Nicholas Roerich is best known for providing the inspiration, costumes, and set designs for Igor Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring, whose riotous performance in Paris in 1913 inaugurated modernism in music. But in the 1920s and 30s, Roerich was a world famous figure, a globe-trotting mystic-artist who hobnobbed with presidents and lamas and whose quest for Shambhala led him to make some remarkable journeys in Mongolia, Tibet, and other forbidden lands, rather like a Russian Indiana Jones, but with a shaved head and dorje. As well as an explorer, archaeologist, and traveller, Roerich was a writer and painter, and his day-glo like canvases of Himalayan scenes exert an hypnotic power. Roerich was one of the few successful mystics, and in 1929 work began on his "Master Building," an upper West Side skyscraper that would house a theatre, a lecture hall, workshops and a museum. Today, Roerich's Master Building is an apartment house, but we can get an idea of what it was like at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, which houses a fantastic collection of Roerich's remarkable work. Roerich's brilliant, psychedelic like paintings turn New York's skyline into something more like Lhasa's. You can reach the museum at http://www.roerich.org/ and you can read more about Roerich in my book Politics and the Occult.