MUSIC
Band of Horses
Everything All the Time
Sub Pop
2006
B+
Stylus
We all wait. Leaves paper the walks in crumple foil, give way to blue rain, then tufts of snow. Music stains it all; we measure ourselves through our new listens. We stay indoors and hear all kinds of bumps and bruises and cologne cacophony. We dim the wind indoors. There’s always something on the horizon, something we place ahead of us in time to make today look like a mark in a larger pattern. In the space we save for that other, another, it’s a day marked off. You’ll excuse the Grey’s Anatomy generalism, but spring’s coming.
Another season climaxed. Typically, spring brings a slow unveiling of some of the year’s most anticipated discs, after the seasonal hangover of January and February and the late vacation of November and December. Band of Horses—a quartet of Seattle mainstays containing prior members of Carissa’s Weird who are coming off of popular dates with Iron and Wine—may not top DJ Martian’s, but they deserve to. You can hear in their acoustic guitars and coyote drawl the warm moist of tourmate Sam Beam, as well as the more tremulous strains of My Morning Jacket. Though we lose our winter to listen, we follow their gorgeous ballads in the ballast. It begins to make sense, in time. In fact, their soft country howl might just replace the wind for the Atlantic’s bleached bone seashores this summer.
Recorded in Seattle with Phil Ek after the success of their EP last year, Everything All the Time includes several must-hears, but the most pressing is “The Funeral.” Stolid with solitude and angst, the band grumbles around a chiming guitar and the gummy reverb of its partner, alternately clean and guttural before they hit its arcing chorus. The My Morning Jacket comparisons emerge most clearly here, though Band of Horses succeeds where MMJ failed on Z: they have fucking melodies. Lead singer Ben Bridwell chants “At every occasion, I’ll be ready for a funeral,” backed by the blue-spined swoon of both his and Mat Brooke’s dueling guitars. And then the band starts again, moving back-forward by waking up tomorrow and promising to see the same fates through, the same misses and maybes and never-agains. They show how simple it should be to make music that can put a stop to everything else for just a glance, your book down, you quit wondering just who’s in your blind spot, and stop questioning who might be squinting against the noise cramming your cubicle. These aren’t new parts, and certainly there’s nothing groundbreaking to be heard. It’s simply transfixing—death pitted past the womb, time versus the clock, crows circling the hawk kinda shit.
Paired with “The Funeral” is the saw-cut acoustic lament “Part One.” Band of Horses tames “Funeral”’s stallion waltz with a whisper in the ear. Make sure your tinny iPod phones are deep in the canal, subway dwellers; the band’s dry, brittle voicing is blunt but shy, with only acoustic guitar and plodding drums to rub off on Bridwell’s voice, sounding here like the ungodly spawn of Wayne Coyne and Perry Ferrell.
Elsewhere, Band of Horses couples its lyrical growth with wispy country smoke-songs. “I Go to the Barn Cause I Like The,” which opens with Bridwell’s stinging couplet “I’d like to think I’m a mask / You’d wear with pride,” is Roy Orbison new-birthed as a tragic indie troubadour, his shadow glasses traded for sun-creases and newt eyes, a heart too full of thistle and burn to acknowledge pretty women or, for that matter, any old tart in the blue bayou. “Monsters” matches the woeful glow of “I Go to. . .” with a stark banjo part and circling guitar, while the hypnotic closer “St. Augustine” shoulders on mourning attire for Spanish Hollywood and Vine, replete with sinewy acoustic guitars and the band’s multi-tracked harmonies.
Though Everything All the Time ain’t all blisskrieg—witness the odd coupling of “The Great Salt Lake” and “Weed Party,” during which the band reverts to the bar lounger’s formula for amp over tune—it serves as a remarkably notable debut in a year which is already proving one of this decade’s most promising. The blur is shadowing into shape again, leaving us something to love as we wait for that next other through spring.
BOOKS AND BIZNESS
Promotional blurb:
A BMW in a Costco parking lot? A working class family with a 50-inch plasma TV? What's going on in the mind of the new consumer? Today's consumers can seem impossible to understand, and even harder to please. For instance, the average mall shopper will spend about $100, then leave when she hits that limit. She'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't want to think about her dress size. And the store most likely to get her money isn't the one with the nicest display or the deepest discounts-it's the one closest to her parking spot. In his consulting with dozens of leading companies, Michael J. Silverstein has interviewed thousands of customers, extracting fascinating patterns about what really drives their purchase decisions. His first book, the acclaimed bestseller Trading Up, has taught a generation of marketers about the "new luxury" phenomenon, and why consumers will happily pay a steep premium for goods and services that are emotionally satisfying, from golf clubs to bathroom fixtures to beauty products.
But Trading Up revealed only part of the story of the new consumer. The same middle-class people who are happily trading up at Victoria's Secret and Panera are going on treasure hunts at Costco and Home Depot. And they are often getting as much emotional satisfaction in the discount stores as in the luxury stores. TREASURE HUNT shows how even the most mundane shopping-for things like paper towels and pet food-has become an adventure rather than a tedious chore. In just about every category, both the high end and the low end are growing and innovation- rich. Many middle-class consumers gladly spend $5 a day for a Starbucks venti latte; others spend forty cents a day on home-brewed coffee, feel good about their frugality, and save up the difference to buy Apple's newest Nano. TREASURE HUNT explains the success of companies as diverse as Dollar General, H. E. Butt, eBay, Commerce Bank, and Tchibo.
But beware: in our bifurcated global market, businesses need a clear strategy for aiming high or low, while avoiding the treacherous middle, where so many have recently stumbled. If your offering isn't exciting enough to inspire trading up, but not enough of a bargain to satisfy the treasure hunters, you'll have no emotional connection with your target audience. And then, as many fallen companies have discovered, your tried-and-true marketing strategies will go into a severe stall. TREASURE HUNT takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant classic, this is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly changing consumer.
Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers studying a blood pressure drug were astonished to discover that drinking a glass of grapefruit juice dangerously increased the drug's potency.
They were testing the effects of drinking alcohol on a medicine called Plendil. The scientists needed something that would hide the taste of alcohol so that subjects would know only that they were taking the drug and not know whether they were drinking alcohol with it. "One Saturday night, my wife and I tested everything in the refrigerator," said David G. Bailey, a research scientist at the London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, and the lead author on the study. "The only thing that covered the taste was grapefruit juice."
So they used it in their experiment, expecting the grapefruit juice to be irrelevant to their results. But blood levels of the drug went up significantly in the control group that drank just grapefruit juice, without alcohol.
"People didn't believe us," Dr. Bailey said. "They thought it was a joke. We had trouble getting it published in a major medical journal."
Eventually the paper was accepted and published by Lancet, in February 1991.
Finding why juice had that effect was the next question. The answer, it turned out, lay in a family of enzymes called the cytochrome P-450 system, in particular one known as CYP 3A4. This enzyme metabolizes many drugs, and toxins as well, into substances that are less potent or more easily excreted or both. Grapefruit juice interferes with the ability of CYP 3A4 to do that, increasing the potency of a drug by letting more of it enter the bloodstream, in effect producing an excessive dose.
Grapefruit interacts with this enzyme only in the intestines, not in the liver or other places where it is found. As a result, the effect is seen only with medicines taken orally, not with injected drugs.
Numerous studies now show the interaction of grapefruit juice with many widely used medicines. Most interactions have no serious consequences, but a few do. For example, drugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis. Does this mean a person could reduce the amount of medicine required simply by drinking grapefruit juice? No, according to Dr. Bailey.
"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice. There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.
"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."
Grapefruit juice can also interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression. Dr. Marshall Forstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, said he told patients to switch from grapefruit juice to something else because most oranges and other citrus fruits do not have the same effect.
"If they insist," Dr. Forstein said, "I try to prescribe the S.S.R.I. or other medication to be taken at a time when the grapefruit juice would have mostly been metabolized."
Among fruit juices, grapefruit has the strongest effect, but lime juice and orange juice made from Seville oranges similarly inhibit the CYP 3A4 enzyme. With some drugs, apple juice may interact in the same way.
While Dr. Bailey suggests avoiding grapefruit juice entirely when taking medicine, some experts say the effect of the juice should not be exaggerated.
"The circumstances under which an interaction will occur are relatively unusual," said Dr. David J. Greenblatt, a professor of pharmacology at Tufts. First, he said, the drug has to be metabolized significantly by intestinal CYP 3A4, and relatively few are. "When you look at the actual data for each drug, the scientific conclusions are that the interactions are unusual, sometimes quite small and not of clinical importance. But there are some cases in which it's significant."
Dr. Greenblatt and his co-investigators at Tufts have conducted research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in this field for years, and he has been a paid consultant to the Florida Citrus Commission. Dr. Richard B. Kim, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, agreed that the interaction was a serious health concern in some patients.
"Grapefruit consumption is a clinically relevant issue, especially for the elderly, who are most likely to be taking the drugs affected by it," Dr. Kim said. "If you're taking multiple medications, or have recently switched to a different type of medication, you should be particularly careful. The easiest thing to do under those circumstances is to take the medicine with water and avoid the juice completely."
Band of Horses
Everything All the Time
Sub Pop
2006
B+
Stylus
We all wait. Leaves paper the walks in crumple foil, give way to blue rain, then tufts of snow. Music stains it all; we measure ourselves through our new listens. We stay indoors and hear all kinds of bumps and bruises and cologne cacophony. We dim the wind indoors. There’s always something on the horizon, something we place ahead of us in time to make today look like a mark in a larger pattern. In the space we save for that other, another, it’s a day marked off. You’ll excuse the Grey’s Anatomy generalism, but spring’s coming.
Another season climaxed. Typically, spring brings a slow unveiling of some of the year’s most anticipated discs, after the seasonal hangover of January and February and the late vacation of November and December. Band of Horses—a quartet of Seattle mainstays containing prior members of Carissa’s Weird who are coming off of popular dates with Iron and Wine—may not top DJ Martian’s, but they deserve to. You can hear in their acoustic guitars and coyote drawl the warm moist of tourmate Sam Beam, as well as the more tremulous strains of My Morning Jacket. Though we lose our winter to listen, we follow their gorgeous ballads in the ballast. It begins to make sense, in time. In fact, their soft country howl might just replace the wind for the Atlantic’s bleached bone seashores this summer.
Recorded in Seattle with Phil Ek after the success of their EP last year, Everything All the Time includes several must-hears, but the most pressing is “The Funeral.” Stolid with solitude and angst, the band grumbles around a chiming guitar and the gummy reverb of its partner, alternately clean and guttural before they hit its arcing chorus. The My Morning Jacket comparisons emerge most clearly here, though Band of Horses succeeds where MMJ failed on Z: they have fucking melodies. Lead singer Ben Bridwell chants “At every occasion, I’ll be ready for a funeral,” backed by the blue-spined swoon of both his and Mat Brooke’s dueling guitars. And then the band starts again, moving back-forward by waking up tomorrow and promising to see the same fates through, the same misses and maybes and never-agains. They show how simple it should be to make music that can put a stop to everything else for just a glance, your book down, you quit wondering just who’s in your blind spot, and stop questioning who might be squinting against the noise cramming your cubicle. These aren’t new parts, and certainly there’s nothing groundbreaking to be heard. It’s simply transfixing—death pitted past the womb, time versus the clock, crows circling the hawk kinda shit.
Paired with “The Funeral” is the saw-cut acoustic lament “Part One.” Band of Horses tames “Funeral”’s stallion waltz with a whisper in the ear. Make sure your tinny iPod phones are deep in the canal, subway dwellers; the band’s dry, brittle voicing is blunt but shy, with only acoustic guitar and plodding drums to rub off on Bridwell’s voice, sounding here like the ungodly spawn of Wayne Coyne and Perry Ferrell.
Elsewhere, Band of Horses couples its lyrical growth with wispy country smoke-songs. “I Go to the Barn Cause I Like The,” which opens with Bridwell’s stinging couplet “I’d like to think I’m a mask / You’d wear with pride,” is Roy Orbison new-birthed as a tragic indie troubadour, his shadow glasses traded for sun-creases and newt eyes, a heart too full of thistle and burn to acknowledge pretty women or, for that matter, any old tart in the blue bayou. “Monsters” matches the woeful glow of “I Go to. . .” with a stark banjo part and circling guitar, while the hypnotic closer “St. Augustine” shoulders on mourning attire for Spanish Hollywood and Vine, replete with sinewy acoustic guitars and the band’s multi-tracked harmonies.
Though Everything All the Time ain’t all blisskrieg—witness the odd coupling of “The Great Salt Lake” and “Weed Party,” during which the band reverts to the bar lounger’s formula for amp over tune—it serves as a remarkably notable debut in a year which is already proving one of this decade’s most promising. The blur is shadowing into shape again, leaving us something to love as we wait for that next other through spring.
BOOKS AND BIZNESS
Promotional blurb:
A BMW in a Costco parking lot? A working class family with a 50-inch plasma TV? What's going on in the mind of the new consumer? Today's consumers can seem impossible to understand, and even harder to please. For instance, the average mall shopper will spend about $100, then leave when she hits that limit. She'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't want to think about her dress size. And the store most likely to get her money isn't the one with the nicest display or the deepest discounts-it's the one closest to her parking spot. In his consulting with dozens of leading companies, Michael J. Silverstein has interviewed thousands of customers, extracting fascinating patterns about what really drives their purchase decisions. His first book, the acclaimed bestseller Trading Up, has taught a generation of marketers about the "new luxury" phenomenon, and why consumers will happily pay a steep premium for goods and services that are emotionally satisfying, from golf clubs to bathroom fixtures to beauty products.
But Trading Up revealed only part of the story of the new consumer. The same middle-class people who are happily trading up at Victoria's Secret and Panera are going on treasure hunts at Costco and Home Depot. And they are often getting as much emotional satisfaction in the discount stores as in the luxury stores. TREASURE HUNT shows how even the most mundane shopping-for things like paper towels and pet food-has become an adventure rather than a tedious chore. In just about every category, both the high end and the low end are growing and innovation- rich. Many middle-class consumers gladly spend $5 a day for a Starbucks venti latte; others spend forty cents a day on home-brewed coffee, feel good about their frugality, and save up the difference to buy Apple's newest Nano. TREASURE HUNT explains the success of companies as diverse as Dollar General, H. E. Butt, eBay, Commerce Bank, and Tchibo.
But beware: in our bifurcated global market, businesses need a clear strategy for aiming high or low, while avoiding the treacherous middle, where so many have recently stumbled. If your offering isn't exciting enough to inspire trading up, but not enough of a bargain to satisfy the treasure hunters, you'll have no emotional connection with your target audience. And then, as many fallen companies have discovered, your tried-and-true marketing strategies will go into a severe stall. TREASURE HUNT takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant classic, this is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly changing consumer.
Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers studying a blood pressure drug were astonished to discover that drinking a glass of grapefruit juice dangerously increased the drug's potency.
They were testing the effects of drinking alcohol on a medicine called Plendil. The scientists needed something that would hide the taste of alcohol so that subjects would know only that they were taking the drug and not know whether they were drinking alcohol with it. "One Saturday night, my wife and I tested everything in the refrigerator," said David G. Bailey, a research scientist at the London Health Sciences Center in London, Ontario, and the lead author on the study. "The only thing that covered the taste was grapefruit juice."
So they used it in their experiment, expecting the grapefruit juice to be irrelevant to their results. But blood levels of the drug went up significantly in the control group that drank just grapefruit juice, without alcohol.
"People didn't believe us," Dr. Bailey said. "They thought it was a joke. We had trouble getting it published in a major medical journal."
Eventually the paper was accepted and published by Lancet, in February 1991.
Finding why juice had that effect was the next question. The answer, it turned out, lay in a family of enzymes called the cytochrome P-450 system, in particular one known as CYP 3A4. This enzyme metabolizes many drugs, and toxins as well, into substances that are less potent or more easily excreted or both. Grapefruit juice interferes with the ability of CYP 3A4 to do that, increasing the potency of a drug by letting more of it enter the bloodstream, in effect producing an excessive dose.
Grapefruit interacts with this enzyme only in the intestines, not in the liver or other places where it is found. As a result, the effect is seen only with medicines taken orally, not with injected drugs.
Numerous studies now show the interaction of grapefruit juice with many widely used medicines. Most interactions have no serious consequences, but a few do. For example, drugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis. Does this mean a person could reduce the amount of medicine required simply by drinking grapefruit juice? No, according to Dr. Bailey.
"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice. There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.
"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."
Grapefruit juice can also interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression. Dr. Marshall Forstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, said he told patients to switch from grapefruit juice to something else because most oranges and other citrus fruits do not have the same effect.
"If they insist," Dr. Forstein said, "I try to prescribe the S.S.R.I. or other medication to be taken at a time when the grapefruit juice would have mostly been metabolized."
Among fruit juices, grapefruit has the strongest effect, but lime juice and orange juice made from Seville oranges similarly inhibit the CYP 3A4 enzyme. With some drugs, apple juice may interact in the same way.
While Dr. Bailey suggests avoiding grapefruit juice entirely when taking medicine, some experts say the effect of the juice should not be exaggerated.
"The circumstances under which an interaction will occur are relatively unusual," said Dr. David J. Greenblatt, a professor of pharmacology at Tufts. First, he said, the drug has to be metabolized significantly by intestinal CYP 3A4, and relatively few are. "When you look at the actual data for each drug, the scientific conclusions are that the interactions are unusual, sometimes quite small and not of clinical importance. But there are some cases in which it's significant."
Dr. Greenblatt and his co-investigators at Tufts have conducted research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in this field for years, and he has been a paid consultant to the Florida Citrus Commission. Dr. Richard B. Kim, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, agreed that the interaction was a serious health concern in some patients.
"Grapefruit consumption is a clinically relevant issue, especially for the elderly, who are most likely to be taking the drugs affected by it," Dr. Kim said. "If you're taking multiple medications, or have recently switched to a different type of medication, you should be particularly careful. The easiest thing to do under those circumstances is to take the medicine with water and avoid the juice completely."
posted by D @ 6:09 AM
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