Saturday, February 7, 2015
Gershwin home movies: who ARE these people?
Oh how I wish I had encountered this little snippet of greatness when I was in my Oscar Levant fever back in 2012-13. Now, every time I ferret out a snippet of Gershwania (which rhymes with mania), I find Oscar. In this clip he's acting more than outrageous, crouching on the ground beside George and pulling up his pantleg, then lunging at him as if to kiss him, only to be pushed away. One can see the contrast, a Mutt n' Jeff quality at work: the long and lean, rather princely being who knew he was a genius, as opposed to the squatty, bulging-eyed, cigarette-sucking madman, the Mephistophelian jester at Gershwin's royal court.
Even here, though, there's a funny vibe going on. I'm partway through my first Gershwin bio, a short one by Walter Rimler, and it's more of an overview, a way of preparing myself for the big one by Howard Pollack, considered the textbook. I can't wait to read about all the ramifications of his brain tumour and the bizarre symptoms that proceeded it, such as squashing up chocolates and rubbing them all over his body.
(Did he think it was cocoa butter, I wonder?)
But I want to get close, and it doesn't seem as if Gershwin HAD a "close". He may not have. His work could burgeon with emotion, and some of it, particularly Porgy and Bess, can be very dark indeed. But what about the man? Did anything or anyone really stick to him?
I see him as being charming and charismatic, not to mention self-absorbed as a baby, but having a touch-me-not quality about him that must have infuriated his women. Yes, "women": he kind of had them in bulk. In fact, one young woman, one of many disciples who had moved her husband and children to New York just to be near him, finally broke down and asked him, "Do you love me?" He answered, "No."
The upshot of all this was that he attracted a very large flock of fairweather friends.
"Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: "I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."
And while this is the stuff of greatness, it's also the seeds of codependence, the breeding ground of hangers-on. I am sure that everyone sucked on his magnetism, drained it dry. Being quite naive and underdeveloped emotionally, with almost no capacity for real intimacy, he might not even have noticed that he was being vampirized. But loyalty actually ran perilously thin in his life. When he was terminally ill, Ira's wife Lee banished him to another apartment, not wanting to see him fall down and drool. The multiple girl friends, not quite knowing what to do, drifted away. His personality became more and more bizarre and unpredictable.
If friends trickled away, Oscar Levant didn't. He stuck by his friend doggedly, even though he had a severe phobia of illness. There was a bit of speculation in the Levant biography that he was sexually attracted to Gershwin. I've also heard people speculate that GG was gay, bisexual or asexual, and that his girlfriend-gathering amounted to a massive coverup.
Levant seems to have loved and even devoured women, until he got married to a gorgeous dame (June Gale) who loved and looked after him for the rest of his life. After that, there's not much about affairs. But what about that undercurrent? All of Levant's close male friends (Copland, Horowitz, Isherwood, and on and on) were known to be gay. In his very strange Memoirs of an Amnesiac, he mentions homosexuals/homosexuality many, many times, as if he's driving around and around and doesn't know where to park.
It doesn't matter, in the long run. But what is interesting is how Levant WASN'T left alone. He could be an awful curmudgeon, caustic, and even dangerous when into the prescription drugs. But people stuck by him. Codependence, yes, but this time it turned out differently.
How we die, I've always thought, says a lot about the way we've lived. Gershwin died in a hospital room after failed brain surgery, his temperature 106.5. No one was with him. Now we know people in comas often hear and know and sense. Did he know he had been abandoned, allowed to die in an empty room, not even a doctor or a nurse at his side?
Levant, now. Another strange death, but different. Candice Bergen, then a young and gorgeous magazine reporter, had interviewed him for an article, and came back the next day to take a few pictures. Oscar was looking forward to another nice chat with this beautiful woman, played the piano for a while, said he felt tired, then went upstairs for a nap.
The next scene was surreal: Candice Bergen standing by Oscar Levant's bed, realizing there would be no interview. He was cold and inert, his wife making frantic"arrangements" on the phone. After all the thrashing around, the mental anguish, drug abuse, and (it seems likely) agonizing conflict about his sexuality, his life ebbed away as gently as the tide.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Backyard beetles: apocalypse on the lawn
NEWS
Chafer beetle wreaks havoc on Rochester back yard
Mandy and Bob Harrison survey the chafer beetle damage in the back yard of their Rochester Avenue home.
— Image Credit: SARAH PAYNE/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
by Sarah Payne - The Tri-City News
posted Feb 5, 2015 at 1:00 PM
Bob Harrison and his wife, Mandy, have lived in their Rochester Avenue home for 30 years, having fallen in love with the view that stretches all the way to the Fraser River, the flat, expansive back yard and the creek flowing beside the house.
Never in those 30 years did they expect to be dealing with a pest the likes of the chafer beetle.
In the past few months the Harrisons have watched their carefully tended lawn turn into an apocalyptic battle scene — the crows pecking away at great chunks of grass, turning it into bubbled balls of turf, and the raccoons laying waste to entire swaths, nosing the sod up and rolling it back with nary a root in sight.
"We had a beautiful lawn here for years and years," Harrison said, shaking his head as he surveyed the damage in his back yard.
And after months of trying to battle the chafer beast, Harrison is throwing up his hands in defeat.
"What do we do with this? It's totally ruined," he said of the more than 6,000 sq. ft. yard.
The couple's grandson did a bit of online research for them and came up with coyote urine as a possible antidote, so Harrison picked up a small bottle from an outdoors store in Bellingham. He sprinkled some on a test patch of grass and tied a urine-soaked rag to a stake that he set out in another area.
"That night the raccoons came back, sniffed around — it didn't bother them at all," Harrison said. "The next night the crows came back as well."
In the meantime, they're also keeping an eye on the front yard, which has somehow escaped the chafer invasion; Mandy figures the large trees and longer grass out front prevent the flying beetles from landing to lay their eggs.
And they're also looking into alternative methods of engaging with the enemy, possibly saying good-bye to their grass and checking into clover, Mandy said, because "maybe the roots aren't as tasty?
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. . . Patience needed to deal with chafer beetle — Wim Vander Zalm
Wim Vander Zalm, owner of Art Knapp in Port Coquitlam, said with spring approaching in just a few months, gardeners are eager to get out into their yard, and many are appalled at what they see — lawns torn up by crows and raccoons searching for chafer beetle larvae to eat
— Image Credit: DIANE STRANDBERG/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
by Diane Strandberg - The Tri-City News
posted Feb 5, 2015 at 6:00 PM— updated Feb 6, 2015 at 12:24 PM
Owners of lawns decimated by chafer beetles and the crows and raccoons that love to eat them will need to be patient — revenge will come soon enough.
That’s the advice of Wim Vander Zalm, the owner of Art Knapp in Port Coquitlam, who has seen gardening trends and concerns come and go but admits he’s seen nothing like the chafer beetle infestation that has ruined lawns from Coquitlam to Port Coquitlam and caused thousands of dollars in damage to city property.
“It’s an epidemic, people can’t believe it,” said Vander Zalm in the store he’s owned for several years that is gradually switching over from winter stock to the brightly coloured flowers of spring, and where people are going to get the latest information about ridding their yards of chafer beetle grubs.
In fact, as many as two dozen people a day are either phoning or coming in personally to his store to get advice on what to do, and sadly, the best thing he can say for now is be patient.
“We don’t know if this will be passing, we don’t know what they are doing. We are trying to evaluate how these insects will evolve over time. Right now, we know they like it here.”
Some people are considering lawn alternatives such as creeping thyme, Dutch White Clover, salal and sedum, while others are ripping out lawns and replacing it with paving stones, gravel or bark mulch, river rock, a vegetable garden or even artificial turf.
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What I love about these articles is the "we don't know why they're here" tone that echoes an old Godzilla movie:
In the past few months the Harrisons have watched their carefully tended lawn turn into an apocalyptic battle scene — the crows pecking away at great chunks of grass, turning it into bubbled balls of turf, and the raccoons laying waste to entire swaths, nosing the sod up and rolling it back with nary a root in sight.
Not only that, but people are going to drastic measures, such as paving their front yards or laying down astroturf to keep the critters away. Should cut down on mowing time, as well.
Only in dear old suburban British Columbia would an infestation of worms in the yard be described as an "apocalypse". One wonders if that reporter wasn't just a leetle bit jestful in her report.
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