Adele's doppelganger: she's a Lulu!

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My separated-at-birth post about Adele and Lulu got me thinking: I haven't heard her one hit (To Sir With Love) for a long time. Though this clip is badly-synched, it does bring home  how startling the resemblance is: a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked, slightly chubby English girl with heavy eye makeup and a "flip" hairdo. Problem is, Lulu didn't win six Grammys at the age of 22, but never mind: she was a big star, if only for a moment, and very much a product of her times. The movie this belongs to is good, by the way, a little cliched but effective: and anything with Sydney Poitier in it can't be all bad.

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I heart gifs

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Wear your heart on your. . . head?

These photos, taken with my husband's phone, are a tad grainy, but cute!  This was a Valentine's/Grandma's birthday/Grandpa's retirement party dinner combination at Red Robin. The "hats" are Valentine purses I knitted for the girls.  Have a happy!

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Adele: Grammy loves her!

I confess, I didn't know who this girl was until very recently: that is, until her face was plastered over every available surface. Predictably, this avalanche of hype ended up with an astounding Grammy win last night, something like six trophies. I didn't even know you could be nominated in that many categories. Busy girl. (And I say girl because she's barely in her 20s: you'd better pray for her now.)

As you can guess, I'm not really in touch with all this, but when I saw her - really saw her on TV, not in her carefully-lit, cheekbone-sculpted publicity photos - I was reminded, startlingly, of someone else.

I wonder if her image is meant to be '60s retro, as in Amy Winehouse's famous towering beehive. Whether it is or not, I'm going to mix up some photos here.

Just a coincidence?. . . You Tell Me!

                                                         

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Whitney Houston: broken butterfly

This was a jolting shock, even though I had never been a particularly big fan. It was one of those, "no, no" moments.


It was sickening news, though there had been plenty of - what? Warning? How can we call it "warning" when someone's life has been spinning out of control for years?

The first time I ever heard of Whitney Houston, even before the movie The Bodyguard catapulted her to fame, my sister, never one to be positive about anything, said, "Oh, she's just a second-string Tina Turner."

Whenever my sister said things like "oh, she's just" ("just" being her favorite diminishing term, purposely busting down anything I loved), I had to sit up and pay attention. It meant something extraordinary was about to happen. And then that incredible song began to appear on the radio, all the time, everywhere.

It had the simplest lyric of all: I will always love you. It was not the words,
but the way she sang them, releasing those pure arcs of sound and sustaining them beyond our capacity to believe what we were hearing.
Back then she was slim and deerlike, wide-eyed, and though I don't know if she was really innocent or not, she looked like she must have been.


She was charismatic, her voice soared almost supernaturally, and she seemed to have everything. a person could possibly want. Then reality caught up with her: the awful, devouring reality of "making it" that seems to eat so many stars alive.

I just can't take it this time, I'm angry and I feel like crying. It's just too much. On the eve of the Grammys, when she was likely to take part as a presenter dressed in a gorgeous designer gown, she lay dead in a hotel room. Efforts to resuscitate her were in vain: this time it really was too late.

One wonders if it was a  Michael Jackson scenario, or maybe Heath Ledger, where people did not call 9-1-1 right away because they were afraid of scandal. I am convinced this is what happened to those other two: shame, denial and a sense of "let's keep this hushed up" may have cost them their lives.


And what about all the people who partied hard with her, knowing she was vulnerable and unable to take even one drink or snort or shot without falling into the abyss? Her many trips to rehab left her in a fragile state, and though she often claimed, sometimes with a touch of belligerance, that of course she was sober and anyone who thought she wasn't was a liar, soon we'd hear that she was in rehab again.

Reports from earlier this week revealed that Houston was particularly out of control, flying on God-knows-what before her spectacular final crash. I don't know why someone (anyone!) didn't take her in hand and put her in the hospital to detoxify. It sickens me, because when I looked up her Wikipedia entry I was dizzy and overwhelmed at her accomplishments on every level. I won't even attempt to list them here, but they were formidable.

In yesterday's post I tried to make some sense of the phenomenon of huge stars plummeting in flames: just what goes on here? Addiction can happen anywhere, but it's often the product of early damage. This can lead the survivor into damaging situations later in life (Bobby Brown!), fuelling the need for oblivion. Having unlimited money is a factor, but the most destitute addicts always find a way to feed the dragon which consumes them.


Does lofty fame convince some stars that they are immune to the horrendous long-term damage of drugs and alcohol? Why did her "friends" party with her, which made about as much sense as helping her play Russian roulette? Are these really friends, or just parasites, sucking at a star's vital force and even trying to steal it for themselves?

I know I'm not saying anything very original, but this one just sickens me and I can't keep silent. We watched Houston's self-destruction in slow motion over many years, and the media feasted on it. We wanted her to win, and yet we didn't. We wanted proof that fame, which so many people lust after, isn't really worth a damn because it swallows people whole. Which it so often does.


But does this stop people from lusting after it and climbing on other people's backs to get it?


The Grammys tonight will be shadowed by this horrendous event, and if it were up to me I'd cancel the whole thing. But the industry juggernaut must move forward, like the great pyramid stone that nearly crushes the old woman to death in that Cecil B. deMille epic. "She's just an old woman. Not important enough to stop a moving stone."

I sometimes hate the dynamics of the human condition, the games we're forced into if we are to survive. The smiling through our anguish, pretending we're all right when inside is nothing but a howling wilderness and a brokenness which is beyond repair. At the Grammys, people will say comforting things like "we know she's with us tonight," because they don't know what else to say. People are afraid to give in to grief, afraid it will demolish them. And sometimes it does.

I don't know why Heath Ledger had to die that way, or Amy Winehouse, or even Michael Jackson with his bizarre addiction to hospital anasthesia. I won't mention all the others because I can't get started or I won't be able to stop. They all missed decades of life that might have been rich and fulfilling, or maybe even painful and desperate, but, at least - life.

A line from the 16th-century poet Alexander Pope springs to mind: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" It's a question, not a statement, and it hangs there, implying crushed beauty and arrested flight. But who? Is it you over there, press agent - or you, entertainment reporter (just doing his job, after all, perhaps a job he loves), or you, the much-demonized paparazzo? Or you, the fans, clamouring for her as she mounts the stage to that exhilarating roar?

But the same fans are eager to eat her alive, and it will happen now, with rotten jokes about her dying the night before the Grammys. I don't leave myself out of this equation because I  too often see huge stars as commodities, and am quick to hurl criticisms, knowing they can't hear me.



There are no second or third or twentieth chances for Whitney Houston now because she has been broken for good. This is disturbing, but there will inevitably be a certain amount of "what can you expect" sentiment along with the praise tonight. I don't know why she didn't make it. I don't know why Billie Holliday didn't make it. Winehouse. Garland. Let's not add more to the list.

We're left with that incredible song from The Bodyguard, the one that made people say, "Hey, who's that?" They had never heard anything quite like that before, and I hope they paid attention, because they never will again.

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The park, the Cowsills and me

Where did all this start? I guess I was watching Entertainment Tonight, which is my religion by the way, and an item came on about The Cowsills. Jesus, God, the Cowsills, who had all those wholesome hits way back, like Indian Lake, the Flower Girl one, and this (which I used to call "hey you on the ground!" after my favorite line in it).  The Cowsills were the '60s in many ways, bubblegum pop that somehow made you feel better about being alive, that made you want to go to Fred Collins Park and hang out with your friends, except they weren't really your friends but your brother's friends, your cool stoned brother with all the girl friends who didn't want to talk to you and you were fat anyway and and. But back to the Cowsills.

According to ET, there's a documentary out (somewhere: not here, for sure, and it has about 67 release dates) called Family Band: The Cowsills Story, and I waaaaaaaaant to see it so badly now, I ache for it, I'm not kidding, because any documentary about a '60s band makes me roll on the floor with delight. This one, though - I don't know why this is, that misery must so doggedly, howlingly follow in the wake of success. The Cowsills, that wholesome family of seven talented kids upon whom the even-more-bubble-gummy Partridge Family was based, suffered the same kind of misery and humiliation at the hands of their father as the Jacksons. And I just now found out about Whitney Houston - my God, Whitney Houston, another one gone, and why? Where does all this wretchedness come from?

So this bubbly bright music, the kookiness of Indian Lake and that I Love the Flower Girl one, came out of fear and anguish and - What is it about show biz? Everyone seems to want to be famous, it's seen as the Ultimate for some reason, and American Idol has made it even worse. But those who get there often go insane or drown in alcohol (Amy Winehouse) or kill themselves in some other way while the rest of the world gapes at them in horrified amusement.

I want to see the Cowsills story because I'm shallow, besides being enthralled by all that sort of thing. I want to watch while all that appalling stuff happens to someone else. Apparently the band, what's left of them, still performs, and I always find it kind of embarrassing when that happens, ancient hippies with beer bellies and grey-haired women strumming on guitars and singing, usually off-key, while an elderly audience cheers madly.

Anyway, I'm geez-tired and whipped after getting involved in a sort of controversy over a local dead celebrity, and I guess I shot my mouth off about him and later thought, hm, he's not even around to whip a CD at me and cut my throat, so I better lay off. So. . .sorry, Lloyd. And, good night.

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Rocky's last stand

Dreams are strange things - no, scratch that, MY dreams are strange things. Slippery, often incomprehensible, with imagery out of some Salvadore Dali painting (or sometimes Van Gogh), they usually defy any sort of interpretation and soon recede into the thick fog from which they presumably came.

Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious", but what did that doofus know? He hated women, said they were incomplete creatures, just castrated men, and couldn't even breathe properly because they breathed upward into their chests. Brilliant doctor that he was, he didn't notice that all his patients were wearing extremely tight corsets (see my corset post, which so far nobody has even looked at).

So Freud was full of shit. Where does that leave us? With the jumble, the ragbag: seeing a giraffe in my back yard (or at least, seeing its head and neck as it leaned over the back fence); going to meet myself at a train station (I never got there); and, last night, something that reeks of significance even if you don't believe in dream symbolism at all.

A dead horse.

It must have been Rocky, my shaggy friend, a non-prepossessing but game little creature with whom I had an intense bond. I've written about Rocky before, and he was an extension of my childhood, the factor that made my pre-teen years bearable. Before we sold him when he got too old and expensive to keep (both boarding and farrier/vet bills were starting to pile up), he was my comfort and solace. I'd longed for a horse as a young girl, and here he was, not exactly a snorting Arabian but nonetheless sweet-natured and dependable.

So when I had this dream, this horse lying on the ground shuddering and apparently breathing his last, it must have been Rocky: I knew that sorrel coat with white stippling through it (for he was a true strawberry roan, just like in the song). I was sitting on the ground leaning over his head and stroking his neck, knowing that a downed horse wouldn't last long and probably should be put to sleep.

Some anonymous people were around (and just who ARE these anonymous people in my dreams? I don't know, they're just there), and I asked them to call a vet. The time had come. His eyes were milky and fixed, and he only breathed once in a while, if at all.

And then.

A big shudder ran through him, and he performed that motion that horses have been doing since time immemorial: starting with his front legs, he began to heave himself back on his feet.

Foals do this when they are born, if awkwardly. It's a practiced movement, and kind of impressive to watch. But this was like literally watching a horse come back to life.

He seemed fine. His eyes were warm and bright again (Rocky always had what horsemen call "a kind eye"), and he started wandering around looking for stray wisps of hay. Soon he'd be lipping them up and chewing with that gratifying hollow crunching sound. All seemed well.

And then: the vet arrived, a woman in a white coat literally wielding a giant syringe with squirts coming off it. "Don't kill him, he's fine!" I protested. She looked at him, then looked at me as if tempted to use the syringe on me instead.

Then the dream sort of wandered into weirdland: the vet hitched up a crude sort of wagon with chains instead of reins. Then she made another one for me, but the chains were all wrong, different lengths, and I had no control. There did not seem to be a horse involved, so I am not sure what was supposed to propell this ersatz chariot. She fixed the reins/chains, so it all worked, but WHAT worked? Where were the horses? Why were we doing this?

And that was the end of it, or at least the part of it I remember.

OK then. . . let's get symbolic, shall we? I know it's early in the morning. The dead horse which is not really dead is my "dream" - in another sense (and why do we use the same word? I've never been able to figure that out), my dream of being published again, of feeling like an author instead of a near-totallly-unread blogger wasting my time every day.

It's Rocky, not just any horse.  And I had author dreams from the very beginning, from the first time I realized, with a shock of wonder, that someone actually created these magic carpets I held in my hands.  

It amazes me how little support I've had, as my parents wanted me to be a musician and were automatically disappointed by anything else I did. Now people try to talk me out of wanting to do more. Just be happy with what you have. At the same time, they are constantly saying, "Well. . . ?", a sort of "what have you done lately" thing. What have you done lately to justify all this time and grief?

I learned today that a publisher I had completely given up on is still "considering" my novel. I don't know what to think about this. It's distressing because it has been a very long time and I had almost given up, to the point that I sent them a very strongly-worded email yesterday. I got "a" reply, but nothing definitive. This is not a hand-cranked press, but one that is larger  than anything I would normally deal with.

Will the horse stand up again? Walk around and snuffle for food as if nothing happened? I don't know. I bounce back and forth between excitement and depression/despair. I tell myself not to hope.

The picture of Rocky and I at the top of this post was taken in our front yard in Chatham in about 1966.  It has a misty surrealism that I love. The four corners of the original, which is one of those old Instamatic things that's barely  2" x 3", were cut off, maybe to fit into a small frame. I know almost nothing about photoshopping, but in this case I really wanted to restore it. If you look very closely at the corners you might see evidence that I didn't know what I was doing: the program was a strange one that plastered "cloned" material on the photo surface like a paint roller. But when I was done, it seemed to pop out at me in 3D in the eerie way of very old photos (such as the header on this blog, also taken in my front yard).

Rocky didn't like being tied in the back yard - in fact, I didn't tie him at all, just left him loose without saddle or bridle or anything - and while we were having dinner he nudged the gate open and took off. Never had he run at such a clip. He galloped all the way back to the barn while we feverishly  pursued him in the family station wagon. I remember my father saying, "I never knew that horse could run so fast."

When he reached his destination (the barn) with unerring accuracy,  he stopped dead as if putting brakes on his hoofs and moseyed on over to a bale of hay.

What does it all mean? Oh, probably nothing. I'm just trying to make my Wednesday a little more bearable.

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World's tightest corset

This clip from the Italian film Beautiful but Dangerous has to be the ultimate cat fight: Gina Lollobrigida in the tightest corset ever made, somehow able to fence well enough to beat the crap out of her female adversary. She even bags a "trophy" at the end. It's not in English, but who cares? A good cat fight transcends all language.

RiARRrrrrrwwwwwww!

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

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Moannn. . . it's Joan

Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom!  Zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom!
"Ayyyyeee. . . maahhh-reeed Joaaannnnnnn. . . "

No, I did not imagine this show, though the memory of it seems to reside in the deepest synapses of my brain along with a fear of monsters in the closet. In other words, I was probably a baby when this came on, or else it was already in reruns. I remember the "doo-WAH, doo-WAH" chorus which you heard even during the show itself, as a segue to the next scene. I don't know if any other show did this. I kind of hope they didn't, because it was putrid, but IMJ was fascinating for revealing classic '50s mores: a cute little housewife, half out of her tree with absent-mindedness and spinny '50s incompetence, having to be married to the dull Jim Backus who only really came into his own years later as Mr. Magoo (and then there was Mr. Howell, but he was pretty dull too).

Old shows scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.  I didn't understand them and they seemed to come from a million years ago. Topper was horrible, hats and gloves and things moving around by themselves in mid-air. December Bride seemed to come out of the medieval period. Really, these shows were maybe about ten years old when I saw them, and I don't know why they seemed so ancient. Then there was "YE-E-E-SS, it's Pete and Gladys!"

I think it was this: in the early '50s, TV was just radio with pictures. Sometimes there was even a stage with curtains and an audience, as in Jack Benny.  Shows were loudly, formally announced in the same way: "The Jo-o-o-o-oan Davis Show! America's favorite comedy show! Starring America's Queen of Comedy (what, no Lucy?), Joan Davis!"  There was something smudgy and dreamlike, even nightmarish about the old shows. TV screens really did flicker then, which people still refer to, incredibly ("the flickering blue screen"). It's like asking, "Do you dream in colour?" Well, why the hell WOULDN'T you? Why are people so damned stupid?

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Simple physics

David Hykes is one of the world's masters in the art of harmonic or overtone singing. He has trained his voice in such a way that his chanting breaks the spectrum of sound apart into its component colors, much as a prism explodes white light into rainbows.


The sound is very very strange and it scares me, because it's a sound that really doesn't exist. It should be contained, one tone inside the other, like Russian dolls, but somehow through a trick of the human voice the individual sounds have popped out. To call the sounds eerie is an understatement. Not whistling; not humming; a little like a theramin, and yet not; and most definitely, not of this world.

Overtones are everywhere: most singers produce them once in a while, so that you  suddenly hear a silky trilling an octave higher that seems to burnish the phrase. Just as you focus on it, it melts away. I once heard them on a bus. The hummy roar of the engine kept producing a much higher, parallel sound, eeming up into the stratosphere in that same eerie way.


Did we invent music, or only discover it? I think it's the latter. There are laws of music, just as there are laws of physics. Our Western scale has seven notes, corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow. (Middle-Eastern scales have quarter- and half-steps that we can't manage: I tried to play a computerized piano on this setting and my, did it sound strange, all flattened. I couldn't get a song out of it at all.)


Humans seem hard-wired to interpret musical sounds in certain ways: we often hear music in a minor key as "sad". It's hard not to immediately recognize celebratory music, military marches or music expressing passionate love.

Anyway, this brings me around to why this music scares me. I can't locate in my mind another sound like this: it's not beautiful in the normal sense, and when it hits that extreme shattered-crystal high, it's almost ear-splitting. It has a consciousness that is separate from the vocalizing that is producing it. It's saying, look, here is the physics of music, and isn't it strange? Do you want to hear any more?


I am fascinated, yet want to turn away, to stop listening. From what I have heard, when someone is chanting in a big resonant space, the overtones dwell way out somewhere in a little spinning vortex of their own. There's a sort of blank indifference to the notes. Simple physics. Why does this disturb me? Because I now believe that this is the true nature of God.

God is indifferent, doesn't love or care, just goes on producing life, masses of it. If there is to be love, we must produce it, must care for each other. There is no freestanding love, no Love, except perhaps as a principle. Where all this life came from, why it came, is a deep mystery that will never be solved by the likes of us. Why we were allowed to come this far is a mystery too, for we hold within our hands the power to destroy the entire thing.


There was a time, a very long time, when I believed in a benevolence, a personal God that loved each of us individually, had in fact loved us into being. I can't sustain it any more: I had a massive, shattering experience, an experience in fact in which I believed I actually stood before God.  And God was not Love. God just "was".


I stood before a dazzling indifference.

That ended it, ended my Christianity and all that went with it. This music is disturbing because there is no emotion in it whatsoever. It's like a machine. It's like something turned inside-out that shouldn't be. We don't want to know that the Universe is indifferent. We want to be loved. We don't want to know that we are responsible for the whole damned thing.


It's not even music, it's just a sound. Simple physics.

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Little Pain on the Prairie

When I was a kid there were certain things we were required to read, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder was one of them. This was long before that sappy TV show: the tales were plainly and effectively told, reflecting a simpler but more gruelling time when pioneers broke the sod and made houses with their own hands.


Like Jo March in Little Women, Laura is the feisty, restless and often rebellious younger child, exasperated by the sweet nature and relative passivity of her big sister Mary. When baby Carrie comes along (later to be blinded by smallpox), Laura is caught between her marginalized position in relation to Mary, and the responsibilities of a sister who suddenly must carry a heavy burden of child care.

It's all tough stuff, fed to us in grade school to make us put up or shut up, to be happy with our own cushy situations because "look what those poor girls had to live through". And indeed, with outbreaks of malaria that almost killed them and a winter so harsh they nearly starved, they did have it rough, rougher than we can even imagine.

But I was gobsmacked to discover something I never knew about those little girls on the prairie.


They wore corsets.

I recently stumbled upon this passage from one of the books I never read: Little Town on the Prairie. In this one, the girls are older, coming of age:

[Mary is trying on a new dress that her mother has made for her, but she is unable to fasten it.]

Laura had a sudden thought. “It’s Mary’s corsets! It must be. The corset strings must have stretched.”

It was so. When Mary held her breath again and Laura pulled tight the corset strings, the bodice buttoned, and it fitted beautifully.

“I’m glad I don’t have to wear corsets yet,” said Carrie.

“Be glad while you can be,” said Laura. “You’ll have to wear them pretty soon.” Her corsets were a sad affliction to her, from the
time she put them on in the morning until she took them off at night. But when girls pinned up their hair and wore skirts down to
their shoe-tops, they must wear corsets.

“You should wear them all night,” Ma said. Mary did, but Laura could not bear at night the torment of the steels that would not let
her draw a deep breath. Always before she could get to sleep, she had to take off her corsets.

“What your figure will be, goodness knows,” Ma warned her. “When I was married, your Pa could span my waist with his two hands.”

Ye gods! Laura and Mary had to strap on those awful things, then go out and work in the fields!

I had trouble believing this, until I found some authentic images of "rural women" in corsets: it appears that no matter what sort of work you did, you were required to wear these things, because it wasn't decent NOT to.

The women above are plainly corseted. Like Pa, a man could practically span those tiny waists with his two hands.

A little harder to make out, but yes, these women, threshing hay or thrashing it or whatever-the-hell they did to it, are wearing corsets. The poses look a little unnatural, but nobody knew how to pose in those days because cameras were like something from Mars.

This is my personal favorite. The two cow heads make her waist look even smaller, a great optical illusion. Perhaps she took them around with her, even to the community dances, to boost her chances of a good match.

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