I don't care what anyone else would say, Terence Donovan's video of Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to love' is still the best music video; ever! If you doubt me then try playing the track and see how women react. They mimic the 'backing band's moves exactly! They can't help it! It is now as much a part of human culture as the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' or 'Le Discours de la méthode' are. I kid you not! MG is quite proud of the fact that he once saw, live, 'Vinegar Joe' with Robert Palmer and Elkie Brookes, in her 'rock chick' phase, on joint lead vocals. One to savour in the memory, he says.*
I do so love coincidences. I came across two performers the other day; previously unknown to me. One a stand-up (although sitting down) comedian and one who uses comedy in part to enhance her somewhat surreal, and at times frankly weird, take on life. Both are what humans might term disabled, although they did not seem to be disabled to this penguin; merely different in perhaps more ways than I could count. MG had kindly led me to them and provided typewritten transcripts so that I could appreciate the humour and, sometimes, the seriousness, which lay behind the utterances.
In listening to the sound of Francesca Martinez, the stand-up comedian, I finally began to understand how strange MG must have sounded to his friends and colleagues after he suffered the stroke; "I spoke like a spastic," he once wrote. Francesca has cerebral palsy, which until the 60's or the 70's used to be called spastic (in the same way that Down's syndrome in the same period was termed mongolism, although why Britlanders should think that the greatest empire known to man in any century should be thought derogatory defeats me) and obviously has difficulty in forming the sounds of BBC received English; she also has some difficulties in motor control which causes her to 'tremble', as she so quaintly puts it, sometimes in an exaggerated fashion, such that she sits while doing her stand-up!
It would be so very easy to lecture those, those who do not have her 'disability', but she does not; she engages in that most difficult aspect of the art of comedy;the self-observational comedy of someone who is, at a superficial level, unlike, and yet profoundly so like, their audience. The fears, which every human has, of inadequacy, of low self-esteem, of social exclusion are made specific to her condition and yet still retain the threads which binds her specific circumstances to the circumstances of every human being and, thus, to the amusement of all; and mighty funny it is too! I know how difficult it was for MG to engage with others, while he was still aphasic; to get up and parade this before a paying audience requires courage of a very profound nature. One can only applaud her 'bottle' for doing it!
And yet, nonetheless, cerebral palsy is known to hide, often, profound intellects in the shrouds of the inarticulate. Perhaps the most startling revelation was watching Daniel Day-Lewis in his performance of Christy Brown; a mind endlessly trapped in an unresponsive body and what it might mean to a mind so imprisoned.
But what of the mind caught in the discontinuities of Tourette's syndrome?
The mind still functions as it should; there seems to be no impairment to function but, as Jess(ica) Thom would point out, the syndrome casts strange and spontaneous outbursts which may often not have any relevance whatsoever. (I should add that only about 10% of people with Tourette's have a fixation on vocal expletives like 'fuck', 'shit' etc.) Jess Thom has 'biscuit', 'cat' and punching her breastbone to fixate upon, although the occasional fuck or cunt is not unknown..
Quite obviously, this a 'malfuntion' of the brain, and cannot be considered 'normal' behaviour but I wonder just how bizarre it actually is. My brain, and MG's too, often lurches sideways into seemingly incomprehensible discontinuities. How do you got from liver dysfunction to isotopic decay in the same 800 words? This seems to me to be not dissimilar to Jess Thom's 'tics', although perhaps more thought out than the random, involuntary 'tics' listed on her web-site, which seem, often, to me, a manifestation of a mind enraptured by the surreal; not a malfunctioning mind. In going through the 'tics', I find a, albeit perverse, logic in many of Jess' 'tics'; her spontaneous utterances.
Whilst many of them are amusing, some are downright hilarious, many seem profound in a Zen-like way. One cannot but wonder whether these are 'contrived' in any way; they seem so apposite to our existence. I believe Jess when she says that these are spontaneous, that she genuinely has no control over what she says, but is something going on in Jess Thom's brain, which is perhaps explicable in philosophical terms but not necessarily neurological?
A long time ago, back in 2008 I believe, I touched, in this blog, upon Daniel Dennett's idea that consciousness was an evolutionary phenomenon. And how, the emergence of consciousness was a subtle 'battle' between emergent ideas; one eventually winning to become conscious thought. What if, in Tourette's, random thoughts, normally suppressed, they were allowed to percolate to the surface? Not just the one that 'won out' in the battle to gain consciousness? Would that explain the somewhat random pairings of Jess' 'tics'; because some of them seem to have significance. At least to Jess' brain, if not, immediately, to ours.
Perhaps a failure of the 'suppresion module', whatever that may be, is to account for this. We are all, at a sub-conscious level, victims of Tourette's but the brain in most cases has evolved to filter out the 'extraneous' thoughts so as to better be able to filter out unwanted or perhaps damaging thoughts which may hinder or hamper our survival at a species level.
Perhaps we should revel in Tourette's as the real example of how our actual brains work without the self-imposed, instinctive censorship, which our brains now naturally apply?
* Of course, this is subject to change on a daily basis.. However how awesome is the video to 'Come back and stay' by Paul Young? Rubbish video but you do get a glimpse of a rare sight of the 'Fabulaous Wealthy Tarts'; got to be worth, at least, a 'high-five'!
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