Oscar Levant: a spill of brilliance

 

Oscar Levant, Oscar Levant! I am too exhausted now from a truly gruesome sick-week  to go into a long prologue about who he was, and what he has meant to me over the years.  So I will just use a canned intro:

Oscar Levant (December 27, 1906 – August 14, 1972) was an American concert pianist, composer, music conductor, bestselling author, radio game show panelist and personality, television talk show host, comedian and actor. He was as famous for his mordant character and witticisms, on the radio and in movies and television, as for his music.

I just finished reading, or re-reading, a superb biography of Levant, A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. It's one of those "old friend" books that  I re-read again and again for a certain kind of comfort. Through a lot of deep research and vibrant writing, the authors capture the Byzantine complexity of a figure so contradictory and fraught with paradox that it's hard to know how they ever pulled it off. Second only to the Marion Meade bio of Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell is This? (which I usually re-read back-to-back with the Oscar one), it's the best biography I've encountered among the at-least-a-hundred-or-so I have read and reviewed.

Oscar was almost hopelessly fxx'ed up, to say it politely, with a host of psychiatric ills that included  bipolar disorder, OCD, runaway anxiety, intermittent paranoia, prescription drug addiction, and even a splash of benevolent narcissism. But there was so much more to him than that. Over the many years, his vast assortment of friends noticed and celebrated the little boy inside the man, the one who played hide-and-seek behind the great wall of his cynicism.  A lifelong friend eulogized him thus: "For behind the facade of the world's oldest enfant terrible  lurked the sweetest, warmest, most vulnerable man I've ever known. . . I loved him." Words such as "innocent" and "pure" crop up, confounding those who so completely bought his sardonic public persona. One doctor described him as an “extremely worthwhile human being”, a rather strange description which he set down in a formal medical report just as Levant was about to be thrown to the wolves of the psychiatric hospital system - again. He didn’t want his patient to be written off, forgotten about,  or completely devoured. 

Levant is mostly remembered as a razor wit, which I think was the very least of his almost frightening mass of talents. I refuse to quote even one of his "isms" here, because I am tired of them and no longer like to see them. He was, as writer and friend Christopher Isherwood described him, "completely unmasked at all times," and this unusually bare-faced quality startled, surprised, and (paradoxically) delighted people. He threw them completely off-guard and off-balance, but instead of being anxious or offended by it, they actually anticipated and enjoyed it. I can't think of another performer who did that, knew how, or could get away with it. 

Turner Classics coincidentally happened to show 5 or 6 of his movies recently, with an embalmed-looking Michael Feinstein introducing them. His introductions mostly consisted of long chains of Oscar-isms which we've all heard dozens of times before. Feinstein is the perennial "Gershwin source" because he early on managed to cultivate George's sister-in-law Lee, and was thus handed a career as fetch-and-carry boy to Gershwin's memory. He also ingratiated himself with Oscar's glamorous actress-wife June, a more complex figure in Oscar's life than anyone else seems to recognize.  It's never spelled out, but I can see the degree to which she acted as an enabler for Oscar's miasma of physical and mental miseries. As a child performer with a drunken Irish father, caretaking was  second nature to her, the kind of support which is a  knitting up and an unravelling at the same time.

 

After not seeing these movies for a few years, watching him perform, sometimes in a pianistic "blob" right in the middle of a third-rate movie, was absolutely hair-raising and almost unbelievable to see and hear. Those abnormally long, slender, piano-machine fingers flew so fast that most of the time they were a blur. His glittering precision inspired a critic to comment that the notes spilled "like brilliants from a broken necklace".  His close friend Vladimir Horowitz (a true buddy - they hit it off immediately, both melancholy Russian Jews  burdened with the gift of being musical prodigies) claimed that Levant was the superior pianist, even the “best”, meaning best in the world. 

When Oscar played, his face was usually masked, a “poker face”,  which is odd given his otherwise “unmasked” quality. Sometimes he tipped his head back, but that's about all. Only rarely did you see any pleasure on his face when he played. He gave it, but couldn't feel it.
But here I  want to insert a sentence that jumped out at me just this minute, when I randomly opened his bio: "While the Swopes' guests were gossiping or playing card games or croquet, someone would invariably be at the piano - George Gershwin, Deems Taylor, or Irving Berlin. Levant would take his place there as well, but only when no one asked. He would play only when he felt like it (see Dorothy Parker's perfectly accurate description of this, below), never on demand - but when he did he would play beautifully." This incredible Last Supper-like  gathering of musical giants makes me want to say, "Pass the salt, Jesus".

I wonder why this sudden return to Levant, except I don’t. I'm pretty sick right now, need surgery, am in almost perpetual  pain, and though I don't usually share it on this blog, I feel a certain desolation that I have hardly any readership left (though, to be sure, I cherish those few that I have), and pursue it now mainly as a sort of therapeutic journal to keep me busy and distracted.  It seems like synchronicity that those movies  came on TCM, all of which I've seen multiple times, just as I came back around to the Levant bio again. Maybe I need to see an example of suffering that is FAR worse than mine, both in frustrated potential in so many areas (despite his considerable fame), and utter, flat-out wretchedness, with both major mental illness (misdiagnosed, mismanaged, and blatantly mistreated) and studio-driven addiction that nearly killed him. All this with a jaw-droppingly neglected, serious and chronically painful heart condition: he was pumped full of Demerol, then pushed back out there so he could keep on performing.

His most energetic performance in The Band Wagon (a movie I just hate, though it's been called the best movie musical ever made) came just six weeks after he nearly died of a serious heart attack and refused to go to the hospital, because he was terrified the insurance companies would dump  him and he’d never work again. So he hunkered down at home with a hired nurse, barely recovering before he dove back into work under an unbreakable contract.

The appalling thing is, he was right - they WOULD have dumped him, maybe forever. He was the breadwinner in the family, so needed to work to raise his three musically-gifted daughters and send them to Julliard.  As with Garland, this was an engineered addiction that ran him into the ground and even cut his life short. He did not play a version of himself in The Band Wagon, that musical dog's breakfast – it was really the only time he didn’t.  In yet another strange Levantine twist, he based his character on his good friend Adolph Green, the man who wrote the script.

It was a heroic effort, and for those who didn't know the circumstances, he covered his pain as well as any broken man could. But he wasn't up to it and was quite literally risking his life. Though his wife June was loyal and no doubt loved him, she didn't stand in the way of any of this nonsense, and too  often even seemed to  encourage it. Indoctrinated as a child performer, her sense of "the show must go on" was amplified to the point of near-ruthlessness. Ironically, he told everyone on set that he had been in a mental hospital because it was "safer" than revealing his heart attack.  I am not making this up!

But his mental illness was his thing, his “shtick”, and though everyone knew he was telling the truth, they found it hilariously funny. I still don't understand this and wonder if he appealed to the worst qualities of schadenfreude and sadism in his audience. He brought this on himself, of course, jacking open his chest to display his broken heart for shockingly comic effect - but what can you do when you’re down and nearly dead from mental illness? You “sell” it, which is what he felt he had to do. 

He lived to be my age, and I love the way he died, taking a little nap upstairs while waiting for Candice Bergen to come over and interview him. It is the strangest but most beautiful death I ever heard of. But I have always felt that, one way or another, you die the way you live. I have a mental image of Oscar borne up on airy wings to Eternity, pianistic diamonds  in a glittering spill behind him. 

I can't say much more about all this, though I certainly could. Originally, I was going to do a comparison of Levant with Dorothy Parker. It's not the comparison that would be hard, but doing all the backstory on Parker, whom a lot of  people probably won't even know about. The parallels between them are surprisingly many. They sometimes crossed paths, had friends in common,  liked each other, and even wrote about each other with great admiration and affection. Oscar eulogized Dorothy:

". . . a tiny woman, fragile and helpless, with a wispy will of iron. She loved dogs, little children, President Kennedy, and lots and lots of liquor. Even her enemies were kind to her; she brought out the maternal in everyone. At her cruelest, her voice was most caressive - the inconstant nymph. She was one of my favorite people."

And Dorothy on Oscar, no less a perfect encapsulation of the man's dizzying complexity:

"Over the years, Oscar Levant's image - that horrible word - was of a cocky young Jew who made a luxurious living by saying mean things about his best friends and occasionally playing the piano for a minute if he happened to feel like it. . . They also spread the word around that he was sorry for himself. He isn't and he never was; he never went about with a begging bowl extended for the greasy coins of pity. He is, thank heaven, not humble. He has no need to be.

He has no meanness; and it is doubtful if he ever for a moment considered murder. . .

Well. This was a losing fight before it started, this striving to say things about Oscar Levant. He long ago said everything about everything - and what Oscar Levant has said, stays said."

CODA. OK, there had to be one! I was fascinated to read that in his very first picture, John Garfield would play a character very closely based on his good friend Oscar Levant. This was in a movie called Four Daughters, and this clip might give you an idea of how well he pulled it off.  

Amen.

A FAUN is not a FAWN! (the cheapening of culture)

I just have to unload something here. I just watched a dreadful BBC music special about the Romantics, with some godawful English lady with two curtains of hair and big teeth, narrating with a constant, fatuous smile on her face. She began to talk about De-BEWW-sea, and when introducing his masterpiece Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, she informed us in her sickly cheery voice that "this marvellous orchestral feast portrays the wonder and awe of a young deer as he slowly walks through a forest glen." 

A young deer. A fawn! The BBC cultural elite thinks a "faun" is Bambi, not some langorous half-drunk satyr wallowing with loose goddesses in an afternoon of  guiltless debauchery.

Even Wikipedia gets it right: "The goat man, more commonly affiliated with the Satyrs of Greek mythology or Fauns of Roman (emphasis mine), is a bipedal creature with the legs and tail of a goat and the head, arms and torso of a man and is often depicted with goat's horns and pointed ears. These creatures in turn borrowed their appearance from the god Pan of the Greek pantheon. They were a symbol of fertility, and their chieftain was Silenus, a minor deity of Greek mythology." 

Tom Robbins wrote an entire, gorgeous novel about Pan (Jitterbug Perfume, one of my all-time favorites), exploring the human sense of smell, its neural roots and erotic significance. Pan's no Bambi in this novel - he cavorts with the tattiest of has-been goddesses, and even in his invisible state gives off a sort of primal reek that sends his unwitting human victims into sexual frenzies. So powerful is his ponk that a magical perfume must be concocted to disguise it. The perfume is made from beet pollen, and here Robbins goes into a vegetable rhapsody unequalled in fiction:

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth, now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”

(Back to me - I can't write that well!) The power of the beet and its reeking pollen (an odor which Robbins describes as "embarrassing") is the only thing that bests the animal stink of the goat. THAT goat, you know? That half-goat, unspeakably lashed to the torso of a man.  No, this is not  Bambi, folks, this is PAN, one of the most basic, fundamental, primal figures in all of ancient human lore, the pagan god of pagan gods, and not only that, the image most often associated with Satan.  And the BBC thinks he's a little forest darling with speckles on his rear!

The huge stir this piece caused when it debuted in Paris had little to do with the sensuality of the music, and everything to do with WHAT it portrayed: a lustful pagan goat-man in full rut. But oh, no, the music historians at the BBC, ALL of them, for surely the text must have been vetted by many, think that Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un Faune is about a baby deer, a FAWN! I don't know why I expected better from a British "music expert". But shit, I knew what a "faun" was when I was eight and my parents dragged me off to classical concerts.

I knew, not because I was some musical prodigy when I was a kiddie (far from it, I was the only dud in the lot), but because I was old enough and curious enough to read the backs of album covers (a lost source of musical education in this digital age). But the best classical music programming the BBC has to offer has no idea what Debussy's masterpiece is even about. Nobody caught it, nobody corrected it, nobody edited it out, and I am beginning to wonder with a sense of despair if I am the only person who even noticed it. It's the cheapening of culture, the shallowing-down of the brimming pools in Debussy's wild pagan landscape.

An outrageous, truly filthy old satyr lolling around in blatant sexual debauchery has somehow been collapsed down into a frolicking Disney character. "Some fun, huh, Bambi?" Dear God.

And the beet goes on! Another of Robbins' inspired passages, this time about the pollen of the beet which makes up the "bottom note" of Pan's perfume:

"If the waft that streams from a freshly opened hive is intimate to the point of embarrassment (ask any sensitive beekeeper), so it is with beet pollen. There is something personal about it, and something primeval. If there is a comparable odor, it is, indeed, the moldy inner sanctum of some fermenting, bursting hive; but beet pollen is honey squared, royal jelly cubed, nectar raised to the nth power; the intensified secretions of the Earth's apiarian gland, reeking of ancient bridal chambers and intimacies half as old as time."

OK. . . I will now stop writing. For the rest of my life.

(Post-post. I HAD to smell it, I had to try to find a sample of beet pollen to see if it really reeked in that intimate, embarrassing way. And I couldn't. BUT - I had a certain house plant, until it died, with thick, dark green, spiky leaves which had a purplish down on their surface. It grew away untended, then suddenly the thing bloomed, and I could tell it had bloomed when I walked into the room: the tiny, dandelion-shaped, bright orange flowers stank of locker room, of sweat, and of all the intimate things Robbins talks about. It's possible the purple passion plant is somehow related to the beet, and its fat, aggressive leaves look similar. This is probably as close as I will get to that smell. And I do wonder, in considerable despair, if anyone now on earth can equal or surpass the lush cascading poetry of Robbins' prose.)

POST-POST-"whatever". As I try to dig up more information on beet pollen, I am finding absolutely NOTHING specific to that plant. It's as if it doesn't flower, which confuses me. All I can come up with is BEE pollen, which is obviously not what I want. For some reason, lupines came up too - the elegant, long-stemmed, bell-flowered plant I plucked on a walk around the lagoon in the summer. It's also known as foxglove, from which the heart drug digitalis is extracted. It's one of the oldest and most effective of  folk remedies. But why is lupinus perennis the only image I can come up with? Is Robbins having us on by inventing a substance just to tease us? 

Persistence pays off. Or, sort of. I  finally found SOMETHING about beet flowers, but it pertained to sugar beets, those hard, lumpy, turnip-like things which were processed in a plant in my home town, emitting a scorchy smell of burnt sugar on hot summer days. This ISN'T the beet Robbins write about, which, incredibly, does not flower (how can you have a plant that doesn't flower?). Small, shrivelled, yellowish petals cling to a gnarly-looking stalk, and I have no idea what they smell like. But the name! The name makes this entire meandering enterprise worthwhile (and didn't we start with "faun vs. fawn"?): 

  

It's BETA VULGARIS. If Robbins didn't find this name while researching his sensuous tour de force, then he should have.

Dog in a Sack: More vintage car safety tips!

Though this incredible "safety" contraption is a shade better than lashing your toddler to the back seat of a Volkswagen on a leash (for more "freedom of movement"), the sheer impracticality of the design makes one wonder if anybody actually used it. For one thing, your doggie might be terrified of being lashed into a hot canvas bag clamped to a running board and begin to plunge around in panic once the car is moving, possibly injuring itself badly (and making for a  horrifying sight for pedestrians). A terrified dog might indeed "mar" the car in a whole different way, but who can blame it? 

This is just another example of jaw-dropping misjudgement of what "car safety" really means, for a kid or for a dog. I hope this was only a failed prototype and not something actually sold to dog owners. I will add, however, that I have a real problem with the dogs I see almost hanging out of open car windows, their quivering noses sniffing the breeze. I wonder - because I never hear about it, but it MUST happen - how  easily a dog could either fall out if the car hits a bump, or even jump out to pursue a  "distraction" (cat, squirrel, dog of the opposite sex). But there are no safety harnesses for dogs in cars, no laws protecting them in any way, and owners of large dogs seem to feel that crating them even for a short time is  tantamount to abuse. 

I'm a cat person myself, and I can picture Bentley crawling cozily into the head-hole of the canvas bag for a nap - but only if the car isn't moving.

TIE THAT BABY DOWN!

"As every parent knows, a toddler is too squirmy to be held on the lap for long or to wear a conventional safety belt while riding in a car. And the hazards for an unattended toddler-passenger are too long to list, especially if mother is driving alone with the youngster.

"In a Volkswagen this problem can be solved for about $2, in a way satisfactory to both parents and toddler. Solution is use of a harness set: the leash of a standard harness fits exactly when strapped around the upper section of a Volks back seat.

"Leash is secured in the center around the backrest, then the harness strap attached. This allows the toddler to sit, stand or lie down, or move a short distance to either side, with the harness strap sliding up and down the leash with his movements."

Harness-leash around seat-back lets bouncy tot stand up. . . 

Or he has enough freedom to move around (. . . ) get bored.

When VW engine drone makes him sleepy, strap slides easily down leash.

"YEAH BABY!"

 

                      Ain't it funky now.

Coping with COPPA: a NewTube's coming!

I've taken a break from all this YouTube/COPPA/FTC nonsense, having multiple health problems to cope with (including trips to the ER with strange doctors poking at my ribs). But this - at least, in this video I try to envision an alternative to the vise-grip YouTube has on communal video sharing. So far, no viable alternative exists, but it COULD, and it MIGHT - so watch for it! In the long run, I believe this is the ONLY solution.

Kitten (sleeping) on the keys

Click right corner for full-screen/sound!

Belle of Brighton: three takes

Megachicken

Vintage style: just walking down the street

Everyday chic in the '20s and '30s.

Dear FTC: Please LISTEN TO ME!

(My letter to the FTC protesting the absurd, destructive new policies which YouTube is trying to force on its creators. I just can't shut up about this! It's an example of an almost Kafka-esque bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. I've had a channel for over 10 years, posted 1750 videos, and can't stop now. I've broken this long screed up into pieces, with my usual, appropriate visual aids from Fritz Lang's nightmarish cinematic vision, Metropolis.)

"I wish to protest against the new FTC/COPPA restrictions which YouTube will soon be passing down to their creators. Under these new restrictions, channels that endeavour to make high-quality content for kids will no longer be able to earn an income OR have their videos accessible to subscribers (due to very tight restrictions on all the features needed to allow their videos to be seen). 

Thus kid-oriented channels will be hamstrung by the very regulations which were originally intended to keep kids SAFE on YouTube. Because kids will no longer have access to their favorite high-quality kids' channels, I believe they are MORE likely go to adult-oriented content which may be inappropriate and even harmful. 

The specifications which must be applied in evaluating the correct category for our videos are EXTREMELY vague and virtually impossible to apply. If we differ from YouTube in our choice of category, which in YouTube's case is done by robots, we can be fined up to $42,000.00 PER VIDEO. 

Most YouTubers are extremely concerned about kid safety, but we CANNOT provide age-appropriate, high-quality content for kids if we have our income and all our features taken away. This has caused tremendous anxiety in the YouTube community, and the only direction we have received from YouTube if we wish to protest this potential meltdown is to "consult a lawyer". 

I am a grandmother of four and have been posting videos featuring my hobbies, collections, nature videos, family celebrations, etc. for 12 years. I am not monetized, but if I lose my channel, I will literally lose 12 years of family history and creative satisfaction. That door will likely be closed to me forever. 

YouTubers pour heart and soul into their work, and their channels are an intrinsic part of their identity. This could be the equivalent of mass firings or layoffs, for no reason that will help child safety whatsoever. PLEASE rethink this, talk to as many YouTubers as you possibly can, watch as many videos in as many categories as possible, utilize REAL people and not algorithms/bots, and try to work with YouTube to come up with something which is possible to comprehend/apply and respectful to creators. 

Without creators, there is no YouTube. With so many people going out of business, you will see a mass exodus. In effect, it could end YouTube as we know it. Surely this was not the original intent! I believe it's within your power to save the situation and make it work better for EVERYONE involved. I ask you to take another look at this entire issue, and work with YouTube AND creators to come up with regulations which make sense, actually DO protect children, and allow this whole vibrant, enthusiastic community of YouTube creators to continue." 

Your Comment Tracking Number: 1k3-9dfc-sdm7

"Bloody marvelous!" The Saga of Mrs.Brough of Esher

My Cat Hates Singing!

    
        Click to full-screen to HEAR HER SING!

CAT LOAF!

   

YOUTUBE PANIC! Fines, threats, and the fear of extinction

There is mass panic in YouTubeland, and I can see why. Suddenly everything has changed, and creators are facing the fear of huge fines, slashing of incomes, and/or deletion of accounts. And yes, this DOES affect me. Though I am not monetized, I have had my channel for 12 years and have posted almost 2000 videos, FAR more than most monetized users. And each and every one of those videos (which YouTube could delete at a click) has deep personal meaning for me.

I have been writing and writing about this in my journal. This is very long and wordy, but I will post it anyway, in case someone out there is as confused as I am. (Please note! In an awful stroke of un-luck, Blogger just deleted the entire edited version of this post, but I backed it up in rough form.)

First, this is what Wikipedia has to say about the matter:

COPPA violations

In April 2018, a coalition of 23 groups (including the CCFC, CDD, as well as Common Sense Media) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that YouTube collected information from users under the age of 13 without parental consent, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

In September 2019, YouTube was fined $170 million by the FTC for collecting personal information from minors (in particular, viewing history) without parental consent, in order to serve targeted advertising. In particular, the FTC ruled that YouTube was partly liable under COPPA, as the service's rating and curation of content as being suitable for children constituted the targeting of the website towards children. In order to comply with the settlement, YouTube was ordered to "develop, implement, and maintain a system for Channel Owners to designate whether their Content on the YouTube Service is directed to Children." YouTube also announced that it would invest $100 million over the next three years to support the creation of "thoughtful, original children's content".

YouTube began to introduce the required policies in December 2019: all channels must either declare the entirety of their content as being directed towards children or not, or do so on an individual basis per-video. Beginning in January 2020, videos marked as being targeted towards children will have reduced functionality. These videos will display contextual advertising based on the video's metadata, rather than targeted to the user. Community features such as end boards and other widgets, notification functions, and comments are also disabled. The FTC settlement places the burden on channel operators to correctly classify their videos (with a threat of a fine of $42,000 per-video). YouTube stated that it would also use machine learning to enforce these rules. Uploaders will not be allowed to appeal automatic decisions of this nature. These policies have faced criticism by the service's community, due to the ambiguous nature of YouTube's explanation of the new policy, and the legal risks associated with them.

(Please note! It isn't December 2019 yet. So either Wikipedia is written by time travellers, or they can't be bothered to update this big lumbering thing once December actually rolls around.)

Blogger's/YouTuber's reflections. This YouTube thing, I don’t know. There’s a lot of misinformation flying around, with a number of “don’t worry”s which are even more misleading. December 10 is the day of reckoning. The “disabling comments on videos containing minors” a few months ago was a complete bust. It was totally random, though small channels got the worst of it. Mine was scattershot, but ALL of the disabled ones featured dolls! Yes, dolls, with no human presence at all except a voiceover, and the videos were meant not for kids but for vintage (adult!) doll collectors. In other words, an algorithm isn't a very efficient way to analyze content. And that is what scares me half to death.

The whole thing is a hot mess, but kids’ channel creators are the ones who are really scrambling. Everyone is afraid of YT now because they’re holding that $43,000.00 fine over everyone's head. No one is spelling out if it means anything for the non-monetized, but it probably does. I just don’t want to lose my nearly 2000 videos posted over 12 years! But if my channel is seen as ambiguous, problematic or just not popular enough, it may be dropped. They have that power. It all comes down to perceived financial worth.

I was alarmed what happened to PizzaFlix, a highly-rated, award-winning vintage movie channel which has always been one of my favourites. For no reason anyone can ascertain, it was abruptly canned, with an awful form letter stating, "We realize this is tough news, but. . . " Though I wonder. . . it mentioned not complying with YT standards. What does THAT mean? The creator may not have been totally forthcoming. He said all his stuff was copyright-free, but that can be extremely tricky, as I found out myself.

I know I should just leave it, because all my comments on YT may even be hurting me. People are going on there and crying! I can’t go over 2000 videos and designate each one as “for kids” or “for adults”, but I may be forced to do just that. In most cases, they were made for a general audience, but "intent" means nothing here. In fact, YouTube has made a public statement that you must choose between those two immutable categories for each and every video you have ever posted.

The only middle ground was taking each video separately, which I finally chose as the only option with any leeway. But that may mean 2000 agonizing decisions based on almost no information. And if YT doesn't agree with how I label them, I will likely just be canned. For example, if I say a video is "for adults" and the algorithm decides you've featured or even mentioned a toy or game or movie or song or costume that MIGHT appeal to children, or if a kid appears somewhere in your video, even by accident, you can be fined $43,000.00 for breaking the law. The original video from YT "explaining" all this to creators kept saying, if you have any questions about all this (or if you want to contest it), "CONSULT A LAWYER."

As usual, the “biggies” with many millions of subscribers and views are above all this and won’t suffer at all. But middling channels may lose their livelihood. And I might be canned and all my videos deleted at a stroke, because I am not financially viable. But the thing is, YT puts all sorts of restrictions on ads, then tells people they’re being terminated for not being commercially viable! And nowhere is it ever spelled out HOW MUCH you have to earn to BE commercially viable.

It’s impossible to tell what you’re supposed to be doing. Some response videos are angry, some are outright rants, some are scared, some placating and nervous and tip-toeing around to suck up to the beast (when protesting to the FCC, they plead with us to "be polite!"), some reassuring (and those are the worst!). Don’t worry, folks! Don’t be so panicky! What’s the matter with you? But then there’s PizzaFlix, which will soon sink into oblivion for no known reason. It seems to me that YT should be revamping its system, but that would be too much work, so it won’t – it's easier to just throw creators under the bus to save their own ass.

I never thought this would happen, but right now I have to think of my mental health. I put a statement in my channel description that my videos are made for a general audience, but I am not at all sure it was wise because that category no longer exists! If I am seen to be contesting the rules. . . It’s hard to put all this aside, but right now I have to. Is it worth it? Yes, it is! Two thousand memories, two thousand joyous creative experiences, two thousand big chunks of family history, birthdays, dance competitions, Taekwondo exams, animations, troll celebrations (which are “dolls” and suddenly "for kids" now!) - gone forever. It's scary, and right now I feel completely powerless. Logic would say that they would just hand my material back to me, but it will be deleted entirely unless this bizarre situation changes, and fast.

More troll stop-motion gifs!

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I am, I really AM working on a serious post for this blog, about the common points/affinities between legends Oscar Levant  and Dorothy Parker. I've been obsessed with both of them for years, and after re-reading the Levant bio, I just have to write something about this. They knew each other well, as it turned out, and liked each other a lot,  though it's doubtful they had too many deep conversations. They didn't have to, because they "got"  each other on a very deep level, which is never more profoundly shared than in the valley of intractible pain. I made notes on a little piece of lined paper in the car,  stuck a few sticky-notes on top of that, typed it in point form on my Word program, and that's as far as I've got it -  but meantime, enjoy my dancing trolls.

Wonder Horse: A dream in black and cream

Tom's back - and that's a fact!