JUST ANOTHER CONUNDRUM

Today is the two month anniversary of my brain surgery. If we're going by dates. The operation was November 13th, so today—or these last few minutes of it here on the East Coast on January 13th—makes it two months.

But then last Friday was eight weeks, which is another way of counting two months. So which is it? And is that a peculiarly English language problem or is that just simple math? And am I having trouble figuring out which day—last Friday or today—is the real mark of my making it to two months past the operation a result of the operation? Or would I have had the same trouble before the operation but just never thought about it this way before?

Or did I think about conundrums like this and just can't remember? Do you think about these things? And if you do, which day would you choose to mark the two month anniversary?

FIRST POST-OP ALPHABET LIST (WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM ITUNES)

This morning I realized the music I noted in the last post was only the names of some of the music makers I listened to since being able to do that sometime in the second month of recovery from the brain surgery (before that listening to music was too intense and overwhelming because my brain was hearing every note and instrument and sound as equal, something that actually was also happening when I went out somewhere, every sound was equal in my brain, a paper being balled up, footsteps, someone talking, a car going by etc., none of the kind of filtering our brains obviously usually do so that it was all too much and what I imagined many with brain problems experience, and then someone told me there's a word for it and many autistic people experience sound that way).

Anyway, yesterday it seemed too difficult to remember the individual tunes I had listened to that informed that part of the list I made, so today I deliberately tried to, using the alphabet format that became a staple with me over the years when I couldn't fall asleep at night or was trying to fall back asleep after waking up in the middle of the night which occurred often and I attributed to the heart medication I take, although I've been a light sleeper since I was young and attributed it to my sleeping back then in places where I had to be half awake in case something happened—i.e. on the street or in abandoned buildings etc.

So I wrote the alphabet down the side of a page of a yellow legal pad and then began thinking of individual songs I've heard from the iTunes on my computer lately and enjoyed, not skipping over them because they bothered my brain like I'm doing with some songs. This made me realize I was mostly digging music that's "happy"—or at least upbeat in tempo (interestingly many with the same beat as the "ticking" that sometimes occurs in my head as a result of the operation).

I filled in as many of the letters as I could, which wasn't many (before the operation I used to do these regularly, as many of you know, off the top of my head while laying in bed trying to fall asleep, but now I pretty much go right to sleep which has led me to believe maybe the growth they removed from my brain had been keeping me up before) and then I used my iTunes to look up ones I couldn't remember or wasn't sure I had right or just to jar my memory.

So this list is made up of only a few songs I remembered off the top of my head and the rest from using my iTunes library as a source. Using this method I came up with some pretty great recordings. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll be able to come up with lists like I used to just out of my head (I meant lists out of my head but it works with the other meaning as well doesn't it):

AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE (Johnny Mercer)
BIG YELLOW TAXI (Joni Mitchell's original acapella version with just her guitar—I know the lyrics aren't "happy" but the brilliance of her creation, from performance to composition, is so uplifting and inspiring and she does laugh at her attempt to sing bass at the end so it's a happy song for me despite the realities it addresses)
CAROLINA SHOUT (Fats Waller—early solo version is incredible you can't help tappin') (and just for extra kicks Sinatra's first recording of COME DANCE WITH ME)
DIGA DIGA DOO (Artie Shaw & Orchestra)
EPISTROPHY (Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall)
FALLING SLOWLY (Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova from ONCE—a slower beat but still makes me feel happy to hear it)
GIRL FROM IMPANENA, THE (Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto et. al)
HALLELUJAH (Rufus Wainwright—thanks to my son Miles for turning me on to this version, not such a fast beat but ultimately upbeat even if just from the power of the performance)
IT DON'T MEAN A THING IF IT DON'T HAVE THAT SWING (Duke Ellington, the original recording)
JUKE BOX SATURDAY NIGHT (Glenn Miller Orchestra)
KO-KO (Charlie Parker)
LADY'S IN LOVE WITH YOU, THE (Glen Miller Orchestra—Tex Benecke doing his vocal swing thing)
MILESTONE (Miles Davis—I used to consider this my theme song when I was in my late teens, whistling and scatting it everywhere I went, and then decades later did the same for the role of the cartoon character "Sparks" in COOL WORLD but they had me redo it because they didn't want to be sued by the record company etc.)
NOW'S THE TIME (Lambert, Hendricks & Ross version of this Charlie Parker tune)
OH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING (Gordan MacRae from the soundtrack of the movie version of OKLAHOMA)
PEACE PIECE (Bill Evans—slow but so lovely)
QUICKSILVER (Art Blakey)
RETURN TO ROAN INISH 1 (from the soundtrack to THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH)
SALT PEANUTS (Dizzy Gillespie)
TOPSY (Count Basie)
UP ON CRIPPLE CREEK (The Band—couldn't think of or find anything more upbeat)
VIPER MAD (Sidney Bechet)
WALTZ FOR DEBBIE (Bill Evans) (and 'cause it's so mellowly upbeat Nat King Cole's WALKIN' MY BABY BACK HOME)
X?
YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS (Eric Dolphy from LAST DATE—in my mind one of the greatest tour de force jazz improvisations ever recorded)
ZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH (Johnny Mercer)

FIRST POST-BRAIN SURGERY LIST!

Okay, this isn't exactly old style. Not my usual pre-op alphabet list, or trinity lists, or couplets or any of the others you can find in this blog's archives under lists, but instead, simply a daytime, wide awake attempt to remember, as well as I can, works of art that I've dug since the operation and have given me some joy and satisfaction and a sense of the goodness (yes, goodness) and creative originality, the talent and commitment, the effort and tenacity that goes into making something new that brings pleasure and more (enlightenment even) to those who experience these works of art.

I got a little preparation for this by revising the lists on my profile several days ago to only post-op options. So here's what I can remember (I know there's more) of works of creativity that have opened and filled my heart with gratitude for their presence in my life since 11/13/09, the date my brain was invaded by the surgeon's blade:

MOVIES:

THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY
RANDOM HARVEST
AFTER THE THIN MAN
ANOTHER THIN MAN
ON THE WATERFRONT
CASABLANCA
IT'S COMPLICATED
CRAZY HEART
JULIA & JULIE (mostly the Julia/Streep parts)
UP IN THE AIR (with a few small caveats)


BOOKS:

EAST OF WEST L.A. (photographs by Kevin McCollister)
A PALPABLE ELYSIUM (photos and commentary by Jonathan Williams)
NOT TWICE ENOUGH (poems by Geoffrey Young I began reading before the operation and finished since)
IRISH TINKERS (photos and quotes taken and complied by Janine Wiedel and Martina O'Fearaghaigh
SWING ERA NEW YORK ("The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson" with commentary by W. Royal Stokes, almost finished with this)

MUSIC:

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (the soundtrack for ON THE WATERFRONT which I have on my computer)
CHARLIE PARKER (early stuff)
LESTER YOUNG (early stuff)
FRANK SINATRA ('40s, '50s & '60s)
THELONIOUS MONK
BILL EVANS
MILES DAVIS ('40s, '50s and early '60s)
JOHN COLTRANE
THE ANIMALS
THE WHO
THE BEATLES
THE ROLLING STONES
IT'S COMPLICATED (the soundtrack)
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (the soundtrack)

ART:

FAIRFIELD PORTER
FRANCIS PICABIA
LOUISA MATTHIASDOTTIR
RICHARD BAKER
(all of the above from reproductions of details of paintings on oversized postcard announcements from TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY—which if you're in NYC you should check out at 724 Fifth Ave.)
and from books I've been perusing from my shelves:
R. B. KITAJ
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

And three blogs that are basically photography (there are other favorite blogs, see the list to the right, that I love but these are the most specifically "works of art" ones):
EAST OF WEST L.A.
MY EYE AND I
DISCREET INDISCRETIONS

[Woops: how could I have left off my oldest photographer friend who is one of the alltime greats, Robert Zuckerman and his KINDSIGHT!]

(and poems that my dear friend Terence Winch has read to me over the phone that he has written since the operation)

PS: Lisa, the ticking in my head from the scalp adjusting to the titanium plate or reattaching to the skull (or whatever causes it) that I thought was gone, hasn't. Ticking away here at the computer this morning. So maybe it will be a year before that's entirely gone as your doctors said. Thank God I find it kind of amusing.

PPS: Though I 'd put in an example of my typing without correcting it. Pretyy good for the most part heh? Certaly a lot better than wherer iI started at.

THE IDIOCRACY

Well meaning friends brought me books and magazines to read while I was recovering from brain surgery, before they understood that this kind of surgery doesn't put you in bed for weeks or months the way serious surgeries on other parts of your body do (since there's not much that gets cut through besides skin and skull and the brain itself, which doesn't feel pain), it just makes it very difficult to use your brain, like to read!

So now that I can read silently to myself (the last aspect of that brain function to return) after eight weeks of recovery, I'm finally getting around to looking at some of the reading material folks brought me, starting with the magazines. The first and so far only thing I've read in a Harper's mag someone left for me at the hospital is the HARPER'S INDEX for November 2009 which had this disheartening fact:

"Percentage of Americans who think the government should 'stay out of Medicare': 39"

This is from Public Policy Poling (Raleigh, North Carolina) and corroborates my feeling upon getting a semblance of brain power back after the first few days and realizing I had returned to a world in which the histrionic outright lies of Glen Beck and the bullying lies of Rush Limbaugh, and the easily refutable lack of factual basis or logic to much of Sarah Palin's political pronouncements are actually treated as part of a public debate at the highest levels of government and media as if any false accusation or baseless claim were worthy of not just the public's attention but serious debate!

With my new found limitations post-operation on what I could grasp intellectually or rather focus on intellectually without feeling anxious or strained, I realized that many people just can't grasp nuanced or layered or complex or complicated reasoning, that their brains either just can't accept it or focus on it or comprehend it or it actually makes them feel anxious (which I suspect is a condition that fuels a lot of the tea bagger movement's lack of logic and reasoning based on reality etc.).

I wasn't able, as I posted about, to watch The Daily Show with John Stewart for the first few weeks of my recovery because it would cause exactly those symptoms, uneasiness and anxiety due to the levels of irony and subtleties in what on the surface seemed obvious in its comedic technique initially.

Now that I can watch Stewart regularly again, and find the show brilliant at times, it's once more clear that his is one of the few shows, maybe the only one, that uses real facts and logic to expose the hypocrisy and outright lying that is allowed to go unchallenged in even the mainstream media let alone Fox News etc.

It is a shame that what started with the superior logic and reasoning of the great minds of The Enlightenment, our country has descended into the depths of what has rightly been called an "idiocracy"—when even those who call themselves "progressives" fall for the most reductive thinking and illogical reasoning.

I'm giving those who don't use reason and logic and provable facts as the basis for their political stands and arguments a pass now and as a result haven't really posted on anything specifically political in a while. But I do intend to eventually post a summary of my thoughts from this period in the future.

PS: I was out at a gathering the other night where there were thirty or more people and for the first time since the operation I felt relatively comfortable and could spend some time talking to individual folks without feeling anxious about the other stimuli in the room as I have been up until now or feeling overwhelmed by the lights and the conversation etc. So still making progress. Next will be venturing out to a busy restaurant or movie theater.

IT'S COMPLICATED REDUX

I watched IT'S COMPLICATED again with a friend yesterday. Liked it even more.

I've read critics and have other friends who either think this is a fun but lightweight movie or object to aspects of it. Like the lead character's (played by Meryl Streep) material success, her thriving business and great home etc.

I'm always pointing out and objecting to the false environments most movies are set in, i.e. young people in New York lofts and apartments that only CEOs could afford, etc. But Streep's character owns a business that is making money, a bakery/eatery in an upscale looking town (Santa Barbara), and the fact is many, if not most, successful small businesses are started and run by female entrepreneurs.

And besides, it's a romantic comedy very much in the style of the old Hollywood classic so-called "women's movies" (except for more explicit language and some nudity etc.). Yes, in its way it's a middle-age female fantasy, but if we dig a little beneath that obvious and facile observation it can be said that the story addresses some very real issues about relationships for those who aren't so young anymore.

The dialogue is snappy and witty (there were only two scenes I would have rewritten, and they were small almost extraneous scenes just setting up some plot points), the acting so charming and unselfconsciously brave (especially from Alec Baldwin who has become one of our greatest comic actors for my taste, and yes as I've disclosed before we've known each other for decades now but there's plenty of actors and artists etc. whose work I criticize who I know as well, like I was leaning toward criticizing Steve Martin in this flick, but on second viewing I appreciate what he does here even more) and the directing (by Nancy Meyers), obviously, is what makes the whole thing work.

Just as the classic romantic comedies of the the '30s and '40s bent the truth to give a nation some relief from the tribulations of The Great Depression and World War Two (obviously if anyone drank the way William Powell and Myrna Loy did in THE THIN MAN series, they'd be needing an intervention—is it a coincidence that Alcoholics Anonymous was founded the year the first THIN MAN movie came out?), IT'S COMPLICATED seems to me to do the same for at least me if not "the nation"—provide some relief from The Great Recession and the aftermath of the Bush-Cheney era's dismantling of so much that was so good about this country (and the world for that matter).

It does that with lots of laughs and a satisfying story that deals with some pretty basic human realities, some of which I haven't seen addressed much, if at all, in movies before—and that alone elevates this to much more than just fluff in my book (or blog in this case).

For my taste—and this might still be a result of the brain surgery and my lingering distaste for dark or dreary film stories—IT'S COMPLICATED deserves some pretty high honors for what it achieves.

A PALPABLE ELYSIUM

I got a little cranky in my post yesterday, which is something the clarity and gratitude of the last post-brain-surgery eight weeks has remarkably kept me almost completely free of. So I thought maybe it was partly provoked by my finishing the first book I got on my own since the operation.

I saw it was on sale for ten dollars in the latest David R. Godine catalog, a publisher that consistently produces beautiful books to be cherished as art objects even if you don't dig the contents. [I forgot to add for full disclosure, as they say, that Godine took over the Black Sparrow press and publisher of two of my books: IT'S NOT NOSTALGIA and IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE.] But I knew I dug Jonathan Williams—the late poet and publisher of fine books himself and someone I considered a friend even though I hadn't been in touch with him for years before his passing. A PALPABLE ELYSIUM is a collection of his photographs and commentary, making it easy for me to read (I'm still not up to an entire book of nothing but prose).

Jonathan was an eccentric, quirky, highly opinionated, sometimes cranky original with distinct tastes in everything. He was born to be a "Southern gentleman"—which in that time and place often meant racist as well—but ended up at the unique experiment called Black Mountain College in the 1940s with people like the composer Lou Harrison and the poet/teacher Charles Olson, as well as dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage etc. In other words the cream of what would become the avant-garde of the 1950s and beyond.

He was a gay man, in every sense of that word, and completely comfortable with his tastes and himself and took no flack from anyone about any of that for as long as I knew him (since the 1960s) and all his life from what I've heard. He sought out artists and poets and composers and others he found unique in the ways they created and led their lives and made them a part of his life (I was flattered to be among them as we met in person after years of correspondence when he showed up with his "lifelong companion" Tom Meyer at a tiny apartment I was living in in Washington DC in 1974).

A PALPABLE ELYSIUM contains photographs of some of the many friends and acquaintances he made from the 1950s to the 1990s (the book was published in 2002), as well as some of their artwork or their gravestones. The photographs are often as casual as snapshots and sometimes as unexpectedly unique and/or flawed. But with his commentary added to each, they become something much more, something that typically cannot be described any better than Jonathan did himself in the title he gave this collection: A PALPABLE ELYSIUM.

Even if you don't have the same taste as Jonathan, and I sometimes don't, if you read his comments often linking his subjects to other artists and friends and then look up the lives and work of all those he mentions in this book, you will have given yourself an education, on the highest level, in a particularly rare contingent of the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th Century.

For my taste, the book is worth owning just for the quality of its production, let alone the sometimes exquisite images (his photograph of poet William Carlos Williams not long before WCW passed is stunning and one I wish I had a framed print of hanging on my wall). But it's Jonathan's commentary that makes this book unique and worth paying attention to. His fearless judgements, his ribaldry, his appreciation of the lone genius creator whether renowned or unknown (he spent a lot of time searching out so-called "primitive" or "outsider" artists and even gives directions to their locations so you can drive the country back roads of rural Georgia or South Carolina and go see their work yourself!).

Whether comparing Whitman's tomb to Colonel Sanders', recounting a visit between Buckminister Fuller and William Burroughs, or trashing fundamentalists and conformists and the taste and caliber of most of his fellow citizens, every entry in this book is an eye opener in its own way, and totally original. That's the main point I guess I want to make is that this is a collection of photos and comments about unique individuals and art by a unique individual and artist. An incomparable rarity any way you approach it.

A WORLD IN A PEBBLE

I've just discovered that for years I've been repeating a favorite quote of mine that turns out to be quite a misquote, though there's a correspondence to the meanings of each.

Back in the 1960s I read an English translation of the Nobel Laureate Par Lagerkvist's novel THE DWARF, in which the title character is in the service of one of the Medeci. When Leonardo DaVinci is hired to do some work for his master, "the dwarf" spies the artist and inventor picking up a pebble and turning it over and over in his hand, intently interested in it.

"The dwarf" concludes from this:

"One for whom a pebble has value must be surrounded by treasure wherever he goes."

I know this because I just looked it up in an old record book in which I have written various excerpts and quotes from novels and poems and other writings.

But for the decades since I first read that and wrote it down, I've been remembering and repeating it differently, as I did for a great niece the other night at a family gathering. I told her that after spying Leonardo examining a pebble for what seemed like an eternity, "the dwarf" thought to himself: "What must the world be like for someone who can find a world in a pebble?"

Sometimes I've said: "How rich the world must be for someone who can find a world in a pebble."

This young woman, my grand-niece Sidney, is extremely intelligent and well-educated, and I was just musing on how the kind of knowledge she is acquiring can make life so much more interesting. I said that I feel very fortunate that I'm rarely bored because I've read so much over my lifetime that almost anything I'm presented with or encounter or that's just part of any scene I wander through evokes all kinds of interesting facts and information and connections to or distinctions from other facts and information, etc.

And this was true even in the early days after my relatively recent brain surgery (two months tomorrow) when I could do little other than eat and talk, unable to read or write or do simple math or answer an e mail or listen to music or watch a movie or TV show etc. etc. I still found life incredibly fascinating and observing the limited way my brain was able to operate and the daily progress that it was and is still making became the focus of a lot of that fascination.

Some folks might find that boring or too self-involved or self-indulgent, (especially those who put on their blog profiles that they see their lives, or everything in it from birth to the present, as "boring"), but fortunately for me, I don't and hope you don't either.

PS: I have several friends who've seen the film of THE LOVELY BONES and loved it, so even though I didn't, you might want to check it out for yourself.