The ghost at the piano

Picture this.

It's sometime in the afternoon back in the God-knows-when, the fall or something, and I have a stack of files or books in my arms, and something comes on the radio and even though I am barely paying any attention to anything other than the rabid stress of the moment, suddenly - all the books slide out of my arms and onto the floor.

I am stunned.

Stunned in my tracks, because someone is playing something on the piano. Something sinuous, noir-ish, midnight-y, redolent of back alleys and cats on fences, of men in top hats kicking cans and regretting, of call girls lurking in shadowy corners, of. . .

I heard this thing, then got distracted I guess, because in an act of total idiocy I didn't listen for what the piece was called, or who wrote it.

It only took around twenty years for me to hear it again - it was called The Graceful Ghost, by William Bolcom - only this time it was played Wrong.

Wrong, as in jaunty, raggy, almost upbeat, probably the way it was intended to be played by the composer.

The version I had heard, sinuous, mysterious, smoky, almost stoned, had slipped away from me. And I still haven't found it.

I've bought several recordings of it, and always end up groaning because it's played in the same choppy, soulless way. Then I heard this YouTube version by this kid, this Grant Carvalho. The comments reflect people's absolute ignorance of what actually constitutes good music: no one seemed to appreciate it at all. They said it was nice, they said it was good, but that his technique was lacking and he needed to keep working at it.

It isn't "my" version, because no one, except that phantom pianist from 20 years ago, could ever reproduce it. But there's something awfully good going on here. Graceful it is, but tinged with melancholy. There's a care for the music, even a love. He's in tune with it. The dynamics are superb (in fact, it's the only version I have heard that has any). And this is a kid! A kid who, if he sticks to this, will be getting right inside music to a degree that very few can ever attain.

Why does this piece haunt me now? Three guesses. Harold Lloyd, Harold Lloyd, Harold Lloyd.

I can't talk about this or I'll jinx it, but because it's never going to happen anyway and I can no longer keep my grief to myself, I'll explain it. All through the writing of The Glass Character, my novel based on the life and loves of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, this music kept playing in my head. Not the jaunty version, mind you - and Lloyd could be plenty jaunty, part of the smokescreen he put up to hide his sensitive interior.

I mean that dark and sinuous, elongated, midnight tomcat version, like something out of a saloon in a Warner Brothers movie starring Bogart and Bacall.  It played and played and played in an endless circle in my ear, the way ragtime does.

Writers can't help it, they see their works in print, and they see them as movies. It's because of these fat successes that come along once in a while and just grab every trophy. We won't even go into J. K. Rowling, who started off writing penny-ante fiction and ended up as the Oprah of kids' literature. Probably forever. Not that we get jealous, oh no. I just want a piece of what they have. I don't want the successes to succeed any less; I just want me to succeed more. Surely there must be enough to go around?

But apparently there isn't, and that's part of the reason many of the publishers I have approached have shut the door (not slammed, of course) before they have even looked at one paragraph of my work. They're full-up and no longer receptive.  I remember the godawful rubber stamp, that "list is full", not even written by hand, and not even on a form letter but stamped on MY letter and returned in my dutiful self-addressed envelope. They didn't even have to pay the postage! I paid to have this thing tossed back at me without a single word of acknowledgement from a human being.

Then there are the rejections that arrive on Christmas Eve. I actually objected to one of them last time, sent off a protest letter, even though you are never, never, ever allowed to argue with a rejection, not even with the time it is delivered. Then in checking with some friends, I found that several of them had also received rejections on Christmas Eve, likely due to editors' habit of cleaning out their desks before flying off to Puerta Vaillarta for the holidays.

Why should we object? What's wrong with us? Don't we want to know what their decision is? Isn't it better to know before the holidays, so we can begin to plan a more effective strategy while everyone else is drinking eggnog and kissing under the mistletoe?

I didn't expect to go off on this tangent. I wanted to write about Harold Lloyd. If I can't stand the heat, I should just keep my mouth shut and pretend I'm happy with the way things have been going. I have something here, I know I do. It may rot in the bud, and there will be nothing in the world I can do about it. Am I unlucky? What's lucky? Whatever I'm not, I guess.

Even Harold's luck ran out eventually, in spite of all his elaborate superstitious rituals. But I'd like to have some luck, just a little, so I can have it run out on me, so I can say, I had my moment, and even though it passed, it gave Harold just a little more time in the sun.

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The two weirdest things in the world

The more Boobahs I find, the more Gaga I get.

Lascaux in Port Coquitlam

(See'f you can tell the difference: my brilliant granddaughter Erica started painting horses the other night. One of them turned out so well, I tucked it under my coat. This horse rivals those cave paintings in Lascaux, I think, except it`s easier to hang on my refrigerator.)

There are beavers

If you just stop to think, here's a lesson for you

What a beaver can convey

With a beaver you make someone happy or blue

With a beaver you make them sad or gay

So be careful what you say
And be careful how you smile

It's so easy for a beaver

To kill us, or make life worthwhile. . .

There are beavers, that make us happy
There are beavers, that make us blue

There are beavers, that steal away the teardrops

Like the Sunbeams steal away the dew

There are beavers, that have a tender meaning

That the eyes of love alone can see

But the beaver, that fills my life with sunshine

Is the beaver that you gave to me!

Yes, the beaver, that fills my life with sunshine

Is the beaver that you gave to me!

Oops. . . didn't mean to click on that "beaver" site. . . heh-heh-heh (munchmunchmunch. . . watch out for that treeeeeeee. . . . . . !)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Twilight drive

I don't know where to start with this. I can't write an essay. It just hit me in the stomach. I was watching my old Twilight Zone episodes: haven't seen most of them in 50 years, I mean the few I managed to see without my Mum knowing about it. They seemed creaky and quaint at first, but gradually the strange and disturbing vision of Rod Serling began to burn through: an alien dystopia, the world seen through the wrong end of the telescope, human darkness laid bare by the frightening advancement of a soulless technology.

Yes, overheated old cathode tubes and beeping big boxes that are supposed to be computers, and astronauts in clunky old suits left over from Diver Dan. An atomic blast that leaves one survivor, Burgess Meredith with his Coke-bottle glasses shattering into a million pieces. But along with laughably primitive versions of future innovation (and the weird sensation of trying to see 1970 as the future), there were other things.

A mournful folk song coming out of tape recorder, a song that was never recorded to begin with, accusing a man of murder. (This one I remember. I had bad dreams about it for weeks.) A doll that talks, yes, talks to Telly Savalas! A grandfather (Ed Wynn, who was on the show several times) whose clock ran out at the same time as his heart. And stuff like that.

Then today, I start watching on my PVR and: my God. It's Inger Stevens.

Inger Stevens, whom I first saw as the sweet but ditzy Swedish housekeeper for Congressman Morley on the '60s sitcom The Farmer's Daughter. (They finally had to get married when viewers complained that it looked like they were shacking up.)

It was a long time later that I learned what had happened to Inger Stevens. It must have been on the internet somewhere, or where? I heard that she had killed herself at age 35.

I thought back, thought of her fragility, the deerlike wariness in her lovely eyes. She was a sort of Nordic Audrey Hepburn, beautiful in a classy kind of way, but always with a look of barely-controlled anxiety.

This episode was called The Hitchhiker. It was in some ways reminiscent of Janet Leigh's famous drive in Psycho where, having just committed adultery and theft, she speeds away from danger and towards safe haven at. . . the Bates Motel. (And here we have a couple of degrees of separation, but let's not get distracted.)

Actually, The Hitchhiker predates Psycho slightly, shown in 1959 during Twilight Zone's first year, when the theme song was an eerie, dark, Poe-like dirge full of dissonant harp sounds rather than the doo-doo-doo-doo that came later. The legendary Bernard Hermann (who wrote the music for Psycho!) composed that first theme, although it was sadly forgotten after Season One.

So Inger Stevens is on a driving trip from California to New York, but we're never sure why. A blonde woman, a young blonde woman, an attractive young blonde woman in a car alone, driving away like mad, is automatically suspect, is she not? After all, the shower scene in Psycho has an undertone of punishment for female independence and its attendent rampant sexuality. Janet Leigh, a lady so bad she wears a black bra, is just enjoying that shower too damn much. (Norman. . . is that you?)

The whole premise of this episode is that Inger Stevens keeps seeing a mysterious hitchhiker, a rather grubby middle-aged man who appears, disappears, then appears again. She becomes increasingly unhinged as it becomes apparent that no one else sees him. She feels so desperately unsafe that she picks up a sailor on leave, another powerful metaphor for sluthood, and offers to drive him back to his ship. He becomes so freaked out by her escalating delusions that he jumps out of the car.

Knowing what we know, knowing what in fact Inger Stevens herself doesn't know, this drama is almost unbearably poignant: there are references to death all through it, and by the end, when it becomes horribly apparent that she is already dead and caught in some sort of awful no-man's-land, we see how lost she is, her eyes huge, desperate, haunted by God knows what sort of dark trauma buried deep in her subconscious.

Dead blondes. Hitchcock revelled in them. Show business eats 'em up and spits 'em out, just the nature of the game. Fame does that to people, doesn't it? Or do people pursue fame, desperately pursue it, to fill an agonizing vacuum within, a vacuum created by lack of love or the awful presence of unforgiveable abuse?

Or am I becoming fanciful once again? Doing a little digging, it turns out Inger Stevens was married to a black actor, and in that era it had to be kept secret. Kind of like being married to a homosexual. But this doesn't make a person swallow a handful of barbiturates and die.

Why do people kill themselves? I'm always shocked and sickened by news of a suicide, and yet, I do get it. Personally, I have always found life a bewildering mess, with odd patches of wonder and beauty that somehow keep you in there, keep you in the fight: and then there are my people, whom I couldn't abandon no matter what sad sort of mess I'm in.

Was Inger Stevens too fine-edged for reality, too thin-skinned, too moody, too bipolar, too drug-addicted, too unloved? Too blonde, too lovely, too famous, or not famous enough?

But she's dead. So we'll never know the answer to that one.

Playtex girdle: so comfortable under your swimsuit!

Some truly astonishing ads from Playtex, circa 1950s-60s. I remember "to lift and separate," "you're suddenly shapelier," "holds you in like firm young muscles," and conversations between women like, "Ah, but I have midriff bulge. I really need a longline." "With some dresses, so do I! Then I wear Playtex longline padded bra."


And so on, and so on. Lycra and wire and rubber and padding, and wearing a girdle under your swimsuit. (Some women even slept in them.) Nowadays, even fat women let it all hang out in jiggly pink rolls, with skimpy tops and pants that ride below the crackline.

Anthony Perkins sings SUMMERTIME LOVE

Walk like an Egyptian

OK then, so it's Tony Perkins time again, just like "cryin' time" in that old song. I keep coming back to him, just because he was so mysterious, so misunderstood, and because he summed up in my mind what it means to be human: conflicted, passionate, vitriolic, kind, altriustic, selfish, brilliant, obtuse, and on and on it goes.

And he was cute, too. Cute in a way women loved, right up to and including the gorgeous, girlish Berry Berenson (sister of supermodel Marisa), who married him in spite of the open secret of his homosexuality. They had two sons and stayed together for 20 years, until he died of AIDS.

I've read lots of stuff about him, including Charles Winecoff's Split Image, which in some ways is the best bio of anyone I've ever read, but which in other ways offends the hell out of me. Never has a biographer been so thorough in ferreting out the real Perkins, penetrating the million smokescreens he put up, but then he wrecks it: he quotes "an unnamed source" who claims to have been Perkins' lover, outlining in excruciating, completely unnecessary detail what he liked to do in bed. Would a heterosexual actor have been subjected to such humiliation, and from a completely unreliable kiss-and-tell source who probably sought some sort of payoff?

I found another book about him, Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life by Ronald Bergan, and I pounced on it. I thought it might be bland compared to Winecoff's claw-sharpening meow-fest, but on the first page it grabbed me because of a surprisingly bang-on description of his unusual body type.

The author was speaking to the actor backstage after a performance. "He was stripped to the waist, revealing the smooth-skinned svelte figure of a man half his age - he was forty-seven at the time - and what the actor William Chappell described as 'an Egyptian torso, unnaturally broad in the shoulder and small in the waist and so flat it is almost one-dimensional.'

Oh yes.

In spite of his great natural talent and versatility as an actor, there was a strangeness about Tony, a remoteness: he was the perennial outsider, but didn't seem to mind it, which made him even more odd. He wasn't a warm actor, but had certain abilities that were unique and eerie. In the Ken Russell turkey Crimes of Passion, he plays a demented minister addicted to sex toys and porn. Kathleen Turner plays a part-time hooker, and at the height of his Byzantine fits of craziness they have this conversation:

"If you're a minister, I'm Snow White. Who are you? You're not a reverend. Who are you?"

"I'm you."

Yes. Tony was us. He needled, he probed, he burrowed inside, he smiled boyishly as he found the subtle flaw and put his hand into it. The cracked cup, the broken building, the chipped tooth, all these were the province of Perkins and his calmly detached fascination. He snooped around the edges of the human condition, not unaffected of course, and capable of a paradoxical deep devotion to friends and family, but still the perennial observer. Why did people like him so much, care so much about a man who seemed almost cold? And they did, they loved him. As he lay dying of AIDS, literally gasping out his last, friends camped around his bedside in sleeping bags. Hundreds of people came to his memorial service, which lasted hours.

Tony loved dogs, but he was definitely more cat than dog, sniffing delicately, warily drawing back. And sometimes lunging forward in almost predatory sensuality. Bergan claims he had charm, but in the original, supernatural sense, a spellbinding power.

A friend once tried to describe his unusual body with its coathanger shoulders and long, gangly arms, which made his head seem small: he resembled "some sort of great prehistoric bird". Exotic, a little scary, impossible to comprehend, echoing all those stuffed owls and ravens of Psycho. Oh yes, Psycho, we were getting to that. Or were we?

Jaycee: I don't know where to start

This morning, for some reason, lines from Leonard Bernstein's Mass rise up unbidden in my mind:

I don't know where to start
There are scars I could show
If I opened my heart
But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.

What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord - I don't know
No, no, no - I don't know

Except for an intrusive migraine, I had a wonderful weekend, spending time with all four of my delightful, beloved grandkids. When I am with them, time stands still and all my life's griefs are postponed.

Why then do I feel so sick right now? I can't explain it. Maybe it's this: so often I wonder what sort of world I'll be leaving them.

This feeling goes beyond the usual frightening predictions about the environment and our feeble, too-little-too-late attempts to fix it. It's not even about the seething political standoff between the Middle East and the rest of the world. We seem to have conveniently forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and will eventually - inevitably - be used.

Maybe I can only focus on one atrocity at a time.

Does this explain the migraine, I wonder? I overloaded myself with atrocity in the past week, first with the sickening, frightening Casey Anthony verdict - the dead-eyed, posturing sociopath exonerated from all wrong except lying to the police - followed too quickly by a TV program I both anticipated and dreaded.

It was Diane Sawyer's interview with Jaycee Dugard, imprisoned in stinking tents for eighteen years by a monster whose main pleasure and meaning in life came from the capture and rape of children.

I don't know if I can write about this at all, except that not writing about it might cost me even more.

In last night's special on ABC, Diane Sawyer towers over the eerily petite Jaycee, whose doll-like face makes her look closer to fifteen than thirty. For some reason that is never explained, she has an odd, awkward gait. Her immature face doesn't express very much when she speaks of the rapes, the terror, the giving birth alone in the back yard (not once, but twice).

I wonder if Jaycee survived by surrendering her will. I wonder if that was her strength. Perhaps it was the only way she could endure the non-stop torture of the crazed, stinking Phillip Garrido, a man who should have been in prison but was let out for "good behaviour". A man who could obviously manipulate the system (and human beings) any way he wanted.

And let's not get into the SIXTY times parole officers visited his house without seeing anything wrong. We watched a video of one such visit, and it was a cursory walk-through that only took a couple of minutes. No one ever looked in the back yard with its squalid squatter's village of tents, Jaycee's "home" for 18 years. Even after an alarmed neighbor called 9-1-1 and insisted that there were children living in the Garrido back yard, no one did anything. Perhaps the possibility was just too far-fetched.

I was still trying to absorb the jaw-dropping Casey Anthony verdict, the way in which that greasy, superficial bastard Jose Baez somehow utilized his client's inherent slipperiness and utter lack of a moral compass to score a victory that made many people feel physically ill. This was not to mention the defense team's champagne celebration minutes after the verdict: who cares about a murdered two-year-old girl when you've scored such a major legal triumph?

Hard on the heels of all this indigestible poison came the Sawyer interview, followed by an intense, passionate investigation of the story by Chris Cuomo. His hard-hitting, angry expose of Garrido's unimagineable crimes should win him an Emmy, but it will likely go to his cohort Sawyer for her  seniority and celebrity status.

I don't think I need to go over every detail of this case. By spending so long on this I may already have ruined a sublime summer day, and as they say, that would be letting the bad guys win.  There was at least some justice in Jaycee's case, even if it took an agonizingly long time.

Unlike the slippery Casey Anthony, the slimy Garrido got 431 years(and I hope they don't allow this demonic piece of shit to commit suicide: hold him to boring, punishing prison rituals for 30 more years!), which should I suppose be of some comfort to the family, if not the world.

But look at it this way. He got 431 years. And he didn't even kill any kids!

And yet, he did something to Jaycee that's so bizarre, I don't really know if I can describe it.

It's often said that people in prison don't age. It's ascribed to lack of sunlight, but some believe it comes from the isolated, unvarying life of prison routines. Someone pushes the pause button, and it stays there.

I couldn't figure out how to feel about Jaycee. I cried a bit, but then I'd get confused by her rather sweet, bland recalling of the horrendous evil forced on her child's body and on her victimized children.

Sawyer is good at what she does, to say the least, but I think she decided in advance to be gentle with Jaycee. Yet there was a constant sense of probing, of "how did you manage to. . ." Jaycee dutifully said things like, "I wouldn't let evil win", which to my mind are things her therapist has probably said to her a million times.  

I also had the eerie feeling that someone had coached her not to smile too much. The serious face looked unnatural for her, almost practiced. Still and all, she smiled a lot for someone who had been in a sort of death camp for most of her life.

Sweet-smiling, smooth-faced, doll-like Jaycee had shut herself down so completely over those eighteen years that it amounted to something like brain damage. Have you ever known someone in that situation, a stroke victim maybe, or someone who has been through a bad car accident? I don't mean brain stem injury, where the person stumbles and slurs. I mean something more subtle, but still pervasive and permanent.

Perhaps she was always this way. Sweetness may just be the natural cast of her personality. But there is another, even more disturbing element to this story: Jaycee's mother.

When you see her, it's a shock: she seems to have absorbed all the darkness and rage and grief and even taken on the deep lines and shrivelled mouth that Jaycee was somehow spared. This is an angry, angry woman, even with her daughter safely home.

In the interview they looked like conjoined twins, constantly glued together. Even when she's smiling, Jaycee's mom looks old and used-up, dessicated. Meanwhile Jaycee is permanently serene, her skin like porcelain, her eyes deep and undisturbed like the eerie eyes of old-fashioned blinking dolls.

This man did a kind of damage that no one has a name for or even comprehends. The inevitable best-selling ghost-written memoir and pine cone necklaces (which both feel to me like grafts from therapists and other hangers-on) won't ever make up for it. When asked if she would consider a relationship with a man, the 30-year-old woman sweetly says she's just happy to stay here with her Mom. I wonder if a sexual relationship with a man will ever possible for her.

She's disabled. I can't blame her, and I am not a bit surprised. But I don't think too much will be said about it. Who will even notice? We only see what we want to see: a heroine, a brave girl who looked evil in the face and stared it down. When those parole officers walked through Garrido's squalid dwelling SIXTY times and saw nothing (or, for that matter, when a jury looked at a tiny girl's skull covered with duct tape and saw a swimming pool accident), they were looking directly at monstrous evil and not seeing it.  

"But we didn't know what was going on," survivors of the Second World War insisted. It couldn't have been that bad: millions of bodies casually thrown into the furnace for no crime other than being who they were. Such things just didn't happen on that scale. Yet Miep Gies, the woman who protected Anne Frank and her family and kept them safe from the Nazis for three years, insisted that people did know. They knew, and kept silent, because it was easier for them to look the other away.

Is it plain disbelief? An inability to absorb the fact that some people are utterly without conscience and seem to take pleasure in destroying their fellow human beings (particularly defenseless children)? If our fundamental sense of human decency slips away, then we begin to die. But some have the grotesque talent of diverting this death onto other people.

Jaycee's mother has died into her grief, and though she finally recovered her treasure in a blazing miracle that still defies all explanation, her face is set in a hard, cracked mask of tragedy. She looks a hundred years old. Jaycee is almost expressionless, a wax figurine, tiny and preserved.

Thank Phillip Garrido for such bizarre manipulations of time. No, thank the parole board who "monitored" his movements with an ankle bracelet and then ignored his constant sojourns into the back yard.

For a week now I've been hearing people praise the Casey Anthony verdict as proof that "the system works". Even people who believe she's guilty say it. I suppose it works as well as our other pathetic, ineffectual attempts to bring evil sociopaths to justice.

This hideous mess was preventable, and no one moved. No one acted.

No one wanted to know.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm