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.

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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.

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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I know a guy. . . WILLIAM SHATNER!

"I know a guy!"

Objectum Sexuality: I want it, OH I want it

It took the last post to make me realize how much of this blog is about "old stuff".

It just is.

Blogs are supposed to have themes (?), so maybe mine does now, as much as it ever will.

(Sayyyyyy. . . that's really swell!)

Things were browner then, and somehow more dreamlike.

These '40s cars are erotic, their jutting noses phallic, bulging fenders like blown-up bosoms, and bottoms squatting haunchily like some faunlike forest animal. This one looks completely unreasonable with its slitty little windows and ridiculous upward thrust, but it must have belonged to someone. Who knows who that is in the foreground. Was this a piece of artwork? I don't think so, but still, it doesn't seem real.

My favorite thing about them is the rear wheels. Why did they cover them like that? They had little disclike things that must have flipped up to service the tires. Some of these are so extreme that the car seems to be sinking into the ground. 

If you look at this dispassionately, which frankly I can't, you see a gorgeous galleon of a thing, insurmountable, its bulbousness both male and female, jutting like the shoulders of certain military men, all out of proportion but devastatingly beautiful.

This one is all haunch, but still with those mysterious wheel covers. Looks a little bit like a Volkswagen bug from the '60s. Who owned this thing, what was his/her life like, what did they like to eat? Everyone has a story. 

This one is some sort of roadster, very sporty, but still with those ridiculous luscious curves and the jutting nose. Also the vestiges of a running board, which carried on well into the decade. Not sure of the year, but surely it's 1940s.

Surely these are animals. They seem alive. Their smoothness makes me want to wrap myself around them, feel the heat and the hum. The tensed haunch seems ready to spring the vehicle straight into the air. 

This one is all nose, ugly really, but interesting for the exaggerated nature of it, the cartoonishness. And still, the covered wheels. I am not sure how long this quirk lasted. (Come to think of it, this DOES look like a toy car. Maybe it came with a toy man.)

And this, one of the most beautiful photos of a car I've ever seen, for it bespeaks Hollywood in the '40s. It's not faked like so many of these sepia poses, as the background vehicles are period-accurate. That caramel tone is irresistible. I want it, oh I want it.

Post-blog blatherings. OK, I watch My Strange Addiction too, everybody does, I don't care how clean your hands are. You masturbate too, c'mon admit it. So I see this  really weird one where a guy is in love with his car. It's plain this is not a platonic thing, either. He - well, I won't go into detail. In an even stranger episode, a woman is married to a carnival ride, one that doesn't even function (but then, can't that be said of many "real" husbands?). 

I don't think what I "have" is this, since I have barely ever seen one of these 1940s monsters, nor have I ridden in one. But I'd be in ecstasy if I did. I will never forget that cream-and-aubergine dream that I glimpsed maybe 12 years ago, that moment. It wasn't just admiration or love, it was a jones. I won't go on the show cuz my addiction isn't colorful enough: if I owned one of these beauties, it might be another story.

It's a definite disorder, this I know, for Wikipedia tells me so: Objectum Sexuality, also called OS or "fetishism", but that term has gone out of style cuz it doesn't have "disorder" on the end of it, or initials that sound good on talk shows. 

Dr. Marsh, writing a weekly column called "Love's Outer Limits" for Carnal Nation, began with three columns called "People Who Love Objects".She has also published "Love Among the Objectum Sexuals" in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, March 2010.

In March 2012, British citizen Amanda Liberty gave an interview to the Daily Mail newspaper (complete with photos) regarding her romantic feelings for the Statue of Liberty. Liberty said:

'She is my long-distance lover and I am blown away by how stunning she is. Other people might be shocked to think I can have romantic feelings for an object, but I am not the same as them.'

In the same month, 40 year old Reighner Deleighnie was interviewed by the Daily Mail newspaper regarding her romantic relationship with a three-foot marble statue of the Greek God Adonis that she bought for £395, and which she had nicknamed "Hans". A later example involved Val Theroux, a 64 year old Canadian woman who flew thousands of miles from Kamloops to the UK every year to see an Oak tree which she had fallen in love with.During the summer of 2012, Babylonia Aivaz, a Seattle woman, married a 107 year old warehouse, however, this particular relationship is not being described as object sexuality, due to the political protest nature of her marriage demonstration.

Erika Eiffel, who adopted her surname after a 2007 "marriage" to the Eiffel Tower, founded OS Internationale, an educational website and international online community for those identifying or researching the condition to love objects.

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So you want to be a blogger

OK, so I've wanted to write about this for a long time. Then I'd say, wait a minute, what do you know about it? Then I'd come to the conclusion: that depends.

Depends on whether the worth of this blog is measured in "views", shares, likes, followers, etc. or merely the daily fulfillment of writing it.

When I started keeping this blog in 2010, I think my main goal was to get a contract for my novel The Glass Character. And after something like 3 years of solid effort, I did, though I don't think it had anything to do with the blog.

What do I know from blogging? Nothing. I used the simplest template I could find and changed the header many times, even changing the title of it when the book finally came out.

So it failed in its first purpose. What is its raison-d'etre now, that I keep on with it with such ardor? I think there are two parts to it. In my case, I made a solemn vow, not unlike getting married (and I've been married 42 years - gasp! - so I think I know something about that), that I would write whatever the hell I wanted to write, just whatever topic struck my fancy. There would be no "shoulds". There would be no "musts". There would be no "popular" topics. It was pretty much wide open. I did delete a few which were too whiny or too personal. But I allowed myself the option of short fiction, lots of photos, Blingees, videos, and ESPECIALLY (my favorite form of illustrations) gifs.

I love gifs because they are a movie in a handful of seconds. If you use archival material, e. g. those very rare George Gershwin home movies, you can discover a lot about the subject. In these snippets, Gershwin hauls a little dog up by the scruff of the neck, and puts his hands around a woman's neck as if he is about to "playfully" throttle her. I could not get dates or a context for these, but made gifs of them because they fascinated me.

There is hardly any film of Gershwin, only a couple of bits of him performing, and those frustratingly brief private movies. Mostly he was shooting them, as in this few seconds of the one-of-a-kind genius Oscar Levant. One wonders why he at least didn't make some recordings of his piano playing, which was said to be gaspingly, even jaw-droppingly brilliant. Instead, he'd play in the background at parties with (actual guest list) Cole Porter, Otto Klemperer, Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and (yes, even) Oscar Levant, standing around smoking, drinking champagne and gabbing. Probably no one really paid any attention.

Slippery as an eel, Gershwin was, really unknowable, so if I can just get a ten-second gif of him at the piano, and if I notice something new on tenth or twentieth viewing, so much the better.

So why Gershwin? He is my current happy obsession. I say happy because I've never enjoyed my obsessions more. Information is at my fingertips, and I can write anything I like, pro or con. So the blog tends to leap from one mad topic to another, but not before it has been thoroughly macerated and giffinized.

Some readers (if there are any) seem to believe that the overbalance of gifs on my blog trivializes it, makes it cartoonish, especially since old cartoons are my favorite subject (along with TV ads from the '40s and '50s). Well, too bad, I love gifs, and like everything else I am good at, they go unsung. Making them is really not that easy - try it some time.

What else? The other pledge, commitment, whatever, along with writing about anything that pleases me and/or makes me angry enough to HAVE to write, is to keep it up. Nothing irritates me more than to discover a really fine blog and to notice that the last post is dated 2011. There is such an "I-lost-interest" feeling about it, a lack of dedication. I think if you're going to keep one of these, you need to keep it, like tending a garden.

About views: I seem to average anywhere between five and (my all-time high) 99,085 - no kidding, I just checked it, it's nearly 100,000! - for a post called I See Dead People: Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. People are still reading this thing, because the number of views continues to rise. Fifteen more views and I'll be at 100,000! How is this? Hell if I know, but I did find a link to it on someone else's blog, a very popular one, I would imagine. I've had a few in the ten-thousand-ish range (Some Cats Know, which is really just a bunch of cat pictures) and more in the hundreds. But for the most part, I don't look.

About repeats. Yes. I do them. I do them because I have a very small number of followers. I do them because in no way, shape or form do I expect people to read this blog every day, or even every week or every month. Even I don't remember much about these repeats. I pick ones that I think are good, ones that I especially like.

Why do I do this? If hardly anyone reads it, why do I bother? I need it. It's like a diary, yet it isn't, because I have to keep most of the personal stuff out of it. The "blogger" develops a certain persona over time, and if that persona is enjoyable to inhabit, then it's fun and gratifying to keep a blog. Though there are topics I return to again and again (I mention "celluloid, Harold Lloyd and me" under the title, and old film/photos/film history/ads/cartoons do form a sort of nucleus for the other mad stuff going on), I don't restrict myself to one subject. It would bore the piss out of me, that's why. And if I am bored, you, gentle reader, will be too.

So I'm a blogger. I don't think it has made one iota of difference to my book sales, because book sales just don't stick to me. It's all very  flukey, like that one post that got 100,000 views, when many of the others (much better ones, in my view) get maybe 5 (four of them from me, when I go back to edit them).

So. You want to be a blogger? Go ahead, just make sure you enjoy it, follow your nose, don't be afraid to be quirky, don't pay much attention to views (even though the entire internet seems to revolve around numbers and popularity), and - this last one is the most important - KEEP IT UP. Nobody wants to find an absolutely wonderful, stimulating blog that ran out of steam in 2009.

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More cat pictures

Mia cuddling up in her new blanket. This was a rush job - I did it in 2 1/2 days! Grandma's blanket magic seems to cross the species border.

I think I'm going to stop writing, stop blogging, or else just give the blog over to cute cat pictures, which get more views than anything. Maybe they'll make a movie out of it. Margaret's Cute Cat Blog: The Motion Picture!

Mia Blingee shot. Miawwwww.

HERE SHE IS: the Mystery Kitten!

 

A new kitten in the family is a very big event around here. Mia is my new grandcat, kitty of my daughter's family. Not long ago they mourned the passing of Oscar, catriarch of the family for some 13 years.

And then along came Mia! Mia and I have yet to meet, but I've knitted her a special blanket (a rush job, I did it in three days) and made her a toy out of one of my famous jujus. Today's the day I see her for the first time.

Caitlin and Ryan are pleased as can be!

So's Mia. Miaaawwwwww!

Bonus Mia Blingee!

Bonus-bonus Mia Facebook profile picture!

Bonus-bonus-bonus Mia Facebook cover!

Amen, amen, amen, and hallelujah.

Just another eggplant

I have never been able to cook eggplant. My mother knew. She fried it, in the way people fried things then, in a lot of hot bubbling Crisco, and she fried it very slowly. The breading would become very dense and crisp from concentrated juices, and the middle was almost like a custard, smooth and jelly-like, with that salty-sweet punky eggplant taste and the slippery texture of the seeds.

Nor can I find it duplicated in a restaurant, though the occasional Greek place has a nice moussaka with a creamy, almost gelatinous texture. But enough.

I've posted before about how I have a thing for cars. Well, no. I hate them. I don't even drive, which is yet more evidence of my freakishness. I hate what cars have done to the environment and believe they are probably about 75% responsible for the planet's impending doom. Nobody thinks about this, but I do.

And yet.

It was years ago, a some-enchanted-evening moment when I saw this car, not exactly the one pictured but of similar shape and vintage. It was eggplant-and-cream, two-toned, with a lot of chrome in between.  It swooshed along elegantly as if driven along by some liveried chauffeur in the 1940s. And something happened to me then: I was transfixed. It was erotic, nothing more or less. I was electrified. Had that car been anywhere near me, I would have attached myself to the roof and held on for dear life while it accelerated madly and blew through red lights. I would have slid down that hunched, crouched back, the back with no wheels, tensed and animal-like. I would have wrapped myself around those balloon-like fenders, so blown-up that they're ready to explode like in that obscene Popeye cartoon where the tire blows up. 

The creature swanned around, did one more turn around the strip mall (for my benefit, no doubt), then disappeared. It was likely going to be displayed in a car show somewhere. I was not yet going to car shows - I didn't "know", not the way I know now. Now I go, and I look for that car, which according to Google is a 1940 Mercury Westergard custom. I may never find it, but I keep on looking. In spite of what everybody seems to think about me, I have always been the most wretched kind of optimist.