The pills arrived on Tuesday, but sat on the counter downstairs for two days with neither of the women in the house noticing. I finally learned they had been delivered when I got asked to rate the completed transaction to our address. My wife finally found the bag (I’d been expecting a box) and brought it up. I explained what the pills were, the story of Bill Gates’s obsession to take down the disease that had stolen his father, including the extraordinary lengths he had gone to in researching the causes of decline in memory and cognition, and the walls he had to break down in Big Pharma to discover that nothing offered as medicine worked and they knew it didn’t and were prepared to defend against any real palliatives if they were found. How Gates did his own research, found an answer and built the process for making an effective treatment available. I told her the pills were the first three months of what should be a year long regimen that was scarce because it depended on ingredients that were limited in quantity and needed 6 months to renew after each harvest.
She nodded, paying token attention, until I asked her if she was willing to give the pills a fair go for three months. Then she hit the ceiling. She thought I’d gotten them for me, and she wasn’t going to take any unknown medicine, given her lifelong experience with allergies. I showed her the blown up photos I had taken of the bottles’ dosing and ingredients label, which clearly stated, “contains no allergens,” and she said, “You got them without asking me. You take them.” (In fact, she was sitting next to me while I listened to the entire hour-long Gates video, placed my order online and entered the credit card information to pay $207 for the first third of the necessary treatment to secure lasting improvement.) She fell silent. When I tried to reopen the conversation, she said, “Why are you doing this to me? You know how allergic I am.” I said, “I’m doing this because I’m the one who cares about keeping you here with us. You are losing your memory at an alarming rate. That’s a fact. The pills can roll it all back.”
More minutes of silence. Then, “Give me the pills. If I break out:from what’s in them, that’s on you.” (She’s also historically allergic to cats, ice cream, and chocolate. She eats ice cream and chocolate every day and is surrounded by cats. Old age has tempered her allergies, but they’re still a good excuse for avoiding what she doesn’t want anyway.)
She has now had the first and the second dose. The anger, the volatility, is part of the symptom set, aggravated by Whwt has always been a hair-trigger temper. It is not her way to apologize, but when she has decided she was wrong, she returns to a friendlier demeanor. Now comes the waiting.
That’s that side of the memory problems I described a couple days ago.
I tried finding some computer solutions to the other big memory problem. Found a lead that turned out to be a prohibitively costly bait and switch. As I ponder my next move, I tried to confine my work to stuff requiring minimal use of disk. How I wound up getting myself back in storage misbehavior yet again. I’m working on it. Honestly. Here’s an excerpt from much lengthier content in my Apple Notes app:
Background on the latest prodigal topic hog…
5/26/26: How I got onto this. The IPR post about Pop Music. Computer problems decimated my ability to do graphic work in the short term (at least). Music topics make the lowest demands on my disks, just link the YouTubes and go… In a music frame of mind, turned to it again for last night’s (i.e., wee hours) go back to sleep background and settled on Diana Krall, whom I had followed briefly years ago. Found her in the ROKU categories files as a live concert offering 2 hrs long. Woke up to no more Krall but a documentary about, ugh, the Eagles. Backed right out of that to the ROKU music files. Looking further down the row of choices found a doc about The Velvet Underground, and thought maybe it was time I learned a little more about them, osmotically at least. Never did go back to sleep. Found a Warhol obsession named Nico in a central role during the band’s startup period, and the rest is as you see here.
Never even heard of Nico before. I had more or less ignored Lou Reed and Andy Warhol both, to the extent that I didn’t even know Warhol was heavily involved in launching the Velvet Underground as a band with a record contract, not just a New York glam fad. It was largely Warhol’s identity as artist-cum-promoter that made me suspicious of him, in addition to his creepy affect. Reed I more or less missed because of timing. He never made the commercial hit list in the dorm halls of Mercersburg. Had him pencilled in more as unacknowledged white precursor of rap than proto-punk, since I had always considered the American roots of punk a false start derailed by the sexual androgyny of the New York Dolls and early David Bowie performance art. Punk entered my ken with The Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Brit cultural revolt against Beatles—>Boston (‘More Than a Feeling’). I liked Lou Reed a lot, just didn’t follow him or study his real role in the birth of punk music. I was happier making up my own version of punk, which borrowed more from Anthony Burgess than actual history, apart from the Sex Pistols’ proud boast that they didn’t know how to play their instruments, as if that were a credential.
Had some glancing bumps into Warhol and Reed I could have paid more attention to but didn’t. The in-vogue-after-his-death artist Philip Core was a member of my Harvard final club, a ghostly presence in black who nevertheless sketched delightful drawings commemorating club dinners, which we hung with others from the past in the men’s room. I never got over the fact that Core had gone to Middlesex prep school with my roommate and ten other members of my Harvard class, all of whom were beer-drinking jocks whose only mention of Core was in connection to his, um, off-putting effeminacy(?). Now I can’t think of anyone from that group whose accomplishments amount to anything compared to Philip Core’s. His most famous painting is of Andy Warhol playing chess with Marchel DuChamp.
He also painted a portrait of Lou Reed, which is how he wound up becoming friends with both men. I think it’s interesting that Core and I were members of the Phoenix at the same time, but I honestly can’t remember any conversation I ever had with him.
Funny, given how I go on about how the universe pops things up to my attention. I don’t always listen so well, I guess, unless some of the pop-ups are set to go off much much later, like now, when I’m older and still somehow working. There was a distinct pop-up with regard to Lou Reed, maybe a little over 10 years ago, after his death, when I acquired an Internet stalker who tracked me on my Instapunk sites and insisted she knew I was Lou Reed, still alive and in hiding. I answered her several times because she was very persistent and more and more convinced she was right the more I denied it. I didn’t see any resemblance myself.
That’s a joke. Don’t think she was talking about looks…
I think I eventually banned her, which I almost never do.
Which brings me to what happened as a result of my watching ROKU’s offering of a Velvet Underground documentary describing the group’s origins and history.
The Headline: A woman named Nico
Warhol was an inspiration and investor in the founding of Velvet Underground, whose Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards creative duo was Welshman John Cale and Lou Reed of New York City. During the effort to produce an introductory album, Warhol imposed on the infant group a female singer who was a glamorous member of the Warhol factory of artistes. Both men resisted but had to give in if they wanted their album produced. Here’s an extremely odd video of the VU song ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ with vocals by Nico but consisting mostly of footage showing Nico listening to her own recording of the song:
It’s hard to realize that she is doing the singing, because the voice has an androgynous timbre not immediately congruent with the appearance of a model/movie star/femme fatale of the sort Nico self-evidently is.
Her association with VU does not last long, but Nico does. She goes through many incarnations as the mistress of famous men (Alain Delon, Mick Taylor, Jim Morrison, et al) and as both a singer in multiple genres and a drug-addicted woman with anger issues. But until her sad sudden death in 1993, she remained a borderline celebrity with a knack for attracting attention from journalists and cultural critics of all kinds. No one ever figured her out.
The drier Wiki version is here.
Turns out she was Alice Hate before Alice Hate was. All kinds of striking parallels. I’m happy with a real life precursor feeding into my own story out of time, effect before cause as it were. I certainly can’t and wouldn’t take credit for the resemblances as if I’d known about her. Better this way.
Through the looking glass?
And my take, channeling Warhol’s famous dotted Marilyn portrait:
I, of course, have my own involved backstory for Alice Hate, which does not need Nico for justification or confirmation. Nevertheless, I am stunned that Nico exists, an inspiration, obsession, and legendary beauty embedded in the environments that also gave rise to my punk writers and their martyred queen.
Compare:
It’s not like Nico didn’t have her own Alice moments…
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