UPDATE: Jazz, Exulansic, and the phenomenon of detransitioning

 

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 This entire post is a repeat from 2014, so you'd think it would be hopelessly out of date.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

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

TT Exulansic (gender-critical content)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But maybe it IS that big a deal.

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

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

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

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

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

God bless,
Robert John

EGG MASTER: horror in a tube

 

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

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

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

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

                                                           Egg? . . . . . UGH.

Oscar, Igor and Little Tich: degrees of separation

 

For several decades now I've been chasing down a Stravinsky album called Favorite Short Pieces. It had some gorgeously eccentric stuff on it and in my teens, when I was in the midst of a Stravinsky fit, I listened to it all the time.

All my internet sleuthing got me nowhere - if it existed at all, it was only on vinyl. But then today - a brainwave - if I got a playlist of the tracks on said album, couldn't I try to find the individual pieces on YouTube?

And by the holy - I did - I reassembled all seven works, not in any order or by any particular artists, but who cares, I have it all now. So how on earth does this connect to the video?  Ah.

My first awareness of Little Tich (who sounds like he has some sort of skin condition) came from reading the liner notes of Favorite Short Pieces. Stravinsky wrote them himself, in his usual dry, droll manner. He claimed that the second movement of his Four Etudes for String Quartet was inspired by "the manifold eccentric appearances of the celebrated English clown, Little Tich." 

And that was all that happened, until I began to read about Oscar Levant.

Stravinsky, Oscar Levant. Little Tich. . . hold on, these dissonances do relate. There was a great tidbit in the fascinating but painful-to-read bio of Levant, A Talent for Genius. Levant liked to hobnob with (some might say suck up to) musical geniuses such as Gershwin and Copland and Horowitz, hoping something would rub off. His encounter with Stravinsky was memorable. This is a long quote, but worth transcribing:

"One day Igor Stravinsky visited the Warner Bros. lot and dropped in on Oscar Levant during a break in the long workday. Wearing black tie and tails and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, Levant received the composer of Le Sacre du printemps in a quiet corner of the movie set. Levant greatly enjoyed the spirited, fiercely opinionated Russian. Between takes he had been reading a life of Ferruco Busoni, the Italian pianist and composer, so he knew that Stravinsky had met Busoni only once, despite the fact that they had lived just five miles from each other in Switzerland during the First World War.

"Why did you visit Busoni only once?" Levant asked Stravinsky.

"Because," replied the composer, bristling slightly, "he represented the immediate past and I hate the immediate past."

It's the kind of remark you like, but you can't quite determine why.

Anyway, about Little Tich. . . I was chopping my way through Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac - a fascinating and nearly unreadable book, the last fourth of which takes place in a series of mental institutions - and I came across the name again - I couldn't believe it! It was Little Tich!Not only hadn't I heard the Favorite Short Pieces album for over 40 years, I hadn't heard one mention of this creature and had come to think of him as chimeric, maybe a product of Stravinsky's fevered imagination.

I wish I could find the exact quote, but you're going to have to trust me that he did talk about Little Tich. I wish I remember exactly what he said: memoirs don't have an index and I've already chopped through enough of it.  I don't want to fall into the Levant memoirs again: the man had talent to burn, and he burned it. Not only that, the name-dropping is deafening. He seemed to have an almost pathological need to align himself with the "greats", even if it was only the likes of Frank Fay or Shirley Booth (or the nightmarish Al Jolson).

I just have to tell one more story - I shouldn't, and I know I already told it many posts ago. Levant was playing the sidekick in a movie calledHumoresque, starring the ferocious man-eating diva Joan Crawford. He noticed she always brought knitting on the set with her and worked at it furiously between takes. She regaled the cast with amusing stories about her obsession: oh, I knit at dinner parties, I knit on airplanes, I knit in restaurants, I. . . 

"Do you knit while you fuck?" Levant asked.

The two never became friends.

CODA. When I got up this morning, I thought: damn! I have to find that reference to Little Tich. You know, the one in Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac. I KNOW it's in there somewhere (probably near the beginning of the book). So I went page by page, and on page 31: JACKPOT!

This is one of his charming, hair-raising mental hospital anecdotes, particularly heartbreaking because he demonstrates the same eccentric, devastating wit that made him so famous:

I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that`s regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me.

There was one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name was Nan.

I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. One day she hauled off with all her might and slapped Nan`s face. Nan didn`t move; she didn`t hit back - some of them do.

Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are.

Oh yes.

CODA TO THE CODA. Poking around, you always find out more. I loved this little Stravinsky anecdote:

Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. This was very nearly a total disaster. I wrote this original post NINE YEARS AGO, then wanted to update and re-post it with a few new bits of information. In so doing, I deleted the entire post! It's only by some tricky miracle (I had already repeated the post in 2015) that I was able to retrieve this much of it. 

But there's more to it than that.  Little Tich, as it turns out, was not very lucky for me after all. A while ago I became fascinated with automata (automatons, I mean), elaborate clockwork figures representing people, animals, and whatever else, which were wildly popular in the Victorian era. Most of them are fascinatingly hideous, a classic example of the uncanny valley effect. I found tons of them on YouTube and began to post tiny excerpts, gifs I had taken from the originals, on my own channel.

I found one particularly macabre automaton of Little Tich, published a ten-second excerpt from it, and got a COPYRIGHT STRIKE from some outfit in France I've never heard of. It's hard to believe I'd be this seriously dinged for a few seconds of video, so it's possible it's the NAME of Little Tich which is copyrighted. Stranger things have happened.  Thus my channel is in danger of being terminated forever, with no chance of getting those several thousand videos back. Since I am now coming up to 10,000 subscribers after nine years of effort, I don't  want that to happen.

The only good part of it is that I found Favorite Short Pieces, whole and complete and in pristine sound condition, on YouTube. It's as great as I remembered, especially the miniature which is meant to represent Little Tich.

Which is right here, so you can listen to it NOW, this minute, and not have to wait nine years for it!

.

Plastic pups, inchworms, and marvelous mustangs: ride 'em, kids!

This plastic pup isn't up to the standards of OTHER plastic pups of the day: Gaylord (a basset hound who SLOWLY walked up the stairs) or Digger the Dog, built on a similar model but faster-moving. The sight of all these spastic plastic fake canines juddering along the street like so many rickety old card tables is quite bizarre. You can give it commands, which is pretty strange, given that you are commanding pieces of molded plastic jointed together. 

OK then, I wasn't going to do this, but here it is, GAYLORD, the more realistic fake dog who actually DID things. Not many things, but things. I wanted one of these, of course, but never got one. All I remember getting was a Dino the Dinosaur from The Flintstones, and I am not even sure it worked.

Digger the Dog was significant because it had a Mom who asked where her tot was going, and he answers in a nasal Queens voice, "A walk with Diggah, Mahm!" Sounds like a young Christopher Walken, who actually did do commercials back in the day. But that was way longer ago. I wonder sometimes what ever happened to these kids - I guess, they grew up and maybe even died. What a thought.

And since we're dealing with plastic toys, we can't leave out Inchworm, upon which you bounced up and down and hardly got anywhere. The theme song is pretty strange, because it seems to be, "Inchworm, GOD KNOWS/I take you with me everywhere I go/Inchworm, I'm telling you true/Inchworm, I love you!" God knows??

OK then, one thing is leading to another, and this one - I KNEW I wanted this one, because I would get on just about anything and pretend it was a horse. Marvel the Mustang has a very strange jingle: "No winding, no batteries", followed by a little girl saying, "What horse do?" Kind of a grammatical nightmare, but I guess it meant "What horse has batteries, after all?" Since I never had a Marvel, I 'd ride strange things. Once it was a stair railing outside a fundamentalist church, which drew a few stairs, oops, I mean stares. Once it was a sawhorse. And, I swear, I took the legs off a metal TV tray, climbed inside it, and pretended THAT was a horse.

But there's one more, Blaze the Galloping Horse, a knockoff of Marvel the Mustang. I wanted this one and never got it either. It was back to the TV trays.

CAT SLAPS SEAL

And the seal rolls over, just like that. . . 

Bone Music: "I can see clearly now"

In Soviet Russia, Forbidden Music Was Smuggled on X-Ray Records 

Music may transcend borders but, in an oppressive place like Soviet Russia, it was easier said than done. First, music had to be smuggled across borders and dispersed without its carriers getting caught. The morbid artifacts of this underground enterprise are now on display at an exhibition in Moscow called Bone Music.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a subculture of young music lovers devised a way to sneak forbidden music around Soviet Russia by writing it directly onto old X-ray films. Adorned with images of skulls and bones, the discs were given names like "ribs" and roentgenizdat, and held within their grooves the sounds of Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong. 

During Stalin's rule and for decades following World War II, the Communist Party clamped down on outside influences, particularly those associated with principles celebrated in the West. Music was a top concern for the regime, so entire genres and artists were banned. Blatnaya pesnya, or "criminal songs," depicted the dark side of Soviet life, and had no place in the Party's system. White Russian émigré's like Pyotr Leshchenko were seen as traitors for not returning to the motherland and their songs were subsequently outlawed. And then there were Western sounds—tantamount to propaganda. 

"Jazz and rock 'n' roll were obviously censored because they were Western," British musician Stephen Coates tells Creators. "But a big chunk, probably most of it, was Russian music that was forbidden." Coates recently helped revitalized roentgenizdat after discovering a circular X-ray at a flea market in Saint Petersburg. The musician asked his Russian friends what it was, but they had no clue what he'd found. The seller even acted shady when Coates inquired more about it, but he purchased it anyway, brought the disc back to London, and eventually discovered it played Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." "I was intrigued," he says, "and did more digging."

Coates found some information about the discs online and was eventually introduced to a Russian academic, who turned him onto The Golden Dog Gang, two young music lovers named Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin who secretly used a record duplication machine to etch songs by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and The Beatles onto discarded X-rays.

X-rays proved to be an suitable medium. They were cheaply and easily (albeit illegally) acquired from local hospitals that were required to throw out the flammable sheets. They took the groove relatively well, though nowhere near as well as vinyl—some X-ray discs apparently sound like listening to music through sand—and they were easy to fold into a shirt sleeve of pocket for a quick transaction. The X-rays were also stunningly beautiful. 

The Golden Dog Gang were caught selling the discs in 1950 and were thrown into the gulag until Stalin's death in 1953. When they got out, they got back to work, this time making more elaborately designed discs, until they were caught again and sent back to the prison for a few more years. Coates has since connected with some of the bootleggers, producing a documentary and book on the topic.   (From Vice.com)

💖VICTORIAN VALENTINES: "My Heart's Gift"💖

💗🧡💛HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!💚💙💜

THE BIRDS: they're stinking up Harry and Meghan's mansion!

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's £11m Montecito mansion is engulfed by foul smell that 'is like offal rotting in the sun' caused by bird refuge nearby

Harry and Meghan's £11million mansion is apparently engulfed by a foul smell leaving neighbours 'disgusted'

The duke and duchess' headache said to have been caused by the nearby Andrée Clark Bird Refugee

Foul smell is said to have hit Montecito, also home to Oprah Winfrey, Orlando Bloom and Ellen DeGeneres

Harry and Meghan have have to contend with odour issues in the past, including a nearby cannabis base

By JACK WRIGHT FOR MAILONLINE

Harry and Meghan’s £11million California mansion is apparently engulfed by a foul smell leaving neighbours ‘disgusted’, it has emerged.

The duke and duchess’ headache is said to have been caused by the nearby Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, a 42-acre saltwater marsh. The area is one of the largest wildlife refuges in Santa Barbara and the water can become ‘stagnant’ leading to an odour.

The foul stink is said to have hit the area in Montecito, which is also home to Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry.

A local resident told the Mirror: ‘It smells like offal that has been rotting in the sun. It makes my stomach churn. I’ve seen lots of homeowners closing their windows when it wafts over.’

Local officials say the stench could last as long as the autumn, when improvements are in the pipeline. Cameron Benson, clean water manager for the City of Santa Barbara, said: ‘Water can become stagnant there. The odour issues are sporadic and sometimes they are worse in some conditions.’

Harry and Meghan have had to contend with odour issues in the past. Last year, it was reported the royals were living near a legal cannabis factory base in Santa Barbara.

The couple’s mansion is just up the road from the 20 large greenhouses full of the plants — leaving the luxury suburb reeking. Neighbours made a string of complaints, sparking the company to install new ‘odour control systems’.

Gregory Gandrud told the Sunday Mirror: ‘The stink was getting stronger and heading their way. I was driving along the freeway and was hit hard by the smell. It doesn’t make you high but it’s not what you want driving at 70mph.

‘I had to pull over. It made me completely lose my train of thought. Lots of people here are suffering.’

Harry and Meghan’s home — which has a sauna, library, and cinema — is surrounded by celebrity neighbours, most prominently Oprah, to whom they made a series of bombshell allegations about the Royal Family last year.

Notably, the couple’s mansion is almost home to the bench Meghan immortalised in her 2021 children’s book The Bench.

It comes as the couple have yet to publicly congratulate the Queen as she celebrates her Platinum Jubilee this year.

The couple have remained silent, despite news that Camilla will become Queen Consort when Charles is eventually made King.

They recently confirmed that ‘sources’ will no longer speak for them, and they will only comment when they wish to through their official press team. Despite the lack of public response, Harry is understood to have been enjoying video calls with his father over the past few weeks. He is expected to return to the UK for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

However, it is thought he will not be accompanied by Meghan, Archie or Lilibet amid a row over the family’s security arrangements.

RETROFUTURISM: one of my favorite things

I love how people in the past predicted the future. The future that is now OUR past. For some reason, this almost always involved cooking and kitchens where everything was automatic and worked by itself. It never happened. And who would keep cleaning and refilling those food dispensers? (Staff?) And how come we never hear about "infra-red" cooking any more? Was it just too Jetsons to be practical?

Giant Tortoises at Full Speed

"EVERYBODY!!!!"

Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee: send her victorious!

Since I write so many negative things about "those other royals" (or EX-royals, though they continue to cling to the tatters of their former status), I felt it was only right to acknowledge a feat never equalled in human history - a 70-year-long, unbroken reign by a world power. Queen Elizabeth II was such a part of my childhood and the fabric of Canadian identity that she was embedded in our perception of reality. We sang God Save the Queen at school recitals. A portrait of Her Majesty was hung on every classroom wall. Even the name of my elementary school was Queen Elizabeth II.

Whatever you think of the monarchy, the flaky Charles, the severe Camilla, the idiotic Andrew and the (I hate the word, but here goes) lunatic Harry, Elizabeth II has always gone about her life's work with dignity and dedication, and somehow kept her head above the squalid mess her beloved family has inflicted on her. I am proud of her, I truly am, and maybe never felt it fully until this moment.

Having endured a global pandemic, endless undeserved scandals, and losing her dear husband, all in the space of the past couple of years, she is still a rock, still somehow staying on the path and serving until the end. Today marks the date she first took the throne, an incredible 70 years ago, and yesterday she formally acknowledged Camilla, once the reviled "other woman" whom everyone thought broke up Charles and Diana's immortal romance, as the Queen Consort when Charles becomes King. 

A gracious Queen, indeed. 

Dear Prince Harry (a message from The Universe)

 

You're better OUT, Harry. NOW.

The world according to Prince Harry! The Duke of Sussex's tips for achieving 'mental fitness'

 

The world according to Prince Harry! The Duke of Sussex's tips for achieving 'mental fitness' (from the Daily Mail)

AIM FOR THE PINNACLE OF MENTAL FITNESS: 'Mental fitness is the pinnacle, it's what you're aiming for. The road towards that can be really bumpy... it's called inner "work" for a reason.'  

INNER WORK: 'With everything else around you, the only way you can combat [burnout] and build resilience for the outside world and your entire environment is the inner work... Outer work becomes so much easier when you get to grips with the inner work... If everybody [had time] to do [inner work], the shift in global consciousness and awareness would be enormous, it would be vast.'

DAILY MEDITATION: 'I know that I need to meditate every day... Put it [into your daily routine] like brushing your teeth every morning... You need to put it into your day diary as a habit otherwise it's the first thing that drops away from your busy day.' 

DAILY ME TIME: 'I have now put in about half an hour, 45 minutes in the morning when one kid has gone to school and the other is having a nap, there's a break in our program. It's like, right, it's either for a workout, take the dog for a walk, get out in nature, maybe meditate. I would hope that everybody would be able to do that.'

LISTEN TO LESSONS FROM THE UNIVERSE: 'Life is about learning and if you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, and even your 50s and you think you've got it sorted then bad stuff is going to happen. But when bad thing happen I think, there's a lesson here, I'm being schooled by the universe, there is something for me to learn.'

TURN NEGATIVES INTO POSITIVES: 'Every single bad thing - or the things you perceive to be bad - that happen actually can be good.' 

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH MENTAL COACHES: 'You need to have someone there who is not only coaching you through life but challenging your perspective. That's what I ask [my mental coach] for on a weekly basis... Professional help, friends, family, anyone can help you in that coaching process [and give you] the ability to be able to find somebody else to throw ideas off or feelings or thoughts.'

WIPE YOUR MENTAL WINDSCREEN: 'Have different points of views in your life and friends who will not worry about pushing back on things you say or feel to be able to encourage you to be able to see it more clearly. I view that as trying to surround myself with people who will happily wash [my mental] windscreen and clear those filters... There is an endless filter system of what you think is happening.'

CREATE A MENTAL TOOL BOX: 'I know how my nervous system is going to react to certain situations that are out of my control, [so I think], what have I got in my tool box? What tools can help me deal with this?'

HONE YOUR MENTAL SUPERPOWER: 'Life is about discovery. In that discovery you are going to find things that you don't like, you're going to find things that make you uncomfortable, that are constantly pushing back on you but as you work your way around those things, all of a sudden the stresses, the chaos, and all of the things that were working against you in your life, be it private life, be it work life... all of the things getting in your way either fall away or you visualize them and are able to turn a negative into a positive and therefore make those things work for you. It almost feels like a superpower.'

BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. I was going to counter each of these statements of warmed-over New Age bafflegab with my editorial comments, but just found it wasn't worth wasting my precious time. Anyone with a brain can see this is very old stuff, the naive blather you used to hear decades ago at expensive corporate retreats where the guru sets up a sweat lodge and kills people. Or makes them drink the Koolaid? 

I can't see this as anything but the Meghan effect, though I think he was a ditzy dolt long before that. Prince Andrew is equally doltish and inbred, but until recently . . . Oh, never mind. At any rate, the pre-Meghan Harry wasn't too fussy about his choice of partywear, was he? And has he ever properly apologized for this? If he did, he'd be liable, and that is NOT a good thing. His lawyers have put tape over his mouth for that one. 

At first I honestly thought the Daily Mail piece was parody, and if you have even the vestiges of a critical mind, you'll probably find it hilarious. Oh, just take an hour off in your busy schedule. Look at me, folks! I do it! I'm so disciplined that I never miss my "me time", though believe me, it's REALLY HARD with all those servants to order around (not to mention deciding which of the sixteen bathrooms I'll use today - Meghan insists I take them in rotation, so people won't say we never use them). I just have to squeeze in all this rocking back and forth with my eyes shut during my all-day-long child care marathons. (Well, maybe he's right. Every nanny they ever hired quit after a week). I have so many worlds to save! Oops, now that I'm with Meghan, she has made the world into ONE BIG THING that we'll BOTH save just by blathering platitudes that were dated forty years ago, back when New Age philosophy sputtered out due to its irrelevance and utter absurdity. (But he doesn't know those words, as they happen to have more than one syllable.)

The infamous Nazi shot has more than one version. The one I always see on royal reporting channels  has two of his partying "mates" in the background - one clearly wearing a white KKK costume with hood, and the other in Al Jolson-style blackface. Then there are his "Paki" remarks, and likely worse - those are just the ones that were reported. If THIS guy is responsible for saving the world, I'd say we're doomed.

THE KICKER. Here are just a few comments posted on Twitter and other social media platforms, criticing Harry's inane statements about "mental health":

It's always me-me time with Prince Harry. Real people have to work for a living...' wrote Richard James.

'Sorry, just don't take him seriously any more,' wrote one user.

'I know he's qualified to talk about being mentally unstable because that's all he does but what does he know about having a job or balance between the two. Exploiting him is not kind,' said another.

'OMG is this a sick joke?.…..Haz doesn't actually know what the word work means!' wrote Carrol McDonald.

'This is a man who has more troubles than those he thinks he has. He needs professional help not being put on a platform & showcased as if he's in recovery,' said Tessa Cate.

'It's really difficult to take mental health advice from a 40 year old who in the middle of a pandemic was complaining on Oprah that he only had his mom's millions to rely on because dad cut him off. This is all during people losing their livelihoods,' explained another Twitter poster.

KICKER TO THE KICKER! I found this bizarre statement on the Daily Mail website under "comments". The article was about the Queen's official announcement that Camilla will become Queen Consort when Charles takes the throne. Harry and Meghan have NOT responded publicly to this historic announcement, but THIS guy did! 

The ENTIRE world loves you so much Harry, handsomest Prince of the Earth. Thank you for being such a chivalrous hero UNRELENTINGLY committed to peace, love and non-violent communication. You are our cosmic light and salvation. Princess Meghan is the strength of your life and ours. Long live Gods brightest angels. #GenZ4Harry #VegansSupportMeghan

OK THEN. . . 

🤍SLAVIC TONGUES: Russian guys talking backwards🤍

Obscure excerpt from an even more obscure linguistic study of "Slavic" language sounds. I left out the sound track and the horrible xrays of moving skulls and tongues.

FRIDA KAHLO: gleefully dabbling

 

"Thus, while her husband paints with large brushes on a huge wall surface, his wife, herself a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress in"

😽MUSICAL KITTY MEOWS in TUNE!

This is why cute cat videos are still a "thing" on the internet.

🌟Are these the first movies? 3D IMAGES FROM 1800s

These are stereoscopic photographs, double images taken from slightly different perspectives, which when viewed through a stereoscope look eerily 3D. When made into gifs, they look like there's an earthquake going on, but the effect is still strangely beautiful.

George Gershwin meets the Lovely and Charming Mrs. Rivera (a. k. a. Frida Kahlo)

 

Jan. 23, 1936
One Thirty-Two East Seventy-Second Street
New York

Dear Elizabeth -
After much patient waiting I finally was rewarded with an epistle (a very well typed epistle I may add) from you. I find its a very good idea to write letters so seldomly as it works up a been desire, almost amounting to pain in the receiving person, and its a swell idea unless of course the person happens to die waiting.

It's nice that things whizz for you out where beauties play my music. On the 9th February I'm playing the same frogs with the Washington Sym. - your mother has asked If she could give me a party in Wash. on that evening and I answered a quick "yes". I wish you were there.

Ira's Follies opens in town next week & it reminds me of a year ago when you had that lovely dress on & we went to the opening of 8:40.

Hope now you are in the pink, physically, mentally & professionally & affectionately & that you'll write soon to

George

& talents go to earn an honest dollar. When life whizzes by, one is really living, so drink it in, honey.

The Mexican trip was fun & educational. No, I didn't fight with Eddie or even the Doc. We all got along 'splendid'. Much sightseeing, travelling for 10 days at an average height of about 7500 ft., seeing all the churches (but no synagogues) looking, but in vain, for the Mexican beauties one hears about, listening to the music but finding difficult to get anyone to play anything away from 6/8 time. Spent a great deal of time with charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera. Made color pencil portraits of them both.

Here I am back in old New York again, freezing cold. It's 10 above zero today. Night before last I played in Philly with the Philadelphia Symphony, the concerto & a suite from Porgy. It was a major thrill to hear that band

Though it's pretty easy to find samples of GG's handwriting, the most interesting thing about these samples is his reference to meeting "charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera", the latter now celebrated as an artistic genius in her own right by her real name, Frida Kahlo.

I have to confess that some of this was a little hard to transcribe. That reference to "playing the same frogs" must, surely, be "songs", unless one of the songs was "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal". I am not sure who Elizabeth is, or was, and the Mexican letter consists of only page 2 and 3. What interests me - and maybe this was as casual then as an email, who knows - is how open he is about handwriting/answering letters from interested people and "fans". It must have been a thrill to get a handwritten note, not just from a secretary but from the great man himself.

By the way, he refers to playing with the Washington Symphony on February 9. No coincidence, is it, that the date happens to be my birthday?

Hello, George: My Gershquest continues

What can you say about a piece of music you've fallen wildly in love with? Having barely recovered from discovering the Makoto Ozone version of Rhapsody in Blue (and yes, his name really is Ozone), I now encounter one of the most rapturous, madly life-loving things I've heard in a long time. Or ever. As my Gershquest continues, now taking me through the rather lumpy and formerly scandalous Peyser biography, his music deepens and takes on new dimensions for me. I want to SING his stuff, I want to be draped across a piano in a smoky room. Would I have wanted to know GG? Who wouldn't want to know a genius?

When I try to take apart and figure out this strange phenomenon of the early 20th century, I find a lot of interlocking puzzles in three dimensions. In his mad social circle of drunken and underaccomplished codependents, he was more addictive than all the champagne in the world. He seemed glued to the piano at these events, or maybe his body grew up out of it, centaurlike. One of the most oft-quoted descriptions of GG's seductive charm came from somebody named Sam Behrman (who also wrote an agonizing description of GG's horrendous last days): "I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

This is as good a description of an addictive drug as I have ever seen, but it is also charged with an erotic longing that dares not speak its name. "Was Gershwin gay?" is still a favorite parlour game among musicologists, as if such a complex man could not be both gay and straight at the same time (which I believe he was: he was simply too beautifully androgynous and dressed too impeccably to be more than 75% straight). And he was a good dancer. My God. I begin to think I am writing about a musical Harold Lloyd.

But this piece, this Cuban overture which was largely overlooked when he wrote it: at first listening you might think, that's not Gershwin. It's just a standard rumba, Latin music writ large. But give it another chance, and another, and you'll hear the dissonances, the bluesiness, the chord progressions which could only be early 20th century (Petrushka, anyone?). He was in with those big guys, the elite composers, but that isn't what stands out here. It's the sheer heat of it, not something you expect from an urban dandy with seventeen summer suits who seldom peels himself away from the piano. Latin music informed a lot of his stuff, including the Rhapsody, but here he wades right in and is consumed. And when I listen to this, I feel an indescribable ecstasy, I want to scream with it! Largely overlooked? Were they crazy? Is everybody NUTS?

Kay Swift, one of GG's longsuffering sort-of-girl-friend-non-fiancee-longtime-lovers, believed Cuban Overture was "Gershwin's finest orchestral composition and also his sexiest. But it went all but unnoticed then, and it has never caught on." I don't know about that. The book I'm quoting from was written in 2009. When you look up the piece on YouTube, there are seemingly dozens of versions, which I have combed through to find (I think) the best. As happens to most artists, Gershwin was a victim of his own success, and once Rhapsody in Blue had everyone in thrall, they didn't really want to hear anything else.

I haven't even begun to probe the enigmatic miracle of that unit, Georgeandira, surely the most codependent songwriting team ever. I once did a line-by-line analysis of the seemingly-simple The Man I Love, a microcosm of a song that would bookend nicely with The Man That Got Away (tune by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira). Don't ever think you can do this stuff, because you can't. "The winds blow colder/Suddenly you're older." That's dangerous. It leaps on you like the predatory animal a great song can be. Ira was George's inverse, his shadow, his verbal self. It worked, until that great prismatic glass splintered into shards, and the universe had to do without him.

I am making my way through a long essay from a medical journal about George Gershwin's psychoanalysis and his death from an agonizing undiagnosed brain tumor. The psychoanalyst was a charlatan and a sadist who enjoyed dangling people and messing with their minds. He had sex with Kay Swift during their appointments, convincing her it was a necessary part of the treatment. Incredibly, this psychiatric fiend was convinced, and convinced everyone else, that blinding headaches, hallucinations, falling down, being unable to eat or play the piano, and having all manner of bizarre behavioural seizures was merely the result of "hysteria". For one thing, it bollixes my mind that a man could be diagnosed with hysteria - I thought that it simply didn't happen. But the real horror of it is, they killed George with neglect. By the time the medical community came to the conclusion it should have drawn years before, he was dead. But I just had this thought now - this second - George played into it too, because for all his fiery genius, he was paradoxically a don't-make-waves sort of person, almost passive, so eager to be liked that he buried his anger and went along with whatever attitude prevailed. OK, so it's psychosomatic. Now what?

But that's for another post.