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A good friend forwarded me this wonderful and very popular TED talk from a couple of years ago:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

It’s well worth watching – she’s a brain researcher who had a massive stroke – and studied it as it happened.  A fascinating and revealing story, and she narrates it extremely well.

But I have mixed feelings about her ideas.

On the one hand, I wish she wouldn’t bandy around course words like “energy” and “consciousness” as if they had any currency, and I wish she wouldn’t implicate the left hemisphere of the brain as being that which individuates us and keeps people apart, singular, and “solid,” imploring us to “step to the right of your left hemisphere.”

On the other hand, she’s earnest in wanting nirvana on earth, and spreading peaceful messages, and she’s incredibly poetic not only as a performer, but as a chronicler of the stroke experience – loved her pixels of business cards description, and the notion that she no longer felt as choreographer of her life, and that she feels as the “life force power of the 50 trillion molecular geniuses that make up my form.”  All of which somewhat match my experience after being stabbed.  And she implies that feeling connected is a “choice” – “which do you choose?”:  all good.

I may well be on the same page with what she yearns for and how she at times feels.  But I’d want to be more careful in my terms, I wouldn’t localize these feelings as hemispheric – and where’s the prescription on how to feel thusly connected, and how to project that?

Tuli Kupferberg died yesterday.  While his contribution to the history of punk music, the antiwar movement, the American counterculture and Lower East Side scene of the 60′s is immeasurable, he’s played a special role in my life.  In November 1994, a friend of mine liberated a few albums from the vault of a certain college radio station (which had gone mainstream and certainly wasn’t going to play them anymore) and shared them on the street with his artist friends.  These albums included  a live Randy Newman bootleg, a couple of Holy Modal Rounders discs, Wild Man Fischer – and a few by the Fugs.  The first night I met Elif, it was love at first sight.  She sung me some comic interpretations of Italian arias; I played her some of my own art songs and some records by the Fugs.  I can’t imagine having spent the last 16 years without having the songs “Carpe Diem” or “Nothing Nothing” bouncing around in my cranium, and I can’t imagine regarding my wife without thinking of the lyrics to the Fugs’ song “Supergirl.”

Many of Tuli’s lyrics are nowhere on the Internet – so here are the “Supergirl” lyrics (as best as I can understand them).

I want a girl that can
fug like an angel,
cook like a devil
swing like a dancer
work like a pony
dream like a poet
flow like a mountain stream.

Super girl, my super girl

I want a girl that can
kiss like a cherry
squeeze like a berry
smell like an ocean
talk like a songbird
walk like a fountain
touch like a flower
sing like the Leaves of Grass

i want a girl that can
love like a monkey
hug like a castle
think like a darling
laugh like a lemon
eat like a monster
roar like a jug of wine

I want a girl that can
kiss like an eagle
bend like a sapling
bark like a beagle
bite like a bagel
fly like a butter
shake like a (mumbled…’hummer’? Human?)

(in the background during fadeout) ‘up up and away!’

Thanks to Eliot Duhan for help with the transcription – and Eliot adds a verse of his own:

I wanna girl who can
Sin like an angel
Twist like an angle
Preach like an engel(s)
Fight like a stengal…

R.I.P., Tuli.

Click here for details.

Here’s the original version:

And here’s the (censored) version, hitting Turkish bookstores next month:

More information coming soon at www.elifsavas.com!