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.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

Now they call it bullying

 

 

“Oh. My. God.”

 

“Here she comes.”

“It’s the suck.”

 

“Suckie.”  

“Suck of the world.”

She could never quite recall or understand when this name was fastened to her, but now it was so stuck that to rip it off her would be fishhook-like, tearing her flesh and infecting her in ways she couldn’t imagine.

There was another name, Maggots, but that was supposed to be an affectionate name, a pet name, the kind of nickname all the kids had at school, now pull yourself together girl, don’t you understand that all the kids are treated this way and all the kids have to learn how to take a little teasing so they can make it through the school day?

 

But “all” the kids aren’t razzed at the school dance because nobody’s dancing with them and all they can do is stand around gawky as if they weigh about 3 thousand pounds. “Whatsamatter honey, having a slow night?”

I don’t know, I try to be normal I guess, but (the guidance counsellor wrinkles up his brow in that “I don’t know what you’re talking about” way she will never see the end of, not even when she’s 50 years old and trying to communicate with a psychiatrist).

Don’t you make an effort to enter into the normal activities of the school day?

What about your social life?

 ("Suckie."

“Suck of the world.”)

 

She has thought about the end of the world lots of times, especially while getting stoned with her brother or trying to keep a guy’s hands off her at one of her older sister’s drunken parties. Some married guy. Her sister phones her up and says hey. You’re wondering why you exist again?  I guess you can come over. It’s as if she’s doing her a big favour by inviting her to an adult party. So she decides to come over.

 

Come over and watch people 15 years older than her get soused, whoop, fuck, and throw up. A guy named Chivas keeps topping up her glass and calls it a Chivas Special. Or is Chivas the name of the drink? She can’t tell, she’s dizzy and spinning around and puking and falling down. Her older sister is taking good care of her and her parents are not at all concerned, nothing bad can happen to her. Right. It’s still better than standing there at the dance by herself or finding notes stuck in her locker, CUNT. We. Do. Not. Want. You.

Some day there will be a name for this activity; they will call it “bullying”. For now, they call it “school”. For now, they call it “hung over and puking in the toilet and telling Mum I have the flu and being sent to school anyway and getting rocks thrown at me by the Catholic kids”.

Rocks?

Yeah, I meant to tell you that it’s

 

Young lady, I find that hard to believe.

 

 

Oh okay, so it isn’t happening then. So I’m not getting those cold stares from my “friends” and those puzzled, puckered looks from teachers when I show up in class crying: “Do you have a cold today?” Yes, a cold that feels like the end of the world.

And it’s lower, lower, lower when she is sent to a psychiatrist and begins to chat him up, flirt with him, make him laugh in that Old World way that shrinks always laugh, the stupid fuckers. He looks like Sigmund Fucking Freud with that beard. She hates them, hates every one of them, and lies about what happens. That’s what they want to hear.

 

"Suckie.”

“Suck of the world.”

A long, long, long time later, after she has finally beaten the alcoholism her sister generously bequeathed her in her teens, she will hear news reports about girls who killed themselves, girls who were only 15 years old, slender and pretty, girls who seemed to have absolutely everything she would have died for in Grade 10, but they died anyway, hung themselves, hung themselves because someone abused them, but it’s doubtful that anyone threw rocks at them or stuck notes in their locker.

 

No, this time it will appear on a screen, and absolutely everyone in the world will be able to see it.

 

Human meanness leaks out in all sorts of ways. Pieces of paper stuck to the inside of a locker with tape: “cunt”. Black magic marker on the inside of a biology text book: “stinking twat”. She will get in trouble for defacing a book and have to pay for it. You can’t rip out pages like that, it’s destructive!

You can’t rip out brain cells, blackened memories of a hell she barely scraped through. You can’t do anything but live around it, the carcinoma of social persecution. What was it about her that caused them to brutalize her so relentlessly? Why can’t she die? Is there another sort of life she can find beyond all this hate?

Living around it is like slinking around the outside of a shadow that is permanently sewn to your body. Don’t fool yourself, everyone can see, even though nobody has the nerve to say it now. You are here because of OUR generosity and you should be GRATEFUL we spared you, that we tolerated your presence! We gave you every chance to be social at those parties, and what did you do?

 

The Old World psychiatrist looks at her over his glasses. “Vhat you heff,” he pronounces, “is yoooth paranoia.”

“Paranoia? Isn’t that imagining you’re – "

“Yes, imagining! But zere is goot news. You vill outgrrrrow it.”

“Glad to hear it. Just one question?”

“Yes.”

"WHEN?”

 

Blackout: what will really happen when the power goes out

Since there are only three or four (or nine or seven) degrees of separation between this topic and another-this, I thought I'd relate the above brilliant re-conception of the audio player to a new hit TV show that I don't really like.

I had high hopes for Revolution, that show where the power goes off. I mean really off, permanently, everywhere, all over the world. You can't even use batteries, for God's sake, though they don't explain why (though after 15 years, when the story actually starts, my guess is that they'd all be used up, except maybe a few reserved for Camilla Parker-Bowles' vibrator). The concept seemed chilling and full of possibilities, so I promised myself I'd watch two of them, in case the pilot was a dog.

I confess I didn't even get to the second one. It was one of those warlord things, one of those, how-do-you-call-'em, the kind I don't like anyway, violent and paranoid, full of border patrols and big guys with chains around them, guns n' weird tattoos n' stuff. I wanted to know things like, how do you make toast without a toaster? How do you blow-dry your hair in the morning, and how do you avoid freezing to death in the winter?

This series, the premise of it anyway, plays on an underlying fear (WAY underlying - most people have pushed it down so far it doesn't even register) that some day, the worldwide power grid will fail and we will be up shit creek without so much as an electronic paddle. This may not happen all at once - or maybe it will - or maybe it'll rotate here and there, just as the collapse of the world climate is poking up here and popping up there: a flood, a drought, a horrendous mudslide, a freak snowstorm in July.

Then I saw what the network did to that great premise, bored it down, dumbed it out, turned it into yet another one of those gritty "things", what's the genre called anyway, but it sure has nothing to do with the ingenuity people would have to summon up to survive a complete and permanent blackout.

Well, it's silly, isn't it? For millennia, that's all there was! For millennia, all during our evolution, all during recorded history prior to the late 1800s (and when was the lightbulb invented? Do you think I'm going on Wiki just for that?), nobody had so much as a flashlight. We were choppers of wood and hewers of water, or whatever the saying is. We made clothing out of blobs of cotton, we squeezed cows and took down squirrels with a slingshot. Some of the greatest geniuses who ever lived never had a Smartphone. 

I love the video above, I love the primitive brilliance of chopstick-and-paper-cup sound reproduction. The only thing stranger is the theory that clay pots somehow recorded sound, I mean hundreds or even thousands of years ago, as the decorating spindle etched grooves in the rapidly-spinning wet clay.

In theory, it could work.

In the last few years some scientist or other discovered he could play back tiny etchings made on paper covered with soot. These went back to something like 1860, and at the time they were made they weren't play-backable, but the guy - do you think I'm going on Wiki for THIS? Forgettaboutit - at least had the principle down. Pointed stylus, rapidly revolving glass drum covered with sooty paper to capture the vibrations. Problem is, this guy was mainly interested in seeing the patterns. A few bricks short of a genius.

I remember eons ago - speaking of low technology, this is the lowest - WHAT show was it, anyway? It wasn't Monty Python, but one of those British comedies like Morecambe and Wise or The Two Ronnies (and I am sure we got more of them here in the True North than the States ever saw), with Spike Milligan, people like that, and maybe Dudley Moore, and. . . anyway, the sketch showed a giant record lying on the ground, and some idiot - maybe Peter Cook - running around and around it with a big stylus and playing it.

Okay.

I wonder if I have a point here. If technology fails, which it seems to be already in the general dumbing-down of the populace, who will thrive and who won't? I'd say the paper-cup-and-chopstick guy will do all right because he has found a way to think outside the cup, so to speak.

Most people are soft - nowadays they are, I think - and selfish - look at the shameful Vancouver post-Stanley-Cup riots -  and will panic and loot and smash and grab and treat each other like shit. Those people will sift out, eventually, having killed each other, leaving behind the real survivors, the reverse pioneers, the retro-explorers who are tough but able to share their resources. And by resources, I don't mean just food but innovative ways to adapt to huge change. This is how we survived as a species, not by fucking destroying each other over a handful of batteries.

Those nutty survivalists, by the way, the crackpots with more arms stashed than the Unabomber, will very quickly be winnowed out. Do you think they're going to share even one can of beans with a starving family? The crazy will NOT inherit the earth because they're inflexible to the point of lunacy. If there isn't any government left to be paranoid about, they will lose the will to live. Just as Jane Goodall once said, "One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee", in the huge scheme of things, one human being is no human being. Without each other for social and practical and even technological support, we're sunk.

I'd be willing to give Revolution another try if it got past all the "my-family-is-alive-and-I'm-going-to-find-them" stuff, the gun-totin' gals with tangled tawny hair who still look sexy without a stylist (and, I assume, still smell nice without running water or deodorant) and the woman with the ludicrous hamster-driven Commodore 64 computer flickering in her basement. But I think it would have been braver of the writers to start with the actual blackout and not just flash back to it for a few seconds here and there. To actually live through it would create the kind of doomsday gut-lurch that futuristic drama is all about.

We have felt the wind of the wing of this particular madness. We're brave enough to glance at the subject, but not to wade right in.