Some Days Are Low

Howdy friends. Well, I'm on the fourth day of a feverish sick (same one, it would seem, that I had two weeks ago, and thought I'd had done with), and a bit down. Stuck in this apartment staring out at the rain. Today I heard of the death two days back of a good friend, Lou Genise (pictured), age 38, of various cancers, in LA. He brought great riches to all his friends' lives, but I'm feelin' pretty broke, now.

What to say. I'm just going to post here this link to him breathing some fire and a piece of music I wrote and recorded for three friends named Lou, and some explanatory text below it. And then I'm going to drink a little and try to get some sleep.



A Tale of 3 Lous

I’ve had three friends named Lou. One of them, Lou Harrison, a composer, taught me among other things to appreciate long-lined melodies of the sort common in the classical Turkish music I now play and compose, but rarer in Western music, which I was studying at the time I met him. He passed away at a respectable old age, having gotten his nickel’s worth, and then some. They’re making a documentary of his life here.

Another Lou, Lou Genise, was a fire-breathing, triple-X, Godzilla-taming space gaucho of long acquaintance. At only 35 years of age he got liver cancer a couple of years ago. The first doctors to see him gave him six months, but he was having none of it. After about eighteen months of aggressive treatment and his usual kickass drive he was *this close* to being cancer free, but it recently came back with a vengeance that even this buffalo of a man couldn't take down and live to tell the tale, and I am very pissed off at cancer. You can see him at play here.

The third Lou, Lou Savett, at 76 and strong as a bull came down with pancreatic cancer last March that swept him away in a shockingly short six weeks. My girlfriend (his step-daughter) and I got to his house in Santa Monica about forty minutes after he'd gone, but our last times with him had ended with peaceful smiles. He was a mensch of the old school menschen and I don't think they make them like that any more. When we got back home to Santa Barbara, full of the gravity of life and death, I wrote this piece to celebrate my three friends named Lou.

(The piece is also called Hüseyni Peşrevi: Üç Lou Hikâyesi, though here in Turkey it has been criticized as neither a true peşrev nor strictly in makam hüseyni - I am holding it to a different standard of authenticity, and you may call it whatever you will.)