“

Mr. Kleinzahler is an American eccentric, a hard man to pin down. Born in New Jersey, he writes poems that have a pushy exuberance and an expert recall of that state’s tougher schoolyards — of bullies with names like Stinky Phil and of “fire trucks and galoshes,/the taste of pencils and Louis Bocca’s ear.” And he writes with elegiac insight about life’s losers, the people he calls “strange rangers,” the addicted, insane or destitute.

Yet for all his gruffness and love of dive bars, he is no Bukowski. Mr. Kleinzahler, who has lived for several decades in San Francisco, writes most often in a strongly accented free verse that is among the most articulate and alive sounds American poetry is currently making. He plays effortlessly with forms, voices, registers. And his range of cultural reference — from Catullus to Custer, from Lorca to Eric Dolphy — is wide and artfully deployed. Rarely does high, learned poetic art sound this casual.”

Read the article.

“At 42 Augusten Burroughs is the first to admit he has written “more memoirs than anyone my age should be entitled to write.”

His fifth, “A Wolf at the Table,” comes out on Tuesday. But this new one, about his relationship with his father, breaks from the dark comedy that characterized the wildly popular “Running With Scissors.” Gone are the sharp one-liners, the exaggerated portraits and the wacky antics. In their place is a chilling and terrifying depiction of a soulless sociopath who can barely contain a murderous rage toward his youngest son and mentally unstable wife. It’s more Stephen King than David Sedaris.

“I knew before writing a single word that it wouldn’t have the same tone,” Mr. Burroughs said during a brief visit to New York from his home in Amherst, Mass. Tall and skinny in jeans, a gray T-shirt and baseball cap, Mr. Burroughs looks much younger than the bearded, severe man who stares out from the back of the book’s jacket.” …

… Sitting in his Manhattan hotel room, he leaned back in the chair and folded his arms, displaying a curling blue-green tattoo along both forearms; written in intricate script was “Cicatrix manet.” “I just got it,” Mr. Burroughs said, holding the tattoo out for closer inspection. “It’s Latin for ‘the scar remains.’ ”

Read the article.

“Samantha Mohan has had her tires slashed and been called names — but not by the drug-addicted people she has provided with clean needles over the past 15 years. …

It’s the people who break out of the cycle and no longer need clean needles that keep her motivated. Over the years, she says, there have been “hundreds” of these success stories. “It’s just when that light clicks off in their brain, you can just tell,” says Mohan. “When they get that, well, what satisfaction is that to actually see a human being say, ‘That is it, I am done beating myself up.’ “

Vancouver Sun, April 7, 2008

By the time Lucy Clark, the protagonist of Fiona Maazel’s first novel, “Last Last Chance,” enters drug rehabilitation midway through the book, she has been through a lot. At 29, Lucy is in rehab for the seventh time, and less than a year earlier her father, an official at the Centers for Disease Control, had vials of superplague stolen from his lab and committed suicide. Lucy’s mother, the chief executive of a multimillion-dollar hat company, is a drug addict herself. (She’s first seen “crawling around the floor, looking for anything white and crumbly. … She’d smoke talcum powder if it was there.”) Lucy’s half sister, born of an extramarital affair, is, at 12, obsessed with disease (she appears to know more about superplague than the C.D.C. itself), and Lucy’s 84-year-old grandmother has taken to wearing surgical masks (she buys them in bulk) when she’s not channeling her past lives (she’s teaching herself Japanese, in the belief that it will help her when she comes back).

“Then there’s Lucy herself. Her true love, Eric, has married her best friend; another man has given her a sexually transmitted disease; and she’s been caught in flagrante with her mother’s acupuncturist, which is what landed her in rehab in the first place — though not without a pit stop in upstate New York, where she has been working on the assembly line at ZOG Kosher Chicken’s slaughterhouse. There she befriends (and eventually becomes lovers with) the longtime pluckhouse supervisor, Stanley Gensch. Stanley, an alcoholic himself (he confesses to putting beer in the cow trough so as not to have to drink alone), killed his wife in a drunken driving accident and, having frozen her eggs, is interviewing surrogates to carry their child. And that’s only the half of it. Maazel’s book has enough event — and enough eccentricity — to torpedo your average novel.”

From NY Times Book Review: Bad Habits

Both David Sheff and his son, Nic, have newly released books documenting Nic’s methamphetamine addiction. David tells of his anguish watching Nic’s harrowing descent into addiction. How do you love an addict? How do you help them without hurting yourself? When is tough love appropriate? Washington State ranks sixth in methamphetamine production and spends over $56 million annually to combat meth labs. How bad is the meth problem in Washington? Who are the users? And what does treatment look like? Today on Weekday: Stories of Addiction.

Listen: KUOW Seattle

The Editor’s Desk: March 3, 2008:

Addiction knows no social or geographic boundaries: what John Cheever called “The Sorrows of Gin” are democratic in their destructiveness. I know few people who have not been affected in some way by addiction—in the world where I grew up, the drug of choice was usually alcohol, with a large side of nicotine—and I suspect the same is true for many of you.

It has long been unfashionable to think of addiction as a failure of character or of willpower. More than 50 years ago, in 1956, the American Medical Association recognized addiction as a disease, and we now speak of it in the vernacular of treatment and therapy. But only recently have scientists started making progress in understanding, and possibly treating, the underlying biological factors. When we began hearing about new advances in the search for pharmaceutical solutions for common addictions, we were curious. If addiction is in fact a disease, then could it be treated in the way, say, diabetes is with insulin?

The hunt for vaccines is not a quest for a cure-all—addiction is a chronic disease; like the conflict in the Middle East, it is something that can only be managed, not solved—but there is important work underway that may produce some pharmaceutical weapons in the struggle against addiction. In an essay, Mitchell Rosenthal, who founded Phoenix House, the national drug and alcohol treatment and prevention organization, notes that vaccines could well help, but are not magic bullets. As in cases of depression, pharmaceuticals work best in combination with other kinds of therapies. A change of heart, of mind or of spirit can be critical in the treatment of addiction; biology surely shapes us, but need not totally control us.

History has been unkind to hopes for a medicinal solution to addiction: opium and cocaine were introduced to the United States as cures for alcoholism in the late 1800s. Still, the National Institute on Drug Abuse is developing or testing more than 200 compounds that block the intoxicating effects of drugs, including vaccines that train the body’s own immune system to bar them from the brain.

Seattle Times: Getting it right on addiction

The American Medical Association first recognized addiction as a disease in 1956. But the medical community has only recently seen it as a “chronic, relapsing brain disorder,” according to this week’s Newsweek magazine, which put addiction on the cover.

Among the findings: The addict’s brain is malfunctioning, like the pancreas of someone with diabetes.

At the SAMA luncheon, keynote speaker Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, compared a drug relapse to type 1 diabetes, hypertension or asthma. It simply must be treated like the illness that it is.

“Once it settles in,” Volkow said of addiction, “the consequences can be long-lasting.”

Seattle P-I: The intersection of science, the brain and addiction

Addiction is often a difficult, chronic and confusing condition that can tear families apart.

There is a push on the federal level and in Seattle to inject more science into treating the disease, which is being linked to dysfunctions in the brain.

On Thursday, Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse, visited Seattle to talk about the intersection of science, the brain and addiction at a luncheon sponsored by the Science and Management of Addictions Foundation of Seattle.

The research psychiatrist spent a few minutes with the Seattle P-I before taking the stage.

If you had one minute to convince someone why addiction is an illness, and not some sort of messy weakness or behavioral problem, what would you say?

“Now that we have the technologies to actually take pictures (of) the chemistry and function of the brain we are able to identify the specific changes in chemistry and function in people who are addicted.

“These are areas that normally allow you to control your behaviors and your desires and emotions.

“And the disease addiction is one that results because there is dysfunction of these areas that normally in you and me allows us to control not doing something because it would be harmful…

“We are also (working) …to teach people to activate their frontal cortex, which is what allows you to put the brakes on your desire.”

An Avant-Metal Icon Mellows, and the Results Are Sensational

I saw them in November at Chop Suey and it was fantastic…

Seattle Weekly:

“The early ’90s Earth albums, Extra-Capsular Extraction, Earth 2, and Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions, are considered to be a holy trinity of sorts for ambient-metal fans. But the aforementioned disciples emerged while Carlson was in hiding, so to speak. As has been documented ad nauseam, Carlson spent the years between 1996 and 2002 flip-flopping between heroin addiction and rehab, but mostly the former.

When he re-emerged, clean and sober, Carlson was greeted with praise from those he had inspired. A lesser musician might have tried being darker and louder than his successors, but Carlson instead got quieter and more reflective. Earth’s 2005 “comeback,” Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, was unmistakably a western album; it sounded like it could be the soundtrack to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. While still rooted in drone, it resonated with Duane Eddy twang and ghost town atmospherics, worlds beyond the body-buzzing wall of metal Sunn O))) were erecting onstage. …

The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull takes this aesthetic to the next level. Indeed, it is the most melodic, clear-headed record in the Earth catalog. Whereas Hex had maintained a doomy, apocalyptic aura, Bees seems to spend its time staring at the sky. Carlson said his intent with Bees was to make a gospel-style record. The result is a wash of primary-colored guitar and organ tones. The seven songs are seamless; one melody from “Omens and Portents 1: The Driver” morphs into all the others so that, like good jazz, what sticks in your head are not whole songs but moments. But “Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)” is certainly the most structured and melody-and-rhythm-driven number in the Earth catalog, containing traces of Ennio Morricone and Johnny Cash. More than Hex, even, that number will confound the devoted Earth listener. But regardless of how broadened Carlson’s color palette has become, drummer Davies and organist Steve Moore keep things anchored, essentially slowing the album’s heartbeat to a near-still, as if keeping time with the natural world.

Bees’ album cover speaks volumes about the band’s past and future. It’s an illustration by N.Y.C.-based artist Arik Moonhawk Roper depicting, quite literally, the album title: bees making honey in a lion’s skull. It’s not as gross as it sounds. Previously, it probably would have been rendered in smears of gray decay. Instead, it’s a lush, colorful portrayal of the organic life cycle of things. “

“It turns out that improving the quality of health care has only a little to do with drug companies. Their influence is a symptom of a deeper underlying pathology. The real trouble is that doctors—somewhat paradoxically—are simply not focused on actually treating disease.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2186446/