Monday, January 26, 2015

Haunted: the home town that lives in my head






We lived at 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Such a long handle, and a strange place.

I just had the urge to dig out some photos of the place. Plenty strange, but a beautiful old Edwardian-era house previously owned by the unmarried Terry sisters.

Since I first posted a different version of this piece a couple of years ago, a wealth of old Chatham photos has emerged from the vast wonderland of Google images. Thus fuzzy memories are brought into sharp relief, a new phenomenon that must be changing the human brain in some fundamental way (oh, THAT was what the church looked like! I thought it had windows on that side. Etc.) But nobody has noticed that yet. When I hear even the most insignificant names attached to Chatham, I get the queerest feeling, almost an ecstasy, but at the same time a longing so intense that it scares me. Oh, I want to go back, go back to when it was simpler, when milk was delivered by horse and wagon and Milky the Clown entertained us instead of Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb.



Plenty of the old houses in Chatham looked haunted, and very ugly. I used to wonder how anyone could live there. I remember sloshing along in rubber boots, walking home to have lunch (fried eggplant, if I was lucky) and watch Popeye. These were the vintage Popeyes made in the early 1930s, which I didn't see again until I found the DVD re-release a couple years ago.

It's all a pastiche or jigsaw or something. Making story means imposing order, usually, an order that really isn't there. So I won't make story today. Wait a minute. These weren't boots at all, but boot covers, something like the ubiquitous "galoshes" (talk about onomatopoeia!) that we all wore to protect our shoes. They leaked like mad, but that's what we did. Ladies wore little plastic bonnets to protect their hair, something like a shower cap.



I remember a bit of a song about pigeons with pink feet. Never mind. A capital ship for an ocean trip was the Walloping Window Blind. . .

Sugar beets. I remember the burny intense smell of sugar beets being processed into sugar. It reminded me of my Mum making something delicious called Burnt Sugar Pudding, a caramelized confection with a velvety texture. In those days, no one had to limit emissions in any way. There was the Lloyd (no kidding, it was really called Lloyd!) jute bag company. I didn't know what a jute bag even was until someone told me, "Dummy, it's a burlap sack."

And then there was Darling's, the most hideous smell in the world. This was most evident on the infamous sweatbox days of a Southwest Ontario summer, when the fumes were held down by a heavy lid of humidity. It was stomach-turning, a mixture of guts and hides and bones. They used to tell me it was a slaughterhouse, but no slaughterhouse could smell that bad. Later on my brother told me it was a rendering plant, i.e. glue factory: so maybe that's why no one told me the truth, so I wouldn't scream with horror that horses were being melted down so our postage stamps would stay on.



"Horse glue,"my husband said 200 years later. I thought about it. I was licking the boiled-down gluten of an old horse, maybe a retired racehorse with a blown tendon. It didn't bear thinking about.

What else?

A thump-thump, thump-thump. . . no, more like a "stock-stock-stock-stock", some sort of factory. God, Chatham seems now like it seethed with industry.

Plack. Plack. A neighbor, an old man named Salem Aldiss, used to take a flexible board and bend it back and let it snap on the cement. Hordes of starlings would shoosh up and blacken the sky, but soon they'd be back on the trees and powerlines, craaawwww! craaaaaaaw!craaaaaaaaaaw-ing in a vast creepy choir and leaving splats of guano that was most unpleasant to try to remove.



I think I bit my neighbor, it's so long ago. Shawne Aitken, Mr. Aldiss's granddaughter, used to come in the summer to stay with her grandparents. She lived in Sault Ste. Marie. I loved Shawne and maybe even had a mild crush on her, but when I was very very little I bit her I think. My mother was required to march me over to her house (only two houses down, not a long march) and apologize. Then Shawne, still a little weepy, gave me a sucker, and we were friends again. (Purple. The best sucker in the bag.)

I thought I was the only child who'd bitten someone in the history of the universe. That memory was squashed so far down in the "shame" bin that, like compacted paper or Jurassic mineral layers, it won't even come out properly. Maybe it's just as well.

There were two Pauls in kindergarten, Paul Sunnen and Paul Tunks. I didn't like Paul Tunks very much, he was fat and obnoxious, but I was in love with Paul Sunnen because he was thin and romantic, and a diabetic. I wasn't even sure what that was - it was called "sugar diabetes" in those days - but there were whisperings that he had to have needles. We all sat cross-legged in a circle embedded in the linoleum floors of the kindergarten room, and I always sat directly across from Paul Sunnen. We drank milk out of weird-looking little glass bottles and had to have a "milk ticket" to get it.



In kindergarten at McKeough School, we had two elderly spinster teachers, Miss McCutcheon and Miss Davy. In my memory, they are about nineteen feet high. My mother was tall as a sequoia. I remember hanging on to her apron and looking up, far up. Family legend has it that one day my mother said to me, "You don't like me." I answered, "You not bad." This sums up our entire relationship.

What else? Ann Peet, who could be nice to me or awful. They were Dutch and lived next door. They were poor in a much-mended sort of way, but clean and presentable, which my mother approved of. There were a lot of kids, Annie and Susan and Charles and Brian and. . Garnet, named after the mayor, Garnet Newkirk I think. Garnet John Cornelius Peet. When he was born, Ann went door to door to tell everyone, telling us his name was Garden John. Ann's father was in the war in Holland and told stories. Once he told her that the people were so hungry in occupied Holland that a woman ate her baby.



All this somehow made its way into Mallory, my second novel. Not sure how it evolved into such an autobiography. Anyway, Mr. Peet (Cornelius: did anyone call him Corny?) had pigeons, and I liked to climb over the (actual) white picket fence in our back yard and watch them reproduce. I had no idea what was going on and one day asked Mr. Peet what they were doing. "Dancing," he said, with a sly smile. One day I saw him bring home a live chicken in a jute bag (probably from Lloyd's). He grabbed its neck and took a knife and sliced its head off. The chicken's body flapped and convulsed all over the yard, while the beak on the severed head opened and closed.

My parents had dirty books. Under my Dad's underwear in the bureau drawer. My God, I must have had nerve. When they were both at choir practice, I would burrow around and find them. One was called Ideal Marriage and didn't say very much. Another one, much more dirty, was called ABZ and was a sort of encyclopedia of sex, originally published in Sweden or somewhere. There were whole pages that were blanked out that said, "This page has been removed by the publisher for violating obscenity laws," or something like that. They didn't just edit it out, they obliterated it. My Dad sold books and would sell Ideal Marriage to someone under the counter, but where the hell did this one come from - and, more to the point, what the hell was fellatio?



Oh, don't let's get into sex and Carmen Ferrie (she's probably still out there somewhere and is still red-haired and funny and smart and popular). She told me stuff, but I simply didn't believe it. Jesus! Even though I already knew from experience what an orgasm was, it was hard to believe that people would actually want to do that stuff.

I will leave horses aside, as I've covered them thoroughly in other posts. I will also have to leave Bondi for now, though it was a rapturous two weeks out of the year. Bondi hasn't changed a whole lot in all those years, and is still run by the same family, which somehow gives me hope.

Stamping on puddles with the little plastic boot-covers that fastened with a button and a piece of elastic. Plash.Stamp. And best of all - the spring flood, when the pitiless endless aching Ontario winter finally let go and released several tons of water all at once. It shooshed and roared. The street was like rapids. Some of the bigger sidewalk hollows still had ice over them, and it was pure ecstasy to stomp them and see and feel them shatter under your feet. Stamp. Crunch.


Around the corner, oh my god there was a little hill in the sidewalk! A little drop. It seemed like a thousand feet down. I was probably three and riding a tricycle. Is that drop still there? Back then a three-year-old was given complete freedom outside, not even watched. I couldn't ride up the hill and had to drag my tricycle up the grass, but I did it over and over again.

There was a strange church on the corner that said Jesus Saves, the kind of church we didn't go to, thank you very much. Too much singing. There was a sort of bar at the front entrance, and I'd hang off it like a sloth and pretend I was riding a horse that I called "Bet".




Oh and, the pervert in the park. When we were pre-teens, Shawne and I in those endless sweatbox summers went to Tecumseh Park because there was a swimming pool (kind of) and baseball games. I hated baseball but went with her anyway because it was something to do. There was a man, this guy. He had a funny smirky smile. He was sort of like "The Big Fat Man" of our very early childhood, a version of the Boogie Man (a rather fat elderly gentleman whom I am sure was completely harmless. When he saw me, he always said, "Hello, boy.") This guy, the funny smirky guy who looked a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald, just loitered around. He was always just out of eyeshot, and we giggled and ran away, having fun. Jesus, we could have been raped or killed. One time, just one time in the Chatham Daily News, there was a one-paragraph story about a paper boy who had been sodomized (how is this possible? But it's true) by an unknown stranger.



I retain memories of Chatham and feel a kind of bliss, which is weird because my childhood was anything but blissful. My Dad's drinking slowly and inexorably escalated until he became a staggering, booming tyrant. My older sister refused to believe any of my stories. He was a fine upstanding man, a wonderful father. But she hadn't been around him for ten years. She had gone to Europe, as far away as she could get, the other side of the world, even speaking another language that none of us knew. He sent her money. Briefly she acknowledged his alcoholism in a letter, and once told me she found him "oppressive", but she took it all back when I told her I had been sexually abused. The wagons went in a circle, and like all oppressive patriarchs, he was once again crowned with many crowns.

Dylan Thomas, you were wrong, this stuff is all shit, and jumbled as hell. I don't want to make story today. This is my life. I somehow came out of all this jumble. Branch led to branch. It's amazing I am still connected to one friend from those days, a little surreal. All this came from the rather ghastly sight of McKeough School, which I never really looked at because I was too busy marching in to military music.



Post-blog observings: I just realized, as I dug out a previous post about my old church being haunted by the notorious Russell Horsburgh, that all of Chatham-Kent and its surrounding communities is thick with apparitions. No kidding, there are ghost tours you can go on. When my friends and I walked by those old Gothic-looking brick buildings on Victoria Avenue, it would not have been much of a stretch to imagine they were haunted. But I never heard of any ghost tours. My own flirtings with the paranormal have never lead me anywhere significant - nothing has really happened, as far as I am concerned, to convince me that it's anything more than wishful thinking and/or my imagination. We all long to know what is on the "other side", and I suppose being a ghost is better than being nothing at all. Though I can see them wafting in and out of the windows of McKeough School (above), which is supposedly being renovated and used as a heritage site, I kind of hope they stay out of my house. Go back to Chatham where you belong!






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Sunday, January 25, 2015

Bye, George




"Hey! Careful, buddy. Gershwin's in the car."


"On July 9, 1937, Gershwin had a seizure and fell into a coma. Subsequent surgery disclosed a large cystic mass in the right temporal lobe; it involved too many vital brain structures to be removed. A biopsy revealed glioblastoma. He died several hours after surgery without ever regaining consciousness.

Despite the perilous ingress of his tumor, Gershwin composed two of his most beautiful songs, "Love Walked In" and "Love Is Here to Stay," in the last few months of his life. The processing of music is not as lateralized in adult males as is speech. Notwithstanding the volatile simmerings of Gershwin's right-sided tumor, his left brain could have assumed, over time, essential functions of his musical genius, allowing for his terminal inventiveness.

I see Gershwin, his neurons moving like piano keys, playing his concerto; his tumor cells press atop the neurons like so many thumbs, until the music stops."

Excerpted from The Language of Cells: A Doctor and His Patients by Spencer Nadler, M.D.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron - An American In Paris




Going with Gershwin, going wherever this Gershwin thing is gonna take me, I'm reminded of one of my fave movie bits: the sensuous, incredibly acrobatic ballet from An American in Paris. The trumpet solo in this version blows all the rest out of the water, forever. Hard to describe, really - you just have to listen to it - but it just has more - balls to it, more imperious sexuality, more Gene Kelly animal physicality. As I've said before, I never associated Gershwin with sexuality (though with this shining steed of a solo in my memory, I don't know how I could have thought it). 

Uan Rasey - does that name ring any bells? Not here. But he was one of the unsung heroes in MGM movies, one of those top-flight musicians who, instead of plodding along in the same groove with a symphony orchestra for decades, found himself providing the sound track for our lives. I don't even know how you pronounced his name, and he died at 90 a few years ago, but God, he made this number, made it racy, a little tom-cattish, finding misted midnight corners in it, nuances no one else could provide. 

I still think of Gershwin as asexual - the princely bearing, the Hapsburg lip, the "Gershwin is in the car" approach to the world - but from somewhere, or out of nowhere, this vibrating, brassy fire.

Who the hell is Mortdecai (and why?)




You know, folks, it's rare that I see a movie with the kind of reviews this one got (see excerpts from Rotten Tomatoes, below). Apparently Johnny Depp has been on a real losing streak. I was puzzled over why he strapped a dead crow to his head to play Tonto in the recent weak update of The Lone Ranger. This one is even more puzzling. I'm not sure I want to know what it is about, but it looks like it's about 2 hours too long for these particular critics. Once Siskel and Ebert claimed they wanted to kill themselves rather than sit through one particularly abominable movie (I think it was called  She's Out of Control). I am sure at least some of these critics wanted to take long (two-hour?) washroom breaks or just sprint for the exit, making up the review out of whole cloth, as I am sure they do anyway.





When I blathered on about making The Glass Character into a movie, an idea which was ridiculed and shot down so quickly I don't even know how it got back on its gasping, quivering feet, everybody said, "Oh, it should be Johnny Depp." Johnny Depp is now well over 50 years old, and while those Cherokee cheekbones have served him well, in the book Harold is barely 30. Johnny looks nothing like Harold, not even close. Zachary Quinto was my first pick, and he still might pull it off, and Jake Gyllenhaal was in second place, though his look is pretty far off (except for. . . those lips). But Johnny. He has yet another stroke against him now. It's sad, because he has turned in some interesting if over-quirky work over the years. I liked him on 21 Jump Street, myself, when he played a rogue cop. But Harold? No matter how cute his Keatonesque antics in Benny and Joon, he just won't make it - in particular, not after this.






Full Review… | January 23, 2015

ScreenRant
With art-heist caper Mortdecai, Johnny Depp tries his darnedest to start a kooky Austin Powers-like franchise with a side of bumbling Insp. Clouseau. But dash it all if it isn't a crashing bore, old bean.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Toronto Star
 Top Critic
[Mortdecai] fails on just about every level, so committed to its ridiculous premise that it doesn't bother to step back and recognize what an unholy mess it is.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015




Grantland
 Top Critic
Stale, strained and sadly dismal considering all parties involved, Mortdecai wants to be a globe-trotting roguish romp crossing the globe in a bespoke suit, but it feels more like a brandy-soaked nap in grandad's threadbare housecoat.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

About.com
Depp's strenuously unfunny performance turns a frivolous caper comedy into a grim death march to the closing credits.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Newsday
 Top Critic
Mortdecai is content to stroll casually and unassuredly through its paces, taking long, long intermissions for Depp to whimper and giggle.





Full Review… | January 23, 2015

CraveOnline
A sh-tshow from start to finish, a theoretically whimsical comedy wherein the actors physically begin to shrink as it goes along, as if they realized what they had gotten into just a beat too late to possibly escape.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Deadspin
Go if you're a raging Anglophile with an afternoon to burn or you just love Depp, even at his hammiest. Otherwise, don't point this thing at you.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Entertainment Weekly
 Top Critic
It's heavy on doses of double entendres, slapstick and zaniness, but completely bereft of any laughs or true entertainment value. (Full Content Review -- Sex, Profanity, Violence, etc. -- for Parents also available)
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Screen It!
When it gels, it's genial. When it doesn't, it drags. And drags.



Film School Rejects
If you have an allergy to pure goofballery, this is not the movie for you. Spend your Depp bucks elsewhere.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Blu-ray.com
What looked funny in small, trailer-sized doses turns into an interminable death march when applied to an almost two-hour run time.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

CinemaBlend.com
There was no laughter, just grim resolve on the part of those of us professionally obligated to stick it out through the bitter end.
Full Review… | January 23, 2015

Beliefnet
[An] absolutely bewildering waste of time, talent, energy and money.


POST-BLOG POST-MORT(DECAI)

Could not resist adding this morbid little tidbit. Much has been made of Depp's box office decline in recent years. It strikes me that he isn't being careful enough what he takes on - just has to work all the time, for reasons of his own. Maybe he's broke. It amazes me how these stars go through money.




Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in Black




Since my enthusiasm so often runs ahead of my knowledge, I'm writing this in advance of knowing anything about my subject. Or not much. I have ordered a biography from Amazon called Oscar Levant: A Talent for Genius, one of those 500-page doorstops I love so much, but for this post I'm pretty much winging it.

He was a strange one, and I have strange feelings for him, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Who wouldn't love a man who could play the piano like that? NOBODY could play the piano like that, poetic sensitivity melded with a gangster's rat-a-tat-tat aggressiveness.




Nobody looked like him either, with that sensual, almost Polynesian mouth, the flop of hair that whipped around as he played, the constant manic bobbing and weaving (particularly later in life when he was in the throes of God-knows-what sort of addiction/affliction) reminding me of Michael J. Fox. The grief-stricken, fathoms-deep eyes, the forlorn eyes of an abandoned child, that could quickly flip over into fierceness, to a sense of "yeah, make me", or even blanked-out indifference. 

Oscar Levant was an updated Oscar Wilde without the effeminacy. You knew he wasn't gay by the way he eyed women. Only his personal charm saved it from being a leer. Some glamorous dame would kiss him on the cheek (he played the harmless, charming, eccentric sidekick in all his movies) and he'd lunge at her neck. He got away with lines that would have been censored without that lightning-stroke, oddly monotone delivery: "It's a good thing Marilyn Monroe has gone kosher, because now Arthur Miller can eat her."







Seductive, but somehow - offputting -  as he evolved into a sort of comic hired gun, an outrageous joke-machine that spewed them out on demand. The narrow-eyed, double-breasted gangster demeanour, cigarette constantly dangling from those Filipino lips, deteriorated most awfully over the years as mental illness slowly consumed him. He ended up, no kidding, a real bona fide mental patient, institutionalized, getting shock treatments right during movie shoots so that he had to have himself signed in and out for his scenes (at one point actually playing a mental patient, a part he described as "Pirandelloish").

That's sad. That's sadder, even, than the elderly Dorothy Parker and her poodle called Cliche holed up in her fusty ash-and-bottle-strewn apartment, watching soap operas all day as her friends edged away from her one by one.








Oscar Levant had friends aplenty, but did they keep him around just because he was so entertaining? Did he sit down and think about all those viper-strike lines, actually write them down, or did they just pop out of him like Athena from the head of Zeus?  He had an extremely loyal wife who became a caretaker in later life, and three pretty, vivacious daughters. He had a lively, varied career that most people would envy, considerable fame and adoration, and at the same time the most awful, soul-destroying depression that finally claimed him and sucked him under. It's hard for me to even think about it. 

People sometimes called him a sellout; he did coattail on his close association with George Gershwin, who did Levant a big favour by croaking at age 38. Levant was automatically assumed to be his successor, but who can follow George Gershwin? Not even George Gershwin. Oscar Levant composed, but it doesn't hold together somehow. He's a  sort of Schoenberg on ice, a "look-at-me-I'm-a-composer" performing triple axels at the keyboard. The music is technically good, but it doesn't say anything.




His classic, often-misquoted line was, "There is a fine line betwen genius and insanity. I have erased that line." He constantly joked about suicide and his own craziness, causing an uneasiness and even fear that, for some uknown reason, was viewed as hilariously funny. He was, I think, the first shock comedian.

So, that's what I know, and it ain't much because it's less than what's in the Wikipedia entry. I think his doorstop of a biography (which I will consume in installments propped up in bed before sleeping) will be a wild ride, or else it will be boring, as some biographies inexplicably are.




About these pictures. It was a big disappointment to discover there were very few good photos of him, except for the sardonic, Edward G. Robinson-esque pose at the piano which was a publicity shot for his most famous film, An American in Paris. Others were grainy and dusty-looking, almost mildewed, as if no one had bothered to take care of them.  Contrast this with the hundreds of razor-sharp black-and-white shots I easily found of Harold Lloyd, even going back to pre-1920.



So I took the ones I could find, many of them extracted from old album covers, and because they are in the public domain, and because Oscar said I could, I tinkered with them. Something leaped out at me, a kind of predatory energy. There were so many dimensions to him. He looked different in every shot (and I've excluded some of the later, really painful ones). In a few of them he looked like a young Alan Arkin. 

Out of those ancient grey lithographs emerged  Shakespearian spectres, that is, if Shakespeare had dealt in slighty off-colour wisecracks. And many of the black-and-whites, particularly very dark concert shots, exploded into colour, which as far as I know is impossible (i.e. it's relatively easy to go from color to black and white, but how is it possible to go the other way?). But in every case, no matter how much I altered the original, he was still Oscar. His essence came through every one of the masks. 




People were known to say things like, "Oh! That's Oscar Levant. You know, he could have been. . . " But if hehad "been", as they say, we'd know nothing about him now. He would've had a stellar career as a concert pianist, then sunk out of sight, with only a few musty-smelling LP covers to remind us of who he was.

Instead we have quite a few "sidekick" movies where he's somehow irresistable in his craziness, and a few YouTube videos that are a little disturbing to watch, as he becomes a sort of tame circus tiger on pointless panel shows. He even does a turn on his own show, and the one surviving kinescope is excruciating: he slurs and bobs around like Ray Charles at the piano while his wife sits close beside him like a watchdog, making sure he doesn't fall over the edge.





And he did fall over the edge. What's on the other side of it? Nothing, or a reunion with his pal Gershwin, or celestial piano keys waiting to be played? Considering the chaos of his life, I think oblivion would have been more than enough.




CODA: I'm not sure I'll be writing about Levant again. In fact I kind of hope he won't be another Harold: making an Oscar doll would just be too challenging. But I did find out something about his death, so I'd better get to it now. Too bad he wasn't around to enjoy it, for he was morbid enough that I think he would have found the bizarre circumstances amusing.




Though everyone seems to think he was a complete wreck at the end, like everyone else with serious mental illness he also had his good days. Days when he could noodle around on the piano, talk to his wife June, take a nap. This is what happened: he went upstairs to lie down for a while (for, at age 65, he was already frail from years of drug abuse), to rest up for an interview he'd be having later in the day with a certain fresh-faced young photojournalist.

Her name was Candice Bergen.

Late in the afternoon when the doorbell rang, his wife welcomed Candy in, all bubbly and excited about meeting this living legend. June called upstairs:

"Oscar! She's here!"

No response.

"Going deaf, obviously. Oscar! Come on down now."

"Oh, it's OK, Mrs. Levant, if he wants to. . . "

"OSCAR." She looked at Candy in puzzlement. "What's he up to? I'll be right back."

Mrs. Levant went upstairs and into the bedroom. He was curled on his side in a fetal position, the way he always napped, the corner of a blanket childishly wrapped around his head.

"Oscar."

The silence was profound.

"Oscar." She touched his shoulder, then drew back with a gasp.




It must have been hard for Candice Bergen, being assigned a plum interview like that, an interview withpictures,  to have to report back to her editor, "Uh, sorry, but I couldn't do it."

"Couldn't do it? Why not?"

"He's dead."

"Dead?"

"Dead."

"Oh. Are you - "

"Sure? Yes, I'm sure."

"Oh."

"He's sure, too."

Then they both disgraced themselves - and each other - by collapsing into helpless laughter.




I'm glad, though. Not glad he's dead - I'm not that mean - but glad that such a turbulent, often agonizing life ended in such sweet surrender. It was like the tide going out: his heart stopped; it was time to go home.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I was dredging around for some decent photos of George Gershwin - for my Facebook profile picture, as a matter of fact - cuzzadafact I'm kind of on a Gershwin kick now. The music frightens me, it is so gorgeous and unbelievable, yet in another way it pushes me back. Anyway, as sometimes happens, I found a cool picture of Oscar Levant instead, and it turned out to be on MY BLOG. I got reading the post, and liked it. In fact it's better than most of the shit I post now. . . I confess. . . so I'll rerun it, in hopes I'll get more than 17 views. This time.



Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!



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.



  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


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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