"You had me at hello"
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Saturday, March 7, 2015
Friday, March 6, 2015
Pastorale by Gabriel Pierne
This is just a few minutes of rapturous beauty. It's a group I've never heard of, but I hope I hear more of them. I first heard this piece on an LP called Pastorales in the 1960s - we played the grooves off it - and since then I've been trying to piece the album back together. This is the best version I've found of this lovely melancholy piece.
The group is Tempest Winds Chicago. More, more, I want more!
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Bob Dylan wrote all of George Gershwin's songs!
Sooooooo! You think George Gershwin was an original, do you? You think he was the genius of that place, y’know, that alley with all those tin pans lying around? You think he wrote hundreds-a great songs like Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’, Shortnin, and Mairsy-Dotes? WRONG. He stole from everybody, just like every legendary composer who ever lived.
This exposé will intersperse my unique revelations about Gershwin and his times with comments from that unassailable fountainhead of true lies, Wikipedia. The author uses it all the time to lend an aura of veracity to her completely fictitious essays and to casually bend facts to her own inclinations. Pay attention!
Gershwin was influenced by French composers of the early twentieth century. In turn Maurice Ravel was impressed with Gershwin's abilities, commenting, "Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves. I have heard of George Gershwin's works and I find them intriguing.” The orchestrations in Gershwin's symphonic works often seem similar to those of Ravel; likewise, Ravel's two piano concertos evince an influence of Gershwin.
Gershwin asked to study with Ravel. When Ravel heard how much Gershwin earned, Ravel replied with words to the effect of, "You should give me lessons”. It was never made clear what kind of lessons he meant. In fact, there is little evidence that Gershwin even understood French and had no idea what Ravel had just proposed. “To me,” he was quoted in the press, “it all sounds like Hinky Dinky Parley Voo.”
In spite of the fact that their attempt to meld their talents failed, the composers had something in common: they both died of brain tumors. This is proof that extended periods of composing causes the brain stem to harden into a hockey puck. Either that, or medical science is wrong and tumors are catching.
Some versions of this suspicious "you should give me lessons" story feature Igor Stravinsky rather than Ravel as the composer; however Stravinsky confirmed that he originally heard the story from Ravel, at one of those salons where they waved at each other and went, “Wooooo-hooooo!” Other accounts differ. In fact they differ so wildly that, as with most musical anecdotes, it probably never happened at all.
Some claim that Gershwin was a time-traveller who showed up in Bob Dylan’s closet in 1962. Dylan's early faux-rockabilly style was a complete failure in Dinkytown,a very small pioneer settlement in Minnesota where none of the residents were more than 2 inches tall. At the time, Dylan was playing a pink plastic electric guitar with gold sparkles in it that he ordered out of the Sears catalogue.
“I want to study with you,” stated Gershwin, citing his complete lack of expertise in writing popular song.
“Hey man,” Dylan replied (though it is doubtful these are his exact words: citation required). "We can't study together. I already dropped outa high school."
“I don’t have any hits,” Gershwin claimed.
“I don’t either, man. I'm still singin' Buddy Holly songs."
"Sing one for me, o legend of your times."
"Goes kinda like this.
I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
I believe it to my soul you're the devil in nylon hose
For the harder I work the faster my money goes
Well I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
I said shake, rattle and roll
I said shake rattle and roll
Well you won't do right
To save your doggone soul
"I note that the tune is somewhat monochromatic."
"Say what?"
"It's all one note."
"Yeah, easier to remember, man. I have to write my changes on my sleeve."
"And the lyric has a certain primitive energy. After all, Cole Porter did allude to a glimpse of stocking."
"Well I ain't makin' a livin' at it yet. Too busy obliteratin' my middle-class upbringing and fabricatin' my image as bum ridin' the rails with Woody. But things are lookin' up. I’m screwin’ this girl named Baez and she's goin' places."
“Maybe I should’ve approached Schoenberg.”
“Yeah. He’s a good plumber, man.”
“Do you mean he plumbs the depth of the human soul?”
“Dig it.”
(This is a good example of how a completely inane remark can be twisted around to reflect future genius.)
But his collaboration with Dylan was not to be (sorry about the title, I changed my mind as I wrote this), nor did he ever work with that other guy whose name is so hard to spell. So he began to steal from other rock legends, notably Bruce Springsteen, whose remarks are not on record.
But the vandalism didn’t stop there. Gershwin's own Concerto in F was criticized for being related to the work of Claude Debussy, more so than to the expected jazz style. The comparison did not deter Gershwin from continuing to explore French styles. The title of An American in Paris reflects the very journey that he had consciously taken as a composer: "The opening part will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and Les Six, though the tunes are original." Others claimed he used the term American to give the piece a veneer of cultural relevance while he sucked all the juices out of the French impressionists. Later Leslie Caron (French!) dumped a bucket of sexuality over the whole thing like whitewash, which is all people remember anyway.
Aside from the French influence, Gershwin was intrigued by the works of Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. He also ripped off Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin (his chief rival, who never learned to play the piano and was in fact tone-deaf). He also asked Schoenberg for composition lessons. Schoenberg refused, saying "I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you're such a good Gershwin already." Gershwin’s reply was, “Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.” (This quote is similar to one credited to Maurice Ravel during Gershwin's 1928 visit to France – "Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you are a first-rate Gershwin?" He then hit him up for a loan.)
The “first-rate Gershwin” remark which every composer in human history claimed to have uttered first has in fact been attributed to Gershwin himself, or perhaps his longtime walking companion Giorgg Greshvinn.
Meanwhile, Gershwin’s ghostwriter Mannie Maneschevitz turned out a semi-hit called Second-rate Gershwin, later made popular by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.
Gershwin’s dog was also named Gershwin. An Irish setter, the dog caused confusion on Tin Pan Alley, where he often drank from a tin pan, and in the salons of Paris where he had his fur foiled (he was actually a black lab). Gershwin was sometimes heard to exclaim, “Good boy, Gershwin!”, which was mistaken for arrogance on his part. Later one of his rivals George Greshwin wrote in the Henbane Times, “That new song Gershwin wrote is really a dog.”
Then again, there is Oscar Levant’s most brilliant, mind-blowing, searing quip ever, better than anything he ever blurted out on To Tell the Truth or Hollywood Squares: “An evening with George Gershwin sure is boring.”
Russian Joseph Schillinger's influence as Gershwin's teacher of composition (1932–1936) was substantial in providing him with a method of composition. (Author's note: Wikipedia wrote this atrocious sentence, not me.) There has been some disagreement about the nature of Schillinger's influence on Gershwin. After the posthumous success of Porgy and Bess, Schillinger claimed he had a large and direct influence in overseeing the creation of the opera; Ira completely denied that his brother had any such assistance for this work. A third account of Gershwin's musical relationship with his teacher was written by Gershwin's close friend Vernon Duke, also a Schillinger student, in an article for the Musical Quarterly. (And so on, and so on, and so on. Time for a new paragraph.)
Porgy and Bess caused controversy in 1936 when it was retitled The Watermelon Review. Featuring only white actors in blackface, it was raided and permanently closed by the police when the burnt cork melted off the actors’ faces, revealing the shocking fact that white people had appeared in a black opera. Gershwin’s suggestion that the opera be restaged with black actors was met with stunned silence. A modest revival featuring Al Jolson playing all the characters (singing such tunes as Mammy, You is my Woman Now and Sum-sum-summertime) resulted in a record number of rotten tomatoes being thrown at the stage, to a possible depth of
During another time-travel episode in 1967, Rolling Stone magazine attempted to analyze Gershwin’s plagiarism but quit after page 3 because they couldn’t get a good cover photo. Oscar Levant kept standing in front of him.
What set Gershwin apart, aside from his overbite, his strange-looking skin rash and a propensity for screaming in the street, was his ability to manipulate forms of music into his own unique voice. He took the jazz he discovered on Tin Pan Alley into the mainstream by splicing its rhythms and tonality with that of the popular songs of his era. In musical circles, this is known as “stealing”.
Although George Gershwin would continually make grand statements about his music, he believed that "true music must reflect the thought and aspirations of the people and time. My people are Americans. My time is today.” Today didn’t last very long because his brain exploded 15 minutes later. He also dissed Toscanini for pretending not to have heard Rhapsody in Blue. “I can’t believe it,” Gershwin remarked. “He must have stuck bubblegum in his ears.” This statement appears in Bartlett’s Quotations on page 96 (citation needed: this whole article is complete bullshit!).
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The Mystery Cat: REVEALED!
Partly out of superstition, and partly out of - well - superstition, I haven't been posting much lately, because my mind is on other things.
Namely, Bentley.
Who's Bentley? you may ask. And since when do we have a cat?
Since Sunday.
When my beloved lovebird Paco died just a short time ago, it was agonizing. She only lived 100 days, and was an absolute delight. I should have spent many years with her. I knew I couldn't get another bird, because if that happened again -
We didn't even have cats on our minds. Oh all right, we did, because my daughter had just adopted Mia, a darling little tabby who stole everybody's heart. I noticed how the whole atmosphere in the house had changed, as if it had been flooded with sunshine.
At one point in my anger and grief over Paco, I said to Bill, "I can't get another bird, I just can't. We might as well go get a cat." This was a reference to the "no more cats" rule we had made after the death of Murphy, the 17-year-old catriarch of the family, in 2007.
Bill especially felt that we'd be too old by the time the cat reached that age, if it ever did. But he said something surprising that changed everything. "We could get a cat." I hadn't meant it literally, but suddenly our thinking began to change. And as we all know, that changes everything.
We decided we would "start the process of looking for a cat". Not rush into anything, of course. We weren't even supposed to be getting another pet at this stage. It was too soon, far too soon, wasn't it? But I began to look into it, research adoption web sites. My first experience was with a Vancouver kitten rescue agency called VOKRA. I looked at one cat, a very lovely cat indeed, and as soon as I reached out to pet her, she tore a chunk out of me. We both went home from that "viewing" with bloody scratches.
I think sometimes certain organizations are just too idealistic about whether a cat is truly adoptable or not. That one wasn't.
So we decided to try the SPCA, where most people go. I had been looking on the web site for a while, and saw this snagglepuss-like baby cougar, and just HAD to go see him. Right now. He was in Maple Ridge, so it didn't take too long.
It was just one of those things. He was housed in an enclosure about the size of a large walk-in closet, much more amenable than a cage, but still kind of cramped for a cat. When he saw me he jumped down, ran towards me and wound himself around my leg. I immediately picked him up and held him. He relaxed into my arms. He had a soft, plushy coat, and was purring gently.
"This is the cat," I said to Bill. "Are you sure?" "There are no other cats. This is the one."
It has only been a few days, yet it seems longer, and not because time is dragging. It's another thing entirely. This little guy, about a year old, has an incredible history. Someone found him outside, mangled and bleeding. He had been mauled by a dog and had bite-marks on his shoulders. And yet, he is a sweet and gentle cat who loves to be held. So far his worst habit is drinking out of the toilet.
He has substantial gaps in his coat where the dog bit and probably shook him. They might or they might not fill in with fur, but if they don't, they'll only remind me of his valor in facing down a nasty old dog, and (even more remarkably) not becoming nasty himself.
My daughter-in-law Crystal has a way of summing things up. "After he flew down from heaven, that's where his wings broke off," she said. Amen to that.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner: the memory of all that
A delightfully goofy interview with two cultural icons. Poignantly, Nimoy's breathing is so laboured you can sometimes hear it, and Shatner protectively puts his arm across his shoulders. The rest of it is just plain hilarious - they manage to avoid answering a single question. Even with illness and frailness, Nimoy was full of joie de vivre, with that marvelous un-Spock-like goofy grin.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The one that got away
The night is bitter
The stars have lost their glitter
The winds grow colder
And suddenly you're older
And all because of the man that got away.
No more his eager call
The writing's on the wall
The dreams you dreamed have all
gone astray.
The man that won you
Has gone off and undone you.
That great beginning
Has seen the final inning.
Don't know what happened. It's all a crazy game!
No more that all time thrill
For you've been through the mill
And never a new love will
be the same.
Good riddance, goodbye!
Every trick of his you're on to
But fools will be fools
And where's he gone to?
The road gets rougher
It's lonelier and tougher.
With hope you burn up
Tomorrow he may turn up
There's just no let up the live-long night and day.
Ever since this world began
There is nothing sadder than
A one-man woman looking for
The man that got away...
The man that got away.
The stars have lost their glitter
The winds grow colder
And suddenly you're older
And all because of the man that got away.
No more his eager call
The writing's on the wall
The dreams you dreamed have all
gone astray.
The man that won you
Has gone off and undone you.
That great beginning
Has seen the final inning.
Don't know what happened. It's all a crazy game!
No more that all time thrill
For you've been through the mill
And never a new love will
be the same.
Good riddance, goodbye!
Every trick of his you're on to
But fools will be fools
And where's he gone to?
The road gets rougher
It's lonelier and tougher.
With hope you burn up
Tomorrow he may turn up
There's just no let up the live-long night and day.
Ever since this world began
There is nothing sadder than
A one-man woman looking for
The man that got away...
The man that got away.
Harold Arlen, Ira Gershwin
Azure, turquoise, aquamarine: the Rhapsody reborn
I still haven't decided if this makes me insane or sends me into orbit, but I can't stop listening to it. This guy takes that old war horse of the concert hall, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and blows it wide open. His dizzy improvs open the piece, creating space for unexpected and highly exotic bloom. Mere orchids become jasmine and patchouli. It's gutsy to do this, though he does it with applomb. No doubt some people hate it. For some reason I keep thinking Leonard Bernstein would hate it. Oscar Levant would hate it, because, as eccentric as he was, he was a musical conservative. You see, nearly all these great composers of the early 20th century were old-school, classically-trained Russian Jews. Gershwin was no exception. So here comes this cocky Asian guy - not exactly a kid, but not too old either - and blows his sacred work out of the water. It's startling, unnerving, because I know every goddamn note of this thing, forwards and backwards. Along with Beethoven's Fifth, it was part of the bread and butter of my musical education.
There are a million bad versions of this. I just ploughed through a dozen of them to try to find something interesting. I don't like the various edited versions that run 9 or 10 minutes. They edit out that great chunka, chunka, chunka, chunka choo-choo part that I love so much (and which GG even mentioned: train sounds were a great inspiration to him). No part of this can be left out, of course, but what can be added? But he isn't adding. He's riffing. Riffing, in jazz, is absolutely sacred. Jazz wouldn't be jazz without it. That twilight-evening-star-sparkling string part - I can't hum it now, you wouldn't be able to hear it, but you know what I mean - has the most incredible circular riff in it, and it is Gershwin's very hallmark.
Anyway, I'm flailing around in the topic as usual, trying like hell to get through the 900-page doorstop biography - I think there must be a few dozen Gershwin bios out by now, including a really filthy one by Joan Peyser that I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on. And yes, indeed, there is a lot of evidence that GG sired a son with a chorus girl, cliche as that sounds. It seems unlikely the man could still be alive, but he insisted all his life that he was George's son, and apparently he even looked exactly like him, even unto the insolent lips, enigmatic eyes and Hapsburg jaw.
(Just found some photos of him, and he even has a Facebook page - but then, so do a lot of dead Gershwin's-illegitimate-son pretenders. It has nothing much on it, to my disappointment, but the photos made me go "Ho. . . ly. . . shit." Same flattish face, long jaw, high forehead - George was well on his way to baldness when he died - and the lips - well, no one else had lips like that.)
I will never get a fix on Gershwin, not altogether. He is even harder to fathom than Oscar Levant, who was complicated and ferociously gifted, but (and he knew this) no George Gershwin. In a sense, GG swallowed up Levant's career the way he swallowed up his brother Ira, who became a sort of living monument to his brother's genius to the end of his days.
So anyway, enough blathering about all this. This is very unfocused and I don't think I will try to focus it, but it's important to my mental health that I write something today. Today marked one week since I lost my sweet little bird Paco, and I still can't get my head around it, that I will never see her again. I have a new project coming up, and if it works out, it could change things a lot around here. The energy will change in the household. But we'll see, it's not quite there yet.
Meantime, I wish I could find a good account of this in one of the Gershwin books, so I'll have to paraphrase. He died horribly of a malignant brain tumor, after being told for months that his agonizing headaches, olfactory hallucinations, and the complete collapse of his coordination were just "psychosomatic". Ira's wife Lee thought they were a mere attention-getting ploy (as if breaking down and being unable to finish a concert would garner him the kind of attention he wanted). But the tumor sure did some weird things. He tried to push this guy out of a moving car, somebody he liked actually, and in some weird kind of behavioural seizure he took a box of chocolates, squashed them up in his hands and started rubbing them all over his face and body.
I never thought I'd find a cartoon of this! But I sort of did. This is from a very weird Gershwin documentary in about four languages, with subtitles on its subtitles. Someone would be talking in English, and suddenly a translator would begin to narrate on top of it (in English). I don't like the subtitles, but they add another dimension of weirdness to the whole thing. This gif dramatizes the great and dramatic chocolate-crush, and the way the front of his dressing gown got all sticky and messy, a thing meticulous George never was.
I'm sure Ira was baffled.
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Saturday, February 21, 2015
The Death of the Bird
For every bird there is this last migration:
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.
Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.
And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart’s possession
And exiled love mourning within the breast.
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart’s possession
And exiled love mourning within the breast.
The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;
The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.
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The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.
And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;
That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,
Custom and fear constraining her no longer,
Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.
A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place,
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place,
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space,
She feels it close now, the appointed season:
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
Try as she will, the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign,
The immense and complex map of hills and rivers
Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design.
And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.
A. D. Hope
It has only been a few days, but they have elongated in the most
bizarre way. I wake up far too early, and there's a hole in my
day that I can't explain. Right now it feels like it must be 9:00
at night, when in truth it's not even 5:00 o'clock.
How can I NOT be reminded by everything? My watch band was
all chewed up, for she loved chewing my watch more than anything.
I had to change the band, not because it was chewed but because I
couldn't bear to look at it. A little candy dish I was putting away
used to be her bird-bath. I've never seen a bird fling herself into
bathing like Paco did: water flew everywhere and soaked
everything.
Today in the dollar store I was looking at craft stuff, and my hand
nearly went to a bag of bright buttons that I knew she would love.
When we get home, the house is dead-silent, devoid of the peeps
and chirps and trilling that told me Paco wanted to come out and
see me.
A lot of birds don't want to come out of the cage. Paco couldn't
wait to come out and see everyone, and screamed like a brat when
she had to go back in. But it was the cage that killed her, wasn't it?
We could have had years together. I still don't know for certain what
killed her, but we have to assume it was a fall. Then why didn't I set
the cage up better?
Did she swallow something inedible, with her eternal beaking of
everything in sight? I couldn't watch her every minute, could I?
Yet I did, as much as possible.
I loved it when she drank, for she would tip her head back and
"chew" the water, clicking her beak. If she didn't like a seed in her
dish, she picked it up and threw it across the room.
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One day I decided to make a stack of alphabet beads, little cubes
about 1/2" across. When I was finished, she strutted over to it and
sent the whole thing flying with her beak. But then. . . she picked
up a cube, walked over to another one and began to tip and tilt the
cube this way and that, as if trying to get the two to balance
on each other. Birds can be taught those kinds of things, but this
quickly? After seeing it only once?
Her favorite perch was on my right shoulder. She would butt her
head on my chin, and nestle. Sometimes she just wanted me to
cover her with my two hands while she went peep, peep, peep.
Paco was beginning to learn a skill that identified her as female:
she was learning how to make nesting material out of paper.
She would beak the edge from left to right so that it was neatly
perforated, then pull and pull to try to get it off. Then she would
chew the strip until it looked like that packing material you use for
parcels.
And then there are the grandchildren: they adored her, and she was
gregarious enough to visit everyone in equal measure. She even
astounded my son by hopping a long distance off my arm to land
on his wrist and clamber up his arm to his shoulder. Once he
delighted Erica by snacking on her hair.
I feel stunned and disoriented. How could this have happened?
I know many people seem to think "it's just a bird", as if I am
grieving a dead goldfish. They have never had that sharp, sweet,
canny attachment, nor the nestling feathery closeness. I was her
mother, her mate, her everything.
She lived for exactly 100 days.
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