Saturday, May 23, 2009

The Re-Entry....


I'm back...actually back for 2 days in my house with the jungle like lawn, untrimmed hedges, vegetable garden running amok...
It was a real ordeal. A few days before I left to work on Le Pamphrage, I started to feel strange. I chalked it up to allergies? But the allergic symptoms turned ugly and I eneded up with a full blown cold and many other less esthetic symptoms.
I thought I was not going to be able to work. I talked my self into getting on the train for Libourne and spent the next 5 days in misery. Then the sun came out...
Yes...the first five days it was really raining and storming. I was hermetically sealed in my rain gear, but the storms were so bad that a few vineyards in Pomerol and St. Emilion were trashed by hail storms.

I gradually began to feel better. I stopped coughing and sneezing and the aches disappeared as I cleaned thousands and thousands of grape vines. By the 7th day, I felt great, my voice had come back to the discomfort of my fellow workers and I had to sing!

So, when I called home, I found that my wife had what I had...these things are passed on in families and that my neighbors had it too and it was the fucking swine flu!
Well, my friends, I am living testimonial that it isn't that bad and you probably will survive...

I know I cought it from the flight attendant on the British Air Flight I took from Chicago to London. He was a peasant enough Scottish chap who kept serial sneezing and apologizing and looking more and more miserable as the flight progressed.

It's over now and I have a great tan already and I went on a nice 40 kilometer bike trip today. I'm afraid to visit my neighbors, they are still sick...things could get ugly.

Thanks to all the nice comments from my friends while I was away!
Valerie, if you read this, check the profile...I corrected my spelling of Aquitaine.

I wanted to post some music and discovered a video by the Artist, Julian Coryell.
It popped up in my YouTube subscription. It was a pop song and Julian sang and played keyboards. I thought the song, "It Makes Me Insane" was pretty good and Julian had a great voice, but the artist I knew as Julian Coryell is the young son of the great jaxx/rock guitarist, Larry Coryell who is one of my favorite musicians.

I had seen Julian when he was younger, just out of Berkely School of Music as a young Jazz player dueting with his father. I heard a record he made in Japan of Jazz and jazzy pop, but I had never heard him sing. I checked his bio and yes indeed it was the same Julian Coryell, who also plays piano and is now writing songs and singing.
I may post that video, but I felt I had to post a video of the other side of Julian..
This is his current Jazz group, Coryell, Augur, Sampler...a fusion trio in the tradition of his fathers groundbreaking fusion jazz. This is a piece called Cobra Commander.
This guy gives me a lot of hope for the future of American music.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, surviving the swine flu makes you one of the immune ones like in The Stand. If you tell us you're heading to Las Vegas next, then we'll know.

I had a more mundane but extremely trying ordeal myself. Orthopedic work on the bones in and around my right elbow, at this point 4 days on, seems to have been successful.

steve said...

that is some tasty beat!