Friday, January 23, 2015

The Gershwin cartoon: it's here! It's very clear!




I was gobsmacked to find this. I went on YouTube and searched under "Gershwin cartoons", knowing such an absurd thing could never be. And here he is in the Rhapsody in Blue segment from Disney's Fantasia 2000, obviously based on the famous Hirschfeld caricature of the 1930s:




I can't find Oscar Levant, but this fellow looks a little bit like him, especially the coffee:




But Oscar, of course, is infinitely sweeter. . . 



Go, men. . . go Munsingwear!























These are some choice cuts from the Munsingwear cartoon-style ads I love so well. I find these rife with paradox: at a time (1940s) when homophobia could not have been more rampant, it was common, even perfectly acceptable to depict half-naked men in locker rooms talking about their underwear. They would even argue about the relative merits of their ginch (gonch, gitch, gatch), often criticizing their buddy for having a baggy ass or sagging crotch. My favorite shows two men in bed:  "Leave me alone, you big overstuffed Easter Bunny!" "Wise guy, huh? Tomorrow a.m., when you're sweating icicles, think of me in these draft-proof Slumberalls! They're so comfortable, you don't know you've got 'em on!" A not-so-subtle image, when you think about it, and which (when added to the pillow fight with the guy bending over) makes for an uncomfortable, yet compelling sociological whatayacallit.



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Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Up in smoke: what happened to George Gershwin?





George #1: dredged out of rare archival footage, in turn dredged up by documentarians. Here we see the godlike, melancholy Gershwin portraits come to life. The guy looks like Basil Rathbone on the surface of things. The pipe, the regal bearing. I assume he's either courtside or At Home, or at the home of some bigwig like Schoenberg. 




George #2. This one reveals so much: the godlike creature casually stretching, the playfully rough character grabbing the neck of some poor unfortunate female (who doesn't look too happy about it), the jauntily histrionic piano-playing with whoever-it-is. Not Oscar Levant, we know that much.

When you keep seeing the same 10 or 15 seconds played over and over again, it either drives you crazy or helps you see more and more in these tiny moments, these gestures, the setting of what looks like director's chairs in front of a massive, flat-trimmed hedge. This really happened, it did, and it spins on your hand, a few seconds of reality played over and over as no one ever dreamed it could be.




George #3. This might be Schoenberg, but then again, I think S. was older than this at the time (early '30s?). Whoever it is, they're playing piano four hands, and goofing around facing the camera like little kids. 




George #4. The long and lanky man with the bearing of royalty Walks Out on the Patio, jerks a treat away from the dog, unfolds a chaise.




George #5, my least-favorite, but perhaps the most revealing. When the dog, which he has already deprived of a treat, won't jump up on the chaise with him (reminding me of Hitler's cowering Blondi), he jerks it up forcefully by the scruff as it resists him with a flinch. I am reminded of a magician yanking a rabbit out of a hat.




George #6: again, in slow, and fade to black.

Given how world-famous he was, why don't we have more archival footage of Gershwin performing? The last gif (below) of GG racing through I Got Rhythm and bowing like a jerky puppet was all I found, and it was described as "extremely rare". He lived until 1938, for God's sake. This wasn't the Stone Age. By that time Oscar Levant (usually seen as a much lesser light) had a solid career as a composer and pianist, and had already written a book and appeared in a couple of movies. Where was George?

And after that, a fade to nothingness. A brain tumour carried him off, horribly, at age 37. His life sprang wildly out of shape, his behaviour became crazed, he smeared chocolate all over himself (though he was surely not the first - or last - to do that; it was just that no one expected George Gershwin to do it. My theory is that he was making himself up in blackface, and missed.)

His sister-in-law Lee Gershwin had a hate on for George, and as he fell out of his chair in restaurants and endured agonizing headaches, she pushed him away in disgust, banishing him from friends and family. It was all psychosomatic, you see, a result of the strain of being a Great Composer. Never did anyone think to look under the hood, where a golf-ball-sized malignant tumor was destroying his temporal lobe.  By the time they looked, it was too late, there was nothing they could do. His temperature shot up to 106.5 degrees, and he soon died, going up in flame hotter than the fires of his genius.

I have only barely begun to touch Gershwin, though like most afficionados I used to think I knew him pretty well. I am becoming fascinated now (oh boy, look out, here comes another obsession that will take up a couple dozen posts!) as I wait for a bio I ordered from Amazon. Not the 900-page one - I'm waiting to see if the shorter one whets my appetite for more, or puts me off. I bogged down in two massive Twain biographies when it all got to be too much. 

I always felt GG was snobby, cool, asexual, full of himself, if vital and driven and full of energy. The music always struck me as a bit crazy, and sometimes excruciatingly beautiful. It was as if the composer and the rest of George were two beings. His death was just plain godawfully horrible, no one deserves to die like that, exiled even from one's own mind. So what was going on there, were things just burning too hot to carry on in in any state of health?

More will be revealed.




APPENDA (UM, IX). I remembered a story from maybe 40 years ago, when my brother Walt, a professional musician, told it to me. At the time I thought, oh, this is what musicians talk about around the water cooler or at the bar or wherever. But it's a damn good story, and as usual I wondered if I dreamed it.  I looked it up, and, yes, here it is!  I found several versions of it (in fact I just deleted one that stunk), but I like this one best, embedded in a story in the Wall Street Journal. There are various versions, of course - and sometimes the teller is actually in the car with Gershwin, or even driving it. If it never happened, then perhaps it should have.




Throughout his brief life—he died in 1937 at age 38—Gershwin had the golden touch. The phenomenon of George Gershwin astonished everyone—not least Gershwin himself. He was famous for his immodesty, except that in him it came off as something else, self-amazement perhaps. "You know the extraordinary thing about my mother," he once said, "she's so modest about me." When a friend in Hollywood was driving wildly, ­Gershwin alerted him: ­"Careful, man, you have ­Gershwin in the car." Listening for the first time to a full ­orchestral rendering of the ­opera "Porgy and Bess," he ­exclaimed: "This music is so wonderful, so beautiful that I can hardly believe I wrote it."


Not F. Scott Fitzgerald but George Gershwin may have been the reigning figure of the Jazz Age. Gershwin holding forth at the piano at parties in Manhattan, everyone gathered around as if by magnetic force—these scenes were among the symbolic tableaux of the 1920s. Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: "I felt on the ­instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."



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Monday, January 19, 2015

Festival of Bad Animation, Part Zero: Worse than Bad




More, more, we need to know MORE about Paddy the Pelican!

Incredibly, there is a Wikipedia entry for this thing, so it must have existed. One YouTube version said it was shown as part of a bad animation festival at Comic Con (a. k. a. ComiCon, Comimicoon, and Goddamn Commie Bastard). 

The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican was an animated television series that debuted in children's local stations in Chicago in 1950s. It is exceedingly rare, but has gained some fame for appearing on Jerry Beck's "Worst Cartoons Ever." On the DVD, he states that he has not found any evidence that this particular animated adaptation was aired on TV, although there is evidence that the Paddy the Pelican character began in 1950 as a local TV puppet show on Chicago's WENR-TV. Paddy's adventures were presented in comic strip drawings done by Sam Singer.This show was scheduled to appear on the ABC network in the fall of 1951; Singer had also started producing a newspaper, Paddy Pelican Junior Journal. The animated episodes currently in existence all have copyright dates of 1954.
The show is notable and infamous for its shoddy pencil-sketch artwork, reused animation, rambling and apparently improvised voiceovers, muffled and poorly synchronized soundtrack, and general low-budget problems. The only music is a few chords played on an organ, although the title card is accompanied by a man making noises apparently intended to sound like a pelican squawking.
Singer, who worked for Disney and other Hollywood animation studios, also produced a television Uncle Mistletoe local children's television show, based on the Marshall Field's character of the same name, as well as other early animated shows.

I thought Marshall Fields was a department store, and I dooooooo not like the sound of Uncle Mistletoe, who reminds me of one of Santa's evil henchmen. As usual, there is the claim that he "worked for Disney": maybe he was his bookie or something, or the go-fer. At any rate, absolutely no animation was used in the production of this cartoon.



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Sunday, January 18, 2015

Festival of Bad Animation, Part 1: Don't Eat the Mushrooms in Oz



What a strange labyrinth is YouTube. I often find stuff I haven't seen since I was preverbal. It strikes me very strangely now. Perhaps cartoons were my first language.

This one, though, Jesus Christ, who let this out of the bag? And WHAT is it, anyway - why can't  I find any information on it? It isn't just the bizarre non-animation, it's the disjointedness of it in general, the way songs inexplicably burst forth out of nowhere. And the creepiness, probably unintentional. It gives me the impression of an outline or rough draft, perhaps a trial balloon for some ambitious project involving actual animation. But even that would have to make a modicum of sense. This is just a truncated chunk of story, starting in the middle and ending a little further along in the middle. 

Perhaps this was shown at Masonic retreats, or at Shriners conventions before they brought on the dancing girls covered in whipped cream.



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Festival of Bad Animation, Part 2: The Completely Bizarre Adventures of Hercules




Do you-all remember those godawful Mighty Hercules cartoons ground out by Trans-Lux in the early 1960s? Believe me when I say that they'll look like Fantasia beside this strange thing. I can't figure it out, don't know what the story is supposed to be. The animation appears to be construction-paper shapes moved along by an invisible hand, or maybe there's a magnet on the back. It's all so unexplained. I want to know more, but in a funny sort of a way, I don't.



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Festival of Bad Animation, Part 3: Who the Hell is Paddy the Pelican?








I don't know why this is, but I keep on dredging up stuff on YouTube, animated things that are just inexplicable. They are so primitive that they hardly qualify as animation, and in this case the lines barely stay on the screen but seem in constant danger of falling off. I see lots of plagiarism of Disney's Big Bad Wolf, not to mention a generous dose of Heckle and Jeckle. It seems every animator from these old cartoons "started with Disney", working for slave wages in Uncle Walt's sweat shop as a kind of badge of honour. I don't think this guy ever got out of his basement. Disney, my ass! He should be making those flip books, I mean the ones drawn on pads of paper, not all this computer nonsense. But there IS something outstanding about Paddy the Pelican: the theme song. The words, in particular, have come to haunt me day and night.

(I can't seem to get rid of the dud video at the top of this, and don't want to make a new post - lazy - so watch this one - or don't. Ha, ha, ha, ha-ha HA hah haaaaa.)




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Saturday, January 17, 2015

This is why nothing happens to you












































EDNA'S case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married - or about to be. Yet not one possessed more grace or charm or loveliness than she.

And as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.

She was often a bridesmaid but never a bride.

That's the insidious thing about halitosis (unpleasant breath). You, yourself, rarely know when you have it. And even your closest friends won't tell you.

Sometimes, of course, halitosis comes from some deep-seated organic disorder that requires professional advice. But usually - and fortunately - halitosis is only a local condition that yields to the regular use of Listerine as a mouthwash and gargle. It is an interesting thing that this well-known antiseptic that has been in use for years for surgical dressings, possesses these unusual properties as a breath deodorant.

It halts food fermentation in the mouth and leave the breath sweet, fresh and clean. Not by substituting some other odor but by really removing the old one. The Listerine odor itself quickly disappears. So the systematic use of Listerine puts you on the safe and polite side. Lambert Pharmacal Company, St. Louis, Mo

This Smart Moire Cosmetic Bag FREE with PURCHASE OF LARGE SIZE LISTERINE
THE HIT OF PALM BEACH at your druggist's while they last
This offer good in U. S. A. only



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Friday, January 16, 2015

Hitchcock redux

Telephone to Glory: the ultimate infomercial



Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!
I can feel the current moving on the line.
Made by God the Father for His very own,
You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone. 

Central’s never busy, always on the line,

You can hear from heaven almost any time.
’Tis a royal service, built for one and all,
When you get in trouble, give this royal line a call. 


Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line.
Made by God the Father for His very own,
You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone. 




There will be no charges, telephone is free,

It is built for service, just for you and me.
There will be no waiting on this royal line,
Telephone to glory always answers just in time. 


Telephone to glory, oh, what joy divine!

I can feel the current moving on the line.
Made by God the Father for His very own,
You may talk to Jesus on this royal telephone



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"Slices, dices, makes julienne fries": Ronco gifs




I.
I love.
I love old.
I love old ads.
I love old ads on.
I love old ads on YouTube
Cuz then I can gif them good.




This lady
does spazz
over dried-out
food
cuz it's good
for you and me.
Come see!




In times of old, 
when everything was orange,
a thing you cranked
spewed food
that you then fried,
and then you died.




Here Grandma cleans her teeth
and Fido cleans his teeth
we all have cleaner teeth
but she does complain
about that funny taste.




Throw popcorn at your records, boys,
while the tone arm hums
its seductive song.




"Oh-oh! Dropped the garbage?
AGAIN??"




Punch that thing in the thing, make an ugly design
And pay for the thing that makes that thing!




Men!
Steam your coat,
Men!
Steam your tie,
Men! 
Steam your pants,
Men! 
Till you die,
It's the STEAM-A-WAY!




This thing
grinds up your hair,
dries your panties to a frizzle.
But your fresh drawers
and puffy head
will make you rightly sizzle!




Drying tip: put your panties on your head
and dry 'em both at once!
Great for pubic hair, too.
Your date will go wild with desire,
And you'll say,
"Thank you, Tidie Drier!"




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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

"Again, the Rhapsody": George Gershwin revisited





I'm all afizz tonight, and for an unexpected reason. I just came out the other side of one of those old Hollywood juggernauts, the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. It really was a too-long movie, and kind of heavy going. I wouldn't even have watched it (again), except for the fact that I'm re-reading A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant. I went through a "thing" a couple of years ago and probably bored everybody (but who's everybody?) with endless posts on Levant, one of the strangest human beings ever to walk the earth (and a musician, so I inevitably fell madly in love with him). Levant was one of several people who "played themselves" in Rhapsody, since they knew and/or worked with Gershwin while he was alive. 

It had that earnestness that film bios had in the 1940s, and though it attempted to portray Gershwin's drivenness and arrogance, it didn't quite come off, largely because Robert Alda was just too weak and mild. He was nice-looking, looked vaguely like Gershwin without that exotic feline strangeness, and could play the piano well enough that he didn't have to fake it, though it was Oscar Levant's inspired performances that ended up on the soundtrack. Alda was. . . well, he was nice, even in his temperamental rages. He conveyed the agony of the brain tumor that killed him by pressing on his forehead and sighing, "These headaches."




Levant wasn't in it very much, and when he was, I was surprised at how baby-faced he looked, almost boyish, with those haunted eyes. I study Levant whenever I see him, and in this movie I noticed something different, how his body language isn't strictly American. The Old World follows him around. He leans his forehead towards people and stares at them when he talks, grabs or perhaps grasps people by the arm, even pinches Alda's cheek in a "mein boy" attitude. He is both sardonic and warm. An exotic thing, I don't know what it is, something almost Middle Eastern about the cheekbones, or surely Slavic. And green eyes, which show up mainly in An American in Paris in the scene where he is lying in bed smoking. 




I'm getting to the part that sneaked up on me, hypnotized me almost, and I didn't expect it. But it seems so obvious now. It was the music. A mammoth hunk of the repertoire, most of it well-performed and pretty much all of it familiar to me, but this time - . What is it that makes your perception of things slip sideways? I was inside the music, inhabiting, dwelling within those dissonant chords, and not just grabbed by the crazy rhythms but infected, injected until my bones began to dance to the music's free will. 




I began to hear Gershwin as both coolly, almost offputtingly elegant and screamingly driven, furiously primitive in the sense of touching the Essence. I began to see a world within his songs, almost a universe. The perfection of it hurt me, jarred me. At the same time, the wildly jarring syncopation, the massive primal rushes of energy were dizzying, like plugging directly into a brain on intense overload. 




The sexuality of it was stunning. I had never heard sexuality in Gershwin before. Ever. I grew up with it, we had records lying around of Gershwin, An American in Paris and multiple versions of Rhapsody in Blue (and here I am reminded of  Levant's mother, her dry comment to her son: "Again, the Rhapsody?"). I have a few favorites, one of them being the I've Got Rhythm Variations. My favorite Gershwin song is The Man I Love, but almost no one knows how to sing it.

But tonight, somehow, it was all changed, changed utterly.




What happened here,  I wonder - how did it fall open, all this grey buttoned-down stuff, the music of my parents, bursting in a heady rush like a  tropical flower that flings itself open and gushes with an overripe, intoxicatingly embarrassing fragrance? This has nothing to do with the mild civilized Gershwin I knew, this bom-bompa, bom-bompa, bom-bompa of something deeper than drums, something that makes the concept of "rhythm" seem laughable. 

Even now I can't capture it, I go around and around the subject. I did not even realize fully that I was being mesmerized and taken over until the end of the thing, when I noticed I felt very strange. There was one song, and God how I wish now that I remember which one, because the chords were gorgeously, sourly dissonant, to the point almost of pain, and I loved it, oh I loved it, loved it and wanted more of it, and now I forget which song it was because they all bled together into one great throbbing Thing.




I did not expect this ambush, a slow cumulative effect that steamrollered me, out of this fusty old '40s movie with its cliches (Gershwin, in a Paris hotel room with the Eiffel Tower visible out the window, hears cab horns going "toot-toot-toot" and rushes to his notation paper, wild with inspiration, writing with an elegant flourish on the title page: "An American in Paris"). Right now I feel tired enough to die and know I have to go to bed. I don't know what it is about music, does it change as we change? New layers are exposed all the time by fresh artists, to the point that the original is sometimes twisted into a corkscrew, its essential meaning lost.




Anyway. When I hear this, Judy Garland's raw and sweet version of my favorite Gershwin song, complete with its distortion and wavering sound, I realize some few artists always knew what was hidden inside this deceptive stuff. Almost every artist sings it as a standard ballad, without much expression, and I want to scream: how can you not hear, how can you not see? The lyric is hopefully hopeless, the yearnings of a waif with no life, of a wispy woman barely hanging on until Her Hero arrives to take away all the ugliness and disappointment, the despair. It's all there, both in music and lyric, but almost everyone misses it. 

There is something about genius that makes us think, "Of course!" Makes us think, "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" or even, "hasn't it always been that way?" But no. Someone blitz-brained it into being, and I'm glad it didn't have to be me. I don't believe I am up to such dark, warlocky tricks.





Post-blog discoveries. I've become fascinated with the brain tumor that killed Gershwin at age 38, the way the whole thing was grossly mishandled as "hysteria" or "neurosis", even "attention-seeking". Seen through today's glasses, it's impossible to look at this set of symptoms and NOT see something neurological going on.

This from the New York Times Health section explains a little bit:


When he was 23, Gershwin began complaining of vague abdominal pain and constipation. Doctors found no physical basis for the complaints and told him the illness was in his head. He eventually sought psychotherapy.
But in early 1937, his behavior turned bizarre. He tried to push his chauffeur out of a moving car, smeared chocolates on his body, complained that he smelled burning rubber and forgot his own music at a performance.
He received little sympathy. ''There were people who said of him that he was an attention-seeker,'' said Hershey Felder, the creator and star of ''George Gershwin Alone,'' a Broadway show. ''They thought he was just making antics.''
On June 23, Gershwin was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, complaining of debilitating headaches. He refused a spinal tap, a painful procedure that was commonly used to diagnose brain tumors, and was discharged with a diagnosis of ''most likely hysteria.''
Less than a month later, he was taken back to the hospital, unconscious. In the right temporal lobe of his brain, surgeons found a cyst filled with an ounce of dark yellow fluid. They removed it, but it was too late. The pressure had begun to bear down on his brain stem, which controls functions like heart rate, respiration, temperature and consciousness, forcing part of it outside his skull. He died on July 11.
(Worst part of this, which they don't say: Lee Gershwin, his brother's acidulous bitch of a wife, seemed to have a hate on for him. Once when he fell in a restaurant and couldn't get up, she was quoted as saying, "He's just after the attention. Leave him there."


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