The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    AARP: Muse Sick in hour Mess-Age

    By PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/24/2012 - 6:39am |

    [Public Enemy reference]

    I was curious to see AARP's response to Paul Ryan's talk, but on visiting their site, I was more caught up by seeing a Stevie Nicks benefit and a lecture by Mickey Hart. Nicks is almost 65, Hart is almost 70 - the idea of the Grateful Dead informing our geriatric existence isn't something I'd considered before.

    And man is it worth considering. Hart and Oliver Sacks ("The Awakenings") give a presentation on an old black guy named Henry, who can't or won't lift his head, who's been in the home for 10 years, who's just slightly more communicative than a potato.

    And then they give him music. Does he light up! And even after music's taken away, his eyes are bulging and bright as he discusses his favorite music, how he feels about it. (Yes and no questions work better to get him started).

    A while ago someone noticed that Alzheimers' patients often had an easier time talking about long ago events than recent ones, so they started having retro-parties from an age that would make the participants more alive. I wonder now how much the music itself has to do with it.

    Though Henry's a rather musical fellow - does music affect non-musical types the same, or are there better triggers for visual and tactile people?

    Anyway, we may be evolving the first generation of old folks really able to experiment on themselves en masse, not that there haven't been similar efforts before.

    As China's population is aging at a tremendous rate - 1/3 will be seniors within about 30 years - it might be that seniors can in some ways become the most productive members of society with the right tools, or at least come up with answers to more and more pertinent longevity questions.

    And a nice reminder that not everything is about politics, though even this type of effort can be influenced by it, negative and positive.

    Happy Trails.

    Comments

    I saw Further down in Coney Island with my son this summer.  Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, but no Mickey Hart.  Dudes with white hair can still rock.  Great show.


    by Bruce Levine on Mon, 09/24/2012 - 4:36pm

    I was going to comment but I don't get it. 

    I will say that AARP has been moving away from geriatrics and toward the Boomers for several years now.  I'm guessing it's because the Boomers have more money and AARP is more into selling insurance than into advocating.  I'm not a member so I don't know for sure.


    by Ramona on Mon, 09/24/2012 - 10:09pm

    I guess AARP's positioning themselves to ride the big retirement bubble. Those born in 1942 are 70 now, so we've got the war babies (I'm assuming no one can afford to retire at 65 anymore so not worth counting). 5 more years their Boomer investment will start to pay off.

    Though Oliver Sacks is almost 80 and he doesn't look like he'll retire soon, and  Stewart Brand is 73 - I guess I just thought it interesting that creative people like this are going through old age, and I expect they'll generate some interesting observations and experiments through the process.

    (and not a big Dead fan, but am interested in Hart's thoughts on music and ties into cognition)


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 2:17am

    I don't think there's any danger of Oliver Sacks getting dull with age.  I'd like to think that every creative person has an edge on the dullards or whatever, probably because they're always thinking creatively and don't have time to worry about age creeping up.

    Celebrating these people because they're old and still functioning is fine, I guess, but it's not so unusual these days.

    On the other hand, ageism exists.  In a NYT review of Joan Didion's latest book, the reviewer found fault with much of it, concluding (I'm not kidding) that the problem with Didion is that she got old.


    by Ramona on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 8:37am

    But would you disagree that age takes it out of some people, while others just keep on going? I know an 81-year-old that seems to run laps around people, while a 70-year-old pretty well just gave up. Some basketball players are "old" at 36. Since I don't know the specific issue with Didion, he might have phrased it "she's lost her muse" or "spark", but the point might be much the same.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 9:03am

    All's I know is that this 53-year-old can kick a lot of 81-year-olds asses. 

    A lot.

    Now, I'm not saying ALL. We all remember our Leviticus, chapter 14, verse 17. "God sufferest not the sons of hubris or the daughters of wanton."

    Or verse 18, less frequently quoted, "Though that one daughter, in particular, caused even a good man to hitch his step."

    Amen.

    SHOUT OUT TO THE REVEREND AL!


    by quinn esq on Wed, 09/26/2012 - 9:36am

    Your advantage is if you get Alzheimers and forget what the fuck you were talking about, no one will ever know.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/26/2012 - 10:40am

    "He" was a "she" and it wasn't in the NYT as I mistakenly stated, it was in The Atlantic--in a review called "The Autumn of Joan Didion".

    Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore...How could the woman who crafted sentences so original they made us fall in love with her have turned out decades of prose about which Katie Roiphe can rightly say, “Her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well”? It’s because she got old.

    Blue nights, which has about it the feel of a valedictory, a sign-off, is about getting old. It’s about the physical indignities that go along with aging, which—in Didion’s case—include being unable to wear her favorite red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, contracting shingles, spending too many hours in the waiting rooms of too many specialists, having friends recommend that she have someone come to live with her.

    So she's an older woman now writing about being an older woman, but she's Joan Didion and apparently that's not allowed. 

     


    by Ramona on Wed, 09/26/2012 - 6:19pm

    I think she's saying Didion's no good in her new milieu, not that it isn't allowed - that her writing at this point doesn't engage.

    William Burroughs when he got old wrote a lot of canned literature, quite a lot with the help of his secretary/assistant. A few good ideas, but nowhere near the quality or interest of his early works.

    But in homage to that other thread, at least it wasn't his estate having him fill out blank signed pages for post-humous sales like they did with Salvador Dali.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 09/27/2012 - 5:52am

    No, what she's saying is that Didion doesn't engage with the reviewer because the reviewer is younger and wants Didion to go on writing what she always wrote--which is the edgy, iconoclastic, cool stuff.  

    No writer who has written that long is going to keep writing the same thing.  Especially a writer who tends to write personal pieces that reflect where she is at the moment and how she sees the world from there.

    It's an accusation that follows every famous writer as they grow older (Updike, Roth, Hemingway, etc.,), and there's some truth to noting that prolific writers are bound to grow stale, but most reviewers do find ways to get around the "she got old" accusation. 

    That's the point I was trying to make about ageism.  Is it okay now to say "she got old" as a reason for what some reviewers see as a disappointing slump?  Not all writers do poorly as they age.  Eudora Welty never lost her touch.  Neither did Wallace Stegner.  Neither did Shelby Foote.  And so on.

    You don't have to get to a certain age to get stale.  It can happen to anybody. 


    by Ramona on Thu, 09/27/2012 - 7:19am

    I was just defending Louis Armstrong's later stuff yesterday, and while Burroughs' written work turned tame, his readings and spoken recordings with hip hop artists etc. were quite nice up to the end.

    While Kesey pretty well burned out at 26. 

    Anyway, it seems this writer is defending Didion all the way through, and in some ways is defending Didion's change, that her body of work and her personality live on, and that she was never quite who everyone wanted her to be anyway.

    She notes both that Didion wanted to scrap this project. And that she (the reviewer) knew lots of tragic Hollywood types - which might make it that she's burned out on reading about it, or that Didion's take really doesn't catch on fire.

    Beauty in eye of beholder - as at the beginning, 2 fans who can support Didion. (I don't know if we can dismiss "ageism" in literature review - while it may be said sloppily, all things should be open in art, though obviously different venues where that openness is more suitable than others)


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 09/27/2012 - 9:09am

    Music is special.  It exists solely in the mind.  It has deep connections in the brain to spatial and mathematical cognition, as well as to perception and memory.  This is probably why it has such wide therapeutic application.  The number of people who just aren't wired for it appears to be pretty small, maybe as much as about 4%.

    Also, I still have that album on vinyl.  Snagged it when I heard this single.  Bonus: baby-faced Jon Stewart.


    by DF on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 4:07pm

    Wow, thanks for that. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 4:58pm

    Over the years, I've heard Sacks ruminate on the music thing in person and on TV and read his ideas about it in more than one of his articles. He's exceptionally interesting on this topic.

    To sum his thoughts on it up very crudely the way I understand it.......He thinks the music part of the brain is more often than not "one of the last to go" in the case of many maladies and even in dying. He doesn't think it has to do with special music talent, which is different, and which he has investigated in depth; rather he suspects it is just a particularly resilient part of the brain.

    And that stimulating it in someone with like Alzheimers, can, because it still works ok while other areas have failed, make a few new temporary brain pathways to other areas of the brain that are still ok but disconnected from the pathways they used to use. And that's why after you have them sing, they might also come up with some memories or something that surprises, that doing  it stimulates a few new neuron connections or similar.

    I think he once said something, half-joking, that if we have a soul, it might be in that music area, because of this, because of its power. And something about Congreve's Music has charms to soothe the savage beast Though he's a music lover, I don't think his observations on this part of the brain is prejudice on his part, as he has spent just as much time investigating quirks of all the senses. One could actually argue that he might have more personal prejudice in stressing vision, as he is an eye cancer survivor and must deal with visual field disturbances.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/26/2012 - 3:30am