THE KIDS
“They’re taking her children away. Because they said she was not a good mother.”
Lou Reed The Kids from the album Berlin
“About a week later Daryl had the kids asleep in the back room. She was asleep on the couch and Pepe was sitting opposite the doorway watching TV. This banging came on the door and the Polish guy was crying and weeping and sobbing, ‘Let me in, Daryl, I gotta talk to you’, and and Pepe said, ‘She can’t,’ He tried to wake her up but she was in a very deep sleep or whatever and he sat back down in front of theTV and said, ‘You can’t come in,’
The Polish guy sloped off and came back with a shotgun, blew the door and Pepe’s leg off. Daryl woke up to the sound of the shotgun and sawPepe holding his leg, which was cut off at the knee. I saw the wall later, still covered in cartilage. I saw Pepe a long time later on crutches. The welfare authorities took the kids away from Daryl, which was part of the background of Lou’s album Berlin. “ From What’s Welsh for Zen by John Cale.
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I woke early this morning from a dream wondering what happened to my hat.
I have many hats, but the one I am missing was a beat up gray fedora, worn with the brim turned up. I wore it for decades. Now, it is gone. I am pretty sure that I gave it away to someone in particular, but for the life of me I can’t recall who I gave it to.
Are our memories like children? Do they grow up and have their own lives? Do they forget us when we grow old? Once I heard it said that the the one with most toys at the end wins. Wins what? You can’t take it with you. Does the one with the most memories win? What about all the forgotten memories, the ones where years will go by, and then you will be walking down a street, or doing the dishes or having a dream, and lo and behold, there it is. Staring at you like the dog in the alley.
Do we grow up wild, then over time become “ trained”, then over time go feral again?
When I was a cruel teenager, and were we all cruel teenagers, but when I was growing up, in my teen age years, I would retreat to my bedroom and listen to records. “Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer; I was taken by a photograph of you.” Jackson Browne Fountain of Sorrow
Inevitably the records I loved most were sad songs. While we driving in the car the other day, my wife remarked on a playlist I had made up, “Why are all these songs so sad?”
My new bass player also said this week, “ Why are all these songs written in minor keys?”
I don’t know the answer, but I fear it might take a few sessions with a psychiatrist to even get close.
One of the records that I obsessed over was Lou Reed’s Berlin. I would play his song The Kids at full volume. My poor Mother! She who gave life to seven children would come in and tell me to turn off ‘that horrible song.’ Horrible because The Kids features children crying. She couldn’t listen to that, as it disturbed her. Unfortunately for her, as a cruel teenager, I stubbornly continued to play it.
I knew it was painful for her to hear it, yet I played it. Perhaps it was kind of a character defect that I had then, and later grew out of. No doubt, I can still be a jerk. I don’t think I am as cruel as I used to be. Wow. I just actually said that. But it is true.
Is it true that the first sign of life is the asshole, and the body grows up around it?
According to Laura Allan, on www.Ranker.com, What Order Do Your Body Parts Develop In The Womb? “Believe it or not, all human beings start out as tiny anuses. In the first few weeks after fertilization, you're nothing more than a small group of cells, called a blastula. This blastula bursts open from the inside out, making a little bitty opening.
This opening is called a blastopore, and it is the first of your proto-organs to begin forming.While that may sound like a pretty fancy word, the blastopore is actually just a miniscule anus. The rest of your body develops from there.”
So I was intuitively correct. We all started out as assholes. Lou Reed was an infamous asshole who loved to get people riled up. John Cale notes in his autobiography, “With Lou, you never knew what condition he was going to show up in. Lou is the most difficult person to work with I have ever known.”
But within that difficulty, a creative tension was born, and that tension between two acknowledged celebrity assholes, in turn created one of the most influential bands of the Sixties. Cale describes the effect they had, “People were constantly leaving during our 20 minute sets. With every show we were coming more alive, like Frankenstein’s monster discovering it could walk.”
Speaking of the Monster, the Monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, what part did the good doctor build his monster from?
In the 1994 film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, his body is made from a man who killed Frankenstein’s mentor, Dr. Waldman while resisting a vaccination.
The Convoy starts here.
The monster is given the brain of Doctor Waldman. This borrowed brain retains Waldman's "trace memories", which help the creature quickly learn to speak and read.
In the novel, the monster is a vegetarian. While speaking to Frankenstein, he tells him, "My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment...The picture I present to you is peaceful and human."
In today’s world, scientists are working with stem cells, grafting, plumping, basically using recycled animal parts. Facsimiles created in 3-D printers. They have adapted the same bio-technology that was used to create Genetically Modified Organisms.
Look what they found in Felix’s bag of tricks?
CRISPR gene editing. In the CRISPR, we tried to make the perfect vegan. In 50’s sci-fi we had Simulacrum, clones, androids. But in reality, we recycle body parts to help people in all manners of ways. Pig heart valves, dentists employing techniques of bone grafting to rebuild the perfect bite.
My own heart was repaired using veins from my leg, arteries from inside my chest, bits of wires, strings, and crazy glue. Who knows what is actually in there? I take their word that all was on the up and up, but do I really know what happened while I was under the anaesthesia? I was out of it for hours as they cut this and grafted that to build the better Monster.
For all I know, they built a better me from a humble asshole.