celebrityshame
A recently unveiled statue of Mary Wollstonecraft has caused outrage by depicting the pioneering feminist writer naked. The statue depicts a nude woman emerging from an amorphous mound of organic matter. The BBC described the statue as “a swirling mingle of female forms.” The problem isn’t the statue. It’s the underlying unconscious shame that precludes our ability […]
In What is the mother wound? I’ve written about the single, multi-faceted wound at the core of all humanity. It’s the cause of our bloodthirsty history—what we like to call ‘civilization’—and our current world in crisis. It’s the hidden objective of all personal development and emotional healing work. Trying to ‘fill the hole’ Knowingly or […]
In the early hours of 2 July 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested at a secluded property in New Hampshire. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations charged the British socialite with several counts relating to sexual abuse by the disgraced, deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein. The charges relate to procuring and grooming young women, many of them […]
I’ve been reading Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now – On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Richardson, a Canadian journalist and motorcyclist, was sufficiently inspired by Pirsig’s philosophical travelogue Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to fuel up his own bike a few years ago and retrace Pirsig’s 1968 […]
Australian Channel Nine newsreader Samantha Heathwood has acquired celebrity status after images of her wearing a jacket with a penis-shaped neckline went viral in early January 2019. The jacket makes Heathwood appear as if she has a large phallus dangling from her neck with its tip nestling between her breasts. Heathwood follows in the footsteps—if […]
On Friday 8 June 2018 the foodie world reeled to the news that celebrity food author and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain, 61, had committed suicide. I never met Bourdain. I never even read his acclaimed book, Kitchen Confidential, though I meant to. But his TV shows like No Reservations and Parts Unknown were go-to choices […]
The media dubbed it—perhaps for the first time—the ‘crime of the century’. On the night of 25 June 1906, Harry K. Thaw shot architect Stanford White at point-blank range in the rooftop restaurant of New York’s Madison Square Gardens. Stanford White was a major public figure. New York was in its Gilded Age of railroad […]
I recently wrote about the influence of unconscious shame upon the personality of perhaps the single most memorable individual to emerge from World War I, T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Since then I have been reading Scott Anderson’s monumental work, Lawrence in Arabia. Anderson’s work is fascinating because, while Lawrence is […]
Shifting Sands, an exhibition at the British Civil War Centre in Newark, examines the perennially fascinating story of T. E. Lawrence—a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia—from multiple perspectives: historical, archaeological and personal. Pursuing clues in Lawrence’s brilliant work on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, archaeologists have discovered places like Tooth Hill—a Lawrence campsite—and the remains […]
I don’t have a single favourite film. But there is a bunch of films, indeterminate in number, that rise above the rest. Wonder Boys, Shakespeare in Love, Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Sunset Boulevard… and American Beauty. American Beauty was a Hollywood wet dream, a modestly budgeted feature that smashed the 2000 Oscars. It won five statuettes, […]