More questions from Lefsetz

Are you up to starving? Are you up to going your own way? Do you have incredible talent? Do you have something intriguing to say?

If not, you'd better make pop.

I love great art, no matter the medium.

Music as art instead of pop

Can you touch our souls? Can you take us on a journey? Can you make us want to become a fan of your music as opposed to your brand? Do you have something pithy to say about the human condition? Then chances are you're creating art. And art, unlike pop, is forever. But art has a harder time breaking through, the stars must align, you have to get lucky.

I love great art, no matter the medium.

Chocolate has surprising benefits

 

Flavanols Could Mend Powers of Memory

In a small study, 50-to-69-year-olds performed better on a pattern recognition test after drinking antioxidants found in cocoa.

By Molly Sharlach | October 27, 2014

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Pattern recognition tasks, such as identifying a new face or finding one’s car in a parking lot, become more difficult as people age. These declines are associated with the weakening of the dentate gyrus (DG), a region of the brain’s hippocampus. According to a study published yesterday (October 26) in Nature Neuroscience, DG functioning may be partially restored by consuming epicatechin and other flavanol molecules found in cocoa.

Researchers at Columbia University assessed the pattern recognition abilities of 37 participants between the ages of 50 and 69. Two groups of participants drank mixtures containing low (10 mg) or high (900 mg) amounts of cocoa flavanols every day for three months. At the end of the study, the high-flavanol group did about 25 percent better on the memory assessment than the low-flavanol group—the equivalent of regaining the memory abilities of someone two or three decades younger.

“Boy, this is really interesting to see it in three months,” Steven DeKosky, a neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times. “They got this really remarkable increase in a place in the brain that we know is related to age-related memory change.”

One flavanol in particular, epicatechin, has been shown to boost blood circulation in the DG. Using high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that higher blood flow to the DG was correlated with better performance on the memory test.

“You’d have to eat 25 chocolate bars a day to get 900 milligrams of flavanols, the amount we used, which is a bad idea,” study coauthor Scott Small told Scientific American. “There is a commercial formulation with a much lower amount,” Small said, referring to a supplement produced by the candy company Mars, Inc., which partially funded the research. “No commercially available formulation has 900 milligrams. Maybe in the future, companies will develop that.”

 


I love great art, no matter the medium.

Jack Bruce

Jack Bruce has died. A great musician and singer about whom the description "SUPERSTAR" was applied for the first time. I was privileged to represent him for a short time. He shocked me by saying I was the first manager he ever had who came to more than one of his performances. We were together in my car when we heard about the shooting of Felix Pappalardi, who had produced The Youngbloods, Cream and continued to record Jack. We were both shocked, dismayed and sad. That's the way I feel today. R.I.P. Jack.

I love great art, no matter the medium.