Selected Gershwin Blingees

Gershwin: by George, by Bling!

By George, by jing, by God-almighty, I found these Blingees in a George Gershwin file and decided they were too hokily cute not to post. 

I went through a Gershwin phase two or three years ago, and I can't  say it's over, since it changed me. In most of them, you see The Great Man, the Gershwin who struck a pose, whether he was (supposedly) at the piano or (supposedly) talking to his girl friend. And even: See George. See George at the beach. These are ALL posed, the products of publicity, and the early ones bespeak an androgyny that I never knew existed.

Some say Gershwin was gay, others don't care (me!), others see his flexibility in who he wanted to spend time with. Kay Swift, a brilliant composer on her own, was one of his longest and closest relationships, and he dedicated the musical Oh, Kay! to her. In fact, I've always seen that title not as whimsy but as a cry from the heart. 

Gershwin eventually ended up sad and frustrated by the public's unwillingness to embrace his full genius (the lamentably misunderstood Porgy and Bess). They seemed to want to push him back to Tin Pan Alley. They were simply more comfortable with the old George. He served their needs, while his true genius seethed inside him. 

Meantime, a horrendous, horrible thing was slowly growing in his head: a monstrous tumour which eventually claimed him, while his doctors insisted his escalating agony and shocking disability was "psychological". So psychological that when he was in the bathroom, he fell down dead, or so close to it that helping him was impossible. I see him leaving his body, hovering around the ceiling somewhere, looking down while the impotent, idiot doctors cracked his skull open like a walnut, finding a grapefruit-sized tumour that had probably been growing there for years. A sad end for a man still in his 30s, the Mozart of his time. We still have the music, but as prodigious as his output was, it was only a tiny fragment of what he kept in his idea file, his treasure box. A box that, tragically, would not be opened until it was too late.

Gershwin Blingees: I have to do something with these

I don't know why it is, but out of all the subjects I've tried to bling, GG blings the best. I learned a long time ago that old b & w photos work better, with the background filled in and the subject left alone. That gives it a certain 3D quality.

I do these late at night, accounting for the nightmarish quality of some of them. I had no idea the dancer would duplicate like that, as a kind of weird backdrop for GG's conducting.

Maybe a little too pretty, but I had to include it. It looks like his hands are moving, which of course they're not.

Maybe the strangest and wildest GG Blingee I've done to date. Even the original was pretty frightening. I think he was a killer at the piano, at least. And a ladykiller.

Another very odd one. Somehow the Jesus/lamb figure fit there, and the pulsing inside his head is eerily prescient. Pretty icky, too.

A rather sentimental portrait of GG with Kay Swift.  Not much animation here at all. The oriole is supposed to be moving. There was too much complicated detail here to make the figures stand out the way I wanted.

Just bleepin' weird. I had to try out the other animated dancer and see if he'd make a backdrop. He does. But who the hell IS he?

These never end, do they? A little Disneyesque, perhaps. But I love how George signed the music.

GG FACT: did you know that for the initial performance of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, GG left one page of the score blank? That cadenza, completely improvised, was never heard before that concert, nor has it been heard since. Like some of his best stuff, it just flared brilliantly, then dissipated into the air like a shower of sparks. So Ozone's version isn't so controversial after all.

Chocolate roses: the Gershwin legend

Welcome to the latest chapter in my exploration of Gershatology, a. k. a. Gershitudinousness. I don't know why it is, but I keep turning to the ever-changing, eclectic and dynamic medium of the Blingee for my pictorial analyses of George. Here are ten takes on a single picture. The most meaningful is perhaps the last one. One of the saddest and strangest stories in the Gershwin canon (not the boom-boom kind) is the squishy chocolates incident. In the ravages of a brain tumour that nobody seemed to want to acknowledge, Gershwin's behaviour became very strange indeed. He had been hallucinating smells for years, experiencing screamingly horrendous headaches, falling down, drooling, etc., all symptoms of, according to his psychiatrist, "hysteria". Nothing neurological going on at all. No sir. Gershwin was so hysterical that one day, when a box of chocolates arrived, a gift from the Gorgon Lee Gershwin, he smashed them all up into a goo and began rubbing them all over his body. I think such an act should be commemorated somehow, if only because it's the strangest thing I've ever heard a sane person do.

Rhapsody in Bling: a Gershwin dozen

"You had me at hello"

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