The planets are in alignment:

brooklynvegan: Jon Stewart, Sufjan Stevens, Dave Eggers, Sarah Vowell, & John Roderick | An 826NYC Benefit show

My new best friend:

From Magnet's current cover story on Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch, p.68 (print only):

"'I love reading biographies about creative processes, whether they're artistic or scientific,' says Murdoch. 'You see people's lives documented and what they have gone through. But the whole time, things are sometimes working out for them, something is brewing, something is simmering to the top.'

This is subject extremely close to Murdoch's heart. Prior to forming Belle and Sebastian, he suffered through a long bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a debilitating illness that basically shut down his waking life. During the process of emerging from this fog, he found new strength through making music.

'I wouldn't be a songwriter if I hadn't gotten sick,' says Murdoch. 'I had an extended period of seven years when I was out of the game, when I gave up all aspects of normal life, and the songwriting was a crutch. I was absolutely hanging onto these songs with a drowning person's grip, they being the only productive thing that I did at all. I realized as soon as I sat down at the piano three years into this thing that I could put words together with melody and create something. It's almost like the first minute doing this, I saw it all stretching ahead and realized that it was something I could feel worthwhile doing; I could document how I was feeling in this vacuum.

'What doesn't kill you makes you,' Murdoch chuckles. 'It was the biggest thing that happened in my life. No question, no doubt. I don't mean to be macabre, but it's often those transient periods that are sometimes the most interesting things to write about when it comes to characters in songs.'"

On par with rabbits, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"...

...vintage Eisenberg jewelry, the Chrysler Building lit at night, and Sea Garden's sweet and sour pork:

Stream the Long Winters' upcoming disc, "Putting the Days to Bed", at Mammothpress.com:

Mammoth Press

"I was starting to get worn out, but after a few minutes lying on a picnic table I realized that it would be all too easy in the warm Tennessee...

...night to just doze off, and the last time I passed out around this many hippies I woke up two days later on the Green Tortoise outside of Redding, California carrying a briefcase full of blueberry pancakes. That was NOT going to happen again."

Part Three of JR's CMJ Bonnaroo report:

cmj.com | new music first

Disparate times call for disparate measures:

Aforementioned cancer was caught, basically, at the instant it developed. Said friend, who sports the immune system of an alpha male mountain goat, should be a-okay. Knock on wood.

Best line this week, from the barrista who accidentally undercharged me by fifty cents: "Go ahead and keep it. It's not like you're Joseph Stalin or anything."

And my friend, the oft-mentioned E, whose talent is matched only by his ability to vex, has launched a new blog, Vonnegut's Asshole. Show him the love he so richly deserves:

Vonnegut's Asshole

Off to the wedding!

Overload:

Yesterday I discovered someone I love has cancer and tonight I attended a rehearsal dinner for someone I also love very much.

There is too much I will never understand.

Write like this or don't write at all:

JR covers the Bonnaroo Festival for CMJ:

Part One:
cmj.com | new music first

Part Two:
cmj.com | new music first

We're doing this with Scotch tape and mirrors:

After a delightful seven day streak at 98.6, this morning the fever returned with a vengeance and by afternoon, I felt like I was walking underwater. The silver lining, if one must search for it, is that the pre-deadline cacaphony is momentarily silenced. I can only hear one voice, because I'm too out of sorts to hear the rest.

Sleep beckons.

From the deadline cave:

Can anything compare to the quiet mournful beauty of the 1:00 a.m. sky? The still and enveloping grace of the sweet nocturnal visage?

Sometimes this is so much fun:

1) My Seattle Sound cover story on Elvis Costello is out now:

Seattle Sound

2) And my friend, E, is writing his debut feature for Vanity Fair.

Awesomeosity with compound interest.

Do not go gentle into that good night:

For the past few days, the air has felt like a solid and Seattle has experienced alternating bouts of flypaper stickiness and alacritous showers.

My hair has responded accordingly.

When I'm in New York in the summer, I know the rules. My hair might resemble kudzu by 3pm, but there are beef franks at Green Papaya and beet salads at Babbo and long(ish) walks through Central Park. There are contemplative afternoons in St. Patrick's Cathedral and journeys through the Met and luggage-altering trips to the Strand. Shows at Park Slope's Southpaw (preceded by iced soy mochas at the nearby Gorilla Coffee), grasshoppers at the Algonquin, the candy shop at the Plaza, Piano's followed by Katz's, the jewelry counter at Barney's flagship store, 1am jaunts through Times Square, and so many boutiques in the West Village, SoHo and NoHo that my heart dances at the thought. (No, obviously, I don't live this way. I save to splurge when I'm over there.)

So my hair occasionally looks like Brillo. There are trade-offs and no one gets everything they want. But here's the thing: I've come to love Seattle in the past eighteen months or so in a way I didn't think was possible. It finally got interesting again and for the first time, I feel as much at home in my home as I do in New York.

That said, I'm unwilling to deal w/ this stuff on my head just so I can see one more show at Hugo House.

Elements, you've been warned: I call bullshit.

I stumbled across both of these in Patricia Bosworth's engaging biography of Diane Arbus:

I'm not sure if I agree with the former--I know I want to--but the latter resonates:

"Every form seen correctly is beautiful."--Goethe

"Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding."--Diane Arbus

If I have to walk, crawl, or hitch hike, I'll be there. From today's New York Times:

Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion, Working on a Merger

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: May 26, 2006

SOON after the announcement was made last December that Joan Didion would be writing a one-woman play based on her autobiographical book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," Ms. Didion had a meeting with Scott Rudin, the Broadway producer who first proposed the idea, and David Hare, the British playwright who will be directing the production.

One of the topics was casting. It was not a long conversation.

Vanessa Redgrave, said Mr. Rudin, "was the only person we ever talked about. There was no one else ever discussed."

More:

Joan Didion - Vanessa Redgrave - Theater - New York Times

Vanderslicer!

My Paste review of John Vanderslice's recent Seattle show is finally up. My editor cut the final paragraph, but I like it, so I've included it after the link:

Paste Magazine :: Review :: John Vanderslice :: Neumo's, Seattle, Wash. 4/7/06 (Page 1)

"Sub Pop's Kelley Stoltz and Suicide Squeeze's Crystal Skulls kicked off the evening with sets that were antic and fresh. The latter celebrated the official release of their new disc, Outgoing Behavior and drew a sizeable portion of the crowd. The night's only snafu came after the house lights went up and Vanderslice suggested playing Ghostface Killah's Fishscales over the sound system. These, the indiest of kids, called bullshit on that."

Because we were running low on beav talk:

Eric Spitznagel, my Believer editor and the only writer (so far) to thank me alongside Ron Jeremy, is touring with his book, "Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter". You can hear Der Spitznagel read at Seattle's Elliot Bay Book Company on Saturday, May 13 at 7:30 pm. And you can read Playboy's "Fast Forward" excerpt here:

Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter

Worth noting:

"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'" --Kurt Vonnegut

"More obscene than anything is inertia."--Henry Miller

The word "shank" springs to mind, too:

Today I spoke with two Island Records employees who had never heard of Elvis Costello. I explained to one, then the other, that Mr. Costello is, in fact, an artist on their label. Neither believed me until I insisted that each look it up on Island's web site. One actually tried to convince me that Island didn't know "who Elvis Costiello [sic] has for a publis [sic]."

I don't have a larger point. I just want to cock-punch them.

From yesterday's Washington Post: Chronic Fatigue's Genetic Component

Chronic Fatigue's Genetic Component

Chronic Fatigue's Genetic Component
Study Clarifies Predisposition to Syndrome

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 21, 2006; Page A08


An intense battery of medical and psychological tests of people with chronic fatigue syndrome has strengthened the idea that the mysterious ailment is actually a collection of five or more conditions with varying genetic and environmental causes, scientists reported yesterday.

But though the syndrome comes in many flavors, these experts said, the new work also points to an important common feature: The brains and immune systems of affected people do not respond normally to physical and psychological stresses.

The researchers predicted that continued clarification of the precise genes and hormones involved will lead to better diagnostic tests and therapies for the ailment, which may affect close to 1 million Americans.

"This is a very important step forward in the field of chronic fatigue syndrome research," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which sponsored the project.

The new findings come from the largest clinical trial ever to focus on people with the syndrome, a debilitating condition accompanied by unexplained extreme fatigue, memory and concentration problems, sleep disorders and chronic pain.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach that agency officials said represents the future of public health, the CDC recruited 20 physicians, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, computational biologists -- even physicists and mathematicians -- to collaborate in an effort to tease apart the syndrome.

The results, published in more than a dozen reports and commentaries in the April issue of the journal Pharmacogenomics, released yesterday, suggest that many cases of chronic fatigue have links to a handful of brain- and immune system-related genes that either harbor small mutations or are working abnormally for other reasons.

That finding strengthens the case that some people are born with a predisposition to the condition. But those genetic links remain weak and incomplete, researchers conceded, leaving most of the syndrome's roots hidden in a fog of poorly understood physiological, neurological, psychological and behavioral factors.

"Chronic fatigue syndrome is very heterogeneous. It's not just one thing," said William C. Reeves, who oversaw the project with CDC co-worker Suzanne D. Vernon. It will take time to identify all the biological pathways involved, Reeves said, but the growing evidence of genetic links should put to rest the idea that the syndrome is a made-up diagnosis for "a bunch of hysterical, upper-class white women."

The new study involved 227 residents of Wichita, Kan., who spent two full days in a hospital undergoing a series of blood tests, hormone studies, psychological exams and sleep studies.

About one-quarter of them met the formal definition of chronic fatigue syndrome. A similar number proportion had chronic fatigue but did not rank as having the full-blown syndrome -- in many cases because their fatigue was not severe enough. A third group met all of the requirements of the syndrome but also had melancholic depression, which does not fit the current diagnostic guidelines for chronic fatigue syndrome. And a fourth group, for comparison purposes, was healthy.

The CDC, which invested about $2 million in the testing, then made blood-test results and other data available to researchers, who performed a wide variety of analyses.

In one set of studies, scientists looked at the activity levels of 20,000 genes known to be involved in the body's response to such stresses as infections, injuries or emotional trauma. Several hundred were found to be over- or under-active in various subgroups of fatigued patients.

Most of those correlations were weak -- that is, the gene expression patterns alone could not accurately distinguish those whose symptoms had been diagnosed as the syndrome from those whose symptoms had not. But in one analysis, the activity of just 26 genes did accurately predict which of six categories of chronic fatigue a patient had on the basis of symptoms and other clinical tests. That is a powerful hint that those genes -- many of them involved in immune system regulation, the adrenal gland and the brain's hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which are involved in the body's response to stress -- may hold clues to the disease variants.

In other analyses, involving 50 genes that some people inherit with seemingly minor "misspellings," five of the 500 genetic glitches that were tracked repeatedly correlated with an apparent susceptibility to chronic fatigue. Those five include genes that affect levels of serotonin -- the neurotransmitter whose levels are tweaked by many antidepressant drugs -- and glutamate, a chemical that excites certain brain pathways in response to stress.

The specific implications remain uncertain for now, said Vernon, a CDC molecular biologist. "But everybody's finding the same five genes to be involved, which is pretty cool."

Several other studies on the Wichita samples found abnormal levels of various hormones relating to stress and mood -- additional evidence that chronic fatigue syndrome patients are genetically and neurologically "wired" to respond to stress abnormally.

It is already known, Vernon said, that the brain can literally rewire itself -- breaking old connections between neurons while building new ones -- in response to various physical or emotional events. Chronic fatigue syndrome may be the result of a bad rewiring job, she said, in people genetically predisposed to handle stress poorly.

And this is fucked up, too:

CNN.com - Mumps outbreak worst in 20 years - Apr 20, 2006

Okay, this is fucked up:

CNN.com - Case of bubonic plague confirmed in L.A. - Apr 19, 2006