Almost camouflaged is Paco, my new, eight-week-old baby lovebird. This bird has been such a delight to be with. She learns so quickly, and is snuggly and trusting. Eats like a little horse.
Paco is known in lovebird parlance as a whiteface blue double violet. The violet aspects show up here more than in normal light, making me think those hues will come out more when she is past the baby stages. Her face will become whiter as well. She loved the little whirr sound of the camera, and didn't mind the flash. A diva in the making!
Mummy is sort of glad she had her hair styled today.
A bird in the hand. . . poopy, but it washes out. . .
A bird on the shoulder, where she likes to hang out.
Such a pretty bird!
Tiny little bundle of joy! This is probably the only shot I have of my workspace. Paco has been happy to be with me up here, and I have set up a little table with food and things to chew on.
For several decades now I've been chasing down a Stravinsky album called Favorite Short Pieces. It had some gorgeously eccentric stuff on it and in my teens, when I was in the midst of a Stravinsky fit, I listened to it all the time. All my internet sleuthing got me nowhere - if it existed at all, it was only on vinyl. But then today - a brainwave - if I got a playlist of the tracks on said album, couldn't I try to find the individual pieces on YouTube? And by the holy - I did - I reassembled all seven works, not in any order or by any particular artists, but who cares, I have it all now. So how on earth does this connect to the video? Ah. My first awareness of Little Tich (who sounds like he has some sort of skin condition) came from reading the liner notes of FavoriteShortPieces. Stravinsky wrote them himself, in his usual dry, droll manner. He claimed that the second movement of his Eight Instrumental Miniatures for Fifteen Players was inspired by "the manifold eccentric appearances of the celebrated English clown, Little Tich." And that was all that happened, until I began to read about Oscar Levant.
Stravinsky, Oscar Levant. Little Tich. . . hold on, these dissonances do relate. There was a great tidbit in the fascinating but painful-to-read bio of Levant, A Talent for Genius. Levant liked to hobnob with (some might say suck up to) musical geniuses such as Gershwin and Copland and Horowitz, hoping something would rub off. His encounter with Stravinsky was memorable. This is a long quote, but worth transcribing: "One day Igor Stravinsky visited the Warner Bros. lot and dropped in on Oscar Levant during a break in the long workday. Wearing black tie and tails and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, Levant received the composer of Le Sacre du printemps in a quiet corner of the movie set. Levant greatly enjoyed the spirited, fiercely opinionated Russian. Between takes he had been reading a life of Ferruco Busoni, the Italian pianist and composer, so he knew that Stravinsky had met Busoni only once, despite the fact that they had lived just five miles from each other in Switzerland during the First World War. "Why did you visit Busoni only once?" Levant asked Stravinsky. "Because," replied the composer, bristling slightly, "he represented the immediate past and I hate the immediate past."
It's the kind of remark you like, but you can't quite determine why. Anyway, about Little Tich. . . I was chopping my way through Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac - a fascinating and nearly unreadable book, the last fourth of which takes place in a series of mental institutions - and I came across the name again - I couldn't believe it! It was Little Tich!Not only hadn't I heard the Favorite Short Pieces album for over 40 years, I hadn't heard one mention of this creature and had come to think of him as chimeric, maybe a product of Stravinsky's fevered imagination. I wish I could find the exact quote, but you're going to have to trust me that he did talk about Little Tich. I wish I remember exactly what he said: memoirs don't have an index and I've already chopped through enough of it. I don't want to fall into the Levant memoirs again: the man had talent to burn, and he burned it. Not only that, the name-dropping is deafening. He seemed to have an almost pathological need to align himself with the "greats", even if it was only the likes of Frank Fay or Shirley Booth (or the nightmarish Al Jolson).
I just have to tell one more story - I shouldn't, and I know I already told it many posts ago. Levant was playing the sidekick in a movie calledHumoresque, starring the ferocious man-eating diva Joan Crawford. He noticed she always brought knitting on the set with her and worked at it furiously between takes. She regaled the cast with amusing stories about her obsession: oh, I knit at dinner parties, I knit on airplanes, I knit in restaurants, I. . . "Do you knit while you fuck?" Levant asked. The two never became friends.
CODA. When I got up this morning, I thought: damn! I have to find that reference to Little Tich. You know, the one in Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac. I KNOW it's in there somewhere (probably near the beginning of the book). So I went page by page, and on page 31: JACKPOT! This is one of his charming, hair-raising mental hospital anecdotes, particularly heartbreaking because he demonstrates the same eccentric, devastating wit that made him so famous: I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that`s regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me. There was one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name was Nan. I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. One day she hauled off with all her might and slapped Nan`s face. Nan didn`t move; she didn`t hit back - some of them do. Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are. Oh yes.
CODA TO THE CODA. Poking around, you always find out more. I loved this little Stravinsky anecdote: Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.
Don't watch all of this, because most of it is a little slow. The good part starts around 2:00 and is only about 45 seconds long. To set this up, here's an interesting fragment of a conversation - at least *I* think it's interesting, and since it's my party and I'll cry if I want to, you simply have to come along - which took place in 1938. Hedda Hopper: Well, when I saw you in 'Daughters', I gasped and said: 'There is Oscar Levant.' John Garfield: You're the first person who's recognized it. When I read the script, that mad, sardonic genius of music flashed through my mind. And I based my character on him. Levant's biographer explains that "it is clear from the wrinkles in his suit to the limp curl hanging over his forehead that Garfield had imagined Mickey Borden as Oscar Levant."
This is interesting, to me anyway, because it illustrates how someone can just remove someone else's skin and try it on, walk around in it. If it sounds gruesome, it is. The movie in question, Four Daughters, is all about a proper New England family (or if they're not New England, they sure seem like it) and the lively and exuberant four marriageable young daughters who to seek to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and French kissing and stuff like that, except it's not allowed on the screen. And women will get pregnant without anyone ever attaining an erection. The only really bright spot in this otherwise too-Rockwell-ish thing is John Garfield's pirating the soul of Oscar Levant. He plays this bitter, sardonic tough wreathed in cigarette smoke who plays the piano like nobody's business, but never seems to catch a break. (Which means, of course, that the most beautiful of the four daughters throws herself down on the cement in front of him.) And he did it so well that no one knew who it really was. Levant was mostly famous as a radio personality at the time, though he'd played a sardonic sidekick in a few movies. But this isn't a caricature; it's that thing where you grab someone's guts and pull.
It's doubtful Levant knew he had been taken over either, or vice-versa, because no one expected it. It was pretty hard to riff on such a strange, saturnine, yet oddly appealing personality. I vaguely remember Oscar going on the Jack Paar Show in the early '60s and talking about being in a mental hospital, describing it all in delicious detail as if he'd just come back from a vacation. The audience found it screamingly funny. When I found out, years and years later, that it was all true, that he DID do serious time for psychosis and drug addiction, it made my mouth fall open, and it still does.
Garfield had a gangsterish quality to him, and Levant did too, hanging out with an unsavory element, wearing Nick the Greek's cast-off overcoat and never wearing a hat. That alone would be grounds for incarceration in those days. I think Levant fell victim to his own wit, however, and became a sort of salon doggy, sitting up and performing his slicing and dicing, things we'd never say because they'd be seen as lacerating and even cruel. When he did it, it was somehow OK. Something about his face. And women loved him, God how they loved him, he must have had some secret or other.
It interests me also that Garfield and Levant did eventually star together in a delicious movie with Joan Crawford. Humoresque was gorgeously parodied on SCTV many years ago as New York Rhapsody, with Catherine O'Hara wearing shoulder pads that jutted out so rigidly you could practically sit on them. She played the sexy older woman with bags of money but an empty life, just looking for a young genius (the violin prodigy with talent to burn) to "encourage" and bankroll/patron-ize. This had obvious sexual benefits for both.
But the movie didn't need parody, for it was already over the top, noir-ish with a hint of sepia, a dark story of bitter failed romance and enraged artistry sucked dry by an insatiable carmine-lipped emotional vampire. The beach scene is a real classic, and they even show them riding horses together. The problem that a tough urban kid like Garfield never would have come within ten miles of horses is never addressed.
Levant is very funny, self-deprecating and caustic in this movie. He was allowed to write his own lines, I mean, just sit down and write dialogue for himself. This was almost unprecedented, but I guess directors must have realized he could do it better than anyone else. Who knows what the screenplay-writers thought. No one listens to them anyway.
You know how one thing leads to another? No? Neither do I, it's only January 5. I haven't started ANY of the things I've resolved to do. Whatever they are. Meantime, I was watching this thing, y'know, this thing on TV called Mysteries at the Museum. . . quasi-educational, sort of, but it talked about these little girls who took photos of "fairies" about 100 years ago, photos so fake they would be laughable even then, and - somebody fell for them, making you wonder what sort of IQs these literary types really have. I don't want to paraphrase this cuz I'm lazy, so here is a chunk of an article about it. I haven't shown this to my husband yet, who worships Sherlock Holmes and everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. I don't want to disillusion him and reveal to him the fact that his hero was just another blithering Englishman with the intelligence of a katydid.
Doyle was a credulous dupe for various kinds of nonsense. He not only believed in spiritualism and all of the phenomena of the seance room, but he also believed in fairies.
In 1917, two teenage girls in Yorkshire produced photographs they had taken of fairies in their garden. Elsie Wright (age 16) and her cousin Frances Griffiths (age 10) used a simple camera and were said to be lacking any knowledge of photography or photographic trickery.
Frances and the Fairies, July 1917, taken by Elsie. Midg Quarter camera at 4 feet, 1/50 sec., sunny day.
Photo No. 1, above, taken in July, showed Frances in the garden with a waterfall in the backround and a bush in the foreground. Four fairies are dancing upon the bush. Three have wings and one is playing a long flute-like instrument. Frances is not looking at the fairies just in front of her, but seems to be posing for the camera. Though the waterfall is blurred, indicating a slow shutter speed, the fairies, are not blurred, even though leaping in the air.
Here's a more detailed look at this picture.
Photo No. 2, taken in September, showed Elsie sitting on the lawn reaching out her hand to a friendly gnome (about a foot high, with wings) who is stepping forward onto the hem of her wide skirt.
Photographic experts who were consulted declared that none of the negatives had been tampered with, there was no evidence of double exposures, and that a slight blurring of one of the fairies in photo number one indicated that the fairy was moving during the exposure of 1/50 or 1/100 second. They seemed not to even entertain the simpler explanation that the fairies were simple paper cut-outs fastened on the bush, jiggling slightly in the breeze. Doyle and other believers were also not troubled by the fact that the fairy's wings never showed blurred movement, even in the picture of the fairy calmly posed suspended in mid-air. Apparently fairy wings don't work like hummingbird's wings.
Hardly anyone can look at these photos today and accept them as anything but fakes. The lighting on the fairies does not match that of the girls. The fairy figures have a flat, cut-out appearance. But spiritualists, and others who prefer a world of magic and fantasy accepted the photos as genuine evidence for fairies.
Three years later, the girls produced three more photos.
Photo No. 3 "Francis and the Leaping Fairy" showed a slightly blurred profile of Frances with the winged fairy suspended in mid-air just in front of her nose. The background and the fairy are not blurred.
Photo No. 4 shows a fairy hovering in mid-air offering a flower to Elsie. This fairy may be standing on a branch, for the fairy images are of indeterminable distance from the camera.
Photo No. 5 "Fairies and their Sunbath" is the only one that looks as if it could have been an accidental or deliberate double exposure.
The girls said they could not photograph the fairies when anyone else was watching. No one else could photograph the fairies. There was only one independent witness, Geoffrey L. Hodson, a Theosophist writer, who claimed to see the fairies, and confirmed the girls' observations "in all details".
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Arthur Conon Doyle not only accepted these photos as genuine, he even wrote two pamphlets and a book attesting the genuineness of these photos, and including much additional fairy lore. His book, The Coming of the Fairies, is still in print, and some people still believe the photos are authentic. Doyle's books make very interesting reading even today. Doyle's belief in spiritualism, convinced many people that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was not as bright as his fictional creation.
Illustration for Alfred Noyes' poem "A Spell for a Fairy" in Princess Mary's Gift Book by Claude Shepperson. (Hodder and Stoughton, no date, c. 1914, p. 101ff). Compare the poses of these figures with those of three of the fairies in Photo No. 1. The figures have been rearranged and details of dress have been altered, but the origin of the poses is unmistakable.
A curious fact is that in this book, a compilation of short stories and poems for children by various authors, there's a story, "Bimbashi Joyce" by Arthur Conan Doyle! Surely he received a copy from the publisher. If Doyle had noticed this picture, and if he had the sort of perceptiveness he attributed to Sherlock Holmes, he might have concluded that the Cottingley photographs were fakes. But, maybe not. Believers are good at seeing what they believe, and not seing things that challenge their beliefs. Or perhaps the close match of drawing and photos is a supernatural psychic coincidence.
On the matter of Conan Doyle's gullibility, Gilbert Chesterton said
...it has long seemed to me that Sir Arthur's mentality is much more that of Watson than it is of Holmes.
It is worth noting that Doyle was said to have an intimate relationship with Lucky, the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, later made infamous by an interminable series of cartoon ads for cereal which was nothing more than dye and a torrent of sugar. When he found pink hearts, yellow moons and green clovers floating around in his cereal bowl one morning, Doyle believed he had found irrefutable scientific proof for his beliefs and published a series of seventeen volumes entitled How I Got Lucky. In honor of his remarkable literary achievement, Doyle was granted an earlhood and crowned Lord Snuffleburg the Stupid. Lucky the Leprechaun was played in the movie version by Sir Basil Rathbone.
It's the Humphrey Bogart of the fish plaque world. And whatever did happen to all the fish plaques? You know, those singing fish. I still have a singing lobster, but it may be the only one left. It's a non-smoker.
