I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
2001-10-23 - 11:30 p.m.
I promised to update today and I always try to keep my promises. Not keeping promises is one of the things that really gets to me. I still feel bad about promises broken 20 years ago. OK enough of that, I don't really want to go there. I'm actually feeling really good today; the world seems to be making more sense.
I want to send out Happy Birthday wishes to my mother and Neal. This is my busy significant date week. Tomorrow is Alan's birthday and my parent's anniversary is the day after that.
I got the finishing touches for my Halloween costume today, now I just have to see if my costume partner, Carey approves. I'm sure she will, I mean doesn't Pete Kennedy always wear glow in the dark shirts and Donald Duck caps?
I can see that this is not going to be one of my focused entries. I never like lots of short paragraphs.
Like that one.
I just remembered something I wanted to talk about that happened this weekend. I went to Union Square to check out how the vigil was doing. It's not doing well. It is mainly people milling around now. There was one guy with a PA system giving a political harangue. I am not sure what his point was but he said his proof was that the Government knew about "the bombings" before they happened and let them happen. The way he knew this was that he got an email about it that said so. I decided to let the fact that they weren't bombings go and to challenge the meat of his argument. I went up to him and asked him if he got this email before the bombing. I mean if he did that would really mean something. Of course he didn't. I asked him why he believed it. He said it was in three newspapers. I asked him "Which papers? "He didn't know. So I pointed out that he was spreading serious accusations with no evidence whatsoever. He just took some guys word and expected us to. When I said that, people applauded. I bowed, got more applause, and left. Uncritical thinking is something I can't stand and I just felt like pointing out how ridiculous he was. I loved the attention of course. So I got to feed my quest for truth and reason and my childish need for approval in one fell swoop.
OK I have to think. What am I going to write about? After my usual bizarre series of associations I started thinking about cartoons. I don't write about cartoons enough, they are one of my real passions too. I know I've mentioned Bugs, Daffy, the Coyote, and the Roadrunner before, but there is so much more. First of all notice I call them cartoons. I think that calling them animation is a bit affected. I'm not ashamed to be an adult who watches cartoons.
I don't indulge my love of cartoons nearly as much as I used to. The main reason is Lauren moved away and I have no friends now that share my interest. I really have to go to a cartoon festival again. One of the best I ever went to was at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a Chuck Jones retrospective and the master was there himself. He made two cartoons that I don't remember seeing as a kid that I caught in college on TV that totally bowled me over. The first is One Froggy Evening. At the time this was a pretty obscure cartoon. Now it's main character, Michigan J. Frog has become the symbol for the WB network. The other one is What's Opera Doc, which compresses all of Wagner's Ring Cycle into a 7 minute cartoon. Once you've seen it you can't hear the Ride of the Valkyrie without singing to yourself: "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit�"
Chuck Jones has a real following now though. So do all the Warner Bros. Cartoons and of course Disney does too. The forgotten classic studio is the Fleisher Bros. Max and Dave Fleisher were pioneers in animation. Max invented rotoscoping, the process in which you film a person performing an action, then trace his motions to form the basis of the animation. Their most famous characters are Betty Boop and Popeye. Some of the early Betty Boops were amazing. Their feel was totally different than that found at the other studios. They were New Yorkers working in the city, most of the other studios were dominated by country boys, thus all the barnyard stories and characters they put out. The Fleisher Brother's films had a gritty, dark urban feel to them. Their greatest film was the Betty Boop version of Snow White. I had read about it before I saw it and tracked it down on video. When I saw it I had to keep rerunning it to appreciate all the details. The highlight is Cab Calloway's appearance in it as a ghost. His dancing was Rotoscoped and he sang a song that is tied for my all-time favourite, St. James Infirmary. The finale takes place in a haunted cave, thus the ghost. You can just lose yourself looking at the details of the background. It is filled with hidden gems. The main action is Cab acting out the words to the song. It has to be seen to be believed. Why have I never seen this on television? I think it is because it is totally not a kids cartoon; it is far too dark. My guess is that they have shown it on Toonheads on the Cartoon Network, but I've never caught it there. It has long been a dream of mine to produce a show, which would show classic cartoons and discuss them. Snow White would be the first cartoon I'd show.
Weird entry isn't it? I just needed to go and talk on an on about cartoons for a bit. Maybe it's out of my system now.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
creative commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile 2001-10-23
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