9/22/14

Excerpts from an upcoming Radio Documentary for WDR (Germany)

I'll be sharing more details as they emerge, but my pal and Other Europeans bandmate Paul Brody decided to expand our many long conversations into and actual radio program. He's well know in Germany, where he lives and works, and has even done a piece for NPR on Berlin's Avant Guard arts community. Paul visited me during my painful re-location from my once beloved Texas to a hopeful but uncertain future in my adopted home of New Orleans. ("NOLA for Life" as the transplants like to say. I'm sticking around for my funeral, if you get my drift.) 
Paul at my home in New Orleans


It was a great/lousy time to be talking to me. I had just been diagnosed with a serious mental disorder (BiPolar 2) and through intensive counseling and drug therapy had been grappling with a long series of recovered memories from my dynamic and oft confusing upbringing. If you've a friend of mine for any amount of time, I sure the diagnosis will come as little surprise as I was for the last few years as one good pal noted "a slow moving train wreck." I left quite a few casualties in my wake of wild ranging manias and depressions. And as we approach the Jewish Days of Awe, I have quite a few folks I need to atone to before I enter the new year and my new life here in Southern Louisiana. 

But at the Breslover Rebbe admonished: "if you believe something can be broken, then by definition it can be fixed." I hope the process of laying bare of every aspect of my personality, even the dark and unpleasant parts, that I encountered in the making of this little radio show for German public radio will finally allow myself a little rachmones for myself and by extension those around me.

But enough about me, here's me talking about me: