So you're dead...now what?

A timeless and timely message from WAAAAAAAYYY before COVID. (Yes, there WAS a "before COVID" - we now call it "B.C",)

Turning Halloween

1

TURNING JAPANESE  (The Vapors, 1980)

I've got your picture of me and you

You wrote "I love you" I wrote "me too"

I sit there staring and there's nothing else to do

Oh it's in color

Your hair is brown

Your eyes are hazel and soft as clouds

I often kiss you when there's no one else around

I've got your picture

I've got your picture

I'd like a million of you all round my cell

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up and turning down

And turning in and turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I've got your picture

I've got your picture

I'd like a million of them all round my cell

I want the doctor to take a picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up

And turning down and turning in and turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women

No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark

Everyone around me is a total stranger

Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger

That's why I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

(think so think so think so)

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

NOTE. I have no idea what this song means. In actuality it has about two verses, though it seems to go on forever. I first heard it on SCTV on the Jerry Todd Show, with Rick Moranis crooning those strange lyrics (pronouncing it "Japa-NEESE"). I thought it was racist and stupid, but since it was on SCTV I more or less forgave it. Then I forgot it. More or less.

THEN, a billion years later I see this Value Village ad for used Halloween costumes, with a song and dance number called Turning Halloween! I recognized it from somewhere. Turning, what, something else? Ah! Of course. Turning Japa-NEESE!

So now I find out that the original was by a British group called The Vapors, and as far as I am concerned it iS sort of racist, or at least damn stupid, so I don't know why I'm posting it except that no one else seems to think so. And the Value Village ad is way cool.

"And I'm not gay!": or, begin the innuendo

Ah, those days: the days of  Johnny Larue and William B. and Dr. Tongue and all the other surreal characters taken over by John Candy. For the characters didn't take him over - it was the other way around. He invaded them and became.

Johnny LaRue, the chimney-smoking, booze-swilling, dame-exploiting would-be politician of Melonville was one of my favorites. In this clip he pitches himself as a candidate for City Council, and even that untidy flop of hair is reminiscent of Donald Trump, along with all the ranting bullshit.

But LaRue had a signature phrase he used in every sketch: "And I'm not gay!" I was reminded of this when I opened my email this morning and found a comment from someone about my Alan Gershwin post (which got a good response, believe me, in light of the 13 views I get for some of them). The reader vehemently denied any suggestion that either George or Alan Gershwin was gay. This is typical of the indignant, deeply insulted, even infuriated tone of people who perceive any such suggestion in biographies of famous (and usually it's) men.

Lost and Found: the mystery of Alan Gershwin

No one ever thinks - it doesn't occur to them even for a moment - that their fury reveals the slightest degree of homophobia. But even a suggestion the person in question MIGHT have been gay is automatically seen as vicious slander which has to be vigorously denied and argued into the ground. No, he was NOT "one of those". There is no EVIDENCE he was "one of those". He had hair on his chest, for God's sake! Don't defile his good name like that!

What???

I'm not defiling anything or anyone when I say there were suggestions that Gershwin might have been gay.  Most of his biographers (including Howard Pollack, who wrote a definitive 885-page doorstop) have pondered the fact without coming to any hard conclusions. In Gershwin's rarefied world, being gay or bisexual was not the big and horrifying deal it was in the general populace. Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Samuel Barber, and many other movers-and-shakers of composerhood were gay, some of them quite openly. It was an arts-saturated environment, and its most celebrated figures seemed to believe they were above convention.

It doesn't matter to me if Gershwin was gay, bisexual or a racehorse (though he was certainly that). But what interests me is the utter fury with which people deny and denounce such "accusations", even if they're stated as mere surmise. I'm apparently attempting to throw mud at an icon, drag him down into the slime.

Hey, wait a minute!

I did a piece on Nietsche not long ago, and the same "accusations" came up in his biographical material, along with that same strident, near-hysterical denial. It's a lie! He had a girl friend in university once and took her to the Philosopher's Ball! The implication is that I'm giving him a black eye just to be spiteful. And, of course, getting my facts wrong. All wrong. This reminds me of that classic Seinfeld episode where, whenever the issue of gayness came up, the mantra was, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Denial of the denial? Let's begin the beguine.

And Cole Porter? Are you kidding? And Noel Coward, let's not forget him. Gay! Gay! Yes, I'm going to ruin their reputations right here and now by saying they loved men (which is obviously a horrific crime - it goes without saying, doesn't it).

Huh??

Come on, people. The suggestion that some great literary or musical figure might have been gay is not automatically slander. In expressing that view, you're revealing a small and very homophobic mind. But your small-mindedness is such that you don't even see it, or at least won't admit it.

"Oh, I knew someone who was gay once and he was a real nice fella." But he's not Gershwin. Or Cole Porter. Or Johnny LaRue.

Imagine these same people were claiming, vehemently and furiously, "he was NOT black!", "he was NOT disabled!', "he did NOT have PTSD!", or any other sensitive categories, and these same people would be horrified. It's OK to be those things now - maybe - supposedly. Or not, but we have to say so, even if we don't believe it. (Though, think about it. A hundred years ago, would it have been acceptable to claim that some important/famous white figure "might have" had black lineage? Think of the outcry, the insistence he was blonde and got a suntan, or something equally ludicrous.)

But why then isn't it OK for Nietsche or Gershwin or any other major figure to be gay or bisexual (bisexual being a category that seems to have been lost in the shuffle, the implication being, for God's sake, make up your mind! Being on the fence like that is oh-so-politically incorrect, even disloyal to the cause.) Sexual orientation still seems to be fraught with confusion. If a man gets married at any time in his life, and (especially) if he fathers a child, he's "not gay". The assumption is, a gay man would not touch his wife with a ten-foot pole. She would remain chaste and pure for 25 years while he pulled out the bodybuilding magazines he kept under his mattress.

People's minds are still in brontosaurus mode. They're stuck, and their thinking is very dusty. Is social change just hurtling along too fast, or what? Is this trapped-in-amber mode of thinking just simple physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Whatever. They piss me off! So Gershwin was gay. Or might have been. Does that take away anything at all from his contribution to music? In some distant universe, not this one, we might even see it as a positive attribute, something that adds to the richness and complexity of that extreme rarity, the blazing miracle of creative genius.

BONUS POST. This is the piece I kept finding during my GershQuest of last year.

gramilano

ballet, opera, photography...

Michael Feinstein’s book on the Gershwins called, sensibly, “The Gershwins and Me” (Simon & Schuster) was published in October. While he was still working in piano bars, Feinstein got to know Ira Gershwin intimately, cataloguing his collection of records, unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in the Gershwin home over a period of six years.

The gay or not gay question has floated about George Gershwin even during the more restrained time when he was a young composer. It is an issue Feinstein tackles in his book. America’s National Public Radio asked him about it:

So many speculated that George Gershwin was gay because he never got married. And somebody once said to Oscar Levant, you know, George is bedding all those women because he’s trying to prove he’s a man. And Oscar Levant said: What a wonderful way to prove it. There have always been rumours circulating about George’s sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it’s important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it’s all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.

Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said.

Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George’s and whose husband Milton Ager was George’s roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay, and Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don’t know anything. But when I asked her about it, she wouldn’t talk about it. So it still remains a mystery.

My own theory is that I think that the thing that mattered most to George was his music. I think he could have been confused sexually. I don’t know. I think that he had trouble forming a lasting relationship.

Kitty Carlisle talked about how George asked her to marry him, but she said that she knew that he wasn’t deeply in love with her. But she fit the demographic of what his mother felt would be the right woman for him.

This is an extract of NPR’s long talk with Michael Feinstein.

Photo: left to right, George Gershwin, Michael Feinstein, Ira Gershwin

NOTE: here is the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of innuendo:

(the making of) a ​remark or ​remarks that ​suggest something ​sexual or something ​unpleasant but do not refer to it ​directly: There's always an ​element of ​sexual innuendo in ​our ​conversations.

Here we touch on the interesting issue of "unpleasant" being juxtaposed with "sexual", which opens up a whole new can of worms: that there's something unsavory and reputation-destroying about sex itself, unless it takes place in the heterosexual/marital bed, infrequently, in the missionary position. And only when you want a kid.

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My Little Marble Hall

The Old Turf Fire

Oh, the old turf fire and the hearth swept clean,
There is no-one half so happy as myself and Paddy Keane;
With the baby in the cradle you could hear her mammy say
"Wouldn't you go to sleep, Alanna, till I wet your daddy's tay."

"Oh the man that I work for is a richer man than me,
But somehow in this world, feth, we never can agree;
He has big tow'ring mansions and castles over all
But sure I wouldn't exchange with him my little marble hall."

"I have got a house and a tidy bit of land;
You would never see a better on the side of Knocknacran;
No piano in the corner and no pictures on the wall,
But I'm somehow quite contented in my little marble hall."

O the old turf fire and the hearth swept clean,
There is no-one half so happy as myself and Paddy Keane;
With the baby in the cradle you could her her mammy say,
"Wouldn't you go to sleep, Alanna, till I wet your daddy's tay."

I heard Catherine McKinnon sing this, ages and ages ago, on Don Harron's TV show. Harron was known mainly for his braying, hole-y-sweater-wearing, rural alter ego, Charlie Farquarson, a quintessential/stereotypical Canadian long before Bob and Doug came on the scene. He and McKinnon were married, which seemed like a strange match since she was cultivated, gorgeous, and sang beautifully.

The only thing I remembered about this song were:

- the tune;

- the "little marble hall"; and

- "wet your daddy's tay", which I assume means refill his teacup,but which COULD mean other things.

I also assumed the title was My Little Marble Hall, and it wasn't, so it was - well, not exactly hard to find, though it took thirty seconds instead of five. Little Marble Hall didn't work, but when I entered the line about "tay" it took me right to the song, not to mention the sheet music.

The wonders of the internet.

This is deeply Irish, and I must find out more about it. Here I go.

OK, right away I find variations, including a version that really makes a lot better sense in voice. The first version seems to switch back and forth: it's the wife first, speaking of "myself and Paddy Keane", then a sort of weird shift to second person: "you could hear her mammy say", then back to mammy: "wouldn't you go to sleep. . . ", THEN obviously switching to the voice of (we assume) Paddy Keane for the rest of the song as he boasts of his tidy little home, made (most incongruously) of marble. Just calling it a "hall" is strange, but maybe it made sense in old Ireland, or maybe it was originally a different phrase altogether.

Here's another version that makes better grammatical sense:

Oh, the old turf fire, and the hearth swept clean
There’s no one quite so happy as meself and Mary Keene
With the baby in the cradle, you can hear her mother say
“Won’t you go to sleep, Alana, while I wet your Daddy’s tay”

Now, I’ve got a little house and land, as neat as it can be
You’ll never see the like of it, this side of Moneylea
No piano in the corner, and no pictures on the wall
But I’m happy and contented in my little cottage hall.

(etc., etc. - the rest is much the same).

In this version, Paddy Keene sings the whole song (referring to "meself and Mary Keene"). The town he names is  Moneylea rather than Knocknacran, so obviously it's worded differently to rhyme and scan. Neither name makes a goddamn bit of sense to me.

And there isn't even a "little marble hall" in this one. It's a mere cottage, which is pretty disappointing. I wanted Paddy and Mary to live in some stonemason's nightmare, with huge slabs of marble hewn from quarries in Kilkenny (or wherever) drug off to Moneylea by shaggy dray horses. Or perhaps made of great collapsing chunks of stone that Michaelangelo had rejected. And "cottage hall" is even more nonsensical than the other one.

Then there are these strange couple of verses I found on various sites that have nothing to do with Mary and Paddy Keene:

Round the old turf fire
Sit the old folk, bent with years
As they watch us trippin' lightly
They're smilin' thro' their tears

So sadly they are dreaming
Of their youthful heart's desire -
In those dear old days so long ago
Around the old turf fire

The only reference to the couple is "as they watch us trippin' lightly", which is pretty strange. It seems like a paste-up job, something added later. A lot of folk songs have that cobbled-together feel, mainly because they've been passed down and passed down, never heard quite accurately, like that game you play where you whisper a phrase down a line of people and see how much it changes.

And then there are mondegreens, which I have written about before:

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/01/have-you-ever-seen-mondegreen.html

This is a not-half-bad post, unlike some of the old ones which make me shudder. Mondegreens are just words misheard in song lyrics, then repeated and repeated as if they're correct. If you quote the lyric properly, someone will say the wrong one at you. The example that comes to me is "s'cuse me while I kiss this guy".

So I've put a tiny piece back in the mosaic of my listening past. Or something. That "little marble hall" has come back again and again over the years, and a question mark has formed over my head like in those old Felix the Cat cartoons, but then I'd forget about it. I may even have tried to find it on the internet once or twice before. But the internet is an amoeba which doubles in size every few seconds, so if you can't find the information you want, check back in a minute or so and you'll be inundated.

Has this ever happened to you??

 

Just in time for St. Patrick's Day: FINIAN'S RAINBOW MEATS!

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Rob Ford displays violent temper during interview (1984)

This gave me the chills, if not the willies!

EXPLAINED: why kids get ADHD

I don't know if anybody except me remembers a strange and wonderful show called TV Nation, Michael Moore's first foray into network television. This was before he became a self-important, helium-inflated buffoon who will do anything to call attention to himself.

We watched this show on (when else?) Friday nights, me and the kids. God, that was back when me and my kids watched TV together! We watched TV Nation, St. Elsewhere and (of course) SCTV. The kids were just pups then and I felt very close to them. Now they're practically middle-aged, and it's different.

Of course it's different. But what I wanted to point out with this dissertation is how much things have accelerated since the early '90s. TV Nation was considered cutting edge, hip, etc. (though watching some of the segments now makes me wince), and nowhere was this more evident than in the opening. It had rapidly-flashing images accompanied by electric guitar playing a sort of fluffy domestic tune. Later on I discovered it was almost an exact copy of the theme song to Rhoda. 

Look at it now, and bo-o-o-o-oy, is it slo-o-o-o-ow. Each image lasts a full second, an eternity in today's  air time. The theme lasts about a minute and a half, which was common then. Compare and contrast to what some call today's hippest sitcom, The Big Bang Theory  (which my granddaughter loves:  huzzah!):

And they wonder why kids get ADHD.

(Post-blog. Now I also know why I make so many gifs. I think they're magic, which probably reveals my age, but more to the point, who the hell is going to watch a 10- or 15-minute YouTube video to see the 5 seconds I'm referring to? Instead, here are the 5 seconds, endlessly repeated in case you (like everyone else) can't absorb a ton of information in a microsecond.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The ultimate infomercial

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I'm turning Japanese (I really think so)

I've got your picture of me and you

You wrote "I love you" I wrote "me too" 

I sit there staring and there's nothing else to do 

Oh it's in color 

Your hair is brown

Your eyes are hazel

And soft as clouds

I often kiss you when there's no one else around

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of you all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up and turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of them all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up I'm turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women

No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark

Everyone around me is a total stranger

Everyone avoids me like a cyclone Ranger

Everyone...

That's why I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

[guitar]

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so, think so, think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Feel like I'm made out of Emmental

This is, or will be, my last word on September Song, I hope. It's now wearing a bit thin now after I was hoodwinked yesterday into thinking Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holliday recorded the exact same song with the exact same arrangement in the exact same vocal style.


Turns out both of them were by Sarah Vaughan, but someone(SOMEONE, not me!) had mislabelled one of the two videos and posted it as Holliday's rendition. There. Mystery solved. What embarrasses me is that I didn't get on to it right away: I did twig on the arrangement, which sounded so much the same that it puzzled me. But because I was expecting to hear two different vocal performances, that's what I heard. Sort of.

I was trying to find some strange versions of this song sung by comedians on variety shows like Ed Sullivan, just to prove that they could be Serious Artists If They Wanted To Be (which they couldn't). Rodney Dangerfield was one of them, I swear. He sang Fool on the Hill, I think, on  Hollywood Palace. I thought he also sang September Song, but I couldn't find any reference to it.


And I DO remember Milton Berle singing it, probably on the Muppet Show.  I found him offensive at the best of times, though the legend of his oversized penis is kind of entertaining. Once during an infamous dick-comparison in a bar somewhere, someone had the audacity to challenge him. His accomplice, probably a gangster in a zoot suit, whispered in his ear, "No problem, Miltie. Just take out enough to win."


I like the concept, if not the execution.

So I find this instead, and think: God, Sammy Davis. I used to buy his albums, incredibly, and marvelled then at how much he sounded like Frank Sinatra. He does, in his phrasing more than his vocal timbre which is actually warmer and smoother. Most singers try for beauty, and Sinatra didn't bother because he had Something Else. He appeared to think with his voice, and I don't know if anyone else has ever done that. (Some men think with their penis, but that's another story.)

A couple of things put me off Sammy Davis. He became more and more Sammy Davis as he got older, and disappeared into the sunken trough of Living Legend. There was all that Candy Man business, followed by the appalling Sweet Gingerbread Man ("Feel like I'm made out of peppermint, uh-huh, uh-huh"). In the mid-'80s I saw the beef-on-a-stick skewering of Davis on SCTV, in which Joe Flaherty nailed him as a histrionic white guy in an Afro spouting show-biz hyperbole. Then I saw Jim Carrey's grotesque impersonation of him, which many found offensive. Well, yes, it WAS offensive, but that was the whole point.

 

 

With these situations, I find it useful to go back and actually listen to the recording(s) in question. It surprises me how often I am - surprised. For one thing, this arrangement (the factor that ruins nearly everyone else's version with sickly suds and squeaky, cheesy violin glissandos) is much cooler, dominated by saxophone, with a Rat Pack sound that suits his performing style. During "the days dwindle down" bridge, the accompaniment takes on a doo-wop quality that reminds me of the Platters (who also recorded this, though for some reason I don't like their version).

I think the song got sort of sung-out in the '60s and you don't hear it any more, not much anyway. It has that godawful introduction ("when I was a young man," and blah-blah-blah, as if we cared) that in some versions literally takes up half the recording. When I found the reference to limping around toothless in the original, it took something away from the song's charm.

You don't expect Quasimodo to stand up there singing a love song.

The worst Polish joke ever!

Backstory? OK. Lots of us (of a certain age) remember the kind of late-night TV that gave rise to satires like Monster Chiller Horror Theatre on SCTV.  But in the '60s, it wasn't satire: there really were late-night shows like that, with hosts much funnier than the lame movies they hosted.

Living in Chatham, which is near Windsor, which is near Detroit, which is sort-of-near Cleveland, we could at least get scratchy versions of Cleveland radio (WKYC, eleven-double-oh!), and eventually, these guys. Hoolihan and Big Chuck had rattled around in the broadcasting biz for years, doing this n' that, the weather, filling in for sick people. By accident they started doing comedy bits together, and somehow the chemistry was right for some very lame, very funny late night TV. So they kept at it for years and years. Big Chuck went on even longer after Hoolihan left, taking up with a dwarf, but that is most definitely another story.


Every so often I'd be allowed to sleep on the pull-out bed in the den and stay up as late as I wanted, and when that happened, I always watched these guys.
It was plain that they stole shamelessly from Ernie Kovacs (and don't get me started on Kovacs, because I periodically begin to write about him and can't stop: at one point I really, really, really wanted to write a novel about him but couldn't because he doesn't seem to be around any more to be "tapped": did too many people steal from him, I wonder?). Their collapsing cardboard sets and the props that fell to pieces in their hands weren't much better than the paper-and-black-marker that Kovacs was allowed in his meagre budget. Hoolihan and Big Chuck weren't geniuses like Kovacs, but they had a blast doing this show and communicated their laugh-your-ass-off style to a very loyal audience. They were wacky and insane and satirized the Polish culture in and around Cleveland (such as Parma: I remember a long-running soap opera called Parma Place) in a way you'd never get away with now.


I stumbled on this one - don't know if I actually saw it or not, maybe not coz this skit came on a few years after we moved away and I couldn't get Cleveland TV any more. (Or anything else.) But it's one of their best, or, at least, it's pretty good, or, um, OK or something, pretty cheesy actually, but funny as hell.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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The leprechaun from hell

This is one of John Candy's finest moments. He plays a giant, vindictive leprechaun wielding a shilellagh (sp.? Does anyone know how to spell this?) and pushing his special brand of "rainbow meat",  chock full of chemicals. I miss John Candy so. In many ways he was the glue holding SCTV together. His movie career, while it had some great moments, never quite came up to the wild creativity of his SCTV days, with its multiple and often complex characters. This is just plain wonderful!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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It's December the first: let's have a party in my rec room

Seeing these guys again is like visiting old friends. I was an SCTV fanatic for many years, starting with their humble beginnings in Edmonton, Alberta (I swear the hot tub scene in that Joan Crawford sendup was filmed at the Edmonton Inn), then soaring to great heights on American national TV. Seldom has a comedy ensemble worked so well. Never noticed the saxophone growing out of Rick Moranis' head before.

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Monster Chiller Horror Theatre!

This lacks in technical quality (turn up the sound a bit), but is pure nostalgia and a reminder of how good these guys were, especially together. We miss you, John!