paul pena by peter pena
I spoke to Brad Kava who reported having played harmonica at the Himalayan Blues Festival (http://www.himalayanblues.com/) which brought to mind Paul Pena’s film, my stint helping Helena Norberg-Hodge and, later, the imagined sound of a prayer bell vibrating to audibility; earlier today I had mentioned to someone that I caught part of the Dalai Lama appearance at a middle school in East Palo Alto, on local cable access.
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 
Prayer bells make me think of kettle bells, which remind me of this short video:
Thanks, Doc. And clicking through to your fine blog I would say that the MRI of the human cortex reminds me of the tie-dyed throngs (but not thongs) at the Grateful Dead shows AND you feature a UCSF doctor toting a guitar (but not Dr. Rupa Marya of Rupa and The April Fishes). Yet still, curiouser and curiouser, how the fields of neuropathology and music/arts/culture overlap…
A couple weird points today one while supposedly out for exercise strolling across campus I met a retired Stanford physicist or so he says named Dimitri (and Luba) in front of the defunct Maya Lin clock-hole, and two a worker at the Redwood health building (Martha?) who directed me towards the new Chihuly in the Lokey Stem Cell Center, and then three a dude named Cameron who works in Bytes Cafe but who was woodshedding acoustic guitar riffs from Oasis and John Fogerty and then I get Dr. Moore’s message about “A Serious Man,” http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02serious.html
Denby’s panning of it as “fascinating but insufferable”, compared to Thomson calling it “worthy of Kafka ” — are they all dybbuks? What is real? I was looking for not the fountain of youth but the sandwich of Ike’s — I had read a review in the PA Weekly about a popular eatery on campus — someone said there are two-hour lines. It all comes down to food, art and movies. Luba called Tolstoy a hippie and implied a comparison to me, the bearded, sweatshirt-wearing mid-day cross-campus wanderer. I invoked Elif Batumann and John Felstiner. I have not read Tolstoy but I know of Batumann getting a drop of shampoo at a conference, over the balcony, from another female scholar.