Word: shamanism
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Playing another radio host, Robin Williams spun this voluptuous sort of word web for maybe 15 minutes in Good Morning, Vietnam and won an Oscar nomination. What does Bogosian deserve? For most of this engrossing, infuriating movie, he sits in a radio studio and just talks, a shaman sparking his listeners' minds around the communal campfire. It is a spellbinding turn...
Walt Disney was of course more than America's story-spinning uncle; he was the canniest businessman in Hollywood. His credo might have been the Jesuits': Give me a child before he's seven, and he will be mine for life. Once this shaman-showman had seized kids' minds, he could raid their piggy banks. And on that mountain of pennies he could build an empire. His cartoons and feature films sired comic books, toys, hit songs (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, When You Wish upon a Star, Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah) and the ubiquitous Mickey...
Together, book and movie create a portrait of the shaman as showman -- demanding everything of himself and his sidemen so he can give everything onstage. The autobiography shows him honing his lyrics, teasing the word "motoring" into "motorvating" for Maybellene, finding inspiration for a verse of Brown Eyed Handsome Man from Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, fretting that while in prison he cannot gain access to a map that would help him chart Po' Boy's itinerary in Promised Land. And once he got it right, he always wanted it to be the same kind of right...
...political artists, the conceptualists with chips on their shoulders. Some were raised in the divided city; others had been drawn there by the Free University or, more generally, by the anarchic and utopian Bohemia of the '60s: the Fluxus group and its best-known member, Joseph Beuys, with his shaman's wands and dead hares; Eugen Schonebeck, with his images of mutants and cripples; K.H. Hodicke, who made fervently swiped homages to Max Beckmann; and Georg Baselitz, creator of clumsy, wistful figures stumbling about in an apocalyptic landscape...
Some of these people would have fallen for a shaman, any fool who claimed, say, he could bend spoons with his mind. But Rinpoche was not a charlatan. By all accounts, he was brilliant, he was the real thing. The easiest conclusion to draw, looking from the outside in, is that he was an astute businessman. His devotees ran to the upper middle class, white, with impressive academic credentials. They dressed like Dharma bums in the beginning, but soon the teacher had them shaved, suited and cravated. If they did not exactly turn their pockets inside out for their teacher...