to say? It's like basketball player LeBron James making pronouncements. Except James has an uneducated BLM agenda, and I'm educated about history and have no agenda, other than common sense.

If you're a small country on the border of Russia, then stop poking the bear. Yes, I understand that you want US and International money. That's exactly what happened in the Ukraine---Western/US NGO money flooded in (including Biden support for the Burisma energy company), and then all of a sudden, Ukraine was demanding NATO membership. Well, of course, Russia wasn't going to have that from a former territory on its border.

Finland and Sweden: You should probably be aware of your surroundings and history and continue your neutrality. I highly doubt that the US is going to get involved in a war over you. But then again: Look at Sarajevo.

You should also probably take a closer look at your current leaders, selling you out in the long term for immediate tech money.

What happened to a people?

I just noticed this a couple of months ago:
The Prime Minister of the UK is Rishi Sunak (Indian).
The Prime Minister of Scotland is Humza Yousaf (Pakistani).
The Mayor of London is Sadiq Khan (Pakistani).

What happened to a people that they're no longer ruling themselves? Yes, the British were one-time colonizers of India (now India and Pakistan). Is this revenge? Is this Anglo-Saxon guilt?

While the USA has always been the proverbial "melting pot," the UK has a distinct ethnic history dating back thousands of years. And they're now allowing Indians and Pakistanis to rule them?

Quite bizarre. (Imagine today if a Brit were attempting to run India or Pakistan---I highly doubt that the populace would put up with this. Yes, I understand that the Brits were once colonizers of India---which is why I suspect this current state of affairs in the UK is purely "white guilt." Otherwise, why allow it? No rational country would ever allow it.)

Take your country back. I advise this for any country. UK, India, Pakistan --- Your country should be ruled by your own people. (Oh wait---India and Pakistan ARE currently ruled by their own people.)

GEORGE JONES: Old King Kong (1975)

GEORGE JONES: "I Don't Need Your Rocking Chair" (1992)

GEORGE JONES: Austin City Limits (1980)

Austin, and "Austin City Limits," used to be soulful and musically interesting like this.

Ram Dass: Be Here Now

Half of the book is on grocery-store brown paper and printed sideways, where you can't read the text near the spine unless you forcibly bend it. (Was this a test of some sort? "Wow---I'm so groovily non-violent that I don't even try to read what Guru tells me because I don't want to hurt a book or the tree that made it...")

Aside from the annoying physical composition of the book, the text itself is from 1971--- What perhaps seemed "enlightened" at that time is a bit dim-witted and obvious now that we've had 50 years to recover from what the media all told us was "profound." Here's a sample:

Lame, halt, blind, dying
We're all dying
At this moment
Your body is disintegrating
Before your very eyes
If you've taken LSD you may be
Seeing it do this   but you know
It's happening anyway
It's all a downhill trip   all the way

What this reminds me of is very bad poetry that I read when I was a sophomore in a poetry class in college circa 1985. A bad writer trying to explain what he/she was feeling; because of the bad writing, we couldn't feel anything that the writer was feeling.

Same with most of this "Be Here Now" text." "Ram Dass" (aka "Richard Albert," formerly of Harvard) was canonized among hippies in the late '60s/early '70s because he'd once been part of The Establishment and then left it after his collegiate LSD experimentation was verboten. Albert then went on to India and later to write this:

You meet another person & there are
qualities in that personality which of-
fend you & there are qualities which
attract you -- some qualities seduce
you -- some qualities repel you -- ...

REALLY? Sometimes you like your mate and sometimes you don't? No one ever knew this, Ram Dass? How did you figure this out?

In short: This text is of its time, but it's not actually very profound at all. Since 1971, I'm sure most of us on this planet have done drugs and had similar "insights." Maybe "profound" in 1971, but not so much 50 years later after every shallow club kid has been on exactly the same "trip." And what other non-drug-doing person on the planet has ever NOT had the experience of sometimes liking and then disliking their mate?

At the time that this book was released, there was so much left-wing worshiping press surrounding it---which transferred to me buying it last month in the hopes of perhaps discovering something, anything. Did anyone ever stop to think that what Richard Albert was expressing about relationships were things that his own parents and grandparents had already figured out---sans drugs---100s of years earlier?

I'm sick of all of these press-promoted "gurus" through the decades who have nothing to say that most of us haven't already figured out innately.

"Coast to Coast" + Autumn Sonata (1978)

I've had a bad relationship with my mother since about age 8.

In 2017, after she revealed that she was leaving 75% of her money to my brother and sons, and only 25% to me, I let her have it via multiple e-mails---the full range of my anger since I was a kid.

We made up in 2020; then it all flared up again a few months ago, when she accused me of being "brainwashed." At Christmas 2022, when I spent one night at her house, I went to sleep in the spare bedroom listening to the "Coast to Coast" AM radio show. I'd first discovered this paranormal show when I came back from NYC in 2010 and had to stay with my mom for 3 months before finding a new job. Every night after 10pm or so, when forced to go to my room instead of being allowed to watch TV in the living room, this radio show was an interesting solace.

This Christmas at my Mom's,  I opted to spend a night, thinking it would be pleasant and restful to be away from my apartment. But, as in 2010, I wasn't allowed to go to sleep with the TV on, so I again tuned in to a small radio by my guest bed to get me to sleep, seeking out the interesting "Coast to Coast" show that I'd known from years before. In this case, though, my mother subsequently claimed that, in the early hours of the morning, she heard---apparently through the bedroom door---some right-wing announcers on the radio. And therefore I was "brainwashed" and "full of hate" because the radio programs had gotten to me during the night, and that's why I liked Trump and disagreed with her politically.

Sigh. My mother is over 80, but she's always been smart and in good health. Where the FUCK did the above insanity come from? I won't be so shallow as to say she's become senile. I, of course, demanded an apology for calling me "brainwashed." Which I, of course, didn't get. And so we're again at odds, for the hundredth time.

It disturbs me greatly. The guilt is that we'll never come to an understanding before she dies, and, post-80, she could die any day now.

Woke up early this morning, 5am, with Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" down low on TCM. I'd never seen it before, though I just last year bought a complete Bergman film set. Tried to go back to sleep 'til 7:30 or so, but ended up watching the whole thing... A film about a grown-up daughter's latter-day horror at her mother's earlier behavior. (Nothing overly abusive about the behavior, just pure neglect and then attempts at making up for it. A psychological problem rather than a dramatic one.)

Almost every time I watch a Bergman film, either on purpose or by accident, I come away feeling cleansed in some way. The crappiest of feelings that I'd been feeling toward my mother, which will probably never be resolved, appeared in Bergman's "Autumn Sonata." He is utterly honest and harsh, yet he also offers a humane resolution---though not any solution---to such psychological dilemmas.

I've felt the same way when watching his other films from the late '40s up until this point: Bergman is harsh but merciful. I've never come away from any of his films feeling that there is no hope.

Postcards from the Edge (1990): Meryl Streep “I’m Checkin’ Out”

Wow! What a great ending! Not intellectually or anything, but just a great feel-good ending. (Both because Streep is great here and because her character has found a great niche in her next movie despite failing previously.)

I wish wholeheartedly that this song (especially the last exuberant half) had been released as a Country single at the time---it's a really great song, and Streep is really great singing it. It should have been a public/publicity sensation at the time: "Meryl Streep Goes Country!"

Postcards from the Edge (1990): "It TWIRLED up!"

"I hate 'spunk'"! Mary's Job Interview

"The Best of Everything" title sequence (1959, Johnny Mathis)

Sorry the ending is cut off---can't control sloppy YouTube posters. But this song, and the opening sequence of the movie (city and working girls), are beautiful. (Rest of the movie is pretty stupid, but the opening is great.)

Today: I challenge any artist to try to make something even mildly interesting (much less "beautiful") out of the utter dump that NYC has become under Democrats deBlasio and Adams (2014 thru present). (There was also fairly recently a particularly inept interlude from '78 thru '93 under Dems Koch and Dinkins.)

Beautiful, special city---temporarily stifled in recent decades by its left-wing mayors blaming crime on "racism" instead of on the same blacks repeatedly committing the same crimes. Not locking up the repeat criminals is insanity.

I'm internally agitating for the city to come back, for the whole country to come back. Can't stand the current malaise as a result of things being run (and being represented in the media) by incompetents and/or DEI appointees who promote the criminals and degenerates instead of correctly seeing them as the real problems in our society.

As a kid, I used to have a "fanciful" notion that one should try to better oneself. Try hard. Not be an intentional fuck-up. Today, though, the goal seems to be that you should claim to be as victimized as possible, and to get as many reparations, and as many welfare payments, as possible. And if you're a drug addict, you shouldn't try to get off drugs---just buy/steal a tent and go live on the street and continue to do drugs and beg for money and steal things. When you have a violent freakout, feel free to threaten (verbally or physically) anyone else around you. If a sane person reacts and tries to stop you, THEY are the ones who'll be arrested, not you---YOU are perfectly fine and normal according to today's sick society.

 

RE sexuality: In the '80s, when I was in my 20s, the liberal college ideal was to be open to androgyny---NOT to deny your biology and claim that you weren't male or female if you were born that way and then force the rest of society to call you "he" if you were a "she." And today, even doctors are now being forced to say that THEY "assign a gender at birth." Correction: Doctors don't "assign" anything. You're born a male or a female. Follow the science.

 

And gay people once wanted to be allowed to marry, to teach in schools, and to visit their partner in the hospital---not to force the rest of society, including sports teams, to wear gay pride flags on their uniforms, or to force schools to have "Tranny Story Hour."

 

We have gone completely nuts as a society.

Mary Tyler Moore Show Theme (1977)

Mary Tyler Moore Show Theme (1970)

The ultimate theme song.
When I was a kid, I wanted to BE Mary and have her job and life and apartment.
Per later opening themes that varied slightly, I also wanted to stride like her along the river (or lake, or whatever it is that Minneapolis has)---I wanted to walk like this and BE just like this.

50 years later... My goal is still to be like this.

One Day at a Time Theme (1975)

The Bugaloos Theme (1970, with Martha Raye)

Welcome Back, Kotter Theme (1975)

With all of the sincerity in my pre-teen heart, I begged my mother to buy me a "John Travolta for President" T-shirt during this time period because I loved his "Barbarino" so.
Somewhere in a '70s family album, there's a photo of me sitting in a tree with this very T-shirt on!

H.R. Pufnstuf Theme (1969)

Oh, You Know My Name Is Simon... (1974)

Simon was too fey for me, but my little brother liked it/him for years. If I remember right, Simon was part of the "Captain Kangaroo" show, which my brother would watch in the morning before school. He would watch quietly for the most part, but as soon as Simon would come on, he would get very excited and call out for my mother to come watch with him!

Hong Kong Phooey Theme (1974)

One of my little brother's cartoons that I was forced to watch. I don't remember anything about it except for the great theme song.

SPEED RACER Theme (1967)

Mostly my little brother's cartoon, but I also watched... was this Japanese or something?
Speed (did he have a name?) seemed troubled most of the time...
But a GREAT theme song!

Gilligan's Island Theme ('64 thru '67)

The Jeffersons Theme (1975)

All In the Family Theme (1971)

Maude Theme (1972)

Lady Godiva was a freedom rider,
She didn't care if the whole world looked,
Joan of Arc with the Lord to guide her,
She was a sister who really cooked,
Isadora was the first bra-burner,
Ain't ya glad she showed up?
And when the country was fallin' apart,
Betsy Ross got it all sewed up...

(I spent a few minutes this morning trying to figure out: If Isadora (the dancer) was a "bra-burner," couldn't the writers of this song have more cleverly worked the "bra-burner" bit into the "Joan of Arc" line---you know, her being burned at the stake and all... But I don't get paid to come up with lyrics for 1970s TV theme songs...)

The Jetsons Theme (1963)

The Flintstones Opening/Closing

Yes, this is the opening/closing for a cartoon show... But if I remember every single image and word 50 years later... It probably was and IS brilliant!

Scooby Doo! Theme Song

I constantly watched this show as a kid.
Watching this video now 50 years later, I remember almost every single image that appears here.

Save Me (Aimee Mann; 1999)

You look like... a perfect fit,
For a girl in need... of a tourniquet.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.

'Cause I can tell... you know what it's like.
A long farewell... of the hunger strike.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.

You struck me dumb, like radium
Like Peter Pan, or Superman,
You have come... to save me.
Come on and save me...
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
Except the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
But the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone.

Come on and save me...
Why don't you save me?
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
Except the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
Except the freaks,
Who could never love anyone.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I had to stop listening to this kind of sickly, submissive, sadistic thing around this time. It was too disturbing.

 
I had to either toughen up or go under. There was no one who was going to "save me." At some point in my young female life, I had to stop the Romanticism and start making plans for my own future. (Who writes songs about that?)

I remain too rational for the freaks and too weird for the straights.

George Jones & Tammy Wynette: "Golden Ring" (1976, the year after their divorce)

A couple of disturbing things:
One: They still look at each other like they care---I think George does, but Tammy does not or else doesn't yet know what she wants. (Both are pros, though, and know what the audience wants.)
Two: Tammy dramatically wipes her face a couple of times because George has apparently accidentally spit on her while singing. Extremely not cool to make a big show of it---I've seen this several times in concerts with George and Tammy: I highly doubt that George is intentionally spitting on her---it just happens when you're singing/emoting so close together. But, even knowing that the cameras are on, Tammy makes a big gesture of disgust. Absolutely no need for that; she's intentionally trying to humiliate him. (p.s. Note in this vid that George holds the mike further away from his mouth---because long ago, Tammy had complained that his voice overpowered hers when they were singing together onstage. He's being nice here.)