My friend, Bohdan: the man who taught me music

This is a brief clip of my beloved violin teacher Bohdan Siedlecki performing at an event in Port Coquitlam. Below is a comment I left  on Bohdan's Facebook page when I read the message from his sister  that he had passed. I did get to  see him one last time last October, nearly a year ago, and I am so glad the last thing I did  was give him a big hug and tell him I loved him!

I was so sad to hear that our dear friend Bohdan has passed. I met him in 1994 when I had a huge project in mind: I wanted to learn to play the violin at age 40. I had tried to learn the instrument as a child, and it completely defeated me, so I needed to do this for myself (and had a lot of doubt that I would be able to do it!) From the very first lesson, he was so patient with me, with such a good sense of humour and such warmth that he immediately put me at ease. I was able to relax and really enjoy music lessons for the first time. We were student and teacher for seven years, and he helped me reach my goal of being able to play proficiently enough to allow other people to hear it! I enjoyed adding to the music program at my church, and was able to perform at Eagle Ridge Hospital with a choral group. Bohdan also became a kind of spiritual mentor for me during a very difficult time in my life.  Last October I was thinking about him and looked on his Facebook page, then reached out to him. We got together at his place and talked over old times, and it was wonderful to see him again, though of course we had both changed a lot (I’m 71 now and too arthritic to play anymore, but I still have my violin!). I had no idea that this would be the last time I would see him, but I am so  glad that I was able to give him a big hug. I found this photo from my first recital, and you can see how happy we both were!

Of course, there is much more to the story than that. Last October I reached out to him  via Facebook, and we got together for what would  turn out to be the last time. We weren't  the same people, of course - both of us had a lot more wear on us, physically and every other way. But we had also come to realize what really matters in life. Reflecting on that visit, I realize now that he wasn't well at all, but as usual was making light of it and asking after my wellbeing. 

To me, the hardest part of getting old is losing friends. People start to die, and since I was the youngest in my family by 13 years, I have naturally gravitated towards people older than me. With each passing year, there is another loss - cancer, stroke, heart attack, even suicide. It's hard to be the one left standing, which is the penalty for being the youngest, I guess. The bittersweet nature of life is not lost on me now, with my grandchildren old enough to vote (and drink, and do all those other grownup things). But they too will move through the life cycle, with all the richness it can bring, along with the inevitable ache of loss. 

GUTTED: My surgical journey to hell and (mostly) back

 

I’ve been reluctant to write in any detail about the medical “issues” I have endured over the past 8 months or so (actually, it goes back to November – so it’s more like 10 months). I swear I didn’t realize something was seriously wrong until a week or so after Halloween, when I suddenly felt an agonizing pain in my lower abdomen on the right side. From everything I have ever heard about appendicitis, I assumed that was what it was, so I finally caved and went in to Emergency, knowing it would be an almost-worse ordeal.

And it was. THREE HOURS LATER, after sitting there twisting and writhing in agony (hey, I could have done that at home!), the hospital staff finally got around to me – took some blood, poked around, then suddenly wanted to do a CT scan. This surprised me, as you usually have to wait months for one. 

Then suddenly, things changed.

A nurse came up to me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very serious voice said, “Margaret, you have an infection.” Infection? Of what kind, and how? I’d never heard of an infection brewing in an otherwise healthy bowel.

But no, my bowel wasn’t healthy at all, or at least it didn’t look good on the scan. They let me have a copy of the report, and they shouldn’t have. It was mostly technical gobbledygook, but I did see one word that jumped out at me in 3D: MALIGNANCY.

What it said was, “underlying malignancy must be ruled out”. Ruled out?

They kept me overnight, another shock, and then I was fast-tracked for all sorts of things. Almost right away, I saw a gastroenterologist, then had  an “emergency colonoscopy”, which was messy, agonizing and frightening (nothing like the previous ones I'd had). I seemed to be bleeding from somewhere deep inside. Then, on Christmas Day (Christmas Day?), I got a phone call giving me a date for another CT scan. The scan took place on New Years’ Eve. Needless to say, the festive season wasn’t very festive, and I remember feeling rotten on Christmas Day and trying to act normal, so as not to bring the whole family down. 

Then came the surgery. Jesus God, the surgery! I can’t or won’t go into all the details, because half the time I didn’t even know what was going on or what was happening to me. This upset my kids, who seemed to think I was deliberately withholding information from them. But I was on so  many painkillers that I was barely coherent. They had apparently removed about a quarter of my colon and reconfigured my entire gut, but fortunately, since it was done laparoscopically, all I had were two little incisions held together with surgical glue. 

Quite  literally, I was glued together.

The surgeon initially told me I’d  be in the hospital 2 to 5 days. Instead it was nearly 2 weeks. I had no bowel control. The pain meds didn’t work. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I threw up constantly, even if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to use a walker just to get to the bathroom, and I usually didn't make it in time.

It was a hospital stay, in other words, but going home was worse in some ways. I had to camp downstairs on the pullout bed – couldn't do stairs, could not even get to the bathroom under my own steam. Having to use a walker made me believe I was now officially in Old Ladyhood. Or was it worse than that?

Since then it’s been one test, one specialist, one procedure after another. I thought I’d be out of the woods by now, but no. The surgeon revealed that had they not removed the diseased tissue, it almost certainly would have turned cancerous (that “underlying malignancy”) within  a year. I really didn’t feel much better, and had it not been for uplifting visits from my grandchildren (bearing flowers, handmade cards and even Purdy’s chocolates), I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. Like angels, they descended on the house with cheery messages, sitting on the pullout bed and gossiping and just being kids. I wanted to join them, as they were clearly in  the land of the living.

But much of the time I felt suicidal, I really did, and my poor 80-year-old husband had to wait on me hand and foot, which with his own mobility problems he could barely manage. I wasn’t cheerful. I kept saying unacceptable things like, “I think I’m going to DIE!” This went on for weeks and weeks. At a followup appointment, the surgeon told me that full recovery might take six months to a year.

Since then, this has actually come to be good news, giving me more time to feel rotten without worrying that I might never recover.

There were so many low points and bizarre happenings. “They” found a spot on my lung during a supposedly routine x-ray, which made me wonder if I had somehow become tubercular. They did more blood tests, and kept finding more and more things wrong.

The spot on my lung was just the beginning. My kidneys were out of whack, there was something wrong with my thyroid gland, and I had to see a hematologist (blood  doctor? Much as I love Dracula, this was not good news.) I had an ultrasound, both kidneys and thyroid, leaving me bruised and worried. I had to wonder: am I really that messed up, or is all this being done out of an abundance of caution (or because I’m 71)?

Bits of traumatic memory from the hospital keep repeating in my head, and in my dreams: being rushed down a dark hallway on a gurney; being told I needed an emergency blood transfusion (!); having a nurse lean over me and saying, “Let’s hope this is the turning point.” Having a disgusting nasal tube shoved down into my stomach for days on end, so my intestines could have a "nice rest".Then another medical person came in and talked to me about my lung, but it made no sense to me at all. My LUNG?

But the worst of the worst of the worst was when they showed me how to use a colostomy bag. Yes. It got that bad.

I have never had serious  surgery in my life, and am wondering, if I need to go through all this again, if it might be better if I just died. I have slowly gotten more  and more of myself back, but since I already had severe arthritis in my spine and hip (on the right side, of course, where the surgery took place), osteoporosis, and – worst of all – sciatica, I'm still not exactly comfortable in my own skin. And lying flat on my back for weeks on end put pressure on the worst possible place, thus activating these various sources of agony as never before.

So where am I now? I wasn’t going to “share” much of this, as nothing is more tiresome than an old person going on and on about their surgical nightmares. But for God’s sake, why do I have this ability to write (and hey, if I didn’t think I wrote well, why would I have devoted my life to it?) – is it just  for entertainment, or is it there to save my life in a while ‘nother way?

So this is a more detailed account, which I do not think anyone will be interested in reading anyway. Why do I bother? I”ve been carrying all this around for eight months, and trying to minimize the ordeal for the sake of my worried family. I’m no longer screaming at my poor  husband, and he’s no longer having to carry trays of food to me or help me out of bed so I can use the walker. I no longer need to wear Depends so I won’t crap all over myself. But how am I spiritually? Emotionally?

Changed, changed utterly, as Yeats used to say. I don’t know where I am, these days, as suddenly everything is "different". I lost ten pounds during this whole ordeal, and – realizing if I got sick again my weight might plummet dangerously – I set myself the task of gaining it back. THAT was another weird thing in itself. All my life I have fought my weight, thinking I was obese at 130 pounds (and brainwashed by a culture that was pre-body-positivity and horribly obsessed with being thin). I had to force myself to eat, because nausea was one of the most  debilitating things I was facing. And I had to flip everything over, and everything I had tried to do for my entire life had to be reversed so that I could GAIN weight. No, HAVE the candy! HAVE the chips! Whatever would make me fatter. (As my idol Weird Al would say: "Eat it! Just eat it!")

It was Bizarro-land, in so  many ways, a chronically-well person having to live in the Land of the Sick. Though I appear to have dodged the cancer bullet, there are no guarantees, given how my kidneys, thyroid and blood seem to still be out of whack. And if cancer WAS brewing in my colon, it could recur, and this  time I really WOULD need the colostomy bag. Why else would they have shown me how to use it?

I don’t want to edit this or add clever pictures or whatever I usually do. I probably shouldn’t post it at all, but I am beginning to see why old people talk about their medical ordeals. They’re lonely, and they’re scared, and they wonder what sort of macabre death scene they may be heading towards.

One of the worst things about getting old, for me, has been watching as my most cherished loved ones are taken from me, one by one. FOUR close friends died in the space of two years: cancer, stroke, suicide. My sister-in-law, always in the full bloom of health, died horribly of cancer and was down to 80 pounds at the end. I will never see these people again, and I can’t just run out and “make new friends”. It was hard enough feeding and nurturing these relationships over decades, but trying to start all over again seems impossible.

What keeps me going now is my spirituality, but it is nothing like what I experienced before. My "god" is the life force itself, manifested by nature in all its multifaceted glory, particularly in the form of birds. Not just the backyard variety, but in tiny ducklings peeping and cheeping, Canada geese hissing at me, and a glorious blue heron, its enormous wingspan owning the sky. All of which I saw just this afternoon. By the way, Sky Daddy, as he is sometimes called, is no longer my guiding force, and any thought of attending a church makes me shudder. I’ll be there soon enough at my memorial service.

And, by the way, as I lay flat on my back on the pullout bed, I planned my memorial down to the location (the dock at Burnaby Lake, where the birds are at their most sublime) and the songs I wanted (three of Bob Dylan's spirituals: Death is  Not the End, Every Grain of Sand, and I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You). At one point, half in a fever dream, I became convinced no one cared about me, nor had anyone ever cared about me in any meaningful way at all. This anguish just came up out of nowhere and overwhelmed me. And at  one point I wrote  a suicide note before tearing it up, not wanting to upset the family.

I wish I could  share better news, and today went OK, so if today goes OK, I have to be content with that.  And that’s about it, that’s the report to date. I can coast a bit  now, until I have more surgery (thyroid biopsy!) in October. Then the hemotologist, no doubt wrapped in a Dracula cape like Bela Lugosi.

Can I breathe now? I’d better keep  going, and not look  back – because something might be gaining on me.

Dated, Demented, Dead: what became of my literary heroes

As usual, I was looking for something else. 

I like to go on Amazon  and order books by the pound (a nice thickie for bedtime reading – unlike so many people who  claim to fall asleep to dull documentaries on YouTube, I still read for the same reason). But it can’t just be any book. I like biographies because they’re generally over 500 pages, and generally not too traumatic. 

There are exceptions. I just trudged through two extremely thick books on my latest "furia", Toulouse-Lautrec: an excruciatingly-detailed bio by Julia Frey, and a novel “based on” his life (but only just) which stretched the Lautrec myth past the snapping point. The novel spent 50 pages dragging out Henri’s horrible death from alcohol and syphilis, and the Frey bio did the opposite and just chopped it all off when he took his last breath. Reeling, I came out the other side of these two (both of them, ultimately, hard to get through), looking for another thickie, and maybe an easier-to-digest one.  

I ended up ordering a new-ish memoir by Barbra Streisand called, of course, My Name is Barbra. It clocks in at nearly a thousand pages, so I just had to have it. But in that labyrinthine way one thing leads to another, I ended up in a totally different place.

For some reason, I got thinking about the authors I used to enjoy eons ago, back in the ‘70s when I wasn’t so interested in bulk. Then I had the thought: what ever happened to Erica Jong? You know, THAT Erica Jong, the one who wrote deliciously dirty books that sold a zillion copies. I did read most of them and found them quite trashy, but “in a good way” (as they say). I liked how she liked men: she loved their bodies in an unabashed, sybaritic way, no holds barred. So I Wikipedia’d her, and discovered she is now 83 years old, suffering from dementia, and living in a nursing home. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast recently published a Mommie Dearest-style expose called How to Lose your Mother. 

Harsh. 

But oh. 83, dementia, nursing home? The last time I saw an interview with Jong, she was in a state of faded glory, her low-cut gown displaying a very wrinkled cleavage. Still playing the bestselling sexpot author at 65. The fame and glamour and all the rest of it did NOT protect her, not from the indignities of age or the acid vitriol of a memoir written by a bitter, disgruntled daughter.

I won’t read the Jong-Fast memoir, because I won't do that to myself before bed -  but while nosing around on Amazon I discovered something pretty hilarious. There it was, a 50^th Anniversary Edition of Jong’s so-called groundbreaking sex-fest, Fear of Flying. The original novel was published and made a huge splash in 1973. But this 50^th Anniversary Edition was published in. . . 2003. I had to look twice, then three times, but I was right the  first time. 30 years had somehow magically been transformed into 50. 

I thought I MUST have read it wrong, but no, all the reviews were from the same time  period. So somehow poor Erica’s masterpiece turned 50 when it was actually barely 30. Did they want to get all those accolades in before Jong was too old to enjoy it (or even be aware of it)? Or before the public completely forgot about her?

I don’t know how I got onto the next one, maybe a “whatever happened to” thing, but I started thinking about the male equivalent to Jong, Tom Robbins. Like Jong, his books were full of sex and whimsy. I remember reading his first, pre-famous novel,   Another Roadside Attraction (in which a hippie couple somehow attain the body of Christ from the basement of the Vatican, and make it the star attraction of their roadside zoo) and his first big bestseller, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. From what I remember, Cowgirls was pretty excruciating even then – the main character being Sissy Hankshaw, a tall, lovely young girl with the perfectly sterile looks of a fashion model, and (inexplicably) thumbs the size of a standard rural mailbox. It has been a long time since I read it, but I do remember there was a spiritual guru living on the hill, a Chinese guy they called – the Chink. And there’s a hideously stereotyped gay interior decorator called Davy who swishes around for hundreds of pages. And those cowgirls, my goodness – aren’t they hot to trot? They only have one thing on their minds, and it sure ain’t the cows!

The movie version of Cowgirls was even worse: just an excruciating ordeal, with Uma Thurman trying to act with massive prosthetic thumbs strapped to her hands. The creakily dated novel was made into an embarrassingly dated film, fortunately soon forgotten.  By that time Robbins was basically writing the same story over and over again, sexy, whimsical, but kind of dumb. He did attempt a memoir which I could not get through at all. It was whimsical in a forced kind of way, and ultimately, simply dull. 

So what ever happened to - ? I looked it up, and discovered that he died on my last birthday at the age of 92. 

That means he was too old to be a hippie, or even a post-war baby. He was a Depression-era baby, like William Shatner, and immensely old. Then – dead.

That’s what happens next. 

But these two wildly-popular authors, no matter how celebrated in their day, just got old along with the rest of us, went crazy, lost their clever literary brains (or their relevance), then expired, or at least left the known world. Kind of sad, but what does it say about me? I don’t want to live to be 92, and at this point I don’t even want to make it to 83, not if I’m holed up in a sanatorium with the rest of the dementia patients. Given the state of my health right now, I am haunted by the feeling I won’t even make it to my next birthday. And that day (February 9) would be the first anniversary of the death of Tom Robbins.  Appropriate? Or, like all these novels that made such a splash and were seen as so daring - just irrelevant and kind of dumb? 

POSTSCRIPT. But there’s this! I am slavishly devoted to anything to do with the Beatles, and every time I see clips on YouTube of their early performances, they show them in their first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My tenth birthday! Like a brilliant flashbulb, the performance left an indelible and radiant impression on my ten-year-old  brain, and it's still glowing even as we speak. 

A good day to be born! But, I suppose, just as good a day to die.  

Don't get me started: AbuseTube, Part 496

 

And let’s not get started on YouTube. I nearly had my channel terminated because they said I was selling drugs. I found an unusual wild mushroom in my back yard, and decided to do a video on it. That’s all. Then it was immediately taken down, with a severe warning that I had “violated community standards re: sale of controlled substances online”. So my channel, which features mainly birdwatching and old commercials, was suddenly a terrible threat to public safety. I had no idea I was a drug dealer all along! I submitted the video for “review”, and got the message, “After careful review, we have determined that your video does indeed violate community standards re: the sale of,” etc.. I have also had numerous comments taken down with warnings saying I was guilty of “threats, bullying and harassment”. I think I criticized one of Meghan Markle’s outfits. Really, I’ve been on the brink for a long time. I wonder what happens to REAL offenders? (I assume FB is going to do the same with this comment, so read it fast!) YouTube won’t allow a lot of words now, but they never tell you what those words actually are. Nor do they spell out the fact you can’t pick a mushroom in your own back yard without being accused of selling ‘shrooms.

This is an example of cross-pollination: copying and pasting a Facebook post in my blog (cuz I'm too lazy to write anything new). But today, it got a lot worse. Today, I realized ALL the comments I had left over the past several days had been taken down. Erased, for no known reason. Normally they'd tell me if  they were going to try to crush my spirit, but not this time. Weirdly, conversations I'd had with other commenters were now one-sided, with all my responses removed. It looks mighty strange to see one person carrying on both sides of the conversation, but there it is - or there it isn't. No reason given, just gone. A new way for YT to torture me?

I don't have the stamina any more to put up with this shit, though commenting is my main source of enjoyment on YT - and now that, apparently, is also gone. The new videos I make and post are completely ignored, implying AbuseTube is no longer recommending or even sending notifications about them to subscribers.  But there's no reason stated, none given, and none available, even though I'm now on Premium (I had  to fork over $150 just  to NOT see ads - pay not to have a feature??). I hate going into settings, as it seems like a minefield from which there may be no return.

I was better off on my Lautrec trek, but these things don't last forever. A few of my old vids are still getting views, not that they need it. I now have 23,000 subscribers, 3,000 videos, and zero people taking any interest in what I do. So why continue? Haven't I had enough abuse from the publishing world?

Toulouse! Toulouse! My Lautrec Fantasy

 

So my Lautrec Trek continues. Sometimes I think I'm over it (my God, this is like a bad breakup!), and at other times I think it has just begun.

One thing that has kept it going is a novel I'm reading by Pierre LaMure, called, strangely enough, Moulin Rouge. It purports to be the novel on which the 1952 movie is based, but so far it bears little or no relation to that much-loved (by me, not by art critics, who loathe it) film, one of those old-friend movies you like to spend some time with, even if you know how it ends. 

 The novel is interesting for the way it DOESN'T truly represent Lautrec, the silly boy behind the gloomy tortured artist, the young wag who dressed up as a clown, an Arab sheik, and a fancy lady in a feather boa, just because he liked having his picture taken. The Julia Frey bio, as bogged down as it is by unnecessary detail, does seem to capture lightning in a bottle, the mercurial, multi-faceted genius who really could go out on the town and have a good time. While at the same time, not whitewashing the fact that he died of a combination of alcoholism and tertiary syphilis.

Though the  novel tries to paint him as so chronically lonely as to be almost friendless, the truth is he had a host of loyal and even loving friends, who tried to protect him from  the nastiness of social stigma. I think they really did see the value of what they had in Henri, a little man with a huge heart, and an incandescence of vision that would all too quickly flame out.

The Pierre LaMure novel, though I was not able to get much information on it (it seems to be out  of print and only available in used copies), is plainly a transation from the French. Though it has touches of brilliance (such as describing a grand piano  as "like a coffin for a harp") there's a clunky quality to it, a labored, almost wheezy sense of trudging through detail. French is essentially untranslatable, and the English language, though it 's good for technical things, is lousy for  expressing  nuance. Only the most brilliant poets can make it jump  through hoops of fire and do pyrotechnic tricks. Whoever translated LaMure's novel, and I still can't find out who, lacked that kind of genius and just went word-for-word, making it a bit of a trudge.

SO: we're left with the paintings, and the drawings, the lithographs, the posters, the immediacy, the startling sense of catching his subjects in mid-breath, as if they are about to turn and speak to you. He not only captured these vulnerable nanoseconds, he captured what they weren't even expressing on their faces or body postures. He got inside them. The little man, no doubt stigmatized for looking so odd, always with thick pince-nez clamped on to his face because he could barely see, saw things in ordinary human beings that no  one has ever perceived before or since.

Can I tell you my Lautrec fantasy? Will you be suprised it has nothing at all to do with night life, absinthe, sex in general? I know a little bit of French, what we Canadians call "cereal box French" (meaning, a degree of familiarity due to the bilingual packaging of products), and Lautrec knew a little bit of English and liked to try to speak it. He dressed like a dapper Englishman, albeit one with sawed-off legs, and his mother even called him Henry. 

My fantasy is that we're trying to have a conversation, and it's not going well, in spite of the fact that it's totally hilarious and I'm having to sing most of my responses ("Sur le pont, d'Avignon, on y danse, on y danse"). This slightly hysterical exchange is no doubt oiled by Lautrec's famous cocktail, called the Earthquake, consisting of  one part absinthe and one part oblivion. As a retired drinker, I don't think I'd really need it to feel the effect.

I want to talk to a man who did the impossible every day of his life. He didn't just paint movement, he painted intent, and even things people had not dared to think in their conscious minds. His paintings are bristling with aggressive and even ugly phallic symbols, demonstrating the fact that men didn't impress him  very much, but the women - . His  tender studies of courtesans embracing, kssing and cuddling in bed are full of a compassion no one else ever thought of, much less expressed. Compassion, for these harlots? And Lesbians, to boot! 

So he knew about contempt, and how easily and casually you could become the target of it if you did not quite fit the social prisons of the day. He saw and saw and saw, mainly how people somehow found love and expressed love in the midst of an ugly, harsh, unyielding environment where everything was for sale. Much as he was famous in his lifetime, he may even have craved anonymity, turning back the clock to simpler times when not so  much was expected of him. 

This is his most famous poster, the one that started it all, and as usual it's topsy-turvy, forcing us to look over the shoulder of this great hulking monster in the foreground to get a glimpse of  the wild cancan dancer La Goulue, the real subject of the work. As a backdrop we see black silhouettes of high hats both male and female, and on the left is a wildly distorted electric light.

And that's another thing. Lautrec was the first artist to paint electricity - that garish new phenomenon that revealed things  we never expected to see. Suddenly the soft gaslight was wiped out,  the newfangled illumination exploding like lightning in a way that must have seemed like a violation.  It's why the grotesque carved-from-chocolate man in the foreground is in shadow, and only the dancer in the middle is lit up, scandalously displaying her crotch to all and sundry. Her lower half lights up the room, electric lamps making her lacy plus-fours flare and glare.  Did any artist of his day dare to display a massive phallic hand just inches away from a nearly-bared female crotch?

The fact that it's beautiful is another mystery, another impossibility, like that wacky Franglish conversation I want to have with Henri. He was gone too soon, but while he was here - while he was here - 

"A little thing, you know, like a puppet" - how his friends saw him

 

All through the sometimes harrowing biography of Lautrec by Julia Frey, there are indescribably cruel and even monstrous descriptions of his physical appearance which just don't tally with what we see in the photos. Or at least, I don't think so. This Guilbert chick didn't mince words, she thought he was ugly, his lips were too thick, he looked disgusting as he ate. But he had such beautiful eyes! It's true, there is so much in those eyes, candid, compassionate, and full of ironic humor. They are kind eyes. So why make such a fuss over his table manners or his unaristocratically full lips? No wonder he drowned himself in absinthe. With friends like these. . . And yet, Henri not only forgave Yvette Guilbert, he was such a great fan that he featured her in many of his artworks. 

As for the puppet remark, I keep running into the fact that Henri was just under five feet tall, about like Danny DeVito who is never described as a dwarf, just a short man. Many women are a similar height, so there is no way everyone towered over him. The fact his legs were so out of proportion, causing his awkward hobble, may have compounded the puppet insult. But was he such a tiny little thing? The fact that he seemed to be two different bodies cobbled together may have emphasized this miniaturized quality.

Why can't I stop writing about Lautrec? Because when I am writing about Lautrec, I forget about how I feel, about all the health woes, the pain, the endless specialists and tests and the sense that even after all this, I am still doomed. Lautrec has been a life-saver, in that I become totally absorbed in what I am doing, in finding just the right words. I can't seem to get back into my YouTube channel after all that has happened, and not just with my health. It does hearten me a little to see that my creativity has once more flowed in a different direction. It has not dried up. Hardly! 

At any rate, I'm grateful to be able to lose myself in what is increasingly becoming a Lautrec fan blog. As for the little thing like a puppet, well, we already know that there were certain portions of his anatomy that were far from miniature. Perhaps Yvette had to find that out for herself.

How many phallic symbols can you cram into one painting??

 

I just don't want to let go of my little friend, just yet. Maybe it's just a distraction from the myriad ongoing health "issues"  that may yet do  me in. The shadow of mortality is never far away, and I honestly wonder how much time I have left. And reading about the man's untimely demise wasn't exactly uplifting. BUT! I still uncover surprises, like this famous poster of Jane Avril sitting ringside in a cabaret with a withered-up old geezer beside her.

Freud could have used this to prove his most notorious theory. There are the obvious ones - the heads of the cellos and bass fiddles in the background;  the arms of the orchestra conductor; his "erect" stick;  the odd little thing like a whale on the left (one of  those inexplicable little figures he always draws in the corners); the old man's cane; the back of Jane's chair; whatever she is holding in her hand - a fan, perhaps? The black gloves of the lady in the background; the riotous "thing" on top of Jane's hat, like a phallus exploding. . . and there are probably more.  Lautrec had a devilish sense of humor, and was not averse to drawing penises all over the place, especially in the sexually-charged atmosphere of the Belle Epoque (also known as the fin de siecle, a darker, more shadowy title revealing the not-so-Belle Epoque's underside). 

I'm still finding more. What is that thing in the bottom right corner? The old man's leg or something? And what's going on with his beard? It seems to blend into some sort of foamy-looking thing. a cravat of some kind. The man's hand on the cane might qualify, though here we risk seeing the entire painting (actually it was a poster, one of his more famous ones) as one big weenie-fest. 

In fact, Jane Avril herself, all decked out in black, her sinuous figure curving upward in a familiar pattern - maybe she's the ultimate phallic symbol. There was lots of sex going on in those days, but I  doubt if there was very much intimacy. It's implied in the  biographies that the sex workers he hired were treating him like social work, an act of mercy for a man who likely would have had a problem attracting a civilian mate. And it was virtually a certainty that he would never marry, a terrible crisis in an aristocratic family like the Lautrecs, where marriages were ways of consolidating wealth and spewing out the next generation of grossly-inbred male heirs. Disabilities were seen very differently then, and his truncated stature and strange, Habsburg-looking facial features might have made fine ladies not want to be seen with him.

But those eyes. Those eyes. I don't even need to say it.

The truth is, they lost out. Imagine knowing a genius like Lautrec! What a mind, and beyond his incandescent talent, something almost supernatural in the energy, the supercharged sexuality, but at the same time, the curious detachment of the world he created and reflected. As his biographer Julia Frey put it: "Everything was for sale." Not just  the women, but the paintings, the posters, the lithographs, all the brilliant work he did in 36 years - all of it had a price on it. HE was for sale, and he knew it, which is partly why he posed for all those droll photographs, purposely making himself look  silly and even trite. He seemed to be saying: I don't take this life seriously, no, not at all! Come to the Cabaret, old chum. Step right up. Step inside, breathe the air, the smoke, the opium, the absinthe, the greasepaint and sweat and cheap  perfume, and even darker things. He painted the air and the anxiety and the drenching, self-annihilating pleasures that were all too brief in their analgesic effect.  

All of it cost him. All of it was for sale.

POSTSCRIPT! I don' t know if I dare post this to Facebook, as it's a family show, after all, and those terrible weenie references may corrupt the youth of this country, if not the world. But I had to include a cute little detail that is also relevant:

Toulouse-Lautrec was nicknamed "The Coffee Pot" by his friends, particularly the women of Montmartre, due to his short stature and the disproportionately small size of his legs compared to the rest of his body. He himself reportedly referred to himself as "a small coffee pot with a big spout," embracing the nickname with his characteristic irony and humor. The nickname also reflected his lively personality and popularity as a lover. 

Strangely enough, as detailed as the Julia Frey bio was (sometimes excruciatingly so), no mention was ever made of his famous/infamous nickname. Could it be that those ladies of the night did not feel sorry for him at all, but really DID celebrate him, not as an oddity or a random genius, but as a well-endowed lover? He could be surprisingly earthy, preferring red-haired women because he claimed their natural scent attracted him. And I don't mean Chanel No. 5, folks.

This is a little sad, but I had to post it anyway. . .

 

So while digging around in Lautrec Land, I found this, a rather sad diagram (in Spanish) listing all the disabilities Lautrec had. It's called Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, which may not exist, and as far as I can see his problems were genetic, the result of generations of aristocratic inbreeding. It's an ugly topic, as it verges on incest in too many ways, and the most horrendous example is what happened to the Habsburgs, who inbred their way to a screeching halt with the freakish Charles II of Spain.

But Toulouse had a more charming persona - well, yes, he WAS charming, the too-long overcoat, the dapper hat and walking stick and the legs that were half the length one would expect. He looks kind of like a doll, a puppet, a child-man. This was a sort of semi-fictional character he deliberately cultivated, so that he became a kind of mascot for the avant-garde. 

So what went on inside hm? A lot of it is in the paintings. But even more of it is evidenced in the way he lived. Not too unusual for a bohemian of his time, but all the absinthe and the cognac and all the rest of it finally and inevitably did him in. No  doubt this came at a much younger age due to all his disabilities, visible or internal. Not to mention that other creepy affliction: syphilis, which was totally untreatable then and which anyone who went to prostitutes could not help but end up with. 

It was a short life, a hard life, but what a life! The Julia Frey biography emphasizes that his life was NOT one big misery - he was a Goodtime Charlie (or Charlot) who really did know how to enjoy himself. He had a host of friends, good and loyal friends who truly loved and took care of him (though they were unable to stop or even regulate the drinking which eventually killed him). 

It wasn't all hell and suffering and wretchedness. He actually made a good living selling his work in many forms. He was never even remotely a starving artist, for even if the paintings and lithographs  weren't selling, his mother provided him  with a comfortable allowance to live on (not unlike Van Gogh with his brother Theo). The sad thing is that he never really had an intimate relationship with a woman that wasn't casual or short-lived (usually a business transaction). In the movie Moulin Rouge, a woman does try to love him, but he is too encased in his bitterness to allow her to penetrate his hard shell.

Did this happen? We don't know. We know he suffered, but he also rejoiced, posed for wacky pictures, played pranks, sang drinking songs, went to bed with tarts, and generally whooped it up. 

Toulouse-Lautrec: BLINK

 

LAUTREC GIFS: Now it's getting REALLY strange!

When I decided to look up Lautrec gifs (and somehow, I think the Little Lothario might have liked this strange, primitive form of animation), most of them were pretty terrible, and I didn't feel like trying to make any of my own. But I managed to winnow out a few, including this high-kicking one which is actually pretty well-animated, especially for a gif.

The painting-come-to-life thing is kind of cornball, but it gives a vivid impression of the way  Lautrec captured motion, mid-kick  or even mid-sentence, if not mid-breath. Some of his portraits actually do seem to be speaking to you. His photographic mind could convey far more dynamic energy than any still photography could. The fact no one knows how he did this is, I suppose, his little secret. 

This one is pretty snazzy and jazzy. Though I think it's from the Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge, which I detested, it still gets across the excitement of the times, the neon flashes long before neon even existed. 

And oh my goodness, I LOVE this one, a tiny excerpt from  the GOOD Moulin Rouge, the one I rhapsodized about in a former post. The more I look at Jose Ferrer in this role, the more I see our beloved Toulouse. Here one of his fancy ladies is trying to get his attention, but he's too absorbed in sketching those other ladies as they fling their  legs up in the air. This image of a little man in the corner drawing furiously on a napkin is thought to be too cornball to be believable, but he actually did this. Not that he took tablecloths home with him (but think how much one of those tablecloths would be worth now!), but the quick deft sketches froze the image in his mind, so that he could  go back to his studio and bring those wispy lines to life. 

And such life. 

NOW I know what's on his head!

 

But I have even less idea what it means! This is one of the many costumes Lautrec liked to don for photographs. He never smiles, which is sort of disappointing, but he may have been self-conscious about his teeth. Like so many of the great artistes of his time, he had syphilis (and that includes Beethoven and Van Gogh, among others), which of course was untreatable. But one of the things the disease does is rot your teeth. I'm sorry to be such a bearer of bad news, but it's true. The Julia Frey bio I'm slogging through (and yes, it IS a hard slog in places, being almost more detailed than you would ever want) presents him as whole as she can, the bright and the dark, including his sexual escapades with prostitutes and the resulting incurable disease. 

He's in some sort of "Oriental" getup, perhaps supposed to be Japanese (which was all the rage with the artistes of the time, including Van Gogh), but why is he holding that creepy-looking doll? The fan seems to indicate orientalisme, if that's what it's called. But I still don't know what that thing on his head is supposed to signify. It  looks phallic (and no other artist ever crammed so many phallic symbols into his work), and oddly like someone sticking their tongue out, or perhaps raising a middle finger. I'm not sure if that particular hand-gesture existed back then. 

In other famous Lautrec poses, he looks cross-eyed, and in some he is plainly in drag. Then there is the most notorious photo of all (or should I say, series of photos, which may have been meant to be put together Muybridge-style to make a primitive animation), where he is taking  a dump on the beach. No, I won't subject you to THAT one!

 But, I have discovered a new trove of Lautrec images on Microsoft Bing. No one uses Microsoft Bing, and I barely knew it existed until I wanted to look up Monmon Cats and found a trove of them there. Really, it's a much better setup than the Google images which have completely overtaken anything else. 

I could get even MORE lost in Lautrec at this rate. Whether it's good for me or not remains to be seen. These obsessions were what Lautrec liked to call furias, passions that took on the intensity of rage - "all the rage", as the saying goes. 

I have furias too, but they never make me world-famous, or cause anyone to even look at my work.  I was amused to hear that the Lautrec family were Anglophiles, meaning - for some weird reason - they loved all things English. It's partly why Lautrec dressed that way. Why? I still haven't figured it out. The dry dullness of the British, preferred to the poetic, exotic French?

 But between his broken English and my fractured French, we might have been able to carry on some kind of conversation.

Afterthought: I came across this rather sad photo of Henri while in his cups, or passed out. 

Toulouse! Toulouse! Even More Lost in Lautrec

 

Or maybe I'm just lost. My only consolation, these days, is how I can still lose myself in the creative process, whether anyone else sees it or not - which they likely won't. 

 But I LOVE this poster! It's an illustration  for that series Waldemar did (I won't even try to spell his last name), which I had mixed feelings about. He seemed to be giving Henri the once-over, and surely he deserved better than that. Besides, he hated Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge, making me wonder if he ever actually watched it.

One of my many favorite photo portraits of Henri. He always wears such an enigmatic expression  and never smiles, though this clashes with everything I'm reading about his hysterical nocturnal revels and the way he loved to roll around with all those women he so accurately portrayed. Here he looks serious, as if striking a pose, and no doubt this is one of his many costumes (what's that thing on his head??). But there is also something tragic in his eyes. Or is it the alcohol? No one knows better than I what it can do to a soul, the corrosive effects of what is supposed to be a pleasure.

This painting has the strange title of Poudre de Riz (Rice Powder), so named after the chalky mask this woman is forced to wear to attract customers. Though the woman is obviously young, not much more than  a girl, there is nothing young about her facial expression, the tough, jaded look that has so much vulnerability and sorrow behind it. No one starts off in life planning to be a prostitute. nor did  Henri decide to be a dwarf and an alcoholic. One must make the best of it, mon cheri.

I laughed out loud when I realized that this is a portrait of Oscar Wilde! Yes, he has captured the man, though in the most cartoonish way possible. The dissipated look with the drooping eyes, the bee-stung lips, the massive body in powder-blue velvet. . . yes, that's Oscar, all right. The two knew each other, and no doubt Henri realized that Wilde was yet another stigmatized soul who would pay dearly just for being himself.

I  LOVE finding more candid shots of Henri! This one is a treasure. Think of  being the anonymous, scruffy-looking character sitting on the park bench next to one of the greatest geniuses of the art world. Wonder what they're saying to each other? Is it happy hour yet? Is it wine o'clock? At any rate, it was always happy hour chez Lautrec. Though I refuse to believe the man was ever happy.

I love how this captures the hard work, sweat and exhaustion behind the most delicate ballet performances. She has plopped down for a second, huffing anf puffing, probably craving a cigarette or a drink, or both. But all the audience ever sees is the delicate illusion. Lautrec was never satisfied with that. As usual, the image seems to have been captured in mid-breath, so you can practically hear her speaking. You are there - always, but it's not always comfortable.

I don't even know who  this  is, but it's an example of why some people loathed his art. They were afraid they'd show up in it somewhere. The woman in the background seems to be someone I knew once, or saw in a dream, or a nightmare - or did I just hear her voice? Lautrec was one of the first artists to paint artificial light, the glaring electric lamps and spotlights in the cabarets making every color look garish, with a gloom in the background in  which things seem to be crouched and coiled.

I love the brothel paintings, the way he portrays tenderness and affection between women who must be tough and hard-boiled to survive their lives. It has been said that these are the only works in which Lautrec shows human beings displaying any tenderness to each other. But it also reveals that there is a world of women which is absolutely NOT dependent on the favors of men. Did Lautrec feel shut out of this world, or did his art provide him with a magic key?

I don't know who this is either, but she is electrifying! The face, the eyes - I  don't know, I can't get out of this thing I've fallen into, this tub of love, this gay Purr-ee that I now know was anything but gay, except maybe in the sexual sense. How can mere paint bring someone alive like this? And why can't I do it? Stick to what you know. Keep writing, even if it kills you. Even if NO ONE is listening and no one even knows you are there. Which is probably true. Everyone noticed Henri, and rightly so, even though he flamed out well before the age of 40. But can you imagine Lautrec old? Or anything else other than what he was - a total original?