The sex life of ungulates: or, I'm in an awful rut

Amorous elk has a thing for cows

 

'This year he decided to go for it'

 

By Wendy Cox, The Canadian PressOctober 19, 2012

Some-where east of this Cariboo community wanders an enormous bull elk, stripped of its crown of six-point antlers and a misplaced attraction for one of Greg Messner's cows.

The elk, a loner that had been turning up at the century-old 100 Mile Ranch to check out Messner's herd for three years, was relocated earlier this month for its own safety and for the probity of the cow.

"He stuck around for a couple of days the first year," said Messner. The ranch has been in his wife's family for its entire history.

"Last year, he was just hanging around again for a couple of weeks and not really doing anything, just hanging around and looking at the cows. This year, he decided to go for it."

Messner said the elk's visits have been a curiosity. Elk are so rare in the area that Messner and anyone else who stopped by to have a look at the impressive creature in the pasture simply call it The Elk.

"It's kind of like the Queen," Messner explained. "There's only one of them."

This year, the beast decided to stay a while and ended up mingling in the herd for about two months during its rutting season.

One of Messner's cows was also in heat and the pair became a freakish but constant spectacle.

"If you were there watching, it would be an X-rated movie. Several times a day," Messner said with a chuckle.

"He was pretty aggressive. He'd put his head down with his great big antlers and poke the little calves and push them away and send them for a little ride once in a while and flick them around."

Messner estimated the elk at about two metres tall and 1.2 metres wide and weighing about half a tonne.

 

He said he finally called a biologist at the University of Northern British Columbia after inquiries from neighbours about whether his cow could have been impregnated by the elk.

"He had a huge rack, but he was too well-endowed by chromosomes," Messner said.
Messner was told an elk has eight more chromosomes than a cow, making the likelihood of a hybrid calf a near impossibility.

But it wasn't the amorous nature of the elk that finally prompted Messner to break up what he called "the harem" in his pasture.

The ranch is bordered by the highway and cars were stopping as passengers tried to get a look at the amorous ungulate, which from time to time would hop from one side of the pasture fence to the other.

Messner said the final straw was when hunters turned up, the lure of a six-point rack potentially dangerously enticing.

"Trucks were pulling over and people were watching this poor elk through the scope of their gun and people were doing U-turns on the highway. It was becoming a real dangerous situation."

Messner called in the conservation officer. He, the officer and two RCMP officers sedated the elk and removed its antlers to make it less appealing to hunters (elk shed their antlers each winter, anyway) and less of a threat to the cows should it decide to return.

The elk was then loaded into a truck and taken about 20 kilometres out of town, towards the mountains.

"I kind of think he will be back next year," said Messner.

 

Blogger's comments: I liked this story, mainly because it wasn't about George Gershwin or flies. It also gave me the opportunity to post some incredible YouTube footage of bull elks bugling in the fall, a display of dominance proclaiming "get away from my females" along with that well-known locking of antlers.

Would an elk really pursue a cow - I mean, a cow cow, not a cow elk, an elkess? Sure he would. I've seen footage - and it's not a pretty sight - of stallions being "bred", i. e. breeders collecting semen samples from stallions, and what they do (cover your eyes if you're very modest) is put a thing like a condom on the stallion, then sprinkle mare urine on another thing that looks like a pommel horse. Anything that looks even vaguely horselike will do, I guess, because the stallion is usually fooled and takes the expected flying leap.

I wonder about animals, I really do, cuzzadafact that they generally only get to breed once a year. With these ungulates (and how I love the name) and horses and such, there is usually a bit of foreplay, the male gets aroused and jumps her, and a few seconds later. . . it's all over. For another year.

 

Compare and contrast to humans. I've read statistics - I'm not making this up - that the "average" married couple has sexual relations approximately three times a week. That adds up to 156 "ruts" a year, if I have the math right. These statistics don't specify if this applies to newlyweds, or people who've been married for 40 years.

Since the average ungulate doesn't live for 156 years, not by a long stretch, we have a pretty bizarre phenomenon here.

I think there is pressure in our society to make sure married couples always have "great" sex, that it lasts more than a couple of hours, and that both partners have orgasms at exactly the same time, just like in a Joan Crawford movie where the violin music swells and the camera pans away to a roaring fireplace.

 

How many men (and women) know how to bring this about? We don't have sex lessons, do we? The very idea is shocking and repugnant in our society. I don't even know if those coy sex manuals of the '40s and '50s exist any more (for surely they were better than nothing).  We're expected to just sort of pick up all those complex skills along the way and bring them to the marriage bed. (And I can imagine how it must have been during all those centuries in which you weren't supposed to have premarital sex at all.)

Hey, I don't know what "most couples" experience because to be honest, I'm not "most couples" - I feel like I'm too damned old for three times a week - but I do know that sexual desire often extends beyond the bounds of the marriage bed. Why? Lots of reasons, one of them being that NO ONE can live up to the sex-manual-and-movie-driven standards of six hours of feverish passion a week or whatever married people are expected to sustain.  I'd be thaddle-thore, I think, and unable to do more for several months.

Sex, I mean sexual attraction, is all over the place, and we try to contain it. This is why people masturbate, as a sort of overflow system. To keep focusing exclusively on one's life parner for forty or fifty years is - well, it's difficult sometimes. It's easy to get in a rut. How long can you sustain a Joan Crawford movie, anyway? Or, for that matter, a porn film? Now that anyone, absolutely anyone can obtain the most over-the-top porn in approximately half a second and no longer needs to lurk around dirty book stores to buy magazines encased in plastic, the stakes for phenomenal sex are somehow higher.

We're left as confused as some of those poor bugle boys who probably don't even know why they're making those beautiful but strange sounds, so full of accidental harmonics and hopeless longing.

 

Is that George Gershwin, or do I need to get the bug spray?

The Movement of George Gershwin’s Left Hand Playing Rhapsody in Blue, by Adrian Göllner.

(From an article entitled The Movement of George Gershwin's Left Hand Playing Rhapsody in Blue, by Adrian Gollner, published in The Movement of George Gershwin's Left Hand Playing Rhapsody in Blue, by Adrian Gollner)


Göllner’s second set of drawings use antique voices of a different kind, relics not of people but of technology long gone. He made them using a Steinway player piano. (Steinway made player pianos – who knew?)

The “reproducing piano” was born in the early years of the 20th century, and though the technology would soon be killed by radio and Gramophone and the stock-market crash of the 1920s, for a few years it was the wealthy audiophile’s answer to hearing high-quality music at home. What a marvel it must have seemed.

The piano would not simply record the touch of the pianist on the keys, as would a typical player piano. Using complex and then state-of-the-art mechanics, the reproducing piano measured the pianist’s every touch of the keys and pedals, and fed the information through a wire to another device that would meticulously punch holes (notes) into rolls of paper. It was, more or less, an early computer.

“It wasn’t just a sequence of keys that plunked out and played some saloon tune,” Göllner says. “This allowed you to have a faithful reproduction of Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Gustav Mahler.”

Göllner found the reproducing piano in the Ottawa home of a retired scientist, and he attached a pen to the individual parts that measure left hand, right hand, soft pedal and sustain pedal. As rolls of music played through the piano, each measuring device made drawings on paper. So a recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue – played almost 100 years ago by the composer – became four drawings. Ditto for Rachmaninoff playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, and other pieces by Debussy and Mahler.

The drawings are abstract scribbles but are distinct from one another, the left hands by times drawn as firm and dark, the right hands typically lighter and softer. “It had to re-emulate the physical movements of the person playing the piano . . . the timing, the expression, the finger work, the pedal work,” says Göllner, who has captured those physical movements of a century ago in an entirely new way.

Blogger's note. I have no trouble with player-piano-diagram-tracing as an art form. It's piano rolls I don't like. What I don't like about them is . . . the sound. It's shallow and mechanical, as if there's no one actually there at the keyboard. Which there isn't. The keys sound like they're being pulled rather than pushed. A piano is a stringed instrument anyway, so nothing mechanical is ever going to do it, any more than those hideous violin machines we sometimes hear in music museums.

What baffles me is why we don't have actual recordings by Gershwin: he was born well within the time when such technology was available, and by the time of his death in 1937, recording quality was quite advanced. We could have had dozens and dozens of these, recordings of him banging out Hitchy-Koo, Babbit and Bromide, Fill Up the Saucer till it Overflows, and all those immortal classics. Movies would've been even better: we could have actually seen that patrician sneer with its prominent Hapsburg lip.

It could be argued that a piano roll is better than nothing. But why this strange phenomenon, this "drawing" derived from what is, after all, a mechanical pseudo-piano playing pseudo-Gershwin? Because it's weird, is why, no one has done it before, and it's kind of neat, though we can't explain exactly why.

Yes, I know they look like bugs, but they're so much more than that. This has emboldened me to invent more ideas for new art forms, either "found" or manufactured. . .

Rhapsody in Grey by G. Gershwin

Why won't my Pen Work? Original scribble by G. Gershwin

Portrait of Ira by G. Gershwin

When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em (When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em), But What Are They?, by G. Gershwin

Has Anybody Here Seen George? by G. Gershwin

When I first learned the truth

You were my adored one,
Then you became the bored one,
And I was like a toy that brought you joy one day,
A broken toy that you preferred to throw away.

 

If I expected love when first we kissed,
Blame it on my youth.
If only just for you I did exist,
Blame it on my youth.

 

 

I believed in everything,
Like a child of three.
You meant more than anything,
All the world to me.

 

 

If you were on my mind both night and day,
Blame it on my youth.
If I forgot to eat and sleep and pray,
Blame it on my youth.

 

 

And if I cried a little bit when first I learned the truth,
Don't blame it on my heart,
Blame it on my youth.

The cure for depression

J.K. Rowling, famed author and creator of the Harry Potter series contemplated suicide a number of times before she started her award-winning book series. She used her daughter as motivation to rise above her depressing state of affairs and started writing the Harry Potter Book Series that became a multi-million dollar franchise.

Hmmm.

This is, of course, taken from one of those uplifting, inspirational "depression" sites, citing all sorts of godlike figures (celebrities) who have "conquered" depression. It's a depressing site, I'll tell you, and this is to my mind the most depressing entry of all, in that it implies that fame lifted Rowling out of her suicidal thoughts.

Maybe it did!

Fame isn't supposed to make people happy, but can you imagine what sort of life Rowling would have had if everyone had turned Harry Potter down? It could have happened.

She could have killed herself, or at least spent the rest of her life feeling suffocated because nobody gave a rat's ass about her work. People always ask WHY the person is depressed, though they don't ask why they have cancer (unless they smoked).

Point I'm trying to make: we're always reassured depression is an illness, an illness, an illness (meaning: what? It isn't a moral failing? It isn't demonic possession?), then life circumstances seem to lift people out of it, particularly worldwide success and millions of dollars.

If you "have" depression, you have it, supposedly, and it never goes away. As with most "mental illness", the implication is that you're stuck with it. How can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time?

You're stuck.

Unless you get that multi-million-dollar book deal! Maybe THEN we're looking at some long-term recovery.

What's a Levant? (a wind, a region, a whole state of mind)

I! GIVE! UP! I've spent an obscenely long time trying to get something (or some thingS) to cut and paste, from different sites, so shame on me anyway, I shouldn't do that. The line spacing was SO fucked up that no matter what I did to fix it, it just didn't work.

But I still got all this information, see? Stuff that really intrigued me, because though my current uber-obsession Oscar Levant was of Russian-Jewish ethnicity, Levant is a very French-sounding name, with very French-sounding connotations (not to mention English: levitating, levity, leverage, all that stuff.)

 

Since I'm tired of fighting with the line-spacing crap, I'm sitting here listening to Levant playing the living hell out of my all-time favorite Gershwin, the I Got Rhythm variations. My God, he really was good and did things no other pianist ever thought of. The only word I can come up with to describe the sound is "bright", and I don't think it's just from a good piano. When you watch him perform in his dozen-or-so movies, often his hands are a blur.

So OK. . . I'm going to have to make jambalaya out of all the information I dredged out of those web sites. Since it took me all morning to cull out this stuff from maybe 150 different definitions of Levant, I reserve the right to blather my own comments when I feel like it.

Among many other things, Levant means:

1. soleil levant: rising sun

2. Levant: the Levant (??)

3. (n.) A levanter (the wind so called)

4. (n.) The countries washed by the eastern part of the Mediterranean and its contiguous waters

5. (n.) Rising or having risen from rest - said of cattle. See couchant and levant, under couchant.

To quote Oscar's close friend Dorothy Parker:

"For work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell. . . "

I can't help but wonder why it is "said of cattle", but I guess I'll have to go along with it.

6. (a.) Eastern (Oriental: see the Gershwin ripoff Oriental Blues, which is perhaps a musical in-joke and sly reference to Levant)

7. (v.) To run away from one's debts; to decamp.

Well! Oscar, you shouldn't be doing that, but there was a little streak of lawlessness in him; it's why we loved him so.

8. (n.) Levanter: a strong easterly wind peculiar to the Mediterranean.

9. (n.) One who Levants, or decamps.

I wonder if Oscar ever Levanted in his lifetime.

10. (n.) Levantine: A native or inhabitant of the Levant

11. (n.) Of or pertaining to the Levant

OK, wtf is this all about? If Levant is a verb - to Levant, or not to Levant - how can it also be a person AND a place AND a thing?

12. (n.) A stout twilled silk fabric, formerly made in the Levant

And a tie.

 

13. Levant (n.) The countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Egypt

This may explain his heavy-lidded, olive-skinned, green-eyed, dishevelled, barely-shaved look that for some reason women went crazy for. The mediterranean look, even though his people were from the Ukraine.

14. Levant: a heavy, coarse-grained morocco leather often used in bookbinding. Also called Levant morocco.

How many people have a kind of leather named after them?

15. Levant: To leave hurriedly or in secret (possibly from Spanish leventar, el campo, to lift, break camp, from vulgar)

Why does this keep coming up?

(and, because Levant was such a hypochondriac, I will include the translation of just one of many, many, many, many sentences in French which include different shades of meaning of Levant):

Ce medecin conseillait a chacun d'entre nous, en se levant le matin, de dire ceci: aujourd'hui, je suis mieux qu'hier et moins bien que demain.

This doctor suggested that every one of us should say the following to ourselves, when we get up in the morning: today I feel better than I did yesterday but not as well as I will feel tomorrow.

Oh, that Oscar could have been so blessed.

(p. s. I also found confusing stuff that implied there was a place called Levant, or THE Levant, in the States, but I was unable to track it down. There is also a Levant sparrowhawk out in the desert somewhere. Geez. Bird, fabric, sunrise, leather, skipping out, rising up, a wind, a region, a whole state of mind.)

CODICIL. This is positively the LAST thing I'm ever going to post on Oscar Levant because now, even ***I*** am getting tired of the subject. But I just found a groovy caricature of him and had to post it:

I don't normally go for caricatures and think they're too grotesque to be funny, but this one captures him pretty well: the dishevelled hair, the pouty mouth, prominent ears, and eyes that are almost feminine in their limpid, long-lashed depths. Whoever did this must have actually looked at a picture of him or something.

Ripples n' Blues: the Gershwin version

Gershwin, eh? We've been a little obsessed with him lately, especially regarding his close connection with the polymath/Polly-wanna-cracker genius Oscar Levant. I apologize for all the blathering at the beginning of this live performance, but it's the best version I can find, and it includes orchestra which beefs it up nicely. Most of the amateur YouTube performances by young students are too slow and careful, too correct: "Is it ragtime yet?"

Yes, this connects with Gershwin, and his pal Oscar Levant must have played this at least once. It's a mere bagatelle, but charming. But wait until you play the next video! There's a surprise better than the sticky little thingamajig in the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.

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.

REVEALED: Bob Dylan wrote all of Gershwin's songs!

The Truth Revealed: 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 3 feet.  The star of the very first talking picture The Jazz Singer was quoted as saying, “This was another Jolson triumph”, before going off to make a movie called The Jazz Singer II: Yes, It’s Crap, but It’s Got Sound.

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!).

CODA. As usual, screwing around with images is both more fun than writing, and much more time-consuming. Thinking about Buddy Holly and his black-framed glasses, the kind that are once more coming into fashion, I wondered how Gershwin would look with Dylan's eyes, and vice-versa. The results were unsettling.

Of course I never got a perfect match because their facial shape is so different, but what struck me is that the eyes were almost interchangeable in the quality of their gaze, their intensity, focus, and almost scary self-possession. Nothing has ever thrown Bob Dylan, not even being booed for ten years for singing Sunday School songs, and Gershwin similarly knew he was great stuff and that no one could equal him.

Gershwin was tragically cut down at 38, and everyone assumes he would have gone right on pouring out hit tunes and classic operas and things. Such might not have been the case. He may well have been a sort of Chaplin figure, a sad elder statesman unable to adapt to dramatically changing times. Fascinatin' Rhythm wouldn't play well even in the era of Vic Damone and the Rat Pack, let alone today. The people who listen to Gershwin now are mainly senior citizens, or musicologists making yet another one of those dreary PBS specials in which they dust off the progeny of the progeny of somebody famous in the 1920s. Plus a few high school students being required to perform the popular music of a century ago just for extra band credits.

Dylan has just hung on by his teeth, tough as an old lizard, his voice completely shot, but unlike 95% of other legends he's a shape-shifter and won't stick to any particular era. Lots of people still associate him with Blowin' in the Wind and "protest songs", but real fans (and I am not one of them: I gave up after Desire/Blood on the Tracks, which I still think would've made a great double album) appreciate the fact that he is still completely unpredictable. He wins tons of awards now, lifetime achievement things, and each medal slung around his neck seems more like an albatross. But hey. . . there's always the Christmas album.

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