Ring-a-Ding-Ding

For me, it all started at about 3:00 am on February 9th, 2008.

At that moment I woke up coughing so ferociously that I ended up injuring a whole set of muscles in my chest. Over the next 10 days, I had every classic flu-like symptom you can name, with one particularly obnoxious addition: a persistent, irritating ringing in my ears. The flu-like symptoms gradually packed up and moved on. The ringing, unfortunately, moved in to stay. At the walk-in clinic up my street, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was pretty bite-down-on-this-bullet about my situation: “At your age, it's probably tinnitus,” he said, pausing gravely after giving the ringing its clinical name, “and that can be a real pain in the ass. You'll just have to get used to it.” The ear, nose and throat guy I ran into sometime later confirmed this standard medical advice: “You've got the kind of tinnitus that either goes away or doesn't,” he said.

Depending on whose figures you read, anywhere from seventeen to thirty percent of humanity has tinnitus in some form, the majority of them being older people. This at first seemed an outrageous figure to me, since I'd almost never heard anybody talk about it. But now that it's happened to me, it seems that everybody my age has a tinnitus story. Whenever I complain about it, the response invariably is “Oh, I've had tinnitus for years”, or “I know somebody who's got it.” It's like the elephant in the doctor's waiting-room: Either we're dealing with a scourge that has cowed a large part of the older population into silence, or we're looking at a condition where its denial is simply a part of being able to lead a normal life---like the schizophrenia sufferer who's learned to ignore the FBI agents following him everywhere.

Tinnitus is a perceived sound without any external source; a phantom perception like the “phantom limb” sometimes felt by people who've had amputations. Tinnitus most often comes in tandem either with the hearing loss you can expect when you age, or---paradoxically---an oversensitivity to noise called hyperacusis. In the less aged, it's usually the result of long-term exposure to loud noise---a phenomenon the Hearing Loss Association of America may some day dub Ozzy Osborne syndrome. Whatever its efficient cause, it's a product of the nervous system: Bits of the nerve pathways normally associated with hearing fire off phantom signals which your brain interprets as sound.

Unfortunately, it's usually irritating sound as well: sufferers have reported it as a clanging, hissing, roaring, or whooshing; like breaking glass, clicking, shrieking, banging, or owls hooting; as a ringing, buzzing, chirping or sizzling; or the sound of rushing water and chain saws. So far nobody's complained of it sounding like Britney Spears covering Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, but it'll probably happen sometime.

It's a very private affliction: Most people won't notice anything wrong with you, at least partly because when you're with other people, the problem's not as bad---you're distracted, and talking seems to drive your private noise into the background as well. (In fact, if you're a complete party animal, tinnitus is probably no big deal for you---most of your day you're either completely distracted, or unconscious.)

Tinnitus intrudes when you most want quiet and repose; when you're alone, with your Self. You have no peace, no solitude, nowhere to simply withdraw---there's always this obnoxious reminder of everything that's bad about the world constantly buzzing in your head. What's particularly maddening is that since this interior noise is most effectively suppressed when you're in the presence of others, it soon begins to feel like you exist only for others. At its worst, tinnitus robs you of your sense of self.

Whatever else you may say about Google, it does allow you to achieve a state of futility in research far more quickly than you ever used to be able to. For the most part, the web offers little scholarly information for people who want to do something about an illness. You're given unparalleled access to people offering quack cures, prayers, and exhortations to Nietzsche-like acts of will. But you're given no theory; no method. Nothing to do.

That's why the phrase 'Tinnitus Retraining Therapy' caught my eye when I was trolling through Google Scholar for something worthwhile to read about tinnitus---it sounded like work, and that sounded good. The reference turned out to be a Cambridge University Press title: Tinnitus Retraining Therapy: Implementing the Neurophysiological Model by Pawel Jastreboff of the Emory School of Medicine and Jonathan Hazell of University College, London. What I was able to read of it on Google Books introduced me to a thoroughly scholarly analysis of the my problem, whose chief virtue was that it gave me something to do; a disciplined hand in my own recovery. (Publishers worried about the access Google Books gives online readers to their product can also breathe a sigh of relief---I ended up buying the book.)

The gist of the authors' argument runs something as follows: There are a lot of people out there with tinnitus, but only about a quarter of them find it troubling enough to go and see a doctor about---the rest experience it but don't suffer from it. What are they doing right?

What their brains have done right is to habituate themselves to the phantom sounds: their limbic systems (that section of the brain responsible for emotions) have learned to be unperturbed by the dissonance, in turn allowing their autonomic nervous systems to place the tinnitus on a sort of Do Not Call list of neurological signals that can be ignored. People with brains thus habituated can call up their tinnitus sounds if they concentrate, but the signals themselves no longer intrude on everyday life. Their tinnitus has become, in effect, background noise.

How do you get from something as irritating as seagulls screeching on your balcony and as persistent as an automated telephone bill-collector, to background noise? Ideally, what you want to do to make a nerve impulse less offensive to your limbic system is simply turn the volume down. Unfortunately, that option isn't available.

But you can turn the background noise up. In my case, I bought a $20 MP3 player, transferred a file of wide-frequency white noise onto it, set it on “repeat”, and listened to it throughout the day through a pair of ear-bud headphones. The volume is set just below the level that would cover up the tinnitus completely: You want it to be there still---after all, you're trying to get accustomed to it, not pretend that it doesn't exist.

And it's not much more complicated than that. The process of habituation can take months, but the relief is almost instant---however the retraining process proceeds, the background noise you're now carrying about with you certainly helps you get through your day.

So, in a sense, Dr. Blood 'n Guts was right---I am just going to have to get used to it. But I've acquired a tool that at the very least makes my days a lot easier to endure. Results at the moment are still up in the air---every day still seems a new adventure---but a good attitude helps. Like the chain-gang captain said to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, “you have to get your mind right.”

-Published in Zoomer Magazine, Winter 2008

Kiefer Sutherland in 2002

He’s not the archetypal Canadian actor; but he may well be the archetypal Canadian actor in Hollywood: More competent than many of the performers who surround him, he remains something of an outsider. For reasons obscure to everyone but perhaps himself, real stardom steadfastly refuses to attach itself to Kiefer Sutherland.

By the early 90’s, his brat-pack days over, Sutherland seemed to be inching towards a consistent film persona. Among the Charlie Sheens and Chris O’Donnells crashing in anachronistic flames about him, he alone looked comfortable with a saber in his hand and a horse between his legs in The Three Musketeers. In the otherwise forgettable The Cowboy Way he carved out a respectable portrait of a modern Western Man; a dignified, denim presence next to whom co-star Woody Harrelson seemed a refugee from Hee Haw.

You got the sense that if he had been born 40 years earlier Sutherland might have had a good career as a western star. His most effective character type is reminiscent of a Joel McCrea or a diminutive Gary Cooper---the reluctant, laconic, self-effacing man of action. Taking on that kind of cinematic persona cannot be a calculated act in contemporary Hollywood---in a place where actors prefer to be seen as gods, nobody writes leading characters like that any more. No, he does it because it’s genuine.

Hollywood has thus not been kind to him recently. The quiet, self-effacing leading man has been cast as: a drooling child-killer in Eye For an Eye; a racist cracker and clansman in A Time to Kill; a demented Peter Lorre imitator in Dark City; a snarling, corrupt lawman in Picking up the Pieces; a psychotic child psychiatrist in Freeway; a porn director in The Last Days of Frankie the Fly…. For a long time now there’s been a sense of him punching the clock and producing a body of work designed for the compulsive video renter but not many others.

From there it doesn’t seem a major career jump to a television series, but 24 will likely prove to be the best thing that’s happened to him in years. The show is slick, professional and compulsively presented, but most important, Sutherland plays a character that suits him. His Jack Bauer in 24 is professional and understated; a man in a world of duplicity and espionage struggling to reconcile his job with his desire to be a competent family man.

The sense you get looking at Kiefer Sutherland as he makes his actor’s way through the world feels awfully similar. When script and role allow, he too is very good at the charade that is his profession. But most of all, he simply seems to be someone trying to lead a normal life. As both actor and man he seems to echo Joel McCrea’s words in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country: “I just want to be able to enter my house justified.”

-Published in Flare, 2002

Obituary: Arnold Schwarzenegger 1984---2001

It is with deep regret that we announce the passing of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as a major movie star. He succumbed after a lengthy and apparently congenital illness that also killed many close relatives. Schwarzenegger was predeceased by his fraternal twin Sylvester Stallone, cousin Chuck Norris and nephew Jean-Claude Van Damme. (His cousin Steven Seagal is still in a coma but apparently reviving.)
Arnold will be sadly missed and lovingly remembered by his agent.
The most immediate symptom of his impending career-failure was the decision of Warner Bros. to release Collateral Damage in October, thus abandoning any pretense of it being a potential big-money earner for them. At the peak of his health, Schwarzenegger dominated the traditional blockbuster month of June like a colossus, when often no rival studio would dare release a movie against him. Observers have since noted ominously that he hasn’t had a lead role in a summer blockbuster since 1996.
Long-term cause of death was likely Hollywood’s tendency of late to star real actors in big-ticket action movies (see: Face Off, The Matrix, Mission Impossible et al); the passing from fashion of the Mr. Olympia physique and the emergence of the Brad Pitt look; and viewers noticing that as a 50+ survivor of bypass surgery Schwarzenegger lacked credibility as an action hero. Some journals have floated the unkind theory that later in his career people were finally able to understand his dialogue, which hastened his decline. (This has yet to be confirmed in a peer-reviewed publication.)
A consensus appears to be emerging that it was simply bound to happen sooner or later: The birth of his career as a superstar was largely a biological accident; a tendency at beginning of the 80’s for filmmakers to cast kickboxers and athletes as action stars. Being an abnormality, this cinematic plague tends to be self-limiting: it comes in cycles, builds momentum and then kills off its food supply---in this case audiences composed of cement-headed grunts and people losing date-movie coin-tosses.
Beginning in 1970’s Hercules Goes Bananas (as ‘Arnold Strong’), Schwarzenegger’s career moved in fits and false starts until career physician James Cameron’s epochal decision to cast him as a machine in 1984’s The Terminator. Finding the persona most within his reach launched him into superstardom, where for many years he was Hollywood’s highest-paid performer, whose movie budgets regularly set records.
Yet, rumors of cinematic ill-health had been spreading for several years and the broadening of his taste in roles has hurt his appeal, once stated succinctly by the late Jay Scott: “He can do nothing. Therefore he can do anything.” Cinematic infibrilation is planned to attempt a career restart (Terminator 3) but the absence of Dr. Cameron from the project will limit its effectiveness. Resuscitation seems unlikely.
Funeral arrangements are by Planet Hollywood. Pallbearers will be Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Chow Yun-Fat, Sigourney Weaver, Keanau Reeves and Nicolas Cage. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the 2002 Governor’s Campaign of the Republican Party of California.

-Published in Flare, 2001

Six Degrees of Detoxification

Kate Moss’s recent coke-fueled misadventures remind us of the truth that lies in the drug-addiction model of fame. All celebrities should be treated as addicts: The more celebrated they are, the more acute their addiction is; the less they actually do to earn their status, the more addictive their behaviour.

So it should be no surprise that the rehab clinic is almost a vacation destination for the high-visibility luminary, or that there are far more drug- and alcohol-recovery clinics in North America than there are Wal-Marts. So, together with some of the big names in rehab, here are a few of the big names who’ve been in rehab.

Clinic The Meadows
Where? Wickenburg, Az.
Alumni Elle MacPherson, Kate Moss
Claim to Fame Recent admission of Kate Moss has set the bar for costly celeb treatment; reported cost to Moss of $4000/day is more than 10 times the price at the Betty Ford


Clinic Promises
Where? Malibu, Ca.
Alumni Charlie Sheen, Christian Slater, Diana Ross, Winona Rider, Ben Affleck, Matthew Perry, Kelly Osbourne, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Very high-end; younger Hollywood clientele; half of Mötley Crüe has passed through its doors


Clinic Impact Treatment Center
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Heidi Fleiss, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame Has reputation for taking on Promises Clinic’s underachievers


Clinic Wavelengths International
Where? Malibu Ca.
Alumni Courtney Love, Robert Downey Jr.
Claim to Fame A mere step along the road for its two most famous patients


Clinic Betty Ford Center
Where? Rancho Mirage, Ca.
Alumni Elizabeth Taylor, Bobby Brown, Stevie Nicks, Mary Tyler Moore, Anna Nicole Smith, Ozzy Osbourne, Lisa Minnelli, Johnny Cash, Kelsey Grammer, many, many others
Claim to Fame Mother of all celebrity detox centers; name provides cachet that you’re serious about treatment; if you’re a star, you’ll likely run into a lot of your friends


Clinic Exodus
Where? Marina del Ray, Ca.
Alumni James Caan, Kurt Cobain, Robert Downey Jr., Courtney Love
Claim to Fame Name ominously appropriate for Robert Downey Jr., who escaped four days into his stint there in July 1996


Clinic Hazelden
Where? Minnesota, plus three other states
Alumni Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithful, Chris Farley, Liza Minnelli, Melanie Griffith, Matthew Perry, Bobby Brown, Nathalie Cole, Calvin Klein
Claim to Fame Has the forthrightness to claim a success rate of only 54%; that is, almost half of their patients are re-toxed within a year.


Clinic Las Encinas Hospital
Where? Pasadena, Ca.
Alumni Kelly Osbourne, Jack Osbourne
Claim to Fame See Alumni, above


Clinic Silver Hill Hospital
Where? New Canaan, Ct.
Alumni Liza Minnelli, Nick Nolte, Mariah Carey, Greg Allman, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Diana Ross
Claim to Fame Musician’s addiction center of choice, although perhaps the only detox center in America not visited by Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil


Clinic “Unknown Detox Facility”
Where? Pick your state or country
Alumni Vince Neil, Drew Barrymore, David Bowie, Courtney Love, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Moss, Betty Ford, Eminem, Domino Harvey, many, many others
Claim to Fame Hey, it might have been one of us

-Published in The Weekly Scoop, November 2005