Patanjali: Conquering Sexual Indulgence In 8 Easy Steps...

"Simply abstaining from sex will not bring about "continence". For this state to be achieved, the following 8 forms of sexual indulgence must be conquered":

THINKING OF

TALKING ABOUT

JOKING

LOOKING INTENTLY

SECRET TALK

RESOLVE

ATTEMPT

EXECUTION

-Patanjali ("Yogi Sutras." Scholars estimate that Patanjali lived some time between 400 B.C. and 200 A.D., though they are in disagreement about these dates. While the scholars debate the actual dates of Patanjali, oral tradition accounts for the apparent time differences by explaining that the name Patanjali is a surname, and is the name of a lineage and school of teachers, students, and sages, rather than being only one person. However, for convenience sake, Patanjali is spoken of as a single person, who might have been founder of the lineage. Although Patanjali is a surname of the lineage, there have also been several individuals with the name Patanjali, which may or may not have been related with the lineage relating to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Oral tradition: In addition, the Yoga traditions are historically oral traditions, and some say the Yoga Sutras were not written down for at least a couple hundred years after they were systematized by Patanjali. During that period it was the custom for the entirety of the Yoga Sutras to be memorized as a part of the practice. This type of learning is still done today by a few teachers and students, though many of them now do this as an intellectual study of Sanskrit, rather than as an aid to practice and direct experience. -"Pandit Usharbudh Arya, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Vol. I, 1986. Image: Jane Russell, "The Outlaw,"1943 ).

HISTORY: Celebrity Body Snatching: Charlie Chaplin's Stolen Body Found...

"The coffin containing the body of Charlie Chaplin - missing since his grave was robbed 11 weeks ago - has been found. It was dug up from a field about a mile away from the Chaplin home in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland. The legendary comedian died on Christmas Day last year, aged 88. He was buried two days later in the village of Corsier in the hills above Lake Geneva.

"Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."
-Lady Oona Chaplin

Swiss police have arrested two men - a Pole aged 24 and a Bulgarian aged 38 - and say they have confessed to stealing the coffin and reburying it. Names of the accused have not been released, but police say they are both motor mechanics. They were traced after police kept a watch on 200 phone kiosks and tapped the Chaplins' phone after the family received ransom demands of £400,000 for return of the body after it went missing in March. Sir Charles' 51-year-old widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay up saying: "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous." In further calls the kidnappers made threats to harm her two youngest children.

The family kept silent about the ransom demands and various rumours circulated about the missing coffin. One Hollywood report suggested it had been dug up because Sir Charles was a Jew buried in a gentile cemetery. Lady Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill inherited about £12m after the death of her husband. The couple and their eight children have been living in Lausanne since 1952. A spokesman for the Chaplins said: "The family is very happy and relieved that this ordeal is over." Superintendent Gabriel Cettou, the head of the Geneva police, said the two men would be charged with attempted extortion and disturbing the peace of the dead.

-BBC News (On This Day, 5.17.1978. Image: Charlie Chaplin's Exhumed Coffin, 1978).

Clifford Odets: On Booze, Love & Longing

"Sid Jeffers: I envy people who drink. At least they know what to blame everything on.

Helen Wright: If it's so simple, why don't you drink?

Sid Jeffers: Me? I have no character.

Helen Wright: I love you so much, I don't care what I think of you."

**********************

"Paul Boray: All my life I wanted to do the right thing but it never worked out. I'm outside always looking in. Feeling all the time I'm far away from home and where home is I don't know. I can't get back to the simple happy kid I used to be."

-Clifford Odets & Zachary Gold (HUMORESQUE, 1946)

Hollywood: When Is Film Art? When Genius Meets Insanity

"As chronicled in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the lunatics were running the Hollywood asylum of the '60s and early '70s. The noun "auteur" was actually bestowed on American filmmakers like Robert Downey Sr. (the father of Junior), Hal Ashby, Arthur Penn, Jerry Schatzberg, Paul Mazursky, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and the great Kubrick. For my taste, the finest film of the era was 1969's Midnight Cowboy, directed by John Schlesinger, a Brit working in the U.S. The buddy story of male hustler Joe Buck and street grifter Ratso Rizzo was the ultimate example of anti-heroicism and we were all anti-heroes. We recognized that life is not a Hollywood movie in which the leading man gets the dame and all is wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. We saw that "decent" men gave us Vietnam and war crimes and that those in the lower rungs of the class system often embodied real decency, potentially more so than the clean stereotypes Hollywood had previously foisted on the marks.

These epiphanies were not the result of mere agit-prop by the filmmakers. They experimented, engaged in flashbacks and dreams, broke the fourth wall. THEY DID NOT FOLLOW THE RULES. All great art is created by artists who break the rules and allow their imagination free reign.

Then one day we woke up: Reagan was president and films were movies again. There are exceptions (the fab Coen Brothers), but even most of the exceptions lack the ferocity and vision of a Roeg. Spielberg and Lucas spewed out childish and manipulative crap for a dumbed-down and subdued nation. What had been a B-movie in terms of story was now the blockbuster. It was morning in America again and we were in mourning. As for Hollywood, there are many reasons for this descent into mediocrity. Beyond the country turning hard-right, accountants and agents had replaced eccentric, dope-addled businessmen who, while not exactly Abbie Hoffmans, were nonetheless willing to take risks.

Again, all great artists take risks. Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The politics of a film is the budget of a film." Where the lunatics once ran the asylum, the bureaucrats were now back in control.

To paraphrase something Coppola noted years ago, the great hope of film-as-art remains with a fourteen-year old girl holding a cheap digital video camera. She won't have to answer to accountants and her personal vision will be available for download on the Internet. The artist will prevail.

When is film art? When artists -- not compromised and spineless yuppies -- make films. They're out there, but chances are you won't find them if you're sitting through twenty-three coming attractions and eleven commercials."

-Michael Simmons (EXCERPT: Huffington Post: "When Is Film Art?" 3.12.08)

Judy Garland: Tried Like Hell

"I wanted to believe. I tried my damnedest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn't...SO WHAT!"

-Judy Garland ( on audio tape and drunker than hell from her unpublished autobiography for Random House Publishing, 1960s).

Genius.