Babes in Toyland (1934) is a Mess

After watching the 1990s and 1960s versions of Babes in Toyland, I had to finally take myself to the source. Well, the first film, that is. All of these evil movies are based on a 1903 operetta. But we shall not speak of this.

This first filmed version is a Laurel and Hardy venture, and I do generally like their scenes the most. I'm probably the first person to say this, but Laurel and Hardy have a pretty entertaining dynamic going on. They should do more stuff as a duo, I reckon.

These guys are funny.

I was initially struck by the beauty of some of the sequences. There are some really impressive sets and beautifully lit shots. We get to see multiple sheep-woman hugs. Because the main woman in this version of the tale is Little Bo Peep. And she loves her sheep.

Aww.

We also see an electric performance by Henry Brandon, who plays this movie's Barnaby, the evil top hat man. He gives the role a wide-eyed pantomime quality, and he does it so well. This man is REACTING. I love him.

I could fix him. With a hammer.

So, for the first half of the movie, I was pretty into it. I felt a bit more connected to the very basic romance. A guy puts Bo Peep in the stocks and then kisses her, it's all very normal stuff. She loves her sheep, and so I support whatever other stuff she wants to do.

Sheep.

The second half, however, devolves into impenetrable nonsense. Mickey Mouse throws a brick at a cat's head. Monkey men get released. It's a whole thing.

The innocent, normal cat.

MICKEY NO!

And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "Lilly, that sounds amazing". Well, listen, some of it is thrilling. I can't deny that I love to see Mickey Mouse attack. But sadly, chaos too can become boring, and this is very much the case here. You're watching scenes of constant screaming by the end, and it turns into a sludge. It's like watching thirty minutes of white noise and racing blobs. What's going on here? I don't know, I stopped paying attention. There's one thousand monkey men in the city. Are they the titular babes? Are the monkey men the babes?

Sure. Whatever.

Barnaby and his monkey boys.

One monkey man out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆ 

A Very Special Book: Hollow Inside by Asako Otani

I joined NetGalley recently, which is a really cool website where you can request Advance Reader Copies of books in exchange for reviews. Since I've been both reading a lot more since late last year, and writing a lot more since committing to my beautiful blog at the beginning of January, I thought, yes, this is my time to get really into reviewing books.

Of course, the prospect of a delicious new book that isn't released to the public yet also whet my appetite. I need those juicy, secret books. I need to be special and ahead of the curve. As a sidenote, I just looked up where the word "whet" comes from, because I realised I had no idea, and it turns out it comes from knife sharpening. You know, like a whetstone - what you whet your wheapon whith. You get it. Very good.

The first ARC (this is techno-speak for Advanced Reader Copy, as mentioned above) I picked up from NetGalley was this enticing, short Japanese debut novel - Hollow Inside, by Asako Otani. It's out now in the UK, and won't be published in the USA until the 5th of May, but I read it January. Because I'm very special.

I chose it partly because this cover spoke to me - the open dog head with two little people inside, yes, okay, nice and sinister, slightly reminiscent of some of the promotional material for Severance - and partly because it's a brisk 112 pages. I thought I should try a short book first and get to grips with the NetGalley experience, and I'm glad I did, because I ran into my first technical mishap immediately: this book was only available as a PDF. As you probably know, reading a PDF on your phone is what we like to call "hellish". PDFs aren't formatted for that sort of the thing. So, thankfully, the length of this novella made it bearable, but in the future I will be looking for gorgeous epubs only. I have learned. I am a fighter.

Without further ado though, let's talk about the book.

 

*** 

 

FEMINISM AND PLASTIC ANIMALS. HERE WE GO. 

There's a bit of a trend at the moment for short, crunchy Japanese novels that concern themselves with pissed off and alienated women. I read Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void and loved it. I thought Convenience Store Woman was pretty cool. And here is a new entry into the canon - a novella about a middle-aged woman who moves in with another middle-aged woman, and feels kinda bad about it.

Here they are. The books.

Hirai is an office worker grappling with the subtle ways judgement manifests in her life. She worries about her mother's expectations for her romantic life, and she worries that her co-workers would think it's super weird for her to live with a female friend at her age. 

Them.

She's 38, and so the pressure she feels to have children is coming to a head. This is all expressed in a wonderfully tentative, suppressed way. Hirai's thoughts are clearly in turmoil - she doesn't WANT to get a boyfriend or have a little baby - but she can't quite accept them. Instead she lies down on her bed periodically and pretends to be dead in these frank, tiny moments of desperation.

"I let all the strength drain from my body. I gave myself over to gravity and sharpened all my awareness right up to my fingertips. I lay on the bed not moving an inch. Pretending to be dead. I sometimes did this.

I was dead. Nothing in this world had anything to do with me. I thought about the dead dogs. The dead dogs that had been doted on by their owners. They had left fake bodies in the world as figurines, and their souls were running around the other world wagging their tails. My soul joined them frolicking there."

I love these perfect little expressions of a hopeless need for escape. I love the latching on to these dogs as adequately and vividly loved. Her roommate, Suganuma, makes 3D-printed custom sculptures of people's dead dogs, and this is used as a very fun metaphor for brokenness and acceptance.

"I picked up what looked like a reject figure that was lying on the floor. It was of a chihuahua, hollow inside and surprisingly light. The threadlike filament had become tangled around its body, as though enveloping it in a spider's web."  

That's right, the book title gets namedropped. There we go! It's Hollow Inside, baby!

The book is, for the most part, very straightforward. Nothing much happens, but there are these pockets of sweetness that I found so touching. There are also some good moments of humour, and I like that often when Hirai expresses an emotion, it's kind of intense, like it needs to burst out of her. She has this incredible disgust for men, finds them so physically repulsive that she can't help but be disgusted by women who touch them, and I just love the way this is explored. She feels so trapped in heterosexual expectations that she wants to THROW UP when a man looks at her. It's so, so good. Just the sheer magnitude of this caged animal reaction to the world.

There's something special nestled into this unassuming, simple story.

Four out of five defective dogs

★★★★☆

 

I Love 1970s Tennis Anime

A while ago I watched through the 1973-74 shoujo anime series about girls' tennis, Aim for the Ace! 

I can't remember how I came across it, but something about the visual style really struck me. The long, angled faces sometimes warped to a sort of dream-like alien degree. The beautiful, blurred backgrounds in purple tones. The colourful airbrushing and paint stippling. It's a gorgeous, odd-looking show.

It centres on a vaguely tomboyish tennis player, Hiromi. She has a fluffy Donny Osmond cut, a reserved personality, and a dream - to play some tennis. We start out with her about to move up to the senior team, and follow her as she takes part in more high stakes matches and gets into more intense training.

She has a little black cat, by the way. This creature isn't particularly important, but rest assured: that cat is there.

What I love about the series is its claustrophobic intensity. At the beginning, it seems that Hiromi and her friend don't care all that much about their tennis prowess, but it quickly becomes the beautiful, sparkling jewel at the centre of Hiromi's life. An intoxicating, visceral passion expressed so vividly by the textured backgrounds and often conspicuously empty, slightly abstract locations.

A figure of great inspiration to Hiromi is Todo, the sparkling and gentle boy tennis player she admires. He is an iconic 1970s boy. He has the most luscious eyelashes in the world, thick, flowing sideburns, and bewitching, geode-like eyes. He is quiet and unassuming, statesmanlike, and a very good tennis player.

The distant intensity with which she views him is so deliciously communicated. She is always gazing at him, and he is always leaping in slow motion, a graceful gazelle of a man on the court. And so, there is an impeccable, tentative sensuality to their relationship. Nothing feels quite real, but every detail is magnified, made huge and shiny.

Balls.

I also love the way the show explores the fraught position of women's tennis, and women in tennis. There's a powerful scene in which Hiromi talks about the extreme challenge she faces in making up for her relative weaknesses in strength and size.

It's so great. You're punching the air at this point. Our girl needs to win. She deserves it.

Another moment has a coach observing Hiromi's training, and he says this:

It's such an interesting and sad look at some of the stark realities of women's sports and their dismissal, but it's also inspiring and invigorating. Here is a girl who is truly in it for the love of the game, giving it her all, pushing her body to the limit - and carving out a space for women of pure, dogged athleticism.

I just love her so much. 

 

p.s. here's a dog:

I Made a Poetry Zine

My library's printing service is called princh (like the Grinch), which is very entertaining to me personally, but it's also very smooth and beautiful to use. You tap the special little screen attached to the photocopier, you check a preview of your image, and then you slam on the plus button and get yourself ten glorious copies. Perfect technology.

This is how I completed my new zine, a small poetry pamphlet with three poems inside, and some collage and illustration. I'll be honest with you, I only really like the last poem - but this was a challenge I set myself, to make a quick zine in one day, and I did it. So it doesn't matter too much how good the poems are, they just needed to exist. And one out of three ain't bad!

I read somewhere online, the other day, right after I had started crafting my zine, that it was zine month, but I can't find any evidence of that now, and I don't remember where I saw it. It just has to be zine year, zine life, zine minute in my heart, I guess. Somebody said this... it was real.

It's been some time since I've made a zine, so it's really nice to do it again and see that familiar, satisfying, grey photocopy texture. I used random words pulled from the newspaper (the Metro), to title each poem, which was a fun little prompt exercise, and the combination of newspaper cuttings, a few printed words, and of course, drawings... worked really nicely.

I have these transparent plastic sticky notes that I used to overlay some drawings on top of other elements, and that turned out to have a really nice layering effect. You can see the edges of these notes in some places, so they cast interesting little shadows of light texture.

Yeah. I like my zine. And I believe I should make more.

Dadposting

My dad died when I was still little, so while I do remember him, it's in a very limited way. There are, though, quite a few interesting pictures of him to look at.

On the tube.

He had a famous big leather jacket that he wore a lot, and, always, long hair dangling down in one pin-straight swoop. He also had a thing for bandanas, and Harley-Davidson merchandise. Father and I would wear matching Harley-Davidson bandanas together on occasion when I was a baby. Supreme fun.

Of course, many of these pictures involve me. After all, I was a charming little child at the time. Who can resist a new photo featuring the dazzling, cherubic infant? 

I love the insane, bug-eyed expression that newborns get sometimes. They are gorgeous little aliens. We have to help them. They need milk. I love this photo. Out-of-focus, barely living baby just taking it as it comes, and this man, head on a trenchcoat. Just new baby stuff.

In this one, I like my expressionless look. That's a baby taking it in, and not knowing what 'it' is. A beautiful lack of comprehension, contrasted with that knowing smile. "I have the baby", my dad is thinking, perhaps evilly.

And finally, here are some solo dad pictures. A pose with a cool bike (note the bandana - fandom membership confirmed!), and an underexpoxed kitchen shot.

If there was one thing that was definitely true about my dad, and that I am not making up, it was that he loved to be by the milk.

Les Misérables: A Beautiful Big Tome

Les Misérables is insane. I started reading it in March of last year on my 3DS, via 100 Classic Books Collection, and because this software organises its books into very tiny pages, it is almost eighteen thousand pages long there. Yowch!

I had to admit defeat after one-too-many late nights staring at the still bright screen, and switched to a regular, normal epub situation on my phone, which put the pagecount at a far more reasonable (and more reflective of reality) 1659 pages. Phew! 

Gavroche, by Emile Antoine Bayard.

It's a long book - I think the longest single book I've read to date - and so you really begin to live in 19th Century Paris across all of these tasty pages. So much time is spent with Cosette and Jean Valjean and weird little Marius that they start to feel like my own desperate family, and so finishing it was monumentally sad.

The book paints a thick, complex portrait of its setting, and what I really love about Victor Hugo's style, beyond his sort of gothic, dirty despair and biblical intensity, is that his books include interconnected networks of essays slotted between story chapters. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame did this too, but that book was tempered by being short, and so he kept to his musings to just a few topics, like the street layouts of Paris and the strange horror of the advent of the printing press. 

"This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. Man is the second."

These interludes which concern themselves with relevant history and the infrastructure of human life allow Hugo's books this very direct commentary. Yes, he's working in all his nasty themes, as an author must, but he's also looking the reader in the eye and saying, "hey... how about that sewer efficiency?"

Jean Valjean's emergence from the sewer, by John R. Neill.

You might think it's going to be boring, and yes, I think sometimes it is - a lot of this stuff is pretty dense and requires a certain amount of context to really stay present with while reading - but the lattice of passionate treatises on all these little topics of humanity and the details of the vast overarching infrastructures which shape the lives of the book's characters provide a unique, strong sense of place. 

"Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country."

Much of it is going directly over my head - most prominently the book's moments of pure French (I don't know how other translations read, but Isabel Hapgood left quite a few passages of untranslated French in there - girl, I can't read that!) - but nevertheless, the great tapestry of Victor Hugo's Big Thoughts has become a familiar delight. It's like having your grandpa just go off on a topic for thirty minutes every so often. You're nodding. You're saying, "yes gramps". You don't necessarily totally get it, but you come to love the grampa lectures. That's Victor Hugo. He just needs to do that.

Fantine in Love, by Gustave Brion.

I love, generally, the sense of dark Victorian allegory that Hugo brings to life so beautifully here. The incredible suffering and tragedy of it all. The allusions to an unstoppable, frightening and mysterious God. It's no wonder that Christian iconography has such a solid place in horror. Christianity via Hugo is this beautiful, mystifying, celestial yet shadowy thing. It is the ultimate refutation of all the hideous injustices faced by the poor and oppressed, yet of course, those poor and oppressed must humble themselves before God to such an extent that it is starkly clear to a modern reader how religious values are, at their very core, a driving force for the persecution and punishment of the downtrodden.

"Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment."

Les Misérables is also, at times, a very funny book. The way Marius picks Jean Valjean's handkerchief up from the street and views it as an object of worship because he believes it belongs to Cosette is pretty great. Marius is a bonafide freak in that chapter. He's a repulsive little man completely captured by his own lust. So he stalks them in the least subtle and most crazed way imaginable, causing Jean Valjean to move house to avoid him. What follows is a wonderful despair spiral from Marius that took me from the zone of laughter to the zone of pain.

"Despair, also, has its ecstasy. Marius had reached this point."

No Marius don't go to the barricade you're so sexy aha... 
Engraving by Gustave Brion / Yon & Perrichon

This novel is about so many things, but I find its claims concerning the godliness and the searing, blissful intensity of marriage a very interesting one.

"When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars."

It's not the most prominent aspect of the story, but the vigour and passion with which it closes in on this glittering reverance for the young married couple is almost too much to bear. Patriarchal legend Jean Valjean can die in his own sort of pained bliss knowing that he has finally passed Cosette on to Marius and therefore fulfilled his vow to Fantine. He has been redeemed in a most excellent way, but not a complete one. He will always be the prisoner - as life in itself is a prison. He remains in the eternal prison of having once been a convict, as it were. So death then, is a sort of freedom, and in a deeply sorrowful, loving way, Jean Valjean is over, and the revolutionary future is here. Aww.

Cosette & Marius, by Emile Antoine Bayard

"If you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs, everybody is happy."

 

Napoleon Blowing Bubbles, by anonymous (1813).

Four tricorne hats out of five. 

★★★★☆  

Birds: My Latest Passion

It's kind of crazy and insane just how many animals are out there. There are so many of them. Who even are they? What are they thinking? Would they even know what to do if I walked into the room?

Roseate Spoonbill, from John Latham's A General History of Birds (1824). 

I've been learning about bird species recently. My grandma liked birds, and once I bought this birdspotting guide in her presence, and she was beyond delighted. I don't think I have ever in my life gained someone's approval more strongly than in that moment. So I sort of thought I should study flashcards and really learn all the British bird types.

My beautiful bird book.

Some of my favourites include:

Redstart 

Now this is a bold character. This is the sports car of birds. High contrast. Love it.

Tufted Duck

Look man, you gotta be tufted. I would be tufted if I could be, but legally it's not possible.

Pied Wagtail

I just think this little snowball is so cute. I love that long tail and that tiny body, the beautiful white and black pattern. An adorable creature.

***

There are endless variations of little (and big!) birds, and just knowing more of their names is really helping me to develop an appreciation for all of the many varieties and patterns and colours. Starlings are so spiky and have an understated green iridescence. Black-headed gulls look like they're wearing a deku mask. Little Auks look like very cute little aliens.

They are all so great. I love them.