Women Rule The World... Get Used To It

Women rule the world, so get used to it. Now When I say "get used to it", I mean women need to get used to it. Men are getting used to it, if not completely so.

I don't think women understand the amount of influence and power they hold today. Seriously. Women hold high positions in the workplace, receive higher wages than ever, and have an immense influence in politics. And even with wages, women complain they don't receive equal pay. Of course, there are some excuses men can come up with why that is so, such as maternity leave, supposed "sick days" on a monthly cycle, and so forth. But female CEOs and bosses will make the same excuses for why they don't give equal pay to women.

The fact of the matter is that the world we live in today was built by men. I'll say it again, men built this world. Commerce, economy, politics, religion, science, any kind of -ology, art, architecture, written language, mathematics, school, the workplace environment, factories, et cetera... all built by men. That is because men are biologically the most useless creatures, save for about five seconds out of their whole lives (i.e. when men plant their seed into the womb, to put it nicely). Women raise, nurse, feed, accompany, and support the children, not mention hauling another human life form around for nine months, followed by painful labor. Men don't really do much else. So, in order to contribute men built a world full of biologically useless things for them to fill their time with (like philosophy, art, politics) in order to "contribute" to the rearing of a child.

But of course women wanted in on this action as well. Consider Cleopatra always trying to weasel her way into the Roman Empire's imperial ruling of the Caesars. Or just think about the old proverb "Behind every great man there's a great woman." Women ran the household, so of course women dictated a part of every man's life.

Socrates once said : "If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." True to speak. Men had to find a way to get away from their wives every once in a while. So they invent things like philosophy, so they can say "Don't bother me. I'm thinking." And if that wasn't enough, men created fraternal secret societies, which, of course, women want in on now (even though they have the Eastern Star).

Women don't even have to obey their husbands anymore, which was a sort of rule that has been so ingrained in our culture that it deserves mentioning. There is a lot of fuse over the fact that Kate Middleton didn't make a vow to Prince William to obey him. What did you expect? This is is the 1850's anymore! Female senators, female governors, female presidential candidates (and future presidents), female Speakers of the House... There is a silly post-it note pack at my work that says : "If men rule the world, then why do they wear ties?" Well it's a damn good question considering men don't rule the world anymore. Maybe a woman could answer that one for us men.

And yet the feminists rant on, claim oppression and mistreatment, which, of course, exists; but women beating their husbands exists as well. Women just need to get used to the fact that they rule the world (and if not totally, then totally in a few decades). Get used to it, then shut up.

"We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really what we need."
~Tyler Durden

 

Jesus : Lost In Space

Recently a friend sent me proof of Hell's existence (and therefore Heaven's existence) via a thermodynamic proof given by a student. Albeit this is an urban legend (see Snopes), it does raise some interesting aspects about religion and proof of the unknown.

It seems that ever since Copernicus we have been trying to justify religious text as actual fact, when, point in fact, they are not. How could they be? I'll give that fictitious student's "proof" some credit, as it is a rather ingenious fallacy that left me speechless. But really, there can be no Hell, at least not in the three-layered universe of the Bible. Of course, we know that the center of the earth is very hot; hot as hell. But religious fanatics try to use suspicious evidence like the legendary well dug in Siberia, that unveiled ("apocalypse"?) the screams of thousands of souls. Later Satan himself popped out of the hole to challenge someone to a fiddle match. Of course, this hoax is widely credited as literal proof of Hell's existence.

And just as a side note : aren't Christians being rather Pagan by using the name "hell"? The term "hell" comes from the Norse "Hel", who was the daughter of Loki and the Giantess, and is Queen of the Underworld (equivalent of the Greek Hecate and Persephone). She is half dead, and half alive, and very, very evil. Why didn't they just keep calling it Sheol like the Jews had been?

Nevertheless, it seems that in an age of science that religions need actual proof of things that are supposed to be based on faith anyway. Since the universe has become more and more understood in the past couple century, there really is no place left for God to hide, now is there? Now we start to say that God and Heaven (and Hell) are in another dimension... really? (Or with the Mormons God lives on another planet called Kolob). Where does it talk about parallel dimensions in the Bible / Koran / Torah? Enoch (great-grandfather of Noah) claimed Heaven was just beyond the Fixed Stars (being the celestial dome in which the stars revolve on). And since the Book of Enoch is non-canonical, we have to rely on Genesis, which gives a very brief and highly vague image of the universe. I can only imagine what Galileo was thinking when arguing with some Biblical scholars over these few vague sentences.

Well what if Heaven is just outside the confines of this universe-fish bowl we live in? Well, if that's true, then we have other problems. Two-thousand years ago Jesus died, went to Hell (wherever that is), then came back, danced around for a while, then ascended into Heaven. Since we are relying on evidence (which is often twisted to suit the purpose of whoever), nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. NOTHING. And note, this was a physical ascension, i.e. his body went with him. That must have been incredibly painful (more so than being crucified) if he was going the speed of light. If he was going the speed of light, then he is only about 1500 light years outside the Milky Way (assuming he went outwards perpendicular to the galactic disc. If not, then he is still in the galaxy), which means he is still in proximity of the galaxy. And the universe is about 18.4 billions old, and expands faster than the speed of light (which is not particle travel, and therefore does not violate relativity). The edge of the observable universe is about 47 billions light years away from us. 47,000,000,000 ly - 2,000 ly = 46,999,998,078 ly... Jesus has some distance to cover. Especially since it is still expanding, which means it will take longer than 47 billion years.

Quite frankly, if Jesus was going the speed of light, no one in the Bible ever gave any description indicating redshift. Which means he couldn't have been going that fast.

And you can't argue that Jesus is special and break laws of relativity because he is divine. If he was divine, then you cannot use your silly proof of some cloth with blood from Mary that got there from when the Holy Spirit impregnated her (see Bill Maher's Religuous). If there was proof, it wouldn't be divine.

"The Virgin Birth has nothing to do with biology. The Promise Land has nothing to do with real estate. The apocalypse is not a physical event. They are states of conscious being."
~Joseph Campbell

The Apocalypse : Death By Technical Error

What a sick day and age we live in, where we find life so dull and miserable that we want everything to just die. Although, I conjecture that the origins of the idea of the apocalypse was derived from a mystical understanding of cosmogonic causality, that seems to no longer be the case. The ancients understood patterns in the heavens, as well as on earth, and found a correlation between the two. In addition they realized that all things have a beginning, and with that, all things have an end. Therefore, an end must come for all of existence at some point. Since the end of all of existence would be a very grand thing, there might be signs of it in the heavens, just as we can predict the coming of a comet or the rise of the Nile from certain aspects in the skies.

Today, sadly, we assume the end must be nigh on account of a technical error. Y2K was thought to be the end of everything because of how computer clocks were programmed. Essentially, to save byte space the first two digits of the year were negated. So when 2000 rolled around the computers would think it was 1900, and vast quantities of data would be erased and credit cards would be screwed, and a bunch of other stuff. Wow, two missing digits could cause the end of all things. I don't know what chaos theory has to say about that, but somehow the butterfly simply created a hurricane on its own. The same is true for the an upcoming apocalypse date in the year 2038, because the UTC in Unix will run out of digits and revert back to 0, and will be much like Y2K.

The same can be said for the Mayan calendar, which simply ends December 23, 2012. Though it never occurs to anyone that the Mayan calendar begins something like 3000 years before the calendar was actually created. It seems that they would make the calendar last for sometime, and if they last long enough to see it end, then they probably would have made a new one (just like how every year we make a new calendar). But no! They ran out of digits, that means it's the end of all life and existence as we know it! O, that this too too solid flesh would melt! Woe is me!

Technical errors do not indicate the end of anything. Considering time and space can swap places within the second event horizon of a black hole, it seems pretty solid that the end of time would not have a causal relation to humans forgetting to put in a few extra digits.

It's a bit like the Witch King of Angmar (lead of the Nazgul) in Lord of the Rings, who dies by a technicality. He says no man can kill him. But, of course, Eowyn is a woman, which means she can kill him. Perfect! Problem solved! Find a loop hole in causality and duration and abolish everything! (Of course, I think the Witch King was just pompous so that no man would actually attempt to kill him, which is another matter).

Technology won't save us. Much less kill us. Technical errors won't do the trick either. I suppose we'll just have to see if the Nemesis Theory is correct in about 12,000 years. That, or wait until 4,500,000,000 CE when then sun swells and swallows Mercury, Venus, more than likely Earth, and possibly Mars.

To Save Them All From The Nothing

Mythology just so happens to be a subject I enjoy dearly. And even if one doesn't enjoy reading the tales of Orpheus, or the Mysteries of Eleusis, or Marduk and Tiamat, the Bhagavad Gita, or Poem Edda... none the less many of us are still familiar with these stories. It is something similar to knowing Roman myths, but not knowing Greek myths. Essentially, Roman myths are Greek with the names changed. In fact, Joseph Campbell claims that all myths are the same myth (what James Joyce called "monomyth") with "different costumes". This is much the same idea Jung had in mind with the Collective Unconscious.

Since we live in another time with different social norms, not many people today are familiar with a lot of history's rich mythologies across the globe. I would simply like to give some examples of how ancient myths are still alive today in our movies. In fact, it is a bit difficult to determine if any movies or stories today (characters, places, and plot alike) are not based on some mythological archetype.

One of my favorite examples is the movie Donnie Darko, which is heavily rooted in the tale of Faust (specifically Goethe's Faust). Of course, the story of Faust is based on the Book of Job, where Satan (meaning "Adversary") acts as God's right hand and prosecutes Job, as Mephistopheles does with Faust. Faust ultimately receives special powers from Mephistopheles, wins the heart of a woman he falls in love with, Gretchen, by selling his soul. Faust often blasphemes, as Donnie Darko does. Donnie also receives special powers (superhuman strength, control over water and fire, and telekinesis - see the director's cut), and wins the heart of a girl he falls for named Gretchen. In both cases Gretchen is not her real name. Donnie must follow Frank as Faust followed Mephisto. Both Faust and Donnie's deal with the devil leads to the death of their Gretchens. Both Gretchens eventually are redeemed, while Faust and Donnie are not saved.

Jaws is another fine example, as it parallels Marduk's battle with Tiamat. In the Enuma Elish Marduk battles with the evil creator Tiamat for dominion over the world (which was nothing but an ocean of chaos). Marduk uses the many winds to slay Tiamat by throwing a wind into her mouth, which renders her unable to close her maw. Then throws another wind into her mouth to slay her. Jaws parallels this when the Sheriff puts an oxygen tank in the shark's mouth, causing the shark to not be able to close its mouth. Then he shoots the tank to blow it up. One may consider this to be a stretch, but I can assure you that Stephen Spielberg is a very well read director, and heavily influenced by mythology. I would not doubt the Enuma Elish inspired him.

A more recent example is the TV show Lost, which amongst drawing from myths of Mesopotamia, Ilium, Greece, Japan, and Germania, considerably relies on the Bible, primarily the Old Testament. In my experience Christians don't know their own holy book very well, and yet the same stories appeared on a major television show, which they are not aware of. I'll focus on one part (as there are many archetypes in Lost). In the last season Jacob is revealed as the heir and protector of the Island. Jacob has a younger twin brother, whom he slays and is later turned into a monstrous entity, which takes the form of black smoke. This twin brother of Jacob is never named, but is simply called the Monster. The Biblical Jacob also had a twin brother, named Esau (which is the name I use for the black smoke in Lost). In the Bible Esau was the firstborn, but traded his birthright to Jacob for some red pottage to sell. In doing so Jacob was entitled to the inheritance of the firstborn. Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, plotted to cheat Esau even further. And so there was a lot bitter rivalry between the twins. Esau declared that one day he would kill Jacob. This, of course, parallels considerably with Lost, as Esau claims he will kill Jacob, Jacob and his adopted mother plot to deceive Esau, and such. Furthermore is the characteristics of the Biblical twins to the show. Esau is Hebrew for "hairy" or "rough", as the character in Lost has facial hair, is a bit haggard, and dark haired. Jacob on the other hand is blond and never has facial hair. It may also be important to note that the Island is a kind of earthly paradise where miracles occur. A Promise Land, if you will. Jacob in the Bible is later named Israel once he makes peace with his brother (you can make the inference from here).

Certainly there are many more examples, which I could spend the rest of my life searching for. I have probably already written a post on this subject before. But I would like to illustrate a little something about the Nothing. One of my favorite songs by Blind Guardian is "Imaginations From The Other Side", which is often considered a ballad to all the great myths and fairy tales. I believe it is about The Neverending Story. The plot of The Neverending Story is to save all the fairy tales and myths from The Nothing, because no one is interested in imagination and fantasy anymore. Point in fact, in our day and age all these stories are saved from the Nothing, but in the disguise of another story. This may only be another variation of the Collective Unconscious, or simply the result of educated storytellers who retell Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary setting, or Marduk through a battle with a shark, or the story of Ezekiel through a repo man and the Chariots of Fire as a radioactive flying car, or the tale of Adam and Eve with the Fruit of Knowledge through a bunch of primitive apes and a black monolith.

Times change, people die, but our stories will always remain.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

There is an old story (The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson) of an emperor who always had to have the best and finest things, most of all his clothes. The person who fabricated the wardrobe of the emperor, always hard at work to make his superior his clothes, ran out of materials due to the emperor's high demand. And so presented to the emperor a new outfit that was so fine that only the most superior could see it. In fact, it was so fine that it was made of nothing at all, and the emperor walked around naked. It's not that the emperor was a fool for thinking he was wearing the finest of the fine, it's that the people agreed with him that it was the finest of the fine in which he was clothed. The people, not wanted to disagree with their superior (who was a fool) claimed patriotism and agreed.

We experience much the same today. One example, pointed out to me by one of my co-workers, is how documentaries on Netflix are always given high ratings, when point in fact not every documentary can be awesome. Given the probability of a hundred individuals making a film, what are the odds that all one hundred are going to be top quality? Astronomically high. It's not that all documentaries are awesome, it's that people don't want to disagree with a documentary because some group of people somewhere said documentaries are always awesome. I, on the other hand, can only think of a handful of documentaries that were interesting and deserved a 5 stars rating.

The second example is books. There is an old cliche surrounding contemporary culture that the book is better than the movie (and a cliche it is). Take for instance Fight Club. Here is a case in which the movie was far better than the movie. The book had no resolution, anti-climatic, and boring. But what a movie! But no matter the case, contemporary dogma holds that the book will always be better, period, the end, go screw off and don't argue. The same holds for music, in which the original is deemed always better than a cover. And I am not apologetic to any Beatles zealots out there, but A Perfect Circle's cover of John Lennon's Imagine is far more poignant and beautifully dark than Lennon's original. First time I heard Lennon's Imagine I cared little, save the stark contrast between a dark apocalyptic theme and the gay piano and the giddy "Yoo-hoo, ooh, ooh!" But when I first head APC's cover I had to pull over on the side of I-26 and cry because I was so overwhelmed by its dark beauty, and just not suitable to drive.

There is something in the translation of books to movies that is necessary for them to be successful, and as a consequence they will be different. And just because they are different doesn't make one better than the other. Several people I know find 2001 : A Space Odyssey better as a book than a movie, although the book was written so it could be made into a movie with the soul purpose of conceiving a plot. The film has a artistic licensing involved to translate a literary plot into a visual media that only film can achieve. If Eraserhead was later written as a book, how could the nightmarish imagery and non-linearity of that film be expressed verbally? There would be an incredible difference, which would seem impossible. It would be like asking a director to make Finnegan's Wake into a film... ?! The medium necessary to express Joyce's monumental perplexing work would have to be far different for it to be in the spirit of the Wake.

And on books in general, many people simply deem books superior, fin. In architecture school there are several books that are just total crap, but are held on high because some professor or starchitect said so. I was highly recommended by many students and professors to read Kunstler's Geography Of Nowhere. When I finally picked it up, I got about halfway through the book and threw it against the wall and never finished reading it. I did so, simply because it was nothing new. It was merely a reiteration of 19th and 20th Century architectural history with Jacob's The Death And Life Of Great American Cities (an amazing book, by the way) in mind. The only difference was that Kunstler had a catchy title. The same would be said for Frampton's Studies In Tectonic Cutlure, a tertiary source, an encyclopedia, and about as worthy of citation as Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica. I read the book, and have henceforth protested the teaching of it in classes. Some of my professors have taken this to be absolute blasphemy.

It is almost purely herd mentality as to why people prefer books to movies (even people who don't read), or the original to the remake, or documentaries over any other kind of film (except maybe foreign films, which is something I will never understand. Just because it's foreign doesn't make it awesome). A final example I find most compelling is Metallica's self-titled album (a.k.a. The Black Album). Almost everyone hates it, except me. Granted that Master Of Puppets and ...And Justice For All were incredible albums; this does not make the Black Album horrible, albeit it was the start of their downfall. Just because something is going downhill doesn't mean that the view is not still amazing. Once it's in the valley you can complain.

Just because some emperor (i.e. critic, group of social superiors, professor, admired friend, et cetera) claims these things horrible or awesome, doesn't mean that they are. That kind of judgment is subjective to begin with. It is thinking for oneself that liberates each individual from the enslavement of society's invisible bonds. It is the suffering youth of today feel to be free to the bondage of their peers, and the rejection from those supposed superior peers (who are only fools) that creates incidences like Columbine. If only Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had simply not cared what the jocks and preps thought about them, liberated themselves from the judgment of mere fools high on a vagarious social ladder, maybe 13 people would not have died by their hands.

Apathy is not always a bad thing : if you don't care about... whatever, how can it bother you?

Eventually The Apple Will Be A Core!

The recent trend of taking pictures of food before you eat it is a rather strange one. The only reason one should ever take pictures of food before it is eaten is if you are a chef making a pictorial menu / portfolio. Now of course some circumstances might arise in which it will be acceptable to take pictures of food, such as if a green pepper strangely resembles a face, or a chicken tender looks like a phallus. But needless to say, it doesn't matter how pretty the food may look before it is grounded, salivated, and digested it will always come out looking and smelling the same : as fecal matter.

In spite of this trend I still like to do thought processes, or experiments, if you will, with the same principles intact. In doing this I find that it doesn't work the same way with other things. Example : building a house. Since we would rather take pictures of it looked like before it became feces, why don't we take pictures of what the site looked like before the house was built? Typically either two environments will have been built on : one is a pleasant and peaceful natural scenery that turned into suburban hell, or it was a toxic landscape (maybe even a cemetery). The former induces guilt, while the latter makes you wish you never knew what was there before. This maybe why the Genzyme HQ (recently bought out by Sanofi-aventis Pharmaceuticals) in Cambridge doesn't have pictures of what was in place of the office before it was built : it was a toxic waste dump for factories in the Massachusetts Bay area. The building requires a separate air-handling system to collect and filter the toxins that leak through the substructure. So maybe the before and after are not the same as it is with food. With buildings we like the after more than the before..

But take it further with the case of food. What was it before it was a meal? That beautiful sirloin was a mother cow with four calves. You killed a mother of four! That loaf of bread was made from a gorgeous field of wheat (one a photographer might have photographed and uploaded on Flickr), where mice and gofers dwelled and played. That is, until a large mechanical tracker came along and killed hundreds of families of rodents, while displacing bees and butterflies! Take a picture of that event and slip it in your coffee table scrapbook.

I suppose there is no point to this post. Not all postings have to have a point. No one is going to stop taking pictures of food until older generations find it trendy and start doing it as well. It makes people feel like artists, or more appropriately DIY artists. Click a button and you're a misunderstood creative individual (whatever that is suppose to mean). Hem a pair of jeans and you're a fashion designer. Take a flight to LA and write about it on your Facebook status and you're a travel writer. The DIY era : something to appropriate our self-worth, something to boost our self-esteem when we have nothing to be confident about. And we certainly don't let silly little things like consistency stop us from being creative! (Whatever that means).

"I don't stop doing something because what happens at the end :
'Mitch, would you like an apple?'
'No! Eventually it will be a core!'"

The Forrest Gump Effect

I often wonder if anyone ever understands what I am talking about. Somethings I can understand, like when I make a specific literary reference to Dante (in Italian nonetheless), or Babylonian nomenclature (such as "Khabiru"). But sometimes I am personally dumbfounded by how dumbfounded some people can be at some references I make.

My roommates were watching Forrest Gump, and I stuck around for the scene when Forrest calls hotel services about the men with flashlights across the way keeping him up. I laughed because I just find that a comical means of working the Watergate scandal into the movie. My roommates on the other hand just looked at me. Since one of them is a history major I would assume she would have made some kind of remark. But no, she didn't understand what was so funny.

Are we that pathetic of an American generation that we don't even know our own nation's recent history? Or were we just not listening in U.S. History class in high school? I can still remember several years ago when Deep Throat finally revealed himself, and my friends finding the fact that the words "Deep Throat" were printed really large on the front page of the newspaper. I was stunned and they were giggling; most of them clueless to who Deep Throat was. I think I still know several people who don't know Deep Throat's implications on the X-Files.

I have only met one person who understood what I was joking about when I tried to lite myself on fire (I had been drinking) and said, "I'm protesting the French occupation of Vietnam". Is Jersey Shore all we have to contribute? Is The Real World the only piece of contemporary American history(?) we care about? I am still stunned by the many who think the Masons are conspiring to take over America... !!! The Freemasons built this country! And personally, I feel very comfortable with a fraternal group of individuals who are freethinkers - and not limited to the views imposed upon them by MTV - running this country.

MTV, the empty icon; the name doesn't mean anything anymore. Literally. MTV no longer stands for Music Television. It doesn't stand for anything, literally and figuratively. It is simply eMpTy V. So shallow is our generation's understanding of recent history in our nation and those events' consequences on our contemporary social disposition, that it should leave even the most stout individual's stomach turning.

All great empires fall due to their own ignorance, corruption, and vices. America is not #1 anymore, but it is still an empire that is soon to fall into the hands of people who don't get the jokes in Forrest Gump. I bet I am one of a handful of Savannahians that get the joke that Forrest is running the wrong way when he is going towards Henry Street (he's running north, though the real Henry Street is south. And Henry Street is not "five or six blocks" away, but almost a mile).

America the Ruinous. America the Fallen. (That's an etymology joke, by the way).

Valhalla, I Would Like You Meet Architecture

For some reason the most amazing work of architecture for the past year or so is not really a building at all : it's a stage design. Now the history of stage designs have been somewhat interesting (enough for me to have written a paper on the subject), but for the most part stage designs have been cheesy.

Of course, there have been some good stage designs in the past. Palladio's Teatro Olympico in Vicenza, which houses a scene designed by Vicenzo Scamozzi that depicts three city streets emerging from an arc de triumph (an effect called pan optico). Scamozzi's design for the stage uses forced perspective. It looks like a really long street, but in actuality the stage is only about 30 feet deep. Essentially, the model buildings get smaller as they go further back. Even Michael Grave's stage designs, done early in his career, were relatively interesting. The thing is that these set designs are all in the realm of the profane. Secular designs are pretty easy : just mock up some buildings. The city is the world stage already; we just need to render a micro-world stage for a good show. But of course, it is still cheesy because we know the entire scene is lightweight and purely superficial.

Some shows are a bit different. How could one properly pull off an opera like Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle? With it's mythic scenes ranging from underwater realms, fiery pits of Hel, mystical rainbow bridges, and Valhalla itself... it all seems like another matter.

Director Robert Lepage working with designer Carl Fillion pull it off all too well. There are no elaborate scenes with cardboard clouds, poky marine backgrounds, or Neo-Classical pseudo-ruins. Rather 24 steel triangles rotate on a hydraulically lifted axle. On these platforms various scenes are digitally projected, anything from a chthonic underwater worlds, flows of lava on top with glows of Hel under the platforms, grassy glades, ethereal projections of deities, or the ribs of a skeletal serpent.

The really amazing aspect of this configuration is that it allows the imagination to make the scenery far more awesome (literally awe-some) than anything that can be physically depicted. I usually refer to this effect as the Michael Meyers effect. Michael Meyers is terrifying because his naked self is never revealed. All anthropomorphic qualities a human can posses are diminished to a pale mask. The only indication there is a human under that mask and jumpsuit is the visibility of his bare hands. And the fact that the hint of a human being under that suit makes him all the more terrifying.

The imagination is far more potent at creating ethereal scenery, terrific infernos, heavenly majesty, and the deepest human sympathy. A simple structure such as Fillion's design provides the dynamics of clouds, movements of fire, the stereotomic of earth, and pulsations of water. It is a bit like Warhol's plays with no props; just bare walls. Valhalla becomes more alive in our minds than it can be in material reality.

For once the myths of old shine into the tectonic environment of the modern era. "Just take me to Valhalla."

Video of some of the costume designs, stage dynamics, and acrobatics :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3UMM37zwdQ&feature=related