SIGNS OF SPRING

It was one of those old fashioned winters we haven't had here since, well, the kind we had around here when I was a kid. With snow on the ground almost from beginning to end. Beautiful.

And now with Spring only days away, the transition is happening in that same old fashioned way, with the last bits of snow being washed away by rain or melted away by warmer temperatures and sunny skies.

But there are still signs of climate weirding (caused by "climate warming" but it's too difficult a concept for some, particularly and most obviously rightwingers to get that when you trace a line created by average temperatures over centuries, there's a steeper and steeper incline towards the end of the 20th that continues to ascend into the present, but because that impacts the weather worldwide in different ways, more moisture more snow in some areas etc. it baffles these people into the "see, it's cold where I am so ipso facto no warming" et-endlessly-cetera).

Like when I took a walk in the local park today under brilliantly blue skies and saw the snow was all gone where it had been only days ago (and had the weather last weekend been cold enough to cause the rainstorm to have been a snowstorm we would have gotten over three and a half feet of snow! as it was winds were clocked at over seventy-five (75!) miles an hours at times and caused some deaths in nearby Jersey towns and many uprooted trees etc. including minor damage here and there like on the front porch of my apartment where two year-round, screwed-in screens were ripped from the porch and from their frames and tossed around the neighborhood)

I also saw signs of spring like the duck pond being thawed out and some ducks floating in it and the sound of familiar birds from my childhood as I walked under the still bare branches of the variety of trees they planted to create this lovely park. Until under one tree I had to look up because I heard screeching that seemed familiar and yet out of place at the same time, and there was one of the many green parrots that make Northern New Jersey their home now and have since the "global warming" trend started rising more rapidly in the last decade.

Now that's nothing like the old fashioned springtime thaw of my boyhood. Nobody from Jersey in my time was accustomed to hearing the sound of screeching parrots in New Jersey! But my youngest is. I mentioned I saw one today and it was like old news. Oh yeah, the parrots. They're always in that tree dad. At twelve years old he's never known the Northeast USA to be parrrotless.

[And as I've pointed out in other posts about this in previous seasons, these are not freed pets as some rightwingers like to picture it, these are parrots native to Mexico that have slowly made their way North as temperatures have risen, just as Spring comes earlier and summer stays longer (on average my rightwing friends, you remember that concept from grammar school?) every year, giving them more and more reason to either move further North each year and/or return earlier.]

MORE POST BRAIN SURGERY MUSINGS

One of the things I noticed in my early recovery from the brain surgery was the things I didn't notice.

You can't walk anywhere in my apartment without noticing books, there's bookshelves everywhere you go.

Before the brain surgery, they were not only a great comfort to me, just the sight of them, familiar and resonating with experiences I cherish, even if just the experience of handling that particular object, let alone reading it, or finding within its pages something that revealed a truth to me that I'd always known but never before seen articulated, or articulated in that way.

As I walked through my apartment pre surgery, a book would catch my eye, a title or binding, shape or color, etc. that would evoke a sensation of pleasure, like when you hear a recording you love or recognize an old friend or lover in the street.

But for quite a while after the surgery, I didn't notice any of the books on any of the shelves in any of the bookcases around my place. I was aware they were books and that they were mine and that at one time they had meant something to me, but for a while they didn't any more.

I couldn't read them even if I wanted to. And I was totally okay with that, I accepted it along with the possibility my ability to read might never return. I didn't miss it because somehow in my acceptance of what I was going through, I surrendered my love, my sometimes obsession with books, and lived in a world, no matter how temporarily, where books were just background.

It was like my view of my apartment as I lived throughout it in those days and weeks and more was being filtered through one of those soft lenses they used to use for some Hollywood stars in the old black-and-white classics, filtered through some kind of gauze or vaseline applied to the lens so that the edges of the frame were always blurred in a way that would have made it impossible to read the titles on the spines of any books in any bookcases.

I think about that now, because once again, as I move through my home, I'll notice a book and get that wave of sensation akin to re-experiencing something pleasurable or remarkable or worth remembering forever. It makes me smile and feel delighted to be alive in a world where these objects can provide me with so much satisfaction.

But it also makes me think about those for whom lots of things that give me pleasure don't do the same for them, or vice versa. And again it makes me think we're all wired in different ways, and a lot of the differences that seem to be separating so many in this country and maybe the world these days are just a result of different wiring and either not having or not using the systems created over time to ameliorate the conflict that different wiring has all too often led to.

QUOTE FROM MONK

"You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence." —Thelonius Monk (as quoted in THELONIOUS MONK: The Life and Times of an American Original)

FOUR MONTHS SINCE BRAIN SURGERY

I'm down with what seems like a tenacious cold and the weather outside is wind and flood city, threatening the electricity, so I'll keep this short (not to alarm a anyone; I'm not—alarmed that is).

Amazing that only three months ago I was still have trouble reading and only a month or so ago couldn't read a long prose book like I just finished and posted on, the Monk bio.

I usually read several books at once all of them at different stages of progress so am finishing at least one or more a week, so to have completed reading only one pretty big but nonetheless sole book of only prose in four months is new, though obviously I'm pretty much back to normal re reading.

And even though I still have no compulsion to make lists and my mind seems maybe calmer but also a lot quieter and foreign without that compulsion, I notice in the post yesterday I did mention the Monk bio as now one of a trinity of favorite bios of musical originals, so...

I think I also mentioned I've been cooking a lot. One of the first, and actually only things, I was capable of doing in the first weeks after the surgery was eat. And all I wanted were home cooked comfort food (thank you to the many family members and friends who supplied a lot of it).

Since I became well enough to care for myself, the offers of others cooking for me recently has been my friend Sue when she isn't with the love of her life or busy otherwise. And I appreciate it. But when my older boy was here he reminded me of how easy it is to cook spinach in a pan on the stove top and that got me started so that now I cook something at least once a day or more (where before the surgery all I wanted to do was buy food to go or use the microwave.

As for writing, I'm capable of doing it obviously from these posts, but it still wears me out (I used to write all day when I could in the past) and if I'm the least tired or rundown, as I am today, I have to spend half the time correcting mistakes.

But I am driving again (though I haven't tried a trip to the Berkshires yet, this is the longest I've been away from there—where my older children and their families live and many friend—in over ten years.

All in all I'm about as "normal" as I've ever been, at least on the outsides, but it still feels odd to look out at the world through my post-brain surgery mind, not quite me (an old friend who hadn't spoke to me on the phone since before the operation recently told me halfway into our conversation that he could hear the difference, and he's a word man, Dale Herd, one of my alltime favorite writers as well as friend.

But to strangers and probably most people I assume I seem like nothing ever happened. Unless they care to feel the little bumps where the screws are or could get inside my head, even if only to hear the different sounds scratching my head where the plate is from anywhere else. Interesting. (And not so short after all.)

[PS: I corrected all the typos and such that I noticed as I was writing or that the computer did, but I notice in rereading this post there's other errors I missed. I'm leaving them not only so you can see the way my writing is still a little problematic, but also because after writing this and correcting what seemed like tons of typos, I'm even more tired.
PPS: I can hear the sirens every few minutes so obviously this storm is taking its toll. One of the things I have to admit I;m grateful for is being a renter! There's gonna be some home repair bills and projects tomorrow!]

THELONIOUS MONK (THE NEW BIOGRAPHY)

Subtitled: The Life and Times of an American Original, this new biography of Monk pretty much lives up to that claim, if not entirely.

The author, Robin D. G. Kelley does a great job mining as much of his extensive research as seems possible to try and deconstruct the myths that were developing it seems as soon as Monk began his career as a professional jazz pianist and composer.

I've been following Monk since I was a teenager when he was finally beginning to get some public recognition, though still years before he made the cover of TIME, a cover I framed when it came out and still have on my wall.

Monk has always been an iconic figure to me, and a challenge. Part of the reason I gave up playing piano professionally was because his genius seemed so far beyond anything I was capable of accomplishing I decided to devote all my time and energy to writing, particularly my poetry, where I felt I was doing something uniquely my own as Monk was with his music.

But even though it took me years of studying—in the beginning almost all of it self-taught in an autodidact way—and false starts and obsessive reading and imitating poetic techniques and strategies and styles until I could finally incorporate them into my own original impulses and talent, it never occurred to me that Monk had done the same until reading this book.

To learn in these pages that Monk actually learned tunes straight, incorporating their original composers' or interpreters' renditions and then reworked them over and over replacing the older standard techniques with his own original harmonics and chord diminishments (I don't mean that in the sense of a diminished 7th but in the sense that he actually would drop two of the triad notes in the middle of a seventh chord to give a sense of space and simplicity but also a kind of disorienting something's-not-right and yet...sound to it that some mistook for discordance or "wrong notes" because he'd end up with two distant notes whose tones were only a step or a half step away from each other, if you see what I mean).

Kelley explains a lot of this stuff in musical terms that are relatively easy for me to get or to try on the piano and then get, though it might be a little arcane for those who don't play music or read it. He also uses a lot of personal accounts by many who played with Monk and knew his techniques and strategies firsthand, as well as Kelley's own descriptions of tapes, made by Monk himself with his wife Nellie's help when he was practicing or composing at home, or by fans when he was working out arrangements for new songs or breaking in new band members while gigging at The Five Spot or other venues, or alternative takes or false starts in recording sessions that were also caught on tape.

It would be great to have a CD with some of that stuff on it to go along with this book. But just picturing Monk going through the process of learning songs of other composers and making them his own not only made me smile, but comforted me, to realize how much harder he worked to create that unique sound that as a kid I somehow thought just came out of him as a result of his inspiring and inspired musical genius. Which, of course, is true, but he started where the rest of us do, which makes his accomplishment even more impressive.

Anyway, it's a great biography. Up there now as part of a trinity of my favorite biographies of American music originals with the two volume bio of Elvis by Peter Guralnick—LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS and CARELESS LOVE—and the first volume (I'm still waiting for the second) of Gary Giddens' bio of Bing Crosby: A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS.

Like those, THELONIOUS MONK: The Life and Times of an American Original is full of details maybe only an obsessive reader and fan of these particular musical "geniuses" can dig (obviously Monk was more of the genius since he wrote a lot of the music he played so uniquely, but Bing's interpretive innovative originality was an enormous influence and had a much more widespread impact on "American" music, as did Elvis's remix and reinterpretation of country and rhythm and blues).

There is much that remains mysterious and enigmatic about Monk that this book doesn't resolve, except to lay to rest the myths of the naive primitivist or childlike saintly presence etc. that often surrounded Monk's persona, and expose some of the more mundane aspects of the life of a genius as well as extend our knowledge a bit of the underlying mental disorders that generated a lot of Monk's more erratic and unreliable behaviors.

But in the end, no matter how often this Monk biography resorts to descriptions and lists of gigs and recording dates, for anyone who loves Monk's music, it's still a revelatory experience to read and a satisfying one as well.

POST-BRAIN SURGERY FIRSTS

I've been meaning to post about Friday night. It was an eventful night for post-brain surgery precedents.

My friend, and fellow brain surgery survivor Lisa O. had hipped me to a night of music at what we used to call "the Community Center" in my hometown when I was a kid. Now it's named after somebody and is more artsy than 1950s attempts to keep kids off the streets.

A bunch of local musicians who call themselves "the collective" and comprise several local bands and various combinations of them were on stage for this event. It was scheduled for 8-11 but me and my youngest showed up around 9:30 to find I had to park a block away, a good sign for turnout.

Inside the hallway was crowded with middle school and elementary school kids, many of whom my son knew. He was happy.

Since I moved back to this area in '99 I've been in this place a few times and am always taken with the changes that have occurred since I was a kid, but also the familiarity of a lot of what makes the old building special in my memory. I've even read my poetry upstairs where we played pool when I was a kid but is now an art gallery and small performance space.

But I hadn't been in the room where the music was going on since I was in high school when it was used for what they used to call "Teen Canteens"—dances for high school kids. I had a lot of memorable experiences in that room so when I entered it with my little guy behind me, I felt overwhelmed that the space, though renovated since then, still evoked memories and at the same time I felt anxious and a little disoriented by the crowd and the loud music and the semi-darkness I was trying to decipher.

I almost turned around and left. But I saw my friend Lisa D. and her husband Frank at a table right in front of me and an empty chair next to theirs and felt, okay maybe I can do this. It took me a while to pay the seven bucks for my son and me and return my wallet to my pocket, feeling overwhelmed by the simplest tasks, but eventually I made it the few steps to my friends and sat down and the anxiety subsided and I was able to look around after a while and see people I knew or at least recognized from the community.

This was the noisiest and biggest crowd I'd been in since the brain surgery. Up on the stage a group of musicians and singers—ten people or so—were rocking the joint. Impressively. My friend Torre was playing guitar, one of them. I started to feel not only more comfortable but very happy to be here.

My youngest hung around for a while listening and then said he wanted to go out in the hallway and hang with friends so he did, while the various musicians on stage kept reconfiguring into different combinations for the Beatles and Stones songs they were playing in what they had set up as a little competition to see which group's songs were most popular.

My friend Lisa O. spotted me and stopped to commiserate and ask how I was handling it all. She offered me ear plugs, but I declined, I never liked anything in my ears. She asked if I could feel the screws in the plate in my skull and I said yes, in fact for awhile I couldn't stop checking them out now and then. She guided my finger to hers and I did the same for mine. Must have looked odd to others seeing this man and woman touching each other's skulls through our hair.

It made me feel very good, kind of secure, knowing she was there. I loosened up and started moving to the beat of the songs like the old table dancing days in Manhattan when there were ordinances against dancing so kids in the '60s invented all kinds of upper body moves for dancing in your seats at tables in coffee houses and such.

I spied a woman who I'd heard sing in a duo and trio situation with other women, I love her voice and her style, and was blown away by a young woman someone told me was fifteen but who looked a lot older, not in a trying-to way but in a solid way, like Janis Joplin always seemed older because she had such a powerful presence and voice, this young woman did too.

I was happy to see and hear my friend Matt who I hadn't seen in a while and was one of the first people I wrote about on this blog, a local Irish-American guy whose a terrific guitar player and singer and does Beatles and other classic rock songs acoustically or electrically better than most groups do their own original songs.

Feeling hungry I went and got a homemade chicken quesadia (sp?) that was delicious and handled the walk to the kitchen and paying for it all relatively smoothly and without anxiety. And after I finished that off, some of the women in the room had gotten up front and were dancing and Lisa O. motioned for me to join them and I did.

So, post-brain surgery this was the first time I'd been in a room with this many people, with loud live music, out this late (they went on well beyond 11PM), table danced or got up on the floor and boogied. I couldn't stop smiling I was enjoying myself so much.

But the post-op diminishment of the filter it's taken me years to build up to keep my mouth from getting into the kinds of trouble I was always getting into in my younger years led me to tell one woman she was "beautiful and unbelievably hot" which wasn't what I meant to say and I'm sure not what she wanted to hear from this older gray haired stranger. But that was a post-op first too. Hopefully I can return the filter to where it was before the operation when I not only would have know better than to say that but would have meant something else anyway, something more like: "Man it's fun dancing and being among so many people having a happy time."

Of course, the next day I paid the price and felt totally wiped out, and after some more things over the weekend I now feel like I need a long rest, but nothing permanent.

BOB BINIAK & RUTH KLIGMAN R.I.P.

I didn't know Bob Biniak except for his appearance in the documentary DOGTOWN AND Z BOYS, which my older son Miles turned me and his little brother on to years ago and we were blown away. The film records the emergence of the kind of free style skateboarding created by surfers in the less grandiose section of Santa Monica back in the seventies that led to the sport becoming what it is today.

It's like watching a new art form come into being. An incredible document. The Z Boys crew, named for the Zephyr skate shop that was right around the corner still when I lived in "Dogtown" in the early 1990s, are shown skating as kids and commenting on their exploits and techniques as adults.

Biniak is one of them, a great screen presence and a great athlete. He was only 51 so it's a terrible shame. Here's the NY Times obit.

Ruth Kligman I did know. She was most famous for being in the car with Jackson Pollock (and for being his young lover) that crashed and killed Pollock and a friend of Kligman's but not her in 1956. I knew her more as an artist and star of the downtown art and poetry scenes in the 1970s and '80s and found her still dynamic and seductive and extremely attractive.

She had a quick wit and a jaundiced eye, but was devoted to art and poetry and those who made both, and I was grateful that someone so smart and sexy and celebrated enjoyed my company and appreciated my creative efforts. Here's her NY Times obit.