Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
"Again, the Rhapsody": George Gershwin revisited
I'm all afizz tonight, and for an unexpected reason. I just came out the other side of one of those old Hollywood juggernauts, the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. It really was a too-long movie, and kind of heavy going. I wouldn't even have watched it (again), except for the fact that I'm re-reading A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant. I went through a "thing" a couple of years ago and probably bored everybody (but who's everybody?) with endless posts on Levant, one of the strangest human beings ever to walk the earth (and a musician, so I inevitably fell madly in love with him). Levant was one of several people who "played themselves" in Rhapsody, since they knew and/or worked with Gershwin while he was alive.
It had that earnestness that film bios had in the 1940s, and though it attempted to portray Gershwin's drivenness and arrogance, it didn't quite come off, largely because Robert Alda was just too weak and mild. He was nice-looking, looked vaguely like Gershwin without that exotic feline strangeness, and could play the piano well enough that he didn't have to fake it, though it was Oscar Levant's inspired performances that ended up on the soundtrack. Alda was. . . well, he was nice, even in his temperamental rages. He conveyed the agony of the brain tumor that killed him by pressing on his forehead and sighing, "These headaches."
Levant wasn't in it very much, and when he was, I was surprised at how baby-faced he looked, almost boyish, with those haunted eyes. I study Levant whenever I see him, and in this movie I noticed something different, how his body language isn't strictly American. The Old World follows him around. He leans his forehead towards people and stares at them when he talks, grabs or perhaps grasps people by the arm, even pinches Alda's cheek in a "mein boy" attitude. He is both sardonic and warm. An exotic thing, I don't know what it is, something almost Middle Eastern about the cheekbones, or surely Slavic. And green eyes, which show up mainly in An American in Paris in the scene where he is lying in bed smoking.
I'm getting to the part that sneaked up on me, hypnotized me almost, and I didn't expect it. But it seems so obvious now. It was the music. A mammoth hunk of the repertoire, most of it well-performed and pretty much all of it familiar to me, but this time - . What is it that makes your perception of things slip sideways? I was inside the music, inhabiting, dwelling within those dissonant chords, and not just grabbed by the crazy rhythms but infected, injected until my bones began to dance to the music's free will.
I began to hear Gershwin as both coolly, almost offputtingly elegant and screamingly driven, furiously primitive in the sense of touching the Essence. I began to see a world within his songs, almost a universe. The perfection of it hurt me, jarred me. At the same time, the wildly jarring syncopation, the massive primal rushes of energy were dizzying, like plugging directly into a brain on intense overload.
The sexuality of it was stunning. I had never heard sexuality in Gershwin before. Ever. I grew up with it, we had records lying around of Gershwin, An American in Paris and multiple versions of Rhapsody in Blue (and here I am reminded of Levant's mother, her dry comment to her son: "Again, the Rhapsody?"). I have a few favorites, one of them being the I've Got Rhythm Variations. My favorite Gershwin song is The Man I Love, but almost no one knows how to sing it.
But tonight, somehow, it was all changed, changed utterly.
What happened here, I wonder - how did it fall open, all this grey buttoned-down stuff, the music of my parents, bursting in a heady rush like a tropical flower that flings itself open and gushes with an overripe, intoxicatingly embarrassing fragrance? This has nothing to do with the mild civilized Gershwin I knew, this bom-bompa, bom-bompa, bom-bompa of something deeper than drums, something that makes the concept of "rhythm" seem laughable.
Even now I can't capture it, I go around and around the subject. I did not even realize fully that I was being mesmerized and taken over until the end of the thing, when I noticed I felt very strange. There was one song, and God how I wish now that I remember which one, because the chords were gorgeously, sourly dissonant, to the point almost of pain, and I loved it, oh I loved it, loved it and wanted more of it, and now I forget which song it was because they all bled together into one great throbbing Thing.
I did not expect this ambush, a slow cumulative effect that steamrollered me, out of this fusty old '40s movie with its cliches (Gershwin, in a Paris hotel room with the Eiffel Tower visible out the window, hears cab horns going "toot-toot-toot" and rushes to his notation paper, wild with inspiration, writing with an elegant flourish on the title page: "An American in Paris"). Right now I feel tired enough to die and know I have to go to bed. I don't know what it is about music, does it change as we change? New layers are exposed all the time by fresh artists, to the point that the original is sometimes twisted into a corkscrew, its essential meaning lost.
Anyway. When I hear this, Judy Garland's raw and sweet version of my favorite Gershwin song, complete with its distortion and wavering sound, I realize some few artists always knew what was hidden inside this deceptive stuff. Almost every artist sings it as a standard ballad, without much expression, and I want to scream: how can you not hear, how can you not see? The lyric is hopefully hopeless, the yearnings of a waif with no life, of a wispy woman barely hanging on until Her Hero arrives to take away all the ugliness and disappointment, the despair. It's all there, both in music and lyric, but almost everyone misses it.
There is something about genius that makes us think, "Of course!" Makes us think, "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" or even, "hasn't it always been that way?" But no. Someone blitz-brained it into being, and I'm glad it didn't have to be me. I don't believe I am up to such dark, warlocky tricks.
Post-blog discoveries. I've become fascinated with the brain tumor that killed Gershwin at age 38, the way the whole thing was grossly mishandled as "hysteria" or "neurosis", even "attention-seeking". Seen through today's glasses, it's impossible to look at this set of symptoms and NOT see something neurological going on.
This from the New York Times Health section explains a little bit:
When he was 23, Gershwin began complaining of vague abdominal pain and constipation. Doctors found no physical basis for the complaints and told him the illness was in his head. He eventually sought psychotherapy.
But in early 1937, his behavior turned bizarre. He tried to push his chauffeur out of a moving car, smeared chocolates on his body, complained that he smelled burning rubber and forgot his own music at a performance.
He received little sympathy. ''There were people who said of him that he was an attention-seeker,'' said Hershey Felder, the creator and star of ''George Gershwin Alone,'' a Broadway show. ''They thought he was just making antics.''
On June 23, Gershwin was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, complaining of debilitating headaches. He refused a spinal tap, a painful procedure that was commonly used to diagnose brain tumors, and was discharged with a diagnosis of ''most likely hysteria.''
Less than a month later, he was taken back to the hospital, unconscious. In the right temporal lobe of his brain, surgeons found a cyst filled with an ounce of dark yellow fluid. They removed it, but it was too late. The pressure had begun to bear down on his brain stem, which controls functions like heart rate, respiration, temperature and consciousness, forcing part of it outside his skull. He died on July 11.
(Worst part of this, which they don't say: Lee Gershwin, his brother's acidulous bitch of a wife, seemed to have a hate on for him. Once when he fell in a restaurant and couldn't get up, she was quoted as saying, "He's just after the attention. Leave him there."
Monday, January 12, 2015
"Of course you can go straight!"
"I squeezed! And squeezed! And squeezed!" The Rainbow Sponge Lady takes ecstasy to a whole new, previously-never-attempted level. Personally, she raises my blood pressure for reasons I can't even fathom. Maybe it's all those nightmarish designs. They resemble the awful visions I have before a migraine.
"No flab on this arm!"
Sunday, January 11, 2015
The wife-tossing contest
He really means this stuff. He thinks it really happens. That's what drives me crazy. Today my husband starts to tell me about this "custom" they have once a year on Skytrain: that everyone (in unison, presumably) drops their pants. I didn't believe it and cross-examined him.
"No, it's true. It's once a year. Everyone does this at the same time."
"WHY?"
"It's a custom, kind of a celebration."
"But why do they do it on Skytrain? Is it some sort of protest?"
"No. Just something they do."
"Who's they?"
"Everybody. You know, that group."
"What group?"
"The group that does it."
But wait, there's more. Another day, he says all women on Skytrain are allowed to take their tops off. "Then they walk down the street," he said. I wanted to say: They. Do. Not. Walk. Down. The. Street. With. Their. Tops. Off. But it was no use. He is firmly convinced that it happens.
This man has a Master's degree in biochemistry. He is not a doofus, supposedly. His last delusion was the "Wife-Tossing Contest" which he described in detail to me and two of my astonished grandchildren. Yes, he believes there is a wife-tossing competition somewhere in Scandinavia (he didn't specify where), a festival with costumes, ethnic foods, wine, etc. I asked him "wouldn't they be badly injured?" He said, "oh, no, they lay a whole lot of mats down first." He MEANS this, he thinks it really happens, and now they pull their pants down on Skytrain.
It's some testicular thing, maybe. The women parading around topless, certainly. But wife-tossing. I just had a Finnish Facebook friend tell me, a bit piqued, that they have a wife-CARRYING contest there, and sure, I've seen footage of it. It's hilarious. The wife doesn't have to do much except hold on. And somewhere along the line, though I can't find any YouTube videos to support it, I've heard of dwarf-tossing. I wonder if he just conflated the two.
On our first date or so, one billion years ago B. C., he decided to amaze and impress me with a whole lot of True Facts. Bill then was like someone who walked off the set of Revenge of the Nerds, or maybe a very retro version of The Big Bang Theory. He wore plaid shirts rolled up to the elbow (and the lower part of the sleeve was several shades darker, for some reason), white undershirts that showed at the neck, a plastic pocket protector, and glasses held together at the bridge with electrical tape. He showed me his slide-rule tie clip once, and when the romance had progressed a little further, his "Peter Meter", a device for measuring the penis that is handed out on your first day of engineering school.
Some of our first hot and heavy dates were in the lab, in which I got to see him cooking up "bugs": microorganisms which were designed to eat oil spills. Later I typed part of his Master's thesis on an old Olivetti manual typewriter.
I think it was in the London Cafe, sitting there eating our cheeseburgers and chips, that he looked at me and said, "Did you know that you have over 200 bones in your foot?"
"No, I didn't know that."
"You mean you haven't heard of it before?"
"No, I didn't know that because it's NOT TRUE."
We had no internet then, so sat arguing about it for half an hour or so, then had sundaes. Eventually I came up with the correct information in a medical book. Bill was nonplussed. No, I mean it. I mean he was the correct meaning of nonplussed, which is "surprised and confused".
"You're saying there aren't 200 bones in your foot?" He still looked doubtful. I didn't have a Master's degree, so how would I know?
"Maybe in your foot."
"No, I mean are there 200 bones in everyone's feet."
"Yes," I said. "IF THEY'RE RUN OVER BY A TRUCK."
Another date, another amazing bit of information: "Did you know that in some parts of the world, a hedgehog can grow to be 200 pounds?"
By this time I was getting a little used to it, but we still had a vigorous argument about tribal myths and glandular beavers. No one won, but I still didn't believe in the 200-pound hedgehogs. Many, many years later I heard about the South American capybara, a rodent not unlike a giant guinea pig that can easily top 200 pounds. Another conflation? Who knows.
Part of me is nonplussed, and the rest of me surprised and delighted that such a smart person could say such dumb things. They're endlessly entertaining, of that I have no doubt. I should have written all of them down, I'd be making money at this gambit by now. The only one that sticks in my mind now is his version of the animated show Beavis and Butthead (and he wasn't being funny, he really thought it was called this): "Buttwist and Weasel."
When his errors are pointed out, it doesn't bother him. At all. He has this giggle. The more hotly I contest his blatantly untrue fact, the more he giggles. He doesn't care that he was wrong, maybe because secretly, against logic, against reason, against all that is holy and visible in the universe, he KNOWS he is right.
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Post-blog blag: I've been corrected about 150 times, so I guess I have to admit defeat. This appeared in the redoubtable, always-influential, ever-readable newspaper 24 Hours:
Scores of SkyTrain riders were travelling by the seat of their underpants on a chilly Sunday afternoon for the fourth-annual No Pants SkyTrain Ride.
Starting at 1 p.m., riders doffed their pants in an effort to spread a little stripped-down mirth to beat the winter blahs.
According to social media sites spreading the word, riders were encouraged to board their train cars and then strip out of their pants as soon as the doors closed.
Tips for explaining the unusual behaviour included telling fellow passengers they simply forgot their pants, and insisting it’s a coincidence others made the same mistake and boarded the train minus the lower half of their wardrobe.
For those feeling a little shy about the stunt, it was suggested modesty could be upheld by wearing two pairs of underwear.
On the Vancouver No Pants Skytrain Ride Facebook page, 199 had confirmed their intention to take part.“This is the best way to start off a new year. Count me in, and count my pants out,” posted
one confirmed participant.
“I am so getting granny panties for this,” posted another. “This is priceless — how can I not do it?”
The No Pants Subway Ride is an annual event organized by New York City prank group Improv Everywhere, whose motto is “We cause scenes.”The initial ride took place in the Big Apple in 2002 when seven brave riders unzipped. According to the group’s website, the pant-less ride has today spread to 60 regional rides in more than 25 countries.
OK, but I still don't get it. My mind just keeps going to a certain scenario. Young men - OK, sometimes old men get boners all the time, and we KNOW they do. They can generally hide them (or they think they can) if they have pants on. But with mere gaunch (gitch, gatch, gotchies), they won't be able to hide a thing. I'd have to look at a whole lot of stiffies, whether I wanted to or not, and to be honest with you, I don't.
Is this concern far-fetched? Think about it. You think you won't see stiffies on men who are staring at a few hundred women in their underwear?
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Saturday, January 10, 2015
Friday, January 9, 2015
Whose idea was this?
It has long been my belief that most things in this world are very badly designed. The designer just does not think it through. Never has there been a better example than this Donald Duck kiddie ride.
You may be getting the idea by now. Perhaps the idea was that the kiddie would sit in Donald's lap (if ducks can be said to have a lap). But that's just not how it worked out.
Donald's view seems a little - inappropriate. I just don't know how to describe it, but perhaps I don't have to. It's just so. . . wrong.
I couldn't find much information on the provenance of this thing. Surely it couldn't have been in an amusement park. The background looks more like an office of some kind. The ride having gained some notoriety, it wasn't long until adults had to try it out.
Oh, bad, bad. . . BAD!!
THIS is a proper Donald Duck kiddie ride. Really. I think there should be a law about this.
Even this one, macabre as it is, has its head in the right place.
P. S. Aha. I found a bit of info on this thing, and I was right: it's not in any amusement park, or anywhere you'd take a child if you had any sense:
Those who drop by Johnny's Saloon in Huntington Beach to listen to a little Johnny Cash on the jukebox and have a drink will find a relic of the Magic Kingdom that imagineers would probably prefer you didn't see. It's a kiddie ride, similar to what you would find outside supermarkets, in the form of Mickey Mouse's apoplectic nemesis Donald Duck. Designed for kids to climb on, it rocks back and forth while playing the tune "It's a Small World."
How these people bought or stole the license from Disney to defile Donald's wholesome image is anyone's guess. It's a pretty twisted idea, but maybe OK - maybe - in a place with a name like Johnny's Saloon. My only question is: where the hell is Huntington's Beach??
P. S. to the P. S. (you know there's always a P. S.). Looking more carefully, this is weird. There's only supposed to be one of these. But it seems to be in a different location every time. The base looks different. The background looks different. Even the floor color, the tiles. Very different. Unless it's being moved all over the place, which seems unlikely, then there has to be more than one of them. They have multiplied like an evil flock of inappropriate amusement devices. There may be a very strange, very perverted cottage industry going on here.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Here to stay is a new bird: Paco, take 2!
Almost camouflaged is Paco, my new, eight-week-old baby lovebird. This bird has been such a delight to be with. She learns so quickly, and is snuggly and trusting. Eats like a little horse.
Paco is known in lovebird parlance as a whiteface blue double violet. The violet aspects show up here more than in normal light, making me think those hues will come out more when she is past the baby stages. Her face will become whiter as well. She loved the little whirr sound of the camera, and didn't mind the flash. A diva in the making!
Mummy is sort of glad she had her hair styled today.
A bird in the hand. . . poopy, but it washes out. . .
A bird on the shoulder, where she likes to hang out.
Such a pretty bird!
Tiny little bundle of joy! This is probably the only shot I have of my workspace. Paco has been happy to be with me up here, and I have set up a little table with food and things to chew on.
Joy!!
Oscar Levant: one-man band
Oscar, reclining and reflective, begins to dream. He dreams he is in a vast concert hall. . .
. . . playing Gershwin's Concerto in F with his cigarette-stained fingers. . .
. . . and conducting at the same time. . . (and he was a real conductor so he isn't just waving his arms)
. . . and likewise the percussion, he's really playing (an early
example of cloning, or else he accelerates himself to the speed of sound)
My personal fave, cuz he looks so sexy. . .
Cute with a gong (and doesn't he look a bit like Buster Keaton?)
"Bravo! Bravo!"
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 Eight Instrumental Miniatures for Fifteen Players 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.
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