"George, who painted as a hobby, does a self-portrait in evening clothes and his older brother responds with one of himself wearing underclothes..."

"... dyed yellow in the bathtub, paunch visible: 'My Body.'... He was comically underactive, congratulating himself for what [his biographer] calls 'peregrinations,' and work-avoidant: 'Upstairs to get typewriter ribbon,' he’d say, jumping up from the piano. 'It’s the only way I get exercise.' He had a weakness for puns that some found fatal. 'Lust Horizon,' he proposed as an alternate title to Billy Wilder’s 'Kiss Me, Stupid,' his last Hollywood collaboration, and a bomb. After repeated falls he called himself a 'rhapsody in bruise.'..."

From "It’s Hard to Be the Brother of a Genius Who Died Young/In 'Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,' Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George" (NYT).

"Despite all this, and regardless of whether 'Rhapsody in Blue' is the worst masterpiece, it’s also the best cheesecake, or something else attractive yet unhealthy. "

The fourth-to-last sentence of "The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100/A jazz musician considers the legacy and unfulfilled promise of George Gershwin’s catchy — or you could say corny — repertory staple," by pianist, composer and writer Ethan Iverson, in the NYT.

Top-rated comment: "Jesus, did Gershwin kill this guy's dog? What's next: a screed on how The Beatles 'Love Me Do' has ossified harmonica playing and kept serious jazz harmonica players with classical chops from bringing to the fore the instrument's atonal properties? I'm not sure what the writer hates more: that Rhapsody is so popular or so much fun."

"Bidin' My Time."

That amazing video was entirely new to me and just uncovered as a consequence of getting involved in the word "abide" — see the first post of today — after Elon Musk used it in a tweet that polls about whether he should step down as "head of Twitter."

And please note: I had absolutely no thought — until I began this sentence — of gesturing — even in the slightest — at the homophonic name of the President of the United States. But feel free to rewrite the Gershwin lyrics... or just leave them as is:

Next year, next year
Somethin's bound to happen
This year, this year
I'll just keep on nappin'

"One of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen..."

"... is that you have time to write your own obituary. (The other advantages are no longer bothering with sunscreen and no longer worrying about your cholesterol.)"

It was a paid obituary, but The New York Times noticed and ran a story about Jane Lotter. That was enough — along with the adorable photo booth pictures of her and the man she married — to make me begin this blog post. As I go along — you have to get to the last third — I see what I think is the real goal of the article: presenting a postcard picture of suicide.

Ms. Lotter took advantage of [Washington state's] Death With Dignity Act.... On July 18, the couple and their two children gathered in the parents’ bedroom. Ms. Lotter asked to keep in her contact lenses, in case a hummingbird came to the feeder [her husband] had hung outside their window.

The last song she heard before pouring powdered barbiturates, provided by hospice officials, into a glass of grape juice was George Gershwin’s “Lullaby.” Then she hugged and kissed them all goodbye, swallowed the drink and, within minutes, lapsed into a coma and died.

Does this picture make you more likely to take the barbiturate way out if you knew you were dying? Would you dissolve the powder in grape juice or some other liquid? Would you play Gershwin's "Lullaby" or something else? Would you be in your own bedroom, hoping to see a hummingbird one last time? Would you include only your closest family — hugging them in a planned sequence — only your most loved one, or would you go alone? As you imagine the theater of a controlled departure — with details corresponding to Lotter's details — are you more favorably disposed to the "Death With Dignity" approach or not? Are you still thinking about yourself, or did you, at some point in reading this paragraph, shift to picturing other people getting enthusiastic about early check-out time and thinking of yourself as one of the taxpayers and insurance buyers — us the living —  who stand to benefit?

Are the females of contemporary theater out of their minds? Is Stephen Sondheim a ridiculous old crank?

Sondheim inveighs against the re-envisionment of "Porgy and Bess":

What [director Diane] Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, [playwright Suzan-Lori] Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by [actress Audra] McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?...

Is "Porgy and Bess" sacrosanct? Are the females of contemporary theater out of their minds? Or is Stephen Sondheim a ridiculous old crank?

Via Metafilter, which also digs up the 1935 review of the original production of "Porgy and Bess."

"Are you serious?" — a constitutional law argument in the Bowers v. Hardwick tradition.

On Monday, I took Josh Marshall (and Nancy Pelosi) to task for resorting to constitutional argument by laughter. They were addressing the "individual mandate" — the federal law requiring private citizens to buy health insurance, which a federal judge said is beyond the reach of Congress's enumerated powers. In my post, I chided liberals and lefties about using their own sense of ridiculousness as a legal argument because "There was a time when people laughed at the idea of gay rights."

An emailer reminds me of the precise language that appeared in the Supreme Court's case that ruled that states could criminalize homosexual sodomy. In Bowers v. Harwick, Justice Byron White (a JFK appointee) wrote for the majority:

Proscriptions against that conduct have ancient roots.... In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, all but 5 of the 37 States in the Union had criminal sodomy laws. In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults.... Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.

When Bowers was reversed 17 years later, in Lawrence v. Texas. Justice Scalia — the liberals' least (or second-least) favorite Justice — saw fit to quote those words in his dissenting opinion.

My emailer was James Taranto, author of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web," which quoted my blog post yesterday and said:

We recall a conversation with a young liberal lawyer we met at an event in late March, a few days after the House passed ObamaCare. When we pointed out that there were likely to be court challenges to the new law, particularly the mandate to purchase insurance, she was dismissive. She asserted that the constitutional questions were well settled. When we offered arguments to the contrary, she did not engage them but became emphatic to the point of belligerence, insisting that it was "crazy" to harbor any doubts about the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Our position was not that ObamaCare was clearly unconstitutional or that it was likely to be struck down, merely that there were serious constitutional arguments against it that had some possibility of prevailing. This modest claim so shocked our new acquaintance that an initially pleasant encounter turned rancorous and left us feeling she had insulted our intelligence....

Well, you'll feel better if you dance like Fred Astaire:



Here's Fred with the words to the Gershwins' "They All Laughed."

They all laughed at Rockefeller Center
Now they're fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney
and his cotton gin
They all laughed Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his chocolate bar
Ford and his Lizzie
Kept the laughers busy
That's how people are
They laughed at me wanting you
Said it would be, "Hello, Goodbye."
But oh, you came through
Now they're eating humble pie

But speaking of Robert Fulton and his steamboat, and who gets the last laugh, Fulton was a famous loser in the most famous Commerce Clause case of them all, Gibbons v. Ogden, and Fulton was on the side that argued for the narrow interpretation of Congress's enumerated power.  Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the broad interpretation:

This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.... [T]he sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects....

The wisdom and the discretion of Congress, their identity with the people, and the influence which their constituents possess at elections are, in this as in many other instances, as that, for example, of declaring war, the sole restraints on which they have relied to secure them from its abuse.

This is the beginning of the line of expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause that the proponents of health care reform will rely on as they take their case up on appeal to the 4th Circuit and, presumably, to the Supreme Court. We'll see who's dancing and who's eating humble pie then.

George Gershwin left some songs unfinished.

And now — authorized by the Gershwin estate — Brian Wilson is going to finish them.

Todd Gershwin said a collection of several dozen song fragments, ranging from "a few bars to some almost finished songs and everything in between" had been sitting virtually untouched for more than seven decades. He and other trustees began reaching out in the last year or two to find contemporary artists who might be interested in completing those musical bits and pieces.

[Brian] Wilson, who says "Rhapsody in Blue" is his earliest musical memory, said the pieces he's working with are very likely to remain as instrumentals, and that they could easily wind up as three-minute pop songs. But he's also holding open the possibility of expanding them to more substantive pieces.

Wilson said many of them aren't easy to evaluate.

"I can't decipher the verse from the chorus from the bridge," he said, "so I'm going to try to insert some new music into them. I might even write some music for an introduction."

Is it easier for the poor to up and move to a new place to take advantage of better opportunities?

Ilya Somin thinks that "contrary to conventional wisdom, 'voting with your feet' generally benefits the poor more than the relatively affluent."

It was easier for him when he was poor, anyway:

By contrast, my fiancee and I have recently moved into a new house a mere three miles away from my old condo. For me at least, this move has been more stressful than the previous five combined. Why? Because, due to my much higher pay since becoming a law professor, I now have many more possessions. The packing and unpacking have been a major pain, to put it mildly. Similarly, moving into a house required hiring contractors to do some work to get it ready, and dealing even with good contractors (like the ones recommended to us) is time-consuming and annoying, especially for people who are inexperienced with it. The process of selling the old home and purchasing a new one also requires an investment of time, effort, and money that people moving from one rental unit to another don't have to deal with.

Poverty has its privileges:



But you know, you can have money and not accumulate possessions. In fact, you'll have more money if you don't buy stuff. I'm sorry to point that out when I know we're in a recession in an economy that depends heavily on consumers enthusiastically purchasing things, but the truth is, you can live very simply, and it can be quite rewarding, emotionally and aesthetically. Keep it simple, and you will have more freedom: You can easily — as Ilya says — relocate; you have more of your money left to buy things if you ever do really want or need something; and you'll have less clutter to look at, worry about, maintain, and fuss over.