Anthony Bourdain: the making of a saint

I can't write about celebrities like Anthony Bourdain, whom I didn't particularly admire, with any great degree of understanding, because I didn't know the man or his work to any depth. I do notice however that the "bad boy" of the foodie world is now being treated like some kind of saint, rhapsodized over in a way that probably would have embarrassed him.

I doubt if it will go down well with people to reveal that I am miffed and even disturbed by all this "but he had everything" talk that I am hearing, over, and over, and over again, even from celebrities whom you'd think would know better.

They don't, apparently.

If they would dig just a little bit deeper into Bourdain's life history, they'd see something different. He was very honest about the lowest times in his life, and left some cryptic clues even in his last few months that more than hinted at his thoughts and even his intentions. Why did no one notice when he left such an obvious trail of bread crumbs (so to speak)?

I've lifted this small piece from one of those entertainment websites - so sue me, people, it's just a quote! - which tells a totally different story from all this "but he was so happy/looked so good/was doing so well" stuff going around, the "we had no idea" that reveals how shallow his surrounds must have been, and the so-called loyal, loving people in it.

Such people, if they were really loving and loyal, would be telling some sort of truth beyond the lionizing bathos I am reading. Wasn't HE known for his honesty? No one is as saintly, as loving, as perfect as all this, especially not a "bad boy" known for using heroin (and heroin addicts, I know from grim experience, are extremely ruthless people until they get into recovery).

I get the sense of someone who had been screaming in pain for years, who had  carefully maintained a facade (which I thought was ghostlike at the end, the eyes frighteningly dead and glazed), and whose friends did not WANT to connect with that other, much more complicated, tortured soul. The regular Anthony they had known all along matched all their expectations and met all their needs. You don't tamper with that, because then you might have to try to have those needs met elsewhere, and that's too much work.

"But he had money and power and fame, so how could he be unhappy?", "But he had so much to live for","But he looked fine to me" and similar statements make me bloody sick. People die from this, and I have seen enough of it.

Anthony Bourdain Revealed He Was 'Aimless and 
Regularly Suicidal' in 2010 Memoir

By DANIEL S. LEVINE - June 9, 2018

After his first marriage ended in 2005, Anthony Bourdain felt
suicidal, the late celebrity chef revealed in his 2010 book Medium Raw.
In 2005, Bourdain's 20-year marriage to Nancy Pitoski came to
an end. In Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of
Food and the People Who Cook,

Bourdain said he felt "aimless and regularly suicidal" while in
the Caribbean after the break-up, reports Page Six.
He described getting drunk and stoned - “the kind of
drunk where you’ve got to put a hand over one eye to
see straight." He said he would
"peel out" in a 4X4 after nightly visits to brothels.
Bourdain said he met a woman in London, and his
"nightly attempts at suicide ended."

Two years after the divorce, Bourdain married Ottavia Busia,
with whom he had a daughter, Ariana. They split amicably
in 2016, and Bourdain soon began dating actress Asia Argento
before his death. The Kitchen Confidential author was always
open up his personal battles.In a 2016 episode of CNN's
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,
Bourdain saw a therapist in Argentina, where he discussed
the feeling of loneliness he gets on the road.

"I’m not going to get a lot of sympathy from people,
frankly,” Bourdain told the therapist. “I mean, I have

the best job in the world, let’s face it. I go anywhere
I want, I do what I want. That guy over there loading sausages onto
the grill, that’s work. This is not so bad. It’s alright. I’ll make it.”
In his last PEOPLE interview in February, Bourdain said he felt a
"responsibility" to
live for Ariana, who lives in New York
with her mother.

"I also do feel I have things to live for,” Bourdain told the
magazine at the time.
“There have been times, honestly, in my life that I figured, ‘I’ve
had a good run — why not just do this stupid thing, this selfish thing
… jump off a cliff into water of indeterminate depth.'"

Bourdain also said he never saw himself retiring.
“I gave up on that. I’ve tried. I just think I’m just too nervous,
neurotic, driven,” the Parts Unknownhost told PEOPLE.
“I would have had a different answer a few years
ago. I might have deluded myself into thinking that
I’d be happy in a hammock or gardening. But no, I’m quite
sure I can’t... I’m going to pretty much die in the saddle.”

Bourdain was found dead in his hotel in France on Friday at the age of 61.

If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Postscript. Of course I am in favor of people getting help and reaching out to talk to someone if they are in pain or despair. But think for a minute. If you were suffering from the worst depression of your life, how could you summon the energy to "reach out for help"? The very phrase puts all the onus on the sufferer, and NONE on the people around that person who are never (ever) expected to reach out to THEM. If they do, it's often with those "cheer up", "life could be worse", "stop feeling sorry for yourself" messages that just make a person want to end it right here and right now.

I am also here to tell you that all this "help" very often doesn't help, or just isn't available. I was fifty years old before I got a correct diagnosis and found a competent medical practitioner and began to truly recover. Civilians don't know about this and will maybe pile on me and say I am a naysayer, but those times I've talked about this in front of a room full of sufferers, heads are nodding all over the room.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I doubt if I can stand to open that box. Though others gain a huge audience from this sort of tell-all confessional, in my case it tends to make everyone jump ship in a hurry. So I will end it here.

Magnet Collision in Slow Motion

            So much more satisfying than in fast motion.

San Francisco? . . . Did you drove or did you flew?

                      A trip down Market Street, 1906

Cook A CHICKEN in a WATERMELON | You Made What?!

Oh all right, so I never tried this, but the idea is intriguing. The chicken is seasoned well and bathed in the sweetish juices of the melon, which kind of shrivels up. I think it would be odd-tasting, but at least it wouldn't be dry.

I've been watching a lot of Emmy Cho lately (the YouTuber emmymadeinjapan)  because her voice is soothing, and her cooking experiments are low-key. She doesn't scream in your face or scratch and claw for "likes", like most YouTubers. I had just about given up on the whole thing, until I found her. I believe she is the best of the best, meaning that (for me) she has redeemed YouTube as something I actually want to spend time on.



I may soon tire of it, however. It's the nature of anything on the internet: initial enthusiasm, ravenous binging, feeling queasy the next day, being "off" whatever-it-is until the next helium-inhalation comes along. It appeals to the shallowness which I have always cherished in myself. Damn sight better than being "deep", which I was accused of for years and years.

"Deep." What does it mean? Boring, probably. I don't even do a lot of cooking now, Bill does most of it and I'm happy with that. 

But as far as YouTube is concerned. . . it's a little sad. I've had my own channel for 8 or 9 years, and hardly get any views, though part of that (at least) is the way YouTube is structuring things now, favoring the monetized/so-called "professional" YouTubers (the ones who really DO scream and shout at you all the time). 

Recently a famous Tuber (whom I'd never heard of) featured a few seconds of one of my odder videos, which I didn't mind at all, but she mentioned rather prominently that "this video had no views. I was the first." She also told her fans, "if you go on this SWEET woman's channel, don't make fun of her, please." I guess the temptation was just so great that she had to mention it.

But on the plus side, quite a few DID go on my channel (and subscribe! I never expected ANYONE to subscribe), and leave comments that were really quite wonderful. 

LaurenzSide is now your number 1 fan :D

laurnzside sent me here and in glad I came

Alrighty so are they merged together or just balanced on top of one another??🤯🤨

Balanced on top of eachother :)

Who’s here from laurenzside

Yeeeeesssss

Laurenzside sent me

Congrats! Your biggest fan is a famous youtuber hahah!

I never get any views, so this is nice! I'm glad you like acrobatic trolls.

Woah how did you find that!?

I took two dollar store trolls, popped the hair out and stacked them

LaurenZside is you biggest fan, check out her channel

Laurenzside sent me

LaurenzSide sent me! Love this!!!!!!

The video, like a lot of my stuff, is posted strictly to get screen shots of my trolls. Never mind. This one was almost completely static, but for some reason Laurenzside saw it and wanted an excerpt, which was OK by me.

Unfortunately for them, almost all of my other videos are of goslings by the water and the adventures of my cat Bentley. Only a few are really (and I mean really) weird. They are in there somewhere.

Embedded egg

Some videos are just so strange, so out-of-place that I just have to post them. The fact that I CAN post them (a marvel in itself) sort of makes me assume that it's OK to post them, that I'm not violating some unknown rule of the universe. I'm not making any money off of it, or anything, so it must be OK.

This has to do with a giant egg, so of course I'm interested. Unlike most people, I prefer vertical videos because they fit my old-fashioned format.

TROLL!!

Coffee with Flopsy

Don't feel like writing today, so I'll post this. Hope you're in a better mood than I am.

Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

It has been a while since I posted about trolls. In fact, I can't remember if I ever posted about them at all, so I guess it's time.

I now belong to not one, not two, but THREE Facebook troll groups. By the time I actually post this, I might belong to zero troll groups, because I have gone back and forth a lot in my feelings about them.

Yes, it's nice to connect with people who love their trolls and have an enthusiasm for them. No, it's not so great to have someone push and push and push to try to sell expensive trolls to me, or tell me they collect nothing but one-of-a-kind 24" trolls from Denmark that Thomas Dam created with his own two hands in 1942. Or see photos of ultra-expensive trolls posing on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a room with a view in Sicily. Or see someone casually mention a small collection of, oh, say, about 5000 or so Dam trolls, only the finest and the oldest, and -

You know what I'm saying. It's all the same problems I have had with social media from the beginning. Troll elitism! It's beyond my powers to comprehend.

My trolls, the ones I started out with until I began to branch out a little, came from the wrong side of the tracks. They came in a little plastic bag:

. . . and cost me, rounded off, about $5.00 each at the dollar store. I had never seen a troll at the dollar store before, so soon I was stoking my collection and making them little felt outfits. I began replacing their silky but rather sparse hair with great spills of yarn, the fibres all pulled apart for maximum volume.

I thought they looked great! 

Needing a place to store them and not wanting to just use a shelf, I  converted some old CD racks and began to stack them in. 

There weren't too many at first.

I am not sure which troll group I joined first, but it didn't make me very happy, even though I got some initial "likes" for my poorhouse trolls in their CD highrise.

But I still had the feeling they were from a different social stratum, and I was never allowed to forget it. People talked in "troll-ese", I am convinced to make people left out who DIDN'T speak troll-ese. It didn't occur to me that Facebook and its intentional envy syndrome had anything to do with it.

But then the inevitable happened, and I began to "covet". I knew I couldn't begin to afford the holy grail ones, but even the mid-sized Dam trolls cost plenty, what with outrageous shipping charges and conversion of the American dollar to Canadian.

But I went ahead. I looked on eBay, I ordered trolls, I bought trolls. I couldn't help myself.

I don't know how to feel about it now. I haven't counted how many trolls I have, and I don't want to, though I did move a bookcase into my office for the overflow. I have spent a lot of money, for me at least, which translates to a few hundred. Money I can't spare. I think I still like my "Dollarinas" best, my yarnies with all the masses of hair I created from material I already had. But the problem is, their faces all look pretty much the same. They're identical cousins. Their bodies are so fragile, knockoffs of knockoffs made of thin plastic, that you could squish them flat by sitting on them.

The feeling is exciting when I order "real" trolls, and even more exciting when I get them and open the box. It's Christmas morning! One of my faves is the one I call Grumpy Grandpa:

But now I want another one. With the same face. Should I get it?

Collections are horrible things, voracious, insatiable. I've never really had one before, and now I don't know what to do. Stop buying them, maybe?

Am I honestly trying to reproduce my Year of the Trolls when I was ten years old, which was (though of course I didn't know it at the time) the best year of my life?

Reaction shots

Apocalypse then

BOSLEY ATTACKS!

Bosley is the handsome but mysterious hybrid duck we've been following for several years on our walks around Como Lake. He's almost always there, in a little flock of three, along with his girl friend Belinda and a mallard drake we call Drake. Though it's difficult to tell without a lot of ornithological knowledge, Bosley is most likely a hybrid of mallard and magpie duck, which is a goose-sized domestic duck with black-and-white or brown-and-white patches. Magpie ducks are raised for their meat, which may explain why Bosley's ancestors saw fit to escape.

Belinda is a bit of a mystery. She appeared last spring, still a juvenile and more mottled than patchy. She has grown into a fatly gorgeous thing with who-knows-what bloodlines, though with her size and meatiness (sorry, Belinda), it's likely she also carries domestic duck genes. It's a fine romance.

So our little flock of three is swimming peacefully around, when suddenly - ! Well, you'll just have to watch the video. Now that I see it more rationally, I realize that the other party may have done the attacking. It's easy to misinterpret what you see in nature, and even easier to interfere for your own misguided purposes.

The conservationists would have us put the orphaned baby moose back in the woods to fend for itself, though it probably won't last 24 hours. What is the alternative? A big, dumb, tame moose, which is one more small step towards extinction for a species which has become habituated. I won't get into the anguish of what is happening to wild habitat - it's the kind of thing I can't afford to let myself think about too much. Sad how small my thought world is becoming. All those condos, where there used to be green space.

Bunny nap

Architect to contractor: "What we have here is failure to communicate"

DIY JIGGLY Japanese Cotton CHEESECAKE Recipe | You Made What?

My current favorite YouTuber, emmymadeinjapan, gamely tries a lot of very challenging, even impossible-looking recipes (when she's not cooking jailhouse meals or eating giant crunchy bugs). The jiggly cheesecake has just caught on in Vancouver, to the point where my son-in-law had to line up for a taste. Verdict: OK, but not great. 

I think the best part of it is the jiggle itself, which is most in evidence when the cheesecake is just out of the oven. It looks more like a souffle to me, more eggy than a normal cheesecake, and I'm not sure about the crust. But I love the moment when Emmy  tastes anything: rhapsodic when it's great, ruminative when it's in the middle, and dismayed when it's not good at all or just lets her down in some way. And her standards are high, as it's obvious she has had chef training: handy with a knife, a strainer, or a jigglypuff cheesecake.

But what I like best is that she will try making something again and again until she gets it right. And this time. . . she gets it right.

Am I going to make this? I can't even do a normal cheesecake, so it's doubtful I could master this. But I might buy one, unless I have to line up for it.

emmymadeinjapan

The return of the typewriter - on a big scale

Ruby Keeler was never my favorite 1930s dance star. In fact, I can think of few other dancers who are less nimble on their feet, or less charismatic. But for some reason, audiences just took to her. She had a kind of calf-eyed sweetness. Plus she was married to Al Jolson, which had to count for something. 

I once read (in that vast repository  of knowledge we call "somewhere") that the reason Keeler couldn't tap dance is that she wasn't a tap dancer. She was a buck dancer, as in "buck and wing", a style that has some things in common with clog dancing. I've seen aboriginal buck dancing competitions, and have noticed that buck shades into jigging, as in the traditional Metis Red River jig. 

Is that what she was doing? Maybe Ruby was just misunderstood.

I don't know if this is a Busby Berkeley number or not - I'll have to look it up - but the hokiness, the use of objects on a giant scale seems to suggest it. It appealed to me because I "read somewhere" that typewriters are coming back. It seemed like an absurd idea at first, but then I thought about it. There is one huge advantage: they simply can't be hacked. The documents they produce can be destroyed - I mean, really, truly and forever - reduced to a pile of ashes in seconds. Remember that "eat the note!" thing  that spies used to do? 

If the hacking problem continues to grow at its present rate, by the year 2050 we'll all be using Olivetti portables with reversible ribbons. Not Selectrics, not that one with the ball that flies around - those are just too advanced, and some electric typewriters even have basic computers in them. No. We'll have to use manuals, and pound the hell out of the keys again, rip out/crumple up the sheets of paper and throw them across the room into the wastebasket. As a matter of fact, I think the stress levels in contemporary society are entirely due to the extinction of this ritual. That, and a lot of other things.

Jiggly cheesecake

Racist thugs: can we still be friends?

The article I have reproduced below came out over a year ago, but I notice the Globe and Mail has let it stand. And that shocks me almost as much as the content, which sickens me even more than it did back then.

It was in the form of a question-and-answer, the answer coming from some sort of tin-plated "expert" on something-or-other. The person asking for help had just poured out her soul in a cri du coeur about her literal survival and the safety of her children. The response from this weird Globe and Mail-style political Dear Abby was a bland little chuckle and a few light-hearted, conveniently stress-minimizing bon mots.

I guess by now you've figured out that this was about Trump. I was astonished and appalled at how mealy-mouthed the piece was, how blandly Canadian in the very worst, don't-get-anyone-upset way. Oh yes, I know this disturbs you a little, as it does me! Certainly. But don't, he advises, ever let the people who put this racist, sexist Tyrannosaurus in charge of the free world get you upset. And for God's sake, don't let it break up your friendship! Your friendship matters much more than all this silly political stuff. Use your healthy disagreement as an opportunity for lively debate over a bottle of chardonnay, while wittily quoting Oscar Wilde.

Oh, yes. Racist pigs are always welcome on my friendship list.

This article and its bland reassurance came out before the worst of Trump's henchmen/women oozed slimily out of the woodwork and took over - not just the country, but people's brains. But the anxious person who wrote to this supposed advice columnist could already see it coming. AND SO COULD HE. But he dodged it, hid behind the post, was "nice", and just wanted everyone to get along, no matter what the price. Writing for a Canadian audience, he was Canadian-nice in a way which I think might finish us yet. It's the one thing about my country which I positively hate.

It made me sick then, and it makes me sick now. NO, you cannot separate someone's politics from the rest of them and just "be friends anyway". It's like those "very fine people on both sides" that Trump blathered about. You cannot, unless you completely lack principles yourself. To quote Katie in The Way We Were: "Hubbel, people ARE their principles." This caused Hubbel to groan and shake his head and go punch the wall.

Roseanne Barr has shown her true colors just lately, revealing what a racist thug she truly is, and could I be friends with her? You think? Not even if I did like her as a person and/or find her wildly entertaining, which I do not. I find this "love the sinner and hate the sin" type of thinking to be the most dangerous I have ever seen. Racism, bigotry and thug-like behaviour should never be "topics of lively debate". People who hold these beliefs are frightening and deplorable, what they do and say is morally indefensible and even criminal, and I want nothing to do with them.

Don’t let The Donald come between you and your friend

DAVID EDDIE
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 10, 2016 UPDATED APRIL 8, 2017

The question

I'm writing you from America – from one of what some people derogatorily call "the flyover states." I am so shocked, disturbed, and I would say even frightened that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. I feel like I'm living in an apocalyptic movie, and for the first time have a dread for my and my children's future. I can't sleep for worrying about it. I can't understand how any thinking, rational person could have voted for Donald Trump – and all (I thought) my friends and Facebook friends agree. But then I was at lunch with a friend of mine, and she was thrilled at the outcome of the election. She thinks Trump is going to be a great president. I couldn't believe my ears. We had an emotional argument and haven't spoken since. I don't know if I can be friends with her, going forward. What should I do?

The answer

First of all, don't succumb to "confirmation bias."

Confirmation bias is the tendency to hang out exclusively with (and, I suppose it follows, sleep with and marry) people who agree with you, and to read things and absorb only the information that confirms your prejudices and beliefs.

And I think it's really boring. So everyone on your Facebook page agrees with you. Almost half of your fellow Americans, it turns out, don't.(emphasis mine)

Why must we all agree? Vis-à-vis Trump I say: True, he's not my type of guy. Obama was my type of guy – smart, funny, thoughtful, soulful, Fugees on his iPod, Entourage his favourite TV show – though not my favourite politician ever.

Trump is sexist, retrograde, boorish, a "short-fingered vulgarian"– well, enough ink has been spilled and hot air expelled to describe him. He's Trump: need we say more?

But give the man a chance. He might just surprise/shock everyone by
doing well.

I've been around long enough to remember when Ronald Reagan threw his hat in the ring, way back in the 1980s.

The media were aghast, despondent, horrified and full of eye-rolling mockery: He's an actor! He was in a movie with a chimp! How's he going to be president of the United States (now glorified with the acronym POTUS)?

(Overlooking the fact he had been governor of California for eight years.)

But Reagan famously went "over the head of the media" and appealed directly to the common folk. And at least as far as conservatives are concerned, Reagan worked out well – left the U.S. and A (as Borat might say) and the world a more peaceful and prosperous place than when he entered the fray as POTUS.

Anyway, the point is not what you think of Donald Trump, or even Ronald Reagan.

The point, I believe, is: it's important to hold on to and passionately argue for your beliefs, but not to go all ad hominem with them – i.e. not make it personal.

I'm always amazed at friendships, or any other kinds of relationships, that go pear-shaped over the fact the two parties don't see eye to eye on some particular issue.

I know of more than one marriage south of the border experiencing "Trump tension," i.e. one spouse likes him and the other doesn't, and one or the other doesn't want to admit it.

But why should it be so personal? Why should it not rather be a fun and energizing topic of debate?

I understand Trump is a polarizing figure. I understand his rise to power (first-ever president without any political or military experience, just for starters) is odd, unusual, shocking, etc.
But that's precisely why the ramifications need to be discussed among citizens in a cool, calm, compassionate manner. Take a cue from the concession speeches of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – I particularly liked Obama's comment (I'm going to miss that guy) to the effect of "this was an intramural scrimmage … We are Americans first."

You and your friend are Americans first. It can be hard, I think, particularly for Canadians to understand, but America is, at heart, I believe, a rebellious country, a country that began in rebellion – a punk country, if you will, and Donald Trump was a punk choice for president.

So it's definitely difficult to process, but shouldn't cause a rift between you and your friend. When one Oscar Wilde character says accusatorily to another "You always want to argue about things," the other character says "That is exactly what things are made for."

I've often felt the truth of that. And never more so than with Trump. Go ahead and argue about him until you're blue in the face and the bottle of chardonnay is empty.
 
Just respect the fact not everyone will always have the same opinion as you. And never, ever let it get personal.

OK. . . I was going to leave it here, but I am gasping like a beached fish even after more than a year away from this bilge. For one thing. . . OK, there is no "one thing", which is why my highlighting escalated to the point that nearly every sentence he wrote was marked. This guy's flip, light-hearted, "hey folks, there's nothing really wrong here, you're just upset, OK? You're overreacting" tone sickened me, when the initial question was posed in an entirely different tone of fear, terror, dread.

Mr. Fix-It here completely let her down. He wriggled out. He began to speak in another language, breezy and dismissive, as in "oh, we've seen this before and it turned out great" (which is irrational in the extreme: if ONE thing goes great when we initially dreaded it, it doesn't guarantee the next thing will. And if he had to use the Reagan administration as an example of a dubious candidate who turned out to be a winner, then I have trouble believing anything he says.)

I don't know, I can't let this go, and didn't even know what images could begin to sum it up.
I decided to choose the absolute horror of Charlottesville to illustrate it, since I was really too overwhelmed to pick anything else. I wonder now, does this gentleman still feel Trump is "not so bad" and we're overreacting (and in my conspiracy-conditioned mind, I now wonder if he's "one of them", a spy infiltrating the fusty old Canadian institution of the Globe and Mail) and that people should only debate about him in a cool, rational, detached manner while slowly getting more and more pissed? I hear the sound of genteel, probably phony laughter, Oscar Wildean witticisms flying through the air, while the world as we know it slowly and inexorably sinks.

I need cake!

When you're on a diet but need cake, watch someone else do this!

Wrong Note Rag

Tonight I listened to the Stravinsky Ragtime for the first time in 20 years, and for some reason cracked up laughing for most of it: that dour, sour, dissonant cimbalom and complaining clarinet and doomy percussion reminded me of someone striding along with his head down, someone who has given up, and for some reason I found it hilariously funny. 

Then I kept thinking: this piece reminds me of something. Or someone. I've been reading up on Bernstein again, an old hero/obsession, and wondering anew why he wasn't considered a "significant" composer (or significant enough) because he "only wrote for musical theatre" (not true anyway). But this wild and wacky version of Wrong Note Rag, the best I have ever seen/heard, flashed into my head, and it was only when I posted the video that I realized that OF COURSE the two pieces had a spiritual kinship: both were slightly crazed, off-kilter experiments in ragtime. In Stravinsky's case a rag with a wooden leg, and in Bernstein's, a rag breathing flaming helium.

Kitty Litter CAKE | Dollar $tore Recipe

What the FXXX is the "Organ of Cecilia"?

This is just another one of those strange things. A while ago I wrote about buying an old hard-cover copy of Colleen McCullough's novel The Thorn Birds from Amazon, and discovering that between its browned pages were sprays of flowers which had been pressed and dried, their colors still faintly apparent even after God-knows-how-many years. It made me wonder who cut these slips from their garden, and where (Australia?), and what possessed them to place them in a volume, a beloved novel I assume, and leave them there, forgotten. For that matter, why was the book sold? Had the owner passed on, faded away along with the mysterious flowers? My questions just multiplied.

But then I dug out this book - and I swear to you, I do not remember when I bought it, where I bought it, and it's just possible I got it from Amazon, meaning it was used when I got it. Maybe. But it seems to me I've had it longer than that. It's a rather dull tome which I thought I'd read again to help me get to sleep at night. Written by the controversial journalist Joan Peyser, it was considered a stick of dynamite in the music world because Peyser dared to state that Bernstein was gay. There erupted a firestorm of  vehement denials, shock, horror, dread, etc., while no one even stopped to think how homophobic that particular reaction made them appear. Oh, no! they seemed to be saying. We just don't want HIM to be gay.

And speaking of. Peyser also wrote  a controversial book about George Gershwin, suggesting he was at very least bisexual and certainly in no hurry to marry any woman he knew. The book was thundered at and railed at and denounced, as was Peyser, who now seemed to be a scarlet woman of musical biography. She'd have her comeuppance decades later, when a dry, scholarly tome which claimed to be The Ultimate Gershwin Biography actually quoted her book, somehow rendering her academically acceptable. (Peyser was also the first writer to posit the veracity of Alan Gershwin's claim that he was George Gershwin's illegitimate son.)

But that's not what this is all about. Neither is this clean copy of the gorgeous cover photo Peyser used, in which Gershwin's elegant narcissism is on full display. The slightly sneering "fuck-me" mouth is particularly disarming, not to mention provocative.

NO! It's about THIS.

THIS, which tumbled out of the Bernstein book as I began to flip through it in preparation for reading it (trying to find, in vain, the sexy or salacious parts).

THIS, of which I have no knowledge, no idea of its provenance. WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING HERE? Who cut this out of the New York Times on Sunday, November 10, 1985 and taped it to a piece of green plastic with multiple pieces of Scotch tape? And why? I had no access to the New York Times then. I don't know why, if someone DID clip this out, they chose one of Lenny's more pretentious little acrostics or whatever they're called. (Like a monkey, he had a mind for puzzles.) Like the gay Copland, the gay Bernstein (who later came out as flamboyantly as one might expect) might be trying to establish his place in the pantheon of greatness by sucking up to the boss. Could that explain the enigmatic reference to "Organ of Cecilia"?

I keep finding things I don't understand! They keep falling out of books, found objects. I wondered just fleetingly if it was something my dead sister did, though why she would do something so strange, I don't know. Certainly if I had done it and given it to her, she would have called me completely insane. But she is dead now, so I don't need to worry.

But it would be nice to now what the hell this is and where it comes from. Who knows what will tumble from the next old book I open? Undiscovered Gershwin scores? Condoms? Pressed and dessicated after-dinner mints?

ADDENDA. St. Cecilia, virgin, martyr, and patron saint of music, which is why she is holding a weird sort of violin or cello. This kind of explains it, but for a virgin saint, she sure shows a lot of cleavage.