Boyhood Photo of Thomas Edison

           Boyhood photo of Thomas Edison

Comments (from The Vintage News)

This is what a young theif and con man looks like.

 A con man and a thief? Are you sure this isn't Elon Musk?

I'm sure there's always been stupid people. But with the emergence of social media in recent times, you actually get to see firsthand exactly how dumb and gullible some truly are…

General electric and Edison ruined Nicola Tesla. History is always written by the victors regardless of whether they are thieving psychopaths or not.

So much rancor for the man! As a boy he was my hero. Working on the Grand Trunk railroad on the baggage car. His chemicals starting the fire and the conductor throwing him off. It was all so brave.

Probably thinking about how he can take credit for other people's ideas.

Thinking about profit his own selfishness and screwing the rest of the world.

I bet he stole the camera for that picture too

Show me the picture of Thomas Edison as a girl too!

For people who believe everything "The Oatmeal" claims about Edison and Tesla

Edison's ideas came from a think tank. It's safe to say he "stole" from a wide variety of people.

Teddy he sure did

Quiet.....Bet most of you thought Tesla was just a car and had to Google to learn otherwise

A hero renowned for his infamy as grand thief of someone else's genius.

That face you make when you know you can steal well.

The smiling face of a future con man, before he became a thug and a thief.

What a smarmy looking little shitbird.

Probably stole that outfit.

Sweet favorite boy of the banksters.

He looks radiant in this photo

Would he be anything else?

He dreamed of 'Westinghousing' an elephant.

someone should’ve punched the kid in the face

I was just about to say that.

He later claimed to have invented the scarf. 

And Bell may have been a thief as well.

"Here I go stealin' again"

What s bright spark

He got old young.

Original mugshot.

As opposed to a girl

Bully.

Lookie that lil thief

Legendary!

Looks like Oliver

Dodgy lil prick

Relative of yours?

Wanker

A thief and a crook

Stop hating

of course! 😂😂😂😂

Look at that smile. What a piece of garbage

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I needed a laugh, and I got one. I have always hated pompous assholes who steal other people's ideas for their own glory, so this actually made me laugh out loud. I'd have to include on the list Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and (yes!) Walt Disney. My generation would have been horrified to see these comments. My generation was full of shit. Everyone disses comments sections, but in this case I think they're right on the money.

Up in smoke: what happened to George Gershwin?

George #1: dredged out of rare archival footage, in turn dredged up by documentarians. Here we see the godlike, melancholy Gershwin portraits come to life. The guy looks like Basil Rathbone on the surface of things. The pipe, the regal bearing. I assume he's either courtside or At Home, or at the home of some bigwig like Schoenberg. 

George #2. This one reveals so much: the godlike creature casually stretching, the playfully rough character grabbing the neck of some poor unfortunate female (who doesn't look too happy about it), the jauntily histrionic piano-playing with whoever-it-is. Not Oscar Levant, we know that much.

When you keep seeing the same 10 or 15 seconds played over and over again, it either drives you crazy or helps you see more and more in these tiny moments, these gestures, the setting of what looks like director's chairs in front of a massive, flat-trimmed hedge. This really happened, it did, and it spins on your hand, a few seconds of reality played over and over as no one ever dreamed it could be.

George #3. This might be Schoenberg, but then again, I think S. was older than this at the time (early '30s?). Whoever it is, they're playing piano four hands, and goofing around facing the camera like little kids. 

George #4. The long and lanky man with the bearing of royalty Walks Out on the Patio, jerks a treat away from the dog, unfolds a chaise.

George #5, my least-favorite, but perhaps the most revealing. When the dog, which he has already deprived of a treat, won't jump up on the chaise with him (reminding me of Hitler's cowering Blondi), he jerks it up forcefully by the scruff as it resists him with a flinch. I am reminded of a magician yanking a rabbit out of a hat.

George #6: again, in slow, and fade to black.

Given how world-famous he was, why don't we have more archival footage of Gershwin performing? The last gif (below) of GG racing through I Got Rhythm and bowing like a jerky puppet was all I found, and it was described as "extremely rare". He lived until 1938, for God's sake. This wasn't the Stone Age. By that time Oscar Levant (usually seen as a much lesser light) had a solid career as a composer and pianist, and had already written a book and appeared in a couple of movies. Where was George?

And after that, a fade to nothingness. A brain tumour carried him off, horribly, at age 37. His life sprang wildly out of shape, his behaviour became crazed, he smeared chocolate all over himself (though he was surely not the first - or last - to do that; it was just that no one expected George Gershwin to do it. My theory is that he was making himself up in blackface, and missed.)

His sister-in-law Lee Gershwin had a hate on for George, and as he fell out of his chair in restaurants and endured agonizing headaches, she pushed him away in disgust, banishing him from friends and family. It was all psychosomatic, you see, a result of the strain of being a Great Composer. Never did anyone think to look under the hood, where a golf-ball-sized malignant tumor was destroying his temporal lobe.  By the time they looked, it was too late, there was nothing they could do. His temperature shot up to 106.5 degrees, and he soon died, going up in flame hotter than the fires of his genius.

I have only barely begun to touch Gershwin, though like most afficionados I used to think I knew him pretty well. I am becoming fascinated now (oh boy, look out, here comes another obsession that will take up a couple dozen posts!) as I wait for a bio I ordered from Amazon. Not the 900-page one - I'm waiting to see if the shorter one whets my appetite for more, or puts me off. I bogged down in two massive Twain biographies when it all got to be too much. 

I always felt GG was snobby, cool, asexual, full of himself, if vital and driven and full of energy. The music always struck me as a bit crazy, and sometimes excruciatingly beautiful. It was as if the composer and the rest of George were two beings. His death was just plain godawfully horrible, no one deserves to die like that, exiled even from one's own mind. So what was going on there, were things just burning too hot to carry on in in any state of health?

More will be revealed.

APPENDA (UM, IX). I remembered a story from maybe 40 years ago, when my brother Walt, a professional musician, told it to me. At the time I thought, oh, this is what musicians talk about around the water cooler or at the bar or wherever. But it's a damn good story, and as usual I wondered if I dreamed it.  I looked it up, and, yes, here it is!  I found several versions of it (in fact I just deleted one that stunk), but I like this one best, embedded in a story in the Wall Street Journal. There are various versions, of course - and sometimes the teller is actually in the car with Gershwin, or even driving it. If it never happened, then perhaps it should have.

Throughout his brief life—he died in 1937 at age 38—Gershwin had the golden touch. The phenomenon of George Gershwin astonished everyone—not least Gershwin himself. He was famous for his immodesty, except that in him it came off as something else, self-amazement perhaps. "You know the extraordinary thing about my mother," he once said, "she's so modest about me." When a friend in Hollywood was driving wildly, ­Gershwin alerted him: ­"Careful, man, you have ­Gershwin in the car." Listening for the first time to a full ­orchestral rendering of the ­opera "Porgy and Bess," he ­exclaimed: "This music is so wonderful, so beautiful that I can hardly believe I wrote it."


Not F. Scott Fitzgerald but George Gershwin may have been the reigning figure of the Jazz Age. Gershwin holding forth at the piano at parties in Manhattan, everyone gathered around as if by magnetic force—these scenes were among the symbolic tableaux of the 1920s. Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: "I felt on the ­instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

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Oscar Levant: The Lost Interview

An interview with Oscar Levant

(from Pulse Magazine, April 7, 1960)

Hello, Oscar. Nice to meet you. You know, I almost said “Hell, Oscar.”

(laughs) It would have been more appropriate. Come right in to my den of thieves.

Thieves?

I steal material all the time, everybody thinks it’s mine. It’s all in the delivery.

You mean a “special delivery”.

Aha, a smart-ass kid! We oughta get along just great.

 OK, Oscar Levant, let me get right down to it. What is it that drives you?

Drives me? I have a chauffeur, but it’s a “he”, not an “it”.

You know what I mean.

Drives me, it’s probably just the will to get up in the morning.

Is that hard for you?

Don’t pry.

OK, I won’t. Sorry. I want to know what. . . I hate to say “inspires” you.

Thank you.

Let me rephrase the question. Did you choose music, or did it choose you?

Do you need to ask?

Would you have done anything else?

I probably would have done practically anything else. The rule in our house was absolute perfection. One wrong note was a source of shame. It drove me absolutely crazy. See, now you have your answer!

As to why you went crazy?

I might have been crazy from the beginning.

So in what way did you depart from absolute perfection?

In just about every way. I hated my teachers. I hated my father. I hated my piano.

I have to tell you a story. Nobody in our family had any talent whatsoever on the keyboard, even though a few of them are professional musicians. When my brother was practicing, he kept trying to leave the room but my mother would stick her head in and say, “You have to practice for half an hour!” At one point he slammed the lid down and opened the front door and yelled at the top of his voice, “I HATE THE PIANO!”                  

(Laughs with a wicked expression)

I love piano stories. I hated the piano too. Or I hated what it did to me.

Did you never feel you’d mastered it?

No performance is ever as perfect as the one that exists in your mind.

That’s profound.

No it isn’t, I forgot my Demerol this morning.

Oh, so that’s supposed to be funny?

It gets big laughs.

So when did you decide to. . .

To be a sellout? That’s what they say about Levant. That he’s a sellout, that he sold out to Hollywood and cheap fame as a movie sidekick who plays cornball classical music between production numbers.

Are you?

A sellout?  Oh sure. But I make a lot better money. And it’s a way to stay out of the concert hall. It’s the ninth circle of Hell up there. (lights another cigarette)

But you’re so good. I mean, you’re –

Let’s get on with the Gershwin stuff, shall we? I know it’s coming.

OK, the Gershwin stuff. May I ask what he was really like?

Nothing like that limp-wristed Robert Alda who played him in the film. Had to dub all his playing for him.

Oh, THAT film! The one where you played yourself. What was it like to play yourself?

Let’s not get obscene here.

I don’t mean play “with” yourself.  I mean – portray yourself in the film.

I’d say it was a snap, but I don’t think I ever really figured out my character.

But you kept the coffee-and-cigarettes mode.

Sweetheart, that’s the only mode I have.

Is it your “shtik”?

Jesus, where do you get these words? What makes you think I’m Jewish?

It was the way you hugged Steve Allen on his show.

I hugged him “Jewish”?

I had to translate it.

(Laughs again) So did these guys send over somebody they think can stay ahead of me, or what?

No one can stay ahead of you.

Better for them. Listen, if I hugged Steve Allen any way at all they’d say I was a faggot. I was friends with Gershwin, and he was supposed to be a faggot, so that made ME a faggot by association.

I get the feeling you’re not a faggot.

Not lately. I think I’ve forgotten how, due to lack of practice. I have a lovely wife,  I mean it sincerely, June, she’s just terrific, we busted up last week. No, seriously, I don’t think I’d be alive without her and I don’t know how she puts up with me.

She loves you.

Loves me, as in popular song? Or loves me, as in, she loves him one minute and hates him the next? That would be my wife.

Do you ever stop joking? Do you ever get truly, deeply serious about things?

You mean, do I ever explore the darkest recesses of my tortured psyche?

Something like that.

Yeah, all the time.

At the piano?

Why would I damage my piano like that?

At the psychiatrist’s office? I saw him on your TV show the other day. That’s an innovative idea, to invite your analyst to come on your show.

He’s the only one I could get on such short notice. Adlai Stevenson bailed out on me at the last minute.

What do you say to your psychiatrist?

HELP!. . .  HELP!

Does he help?

I’m not sure there is such a thing as help, I mean on this plane of existence. I think you are who you are. It might be worse if I didn’t go.

Do you run in little circles inside your head?

What sort of question is that?

Just curious.

If you mean, am I a manic-depressive, of course. That’s the only diagnosis they could come up with that was frightening enough.

What are the highs like?

I don’t even know I’m on a high until I come down and realize that I’ve been babbling and swinging from chandeliers for weeks. Usually turns out I’ve offended a lot of people.

It sure smells like cigarettes in here.

The place is one big ashtray.

Are you hooked?

(Gazes at interviewer, lights another cigarette)

Would you play something for me right now?

I thought you’d never ask.

The Humoresque?

Which one?

Dvorak. Am I pronouncing that right?

No. Do you know there are words to that piece?

I didn’t! Why don’t you sing them?

Right now?

Right now.

(He sits at the piano, fidgeting and taking 2 or 3 minutes to get settled.)

Like a bike but so much cuter

Is my tiny two-wheeled scooter,

And I ride it ‘round and ‘round each day.

Though it has no engine on it,

Once I place my feet upon it

Merrily I’m on my way.

When I grow older

I may be bolder

And I’ll think of aeroplanes

And auto-mo-biles. . .

But right now when I’m outside

I’m satisfied to guide and ride

My tiny little scooter

With two wheels!

Oh, that’s lovely!

So are you, sweetheart. Come back any time. (Coughs, drapes arms around interviewer in Jewish embrace)

END

Oscar Levant plays Khatchaturian

So here is the only clip I could find that would play: the Concerto in F one wouldn't work. This is more of a flashy showpiece, but my my, what he does with it! Women must have thrown their hotel room keys on the stage. This video displays certain unique aspects of his playing: the prizefighter bobbing and weaving; being a hair's-breadth ahead of the beat, which conveys a certain urgency; tiny comic elements like turning around to face the orchestra; producing a "something extra" with some chords (I can't express this, but I can hear it), almost a hidden overtone or bright extra sound that wasn't written down anywhere, a new color in the spectrum, so that the chord opened out and became excruciatingly pleasurable (and this is, after all, Khatchaturian, the composer I rhapsodized about a few posts ago). But it happens so fast and then vanishes, not so much mercury as lightning. I wish I knew who wrote this arrangement of the Sabre Dance, but at the same time I know it could be no one else but Oscar, incorporating his trademark sour/sweet dissonances and complexity. He blows this tired old piece of circus music out of the water.

Harold Lloyd: the man with the moves

                                              

 

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