“Poetry, Music, Forests, Oceans, Solitude—They were what developed enormous personal strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.” —Herb Elliot, Olympic Champion and World-Record Holder the Mile who trained in bare feet, wrote poetry and retired undefeated. Rising up, a head [...]
“Who could conquer Tenochtitlan? Who could shake the foundation of heaven…?” It is the winter of 1519 and there is much ado in Old Worlds and New: the Roman Papacy, led by Leo X is doing its best to suppress a renegade heretic named Martin Luther from spreading his blasphemies; Ferdinand Magellan is outfitting [...]
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made…” — [Genesis 3:1] Where does life come from? It’s a question that has plagued man since the first spark of consciousness emerged. To seek it, people have looked to the sky, opened up sacred books, peered through microscopes, [...]
Of all the major metropolitan cities in America, none deserve the misanthrope’s fury more than Los Angeles. After all, what urban area better represents the false promises of contemporary American Dreams than the one that declares you’re special and deserve your own TV show, only to exchange that dangling carrot for a dishwasher’s rag or [...]
“This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.” — Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights We can thank people like Bob Moog for his eponymous synthesizers, Tsutomu Katoh for his Korg brand of musical [...]
“Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” — Patti Smith, Just Kids In one of my favorite scenes in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee [...]
“Du grand art dans la noirceur cauchemardesque.” * — Michel Lebrun, on Thierry Jonquet’s work. Throughout the millennia spiders have been represented in art as creative and cruel, perspicacious and pernicious. They can be as deceptive and deadly as they are delicate and demure. Tarantulas, basically bigger, hairier versions, belong to the same order–Araneae–as their [...]
That Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom, debuted at #1 on the Fiction section of the New York Times Bestsellers List in September last year is one of those phenomenal outliers that defy the logic of free market capitalism. It’s not that it has no business being #1 when the spot is usually held by the [...]
“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” — David Byrne “When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you [...]
Across the barren steppe totem flags flap in the cold winds that blow from the Altai mountains beneath a bright blue sky. The world’s last wild horses run in the distance as herds of goat, sheep and cows graze on the sparse grass. A shaman’s drum beats rhythmically across the land while a woman in [...]
GIA, ETA, IRA, ELN, FARC, Tamil Tigers, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayaf. What do these names mean? What makes the men who establish & recruit for them tick? To try and answer these questions, HESO looks at Phil Rees’ seminal book Dining With Terrorists
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died this past week, but it is not true to say that we suffered a terrible loss with his passing. There can be no question that his passing will be noted. If not all of us collectively, I, at least, will certainly miss him. But Mr. Vonnegut described to us throughout his [...]
Japan has, at least since the 1980’s, been associated with the future. Ridley Scott based the set of his sci-fi classic Blade Runner partly on Osaka. Likewise, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and a number of his other novels), the book that popularized the term cyberspace along with the cyberpunk genre, was set in partly in Tokyo. [...]
