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In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors’ drugs�largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeatedly published in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published.^[8]But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome. It is not unusual for a published paper to shift the focus from the drug’s intended effect to a secondary effect that seems more favorable.

This article from the New York Review of Books about how the doctors who lead medical tests on new drugs from big Pharma companies is particularly damning. I’m especially worried about how the medical doctors don’t seem to recognize that these are conflicts of interest – the fact that they receive thousands if not millions each year from the companies that produce the drugs they are supposed to be scientifically (read: without bias) testing. Yet another hole in our current medical system.

For anyone who might read this blog regularly I am preparing a series of posts on the information I’ve gained in the past few months about the US healthcare system. Nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary, but just trying to compile and sort out all the information in my head. I hope to start posting them over the weekend, once I get the drafts for every post completed.

�Here�s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They�re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can�t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.�

-Jack Kerouac

This has always been, and most likely will always be my favorite ad campaign ever. There are lots of reasons why it works as excellent advertising, but I love the way it works as inspiration. Seeing these great faces and hearing Kerouac’s quote is inspiring. This commercial (and the posters that were part of the campaign as well) reminds that mankind is capable of truly awesome inventions and art, and it is not necessarily the smartest of us who create them, it is the bravest. Those who step out and do think different.

I need to watch this video on a regular basis.

I’m in no mood to write a review, so this is a scattershot meditation on Spike Jonze’ film that came out today. Freya and I couldn’t wait any more to see it, so we braved the midnight showing here in Nashville.

This film is a child-view examination of the life that we live in constant tension. The wild things are ferocious and more than capable of crushing or eating Max, but they also want him to lead them and all have their own problems that they think he solve.

There is no attempt to simplify life or hollywoodize a moral out of a wandering story, rather the film is simply concerned with what does it mean to be a child, what does it mean to have emotions that are stronger than we care to admit, what can imagination and escape do for us, and yet to simplify the film to these questions offends the power and beauty of it. Spike, and co-writer Dave Eggers have attempted to remove the wisdom we get as adults and simply capture the volatility and wonder of being nine years old, of trying to understand why good things happen and why bad things happen.

The film is beautiful. That’s really all I have to say about it right now. I can’t wait to see it again, to enter back into the world where the wild things are, to see the reign of King Max, who will be a good king. This movie is devoid of nostalgia about childhood, and in stripping that away, we remember the world as it was before we built up our defenses and coping mechanisms. And that world, as scary and volatile as it was, is worth revisiting.

Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, reviewed some of his favorite Christian and religious albums for emusic, on the occasion of the release of his new album, on which every song is inspired in some part by a scripture verse. Here, he recommends “The World as Best I Remember It, Vol. 1″ as the album to check out from Rich Mullins:

It’s hard not to go with�Songs, the first greatest hits collection � it’s more solid end-to-end. But the title of this one comes from “Jacob & Two Women”, which is one of the best Christian songs of the past thirty or forty years by anybody and an incredible song by any measure. (My favorite version of it is Carolyn Arends’s graceful reading on�Awesome God: A Tribute to Rich Mullins.) It’s a song that shows Mullins at his best: witty; clever; open; doubting; playful; faithful; wistful; in touch with the sorrow & the loss & the hope & the wonder that lies underneath all spiritual seeking, and all housed in one flesh-and-blood, wholly unpretentious person. There’s also “Step by Step” and “Calling Out Your Name” here � both clear evidence of how truly great a songwriter Mullins was and how much the music world lost when he died.

Amen. Amen. �See the full list here.

Over on Tiny Mix Tapes, Darnielle is given the full interview treatment, and this question is illuminating, heartbreaking, and worth swallowing any immediate reaction you have to consider what he says for awhile.

Let�s turn to the album. Religion always seemed hinted at in your music, but it�s never been so blatant as it is on�The Life of the World to Come, even without the song titles. Is there any reason for this explicitness? Religion is treated here in a similar way as subjects like love or family on past albums.

For sure: religion�s explicitly personal for me, for a bunch of reasons. My early school experiences were in Catholic school, and some of the early Sisters who taught me were real heroes to me: they nurtured me, treated me with love and respect; they meant so much to me. Experiences like those, at a parochial school, can really cement one�s ideas about God and bind them with one�s ideas about self-worth and feeling welcomed and at-home.

And then my parents divorced, and church became something we only did when we (my sister and I) would go to stay with my dad, and he wasn�t Catholic any more at that point, so I�d get exposed to the weird world of protestant services, which had their own warmth for me. And then I renounced God and raged against religion for years, as I still will, often, given all the damage that Christians (not fake Christians, that�s a cop out: real ones do all kinds of harm) will do. But down in my gut, I want to believe so badly. I can�t stand the idea that Christian virtues are mainly humans celebrating their indwelling natural goodness; it�s probably true, but I want transcendence. That�s personal. And some of my friends are dead, but I feel that what they left in this world persists: and that�s spiritual. So, yes. Spiritual stuff, way personal for me.

Thursday afternoon Freya and I are our skidaddling out of Nashville towards the similar sounding city of Asheville for our one year anniversary trip. We’re a week early so technically it’s a 51 week anniversary but we’ll take it.

The cabin has a hot tub on a deck and a skylight-lit loft area and acres of woods surrounding it, followed by mountains and forests surrounding those.

I’m taking my typewriter with a fresh ribbon, a stack of blank pages, a notebook or four, 5 New Yorkers, 1 Wired Magazine, 3 books of poetry, one book of non-fiction and possibly a novel.

I think Freya’s list of items to bring is similar in length but decidedly more visual arts themed.

We’ll be taking two cameras, one digital SLR, one polaroid.

At the Greenlife grocery in Asheville we’ll be buying ingredients for homemade chicken salad and homemade butternut squash bisque and any other recipes we find that strike our fancy.

We are making no plans except for maybe a picnic drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway, and on Monday we’ll be visiting the Biltmore.

Otherwise we will spend our days creating and reading and enjoying the hot tub and the complimentary bottle of champagne and most of all the company of each other.

And Thursday cannot, absolutely cannot come soon enough.

The wife and I saw The Decemberists in concert at the Ryman on Sunday night. The timing could not have been better as every time I go see a good concert I inevitably listen to the band on heavy rotation for the next few weeks. And the very day that they played their show the first true day of Autumn decided to sweep into Tennessee.

So I’m at work right now, storyboarding for a new video that I conceptualized, helped write, and am now animating, and who should be providing the soundtrack in my headphones but The Decemberists. I put on The Crane Wife, their album of a few years ago that was pretty excellent. I listened to 9 of the 11 songs before I really paid attention, but as soon as track 10 came on – The Crane Wife 1 & 2 – I had to stop and be a little sentimental.

There are songs attached to memories, song attached to emotions, songs attached to periods in our life or times when we were erasing the preceding period of our life. But this song is something else. As this digital copy of a recording of Colin Meloy’s voice begins to play, I am transported to an unknown place and time in a very concrete season.

The acoustic guitar is the lapping of a bonfire, and as the organ slowly rises in the background I feel the heat from the cup of hot chocolate I’m holding and the fire on my legs. The lyrics are small at first; so is the circle nearby that the fire illuminates and as the lalala’s build at the end I see all the stars above and the blackness around. But most of all, the rhythm of the song, the slow, melancholy tone that it is sung in makes me feel the cold of winter, the dead of the world as it hibernates and holds still for a season.

The return of the crisp, cool air in the evenings this week has been wonderful. Sunday after the concert we walked with some friends to the Walking Bridge and took in downtown Nashville. Last night we sat on our deck with good friends and drank hot chocolate and smoked pipes and enjoyed that we were chilly, reveling in the way the night air actually caused us to shiver and bundle and appreciate the warmth of the house.

After the new year, a few months from now, the winter chill will be at its worst and the grayness of the world will be crushing and every breath will be cut short because of the way your lungs freeze. Then we will once again long for spring, for warmth, for specks of green in a world of browns, and sometime after that those things will arrive.

But this week, right now, there is the first arrival of Autumn and after the lethargy of late summer and the monsoons of the past few weeks the cool air in my lungs is more entrancing than the very best fireworks display on our national birthday. And the Decemberists are doing their part to excite me about the impending chills.