Word: shamanism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Branding is, well, a hot trend largely due to Fakir Musafar, 69, a former ad executive who calls himself a shaman and devotes his life to bod-mod, along with other more fantastic practices like O-Kee-Pa, a mystical Native American body-suspension ceremony. Musafar started a California state-licensed branding school in 1992 and has spread his philosophy through a website and a quarterly magazine called Body Play. He claims that branding is now administered by some 50 people in the Western world and could hit the mainstream in the way piercing did a few years...
...native medicine men in the Amazon rain forest, Davi relies on hallucinogenic powders to reach the spirit world, but this leader of the Yanomami Indians also wields a more modern means of communication: a two-way radio. When an otherworldly voice squawks through the speaker, Davi wraps up his shaman's crown of toucan feathers, dons uncomfortable city clothes and walks to a clearing in the forest, where a four-seater plane awaits, propellers revving...
This is brisk, epic storytelling. Like a shaman in a village circle, the film spins the old saga, made familiar in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books and nearly 50 films, but with a fresh and affecting power. Now it is a safari into the interior of Tarzan's conflicted soul, where he searches not so much for his mate Jane as for his place in a society of men and apes. Though it would be nuts to predict Lion King-size revenues (that film and its ancillary markets made Disney $1 billion in profit), it is also hard to believe...
When drivers aren't praying, they're fasting. Who knew they were an offshoot of the Franciscan monks? As I'm talking to Kyle Petty, the ponytailed shaman among NASCAR drivers, he goes into the refrigerator of his trailer for an energy bar and makes sure it has the right ratio of protein to carbohydrates. "In the trailer park where all the drivers live in their coaches, if you're out of skim milk or tuna, you know what door to knock on, because you know who's on what diet...
...three men trying to cope with these mid-ether collisions of dollars and expectations are an unlikely team. Greenspan, the data-loving analyst with government roots sunk back into the financial and moral chaos of the Nixon Administration, and a shaman-like power over global markets. Rubin, the Goldman Sachs wonder boy who ran the firm's complex and dangerous arbitrage operations and then led it to rocket-ship international growth. And Summers, the Harvard-trained academic who is invariably called the Kissinger of economics: a total pragmatist whose ambition sometimes grates but whose intellect never fails to dazzle...