Word: shamans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shaman placed a bamboo shoot filled with hallucinogenic snuff against Mark Plotkin's left nostril and blew into the tube. Plotkin's head snapped back, he recalls, as if he "had been hit with a war club." Little men began dancing before his eyes. He asked the shaman who they were. "They are the hekuri," the wise man replied, "the spirits of the forest...
Celebrity best sellers like Andrew Weil's 8 Weeks to Optimum Health (Knopf; $23) and Jean Carper's Miracle Cures (HarperCollins; $25) may promise more than they can deliver, but they do contain healthful hints. If you want to add adventure, read Mark Plotkin's Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice (Penguin; $14), which shows how ethnobotanists comb jungles for natural cures...
...late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that art could release his inner shaman, antlers, rattle and all. Hence the portentous "mythic" subjects of his pictures (The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pasiphae and so on) and their general ooga-wooga atmosphere. As Varnedoe writes, "The godsend, liberating idea for him was the one he got simultaneously from looking at modern art and listening...
Eddie Murphy--bald, blissful and guileless--is top-billed in this clever, derivative comedy (think The Truman Show with lower ratings) about a wandering shaman who stumbles into fame on a home shopping network. But the real star is Jeff Goldblum as the network's frazzled manager. With his lupine smile and fake-intimate voice, he pushes a line of patter that is just a bit too slick to pass for charm. And when his life starts crumbling, you can almost smell his comic flop sweat through the screen. Tom Schulman's script is smart about the media's ability...
...them, the cures for just about any disease imaginable. This is taught to every second grader, and it is one of the main themes in the new IMAX film Amazon. Now playing at the Boston Museum of Science, Amazon follows two medicine men--an American ethnobotonist and a tribal shaman--on their separate quests for new plants and possible medicines, before they are gone. Although it hasn't been as well publicized as Everest, the other IMAX film currently playing at the museum, crowds of a respectable size still venture out into the night to see the show, even...