Culture Kultür: Electronica For The Mind And The Body

Culture Kultür is a great Electronica trio from Malaga, Spain, whose music is similar to that of Covenant and Pride & Fall, but which stands on its own.

June Suggested Reading: Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy

Sara Creasy’s debut Song of Scarabaeus is a science-fiction romance novel which reinvents the future through introducing some new technologies and also yields a fun reading.

Media & The Way We See Ourselves

In the last few posts we talked about eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia, which are the two most common disorders in the world, the devastating effects, first-hand accounts of those who survived the disease and how you can help those who suffer from them.

On this article, we’ll talk about one of the main reasons behind the increasing epidemics of eating disorders and other weight and self-image-related psychological problems: media’s brainwashing for profit.

Michele-lee Phelan: Faery Worlds

The Australian Michele-lee Phelan is a very talented artist, who specializes in Pagan and Mythology pictures. Though she is 40 years old, she has been a professional for only 5 years. She is an example that we can always improve our lives and make our dreams come true, and also of how giving in to our fears can keep us from achieving our goals.

Bulimia: Purging The Excesses

Bulimia Nervosa is the second most common eating disorder in the world, the first being Anorexia Nervosa. Those who suffer from it have frequent periods of binge eating, consuming inordinate amounts of food in little time, and then purge through vomiting, excessive work-out or severe fasting.

Basic Facts

Some of the symptoms of Bulimia Nervosa are: worrying about food, secretly binge eating and then vomiting, abuse of laxatives, diuretics and diet pills, denial of hunger, using drugs to induce vomiting, exercising compulsively.

Physically, bulimics have chronic gastric reflux after eating, dehydration, electrolyte imbalance (causing cardiac arrhythmia or arrest, sometimes leading to death), inflammation of the esophagus, oral trauma because of insertion of fingers or objects causing lacerations in the mouth or throat, broken blood vessels in the eyes, teeth decay, suspended menses, infertility, constipation, enlarged glands in the neck under the jaw line, calluses or scars on the back of the hands from inserting fingers in the mouth, constant weight fluctuations, among other consequences. [1]

The difference between common binge eating, which happens because of miscalculation or overindulgence, and the binge eating of a bulimic, is that they consume a huge amount of food in a short period of time (2 hours or less) and they feel they can’t stop eating, also feeling physical and emotional anguish.

Then next comes purging, which is, as described above, done by taking extreme measures to rid the body from the food. The problem is that it seldom works for losing weight. Diuretics and laxatives make a person lose water not weight. Also vomiting is useless, as 50-75% of the calories have already been absorbed. As a result, bulimics can either have normal weight, be overweight or underweight, or can change weight constantly, and in the meantime, they can lead “normal” lives on the outside, working, studying, etc, which can make it very difficult to identify those who suffer from it early on.

The frequency in which such behavior happens is also worrisome, it may occur over 2 times a week and for at least 3 months, which is certainly a terrible aggression against the body.

Those who suffer from Bulimia Nervosa are overly concerned about their looks, having self-deprecating thoughts, and keep the habit of binge eating/purging as a compensation for something that is going bad in their lives, and also as an attempt to achieve a better image of themselves. However the compulsion eventually leads to isolation, constant anguish, and more desperate actions, as the inner pain obviously doesn’t go away. [2]

Below are three accounts of people who have suffered from Bulimia Nervosa and overcame it. For information on how to help bulimics, check the first article in this series about eating disorders, and visit the sites mentioned at the bottom of the post.

“The image that I used to see reflected on the mirror was more of a monster than of a young girl. I was in a state where nothing was more important to me than to “look good” and if that meant to be sick I wouldn’t care.

“Many years later and 100% recuperated, I value more how I feel than how I look and these pictures reflect, in one way or another, my physical and mental state. I have accepted and love myself the way I am; I respect my body and take care of it like a temple.

“Rather than looking perfect, I value the fact that I can run or walk for an hour without getting exhausted or losing my breath. I value more the fact that my endurance has increased incredibly and that I have fulfilled successfully the physical challenges that I have set out. When I thought I couldn’t any more, I could…”

- Rosa Acosta [3]

“It's hard to say where my addiction began. I would have to say sometime in middle school. That's when I began to hate my body. I started off skipping meals and working out off and on. By the time I got into high school, my eating disorder became my life. By my freshman year, no one recognized me. I dropped a few sizes and I didn't even notice it till my friends began to talk. I went from a size 6 to a size 2. When I looked in the mirror, all I saw was fat. I could of sworn that I gained 50 pounds.

“When I got really hungry, I would go into my kitchen and eat tons of food. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor at 2am and eating a loaf of bread, a box of gram crackers, a bag of chips and then drinking some orange juice to help it all go down. I would feel so guilty that I would go and throw it all up.

“This happened for a few months then it got even worse. I began to take laxatives and diuretics as meals and kept up the binging and purging. If I was really bad I would bring a heater into my room and crank it up. Plus I would wrap myself with a garbage bag and put on a few layers of sweat pants and sweaters. I lived like this all throughout my high school days.

“Bulimia, to me, is like a giant mental mind game. Everyday I woke up and I hated to look into the mirror. I didn't like the person I saw and I felt so guilty every time someone looked at me and said how healthy I was. I felt like such a liar. I used to work out for three hours a day. That was my life. I started to do triathlons so I would get to work out even more without people questioning me.”

- Anonymous [4]

“It is a very dangerous illness to have, because I carried on at school, I did my exams, I didn't do very well, but I did my exams, I'd go into university, I went abroad for a year, then, so I did carry on, meanwhile, I was secretly vomiting, my teeth were decaying, my period stopped for quite a while... and I unfortunately grew to learn to hate myself... it was on university actually that I realized I had to see somebody... and it was basically… I knew I had to stop, because I was living a dual life.

“There's absolutely nothing glamorous or exciting or positive at all about developing an eating disorder. All it does is… it's decaying your body, it shortens your life, you know, I still spend ridiculous amounts of money on my teeth, which are really in a bad way. It affects people's fertility, and I think really importantly, it affects one's identity and how one feels about oneself in the short life that we have here and it affects your relationships with family, friends, partners. For many many years I didn't have a relationship because I was too afraid to. Because I was living in this terribly self-destructive bubble.

“In terms of getting help, I think the difficulty is you can't force somebody to talk to somebody, especially with an illness like this, because you're living in denial, and for me there was a huge shame about it, terrible shame, it’s sort of the ultimate… it's grotesque, you know, people don't want to know about your disfunctioning, whereas, you just want to be normal, you want to fit in. And it's an addiction. So until you realize that there's something wrong in your behavior, it's not a way of surviving, it's the opposite, only then will you want to get help.”

- Liselle Terret, who was 38 at the time of the interview, was bulimic from age 14 to 23. [5]

Come back tomorrow for the last article in this series: Media & The Way We See Ourselves.

More information and help center:

Survivor's Club

Addams Family: Creepy and Sweet

Mixing gothic elements in a social satire, The Addams Family series may have had a short life when it was first aired between 1964 and 1966, but its afterlife has been proven eternal so far.

The series was based on the characters created by cartoonist Charles Addams for the New Yorker magazine, which was about an eccentric and rich family who lives surrounded by elements from the gothic imagery and is blissfully unaware of how different they are and the effect their bizarre lifestyle has on others.

The original single panel cartoons were published between 1938 and 1988, when Charles Addams died. In its posthumous success, the series was succeeded by TV specials in 1972, 1977, and 1998, 2 animated series in 1973 and 1992, 2 movies in which Morticia and Gomez were played by Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia in 1991 and 1993, and this year, a stop-motion movie is being produced by Illumination Entertainment.

The 30-minute episodes are very funny with their ironic tirades, and for our present standards, have a light innocent sense of humor. Dialogues like this one are very common:

Gomez: “What news, Tish?” Morticia: “The police are on their way over. Oh! Good Heavens, the neighbors will think we committed some crime.” Gomez: “Does make me feel like a fraud.” - (from the episode Wednesday Leaves Home)

Basically the Addamses make fun of stereotypes that were usual in sitcoms of the time, showing the ‘perfect American family’, only in their case, it was a bit twisted.

Gomez Addams (John Astin) is the head of the family, always enthusiastic about his plans, madly in love with his wife, Morticia, a dedicated father, who loves playing of wreaking toy trains with his son Pugsley.

Morticia (Carolyn Jones) is the aristocratic mother and wife, loves gardening her poisonous, carnivorous plants, she is always kind with everyone, and is a devoted mother to her two children Pugsley and Wednesday.

The Addamses’ children are quite amusing: Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax) makes his parents worried from time to time, because of his bouts of being ‘different’, which means playing baseball and becoming a boy scout, among other weird pastimes. As for Wednesday (Lisa Loring), she is very charming, and loves playing with her beheaded dolls Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, and Little Red Riding Hood. She also has a pet lizard called Lucifer.

Complementing the Addams Family are the characters Lurch (Ted Cassidy), the sinister butler, who loves playing harpsichord and speaks in monotones and grunts, Cousin Itt (Felix Silla), whose body is covered in head-to-foot hair and chirps like a bird, Thing (Ted Cassidy), the servant hand in a box, always ready to help, Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan), Morticia’s uncle, and Grandmama Addams (Blossom Rock), Gomez’s mother.

Much of the humor in the series is attributed to producer Nat Perrin, who was a close friend of comedian Groucho Marx and had previously worked as a screewriter for the Marx Brothers. There various subjects: politics, the legal system, Beatlemania, Hollywood, parenthood.

Below is one of their episodes, Wednesday Leaves Home:

Addams Family TV Series @ Wikipedia # Addams Family Cartoon @ Wikipedia # Addams Family Fan Site