ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S FAIRIES

I'm too sleepy to put up a decent post but here's an interesting quick and dirty one. These (above and below) are the photos that convinced Doyle of the existence of fairies!

The girl in the picture above seems to be completely unaware of what I assume are dancing illustrations superimposed below her.

Imagine the creator of Sherlock Holmes being taken in by pictures like these! No matter, I still love Doyle and my respect for the man is only slightly diminished by the gaff. Most, if not all, of us will believe in something silly that we'll regret later. You can't blame him for being human.

Holmes is one of the greatest characters in all of fiction, some would say the very greatest. At the core of every story is an intriguing mystery and surrounding it is the endlessly fascinating lifestyle, moral character, courage, intellect, playfulness, earnestness and capacity for friendship of the famous detective. Holmes always changes and improves the person who reads about him. Doyle was said to have been surprised by the success of his detective stories. He thought the book everyone would remember would be "The White Company," about crusaders, I think. The Wyeth illustration above is from that book. I don't know anything about it, but if Doyle thought it was his best then that's reason enough to read it. I'll put in a save at the library.

THE ART OF PENCIL TWIRLING!

I'm still obsessed with pencil twirling! I tried it for half an hour before writing this and I can already see the improvement! Learn it yourself and we can have duels at the drawing table!

















Whit, thanks for putting me on to this! I knew about cigarette twirling but it never occurred to me to do it with a pencil til you mentioned it!

CLARA BUTT SINGS "LAND OF HOPE & GLORY"

You've heard this music before under the title "Pomp & Circumstance." In America it's the standard music played at school graduations. What you might not have heard is the core of that music performed as a song with some of the most stirring British patriotic lyrics ever written.

The version linked to here is my all-time favorite by Clara Butt ( yes, that's her name), who recorded it in 1911. Clara sounds the way Margeret Dumont from the Marx Bros films might have sounded, if Dumont could have sung. The voice sounds funny for a moment but when you get used to it, it's immensely moving and sincere.

Here's Clara's autograph on a picture of Britannia. It's a big, sentimental, and dignified signature, full of character. It's said that when you acquire character, you acquire a destiny. Clara's destiny was to be a major support for English morale during WWI.

I actually have an original autograph of hers, given to me by Steve Worth, who's also a Butt fan.....um, maybe I should have rephrased that. Anyway, thanks, Steve!

Here's (below) the lyrics for "Land of Hope and Glory. " Just to establish a mood I thought I'd combine them with a picture that would call to mind the glory days of the British Empire. Sad to say, I didn't find any first-rate pictures on that subject, so here's (above) a picture on a related subject, that of British sea power. This is from the Battle of the Nile, fought during the war with Napoleon.

LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY

Dear Land of Hope, thy hope is crowned.
God make thee mightier yet!
On Sov'ran brows, beloved, renowned,
Once more thy crown is set.
Thine equal laws, by Freedom gained,
Have ruled thee well and long;
By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained,
Thine Empire shall be strong.

Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee,
Who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.

Thy fame is ancient as the days,
As Ocean large and wide:
A pride that dares, and heeds not praise,
A stern and silent pride:
Not that false joy that dreams content
With what our sires have won;
The blood a hero sire hath spent
Still nerves a hero son.


Here's (below) where the song can be found on an mp3 format. If you intend to listen to it more than once, will you download it to your own computer so we don't tax the bandwidth of the parent site?

http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/landofhopeandglory.htm

If the link doesn't work (it looks like the final "l" is missing), just google the title of the song.

THE WORLD OF SMOKING VIDEOS

I haven't drawn anything for the site in a while so I thought I'd look up some good smoking scenes on YouTube and draw them. To my surprise I didn't find any! Maybe it's because I got distracted by all the bizarre offerings on the sidebars. More on that in a minute! Anyway, here's (above)the best one I found, from one of the Dr. Mabuse films. It gets boring after the first minute but the opening pan of the smokers is brilliant!!! When I was a kid eating in restaurants was like that.





Here's (above) why I got distracted. There's a kazillion clips on the sidebar menus showing girls smoking. Nothing else, just girls sitting there smoking! A lot of them are goths and they blow smoke right at the camera just to let you know who's boss!






Here's another girl smoking. This one amazed me because it proved that urban men and women exist in different worlds. In the clip a girl sits down and smokes nervously beside a TV set, under some plastic leaves. What kills me is that she has complete confidence that tens of thousands of men will be interested in seeing her do that... and the weird thing is, she's probably right. After all, I watched.

What strikes me is that if I sat there with a cigarette, doing the exact same thing, NOBODY would watch it, not even my mother. Not even me! I don't know what lesson there is to be learned from this, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway.





Here(above)was an even bigger distraction! A girl blows smoke into the viewer's face while commanding him to send her money! She promises to use the money to treat her boyfriend to dinner at the viewer's expense. Believe me, she's serious! I had no idea this stuff was going on! I'm dying to know if she's making making money at it!

I won't go into all the other genres I discovered, all with a connection to smoking. There's tons of clips of close-ups of long-nailed women smoking and there's lots of "smoking ands": smoking and socks sites, smoking and shoes, smoking and glasses, smoking and pets, smoking and underwear...everything!





Here's (above) a really good clip of Jerry Lewis trapped in an elevator with a smoker. I posted this before in another context but it won't hurt to reprise it here.





I'm still marveling that the girl makes all that money with the "you-vile-worm, send-me-your-money-clips." Just to clear our heads, here's (above) a clip of a guy twirling a cigarette around his fingers like a baton. I swear I'm going to learn how to do this with a pencil! Every artist should know how!

APACHE DANCE, ANYONE?

What do you guys think of Apache Dancing? That's the dance where the sleazy boyfriend beats up his prostitute girlfriend because she won't share her money with him.

Everybody associates the dance with France but I'll bet it got started in Spain. The Spanish have a flare for this sort of thing. Look at Flamenco and Tango...or is tango purely an Argentine dance?

Here's (above)a must-see apache dance from TouTube. Don't be put off by the silly beginning. It heats up real fast.





For purists here's (above) a clip from a Parisian apache from 1934. Nifty, huh?

A HAT FOR SAYING, "NO!"

I got myself a Halloween present this year, which is pictured above. It's a Spanish "No" hat! When you shake your head "no" the little balls shake back and forth and even make a cool thunking sound when they hit the brim. If you want to see it just try to borrow some money from me some time!

The problem with the hat is that it's no good for saying "yes." Of course you can sometimes say yes without using the word. If a guy asks "Would you like me to stop standing on your foot?", you might say, "No, no! Stand no longer on my foot!" That's three no's! Or you can lie sideways and shake your head no, which will appear as yes to him. Aaaargh! I'm getting confused!

WHEN STARS CHOOSE THE SCRIPTS

Big stars have more power in the film world than ever. I'm not sure why. Maybe it has to do with the changing ways that films are financed. Overseas money is more important now and foreign backers are even more star conscious than Americans. Or maybe it has to do with a cultural shift. Whatever the reason, you have to please the big stars to get a film made now and the way to please big stars is to write the kind of script they like to play.

What do stars like? Stories that are about them! The plot's irrelevant. What matters is the character dynamics. So what if the city's going to blow up if somebody doesn't find the nuclear bomb? Who cares? What the star cares about is that their character comes off as strong and appealing, with a wide emotional range for reviewers to comment on.

The kind of scripts that stars like determine the kinds of films that get made. For comparison, here's (below) a picture gallery of films made in the era when studio bosses picked the scripts:

These are my kind of films, real stick-to-your-ribs stuff. And here's (below) an example of the kind of scripts favored by studio bosses:




The studio chiefs had pretty good taste! I love the lines, "I'm gonna kill you right now, Lone Ranger!" / "Oh, no you ain't, Cal steward."

Well, that was then and this is now. Here's (below) a gallery of pictures from the star power era:

See the difference? Stars like those intimate, psychological, Stanislavskian scenes. When they pick the scripts the film is always about emotional confrontation. In the old days when two characters had a disagreement one hit the other guy, and the guy fell down dead. Nowadays it's more nuanced. Here's (below) an example of the kind of script actors like:

Stars are running the show now so you better get to like nose-to-nose psychological confrontation. You're going to be seeing a lot of it!