Oscar, Igor and Little Tich: degrees of separation

 

For several decades now I've been chasing down a Stravinsky album called Favorite Short Pieces. It had some gorgeously eccentric stuff on it and in my teens, when I was in the midst of a Stravinsky fit, I listened to it all the time.

All my internet sleuthing got me nowhere - if it existed at all, it was only on vinyl. But then today - a brainwave - if I got a playlist of the tracks on said album, couldn't I try to find the individual pieces on YouTube?

And by the holy - I did - I reassembled all seven works, not in any order or by any particular artists, but who cares, I have it all now. So how on earth does this connect to the video?  Ah.

My first awareness of Little Tich (who sounds like he has some sort of skin condition) came from reading the liner notes of Favorite Short Pieces. Stravinsky wrote them himself, in his usual dry, droll manner. He claimed that the second movement of his Four Etudes for String Quartet was inspired by "the manifold eccentric appearances of the celebrated English clown, Little Tich." 

And that was all that happened, until I began to read about Oscar Levant.

Stravinsky, Oscar Levant. Little Tich. . . hold on, these dissonances do relate. There was a great tidbit in the fascinating but painful-to-read bio of Levant, A Talent for Genius. Levant liked to hobnob with (some might say suck up to) musical geniuses such as Gershwin and Copland and Horowitz, hoping something would rub off. His encounter with Stravinsky was memorable. This is a long quote, but worth transcribing:

"One day Igor Stravinsky visited the Warner Bros. lot and dropped in on Oscar Levant during a break in the long workday. Wearing black tie and tails and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, Levant received the composer of Le Sacre du printemps in a quiet corner of the movie set. Levant greatly enjoyed the spirited, fiercely opinionated Russian. Between takes he had been reading a life of Ferruco Busoni, the Italian pianist and composer, so he knew that Stravinsky had met Busoni only once, despite the fact that they had lived just five miles from each other in Switzerland during the First World War.

"Why did you visit Busoni only once?" Levant asked Stravinsky.

"Because," replied the composer, bristling slightly, "he represented the immediate past and I hate the immediate past."

It's the kind of remark you like, but you can't quite determine why.

Anyway, about Little Tich. . . I was chopping my way through Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac - a fascinating and nearly unreadable book, the last fourth of which takes place in a series of mental institutions - and I came across the name again - I couldn't believe it! It was Little Tich!Not only hadn't I heard the Favorite Short Pieces album for over 40 years, I hadn't heard one mention of this creature and had come to think of him as chimeric, maybe a product of Stravinsky's fevered imagination.

I wish I could find the exact quote, but you're going to have to trust me that he did talk about Little Tich. I wish I remember exactly what he said: memoirs don't have an index and I've already chopped through enough of it.  I don't want to fall into the Levant memoirs again: the man had talent to burn, and he burned it. Not only that, the name-dropping is deafening. He seemed to have an almost pathological need to align himself with the "greats", even if it was only the likes of Frank Fay or Shirley Booth (or the nightmarish Al Jolson).

I just have to tell one more story - I shouldn't, and I know I already told it many posts ago. Levant was playing the sidekick in a movie calledHumoresque, starring the ferocious man-eating diva Joan Crawford. He noticed she always brought knitting on the set with her and worked at it furiously between takes. She regaled the cast with amusing stories about her obsession: oh, I knit at dinner parties, I knit on airplanes, I knit in restaurants, I. . . 

"Do you knit while you fuck?" Levant asked.

The two never became friends.

CODA. When I got up this morning, I thought: damn! I have to find that reference to Little Tich. You know, the one in Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac. I KNOW it's in there somewhere (probably near the beginning of the book). So I went page by page, and on page 31: JACKPOT!

This is one of his charming, hair-raising mental hospital anecdotes, particularly heartbreaking because he demonstrates the same eccentric, devastating wit that made him so famous:

I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that`s regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me.

There was one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name was Nan.

I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. One day she hauled off with all her might and slapped Nan`s face. Nan didn`t move; she didn`t hit back - some of them do.

Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are.

Oh yes.

CODA TO THE CODA. Poking around, you always find out more. I loved this little Stravinsky anecdote:

Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. This was very nearly a total disaster. I wrote this original post NINE YEARS AGO, then wanted to update and re-post it with a few new bits of information. In so doing, I deleted the entire post! It's only by some tricky miracle (I had already repeated the post in 2015) that I was able to retrieve this much of it. 

But there's more to it than that.  Little Tich, as it turns out, was not very lucky for me after all. A while ago I became fascinated with automata (automatons, I mean), elaborate clockwork figures representing people, animals, and whatever else, which were wildly popular in the Victorian era. Most of them are fascinatingly hideous, a classic example of the uncanny valley effect. I found tons of them on YouTube and began to post tiny excerpts, gifs I had taken from the originals, on my own channel.

I found one particularly macabre automaton of Little Tich, published a ten-second excerpt from it, and got a COPYRIGHT STRIKE from some outfit in France I've never heard of. It's hard to believe I'd be this seriously dinged for a few seconds of video, so it's possible it's the NAME of Little Tich which is copyrighted. Stranger things have happened.  Thus my channel is in danger of being terminated forever, with no chance of getting those several thousand videos back. Since I am now coming up to 10,000 subscribers after nine years of effort, I don't  want that to happen.

The only good part of it is that I found Favorite Short Pieces, whole and complete and in pristine sound condition, on YouTube. It's as great as I remembered, especially the miniature which is meant to represent Little Tich.

Which is right here, so you can listen to it NOW, this minute, and not have to wait nine years for it!

.

Plastic pups, inchworms, and marvelous mustangs: ride 'em, kids!

This plastic pup isn't up to the standards of OTHER plastic pups of the day: Gaylord (a basset hound who SLOWLY walked up the stairs) or Digger the Dog, built on a similar model but faster-moving. The sight of all these spastic plastic fake canines juddering along the street like so many rickety old card tables is quite bizarre. You can give it commands, which is pretty strange, given that you are commanding pieces of molded plastic jointed together. 

OK then, I wasn't going to do this, but here it is, GAYLORD, the more realistic fake dog who actually DID things. Not many things, but things. I wanted one of these, of course, but never got one. All I remember getting was a Dino the Dinosaur from The Flintstones, and I am not even sure it worked.

Digger the Dog was significant because it had a Mom who asked where her tot was going, and he answers in a nasal Queens voice, "A walk with Diggah, Mahm!" Sounds like a young Christopher Walken, who actually did do commercials back in the day. But that was way longer ago. I wonder sometimes what ever happened to these kids - I guess, they grew up and maybe even died. What a thought.

And since we're dealing with plastic toys, we can't leave out Inchworm, upon which you bounced up and down and hardly got anywhere. The theme song is pretty strange, because it seems to be, "Inchworm, GOD KNOWS/I take you with me everywhere I go/Inchworm, I'm telling you true/Inchworm, I love you!" God knows??

OK then, one thing is leading to another, and this one - I KNEW I wanted this one, because I would get on just about anything and pretend it was a horse. Marvel the Mustang has a very strange jingle: "No winding, no batteries", followed by a little girl saying, "What horse do?" Kind of a grammatical nightmare, but I guess it meant "What horse has batteries, after all?" Since I never had a Marvel, I 'd ride strange things. Once it was a stair railing outside a fundamentalist church, which drew a few stairs, oops, I mean stares. Once it was a sawhorse. And, I swear, I took the legs off a metal TV tray, climbed inside it, and pretended THAT was a horse.

But there's one more, Blaze the Galloping Horse, a knockoff of Marvel the Mustang. I wanted this one and never got it either. It was back to the TV trays.

CAT SLAPS SEAL

And the seal rolls over, just like that. . . 

Bone Music: "I can see clearly now"

In Soviet Russia, Forbidden Music Was Smuggled on X-Ray Records 

Music may transcend borders but, in an oppressive place like Soviet Russia, it was easier said than done. First, music had to be smuggled across borders and dispersed without its carriers getting caught. The morbid artifacts of this underground enterprise are now on display at an exhibition in Moscow called Bone Music.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a subculture of young music lovers devised a way to sneak forbidden music around Soviet Russia by writing it directly onto old X-ray films. Adorned with images of skulls and bones, the discs were given names like "ribs" and roentgenizdat, and held within their grooves the sounds of Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong. 

During Stalin's rule and for decades following World War II, the Communist Party clamped down on outside influences, particularly those associated with principles celebrated in the West. Music was a top concern for the regime, so entire genres and artists were banned. Blatnaya pesnya, or "criminal songs," depicted the dark side of Soviet life, and had no place in the Party's system. White Russian émigré's like Pyotr Leshchenko were seen as traitors for not returning to the motherland and their songs were subsequently outlawed. And then there were Western sounds—tantamount to propaganda. 

"Jazz and rock 'n' roll were obviously censored because they were Western," British musician Stephen Coates tells Creators. "But a big chunk, probably most of it, was Russian music that was forbidden." Coates recently helped revitalized roentgenizdat after discovering a circular X-ray at a flea market in Saint Petersburg. The musician asked his Russian friends what it was, but they had no clue what he'd found. The seller even acted shady when Coates inquired more about it, but he purchased it anyway, brought the disc back to London, and eventually discovered it played Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." "I was intrigued," he says, "and did more digging."

Coates found some information about the discs online and was eventually introduced to a Russian academic, who turned him onto The Golden Dog Gang, two young music lovers named Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin who secretly used a record duplication machine to etch songs by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and The Beatles onto discarded X-rays.

X-rays proved to be an suitable medium. They were cheaply and easily (albeit illegally) acquired from local hospitals that were required to throw out the flammable sheets. They took the groove relatively well, though nowhere near as well as vinyl—some X-ray discs apparently sound like listening to music through sand—and they were easy to fold into a shirt sleeve of pocket for a quick transaction. The X-rays were also stunningly beautiful. 

The Golden Dog Gang were caught selling the discs in 1950 and were thrown into the gulag until Stalin's death in 1953. When they got out, they got back to work, this time making more elaborately designed discs, until they were caught again and sent back to the prison for a few more years. Coates has since connected with some of the bootleggers, producing a documentary and book on the topic.   (From Vice.com)

💖VICTORIAN VALENTINES: "My Heart's Gift"💖

💗🧡💛HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!💚💙💜

THE BIRDS: they're stinking up Harry and Meghan's mansion!

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's £11m Montecito mansion is engulfed by foul smell that 'is like offal rotting in the sun' caused by bird refuge nearby

Harry and Meghan's £11million mansion is apparently engulfed by a foul smell leaving neighbours 'disgusted'

The duke and duchess' headache said to have been caused by the nearby Andrée Clark Bird Refugee

Foul smell is said to have hit Montecito, also home to Oprah Winfrey, Orlando Bloom and Ellen DeGeneres

Harry and Meghan have have to contend with odour issues in the past, including a nearby cannabis base

By JACK WRIGHT FOR MAILONLINE

Harry and Meghan’s £11million California mansion is apparently engulfed by a foul smell leaving neighbours ‘disgusted’, it has emerged.

The duke and duchess’ headache is said to have been caused by the nearby Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, a 42-acre saltwater marsh. The area is one of the largest wildlife refuges in Santa Barbara and the water can become ‘stagnant’ leading to an odour.

The foul stink is said to have hit the area in Montecito, which is also home to Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry.

A local resident told the Mirror: ‘It smells like offal that has been rotting in the sun. It makes my stomach churn. I’ve seen lots of homeowners closing their windows when it wafts over.’

Local officials say the stench could last as long as the autumn, when improvements are in the pipeline. Cameron Benson, clean water manager for the City of Santa Barbara, said: ‘Water can become stagnant there. The odour issues are sporadic and sometimes they are worse in some conditions.’

Harry and Meghan have had to contend with odour issues in the past. Last year, it was reported the royals were living near a legal cannabis factory base in Santa Barbara.

The couple’s mansion is just up the road from the 20 large greenhouses full of the plants — leaving the luxury suburb reeking. Neighbours made a string of complaints, sparking the company to install new ‘odour control systems’.

Gregory Gandrud told the Sunday Mirror: ‘The stink was getting stronger and heading their way. I was driving along the freeway and was hit hard by the smell. It doesn’t make you high but it’s not what you want driving at 70mph.

‘I had to pull over. It made me completely lose my train of thought. Lots of people here are suffering.’

Harry and Meghan’s home — which has a sauna, library, and cinema — is surrounded by celebrity neighbours, most prominently Oprah, to whom they made a series of bombshell allegations about the Royal Family last year.

Notably, the couple’s mansion is almost home to the bench Meghan immortalised in her 2021 children’s book The Bench.

It comes as the couple have yet to publicly congratulate the Queen as she celebrates her Platinum Jubilee this year.

The couple have remained silent, despite news that Camilla will become Queen Consort when Charles is eventually made King.

They recently confirmed that ‘sources’ will no longer speak for them, and they will only comment when they wish to through their official press team. Despite the lack of public response, Harry is understood to have been enjoying video calls with his father over the past few weeks. He is expected to return to the UK for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

However, it is thought he will not be accompanied by Meghan, Archie or Lilibet amid a row over the family’s security arrangements.

RETROFUTURISM: one of my favorite things

I love how people in the past predicted the future. The future that is now OUR past. For some reason, this almost always involved cooking and kitchens where everything was automatic and worked by itself. It never happened. And who would keep cleaning and refilling those food dispensers? (Staff?) And how come we never hear about "infra-red" cooking any more? Was it just too Jetsons to be practical?

Giant Tortoises at Full Speed

"EVERYBODY!!!!"

Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee: send her victorious!

Since I write so many negative things about "those other royals" (or EX-royals, though they continue to cling to the tatters of their former status), I felt it was only right to acknowledge a feat never equalled in human history - a 70-year-long, unbroken reign by a world power. Queen Elizabeth II was such a part of my childhood and the fabric of Canadian identity that she was embedded in our perception of reality. We sang God Save the Queen at school recitals. A portrait of Her Majesty was hung on every classroom wall. Even the name of my elementary school was Queen Elizabeth II.

Whatever you think of the monarchy, the flaky Charles, the severe Camilla, the idiotic Andrew and the (I hate the word, but here goes) lunatic Harry, Elizabeth II has always gone about her life's work with dignity and dedication, and somehow kept her head above the squalid mess her beloved family has inflicted on her. I am proud of her, I truly am, and maybe never felt it fully until this moment.

Having endured a global pandemic, endless undeserved scandals, and losing her dear husband, all in the space of the past couple of years, she is still a rock, still somehow staying on the path and serving until the end. Today marks the date she first took the throne, an incredible 70 years ago, and yesterday she formally acknowledged Camilla, once the reviled "other woman" whom everyone thought broke up Charles and Diana's immortal romance, as the Queen Consort when Charles becomes King. 

A gracious Queen, indeed. 

Dear Prince Harry (a message from The Universe)

 

You're better OUT, Harry. NOW.

The world according to Prince Harry! The Duke of Sussex's tips for achieving 'mental fitness'

 

The world according to Prince Harry! The Duke of Sussex's tips for achieving 'mental fitness' (from the Daily Mail)

AIM FOR THE PINNACLE OF MENTAL FITNESS: 'Mental fitness is the pinnacle, it's what you're aiming for. The road towards that can be really bumpy... it's called inner "work" for a reason.'  

INNER WORK: 'With everything else around you, the only way you can combat [burnout] and build resilience for the outside world and your entire environment is the inner work... Outer work becomes so much easier when you get to grips with the inner work... If everybody [had time] to do [inner work], the shift in global consciousness and awareness would be enormous, it would be vast.'

DAILY MEDITATION: 'I know that I need to meditate every day... Put it [into your daily routine] like brushing your teeth every morning... You need to put it into your day diary as a habit otherwise it's the first thing that drops away from your busy day.' 

DAILY ME TIME: 'I have now put in about half an hour, 45 minutes in the morning when one kid has gone to school and the other is having a nap, there's a break in our program. It's like, right, it's either for a workout, take the dog for a walk, get out in nature, maybe meditate. I would hope that everybody would be able to do that.'

LISTEN TO LESSONS FROM THE UNIVERSE: 'Life is about learning and if you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, and even your 50s and you think you've got it sorted then bad stuff is going to happen. But when bad thing happen I think, there's a lesson here, I'm being schooled by the universe, there is something for me to learn.'

TURN NEGATIVES INTO POSITIVES: 'Every single bad thing - or the things you perceive to be bad - that happen actually can be good.' 

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH MENTAL COACHES: 'You need to have someone there who is not only coaching you through life but challenging your perspective. That's what I ask [my mental coach] for on a weekly basis... Professional help, friends, family, anyone can help you in that coaching process [and give you] the ability to be able to find somebody else to throw ideas off or feelings or thoughts.'

WIPE YOUR MENTAL WINDSCREEN: 'Have different points of views in your life and friends who will not worry about pushing back on things you say or feel to be able to encourage you to be able to see it more clearly. I view that as trying to surround myself with people who will happily wash [my mental] windscreen and clear those filters... There is an endless filter system of what you think is happening.'

CREATE A MENTAL TOOL BOX: 'I know how my nervous system is going to react to certain situations that are out of my control, [so I think], what have I got in my tool box? What tools can help me deal with this?'

HONE YOUR MENTAL SUPERPOWER: 'Life is about discovery. In that discovery you are going to find things that you don't like, you're going to find things that make you uncomfortable, that are constantly pushing back on you but as you work your way around those things, all of a sudden the stresses, the chaos, and all of the things that were working against you in your life, be it private life, be it work life... all of the things getting in your way either fall away or you visualize them and are able to turn a negative into a positive and therefore make those things work for you. It almost feels like a superpower.'

BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. I was going to counter each of these statements of warmed-over New Age bafflegab with my editorial comments, but just found it wasn't worth wasting my precious time. Anyone with a brain can see this is very old stuff, the naive blather you used to hear decades ago at expensive corporate retreats where the guru sets up a sweat lodge and kills people. Or makes them drink the Koolaid? 

I can't see this as anything but the Meghan effect, though I think he was a ditzy dolt long before that. Prince Andrew is equally doltish and inbred, but until recently . . . Oh, never mind. At any rate, the pre-Meghan Harry wasn't too fussy about his choice of partywear, was he? And has he ever properly apologized for this? If he did, he'd be liable, and that is NOT a good thing. His lawyers have put tape over his mouth for that one. 

At first I honestly thought the Daily Mail piece was parody, and if you have even the vestiges of a critical mind, you'll probably find it hilarious. Oh, just take an hour off in your busy schedule. Look at me, folks! I do it! I'm so disciplined that I never miss my "me time", though believe me, it's REALLY HARD with all those servants to order around (not to mention deciding which of the sixteen bathrooms I'll use today - Meghan insists I take them in rotation, so people won't say we never use them). I just have to squeeze in all this rocking back and forth with my eyes shut during my all-day-long child care marathons. (Well, maybe he's right. Every nanny they ever hired quit after a week). I have so many worlds to save! Oops, now that I'm with Meghan, she has made the world into ONE BIG THING that we'll BOTH save just by blathering platitudes that were dated forty years ago, back when New Age philosophy sputtered out due to its irrelevance and utter absurdity. (But he doesn't know those words, as they happen to have more than one syllable.)

The infamous Nazi shot has more than one version. The one I always see on royal reporting channels  has two of his partying "mates" in the background - one clearly wearing a white KKK costume with hood, and the other in Al Jolson-style blackface. Then there are his "Paki" remarks, and likely worse - those are just the ones that were reported. If THIS guy is responsible for saving the world, I'd say we're doomed.

THE KICKER. Here are just a few comments posted on Twitter and other social media platforms, criticing Harry's inane statements about "mental health":

It's always me-me time with Prince Harry. Real people have to work for a living...' wrote Richard James.

'Sorry, just don't take him seriously any more,' wrote one user.

'I know he's qualified to talk about being mentally unstable because that's all he does but what does he know about having a job or balance between the two. Exploiting him is not kind,' said another.

'OMG is this a sick joke?.…..Haz doesn't actually know what the word work means!' wrote Carrol McDonald.

'This is a man who has more troubles than those he thinks he has. He needs professional help not being put on a platform & showcased as if he's in recovery,' said Tessa Cate.

'It's really difficult to take mental health advice from a 40 year old who in the middle of a pandemic was complaining on Oprah that he only had his mom's millions to rely on because dad cut him off. This is all during people losing their livelihoods,' explained another Twitter poster.

KICKER TO THE KICKER! I found this bizarre statement on the Daily Mail website under "comments". The article was about the Queen's official announcement that Camilla will become Queen Consort when Charles takes the throne. Harry and Meghan have NOT responded publicly to this historic announcement, but THIS guy did! 

The ENTIRE world loves you so much Harry, handsomest Prince of the Earth. Thank you for being such a chivalrous hero UNRELENTINGLY committed to peace, love and non-violent communication. You are our cosmic light and salvation. Princess Meghan is the strength of your life and ours. Long live Gods brightest angels. #GenZ4Harry #VegansSupportMeghan

OK THEN. . . 

🤍SLAVIC TONGUES: Russian guys talking backwards🤍

Obscure excerpt from an even more obscure linguistic study of "Slavic" language sounds. I left out the sound track and the horrible xrays of moving skulls and tongues.

FRIDA KAHLO: gleefully dabbling

 

"Thus, while her husband paints with large brushes on a huge wall surface, his wife, herself a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress in"

😽MUSICAL KITTY MEOWS in TUNE!

This is why cute cat videos are still a "thing" on the internet.

🌟Are these the first movies? 3D IMAGES FROM 1800s

These are stereoscopic photographs, double images taken from slightly different perspectives, which when viewed through a stereoscope look eerily 3D. When made into gifs, they look like there's an earthquake going on, but the effect is still strangely beautiful.

George Gershwin meets the Lovely and Charming Mrs. Rivera (a. k. a. Frida Kahlo)

 

Jan. 23, 1936
One Thirty-Two East Seventy-Second Street
New York

Dear Elizabeth -
After much patient waiting I finally was rewarded with an epistle (a very well typed epistle I may add) from you. I find its a very good idea to write letters so seldomly as it works up a been desire, almost amounting to pain in the receiving person, and its a swell idea unless of course the person happens to die waiting.

It's nice that things whizz for you out where beauties play my music. On the 9th February I'm playing the same frogs with the Washington Sym. - your mother has asked If she could give me a party in Wash. on that evening and I answered a quick "yes". I wish you were there.

Ira's Follies opens in town next week & it reminds me of a year ago when you had that lovely dress on & we went to the opening of 8:40.

Hope now you are in the pink, physically, mentally & professionally & affectionately & that you'll write soon to

George

& talents go to earn an honest dollar. When life whizzes by, one is really living, so drink it in, honey.

The Mexican trip was fun & educational. No, I didn't fight with Eddie or even the Doc. We all got along 'splendid'. Much sightseeing, travelling for 10 days at an average height of about 7500 ft., seeing all the churches (but no synagogues) looking, but in vain, for the Mexican beauties one hears about, listening to the music but finding difficult to get anyone to play anything away from 6/8 time. Spent a great deal of time with charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera. Made color pencil portraits of them both.

Here I am back in old New York again, freezing cold. It's 10 above zero today. Night before last I played in Philly with the Philadelphia Symphony, the concerto & a suite from Porgy. It was a major thrill to hear that band

Though it's pretty easy to find samples of GG's handwriting, the most interesting thing about these samples is his reference to meeting "charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera", the latter now celebrated as an artistic genius in her own right by her real name, Frida Kahlo.

I have to confess that some of this was a little hard to transcribe. That reference to "playing the same frogs" must, surely, be "songs", unless one of the songs was "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal". I am not sure who Elizabeth is, or was, and the Mexican letter consists of only page 2 and 3. What interests me - and maybe this was as casual then as an email, who knows - is how open he is about handwriting/answering letters from interested people and "fans". It must have been a thrill to get a handwritten note, not just from a secretary but from the great man himself.

By the way, he refers to playing with the Washington Symphony on February 9. No coincidence, is it, that the date happens to be my birthday?

Hello, George: My Gershquest continues

What can you say about a piece of music you've fallen wildly in love with? Having barely recovered from discovering the Makoto Ozone version of Rhapsody in Blue (and yes, his name really is Ozone), I now encounter one of the most rapturous, madly life-loving things I've heard in a long time. Or ever. As my Gershquest continues, now taking me through the rather lumpy and formerly scandalous Peyser biography, his music deepens and takes on new dimensions for me. I want to SING his stuff, I want to be draped across a piano in a smoky room. Would I have wanted to know GG? Who wouldn't want to know a genius?

When I try to take apart and figure out this strange phenomenon of the early 20th century, I find a lot of interlocking puzzles in three dimensions. In his mad social circle of drunken and underaccomplished codependents, he was more addictive than all the champagne in the world. He seemed glued to the piano at these events, or maybe his body grew up out of it, centaurlike. One of the most oft-quoted descriptions of GG's seductive charm came from somebody named Sam Behrman (who also wrote an agonizing description of GG's horrendous last days): "I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

This is as good a description of an addictive drug as I have ever seen, but it is also charged with an erotic longing that dares not speak its name. "Was Gershwin gay?" is still a favorite parlour game among musicologists, as if such a complex man could not be both gay and straight at the same time (which I believe he was: he was simply too beautifully androgynous and dressed too impeccably to be more than 75% straight). And he was a good dancer. My God. I begin to think I am writing about a musical Harold Lloyd.

But this piece, this Cuban overture which was largely overlooked when he wrote it: at first listening you might think, that's not Gershwin. It's just a standard rumba, Latin music writ large. But give it another chance, and another, and you'll hear the dissonances, the bluesiness, the chord progressions which could only be early 20th century (Petrushka, anyone?). He was in with those big guys, the elite composers, but that isn't what stands out here. It's the sheer heat of it, not something you expect from an urban dandy with seventeen summer suits who seldom peels himself away from the piano. Latin music informed a lot of his stuff, including the Rhapsody, but here he wades right in and is consumed. And when I listen to this, I feel an indescribable ecstasy, I want to scream with it! Largely overlooked? Were they crazy? Is everybody NUTS?

Kay Swift, one of GG's longsuffering sort-of-girl-friend-non-fiancee-longtime-lovers, believed Cuban Overture was "Gershwin's finest orchestral composition and also his sexiest. But it went all but unnoticed then, and it has never caught on." I don't know about that. The book I'm quoting from was written in 2009. When you look up the piece on YouTube, there are seemingly dozens of versions, which I have combed through to find (I think) the best. As happens to most artists, Gershwin was a victim of his own success, and once Rhapsody in Blue had everyone in thrall, they didn't really want to hear anything else.

I haven't even begun to probe the enigmatic miracle of that unit, Georgeandira, surely the most codependent songwriting team ever. I once did a line-by-line analysis of the seemingly-simple The Man I Love, a microcosm of a song that would bookend nicely with The Man That Got Away (tune by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira). Don't ever think you can do this stuff, because you can't. "The winds blow colder/Suddenly you're older." That's dangerous. It leaps on you like the predatory animal a great song can be. Ira was George's inverse, his shadow, his verbal self. It worked, until that great prismatic glass splintered into shards, and the universe had to do without him.

I am making my way through a long essay from a medical journal about George Gershwin's psychoanalysis and his death from an agonizing undiagnosed brain tumor. The psychoanalyst was a charlatan and a sadist who enjoyed dangling people and messing with their minds. He had sex with Kay Swift during their appointments, convincing her it was a necessary part of the treatment. Incredibly, this psychiatric fiend was convinced, and convinced everyone else, that blinding headaches, hallucinations, falling down, being unable to eat or play the piano, and having all manner of bizarre behavioural seizures was merely the result of "hysteria". For one thing, it bollixes my mind that a man could be diagnosed with hysteria - I thought that it simply didn't happen. But the real horror of it is, they killed George with neglect. By the time the medical community came to the conclusion it should have drawn years before, he was dead. But I just had this thought now - this second - George played into it too, because for all his fiery genius, he was paradoxically a don't-make-waves sort of person, almost passive, so eager to be liked that he buried his anger and went along with whatever attitude prevailed. OK, so it's psychosomatic. Now what?

But that's for another post.

SHOCK WARNING: Return of the Dancing Pig!

I am sorry.  I know I will never stop posting videos of The Dancing Pig. I keep finding new dimensions to this horror, and thus I must share them. This bit is only the last minute or so of a much longer, much stranger silent movie in which a pig in a tuxedo dances with a fancy girl who eventually rips his clothes off. They both disappear off-stage, but suddenly the pig is back - making these - faces. Some have surmised that the pig actually ATE the girl while they were off-stage, which explains the sardonic glee on his porcine face. I also can't figure out - did they use a puppet for this, or what? I can't believe it's the same pig-head as the dancing pig's head. This one has all sorts of bells and levers and pulleys and strings to make it do different things. But what makes it so wicked are those TEETH - surely someone got it wrong when designing a pig's mouth, and thought that pigs were carnivores or dinosaurs or something. The fact that this has been revitalized in that weird way they can do now - somehow resurrecting a flat, grainy image into 3D and almost-colour - just gives it an extra shot of the macabre. It's almost as if you are there.

🚗Is THIS the most dangerous car ever made?

This is a kinescope of (obviously, given the long awkward silences) a live stage show which was typical of very early TV. Nobody knew how to use the new medium, so when they weren't doing "radio with pictures", they were just filming vaudeville shows that had been running for years. Ed Sullivan somehow kept this ancient format going into the early 1970s. There were no re-takes, so glitches and ill-timed entries were common. I'd put this ad in the late 1940s, likely on "the DEW-mont Network" (infamous for the fact that when it went bankrupt, most of the kinescopes were quite literally dumped in the Hudson River). We get a good long look at this fierce-looking thing with the bared teeth, but my favorite bit is where they demonstrate just how easy it is to CLOSE THE DOOR - and, even more alarmingly, how easy to open it. That heavy, four-foot-wide passenger door they've just bragged about literally opens at the touch of a finger, so it won't slam on your feet or ankles (which it wouldn't anyway!). But just think about it. Seat belts literally did not exist back then, so one tiny touch would pop the door open like a jack-in-a-box and eject whoever was in the passenger side with enormous force. But, as they used to say in the bad old days, you don't need a seat belt anyway because in the event of an accident, "you'll be thrown clear".

The way we live, the way we die

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention".

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself! But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself. It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG. A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit.

UPDATE. This was something I found deep in the files, while looking for something else. Which could be the story of my life - but it all seems so very long ago now, and those connections, once seemingly valuable and even precious to me, so painful and costly to my soul. I republish it here because I have some sort of perspective on it all, some four years after I wrote it, and many years since the events I described happened. So what was I after here? Was it intellect, insight, heart, any of the things I thought I had at the time? These were the hollow men in my life, straw men, finally consumed in a fire of their own making. I am not sorry they are gone, and their leaving left a bitter taste, but nowhere near as bitter as the realization that I willingly played the fool to men who were not even wise, and certainly not kind.