Go home, George (and take Ira with you)

Review of George Gershwin's masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, by fellow composer Virgil Thomson: "One can see, through Porgy, that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources and his frank acceptance of the same. It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn't learned the business of being a serious composer, which one has always gathered to be the business he wanted to learn."

Caitlin dances to Pentatonix!

Minions 'n Mermaids: must be Christmas!

Since all four grandkids already had everything they wanted in electronics, games, etc., I was left to try to figure out what else I could give them.

But then. . . it came to me. I knew they didn't have these. . . 

MINIONS! I mean hand-knitted, personalized Minions. Four of them. I thought of this idea about ten days before Christmas, so was in Minion hell for a while, just cranking them out. These guys appeared in the toe of each kid's stocking and were probably better-received by the adults than the kids. I don't know Minions from the bottom of my shoe, and thus was working from a very chintzy photo of a knitted Minion. (Not nearly as nice as mine.) I ended up going back to the original images from the movie. "Which Minion is this?" one of the grandkids asked. Which Minion? You mean they have names?

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. . . 

Mermaid tails!! These were knitted like small sleeping bags and were a hit, thank God, because I wasn't at all sure that: a) they'd know what they were, or b) they'd want anything to do with them. Preteens blow hot and cold. But they took to these and soon were hopping around in them as if in a very strange mermaid sack race. Caitlin has grown so rapidly that I really could've added another 4 inches to hers. From a very petite little girl, she's suddenly (overnight, it seems) as tall as many adults and will soon be looking down on her mother. Ahem. The happy-faces may look strange, but my daughter-in-law prefers not to have her kids' faces on a blog, and I understand completely. Suffice it to say their own faces are a lot prettier. 

Caitlin surrounded by her loot, or some of it, or at least the packaging it came in.  I gave her a makeup kit this year. Yikes.

My lovely daughter Shannon with her nutcracker, Boris. Took a long time to get him to stand on her shoulder like that.

Minions!!

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Scary Santa of the Century (if not the millennium)

There ain't no sanity clause

Have a!

No, really, this IS the worst Christmas song ever!

Gershwin plays Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (solo piano)

As is so often the case, I appear to have come full circle.

I was on an obsessive George-trek some time ago, when it was aborted by someone's astonishingly insensitive remarks. Seldom in my life have I ever had the rug so nastily pulled out from under me by someone who used to (I thought) support me.

He has set himself up as the head of a Spiritualist church in a tiny community on the Island, grabbing the crown and putting it on his own head like some small-minded backwater Napoleon. Since he got into all that, he seems to believe my own psychic experiences (which I used to feel safe to share with him) are, at best, suspect, and at worst, completely fraudulent.

It all just died away then, seemed to end forever, and there was nothing I could do about it but move on.

And then.

Love walked in.

I have had an on-again-off-again relationship with spiritualism for my whole life, but I approach it in a  slightly different way from the blue-haired dowagers sitting around the table with the wee-gee board. I don't believe in "calling" spirits or summoning them or telling them to do anything at all. I don't feel haunted, and I am not at all, one bit, afraid of being taken over by evil spirits. No. It has never been like that with me.

I have had any number of things happen to me which, if you classified them, would have to be filed under "psychic experiences". Many came soon after someone's passing, either someone I knew or knew of. Sometimes, what I perceived turned out to be of some comfort to those who were left behind. I never offered those insights, if that's what they were, unless the situation felt right, unless I sensed some receptiveness and thought it actually might do some good.

THAT is what this is all about, sharing your perceptions in order to help others, not hanging out a shingle or starting an insular little church and making yourself the head of it. And yet, the message I was receiving from this psychic despot was, no, Margaret, what you're receiving can't possibly be authentic. The main reason being, I "don't know enough about it", am a rank amateur who shouldn't even go near this subject, and need to go get an advanced degree from his little University of Evil.

Never mind, I'm getting carried away.

I do feel presences, cannot prove or disprove them, but who cares when it feels like this? This one, when he does come around, just sends me swooning, the vibe is so wonderful.  I ask myself, who am I to be perceiving this? Then again. Why not, when I am willing to leave that door open and see what happens, with neither expectation nor fear?

I have never "seen" George, but lots of people have. There are any number of curious anecdotes about his sudden, startling appearances. He never got to complete his work, had barely started on the mature works which surely would have grown in richness and complexity. But it was more than that. Towards the end of his short life, he was known to ask out loud, "Why can't I fall in love?" It was hard for him to be profoundly close to another human being. His brother Ira probably came closest. 

With this restlessness, this odd loneliness amidst the adulation of millions, then the sudden cutting down of a life not even yet in full flower - it's a combination which might, if you do believe in such things, lead a person to want to hang around on this earth even after they have "passed". 

The sightings aren't usually macabre or scary, though they can be startling. Mostly it's playful and a little wicked, the pranks of a little boy who never grew up. He can be walking down the street in that hurried head-down way, sitting at a player piano with his own music coming out of it, or in his workroom smiling and waving while his poor brother Ira nearly has a heart attack from terror.

When he walked back in recently, just completely spontaneously - I can't really describe the feeling. I don't have the words. An astonishing rush of rapture, a sweetness, a dearness, a - . I'll never get close, damn it - how I wish I could describe it! I can see why people loved him the way they did. 

I just listened to HIS version of Rhapsody in Blue and laughed all the way through it - yes, laughed. That little circular riff in the Andante, the three notes played over and over, sounds more like a slightly lopsided triangle when he plays it, the rhythm a little tipsy so that it becomes so much more quirkily wonderful.  But you can't write that kind of thing down.

People try to define genius in all sorts of different ways. "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" It's so simple! But no one did. And yet, and yet - works of genius appear to have always been there. It's a great paradox.

Gershwin knew he was a genius and spoke almost modestly of it, with that strange arrogant self-effacement that was his trademark. In fact, he had all the modesty of a brilliant eight-year-old who is constantly being told how smart he is. That level of smart is loneliness itself, because there is simply no one else on your level. And yet, for all his warmth and loveableness, he was unattainable, unavailable to people. That inaccessible core found expression only in the music. 

They're writing songs of love, but not for me.

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Meow Mix, Meow Mix, please deliver

Messing with your mind: Victorian Christmas cards

The Victorians had kind of an odd sense of what was festive. Large jellyfish suspended in mid-air seemed like an unusual choice. Not sure what the child (dressed very strangely) is doing. Or is he/she perhaps underwater?

Now, here is the true Spirit of Christmas: a child taking a savage beating from Father Christmas. Or maybe this is our good friend Belsnickel! Didn't he used to tie kids to trees?

The Victorians loved anthro - anthropo -anthropomor - oh screw it, birds that looked like people. To me, this is remeniscent of Hieronymus Bosch and his bird-headed demons in Hell, but at least these guys are decently dressed.

Cards with dead birds on them. These just kept showing up. I don't think you'd send a card like this now, except maybe to a cat.

This looks kind of like a human dung beetle. I hope he doesn't have to go to the bathroom any time soon.

For some reason this reminds me of Terry Gilliam.

Merry Molluscs to All! And a loaded New Year.

This one is handsome, if oddly Satanic. Maybe it's the hornlike ears.

Frogs! Frogs everywhere, falling on their backs, murdering each other, marching in frog bands.

It seems that terrified children have always been part of the Yuletide scene. We've covered this in a previous post: Belsnickel and his terrifying sidekick, Krampus, but I really think this is a little extreme for Christmas. And why is he driving a car?

Now this is my favorite. It would make me scream out loud! I am not sure how this (and it looks a bit like a coaster for a drink) would convey The Compliments of the Season, but it must have, or nobody would have sent it.

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I can't BELIEVE I used to watch this. . .

Does humiliation ever have an end? I used to watch this show slavishly, loved it, in fact, even while I had a sneaking feeling it was the worst dreck I'd ever seen. And now I know! My kids were teenagers then and made horrible fun of it, calling it "Buddy and the Buh". I've tried to watch bits of the thousand or so episodes that are now posted on YouTube, but I can't. Something always stops me. (Good sense? Sanity? Taste?) I do remember, for it was on Friday night, which is a magical time already (is it not?), drinking a gallon of peach cider and weeping because Real Life Should Be Like This, and isn't. I'd get pretty soused and pretty self-pitying. I no longer drink, at all, because I've since come to realize it plays crazy-eights with my brain (all that Irish DNA, no doubt). And I don't think I'd watch a show like this, of which even the introduction is smarmier than smarmy. But in a cringeworthy sort of way, and as a big chunk of Gorgonzola-like nostalgia, it's almost a little bit fun.

At the end of Season 2, ratings were beginning to slip. Even the most ardent 70-year-old woman was beginning to find the show too predictable. Also, I think people came to realize that Ron Perlman wasn't the handsome hunk they assumed he was (which see, below).

So. . . in a bold ratings grab, the producers decided to have Katherine and Vincent finally Come Together. This had a Thorn Birds effect and drove the final nail into the Nielsen coffin. (The Big Bang Theory recently did the same by having Amy and Sheldon have "coitus". The idea so sickens me that I haven't even watched the episode on my DVR.) From this point on, BATB plummeted in more than just ratings. Unresolved sexual tension between Katherine and Vincent (who had an awfully low libido for a beast) was the only thing holding the whole preposterous mess together. But this montage from the "sex scene" is the most ludicrous moment of all, accompanied by someone singing a syrupy version of the theme music.

Does any of this have anything to do with sex? You tell me. Sliding your hands together in slo-mo, then pulling them apart again, must be symbolic of Something Else. At least Rachel Ward and Richard Chamberlain (who is resolutely gay) got to run along the beach in The Thorn Birds before collapsing into bed. I do wonder how that whole rose-blooming/ball of flame stuff would play now, almost 30 years later: to me, it's kind of like that famous Monty Python montage with the collapsing tower.

Ay-ay-ay! The entire show self-destructs in one scene. Katherine then has Vincent's fuzzy little baby, which predictably gets lost in the dense labyrinth. Whether "above" or "below", I don't know or care. Then she is killed off and the show has to limp along without her. Linda Hamilton, following the trend of many an actor in a successful series, wanted out of her contract, certain her career would explode without it - followed by the inevitable return to obscurity and deep-dish unemployment.

This commentary by Christopher L. Bennett kind of sums the whole thing up:

Anyway, the second season ended with a cliffhanger where Vincent was lost in his rage and Catherine went in to try to help him, and in the third season premiere, that “help” evidently consists of the physical intimacy the show aggressively avoided until now. Although the avoidance is still intact, because their “love scene” is in the form of a hilariously cheesy video montage of blooming roses and explosions and hands clasping, with the song version of the main title theme playing over it. This cheesy montage has two effects: One, it gets Catherine pregnant, and two, it breaks their empathic bond so that Vincent can’t find her and save her when Gabriel abducts her (before she can tell Vincent about the child). But Gabriel learns of Vincent and wants to possess his child, keeping Catherine alive until she delivers and then killing her, with Vincent just too late to save her. The show remains intensely euphemistic about sex even in her dying words to Vincent: “We loved. There is a child.” Christopher L. Bennett

So Katherine had to TELL him they had done the nasty. Good grief: didn't Vincent even remember his one opportunity to make the beast? This show was even sadder than I remember.

P. S. TOTALLY looks like Will Ferrell's uglier brother.

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