Friday, May 31, 2024

JEWELLED COINCIDENCES The Devon and 'Madame Mandelip'





Watching Todd Browning's 1936 film, The Devil Doll.....I freeze-framed a couple of stills.......One was from a scene wherein Lionel Barrymore is digging an emerald from a platinum ring........."Hmm"....I thought.....I have a ring that's almost identical.......and have renamed it The Devon Ring......Obliquely, "Devon" was sitting next to a cluster of a dozen old German figurines.......In the film, the ring mount and it's emerald, removed, is placed in a 'doll', on a table with a dozen other dolls......And, even more coincidentally, Barrymore plays a character, in drag, wearing a pair of earrings that are exactly like a pair that I have and have worn........Go figure! This film, a sub-text being the sub-miniaturization of creatures.....to make the Earth more capable of feeding the exploding populations of 'everything'......was created shortly after Einstein's having published his then Science-Changing Theory of General Relativity and the introduction into Art of the Physics of matter and energy.......Early in the film, the Scientist, Marcel, lectures, briefly, on the Theory... that, if the space between atoms were reduced, miniaturization would be possible.... Levond comments, in The Devil Doll: "if most men were reduced to the dimensions of their mentality, Marcel's plan wouldn't be necessary."





Wednesday, May 29, 2024

THE BEST RE-FORMATTING OF THE LEGACY OF BUSBEY BERKELEY'S MUSICALS.......Christina Aguilera, perhaps the greatest living 'Blues Singer' ...with her naughty 'touch of Etta James'........


The familiar Story:   days before the Show goes 'belly up' in bankruptcy, A singer/dancer is replaced...at the last minute, by an unknown Chorus Girl......Saving 'The Show'........Steve Antin's short stretch from "It's My Party"  tribute film to 1930's Hollywood Musicals...........A 'Formula' that still works, today......

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Lenny Bruce without obscenity and Dustin Hoffman with no Academy Award Statuette in his hand......

MY LEAST 'LIKED' FORM OF 'ENTERTAINMENT' HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONSTAGE PERFORMANCES BY NARCISSISTIC, DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION STAND-UP COMICS......YET, DUSTIN HOFFMAN'S DEPICTION OF LENNY BRUCE BROUGHT SOME SYMPATHETIC TEARS TO MY FACE.....

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

"THE GAY DECEIVERS" ....(1969)





Well, it HAS been half a century since 'this' was an excuse for Vice Squads to round up 'congregated' 'Ah Men'-clad gays and haul them off in handcuffs, and contact their parents....begging some parental humiliation and 'straightening out'....before their sons 'get into some REAL trouble'!....And, furthermore, June Buckridge.... put on that pretty flowered dress.....you're looking like a man....What will our righteous neighbors think? Don't you know that Mercy Croft is Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney's mother? Real Ladies won't put up with this......We're going 'clothes-shopping' in downtown Tuscaloosa, where there may be both a Schwobilt's and a Lane Bryant Shop....Wear your tassel-loafers, son.....those 'pinkish' suede Pat Boone loafers may give someone the 'wrong idea', you know...... 

Challenging gender stereotypes, Taiwanese men have donned skirts both to celebrate Taiwan's long-awaited marriage bill.....and, that bill was the most liberal version, of three proposals!......Of course, wearing 'skirts' & 'dresses' is not as 'out of line' in the 'Orient', is it? Even testosterone-laden Samurai went into battle, wearing skirts, didn't they? Americans still prudishly 'dress like Joe Bob'.....until pop-culture conformity gets Idaho farmer boys into do-si-do hoop skirts....with some chains, tattoos, combat boots, trendy-framed dark shades, chrome and black leather bondage jewelry, foundation cosmetics and butch-wax....to let everyone know that they're not 'sissies'.....I'll bet that some angry fag-haters are rolling out some barbed wire fences....

Sunday, May 19, 2024

Passing Parade: "People on Paper" 1945

I watched all of John Nesbitt's 'documentary films' when I was still a 'pre-teen'....... They installed a 'perspectivometer' under my skull, I think.....encouraging self-determination and the courage to develop as an 'Eccentric'...... After viewing "The Great American Mug", also made in 1945, I thought it a bit absurd to 'go to the barber shop' to conform to the 'Fashion TRENDS of the Day'......