Melodious Funk writing a language nobody cares about much less speaks in a little corner of the unknown universe we cling to it we’re proud of it we even think there’s some reason to preserve it & so we keep on writing as if somebody’s going to read it hello out there As I’m one […]
Five to six days a week, I think about prisons. In fact, I go to a desk in an office, and sit down with a pile of mail sent from prisons around the United States (and sometimes from other countries as well). I respond to help them with their lives, however I reasonably can, mainly […]
I’ve written blogs on the Israeli-Hamas conflict, translating tantric poetry, photography as dharma art, the Denver Nuggets, prairie dogs, Hugh Hefner, recognizing ordinary mind, and a shamanic journey to extirpate the karma of the atomic bomb, but what by far got the most reaction was my review of Taylor Swift’s concert movie (Taylor Swift: The […]
At our organization, Mindfulness Peace Project, where I work as the “Co-Executive Director,” the lion’s share of what we do consists of helping prison inmates to learn dharma. This has resulted in some cases in many year relationships with people I’ve never directly met, done entirely through writing personal letters and commenting on […]
The enduring interest in any artistic production, as I started to address in the previous post, remains a hard thing to pin down, as much as critics might monumentalize it. Why this photo comes to the fore and not that one–I don’t necessarily have a language to describe it. That’s the most interesting thing. […]
A fundamental element to my practice of taking pictures, particularly of the natural world, comes from the perceptual sense that I could take a thousand pictures standing in one spot—that everything I see constitutes an organic artfulness that doesn’t require fashioning. What the eye can see has […]
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 […]
