Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Enrico Caruso: "Over There" by George M. Cohan




Pretty strange stuff! I woke up with a song from the '70s Broadway musical George M! in my head. It was called All Our Friends, and so far I haven't been able to find lyrics or a performance other than a hideous rendition by an amateur group that can barely stand up, let alone do an awkward kick-line and sing wildly off-key. But I do remember some of it: "Half a ton of them, every one of them, all our wonderful friends. . . the line of them never quite ends!" This of course reminded me of the definition of "friend" on Facebook. In most cases you have never met or spoken to, nor will you ever meet or speak to, these people. I encountered a gushing new page by someone who had "omigosh, already exceeded the total on my page (5000 friends, all close, personal and intimate, of course), and have to start a new one just for fans of my writing." Already it was up to 1500. I don't know how this happens. Most of these friend-laden people aren't famous, and you cannot tell me (and no one will even talk to me about this - everyone goes silent) that they really do have thousands and thousands of "wonderful friends. . . The line of them never quite ends!" So instead, here is Enrico Caruso singing George M. Cohan's patriotic World War I anthem, Over There, perhaps in French towards the end (? French?) The line of them never quite ends!




(Oops, just found a fantastic version, probably sung by Joel Grey - even with a repeat, it lasts only one minute, so it took me several tries to transcribe the words. They are pretty much as I remember them. The link below may or may not work - I hope so, because it's a kick-ass performance.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=George+M.+Cohan+All+Our+Friends

All Our Friends

George M. Cohan

All our friends, every one of them, they’re
All our friends, wonderful friends
Dozens and dozens, a regular throng
Simply besiege us and follow along
Because they’re all our friends
Half a ton of them, the line of them never quite ends!
They come in groups and troops, invited or not
Uptown, downtown, right on the spot
I must confess I guess I worship the lot –
Yes every mother’s son of them
Every one of them
All our wonderful friends!


(Da-da, da-da-da, da – LIKE!)





Bonus Joel Grey. I can never get enough of Joel Grey.




The only one who could keep up with Cagney. Who was the only one who could keep up with George M. Cohan.



Sunday, August 3, 2014

Weird shit in the lab!




The first time I saw this one, I thought, duhh-y, duhh-y, duhh-y, like Bugs Bunny in the cartoons. Now it's the twentieth time, and I'm still saying it. I realize, yes, that it's some sort of science experiment, that it's probably perfectly safe, but why does it take place on a cookie sheet? Is it meant to be edible? Some new form of calamari, perhaps?





This one is even more volatile and mysterious. It just puts out these - things. I don't understand science, don't understand how anything can even "be", and then something like this comes along! Satanic, if you ask me. Black magic. The Republicans would be against it, for sure.




This one goes on for about half a minute. Not sure how that can be, because gifs have an outside limit of fifteen seconds, but maybe in the Land of Kraken, the usual rules are suspended. All I know is, my blog is having a hard time playing these things and I've already had to re-gif and substitute several times.  My blog is trying to spit them out!  Just a coincidence? I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!






This is a truly horrible experiment by that Mad Russian guy, whoever he is, KGB Guy or whatever, the one who made the floating candle floating in kerosene. It looks as if the yard is about to explode. Don't try this at home. Don't try this, EVER.




A mere science experiment, or a new life form in the microwave?  You decide.


(Mad Scientist's Note. I had to cut about half of these because they stopped playing. So if the rest of them won't play, it's the Mysterious Ghost of Pharaoh's Snake or the Kraken Kreature, or whatever, or else the gifs are too long (which makes no sense because the longest one plays fine). Sometimes I just have trouble with these things, other times not. It's kind of like my lumbar region. Hope these are sufficient to gross you out.)


Why did the chicken beat up the dog?





Why did the chicken cross the road?

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

SARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he's a maverick!

BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.

JOHN McCAIN: My friends, the chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road?

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or against us. There is no middle ground here.

DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross the road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he's guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way the chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

GRANDPA: In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heartwarming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2014, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2014. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Hap, hap, happy - it's the Hapsburgs!




Sometimes you just have a few things left over, you know? And you're not sure what to do with them. Such was the case with my Hapsburg Lip post. Bizarre as the story was, it was about to leap to the next level, the one called "weird or what?" Some of the pictures were a little hard to believe: portraits done by professional artists who were hired to make flattering images, coming up with things that belonged in a freak show. The fact that these people, who all looked alike and had the same deformities, were marrying each other as a matter of course was - well - disturbing.

 Here Charles the 2nd of Spain, also called El Corkscrew for his twister-pitcher genes, gets it on with some wench, probably (judging by the lip) a Hapsburg.




I don't know why, but I found a cartoon character with a vast prognath - prognath - REALLY BIG jaw, and wondered if he might be descended from Hapsburg blood. The problem is, the internet is keeping it hush-hush, as if the incest ramifications are just too creepy and no one will admit to being a descendent. Those Hapsburgs, eh? Still powerful after all these years.




Meantime we keep finding evidence, like this stone guy with a really big, you know.




Then there is Salad Guy, who is also said to be a Hapsburg - or are those radishes? You decide.




This guy was especially useful during planting season.




It's a little-known fact that Charles had a cat, which he named Charles Jr. How the Hapsburg genes ended up in a cat is anybody's guess, until you realize that Charles' half-sister married her uncle, who was also her first cousin. These marriages were called consanguineous, or "cat marriages".




Though crossbreeding was strongly discouraged, it did sometimes happen through sheer boredom. Interspecies romance was carried on covertly, often on a blue blanket.




This is what Charles saw when he looked in the mirror: the ultimate Power Pout. It shattered only seconds after the portrait painter was finished, resulting in his beheading in the public square.


Sugar Sphinx

Artist Kara Walker Draws Us Into Bitter History With Something Sweet





Kara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.

In other words, Walker is used to filling a room. But this spring she was asked to fill a warehouse — the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in New York. It's about to be leveled to make way for condos and offices, but before it goes, Walker was asked to use this cavernous, urban ruin for something special.




Walker took me on a tour of the show a day before it opened. The factory is covered in sugar — it almost looks like insulation or burned cotton candy.

"It's a little bit sticky in some areas ..." she said. "There's sugar caked up in the rafters."

I was so busy trying not to get molasses on my shoes that when I turned the corner, I was stunned. There in the middle of this dark hall was a bright, white sphinx. The effect is the opposite of those white-walled galleries; a dark space and a towering white sculpture made of — what else? — sugar.






"What we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features," Walker explained. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable — recognizably human. ... [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you."

Walker has dreamed up a "subtlety" — that's what sugar sculptures were called in medieval times. They were a luxury confectioners created for special occasions.






To understand where all this is going, you need look no further than Walker's teasingly long title for the show: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."

I know, it's a mouthful. But Walker has this wide smile and as she sweeps her hands around in broad gestures, white tides of sugar dust ripple at the edge of her feet — and she sells it.




"It was very fun and childlike to, you know, have your hands in a bucket full of sugar, or a 50-pound bag of sugar, throwing it out onto the floor," she says.

She's doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you've admired something disturbing. In this case, that's the horror-riddled Caribbean slave trade that helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries; a slave trade built to profit from an insatiable Western market for refined sugar treats and rum.







"Basically, it was blood sugar," Walker says. "Like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands."

She explains that to make the sugar, the cane had to be fed into large mills by hand. It was a dangerous process: Slaves lost hands, arms, limbs and lives.

"I've been kind of back and forth with my reverence for sugar," Walker says. "Like, how we're all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane."







Walker went down a rabbit hole of sugar history, at one point stumbling on some black figurines online — the type of racial tchotchkes that turn up in a sea of mammy cookie jars. They were ceramic, brown-skinned boys carrying baskets. Those were the size of dolls, but Walker's are 5 feet high, some made entirely of molasses-colored candy. Fifteen of them are posed throughout the factory floor, leading the way to her sugar sphinx.

The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but they're also kind of scary — some of the melted candy looks a lot like blood.

"I knew that the candy ones wouldn't last," Walker says. "That was part of the point was that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating. But what's happened is we lost two of these guys in the last two days or so."








Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.

"Also in a nutshell," Walker says, "and maybe a little bit hammer-over-the-head, is that some of the pieces of the broken boys I threw into the baskets of the unbroken boys."

OK, that's not so subtle, but it's also not unusual for Kara Walker. She's dressed in a shiny, oversize baseball jacket emblazoned with the gold face of King Tut on it. I ask her if at a certain point she worries about doing work that is seen as being just about race.






"I don't really see it as just about race," she says. "I mean, I think that my work is about trying to get a grasp on history. I mean, I guess it's just kind of a trap, in a way, that I decided to set my foot into early on, which is the trap of race — to say that it's about race when it's kind of about this larger concern about being."

I tell her it's almost impossible to talk about our history without talking about race. She replies: "There [are] scholarly conversations about race and then there's the kind of meaty, unresolved, mucky blood lust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive."

Inconclusive, but for artist Kara Walker, ongoing.




BLOGGER'S BLAH BLAH BLAH. When I first read about this today, I was astonished. It was the most innovative thing I'd seen in years, gorgeous in a scary, monumental way. It's Mammy as Ramses, as Isis, as Mount Rushmore carving, as the Venus of Willendorf with a scarf tied around her head. She's Goliath, she's Gulliver, she's everything God-sized and oversized and improbable. Everything about it, from the jutting fertility-symbol breasts to the enormous rounded butt thrust up either as an offering or a giant ass-up fuck you, to the face that is Sphynxlike and  impossible to read, is provocative and even thrilling.

But I always have a strange stab when I see art like this. I truly think, whether this is irrational or not, if I had been able to get a career like this going when I was that young, if I had had that much acclaim and affirmation, recognition of my talent, opportunities even, my life would have been totally different. Happier? Hell, it would've been ecstatic, and the problems I've had - oh God, let's not get into the problems I've had - never would have happened at all, because I would have been an Artist.




Logic tries to scream at me that women artists, in particular, can be self-destructive and even suicidal, that no amount of acclaim or even love is ever enough. And I don't believe it, because in the core of my doomed little brain I think success solves everything. I just feel that way, I am convinced.

But that's a mere sideline. This was a headspinning project that must have been built to scale by a huge team of people, and I am not sure how all that sparkling white sugar was layered on. I know there are other articles about this astonishing display, but right now I'm tired and I don't want to read any more. My own life is mystifying, not very productive it seems, and I'm not expressing anything of note. But maybe I should take heart in the fact that at least somebody is.





Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Friday, August 1, 2014

Don't give me none of your lip: the freaky demise of the Hapsburg Dynasty




If this guy looks freaky enough to scare the Elephant Man, that's because he is.

He represents one of the biggest genetic train wrecks in human history.

How do I get on to these things, for heaven's sake? I saw a photo of Queen Elizabeth II on the cover of Macleans, a national newsmagazine in Canada. She's on her semi-regular Royal Tour, causing very elderly ladies wearing hats with veils to totter out to the edge of the sidewalk while Liz does her indolent royal wave.

All these people, these royals, and I mean royals all over the damn world, are interrelated. It's scary, but they were bred like horses back then, bred for stamina and aggression and militancy and all those desirable traits.

What stunned me, in looking at the rather hideous cover pic of the Queen in her typical mauve polyester suit and gigantic frothy hat, was how much she is starting to look like her husband, Prince Phillip.




It's bad enough that Prince Charles now displays all the worst attributes of both his parents: long horsey face, thin sharp nose, bad teeth, and eyes set too close together. And worse somehow, that William and Harry, who used to have so much glamour and seemed to have broken the family curse for ugliness, are already starting to look too royal for comfort. Even Harry, long rumoured to be the offspring of Diana's illicit affair with her riding instructor, has the long razor nose, the close-set eyes and the vulpine Windsor smile.

OK then, this is a very long way around my topic. In googling around to get more info on royal intermarriage, I struck pay dirt: an article in a New Zealand newspaper called "The inbreeding that ruined the Hapsburgs".




"The Hapsburg dynasty (more correctly spelled Habsburg, but that's too hard to pronounce) was one of the most important and influential royal families in Europe dating back more than 500 years and producing rulers in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands and the German Empire."

These people might as well have all lived in one country. They were their own brothers and sisters. Generation upon generation of harrowingly close genetic unions gradually produced a host of medical problems, but since nobody knew what the fuck was going on, the political alliances based on blood continued, until. . .




Until Charles II of Spain, a monstrous bundle of mistakes who limped through a short life, unable to reproduce because he didn't know one end from the other. Fortunately, he was the end of the line for the Hapsburgs in Spain.

This guy lived around 1700, when every malformation was seen as demonic. And boy, was this guy demonic. Even royal portaits like the one above (and remember that these portraits had to be flattering, or the artist would literally lose his head) revealed a freakish person with a huge head, jutting jaw, small insectoid eyes, and what became known in history as the "Hapsburg lip".




This has nothing to do with back-sass, or even lips, but the extreme forward set of the jaw, so extreme in poor Charlie's case that he could barely talk and couldn't chew his food. It went well beyond the typical Hapsburg "power pout" which until that point was seen as a mark of distinction (sort of). His development was so retarded that he couldn't speak until he was four, couldn't walk until age 8, and remained what was then called an imbecile, barely aware of his surroundings. He was kept in a sort of pupa for a few decades in the feverish hope that he would produce an heir. The relentless and horrific centuries-long mass of genetic deformities finally collapsed like a row of dominoes. Charles turned out to be the last of the Spanish line.

Scientists have tried to figure out his "inbreeding coefficient" and all that jazz, but suffice it to say it was ten times normal. Like the song says, he was his own grandpa:

"Charles' father, Philip IV, was the uncle of his mother, Mariana of Austria; his great-grandfather, Philip II, was also the uncle of his great-grandmother, Anna of Austria; and his grandmother, Maria Anna of Austria, was simultaneously his aunt."

Whew.



It would have benefited the poisoned gene pool of this dynasty to introduce the blood of some commoners, but they wouldn't have it. Convinced that interbreeding was the road to greatness, they manipulated alliances between uncles and nieces and cousins and half-siblings  (who must've started reproducing at 12), ignoring the fact that all these folk were beginning to look mighty peculiar.Not to mention similar.

Jay Leno had nothing on them. One of Charles' ancestors, Leopold I,  was nicknamed Hogmouth. They were ugly. I mean uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-gly.

All this is odd, when you think about it. Through most of human history, people lived in little villages and never went anywhere. Inbreeding was a certainty, so why didn't the race die out like poor, impotent, imbecilic, drooling Charlie?




Is this the real reason why famous explorers struck out, going to ludicrous extremes and taking risks that only a madman would take?

I have often wondered if the explorers we know about, Cortez and Champlain and all dem guys, only represent the tip of the iceberg, the more-or-less successful ones who then established colonies in the New World. How many tried and failed, and never made it into the history books?

Lots, probably. But something in their genetic code was saying, "Get out, get out! Get OUT of here before you end up with a chin you can set your coffee cup on."




Genealogy and mitochondrial DNA testing is all the rage now, with people anxious to find out they're related to Ben Franklin and Joan of Arc and such. Nobody wants Joe Blow the average schlub as the patriarch of their lineage, but in most cases it's probably true.

We can rest easy, however, in that none of us is related to Charles II, whose DNA coils were as damaged as a Slinky that's been run over by a Mack truck.




NOTE. This is a summer repeat, cuzzadafact I don't feel like writing today - hey, summer's half over and I want to go buy some watermelon. I've also added a lot more illustrations: my blog was limited when I began, or perhaps ***I*** was, and didn't know how to manage photos. But this is a topic worth revisiting for its extreme icky-squicky factor. What's so astonishing is the ignorance of the people involved, the way they kept on relentlessly boinking their ever-closer relatives and producing children ever-more-ugly-and-enfeebled. Finally the problem solved itself when the last of the male line collapsed in a heap of genetic mistakes.

Fun stuff for a summer's day. Eh?





And here's a bonus, gleaned from some-site-or-other, one of those Really Pompous Historical Ones:

"Charles II is known in Spanish history as El Hechizado ("The Bewitched") from the popular belief - to which Charles himself subscribed - that his physical and mental disabilities were caused by "sorcery" rather than the much more likely cause: centuries of inbreeding within the Habsburg dynasty (in which first cousin and uncle/niece matches were commonly used to preserve a prosperous family's hold on its multifarious territories). Charles' own immediate pedigree was exceptionally populated with nieces giving birth to children of their uncles: Charles' mother was niece of Charles' father, being daughter of Maria Anna of Spain (1606-46) and Emperor Ferdinand III. Thus, Empress Maria Anna was simultaneously his aunt and grandmother."


"Still, the king was exorcised, and the exorcists of the kingdom were called upon to put straight questions to the devils they cast out. His great-great-great grandmother, Joanna the Mad, mother of the Spanish King Charles I who was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - became completely insane early in life; the fear of a taint of insanity ran through the Habsburgs. Charles descended from Joanna a total of 14 times - twice as a great-great-great grandson, and 12 times further..."


"Towards the end of his life Charles became increasingly hypersensitive and strange, at one point demanding that the bodies of his family be exhumed so he could look upon the corpses. He reportedly wept upon viewing the body of his first wife, Marie Louise."


(I'd cry too.)







UPDATE! I just received a tip-off from a reader about the Crown Princess of Sweden, who is looking suspiciously Hapsburg-y in the chin area. Well, I looked her up, and my God. . . 




Pray for her children.