Why egg tubes? Because why not. Somehow the infomercial looks a whole lot better than this: detumescent appendages made of squashed-up egg (no discernible white or yolk, yet NOT scrambled). The way the soggy tube of egg rises from the depths of the strange aluminum thing is quite dramatic, in a revolting sort of way..
Me and Ashens go way back. I think he was one of the first YouTubers I became aware of (mainly because he was one of the first YouTubers!) in or around 2008. His content hasn't varied at all in all the intervening years, which is why I still watch. Late at night, when I can't be bothered with anything, when I'm winding down to sleep anyway and don't WANT to learn anything. . . Ashens has always used a tatty brown corduroy sofa as his "stage", and for some reason it works. It's practically the definition of keeping it simple, and it's something I WISH more YouTubers would consider for toning down their loud, slick extravaganzas in the kitchen, obnoxious music blaring while the shouting cook's face is shoved within half an inch of the camera lens. Ashens is more low-key, but is one of those rare people who is naturally funny and can improvise in a way that makes me laugh out loud. Especially late at night, when I don't want to learn anything. This video is such classic Ashens that I realized, from my own comments, that I have so far watched it four times. Four. I cannot live without the sight of the soggy phallic plop of cooked egg falling onto the plate.
In this video by an outfit called Silicon Republic, a nice young Irish lady attempts to make sense of a bizarre vertical egg pan (or tube or whatever), repeatedly remarking that the smell is abominable. It's hard to imagine a more efficient way to ruin an innocent egg than to do this to it. The egg does not even do its dramatic rising from the tube, then flopping over wetly like a collapsed erection. She has to dig it out with a fork, then deliver the rest of it like a long-past-term baby. Then she is faced with a wet column of detumescent egg, sitting on a plate, smelling bad. Whose idea was this?
This is causing some people actual pain. NO one seems to be having a good experience with it! The egg cooker takes forever, the egg does not want to rise, and when it does, the results are underwhelming.
For several decades now I've been chasing down a Stravinsky album called Favorite Short Pieces. It had some gorgeously eccentric stuff on it and in my teens, when I was in the midst of a Stravinsky fit, I listened to it all the time. All my internet sleuthing got me nowhere - if it existed at all, it was only on vinyl. But then today - a brainwave - if I got a playlist of the tracks on said album, couldn't I try to find the individual pieces on YouTube? And by the holy - I did - I reassembled all seven works, not in any order or by any particular artists, but who cares, I have it all now. So how on earth does this connect to the video? Ah. My first awareness of Little Tich (who sounds like he has some sort of skin condition) came from reading the liner notes of FavoriteShortPieces. Stravinsky wrote them himself, in his usual dry, droll manner. He claimed that the second movement of his Four Etudes for String Quartet was inspired by "the manifold eccentric appearances of the celebrated English clown, Little Tich." And that was all that happened, until I began to read about Oscar Levant.
Stravinsky, Oscar Levant. Little Tich. . . hold on, these dissonances do relate. There was a great tidbit in the fascinating but painful-to-read bio of Levant, A Talent for Genius. Levant liked to hobnob with (some might say suck up to) musical geniuses such as Gershwin and Copland and Horowitz, hoping something would rub off. His encounter with Stravinsky was memorable. This is a long quote, but worth transcribing: "One day Igor Stravinsky visited the Warner Bros. lot and dropped in on Oscar Levant during a break in the long workday. Wearing black tie and tails and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, Levant received the composer of Le Sacre du printemps in a quiet corner of the movie set. Levant greatly enjoyed the spirited, fiercely opinionated Russian. Between takes he had been reading a life of Ferruco Busoni, the Italian pianist and composer, so he knew that Stravinsky had met Busoni only once, despite the fact that they had lived just five miles from each other in Switzerland during the First World War. "Why did you visit Busoni only once?" Levant asked Stravinsky. "Because," replied the composer, bristling slightly, "he represented the immediate past and I hate the immediate past."
It's the kind of remark you like, but you can't quite determine why. Anyway, about Little Tich. . . I was chopping my way through Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac - a fascinating and nearly unreadable book, the last fourth of which takes place in a series of mental institutions - and I came across the name again - I couldn't believe it! It was Little Tich!Not only hadn't I heard the Favorite Short Pieces album for over 40 years, I hadn't heard one mention of this creature and had come to think of him as chimeric, maybe a product of Stravinsky's fevered imagination. I wish I could find the exact quote, but you're going to have to trust me that he did talk about Little Tich. I wish I remember exactly what he said: memoirs don't have an index and I've already chopped through enough of it. I don't want to fall into the Levant memoirs again: the man had talent to burn, and he burned it. Not only that, the name-dropping is deafening. He seemed to have an almost pathological need to align himself with the "greats", even if it was only the likes of Frank Fay or Shirley Booth (or the nightmarish Al Jolson).
I just have to tell one more story - I shouldn't, and I know I already told it many posts ago. Levant was playing the sidekick in a movie calledHumoresque, starring the ferocious man-eating diva Joan Crawford. He noticed she always brought knitting on the set with her and worked at it furiously between takes. She regaled the cast with amusing stories about her obsession: oh, I knit at dinner parties, I knit on airplanes, I knit in restaurants, I. . . "Do you knit while you fuck?" Levant asked. The two never became friends.
CODA. When I got up this morning, I thought: damn! I have to find that reference to Little Tich. You know, the one in Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac. I KNOW it's in there somewhere (probably near the beginning of the book). So I went page by page, and on page 31: JACKPOT! This is one of his charming, hair-raising mental hospital anecdotes, particularly heartbreaking because he demonstrates the same eccentric, devastating wit that made him so famous: I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that`s regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me. There was one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name was Nan. I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. One day she hauled off with all her might and slapped Nan`s face. Nan didn`t move; she didn`t hit back - some of them do. Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are. Oh yes.
CODA TO THE CODA. Poking around, you always find out more. I loved this little Stravinsky anecdote: Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.
BLOGGER'S UPDATE. This was very nearly a total disaster. I wrote this original post NINE YEARS AGO, then wanted to update and re-post it with a few new bits of information. In so doing, I deleted the entire post! It's only by some tricky miracle (I had already repeated the post in 2015) that I was able to retrieve this much of it.
But there's more to it than that. Little Tich, as it turns out, was not very lucky for me after all. A while ago I became fascinated with automata (automatons, I mean), elaborate clockwork figures representing people, animals, and whatever else, which were wildly popular in the Victorian era. Most of them are fascinatingly hideous, a classic example of the uncanny valley effect. I found tons of them on YouTube and began to post tiny excerpts, gifs I had taken from the originals, on my own channel.
I found one particularly macabre automaton of Little Tich, published a ten-second excerpt from it, and got a COPYRIGHT STRIKE from some outfit in France I've never heard of. It's hard to believe I'd be this seriously dinged for a few seconds of video, so it's possible it's the NAME of Little Tich which is copyrighted. Stranger things have happened. Thus my channel is in danger of being terminated forever, with no chance of getting those several thousand videos back. Since I am now coming up to 10,000 subscribers after nine years of effort, I don't want that to happen.
The only good part of it is that I found Favorite Short Pieces, whole and complete and in pristine sound condition, on YouTube. It's as great as I remembered, especially the miniature which is meant to represent Little Tich.
Which is right here, so you can listen to it NOW, this minute, and not have to wait nine years for it!
