"Deep in the being of George Gershwin was a map of all the human suffering of the world. Anyone who knew him could not have missed that characteristic feature." - Merle Armitage
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Glorious George, part 476: that face
That face, that face, that wonderful face
It shines, it glows, all over the place
And how I love to watch it change expressions
Each look becomes the prize of my possessions.
I love that face, that face, it hmmm, just isn't fair
You must forgive the way that I stare
But never will these eyes behold a sight that could replace
That face, that face, that face.
I see that face, that face, wherever I go
It's here, and it's there, bewitching me so
It's got my crazy heart in such a tangle
It drives me simply wild from any angle.
I love those eyes, those lips, that fabulous smile
He laughs and spring goes right out of style
And oh, the thrill I feel each time my fingers gently trace
That face, that face, that face.
Oh, what a face, that face, it lights up a room
Intoxicates like heady perfume
No painter or photographer could catch it
No rainbow or no sunset ever match it.
Beneath the moon, the stars, ahhh, under the sun
Asleep, or awake it's second to none
What view completes my universe
Transcending time and space
That face, that face, that face.
Oh that face
That face, that face, oh, that face.
Alan Bergman Lew Spence
Lost and found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin
This might be categorized as a Separated at Birth of a very different stripe.
I love a mystery, but this mystery has pushed me back time and time again, leading to more frustration than information.
I've been chopping my way through several of the multitude of George Gershwin biographies. Surely no American composer has ever been more sliced, diced, hashed and rehashed than GG. I finally found my way to the really smutty one (The Memory of All That, 1998) by Joan Peyser, the one that reviewers vilified for being inaccurate and making "outrageous claims", including the insistence that GG sired an illegitimate son with a chorus girl in 1926.
One indignant review of the Peyser book sniffily claims that "the family has never recognized Alan Gershwin's claim to their", etc., etc., blah blah blah, but why would they? The stigma of an illegitimate child could ruin a career back then. No doubt the woods were full of opportunists and pretenders, not to mention gold-diggers. After his death, GG's affairs (literally) were hermetically sealed by Ira and Lee Gershwin, his brother and sister-in-law, who lived a long time and were bound and determined to show only the more brilliant facets of this enigmatic jewel to the public.
That restriction remained in place long after both of them were dead.
Strangely enough, in subsequent reviews and commentaries on Peyser's book, critics have become more forgiving. Over time, her formerly sleazy tell-all has found its way into the Gershwin canon (not the boom-boom kind: I keep telling you!). A three-inch-thick Gershwin tome by Howard Pollack, the "definitive" bio until the next one comes along, admits Peyser's scholarship is a bit wonky, but nevertheless cites her work three or four times in a fairly straightforward manner. It's included, which in itself lends her work validity. By some mysterious process that I don't understand, her controversial, vilified, preposterous and completely discounted biography now "counts".
Could it be that she got it right?
But here's the thing. When I try to dig up some hard, plausible evidence that Alan Gershwin exists, or ever did exist, I can't find anything. There is a glorious photo gallery of "someone" - the photographer claims it's AG - taken when he would have been 88 years old. The fine facial bone structure that has kept him photogenic all these years is a trait he shares with George (who never had the misfortune of growing old). But I can't post these, they're protected by the web site, and there's no text with them that I can find. Nothing to explain the photos. Nothing at all.
The few sites I found that even mention Alan Gershwin now identify him as "son of George", not "supposed" or "alleged" or any of that. No one seems to question it any more. But except for a claim to be a composer in his own right, this man of nearly 90 left very little trace. I found a YouTube video of just one piece he wrote called The Gettysburg Anthem, performed a few years ago at a small church for a commemorative Lincoln event. But the piece was composed FIFTY years ago - a bit longer than the time it took for GG to snatch his notation paper off the piano and perform it in public the same night. In his case, the smoke was still rising, the ink was still wet.
And that is all. No more videos. No more compositions. Nothing. I modestly have to tell you that there is a hell of a lot more of MY stuff on the internet, maybe because I don't know when to keep my mouth shut.
Tantalyzingly, there is a Facebook page that had me racing to find it, but in essence there's nothing on it except a link to a review from the late 1990s of the Peyser bio, one of the very few positive ones that thought her claims of an illegitimate son were valid.
There's also a cropped photo of AG's mouth, the feature that most resembles GG's. Hmmmmm.
If you're to believe this strange and ultimately unproven story, people would see the young Alan Gershwin and nearly fall over backwards because they thought they were seeing a mini-George. Imagine what a shock it must have been after GG's untimely death in 1937. Alan Gershwin was a walking stigma, or else just an oddity with a chance resemblance. But it wasn't just the way he wore his hat, the way he sipped his tea. His gait, his way of inhabiting his lanky body, his nervous energy and the smile that made you hear bells and the intoxicating rattledy-bang of trains - they really did seem to match up.
Or did they?
AG has never submitted to a DNA test. And of course, there are lots of examples of the Separated at Birth phenomenon (many of which I've posted here) that are almost creepy in their similarity.
Might AG be one of these? Now that he has aged, the resemblance isn't quite so startling, except at certain angles. The photo most widely circulated plays that up.
And yet, and yet.
One of the tidbits I found, deep in the archives of a website called The Blacklisted Journalist, was this piece of information, true or not:
Alan Gershwin was born in Brooklyn on May 18th, 1926, his birth certificate recorded in the name of Albert Schneider, with Mollie Schneider, Alan's mother's sister, listed as his mother.
In Alan's early years and during his occasional visits with his famous father, Gershwin could never find the courage to acknowledge Alan as his son and introduced Alan as a "son of a friend".
For what appears to be endless years, Alan waged a futile battle for full acknowledgement. And while the evidence is overwhelming, denials rage on.
After a sad childhood, lacking even a shred of his father's musical genius, Alan approaches the waning segment of his life still hoping the world will, at the very least, announce him as "the son of George Gershwin," not Gershwin's "son of a friend."
Some people coat-tail all their lives, and it's sad. Meanwhile, a weird thing has happened: Alan Gershwin has morphed into someone who looks sort of like George's grandfather, if grandsons bore that much resemblance (which they don't).
In fact, in a rare photo of George's father, we see no resemblance at all.
Just when I am ready to write this off as a strange posthumous form of stalking, I think of Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was a bona fide American hero, an aviator who flew solo from New York to Paris in 1927. Tickertape parade, picture on the cover of Time, the whole works. (Except Time probably didn't exist then.) Though he was supposedly happily married to the longsuffering Anne Morrow Lindbergh, rumors dogged him throughout his life that he in fact had several families scattered all over Europe, and that he had fathered, according to the garbled information I found, either four, five or nine illegitimate children (along with the six he had with Anne). These rumors seemed as preposterous as the murmurings that he was a Nazi sympathizer, until the surviving children took DNA tests in the mid-2000s and proved to the world that it was all true.
This one is truly bizarre, one of the strangest photographs I have ever seen. I have no idea where it came from, who took it, and why. Like all the other shreds I found, there's no explanation for it. It appears to be a shot of Alan Gershwin's face in profile, directly behind that of his father, perhaps made as a deliberate comparison. This would have been hard to accomplish, I mean technically, back in the day, so it may be a sophisticated form of photoshopping. The scribbles all over it are somewhat similar to the scrawling George liked to do when he gave someone a photo. He was even known to write little musical phrases, like-a so:
Or were the scribbles by George himself? Unlikely - they're big and sloppy and nothing like George's small, neat, upright hand. (Sidebar note: apparently George's original manuscripts were as immaculate as Mozart's, often without a single correction.) They also obscure the photo, which would have driven him crazy. In spite of the dash and verve of his music, his vibe suggests to me obsessive attention to detail and an insistence on order. On top of that, like most geniuses he was an inherently narcissistic personality who needed the world to see that incredibly beautiful face.
So we are left to compare basic features: the flattish face, the aristocratic high-bridged nose with its handsome Jewishness, the long clean jaw reminiscent of a movie star's. The sloping forehead with its receding hairline. The sweet, sad, expressive eyes that one jilted girl friend described as "heavenly". But most of all, and perhaps this is why it is on the FB banner, the "Hapsburg lip", pouty, sensual and a little sardonic. George had a killer mouth, with the kind of insolently brilliant smile that would light up a foggy day in London Town, or anywhere else.
What do you think? Are you with me here? Am *I* even with me here? Due to the frustrating lack of information, I don't think I will ever know for sure.
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
BONUS! Just found an incredible version of the "superimposed" GG with Alan Gershwin. It was for sale on Etsy, of all things, for five bucks, an "original", and that's all it said. The mystery deepens. . .
THIS IS HUGE! Recently I sadly learned of the passing of Alan Gershwin. But with his death, yet more mystery is emerging. Anyone who is interested in this strange case should read the article by David Margolick from the New York Times. The mystery may be solved - or is AA more enigmatic than ever?
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
What's under the label
Hey listen. I have nothing against kids who have major problems "getting help". But what's the help? How competent is it? How medicalized has it become? Isn't it true that (especially in the age of split-second information-sharing) diagnoses can become faddish and even trendy?
In my day, in the dark ages, we had a few labels too, and they were judgemental and not helpful at all: "slow". "Retarded". "Disobedient". "From a broken home." "Problem child." Now all these have been splintered into multiple diagnostic categories, but instead of having kids sit in the corner, we diagnose and prescribe for them.
This won't be a rant. I'm not against psychiatry or drugs. I'm not against saying, here and now, that when I was finally diagnosed bipolar at FIFTY years of age, and finally put on the right meds (lithium, the most basic treatment for BP) and found a decent shrink, probably the last one in the world, it was nothing short of a breakthrough for me. Decades of painful, sometimes agonizing confusion and pain and being chewed up by a heartless system were finally over.
I think I began to get well when I began to object. Hey, wait a minute. This drug is making me sick. Hey! I don't think I have a personality disorder. ("How would you know? You have a personality disorder!"). I can argue with my shrink, who by the way is highly critical of the medical/psychiatric community and the way it operates. (This is the only reason I keep going back.) But kids aren't in a position to do this, and their parents are usually completely intimidated by "experts".
(This could be a whole post on its own, but have you noticed how many articles giving expert advice on psychiatric matters are written by Joe Shmoe, some hack with NO qualifications whatsoever, only misguided opinions and a space to fill on a quasi-medical web site? But people lap this stuff up! It absolutely amazes and appalls me how many people believe practically everything they read. It's as bad as that meaningless phrase, "Statistics show." WHAT statistics? Show me! And even if they do exist, how skewed are they?)
But I digress. There's this term, iatrogenesis, and I like it not only for all those syllables (six!) and its odd look on the page, as if it's starting in the middle, but for its meaning: a condition caused or at least driven by the "cure". After a while it is self-causing and self-perpetuating and attains an awful autonomy. It goes around in endless circles, causing medical people to label it "hypochondria", or maybe even something worse that requires a new kind of medication.
Good help is hard to find.
I won't go into all of my history - I don't go in for that sort of thing, as I think it inspires vampire-like lust in readers, the "oh-poor-thing/thank-God-that-never-happened-to-me" syndrome. I'd rather be wildly admired for my brilliance than felt sorry for any day. It was a mess, a battlefield, one war after another, with long stretches of vibrant life - years, in fact - so that when I had to go back and "get help" once again, the unspoken subtext was, "Didn't you straighten all this out already?" What - you mean you're depressed AGAIN?
I remember seeing a piece in Psychology Today in the early '90s which had a revolutionary article in it with an idea so daring, so controversial that they almost never printed it at all.
Depression is a recurrent condition.
Recurrent?! Meaning: part of the human condition? Meaning (like most things) ongoing? Something you have to deal with each time you get up in the morning?
I thought that was called "life".
Prior to this earthshaking announcement, depression was supposed to be cured "by the book": by reading asinine pop-psychology books, most written by (again) non-professionals. I'm OK, You're OK. How to Be Your Own Best Friend. And (my worst pick of all) The Down Comforter, strongly implying that we really do enjoy wallowing in our depression and don't want to give it up. But I used to think these were sort of like diet books. If it works so goddamn well, why is there another one along a few months later that sells even better?
Anyway, I no longer give a fuck about most of this. I've had to learn to be selfish, though if I had not found real "help" after decades of horrific damage to my self-esteem, my identity and my soul, I might not be here to write this. It was not so many years ago I was seriously planning to jump off a bridge after taking all my meds. (It's always a good idea to commit suicide twice.) What brought me to this state of despair was not my disease, but the appalling lack of understanding in the medical community of the nature of my problems. The abyss of loneliness was harrowing. As for the "help", there was a sense of "whaaaaat? You're back here again?" (Didn't we just see you fifteen years ago?)
I really like the way this video is presented: simple, yet incredibly effective. And I am NOT "against" diagnosis or treatment or even drugs, when they are used prudently (and only when the response is positive and helpful. Dump the crappy drugs that don't work and make you feel sick!) But I begin to feel that the medical community is getting farther and farther away from its own humanity. It's convenient to box kids, dump them in a category, dose them. They will trudge into adulthood with their spirits dampened, the label still stuck to them, even if in tatters. Their hopes of ripping off that label to reveal the shining spirit beneath are starting to look depressingly dim.
"You had me at hello"
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Gershwin Blingees: I have to do something with these
I don't know why it is, but out of all the subjects I've tried to bling, GG blings the best. I learned a long time ago that old b & w photos work better, with the background filled in and the subject left alone. That gives it a certain 3D quality.
I do these late at night, accounting for the nightmarish quality of some of them. I had no idea the dancer would duplicate like that, as a kind of weird backdrop for GG's conducting.
Maybe a little too pretty, but I had to include it. It looks like his hands are moving, which of course they're not.
Maybe the strangest and wildest GG Blingee I've done to date. Even the original was pretty frightening. I think he was a killer at the piano, at least. And a ladykiller.
Another very odd one. Somehow the Jesus/lamb figure fit there, and the pulsing inside his head is eerily prescient. Pretty icky, too.
A rather sentimental portrait of GG with Kay Swift. Not much animation here at all. The oriole is supposed to be moving. There was too much complicated detail here to make the figures stand out the way I wanted.
Just bleepin' weird. I had to try out the other animated dancer and see if he'd make a backdrop. He does. But who the hell IS he?
These never end, do they? A little Disneyesque, perhaps. But I love how George signed the music.
GG FACT: did you know that for the initial performance of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, GG left one page of the score blank? That cadenza, completely improvised, was never heard before that concert, nor has it been heard since. Like some of his best stuff, it just flared brilliantly, then dissipated into the air like a shower of sparks. So Ozone's version isn't so controversial after all.
Stairway to Paradise
One of those Facebook Brane Twizzlers. Is the cat going up or down the stairs? When I first looked at it, it was definitely up. Now it looks like it's definitely down. Five minutes from now it won't matter at all.
OUTTAKE: misfired screen saver. Still, I like it.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Thursday, April 2, 2015
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