FREAKING GENIUS: 1812 Overture Finale by Ernie Kovacs!

 

                          I have no words.

Overture 1812 finale Ernie Kovacs show

Can't Help Falling in Love (on a kalimba)

I had never heard of a kalimba before, but I sure recognized the sound. It's the tinny, plinky sound of my first toy, an old tin jack-in-the-box (old even when I inherited it from my older siblings).

It looked and sounded something like this:

POP goes the synapse! And memory that is no more than a nearly-invisible, hairlike trace among the neurons once again begins to sizzle.

Sense memories, mostly. I remember the jack-in-the-box and its rusty chipped paint, rubbery plunks and scary pop-up man, the pictures of clowns on the sides. I remember associating it with the smell of pee, or a urinous scent that makes no sense unless I wasn't potty trained yet. These are OLD memories, you must realize, as old as I am. I remember sitting in the middle of the living room floor alone, my fat little legs stuck out in front of me, watching a flickering blue screen, a magic box that had come in the door the same day my mother brought me home from the hospital (upstaging me so completely that no one paid any attention to the new baby). The surreal, dreamlike, smudgy black-and-white images somehow pushed the record button in my infant mind, so that I remember - very distinctly - a man with a moustache, twisting his face around this way, then that way:

Something like this.

Exactly like this, because this IS it, this IS the exact image I saw on TV in my infancy, one of my very first memories! I didn't know what it was, who it was (though of course I recognized it as a face), and it was years or even decades later before I realized it was the wildly innovative comedian my older brother always talked about - THE SAME MAN - Ernie Kovacs! Even later than that, in adulthood, I saw some rare kinescopes of Kovacs' TV show (most of the videos erased by the networks to record game shows like To Tell the Truth and What's My Line. Remember Bess Myerson? ). Even now it gives me a strange, not too comfortable feeling. Kovacs only seems to exist in this grey phantom world, scary, sometimes even off-putting  as it seems to have a mildewed, obsolete quality. But his madness seemed to keep pace with my own, with ideas and thinking that might have been original but were forever out of step.

Sputnik. I remember Sputnik, everyone talking about it, though I was three years old and had no idea what it was, what it was about. No one ever explained anything, but there was an uneasy feeling that I should know, that I shouldn't NEED it explained, because everyone else got it, didn't they? As usual, since I was the youngest by over a decade, everyone else towered over me. I do remember going up some spooky steps at the back of my father's store in pitch darkness to stand on the flat roof with a telescope, trying to see Sputnik. I always thought I imagined that part, that there was no way anyone could see a suitcase-sized sphere hurtling across space from a store roof, but just last night I was talking about it to my son and he said, "Oh, yes, it was visible in the night sky." Jesus Christ!

I remember moving. I hate moving, and maybe this is why. This one is even earlier than Sputnik: I was probably in my two's (toilet trained? Who knows) and being hauled around to look at a new house. A new house where we were going to live. What was wrong with the  old house? These thoughts weren't even verbal, just deep uneasy feelings. If we could move for no reason, then anything might happen.

I was trundled around this huge, empty, cavernous place while everyone murmured and talked. There was no furniture, not even any rugs. I assumed this was how we were going to live. No one told me otherwise. Waffling confusion like a cloud system, never quite clearing up. 

Debby Carey made me come into her playhouse (an awful tippy thing with a cracked linoleum floor) and dared me to pee on the floor. I think I did, and it was hot and the smell was disgusting, but we giggled.

Sandy, the neighbor's bad-tempered cocker spaniel, bit me behind my knee. I think I was four, as it was before kindergarten. When the dog pooped hugely on our front lawn, the kids made up a song to "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow": "Sandy went to the bathroom, Sandy went to the bathroom. . . "

They go back farther, more soft-bordered and woozy like the feeling just before you faint. Being in "the gulley" somewhere around my grandmother's house in Delhi. My sister towering over me as I lay in the weeds and saying, "Are you wounded?" I don't even know what the game was, though I was often (being the smallest, and powerless) taken prisoner.

The tent, being tied to the pole, a reek of canvas. Playing war. Eating sweet peas from the garden, war provisions. Summer noises, cicadas. Long, sizzly, tambourine-like arcs of hot summer sound.

And the skeezix bird, the night hawk that produced a weird booming noise that no one else seemed to hear, so that I assumed I was the only one, or was crazy like everyone told me. Some of them (not many) noticed the call, but not the strange noise that followed it, which my brother claimed was the sound waves bouncing off buildings. (This video finally explained it to me, some fifty years on.)

And just a hair of memory, something that came up in hypnosis, a disastrous session in which I felt I stood before God, but what led into it was a memory of  being newborn and in a crib, my mother opening the door of my dark room - a gigantic exploding rectangle of yellow light, then a figure fifty feet tall, looking down at me with indifference tinged with a certain grim sense of duty.

Rialto Ripples, Oriental-style

When Ernie Kovacs, the mad genius of early TV, needed a theme song for his mad genius show, somebody did an arrangement of Gershwin's catchy piano piece Riato Ripples Rag (see last video), and retitled it Oriental Blues. Except for the goofy sound effects, the pieces are pretty much identical, so I don't know how they ever got away with it.

Everyone knows Gershwin wrote the original, but why was the Kovacs version called Oriental? Well! Out of some madness, I decided to see what the name Levant means "in English". It seemed sort-of French and I wondered what arcane meanings might pop up.

As it turned out, there were more than I could ever include, and they were getting stranger and stranger. But one of the meanings that kept popping up was "of the Orient," or. . . Oriental.

Levant was still around and fairly vigorous in the 1950s, when Kovacs reigned supreme. He was wasting himself on stupid quiz shows and making $45.50 a week, but surely he must have been aware of Kovacs and his insane brand of humor.  Did someone know and exploit the mystical connection between Levant and Oriental and Gershwin? Maybe it was just a coincidence, but there is nothing even vaguely oriental about this piece.

Then again, is there a Rialto, and why does it ripple? Am I just hallucinating again?

You decide.

My head is spinning (and yours will too)

Was Ernie Kovacs murdered?

DEATH IN SIX TAKES

Ernie is driving his Corvair station wagon at blinding speed along Santa Monica Boulevard, an unfamiliar route. He has just come from a Hollywood party full of celebrities, at which he was collossally bored. It is teeming down rain, pitch black, and the Corvair is fishtailing, hard to control. He has had four stiff drinks and feels slightly tipsy. Then he realizes he has left his cigars at home, unthinkable, and has nothing with which to obliterate his thoughts. $200,000.00 in debt from poker and gin games, which he played badly. The IRS on his tail for an astronomical sum of back taxes. Several days before, he was overheard to say, “I’m worth more dead than alive.” Almost absently, he lets go of the wheel, just to see what will happen.

Suddenly the car skids and spins, Ernie grabs the wheel and tries to steer madly, but it is too late: a split-second later, it slams full-force into a utility pole.

Take One:

Ernie dies instantly, on impact. Police find him hours later, thrown partly out of the passenger side. His left hand is outstretched towards an unlit Havana cigar. Cause of death: fractured skull and ruptured aorta.

Take Two:

Ernie does not die. After the sickening noise of the crash, he is somehow aware and awake, with the weird clarity that often follows massive trauma. He reaches over to open the passenger door and begins to crawl out. “Edie,” he says. He can’t die. Edie will be left with the mess. A few seconds later, he blacks out.

Take Three:

Ernie does not die. He begins to crawl out the passenger door, but an astounding blow of impossibly powerful pain brings him down as his brain begins to haemorrhage and his heart explodes.

Take Four:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. Even the most hardened cop feels tearful and sick. A jackal reporter takes a macabre photo of the dead body, and next day it appears on the cover of every tabloid in Hollywood.

Take Five:

The police arrive. They find Ernie face-down on the pavement with no sign of life. “What are we gonna. . . “ “I don’t know. Maybe. . . “ “How ‘bout we say he was trying to light a cigar.” “Anybody got one?” “Here.” “This isn’t the right kind.” “It won’t matter anyway, a cigar’s a cigar.”

Take Six:

Another reporter arrives, but Ernie’s body is already gone. He takes out a large Havana cigar, and though they make him sick, he smokes half of it. He stubs it out, places it on the pavement, and takes a picture of it. The photo will appear on the cover of every newspaper in Hollywood.