The Artwork of Mari Kono featured at Petals!

The walls of Petals Nail Salon are now adorned by the artistry of Mari Kono!

Join us on Sunday, July 16th between the hours of 2-5 pm for a viewing of her original artwork.
Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Mari and learn about what inspires her beautiful images.
All artwork will also be available for purchase. Please RSVP at (213) 620-9960.

We will be serving light refreshments catered by Grill Lyon.

About Mari Kono:
Mari Kono is a collage artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has exhibited her work at museums and galleries across the U.S., including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, Spirit Square in Charlotte, North Carolina and Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, California.

About the Art:
“Inspired by psychedelic art of the1960s, Japanese design and fantasy illustrations from Faerie-tale books, my collages are intended to release more love, understanding and compassion into the world. My palette includes self generated digital images, in combination with materials gathered from books and magazines, found scraps, wrapping paper, glitter, paint, rubber stamps and dimensional objects. As I work, I pray that my collages might instill a sense of mystical pleasure in all who encounter them.” –Mari Kono

For more information about Mari and her artwork, please visit her website at http://www.marikono.com

Petals Nail Salon
Honda Plaza in Little Tokyo
408 E. 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

(213) 620-9960
http://www.petalsnailsalon.com

Appointments highly recomended

New Hours of Service (starting July 10th):

Tuesday thru Friday: 11am to 7pm
Saturday: 10am to 5pm
Sundays: By Appointment Only (must be made by the previous Thursday)

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Digital and Paper Collage Art!
http://www.marikono.com

ARTHUR GOES TO LEBANON, SYRIA AND EGYPT.

“Dr. Moustache and The Egyptian Gentleman (Pts. I & II)”: American journalist/photographer Daniel Chamberlin spent three weeks traveling through the Middle East this summer. Part I of II chronicles adventures in Egypt and Lebanon, from Cairo’s Cities of the Dead to the Hezbollah gift shoppes at the Israeli border. From the November 2005 issue of Arthur.

“The Further Adventures of Dr. Moustache and the Egyptian Gentleman (Pt. III)”: An American traveler spends three weeks in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Reporting and photography by Daniel Chamberlin. From the January 2006 issue of Arthur.

Thursday, July 13 – 7:30 PM
1922 Egyptian Theatre
Hollywood

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Salute – Double Feature:

Brand New 35mm Print! BEDAZZLED, 1967, 20th Century Fox, 107 min. Dir. Stanley Donen. The definitive Mod Comedy, filled with leaping lesbian nuns, bottles of Froony Green Eyewash and Raquel Welch as Lillian Lust (the Babe with the Bust). Peter Cook wrote the screenplay and stars as the deliciously hip Devil, merrily ripping the last page out of Agatha Christie novels. Dudley Moore co-stars as the hapless hamburger chef who trades his soul for seven chances to bed the luscious Eleanor Bron.

THE BED SITTING ROOM, 1969, Sony Repertory, 91 min. Dir. Richard Lester. An ultra-rare lost classic, this surreal dark satire anticipated and influenced Monty Python and blended DR. STRANGELOVE-style apocalyptic barbs with Salvador Dali-meets-FELLINI’S SATYRICON visual brilliance. Lester and British comedic guru/Goon Spike Milligan (who co-authored) concoct a post-nuclear-holocaust Britain as a device to savage every last sacred cow – utilizing absurd characters drawn from a who’s who of British comedy (Milligan, fellow Goon Harry Secombe, Marty Feldman, Roy Kinnear, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore) and leading thespians (Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Mona Washbourne). The film defies capsule descriptions but is universally hailed as the Holy Grail of black comedy by those lucky enough to have seen it. Check out the raves on IMDB. File under “un-miss-able!” NOT ON DVD!

New York Times

By MICHAEL T. LUONGO
Published: July 12, 2006
Buenos Aires

In Latin America, Argentina has always been the country least influenced by indigenous culture, while maintaining its European ties. But now many Argentines, feeling the effects of external forces like globalization, are re-evaluating the country’s long-shunned culinary roots.

This new attitude is showing up on the plates of restaurants in Buenos Aires. The food of the Incas, a 15th- and 16th-century empire that once stretched into modern Argentina, is finding new panache.

One of the first restaurants to work with Incan ingredients was De Olivas i Lustres in the trendy Palermo Viejo neighborhood. Its owner, Miguel Moreno, and his business partner and chef, Sebastián Tarica, experimented with quinoa, a grain sacred to the Incas, and amaranta, or amaranth. Mr. Moreno claims amaranta has “more protein than any vegetable on the planet,” a necessity for the Incas because “there was not much meat in the Andean diet.”

The restaurant’s 13-course tasting menu incorporates these grains, along with meat from animals once hunted by the Incas and local tribes: llama; nandu, an ostrichlike bird; and yacare, a small river alligator. Kebabs include lamb breaded in what Mr. Tarica calls “popcorn of amaranta,” air-puffed kernels of the grain, and chewy strips of yacare with olives and onions.

Mr. Tarica uses quinoa in his favorite dessert, a mandarin orange stuffed with the nutty grain and sunflowers, drenched with honey and topped with a flower petal garnish. It hits the tongue with a tart, gritty sweetness. Another dessert is caramelized amaranta with yogurt — crunchy, sweet and tangy all at once.

Mariana Moreno, Mr. Moreno’s wife, said she thought the return to the country’s roots was “a reaction to globalization,’’ adding that such globalization hurts fragile economies like Argentina’s.

Marcelo Epstein, the owner of Sabores Argentina, a company that supplies restaurants with native ingredients, agreed.

Argentines “started creating a resentment to foreign things,” he said. “It was a change in mentality, together with that ‘let’s eat Argentine’ feeling,” that encouraged the use of Inca ingredients.

In 1998, Mr. Epstein had only about five or six clients. Now he has nearly 120.

Some Argentines in the food business say locally produced ingredients were embraced because of the peso crash in 2001, when restaurateurs sought to reduce their use of expensive imports. But Mr. Epstein said, “No one can tell me we’re buying it because it’s cheap.” Nandu, he said, is $12 a kilogram, much pricier than beef.

Just as many say the return to Incan ingredients is more about discovering “old” flavors.

Guillaume Bianchi, head chef at the Buenos Aires Hilton restaurant, cooks native foodstuffs using French techniques. In 2003, he was among the first local chefs to put llama on the menu. His braised nandu started as an hors d’oeuvre, he said. “It was excellent, so I dedicated to put it in the menu.”

Mr. Bianchi’s ingredients — like a spicy nandu prosciutto — pleasantly surprised conservative business patrons. “First they were a little bit shocked,” he said, “but I think it’s very well accepted now.”

Getting clients used to the products is not the only issue, however.

“Meat from llama can be very tough,” said Inés Villamil, the hotel’s food and beverage manager. Grains can be problematic, too. “Since the products are natural they are therefore of an inconsistent quality, or limited in quantity,’’ she said. “It can be hard to set a menu with the items.”

But creativity can overcome this. During the lunch buffet, “quinoa can be prepared like rice, or it’s like couscous, served cold in salads,” Ms. Villamil explained.

In the vegetarian restaurant Bio, quinoa takes pride of place as a main dish in the hands of Maximo Cabrera, the chef. Quinoa risotto is his favorite dish. He knows of five quinoa varieties and uses whatever type comes in that day.

He adds Parmesan cheese, yogurt, onions, carrots, scallions, mushrooms, white wine, and peppercorns and other spices. The mixture is then molded into an almond shape.

“It is all natural and organic,” he said, and light compared with traditional rice risottos. The tang of the yogurt and the texture of the quinoa form the overall impression.

“It’s illuminating to cook with these items,” Mr. Cabrera said. “Quinoa is a sacred ingredient. The conquistadors had hoped to destroy it,” to consolidate power over the Indians, he said.

For him, cooking with Incan foods is a way to bring back the country’s past. Still, as a chef, he wants to use the ingredients in modern ways.

He picked through a handful of Andean potatoes, pebblelike blobs of various colors that bear no resemblance to a modern potato. “The potatoes are tiny because they were grown on terraces,” Mr. Cabrera said.

His eyes sparkled as he thought about the ancient culture he now serves. “The borders are new; they are political,” he said of modern Argentina. But of the Incans who first grew the Andean potatoes, he said, “These people are Argentine.”

July 11, 2006 – Washington Post

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer

Psilocybin, the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms,” expands the mind. After a thousand years of use, that’s now scientifically official.

The chemical promoted a mystical experience in two-thirds of people who took it for the first time, according to a new study. One-third rated a session with psilocybin as the “single most spiritually significant” experience of their lives. Another third put it in the top five.

The study, published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology, is the first randomized, controlled trial of a substance used for centuries in Mexico and Central America to produce mystical insights. Almost no research on a psychedelic drug in human subjects has been done in this country since the 1960s. It confirms what both shamans and hippies have long said — taking psilocybin is a scary, reality-bending and occasionally life-changing experience.

The researchers say they hope the experiment opens a door to the study of a class of compounds that alter human perception and erode the boundaries of self — at least in some users. They hope it will provide new insight into how the brain works and what neurochemical events underlie moments of mystical rapture.

If the generally positive effects of the drug are confirmed by other studies, the research is likely to raise the question of whether people should be allowed access to psilocybin for self-improvement or recreation.

Rigorous study of these substances has been shunned since the 1960s, although it is not legally prohibited. Research on them was a casualty of the muddled mix of science and advocacy by people like Timothy Leary, the LSD guru and former Harvard psychologist once called the “most dangerous man in America” by President Richard M. Nixon.

“Our study has shown we can conduct a study of this type safely, and that the effects produced are really quite interesting,” said Roland R. Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who ran the experiment. “There is a clear neuroscience agenda to understand those effects, and clear clinical applications that could be pursued.”

Other brain researchers hailed the experiment as much for the fact that it was done at all as for its findings.

“These are some of the most potent compounds we know of that can change consciousness,” said David E. Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University who has studied the effects of psychedelics on rats and cultured cells. “It’s kind of peculiar they have just been kind of sitting on the shelf for 40 years. There is no other class of biologically active substances I am aware of that have been ignored like that.”

The study, which involved 36 middle-aged adults from the Baltimore-Washington area, was conducted over five years. The subjects were chosen from 135 people who answered newspaper ads. All said they were members of a religious organization, practiced meditation or took part in other spiritual activity.

The study was designed to minimize the effects of anticipation and group enthusiasm, which might color a person’s response. It also sought to examine the delayed, as well as immediate, effects of the drug.

The volunteers were randomly assigned to take either 30 milligrams of psilocybin (chemically synthesized, not extracted from mushrooms) or 40 milligrams of methylphenidate, the stimulant sold as Ritalin. The sessions lasted eight hours in a room where a person could listen to music, relax on a couch with eyeshades or talk with two monitors always in attendance. Each subject then took the other drug in a different session two months later.

Of the 36 people, 22 had a “complete” mystical experience as judged by several question-based scales used for rating such experiences. Two-thirds judged it to be among their top five life experiences, equal to the birth of a first child or death of a parent. Two months after a session, the people who had taken psilocybin reported small but significant positive changes in behavior and attitudes compared with those who had taken Ritalin.

One-third of the subjects, however, said they experienced “strong or extreme” fear at some point in the hours after they took the hallucinogen. Four people said the entire session was dominated by anxiety or psychological struggle.

Nichols thinks that last finding should give people pause.

“I think these drugs are potentially very dangerous,” he said. “I would be very disappointed if in any sense these results were used to encourage recreational use of these compounds. I wouldn’t want to take responsibility for anyone under unmonitored conditions coming up with those feelings.”

Alan Leshner, who headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse for seven years and now leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was both wary and excited about psilocybin’s reported effects.

“If it is ultimately shown to be benign but enriches people’s lives, who could object to that? But I don’t have that level of confidence at this point, given the paucity of research on it,” he said.

A scholar of mysticism, G. William Barnard of Southern Methodist University, suspects that most mystical traditions would not object to the idea that a chemical could allow a person to tune into a preexisting state of consciousness, usually ignored, just as fasting, prayer, yoga and other activities can. But there is less enthusiasm for the idea that this kind of research will unlock the mechanism of mystical insight.

“Most people I suspect would say that the neurochemistry is not the full cause of these experiences,” he said.

(Courtesy D. Cotner!)

3:00-4:30 Deepak Chopra and Grant Morrison: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Super-heroes— Virgin Comics presents literary icons Deepak Chopra (How to Know God and co-founder of Virgin Comics) and Grant Morrison (All-Star Superman) in a far-ranging discussion about Dark Knights, Devis, and the development of tomorrow’s mythologies in this special Comic-Con exclusive event. Hosted by supermodel/spokesperson Saira Mohan. Room 20

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