Let`s call the whole thing George

An intriguing trick, but it works very well here. The piano part is exactly synched to Fred and Ginger's singing. . . and then they rollerskate.

Jack Gibbons transcribes Gershwin's original piano rolls note-for-note, then attempts to take a seat in George's chair. Which he can't quite do - no one can. But I do appreciate the attempt, especially in cutting through all the layers of smarm and sentimentality that have accrued over the years. Most singers seem to howl Gershwin, or yodel him, or half-sob him, pulling up all kinds of drama that was never meant to be there. Just sing it, and the song will do the rest.

I think of George as a kind of shimmering iridescent musical peacock. There's so much going on at the same time that you can't keep track of it all - but you don't have to, because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In my Gershwin journey there have been times I've felt almost physically lifted up, or turned in some strange way, as he turned and lifted up musical history, almost casually. No one was as full of paradox, and in the end, no one was as wounded, and by those who claimed to love him.

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George walked in

This is one of those nice GG videos that features photos and even snippets of film from his life. Rare enough, but what happened last night? What happened when I was so unprepared for the second song (Love Walked In) on this video?

What happened is, I felt astonishment, and I cried. Cried because, stripped of all the schmaltz, we have a version so close to what George would play that it's almost scary. He was not a sentimental pianist and played with tremendous energy and verve. The love songs shone and gleamed, shot through with sunlight. He was solar rather than lunar, though that sunnyness  was sometimes sadly, darkly eclipsed.

I heard Debussy in those newly-revealed, stripped-down chords, but I heard something absolutely original too. I don't know of any other composer who can knock me back with a single chord. It's remarkable.

So we have the two sides of George here, almost aggressive honky-tonk (and believe me, in the few recordings we have of him, he played fast and he played hard) and sheer, naked poetry. Jack Gibbons has tried to peel back all the layers of sentimentality and get back to essential Gershwin, and it's like restoring a gorgeous Renaissance painting that has been dulled by a thousand layers of varnish and time. What is revealed is startling, so fresh the paint is still wet.

The song begins at 3:01. It's one of those songs that is so simple, it's hardly there. As Salieri says in Amadeus, remove even one element, one note and the whole structure would fall down. And yet it is something that will last forever.

Nothing seemed to matter any more,

Didn't care what I was headed for

Time was standing still,

No one counted till

There came a knocking at the door.

Love walked right in and drove the shadows away ;

Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day.

One magic moment, and my heart seemed to know

That love said Hello ! ,

Though not a word was spoken.

One look and I forgot the gloom of the past ;

One look and I had found my future at last.

One look and I had found a world completely new,

When love walked in... with you.

And now, the inevitable P. S. :

And here is the best vocal version I've heard, sung sweetly and sincerely with a simple, clean, unsentimental orchestration and a fantastic segue into "swing" near the end (the last dreamy note reminding me of an Astaire and Rogers film). I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS IS! But I think that Gershwin, who always referred to himself as a Russian, would have appreciated this.

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His face, at first just ghostly

Where should I begin?

I don't know when it began. After I realized my third novel was crashing in flames, and would never rise again? Perhaps. But I think it started long before that.

How can you NOT know about Gershwin? At least something. At least some of those songs: The way you wear your hat. I got rhythm. And even (though we don't know where, or why) Swanee, how I love ya, how I love ya.

It's a delicate thing when you begin to feel a presence in your life. You're not sure how to receive it. And it's a lonely thing, because either you offer it up to mediums and spiritualists and those who are supposed to understand, or you tell non-spiritualists and are seen as basically crazy.

I would not recommend you offer it up at all, lonely as it is. You take a terrible risk. The presence I feel now-this-minute is catlike, sleek, lovely, indescribable, and even describing it here is somehow risky because I begin to feel foolish. Most of all, I wonder if it's the right thing for him.

But wouldn't he understand?

GG was rougher around the edges than most people knew, or saw. He cursed more. He fumed. Didn't get openly angry because he did not want to appear vulnerable, which he was, terribly. Tin Pan Alley followed him all his life, to the point that the critics ripped into him for writing Porgy and Bess without having the proper classical roots to even attempt such a thing. He was sensitive about technical know-how and hated it when they accused him of not having it. It was kind of like expecting Picasso to learn art techniques with a paint-by-numbers set. If he had had that standardized technical background, Porgy and Bess would have been forgotten a very long time ago.

I could write about GG the autodidact, the pianist, lover, etc., and it would all be right, or at least correct. But what about the lonely soul, seemingly even lonelier after his passing? What about all those frequent, baffling George appearances, which seem to make people's hair stand on end? For he keeps appearing, perhaps as revenge (no matter how playful) for his horrible, unforgiveably botched and bungled death.

His diseased brain, that beautiful brain that gave us the transporting miracle of his music, was gutted, cored like a grapefruit. The medical staff, embarrassed that they could not cure him and perhaps hoping he would die rather than turn into a vegetable, abandoned him to a room, where he died alone. George. Gershwin. Died. Alone.

Some spiritualist friends of mine have told me that the WORST thing that can happen to a person is to die in a room alone, especially in a state of spiritual confusion. GG had lapsed into a coma when the tumor in his brain finally exploded. He didn't know what was happening to him. He must have been looking down at his ravaged, ruined body and brain, knowing he had to leave, but not understanding, not understanding at all.

I remember that thing in A Christmas Carol about Jacob Marley. If a man's spirit doesn't engage with his fellow man during his lifetime, he's cursed to wander around endlessly after his death, seeking something he can never find. 

Is it too late for George?

I am not a medium, but I do not sweep aside the (many, many) impressions I receive from people who have passed. It happens all the time, really. When I dared share my George adventure with a medium in Nanaimo, someone I've known for 25 years, he at first seemed interested - "fascinating!", he exclaimed again and again - and then, suddenly, with no warning or explanation at all, he dumped all my revelations as phony, inauthentic, even concocted by me to try to play the spiritualist and overstep the bounds, because after all, I've had no Medium Training and thus know nothing. 

So Paul B. (I won't give his full name, not to protect him but me) ripped into my vision. I cannot tell you how devastated I was. It didn't merely pull the rug out from under. It was more like falling through the ice. This man's arrogance is nothing new. Years ago I sent him some samples of the novel I was writing, because he seemed very interested, and I had already read an entire manuscript of his (which was extremely dull and even offensive in places). I got this answer from him: well, Margaret, I think you need to be extremely careful not to make a fool of yourself sending this out to publishers, because they're going to see it as some kind of zany soap opera (the thing was a gut-wrenching take on the abuse I suffered as a child). Devastated, I wrote back to say: listen, Paul, these were just samples, not the whole novel. Please, read the whole thing before saying stuff like that! 

And this was a so-called "friend". At that point, I wished I had not trusted ANYONE with my work.

Years went by, I didn't count how many, and then I got one of his calligraphy-written letters ("I don't know how I know how to do this", he told me), saying he wanted to apologize to me for saying those nasty dismissive things, but he couldn't help it because the subject matter of my novel had triggered all his "unresolved issues". It was a case of "look what you made me do", I see now, but of course I couldn't see it then. I just felt amazed that anyone had apologized to me for being abusive: it had never happened before, not in my lifetime. I tried to put the "zany soap opera" remark behind me, even though he admitted he had not even read the excerpts from the novel before condemning it. The outline was enough for him to form an opinion.

Fuckface, bastard, I hope he dies. . . but he won't. He has set up a backwater fiefdom in Nanaimo, and is now a little prince strutting around with little old ladies hanging on to his every word. When he suddenly cut my George impressions out from under me, it was "zany soap opera" all over again, only worse, because he was accusing me of being an amateur and a fraud, someone who should keep her fingers out of this stuff before the Devil comes marching into her living room.

Fuck that.

But something happens with George, and I have found out about it. He appears to people, not always where he knows he will be understood. I don't see him, but I feel him and I always know who it is. He walked in, just like Love walked in, and walked around the left side of my office chair and stood in front of me.

I still feel him, slipping around the room, silently, occasionally tapping me on my (always) left shoulder to correct something I'm thinking, or clarify. "Display" was one word I received (it's a felt knowledge, so I sort of have to translate it into actual words). I was thinking about his appearance, how elegantly he dressed, how well-turned-out he was, and I wondered if it was at least partly a - hmmm - a -

Now I know. Yes, it makes sense because he was already wildly famous by the time he was in his mid-twenties. It's not such a long way from being a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley to world fame. Not if you're George Gershwin. A hop, skip and a jump is enough.

Why is he here? You can make up your own mind whether he is or not, as I often have to do. I never went to Medium School, and I firmly believe each person who practices spiritualism in any form IS their method. You don't learn it out of a book. Paul B. is so overeducated I am surprised he doesn't waddle when he walks. He has two Master's degrees and a PhD. To my mind, no one is duller and less-equipped to handle reality than an academic. Like Napoleon, he has grabbed the crown of mediumship and plunked it down on his own swelled head.

George is smiling, though only a little, and I feel warmth on my left side. It's like a cat rubbing on me, almost imperceptibly. Sleek and warm and lovely, but there is a melancholy, a heartbreak really, or he wouldn't have been able to write those songs. "All my friends are leaving me," he said when he was very near to his deathbed. It's true. Scared of his illness and the bizarre behaviour that went along with an undiagnosed/untreated, grapefruit-sized tumour in his head, they did abandon him, even his soul-mate Kay Swift who was not allowed anywhere near him. Only a few remained, including Oscar Levant, who was so phobic about death that he could not stand to hear the word "insurance". 

But he stayed, played him songs out of Porgy and Bess on the piano (which George, his co-ordination destroyed, could no longer play), and sang them in his bellowing baritone. It's often said that in a crisis, you find out who your real friends are.

But even Oscar's dogged loyalty couldn't save George. When you pass out of this world in confusion, with not even a kindly nurse or a cleaning lady in the room with you, no human energy at all, you don't know you're dead, don't know where the hell you are and what's going on. This has to be resolved somehow, and the upshot of it is that this world and the next become separated by a gauzy veil, the thinnest and most permeable of membranes. You can easily slip back and forth between worlds.

It's called being a ghost, folks. Why don't I finally say it? George Gershwin, as amiable and benevolent as he is, is a ghost.

So who am I to be receiving these impressions, I who have never gone to Medium School? Why is it someone so famous? Do you think I know? Is it like reincarnation, where everyone thinks they used to be George Washington or Cleopatra, not just some schlub digging potatoes in the fields? 

Is it the fact I open to him, I welcome him, I pay attention to him, I - in fact - love him?

Mediums and spiritualists go on and on about Love being the Ultimate Reality and all that. But I am here to tell you something. There are things more important than love, and I will tell you what they are. I will list them for you right now.

Respect.

Understanding.

Loyalty.

Compassion.

Courage.

Acceptance.

Forgiveness. Yes, even that, the thing I often scorn and rage about. Forgiveness is more important than Love, because without it, Love is soon destroyed. It is more fragile than we realize.

So if all these other things are more important than Love, then loving George isn't such a big deal, is it? Of course it's a big deal, it's huge. It graces my life. I feel his presence and it wraps around my left side. He faces me and wants me to understand, and in that plea I almost see him.

I wouldn't be afraid to see him, I would know who he was and why he was doing this. I'm not meant to go trumpet all this to the world, and in fact I only write it here because I know only a handful of people ever read this blog (with the exception of the entry I See Dead People, which has had more than 110,000 views to date because, I think, it's on Pinterest). It's safe. I can do this. I need to, because goddamn, sometimes it's lonely being who I am and carrying all this baggage, and losing so much along the way.

And I think, somehow, George would understand.

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George is on my mind

Away with the music of Broadway
Be off with your Irving Berlin
Oh I give no quarter to Kern or Cole Porter
And Gershwin keeps pounding on tin

How can I be civil when hearing this drivel
It`s only for nightclubbin` souses
Oh give me the free `n` easy waltz that is Vienneasy and
Go tell the band If they want a hand
The waltz must be Strauss`s

Ya, ya ya, give me oom-pa-pah
When I want a melody
Lilting through the house
Then I want a melody
By Strauss
It laughs, it sings, the world is in rhyme
Swinging to three-quarter time

Let the Danube flow along
And the Fledermauss
Keep the wine and give me song
By Strauss

By Jove, by Jing, by Strauss is the thing
So I say to ha-cha-cha, heraus!
Just give me your oom-pa-pah, by Strauss!

Let the Danube flow along
And the Fledermauss
Keep the wine and give me song
By Strauss

By Jove, by Jing, by Strauss is the thing
So I say to ha-cha-cha, heraus!
Just give me your oom-pa-pah, by Strauss!

Wail: one bar that changed musical history

"The Rhapsody was performed by Whiteman's band, with an added section of string players, and George Gershwin on piano. Gershwin decided to keep his options open as to when Whiteman would bring in the orchestra and he did not write down one of the pages for solo piano, with only the words "Wait for nod" scrawled by Grofé on the band score. Gershwin improvised some of what he was playing, and he did not write out the piano part until after the performance, so it is unknown exactly how the original Rhapsody sounded.

The opening clarinet glissando came into being during rehearsal when; "... as a joke on Gershwin, [Ross] Gorman (Whiteman's virtuoso clarinettist) played the opening measure with a noticeable glissando, adding what he considered a humorous touch to the passage. Reacting favourably to Gorman's whimsy, Gershwin asked him to perform the opening measure that way at the concert and to add as much of a 'wail' as possible."

Go home, George (and take Ira with you)

Review of George Gershwin's masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, by fellow composer Virgil Thomson: "One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business he wanted to learn."

Gershwin plays Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (solo piano)

As is so often the case, I appear to have come full circle.

I was on an obsessive George-trek some time ago, when it was aborted by someone's astonishingly insensitive remarks. Seldom in my life have I ever had the rug so nastily pulled out from under me by someone who used to (I thought) support me.

He has set himself up as the head of a Spiritualist church in a tiny community on the Island, grabbing the crown and putting it on his own head like some small-minded backwater Napoleon. Since he got into all that, he seems to believe my own psychic experiences (which I used to feel safe to share with him) are, at best, suspect, and at worst, completely fraudulent.

It all just died away then, seemed to end forever, and there was nothing I could do about it but move on.

And then.

Love walked in.

I have had an on-again-off-again relationship with spiritualism for my whole life, but I approach it in a  slightly different way from the blue-haired dowagers sitting around the table with the wee-gee board. I don't believe in "calling" spirits or summoning them or telling them to do anything at all. I don't feel haunted, and I am not at all, one bit, afraid of being taken over by evil spirits. No. It has never been like that with me.

I have had any number of things happen to me which, if you classified them, would have to be filed under "psychic experiences". Many came soon after someone's passing, either someone I knew or knew of. Sometimes, what I perceived turned out to be of some comfort to those who were left behind. I never offered those insights, if that's what they were, unless the situation felt right, unless I sensed some receptiveness and thought it actually might do some good.

THAT is what this is all about, sharing your perceptions in order to help others, not hanging out a shingle or starting an insular little church and making yourself the head of it. And yet, the message I was receiving from this psychic despot was, no, Margaret, what you're receiving can't possibly be authentic. The main reason being, I "don't know enough about it", am a rank amateur who shouldn't even go near this subject, and need to go get an advanced degree from his little University of Evil.

Never mind, I'm getting carried away.

I do feel presences, cannot prove or disprove them, but who cares when it feels like this? This one, when he does come around, just sends me swooning, the vibe is so wonderful.  I ask myself, who am I to be perceiving this? Then again. Why not, when I am willing to leave that door open and see what happens, with neither expectation nor fear?

I have never "seen" George, but lots of people have. There are any number of curious anecdotes about his sudden, startling appearances. He never got to complete his work, had barely started on the mature works which surely would have grown in richness and complexity. But it was more than that. Towards the end of his short life, he was known to ask out loud, "Why can't I fall in love?" It was hard for him to be profoundly close to another human being. His brother Ira probably came closest. 

With this restlessness, this odd loneliness amidst the adulation of millions, then the sudden cutting down of a life not even yet in full flower - it's a combination which might, if you do believe in such things, lead a person to want to hang around on this earth even after they have "passed". 

The sightings aren't usually macabre or scary, though they can be startling. Mostly it's playful and a little wicked, the pranks of a little boy who never grew up. He can be walking down the street in that hurried head-down way, sitting at a player piano with his own music coming out of it, or in his workroom smiling and waving while his poor brother Ira nearly has a heart attack from terror.

When he walked back in recently, just completely spontaneously - I can't really describe the feeling. I don't have the words. An astonishing rush of rapture, a sweetness, a dearness, a - . I'll never get close, damn it - how I wish I could describe it! I can see why people loved him the way they did. 

I just listened to HIS version of Rhapsody in Blue and laughed all the way through it - yes, laughed. That little circular riff in the Andante, the three notes played over and over, sounds more like a slightly lopsided triangle when he plays it, the rhythm a little tipsy so that it becomes so much more quirkily wonderful.  But you can't write that kind of thing down.

People try to define genius in all sorts of different ways. "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" It's so simple! But no one did. And yet, and yet - works of genius appear to have always been there. It's a great paradox.

Gershwin knew he was a genius and spoke almost modestly of it, with that strange arrogant self-effacement that was his trademark. In fact, he had all the modesty of a brilliant eight-year-old who is constantly being told how smart he is. That level of smart is loneliness itself, because there is simply no one else on your level. And yet, for all his warmth and loveableness, he was unattainable, unavailable to people. That inaccessible core found expression only in the music. 

They're writing songs of love, but not for me.

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George Gershwin: The Graceful Ghost

Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time). After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around. But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously,in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition.

 GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page. Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot. 

Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Since writing this, one of the first passages I ever wrote about Gershwin and my sense of close contact with him, I found a number of other writings that made my scalp prickle. It does make me wonder: does he have the capacity to move back and forth between worlds, or has he decided to stay in this one, wandering around as curiously and restlessly as he did in life?

My wonderful George experience was completely derailed when everything I wrote was shot down by a so-called friend, a spiritualist medium who has decided to set up his own little fiefdom and call himself God. To be honest, it came out he never actually read any of the things I sent him, but was still certain that it was all bogus. This was also true when he dismissed my first complete novel as "a zany soap opera" (having never read THAT either). Later, when he half-assedly apologized, he said I had "triggered his issues", meaning "you made me do it."

To my chagrin, the entire thing dropped out from under me and disappeared, and I felt considerable grief. I had to keep moving forward and practically stopped thinking about it. He had triggered embarrassment in me, which I guess was what he wanted. But I had trusted him, and now I didn't know why I took that risk.

Then the other day, someone or something entered my office - just came in, I mean. Didn't so much waft or float or materialize like the ghost of Jacob Marley. He just walked in, like Love in that song. He walked in on my left side and came around so I was facing him and I saw that sweet, familiar look and that indescribable vibe.

George was back.

Below are a couple of quotes from the many (many, many) books on George. It seems he does appear to people, including his own sad, bereaved brother/writing partner, Ira. It's too bad he could not have enjoyed the visit more, sad that he was so terrified at George's friendly, unspectral return.  I feel George as the most gorgeous, the most glorious presence, but at the same time soft, tender - really, quite indescribable, the most beautiful of vibes stealing into the room.

“George even passed the most acid of tests for great leadership by remaining a presence to his followers even after he’d left the planet. Ann ‘Willow Weep for Me’ Ronell told me some half century after his death that she still ‘saw’ Gershwin regularly in the crowds of the Upper West Side, looking as if he’d just walked out the door. And on that same day, Burton ‘How About You’ Lane testified to an even more precise epiphany. Lane had recently been to a concert of Gershwin’s newly-refurbished piano rolls being played on a baby grand pianola in a pool of spotlight. And as the notes began to go mechanically down and up, ‘There was George for a moment,’ he exclaimed, ‘playing away. I almost passed out.’”

- The House that George Built, Wilfrid Shed

"As Ira grew older, he became not less but more obsessed with George. When he was in his eighties, Michael Feinstein, who had become something of a surrogate son to him, heard him talking to George in his sleep. These were, according to Feinstein, 'lengthy conversations' that were 'often filled with anger, centering around Ira's desire not to stay here on earth and George's insistence that he stay.' Just before Ira's death in 1983, he revealed to Feinstein in a hushed voice something he had never told anyone else. Shortly after George's passing, he had looked into his brother's workroom upstairs at 1019 North Roxbury and seen him 'sitting on the sofa, smiling and nodding to me. It terrified me. I wasn't drinking. I wasn't drunk. But I saw him.'"

- George Gershwin, An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler

Time traveller

George was one of the few who busted the code.

Who realized we shouldn't be limited by something as foolish as Time.

And thus, he became a Time Traveller.

Music is temporal, not spatial.

It takes up time, not space.

Though it never runs backwards, it runs in many directions

and has many dimensions

that we cannot hear.

Bust it through a prism

and you'll have overtones

that I guarantee will spook you out

no longer recognizable

as the tones from which they came.

Singing and spinning

even bending as time should never bend

and in its scary iridescence

we meet ourselves again and again

George!

George, George, George!

It has been happening just around the edges of my mind. A snatch of tune here and there: ". . . a foggy day in London town," or just a bit of the Rhapsody.

He's back.

I didn't want to say this until now, still quake a bit when I say it. Some months ago, I went on a Gershwin journey and went as deep into his life as I could.

It was fascinating, the things I found out. I even found recordings of his voice, the level, cultured/Brooklyn sonority of it, perhaps consciously cultivated, but now made his own. And I heard him rehearsing Porgy and Bess with a mixture of feverish excitement and anxiety.

George.

George was/IS one whose ties to the earth haven't been broken. The veil between his reality and ours is an exceptionally thin one, more like a fog. He has slipped back and forth a lot. Not only did his brother Ira see him after his death, so did a lot of other people. I kept finding - eerily - stories of "sightings", even decades later, George walking down the street in that rapidly purposeful way, smiling and waving, even sitting at a player piano with eternally youthful playfulness.

I came to be close to George, or maybe WITH George, which is another thing entirely. The material I wrote down was so intriguing that I sent portions of it to a friend who calls himself a medium. I've known him for 25 years and have had my innings with him, such as when he dismissed my first novel as a "zany soap opera" without reading a word of it. When he abjectly apologized years later, saying I had triggered all his "issues", I forgave him, not realizing it was a clear case of "look what you made me do".

What happened was, oh my, Margaret. This is definitely an authentic connection. This is fascinating! And on and on and on. So I kept on sending it to him, but now I doubt if he even read it. (If he could ignore a whole novel and still dismiss it. . . ). Then at a certain point, and abruptly, "I don't know, I can't make any sense of this but it's definitely nothing to do with Gershwin. Either someone else is pretending here, or you are."

Then he wondered why I was angry.

This time I really let him have it. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to be totally honest with a bully. A "psychic" bully - the worst kind. He quickly emailed me a rejoinder (fortunately he doesn't live here, but hunkers down on the Island with the Satanists), which I deleted unread.

But it killed George.

It killed him for me, though he was already dead, but not dead, not really. Passing back and forth, but turned away now by someone else's cruelty. My interest in him didn't wane - it died, even though I never wanted it to.

Gershwin had women friends whom he respected immensely. He respected them intellectually, but there was very little romantic love. His sexuality has been much discussed, as if it's any of our business. I don't think he was happy, but he was joyful. Exuberant. By turns, when he didn't have very deep blues, indeed. Deeper than the deepest indigo.

I felt I was in touch with him. Suddenly - . I thought he was gone forever, and what happened? I don't know, exactly. The silly, playful gifs and Blingees and carefully collected photos now seem relevant again. I want him to stay, and I don't want any phony spiritualists wrecking this, wrecking my deep connection, my mysterious contact with him, out of jealousy or pettiness or even worse things.

Nothing will. Suddenly, something sweeps in: and I am reminded of that incredible Ira Gershwin line: "but the age of miracles/Hadn't passed." Simple as e=mc2, and as profound.

It will never happen again. George will never happen again. Was once enough? Of course not. But he keeps coming back, in my dreams.

And here.

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The age of miracles

A beautiful, gorgeous, luscious chunk of movie impressionism, with Fred Astaire to boot. And he's singing Gershwin! Mr. Gershwin and I took a blow today - quite a bad one - someone claimed our relationship was bogus and in fact didn't exist. One wonders, sometimes, just who is the fraud. WE know what is important, and we know what transforms a life, and it's love, George, isn't it. You knew all about it and lived it through your songs. So away with the naysayers and phony psychic prophets. They know nothing, and are jealous of our connection, no doubt. We survived the hit, we survived the attempt to discredit us and hang us out to dry. Love will win: it always does. The age of miracles hasn't passed.

Are you listening, George? Somebody finally got it.

Like a peacock on fire: By Strauss!

It suddenly occurs to me that my last post probably made no sense to anyone but me. I think - I hope - I was trying to draw parallels between the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, and George and Ira Gershwin. Sounds silly? Maybe. But it seemed oh-so-significant at the time. My Gershwin exploration is a dreamlike experience, and you know how hard it is to explain or even describe a dream to someone else, if you can even remember it. And somehow it falls apart on remembering.

But meanwhile! Here is a fabulous recording of one of the GG brothers' most charming songs. It has a killer lyric that is very hard to get your tongue around, and a fast, sassy, brilliant tune. Maureen McGovern, an underrated singer with an incredible range, gets around this very handily, and with operatic precision. And for all that, she still has fun with it.  By Jove, by jing, by Strauss is the thing!

(P. S. Kiri te Kanawa does a bizarre version of this in a thick Yiddish accent - wtf?? - and does not sing the high-altitude coloratura solo which McGovern knocks off with such aplomb. Now, it could be that the arrangement was written especially for her. At any rate, like this song that flames up like a peacock on fire, it's killer.)

Away with the music of Broadway

Be off with your Irving Berlin

Oh I give no quarter to Kern or Cole Porter

And Gershwin keeps pounding on tin

How can I be civil when hearing this drivel

It's only for nightclubbin' souses

Oh give me the free 'n' easy waltz that is Vienneasy and

Go tell the band 

If they want a hand

The waltz must be Strauss's

Ya, ya ya, give me oom-pa-pah

When I want a melody

Lilting through the house

Then I want a melody

By Strauss

It laughs, it sings, the world is in rhyme

Swinging to three-quarter time

Let the Danube flow along

And the Fledermauss

Keep the wine and give me song

By Strauss

By Jove, by Jing, by Strauss is the thing

So I say to ha-cha-cha, heraus!

Just give me your oom-pa-pah, by Strauss!

Let the Danube flow along

And the Fledermauss

Keep the wine and give me song

By Strauss

By Jove, by Jing, by Strauss is the thing

So I say to ha-cha-cha, heraus!

Just give me your oom-pa-pah,

By Strauss!

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Gershwin's Ghost: conversation

May 7/15

I should I guess try to slow this down or stop it or spread it out or something.

Why?

I’m getting greedy.

For what, we don’t know. But I am here on the line

Does it matter how much things have changed since –

Does it seem to?

No, it doesn’t. This is a timeless time. Are you appearing to people still?

I haven’t for a while because I was not sure they would know me.

Oh they would. For some reason I am thinking of Jacob and Esau

What brought THAT to your mind?

Something about birthright – you and Ira – I don’t know.

“The hands are the hands of Esau.” You know how it goes?

I need to be reminded!

Jacob stole Esau’s birthright, or he sold it for a bowl of soup. Great deal, eh? Did you ever pay attention to what my real name is?

Jacob.

Esau being the eldest, so he’d get the caboodle, all of it.

I just found the reference, here it is:

21 Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was childless. The

Lord answered his prayer, and his wife Rebekah became pregnant.

22 The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, “Why is this happening to me?” So she went to inquire of the Lord.
23 The Lord said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.”
24 When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb.
25 The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment;so they named him Esau.
26 After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebekah gave birth to them.
27 The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents.
28 Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.
29 Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished.
30 He said to Jacob, “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!” (That is why he was also called Edom.
31 Jacob replied, “First sell me your birthright.”
32 “Look, I am about to die,” Esau said. “What good is the birthright to me?”
33 But Jacob said, “Swear to me first.” So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob.
34 Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left.
So Esau despised his birthright.

Rings true in a way.

I don’t think he despised his birthright but some things do ring true in it, including your own cleverness and the way your personalities contrast. I just looked up the rest of it and Jacob fools his father twice! His father seems unable to go back on it, so poor Esau. . . in a way, he’s cursed, or certainly not blessed. But who on earth could outfox Jacob?

Nobody. He looks after his own. Yet Esau loves him, maybe too much.

He’s beholden to him?

It should be the other way around, but it isn’t. George ends up being the genius.

You have no trouble saying that, do you.

No. I have no trouble saying that. Ira would have no trouble saying that. He was the favored son, but look what happened, I jumped on the piano stool and was off. And it was Ira’s piano. He was supposed to take lessons. You could say the piano was his birthright, and I stole it. At least I had no trouble taking it.

But it really was.

It really was. Did he feel left behind? Then he wrote these incredible lyrics, and it became evident we really were “twins”, with the words and music intertwining.

That is absolutely fantastic! “The hands are hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.” Pulling a switch, there, and a clever one. It’s almost like you/he stole Esau’s hands!

Esau’s hands were hairy. Jacob’s hands were smooth. Boy they sure got it backwards there.

Yeah I’ve seen pictures.  Wow. I’m just resonating from this

Go away and chew on it for a while.

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