Merry Christmas From Us' To You's

 (photo John Hancock)
Last night was the big Christmas Party and 10 year anniversary for the San Diego Troubadour Newspaper, and what a celebration and gathering of tribes it was. Everybody got up and played a song or two on stage, while out back around a campfire there was a perpetual trad/music-jam going. Kent and Liz, the owners of the newspaper hopped on stage and sang some Everly Bros.,  Lou Curtis a long time accomplice to, and purveyor of, the San Diego folk scene sang a traditional tune and accompanied himself on auto-harp. There were too many cookies, alot of wine and even a few kids. 

(photo John Hancock)

My son Alexander and I were down in the city all afternoon because we'd gone to see the Old Globe Theater's wonderful production of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. We wandered around Balboa Park and then came over to the Troubadour party at nightfall. Folks were already up on stage playin' music and the party was jumpin'. Alexander was up for playing a song on mandolin and so we played House of the Rising Sun. Sure, not very christmas-y, but the only song he knows all the way through and plays melody on. 

(Last Christmas the Women's Group Widow's fund from Pilgrim Church-UCC  gave us a money gift toward a musical instrument for Alexander. He chose mandolin and has been taking lessons for about 4 months)

(photo Dan Chusid)

It turned into a little media-fest with our friendly neighborhood paprazzi-pals snapping lots of photos of Alexander's first time playing mandolin on stage and solo-ing (his idea). I was just the backup musician here, while he made his fedora-hat-wearing-debut. Fearless, is what I'd call his performance.  

(photo Dennis Andersen)

Other notable news of the night; Alexander learned how to play pool from some kids dad and later got more pool shark pointers from Skid Roper (Mojo Nixon's longtime washboard player).

(photo Dennis Andersen)

(photo Dennis Andersen)

I'd like to express my appreciation to the San Diego Troubadour for supporting acoustic music and artists in our community. You guys have a tough job getting the zine together every month but we musicians thank you for your ardour and commitment, from the bottom of our hearts.  

http://sandiegotroubadour.com/

Steel Drum Concert-Kainga Music

My son Alexander playing with his steel drum ensemble at the State Theater in Carlsbad, CA. His teacher, a gifted pianist and arranger explained that the word Kainga comes from the language of the Tonga, a Pacific island where his family is from, and means 'coming together' or community. And so we did have community tonight around the steel drum which is actually from the Caribbean.

Alexander in the white fedora and his best friend Guthry Hahm without fedora.

They started with Santana's Evil Ways then played Winter Wonderland, the head-banging I Don't Wanna Be (Davin DeGraw) and finally Dog Days Are Over (Florence and the Machine)

The closing act... (the girls brought the fedora's and deemed the group The Fedorables for the night.) There'd been several other groups earlier of equally inspiring yet older kids and even adults, with solos on the drums and some galloping 16th notes, a sublime steel-drum dream version of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, and a nod to Dave Brubeck.

Taking their bows....my son in front in blue and his friend, beside him. 

December Moon

Driving home at midnight along Coast Highway 
the moon called 

to me

Christmas Fest at Alexander's School

Alexander and middle school kids dancing to Gangnam Style at the Phoenix Learning Center holiday night (no relation to Phoenix Az btw)

We won the one of the most popular prizes at the raffle (gasp), a popcorn popper...

Here's the funny synchronicity thing Alexander pointed out today: We've had 2 run in's this week with popcorn poppers. The first one on Saturday where we were evacuated from a movie theater very suddenly/screen goes dark/alarm wails/pre-recorded voice "evacuate immediately"/ and with much urgency...and later, calling them, finding it to be the fault of a smoking popcorn popper that set off the theater alarm. And now winning this big popcorn popper at Alexander's school. What's next?

The 6th graders and their teachers did some kinda dance thing together. It was warming and heartning to see the teachers, staff, students and parents all having such a good time at the school last night. Alexander's in 6th grade now but has been at the school since kindergarten

Better 'n a bankers holiday

Playing songs at Culver City's premiere dive bar, The Cinema Bar with Randy Hoffman on glockenspiel and cardboard box and David Schwartz on upright bass. 

My pal Syd Straw jumped up and joined us on a shouting match of Make Way for The Handicapped

I went from walking into this place, when we were unloading our stuff, and thinkin' "oh crap, the band is gonna hate me" to "hot damn, we is havin a helluva good time". I think everyone in the crowd played some kinda of instrument so at some point we had a Ravi Shankar tribute with a bunch on droning notes and the lovely and talented Lucy Schwartz doing some free-jazz spoken-word-verse. 

Buddy Zapada, Phil, Jeff Turmes, Greg Boaz. Thanks to Buddy for setting up the show and overseeing everything. More fun than a payment to the spa, more nourishing than a field trip to Chik-fil-a, and better than a bankers holiday. Plus everybody in the audience got a lollipop.

Randy and I outside of David Schwartz' recording studio. I met David a few months ago and Wednesday was our first time running through these songs with the three of us. Randy kept saying "Man, I've never heard these songs with a bass before". David was a blast to play music with, and true to my long-time mission statement; he was willing to 'play well beneath his innumerable abilities'. 

See you all February 14th for the next round at the Cinema Bar

(photos by David Schwartz and Greg Boaz)

Lenny Kaye Talks Paul Williams

Lenny Kaye's Travel-blogue

A very nice posting about Paul (link above) from rock-onteur and Patti Smith guitarist, Lenny Kaye over at his blog.... You'll see the Paul-visit-writing the 4th photo down. Plus lots of great travelogue-ing about the recent Patti tours..

CLB, Alexander and Lenny after Patti Smith's San Diego show Spreckles Theater 10/12

Why It Happened

My husband Paul Williams, as many of you know, lives in a nursing home with early onset of dementia-due to a brain injury he sustained in a bicycle accident in 1995. Paul had the kind of recovery from that accident that his doctors called 'miraculous' at the time. He went back to writing books, lecturing about things he was an expert in, editing the Complete Collected Works of Theodore Sturgeon, fielding interviews on scifi writer and friend Philip K Dick, and managing the day to day sales and shipments of his books.

Aside from Paul's lousy driving (and it was bad after the brain injury). Most folks wouldn't know he'd had 5 centimeters of his right temporal lobe crushed and then removed in an emergency room brain surgery.  He pretty much seemed like his same old self.

Paul was very fortunate. During the brain surgery one of the surgeons came out to tell me what was happening and what Paul's prognoses might be. They asked what kind of IQ he'd had and I told them what his mother had told me (she'd had him tested as a teen), near 180. "The fact that he had a very high IQ means that he will probably be a little less effected by this injury. But I'm going to be honest, he very well may be like someone with Alzheimer's (the doctor actually said "like Ronald Regan").

So Paul was on the lucky side, he knew everything that he'd known before. His doctors said things could only get better for him now. He couldn't wait to get out of the hospital, rehab, and scheduled and went out on a lecture tour in Europe within six months of the accident.

From April 15th of 1995 (the date of the injury) to somewhere in 2004 Paul was active as a writer, editor and lecturer. He was the "miracle" recovery the brain doctors had deemed him back at rehab.
Then something went very very wrong.

These are images of axon regeneration in mice two weeks after injury to the hind leg’s sciatic nerve. On the left, axons (green) of a normal mouse have regrown to their targets (red) in the muscle. On the right, a mouse lacking DLK shows no axons have regenerated, even after two weeks.

Paul's brain, as smart as it was, could no longer hold back the tide of the inevitable that was now upon it, circa 2004. When he had his initial injury, in 1995, microfibers of his brain, neurotransmitter-super-highways called Axons, were cut and those highways closed down for good. But much like his brain surgeon told me; "Paul can take other side streets, it may take those electrical impulses longer but they can still arrive at their destinations, it's just that 'freeway 5' is now closed for good."

For almost 8 years Paul's brain seemed to do very well, wagering those side streets. For a while that brain kept getting better. Rarely was it at a loss for words, or memories; short or long term. But those Axons (super-highways) that were broken from the accident didn't stay broken in the same way. The road began now to break down further, slowly, mile after mile. The Axons began to regress taking away more ability to handle the movement of electrical impulses.

And how did that look. It looked like Paul was sleeping much of the day, that he became unable to handle simple daily tasks, he forgot where we were reading in the book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and he kept reading me the same page over and over. He struggled to do our taxes April of 2004, lost his temper and bit our 2 year old son on the arm when the boy tried to get his dad's attention. It was like his brain was losing control.

That initial break in the neurotransmitter highways is called a traumatic brain injury, but the subsequent retraction of the axons, worsening the ability of the electrical impulses to get around the brain, is what became of Paul, "Early onset of dementia/due to a brain injury".

Sheesh, I got it! Just today at a lecture by Yimin Zou, Ph.D., UCSD, where he talked of new research on regenerating growth of those axons, mostly in spinal injuries (by inserting antibodies into the lesion and blocking the "scabbing" effect of WNT which blocks regrowth of the axons,..../blabla, something like that)...and his precise telling of how it worked made it all click into place. With a little deductive reasoning I began to piece together what happened to Paul.

I raised my hand and asked Mr. Zou; if the retracting of the axons was what caused football players with head injuries, and others, to fall into dementia later, and he said "yes, exactly, that is what happens. And it can happen sooner or later".

Now I know. It was a mystery that no neurologist could figure out at the time. They didn't know this much stuff 8 years ago, apparently. Paul, who'd been having severe anxiety attacks, saying he was "losing his mind" had a psychiatrist through our HMO and the guy insisted, insisted, Paul was falling apart because of his acid and drug use when he was younger. I knew that guy was out of his mind-wrong. And he was. He didn't know about axons and WNT's, and proteins....and the new research that might be able to regenerate growth of those most beloved super-highways.

We went round and round to different specialists to try to help Paul: anxiety and depression? they recommended psychiatry. Clumsiness? Neurology. Neurologist sends us to an expert outside of the HMO, they didn't even figure out Paul had dementia for 2 years, he always answered the questions correctly: "who is the president and what year is it".  It wasn't until Paul showed up, unbeknownest to me, at the expert neurologists office disheveled and confused, did they decide it was some sort of dementia he had, not just a psychiatric disorder...

This was only 6 to 8 years ago. Since then much has been made of post brain injury dementia via the NFL players that have succumbed to it, some donating their brains to research. New research is giving us hope that spinal cord injuries may possibly be repairable in the near future and according to Dr. Zou, brain injury research, very closely related, is not far behind.

And today I found out what happened to Paul. And for some reason I'm excited and relieved to know.

(Photo at top of post: An axonal growth cone of a cultured hippocampal neuron. Rab33a (green) participates in axon outgrowth by mediating anterograde axonal transport of post-Golgi vesicles and their concomitant fusion at the growth cones. Red, actin filaments; blue, microtubules.

-Journal of Neuroscience, September 2012)

Thank you to the San Diego Brain Injury Foundation for hosting Dr. Zou's very informative talk at their November meeting 

A gift

Paul holds and considers the guitar pick Patti Smith handed me, 2 weeks ago, to give to him. She acknowledged him and another influential rock journalist Paul Nelson, quite nicely in her book Just Kids

Paul Williams and the Gospel Songs of Dylan Documentary

Bob Dylan- Gotta Serve Somebody - Gospel Songs of from baddaboom on GodTube.
Paul Williams comments on Bob Dylan's Gospel songs at the beginning (and again at 3:11) of this clip (from the documentary Gotta Serve Somebody Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan). 

I think I remember the film maker coming out to our place and interviewing Paul in the early 2000's. Maybe 2004 or 05. You can see my nifty Wurlitzer sitting behind him. I do remember the film maker trying to get ahold of Paul around 2007 to see if Paul liked the way the documentary turned out. Sad that Paul was never able to get back to him.

Thank you Johannes Wilbrand for emailing this link over to me.

Geez, watching this, I sure do miss him. What a wonderful, 
brilliant wack he was...just my type.

PS: you can also find him on this Philip K Dick documentary at 1:27, 7:42 and 9:14. Paul was a good friend to the science fiction writer and, after Phil's death, became the literary executor of the estate for a while.

Deep Sea Fishing

New song and a little film-short to match. Thanks to the fisherman who was willing to 'co-star', the Oceanside Police Dept. for the $56 parking fine (my front wheel was over the line a few inches)
... and to PS and B for the inspiration

(Oct 30th-updated the editing a bit)