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Indonesia arresta a hombre buscado en China por ayudar a llevar a cabo estafa de inversiones

Agentes de inmigración de Indonesia en la isla turística de Bali arrestaron a un sospechoso chino buscado por Beijing por ayudar a llevar a cabo una estafa de inversiones por más de 14.000 millones de dólares a clientes en China, informaron las autoridades el jueves.
Read full article on: latimes.com
Will Justin Hartley’s ‘This Is Us’ co-stars be on ‘Tracker’ Season 2?
"If I could get every single one of them up here, I would love that," Justin Hartley said about his "This Is Us" co-stars.
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nypost.com
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ lawyer said food is probably the ‘roughest part’ about rapper’s life behind bars
“I think the food’s probably the roughest part of it," Combs' attorney, Marc Agnifilo, told reporters outside of a federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday.
nypost.com
Priscilla Presley’s Ex Addresses Lisa Marie Sex Abuse Claims
Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesMichael Edwards issued a statement Thursday denying claims made in Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir that he sexually abused the singer for several years beginning when she was 10.“These claims are absolutely untrue. I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion I did,” said Edwards, who was in a relationship with Lisa Marie’s mother Priscilla Presley at the time of the alleged abuse.According to From Here to the Great Unknown, a memoir that Lisa Marie, daughter of Elvis Presley, was writing at the time of her death in 2023, Edwards allegedly entered her room in the middle of the night and said he was going to “teach me what was going to happen when I got older” before molesting her. Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
How can I get a musty smell out of old wood furniture?
Mildew and other odors are very off-putting. Here’s what you can do to get rid of them.
washingtonpost.com
L.A. Affairs: He hadn't dated since 1989. Did a relationship with him stand a chance?
On our very first date, I was eating from his plate. Could he be the one I've been looking for, especially after having a series of bad dates with other guys?
latimes.com
Michelle Chambers for Senate District 35
Michelle Chambers, who worked for the state attorney general and is a former Compton City Council member, is more likely to be the representative the district needs.
latimes.com
Justin Hartley Talks ‘Tracker’s Success, Season 2 Storylines, And Working With Wife Sofia Pernas: “I Got So Lucky”
Harley talked potential love triangles,This Is Us crossovers, and more.
nypost.com
New Movies and Shows to Watch This Weekend: ‘Outer Banks’ Season 4 on Netflix + More
...plus Cate Blanchett in Disclaimer on Apple TV+, Sweetpea on Starz + more.
nypost.com
49ers WAGs have perfect celebration after they were ‘dying’ for a touchdown
That was a touchdown celebration for the books.
nypost.com
San Jose State volleyball team with transgender player says no more future matches have been forfeited
San Jose State University has said no future opponents have informed them they plan to cancel matches, amid controversy over a transgender player on the team.
foxnews.com
Trump’s Ghostwriter Says Ex-Prez Will Seek ‘Revenge and Domination’ in White House
Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesThe ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s best–selling book The Art of the Deal has warned that if he returns to the White House, the former president will seek “revenge and domination.”Tony Schwartz claims Trump is haunted by his upbringing with a hard-driving father disdainful of any form of weakness.“If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination—damn the consequences—in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough,” writes Schwartz in The New York Times.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
The Yankees are pennant favorites, the city is alive and what a week we have ahead
Just one night after the Mets clinched their stunning NLCS berth, the top-seeded Yankees slammed the door on the Royals’ fairy-tale season.
nypost.com
Florida fisherman rescued after spending night clinging to an ice box at sea after Hurricane Milton
The fisherman was saved by a US Coast Guard helicopter crew on Thursday after he was spotted floating on the open cooler in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
nypost.com
Walz weighs in on Biden's term when pressed on GMA
Tim Walz said that he wasn’t sure anyone does “everything right” but that President Joe Biden has “done everything in the best interests of the American public."
abcnews.go.com
UFC CEO Dana White slams Kamala Harris’ appearance on Colbert: ‘Should scare EVERYONE’
UFC chief Dana White has come out swinging against Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the fact she is "incapable of putting a sentence together" should “SCARE THE SH-T” out of everyone.
nypost.com
The Sports Report: Dodgers go with Yoshinobu Yamamoto for Game 5
Dodgers announce late Thursday that Yoshinobu Yamamoto will be their starter for Game 5 against the Padres.
latimes.com
Mets’ David Peterson thriving in many different spots as playoff reliever
David Peterson made 21 starts this season — generally excellent, with a 2.90 ERA — before taking on a new role as a big-time playoff reliever.
nypost.com
Watch never-before-seen video of missing Montana mom Jermain Charlo
Police share last-known images of Montana woman, hoping to generate new leads. "Someone out there knows what happened to Jermain Charlo" says detective.
cbsnews.com
Female captain not to blame for sinking of $61M navy ship: New Zealand defense minister
New Zealand's Defense Minister has rebukes claims that the appointment of a female captain to commandeer a $61 million navy ship ultimately led to its sinking.
foxnews.com
Actor-comedian Eddie Griffin says he may be ‘going with Trump’ instead of ‘liar’ Kamala Harris
Comedic actor Eddie Griffin shredded Vice President Kamala Harris as a "liar" during a podcast, declaring he might support former President Trump.
nypost.com
Jaguars legend Maurice Jones-Drew explains how team can use London trip to 'springboard' into win streak
The Jacksonville Jaguars finally got their losing streak broken last week, but team legend Maurice Jones-Drew believes a win streak can begin in a very familiar place in London.
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foxnews.com
The 10 best home openers in Capitals history
The puck will drop on the Capitals’ 50th season Saturday when the team hosts the New Jersey Devils at Capital One Arena.
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washingtonpost.com
Ukrainian Journalist Viktoria Roshchina Dies in Russian Captivity, Ukraine Says
Viktoria Roshchina, a 27-year-old reporter, had been detained by the Russian authorities after reporting from occupied territories in Ukraine.
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nytimes.com
Here's how the US has helped a tiny fraction of its citizens evacuate war-torn Lebanon
As bombing intensifies around Beirut, only a tiny fraction of the 86,000 Americans and green card holders who reside in Lebanon have been evacuated with U.S. help.
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foxnews.com
Arizona mom reveals what it was like sheltering inside Disney World during Hurricane Milton
The family remained committed to their trip to the park even after learning of Milton barrelling toward the Sunshine State.
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nypost.com
Biden's handling of hurricane recovery takes center stage of Trump-Harris race and more top headlines
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.
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foxnews.com
Maria Bakalova, as Ivana Trump, is trying to provoke you
Bulgarian actress, Maria Bakalova, 28, was fearless in “Borat.” Now she’s ferocious as Donald Trump’s first wife Ivana in “The Apprentice.”
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washingtonpost.com
Woody Marks finally getting the chance to unleash his total skill set at USC
After years of trying to showcase what he could accomplish on a football field, USC's Woody Marks is now one of the Big Ten's top offensive threats.
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latimes.com
Late wife and husband with same names as Hurricane Helene and Milton would be ‘mortified’ over storms’ destruction, loved ones say
"I thought, 'I'm glad they’re not here – they’d be so embarrassed,’” daughter Davidene Alpart told The Post. “They’d never want to hurt anybody.”
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nypost.com
What to watch with your kids: ‘Joker: Folie à Deux,’ ‘Piece by Piece’ and more
Common Sense Media also reviews “Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft” and “The Franchise.”
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washingtonpost.com
NFL great believes panic in Jets’ organization played a role in Robert Saleh’s firing
Pro Football Hall of Famer and Green Bay Packers legend LeRoy Butler says panic in the New York Jets organization led to the firing of head coach Robert Saleh.
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foxnews.com
Can UCLA salvage its season? Five things to watch when the Bruins face Minnesota
Who will start at quarterback for UCLA? It's one of five things to watch when the Bruins face Minnesota Saturday at the Rose Bowl.
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latimes.com
Pluto is going direct in Capricorn for the final time — and for some it will be a highway to hell
The dark dwarf will remain in the sign of the sea goat until Nov. 19, when it will enter Aquarius and where it shall remain in residence for the next two decades.
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nypost.com
Giants’ disruptive ‘pack of wolves’ creating defensive identity
An identity has slowly begun to take shape.
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nypost.com
The Trap of Making a Trump Biopic
As the young Donald Trump in the new film The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan slouches while he walks, pouts while he talks, and delivers every line of dialogue in a near monotone. Such behaviors tend to form the foundation for any recent Trump performance, but Stan delivers more than a comic impression. He finds complexity in these hallmarks: an instinctual defensiveness in those hunched shoulders, a frustrated petulance in the scowls. It’s precise work, in other words.If only the film around him were just as carefully calibrated. The Apprentice attempts to chart Trump’s rise from real-estate businessman to future presidential candidate by focusing on his early career in the 1970s and ’80s, when, under the tutelage of the pugnacious lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong), he learned how to project power and not just crave it. The film is a muddy exercise in Trumpology that never answers the biggest question it raises: What does chronicling Trump’s beginnings illuminate about one of the most documented and least mysterious men in recent American history?Not much, as it turns out. Yet the film struggled to find a U.S. distributor willing to back it during production; Trump is a polarizing figure, after all, and famously litigious. After its debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Apprentice indeed faced legal threats from the Trump campaign, leaving it languishing for months in search of any company that might help it reach American audiences—the ones most likely to see, and be affected by, the film. Briarcliff Entertainment, a small company that has begun to develop a reputation for picking up controversial projects, stepped in and launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the movie’s theatrical run, which begins Friday.[Read: The most consequential TV show in history]But the director, Ali Abbasi, an Iranian Danish filmmaker whose previous film, Holy Spider, turned a real-life serial-killer case into a fascinating drama, has insisted that The Apprentice isn’t meant to truly be about Trump; rather, it’s an outsider’s perspective on America through its most divisive avatar. “We wanted to do a punk-rock version of a historical movie,” Abbasi told Vanity Fair, citing Stanley Kubrick’s transporting epic Barry Lyndon as an inspiration. He, along with the screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who has long covered Trump, intended to “strip politics” from the story altogether.The idea of a politics-free film about Trump may be provocative to some viewers, but The Apprentice never quite achieves this goal. The action unfolds in two parts: In the first, the 20-something Trump, still attempting to carve out a real-estate career and climb the social ladder, is dazzled by Cohn’s celebrity. He tails him around New York City for much of the 1970s while absorbing Cohn’s three tenets for success: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and claim victory, never admit defeat. In the second part, Trump has come to embody those rules fully. It’s only a two-year time jump, from 1977 to 1979, yet it feels jarring, because the Trump of the ’80s is more ruthless than Cohn ever was. And that decision, to skip past depicting his shift toward callousness, prevents the film from fulfilling Abbasi and Sherman’s aim of interpreting America’s transformation. It drops plenty of tasteless hints at present-day Trump instead: A scene of him being intrigued by the potential new slogan for Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign—“Let’s make America great again!”—is played for laughs. When, during an interview, he scoffs at the prospect of launching a political campaign himself, the shot holds for an extra beat, as if daring viewers to chuckle along with him.By omitting the years when Trump started coming into his own, The Apprentice delivers a summary of his character rather than an arc. Take his relationship with Ivana (Maria Bakalova), for instance: In the film’s first half, Trump is a hapless suitor, literally falling over during an attempt to impress her. In the second half, he is seen assaulting his now-wife in their home in a violent scene that likely drew the Trump campaign’s ire. (The scene is based on Ivana’s recounting of an incident in a 1990 divorce deposition, which she later recanted; Trump also denied the allegation.) The contrast underlines the difference between a power-hungry man and an actually powerful one, but it doesn't show us the trajectory itself. The Apprentice suggests that Cohn hastened whatever rot was already present in his protégé, but its early scenes portray the opposite—that Trump, at his core, was simply naive. He desperately attempts to contribute to his family’s real-estate business; he idolizes his older brother; he displays a simpering loyalty to Cohn. Abbasi may have wanted to avoid putting his finger on the political scale—to steer clear of sympathy or condemnation—but the result is a shallow, murky portrait.[Read: HBO’s Roy Cohn documentary is a lesson for Trump]Perhaps this lack of substance is meant to evoke the flimsiness of the TV show the movie is named after. But The Apprentice offers glimmers of more nuanced ideas. It is handsomely shot, the production design making 1970s New York look like it’s in a state of decay, with the grime extending to the staging: Trump, in one of the earlier, more dynamic scenes, corners Cohn in a bathroom to convince him of his worth. The best parts of the film engage with how Cohn boosted his own ego and drew considerable pleasure from molding Trump into his image; Stan and Strong deliver committed, electric performances in their scenes together. But the energy fizzles when The Apprentice descends into a supercut of the younger Trump’s lore. It re-creates some of his most braggadocious interviews. It shows his reported scalp-reduction surgery. It ends in 1987, with him meeting the ghostwriter of his memoir. When an ailing Cohn finally confronts Trump for avoiding him, the encounter feels perfunctory, a mere interruption of an extended clip show.The Apprentice could have delved into the Trump persona or explored how it calcified. But by trying to avoid how Trump’s past reflects his current approach to politics—his zero-sum relationship to power, his pettiness and egotism—while simultaneously winking at viewers’ knowledge of him, the film lands itself in a trap. Abbasi and Sherman’s intent—to hold today’s Trump at arm’s length and dramatize his backstory in “punk-rock,” cheeky fashion—is inherently flawed, because separating Trump’s philosophies from his transformation as a public figure means dulling the story of any potency or relevance. Even the one relationship, between Trump and Cohn, that feels potentially insightful gets diminished by the end. The film becomes an exhausting reenactment of familiar events instead—a safe endeavor that coasts on its protagonist’s infamy.
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theatlantic.com
Hezbollah Waged War Against the People of Syria
When Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed last month, my social-media feeds lit up with images and videos from Syria, my home country. In some areas, including Idlib and the suburbs of Aleppo, residents celebrated late into the night, blasting music and raising banners calling for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, to be next. People handed out sweets; celebratory messages, memes, and phone calls flooded my WhatsApp. But the news channels broadcasting from just across the border captured something else: a wave of grief sweeping southern Lebanon.The jubilation on one side of the line and the mourning on the other reflect our region’s deep complexity. For several years, Hezbollah ravaged the Syrian opposition on behalf of the autocratic Assad government. Its intervention left deep scars—displacement, destruction, and trauma, especially in the Damascus suburbs and Homs, which Hezbollah besieged. The Syrians who welcomed Nasrallah’s assassination were not exactly celebrating the Israelis who carried it out. But many of us felt that for once, the world had tipped in our favor.Assad—and his father, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, before him—had made Syria the crucial geographical and political link between Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shiite militia could not have survived without the weapons, fighters, and funds that Tehran supplied by way of Syria. But in 2011, circumstances in Syria threatened this arrangement. Peaceful protests challenged the country’s autocracy; Assad met them brutally, and the country’s opposition transformed into an armed rebellion. Nasrallah saw little choice but to defend his supply line and political network. Hezbollah justified this intervention by framing it as a war against extremists, a fight against chaos, and a defense of Syria’s sovereignty against Western-backed militants. But on the ground, Hezbollah wasn’t just fighting armed factions; it was waging a war against the Syrian people.[Read: Nasrallah’s folly]Madaya, a small town near the Lebanese border, lay along Hezbollah’s supply route to Syria. Armed rebel fighters reached that town in 2015, and Hezbollah, together with Assad’s forces, encircled it, cutting off food and medical supplies. Within weeks, the people of Madaya were starving. A border town once home to markets for smuggled electronics and clothes transformed into a fortress of suffering. Some civilians resorted to eating leaves, grass, or stray animals. People foraging for food were shot by snipers or killed by land mines. At least 23 people, six of them babies younger than 1, died from starvation in Madaya in a little over a month, in December 2015 and January 2016. An international outcry did nothing to stop Hezbollah from continuing to enforce its siege.Syrians tried to expose these horrors by posting stories and photos from Madaya on social media. But before long, supporters of Hezbollah and the Syrian government sadistically adopted the hashtag “in solidarity with the siege of Madaya” and posted photos of tables laden with grilled meat and fish, along with selfies in front of overloaded fridges. Despite numerous human-rights groups’ reports to the contrary, the government and Hezbollah claimed that the photos of starvation were fake, and that no civilians remained in Madaya anyway—just foreign agents and traitors whose deaths were necessary to save Syria.Madaya remained under blockade until 2017, when Qatar, representing the rebel forces, and Iran, representing the Syrian government, brokered an evacuation deal relocating the survivors of the siege to opposition-held areas, such as Idlib. Worn down by hunger and bombardment, the evacuees were told to pack only one small bag each, and leave everything else behind.Hezbollah was not kinder to other Syrian cities. In Aleppo, a relentless bombing campaign that was the joint work of the Syrian government, Russian forces, and Hezbollah destroyed neighborhoods, killed thousands of people, and wrecked infrastructure. Nasrallah called the contest for Aleppo the “greatest battle” of the Syrian war. He deployed additional fighters there to tighten the regime’s hold. Civilians were forced to evacuate—and as they did so, Hosein Mortada, one of the founders of the Iranian news channel Al-Alam and a propagandist embedded with Hezbollah, stood by and mocked them.Mortada was already infamous among Syrians for turning media coverage into a weapon of psychological warfare. With his thick Lebanese accent and brutal livestreams from the battlefield, Mortada cheered missile strikes and referred to opposition figures as “sheep.” In one YouTube video, he sits in a big bulldozer and praises its power, then squats in the dirt with a toy truck, saying gleefully, “This bulldozer is better for some of you, because you don’t have anything.”Many who endured the siege of their cities, only to have Hezbollah agents mock and question their suffering before international eyes, have little ambivalence about celebrating Nasrallah’s death. They view the Hezbollah leader’s fate with a tragic sense of justice: Finally, someone whose hands were stained with blood, and who seemed untouchable, was killed.But as the prominent Syrian intellectual and dissident Yassin Al Haj Saleh often admonished, looking at the world solely through a Syrian lens only isolates us. For many of us Syrians who were active in the uprising and now live in exile, that warning has resonated since Nasrallah’s death. Both on social media and in private conversations, we question whether the justice felt in Nasrallah’s demise should be tempered with concern for the broader regional suffering. We ask: Is it moral to welcome Nasrallah’s killing if the cost is the destruction of Lebanon—a country already reeling from economic collapse, political mismanagement, and the Beirut port explosion just a few years ago? Nasrallah is dead—but for many Syrians who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed thousands of civilians, the manner of his death made the event hard to celebrate. Dara Abdallah, a Syrian writer and poet exiled in Berlin, wrote on social media that he could not condone Nasrallah’s assassination, because the means—what appears to have been multiple 2,000-pound bombs rather than, say, a sniper’s bullet—demonstrated that “Israel has no problem eliminating an entire group of people in order to kill just one person.”[Read: How Beirut is responding to Hassan Nasrallah’s death]I worry that when the parties, memes, and trays of sweets are finished, Syria will be all the more isolated. Our country’s anguish has been pushed to the margins of global consciousness. Its regime has committed atrocities detailed in thousands of pages of documents that have yielded nothing but distant, largely symbolic trials in European courts. To live through all of this is to understand, in the deepest sense, that the world’s moral compass does not always point toward justice.When the news of Nasrallah’s death broke, many Syrians felt, for a brief moment, that an elusive dream had taken material shape—that eliminating a figure like Nasrallah would somehow move us closer to peace, closer to righting the wrongs done to us. But the rising death toll in Lebanon also suggests a bitter truth. I am reminded of other moments in our region’s history—the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, for example—that seemed at first to render justice but only perpetuated the cycle of violence.In our region, we sometimes feel as though accountability is destined to be followed by more destruction and bloodshed—as though we can never say that the scales have tipped in our favor without questioning the cost.
1 h
theatlantic.com
We Live in Time Asks Too Much of Us
Andrew Garfield is heartbreaking in the weepy new romance, but the movie puts viewers in an uncomfortable position.
1 h
time.com
Shakespeare’s Obsession With Queer Desire
'Shakespeare’s culture and society made much more space for the articulation of same-sex desire than we might expect,' writes Will Tosh.
1 h
time.com
In Photos: Celebrating Hawaii’s Wonder a Year After the Maui Wildfires
In his latest book, The Blue on Fire: Hawaii, photographer Enzo Barracco hopes to inspire the world to protect the ocean.
1 h
time.com
Creativity as a spiritual practice
There’s an old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s intended as a dig at music criticism, but beneath that, there’s a deeper truth: Music is intangible, subjective; it’s universal yet still deeply personal. And while science and math are involved in its creation, there is something undeniably mystical about it.  Laraaji is a 80-year-old pioneer of so-called New Age music and someone who’s been sitting on the fringes of the music world for decades — though, last year, he joined Andre 3000 onstage in Brooklyn.  When he was young, Laraaji experimented with acting, including a role in the landmark experimental film Putney Swope, and spent time in the 1960s standup comedy scene. After that, he became interested in spiritual communities, discovered the autoharp, and devoted his life to making music. He’s been a truly prolific artist ever since.I recently invited Laraaji on The Gray Area to talk about music, meditation, spirituality, and the therapeutic power of laughter. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing I’m so intrigued by all the artistic interests you’ve had in your life. You’ve done standup comedy. You’ve done acting. Obviously, in the end, you gave yourself over to music. Did the experience of acting and doing comedy make you a better musician? Or is it just creatively a totally different thing?  Laraaji  It’s the same thing, Sean. It’s wherever I choose to open and give expression to. I’m practicing the art of surrendering and spontaneity.  Sean Illing I think that’s why I’m a lousy musician. I’m too in my own damn head.  Laraaji  I say observe your body language when you have your next orgasm.  Sean Illing  I don’t think anybody — including myself — wants to see that! Laraaji  Seriously, look at your breath. Look at your body language. Look how focused you are into surrendering to this energetic expression. And I see some of that expression carried over into the way people sing pop music, rock music. They get into the more orgasmic, passionate level of release.  Sean Illing Do you think of yourself as primarily an improvisational musician for those reasons?  Laraaji I depend more on improvisation than I do on set scores. I find that improvisation is aligned with what I call my spiritual belief that every moment is new. And to trust that what I need in this moment is here.  Sean Illing  Musicians always talk about that, feeling more like a conduit than an author. Is that what it’s like for you on stage?  Laraaji  Yes, and it’s magical and mystical and a transportive place because you’re somehow beyond linear time flow. You’re in the midst of local time, but you’re also witnessing an unbroken, constant present time. It’s speaking through me and it’s speaking as me. I’m sound, I’m space, I’m timelessness. This is like music I can dream up. Part of my art is knowing when to get out of the way, how to set up a musical flow or a musical event, and then to step to the side of it and let it speak through.   Sean Illing  You also sing but it feels like part of the music, like there’s little distinction between the instruments you’re playing and what’s coming from your voice. Do you think of your voice as another instrument and not something separate? Laraaji  Yes, I do like doing everything at the same time. Spontaneous, unified flow.  Create a flow with several instruments at the same time, using the voice without calling the mental process into linear thinking. And using a voice as an emotional expressional instrument. That’s what I’ve been exploring, especially with meditation or deep contemplation of contacting altered planes of conscious present time. And so to talk about it is to take the mind out of it.  Then there’s sounds of passion, passionate immersion. The voice can be used to express witnessing inside of an awe-inspiring perception. So the whole body becomes the voice and the breath and the movement and become a conduit.  Invented or improvisational language can be the evidence of a person or practitioner in total immersion, total submission, getting involved with a total perception that’s beyond linear description. So the brain is given a vacation, and in that vacation or place, it might be freed up to have an alternative space-time experience. And that might be the message the artist wants to convey, that there is an alternative way of being conscious here and now.  Sean Illing  I have heard you talk about music as a tool for total presence. Why do you think music has that kind of effect on us?  Laraaji  Music generated or channeled by the right musician or artist? The artist is in a state of contemplation or meditation or a suspended time awareness. And in the languaging that occurs with their instrument, their interaction with their instrument and with their voice can convey this repurposing of the human instrument, repurposing it from a conveyor of local human-based emotion to a conduit of exalted emotion, direct perception inside this timeless present moment.  It’s always available. Certain sounds. Drones can do that. Music that’s very spontaneous, that can pull the mind out of linear thought, could allow the perceiver, the listener, to suddenly directly notice the reality of eternal time and the infinite space.  Sound can point to the invisible and sound can suggest the flowing of energy, the flowing of blood, the flowing of breath. It can suggest the integration of seemingly separate and discordant. In the case of a harp, all 36 strings are vibrating at the same time and producing this synergetic tonal event. So, as you say, that sound can throw a suggestion. It can point to the invisible, it can point to the transcendent. It can direct the emotional body out of heaviness so that a lightness, a more ethereal resonance can be directly witnessed.  Sean Illing  Once we start talking and using words, we’re already in the world of ideas and abstractions. But music is more primary than that, right? It touches something in us that existed before we invented words.   Laraaji  Yes. Music might be able to say more than what speech can say. My general mode of operation is to prepare before a performance or recording through just dropping into a refined sense of the meditative field. Do some yoga postures, some breathing exercises, some positive affirmations, and then sculpt this field or point to this transcendental field and let it transmit itself into a sound repetition through me. When this happens, I tend to call it a sound bath. A celestial sound bath. It’s an immersion experience. And once again, here we’re away from the words and we’re into the pure impacting force of sound.  Sean Illing  Do you actually find a meaningful distinction between music and meditation, or is it all just different manifestations of the same practice?  Laraaji  My ultimate answer is that they’re one and the same, meaning that in the moment of deepest meditation, I consider meditation to be the highest romance and that romance is the highest meditation. This meditation is simultaneous with music. It couldn’t be separated.  Sean Illing  When did laughter become such an important thing for you?  Laraaji  It shifted the energies of the bullies in my neighborhood when I was young to use humor. I wouldn’t be so afraid of their presence when I could use humor. And in church, we use humor because it could get so boring. And because I was in the right place to use it, we’d use it to get other peers to laugh in the middle of a serious sermon. But I notice the power of laughter to alter, to break the sense of rigidity and separation. I began writing scripts in high school and doing situation comedies for talent shows because I enjoyed seeing people lose it to laughter. The family I grew up in, the uncles, aunts, the cousins all were laughter friendly, so laughter was always on the menu. I can’t remember even a funeral where laughter was outlawed.  Sean Illing  You really do see it as a transformative force?  Laraaji  Well, after doing standup comedy I decided to let standup comedy go for a while and just focus on music. It was a book by Rajneesh, Osho Rajneesh, that helped me to realize that I could access the laughter experience without doing comedy, and that I could guide other people into the laughter zone and enjoy the deliciousness of laughter without using humor and at the sacrifice of something.  And now, through laughter — play shops, I call them — we use laughter to get people into the play zone and to get them into contact with their inner child and to get them into deep relaxation. Yeah. And I really enjoy laughter now because it can come up out of people without it having to be nervous. Yeah, the entire body can get involved. The entire breath can be open, and it’s getting sweeter and more delicious every time I do one of these.  Sean Illing  So laughter is another way to transcend the thinking mind?  Laraaji  Yes. Rajneesh pointed out that when you’re laughing, really involved with laughter, that you or us or whoever is laughing is not thinking, they’re not involved in the thought process of linear thought. That may be so if you’re into pure, open laughter. If it’s a nervous laughter where you’re mindful of a threatening situation, that would be a different situation. But real, full body, cathartic laughter, you’re releasing faster than you can think. So there’s no thought process processing what it is that’s being released. It’s just a yummy, open, nurturing release.  Sean Illing  You’ve been a professional musician for decades, performing all over the world. You’re entangled with the business and the commercial side of music. I guess I just wonder how you navigate that element, of being a professional musician and being a spiritual person at the same time?   Laraaji  Well, I did many years ago get that unless I integrate my spiritual nature, I would never be totally happy, content, or experience resolution because I can’t get it from the physical world. I’m not hating the physical world, but things in the physical world are temporary and constantly we’re reminded that things come, they stay, and then they leave. And some things are just too beautiful for us to accept that they’re ever going to leave.  And I grew to understand that behind the world that is changing, there is this spiritual field that if I learn how to embrace it constantly, even while I’m embracing my outer wealth, that when the outer wealth shifts, I’m not bent out of shape because I’m still connected to this inner spiritual platform that doesn’t get bent out of shape when the outer world shifts. So for me, staying constant and staying with my spiritual practice allows me to be more playful and less fearful of the physical world, and less fearful of change and less fearful of losing. And so I find that the spiritual side helps me to be more present, more experimental, and more risk-taking with my musical expression.  Sean Illing  I’ve also heard you say that you think our core spiritual problem is our misidentification with our bodies. What does that mean?  Laraaji  I’m not going to do this. I wouldn’t think of doing this to you, Sean.  Sean Illing  Wait, what are you going to do to me?!  Laraaji  I would amputate your leg. Your feet. You’re still there. Your torso. You’re still there. Your arms, your elbows. You’re still there. That’s just a head. And you’re still there. Your ears and nose goes. You’re still there. Your lips and tongue. God is still there. Suddenly your head disappears. But you’re still there. And you’re saying to yourself, wait a minute. I thought I was that body. Look. I’m timeless. I’m invisible. I’m wingless. What do I do with this?  And I believe that identification with the physical body, which is birth, that lives and dies, and we get attached to it, and we get sentimental with it. And we try to enjoy its five senses, and we forget, or we don’t access the joy that we can have, the more expansive joy we can have through the infinite self that is always here.  Perhaps your buddies have had an epiphany through the use of certain ceremonies. Where you’re suddenly in another sense of present time and space, a different sense of expansiveness, a different sense of how time is unfolding, slower or not at all. And to have this experience is to be taking advantage of a different form of body. The deepest sense of happiness and joy I feel comes from having an intimate, communing experience with my eternal present time-self. The spiritual presence which is always here, always everywhere. It just needs to be totally present, to dig it in, to catch it and to wear it and to behold it.  Sean Illing  You’re 80 years old. You’ve been making music for over 40 years. You’ve lived such an interesting life as an artist and a contemplative. As you sit here now, today, what is your spiritual mission? What gets you out of bed every day?  Laraaji  I’ll go through what I have to do the moment I get out of bed. Usually what gets me up is a sense of a daily agenda, which is different every day. Something that I’m going to do that day that I’m going to really enjoy, whether it’s music, performance, or designing, new tuning or getting to know a new piece of equipment, or sitting for an extra period of time in meditation, either in lotus position in my house or going for a walk in Central Park or Riverside Park and sitting on a bench in the sun, getting into meditation.  What keeps me enthusiastically involved in life and passionately involved with life is the sensation of an eternal non-human intelligence that’s generating this thing called creation and is allowing me to participate in it and to co-witness and to co-collaborate with it. And then in the midst of this, it is remaining invisible and remaining infinite. And I’m feeling it through my connection with it. And so it’s not so much what I’m getting out of bed for, but as I’m getting out of bed there’s this sense of conscious improvisational collaboration within the divine alternating intelligence. But when I’m doing tours and I’m put in a nice, beautiful hotel, I’ll happily get out of bed for the breakfast.  Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 
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