Dream On

Boo

Lynn Phillips — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:12:57 +0000

Given America's fear of drug addiction, you would think that the fly-by-night Halloween costume stores that have sprouted like toadstools in virtually every commercial meadow would offer the wishful reveler a dope-fiend costume; but no. These temporary theme stores, whose flimsy and generic costumes appear to have been supplied by the porn-fantasy industry, have apparently declassified drug addiction as a suitable fear for Fright Night fun.

There are no William Burroughs disgises (narrow-brim fedora, flasher's raincoat, hangdog mask). There aren't any Cheech and Chong packets in any of the plastic envelopes among the hundreds that hang up to the ceiling in these "Spirit" stores. The closest you can get in a ready-made to impersonating your inner dope fiend is a Michael Jackson get-up (pale and noseless mask, wig, glove).

This phenomenon is not entirely new. Last year, for Kate Hudson's party, Cindy Crawford had to make her own Amy Winehouse costume. But the costume business seems to be scaling up, along with the scaling down of magination.

There are plenty of ghouls and devils, revenants and corpses available among the licensed movie franchises (superheros, scizzorhands, Adams family,) and, while many have the dope fiend's pallor, the living-dead, underworld and misfit vibes of this class, none of them are obviously drunks, cartel bosses, crack smokers or meth heads. Not even Scarface made the cut, and that says something, because he is an important fantasy figure for a certain stripe of cokehead -- and he has studio connections.

Interestingly, you can be a cop or wear a fake ATF uniform. Is it that law enforcement has become more frightening than the acts we outlaw?I think it's just that marketers assume that we're too afraid of certain things to have fun with them.

You'll notice that dope fiends are not alone in Halloween exile. Political figures, once common in costume shops, where they were presumably at home among the dead and the monstrous, are curiously lacking from the current array. Also absent are mad scientists and terrorists. You can be Frankenstein's monster, but not the doctor who created him. You can be a horror-film killer, but not a suicide bomber. You can be a hot dog, but you can't be a Roman Polanski.

It's as if everything that collectively frightens us (other, obviously, than generic Death itself ) is to be buried in Halloween corpses' vacated graves. Personally, I will miss seeing our national fears converted into carnival play. After all, why spend all that money and effort on skeletal imagery and not get down to the bone? But I'm confident that the day after, all of our usual bugbears will be back to haunt us.

Hooked on Snap

Lynn Phillips — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:32:36 +0000

My mother the corporate lawyer, when I told her I was about to marry a guy whose parents were Catholic, asked, alarmed: "Do they believe in Darwin?" And she wasn't aware that the question was, um, funny.

The Origin of Species was to Mother what The Holy Bible is to so many: she never read the whole thing, but accepted every word of it as true, while looking askance at doubters. ("Looking askance" here means "thoroughly despising.") So I understand why many creationists falsely view evolution as a rival version of fundamentalism: at the lay level it often is.

But even professional stewards of the scientific method share a particular vice with creationists: a secret addiction to certainty. Like crack, certainty is something our minds are designed to enjoy and ill-equipped to resist, even when it leads us down dark paths. Scientific fundamentalism -- certainty addiction at its most paradoxical -- claims that all science is based on solid proofs, on hard facts, or at least on the best available knowledge of the moment. But science itself tells us that this isn't exactly or always true, and is, in the un-fuzzy language of formal logic, "false."

Peer reviewers at scientific journals, the gatekeepers of best available knowledge in their fields, are as human as my mother, and humans are not only biased in all sorts of ways, but, cognitively speaking, unconsciously biased, biased in ways they haven't even thought of, purveyors of jokes they don't get. We run on snap judgments.

A recent study described in Science News showed that, despite their pledges of neutrality, peer reviewers presented with two nearly identical papers approved "positive" results (results that showed that a new drug worked better than the old one) over neutral ones (in which the two drugs did equally well). Worse, reviewers rated the methodology in the positive-results paper higher, and missed more (pre-planted) errors in it, even though, like I said, the papers were in all other ways twins. (1)

At the meeting where these results were presented, a former editor in chief of the Danish Medical Journal reminded attendees of a study he did nearly 20 years ago showing that peer reviewers favored papers in English over identical ones in their own Scandinavian languages.

Back in 1977, Michael J. Mahoney reported that peer reviewers had a "conformational" bias for papers whose conclusions matched their own, whereas science is committed to explore any and all contradictory evidence or explanations. (2)

Our certainty habit is not the fault of either science or religion. If those two strange bedmates teach nothing else, it is that reality in its largest sense is beyond our ken. But our minds are designed to forage and to slay gazelles; to survive we need to lock quickly onto hypotheses as if they were givens, to act without thinking. We need snap judgments: strange red berry=danger; gazelles better than no gazelles; medicine dance broke my fever; positive results get research grants.

Perhaps it is because decisiveness is so adaptive that our brains reinforce it. In any case, feeling sure of something is gratifying. We experience certainty as a high, a lever we want to keep pushing. Even after we undergo the shock therapy of contradictory data and get clean for awhile, we'll tend to wander back to our old haunts and habit. (3)

Religious certainty is based, proudly, on faith, on the devotee's commitment to keep pushing the same certainty lever no matter what, while my mother's Darwinian bible is by now encrusted with enough credible evidence to support the spine of its argument unaided by individual belief. But precisely because, as Darwin intuited, our brains are evolved structures, not divine gems, the quality of scientific evidence we amass varies widely in angle and rigor.

Even skeptics long to be certain that published studies, "scientific findings" represent our best understanding of the world as it is. But if you can control your own most insidious addiction to certainty, you might, as Darwin did, find a strange and astounding world on the other side of what everyone is so terribly sure about. (4)

--------------------------------------------------

Notes (the fun part)

(1) Science News described the two-drug study as showing that peer reviewers prefer "novelty," but, as if to prove the article's point about preconceptions, the study doesn't necessarily show that. It can as easily show that reviewers prefer results showing a clear result or a result that promises "progress" over a null result. Null results ("no evidence found for . . .") are notoriously under-reported in the popular press as well.

(2) Here's one snippet of an amazing screed by Michael J. Mahoney (Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1977, PP. 161-1 75) that you can read in full here.

"One study found that the vast majority of scientists drawn from a national sample showed a strong preference for "confirmatory" experiments (Mahoney & Kimper, 1976). Over half of these scientists did not even recognize disconfirmation (modus tollens) as a valid reasoning form! In another study the logical reasoning skills of 30 scientists were compared to those of 15 relatively uneducated Protestant ministers (Mahoney & DeMonbreun, 1977). Where there were performance differences, they tended to favor the ministers. Confirmatory bias was prevalent in both groups, but the ministers used disconfirmatory logic almost twice as often as the scientists did."

(3) One of the clearest cases of knee-jerk bias in popular science reporting was the 1985 Newsweek "Marriage Crunch" article stating that "women over 40 have as much chance of getting married as of being killed by a terrorist." This sloppy thesis, rescinded by Newsweek 20 years later was the progenitor of a kind of fake "study" on successful women's unhappiness that is still fertile today. (See feminists whale on this trend here.)

(4) P.S. I married at 37, once my chances of marrying were less than my chances of being impaled by a unicorn. My husband's parents'views on Darwin, whatever they are, have happily been a null factor in our relationship. My mother died of something science was, to her horror, unable to diagnose, but, though her faith in medical science was shaken, she remained an avid Darwinist to the end.

Singin' in the Wane

Lynn Phillips — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:30:28 +0000

Barbara Ehrenreich has nothing against happy people; it's self-serving pseudoscience she questions. In her newly released book, Bright-Sided How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, she pillories disinformation's more insidious perpetrators, so that those few of us who have managed to avoid total bliss now have something to snarl at besides our mirrors.

Combining academic research and field work, (1) she traces the history of American mood swings from the dour Calvinism of the Puritans, through the "irrational exuberance" that preceded the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe. From there, she skewers current attempts - whether in the Psych Departments of the Ivy League or the multimedia pulpits of megachurches -- to market a culture of cheerful, and sometimes dangerous, self-delusion.

Positive thinking turns out to have a rather roomy date book, encompassing every practice from meditation to marketing and listing a tangle of concepts, including the fundaments of Christian Science, Buddhism, neurobiological materialism, and shameless auto-veneration.

Taken in sum, America's gushing geyser of mandatory good cheer can be very annoying, and Ehrenreich is delightfully annoyed. But when it comes to positive thinking's gobbledygook about mind-over-matter, she's more than annoyed: she takes it personally.

For years, breast cancer patients were told that a "positive attitude" will help them beat the reaper. Alas, there is no sound scientific basis for this claim. As the Chair of Sloane Kettering's Psych Department, Jimmie C. Holland, reports in her book, The Human Side of Cancer, the pressure to paint smiley faces onto darker dispositions can actually do patients harm. Ehrenreich, who developed breast cancer after eight years of hormone replacement therapy, writes :

"Bad science may have produced the cancer in the first place, just as the bad science of positive thinking plagued me throughout my illness."

She has a dog in the fight for scientific rigor; and by implication, we do, too.

Because she is viscerally allergic to hucksterism, she has a rollicking good time in Chapter Six deconstructing Dr. Martin Seligman, ex-president of the American Psychological Association, the man who validated positive thinking and its marketing apparatus for the previously skeptical academic community.

Seligman, currently the author of Authentic Happiness, betrays a conservative bias that Ehrenreich wants to spotlight: He concedes that "circumstances" (like belonging to a disadvantaged group) might be a factor in human happiness, but grants it a tiny, wee piece of the happiness pie and discounts even that sliver of environmental impact as "impractical and expensive" to change. Notes Ehrenreich:

"This argument - ‘impractical and expensive' - has of course been used against almost every progressive reform from the abolition of slavery to pay equity for women."

It adds to her credibility when Ehrenreich isn't afraid of evidence that undermines the purity of her argument. She's pleased to report that though you can't smile away breast cancer, there is much sounder evidence that positive attitudes may help prevent heart attacks. If you want an excuse to cheer yourself up, she won't begrudge you. Go ahead. Pet a kitten. Read The Little Engine that Could . Just don't chug-chug-chug yourself clear off the track.

To make sure you won't, Ehrenreich treads lightly over some of positive psychology's possible plus points (2) to focus on how staying upbeat has become an ideology rather just another useful option. (3) In order to clarify the societal cost of optimism run amok, she is says too little about the more rigorous findings of academic happiness researchers.

Stumbling on Happiness author, Dan Gilbert, like Seligman, points out in his powerful TED lecture, that a year after their change in circumstances, paraplegics and lottery winners report themselves equally happy with their lives. (4) His data, too, supports the anti-Marxist theory that human happiness depends more on psychological orientation -- genetic temperament and learned techniques-- than on material circumstances. But Gilbert exempts from this nimbus of self-induced bliss homeless, starving people -- whose very survival is at risk. He also emphasizes that our brains are wired for altruism as well as self-absorption.

Whether or not helping others makes those others happier, it's likely to bring joy to you. Be Emma Goldman if you find political agitation meaningful; just don't expect every positive thinkers' gratitude.

Positive thinking, in other words, is not all bad; but even if was all good, it would not be enough for Ehrenreich.

If she is correct, the happier people become in the face of staggering inequality and rampant quackery, the more we'll need the happiness pushers to manage our pain, and the worse our world will become.

It takes an equal and opposite countermotion to slow an out-of-control juggernaut, and Ehrenreich, happily, is not afraid to apply the brakes with force. Negative thinking - critical analysis and the kind of social progress ignited by self-interested discontent -- has great value for our species as well as our society. Bright-Sided reminds us to hang onto that realization as if our lives depend upon it. Because, of course, they do.

(1) As she did in her best-selling Nickel and Dimed - On (Not) Getting By in America.

(2) She also has nothing to say about a recently successful presidential campaign and Nobel Prize award both based almost exclusively around the word, and strategy, "hope."

(3) For an amusing defense against the self-esteem juggernaut, see by humor book, Self-Loathing for Beginners, (Santa Monica Press) which is being released in Britain at the end of this month by Aurum Press Ltd. as I Can Make You Loathe Yourself.

(4) Ehrenreich says that Seligman now casts some doubt on the extremity of these numbers, though not the gist of them.

Fashion Weekly, Part II

Lynn Phillips — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:28:07 +0000

Yes, high fashion has been hit hard by the recession, coupled with its own self-immolating marketing practices --like teasing impulse buyers with seasonal collections six months before the clothes hit the stores, But the survival of fashion itself is not in question. All school yards, all workplaces and many bedrooms have their trend-setters and enforcers. Everyone's body at some point or another becomes a site of a fashion transaction. Here's Curtis Sittenfeld in the novel Prep:

"Through my senior year, I wore floral dresses that came to my shins, sometimes with a belt of fabric at the waist, sometimes with puffy sleeves, with a square neck, or a lace collar, or a corduroy Peter Pan collar. Everyone wore these, event the prettiest girls -- I wore them because the prettiest girls wore them. A few years after college, I gave away all the dresses, though it was hard to imagine who would want them..."

Like Sittenfeld's fictional scholarship student dressing to pass, budget buyers can't afford to look obsolete or inappropriate to their target audiences. Whether job-hunting, mate-seeking or parenting, we all live in a world of changing styles, of "must haves" and obligatory status objects we get measured by. So, although the term "fashion addict" is usually used semi-facetiously, there's a case to be made for fashion addiction as a shadow syndrome that afflicts modern society as a whole.

Fashion Addiction Is Socially Mediated
Although many mass-market fashion consumers humorously call themselves junkies, sub-cultural dress codes are as much a driving force behind our over-inflated consumption of style as couture. To hang with the Goths, dress goth. To join the Crips or the Bloods, you'll have to shop for their colors. Similarly, a recent career column sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) urged job applicants to dress in accordance with corporate fashions rather than in their own personal styles so that interviewers -- gatekeepers to the vaults of scientific objectivity -- would see them as team players attractive to funders.

There is, of course, no scientific proof that the wearing of jeans rather than "business conservative" is an accurate index of attitude or mind, or even that every corporation will find it so, (1) but it *has* been scientifically proven that interviewers are helplessly in the grip of their first impressions, and that clothing plays a role in their unconscious snap judgments. So if it's a science career you want, young Blood, it's suit up and shut up.

It's Politically Problematic
When target audiences are diverse, the rules of acceptable dress can get whimsical. Sarah Palin's foray into designer fashion - even though she was auditioning for a role as diplomat - struck her critics as a case of hypocritical posing rather than as the sort of strategic dressing recommended by the AAAS. Like Hillary Clinton, who was also excoriated for her costume and grooming choices, Palin's fashion decisions were carefully analyzed by press and public while her policies were not, a crippling habit for a democracy to indulge.

Distorts Priorities based on False Reward
"Shopoholia" is a disorder of consumerist behavior in general and of the purchasing ritual in particular, but very often the trigger that prompts shopaholics to overspend isn't just "buying" or "newness" but stylistic currency - that is, fashion. For many (particularly women and children) the pleasure-surge of a wardrobe update is a super-stimulus, more powerful and re-enforcing than any short-term joy to be had from human interconnection, good works or immersion in nature.

The Addiction Is Physically Punishing
Fashion replaces the biotic environment in more than our hearts. Because the upwards of 226 billions of dollars worth of new clothing we buy each year has so far to wander from mill to mall to closet to dump each year, a great deal of carbon goes up in smoke to deliver it: one more chip off the old polar ice cap.

Leads Innocents to Live Outside the Law
One of the earmarks of an addiction is that, to get their fixes, users will break the law -- supporting international criminal networks into the bargain. On Canal Street it's obvious that budget shoppers are willing to do just that. As the Website, Counterfeit Chic explains, according to the latest OECD report,

"...counterfeiting and piracy are more profitable than trade in illegal drugs. ..the rough estimate is USD $200 billion in international trade alone; fakes produced and consumed domestically or traded via the internet could add up to several hundred billion dollars more. "

Induces Physical Dependency
But even legal mass fashion exacts high social costs for the thrills it delivers. In factories the world over people work like galley-slaves to manufacture knock-offs for the voracious U.S. discount market. The stagnant wages and constricted opportunities facing US workers have been cloaked, in part, by price cutbacks on apparel. Profits from the resulting trade deficit are now being loaned back to us to stabilize our fashion-dependent economy.

Promotes Moral Decay
New marketing techniques not only accellerate the rate of style turnover but push fashion-dependency towards excess and vice. Alexandra Jacobs in the September 14th issue of The New Yorker reminds us that

"Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible. (So is 'Sex and the City.')"

Thanks to generous Internet return policies and media hype, it is no longer considered callous or even excessive to own a closet (or two) full of shoes or purses while the people that make them are barely getting by.

With this morally dubious extravagance in mind, the New York Times Magazine's article of September 6th charting the market for personal storage spaces takes on a disturbing poignancy.

Destroys Lives of the Most Vulnerable
Evidently, rented cubicles were originally the end destination for millions of surplus T-shirts, socks, jeans and other identity-markers (now deemed "junk") that U.S. shoppers bought for quick fixes of novelty and self-expression. Alas, many shoppers who invested billions in disposable fashion instead of their mortgages are now disgorging the entire contents of their tragically foreclosed homes into those self-same storage units. Had they only stuck to designing their family's jeans in Second Life's virtual fashion market, where hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands rather than billions, perhaps they'd be able to afford a new car to live out of today.

Responds to Price:Budget Disincentives, But Within Limits
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008, while the consumer price index rose more than 4.9%. In response to this shortfall, according to MasterCard, istockanalyst.com claims, US women spent 4.9% less on clothing last March than they did a year ago. It's a reduction that compensates for price hikes, but not for lost income. We were able to curb our desire for fashion, just not quite enough to pass for fully rational. (2)

No Permanent Cure
Fashion, in other words, with its shifting styles and codes of identification, is front and center 365 days a year, messing with our brains' processors of desire, memory, will and reason. And it has been for a long time. Dyed flaxen clothing fibers recently found in the Dzudzana Cave at the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains were in soil layers that carbon date as early as 32,000 years ago. Plain flax wasn't good enough for us, even then. (3)

For all its potency at both the social and individual levels, fashion addiction, because it doesn't necessarily involve tolerance and withdrawal, is not an indisputable addiction. Because of its universality it is not certified as a mental disorder, either. You won't find it in the American Psychiatric Association's fashion bible, the DSM-IV, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition). There are no doctors devoted to its management. And why should there be?

Insofar as fashion acts like a drug, it's a drug akin to language -- one we're born addicted to. For that reason, attempts to break the fashion habit simply lead to new fashions - hairy legs for feminists, green cotton for tree-huggers, new outfits that look Goodwillish for Brooklyn hipsters. You can't drop out of the fashion race without "making an anti-fashion statement" that someone will quickly commodify and make into a "look." So, although it often causes us harm and makes us crazy, it's one of those addictions we'll never completely kick. Perhaps, like Reverend Billy of the Church of Life Beyond Shopping, we'll have to reconcile ourselves to thinking of fashion addiction as a sin the flesh is heir to, an impulse we can eternally wrestle with without ever conquering -- at least not in this world.

________________________________________

Footnotes

(1) Eastern Illinois University on Proper Attire: "In the more trendy high tech industry, business casual may include sneakers and jeans."

(2) Are rival theories of smoking underdetermined? T. Leonard, Princeton
on how current and potential smokers respond to price incentives.
http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/underdetermination.pdf

(3) Balter, Clothes make the (Hu) Man
Science 11 September 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5946, p. 1359

Fashion Weekness, Part I

Lynn Phillips — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:04:43 +0000

Seeing as it is fashion week here in New York City, it seems fitting to give fashion's addictive features a scan. Yes, fashion gets an entire week to itself here, six more days than those other festivals of consumption, Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day and the birth of Christ. For these seven days of fashion carnival and carnage, thousands upon thousands of fashion addicts are urged by the communications, accessories and apparel industries to flaunt our not-altogether-healthy obsession with sartorial trends, past, present and implicitly -- since what is on show now is "Spring 2010" -- predictive.

Compulsion and obsession, shades from addiction's palette, are on everyone's lips. Designers along with their parent corporations whip up excitement about a style's "hook"; buyers try to predict what their customers "won't be able to live without"; wealthy shoppers try to figure out which styles and items they "must have," and street addicts like myself start wondering which styles they can fake or ignore and still pass as a serious user. Articles, documentaries, live events and, of course, blogs, document the entire process, work-room to catwalk, with excitement, snide amusement and not a little reverence.

So far this year's collections seem torn between girlishness, Grecian dignity and Scarlet O'Hara's summer curtains. I'm seeing fluffy, pretty things, but not anything I particularly want to wear, let alone dry clean or "die for." But, like any fashion addict, an absence of satisfaction only whets my appetite for more of what I crave. I continue to believe that any day now an outfit will come strutting along that can duplicate for me that first rush I got from some now-forgotten Calvin Klein collection -- a melange of fabrics and lines that let me in on the enchantment other women (including my mother) seemed to get from clothes and that I never before understood.

I dislike the puritanical streak in our culture that refuses to take fashion seriously merely because it is pleasurable, but we're all aware that the fashion business, although gentler than cocaine smuggling, isn't a whole lot prettier. Models not old enough to vote are smoking cigarettes, snorting cocaine and starving to make designer clothes hang well; assistants and underlings cower and squirm under the stilettos of temperamental creatives they are conniving to replace; paying enough for a dress to feed and clothe an entire third world village always smacks of heartlessness (no matter how many orphans one adopts), and The New York Observer reports that Vogue editrix Anna Wintour, panicked by recession sales, recently proposed that shops coordinate their mark-downs. She was reminded by Diane Von Furstenberg that price fixing is illegal.

But one's docile acceptance of the darkness of the trade is just another sign of that one is hooked, as is this eternally springing hope of a high. It's well established by now that drug addicts' dopamine pathways - the circuits governing memory and desire -- light up in anticipation of a fix, at the very thought of one, in the neighborhood of a past score, at the sight of the dealer or the dealer's girlfriend, or her new outfit, addiction being, in part, an inability to properly recall disillusionments past.(1) And it is in that festive spirit that I am eagerly anticipating the rest of the week's shows.

--------------
Next: Part II: Everyone's a fashion addict - mass market, sub-cultural and ubiquitous fashion -- the delusions that attend the human dependency on style.
-----------------------
Footnote:
(1) "The role of dopamine in addiction is now recognized as critical in anticipation and withdrawal as well. In an elegant series of experiments, Schultz (2001) found that in primates trained to associate a cue with a pleasurable experience (food), increased dopaminergic activity was seen in response to the cue and not to the food. If the food was not then presented, dopaminergic function dropped. Reduced dopaminergic function is thought to be associated with negative affect (e.g. dysphoria). Thus, an individual with an addiction may see a ‘cue' (e.g. a public house, mirror or needle) and if their drug of choice is not available may feel dysphoric, which is likely to increase the drive to obtain the drug."

Addict Addiction

Lynn Phillips — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:49:52 +0000

Dead arty bad-boy addicts (DABBAs) are dangerously addictive.

In the middle of July, in the East Village's pricey Hotel Lafayette, a young downtown decadent and "emerging" artist named Dash Snow died a day before his 28th birthday, apparently of an intentional overdose of heroin.

Snow's fall, following as it did so closely on the flashing heels of Michael Jackson's last dance, led me into a long rabbit warren of meditations -- of which the following is only one tunnel -- on dead arty bad-boy addicts (DABBAs) and the subcultures that love them.

Because he started out as a graffiti artist, just like Jean-Michel Basquiat, and because Snow managed to die at the exact same age as his predecessor (who went on to become a post-overdose goldmine) Snow's numerous Polaroids, collages and installations are now candidates for rapid price appreciation. That he was a grandson of art world goddess Christophe deMenil hasn't hurt his chances. Someone has already created a Web-side called, 200 sites to know about Dash Snow. Attempts to canonize him - and commodify him - are underway.

His "legend" is a modestly re-touched reproduction of the now-standard saga of the sacrificial art star: Rebellion, drug use, exuberance, taste of success, despair. He was, his friends assure us, personally loveable: charming, "sweet." Also delicious: lithe, fair, sad, mischievous, regressed. He was notoriously fond of sex, drugs and danger: petty theft, little orgies in "hamster nests" of shredded phonebooks staged in galleries and hotels with friends: Dirty dumb fun.

Snow ran wild, eventually hooking up with a pack of Downtown artists that included Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley. The latter, a photographer who describes young Snow as his muse, captured him as a young graffiti artist tagging the side of a building at dusk -- an image of a saturnine angel high and alone that is now an icon in Snow's hagiography.

In ending his life, Mr. Snow abandoned his lover and his two year old daughter. It's pretty unforgivable, but DABBA addicts will eventually let it go. We did as much for Kurt Cobain, whose two year old daughter turned out alright despite her daddy's shotgun suicide, and we seem to have done as much for drunk-driver Jackson Pollack who took out Edith Metzger, a young woman who hapened to be in his car when he crashed it on August 11, 1956. The great thing about legends, as distinct from actual people, is that you can erase the parts you don't like.

I confess that, against my better judgement, I set aside the intimate tragedy of young Snow's life, his sufferings and flaws and became entranced by his press and on his pin-up potential. I debated with myself whether he was really handsome--like jazz great Chet Baker, or just irresistibly strung out looking --like heroin-survivor Keith Richards.

I became fascinated by his tattoos, his weird beards, his proclivity for ejaculating on tabloid images of Saddam Hussein and presenting the results as art

I imagined what his wallows in trash must have felt like; I got empathetically angry at his mother. (When he was a teen, she shipped him off to some rehab outfit whose blandness, judging by its website would have driven the Pope to pop pills.) I hated him, loved him, was him, congratulated myself on not being him. In other words, although I knew this instance of the DABBA romance might be cut with inferior product, I made the buy, took it home and mainlined it.

I had a similar imaginary-playmate response to Dash's death that millions of media-consumers had to Jacko's. Now that he was something other than a living person I could use "Dash Snow" to generate emotions and an illusion of connection to things I don't have the time or nerve or social placement to access. Through him I momentarily escaped the beloved confines of my life. It was dirty, dumb fun.

The scientific community, psychologists, neuroscientists, et. al. know a lot about addiction, and, while I find much of what they tell us fascinating, none of it is fun. Science makes the glamor of addiction wither on the vine: At first, researchers tell us, opiates like heroin flood the brain with pleasure-giving dopamine. Many potential addicts start out with fewer than normal dopamine receptors, which makes the early experience of dopamine highs feel less like a kick than a revelation. But over time drug-associated dopamine surges distort one's ability to set priorities (like caring for daughters) or unlearn a drug habit. In later stages of a habit, the addicted brain tries to stabilize itself by shedding dopamine receptors, and with them goes the ability to feel joy. That kind of impairment is slow to heal and is sometimes permanent, which is one reason addicts so often relapse, as did Dash Snow.

Science is fascinating; it has an endless narrative of discovery and rediscovery; it connects people all over the world; it's strong medicine. But as an antidote to the lure of intoxication scientific knowldge remains a placeholder - not a cure.

I still feel (guiltily) glad that Dash Snow did crazy, stupid vulgar things that I can enjoy from the safety of a museum's atrium. As an artist, he may turn out to be more of a Modigliani - gorgeous, dissolute, minor -- than a Corbet - arrogant, shocking, major - but, speaking as one addiction addict among billions, I'm delighted to have him for my collection.

Foot-In-Mouth -- Addiction? Disease? Just Plain Stupid?

Lynn Phillips — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:52:35 +0000

Here's one thing I always thought I was addicted to: not shutting my pie hole. "Could you possibly refrain," I'll ask myself, "from informing Eddie that his scheme to save the mountain gorilla armed only with a sappy video and an email petition is just plain hog slop?" And then I come right out and tell him anyway.

Worse, when I resolve to drop it (hoping he'll forget how awful I was), the very next time I see Eddie I blurt out an apology for having been so critical. And of course he doesn't remember at first. . . What was it I said, exactly?

Then back it comes: Oh yeah: Hog slop!

I did this twice? Nice. To a guy who just wants to save endangered wildlife.

And there's more.

Not only will my mouth not stay shut as requested; my mind won't obey me, either. That evening, I resolve to put my gaucherie out of mind. Think only happy, happy thoughts, I command myself: like of Eddie coming down with amnesia, or of winning a six-week trip to Mogadishu. But when I try to mentally sail away from my disgrace, the words "hog slop" come hurtling at me.

There I am; envisioning inventive little cocktails served up on my yacht by well-toned, admiring Somali pirates, when memories of my words to Eddie break over me, and I'm awash in stinging jellyfish of shame.

Why am I addicted to tactlessness, I wonder. Why won't my mind follow orders? Am I chasing some bygone teenage thrill of disobeying myself? Helplessly imitating Mother, a famous planter of faux pas? I can't possibly be dependent on the shot of self-generated downers I get every time I act like something out of Mommie Dearest Wears Prada? I try so hard to stop, but. . .

You can quibble that wanton wrong-speaking -- the fleeting high of uncensored speech followed by the painful self-hatred of withdrawal -- is not an addiction; but for me it might as well be. I'm convinced that over the years my missteps and their train of regrets have cost me millions.

Okay: Thousands. But whatever the price tag, these tiny black-outs of volition bother me. Where am I, exactly, while devils are running my mouth?

Not, evidently, alone.

In a recent review article in Science, delightfully entitled, How To Think, Say Or Do Precisely The Wrong Thing For Any Occasion, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard's Department of Psychology explains that my perverse lapses, what he calls "counterintentional errors" while often beyond my control, are not true addictive behaviors. "The ironic return of suppressed thoughts" as he calls them in Harvardspeak, is a common consequence of the way our minds process attention and intent.

To start with, the human mind is not a great multi-tasker. As the New York Times reminds us frequently these days, it has trouble staying focused on the road while it's helping you speak on your cell phone. It can miss seeing a gorilla walk through the room if it's focused on some fussy task; and it's especially difficult for it to multi-task while processing life's many other stresses and distractions.

Wegner's theory is that when you try to suppress a thought like "hog slop," or a feeling -- like "I'm such an idiot!" two mental processes kick into gear. One processor, the squelcher, runs the instructions, like, "Do NOT say "hog slop;" or, "You're not a TOTAL idiot," over and over. The other processor, the hunter, is almost as busily looking for the hog slop, or the self-flagellating label to be suppressed.

Throw in a little distraction or stress -- like the hideous violins in Eddie's video, or the fearsome clatter of possible criminals unpacking next door -- and your squelcher slips its grip, letting the thing-to-be-avoided pop up like a jack-in-the-box (or like the boner that drunken homophobes tend to get when watching gay porn and desperately trying not to be queer).

So I'm not an addicted rebel, mom's evil spawn or hooked on stinging jellyfish. I'm distractable: Perhaps a bit more than normal. Or a lot more.

In any case, there are some moves one can make towards reducing failures of kindness and tact. Hypnotism might help. And, paradoxically, if you don't push your brain to help you avoid something, it is less likely to cough up that dreaded thing if and when its attention is hijacked. Tell yourself to make Eddie laugh instead of trying to avoid saying you-know-what. Noise-canceling earphones might help a yacht fantasy glide serenely past a new neighbors' worrisome racket.

In other words, work the odds. But no matter what I do, I have to face up to my real disease: fallibility. I'd prefer to call my tactlessness an addiction because I'm happier imagining I'm in some vise-like grip -- a victim of domamine imbalances, drug lords and big pharma -- rather than facing the fact that my will, like yours, like everyones, flickers on and off all day like a firefly. The crazier you make yourself about this, the worse it gets. So, in spite of my instinct to tighten my grip on myself, I'm going to cut myself more slack.

My new mantra: Hog slop happens.

Articles cited and linked to above:

How To Think, Say or Do The Wrong Thing etc.
M. Wegner,
Science Vol 325 3 p 48-50, Jul 2009

Ironic process theory
M. Wegner, et. al.
Psychol. Rev. 101, 34, 1994.

Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks
New York Times, July 18, 2009

Ironic effects of trying to relax under stress,
Wegner DM, Broome A, Blumberg SJ.
Behav Res Ther. ;35(1):11-21, Jan 2997

Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?
Adams HE, Wright LW, Lohr BA
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
105, #3, 440-445, Aug 1996

Gorillas in Our Midst - Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events
Simons
Perception 1999, vol 28 pages 1059-1074, 1999

The Kid Is Not My Sun?

Lynn Phillips — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:03:34 +0000

Tanning addiction is, and isn't just that.

When Michael Jackson's skin kept getting lighter and lighter -- allegedly an effort to even out the white blotches caused by a case of Vitiligo -- it was commonly (and flippantly) said that he was "addicted to plastic surgery." Similarly, when Caucasians take to beaches and tanning beds and brown themselves like rotisserie chickens despite dermatologists' warnings that overexposure to ultraviolet (UV) light can cause skin cancer, the media is inclined to say that they are "tanorexic," "tan-oholic" or "addicted to tanning."

Should we take those diagnoses seriously?

It's easy to see why people might over-tan. Tan and fit and thin will get you hired and admired. Whereas Jackson's skin-lightening was frequently attributed to self-hatred, seeing light-skinned people darken themselves doesn't strike us as self-repudiating.

The racial cast of this bias, if not its exact socioeconomic meaning, was not lost on Jackson himself, who said to British journalist Martin Bashir in "Living With Michael Jackson":

"How many white kids sit out in the sun all day to look black? ...They're trying to be other than what they are. But that's okay, I guess. Right?"

Well, more like half-right. Many white people do tan to transform their status -- but not to become "black." They do it for the same reason Jackson did: to look "whiter," which is to say "classier," more glamorous and widely accepted.

Alas, trading a pasty white skin for a yachtsman's confident glow is similar to what Jackson did not only in short-term payoff but also in long-term price. Eventually, as with super-tanner Donatella Versace, a sun-abused hide cries, "old" and "lizard-like" instead of "suave" and "healthy." Like Jackson the over-bleacher, the over-tanner becomes a grotesque.

Obviously, over-tanning is a folly. But, is the obsessive pursuit of beauty, wealth and status through skin tinting comparable to the neurochemical dependence we associate with addiction? As yet, only a few wisps of substantiating research support this claim.

One study, out of the University of Texas in Galveston, showed that when you swap "tanning" for "alcohol" on standard psychological questionnaires -- including the DSM-IV-TR -- between a quarter and a half of beachgoers will come up positive for addiction. The study's sampling, however, was small, and, like any survey-based study, founded on self-diagnoses, it lacked rigor.

Another study suggests that sun exposure may produce addictive doses of endorphins, so that tan-addicts when forced to stop sunning experience something like physical withdrawal. But the word to take away here is "suggests." No sun-induced endorphins have as yet been detected.

The established existence of S.A.D., or Seasonal Affective Disorder, also shows that sunlight, for some, acts as an anti-depressant. It is conceivable people might crave to excess anything that helps them feel less dismal. But is there really such a thing as a physical dependency on UV light? At this point, the science just isn't there.

Few dispute, however, that over-tanning is destructive over time, physically, and cosmetically. If calling it an "addiction" helps people kick the habit then the metaphor is a useful public health approach whether or not it is scientifically sound.

Because social reinforcement and fashion are obvious factors in this behavior disorder (Victorian ladies never ever over-tanned,) at this point the best move is to encourage efforts by the vampire fan base to bring back the romance of pallor. Because as long as we are all "addicted" to the sight of a tan, we're cooked. Whatever habit-forming qualities the sun may have will join forces with that greatest of American obsessions -- the one that Michael Jackson nailed so well: The drive "to be other than we are."

NOTES:
1. The two studies cited are:

UV light tanning as a type of substance-related disorder.
Warthan MM, Uchida T, Wagner RF Jr.
Department of Dermatology, The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston 77555-0783, USA.
Arch Dermatol. 2005 Aug;141(8):963-6

and

Induction of withdrawal-like symptoms in a small randomized, controlled trial of opioid blockade in frequent tanners.
Kaur, M., MD, Liguori, A. PhD, Lang, W. PhD, Rapp, S.R. PhD, Fleischer Jr A.B., MD, and Feldman, S.R. MD, PhD.
J Am Acad Dermatol. 2006 Apr;54(4):709-11

2. While no one advocates over-tanning, the evils of moderate suntanning are controversial. Just how fatal UV exposure is, and under what circumstances, is under some debate, in large part because Vitamin D, which sunlight exposure increases, has so many beneficial effects. A few renegade scientists advocated moderate tanning, but they haven't yet swayed the others.

The medical establishment continues to assure us that an overdose of UVBs and UVAs can be as malignant as whatever drug cocktail Michael Jackson overdosed on, and advises us to minimize sun exposure, while getting our vitamin D through supplements, until a clearer case is made for running around without a shirt, hat and sunscreen.

Hooked on Addiction Culture

Lynn Phillips — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:04:25 +0000

In medicine the word “addiction” usually indicates a physical dependence on a chemical substance or behavior that messes with your dopamine system. But, as Wikipedia admits, the word is now used much more broadly to mean any old gratifying dependency you have a tough time ending without tears. That’s the definition I’m taking home.

So, while occasionally here in “Dream On,” we’ll look at the roles that mind and brain play in the predictable dopaminergic addictions like huffing glue (substance abuse), compulsive Purex use (OCD) and designer purse collecting (shopoholia), most often we’ll focus on the addictiveness of ideas, concepts, and fantasies -- from skewed self-images and the myth of “the American dream,” to the need to pretend that your sex partner is Angelina Jolie, a black stallion or Samuel Beckett.

Apologies to my stricter readers: Using the word “addiction” to apply to illusions, delusions and habits of thought as well as mad cravings for intoxicating chemicals isn’t all that fair of me. The human mind, we are learning to our dismay, is pretty much a whirligig of habits and triggers, so that allowing habits of mind into the “compulsive” category gives me pretty much of a free pass to write about anything I like, as long as it’s pointed in the general direction of human psychology -- our helplessness in the face of ignorance and desire, our failure to see ourselves as the gods see us, our underdeveloped sense of smell compared to dogs. I tell myself I’m gaming Psychology Today’s category system this way, getting my blog category listed under “A” for “addiction” instead of “Z” for “bottom of the list,” but the truth is quite possibly that I can’t help myself. I have to consider that, far from a cunning choice cannily made, picking “Addiction” as my blog’s grouping may well be a craven need.

I’ll even have to allow the weed-toking possibility that thinking about addiction can itself be addictive. “Booze-hound” after all, has a certain louche glamour that “hamster-on-a-wheel” lacks, no? And the phrase “Man With a Golden Arm” sounds a lot hotter than “dunce,” at least to me. "Betty Ford graduate," "fake it 'til you make it," "user," "hop head," the language and concepts we've developed to confront addiction insinuate themselves into all sorts of other issues and topics, where they make hard, cold scientific information more exciting and accessible to the tabloid portion of the brain.

So, okay, I confess: I’m an addiction metaphor junkie. But so what?, Not all mental compulsions are bad for you, not unless you think that being something less than fully free or less than totally in control of yourself is intolerable. And, well, even if you do, I might try to change your opinion about the inherent shamefulness of mental autopilots.

As William James explained to a group of teachers in 1892, choosing your poisons is less a standard option than a rare privilege; people old enough to teach don’t have many choices left:

“Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking…even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions.”

James’s point wasn’t just that everyone over twenty-five is 99% brainless robot, it was also that the right blind compulsions may promote survival. If you go through life kidding yourself into thinking you can do anything if you work at it hard enough, you may fail to make the majors, but you’ll still do better than you would have if you hadn’t stepped up to the plate with optimism, persistence and determination.

So my proposition is, that if we think about all those mental processes and quirks over which we are relatively helpless in the sensational and often hilarious vocabulary associated with addiction, we might be able to gain a hair more awareness, understanding and even leverage over them. And when these pop-sci metaphors threaten to destroy our brains and turn us into zombies? That will be interesting to notice, too.