good.

y'all see that word?

take a "good" look.

y'ain't seen that word here for awhile, having anything to do at all with my medical fortunes.

all y'all 'n 'em are seeing it today.

I have good news. glad tidings I bear unto all peoples.

I haven't been writing about my cancer stuff. I'm way beHeinz, and have some ketchup to do.

I did my third round of the chemotherapy starting Dec.20th, Monday. unlike the last round, all of the drugs starting basically at the same time. we used zofran instead of eloxi for the anti-emetic, nausea reducing drug, nausea being a more pronounced side effect the second time than the first.

either the timing of the drugs, or the zofran, worked. nausea was not as bad this time. you wouldn't want it, but not that bad.

fatigue seemed cumulatively worse.

the third morning of the infusion, and the second day after it stops, were the hard ones the first two times. Dec.23rd, and Christmas Day.

I got the PICC line, the place the drugs go in, out of my arm Christmas eve day. this time they felt it necessary to use my right arm...so I felt even a little more hamstrung than usual.

Christmas angels sang when it was gone.

as you know well, patient reader, I decided to put off Christmas at 708 Arapahoe til' New Year's, when I would be feeling better.

so Christmas came...it came, it came, it came just the same... and I didn't feel like moving.

presents sat under the tree...no one came over...

Scrooge, when confronted with Ghosts. trying desperately to come up with naturalistic explanations for his experiences, says, you could be nothing more than that piece of sour gruel I had for dinner tonight.

my body felt physically sour. like it had ingested something that head to toe did not agree with it.

of course, the point of chemo is hardly internal agreement. I understand the need for an angry, pointed, gloves-off debate.

my system gets confused about what is poison, what is food. food has been hard, and I ...usually the happiest of men to eat, making anyone who loves cooking for a happy man a happy person...have been skipping meals and pecking.

now, I generally run pretty cool in the world. I'm usually me. I've kind of worked on it, and have some ideas about food and exercise and sleep and attitude that make me, I think, a pretty consistent guy.

in fact, most of the time people think I'm taking some emotional place I'm in out on them...they are usually in some emotional place and looking to put it on me.

but I felt sour on Christmas. dim. and I probably wasn't much fun for anyone around me. the combination of chemo down day and Christmas Interruptus made me, I think, more Ghost Scrooge than "go buy the turkey as big as you" Scrooge.

my expectation that this was the last time I would go through exactly this, that on Monday I would find out what would be happening with this much easier oral chemo, Sorafenib, and that I would feel better and have Christmas as the first act of the New Year in a week...all of that seemed a million miles away.

Dr. Klancar had been out of the office Christmas week, and it had been a feat to get an appointment on Monday at all...turned out to be possibly her first of the morning, 8:30am.

personally, I feel like it's like a teacher giving a test on the first day of school, to ambush someone after a vacation the minute they walk in the door, and expect them to be up to speed.

yes, I was feeling better, less dim, less sour.

but janice found a study conducted by Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan on the effects of Sorafenib (with another chemo) on Neural Sheath Tumors. Stewart Greisman, about whom more later, had contacted a doctor at the CU cancer center who spoke of another drug. Ken Morris, musical cohort and champion of my case, had found some online stuff that didn't speak well of Sorafenib and lung cancer.

and I had questions.

all of which I had emailed to Brenda J., the chemo nurse who seemed to have everything together, who promised to forward it to Dr. Klancar.

I wrote up a one page precis of questions and developments, copied on paper all of the emails, and a study or two, and went in to find out what was next.

she looked rested, comparatively, and was very alert and social. to her great credit, she was more than open to the sheaf of paper I ambushed her with, and offered to make the calls, find the info, come up to speed.

she hadn't seen the emails. she said several times, didn't I talk to you about that? she didn't cover up, wasn't evasive, but it was evident she had not brought her weight to bear on my case.

my last question was...all these options...are there any of them that hold any kind of long term hope?

she said, they are all about months instead of years. there's always hope. I've seen the miracle cases, she said. but it's not in the literature.

lisa broke out in tears. she does that for me. it's only my wrongheaded orneriness that keeps me from it.

she wanted to be mad at Dr. Klancar. we come to her for answers, and she wasn't aware, didn't know, it felt like we are on our own.

when I used to watch the Broncos, when my income from gigs rose when they did well and made for bummer gigs when they sucked, I'd yell at the announcers. "well, that boy is certainly a football player. there is no doubt that he came here today to play some football."

personally, I had never been in doubt.

"you just have to say, they've got to get some points on the board if they want to win this game."

the only reason one might not have to say that is if it were too incredibly trite to even mention.

and the refs. I'd yell at the refs. alternating stripes of black and white...alternately saviors and perpetrators of unfair handicaps, the real reason for a loss.

I wasn't mad at the refs and the announcers...well, give or take Howard Cosell...any more than lisa was mad at Dr. Klancar. it just sometimes felt easier than facing what we are mad about, or hurt about, or dread, directly.

Dr. Klancar called the house at 4pm.

first day back from vacation. slammin' busy appointment load.

still, she had called the doctor that Stewart Greisman's friend had emailed, Dr. Elias, at the CU Breast Cancer Center. spoken with him. she said the drug he was working with, Trabecktedin...new vocabulary word...sounded like a better bet than the Sorafenib.

she did this because of the email from Stewart I had printed out and handed to her.

50% of people on Trabecktedin, said Dr. Lillian Klancar, have tumor stabilization. 88% have higher scores on Jeopardy, and better banter with Alex Trebeck.

she had a number he had given her which was a direct in to him, and said I should call Dr. Elias.

I don't care if someone has a day when they are not up to speed. I use some of those coupons myself sometimes.

she had looked at me and said, I just don't have time to do all this research.

to me, I guess that means...that isn't really the focus of my job.

but on a world's record busy office day, she shoehorned in getting up to speed on my case.

think I'll make her one of the team, not one of the refs. an asset, not an obstacle.

the hard won number turned out to be the main number for University of Colorado Breast Cancer Center. well. that can work too.

I let the menu wash over me, pressed buttons, finally Colleen answered the phone. I got a couple of sentences out and she said, can I put you on hold? I'm finishing up another call.

nobody's nice to these people. I try to be. I said, thank you.

it was ten minutes or so. I thought about calling back. but...what exactly was more important to do than wait for this?

she was very apologetic when she returned. I told her my story.

neither the doc nor his nurse were in today. she would email him and he would call...he's very good about getting back to patients. here's my number...if you don't hear from him by the end of the day, call me.

when Colleen was not totally overloaded, she seemed personal and focused.

two hours later, Dr. Elias called.

he really impressed me.

and I liked him.

he made a joke.

Dr. Klancar had said she knew of him in breast cancer research, and hadn't known that he had taken on sarcomas.

he said, when you come to see me, I'll be in the Breast Cancer Center.

bring a tutu, he said.

I said, I'll try to fit in.

Dr. Elias (also Walt Disney's middle name) seems to be one of the world's most advanced authorities on sarcoma. you go to the world map of research online, type in Sheath Cell Sarcoma, and a few spots on the globe light up. including Denver. because of him.

Dr. Klancar said that he had kind of pooh-poohed Sorafenib. when I asked him about it, he said, oh, you can use it, but we did a study two years ago on Sorafenib and neural sheath cell tumors...it wasn't effective.

that, to me, is not pooh-poohing. pooh-poohing is when you express a vague sense of not preferring something. this is, like, we tried it and it didn't work.

Trabacktedin...retail name, Yondelis... had, said Dr. Elias, a proven track record with this kind of stuff.

wow.

24 hour IV through a pump, every three weeks. sigh.

will there be down days after, I asked?

he laughed. nausea, fatigue for a week. but, he added, nothing like what you've been going through.

and there is no cumulative toxicity. each one won't be worse than the last. so, I said, there's not a certain number of rounds?

he said, when it works, we've used it for years.

kathy practically jumped when she heard that. somebody somewhere is talking about years, not months.

I have to be "clean" for three weeks before joining the study. probably starting the 23rd of December. it means nothing countering the tumor for a week longer than if I had stayed with the original chemo. but it also means...a chance to get off the mat. three weeks without sour gruel to overcome...sounds pretty damn good to me!

he said, well, we take a scan after two rounds and see how we're doing. if it doesn't work, there's lots of things to try, even first line stuff.

but this is the best for right now.

in three words, he's the guy.

I feel like 30% of a hundred ton weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I feel like it's Christmas.

50 % stabilization (don't really know for how long)... I feel more than hope...if it were 51%, one could almost call it promise.

but more...he's the guy. and he's here. well, Lowry, if you don't think of that as the Twilight Zone.

I went to see Jim and Salli Ratts last night, kind of a Christmas Elf run.

I guess I go back with him to 1985 or so, did my first recording in his studio in 1986. we've spent a lot of time serving in a lot of different trenches together, and you couldn't stand next to a better guy when the bombs start falling. he's the first guy to ever let me sit at a mixing board, the first guy I ever played at the Little Bear with. three quarters of the musicians I know I met through him. additionally, he's a model for engineer carefulness I will never live up to, a model for taking the high road in sticky interactions I am still learning from, a model for grace under pressure, a model for patience and generosity. no matter how either of us grow, Jim will always be a mentor to me.

I've always heard of Jim's great and good friend Stewart Greisman, who had somehow frittered his life away being head of the Emergency Rooms at Porter and Swedish hospitals at the same time, instead of becoming a musician as any good parent hopes. I'd met Stewart a couple of times...good guy.

Jim had invited Stewart into the studio a few years back to record a guitar and voice basic for a song Stewart wrote - then secretly hired some musicians and filled out the recording and surprised Stewart with a mixed CD of it.

I don't think the surprise wore off. Stewart started planning for a whole CD as a 60th birthday present from him to his friends.

I was brought in on the case.

now anyone in Stewart's position can approach the project in a number of ways, mostly depending on how much they want to grow and stretch versus how much they want to stay in the comfort zone. another determinant would also be, how much musical talent the doctor/ financier/ plumber would bring to the table.

Stewart didn't know it....probably still doesn't...but he was bringing some pretty darn workable songs and ideas in. and a voice with something to offer.

but, more, right from the first, anytime he could stretch, he'd choose to. anytime I completely violated his comfort zone, asked for something different or more, he seemed to flourish. of course, that only made me ask for more.

every time we got together, the project grew, and Stewart grew.

and always he had the deepest appreciation for the process, gratitude for Jim and I, and a child's delight at everything about it.

I looked forward to every session. the project exceeded, I think, anyone's preconceptions. and Stewart by the end of it was more a friend to me than a work buddy.

it was Stewart, you may recall, who cast about when I was first considering neck surgery, and found the guy, Andy Nemechek.

it was he who asked a friend who referred him to Dr. Elias, and first contacted him, literally saving my life a second time

everyone who loves and supports me, faithful put upon readers of this blog, everyone I care about, this day Stewart has brought all of them some relief. I look around, and all of the reflections I see in faces are happier.

what a gift that is.

Stewart, and Jim before him. I was tearful when I got off the phone with Dr. Elias. I'm just now getting a sense of how strapped in I was, how bumpy the ride has been, how far from the everyday was the place I was living in.

good news. good.

and good people.

I used to say I had no friends. lovers, musical bumpercar relationships, no friends. the year Runaway Express played in Telluride that James Taylor closed the bill, I was in the VIP section watching him play "You've Got a Friend"....he looked right at me, and stopped.

I 'bout have to be raped with friendship. but it's happening. resistance is futile.

gentle reader, know well, know well

know well, know well

I have known sickness, but I will know well.

holy days

which ones aren't?

but I couldn't enjoy any more than I do days of special focus, remembrance, dedication to celebration and awe,

days to stop and let the holiness of them fill our hearts and minds.

y'know, Halloween, not so much. it's debra's birthday, and I'm way more into celebrating that than dealing with death and horror by looking into their images and laughing. it's like I would run out into an empty street like a child, sticking my tongue out in what seemed at the time bold defiance, than running fast I could back to the curb when an actual car came.

there are people, hardened soldiers and enlightened monks, who claim not to fear death. I think to do that, you have to feel life ain't such a big deal.

I don't feel that.

but I am making My own holiday this year.

one Christmas as a child, I remember I was so sick. I opened my presents sitting on the john.

I didn't want to relive that this year, with Christmas week being the first week of the third round of chemotherapy.

so I am delaying Christmas at 708 Arapahoe to coincide with New Year's, Christmas Eve to coincide with New Year's Eve.

as indicated, I pick and choose among holidays anyway...and I have many of my own. did you know that many days of the year hold secret positive messages?

oh, yes! I celebrate the spur to action every "March Forth!" and I find October fourth...10-4...

very affirmational. Fans of Celtic music, especially the jig, should play all day on June 8th...6/8...and devotees of the slip jig should enjoy a day of 9/8 in September. (of course, we remember December 8 for non-metre related musical reasons)

Time Change day...Jerry Lewis Day...yeah, I have a rich calendar.

light, at the moment of deepest darkness.

what observance could mean more to me now?

I just can't find contradiction in any of the solstice/Santa Clause/ Jesus celebrations this time of year. I don't see why "Here Comes The Sun" should not be the theme carol of all three. as well, I don't see much conflict in the miraculous Menorah of Hanukkah. miracle light, when only darkness was predicted...break me off a piece of that anytime!

Kwanzaa, I was delighted to read, was invented in the US in 1966 for African-Americans in the US.

that relieved me. because in Africa, the parts south of the equator, a festival this time of year would need to celebrate the longest day of the year. along the equator...it's just light, light, light til' you're sick of it. a miracle story there would be, like finding shade where there was no tree growing, or sticking your head in an ice cream truck freezer.

Dr. Maulanga Karenga, founder of Kwanzaa (see! I can too invent holidays! people do it all the time!) originally preached that Jesus was "psychotic", and wanted to create an alternative to Christmas, as Christianity was a white religion to be avoided at all costs by blacks.

they light seven candles, not 8. works better with the calendar, don't you know.

I can't imagine the pressures put on you when you invent a holiday picked up throughout the world. Nelson Mandela probably calls you up and says, mellow out, dude. The Pope might send a message saying, take it easy, you're ruffling my coat. and don't even get Bono started.

anyway, by 1997, Dr. Karenga was saying, Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday.

so it's cool for the many black people who celebrate Christmas and Kwanzaa too, now.

other than the seven candles, I don't see any light-in -the-darkness symbolism in Kwanzaa observance at all. maybe it's the barely remembered effects of the geography of old.

but Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the light...at least, he was quoted as saying it. and Tom Bodet wasn't around when Joseph and Mary were looking for lodging...it was a pretty dark night, presumably a pretty dark world.

they often call Christmas a season of hope...but I'll go farther. Christmas is an act of will...I am going to make a light, at this dark time, I am going to establish an outpost of all of the warmth and good things I believe in, I'm going to give gifts at the time when we all need light the most, and be cheerful at the longest coldest time. (it is better to light one candle than to curse the fucking darkness. owww! my toe!! dammit)

because I don't hope the light will come again. I believe.

and every year I have always been right, to follow the light in my heart instead of the dark outside. this year I believe it is the right course as well, and I'm going all out to demonstrate it.

so, Christmas. but...New Year's?

New Year's Eve...or Old Year's Night...is thought to be the oldest celebration, dating back thousands of years.

you'd need some kind of calendar to celebrate it, I suppose.

but celebration seems kind of intuitive, as we celebrate at odometer-turning landmarks. out with the old! in with the new! here ...no, here...no, here! is where the past becomes the future, here is where the tracked up mess that is yesteryear's calendar is traded in for the New Year's, clean as a field of fresh fallen snow. Father Time, leaning on a staff and sporting a long white beard, old like the old year is old, holds the baby 2011, new like the future is new. we wait -last year, janice and I waited seven hours in a New York street- we count down, we make noise, we kiss.

Father Christmas has a long white beard, but despite the passage of time and the mileage of 800 Christmases (not to mention chronic obesity), he still has a remarkable amount of energy, an incredible sense of organization, and anything but flat affect...some even would say he is jolly still.

even the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade planner goes home that Thursday, rests his feet for a minute, pats himself on the back, and starts planning for the next year...same with the Christmas window dressers of New York on the 25th.

Father Christmas must as well. I doubt he works teachers' months, pretty much goofing off til' March. he's probably right back at it...and shows no signs of just plain being over it all.

Father Time has an even longer white beard. thin and hollow faced, even in the most humorous of drawings, he's flat out tired. in his keeper-of-eternity persona- he's not jolly. he's seen some stuff. a lot of it, he doesn't like. and he's anything but heading for retirement. he's got job security. not likely to be outsourced.

it's worse for him in his lame duck 2010 persona. he's dying. and people all over the world are cheering it on. forget about how glad we were to see him come...maybe we hold him, not ourselves, accountable for all the promise of a new year that we didn't fully take advantage of.

I didn't even watch "2010...The Year We Make Contact", the sequel to "2001 A Space Odyssey", as I promised myself I would this year.

anyway, 2010 is so passe, so last year.

when we kiss on New Year's Eve, it is the kiss of death for 2010 Father Time.

so New Year's Eve, or as is it is hardly known at all, Old Year's Night, should be, I say- I say, should be the holiday to reflect on impermanence.

impermanence is one of the aspects of the Human Condition that is hardest to look at, and there are worse measures of a person's worth than how they deal with it.

we owe everything we are to impermanence, and everything in our world. every million years, every hundred years, how much had to change, how much had to die, for us to be who we are where we are? how much had to be dis-integrated and re-integrated for our world to be what it is?

if anything were permanent, we wouldn't be here.

what was torn down, to build the place we live? how many changes, even deaths, were necessary for this meal? how many thousands of events had to occur in an exactingly perfect way, for us to wake up in our beds today? continuances, yes...but also impermanence.

I've always been fascinated by shrink wraps, milk cartons...things designed to be strong enough to be integrated just long enough to serve, then torn apart when it suits our purpose.

because we are among them. built just strong enough to stay integrated until it's time, then to fall apart to be reused and recycled.

we do not acknowledge out debt to impermanence. and we resist its governance of our mortal lives. we build pyramids. have children. make art. tell stories we wish to have outlast us. lovers promise each other forever. it has to be forever...love is meaningless, we say, if subject to any impermanence.

some people for whom tattoos are just too ephemeral seek to be branded these days. now, for heavy duty body modifiers, branding uses thin heated strips of metal, applied several times to form the desired design...not exactly Rawhide, and only a little painful.

but I heard a woman who does such things say, everyone wants to have me do the name of their lover. I say...don't do it.

things change, she said.

I remember the story of Pam Anderson getting a tattoo to fit under her wedding ring, that said, Tommy. when she divorced and had a child, she changed it to read, Mommy.

New Year's Eve. I'm telling you. time to look straight at impermanence. how we depend on it. what we owe to it. how it's there when we like it and when we don't. and, if one has way more perspective than I can muster at the moment, to celebrate it as one of the abiding universal forces, even when it takes away something we like.

I remember walking with catherine around CU, two years after she had graduated. how much does Boulder change in two years?

well...that wasn't there...and this used to be where we...and what happened to that...it's all changing, I don't like it!

she apparently hadn't yet had that experience much.

there's a saying around our house...if Scott likes it too much, it goes away. we dream of an Island of Lost Treasures, where we will find all the Hain Thousand Island Dressing, Knudsen's Black Cherry drink, New Balance 2000's, new Ry Cooder (non-soundtrack) albums, Santa Fe soap, The Harvest restaurants, Gemini three berry shakes, etc., etc.,etc. we could ever want.

and right next door, R.E.C videos from Times Square- a bootleg video store, with VHS tapes of all the bands I never got to see - , Balducci's grocery stores in New York, FAO Schwartz when it was FAO Schwartz - and in Cherry Creek too!- the Disney Store and the Met store in Cherry Creek, Aaron's records in Hollywood -where DJ's would get the latest LP's a week before release, sell them to Aaron's two days later, and I would buy them for half price before they came out- the old non-Swarovski snowflake above 5th Ave. and 58th, the old Plaza Hotel...Alfalfa's...

an endless list.

but, then, the list of things that were even better that came along- and still doesn't erase the grasping for the past- the internet, which makes visiting other cities so much more relaxing, as there aren't many things you can go to a store and get that you can't find there...all the REC videos now on YouTube, for free download (with the right software, like Toast)...the shopping center that grew up in a Golden field I kind of liked the way it was, but then had an Alfalfa's within five miles on my house, which was a real godsend...and the current rumor that the original Alfalfa's store in Boulder will reopen as Alfalfa's in the next year...

I was so mad when the owner of the big house in Englewood and the little carriage house in back that I lived in sold to this guy I didn't like at all, who put wrought iron over all the windows and kicked me out...I spent weeks driving around Golden, where I'd really wanted to live, until I passed a beautiful brick house with a for rent sign on it and a guy inside painting.

it was 1989, and I said, even if they want six hundred a month to rent this house, I have to come up with it.

it was bank owned, and they weren't sure what to do with it yet. $400 a month. I wrote a check on the spot.

it was sooooooooooo much better.

I was so mad eight years later when the bank sold the house and the owner doubled the price. ssoooooooooo mad. I left, and had no fixed address for a bit, just out of anger.

it was in 1999 that catherine and I walked to a house for rent from my apartment. we submitted ourselves and our application, and cried for how much we wanted this house.

we were to hear over the weekend. we didn't.

on Monday I said, we are walking right back down there. no phone calls. we're going to find out we've been rejected in person.

the landlord said, yes, I did give the house to someone else.

but you know what? I haven't heard back from them, and he ain't here, and you are, and the house is yours.

it's sooooooooo much better than the brick house.

he hasn't raised the rent since then. stubborn cuss.

it's been a major blow to my feeling sorry for myself ever since.

so, we have to, we have to, we have to celebrate impermanence. even when we don't like what it does...sometimes we end up grateful.

maybe, somehow, when my turn on the carousel is up, in some way I don't see now, I'll have a feeling it's something better beginning. and I'll say, you know, I could have accepted this better all along.

right now, I don't. I am fighting hard as I can to stay in the body I'm renting, and don't much see that giving it up will put me in any better rent district.

and so my assignment is to reach for joy, love, magic, wonder, amazement, and at the very same time come to grips with impermanence.

Christmas and New Year's. in one. that's my holy day this year.

Merry Christmas, and happy Christmas Eve to all dear gentle readers. I will be making my Santa rounds next week.

p.s. buying Christmas presents at after Christmas prices...kinda cool.

p.p.s sometime soon, I'll write about medical stuff. honest.

lunar eclipse...solstice...medical news...new york

that's where I am...thanks to New York, the wonder drug...maybe also decadron, the steroid they give me.

I don't feel buzzy. I feel average, when I probably should feel battered. average, but chatty.

which can mean only one thing, in the face of medical concerns and astrological singularities:

an extensive review of Spiderman...Turn Off The Dark.

this is the worst must-see musical I have ever seen.

I saw it in previews. they think a month more tinkering will help. not so much.

but ya gotta see it.

I mean, suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to speak about the action sequences. what disbelief? there are five or six Spidermans (sic), so that one flies from the stage to the balcony (!), rests on a little platforn there, the lights go out on him and Spiderman is onstage, flying and tumbling and landing. he flies offstage, and then he (not) is anywhere in the 360 degrees above the audience. moving fast.

halfway through the first act, The Green Goblin has some kind of boogie board that he's laying on, and up to the same flying tricks. now he owns the theater space...a little threatening. but towards the end of the first act, Spiderman goes out after him.

yes, they are both flying about through the airspace above the audience - how do you keep from tangling the wires? - weaving and darting... a WWII dogfight before our eyes...Spidey climbs on top of The Goblin and some obviously limited fighting ensues...

it's everything one could hope for in theater aeronautics...people cheered...amazement!

and that was by no means all.

perhaps my favorite scene involves six unnecessary characters (on which more later) six Greek goddesses on yellow fabric swings (in Spiderman? later, I said...) , in a perfect line just above the stage. they swing forward together, and a horizontal yellow fabric spanning the stage flies to the top of the proscenium...they swing back together, and another. more, until the whole stage from top to bottom is a yellow fabric grid.

they are weaving.

women...weaving...spiders weave...and it's so cool and beautiful! ok, maybe the plot doesn't have to advance for a minute. maybe that beautiful feminine energy does have something to do with something. maybe...maybe...

later.

all of the set design was striking, and all of it was pencil drawings...not a comic book, not even Sunday color funnies, but daily strip black and white, outlines. stylized, referential...still, a good idea?

but I still had to love the scene where one completely, nonconsentually forced perspective set had a skyscraper "rising" from the middle of the stage (on the vertical axis) to the top, another from the middle of the stage to the bottom (towards the earth) of the stage, so that we seem to be above the city, looking down. to cement the effect, a slow packed line of headlighted miniature cars crawled from left to right in the middle (again looking from top to bottom) of the front of the stage.

it was cool. but here is the genius part.

Spiderman crawled down the building pointed down. which of course looked like he was crawling up it. but it looked more natural than any Spiderman yet, even in the movies. wow.

then I'll add the ten floor to ceiling video strip screens that showed, among other creations, a scarily broken image of The Green Goblin...I am pretty used to lots of scary villain tricks, but it was very effective. and they were used throughout to good and new effect.

there was a cool slow motion fight scene early, where black covered stagehands helped bodies fly through the air (slowly) and maintain otherwise impossible balances.

gentle reader, such are the must see positives of this production, and truly newsworthy they are.

the problems would be enough to totally must-not-see any other production.

Julie Taymor directed and co-wrote the story and book.

she has a lot of cred with me from The Lion King, which was my favorite entertainment until The Beatles' Love, with Cirque Du Soleil in Las Vegas. a lot. the coolest thing, to me, about that Disney musical was the way it delivered wow not only from new style technology and state of the art tricks (and what I think is a killer story), but traditional storytelling means -shadow puppets- and new takes on simple coolness...like twenty actors with squares of underbrush on their heads, and Simba and Nala puppets running through the grasslands. hard to do? no. no, how did they do that? but was it way cool? yeah!

Julie made the case with Disney (probably not an easy one) that Rafiki, the storyteller, would most probably in African culture would be a woman instead of a man. Disney probably did not give a-frican fig about that, but they caved. and it worked well...certainly didn't lose any impact.

since, Julie Taymor has been busy, in projects with varying visibility. a couple of Broadway shows that only more aware people than I have heard of, a movie version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus that I didn't seek out, a movie, Frida , that I didn't know about until I googled it that sounds pointedly fem-o-centric.

and Across The Universe, which I first heard about at the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. they had a booth. Julie Taymor, movie about the sixties, music all Beatles covers...color me there!

some people loved it. some people went cult with it. I saw a lot of Taymor in it that took me away from the story, and a certain amount of female-forwarding agenda that didn't so much fuel the story (I'm all for women. up with women! but integrating such an agenda into drama...hard to do seamlessly and interestingly) I was suspending my disbelief til the end, where I hoped it would magically...well...come together.

the end was a total plot letdown to me. it cast shadows on...or threw light upon...the misgivings I'd had throughout.

I have to say Julie Taymor is a premier, imaginative storyteller...but her story writing skills aren't yet proven to me.

I'll cut to the chase on Spiderman, and fill in the backstory later:

during the whole second act, there is only Peter Parker. we never once see Spiderman.

now I know that what made Marvel comics, and set them apart from DC ("Superman") comics was conflict and lack of resolution. Spiderman defeats the villain, but doesn't keep his word to Aunt May, and can't be intimate with Mary Jane because of the secrets he needs to keep. when he powers down, he's us.

confession: I was a huge DC comics geek, and never cared for the deeper, more resonant Marvel. I didn't want to say, there! that's just what it's like to be me. I wanted only the escape.

so I know that the most important issue in every issue of Spiderman was his internal battle. and occasionally it would make him question whether there was any point to being Spiderman. and I know that The Green Goblin is nothing...Spiderman's most powerful adversary is...himself.

Sondheim talks about real logic versus theater logic. he wrote a blockbuster for Ethel Merman in Gypsy, who has a musical breakdown towards the end. it made no sense, he said, for this to end on a big chord followed by applause. some theater god he asked about this said, no, no, no Steve. if you don't let them applaud, they will spend the rest of the play nervous and distracted.

he was so right. sometimes theater logic must, must, trump inner logic.

the second act ends with Mary Jane somehow (we don't know how) learning that Peter Parker is Spiderman. she's fine with it. we hear a woman, with all the fervency of "Where's the beef?" or "I've fallen and I can't get up." yell, "help! someone's stolen my purse!"

MJ purrs, "Go get 'em, tiger"

curtains. figuratively and literally.

do I have to elaborate? I wanted to cry out, "turn off the dork!"

some stories can end with a character reaching a turning point after a long internal journey. James Joyce's Ulysses comes to mind..."yes" is the climax.

Spiderman, no. we need the final biggest battle last. we need it.

in a comic, you can have a denouement after the battle where it's the same world the character (and we) left when we started the book.

I don't think you can even do that in a Broadway play. no time for the subtle pleasures, the nuanced word. I've been here for two and a half hours. I went to Spiderman, for heaven's sake! show me something! send me out triumphant and singing!

that's the biggest flaw, but just, I'm afraid, the start.

#2 for me is...I'm sorry, Julie, but what Spiderman has been lacking for forty years is just not a huge infusion of feminine energy.

I know I'll seem like a misogynist when nothing could be farther from the case.

but Julie took us back before Spiderman to Arachne, the first eight legged human in Greek myth.

she's beautiful, compelling onstage, floating in mid air. she has six hench...spiders...who all do interesting things with their legs.

she is his muse and torturer throughout the play, believing that him being Spiderman will reverse the ancient curse on her. why? who knows? they have a beautiful pas-de-deux in midair that is one of the high points to me. the second act consists largely of Arachne spinning the illusion that all of Spiderman's vanquished villains come back, and shut down power to Manhattan...meanwhile, Peter Parker has Mary Jane in his arms, and is not going to put the costume back on.

conflicts in Spiderman are supposed to end in drama's least intellectual way...violence! or at least, action! but Julie tends to end conflict by fiat, without the least sense of resolution. Peter and Mary Jane...well...they must of worked it all out offstage. secret identity? oh, that happened sometime. Arachne kidnaps Mary Jane and suspends her in a cocoon where she can't breathe, separated from Peter by a stage size net which he climbs to no avail....she sees that "there's still Peter Parker in you"...and just forgets the whole plan, MJ is saved, power comes back on, illusion gone...left Me wondering, why did I care who shot JR in the first place?

Arachne and her spider posse are a huge red herring. she's not a hero, not a villain, her motivations are unclear, I don't know how a Greek myth is supposed to interact with a comic book hero...kind of gives me double vision... I'd scrub all this stuff, myself.

#3...about a fifth of the play concerns four comic book geeks...three boys and one kind of hip hop girl with a kitty kat hood...they come onstage, all action stops, and they write the next scene before our eyes. they speak in a combination of too-hip-for old-school lingo and rhymed couplets. I kind of liked the effort in putting that together.

but the girl is clearly Julie Taymor, the kids clearly her collaborators.

and I don't think Julie Taymor needs to be a character in a Spiderman vehicle.

more, seeing it written as if those kids were gods writing about a goddess and a legend, takes a lot of the involvement away from the characters themselves. and no matter how comic-y, no matter how camp, no matter how unlikely, empathy for the characters in a play is central. even on Seinfeld. even on Batman.

three quarters of the way through the play, the spidergirls inform the geeks that "we are writing the show now", and the geeks should just get lost.

what...how...

it's another Deus Ex Machina conflict end without resolution. or comprehensibility. but then...

ten minutes later...the kids are back. as what? observers?

I am fascinated by theater/ movies/ drama and how it is written. but even I don't want the writers onstage, showing some version of how it was done...incidentally, the boys are thick and slow, and Julie always enlightens them.

I'd scrub the kids entirely.

#4 is more of a mixed blessing...music by Bono and The Edge.

it's occasionally good music, too.

but, first, Julie and co. are too reverent of it. the scene has to go on until we can hear that third or fourth chorus, whether or not it serves the drama.

it makes many scenes overlong. like this essay.

the guitarist and bassist, in a Lion King-like move, are standing in view of the audience, seemingly completely concentrated on getting the darn thing right. they won't distract anyone's attention. the rest of the tracks are prerecorded...though there is a video conductor for the actors and musicians on a screen.

but produced as if it were a five man pit band. lots of generic synth. occasional horns.

but U2 songs, without Bono's voice, and without U2 production.

and compressed and managed without impact, for those scads of older theatergoers. often inaudible or no drums.

when I saw Legally Blonde...probably the largest gap between what I expected and the treat I got...the drum was a drum. all the contemporary knock-offs sounded right. volume wasn't rock loud, but you got the music. maybe word got out among Jewish grandmothers not to go...My guess is, it was ok.

when I saw it in Denver, the drums had no treble and sounded like oatmeal, and the greyhairs listened in peace. sigh.

I'm interested to see what will be released of the music. I didn't mind that it was all The Edge. but I will say that Bono's lyrics have a mystical, blurry feel that I am pretty fond of in a U2 song I hear maybe thirty times. "you've been all over, and it's been all over you"...my idea of a good line.

but imagine it on a complex stage, going by once, with actors and plot and drama and no time to chew on it...by the time you've thought about it, you've missed a lot.

there was a lot of that. add the sometimes compromised intelligibility of even good PA systems...

for my taste, clearer lyric writing would have served better.

and U2 songs with a straight ahead Broadway voice...I ended up kind of wishing he'd adopted a Bono mannerism or two...

I'm not precisely done. there's lots more. did we really need "biff" "pow" "boom" in lights, from the Batman show...how much camp are we talking, here? Arachne visits J. Jonah Jamison and terrorizes him (somehow) into printing, Spiderman where are you? how? why? I kind of liked Jamison, but if he said, that's not a headline! give me something I can print! one more time, I might have jumped up and shouted, Great Caesar's Ghost!

in short...as if...the kids, Arachne, the pencil drawings, the thickness of the lyrics and mall like arrangements, the absence of the title character through the entire second act...they all add up, to me, to a dissociation with the characters, with the story, with the project. after the first act battle in the air, I asked myself, holy cow, what are they saving for the second act? turns out, nothing.

when the curtain rose, the audience wanted to love Turn Off The Dark. they cheered the first appearance of the costume. when the flying happened, they were ecstatic. if there had been genuine empathy with the actors, this would be a strongly moving experience.

lisa thought the actors were wooden...I dunno. you fly around the room a few times, you don't have to be Olivier. but they were staged standing by themselves singing frequently...which is what you do to show off star power. they didn't carry that as well as you'd like...I think totally stopping a Spiderman story for four minutes has got to be a questionable call. I know...these unassailable songs by Bono, the importance of the inner life of Peter, and Peter and MJ and and and...

by the end of the second act, the audience's pre-ventured good will was spent. there was no standing ovation, mandatory these days on Broadway.

after the show, an usher said to me, did you have fun? I said, I'm glad I saw everything I saw...didn't think he wanted much depth. he said, I love all the effects. I said how about the story?

he shrugged his shoulders.

he said that this had been the first night for the net, in the second act. they're changing everything every day, he said.

the man who addressed us before the play said "this is just a preview show...last night it ran without a stop. we got approval for the flying, as long as we say this warning...don't touch anything involved with it" he said that they hoped to have the opening sometime in January.

today I read that yesterday a Spiderman double fell and his harness broke, and he was in pretty serious condition. opening night, it said, pushed back to February 1.

why does this all fascinate me? can't say I completely know. and I realize it might bore hell out of y'all.

my father started as an engineer. he was good at making things work, fascinated by what made them work. it was territory I completely ceded to him...my mother would say, go help your father, but I would know shame was to follow because I didn't already know everything.

but what makes a song work, what makes music work...that has been a lifelong source of compelling interest.

and, I guess, what makes a movie or musical or story work or not.

the engineer doesn't do that in music...the producer does...but I can't help but link it to some take-things-apart-and-put-them-together-right that my dad had.

an artist has a hit record...does he repeat the formula, try to diverge, or change it completely?

all three answers are wrong...and all three answers are right. you can do any of them musically, or slapdash.

a movie spawns a sequel. what should it be like? how different? how referential?

it fascinates me.

Back to the Future II made what should have been a mistake...going back to the climactic scene of the first movie...and turned it into a thrill ride. (the money they spent on II, they saved on making III...it's kind of a holding pattern, ZZ Top notwithstanding)

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is a textbook sequel to me. all of the visuals you loved, only a bigger budget to do more of it. and all of the soap opera romance and mystical import you loved, but time spent thinking up cooler surprises and insights. and the originally named Revenge of the Jedi, thankfully rechristened Return of the Jedi...well, I had a dream about it before it came out, that I was in a dreamlike theatre and the movie was good like some impossible dream, and I awoke quite pleased.

the movie was better.

it was the last one his wife was involved in "editing". who knows what kind of pull she had? all I knew was Lucas had tenure with me.

I went to see his next movie, Willow...it was quite the letdown. by the time I got through Howard the Duck, it was clear to me that something has slipped.

how do you know when something works?

in math, it's direct and clear cut. I hate that. I love it when the only way you know if something works is when you try it on in your heart, and your heart says yes.

I don't think Julie et al were listening. I think other stuff took priority.

I think it's a little like the scene in Aliens where the little guy comes up from the astronaut's stomach...a visual I am not over yet. the doc says, to take him out, I'd have to take out too much of the astronaut's body, he's too entrenched.

kind of like separating the very very good from the very very bad in this musical.

or unresectable cancer...

not the best news...then again...

maybe the best news.

the scan today...as I heard about it in a short phone call from Dr. Klancar...showed the tumors growing about half a centimeter.

not halting. not shrinking. but only slightly larger.

I saw Dr. Klancar briefly after the scan, when she was saying it would take awhile to get the results, and she looked like she hadn't slept since last Monday, when she looked like she hadn't slept all weekend. I knew she was not coming into work next week, Christmas week, and I said I hoped she'd get some rest then...she didn't seem too optimistic about the prospects.

last Monday, her staff ratted on her, that she had been up at 4 in the morning checking out other treatment prospects for me.

today she suggested one.

sorafenib

I mean, backwards, it's binefaros...almost like beneficent...why wouldn't a drug company go with that?

trade name...always got to have a trade name...nexavar. Bayer makes it, to counter sliding aspirin sales.

Dr. Klancar said that, for the level of toxicity and side effects the chemo is having on me, she isn't satisfied with the amount of results.

sorafenib is an oral drug. twice daily.

she said, she wouldn't be able to get it right away, probably not before the next week 1 on the 20th. so, she said, let's stick with the plan and do the regular chemo one more time, and that would be it...then start the pills.

something that might be more effective, that doesn't cost my body nearly so much to sign up for?

I wasn't totally disappointed in the phone call.

the girls were. they were hoping hoping hoping for the miracle now. all of it.

if there had been no cancer at all on the scan...if they said, we think we switched your scan with another patient, you may never have had tumors...I would probably still have had to go through the six rounds of chemo.

if at that point, the docs had scratched their heads and said, I dunno where it went, there would probably still be a maintenance dose of drugs for a long bit.

I didn't see any way out of the six rounds.

now I do.

so I...as several of my Dear Readers may well do...Googled binefaros...I mean...sorafenib.

it was approved by the FDA early this decade. there was a study in England, I believe, that spoke quite excitedly of it. it said that the placebo group was taken off of it early, because the results were so positive.

it extended the TTP (time to tumor progression) by a median of three months. median survival time by the same three months.

my heart dropped. we had this outside shot at tumor regression or elimination with the adriamycin...now we're lobbying for three more months?

I mean...I'll take three more months anytime with tears of gratitude. but...is she giving up?

Brian Daniell, "I'm not that kind of Doctor" former teacher of statistics, calls the median a stinking pile, and insists on seeing the mean.

several Google pages later, I gained a new appreciation for his point of view.

now...the study I saw on page 11 or so was of asians. with metastatic renal cancer...kidneys. no literature exists about the effectiveness of this drug on metastatic lung cancer.

literature only exists that adriamycin (doxyrubicin) has been used for 30 years, and my particular ifex/ adria cocktail has failed at this for ten.

here is what I read about sominex...I mean, sorafenib...in this study:

Radiologically confirmed complete response (CR), partial response (PR), stable disease (SD) of more than 4 months, and disease progression as best objective responses were observed in 1 (1%), 23 (23.5%), 62 (63.3%), and 12 (12.2%) patients, respectively. The tumor control rate (CR+PR+SD of >4 months) was 87.8%. The 1-year estimated PFS and OS were 58.4% and 64.6%, respectively. The median progression-free survival (PFS) time was 60 weeks (95% CI 41–79); and the median overall survival (OS) time was not reached with a follow-up of 76 weeks.

nooooooooooooooowwwwwww we're talking.

one Asian son of a gun had complete response! cancer gone.

almost a quarter of them had shrinkage

almost two thirds had no growth. that's better than I got now.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/9/249 if you care.

and that was a study from last year.

the median snowball stayed in hell 60 more weeks without melting.

oh, a batch of folks had side effects and had to stop. and this is out-of-its-prescription drug application.

cutting edge. up to the minute.

I say, do it! we'll all find out together.

I don't want to spoil the party, so I ain't going!

except to New York tomorrow. where health concerns, even these, will take a back seat to flippin' having fun!

comfort, and joy.

little c cancer, meet big C Christmas.

this is the work.

this morning, today, all the budget is going to the internal fight.

not too sparky. sleeping a lot.

I don't want to "grey". I don't want to "dim".

but today, it's like talking to someone whose focus is just elsewhere. it's day 4 of 4 in chemo...until about 1:30pm tomorrow, when the adriamycin is all done going in. and there's a small blackout going on, to support the War Effort.

I took a compazine last night, remembering that night 3 was where I hit a bad patch last time. it is prescribed, as I say, to relieve "nausea", but also is precribed as an anti-psychotic drug.

it's nothing. but I went looking this morning to make sure my psychoses are all healthy and happy. to wit:

Something endemic,

Something systemic.

It's one more poisonous commodity to fight!

Meant for my curing,

Now I'm enduring,

hope that I won't be feeling vomity tonight!

No more of PICCs! Nothing of ports!

No more of IFEX , piped in by quarts!

Paid by insurance,

Frayed my endurance.

Long as the outcome comes out right,

Healthy guy tomorrow,

Problem child tonight!

(I rest my case...)

(ok, maybe not everyone is familiar with "Comedy Tonight", the Stephen Sondheim work I bowdlerized above. but they should be. maybe not now. but soon. and for the rest of their lives.)