Back Home at Last!

YESTERDAY evening I had the bizarre feeling that I was "normal" again. My head was full of rational thoughts and I looked back to my ridiculousness of the past week or so and thought "I'm glad to be myself again". I felt like when you come back from holiday and your house is cold and stale (and in my case, foetid) but hey, it's home! So I'm back at last. [From alleged "hypomania".]

Binky lent me the film A Beautiful Mind starring Russel Crowe as the schizophrenic Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash. O boy was he crazy! His entire life seemed to be a fable and then when the doctors come to arrest him I actually thought they were the KGB! Just like the director probably intended. I've never gone mad like that ~ that's paranoid schizophrenia, where a person has an entire delusional structure they live by. My worst madness was far more Confusional than Delusional.

At one a.m. I finally went to bed. And slept. And slept. And woke up at nine feeling "ukh why so early". Except that 1-9 made a perfect eight hours' sleep... But then I drank my methadone and went into the kitchen and spotted something that looked like a Rice Krispie on the microwave but ~ wahey! ~ it was a lump of "B". So I banged that up in my leg and promptly fell asleep. And slept, and slept. And slept and slept and slept. And slept some more. Finally getting up after four. And no, I wasn't gauwching, It was true sleep. A Rice Krispie sized bit of 'eroin would never get me that high. Actually, that stuff doesn't even make me sleep any more. Nowadays if it makes me "high" it's a hyper high, like heroin isn't "supposed" to be. But I've got to the stage now where my mind is so fried I never know what to expect of anything.

Excessive sleep is a warning sign of depression. How can I be depressed when my mind is still full of such marvellous ideas ~ all thought up last week. And apart from some of the names for my clubnight they are marvellous. I mean, I haven't even told you about my fabulous magazine yet. Condé Nast will piss their pants when they see it. The key to success in magazine publishing is obviously ad revenues. I think that's where Andy Warhol went wrong: he never seemed to have a top flight ads team for Interview magazine ~ and I bet he was too stingy to pay them a cut of revenue. Well my mag will be nothing like Interview. Imagine the fabulousness of Vogue but without the boring clothes and you've got it. [You really think I'm going to give out my concept on my blog?] Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arples, Cartier, Tiffany all the big names will be queueing to get in ... It will be for everyone male or female, young or old who is Fresh, Fabulous, Funky and Friendly... the Big Wow of tomorrow...

Anyway... It's late; I've got to go. It's getting dark around 4:30 now the clocks have gone back. But hey, my golden fleece still gleams wondrously in the night...

Places That Belong To You: Barbra Streisand

THIS is an old post, previously unpublished, recently unearthed from sometime back in June...

PLACES THAT BELONG TO YOU

This is the love theme to the film Prince of Tides, the best movie Babs ever directed and one of the best she starred in (about Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) the brother of a bipolar poet trying to piece her life together after a serious suicide attempt, he comes to New York hating the city but falls in love with his sister's psychiatrist, played by Streisand). The theme tune is played over and over in the film, but this sung version is never heard. Barbra felt that putting her voice all over it would be too intrusive...

It's a very sad story about lovers who cannot stay together. (Though having seen the film at least three times, I fail to understand why...)

OK I just read the Wikipedia digest of the plot and found out Tom Wingo was MARRIED. No bloody wonder. You see ~ unless something is double-underlined in red someone like me is sure to miss it...

Here's the song:




(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)(☺ © ♨)

Judy Garland: A Complete Mess

I SAW A TV FILM called Life With Judy Garland: Me And My Shadows first thing in the morning. My: was she a mess. I knew she had her pill problems, but didn't realize they were quite that bad. In the end she was taking 1600mg a day of Seconal, on top of heavy doses of (prescribed) amphetamine. Plus she was drinking heavily. Barbiturates like Seconal are supposed to magnify the effects of alcohol considerably. They also cancel out the jitterier side-effects of speed, so you get a double-high.

In the beginning she was depicted on speed giving a master performance: singing her heart out, gesturing, pinging across the stage, reaching out to audience members' hands etc. Then she put in an Oscar-nominated performance opposite James Mason in the 1954 film A Star Is Born ~~ and yet no-one wanted to hire her afterwards because by that stage in her career she was already considered unreliable.

In the end she was performing concerts in theatres for practically no money because she owed it all to the IRS as back taxes for movies made the decade before. Drunk, confused, forgetting what song it was, tangling herself up in the microphone wire. And booed off the stage in Australia.

Her poor daughter Lorna Luft (upon whose memoir the film was based) had to tell a family court judge that she wanted to be with her mom rather than her dad because her mother couldn't live without her. This was true, in the most literal way. The judge sighed and granted custody to "Miss Garland". And the drunken, drugged confusion continued.

Towards the end, Lorna, who is barely in her teens, is reduced to a state of nervous collapse and physical exhaustion and realizes she just cannot go on. So Judy Garland is left alone and drinking. One night she cannot sleep despite all that Seconal and so she takes several more. And is found on the bathroom floor, dead.

It was a pretty horrible story. Funny how when you see something close-up it doesn't seem in the slightest bit "glamorous". A lot of people do consider drug-taking and even drug addiction glamorous. The more you see, the less you like it. But many don't see the full details until they themselves are addicted. By that time your one comfort, that seems to give you life, is the thing that is killing you.

*
I wasn't trying to say yesterday that I thought my lovely label would get my any special treatment. Merely that I tick a box. So they would know what preconceptions to shove my way if I ever did get inpatient "care"...

Here's a furry picture of a cute koala.

Illustrated: the woman to the left in the second picture is Jacqueline Susann, author of the 30,000,000 copy bestseller about pillpopping, Valley of The Dolls...

*

MUSIC: Judy Garland sings THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY in A Star Is Born

  I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE WEEKEND   ***

James Bond, the Queen, Cleopatra, Fukushima, and a Dash of Hypomania

I'M AMAZED that Her Majesty consented to appear for real ~ yes it really is her ~ in this James Bond clip that was part of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

You know it was an ambition of mine for years to actually go and see the Olympics in person. Especially gymnastics or diving.

But they bodged the ticket allocations so badly that most people who wanted to go never even got the chance. Because I don't even have a credit card I would never have been in the running. Which is quite ridiculous...

Cleopatra is playing [I scribbled this down last night]. A very good film but very longwinded at over four hours ~ cut down, the audio commentary informs me, from over six. How anybody endured this in the cinema is anyone's guess. But at least in those days you could have a fag on the whole time.

Elizabeth Taylor got the princely sum of a million dollars and Richard Burton a half million in this $42 million spectacular, which is still, in inflation-adjusted terms the most expensive film ever made.

The commentary says you need to multiply by four or five to get today's prices. But 1960s Sterling requires about fifteen times multiplication to be even halfway close.

Did you know when Elizabeth went through her final divorce, from construction worker Larry Fortensky in 1996, her total assets were valued at over $400 million, with over $200 million in the bank!

She made more money from perfume than all her movies combined. The multiple hundred millions stemmed from her marriages, art investments, her $100 million jewellery collection plus numerous business interests.

Cleopatra, by the way, had barely a drop of Egyptian blood in her veins ~ the woman was GREEK. She was fluent in seven languages and, as the film says, would, if she had been a man, have been considered an intellectual.

Talking about nuclear [yesterday] by the way (and I don't know what possessed me to put up and watch the attack section of The Day After) the site of the word's most recent nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan, Fukushima 福島 means, irony of ironies, "Good Luck Island"~!

WAS I hypomanic yesterday? I could well have been. I notice the post I wrote swerved back and forth ~ especially into Chinese characters. It's true I was unusually chirpy, which is the most typical sign of the condition. Before flying into the foulest of bad moods when the computer repeatedly refused to function fast enough. (Extreme impatience is another hypomanic characteristic. The faster you go, the slower the rest of the world seems. Add this to irritability and you get hyper-impatience.)

I ended up staying up very late last night (not sleeping is a hallmark of the condition), until the medication zonked me in the early hours. Then I slept a good eight hours (sleeping six hours or less is more typical of hypomania). Only rising at 1:30pm ~ a most disrespectable time. And my body was acheing all over, another sign that I had been hyper. Plus I felt this diffuse sense of anxiety, which can also be associated with hypomania. All this is only "important" in that I like to have some sense of where I am going with my mood. It gives at least some feeling of control over the uncontrollable.

Last time I saw my GP for a quetiapine (Seroquel) refill, she suggested changing it to olanzapine (Zyprexa) but mentioned the new drug is notorious for weight gain. Which I really don't want. I associate gaining weight with running out of control, something I really don't like to do. I never got addicted to heroin in a quest for oblivion, as you might expect. No, paradoxically, the stuff made me feel far more in control than ever before and THAT among other things was its chief attraction to me.

So I'm most certainly NOT hypomanic any more... Who knows where we go from here...?


FILM SPECIAL:
JAMES BOND ESCORTS THE QUEEN TO THE OLYMPIC GAMES...




SPECIALLY FOR YOU, BEV, HERE ARE SOME MYSTICAL SYMBOLS...
❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬

MADONNA: GIRL GONE WILD (2012)
I thought, aged 54, she'd outgrown all this raunchy imagery... apparently not...





❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡ ❤ ღ★ ☆ ✰♩ ♪ ♫ ♬☮ ☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚ ✞ ☨ ╬❤ ♡

High Society

I AM WATCHING High Society. I wasn't well enough to watch it yesterday, so it spent all night on pause. Somehow I have managed to lose my DVD remote control. Being as the player cost only £17 and has its foibles, I might as well get a new machine as pay £10 for a new remote.

I was in a strange mood yesterday. The type of mood where the thud of doors, the clatter of pans, forms words, so that inanimate objects speak to me. They never say anything particularly interesting, by the way, apart from the odd obscenity. So much for quetiapine 300mg. All it does is make my mouth as dry as the bottom of a birdcage.

Oh by the way that film has just finished while I was writing and I still don't know who ends up marrying whom. The picture quality was absolutely amazing. And the colours. How come 1950s films had such brilliant colour? Is it to do with the Technicolor process?

By the way, I notice by reading the DVD cover that Ted Turner owns the rights. The only truly successful bipolar person I can think of. He bought the entire back catalogue of MGM Pictures for $1.5 billion in the 80s. Exactly what I would have done, if only I'd had the money.

Grace Kelly was like a more glamorous Audrey Hepburn. She's the only woman I can think of who managed to get drunk on screen in a ladylike way. No wonder she became a princess.

Apart from Fank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly, the best thing about this film is the Technicolor interiors. If you get bored of the dialogue you can always just gaze at the background.

By the way I bet Louis Armstrong got paid less than the white actors. Racist bastards. Hey I'm jut watching the extra features. Did you know High Society cost $2.7 million to make in 1956. That's a lot of money. (It grossed $12 million later that year.)

And I'm still in a funny mood...


  
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HERE are the two stand-out numbers from the movie. If you get bored of the songs, just bathe in those brilliant collours...

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE
FRANK SINATRA and CELESTE HOLM



TRUE LOVE
BING CROSBY and GRACE KELLY