The Best Laughter

John Huston, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich

"There is a laughter that goes so far as to lose touch with its motive and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best."  

~Max Beerbohm 

Shangri La?

Having recently written a novel about the longing for utopia (The Assassin Lotus), it was wonderful to take a trip with my wife to a real-world paradise--the "Garden Isle" of Kauai. Oldest of the Hawaiian Islands, it remains as lush and wild as when I traveled there as a teenager some 40 years ago. A veritable Garden of Eden--without a single snake!  Click the pics to enlarge:

The Storm Before the Calm

"Christ Before Pilate" - Andrea Mantegna, 1500

"Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of man's consciousness, with all its crises, pangs, and torments." 

~Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik

A Baroque Birthday

Johann Sebastian Bach
March 31, 1685 - July 28, 1750

"To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time."                                 ~ Pablo Casals

"If Bach is not in Heaven.....I am not going!"                           ~ William F. Buckley

The Bravest

"US Soldier in Baghdad," photo by Karen Ballard

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."

~ Thucydides (460-395 BC)

Fanaticism

"All men harbor fears and doubts. We struggle to overcome them. Fanaticism springs from the effort to deny them."

~Professor Conrad Woolsey in THE ASSASSIN LOTUS

The Big Picture