EXCLUSIVE!: Whale, dead for five years, imitates human voice

Being of a sensitive (morbid?) nature, when I first heard this, I freaked.

I freaked because it just sounded so dang-blasted weird.

As a kid, this would've scared me into my bedroom for a month. Fortunately I'm not a kid, but as with everyone, a little dotted-line ghost-kid lives inside of me and was scared half to death.

This is a whale (and for some reason this strikes me as "fishy": he died five years ago, and for some reason he's being called a "white whale" when he sure looks like a beluga to me) that somehow was able to imitate patterns of human speech. Not actual words, unless "lillgadillgawawwllyagawllwwlwlyawggldlgalyylga - PHHHT!" qualifies as actual words.

Still, there's something about those sounds. When I saw it on TV - and I will not bore you with all the scientific bumph that surrounded this 15-second clip, cuzzadafact that nobody cares about all that shit anyway, let's just get to the good part - the explanation is that this captive whale, who was at least 30 years old, was accustomed to hearing a man speak to him from underwater. And yes, those sounds do sort of resemble the distorted shouting of someone, a male voice, trying to make himself heard. The pitch of it is several octaves lower than the usual "wwweeeeeeeeeeeeeet!" (sorry, this isn't phonetically reproduceable) of most cetaceans, like the adorable screeching scene in Splash when Darryl Hannah breaks all the TV screens in Bloomingdale's.

But one wonders. Right about now everyone would be clamoring to hear more from this whale, to ask him about the last Presidential debate or to comment on Ann Romney's age-appropriate swimsuit and whether or not she wore Mormon "garmies" underneath.

But no, we can't do that, because this whale is DEAD: it died a long time ago, and all we have is this weird recording and this scientist's claim that he made those eerie, almost-human-speechlike sounds.

They could easily have been faked. Just stick
your head in a goldfish bowl and go "lillgadillgawawwllyagawllwwlwlyawggldlgalyylga - PHHHT!"  In fact, that pop-culture Supreme Court known as YouTube seems to have voted against the veracity of this phenomenon. Someone compared it to their mother-in-law, others to a cab driver in Dublin or gargling with Listerene. 

The verdict? To quote Elaine on Seinfeld when questioned about her orgasms: "Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake."

I don't know what to think. I want to believe; I want this to be real, even though it freaks the fuck out of me.  I am reminded of Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met, a 78 r. p. m. record from my childhood (and now you know how old I am, as if you cared) based on a grotesque Disney animated featurette about a whale who sang "Grand Opera" at "the Met" (presumably, the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York). 

I had no idea what the Met was, and as usual nobody explained it to me. The video is available on YouTube, but I won't post it here because Willie is ghastly, resembling a giant foam rubber toaster with a tiny Clutch Cargo mouth halfway down his stomach. A more awkward, unappealing character was never created by Disney or anyone else, not even Chuck Jones when he was off his lithium.  Why not a beluga (sorry, "white") whale with his mouth in the normal place? Even something like the huge majestic whale in Pinocchio would have been preferable, though perhaps he was seen as not friendly enough.

The Met, as far as I was concerned, was the Metropolitan department store in downtown Chatham (then referred to as a "dime store" - Lord, how things have changed), one of my favorite places because they had a lunch counter and cheap things like marbles and plastic skipping ropes, and you could even buy pets. Turtles that came with round plastic bowls with spiral-shaped ramps in them and a little plastic palm tree and disgusting food in a little tin and everything. And budgies: I finally wore my Mum down about a budgie, though it took a long time, and one tragic day when everyone was out of the house, the bird somehow got out of the cage and the cat ate it.

No kidding: we found a pile of feathers on the floor and a single, pink, scaly little foot.

I spent my childhood in confusion over such things because I was afraid to ask any questions. My sister was thirteen years older than me, and I believed I was supposed to be her intellectual equal and understand Goethe and Schiller and Bertolt Brecht. 

There is another association with articulate animals: the Children's Record Guild recording of a very strange, adulterated version of Puss in Boots. We had a number of these recordings, which originally came through the mail as a sort of record-of-the-month subscription. But this set of maybe thirty or forty records was bequeathed to us by someone who didn't want them anymore. Obviously they hadn't been played much: there was hardly a scratch on them. We soon took care of that.

Through the wonders of the internet, I've found some of these records and listened to them again for the first time in more than ("lillgadillgawawwllyagawllwwlwlyawggldlgalyylga - PHHHT!")  years. The Travels of Babar, Slow Joe, Build Me a House, Robin Hood, etc. I even found a bizarre version of Pinocchio with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney which we played half to death (though my recent posting about the hellscape of Winchell-Mahoney Time expresses my abhorrence of that particular entertainer, who always struck me as a son-of-a-bitch).

These reborn-through-the-internet kiddie records are miraculously pristine, with no World War III going on in the background. Someone must have preserved them in a vault somewhere, or found some way to remove all the scratches. Anyway, the one I most happily happened upon was Puss in Boots, the strangest re-imagining of the story I've ever heard. Puss, a cheeky little feline in seven-league boots, adopts this person named John and somehow renders him into a Prince by wangling an audience with the King. Sort of like that. But first of all, John is totally gobsmacked by the fact that THIS CAT CAN TALK!

Here is the Ballad of Puss, which we used to sing to each other endlessly. I just listened to it again (I had to convert an unplayable MP4 file into an MP3 for this, which took some doing), and made an effort to transcribe it: for you, precious reader, the gardenia that blooms in the innermost Eden of my heart, deserve to share it with me today.

When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty
Everyone told me that I looked so pretty
They said, 'beautiful eyes'
They said, 'lovely fur'
But all I could answer was 'meoowwww' or "purrrrrr"

My coat was black, my eyes of course were yellow
People always said 'what a charming fellow'
I wanted to thank them, but I did not know how
For all I could answer was 'purr' or 'meow'

Then one day as I was lying sleeping
A great idea into my head came creeping
A pussy cat that had learned to say 'meow'
Could say just 'me', by leaving off the 'ow!'

So I said me, me, me, me, me,
Then it was plain as could be
From me to he to she to we
Was just as simple as it could be
I practiced daily for a week
And that is how I learned to speak!

(Here a verse is omitted, I can't keep up)

Soon I was no longer a beginner,
When someone asked 'how would you like some dinner?'
If I wanted to answer, I could say 'yes sir!'
Instead of just saying,
MeOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW
Or purrrrrrr.
Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

So if a cat can learn to talk, and a whale can sing at the Met, along with all those turtles and budgies and things, why can't a beluga - or is it a "white" whale, which I thought was something entirely different - go
"lillgadillgawawwllyagawllwwlwlyawggldlgalyylga - PHHHT!"

When a whale that's been dead for five years shows up in the headlines, anything is possible.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Life's Lesson: you're an asshole!

(An excerpt from one of those advice columns, it doesn't matter which one)

October 23, 2012 - Give YOURSELF the chance to start fresh Nearly two years ago, I broke some dishes on our loft’s concrete floor. I left. My wife broke the rest of the dishes. She also broke the kitchen tap and didn’t know how to turn it off. She called the super who told her to call the cops. She lied and said I did everything. I got arrested, got legal aid, pleaded guilty, and got 18 months’ probation for "mischief under $5000." Calls from my probation officer to my wife, to ensure my possessions were returned, went un-answered. We operated a business together. I was its founder in 1998 prior to re-incorporation in 2005. Now, I have next to nothing, struggle with making ends meet, and trying to get a job that doesn’t receive anonymous phone calls that get me sent home. I have no money for a lawyer; get no help/sympathy from Police, or Probation. The judge who sentenced me said I’d get my possessions back. We’re not divorced. My probation disallows direct or indirect contact, unless by lawyer, till the end of November. I was told that some of my possessions were sold. My wife told the courts/police that I worked for her at her company. I never received a paycheck since she re-incorporated in 2005. I was her biggest cheerleader and found nearly 100% of the new clients, while she managed accounts, lied to me about the lack of progress on them, while telling clients that I was to blame when accounts’ issues arose. It's like I had no idea who I married. I totally screwed up and put her at the company’s helm. Sometimes I feel I should move to another province, but I don't want to leave my family. I've had a lot of therapy, but I can't seem to choose to accept this and move forward… as if the universe won’t let me heal until I figure out what I’m supposed to learn from all this. Used and Defamed   You’ve written to a relationship advice person, not a lawyer, so I’m looking through the lens of your relationship with yourself. You even close your account with an inward view… about being stuck, unable to heal from the whole episode, unable to move forward. The issues of your lost possessions, along with business and other past “screw-ups,” must now be kept separate from your sense of self, of inner strengths and abilities, and of having a future. You need income. You need your family. And you need to regain self-respect. You’ve served the probation time. Hanging on to despair about your stuff, or the company, keeps you mired in sadness and defeat. Legal Aid workers can ask the court to now demand the return of your remaining possessions. It’s a practical matter; your self-esteem does NOT rest on it. Focus on what’s needed immediately, which is a job. If anonymous calls start, inform Police you’re being harassed. Give yourself a fresh chance at the future.     Tip of the Day: Even significant mistakes can be put in the past, if you believe in yourself. Blogger's Comments. EARRRGHHHHHH. I am old enough to remember the ancient dinosaur advice columnists such as Ann Landers and - who was that other one, her sister? The stuff that ran then was pretty mild, such as the earth-shaking issue of how should you hang the toilet paper roll, with the end of it facing in or out. She was coy about anything sexual, and the really raw problems were - well, I'm not even sure there WERE problems like this way back in what they now call "the day". It's not so much the appalling mess this guy has got himself into - doing a lot of heavy blaming for what strikes me as an obscenely abusive pas de deux - but the pat, ribbon-tied advice this "expert" gives him, the shallow "positive attitude and self-esteem" stuff that is so easy to dispense in a world that is becoming more superficial and less literate with every passing day. I have a feeling there is a lot more going on here than this guy is revealing, just from the menacing subtext which seems to murmur the abusive tyrant's sweet refrain: "Look what you made me do." What appals me even more is the way women seem to be sucked in by these frightening losers, as if they have no protective emotional radar whatsoever. Maybe I watch too much Dateline. I don't know. But it happens over and over again, not just on some slick American TV show but right here in my own back yard. I wonder sometimes what sort of cushy self-esteem-oriented advice these rotters get that gives them license to go right back out there and find some more victims. What frightens me even more is this: more victims are never in short supply. In too many cases, women CHOOSE to be with men who are convicted criminals. They write them sweet letters on death row, even marry them, buying their well-practiced, totally self-serving line of bullshit that they were railroaded by the legal system and are in fact completely innocent. I once heard it said that a woman like this will walk into a room with 100 men in it, and gravitate immediately toward the one loser, the one on probation, the one with a secret wife stashed away, the one who can't help his rages because he's in the throes of a terrible addiction that he can't recover from because he was abused as a child, and furthermore, whatever is wrong with him is HER fault anyway, so how can she leave and stir up all his tragic abandonment issues? Women can be just as evil and slimy as men, can be sociopathic murderers and not bat an eyelash, but it seems the really elaborate, Byzantine stories of emotional destruction are man-to-woman. These guys don't need hand-holding or lectures on self-esteem. They don't need bullshit New Age therapy that tells them "the universe won't let them heal" until they figure out "what they are supposed to learn from all this". Jesus, give me a break. They are supposed to learn that they are assholes, and if they don't change their behaviour and their attitudes and KEEP them changed, they will always be assholes. But that's not the refrain we hear from therapy circles. First, I don't get this "universe" stuff, as if all the stars and galaxies revolve around ME, the mighty epicentre of all things. It reminds me of The Secret, that infamous crooked belief system spawned by sociopath James Ray, which claimed we can have anything we want (and isn't that the purpose of life, after all: to get what we want, particularly wealth?) just by wanting it. Even Oprah got down and kowtowed to this person, who obviously fed into her financial might-means-right philosophy.  In an insulting parody of a sacred native ritual, Ray brainwashed his followers into entering a cobbled-together, unsafe sweat lodge, an updated version of drinking the Koolaid, this time involving searing smoke and fatal fumes. I don't even think Galileo believed the universe was some sort of Big Daddy God-force that looked after him, wiped his nose and patted him on the back, spewing out "lessons" at regular intervals. I'm afraid such an entity does not exist. I used to ascribe to it, more or less, but I now believe that there is no one hovering above us that knows everything about us, that made us in the womb, etc. If there is a God, it's a totally impersonal force that was somehow ignited when life on earth began, then didn't know how to stop itself. The rest was up to the relentless forces of evolution. If there is a personal God, then it lives within us - hardly an original thought, but it's the only one I can adhere to after a personal crisis that nearly tore me to pieces - and it has become more imperative than ever that we listen to it. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, I believe it compels us to love and care for one another in a way that can make a profound difference. If we think we can get something just by wanting it, try wanting sensitivity - wanting compassion - wanting grace. If I got a letter like this guy's,  and thank God I'm not one of those glib advice-spewers who generally have no qualifications at all to do what they are doing, I'm not sure what I'd say. How about, for starters: you're a creep, buddy, you're lying to me, and if SHE had a chance to speak she'd tell me a whole load of stuff you didn't say because you're a con and a sociopath who sucks people dry, then ruthlessly moves on. You can't say that, or you don't, because everyone has to learn to love themselves, even Jeffrey Dahmer types who strike me as more reptile than human.  Is there no such thing as true recovery? I know it exists, I've seen it, but it's hard work, it's long and discouraging and must be maintained day by day for the rest of your life. How many criminals and cons are willing to take on such a gruelling wilderness trudge when ripping people off and fucking people over is so much easier and even more personally gratifying? I get tired of it all. Tired of the bandaids plastered over cancer, the "stay positive", the basic falseness that keeps people from finding real recovery, the kind of recovery that generally speaking turns your guts slowly inside-out until you somehow find some semblance of personal authenticity.

Ann Romney in a swimsuit?!

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD!!

Ann Romney cooled off on a Florida beach this weekend as her husband got fired up for the final presidential debate.

As husband Mitt indulged in a beach football game between his staffers and invited reporters, Mrs Romney took advantage of the Florida sunshine in her fetching floral suit, going for a swim with her family at a public beach.

The 63-year-old wife of the Republican presidential candidate looked glamorous in the brightly-colored, halterneck suit with matching sarong on Delray Beach.

She splashed around in the water with her son Craig, his wife Mary and grandchildren, before she grabbed a towel and headed for a hired sun lounger surrounded by other families.

 

 

The seven of you who follow this blog will probably realize the heavy political emphasis I place on each and every post. In other words, yes, I am vaguely aware there is a Presidential election going on, or should I say a campaign, and that these-hyarr guys seem to be arguing it out every time I dang-well turn around. Not that any of this affects me in Canada, Land of the Silver Birch, Home of the Beaver.

But I DID sit up and bark when I watched my favorite hard-hitting analysis of world news, Inside Edition with Deborah Norville, and saw a gushing item about Ann Romney deciding to go to the beach in Florida: the BEACH?? Wait a minute. This woman is over SIXTY years old and is deciding to go to the beach? Then surely she won't be wearing one-a-them swimsuit things, will she? Gadawmahty. A Mormon, ain't she? With five kids and the Lord only knows how many grandkids?

So anyway, they show pictures of her in the kind of suit I would die to find, IF I could find one anywhere, which I can't, which is one reason I stopped going to the beach a long time ago, even though I am not 63 or a Mormon. And she looked - good. The suit had a colorful, sundressy flavor to it, no industrial-strength spandex straps or bumpy black crimplene in evidence anywhere.

But here's what got me: their style correspondent or whoever-it-was came on and started gushing on and on, analyzing the suit thread by thread, seemingly, and gasping in shock and awe and even disbelief that a woman her age could "still" look good in an actual bathing suit. It was as if Ann Romney had taken a huge risk, bigger than that guy, you know, the one who jumped out of that thing and spun around and around and around and still landed up OK.

This can't be happening, they seemed to say: some magic must be afoot, and we must find out what it is!

The word "age-appropriate" came up so many times that I wanted to gag. Yes, the suit was attractive, BUT it was age-appropriate. Yes, the suit was colorful, BUT it was age-appropriate. God forbid she should wear something that made her look like mutton dressed as sacrificial lamb, or some henna-haired Mormon chippie.

It just galled me, is all. Age-appropriate this, age-appropriate that, and wowee, a woman who looks good  (they didn't dare say sexy: she's past menopause, for the love of God!) who isn't 35? Normally those comments are reserved for the mausoleum look of such death's-heads as Joan Rivers and Mary Tyler Moore. Everybody knows that "older" women (women who are no longer 35) have to preserve their "beauty" at any cost. Which means their eyes suddenly tilt up as if they're Chinese, plastic cheekbones explode forth like ping-pong balls, lips blow up like inflated worms, and faces become dead of all expression, with noses caved in like Michael Jackson's.

I have nothing against political candidates if they want to go knock their brains out. To me, "Romney" still refers to the governer of Michigan, whom I guess was Mitt's Dad, George (and who in their right mind would name their son. . . but I digress.)

Anyway, the below-most little article more or less sums up the bumph I've been seeing on this recent sensation. Funny, when Jackie Kennedy used to go to the beach, nobody said, "My God!", or "what nerve" (which is the hidden subtext of all this gasping and slavering). I don't think it mattered how old she was or whether or not the cameras were snapping. She was cool like that.

MAKING A SPLASH: ANN ROMNEY'S FLAWLESS BEACH STYLE

By Tamara Abraham

While most women of 63 would be hitting the beach in all-obscuring black, or shrouded in a loose cover-up, the trim Mrs Romney knows she has nothing to hide.

Proving women in their sixth decade can have as much fun with swimwear as their daughters, the white floral-print number is a clever choice that flatters the figure without losing out on style.

The punchy print, with its bright flowers, distract from any lumps and bumps beneath, as does the ruching across the midriff.

The suit, which may actually be a tankini, though it is difficult to tell, appears to have some underwire to support the bust. This lends structure, helping to make the waist look smaller - and the wearer walk taller.

A slim halterneck, too, is always pretty - a thicker strap style would have looked matronly with that print.

And though Mrs Romney has slim legs that a woman half her age would envy, the co-ordinating swim skirt covers her behind, allowing for a more modest look befitting her age, while the tie at the side can be adjusted so as not to cut into the waist.

 

 

 

I found a whole bunch of Mormon stuff, too, which kind of gets more unbelievable with every site, but if true, then Ann Romney must have her "garmie" all bunched up inside of that swimsuit, an act which may scandalize the elders of the Mormon Church, not to mention the Sister Wives who really aren't in any kind of shape to wear a bathing suit anyway.

This is from one of those style-dissection sites and talks about Ann Romney doing scandalous things like wearing the skins of animals with cloven hooves.

We can all agree that the black leather outfit Ann Romney wore on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno last night was the closest to risqué she's ever come. But according to a chat forum titled "Why didn't Ann wear her garments ... ?" on a website called MormonDiscussions.com, some members of the LDS church are concerned that she might not be wearing "garments," a kind of underwear worn by most adult Mormons. Here's a sampling of their reactions:

From zeezrom:

Thank God for Ann. This is a cry to all the LDS Women in the world:
"It is okay to raise the hemline!"
Now, let us pray she begins to work on the sleeves next.

From Just Me:

She could absolutely wear garmies with that awesome skirt.
 

From DarkHelmet:

She's probably wearing garments. Garments tend to ride up a little bit. The skirt probably just barely covers her garments.

 

 

From Elphaba:

I have a couple of questions. First, are garments fairly standard in length? I know my mother's garments would definitely have shown when sitting down if she had worn Ann's skirt, but my mom is only about 5'5". Is it possible Ann is tall enough that they would not have shown when she sat down?

Second, does the Church approve of adjusting the garments in some way to prevent them from showing? If Ann's height did not ensure the garments would not show when she sat down, it's obvious to me she altered them somehow, such as taping the hems up. In fact, given she was on national television, I would be shocked to discover she didn't take precautions of some sort to ensure they did not show. I have no personal objection to that, but it does seem to me something the Church would oppose. I admit, however, I really don't know.

Neither do I, Elphaba. I'm going to go lie down now.

 

Their Satanic Majesties will now take requests!

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