Lament for the world

PSALM 74      A maskil of Asaph.

¹ O God, why have you rejected us forever?
    Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture?
² Remember the nation you purchased long ago,
    the people of your inheritance, whom you redeemed—
    Mount Zion, where you dwelt.
³ Turn your steps toward these everlasting ruins,
    all this destruction the enemy has brought on the sanctuary.

⁴ Your foes roared in the place where you met with us;
    they set up their standards as signs.
⁵ They behaved like men wielding axes
    to cut through a thicket of trees.
⁶ They smashed all the carved paneling
    with their axes and hatchets.
⁷ They burned your sanctuary to the ground;
    they defiled the dwelling place of your Name.
⁸ They said in their hearts, “We will crush them completely!”
    They burned every place where God was worshiped in the land.

⁹ We are given no signs from God;
    no prophets are left,
    and none of us knows how long this will be.
¹⁰ How long will the enemy mock you, God?
    Will the foe revile your name forever?
¹¹ Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?
    Take it from the folds of your garment and destroy them!

¹² But God is my King from long ago;
    he brings salvation on the earth.

¹³ It was you who split open the sea by your power;
    you broke the heads of the monster in the waters.
¹⁴ It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
    and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.
¹⁵ It was you who opened up springs and streams;
    you dried up the ever-flowing rivers.
¹⁶ The day is yours, and yours also the night;
    you established the sun and moon.
¹⁷ It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth;
    you made both summer and winter.

¹⁸ Remember how the enemy has mocked you, Lord,
    how foolish people have reviled your name.
¹⁹ Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts;
    do not forget the lives of your afflicted people forever.
²⁰ Have regard for your covenant,
    because haunts of violence fill the dark places of the land.
²¹ Do not let the oppressed retreat in disgrace;
    may the poor and needy praise your name.
²² Rise up, O God, and defend your cause;
    remember how fools mock you all day long.
²³ Do not ignore the clamor of your adversaries,
    the uproar of your enemies, which rises continually. 

CORSET LADIES RIDE SIDESADDLE in Victorian photos

A particular aspect of Victorian culture was the sidesaddle. For the sake of modesty, women were not allowed to ride astride - such things were indelicate, if not immoral. But what amazes me is how a woman could attain great heights of horsemanship sitting sideways on a saddle that was flat as a chair, with only one stirrup and a HUGE, voluminous skirt hanging down to her high-buttoned shoes - not to mention a very tight corset which restricted her breathing. Some of these shots are of trick riders, who still managed to do things like jump rope on horseback - sitting sideways! For a while, divided skirts were allowed, but this may have been the influence of the bicycle, which became wildly popular with women as it gave them a measure of freedom they hadn't known before. They could even get away from "mashers" without having to stab them with a hatpin. But even bicycles were frowned upon in some quarters as being too "stimulating" in an intimate way. Victorian women just couldn't catch a break.

BLOGGER'S NOTE! I just realized that one of these women is the world-famous sharp-shooter and horsewoman, Annie Oakley! She was a pattern breaker in a totally male-dominated field, outshooting all her rivals with a rock-steady hand - even once winning a competition with a broken arm. But even she couldn't ride astride - it was too indelicate.

😾BENTLEY'S IN THE PICTURE!💗

This is a bit of a classic: Bentley trying to be right inside a TV program. It was a Nature of Things documentary about CATS, and though he has never given the TV a second glance, he jumped right up and began to paw the screen as if to try to get inside. By the end, he is posing very elegantly along with his fellow "video cats".

"Ah, the French" - Orson Welles REMIX

Part Two of the Orson Welles wine ad that made me laugh for the first time in YEARS.

Orson Welles Drunk Outtakes for Paul Masson Wine Commercial

"AHHHH! The French. . ." I found this gem late at night, and COULD NOT stop laughing, until tears rolled down my face. Then it struck me with a certain shock that I had not laughed like that in . . . years. I could not tell how many. And yet, I cry almost weekly. I don't know what that means, but I am grateful to the spirit of Orson Welles for giving me a good laugh, AT LAST.

CRAZY '80s CELLPHONE LADY!

What can I say? You could build some mighty muscles lifting one of these.

💀TOXIC SMOKE: Cigarettes are KOOL!

Come up. Come up. Come ALL THE WAY UP . . . to Kool. Or lung cancer.

1000 Baby Turtles, 100 Little Dolls

 

I can say nothing about this gorgeous work of art  (so I'll say something): it symbolizes every summer I ever spent at the cottage, sand on my feet, still wrapped in the innocence of pre-puberty, the Jimmy Olsen Annual clutched in my hand, and all my life (such as it was) still ahead of me. Beach sand and lake water and very short, very short holidays, and long periods of wondering what these marvels would look like if we really had them. No one I knew ever sent away for them, perhaps because the addresses were always in the States somewhere. It was just too intimidating.

Were my comic book ads ever this lovely? I doubt it, and I think they left out some of the most important ones:

The "100 Little Dolls". They were little all right, an inch and a half tall, kind of like those plastic soldiers that stood up on a base, but much more slender. I've seen pictures of them, and they remind me of those plastic cocktail skewers that look like things or people. 

These are now a valued collectible on eBay, for much more than $1. These dolls were made "not of paper or rags but of STYRENE plastic and hard synthetic rubber," a wonder-substance in those days. The dolls were described as having a strange quality known as "Lilliputian cuteness", a bizarre expression if ever there was one, and one that no child (and few adults) would understand unless they had read Jonathan Swift.

I think you had to sell something here - photos, this time, which might have been a somewhat easier sell than going door-to-door with salve. I wonder if anyone ever did "win" the chihuahua in a teacup. I feel sorry for a tiny dog, likely sent through the mail, traumatized. They don't even call it a chihuahua, but a "miniature dog".

Here is the text, or as much of it as I can read:

"I'll be happy to send you without you paying a penny, this lovable, young miniature DOG that is so tiny you can carry it in your pocket or hold it in one hand, yet it barks and is a reliable watch dog as well as a pet. You can keep it in a shoe box and enjoy many amusing hours teaching it tricks. . . active, healthy, intelligent and clean. Simply hand out only 20 get-acquainted coupons to friends and relatives to help us get that many new customers as per our premium letter. I enjoy my own lively, tiny dog so much. It is such wonderful company that I'm sure you'll simply love one yourself."

I can't find any accounts from people who actually did get the dog, but there are a couple of horrendous stories about the fabled squirrel monkey, and they are so horrible - the worst animal abuse I can think of - that I won't recount them here. People were actually surprised that their monkey bit them, acted terrified, and pooped on the floor. One of the stories was supposed to be "humorous" and appeared on national public radio. Shame on them - it was a story of abject animal suffering and terror, which - surprise! - is NOT FUNNY.

Another mystery, Grog. I wondered how this would work. Would it be sort of like those Hawaiian ti plants that used to be so popular then? They "grew like mad" too, except I could never get one to grow.

"GROG GROWS OWN TAIL. PLANT TAIL OUTSIDE AND IT GROWS LIKE MAD INTO A  BEAUTIFUL SHADE TREE! Grog, amazing prehistoric monster, comes with half-a-tail. In a few days the tail starts growing. It grows, grows, g-r-o-w-s. Remove the tail from Grog's body and plant it outside and it springs quickly into a flowering, fragrant shade tree. Then Grog grows another tail. Remove the tail again and he grows another, and another. . . endlessly. Only $1 plus 25 cents postage. Satisfaction or money back."

And then there were the baby turtles. I never even hoped for these. They just seemed too good to even dream about:

At first, of course, I thought you'd send away for 1000 baby turtles, which made me wonder where I'd keep them all, how I could hide them from my mother. You could get live baby turtles at the Metropolitan (what used to be called a "dime store", an expression you still hear once in a while), along with a plastic tank with a ramp in it, and a plastic palm tree. I was astonished to find out that you can still get these - they're called turtle lagoons - and that people still keep actual turtles in them. In Canada they're banned, for some reason - perhaps they smuggle contraband under their shells.

 

"Here's one of the most exciting toys you've ever owned. Just think - a baby turtle all your own. What's more, a real growing garden to keep him in, a garden you plant and grow all by yourselef. You can teach him to recognize you when you feed him. Watch him swim - see how he pulls his head and feet into his shell when he's frightened. You can have turtle races - you can make a" (oh, fuck the rest). I don't like the idea of calling a living creature a "toy", but I guess that was the attitude back then. The turtle likely wouldn't survive shipment anyway.

And how cool is this? You could actually grow, harvest and eat the peanuts. Maybe sell them! Except that it would never work in Southwestern Ontario, with our three feet of snow in the winter, and the ground like iron. The text is a little too small/boring to transcribe. 

I confess I didn't see these ads until I found them on Google. Just as well. Why didn't we see how creepy these things were? It's kind of like the way we didn't see the creepiness of clowns. Back then, "rubber wonderskin" was a GOOD thing.  A cowboy ventriloquist's dummy smoking a cigarette was something every boy ought to have.

And these need no explanation.

                        

Dancing Dawn Fashion Doll

💀FANATIC: a face in the crowd💀

This few seconds of film has haunted me for years. I did not give it a context, because I felt it was more powerful if I didn't - and YouTube would likely brand it as "hate content"if I did.  But in truth, it's historic footage, because it provides a tiny glimpse into the phenomenon of mass worship/hysteria and how easily the mindless crowds can be swept along. The woman with the crazed look in her eyes, almost fainting from rapture, is eerie and disturbing in the extreme. She would likely do ANYTHING for the cause - which in this case was world domination through mass extermination. It didn't work, but if the rest of the world hadn't risen up in protest and marshalled all their forces, it could have. Watch troops goose-stepping in North Korea, and you will see the same mentality, the same dreadful uniformity. Read the news about what is happening right now in Ukraine, five million desperate refugees fleeing for their lives, and you will tremble. What is wrong with the human race, and can I opt out now and be something else?

GOOSE PARADE!

😾BEDTIME for BENTLEY: Sleepy, yawny kitty is begging for treats!💗

Bentley and I have a bedtime ritual which never varies. He has to beg for (no, ASK for his treats) by raising his paw. Undignified for a cat like Bentley, but if he wants his treats badly enough, he does it. 

"Hello, my Baby" (or: time capsule full of shyte)

Newly Unearthed Time Capsule is Just Full Of Useless Old Crap

TOPEKA, KS—A deep sense of disappointment gripped the citizens of Topeka, KS, Tuesday, when a 60-year-old time capsule unearthed from the site of a demolished library was found to contain a bunch of useless old crap.

"What were the people who buried this thing thinking?" asked Topeka mayor Donald Kirschward, following a capsule-opening ceremony at Topeka Town Hall. "None of this stuff is worth a red cent. It's all a bunch of stupid, worthless junk: newspapers, photographs, children's toys, sheet music, a pen knife, an iron and some rusty kitchen appliances. Big deal."

The capsule—a large wooden crate bearing the words, "For The People Of The Future, So That They May Come To Know Us"—is believed to have been buried in 1939 during the dedication of the just-built Topeka Public Library. Earlier this month, as the library was torn down to make room for a new Steak & Shake, demolitions workers came across the capsule, which had been sealed in the building's cornerstone.

Though the capsule also bore the instructions, "Not to be unsealed until 2939 A.D.," civic leaders decided it should be opened as soon as possible.

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"Everyone was very excited about the capsule," Kirschward said. "We thought, 'What if it contains gold? Or pirate treasure? Or a deed to a diamond mine?' We also figured that by the time 2939 rolled around, folks would probably know how to synthesize gold and other precious metals anyway, so why let them get all the good stuff when we could really use it now?"

As word got around Topeka that the contents of a circa-1939 time capsule were to be revealed in a public ceremony, rumors about its contents began to fly. Local residents conjectured that it contained everything from solid-gold Egyptian tomb idols to the British crown jewels to vials of pure uranium.

"The speculation really got ridiculous," Kirschward said. "How would a Kansas farm town get a hold of Egyptian tomb idols, especially during the Depression? It's just absurd. Now, Disney stock certificates, that's what I was counting on."

But when the capsule was finally opened, a collective groan rose up among Topeka residents. Instead of treasure, the capsule merely yielded banal items of everyday function. Among the "artifacts" were photographs of prominent Topeka residents, postcards of town landmarks, a spoon, a vacuum tube, a measuring pitcher, an alarm clock, a Bakelite comb, a washboard, a pair of spectacles, a die-cast toy car, a Sears-Roebuck catalog, a pair of leather shoes made in the now-defunct Topeka Shoe Works, detailed statistics of Topeka County's 1938 agricultural output, and a stack of hand-written county birth records.

"The first question was, 'Why?' Why would the town fathers bury a box full of junk?" Kirschward asked. "A letter included with the time capsule explained that the items are designed to give future generations an idea of how people lived and what life was like in Atchison in 1939. Well, who cares about that?"

Added Kirschward: "Yeah, pretty impressive, people of 1939. Thanks for giving us the priceless, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look at all of your old garbage."

Perhaps the most unusual item in the capsule was an elaborately calligraphed document titled, "A Proclamation To The Peoples Of The Distant Future."

"It is our profound hope," the document read, "that as the clouds of war once again darken the Earth here in 1939, you, our descendants of the year 2939, will have come to realize that the destruction of civilization in the name of nationalism is too great a price to bear. It is also our hope that peace, harmony and prosperity will embrace your world as it has eluded ours."

"Boring!" said Cub Foods cashier Sherri Gower, 20, who witnessed the capsule-opening ceremony during a cigarette break. "It would've been a lot more interesting if they'd included something cool, like a signed murder confession from a famous citizen or a severed hand or something. Instead, they give us some big lecture about how bad war is. Well, duh."

University of Kansas history professor Dr. Curtis Dandridge said the capsule's dullness is a reflection of the time from which it came.

"The 1930s were one of the most boring eras in American history," Dandridge said. "People didn't have a lot of money or education, so they amused themselves in simple ways. Yes, there were movies, but they were in crude black-and-white and didn't have any swearing, nudity or special effects. Radio also existed, but the programs were hokey and old-fashioned. So planting a time capsule was, for these people, a departure from their horribly dull routines. But their poverty, combined with their naïvete and limited knowledge of the world, left them no choice but to put cheap, uninteresting stuff in their time capsule."

The capsule's contents are currently being stored in a broom closet in Topeka Town Hall.

- The Onion

UPDATE: Jazz, Exulansic, and the phenomenon of detransitioning

 

(PLEASE NOTE. This entire post is a repeat from 2014, so you'd think it would be hopelessly out of date. It isn't. Since I published it, expressing my concerns about the seeming stampede towards flipping one's gender identity just because it seems like a cool idea, we have been inundated with pushback against the dreadful, stomach-lurching phenomenon of ten-year-old children being given Lupron, a treatment for prostate cancer, to deliberately suppress puberty so that they can "transition" more easily to the gender they SHOULD have been born into. God makes mistakes, apparently, pretty bad ones, but not as bad as humans continually make.

There's just too much on this subject to even begin to deal with: the jaw-dropping TLC show I Am Jazz, the blistering gender-critical posts of one TT Exulansic (since banned from YouTube and taking refuge on Odysee), and a new wave of young people discovering they made an awful mistake and want to try to find their way back.

TT Exulansic (gender-critical content)

So this is supposedly old stuff, but I still mean all of it, and then some.)

https://www.outsports.com/2019/10/15/20915287/lgbt-sports-history-christine-daniels-transgender-transition-death

Though it is far from the complete picture and is definitely slanted towards conventional transgender ideology  this article at least attempts to address the complex, thorny, politically- and socially-charged issue of gender identity, which is (as far as I am concerned) impossible to untangle from human identity. In this case, in spite of a valiant effort, it all went disastrously wrong. I believe the current prevailing attitude is to believe that if a person is unhappy with their birth gender, transitioning will help them be "who they really are", and as a result, much happier and more fulfilled. If a person's experience does not fit this preconceived idea, everyone gets very uncomfortable.

In this case, Christine Daniels initially embraced a lifestyle that seemed to fit the new woman she had become via surgery and hormones. But the internal conflict was brutal and never resolved, and she committed suicide before even reaching a truce. She found it impossible to be a "real woman" because there were just too many hoops to jump through.  Myself, I often wonder why women's identity seems so bound up in hair extensions, makeup and stilettos, all the trappings that social pressure demands must be done as perfectly as possible. To "pass" (a rather shocking word used in this piece), you have to get everything right.

As for myself, and most of the women I know, we don't feel that pressure, at least not in midlife. It's not that we're slobs. The inside may well match the outside, if the inside isn't shallow and vain and obsessed with appearances. And here I talk of the popular culture at large, the whole Kardashian monstrosity of instant celebrity/rampant narcissism. 
It's distressingly mainstream, and seems to indicate that so long as a transgender person matches up, everything's fine. But there are undercurrents, and I did stumble across a provocative statement from a plastic surgeon who has stopped doing gender reassignment surgery because from what he has observed, people are no happier post-surgery than they were before. But again, that's something we just don't say.

In digging into all this, I found statements to the effect that only a microscopic proportion of transgendered people ever feel any regret about their decision, maybe 1/10 of 1%. Then another article says no statistics have ever been kept. How to set up such a study, then, when everyone is so uncomfortable even with the idea? I'm not saying "study transgender regret so people will stop having sex changes" - I'm not Archie Bunker. I'm saying that whenever I see fog or a dense curtain, I have an overwhelming desire to see what's behind it. Knowledge is the only way to clarity. There is just so much we don't yet know. 

Other things float to the surface. There used to be a regulation that a candidate live as the opposite sex for two years before undergoing surgery. Then it was one year. Now it's down to six months. Hey, I'm not saying "don't transition," I'm just saying don't keep accelerating the whole process at the speed of light (typical of our "no waiting" mentality with its microscopic attention span) until it's down to nothing. My feeling is that it would be crucial for a candidate to have a substantial span of time to feel out what it's like, really like, the good, the bad and the indifferent, especially with regards to existing relationships.

I don't know about any of this because I haven't been through it. But I can talk about gender, see, because I seem to have one. I don't want to be male, though there are days when being female, particularly an older female, is kind of a drag (if you'll pardon the expression). Though I love being a grandma, and I like men's bodies if they're nice ones, and I really love the way men smell (especially good-smelling ones), making me "traditionally female" in some people's books, I refuse all molds and categories. Throughout my life, most of my close friends have been men (some of them even gay! Shrieks of horror!), I love looking at photos of women in Victorian gowns which might be seen as gay-ish (but I don't care, and even cherish it), and for the most part, I identify not as male or female, nor even androgynous, but human.

I do wonder however, whenever I delve into this subject, particularly with MTF transition, why there is such a tremendous emphasis on appearance. There are even  schools where the transitioning can learn how to act like women, how to walk and talk and speak like a proper lady rather than a flower girl (so to speak). It's real finishing-school stuff, which fork to use, balancing a book on your head, etc. Amazes and dismays me that we focus on something so relatively shallow. I'd flunk that course for sure. If anyone tried to show me "how to act like a woman", I'd bite them. Where it hurts. 

POST-BLOG-POST BLOG POST: (or something). Yes, I've furthermore found just tons of stuff on this, and it is alarming. I think it's an example of activism at its worst, starting off with a clear purpose and even good intentions, then snowballing into an alarming imperative of "we-think" (and there is nothing more deadly than "we-think", because "we" lose our individuality), eventually forcing conformity to new and equally soul-destroying norms. 

In other words, if anybody in the "transgender community" bails, reverses, detransitions, or just desires to sort out their own human complexity in some new and less-entrenched way, they are not just ostracized but attacked. Meantime the "detransitioners" (awful terms, sorry) are beginning to point out that the medical establishment, the new, cool, socially-enlightened medical establishment (you know, the one that doesn't exist) has been a major force behind a lot of current thinking about gender reassignment and the "surgical cure". It's getting easier and faster all the time to get this shit done, which means there's not much time for changing your mind.

Am I the only one that gets queasy about all this? News stories are presented with soft-focus light and tender music, depicting Jesse, a 5-year-old boy who knows he's a girl because he plays with Barbies rather than trucks. (No kidding, it all comes down to that. If we are what we play with, then I guess I must be a pail of frogs.)

Then we hear that Jessica's parents (they're calling him Jessica now) plan to give him hormone-blockers to suppress male puberty, just so's he'll be more comfortable with himself as he slowly turns into a . . . girl?

It pushes us all, I think, into deep and spooky realms. Who are we? What's male, what's female, besides our anatomy which sometimes seems crucial (when having a baby, for example), and sometimes utterly irrelevant? Why is it so hard to get past, if it isn't that big a deal? 

But maybe it IS that big a deal.

I haven't failed to notice, in the many stories I've recently read, that when a confused, pain-filled man rushes to embrace a new female identity, there's a rash of facial plastic surgery (Caitlin Jenner, anyone?), with the usual bizarre, puffy-lipped, ping-pong-cheeked results, followed by magazine photo-shoots of the New Woman wrapped in tight leopardskin and sprawling on the floor with a provocative expression and fuck-me shoes. Her hair, the new hair, the extremely perfect salon hair styled to look casual, wafts gently back in an electric-fan breeze. This is somebody's idea of a woman, and my idea of a "what??"

Dismays me, is all. Dismays me that people who insist they are really women inside have to go through such a meat grinder to pass inspection. Please! These are cartoons.

(Just a kicker at the end. Under the heading "victories" on the sexchangeregret.com site is this strange message from "Robert John". It appears that lurking behind this supposed attempt to unmask an uncomfortable truth is an even more uncomfortable truth - fundamentalist Christianity. It's mentioned nowhere else on the site.)

I had irreversible gender reassignment surgery in 1997 absolutely convinced I was a woman in a man's body. I anticipated living happily ever after, however I had persistent difficulties and fell into deep depression. I began reading the Bible, unsatisfied with superficial proclamations of diversity, inclusiveness,and tolerance. I happened upon King David's famous repentance Psalm 51 and discovered, like David, I could be forgiven for all my sins. I also learned God chastens those whom He loves and I was being guided to seek repentance, and faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. I knew identifying as a woman was not living in truth,and returned to my given names and birth gender without further surgery.

My victory has come by allowing the Lord in my heart, becoming God-focused instead of self-centered, and am thankful for my birth sex and many blessings. despite the consequences and challenges. God has led me to witness His truth and love, and I can testify: indeed, God's grace, mercy and truth do set one free.

God bless,
Robert John

EGG MASTER: horror in a tube

 

Why egg tubes? Because why not. Somehow the infomercial looks a whole lot better than this: detumescent appendages made of squashed-up egg (no discernible white or yolk, yet NOT scrambled). The way the soggy tube of egg rises from the depths of the strange aluminum thing is quite dramatic, in a revolting sort of way..

Me and Ashens go way back. I think he was one of the first YouTubers I became aware of (mainly because he was one of the first YouTubers!) in or around 2008. His content hasn't varied at all in all the intervening years, which is why I still watch. Late at night, when I can't be bothered with anything, when I'm winding down to sleep anyway and don't WANT to learn anything. . . Ashens has always used a tatty brown corduroy sofa as his "stage", and for some reason it works. It's practically the definition of keeping it simple, and it's something I WISH more YouTubers would consider for toning down their loud, slick extravaganzas in the kitchen, obnoxious music blaring while the shouting cook's face is shoved within half an inch of the camera lens. Ashens is more low-key, but is one of those rare people who is naturally funny and can improvise in a way that makes me laugh out loud. Especially late at night, when I don't want to learn anything. This video is such classic Ashens that I realized, from my own comments, that I have so far watched it four times. Four. I cannot live without the sight of the soggy phallic plop of cooked egg falling onto the plate. 

In this video by an outfit called Silicon Republic, a nice young Irish lady attempts to make sense of a bizarre vertical egg pan (or tube or whatever), repeatedly remarking that the smell is abominable. It's hard to imagine a more efficient way to ruin an innocent egg than to do this to it. The egg does not even do its dramatic rising from the tube, then flopping over wetly like a collapsed erection. She has to dig it out with a fork, then deliver the rest of it like a long-past-term baby. Then she is faced with a wet column of detumescent egg, sitting on a plate, smelling bad. Whose idea was this?

This is causing some people actual pain. NO one seems to be having a good experience with it! The egg cooker takes forever, the egg does not want to rise, and when it does, the results are underwhelming.

                                                           Egg? . . . . . UGH.

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"💖

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