Gallery of ”Misused” Quotation Marks

Lincoln Center Gets New Jazz Director. Another nail in the coffin of Great American Music, in line with Ken Burns’ and Wynton Marsalis’ treatment of the genre as a museum piece. What in the world would an ex-dean of Juilliard and the Boston University School of the Arts (where no jazz programming exists), a classical composer, a former v.p. of G. Schirmer the music publisher, want with the position? Should we worry that he wants to “propel jazz into the center of the culture” and thinks putting up a new building for Lincoln Center in Columbus Circle will do it? New York Times

MTV: Rewinding 20 years of music revolution. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the advent of “the only television phenomenon that had a generation named after it.” CNN It’ll be no surprise to FmH readers that there’s no love lost between me and MTV. In addition to the usual criticism that its three-minute quantization of entertainment doses has driven a generation to attention deficit, critics worry that the indelible grafting of visual imagery onto music has done something profound to our aural senses. It’s true, music as a performance art has always had an element of spectacle, but the violent, debased, usually misogynistic imagery of a TV commercial director has a deeply different effect than watching the performers performing, to which aficionados of live music have for ages been devoted. Finally, in some irrational way, I blame MTV every time I see anyone who isn’t a catcher wearing a backwards baseball cap (only acceptable if it’s an FmH cap…) In related news, MTV was forced to create a new finale for its anniversary gala when keynote singer Mariah Carey cancelled after a psychiatric admission. (BBC) (The oft-cited “emotional exhaustion”, by the way, does not correspond with any psychiatric malady and should be considered an uninformative euphemism at best. Denials from her spokesperson that she attempted to cut her wrists smack of the lady who doth protest too much… )

The annual human rights and violence thematic issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association is out, with a Longitudinal Study of Psychiatric Symptoms, Disability, Mortality, and Emigration Among Bosnian Refugees by Boston physician and human rights activist Dr. Richard Mollica (who long steered the Indochinese Refugee Clinic at the Brighton Marine Hospital in my backyard) and associates. Interesting finding of this study is that repatriation of refugees back to their countries of origin, even after horrendous resettlement camp experiences, does not appear to help alleviate their psychiatric symptomatology. As Mollica comments, the economic rehabilitation of wartorn regions is pouring good money after bad in the face of such an unmet need for society-wide mental health intervention. Links to other JAMA theme issues, including previous annual violence/human rights volumes, are here.

Chuck Taggart at Looka! pointed to this unspeakably tragic instance of medical carelessness. A 6 year-old boy was killed at Westchester Medical Center while undergoing an MRI scan to assess his progress in recovering from a brain tumor, because someone left a metal oxygen tank in the room during the scan! Recall that an MRI scanner is based around a 10-ton electromagnet, and imagine the rest. For God’s sake, the referral form I have to fill out when I refer a patient for an MRI scan goes to prodigious lengths to rule out the presence of even the smallest fragment of metal in the body of the scan subject because of the dangers of such a powerful magnetic field! Nice to know the entire medical center is grieving, and that the state health department wonders “if there were any violations”. I can’t imagine the responsible party having to live with the knowledge that s/he had committed such an outrageous mistake any more than the family can metabolize the senselessness of their little boy’s loss. My heart goes out to all of them. This is not the first instance of gross malfeasance at Westchester Medical Center either. Time for the head honchos to step down, if not be prosecuted for criminally negligent homicide along with the directly guilty party? There are some societies where the head of the institution might offer to take his own life over this… Nando Times