I arrived in South Korea in September 1995, and I’d been there 3-4 months. I started to think about my camera, a beloved Minolta 35 mm. film camera I’d had by then for about ten years. I hadn’t put it to use, but here I was in a perceptual world quite distinct from my lifelong […]
Last year I addressed Taylor Swift’s divahood in this space, but with her “Eras” tour that’s dominated the music industry and media this year, she’s raised herself via apotheosis to pop goddess. What else can you call her, as the camera descends on the roof of the state of the art SoFi Stadium in LA, […]
Am I the only one who sees the Israeli-Hamas conflict as psychotic? Am I the only one who wasn’t surprised when it arrived at a whole new level of savagery? If the Israelis in any way still wondered what Hamas thinks of them, now they know: Hamas’ hatred burns so intensely it wants to chop […]
The last episode of Winning Time’s second season on HBO charts the 1984 NBA finals between Magic Johnson’s LA Lakers and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics, an animosity great enough for the Boston fans to pummel the Laker’s bus in a flurry of garbage as it pulled out of Boston Garden. In a signature brutal moment […]
If you live in the western US, on the grassland plains, you probably know prairie dogs, whom you can find tunneling vacant lots, quite possibly in your neighborhood. At least, they’re certainly in my neighborhood. When I walk out through King’s Ridge and take the bike path out to Cottonwood Trail, I pass them foraging […]
“The pure products of America go crazy—” –William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” While his name may live on in militant rightwing bunkers on the internet as a martyr to government tyranny, most likely most of us won’t remember his story a day later. Americans have extraordinarily […]
In 1981, my first year at Naropa, Ram Dass came and did some talks. One thing he said has always stuck with me: “People ask me what I think about the theory of reincarnation, and they get mad when I tell them it’s not a theory, it’s a fact.” It’s not a theory, it’s a […]
Now, to put this thinking to the test, I’ll assay a fairly difficult doha by Shabarapada (aka, “Shabara,” “Shavara,” “Shavaripa”) from the Charyagiti, a collection of condensed, gnomically esoteric ejaculations by Indian siddhas, that has a detailed commentary by one Munidatta, without which I doubt we’d have the slightest idea what most of them have […]
“When we get onstage, what we really want to happen is, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something a little wider, something that enlarges them. So maybe it’s […]
The dakinis (Sanskrit: “sky-goers”; goddesses who appear in many forms) confront the Indian tantric master Tilopa (988-1069), challenging Tilopa with their own tantric doha: The born-blind looks at, but he cannot see the forms; A deaf man listens to, but he cannot hear the sounds; An idiot speaks, but he cannot understand the meaning. At […]
