Be Here Now

Dionysus Unleashed (again)

2012-02-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

Following last year's mob rape in Tahrir Square of "60 Minutes" reporter Lara Logan, comes another, far more deadly, Egyptian Night of the Furies:

(Sky News) At least 74 people have been killed and 1,000 injured after a football pitch invasion in Egypt, according to reports.Clashes are said to have broken out as fans flooded the field seconds after the game in the northern coastal city of Port Said finished.There were reports of rocks, bottles, flares and fireworks being thrown as politicians in the country criticised a lack of security at the match.Doctors treating the victims said some had been stabbed to death. One player caught up in the rioting described it as "a war".

I would describe it as another horrific example of the Primal Sin.

Mitt and the Mad Myth of the Mormons

2012-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

Say what you will about Mitt Romney, the guy is an Eveready energizer bunny, always upbeat and undaunted, effective and accomplished in business and politics, and obviously totally committed to his family. It also happens that Romney is a Mormon.

In this regard he seems to me a perfect example of a basic idea behind this blog: that what is most important about a myth is not its credibility, but its effectiveness in sustaining and guiding positive human behavior. As the Mormon character says at the end of the (in)famous South Park “All About Mormons” episode:

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it.

Two Feet of Snow in Seattle

2012-01-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

(from Michael Drescher)

Inscrutable Frivolity

2012-01-09T16:25:00.000-08:00

Mark Rothko, "Red on Maroon"

Saturday night we joined the parade of looky-loos touring the LA art galleries on south La Cienega Boulevard. The profusion of mind-numbing abstract art and the zombie stares of the foraging crowd reminded me of John Logan's Rothko play, RED, and a review of it written last year by the British critic/playwright Lloyd Evans:

"This play is about painting, or rather about the remnant of painting we call ‘modern art’. Before photograpy destroyed draughtsmanship, artists were labourers, odd-jobbers, innovators, scientists in the best sense, philosophers with dirty hands using the materials of the universe to enhance our understanding of it. Until the second half of the 19th century, painting was a vague and happy alliance between technique and meaning. No one cared at what point a piece of representative art rose from the literal to the metaphysical. But once craftsmanship became obsolete this started to matter a lot. It became paramount. Divine inspiration was everything suddenly, because there was nothing else. Every artist had to pose as a genius or face being dismissed as a water-colourist, a weekend doodler, an easel weasel painting pretty sunsets. Artists declared war on craftsmanship. Sadly they won. (Writers tried it, too, but after Finnegans Wake, the worst book ever published, they hastily and blushingly signed an armistice.) Crucial to the artist’s new status was his strategic decision to shift the burden of elucidation from himself to the viewer. ‘Don’t ask me what it means. I commune with the godhead, earth-dweller, you explain it to me.’

"These two renunciations — of technique and of meaning — created art in its current phase of inscrutable frivolity."

That about sums it up. Even the simple value of beauty seems to have been forgotten. After two hours wandering, I left the galleries feeling absolutely nothing.

Cheetah Dies at 80

2011-12-28T21:54:00.000-08:00

This blog is beginning to resemble the obits--first, Christopher Hitchens, now Cheetah the Ape. (Who knew apes could live to such a banana-ripe old age?) Cheetah was part of one of America's greatest mythic inventions, Tarzan of the Apes, from Chicago native Edgar Rice Burroughs.

PALM HARBOR, Fla. (AP) - A Florida animal sanctuary says Cheetah the chimpanzee from the Tarzan movies of the 1930s has died at age 80. The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor announced on its website that Cheetah died on Dec. 24 of kidney failure. Sanctuary outreach director Debbie Cobb on Wednesday told The Tampa Tribune ( http://bit.ly/rRuTeJ) that Cheetah was outgoing, loved finger painting and liked to see people laugh. She says he seemed to be tuned into human feelings. Cheetah was the comic relief in the Tarzan series starring American Olympic gold medal swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Cobb says Cheetah came to the sanctuary from Weissmuller's estate sometime around 1960. Cobb says Cheetah wasn't a troublemaker. Still, sanctuary volunteer Ron Priest says when the chimp didn't like what was going on, he would throw feces.

12/30 UPDATE: Apparently some have questioned the "80 year old" claim.

Christmas Query

2011-12-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

"How can we contrive to be at once astonished by the world and yet at home in it?"
--G.K Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

Some Things Never Change

2011-12-21T21:17:00.001-08:00

Up in Smoke

2011-12-17T16:56:00.000-08:00

"It will happen to all of us that at some point, you get tapped on the shoulder and told not just that the party's over, but slightly worse: The party's going on, but you have to leave."
--Christopher Hitchens, RIP (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011)

Martyrdom: The Ultimate Performance Art

2011-12-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

"Art reaches perfection when it portrays the best life and the best death. After all, art tells us how to live. That is the essence of art. Is there art that is more beautiful, more divine, and more eternal than the art of martyrdom? A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity. Those who wish to undermine this principle undermine the foundations of our independence and national security. They undermine the foundation of our eternity."

--Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Nighthawks, 2011

2011-12-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

Experience over Reason

2011-12-14T21:16:00.000-08:00

"Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not Reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the British Constitution. It was not Reason that discovered or even could have discovered the odd and in the eye of those who are governed by reason, the absurd mode of trial by jury. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given sanction to them. This then was our guide."

--John Dickinson (1732-1808), Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

2011-12-12T21:44:00.001-08:00

Lament for Michelle, Rick, Herman (and Newt?)

2011-12-03T14:23:00.001-08:00

In honor of Herman Cain and all the other flame-outs from the Republican presidential primary, here is Herbert James Draper's magnificent 1898 painting, The Lament for Icarus. (To feast your eyes CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE, then click again.)

Every brain is on the brink

2011-12-02T21:55:00.001-08:00

Restoration  (1952)

To think that any fool may tear
by chance the web of when and where.
O window in the dark! To think
that every brain is on the brink 
of nameless bliss no brain can bear,

unless there be no great surprise --
as when you learn to levitate
and, hardly trying, realise
-- alone, in a bright room -- that weight
is but your shadow, and you rise.

My little daughter wakes in tears:
She fancies that her bed is drawn
into a dimness which appears
to be the deep of all her fears
but which, in point of fact, is dawn.

I know a poet who can strip
a William Tell or Golden Pip
in one uninterrupted peel
miraculously to reveal
revolving on his fingertip,

a snowball. So I would unrobe,
turn inside out, pry open, probe
all matter, everything you see,
the skyline and its saddest tree,
the whole inexplicable globe,

to find the true, the ardent core
as doctors of old pictures do
when, rubbing out a distant door
or sooty curtain, they restore
the jewel of a bluish view.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Odyssey

2011-11-14T21:14:00.001-08:00

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Solitude

2011-11-13T21:19:00.001-08:00

"You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone… Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came."

--Paul Bowles (1910-1999)

Let's Have Some New Clichés

2011-11-10T00:08:00.000-08:00

“We should have more clichés. They are in truth, as someone said in jest,the poetry of the people. Withoutclichés, there are no proverbs, no shared references, and language itself isscarcely possible.”

--Dot Wordsworth

(Click to Enlarge)

Anti-Meth PSA's

2011-11-09T21:11:00.000-08:00

(CBS) Academy Award winner Darren Aronofsky is known for directing such critically acclaimed films as"Black Swan" and "The Wrestler." Now he's turned his lens towards helping The Meth Project - a national campaign that spreads awareness about the dangers of methamphetamine use. He's directed four shocking public service announcements depicting terrifying scenes of meth users in bad situations.

If that wasn't frightening enough, there are more HERE.

Aranofsky’s approach to these 30-second spots is similar to that taken in his movies, with their fluid shifting between subjective and objective points-of-view. The tension between the two adds a fascinating dimension to the unfolding drama. In essence, his style confirms the primacy of consciousness: one’s state of mind inevitably shapes the stateof one’s reality.

Almost Jonah

2011-11-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

This video was shot near Santa Cruz, where a pod of humpback whales has been surface feeding lately.

Howling at the Moon

2011-10-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

Recommended Halloween viewing: THE WOLFMAN (2010), a masterful version of the werewolf myth rendered in classic Hollywood style by director Joe Johnston. Ominous, painterly, full of bravura action sequences and subtle, seething passions, the movie is a gorgeous period piece, set in England in 1891. The leads, Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt, give pitch-perfect performances with sizzling on-screen chemistry. Anthony Hopkins is perfectly cast as Benicio's eccentric, willful father, presiding over a fog-laden, decaying country estate. Lush sets and art direction, dark and moody, yet vividly evocative, bring the period and the performances dramatically to life. Danny Elfman works his usual magic with a brilliant, brooding score, and Shelly Johnson's cinematography is nothing less than breathtaking.

An overlooked masterpiece--miss it at your own peril!

Hysteria

2011-10-29T14:17:00.000-07:00

My friend and manager Ken Atchity is in Rome for the premiere of his movie HYSTERIA at the Rome International Film Festival. Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy, Jonathan Price, Rupert Everett,and Felicity Jones, HYSTERIA is a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian England. Ken is executive producer.

UPDATE 10/30: Ken reports film was very well received, with a standing ovation!

Manliness

2011-10-26T21:47:00.001-07:00

A passage from Neal Stephenson’s new book:

Neither of these men had much in the way of formal education, since each had decided, during his late teens, to simply go out into the world and begin doing something. And each of them had found his way from there, sometimes with good and sometimes with bad results. Consequently, neither had much in the way of money or prestige. But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women. But perhaps because of her background in refugee camps and the premature death of her mother, she could not bring herself to be interested in those men. This quality that she had seen in Peter and now saw in Csongor was — and she flinched from the word, but there seemed little point in trying to distance herself from it through layers of self-conscious irony — masculine.

OWS

2011-10-14T23:14:00.000-07:00

"Never has a man, a moment, and a movement come together like this."
Ed Driscoll

Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick

2011-10-13T20:44:00.001-07:00

Here's a shout out for my friend Joe Schreiber, a prolific and talented thriller and horror author, whose new 'young adult' novel comes out October 25th. Starred review in Publisher's Weekly and movie rights to Paramount. I'd order it based on the title alone, but if that doesn't do it for you, get a load of this:

New Faster-than-Light Theory Must be a Joke

2011-10-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Einstein Albert

"We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here," says the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

Maelstrom

2011-10-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

"Amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

--Herman Melville

The Silent Service

2011-10-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

Another addition to my research on courage. In his Spectator review of Tim Clayton's Sea Wolves, James Delingpole describes the risks taken by British submariners in WWII:

Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Sure, their losses weren’t quite as bad as the German U-boat fleet, where your chances of being killed were four in five. But in the course of the war about one third of British submariners lost their lives; and in the earlier years your chances of coming back from a mission alive were no more than 50/50.

Bomber crews, of course, had to face similarly grim odds. But at least they got back home to clean sheets, a hot shower, a beer and a fag or two. On subs a patrol meant at the very least a fortnight in a foetid, claustrophic hell of cramped, shared bunks and rank air sometimes poisoned with chlorine gas, your clothes perpetually damp and stained with oil, with no water to wash with, increasingly rotten food, and the constant, nagging fear that at any second you could die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable.

Depth-chargings were the worst. You could hear the propellers of the destroyer thrumming louder and louder above you. Then came the agonising wait. The enemy knew your position but not your depth, so your survival depended on how deep they set the various charges to explode. Even a miss was pretty traumatic: the noise, said one captain, was like being ‘in a 15-inch turret standing between the guns when the guns go off.’ The interior of the boat would become a fantastic blur of shaking as paint shredded off the bulkheads and lights smashed. Then you’d hear rivets popping and the hull groaning ominously and you’d wonder whether or not you were about to burst at the seams.

(Click to Enlarge)
Though the second-world-war subs were equipped with an escape hatch, your Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus took ages to put on and was only effective at depths of less than 100 feet (though someone did once survive an escape at 171 feet below). More likely, if your sub was damaged, you’d end up being torn apart as it sank to the bottom and imploded. When the Italian destroyer Circe depth-charged P38 in the Med, it knew it had scored a hit from what rose to the surface: first bubbles and oil; later, ‘a polished cupboard door, a table top, a bag of flags, a human lung’.

So what on earth possessed these sub-mariners to do it? Though it’s a myth that they were all volunteers, the majority of them were drawn to the Silent Service partly by its elitist mystique, partly by its much higher pay (a little less than double the ordinary mariner’s rate) and partly by its independence.
Lieutenant Commander George Phillips and the crew of the submarine HMS Ursula

An ambitious officer could find himself with his own command at just 28 (and by 35 you were considered past it), while crews relished the cameraderie and the unstuffiness. Discipline was adamantine, because the slightest mistake by one man could destroy an entire crew. But there was no space for the vile bullying or rank snobbery you still often found on capital ships. Submariners relished their piratical raffishness, returning to port after successful patrols by flying the Jolly Roger.

Whether they lived or died was dependent above all on the skill and nerve of their CO. A submarine was only as good as the tonnage it sank, and torpedoing a ship required verve and daring bordering on the suicidal. Commanders who failed to close and kill were quickly replaced: it wasn’t a job for the squeamish. German U-boats may have machine-gunned the crews of ships they’d just sunk but so, on occasion, did British submariners. This was a war of attrition and there is little space for prisoners on a sub.

Was it all worth it? In his gripping history Sea Wolves, Tim Clayton argues that it was. He cites the claim, by Rommel’s chief- of-staff Fritz Bayerlain, that it was British subs which really defeated the Afrika Korps by destroying so many of their supply ships. But this was achieved at the cost of 42 per cent of British submarines lost in the Med alone. Many of these young men’s lives, it’s clear, were simply thrown away by a naval establishment which never quite understood the point of subs. Their radios and guns were poor; their supply of torpedoes pitiful; and the missions they were sent on sometimes suicidal, especially in the Baltic, in the summer, where the near 24-hour daylight made it impossible to surface safely by night and recharge their batteries. Perhaps the pride of being in the Submarine Service was the only real recompense.

Transcendartist

2011-09-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

Flourish by Julie Robinson

"That which is SEEN is the reflection of one's own consciousness."
Sri Nisargadatta

From an interview with the artist Julie Robinson (Asheville Citizen-Times):

"I make abstract, nonrepresentational paintings that portray nonphysical spiritual experience. I call this “abstract transcendentalism,” which for me signifies a magical gateway through which I can leave the troubled world and find a moment of quiet stillness.

"Painting is something physical that helps me connect to my oneness and timelessness. Eckhart Tolle would call this “getting in touch with the power of now.”

Rare Breed

2011-09-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

CSM: [Yesterday] Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer was awarded the Medal of Honor for his attempts to locate and rescue missing comrades despite hostile fire in Ganjgal, Afghanistan. Rather than stay at a relatively safe distance from the intense firefight as he had been ordered, the then-21-year-old crossed battle lines five times and saved the lives of 36 US and Afghan troops pinned down during a Taliban ambush in September 2009.

Meyer is the third living recipient of the Medal of Honor for actions in the wars of Iraq or Afghanistan.

From The Wrong War by Bing West:

"A few weeks later, Lt. Gen. Joseph Dunford, commander of the Marines in Afghanistan, visited Camp Joyce, ate lunch with a subdued Dakota Meyer, talked with the survivors of Gangigal, and flew off, studying his notes.

"Dunford was no man's fool. His troops called him Fighting Joe because he had led from the front in battles in Iraq. He was thoughtful and literate. He studied war, leadership, and courage. Meyer had him stumped. In 28 months in command as a regimental and assistant division commander, he had never come across anything like this.

"In 1942, Sgt. John Basilone had charged several Japanese machine gun nests on Guadalcanal and received the Medal of Honor. Dunford was looking at a similar feat. To rush forward five times, knowing you were going to die...what kind of man did that? Dunford had talked with Capt. Swenson, the savvy advisor, who could only shake his head. The fury of the battle and the lack of support had infuriated Meyer. That four comrades were trapped was unacceptable to him. He wouldn't stop attacking.

"In The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran described his firsthand experiences in observing bravery in World War I. 'When the death of a husband or son or brother has grown distant,' he wrote, 'and the world is free again to think without impiety that courage is not common, men will remember that all the fine things in war as in peace are the work of a few men; that the honor of our race is the keeping of but a fraction of her people.' Meyer was one of those 'few men.'"

Courage Under Fire

2011-09-13T23:28:00.000-07:00

Amazing Video: Bystanders Lift Burning Car Off Injured Motorcyclist: Bystanders stopped to help police lift a burning car that hit and dragged a motorcyclist in Logan, Utah. The cyclist was rescued by a group who picked up the car and pulled the man out from under the wreckage.

9/11/11

2011-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

Thinking Big Time

2011-08-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

"We are building a 10,000 Year Clock. It's a special clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking. It's of monumental scale inside a mountain in West Texas. The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989. He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. The vision was, and still is, to build a Clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years."

Jeff Bezos
CEO of Amazon.com
(read more HERE)

London Burning

2011-08-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

“My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.”

--John Buchan (1875-1940)
Scottish novelist and politician
author of The 39 Steps and Greenmantle

Having a Wonderful Time

2011-08-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

Our mountain of debt and the plunge in the market remind me of a story about the Hungarian playwright, Odon von Horvath (1901-1938). While hiking in the Alps, he came across the corpse of a long-dead climber. After rummaging in the man's rucksack he found a postcard. "Having a wonderful time." Asked by his friends what he did next, Horvath replied, "I posted it."

Horvath's own death displayed a similar note of absurdity. An exile from Hitler's Germany, he had settled in Paris just before the outbreak of the war. All his life he had suffered from an inordinate fear of lightning, and one day, while on his way to watch Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, he took shelter from a thunderstorm on the Champs-Elysees and was killed by a falling tree branch.

So maybe it's true what FDR said: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just don't tell that to a mountain climber!

(cartoon by Michael Ramirez)

Going Ape

2011-08-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Though memories of the original Planet of the Apes (1968) remain vivid to this day, the sequels and Tim Burton's 2001 remake were largely forgettable. Not so with the fabulous new Rise of the Planet of the Apes. A technically brilliant and highly emotional "prequel," Rise does proper justice to one of Hollywood's greatest cinematic myths. Although it indulges the hackneyed anti-capitalist cliche of the greedy, heartless pharmaceutical company run amok, in the end the movie celebrates the struggle for freedom and the dignity and power of self-reliance. The film contains many of what critic Kenneth Turan called "bravura visual moments," including a denouement that sends your mind reeling back over four decades to the final stunning image from the original.Check out the Rise trailer HERE.

Lincoln on the Art of Compromise

2011-07-29T21:05:00.000-07:00

Michael Ramirez cartoon (click to enlarge)

"The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded."

--Abraham Lincoln

Another Utopian Fascist

2011-07-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

image from Anders Breivik's video

Don't miss Michael Ledeen's insightful and provocative post on the mass slaughter in Norway, The Myths of Oslo:

"Anders Breivik’s demons did not drive him to attack Muslims, although there may have been some among his victims; his targets were his own people, those he called “traitors” for betraying the mythical West to the mythical global forces of Islam and Marxism. Quite a bizarre tapestry: A fight to the death among and within three spent forces which had already died."

Drift

2011-07-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

Drifting thoughts passing through
or accumulating, the way petals
from shattered cherry blossoms do,
plentifully bunched, breezily high-flown,
a windfall that heaps and settles
along gutters, softening a kerbstone
edge, carpet rolls of flowers
thick as ashes, white and pink,
more numerous than your hours
alive, or thoughts still left to think.

--Roy Kelly
(2 July 2011, The Spectator)
Bodhidharma, woodblock print by Yoshitoshi, 1887

2011-07-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

Noah

2011-06-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

Not many movies I look forward to these days, but Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky's latest venture, Noah, based on the Bible myth of the ark, has the potential to be great. He's hired screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator) to work on his original script, and rumors are Christian Bale is being sought to play the lead.

Above and Below

2011-06-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

Photo of Greece at night taken by NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock aboard the International Space Station (click to enlarge). The god's-eye view looks enchanting and serene; little would you know that on the streets below there rages a Night of the Furies:

The Opposite of Courage

2011-06-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

Guardian, 6/26: Taliban use girl, 8, as bomb mule in attack on Afghanistan police post
Afghanistan's interior ministry says girl died in blast after insurgents gave her a bag containing explosives.

It's happening in Pakistan as well:

Last week in Dir district in north-western Pakistan, police defused a bomb strapped to a nine-year-old girl who said she had been kidnapped in Peshawar then set off walking towards a checkpost.
"They told me: 'You keep on reciting Qu'ranic verses till you push the button," she said afterwards.

Syria

2011-06-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Image: REUTERS

"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail."
Vladimir Nabokov

It's Gettin' Real in the Whole Foods Parking Lot

2011-06-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

JAPAN: three months after the quake

2011-06-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

These stunning before and after pictures show the amazing progress--and lack of progress--in Japanese cleanup and recovery efforts. (Click HERE for more pix.)For readers interested in contributing to the cause, you can go right now to this page on Amazon.com, and for $3.99 buy a collection of wonderful Japan-themed stories specifically written by 20 different thriller/mystery authors to raise money for Japanese quake relief. Every nickel raised from sales of the book will go to organizations working to rebuild shattered communities and shattered lives in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. (You can find more details on this remarkable collaboration at the website of author Tim Hallinan).

Please buy the book and pass on the word--you'll enjoy some excellent stories while helping do some good.

Out There

2011-06-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

detail from M. Chearney's White Out

My tennis buddy, the painter Mi chael Chearney, participated in the group show OUT THERE at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood last night.

Joanna among the art lovers

Mike with his painting White Out
(click to enlarge)

"Crazy Mike" as we call him on the courts has a fabulous energy and an indomitable Buddhist spirit. You can see it in his fluid and vigorous work, an artful combination of control and abandon. For me his paintings exhibit a similar theme to one I've been exploring in my novel: merging the assertiveness of the willful West with the ego-dissolution of the mystic East. In life this is seen most dramatically in acts of self-sacrificing courage. In art it is embodied in the artist himself, his daily struggle to lose himself in his work.

On a lighter note, Joanna and I liked this mixed media piece by the artist Deborah Baca. Note the perfect detail: a bottle of Evian water.

Arachnid Attempting 5th Position
(click to enlarge)

Art of War

2011-06-10T13:55:00.001-07:00

Seal Team Six - the guys who got Bin Laden
(click to enlarge)

...And the guys who didn't (from the ONION Daily Dispatch, 6/10/11):

Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its Full Cooperation With U.S. Forces During Upcoming Top Secret June 12 Drone Strike On Al-Qaeda At 5:23 A.M. Near Small Town Of Razmani In North Waziristan

Courage

2011-06-05T14:34:00.001-07:00

London MIRROR: A fearless Gurkha who single-handedly fought off an attack by up to 30 Taliban soldiers has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun, 31, above, fired 400 rounds and launched 17 grenades to thwart the assault on his checkpoint in Afghanistan. He also beat away an insurgent with the tripod of his machine gun when the weapon stopped working. The Gurkha ran out of ammunition but detonated a mine to repel the final two Taliban fighters.

I've been in awe of these amazing warriors for some time--check out this earlier post. A Nepalese Ghurka plays a key role in my current novel-in-progress, THE LOTUS ASSASSIN. For more pix and details on Sergeant Pun, click HERE.

The American Dream --Version 3.0?

2011-06-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

This ever-renewing American myth is explored by Walter Russell Mead in a fascinating series of posts called The Death of the American Dream:

"This isn’t the first time the American Dream has died. The old dream — your own farm rather than your own home — once dominated American culture, politics and family life as much as the family home ever did. The slow and painful death of that dream was one of the country’s core preoccupations in the first half of the twentieth century. The death of the new dream is likely to be a big deal as well."

"That dream is timelessly valid, and it is still the thing that people around the world admire most about the United States. We are going to have to re-imagine and re-engineer the dream to keep it alive in the decades ahead, but that shouldn’t daunt us. America is a nation of dreamers; building the future by following those dreams is what we do best."

Do Not Go East

2011-06-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

Do not go East: satori is at hand.
In shifting shells, in sea shelves seeing is
believing: more than all beliefs unshelved.

Do not go up: here heaven has a hold.
Air there is thin, too thin for breathing in,
and yet there is a rapture in the deep

beneath the light: green, dark and wonderful.
And dark is where the dreams are; past things, too:
the place we see ourselves unselved,

and find an ocean, opiate enough
to drown all doubt. Go down, then, if you will,
and sink into intoxicated sleep.

Shells shift and speak tomorrow and afar.
Tomorrow is the place where rumours are.

--Philip Quinlan

Philip Quinlan was born, and lives, in the London area but spent many years in the North of England. He has published two (so far narrowly circulated) slimmish volumes of poetry (illustrated by the artist Annie Ovenden): True North and Leaves and Limnings. [from The Chimaera, March 2010]

photo by Barbara Cole

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

JOPLIN, MO: Crystal Kilpatrick plants an American flag on the house of a family friend after the home was destroyed when a massive tornado passed through the town killing at least 132 people.

Lunch with a couple Thrillers

2011-05-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

David, Tim, Brett

Had lunch at Farmer's Market yesterday with fellow LA writers Tim Hallinan and Brett Battles. Brett is a scarily prolific author with three (!) novels written in the last twelve months. I just finished his breathtakingly paced THE SILENCED, the 4th book in his Jonathan Quinn series. Quinn is a professional "cleaner" whose job is to dispose of bodies and clean up loose ends after a hit. He's usually hired by the good guys (CIA, MI6) but then, of course, you're never really sure who the good guys are...

Tim Hallinan spends half his time in LA and half in Bangkok, where his acclaimed Poke Rafferty series is set. Tim's latest novel, The Queen of Patpong, was nominated for an Edgar as best novel of 2010 by Mystery Writers of America.

Tim is currently working on a novel about the God's Army guerrilla group in Burma, led by the legendary 12-year-old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo. I can't wait to read the book--just look at this amazing photo of the twins:

Bang!

2011-05-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

M1911 A-1 semi-automatic pistol

Jack Duran, the reluctant hero of my mythic thriller series, is currently in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan about to engage in a gunfight for the first time in his life. To research the scene, I asked my attorney pal Norman Boxley--a former Infantry Commander in Vietnam--to give me a lesson in firearms and shooting. Together with his son Will and Will's Vegas buddy Rob, Norm drove us up to the Angeles Shooting Range in Tujunga Canyon just north of LA.I'd never been to a shooting range before. Guess what? It's loud! You're required to wear ear plugs and eye protection, and even though the shooters are all aiming toward the hills, the random, incessant BLASTS of the guns made the whole canyon feel like a war zone. I kept thinking how in a real firefight, with the barrels pointed at you, the noise would be a major fear factor.

Here's a sequence of Norm loading and shooting his trusty Glock, an Austrian designed semi-automatic that's very popular with U.S. law enforcement agencies. In the last shot you can really see the recoil; also note the shell ejected as the bullet is fired. [Click to enlarge]

Here the expert Will takes aim with his father's M-1 rifle. The lightweight M-1 was a standard weapon in the U.S. Military from WWII through Korea and Vietnam. It's very user-friendly. I hit a dish-size target at 100 meters on my very first shot, which made me understand how easily a soldier could come to love his rifle.

I liked Norm's 1911A-1. It takes a .45 caliber bullet; a single shot in the right place could easily kill a man. I was finding it hard to hold it steady.

Will says I'm leaning back too much and helps adjust my stance. You need to put your left foot out front, he says, face the target more, and form a kind of triangle with your body and your arms, leaning into the shot to balance against the recoil. It's a very aggressive stance.

Will shows how it's done.

Landscape of Time

2011-05-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

Check out the marvelous photo gallery of reader Shaun Mazurek. His long-exposure landscapes exude a kind of timeless quality that borders on the Transcendent.

Competing Economic Myths

2011-05-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

Fight of the Century: Keynes vs Hayek, Round Two -- a brilliant cinematic hip-hop dramatization by John Papola and Russ Roberts.

Osama bin Dead

2011-05-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

Michael Ramirez (click to enlarge)

Art is Revelation

2011-04-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

"God is in the details." The quote is commonly attributed to the German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it has also been attributed to Gustave Flaubert, to my mind the more likely candidate. Vladimir Nabokov had his own variation: "Caress the detail, the divine detail." And I've always liked the ditty by the obsessive Michelangelo: "Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle."

While God may be in the details, it seems the devil is in there, too. In her entry in the Spectator DIARY, Jenny McCartney is struck by this "appealingly casual" drawing by Watteau (currently on display at the Royal Academy of Art).

"It calls to mind the difference between pornography and eroticism: pornography imposes the uniform of desire upon its faceless subject; eroticism teases out the particular allure of the person already there."

Particulars turn us on. They're keyholes into the mystery, the rousing essence of art.

Libya and the Oracle of Delphi

2011-04-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

As the British classicist Peter Jones explains in Ancient and Modern, The Two Libyas, the famous Oracle of Delphi played an instigating role in the initial colonization of north Africa by the Greeks:

"Herodotus tells the story. A deputation from Thera (modern Santorini) had gone to Delphi to consult the oracle on various matters and was told to found a city among the Libyans. By Libyans, Greeks meant the people who inhabited north Africa. But since no attention was paid to this command, Thera suffered a seven-year drought.

"A mission to Delphi to discover the reason was reminded of that command, and, after some help from Crete and many false starts, a settlement was finally founded at Cyrene in 630 BC. Despite some hostility from local Berbers, other Greek towns sprang up — one was Berenice, modern Benghazi (c. 250 BC)—and the whole region became known as Cyrenaica. Cyrene itself was the jewel in its crown, a magnificent city famed for its medical school and philosophers."

Temple of Zeus, Cyrene

Meanwhile, the western area of Libya had been settled centuries earlier by the Phoenicians. Under the Romans it became known as "Punic" Africa, and it grew into a large and flourishing settlement, much as did its later Greek counterpart to the east. The two regions were 1200 miles apart by land, 700 miles by sea, but because of the strong trade winds and notorious dangers of shipping along the coast, they remained largely separate from one another throughout their long history--up until 1911 when the Italians invaded and consolidated both into modern Libya. Cyrenaicans resisted for years, but were finally quashed by Mussolini in 1934.

According to Jones, if the two Libyas once again split into what they had always been prior to il Duce, it would be "a very sensible idea."

I wonder if the Oracle of Delphi would agree?

Jack's Dream

2011-04-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

“Wake up!”

Awaken to the rustle of her silk skirts, to the scent of jasmine oil on her wrist, to the clink of her coins in the alms bowl, to the young bride’s whispered prayer.

I sit in the dust of the village road, grinning under closed lids despite my hemorrhoids. The biting flies, the woman’s scent, the hunger pains, the lust—all come and go like night and day: All things must pass away.

“Wake up!”

Awaken to the creak of the wagon wheels, to the odor of the defecating horses, to the wife's farewell to her warrior, to the clatter of the armor and swords.

I sit in the mud beside the village road, grinning under closed lids despite the pouring rain. Though I live in every passerby, there’s nothing I need do. Just sit in silent testament: Peace comes from within.

“Wake up!”

Awaken to the smoke of the funeral pyres, to the futile pleadings of the mourners, to the wail of the grief-stricken widow, to the chant of the senile priest.

I sit in the dark along the village road, grinning under closed lids despite the falling snow. Though demons circle, they pose no threat. Grief cannot devour me; the cold can only bite. I am the Buddha, and I am free. Free from want, free from fear, free from the bondage of birth and death: There is no joy like the joy of freedom.

“Wake up, Jack—you’re safe.”

Goliath or Hercules?

2011-04-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

Mujahedin resistance to the Soviet invasion becomes kitsch myth, with echoes of David and Goliath, in a recently unveiled diorama in Herat's People's Museum [click to enlarge]. An Afghan boy on a rooftop takes aim with a slingshot, while a Soviet tank erupts in flames below. (from THE SPECTATOR, 12 March 2011)

Although Goliath makes a brief appearance in Chapter 2 of the Koran, it's an adaptation from the original story in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). Hence Muslims aren't the only ones attracted to the myth:

"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom."
--President Ronald Reagan, March 21, 1983

With what myth will the Afghans paint the U.S. intervention? Let's hope it goes something like the Second Labor of Hercules:

"For his second labor, the hero had to kill the Lernaean Hydra, a creature with nine heads that lived in a swamp. One of the beast's heads was immortal, and the others grew back when cut off. With the help of his friend Iolaus, Hercules cut off the Hydra's eight heads and burned each wound, which prevented new heads from growing back. Because he could not cut off the ninth head, he buried the creature under a great rock."

Apparently, to vanquish the hydra-headed Taliban, all we need to do is find a big enough rock!

Tsunami

2011-04-03T14:03:00.001-07:00

Michael Ramirez's update of the famous Japanese painting, The Great Wave, by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Here's the best image of the original I could find [click to enlarge for a fabulous view]:

Klavan on a Classic

2011-03-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

Could a 1000-year-old poem be the oldest (Old) English language thriller? So contends author Andrew Klavan in a brief and insightful essay on the heroic epic BEOWULF, "a brooding, blood-soaked celebration of warrior manhood."

"It may not be a thriller in the modern sense of the word, but it holds the kernel of the idea that gives our genre one of its key reasons for being. In modern fiction, only genre novels—crime, horror, fantasy, sci-fi—regularly dramatize the existence of evil, the need for courage, and the glamour of physical strength and fighting skill. It’s an essential and too often neglected role of the arts to portray these things. If they don’t, it becomes too easy for us to forget them, too easy for us to be self-satisfied with our lives of compassion and peaceful loving kindness without paying tribute to the warriors who make those lives possible."

The Sleepers

2011-03-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Gods are not dead;they are sleeping like ferrets,
Curled up in their underground temples of gold,
And they smile as they dream of fresh worlds where their merits
Are properly prized and they never grow old.

They smile in their sleep. Their triangular teeth are
As white as the smocks of the virginal martyrs,
Whose psalming and incense swirl up to the ether:
Sweet, spiritual smells and religious cantatas.

How weary, these Gods, when their efforts to please us
Are written on water or crumble to dust!
Now Phoebus Apollo and Brahma and Jesus
All sleep the Elysian sleep of the just.

Will they wake? But why should they, now no-one supposes
Mere prayers can alleviate famine or flood?
So they sleep and they smile, and their sharp little noses
Just wrinkle a little -- as if they smelt blood.

--John Whitworth

2011-03-07T21:21:00.000-08:00

The Novel as the Modern Medium of Myth

2011-03-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

Throughout human history, we have looked to stories and myths to provide the sense of meaning and significance that a fulfilling life seems to require. It's one of the essential yearnings of humanity--to transcend our mundane existence, to be lifted momentarily outside ourselves, to touch something deeper, perhaps eternal, beyond the reach of death.

In A Short History of Myth, religious scholar Karen Armstrong asserts, "There is never a single, orthodox version of a myth. As our circumstances change, we need to tell our stories differently in order to bring out their timeless truth." Beginning with the Paleolithic Period, she traces the major changes in mythology over the past 10,000 years (in a mere 149 pages!), ending with a discussion of the modern era, in which myth has been largely rejected in favor of more rational, scientific, historical modes of thought.

I learned to meditate when I was young and have continued doing so twice a day for over forty years. Repeating a simple thought-sound called a mantra, I reach a disembodied state of expansiveness and calm, in which the sense of separateness seems to blissfully fade away.

It may be this experience is nothing more than a physical function of brain wave activity, a momentary coherence that gives the feeling of expansiveness, like a form of self-hypnosis, an illusion or trick of the mind. That would be the most likely "objective" explanation.

I prefer, however, to believe it's something more. I prefer the myth offered by the sages of ancient India, who first discovered this transcendent state some three or four thousand years ago. They believed they were tapping into the divine realm of Brahman, the universal Spirit, the infinite Ground of Being, the field of pure consciousness that underlies all of Creation. For the sages, experiencing Brahman was not an illusion; to the contrary, it was the mind "awakening" to the Truth.

For me, believing this myth not only enhances the experience of meditation, more importantly, it deepens and enriches my daily experience of life. But beyond its usefulness, I feel, in a way, compelled to believe the myth. I feel it simply has to be true. It is, after all, my experience. And the sages' explanation is certainly more satisfying than the notion that it's only some kind of chicanery in the brain.

As Ms. Armstrong writes, "A myth is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information." Still, I feel some tension around it, an unsettling, perhaps irresolvable, uncertainty.

This reflects the basic tension surrounding religious faith, an anxiety very much alive in the modern world: the inherent human yearning for myth and meaning, and the difficulty for modern man to believe what is not objectively verifiable. I think it's the most important challenge confronting artists, writers, and filmmakers, the contemporary constructors of myth: What can you make us believe in? Or more exactly, what is worth believing in?

According to Karen Armstrong, these questions of modern mythology may perhaps be best addressed in the art form of the novel:

"...[T]he experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. It is an exercise of make-believe that [...] breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathize with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever."

paintings by the master, Harry Holland

2011-03-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to the Indispensable Man

2011-02-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. "

George Washington

Mythology in Advertising - Japanese style

2011-02-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

The Primal Sin: Modern Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Madness of the Mob

2011-02-15T20:47:00.000-08:00

Mask of a Maenad - icon of unconsciousness

Plato believed the source of evil lay in ignorance. The worst sort of evil arises from the blindest ignorance, what Carl Jung called "the primal sin"--the sin of unconsciousness. "Wherever unconsciousness reigns," he wrote, "there is bondage and possession." And in no place does it reign with greater sway than in a mob.

My novel, Night of the Furies, was constructed on this premise. While cruising the islands of Greece, two Americans encounter a secret Dionysian cult of maenads. A chaotic orgy ensues. They surrender themselves to unconscious impulse and experience an exhilarating freedom. But it's a false freedom, a slavery to the flesh, a "bondage and possession" that ends in violence.

True freedom comes only in a state of full awareness, when motives are examined, and choices consciously made. We call it "free will."

Such freedom is a burden as well as a gift, as the ancient Greeks discovered. Much like the modern Egyptians, they had long lived in a conformist society based on a restrictive religion, where the longing for freedom was routinely suppressed and decisions were left to tradition. All that changed with the dawning of democracy and the birth of individual freedom. As the scholar E.R. Dodds explains, "Individual freedom brought the terrifying burden of daily responsibility and the irresistible urge to abandon it." And so the Dionysian cults flourished.

I thought of this today when I read the terrible news about the "60 Minutes" reporter, Lara Logan.

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

Ms. Logan returned to the United States the following morning and is currently in the hospital recovering. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. May she regain her admirable spirit and courage, and return to the struggle of all free people, battling the primal sin.

A Known Unknown

2011-02-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

by--who else?--the brilliant Michael Ramirez. What astounds me is not just his striking visual ideas, but even more his remarkable skill as an artist. This rendering of Egypt's most famous Pharaoh is positively gorgeous (click on the image to enlarge).

Happy Birthday Abe

2011-02-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

“I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men’s rights.”

– Abraham Lincoln

The Importance of Being Ambivalent

2011-02-09T21:10:00.000-08:00

Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT

"The only good basis for a film or a play is a central character who's split, where there is a conflict within him and within the author about him. 'Ambivalence' is the essential word."

--Elia Kazan

Ditties

2011-02-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand in stone:
Friendship in another's trouble,
Courage in your own."

--Princess Diana

"Life is mostly toil and labour,
Two things see you through:
Gloating when it hits your neighbor,
Whining when it's you."

--Kingsley Amis

The Stuff of Legends

2011-02-01T18:26:00.000-08:00

So goes the motto of the renowned Nepalese Gurkhas. Recently a retired Gurkha soldier named Bishnu Shrestha demonstrated their legendary reputation for courage when he single-handedly took on forty armed bandits pillaging a train in northeast India. His only weapon: the Gurkhas' trademark kuhkuri blade.

The band of about 40 robbers, some of whom were traveling as passengers, stopped the train in the Chittaranjan jungles in West Bengal around midnight.

“They started snatching jewelry, cell phones, cash, laptops and other belongings from the passengers,” Shrestha recalled. The soldier had somehow remained a silent spectator amidst the melee, but not for long. He had had enough when the robbers stripped an 18-year-old girl sitting next to him and tried to rape her right in front of her parents. He then took out his khukuri and took on the robbers.

He killed three of the brigands, injured eight more, and chased off all the rest. Read the full account here.

Internal Combustion

2011-01-29T10:56:00.000-08:00

"Against Advice"
for Veronica Furner

Her apple tree felled
Became logs for our fire.
Let them dry out she said
And use them next year.

As I stacked them I noted
Their moist mottled bark
But my usual impatience
Soon put them to work.

Reluctant to kindle
They sizzled and spat
Like the right words in waiting
But not ready yet.

Then after a while
Smoke turned into flame
And with sudden combustion
The poem came.

--John Mole

2011-01-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

The most talented political cartoonist in America, Michael Ramirez.

the Myth of State

2011-01-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

"Government is the great fiction, through which every- body endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
French political philosopher

Art of Transcendence

2011-01-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

From P. J. Kavanagh's review of The Great Books by the philosopher Anthony O'Hear:

"...O’Hear points out for example that the Greek heroes in Homer (whom Simone Weil called ‘ killing-machines’) were attacking a culture that was domestic and civilised. Andromache was preparing a hot bath for her husband Hector, not knowing that he was being dragged, dead, behind the chariot of Achilles. Homer tells us this, but amid the blood and clamour we might overlook the contrast. In the Aeneid Vergil can be sensed flinching at the violence of the pax romana — even ‘pious Aeneas’ could be guilty. This ‘piety’ is O’Hear’s theme.
"All the books he describes and examines, from Homer to Goethe’s Faust, exist in an order that contains some form of transcendence, above and outside man. This order, essential to understanding the books themselves, O’Hear contends that we now too often push aside, treating ‘the mythology and mysticism of Plato’s thought as if these things were too naive and embarrassing even to notice’. Against this impoverishment O’Hear, unfashionably, goes doughtily to war."

Born Yesterday

2011-01-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

Friends of ours just sent this snapshot of their beautiful new granddaughter, Thalia Sky, born yesterday afternoon. I was struck by the infant's open stare, and went scrambling for a passage from a book I'd read recently, The Power of Eye Contact. In a chapter on intimacy, it talks about how "appreciating really brings presence":

Presence is a major nutrient that people need lifelong. If you think of babies, we just gaze at babies and look at them, and we don't need to do anything; we just exchange gazes. ...Your essence, who you really are, is so available just from gazing, giving and receiving attention. (K. Hendricks, p173).

Uninhibited by the cultural taboo against staring, a baby's eyes express that deep yearning we all have to relinquish the condition of separateness:

...they just can't take their eyes off yours. ...It's utterly natural. We're all seeking this communal experience of union. (W. Johnson, p187)

Thalia Sky, with her innocent stare, reminds us of what Zen Buddhists call beginner's mind: experiencing the world without preconceptions, without filters and blinders, appreciating it anew, with the freshness and wonder of a baby's eyes.

On My Whoosh List

2011-01-05T15:11:00.000-08:00

Some books look irresistible. Those of us enamored of the ancient Greeks will have difficulty passing up this one: ALL THINGS SHINING , Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. According to Eric Ormsby in his WSJ review, the authors--philosophers Hubert Dreyfus at Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly at Harvard--"view the ancient Homeric gods as hidden presences still susceptible of invocation. Indeed, they hold out 'Homeric polytheism' as a solution to the 'lostness' of the contemporary world."

The authors' general theme, and lament, is that we are no longer "open to the world." We fall prey either to "manufactured confidence" that sweeps aside all obstacles or to a kind of addictive passivity, typified by "blogs and social networking sites." Both are equally unperceptive. By contrast, the Homeric hero is keenly aware of the outside world; indeed, he has no interior life at all. His emotions are public, and they are shared; he lives in a community of attentiveness. He aspires to what in Greek is termed "areté," not "virtue," as it is usually translated, but that peculiar "excellence" that comes from acting in accord with the divine presence, however it may manifest itself.

The two philosophers describe a fascinating notion they call "whooshing up:"

Whooshing up is the sensation we enjoy at a sporting event when the crowd rises to its feet as one to register a communal sense of awe and admiration before some astonishing athletic feat.
Whooshing up is communal, it is public and it is shared; and so, according to the authors, it is close to the kinds of sensations the ancient Greeks admired and cultivated. Throughout the book, such great athletes as Bill Bradley, Lou Gehrig and Roger Federer are invoked as supreme examples of such shining, almost instinctive, grace. Their greatness lies not solely in their skill, the authors argue, but in their ability to let some outside force course through them, just as the heroes of old were exquisitely attuned to the power of a god working through their bodies.

I could use some of that in my tennis game--I got whipped this morning. Look out, Stephan-I'm ordering this book!

Home on the Range

2010-12-23T23:42:00.000-08:00

I have always assumed that my surname, Angsten, was derived from the German Angst, with its negative connotations of fear and anxiety. While not exactly inspiring, it seemed suitable to a writer of adventure thrillers. In researching my latest novel, however, I've discovered a more positive spin on the name. It now appears perfectly--even cosmically--appropriate for an author named Angsten to be writing what I'm currently writing: a contemporary thriller about the origins of eastern mysticism and the age-old quest for liberation.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the ancient Vedic people--the Indo-European or 'Aryan' tribes that swept down into India from the steppes of central Asia early in the second millenium BCE. Like most of the Indo-Europeans, these Vedic nomads were in constant need of fresh pastureland for their cattle and horses. The Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger, in her recent book, The Hindus, describes them as basically "cattle herders and cattle rustlers who went about stealing other people's cows and pretending to be taking them back."In this regard--as well as in their fondness for gambling--the Vedic people resembled the cowboys of the 19th-century American West. They were driven, like their vast herds of horses, "to move on, always to move on, to new lands." This insatiable urge for expansion was supported by their religion and expressed in their collection of spoken prayer known as the Rig Veda--the oldest religious poetry in the world.

Among these poems the word prithu--'expansiveness'--is frequently encountered. Derived from the name of a mythical king who hunted cattle on the broad plain, prithu connoted something like 'the wide-open spaces.' And that's where my surname comes in:

"The opposite of this word prithu is the word for a tight spot, in both the physical and the psychological sense; that word is amhas, signifying a kind of claustrophobia, the uneasiness of being constrained in a small space. (Amhas is cognate with our word 'anxiety' and the German Angst.) In this context, amhas might well be translated, 'Don't fence me in,' since it occurs in a number of Vedic poems in which the poet imagines himself trapped in a deep well or cave, from which he prays to the gods to extricate him."

For these ancient cowboys, then, the term from which the name 'Angsten' is derived was less an expression of fear and anxiety than of the inherent human yearning for freedom.

That yearning went beyond the physical plain; it literally drove these cattle rustlers into the spiritual realm. The ninth book of the Rig Veda celebrates a fiery hallucinogenic plant known as soma, which played a key role in several important Vedic rituals. The following is a typical passage:

We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now? The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space. (8.48.3)

The entire book reiterates this blissful theme of transcendence. Professor Doniger concludes: “The feeling of expansiveness, of being set free in wide space, is not merely a Vedic political agenda, an expression of the lust for those wide open spaces, it is also a subjective experience of exhilaration and ecstasy.”

Though today we do not know what the soma plant was, it's easy to imagine its possible influence on history. The Vedic hymns it inspired formed the fountainhead of Indian civilization and the beginnings of Hinduism, the world's oldest living religion. It may just be possible, as many have suggested, that it was soma that spurred those early cowboy/mystics to probe deeper into the nature of reality, to learn how to harness the wild horse of the mind, to whip a galloping mantra across the infinite Ground of Being.

Freedom from Fear

2010-08-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

David Grann's riveting "The Lost City of Z" is a breathtaking account of the Amazon adventures of the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett. Fawcett was "'contemptuous' of anyone who succumbed to fear," describing it as 'the motive power of all evil.' This quote from Fawcett's personal notes seems to sum up his Dionysian understanding of life:

"Civilization has a relatively precarious hold upon us and there is an undoubted attraction in a life of absolute freedom once it has been tasted. The 'call of the wild' is in the blood of many of us and finds its safety valve in adventure."
Not so much a 'safety valve' as it finally turned out. On his final
trek into the jungle in search of the fabled city of Z, Fawcett mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Possession

2010-03-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

Author Steven Pressfield (Gates of Fire) has written a brilliant post about the craziness that drives the artist, writer, or entrepeneur:

"But this state of mind isn’t really crazy. It comes from the gods. It’s a species of divine madness. Socrates called the poetic variety of this condition “possession by the Muses” (and rated it superior to technical mastery), though he could have referred with equal accuracy to seizure by any Olympian deity. When this kind of nuttiness grabs us, we are possessed by forces we can’t name and can’t see, can’t measure or quantify, and whose very existence is doubted by much of the conventional world.

But this state of possession is real, as anyone who has experienced it will testify–and so are the forces that inflict it on us. What do these forces demand? First and foremost, they want depth. They require of us passion, authenticity, courage, stubbornness and commitment over time. They want us. They want everything we’ve got."

Read the whole thing HERE.

Secret of the Arts

2010-01-24T16:37:00.000-08:00

'Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.'
Francesco de Goya

AVATAR - The Gospel According to James

2010-01-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

In a challenging opinion piece written for the NY Times, Ross Douthat asserts that AVATAR is James "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism--a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world."

"...pantheism has been Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now. It's the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It's the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas." And it's the dogma of George Lucas's Jedi, whose mystical Force 'surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.'"

An appealing myth, no doubt, and "a form of religion that even atheists can support," but ultimately, Douthat concludes, it offers little solace. Read the whole piece HERE.

The Real Test

2010-01-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

"No drug, not even alchohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
--P.J. O'Rourke

Naked and Conflicted

2010-01-24T10:49:00.000-08:00

In her excellent NY Times Book Review essay, The Naked and the Conflicted - Sex and the American Male Novelist, Katie Roiphe contrasts the vigorous sexual explorations of the previous generation of Great Male Authors with the current crop of politically correct, sexually neutered navel-gazers. "Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, post-feminist second-guessing."

"The younger [male] writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life."

As an antidote, I know of at least two novels I would highly recommend...

Iran

2009-06-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Art of the Furies

2009-05-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

[MANY PICTURES TO THIS AND OTHER PREVIOUS POSTS HAVE MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED. MY APOLOGIES.]

On Saturday night at the JK Gallery in Culver City, we attended the opening reception for a series of new paintings by the artist Kathleen Waterloo. Kathleen tells me the paintings were inspired by my novel, NIGHT OF THE FURIES.

Kathleen (right) with LA sophistos

The works are colorful abstractions of classical architecture, with each painting borrowing its tantalizing title from a Greek term found in my book (e.g., Naos, Eleusis, Mystai, Kystai, Kykeon, etc.).

I'm always interested in the role chance plays in the production of a work of art. Kathleen's paintings seem a subtle mix of playful happenstance and conscious design.
Surprisingly, this sense of artful spontaneity is captured in a painstaking ancient technique called encaustic.

Encaustic is from the Greek word enkaustikos meaning 'to fuse,' or ‘to burn in.' The ancient Greeks sealed the hulls of their ships by coating them with wax and resin, while heating the coat with fire. Eventually they began to mix in pigments, adding color to create their startling warships.

Though slow and difficult, the layering of the wax heating process gives a rich and life-like optical effect, and is far more durable than tempera.

By the 5th c. B.C., the technique was being used in highlighting features of the marble statues on the Acropolis and the famous Parthenon frieze.

"Phidias and the Elgin Marbles"by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, oil, 1868

Kathleen explains her use of the process:

"Animal or vegetable wax (I use beeswax) is melted with the resin of the Asian fir tree. Oil paint is then added to the hot liquid and applied with brush to a wooden panel. The wax immediately hardens and must be fused with fire, or heat, for its permanency."

Along with gorgeous colors (you really can't appreciate the translucent effect in these flat, digital images) the process leaves an interesting edge to the paintings.

Here's how the catalog sums up her art: "The elegance of the works is tempered by geometric blocks of color, giving a sense of contingency to the otherwise highly controlled world of architecture."

I like that: a sense of contingency. It speaks to the process, the art of the art. As if Chance had been caught while fusing into Fate.

Coming Home

2009-05-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Just in time for the Memorial Day weekend, I received a copy of my Uncle Bob Angsten's account of his experiences in WWII. Bob was assigned to the 1252nd Engineer Combat Battalion, a part of General Patton's Third Army. After nearly getting killed during the Battle of the Bulge, he rode with a fleet of tanks across the Siegfried Line, overran a V-2 rocket launching site, passed through the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, dropped in for a visit to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and celebrated his survival with a two-week "Rest & Rehab" gig in Paris.

Time to head home, right?

Not yet.

"In July, '45, we were sent to Marseilles, France to be completely re-outfitted with new vehicles, arms, clothing, for our intended re-assignment to the CBI (China, Burma, India theater of operations) to help end the war with Japan. Everyone knew that, since the 1252nd single-handedly ended the European war, we would be needed to do the same thing to Japan. On August 23, 1945, we left Marseilles heading for the Panama Canal. Three days later, "the bombs" were dropped on Japan and our troopship abruptly changed course for Camp Miles Standish, Massachusetts. In the Boston harbor, by this freakish and undeserved turn of events, we happened to be among the first, if not the, first troopship to return to the States. In the craziness and jubilation of the moment we were escorted into the harbor by anything and everything that would float, including several fire-boats shooting water over our bow. No other experience on earth could match the emotional intensity of that moment when 2,500 grown men aboard were bawling like babies!"

Uncle Bob went on to serve in the Illinois National Guard before embarking on a career in the auto industry, marrying, and eventually raising six children. He ends his humble tale with this:

"All of my still-surviving buddies of the 1252nd agree on one thing: we would never want to go through anything like WWII again, yet we wouldn't have missed the experience for all the world! Note that not wanting to go through it again is a lot different than refusing to go. Living in freedom is well worth the price."

Missing heroes

2009-05-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn writes Superheroes Are Starting to Bug Me:

"The critic James Bowman thinks the current vogue for big screen superheroes helps to isolate and quarantine heroism in fanatasy-land. 'Heroism' is what people who’ve been bitten by radioactive spiders do. Until that happens to you, best to steer clear. And so a world of superheroes leads to a world without heroes. Gone now are the amateur adventurers of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, chaps who’d find themselves caught up in something, and decide to give it a go, initially because it’s a ripping wheeze but also because, in some too-stiff-upper-lipped-to-say way, they understood honour required it. Now the conventional romantic hero is all but extinct, and as giants patrol the skies those of us on the ground are perforce smaller. In The Incredibles, there’s a famous line aimed at the feel-good fatuities of contemporary education: when everyone’s special, nobody is. The failure of storytelling in today’s Hollywood teaches a different lesson: when everyone’s super, nobody’s a hero."

Maenads Descend on U.S. Capitol

2009-05-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

Some myths seem perpetually ripe for reinterpretation. The female devotees of the Greek god Dionysus, known as bacchae, or maenads, have been the subject of artists and writers for nearly 3000 years (click HERE for a gallery of historical examples). Perhaps the most famous work based on the myth is the playwright Euripides' ancient tragedy, The Bacchae. Written in a time of war and plague, it explored the dangers of unconscious possession and the horrors of instinctual passions unleashed. Euripides' play was the inspiration for my thriller, Night of the Furies, which imagined similar irrational passions recurring in contemporary times.

But maenads have only rarely been viewed as savage hellions of horror; more often their unconsciousness is portrayed as a kind of innocence, a playful, joyful freedom.

Dancing Maenad and Satyr, Pompeii.

An exhibit entitled "Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples," which recently opened at the LA County Museum of Art, shows several superb examples of these docile, dancing maenads, recovered from the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius. Most of the works date from the 1st century BC to the year of the eruption, in 79 AD. Although Rome had conquered Greece in the sack of Corinth in 146 BC, the Romans adored Greek art and culture and adapted its myths and themes as their own.

Dionysos with kantharos (drinking cup) and maenad holding a sacred thyrsus.

Mask of maenad, from the House of the Gilded Cupids, Pompeii.

Relief panel of Maenad and Satyr, in procession with Dionysus, the Lord of Liberation, draped in an animal hide and holding a pine-cone thyrsus. From Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples.

Some 18 centuries after it was buried, this delicate fresco of a floating maenad, recovered from the House of Ship in Pompeii, inspired a distant descendant of the ancients, Constantino Brumidi.

The Greek-Italian artist, born and trained in Rome, emigrated to the United States in 1852, and three years later was hired to create murals in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. (Only in America!)

His paintings for the Naval Affairs Committee Room (since 1912 the Senate Appropriations Conference Room) are based on his study of Pompeian wall decoration and, specifically, the fresco of the floating maenad.

As you can see in this close-up, Brumidi's angelic, Pompaeian maenad has exchanged her sacred Dionysian thyrsus for a star-studded American flag. Over two millenia, she's gone from hysterical madwoman to patriotic nymph.

But beware: In the shadowy corridors of Congress, you never know when a possessed maenad will succumb to the dark side again.

Hallelujah!

2009-04-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

At the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles last weekend, we saw the great Leonard Cohen in concert--an absolute delight! I've been an ardent fan since my college days, when I saw him play solo in a small Chicago club. Canadian by birth, Cohen grew up in a Jewish family in a wealthy neighborhood of Montreal. A lugubrious romantic, his somber songs have always been more popular in Britain and Europe than in the United States (I remember hearing his gravelly voice droning from a phonograph in a Paris neighborhood when I was going to school there in 1975).

But unlike many listeners, I've never found his music depressing. Even his most bitter song ("Everybody Knows") has a jokey joyousness, an undertone of pleasure. This cosmic sense of acceptance seems to have only increased with age. His last time out, fourteen years ago, we saw him perform at the Wiltern Theater in LA. Since then he spent five years in seclusion at the Zen retreat on Mt. Baldy. It appears to have done him some good. He seems less melancholy--dare I say even happy?--and could be seen at the Nokia literally skipping across the stage. Many of his most impassioned songs were performed on bended knee, and his voice seems to have grown even deeper and more resonant. At times in the large hall of the Nokia, he reached the sustained, guttural lows of a Tibetan Gyuto monk. Cohen is 74 years old.

From the Nokia concert, someone YouTubed this cell phone video of his performance of Hallelujah. It's one of his most famous and frequently covered songs. He discussed it in 1997 in this interview with Chris Doritos, where he also played a unique and thrilling Flamenco version of the song, performed by the Spaniard Enrique Morente. For years the recording was unavailable; now you can listen to it HERE. Crank up the volume, close your eyes, sit back and relax like a monk--I guarantee you'll be catapulted into transcendent realms of bliss. Hallelujah!

Crisis = Danger + Opportunists

2009-03-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about "not wasting a crisis," that the financial disaster offers a chance to do big things and make great changes. The unspoken catalyst for all this change, of course, is fear--when people are scared they're more easily swayed. In such times, we are frequently reminded that the Chinese symbol for "crisis" consists of two characters, one denoting "danger" and the other "opportunity." The idea that a crisis is an opportunity has become a kind of reassuring proverb. It is also entirely false.

Victor H. Mair, the renowned professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania (his translation of Chuang Tzu, Wandering on the Way, is one of my favorite books), has written an enlightening essay explaining that "crisis" = "danger" + "opportunity" is a "potentially perilous, fundamentally fallacious theory."

Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements meaning "danger" and "opportunity" are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution.

The Chinese logograph for "crisis" is wēijī, consisting of two characters:

wēi

jī

While the wēi character does indeed denote "danger," Professor Mair contends that the jī character most definitely does not denote "opportunity."

The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his/her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis.

It’s important to be clear in our words, especially in times of wēijī. As the great Taoist Chuang Tzu said, "When deeds and words are in accord, the whole world is transformed." But for those opportunists with utopian dreams, the master added this admonition:

If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!

The Language of Myth

2009-03-06T16:25:00.001-08:00

Harry Holland, Outcrop

"We have come to realize that myths are among the subtlest and most direct languages of experience. They reenact moments of signal truth or crisis in the human condition. By mythology is more than history made memorable; the mythographer - the poet - is the historian of the unconscious. This gives the great myths their haunting universality."

George Steiner

G wiz

2009-02-21T11:11:00.000-08:00

The amazing Varanasi photographer Laurent G has a beautiful post on the Eleusinian Mysteries, which he illustrates with this typically haunting image.For anyone with an interest in the religion and mythology of India, I urge you to visit his gorgeous site, designldg. Here are just a few of his astounding photographs.

2009-02-16T22:59:00.000-08:00

Beauty and a Poet's Death

2009-02-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

The US Postal Service has issued a new stamp com-memorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. "For more than a century and a half, Poe and his works have been praised by admirers around the world, including English poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who dubbed Poe 'the literary glory of America.' British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called him 'the supreme original short story writer of all time.'" The tender and somewhat idealized stamp portrait (click to enlarge) was painted by the highly accomplished American artist Micheal J. Deas.

Deas' book, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe, contains this more troubling image of the master, taken the year before his untimely death (click HERE to enlarge).

Here Poe's oddly bifurcated face appears simultaneously arrogant and afraid, giving hint to the deep divisions of his soul. Poe was a famously haunted writer, obsessed with the paradox of beauty and death.

He married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, and for six years watched her slowly die of consumption. Peter Ackroyd, in Poe, A Life Cut Short, writes that "All his life he liked to wander through cemeteries. Death and beauty were, in his imagination, inextricably and perpetually associated. 'No more' was his favorite phrase. The secret chambers and the mouldering mansions, in which his fictions loved to dwell, are to be construed as those of the mind or of the grave."

His own strange death is worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Here's how his demise is described in Wikipedia:

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own. Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Some sources say Poe's final words were "Lord help my poor soul." All medical records, including his death certificate, have been lost. Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. However, the actual cause of death remains a mystery...
We may be com-memorating his birth this year, but Poe might have preferred that we commemorate his death--the moment when the poet was, finally, 'no more.'

Two Sides of the American Coin

2009-02-05T12:24:00.000-08:00

We hear that at the Davos economic summit world leaders were piling on the new game in town--blaming America for causing the global financial crisis. However just or unjust this may be, it's certainly understandable, especially with the American Bernard Madoff parading as the new poster boy for greed run amock.

At this lowly juncture, it may be worthwhile to point out that the flip side of America's 'excessive' greed is America's great generosity. Indeed, the worst thing about the Madoff scandal is the number of charities whose funds have been lost. As has often been noted, Americans lead the world in charitable giving:

In 2005, Americans gave $260.28 billion to scores of religious, environmental, and health organizations—$15 billion more than in 2004.
In 2006, Americans gave nearly $300 billion to charitable causes, setting a record and besting the 2005 total that had been boosted by a surge in aid to victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the Asian tsunami.
Warren Buffet pledged to donate $37 billion to charity.
About 65 percent of households with incomes lower than $100,000 give to charity.
The U.S. government gave about $20 billion in foreign aid in 2004, while Americans privately gave $24.2 billion.
Americans per capita individually give about three and a half times more money per year, than the French per capita. They also give seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians.

Everyone understands the temptation of greed. What remains a great mystery is the impulse of human kindness. Here's a very elegant and beautiful statement on the nature of kindness--from, of all people, that renowned philosopher of economic selfishness, Adam Smith:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

Swarms Spawned from Serotonin?

2009-02-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

From Los Angeles Times:

Desert locusts are normally solitary individuals who eke out a meager subsistence while avoiding others of their species. But when food sources become abundant, such as after a rain, they transform into ravening packs of billions of insects that can strip a landscape bare.
The key to the transformation, researchers said Friday, is the brain chemical serotonin, the chemical that in humans modulates anger, aggression, mood, appetite, sexuality and a host of other behaviors.

Serotonin at Work: On left, a locust is ready to swarm and devastate crops. On right, one is in loner mode.
The locusts swarm when contact with one another triples their serotonin levels, British and Australian researchers reported in the journal Science.

It appears from this video that certain aromatic compounds can have a similar effect on human serotonin levels :