Too Damn Much Bowing
So Peebo & I went to see a free movie preview, Zen Noir. Zen could mean just-so Taoism crossed w/ riddle-me-this, & noir can be good, & mashups are trendy, & free is good, & the movie won awards, so odds were good that it would be worthwhile. But high expectations can be deadly to movie-going fun (see “Just Like Heaven” below for the opposite phenomenon). And it doesn’t help when a wide-shouldered LotR-type troll in dirty pants sits next to one (me), & shoulders over the armrest, or when a white-haired, Michael Jackson plastic jacket-wearing lech creepily tries to hit on one (Peebo) — a sortof movie audience nightmare sandwich. A friend of mine said that this is why she’s all but stopped going to the movies.
And the movie was terrible as art and even worse since it was religious sect/ philosophical propaganda.
Something Zen I liked was Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality. Warner was a punk rock bassist & later a neo-psych recording artist, & then a living-in-Japan Zen priest. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember not liking the 1st chapter, then liking the rest of it, so give it a chance.
Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center tells the story of abuse of power at SFZC. Roshi Richard Baker’s shenanigans (see “Richard Baker and the Myth of the Zen Roshi“) are pretty well-known but his successor Reb Anderson had his own experiment in wackiness, being caught waving a gun that he claimed to have found near corpse in Golden Gate Park. He’d taken the gun from the crime-scene, never reported the corpse, & carried the gun around with him for years. The police eventually “lost” their records regarding the politically-connected sect’s leader’s gun-brandishing.
Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki is a biography of the guy who founded the SFZC (and wrote the influential Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). The author, David Chadwick, was a follower and admirer of Suzuki, but he’s honest enought in his portrayal that the reader may not share Chadwick’s admiration. And you can see how America changed a Japanese Zen master’s import.
Zen at War ties up the whole Zen feet-of-clay reading list.
“Pigs in Zen” by Jane’s Addiction:
Pig’s in the mud
When he tires
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zen
Pig is nude
Unashamed
Pig’s in zen
Pig’s in zenTalking bout the pig
The pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig
Goddamned pig …The pig is led to the slaughter
Pig is led to the slaughter
This he says
Is the price some pay
For a simple life
How he feels
Thats proof for him
Pig’s in zenTalkin bout the pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
The pig
Goddamned pig
The pig – uh
Pa-pa-pa-pa-pig
—
And on ProgressDaily we have “Porkers United.”
[...] I tried to read a Bukowski book once — not sure which one — but failed. At Mr B’s recommendation I’m gonna try Post Office soon, which, if I’m not mistaken, is, ironically, the book that the terrible movie I just saw is based on. After the troll-next-seat movie-going experience, I noticed that the seats at the Embarcadero theater are also small, making me think: have my shoulders recently grown? Anyway, from now on I’ll be looking for aisle seats. [...]