Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account.
The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
Modern men in the throes of a midlife crisis have been known to overhaul their careers, their relationships—even their bodies. Few, though, intentionally induce hallucinations in order to commune with demons and deities and end up creating a text transforming—at least indirectly—the entire field of psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung was 37 when by most accounts he lost his soul. As psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani explained, “Jung had reached a point in 1912 when he’d achieved all of his youthful ambitions but felt that he’d lost meaning in his life, an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth.”
In fact, the dilemma was so profound it eventually caused the father of analytical psychology to undergo a series of waking fantasies. Traveling from Zurich to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in October 1913, Jung was roused by a troubling vision of “European-wide destruction.” In place of the normally serene fields and trees, one of the era’s pre-eminent thinkers saw the landscape submerged by a river of blood carrying forth not only detritus but also dead bodies. When that vision resurfaced a few weeks later—on the same journey—added to the mix was a voice telling him to “look clearly; all this would become real.” World War I broke out the following summer.
These experiences prompted Jung to question his own sanity. But they also motivated him to embark on what turned out to be a 16-year self-seeking journey documented in a red leather journal titled “Liber Novus” (Latin for “New Book”). It features ethereal, often unsavory passages and shocking yet vibrant images expressing what Jung himself termed a “confrontation with the unconscious.”
Mr. Shamdasani, who got hold of a copy in 1996, took five years to understand it and three years to convince the Jung family to allow the journal’s publication. (…)
The result was W.W. Norton’s “The Red Book: Liber Novus.”
I am a nerd. This fact was quite apparent to many of those around me growing up, but came as quite a surprise to me. Part of the reason that I was regarded as a nerd was because I wasn’t into sports. (…) Being a nerd, of course, I developed my love through study, through reading. (…)
Through reading, sports ceased to be a private vocabulary—one that every other boy seemed to have had whispered into his ear at infancy, but which had strangely been denied to me—and became instead a new intellectual problem, something else to be considered and solved.
The thrill of sports is and will always be largely visceral. I would have it no other way. But behind the moments of raw action are endless intricacies, seemingly limitless geometries of movement which can be studied and enjoyed in precisely the same way one enjoys science, math or history. I’m sure some people are probably reading that sentence in horror–the division between jock and nerd is so elementary and animalistic I’m surprised Joseph Campbell never wrote about it–but I mean merely that intellectual play in the consideration of sports is little different than in any other subject. There is something universal in the basic pleasure of applying mind to (subject) matter and slowly, gradually, feeling the unknown become the familiar.
I publish this column every year as a public service to make sure your friends and relatives will think twice before they send you an invitation that will screw you out of a precious summer weekend.
Why do they do it?
Why do our friends and relatives destroy the summer for us? Why can’t they get married in February? Why do they choose the middle of summer to have birthdays, anniversaries, Bar Mitzvahs, family, college, high school and even nursery school reunions? That’s not all. Frankly, some of them are thoughtless enough to die in June, July and August, and there goes another summer weekend.
I promise that if it’s possible, when it’s time for me to go, I will go on life support until some rainy Friday morning in January so that my mourners can bury me early in the morning and still enjoy a three-day weekend. That’s the kind of generous guy I am. (…)
Which brings me to summer weddings in the city. They must be banned.
There are some facts that people who drag their friends away from the beach for their wedding must be made aware of. Jerry Seinfeld, an East Hampton resident, had a message for all the newly engaged couples: “Nobody wants to go to your wedding! We are not excited like you are.”
Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.
After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”
Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.
in the beginning there was imp, and imp had a groove. and from this groove came the grooves of all grooves. and while one day viciously throwing down on her box, imp boldly declared, let there be house! and house music was born. i am, you see, i am the creator, and this is my house, and in my house there is only house music. but i am not so selfish, because once you’re into my house it then becomes our house and our house music. and you see, no one man owns house, because house music is a universal language spoken and understood by all. in every house, you understand, there is a keeper and in this house the keeper is imp. now, some of you might wonder, who is imp and what is it that imp does? imp is the one who gives you the power to imp your body. imp is the one who gives you the power to do the snake. imp is the one who gives you the key to the power disco. imp is the one that can bring nations and nations of all impers together under one house. you may be black, you may be white, you may be jew, or gentile. it doesn’t make a difference in our house.
I’m getting to that age where it pays to be proactive and start getting tested for the myriad of things that can go wrong with my body. One of the things I wanted to get over with is a check for colon cancer. Although I’m officially younger than the “suggested age” for a colonoscopy, I wanted to get it out of the way. I had read and heard too many stories about people who found polyps and how if “they had only caught them a little sooner” it would be no big deal to remove them. So I set my appointment and went for it.
Like every guy, the thought of being violated by a long tube is at the very bottom of the list of things I want to do on a summer day. I could live with having to take all the laxatives that lead up to the procedure, That’s just more time to get my reading done. But the tube up the outdoor, that’s scary.
Well this morning was the morning. I had officially lost 4 pounds to the laxative over the past 24 hours and was surprisingly not hungry after going without food for the past 24 hours as I got to the hospital at the prime time of 7am.
I was definitely nervous. Despite doctors and nurses telling me it would be a breeze, I was naturally skeptical.
A breeze was an overstatement. I can honestly say that if it made medical sense to get one done every year, i would have no problem with it. It was easy and breezy .
Once I got into the Gastro Room where they did these, they told me that they were going to knock me out, and I would get a nap and wake up like nothing happened . They were right. One minute Im talking rugby, the next I’m waking up, picking up the conversation where I left off and being told to “dispell the air in my system”.
No where else can you rip off some huge farts and have 3 nurses and a doctor, while maintaining a very professional demeanor, tell you that you aren’t done yet and demand that you let loose a few more.
I’ve been there. A thousand years ago, my wife, the beautiful Judy Licht, and I traveled 3,000 miles with our daughter Jessie, then a three-year-old, to Disneyland to see “Mickey.”
We were less than 20 feet inside the Disney property when three characters, one dressed like Pluto, along with one dyspeptic-looking and another dopey-looking dwarf, rushed up and hugged my daughter. She started to hysterically scream, thinking she was being attacked by a nine-foot-tall dog and two four-foot dwarfs with giant heads. She didn’t stop crying for hours. The only character who calmed her down was an attractive young blond woman in a pink dress who was billed as Cinderella. It was quite a sight – there was Cinderella kneeling down so that she was eye level with about eight little kids who were gazing at her in awe.
There were the children’s mothers, misty-eyed at their kids’ sense of innocence and wonder. There were the kids’ fathers, standing on their toes to better look down the front of Cinderella’s dress. Forget men are from Mars, women are from Venus; this, I thought, is the difference between men and women. I remember feeling like a low-life standing there, with the other fathers, on our toes trying to get a look at Cinderella’s cleavage. I don’t know about the other men, but I hated myself. For crying out loud, I was lusting after Cinderella! What was next for me, Snow White?
Of course my daughter was too young to go on any ride except something called the “Pink Teacup.” I had to ride with her over and over, spinning around until I almost threw up the corn dogs, frozen bananas and icky green drink that I had eaten because it was the stuff that passed as food in Disney World in those days.
Did I learn my lesson that trip? Of course not – a few years later, I carried my sleeping four-year-old son on my back for hours at Epcot Center in Florida. After a while, he felt like he weighed 200 pounds. This may give me a heart attack, I thought to myself. Then I started wondering if the EMS guys, who were going to have to paddle my heart back into rhythm, would arrive with paddles that had Disney characters painted on them.
Frank settled down in the Valley and he hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife’s forehead. He sold used office furniture out there on San Fernando Road and assumed a 30,000 dollar loan at fifteen and a quarter percent put a down payment on a little two bedroom place. His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash. Made good Bloody Mary’s. Kept her mouth shut most of the time. Had a little Chihuahua named Carlos that had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind. They had a thoroughly modern kitchen. Self-cleaning oven, the whole bit. Frank drove a little sedan. They were so happy. One night Frank was on his way home from work. He stopped at the liquor store. Picked up a couple of Mickey’s Big Mouths. Drank ‘em in the car, and with a Shell station he got a gallon of gas in a can. Drove home, doused everything in the house. Torched it. Parked across the street laughing. Watching it burn. All Halloween orange and chimney red. Then Frank put on a top forty station. Got on the Hollywood Freeway and headed North. Never could stand that dog.
Ruby Mazur, creator of the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, received a call most artists only dream about.
A native New Yorker and a Las Vegas resident since 2000, Mazur has been invited by the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to show a retrospective exhibition of his entire collection of paintings.
“That’s heavy, man,” Mazur said Thursday. The Whitney is considered among the worlds’ top contemporary museums.
Las Vegans might get first peek at the exhibition. Mazur not only has a one-man exhibition at Art de Vignettes at the Fashion Show Mall on July 22, but the Whitney might launch the exhibition here, Mazur said.
His Stones’ logo was selected in 1971 after Mick Jagger asked Mazur to create it. It made an immediate splash.
“I did it over a weekend and when I took it to his house on Mullholland Drive (in Hollywood), I gave it to him outside by his pool. He got so excited he pushed me, and I fell back into the pool, fully dressed.”
The logo remains the Stones’ emblem.
“It made me,” Mazur said.
He’s done more than 3,000 album covers, including childhood pal Billy Joel ’s “Cold Spring Harbor,” Elton John ’s “Friends,” and the soundtrack album cover and artwork for the advertising campaign for “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
Tom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. Any regrets? Absolutely none.
Finally I went to 104, still musing, alarmed by the grim power of this corner of Paris, passing in front of the hotel Royal-Aboukir (what a name!). All this was like some disinherited New York neighborhood, on the smaller Parisian scale. At dinner (a good risotto, but the beef, of course, not cooked at all), I felt comfortable with friends: A. C., Philippe Roger, Patricia, and a young woman, Frédérique, who was wearing a rather formal gown, its unusual shade of blue soothing; she didn’t say much, but she was there , and I thought that such attentive and marginal presences were necessary to the good economy of a party. (…)
In the taxi on the way home, storm and heavy rain. I hang around the house (eating some toast and feta), then, telling myself I must lose the habit of calculating my pleasures (or my deflections), I leave the house again and go see the new porno film at Le Dragon: as always—and perhaps even more so than usual—dreadful. I dare not cruise my neighbor, though I probably could (idiotic fear of being rejected). Downstairs into the back room; I always regret this sordid episode afterward, each time suffering the same sense of abandonment.
You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. (…) After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?
However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.
The doors open and three women step on: a blonde, a brunette and one whose hair has been bleached and blown dry so many times it’s not a discernible color. All of the women could stand to have a good 3 inches cut off their hair. They wear slight variations on the Little Black Slut Dress. They wear too much makeup, a pair of shoes that doesn’t quite match the dress, towering heels.
The man in the corner rolls his eyes and thinks to himself, “And I’m the hooker.”
That’s right: I’m 47 years old, I’m a good 30 pounds overweight, and I make my living by taking care of men who come to Las Vegas hoping for some skin time with other men — for a fee. And in case you’re ready to dismiss me as someone clinging onto the last shreds of his faded beauty, you should know that I was well into my 40s before I started hooking.
In a Tampa Bay area hospice, the mystery of a man with no identity.
Here lies a man who does not exist. He is very old, and maybe a little deaf. His hair has gone white and his teeth have gone missing. He will tell you he is 95. But later he might say 94, or 93. He says he has traveled the world as a hobo. Slept under trucks, on park benches, in barns. Played football with Burt Reynolds and baseball with Fidel Castro.
But his stories shift and change, and he admits he hasn’t always been truthful. But no one knows why. He carries no identification. He swears he’s never smiled for a passport photo. He has no birth certificate, no Social Security card. No family. Just a couple of old friends. And before he dies, even they want to know: Who is Roger George?(…)
People die with secrets all the time. Secret affairs, secret pasts, secret urges. Roger George’s secrets appear to be much more fundamental. Maybe he’s entitled to those secrets, whatever they are. Or maybe he’s just a sweet old man with a foggy memory and a colorful life.
When I was single, I toured around Japan while between jobs, and early in my trip hooked up with a couple of fellow Americans—a former college basketball player and multi-millionaire heir, and his girlfriend, an IBM salesperson. He was about 6’5”; she was 6’1”, ponytailed, and looked like a beach volleyball player. I’m 6’3”.
In just the past generation, the Japanese have pretty much caught up with Westerners in terms of height, but 22 years ago, people of our size were still a novelty, and the three of us were mobbed on a couple of occasions—I have some photographs of the millionaire’s girlfriend and me in a parking lot at Mt. Fuji surrounded by high-school girls clamoring for our autographs merely because of our foreignness and our parents’ foresight in deeding us tall genes. (…)
Lastly, whether they are drunk or sober, Japan’s people are at once welcoming and friendly, and yet incredibly prone to either cause foreigners to act in foolish ways, or to act, themselves, in foolish ways in front of foreigners.
{ In performance piece ‘object if i’, artist Bon Jane invited street-side passerby’s to photograph her inside a cardboard box in various stages of undress and self-adornment. Held in NY on 23rd street at 10th avenue october 22nd 2009 from 6-8pm | Bon Jane | more }
