The Louise Brooks Hairdo

The world is funny, life is a shaggy-dog story playing in real-time through a strange loop, and no anti-climatic punchline coming anytime soon. Hmm. Case in point?

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E@L’s favourite movie review podcast (pretentiously implying that he listens to, let alone is aware of, more than one) is Kermode and Mayo’s Take. Love it: music and movie trivia and fun boomer banter, movie recommendations, jokes, opinions, and crucially, great emails from listeners…

One of these on the most recent download E@L was listening to this afternoon was a question about naming some once illustrious actors whom no-one remembers these days, presumably due to the vast cultural chasms between generations. Could Mark or Simon name some famous movie people who aren’t any more. Famous that is. Mark quickly brought up the silent movie star Louise Brooks as an example. Once a legend of the silent screen, but now, mostly forgotten. E@L searches his memory to no avail. (Where did he put his small headphones, also none of this avail stuff.*) Mark promised that we would recognise her if we saw her photo, so Simon, who did not recall the name either, Googled and then said, “Yes I do recognise her!” (Or words to that effect.).

E@L wasn’t sure he knew the name either. He wondered if she was in the sister’s big old book of glossy promotional photographs of Hollywood Stars, The Image Makers, and if he would recognise her… but then he got distracted by life, like not driving into the car in front of him as he sips his flat white, etc…

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Cut to the balcony at E@H GHQ later that day, where it’s a bit windy and chilly considering that summer is a hair’s breadth away, but the mosquitoes don’t care, so the gas patio heater is raging and emitting throaty burps of flame as the wind hits it sideways, the smoking mosquito coil is threatening go blow out, the ice in his Disaronno (been to an Italian restaurant, in the mood for an almond digestif) is slowly melting, the solar powered lights still have charge, and E@L is up to page 205 of Thomas Pynchon’s newest, Shadow Ticket.

It’s the depression era, prohibition is about the end, and our gumshoe protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, from Milwaukee is in… Budapest? Vienna? Paris? (fuck it’s hard to keep up with these details in a Pynchon novel) talking to Daphne Airmont, the absconded jazz singing daughter of a business/criminal type, known as “The Al Capone of Cheese”, and she’s the person he’s supposed to bring back to the family mold, I mean fold in Chicago, and she is complaining about her putative fiancé, saying how she’s often “come upon him in the sweaty clutches of some Swing Girl barely into her teens, Louise Brooks hairdo, nighttime makeup in the daylight hours…” 

And E@L goes W. T. A. F!

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Twice in one day! Like, SMW** or what!

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Remembering The Image Makers, E@L runs around his tsunduko style library looking for the old book - here it is! Looks like some naughty puppy (Alfie, the family’s cocker spaniel from the 1970’s no doubt) has taken a fancy to some of the pages, but there they are the early days in artistic black and white: actors and those who were once called actresses, with their the soft-focus cheeks, bright eyes either with I-dare-you-to-come-hither stare or a thousand yard stare to left/right (which is my best profile?), the elaborate stage clothing with that daring flash of cleavage or side-boobage that E@L recalls from his teenage years. And there’s the blokes with their chiselled jaws, earnest testosterone fuelled smiles, brylcremed hair, and fuck-you-I’m-famous personae.

But…

No Louise Brooks.

With the same straight fringe flapper bobbed hairdo though, are only Colleen Moore, and Claudette Colbert (though fair haired).

So, following in Simon Mayo’s fingerprints, E@L Googles her….

And yes, he does recognise the Louise Brooks hairdo, the face, the whole impression of her. Black hair. Very short bob, linear fringe.

This:

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E@L has seen her before, surely. Inside whatever part of brain controls trivia, there is an explosion of electricity and a flushing toilet of neurotransmitters across of a network of said neurones, despite what any number of agents might be trying to do to his serotonin, and hey! HEY!

Surely Louise Brooks is The Hat-check Girl in that hilarious 15 sec snippet of Buster Keaton from Seven Chances (1925)… Tight black bob, steely, indifferent but accusing gaze — must be her!

This one:

Watch it on YouTube for a complete giggle...

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Louise Brooks’s life as Hollywood starlet and after was documented in her autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood. And there are a few resources around on the internet, like an interview with Kenneth Tynan in The New Yorker, and extended bio here, and a shorter YouTube bio or two. So I won’t go into it myself. It seems to be an “Oh dear, to fame and riches, to who? and rags, to oh dear (escort girl!), to relative fame again” story. The not quite classic Joseph Campbell mythic cycle, but what is?

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So E@L watches the Buster Keaton clip one, two more times. It never fails to amuse him. But what tale of forlorn love doesn’t? you ask. Good point.

And then he finds other resources to confirm that the wise, wily, worldly “girl with the black helmet” in Buster’s visual gag really is Louise and…

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Here’s the shaggy dog ending… (“That ain’t my dog. Mine ain’t that shaggy.”)

It WASN’T her in the Keaton clip after all.

Sigh. It was someone else, with the oh-so popular Louise Brooks hairdo. It’s Rosalind Byrne, another forgotten star of the silver*** screen. She’s got a post of her own in someone’s Louise Brooks fan-blog (with further links if you’re interested), probably because of people like E@L who get them mixed up.

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Oh dear. Two out of four references in one day; well, it ain’t great, ain’t even a pass, but considering he was not aware of Louise Brooks or her infamous hairdo it ain’t that bad really, thinks

E@L

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* #CRUNCH#, oh there they are, under the wheels of his office chair.

** Spooky. Mystic. Weird. (Have you forgotten already?)

*** Metallic silver really was used in the reflective screens with the projection technology of early cinema. 

Not The Expat That E@L Used To Be.

Something was missing, and it was this: it was the feeling that I was expressing what I intended to express, and that I had an audience with whom I was in sync, who understood me, got from me what they wanted and what I wanted to give. It was the feeling of belonging. 

I hadn’t belonged anywhere for a few years now.

Tracy Thorn: Bedsit Disco Queen.  p240. (emfarsis mine)

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After severalish, smalllish Japanese whiskeys, these are the sentiments that E@L is resonating with at the moment. 

Problems with writing stem from…?  

E@L doesn’t know. He is aware of a potential audience of 2 to sync with at the maximum. 

Is it the 21C schizoid learned distractability of smartphones, and of course the internet in general? Is it the barely subdued anger at the spiralling chaos of the last few years leading up to and including his post-expat suburban life, circumstances dumping him in this unexpected place in what is allegedly his new reality, his new normal…? 

And add the righteous anger at the currently even more fucked up than usual actual world itself? 

With all these angers, frustrations, regrets, and nostalgia for lost futures spinning into each other how could he think clearly, how could he write about the pernicious banalities of his current life and try to milk a laugh out of them? How could he write about anything now and be the E@L of the old days (when he was funny…)?  

The absurd reality of what his life is now like… What he shoulda describe woulda outdo the most imaginative fictions anyone coulda create. 

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E@L sits at the computer on his desk, and can’t face his Scrivener blank pages. There is some magnetic like-poles repulsion from sitting with a writing programme open to, well, to sitting at all, let alone fucking writing anything.  

He needs distance, the distance the computer is trying to push him away to... Is this why he rides 30-40kms on his bike when the weather permits? Real or spiritual, emotional, physical, he needs distance from all things. Perhaps take the laptop outside to the table on the balcony. Perhaps this desk is no longer his writing desk. Perhaps he should have another whiskey. Or perhaps another desk…

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Or (phew, oof, that smell again!?) perhaps he should change his colostomy bag before going to bed and risking a blowout and a Trainspotting worthy bed-linen crisis at 4am. 

Ignore all the preceding: all else pales. At the moment, right now, this is the biggest question in the life of   

E@L

eRide Like The Wind! (Part 1)

Exercise is needed badly here: after a few years of troubles, including quite a few hospital stays,  pretty much lying in bed for most of several months all up, E@L had transformed himself into the classic ageing former expat. Big belly (OK that was always there), no arse, skinny legs, pants hanging way too low thanks to an even more grossly unhealthy hip/waist ratio. 

His good legs were once a feature: an ultrasound scan of his muscular thigh even made into a long lost promotional poster.

Now they are nothing to be proud of: nothing, to be honest, but an embarrassment! 

Yep, he should have be following his old but never implemented New Years Resolution of 2013. This the first year after that first “Italian angina incident” which required two stents, a week in St Catherine’s Hospital, two weeks walking around Sienna, still missing 90% of the historical significance of the place, and he had missed the horse race by only a few weeks. This was followed by four, or was it six, weeks in Hamburg with expat ex-Singapore friends - he wasn’t supposed to fly, but hey! (Aside: The 180km/h autobahn run from the airport at Lübeck, where his friend worked, certainly tested the integrity of his refreshed myocardium.) 

That NYR involved a big rubber exercise ball, one that he had bought at the request of his part-time flat-mate with a bad back who needed to sit straight at her desk. You could do a variety of exercises with this impressive orb, but his principle goal was 40 (to start) big-ball-supported wall-squats. 20 in the morning that is, and a repeat 20 in the evening. Sad fact: After 13 years with this ball, now repatriated and blown up again (like himself), he calculates that he might be up to maybe 800 reps in toto. Under-utilised, wouldn’t you say?

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E@L recently connected with an old friend, seriously old, same age as himself, and getting older. As with most lost-in-life old friends, they connected at the funeral of another old friend, one who’s not getting any older. 

This old friend, Mick, sorry, Michael (“My mother christened me Michael” he would say, just to put people out of step, which he found amusing) had brought his new friend, a mid-priced eBike, down from the country with him. It had fat tyres, an engine in the hub with 5 speeds of assist, 8 gears. Michael, though it seem unlikely to some, must had been sponsored to ride as his aerodynamic lycra top had brand names all over it. He loved his eBike. He rode up around 30kms most days, and sometime further, to the limit of its battery; breezed uphill past struggling Tour-De-France wannabes; tinkled his bell as he shot up behind meandering pedestrians and their dogs; enthusiastically tried to convince E@L to buy one. 

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Michael and E@L went camping out at an old surf-spot down the coast (beware of koalas, kangaroos, tiger snakes) with two other old friends — see above re: connection method. The first evening, these four old retired men, sat together outside their varied styles of 3-night accomodation. 

Michael had hired camper-van with all mod-cons as he was thinking of his fast approaching grey-nomad years and thought’s he’d try one out. 

Wally, who had organised this reunion, kipped out in the back of his small EV, on a foam mattress, old surfer style. He had a marquee thrown out from it which covered tables chairs, a hot-plate, a toaster, tubs of camping things, and even a small bar-fridge! How did all of that come out of his car? Tardis, go eat your multi-dimensional hear out! 

Bernie, now that he was retired, had cleared his large work van, a Mercedes (fond of German autos, he once drove a surfie-style VW station-wagon), of all his carpentry stuff to put a foam mattress on a bench in the back.  E@L had a two man tent, borrowed from Wally, with a new large-size camp-bed with specs to carry his weight, but not to match the tent’s dimensions, so that it protruded from the tent for half a metre, exposing his feet (or his head, choose one) in the night to those koalas, kangaroos, and tiger snakes.  

In the chill of that autumn evening, they sat around two aromatic candles on an upturned bucket, drinking their self-supplied favourite poisons and reminisced about journeys E@L had not been on as he was married at 19 and moved overseas at 40, and hadn’t really seen these friends in 40 years or so. Their stories of Baja California, New Zealand, the desert breaks in South Australia, filled the evening. E@L kept his adventures in Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza to himself… 

And why candles, you ask, and not a roaring open fire, marshmallows, guitars, as old campers might prefer? In this site, adjacent to a large national park, open fires were not permitted except in certified, approved, don’t-start-another-devastating-bushfire-round-here fire-pits, which none of the group owned, or knew to purchase in advance.

But Michael also loved to rave about his eBike.

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These friends could not help but notice that E@L was not the greatest paragon of health and vigour in the group. Heart attacks, multiple bowel surgeries, a colostomy, alcoholism (only a social-media drinker, but when isn’t he on FB?), still a large beer-belly despite his success with Ozempic, no arse, skinny legs and all. But they were still friends, old friends, friends enough to suggest that E@L fucking do something about it, and fucking quick! A quick dip in the ocean while they tried to recherchéz les surfing skills perdu, was hardly enough exercise.  Maybe, one day you could surf again too, E@L? 

And maybe fucking not! 

“Get an eBike” was Michael’s strongly enthusiastic suggestion. The others agreed, even though they didn’t have eBikes. Was this some conspiracy, E@L wondered. 

Michael had also suggested getting another couple of candles for the next night. While the “warmth” from these two was reasonable[!?], another two $35 aromatic candles would surely do more to keep away the beach-side, clear-skied evening chill. He also suggested that each time one of them went for a piss, that they move the candles around, like stirring wood in a real fire. He had a sense of silly humour that was infectious. But he was serious about the eBike. 

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E@L will skip the other hijinks of the trip… OK maybe one thing. On the third and last morning, prior to packing, Michael and he, up earlier than the others, were checking the non-existent surf. They were standing on the sandhill at the edge of the beach, not far from the small cliff at the S-W point of the bay, when suddenly a screaming came across the horizon from the clifftop above their heads, and, so low you could almost reach up to it, with the deafening whine came a military jet, unmarked as to from which air-force it originated… Wow! Deafening, and, you might even say, surprising! The plane banked to follow the curve of the coastline and shot off, up towards Anglesea, until it was too far away to see… 

Then we remembered that there was an airshow back in Geelong, and of course some Goose or Maverick was checking out the surf for themselves. We think it was probably an F-16, but what the fuck would we know?

Given the early morning, and the heavy drinking the night before induced brain fog, and with the jet and its scream well gone, it was quite the “Did that actually happen?” moment.

An alarming reality was now only a memory. 

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But, in conclusion: You’re old man now, or the same age as one, and you’re not an athlete, and you're well behind the eight-ball of “living forever or dying in the attempt” billiards: c’mon, get an eBike and build back those

E@L   

thighs!

To Be Continued!