My China doll

China Girl (filmmaking)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A China Girl image, with explanatory labels.

In the motion picture industry a China Girl is an image of a woman accompanied by color bars that appears for a few frames (typically one to four) in the reel leader. A "China Girl" was used by the lab technician for calibration purposes when processing the film (with the still photography equivalent being a "Shirley Card").[1] The origin of the term is a matter of some dispute[2] but is usually accepted to be a reference to the models used to create the frames - either they were actually china (porcelain) mannequins, or the make-up worn by the live models made them appear to be mannequins.

Originally the "China Girl" frames were created in-house by laboratories to varying standards, but in the mid-1970s engineers from the Eastman Kodak Company developed the Laboratory Aim Density system as a means of simplifying the production of motion picture prints. Under the LAD system, Kodak created many duplicate negatives of a single China Girl and provided them to laboratories to include in their standard leaders. These LAD frames were exposed to specific guidelines and allowed a laboratory technician to quickly make a subjective evaluation of a print's exposure and colour tone by looking at the China Girl herself. If a more objective evaluation were required, a densitometer could be used to compare the density of the colour patches in the LAD frame with Kodak's published guidelines.

In keeping with changes to the modern laboratory process, Kodak also provide a "Digital LAD" to be incorporated in the film-out process to check the accuracy of the film printer and processor.

In 2005, "China Girl" images were the subject of an art exhibit by Julie Buck and Karin Segal at the Harvard Film Archive[3]

The "China girl" has occasionally appeared as a visual trope in experimental films over the years. Some experimental films which use "China girls" include Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66) by Owen Land, New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976) by Owen Land, Girls on Film (2005) by Julie Buck and Karin Segal, MM (1996) by Timoleon Wilkins, Standard Gauge (1984) by Morgan Fisher, To the Happy Few by Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs, China Girls (2006) by Michelle Silva, and Releasing Human Energies (2012) by Mark Toscano.

The narrator and main character in the 2013 novel The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner shared her experience as a China Girl model for a film lab in New York City.

I'm a travelin' man

I've made a lot of stops all over the world

And in every part I own the heart

Of at least one lovely girl

I've a pretty Seniorita waiting for me

Down in old mexico

If you're ever in Alaska stop and see

My cute little Eskimo

Oh my sweet Fraulein down in Berlin town

Makes my heart start to yearn

And my China doll down in old Hong Kong

Waits for my return

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea

I remember the night

When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki

And I held you oh so tight

------ instrumental break ------

Oh my sweet Fraulien down in Berlin town

Makes my heart start to yearn

And my China doll down in old Hong Kong

Waits for my return

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea

I remember the night

When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki

And I held you oh so tight

Oh, I'm a travelin' man

Yes, I'm a travelin' man

SUNDAY THOUGHTS. I'm fascinated, if not obsessed by obsolete technology, and my goodness. I keep learning new things. I collect film leaders because they are just so bloody cool, and I am finding out I am not the only one who really really likes them. Film students and amateur filmmakers use them to give their productions a "retro" look and atmosphere.

I remember them from my McKeough School days, because on Friday afternoons when we were about to be released from prison, we'd all be marched downstairs into the dank, dark basement of the school to watch a "fillum". That's what they called it. For a long time I thought that was the right way to say it. Usually it was some edu-ma-cational thing, a National Film Board movie about the Rocky Mountains, or even a hygiene film, though of course we didn't know what hygiene was.

The fillums, which were at least 20 years old, would always start with the countdown, but before the countdown was that explosion of grease-pencil writing and scratches and flashes of "things". It also made - well, that sound, you know what I mean, that snappy, gritchy sound. The picture was pretty gritchy too, and usually black and white. Colour fillum was a very big deal in those days.

We particularly liked it when the countdown was accompanied by beeps. These were more like boops, actually. We were not supposed to count along - no one ever told us this, by the way. We just knew. Our principal was an old army man who kept order; we even marched in to military music in the morning. My God.

I sort of vaguely noticed split-second flashes of human faces (not always girls) in my film leaders, but wasn't sure why they were there. So today (last night, actually, very late, when I do these things) I found out about China Girls. I'm not sure exactly where the name came from. The Wikipedia entry seems embarrassed by it, trying to avoid the possibility that there's something racist about it. If it's a reference to porcelain or even a mannequin, the name would not be capitalized, would it? But here they capitalize BOTH names, just to stay on the safe side.

It brought to mind Ricky Nelson's Travellin' Man, an incredibly racist thing that basically says he fucks them all over the world, assigning them pretty much equal value as far as nooky is concerned. Or is that spelled Nooky?

And there's this, from Moving Image Archive News, in case you'd like to know more (and more, and more, and more).

China Girls, Leading Ladies, Actual Women

Oh, and. . . this, from a Harvard magazine (still trying to find the name). Given my post from a couple of days ago, there are only a few degrees of separation.

"What is striking is how familiar some of the faces seem. When the exhibition was shown in New York, Buck says, visitors would swear that they had seen some of the women in old films, but that is unlikely. As far as Buck and Segal have been able to determine, none of the women in this collection ever made the leap from China Girl to film actress.

Julie Buck and Karin Segal, after an unknown studio cameraman, 2004. 'Girl # 62' image courtesy of the artists. (Test Strip 62)

In the end, the sense of déjà vu probably results from the combination of lighting, makeup, hairstyles, clothes, and facial expressions that suggest film actresses of a particular era. But the resemblance does raise questions about why our response to a famous face is different from our reaction to one that is eerily similar but which lacks the associations acquired through a career as an actress and celebrity.

Rumors persist, however. One that Buck and Segal heard as they were interviewing film technicians is that a teenage Joan Baez once stood in as a test-strip girl when her physicist father was engaged in making an educational film in the Boston area. But so far, the photo has not shown up." (Emphasis mine. This DOES sound like something the adventurous young Joanie would try, looking for her .001 seconds of fame. As it turned out, she had nothing to worry about.)

But there's a kicker. A kicker to the kicker!

My exploration of China Girls led me to something called the Shirley Card. Let me explain. There were pretty "girls" (young women) posing, perhaps professionally, though likely for a pittance, as a standard for colour tones in still photography back in the '50s and '60s. This is where all the aspiring models went, when they weren't out on the town as escorts. Most of this had to do with getting skin tones right - because, as we all know, if we get THOSE right the rest of the picture is OK. Problem is, all of them were young, gorgeous and - of course - Caucasian. Their hopelessly idealized beauty explains why Joan Baez got so depressed back then. But look at her now, eh? - and most of THEM are probably dead, or all wrinkled up. Or dead.

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"And I'm not gay!": or, begin the innuendo

Ah, those days: the days of  Johnny Larue and William B. and Dr. Tongue and all the other surreal characters taken over by John Candy. For the characters didn't take him over - it was the other way around. He invaded them and became.

Johnny LaRue, the chimney-smoking, booze-swilling, dame-exploiting would-be politician of Melonville was one of my favorites. In this clip he pitches himself as a candidate for City Council, and even that untidy flop of hair is reminiscent of Donald Trump, along with all the ranting bullshit.

But LaRue had a signature phrase he used in every sketch: "And I'm not gay!" I was reminded of this when I opened my email this morning and found a comment from someone about my Alan Gershwin post (which got a good response, believe me, in light of the 13 views I get for some of them). The reader vehemently denied any suggestion that either George or Alan Gershwin was gay. This is typical of the indignant, deeply insulted, even infuriated tone of people who perceive any such suggestion in biographies of famous (and usually it's) men.

Lost and Found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin

No one ever thinks - it doesn't occur to them even for a moment - that their fury reveals the slightest degree of homophobia. But even a suggestion the person in question MIGHT have been gay is automatically seen as vicious slander which has to be vigorously denied and argued into the ground. No, he was NOT "one of those". There is no EVIDENCE he was "one of those". He had hair on his chest, for God's sake! Don't defile his good name like that!

What???

I'm not defiling anything or anyone when I say there were suggestions that Gershwin might have been gay.  Most of his biographers (including Howard Pollack, who wrote a definitive 885-page doorstop) have pondered the fact without coming to any hard conclusions. In Gershwin's rarefied world, being gay or bisexual was not the big and horrifying deal it was in the general populace. Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and many other movers-and-shakers of composerhood were gay, some of them quite openly. It was an arts-saturated environment, and its most celebrated figures seemed to believe they were above convention.

It doesn't matter to me if Gershwin was gay, bisexual or a racehorse (though he was certainly that). But what interests me is the utter fury with which people deny and denounce such "accusations", even if they're stated as mere surmise. I'm apparently attempting to throw mud at an icon, drag him down into the slime.

Hey, wait a minute!

I did a piece on Nietsche not long ago, and the same "accusations" came up in his biographical material, along with that same strident, near-hysterical denial. It's a lie! He had a girl friend in university once and took her to the Philosopher's Ball! The implication is that I'm giving him a black eye just to be spiteful. And, of course, getting my facts wrong. All wrong. This reminds me of that classic Seinfeld episode where, whenever the issue of gayness came up, the mantra was, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Denial of the denial? Let's begin the beguine.

And Cole Porter? Are you kidding? And Noel Coward, let's not forget him. Gay! Gay! Yes, I'm going to ruin their reputations right here and now by saying they loved men (which is obviously a horrific crime - it goes without saying, doesn't it).

Huh??

Come on, people. The suggestion that some great literary or musical figure might have been gay is not automatically slander. In expressing that view, you're revealing a small and very homophobic mind. But your small-mindedness is such that you don't even see it, or at least won't admit it.

"Oh, I knew someone who was gay once and he was a real nice fella." But he's not Gershwin. Or Cole Porter. Or Johnny LaRue.

Imagine these same people were claiming, vehemently and furiously, "he was NOT black!", "he was NOT disabled!', "he did NOT have PTSD!", or any other sensitive categories, and these same people would be horrified. It's OK to be those things now - maybe - supposedly. Or not, but we have to say so, even if we don't believe it. (Though, think about it. A hundred years ago, would it have been acceptable to claim that some important/famous white figure "might have" had black lineage? Think of the outcry, the insistence he was blonde and got a suntan, or something equally ludicrous.)

But why then isn't it OK for Nietsche or Gershwin or any other major figure to be gay or bisexual (bisexual being a category that seems to have been lost in the shuffle, the implication being, for God's sake, make up your mind! Being on the fence like that is oh-so-politically incorrect, even disloyal to the cause.) Sexual orientation still seems to be fraught with confusion. If a man gets married at any time in his life, and (especially) if he fathers a child, he's "not gay". The assumption is, a gay man would not touch his wife with a ten-foot pole. She would remain chaste and pure for 25 years while he pulled out the bodybuilding magazines he kept under his mattress.

People's minds are still in brontosaurus mode. They're stuck, and their thinking is very dusty. Is social change just hurtling along too fast, or what? Is this trapped-in-amber mode of thinking just simple physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Whatever. They piss me off! So Gershwin was gay. Or might have been. Does that take away anything at all from his contribution to music? In some distant universe, not this one, we might even see it as a positive attribute, something that adds to the richness and complexity of that extreme rarity, the blazing miracle of creative genius.

BONUS POST. This is the piece I kept finding during my GershQuest of last year.

gramilano

ballet, opera, photography...

Michael Feinstein’s book on the Gershwins called, sensibly, “The Gershwins and Me” (Simon & Schuster) was published in October. While he was still working in piano bars, Feinstein got to know Ira Gershwin intimately, cataloguing his collection of records, unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in the Gershwin home over a period of six years.

The gay or not gay question has floated about George Gershwin even during the more restrained time when he was a young composer. It is an issue Feinstein tackles in his book. America’s National Public Radio asked him about it:

So many speculated that George Gershwin was gay because he never got married. And somebody once said to Oscar Levant, you know, George is bedding all those women because he’s trying to prove he’s a man. And Oscar Levant said: What a wonderful way to prove it. There have always been rumours circulating about George’s sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it’s important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it’s all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.

Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said.

Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George’s and whose husband Milton Ager was George’s roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay, and Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don’t know anything. But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t talk about it. So it still remains a mystery.

My own theory is that I think that the thing that mattered most to George was his music. I think he could have been confused sexually. I don’t know. I think that he had trouble forming a lasting relationship.

Kitty Carlisle talked about how George asked her to marry him, but she said that she knew that he wasn’t deeply in love with her. But she fit the demographic of what his mother felt would be the right woman for him.

This is an extract of NPR’s long talk with Michael Feinstein.

Photo: left to right, George Gershwin, Michael Feinstein, Ira Gershwin

NOTE: here is the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of innuendo:

(the making of) a ​remark or ​remarks that ​suggest something ​sexual or something ​unpleasant but do not refer to it ​directly: There's always an ​element of ​sexual innuendo in ​our ​conversations.

Here we touch on the interesting issue of "unpleasant" being juxtaposed with "sexual", which opens up a whole new can of worms: that there's something unsavory and reputation-destroying about sex itself, unless it takes place in the heterosexual/marital bed, infrequently, in the missionary position. And only when you want a kid.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Is it plagiarism if you steal from yourself?

I could (and do) watch old cartoons all day long. Now that I have YouTube, I am in fact good for nothing else. But it's an interesting thing to look at the really old ones, like these two. They represent the first entries in a very long series by Warner Bros:  Merrie Melodies. (Perhaps you've heard of them.)

The first one, Lady Play Your Mandolin, features a drunk horse, and the second, You Don't Know What You're Doin' (which some YouTube wag called Justin Trudeau's theme song) a drunk dog who must have had a genetic mixup with the horse or something. Or else the animators just got lazy.

I mean! This is Cartoon One and Cartoon Two of the immortal, incomparable Merrie Melodies series, and they're repeating themselves in the second cartoon. The shot of the character screaming at the camera is pretty much identical, except the horse is white and the dog is black. Even the dragon-ish looking thing is pretty similar.

They say Disney stole from everyone - I wrote about that once, and I may steal from myself and re-run it because I don't remember much about it. But on the second cartoon? I think they should've quit while they were ahead.

Actually, it was this documentary I was thinking about. (I can't believe I found it again! I had no idea of the title or when it came out or anything, but if you keep Googling, anything is possible.) It was shown once on CBC, years and years ago, and never again - in French, with English subtitles. There's no English in this version at all, so I didn't get very far. But hey, if you're French. . . It's an eye-opening look at just how much Uncle Wally got away with.

The pitfall trap

Have I been feeding this beast (my blog) regularly? Depends on what you mean by regularly. I usually consider that to mean "every day", but to my shock, I now see I haven't posted anything much all week. And I think I know why that is.

Something will sneak up on you sometimes, something that snags some issue from the past. Ten months ago I had a serious falling-out with someone whom I considered to be a reasonably close friend for a very long time (he was maybe 6.5 on my friend-o-meter). Then, this past Easter Sunday, and without any warning whatsoever, he died. I only found out about his death because I was part of a mass mailout: somehow I had been left in his email address book, maybe because he didn't bother to remove it.

What does it mean when someone dies, and there was unfinished business? Maybe it WAS finished, and that was the whole trouble. I ask myself sometimes: Glass Character, why is it that you seem to be cutting certain people out of your life? And I always come to the same conclusion. They're people who, for one reason or another, appear to have seriously lost their way. In particular, this applies to their personal integrity.

It happens. It happens that people begin to live in a way that is not only deceptive, but deceitful. It happens that a person who has been refreshingly tart turns irreversibly sour. It happens that people begin to use you as a dumping ground for resentments that they're too afraid to meet at the source. Or maybe it's just more convenient that way.

So what happened? It's not as if I have lost all my friends, but I will no longer give quarter to anyone who sucks my energy away, or demeans me in any way, or hauls their support out from under me and still expects ME to support THEM (i. e. act as a bottomless receptacle for their toxic waste).

This most recent shock - and shock it was - has had yet more shocks attached to it. When he suddenly died of a massive stroke, my former friend left his longtime partner completely in the lurch financially - not merely penniless, but in an abyss of debt that he cannot possibly cope with. This is so extreme that it's quite possible he will end up homeless and/or have to declare bankruptcy, not exactly a desirable legacy from a 25-year relationship. The community has set up a GoFundMe account for him which so far has only taken in a few hundred dollars.

How could he not have known they were in such dire straits? I don't believe he did. I think he just trusted his partner to take care of him. In some ways, he was like an old-fashioned wife who has no idea of the state of her husband's finances until he dies. Then comes the nasty surprise, and the crushing burden that accompanies it. 

An important aspect of love is financial responsibility, though many people would be incredulous to hear me say that. Or even appalled: dirty, crass money, attached to something as sublime and ideal as Love? Well, think of it. One must live - isn't that so? To live, one needs financial support of some kind. Unless you think you're going to live forever, you must make provisions for your partner, especially if that partner is more than twenty years younger than you (meaning he may have another 30 to 40 years left to live, with no significant means of support except a disability pension). If you don't make these provisions, if you don't think about it or bother about it, it's not only arrogant but thoughtless, ignorant, and - I think - cruel.

Ten months ago when we had our falling-out, I was reacting to something that I now see reflected this arrogance and thoughtlessness, well-concealed by his "sweet" public persona. I felt the ground being cut away under my feet, destroying what I thought was his support. But then, being truly supportive was something he did not seem to know how to do, or even have any interest in.

Suddenly I knew nothing, I shouldn't even be taking one step towards the issue at hand because I had not had the years and years of training he had, and blah blah blah blah blah. He had to be right, always, and his righteousness had to be acknowledged. That's the way it went, those were the rules, and I wouldn't play by them.

My reaction and throwing the friendship into reverse is only a particle, not even that, compared to what his partner is going through now. He has less than nothing: he's in the red, the minuses, though to what extent I don't know. How could this happen? How could two ageing men living quietly in one of Canada's favorite retirement communities get themselves into such a godawful mess? I have a bad feeling about it, and it seems to confirm some suspicions that there was a lot going on in this case that is deeply disturbing to contemplate.

But I can't write about it now.

When people die, they are often elevated to sainthood. I'm sure this will happen tomorrow afternoon at his memorial service. It's just something we do, a social custom, or else a superstition (don't ever speak ill of the dead or they will rise up out of their grave and fly around your house making pictures jump off the wall and going "Wooooooo!"). Suddenly we can't say enough about them, though it's not really about the person who died at all. It's to make US feel better about harbouring all those resentments and negative feelings, to pretend they don't exist at all. 

But sometimes they exist for a reason.

It's Friday now, and it hasn't been a good week for blogging because I just feel kind of flat. It depresses me when someone I respected turns out to be this irresponsible. Or should I say: this big an asshole. For that's what he was, or he wouldn't have held his partner hostage to a crushing, stigmatizing financial burden he can never repay.  At its worst, debt is dishonest. Even at its best, it's like living on top of a gigantic hole with a fragile floor over it (and there is a name for that, by the way: it's called a "pitfall trap") that will barely hold your weight. Sooner or later disaster strikes, and it all caves in. Then the person you supposedly love the most must fall into the abyss.

To quote Bob Dylan, whom I've been thinking a lot about lately: "But oh, what kind of love is this/Which goes from bad to worse?"

We carried you in our arms

On Independence Day

And now you’d throw us all aside

And put us on our way

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun

Would treat a father so

To wait upon him hand and foot

And always tell him, “No?”

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

We pointed out the way to go

And scratched your name in sand

Though you just thought it was nothing more

Than a place for you to stand

Now, I want you to know that while we watched

You discover there was no one true

Most ev’rybody really thought

It was a childish thing to do

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

It was all very painless

When you went out to receive

All that false instruction

Which we never could believe

And now the heart is filled with gold

As if it was a purse

But, oh, what kind of love is this

Which goes from bad to worse?

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

TAG-ON: Obsessed with Dylan again, and re-reading one of the bios, I had a bizarre experience last night. Didn't sleep worth a shit, didn't even think I WAS asleep all night, because I kept seeing or experiencing a long series of short films about Dylan. These were all from different times in his life/career and not in any order. They looked sort of like they were on panels or things like piano keys and I went from one to the other, and I didn't want to see them but couldn't stop. Sometimes I felt like I was IN the movies, but probably not. I wanted to get out of them and felt like the movies went on all night and I got no sleep at all. I was full of anxiety because I don't do well when I don't sleep, and serious sleep deprivation has been known to make me go completely crazy. But when I woke up, I said, Jesus, Margaret, don't you know those were dreams, and if they were dreams you must've been asleep?

TAG-ON TWO: While Dylaning around on the internet last night, I found a crazy and incredible speech he made at the Grammys in 2015, after receiving some sort of award. It just went on and on. Normally if he gets an award, he nods tersely, takes the award and goes home. In this case, God knows how long the speech took, but this is the part I want to share with you because it moved me so, and somehow ties in with the video I used to illustrate this post.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.

People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby little waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Love. And she's a free, independent spirit. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman with devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Olive's beauty ritual

Hippo meltdown

 

Why was I always so terrified as a kid?

This is why. THIS would come on TV, probably when I was about 3 or 4 years old. Though I now think it's quite beautiful and use it as one of my signature gifs at the end of posts (and that's what those are, folks, in case you're thinking they're totally irrelevant), it petrified me then, because I had no idea what a logo was - or a network - or, frankly, even a peacock. I was a toddler, for God's sake, I was barely out of diapers, and permanently confused.

It's a strange sort of thing because it totally runs counter to the ugly, primitive-looking logos you saw for the other networks (and I have a gif for that!). It has a severe, harlequin-looking aspect to it and is quite complex, and when it goes from stark black-and-white to colour, you just don't expect it. It jumps off the screen, as they say. Someone designed this back in 1957, someone with real talent, and NBC then proceeded to dumb it down for the next 60 years. It's still used, only the peacock has something like four colours. Oversimplification. 

Like 95% of households in the '50s, we had a black-and-white TV, so what was the point of a colour logo anyway? And yet, and yet. The slightly disturbing quality of this early logo is what makes it so effective and such a piece of art. But it still creeps me out big-time. 

And the music, my God, the MUSIC on this thing - it still makes my guts cringe. It just scared me then. It wasn't friendly. At all. It didn't make you want to watch the show. It made you want to run screaming out of the room. It has a big gong and evil upward glissandi on dark woodwinds and a sort of dissonant non-melody that doesn't belong on TV at all.  I had not heard the music since probably 1957 or 1958, I had forgotten it even existed and had pushed the whole nightmare into the back of my head, when I stumbled on it on YouTube, and my God! I cannot even tell you how strange I felt. I was rocketed back in time, and let me tell you, it was not a pleasant feeling to suddenly find myself getting smaller and smaller and more and more frightened. 

Most of the "scary" logos on YouTube (and there are many compilations, all of which I watch obsessively late at night) really aren't that scary. If you turn the sound off, they aren't scary at all. The music is the main element of terror here - it's all hair-raisingly aggressive, with loud percussion like somebody hammering on railroad spikes, whining synthesizers, etc. In many cases it's more like noise. Why did they do this? You can look away - easily - but you can't keep sound out, even if you stick your fingers in your ears. This is why ads in general are so repetitive and shrill. Also why I find gif-making so comforting, because there is no sound involved at all.

BTW, this is the peacock logo only a few years later. It has been made a damn sight friendlier, with blurring Venn diagrams of colour rather than that odd black-and-white abstract net, and completely different music, with bubbly arpeggios on a clarinet and cheerful trills on a flute. All the threat has been removed. Gone is that King of Siam severe, exotic quality. But the final splash of pigment, the startling, paint-brushy effect at the end is still there. 

But look you here! as the ghost said to Scrooge. OK, it's fatter, has a shorter neck, but doesn't this partridge just a LITTLE bit resemble the NBC peacock without its tail feathers? It's facing the same way, it has a similar doohickey on top of its head, and - well. It could be I'm reaching here. But what network WAS that show on anyway? (frantic interval while she goes on Wikipedia - watch this in the interim!):

(gasp, gasp) I'm back. No, no, I was wrong, The Partridge Family ran on ABC, not NBC, and yet, here it is, this weird resemblance between the peacock and the partridge. Maybe it was one of those unconscious things (I don't mean as in knocked out), i. e. the artist or animator borrowing the image, or even sending it up: a fat, tailless NBC peacock equals a partridge! Any show that gave the world both David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce has a lot to answer for. So I'd say stealing a logo is the least of its crimes.

Badda-boom: Here is the logo NBC uses now. Compare and contast. At least the music doesn't scare me.

When the truth comes home

All week my thoughts have been straying. The weather has been glorious, and yesterday we took a sort of tour of the kwanzan cherry trees, which are now in their full glory all over Vancouver and area. This year they are particularly magnificent, heavy clusters of blossoms that are a rich pink, almost fuschia. Like the choir of birdsong we recently heard at Burnaby Lake, they lulled, calmed, and (wince, I hate the word) even healed my spirit.

It’s difficult when someone dies and there is unfinished business, or even bad feeling. It’s difficult when you realize that a supposedly-kind, supposedly-generous, much-loved figure was quite abusive to you over the years: that he said and did demeaning, even contemptuous things in the guise of “helping” you. That he undermined your most cherished and passionate beliefs so you wouldn't make a fool of yourself by sharing them with the world.

In this case, our mutual interest was spiritualism. He considered me a dabbler, himself a master. One of the last things I said in my final email to him was “no one is more hidebound than a hidebound medium”. He quickly fired back a response, which I deleted unread, because I knew what was in it already. I was so sick of this, so sick of the pattern, needed to break it once and for all.

It was disturbing to me to see how often I had ended up this way. Even “best friends” somehow seem to arrange it so that I have to run back and forth and hit the ball from both sides of the net. It's just so much work to keep the whole thing going. The best I can anticipate is indifference; the worst, abuse.

Not to say I’ve never had real friendships, and some of them have been incredibly rich. But they’re often problematic. They tend to be like rivers: long ago in high school geography, I learned that rivers have a life, and though most of them start off vigorous and splashy and full of liquid energy, some end as a mere meandering swamp. Who knows why or how this happens. But is it beyond the realm of possibility that the toxic swamp I grew up in had serious, though unconscious repercussions, that it bent and swayed my choices in friendship in ways that often snapped back cruelly in my face?

I think my former friend probably served a need, and sometimes he listened when we talked – or so I thought. I had known him about 15 years when he moved away and started his own church, which he retired from (or left, disaffected? Why do I think so?) early this year. Starting your own church is always a bad idea, or at least it always ends badly. The faithful inevitably turn against you  – you lose control, they no longer follow your dictums. All this newfangled stuff comes in, and all of a sudden people want to think for themselves. You have a stranglehold, and eventually it just snaps in your hands and lets go. I won’t get into the bloody mess, the civil war that happened in my own former church when it all melted down, nor the stress it caused, which (incredibly!) I denied was a major factor in my own complete meltdown, the near-death experience of 2005.

But that's another story.

When I first began to share some of my Gershwin stuff with him last year, the vivid impressions I was receiving through his music and his voice, at first he was extremely enthusiastic, almost in awe. He claimed I might even have “undeveloped or underdeveloped psychic ability”. Prior to this, we had gotten together for coffee for over fifteen years and done nothing BUT talk about our psychic experiences. I shared my own impressions and beliefs very freely, and he seemed to be listening. I assumed he acknowledged that I had some degree of ability, else why would we be doing this?

But then, out of the blue, it all changed, and as with most psychological abuse, I don't know why. It took the form of, “Of course, in this case I am speaking as a psychotherapist, which leads me to believe that having these particular fantasies might serve a psychological need in you due to your former psychiatric” (blah blah blah blah blah).

It was not the first time he had used the word “fantasy” to write off my experiences (or pulled the "psychotherapist" card, which is brutal), though his own were always authentic. How did he know? Because everyone respected his gifts, that’s why – this was some sort of proof, the fact he had so many followers. It validated him. But why did everyone respect his gifts? Because his experiences were always authentic.

There’s a word for this: tautology, a snake that swallows its own tail. I was amazed such an educated man could be so completely blind to it.

I don’t know about everything that happened in this particular situation, because it is still murky and muddled. I know he is dead, and his death came as a shock to me. I know that ten months ago I was spitting nails, I was so angry at the stuff he said and did, the way I was dismissed. (Is that the true meaning of "dissed"?). And now this, a completely unexpected development. In fact, bizarrely, I just got an email from him - no kidding, from HIS email account - announcing the particulars of his own memorial service. For a lifelong spiritualist, this is irony taken to the level of the sublime. (The more mundane explanation is that his partner, who has the same first name, is still using his email account.)

I have long believed that people die the way they live. It's a sort of variation of "live by the sword, die by the sword" that proves itself over and over again. They saw off the branch they are perched on, the one they're afraid to climb down from. A lot of workaholic businessmen drop dead on retirement, having lost their sense of purpose. My former friend “retired” from his church/spiritualist centre, where he was resident medium for eight years, but I have a funny back-of-the-neck feeling he left, which is a different thing. The tepid response on Facebook to his retirement notice (just a handful of likes and comments, after eight years?) and even more tepid response to the death announcement tells me something. I don't know why, some psychic flash perhaps (heh-heh), but I can see an "open letter to the members of the Blah Blah Church" stating his reasons for leaving. That's just the kind of thing he'd do. Pedantic, lawyer-ish, pounding away at the same point until you want to scream.

(I know all this is far too personal to write about, but I do get tired, sometimes, of posting Betty Boop gifs, much as I enjoy making them. This blog has never been quite sure what it is about, and it will never have a large readership, but one of the purposes of it is to help me wrestle with/hack my way through the jungle of serious dilemmas. Writing is a way, as far as I am concerned, like the Way of Zen that Alan Watts used to write about. It’s my way of surviving in the world and at least trying to make sense of things.)

This is a rapid turnover thing, however. Already, today I am in a different place, though not through any conscious decision. With my family of origin, eventually I came around to pitying them, pity being the back door of compassion. I didn’t leap into the arms of forgiveness, in spite of the current cultural imperative to forgive people who’ve raped you, murdered your children, etc. etc., because if you don’t you’ll walk around seething with hatred for the rest of your life and it will destroy you. There are no other alternatives, of course: forgive the person completely, or consume yourself in the acid of hatred, which of course you “shouldn’t be feeling” anyway. Nice people just don't.

I’m not for hate, and I never have been, but I was surprised when compassion came in the back gate. It just sort of did, it sat there on the stump in the yard. I didn’t exactly welcome it in for tea, but I was surprised and felt something of a sense of awe. I now felt sorry for all of them, especially the ones who are dead, who I can never talk to again. The more egregious the wrong, the deeper the pity. What else could I feel? Imagine BEING that way. Evil consumes itself, and you don't even have to concern yourself with revenge. The most you will ever have to do is hold up a mirror.

I don’t know if evil was going on here, but I know there was contempt and loftiness and pulling the card of superiority (“you must be very, very careful, Margaret, because I have years and years of intensive training, whereas you. . . “). I know that loftiness and the swirling cape of expertise hides a hole. It only has a few branches and some scrub over it, so I know how easy it is to fall in.

Something about the manner of his dying continues to bother me. It's the same way Lloyd Dykk died, and if ever a man carried a load of poison karma, it was that one. His colleagues stood around his deathbed trying to figure out if they could remember any details of his life. Incredibly, he only worked in one place for his entire career, the backwater arts pages of the Vancouver Sun, and had never spread himself out, probably because his spirit was so small. No one knew if he had kin anywhere - there were only vague, conflicting ideas. So what is a stroke? Something backs up on you, I think. Something in your head disastrously explodes. If you're immensely old, it makes some sense - the vessels age, they wear out - but at 67? At 67, it's a form of autointoxication. 

My former friend the medium seems to have been  struck down in the same disastrous way, though he was three years older. I DO feel sorry for the people who miss him, as they now must cope with mixed feelings over how he must have treated them. His former disciples may be of the “you must forgive" school of thought, not wanting to acknowledge that life isn’t a dichotomy. In fact, sometimes it’s so bloody complicated, with so many confusing and conflicting options, that it’s hard to know how to feel at all. But one thing I do know: it is almost never “either/or”.

I also know that “should” has no place here. Other people’s agendas have no place. “You should forgive”, or, worse, “You MUST forgive” only reveals their profound discomfort with your anger, pain and grief. They want you to freeze that anger, hide it, even swallow it, though they would be indignant if it were pointed out to them that all of this is for their own sake, to save THEM grief and discomfort. In truth, they just don’t want to know.

This whole situation has affected me far more than I thought it would. I do feel sorry for those involved, because I don’t know how many people this man had in his life, how much kin, if any. He did seem to lose his way professionally, and I do think he badly needed the pompous professorial mode (two Masters degrees and a PhD, whew!). And the way he died was simply awful, a massive "cerebrovascular accident" on Easter Sunday which took a couple of days to kill him. His partner posted a heartbreaking account on his blog, and it made for very difficult reading. It also gave me a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, because to be perfectly honest, he was the one and only person I ever formally put a curse on.

Coincidence is a strange thing.

So what now? I don’t know, I guess now it’s none of my business. There is a memorial service in a week - interestingly enough, NOT at his former church - but it’s inappropriate for me to go, and I find I just don’t want to. We either go on after we die, or not. Maybe the energy dwells only in our collective memory, but that’s powerful enough. I was shocked to learn that the church he walked away from had to pass the hat to scrounge up enough money to bury him. Here I’m not revealing any secrets, just repeating something which is stated on the church's Facebook page. There was a plea for donations to help his surviving partner cope with the massive debt he left behind.

This is sad, but you reap what you sow. Debt is a hole you fall into eventually –  it means you’re living on someone else’s money and should be making restitution, but you’re not, for whatever reason. And it usually comes about not through chance or a sudden event, but by a whole series of very unwise decisions.

And to leave massive debt on the shoulders of your surviving partner, particularly a person who appears to be emotionally fragile, is nothing short of irresponsible.

So all this has made for a very strange, sometimes melancholy week. I keep thinking of Celie in The Color Purple: one of the most powerful scenes in moviehood, where she points at her tormenter and flings a curse which is full of righteousness. CAN a curse be righteous? I think it can, because in essence it merely turns the dark beam around at the person emanating it. In an awful lot of cases, it turns out to be too much for them to stand.

(This is a rerun of the "Gershwin time travel" piece that started the whole thing. Or perhaps it started much longer ago than that. My big question is: when does it end?)

Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time). 

After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around. 

But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously, in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition. GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page. 

Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot. 

Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?

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