What's see let's new?

I'm at Mandala. Leslie was here earlier, it was nice. We talked about stuff, and whatever or something. Tea just high stepped. She is wearing vegan shoes: denim or fabric something uppers, woven lowers, cute. She has a navy skirt with some sort of non-ethnic traditional based design on it. A little new orleans, a little greek, a little polynesian, a touch of new wave france. Her hair is partially obscured by a teal/purple sort of fro cap thing. She has a black shirt on. She is rolling silverware, and I just told her that I'm liveblogging about her rolling silverware, but I think she didn't take me seriously. Hana is too hilarious. "Blog blog blog" she says. She finished rolling silverware. Tea dances a little. "I just want to dance" she says to no one. She isn't kidding. She moves with the rhythm of something else, like if a young tree (sapling) could uproot and sway and jive as it wished. Or maybe it's more like an animal, like a young lion, or an unusually graceful giraffe, though she isn't long or tall. Just like a well placed and rhythmic animal or plant. Hana has disappeared. She reappears. She peaks at my screen, and skips away when I say that I'm writing about her. I wonder if she is aware now that everything she does entires a collective consciousness. It already did, I think, but now it's physical. This time, it's personal. They rolled the silverware with rhythm as well. Maybe that's what it is. Beat and tempo. The speed or lack thereof. The spaces in between must be important in places such as this that strive to be something in the midst of something that they aren't. Scottsdale loves the surface.

It always looks darker from inside of here when I look out. That's too obvious. They whisper now, when they did not before. Tea is overly expressive, but it's good. She isn't afraid to stretch when she needs to either. Hana (by the way, this is actually spelled hannah, but hana is more fun/appropriate in this case) is good at her job, and likes what she does, but I think there is more. I think she is unsatisfied, but afraid of being so. I'm not sure in what way she is dissatisfied, but I think it is a general malcontentedness that does NOT come through at all. OR maybe she really is this balanced and happy. I don't think so, but I may just be wrong. She is the type of girl that if she were to fancy me, it would reflect positively on me. I wish she did, in fact. Although, that may be true of either of them. They are both resume boosters, but not in the cold way. They are Harvard or Yale maybe? No. Peace Corps. Universally loved, I would think, and to have been a part of it makes you better. That must be who they are. I think. I hope. I'm pretty sure though.

I think that they are the types that I just assume are constantly hounded by guys. I mean, they aren't traditional, nor are they traditionally Scottsdale, but that's why they are good. They are beautiful, and interesting, and the guys who come here must fall in love with frequency. Maybe I'm wrong. I kind of want to ask, but that sounds like a come-on. I'll find out someday. Tea just made an intense face, because she knows what I'm doing. Cute. Hana carries plates with food but she is also on her cell phone. Her neck is bendy. It sort of bugs me how that partition is missing a piece, but it also makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate its character. I just wonder how that even happened.

So I'm also fairly certain that the way that I read people instantly IS accurate, despite recent waverings in my confidence. I was right about a girl's guy, and I was right about granola (I did not write about this yet). I hate that people consider me arrogant when I tell them about this. I AM BETTER at this than other people, even though everyone thinks that they can do what I do. I DO THINK better than most people that I meet. I comprehend differently. I almost never take something in the way that my company does.

So apparently Tea rides. She actually knows things. We just talked about fixies and wheels and she actually dropped some brands that are known only by those who know. A trillion cool points.

I've decided that I hate liveblogging. This is done.

Granola V

Okay, so I had sort of already stepped out of interest in Granola, since she told me that she just wanted to be friends. I was only slightly disappointed, though, since I found her only mildly attractive (if she didn't have bangs, she'd be like ten times better), and moderately interesting. I guess I didn't feel like I was losing out on much, but I was of course slightly offended that after she met me she did not want to pursue anything. ANYWAYS, the point being that I was mostly done with her.

Lou Bega and I stopped by on Saturday night, and we all played some lame ass games and talked/laughed/whatever since I was only looking at Granola as another girl in the room. This apparently ignited some fires in her girl crotch (Scary Eye's hilariously prudish term for vajayjay), and she asked me out the next day.

So "the next day" was last night. We went to Three Margaritas, then drove around Tempe a little bit (tempe marketplace, dutch bros. coffee, petsmart) and headed back to her place. I had decided that she was going to have to win ME over, so I was just sort of shooting the shit all night long. I think that my hard to get bullshit is totally working her over, since she claims that all guys normally love her. She is the type that attracts extraordinarily weird dudes who profess undying love and threaten to kill themselves and say that they are going to marry her after one date. She also claims that she is really good in bed, which is intriguing, but unconsequential. So whatever. I guess that Scary Spice has told her that I only think she is cute, and since I won't ever commit to dates with her (I always tell her that I'll have to call her the day of, because I'm not sure yet), she is just like driven crazy.

Anywho, I forgot what else I was going to say, but I'd like to mention that Raerae is single now. An entry on her later, I think.


"Oh, I don't know why you're not there
I give you my love, but you don't care
So what is right and what is wrong
Gimme a sign"

"What Is Love"
Haddaway

Granola IV

Okay, so Granola asked me out on a date. What?

Big Hair Little Hair

I had most of my hairs cut tonight. Probably all of them. Mohawky sort of thing. I like it, but I imagine most other people won't. That's fine. I'll bet Carebear'll hate it, but she'll be kind of intrigued, too. Have I introduced Carebear yet? I don't think so. She is a customer crush. My next love. Surely.

Neutral Milk Hotel's Legacy

The Salinger of Indie Rock: What happened to Jeff Mangum?
By Taylor Clark
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008, at 1:45 PM ET
Jeff MangumJeff Mangum

Ten years ago this month, a songwriter from nowhere and his ramshackle band brought out one of the few truly great albums of this generation, a musical curio so gloriously odd that it almost defies explanation. The group called itself Neutral Milk Hotel, and the record, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is a concept album about Anne Frank in which vocals about lost Siamese twins and semen-stained mountaintops mingle with the sounds of musical saws, fuzzy tape loops, and an amateur psychedelic brass band. It seems like a formula that would blister your eardrums, yet Aeroplane is a gorgeous, much adored work of art. In 2003, the alternative music magazine Magnet dubbed it the best album of the past decade—better than Nirvana, better than Radiohead.

While the record sells better today than ever, you won't see Neutral Milk Hotel onstage anytime soon because, for all intents and purposes, they've vanished into thin air. At the end of Aeroplane's final song, you can hear Jeff Mangum—the band's singer, songwriter, and all-around mastermind—set down his guitar and walk off, and, minus a few months of under-the-radar touring, that's exactly what Mangum did in real life. When the major labels and the glossy magazines and the half-crazed fans came calling, Mangum never responded. There was no breakup announcement, no reason given for the radio silence—he just faded out. After a decade of speculation, sightings, and hoaxes, his story remains a mystery: Why did he decide to disappear? And where has Mangum gone?

Even before his public vanishing act, Mangum was something of an elusive character. Raised in the arts vortex of Ruston, La., he bristled at his hometown's jocks-and-booze ethic and hoped from an early age to unchain his creative spirit. In the early '90s, Mangum and a few friends formed a now-legendary collective called Elephant Six, which grew to encompass dozens of strangely named bands creating eclectic music mostly for their own enjoyment. Yet Mangum himself seldom stayed in one place for long; he constantly hopped from city to city, acoustic guitar in hand. At home in the collective's base of Athens, Ga., or out on his peregrinations, Mangum cut a strange figure: a long-locked, intense-looking man with a gale-strength singing voice who liked to wear garish thrift-store sweaters and embellish the cuffs of his pants with cartoon sketchings.
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Because he suffered from night terrors, Mangum often stayed up until dawn working on his songs, sometimes addressing them to the ghosts in a haunted closet. At first, this method produced modest results: His first album, On Avery Island (1996), showed flashes of promise but had its sludgy and spotty patches. One day, Mangum wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. The book consumed him. After finishing it, he spent a few days crying over Frank's story. As he told a Puncture magazine interviewer before Aeroplane's release, "I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that's embarrassing?" The songs and lyrics he started writing about Frank could be so nightmarish in vision that Mangum grew afraid of what was issuing from his brain: verses about "pianos filled with flames" and eating "tomatoes and radio wires." At times, he seems possessed, singing on Aeroplane's title track, "Anna's ghost all around/ Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me."

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a "cult" record, since that would imply it's some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum's haunting lyrics: "And here's where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore." Aeroplane isn't about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song "Oh Comely" in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell "Holy shit!" in the background.)

When Aeroplane first debuted, sales took a while to warm up. Those who found the record would appear at shows and (to the annoyance of many audience members) collectively drown out Mangum's singing with their own rendition, but this was still indie music's dark, pre-blog era. By the time magazines started paying attention, toward the end of 1998, Mangum already had one foot out the door. Worn down by months of touring, he grew fed up with discussing himself and explaining his lyrics, eventually declining to accept any calls—yet friends say he still fixated on every word written about him. As his bandmates pressed him to capitalize on Neutral Milk Hotel's success, he withdrew more and more. When R.E.M. offered a chance to open for them, he said no. And for the last decade, that's nearly all he's said.

As Aeroplane's legend began to build, Mangum kept himself busy by having a total nervous breakdown. Laura Carter, his then-girlfriend, told the Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing that he spent entire days sitting in his house in a state of near panic, wearing a pair of old slippers and doing absolutely nothing. He became paranoid, hoarding rice for the inevitable post-Y2K apocalypse. Since 1998, Mangum has rejected every interview request save one 2002 conversation with Pitchfork in which he explained his meltdown. "I went through a period, after Aeroplane, when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling," he said. One of those assumptions was that music would somehow erase his problems. "I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after," he continued. "So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain … I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering."

It took Mangum years to rebuild himself after this spiritual crisis—and since part of that crisis was his recognition that music would never save him from his demons, he couldn't very well embark on another record. So he wandered the globe to find spiritual balance, even spending time in a monastery. (Aeroplane's steady sales helped finance the quest; the album still moves a reported 25,000 copies a year.) Occasionally, Mangum flitted ever so briefly into the public eye. He released a disc of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music, then disappeared. Calling himself "Jefferson," he hosted a late-night radio show on New Jersey's WFMU a few times until he was discovered, then vanished once again. Sometimes he'll appear onstage at friends' rock shows for a song, sending the crowd into paroxysms—but when those friends suggest he record his own music, they say he becomes evasive.

Mangum's continued silence has angered some fans, who accuse him of being selfish or "indifferent to his talent," as if musical ability comes with some sort of obligation to society. At least once a year, someone writes a hoax message from Mangum and posts it online—generally throwing in some fanciful verbal junk to bilk fans into believing it's the genius himself wielding the keyboard. Some have announced forthcoming records or tours, while others have revealed the long-hidden sources of Mangum's misanthropy; they've all been debunked. All we really know for sure is this: According to his record label, Mangum now lives in New York City. He recently married filmmaker Astra Taylor. Friends say he still creates art and that he seems "very happy." If he has plans to record more music, he hasn't told anyone.

And if Aeroplane really is Jeff Mangum's final statement to the universe, maybe we should be happy with that—not because of some tired line about going out at your peak (which he likely didn't reach), but because his story is a kind of modern fable. Many fans see his disappearance only in selfish terms: They've been deprived of more great music for no good reason. They can't understand why Mangum would shun success just to shuffle through his days, and, indeed, when musicians abandon this much promise, the culprit is usually drugs or debilitating accidents or people named Yoko. So he must have gone nuts, right? Well, no. After all, what if Mangum is just being honest? What if he poured his life into achieving musical success only to discover that it wasn't going to make him happy, so he elected to make a clean break and move on? We should all be so crazy.

As always, though, hope for Mangum's return still glimmers. Last month brought news that he may play a guy in a lobster suit in a soon-to-be-released conceptual film. But who knows? You can't see inside the suit.

You Make Me Want To Puke

Here is a recent post from MODBLOG, one of my favorite blogs:

"Now THAT’S dedication to body modification
Tuesday February 26th, 2008 @ 12:33 PM
Filed under: BMEBoys

Paul writes,

I’ve been working on a weight loss/body sculpting *mod*for a few years now, and I’ve finally hit my goal, going from over 235lbs down to 155lbs. I’ve been self conscious for a long while, but now I’m happy with where I’m at. It’s funny how self hatred can drive you to self love.

It’s one thing to sit under the tattoo needle for a few hours to modify your body, but I think we all too often write off the thousands of hours (and don’t get me started on the pain) it takes to transform ones physique like Paul has.

"

Anne Frank's love?

Admittedly, I'm hypersensitive to certain issues as of late, but this story really made me sad.

UK paper: Photo is of boy loved by Anne Frank

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23321701/?GT1=10856

LONDON - A British newspaper has published what it calls the first known photograph of a boy Anne Frank fell in love with and wrote about in her famous diary.

Anne Frank, the Jewish schoolgirl who wrote her diary while hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II, was captivated by Peter Schiff.

She met him at school in 1940, his family also having fled from Germany to Amsterdam the previous year. At age 11, Anne fell in love with Schiff and later, while in hiding in Amsterdam herself, wrote about how much she missed him.
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Her last mention of Schiff was in 1944, the year her family's safe house was raided by the German security police. She later died in a Nazi prison camp.

Sunday's The Observer newspaper reported that Ernst Michaelis, 81, of London, found a photo of Schiff in a family collection after realizing that Anne Frank was writing about a boy he had known as a fellow student in Berlin.

Michaelis, who moved from Germany to Britain many years ago, said he has had the photo authenticated and that it will be displayed on the Anne Frank House Web site.

Schiff also is believed to have died in a Nazi prison camp.

The Anne Frank Foundation in the Netherlands was closed on Sunday and could not immediately be reached by The Associated Press for comment.

Stuff White People Like

This is a great blog:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

And yeah, almost every single thing does apply to me, I am aware of this.

This post from a different blog, but in the same vein, is awesome as well:

http://www.catsandbeer.com/music/the-top-10-rap-songs-
white-people-love

Antidepressant Deception

This is funny because the original Prozac trial that got the drug into massive popular consciousness is something that we often refer to in my school. Being that we are all a little bit hippy about drugs and such, it is frustrating for us to hear stories like the inception of Prozac, which was based on a study with only 14 people in it. 14 people is NOT an adequate sample size for a rigorous gold standard (randomized controlled trial/double blind placebo study). It is one of the most ridiculous examples of slant and skew, and we laugh about how ridiculous it is that the tactics actually worked.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/
feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch

Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists

Analysis of unseen trials and other data concludes it is no better than placebo

* Sarah Boseley, health editor
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday February 26 2008


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This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 26 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 09:56 on February 26 2008.
A single Prozac capsule

A single Prozac capsule. Photograph: Alamy

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.

The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.

"Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed," says Kirsch. "This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported."

The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of the drugs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) already recommends that counselling should be tried before doctors prescribe antidepressants. Kirsch, who was one of the consultants for the guidelines, says the new analysis "would suggest that the prescription of antidepressant medications might be restricted even more".

The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

Two more frequently prescribed antidepressants were omitted from the study because scientists were unable to obtain all the data.

Concerns have been raised in recent years about the side-effects of this class of antidepressant. Evidence that they could prompt some young people to consider suicide led to a warning to doctors not to prescribe them for the under-18s - with the exception of Prozac, which was considered more effective than the rest.

In adults, however, the depression-beating benefits were thought to outweigh the risks. Since its launch in the US in 1988, some 40 million people have taken Prozac, earning tens of billions of dollars for the manufacturer, Eli Lilly. Although the patent lapsed in 2001, fluoxetine continues to make the company money - it is now the active ingredient in Sarafem, a pill sold by Lilly for premenstrual syndrome.

Eli Lilly was defiant last night. "Extensive scientific and medical experience has demonstrated that fluoxetine is an effective antidepressant," it said in a statement. "Since its discovery in 1972, fluoxetine has become one of the world's most-studied medicines. Lilly is proud of the difference fluoxetine has made to millions of people living with depression."

A spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Seroxat, said the authors had failed to acknowledge the "very positive" benefits of the treatment and their conclusions were "at odds with what has been seen in actual clinical practice".

He added: "This analysis has only examined a small subset of the total data available while regulatory bodies around the world have conducted extensive reviews and evaluations of all the data available, and this one study should not be used to cause unnecessary alarm and concern for patients."

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/
25cnd-religion.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
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The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United States Census does not track religious affiliation.

The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church “has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes.” The survey also indicates that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”

Detailing the nature of religious affiliation — who has the numbers, the education, the money — signals who could hold sway over the country’s political and cultural life, said John Green, an author of the report who is a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.

Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, echoed that view. “Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors,” said Mr. Lindsay, who had read the Pew report. “It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”

In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that from 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.

In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.

To Prof. Stephen Prothero, large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity point to the same desires.

“The trend is toward more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” said Mr. Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, who explained that evangelical churches tailor many of their activities for youth. “Those losing out are offering impersonal religion and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”

Immigration continues to influence American religion greatly, the survey found. The majority of immigrants are Christian, and almost half are Catholic. Muslims rival Mormons for having the largest families. And Hindus are the best-educated and among the richest religious groups, the survey found.

“I think politicians will be looking at this survey to see what groups they ought to target,” Professor Prothero said. “If the Hindu population is negligible, they won’t have to worry about it. But if it is wealthy, then they may have to pay attention.”

Experts said the wide-ranging variety of religious affiliation could set the stage for further conflicts over morality or politics, or new alliances on certain issues, as religious people have done on climate change or Jews and Hindus have done over relations between the United States, Israel and India.

“It sets up the potential for big arguments,” Mr. Green said, “but also for the possibility of all sorts of creative synthesis. Diversity cuts both ways.”