ZenCowboy

A Story in Pictures

2010-09-14T01:48:00.000-07:00

Photo #1 by me

Photos 2-5 by the little Yankees fan (traitor)

Michigan

July 2003

Dirty Zen: Poetry by Ikkyū

2010-08-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

clouds endless clouds climbing beyond
ask nothing from words on a page

poems should come from bare ground
night falling on night falling on black landscape

sometimes all I am is a dark emptiness
that I can’t hide in the sleeves of my own robes

nobody understands why we do what we do
this cup of sake does

a woman is enlightenment when you’re with her and the red
thread
of both your passions flares inside you and you see

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst
and blossom
now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you

her mouth played with my cock
the way a cloud plays with the sky

she’d play with it almost anywhere day and night
touch it with the deepest part of herself

and the night inside you rocking
smelling the odor of your thighs is everything

for us no difference between reading eating singing
making love not one thing or the other

mirror facing a mirror
nowhere else

only one koan matters
you

you stand inside me naked infinite love
the dawn bell rips my dreaming heart

I think of your death I think of our touching
my head quiet in your lap

this hungry monk chanting by lamplight is Buddha
and he still thinks of you

why is it all so beautiful this fake dream
this craziness
why?

Music: Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On remixed from the 2005 album Motown Remixed

Poetry: Crow With No Mouth: Ikkyū 15th Century Zen Master Versions by Stephen Berg

Photo: Vaiden & Will’s Wedding - Phoenix, AZ - November 25, 2006

Facebook readers click here for the real deal with music & all.

But Seriously

2010-08-23T17:37:00.001-07:00

Serious about Comedy

You wouldn't know it from reading this Blog lately, but I have now been doing stand-up comedy for six months. And much of that time I have been performing on a stage at least two nights a week. I have been asked to post one of my bits and so here it is, one of my bits from an early gig. There are some references to other things I said before record was hit and a few call-back references to other comedians’ bits, but I think it captures me about a month into this new endeavor. If you're on Facebook click here for the video.

Classroom Personas

2010-08-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

My classroom
Phoenix, AZ
August 2010

Pissing Off a Local

2010-08-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

Sausalito, CA
October, 2008

Meezie Pup

2010-08-16T01:14:00.000-07:00

Asleep on my office couch
Alright!! Enough of my self-indulgence sad sack pity crap!!
It's time for a puppy picture.

The Roots: how i got over

2010-08-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have felt like I'm passing an emotional kidney stone. Lucky, there always seems to be a great album released that fits perfectly into my emotional landscape. The Roots: how i got over dropped just when I got back from Auschwitz and I have been spinning it almost daily. If you're on Facebook click here for a couple of videos from the album:

They will be playing a sold out show in LA at the Troubadour on Friday, August 20. I'm getting too old for musical road trips. I will be in Phoenix. Such is life.

Postcards From Auschwitz

2010-07-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

While sitting by the railroad tracks in Auschwitz, a line from the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt came into my head. In this film, they play a bored married couple that is surprised to learn they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other. In the middle of a gunfight in their home, Mr. Smith asks about what happened to their happily-ever-after.

Mrs. Smith answers, “Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished yet.”

I wish that after this Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz I could write an uplifting piece about healing and reconciliation. I can not. To be honest, I left this retreat feeling the most emotionally battered I have ever felt in my life.

And yet, I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. Krakow is a beautiful city. Zywiec is a wonderful regional beer. I am happy to have been given the opportunity to participate in this experience.

I had moments of great catharsis where I felt a deep appreciation for my life. And moments of deep nihilistic despair. I experienced moments of compassion for others and myself, excitement, grief, irritation, satisfaction, frustration, fear, anxiety, peace, anger, jealousy, joy and just plain old boredom.

Normal every day human being stuff.

Amplified through the filter of That Place and squeezed into the practice container that was created to hold us in That Place for a week.

Every day, after our morning meditation, we would split into smaller groups and perform Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist religious services throughout the camp. In the late afternoon, before we left for the day, we would all gather together and Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi would lead us in the Kaddish prayer. We read it four times: once in Polish, once in German, once in English, and once in Hebrew.
On the last evening, before we left the camp for the final time, we all gathered at one of the ash ponds for a final service. After that service was over, Roshi Peter Muryo Matthiessen spoke a few words. He talked about how sixty-five years earlier, Auschwitz was a desolate place. There had been no natural signs of life left. No grass, no leaves, no animals, no birds, only mud and death. Today, Auschwitz has become a place of life. We were surrounded by blue skies, sunshine, grasses, flowers, lush trees and singing birds everywhere.

He was right. Poland experienced weeks of rain before we got there and that made the place come to life even more vibrantly. Auschwitz was SO blindingly green it made my Arizona eyes hurt.My friend Eric Manigian then looked down. In front of us was a small puddle of water teeming with tadpoles. The late afternoon sun was beating down on this little island of water. We could see that it had shrunk to at least half of its original size in the last few days. Eric looked and me and said, “If the sun keeps beating down on them like that, the water will be gone in a day or two. All of them will die.”

I pointed my camera to take a picture and then stopped. I was filled with shame that I wanted to capture an image of the tadpoles’ imminent demise to illustrate the story that I was already forming in my head. And then I felt like a dick for all the pictures I had been taking the whole week in Auschwitz, and for all the stories that were being formulated in my head in an attempt to create some sort of understanding of this place.

I put my camera away and walked quietly out of the camp.

I’m glad I didn't take that picture.

I wish I had taken that picture.

“I would like to prompt the viewer:

be patient,
patiently read everything that is recorded in these pictures.
These are my ‘words that are drawn’ for you.
You have to read them.”
Marian Kolodziej

Much of the artwork that I have been using in these posts has been photographs of drawings by Marian Kolodziej, Auschwitz prisoner number 432. The collection of his drawings is called Images of Memory – The Labyrinth, and is housed in the basement of St. Maximilian Kolbe Franciscan Church in Harmeze, Poland, located about 6 miles from Auschwitz.

Marian was a 17-year-old in the Polish Resistance when he was captured at the beginning of the German occupation of Poland. He was arrested in 1940 and later deported to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940 as one of the first Polish prisoners to be transported to the new concentration camp, Auschwitz. He became number 432. After evacuation of Auschwitz at the end of 1944, 432 was sent on various death marches to other camps until he was liberated by the American Army on May 6, 1945, from the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, some 350 miles west of Auschwitz.

He weighed 79 pounds.

Returning to Poland, he enrolled as a student of painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow, graduated with a degree in stage design, and went on to became a successful production and stage designer in theater and film.

For close to 50 years he did not directly speak of Auschwitz, until 1993 when, at 70, he was debilitated by a stroke. “And in the hospital room, weak and close to death, he lay on his belly, a pencil taped to his hand, and began to recreate on small sheets of paper the details of a life he’d tried so hard to forget but that was more vivid to him half a century later than his more recent career as Poland’s most renowned theater set designer. Those pages multiplied and spread into gigantic murals and drawings . . .” (In Memoriam: Marian Kolodziej)

And with the support of his beloved wife, Halina,
he returned to Auschwitz,
For us.

“Hurra! Hurra! Ich Bin Wieder Da!”

The progress of his recovery and
the growth of The Labyrinth became one.

Marian quotes the words of poet Zbigniew Herbert,
“You were not saved in order to go on living.
Time is short—You must bear witness...”

At the entrance of The Labyrinth Marian writes:

"This is not an exhibition, nor art. These are not pictures. These are words locked in drawings…I propose a journey by way of this labyrinth marked by the experience of the fabric of death… It is my lack of agreement to the world of today…It is a letter of an old man to himself 55 years before and a rendering of honor to all those who have vanished in ashes."

Auschwitz is now a museum. My snapshots of That Place are essentially postcards of history. And postcards can be discarded or overly sentimentalized. The ink from Marian Kolodziej’s Images of Memory – The Labyrinth has gotten under my skin, like a permanent tattoo. His images shifted the focus of Auschwitz into the confines of my own heart and cracked me open.

“The apocalypse is a kind of dream. It is a picture that a teen-age boy saw in a dream, remembering Duerer from reproductions hanging in his school corridor. During the first years we slept on the ground crammed together in an unimaginable fashion, squeezed close. The whole room on its left side because that's the way the first man lay down. If the first man lay down on his right side, then everyone had to lie on his right side. The head of the man in the second row on your knees, and in that way you got five hundred sleeping in one stinking room. By the door, a latrine barrel filled to the brim with urine and excrement.

And I'm there too. I sleep and see the massed attack of the many-headed Beast, of horses, of dragons and of reptiles - it is the whole cruelty of the day united with the loathsomeness of the night, it is the kapos, criminals, degenerate murderers, executioners, sadists, it is the everyday life of the camp. It is like in the Bible. The Four Horsemen, the Whore of Babylon, plagues from the sky. Everything according to the verses of the Apocalypse of St. John, but all crammed into the camp, into the reality of the camp.

We made this Apocalypse in ourselves, for ourselves.

And today I dream in the same way and I dream the same things. In these dreams the Beasts come back, repugnant, brutal, predator, cruel - people.

Through the smoke from the crematorium that I will dream about for all eternity, I do not see the sky. Sometimes there is only a cry. Someone is running through the camp and calls out,

"Where are you, God?"

All the while, life in the camp goes on normally.
Someone brings a barrel with food.
People eat, relieve themselves, die.

Today, from the perspective of the years, I am absolutely certain that,  if I am as I am, it is because of those experiences in the camp, because of the hell that I went through. I learned and I taught myself to live - in isolation and in the herd and for the herd. To live honestly and worthily, to have a conscience. Maybe it was worth going through all that?
Looking in advance from my life's close at this twentieth century of ours which is coming to an end, I see that after Auschwitz not only did nothing change on earth - though it was supposed to - but it is worse.

The laws of the camp still govern the world. 

The factory of death has been modernized, computerized,

The monstrous Apocalypse from my drawings endures.”

I have been told that Marian has also said that although he surely endured the hell of Auschwitz, he spent the rest of his life in the heaven of his wife, Halina’s presence. And that when Marian and Halina looked into each other’s eyes, the power of their connection and love was palpable to everyone in the room.

Marian Kolodziej died last year.

Halina returned to the camps, for the last time, on the last day of our retreat to sprinkle some of his ashes on the grounds of Auschwitz.

There are no happy endings.

Halina spoke to us that day and ended by saying that ultimately all there is, is love.

Every day, at dusk, we walked back to the Center for Dialogue and Prayer to the room that I shared with seven men, and I would attempt to take a shower (generally ice cold), wash my sweaty clothes in the sink, eat dinner, buy an espresso in the lobby café, and use their Wi-Fi connection with my laptop to Skype Helene for 10 - 20 minutes before going back into the evening schedule.

On most Buddhist retreats, once it has started, I do not speak to my wife until its end. In Auschwitz she was my lifeline. I saw too that for the other men in my room, emails, phone calls, and daily incoming photos of the kids became their lifelines through this labyrinth we had immersed ourselves in.

I began to feel Viktor Frankl’s words in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us.

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun, which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'"

Writer Primo Levi in his book If This Is a Man says that if a note could have been smuggled out of Auschwitz it would read, “Enjoy your life.”

Primo Levi is said to have committed suicide in 1987.

I was in the soup line outside the camp one afternoon with a friend, talking about all those who survived Auschwitz only to be overtaken by the shadow of Auschwitz later and end their own lives. The woman behind us joined our conversation and said she grew up next to a couple who had both survived the Holocaust and married after the war. She told us that the husband committed suicide, and when someone suggested that part of the tragedy was that he had survived the holocaust only to take his own life later, his widow said that the real tragedy was that her husband had not survived the Holocaust.

In 1987, Elie Wiesel said that really, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier."

On February 1, 2007 Holocaust denier Eric Hunt attacked Elie Wiesel. Hunt tried to drag Wiesel into a hotel room but failed to do so. Wiesel was not injured. Hunt fled the scene but was found and arrested. On July 21, 2008 Hunt was sentenced to two years, but was released on probation. Currently, he maintains a website promoting Holocaust denial.

No one survives.

Survival comes from our ability to move with Loving Action through this existence for others and ourselves.

To treat each other with dignity, generosity, compassion; to use our humanity as wisdom to empower each other with our humanity; to look, with gratitude, into the eyes of another and bear witness; to bear witness to just this. . .

Loving Action is the only response. Everything else (desire, judgment, ignorance) is a knee jerk reaction to this death trap.

Ultimately, all there is, is love. And yet . . .

Some of the people on that retreat annoyed the hell out of me. They were so shallow compared to me. They didn't get it at all. Obviously their practice was not as deep as mine. Others were just stuck in their own self-pity. Then there were those who treated the whole thing like it was some kind of Death Camp Disneyland complete with Auschwitz gift shops.

“Really, gift shops at Auschwitz?” I thought to myself indignantly. “What the hell are they going to sell there: Anne Frank key chains, Elie Wiesel Night-lights, second hand shoes?” Mostly, the shop was filled with books, autobiographies of survivors, histories and commentaries written for different age groups and levels of understanding, a bound collection of Marian Kolodziej’s drawings.

Tasteful.

And then I saw a sign that said, “Postcards: 1 zloty or 4 postcards for 3 zlotys.”

“Postcards from Auschwitz!?” I got angry again. “Who would you even send that to? And what could you possibly write on the other side? ‘Sitting in Auschwitz thinking of you. Wish you were here!’ How arrogant and disrespectful to create such a commodity,” I thought. And then I bought one.

At night I slept among a symphony of snores in a stiflingly hot room. The windows could not be opened because apparently they have not invented screens yet in Poland and the mosquitoes there were always right outside the locked glass.

The first night in Auschwitz, one of the men in the room screamed in his sleep in German. The rest of us sat up in our beds looking around, startled and shocked. The next morning he apologized for his outcry. I thought to myself, “I guess if I was German and in this place I’d probably be screaming in my sleep too.”

On the last night in Auschwitz, I was again awakened in the middle of the night by a cry. I sat up in my bed, but every one else remained still. Shocked, I wondered if the scream had been real. I wondered if it was I who screamed.

Sweaty, with my heart beating fast, I got up, splashed cold water on my face, looked in the mirror, and thought, “Was it just a dream? “

The next day, Eric asked if I knew who it was that screamed in the night. “That was real?” I asked. “If someone screamed, how come no one but me got up? I thought I dreamed it? Was it me?”
“I don't think so. It didn't come from your side of the room.”
“So who was it?”
"I don’t know, maybe we all just dreamed it.”

According to Bernie Glassman, much of life is dealing with diversity and Auschwitz is an extreme example of how we deal with diversity; kill everyone that is different from me.

Standing in the Karkow airport, waiting for our flights, I told Eric that the next time we plan a trip together it should be to the Caribbean with our wives and his son. Next time, we should spend our days drinking beer on the beach and our nights playing in the dark.

Eric was heading back to New York to his family, and I envied him. I still had another week in Europe before I was finally heading home. Spending time in Europe after Auschwitz seemed like a good idea when I had planned the trip but in that moment my plans felt shortsighted. All I wanted to do was fly home and enjoy my every day life with Helene. Instead, I was flying to Amsterdam to wander without aim in a foreign city and hang out with Juriaan and Martin in the evenings at the Wilderman. I guess that was okay too.

Eric got on his plane. I had over an hour before I could board my plane, so I sat in the airport alone feeling broken and grateful.

I unzipped my backpack, pulled my worn copy of The Eye Never Sleeps, by my teacher Genpo Roshi, and read these words:

“Nothing is really static. Yet what are we always trying to do? To make everything stay put! . . . There is nothing to hold onto, nothing we can depend on; it is all moving too quickly. There is only one time when we will be safe and secure: in a pine box! Only then will you be secure; . . . You will be very, very secure when you are dead, but then it will be too late to enjoy life.”

I will end this post with a song:

Leonard Cohen - Dance Me To The End of Love

Mark Pellington | MySpace Video

‎שואה

2010-06-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

The Shoah in 1200 words, more or less . . .

Before I started practicing Zen Buddhism with Genpo Roshi, I was a Vipassana student and at least once a year I would go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Those of you who know me in my day-to-day life may find this hard to believe, but breaking that silence was always hard for me. After spending days and hours in the quiet within myself, talking to someone about my cell phone provider or whether or not I preferred wheat or rye bread felt jarringly ridiculous. All words I spoke felt like lies and trivializations, disruptions from what is REALLY going on inside and all around us.

And yet, our words and our stories are in part what give us our humanity.

I have always loved that Lao-tsu’s first lines of the Tao Te Ching are, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. . .” And then he proceeds to put down 81 verses about the Tao.

It is in this space that I enter the stream and speak about my experience at the June 2010 Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz. These “retreats” are multi-faith and multinational in character, with a strong focus on the Zen Peacemakers’ Three Tenets:

Not-Knowing
Bearing Witness
Loving Action

Traditional Buddhist retreats tend to have a greater emphasis on creating a container to sit in silence and stillness to observe what is coming up. This retreat felt more like trying to be grounded in the middle of a bumper car ride.

Bearing Witness at Auschwitz took the traditional Buddhist practice container and placed it on its head as I spent a week crashing into The Other and Myself over and over and over again.

My understanding of Not-Knowing is to enter the stream without holding on to prior judgments or pre-conceived notions about what should or should not be happening. Bearing Witness is to simply be with what comes up, both in others and myself, and Loving Action is ultimately the aware response to what arises when I am connected to the moment and not finding a way to separate myself from my life.

I fail at following these (pain-in-the-ass) tenets all the time.

Auschwitz is an abyss.

I found Auschwitz to be a place that was incredibly difficult for me to NOT go numb to what was happening around and inside me.

I still do.

In 1933 there were around 9,000,000 Jews living in all of Europe. (About 1.5% of Europe’s total population at the time.)

9,000,000
6,000,000
3,000,000

By 1945 TWO-THIRDS GONE.

6,000,000 people violently ripped from the fabric of their everyday lives and slaughtered.

3,000,000 people left to rebuild their lives from ashes. Literally.

Bone.

Ash.

Dust.

Gone.

Today Europe is home to over eight hundred and five million people.

Only two million Jewish people are left in ALL of Europe today. (About .3% of Europe’s total population.)

The term Holocaust, comes from the Greek word holokauston which means,

"sacrifice by fire."

Genocide is not the act of one man or one nation.
It takes the collective.

The first two days of this retreat were spent in touring the Jewish Quarter and Ghettos of Krakow and then the full tour of the Auschwitz museum. After a day and a half spent focusing on what has got to be one of the darkest periods of Western history, I found myself asking the questions, “Why? How could THEY do this?”

Identifying myself as one of the Buddhists in this multi-faith gathering, I wore a samu jacket and rakusu, traditional Japanese Zen Buddhist clothing. While staring at the picture of a German solider shooting a mother and child, a Japanese man who was also touring the camp came up to me, pointed to my rakusu and asked in heavily accented English, “What country?”

“United States,” I replied.

“No!” he said and then pointed to my rakusu again. “What country?”

“Japan.”

We both smiled and bowed at each other with our hands in gassho.
In the face of all the evidence of human suffering around me by the hands of other humans that bow to a stranger and the connection it brought me became a warm, momentary respite. I, after all, was here for peace and to raise awareness for peace.

And then it hit me in the next moment that in WWII Japan was an ally to Germany. Japanese Zen Buddhism was as much a part of Auschwitz as the Catholic Church was.

I was using my condemnation and judgment of The Other, The Nazis, to separate myself from what was really going on. I was no longer Bearing Witness; I had become judge, jury, and executioner. “THEY were evil! How could THEY do this? Those fucking bastards deserve to die!”

My questions became, “Why? How could WE do this?”

Then we went to Birkenau, the ultimate 24 hour 365 day-a-year killing machine with the ability to gas around 7,000 people every 20 minutes. There were the remains of barrack chimneys for as far as my eyes could see for the 100,000 people who where kept alive to process the dead until they too were reduced to ash.

In the back of the camp was a building called the Sauna. This was where those chosen to work were stripped of everything: their family, belongings, clothes, hair, dignity, humanity.

Everything.

One of the items that most people brought with them were their family pictures. They were stripped of these too, but unlike jewelry, shoes, glasses, and hair, these pictures were worthless to the Nazis. They were found in the camp after the war. And today, the sauna holds the history of their humanity. Wall after wall of framed pictures. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, bar mitzvah pictures, family pictures, vacation pictures. . .

. . .pictures of my mother and my father and my grandparents and my sisters and my brothers and my wife and her mother and her father and her family and our children and their children.

Wall after wall of their stories.
Of our stories. . .

I asked myself, “Why? How could I do this?”

And then I knew why and how. In every moment, when I separate myself from my own feelings of anger, resentment, responsibility, helplessness, fear, denial, judgment; both towards others and myself; I have the potential to be both the victim and the perpetrator. This separation in ourselves is how an Auschwitz is created.

THEY did not create Auschwitz. WE did. WE still do. . .

When I am not Bearing Witness, I am Auschwitz.

In the shadow of The Shoah, my words and pictures are trivial.
But I have no other recourse.

Other fragments from my head:

How can I sing - My world is laid waste.
How can I play with wringed hands?
Where are my dead? O God, I seek them in every dunghill,
In every heap of ashes. . . O tell me where you are.

from “The Song of the Murdered Jewish People” by Itzhak Katzenelson He wrote this song in 1943. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

from “One” by U2

Is it getting better
 Or do you feel the same 
Will it make it easier on you now  
You got someone to blame

We're one
 But we're not the same
 Well we  
Hurt each other 
Then we do it again

One love
 One blood 
One life 
You got to do what you should
 One life 
With each other 
Sisters 
Brothers 
One life 
But we're not the same
 We get to
 Carry each other 
Carry each other  

One...life

  One

from The Heart Sutra

Gya-te-gya-te-ha-ra-gya-te
Ha-ra-sou-gya-te-bo
Ji-so-wa-ka
Han-nya-shin-gyou

Gone! Gone! Gone! Beyond!
Gone beyond the beyond!
Bodhi Svaha!
Heart Sutra.

from Kaddish

Beyond the reach of all consolation.
Beyond! Beyond! / And say, Yes.
Amen.

Auschwitz / Birkenau: Beyond! Beyond!

2010-06-17T01:41:00.000-07:00

My first response to leaving Auschwitz / Birkenau has been silence. There is a line in the version of Kaddish that we read every day that is translated as, “Still you remain beyond the reach of our praise, our song, / Beyond the reach of all consolation. Beyond! Beyond! / And say, Yes. Amen.”

Beyond the reach of all consolation.
That, I think, is a good place to start.

I went to Amsterdam after Auschwitz / Birkenau with the intent to write about my experience. But when I got here, I found that more than anything I needed to sleep, watch people walk by, eat good food with friends, and wander without an aim in a beautiful city.

“You have arrived here not at a sanatorium, but at a German concentration camp, from which the only exit is through the chimney of its crematorium.” This was the speech given by SS officer Karl Fritzsch to the 20% of the new arrivals who were chosen to work to death and not immediately send to the gas chambers. The Nazis called this, "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" (Destruction through work).

This picture of the exit sign at Auschwitz is in remembrance of all those who could not do as I did, simply open the gate and walk out.

And So It Begins, Again . . .

2010-05-31T18:57:00.000-07:00

By this time next week I will be in Auschwitz/Birkenau. Here are my Malas. Each bead represents one of you, who has chosen to support me, in one form or another, on this trip. I offer nine deep bows of gratitude to each of you.

I chose the center beads to be black and white. On the black on is a painted star and the white one reminds me of carved bone. The two blended together I see as balance. Thank you for being a part of this trip with me. Peace, Hoen

Auschwitz/Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat: June 2010

2010-05-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

My practice, as a Buddhist, includes bearing witness to the suffering of this world as a means of raising consciousness for social change. As part of my commitment to compassion, this summer, I will be participating in a week-long ZenPeacemakers’ Auschwitz/Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat beginning on the morning of June 7th. Each day will be spent sitting by the train tracks in the death camp, both in silence and in chanting the names of the dead.
This journey must begin with me humbly asking for your assistance. I am holding out my begging bowls and seeking to raise $1,500 towards this trip, most of which will go to the Zen Peacemakers organization and their continued commitment to socially engaged Buddhism.

Admittedly, I find the prospect of sitting and being fully present in Auschwitz overwhelming. Your support means I will not be going there alone. I will be assembling a Mala, Buddhist prayer beads. Each bead will represent each one of you who has donated.

I will wear this Mala on my journey, taking all of you with me. The support Malas I wore in 2007 when I went on a Street Retreat in Detroit were a lifeline of strength and connection for me, and I know I will definitely need a lifeline in Auschwitz this June.

In Auschwitz, we will be performing memorial services for the dead, and if there is anyone you would like me to include in this remembrance, please send me their names. I would be honored to include them as I recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.

I have set up a PayPal link at the top of this page. You can log into your account from there or, if you don't a PayPal account, go to "Don't have a PayPal account?" and click CONTINUE.

The photographs in this post are from others who have made this journey and share their images with us. My intent is to photograph and record my journey and post them here as a means of bring this experience back to you.

Thank you for reading this and considering a donation.

Here is a video made by the Zen Peacemakers about the first Auschwitz/Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat in 1996.

Peace & Love, ZenCowboy

Movement 2010

2010-04-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend this year's DEMF over Memorial Weekend. And with headliners like Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman), Kevin Saunderson's Inner City and Juan Atkins, the mastermind behind Model 500 and Cybotron, it should be a great party.

For those of you who are going, here's a Classic Detroit Techno mix by my friend Cain (who will be there).

Put Your Hands Up For Detroit - Techno Pioneers I by Cain on Mixcloud

Here's the link for MOVEMENT 2010
and a few more of my pics from last year.

Ms. CM: Detroit Techno Tour Guide

Comedy Gigs This Week

2010-04-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

If you thought that last post was funny,
(or even if you didn't)
I will be performing three nights this week between 9 & 10 pm.

Monday, April 26 at The Turf
Tuesday, April 27 at Plazma
Wednesday, April 28 at The Hidden House

Thank Goodness!!

2010-04-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling mighty proud to be an Arizonan this weekend. Thanks to Jan Brewer and her cracking team I now have the right to carry a concealed weapon without any kind of training or permit, I can look forward to more fine corporations coming to our state with the 21% corporate income tax reduction that she hid in an education bill, and at last Arizona is getting rid of all those EVIL Mexican vermin that sneak on to OUR land like rats!!

Here's an example of one of the illegal immigrants that I have to deal with EVERY day. I hope they find him and lock him up for being here in OUR country illegally!!! Who does he think he is!!! Following OUR American dream!!!

Immigration Technicality my ass, this kid is an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT probably brought here by his parents when he was two years old. He should be deported or better yet, put into a camp in the desert here in Arizona so we know he'll never try to get into OUR country again. Maybe our own Sheriff Joe Arpaio can help with that. He's good at setting up camps in the desert for vermin. We need a FINAL SOLUTION to get rid of such criminals before it's too late.

Thank you Jan & Joe for getting the cattle car wheels going and keeping us white folks safe from those damned intelligent immigrants!!

Soundtrack To My Soul

2010-04-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

The soundtrack to my soul is a combination of Radiohead's Kid A and The National's Boxer. That's a tough order to follow. I have never stopped loving Radiohead, but I couldn't really listen to any new Radiohead disks and deeply enjoy them until their 2007 album In Rainbows. Happily, I have been able to go back and really enjoy Amnesiac.

May 11 is the release date for The National's new disk, High Violet. It ain't Boxer. Which is good. But still . . . I'm not sure how a feel about this album yet. You can listen to the whole thing at the NY Times. And it's really interesting article about the band. If you hit this post after they stop streaming it, here's the first single, Bloodbuzz Ohio.

And then out of nowhere comes John Grant's Queen of Denmark, which will more than likely make it on my top ten at the end of the year.

Recorded by and with Midlake last year in their studio in Texas, they made it their personal mission to get John Grant's music out to a wider audience. Thanks Guys!! This album blew me away the first time I heard it. The BBC is streaming samples of each track here. And here is the first single from the album, I Wanna Go to Marz.

And if you're local, The Tallest Man on Earth will be playing at the Rhythm Room May 4.

His album The Wild Hunt is another of my favorites so far this year. Here's the whole disk. Listen. If you like it, buy it and come to the show.

Bonodo Show in Pictures: LA 04/22/10

2010-04-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

The Gang

The Band

The Singer: Andreya Triana

Simon Green, "Mr. Bonobo"

Simon Green on Keyboards

Drum Solo!!

The End

Happy Fans

A Day in the Life

2010-04-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

If you are seeing this post on Facebook, click the link below. There is a YouTube video invloved.

Catching Up

2010-04-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Taxes, teaching, doing at least two stand-up gigs a week, the last push of the school year with graduating seniors, and getting ready for my trip with the Zenpeacemakers to Auschwitz II-Birkenau this June has kept me so occupied, it feels like my last post from almost a month ago was made last week. I'm taking this week off from the stand-up stage to write new material and enjoy some live shows for the first time in what seems like forever.

Monday night was Beach House. Here's a clip from that show (But you will have to turn off the Bonobo track below first:

Thursday it's out to LA to see my little sister, who's in from New York, and we're going to catch Bonobo doing a live set at the EL Ray Theatre. Here's Bonobo's latest disk remixed down to eleven minutes to get a feel for how wonderful it is.

I'll also be at The Tallest Man on Earth's show at the Rhythm Room on May 4.

One more Beach House Photo

A Night at the Symphony

2010-03-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

The afternoon of Friday, January 20, 2010.
"Hello?"
"Zen Cowboy?"
"Yeah, what's up Dr. T?"
"Dude, I have four box seats for Phoenix Symphony tonight. It's the show where they play the music of Led Zeppelin."
"Seriously?"
"Yes, you in?"
"Absolutely! I'm in."

Later that night:

Like a hotel, but with live music

Room service for The Ladies

The Boys

The Show

Drum Solo

Stairway To Heaven

This show is put on by Windborne Music. They tour with local symphonies all over the country. Box seats or not, if they come you your town it's a great gig. Here's a track off the free CD that came with the box seat purchase. You can buy it here. The track is Stairway to Heaven, of course.

Relaxin' in a Window Seat with Erykah Badu

2010-03-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

H is up in Sedona hanging with Z. I had some work to do and had to stay here in The Valley. That's done now.

It's a windy, warm day here in Phoenix. The script, Utah Zen, is done (for now) and I'm happy with the results. So is T. We shall see what comes next.

I've performed my comedy bit three times in two weeks and have been signed up to perform it three times next week. Not bad for a guy who's first time on stage was Monday, March 15, 2010, if I do say so myself. There's no point in writing new material, yet, until I get this first bit out there around town.

The taxes are done and we get a little money back, always good.

Next week is the end of my fifth term. My little writers are ready to hit the stage Tuesday and Wednesday to read their pieces.

This is the perfect afternoon to relax, open the windows, and listen to the new Erykah Badu album, New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh, that hits the streets on Tuesday. Such a wonderful grove. And I love the trippy album cover, another fabulous piece by artist Emek. Here's a bigger look and a collection of other pieces he's done with and for Ms. Badu.

The first single is the second track of the disk, Window Seat:

There is also a new video floating out there in the digital ether. The song is not on the new disk, but it's defiantly worth checking out:

Contrasts

2010-03-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

These pictures are the whimsical result of living and working within the contrast of Eastern trained and Western trained Zen monks coming together.

Eastern style

Western style

American Gothic style (Grant Wood)

Norman Rockwell style

English style

Welsh style

Detroit Techno on Miami beach?

2010-03-19T13:18:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to decide of this show is cruel to the fans in Michigan or if the promoters understand that probably half the residents of Michigan who would go to this show are in Florida right now anyway. Either way, what a great line up. If you're in the neighborhood next Thursday here's the link.

The Evolution and De-evolution of Kogen

2010-03-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

Kogen in pictures

The beginning: Ameland January 2009

ZMC Arrival
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
Attention Shusso!
Winter 2010
Time to go
Dancing fool
Original Face
Phoenix Butterfly

The REAL ZenCowboyS

2010-03-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

I have never seen myself as the owner of the moniker “ZenCowboy”. I believe it’s one of those archetypes that was evident the moment Eastern Spiritual traditions hit Southwestern “Lone Cowboy” traditions.

I’m A Zen Cowboy. Not THE Zen Cowboy.

A simple Google search will produce:

At least two Zen Cowboy musicians:

Chuck Pyle

& Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Michael W. Domis published a Zen Cowboy book:
Ken Wolverton has a Zen Cowboy short story blog:

There is a Zen Cowboy Clothing Company

And a Zen Cowboy Design Company

As I said, there are lots of Zen Cowboys out there. And that’s cool.

BUT right now I am pleased as punch that if you type “zencowboy” into Google, the middle of the screen gives you video results that look like this:

Me and Jeff Bridges side by side as ZenCowboyS!
That’s not just cool, that’s COOL BEANS!

A Modest Proposal

2010-02-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

It's not enough to simply be a Teabagger!!

Let's come together and fully embrace who we are: FLAMERS!!!!!!!!

“The tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with water from PRIVATIZED fire departments.” -THOMAS JEFFERSON

For too long now, fire departments across the United States have been SOCIALIST organizations, resulting in TAXES on the American people.  FACT: Most Americans never use the socialized services of the fire department. We have the best fire departments in the world in the US, but that doesn't mean that anyone (even non-US citizens) should be able to dial up and have fires put out, etc. There are private companies (Halliburtion, Etc.) who could step in tomorrow and take over every fire department in America and charge the consumer directly. 

This is AMERICA. NO FREE FIRE SAFETY.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in asbestos and carrying a fire hose."

This is THE new political movement in America. The Birther movement and The Teabagger movement have FAILED. We are The Flamer movement, and we are succeeding at tearing down ALL forms Socialism - starting with our Fire Departments.

Please tell everyone you know about this group.

When it comes to ObamaFireCare, remember, we are: Taxed Enough Already For American Red Truck Socialism.

"This is America. Pay to Spray."
- Member Susan Weinberg

Buy the shirt here.

For the FACTS go to http://angrytownhall.com/
or check us out on Facebook here

Politics aside this is the best social commentary I’ve seen in a long time. Andy Kaufman would be proud! God Bless America and Troy Conrad!

A Desert Bird's Winter Weekend: More Pictures, Few Words

2010-02-23T20:12:00.000-08:00

By The Time You Read This . . .

2010-02-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

I will be off into the woods at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center for a much needed long weekend of sitting and silence.

I haven't been up since last November. It will be good to reconnect with everyone there.

Including myself.

"Who is the self that I will be reconnecting with?"

Dude, just shut up with the questions and sit!!

ZenCowboy Reveals THE SECRET!

2010-02-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

But DON'T tell anybody!!

Happy Valentine's Day from ZC

2010-02-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a sneak preview of what I will be putting on for my wife later tonight. Sorry ladies, she's got the exclusive rights to this Love Vaquero.

Morning Coffee w/ Poetry & Birds

2010-02-11T06:21:00.000-08:00

Lullaby of Entropy

How do you pray for
faith?
Wind without sound
wakes voices from other
things.
Earn your way
back into being
by saying
the silence after the
music.

Be Generous
In Your Thoughts, Deeds, And Things

No one understands
the subtle work of small grey birds--
what will count
is the tenderness evoked
in those who come after
remembered breath, unconfused words.
All things fear not to live.
Awareness, not fear,
is our humanity.

Poems by Terrance Keenan in his wonderful book St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness

My Old Faded Rose

2010-02-07T22:18:00.000-08:00

Way back in 2000 a Johnny Cash box set called Love, God, Murder was released and was so successful that in 2004 another completion called Life was created. I remember thinking it looked like a great collection, but I’ve never been into box sets, not even a box set of Johnny Cash. Fast forward to February 2010. Amazon.com has the Love album of that collection as one of their $5 dollar download deals this month.

BUY IT.

I did. And as I’m listing, track five, “My Old Faded Rose”, comes on and stops me cold. This has got to be one of the funniest and most hard-core painful “love” songs I’ve ever heard. Click the cover to hear the track.

A February Beach House Buzz

2010-02-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite music web sites, Daytrotter, posted a recording session today of Beach House playing songs off their new disk Teen Dream. Seeing as how I posted yesterday saying this was such a great album, I thought I might as well share some today's buzz out there for this disk.

Daytrotter, by the way, is a recording studio that posts their session with great new bands for you an me to listen to and download. If you've never visited them, I highly recommend you check out their archives. I've posted the Daytrotter Beach House recording session track "Zebra". Just click on the cool picture below. For the rest, click here.

And as long as I'm posting today's Beach House buzz. Pitchfork posted this video today of BH singing their first single, "Norway", live in their fuzzy Baltimore studio. (Feb. 16 update: Pitchfork has posted them playing the track "Zebra" from the same fuzzy session.)

A Little Something to Keep the Blood Flowing

2010-01-31T23:29:00.000-08:00

So far 2010 is entering my veins, musically speaking, like a shot of 151. It’s a bit intoxicating. I’m having a hard time listening to anything else other than the new Four-Tet. But there’s still more to drink in. Last week the Baltimore-based duo Beach House, released their third disk Teen Dream. The band has put their first single, “Norway”, out as a free download. It’s a click away right here.

One of my favorite disks of 2006 was Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther. This week there new disk, THE COURAGE OF OTHERS comes out and it’s absolutely beautiful. Here are two tracks:

I also dig the whole wizard look of the album cover:

At the end of 2008, the album Holiday was released by Alaska in Winter aka Brandon Bethancourt. The only reason why it did not make my top ten that year is I heard it for the first time in January of 2009. And now one year later, he has released what I can only describe as a collection of synth jams entitled Space Eagle [the motion picture soundtrack] for a 1980’s “film not yet in existence.” Apparently this disk in only available on cassette tape and will be released sometime this year. Looks like this is my first favorite digital download of 2010. You can get it here today!

And if you haven't checked out Four-Tet’s new album There Is Love in You do it NOW. I posted the whole disk earlier this month. It’s gone now. BUT he has posited an incredible mix from last December called Much Love To The Plastic People that is available for download on SoundCloud. Click on the little blue play icon to listen here.

Swedish Opera Pop Music:

2010-01-29T11:41:00.002-08:00

this ain't no Chess

Last week I posted the song "Colouring of Pigeons" from the soon to be released double CD opera Tomorrow, In A Year, written and performed but The Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock.

I loved that single and was excited about what the rest of the disk would sound like when it came out in March 2010. Starting this week, The Knife are streaming the whole album from their website and you can pre-order the disk and receive the mp3's today. That's cool.

If you find the first disk unlistenable at first, start with the first track from disk two, "Annie’s Box" and then go back to the first disk later. I hope they bring this performance to America's West Coast this year. I stopped taking road trips for shows a few years ago, but I would for this one.

I will warn you, some of these tracks, especially on the first disk are more challenging. "Variation of Birds" definitely had to grow on me. In fact, it's still in it's gestation period.

Here's the whole album stream:

But I would expect nothing less from The Knife. Here's a clip of Karin Dreijer Andersson from The Knife accepting an award at Sweden's P3 Guld public radio award show for her Fever Ray solo album.

And from what I can see, The Knife are not an aberration of Swedish pop music today. Here's another clip from that show. You can see Karin in the audience with her melted face watching. And what are we watching? Staygold debuting a track called "Backseat", with assists from Spank Rock and Robyn.

But then, if I'm going to post a live video, I should post my favorite live video from The Knife:

ZenCowboy says, "Let's be SAFE out there!!"

2010-01-22T12:03:00.000-08:00

New Tunes for Jaunary

2010-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about being too sick to get out of bed is that I can just lie there and stream new music. Normally, I use January to catch up on albums that other people listed on their top ten lists. But there are already several disks of note that have come out and are coming out this January.

So far I have two new electronic disks that I can't stop listing to. The first is Real Life Is No Cool by Lindstrøm & Christabelle. Lindstrøm's 2008 disk Where You Go I Go Too was one of my favorites that year. Their first collaboration was a 2003 single called "Music (In My Mind)" under the name Lindstrøm & Solale. She now goes by the moniker Christabelle. This new album has take the potential of that 2003 project and blossomed into what Pitchfork is calling "sexy, sexy space disco." Here's a track:

Lindstrom & Christabelle - Baby Can't Stop by James DB

Albums Pause(2001) and Rounds(2003) by Four Tet are still a playlist on my iPod and will probably always be. Next week (when it comes out) I will be buying and adding Kieran Hebden's latest disk There Is Love In You to that list. Instead of trying to find words, like intelligent dance music, to describe his work here is the disk from start to finish. Hebden has posted it on SoundCloud for us to listen to for the next week.

There Is Love In You by Four Tet

And on the folk front, Portland's Laura Veirs released her seventh disk July Flame on January 12. I've been a fan since her 2004 release Carbon Glacier. So much so that I made a road trip to Tucson that year to see her live as she decided to skip Phoenix on that tour.

July Flame is getting some well deserved buzz. Here is the video for the title track.

And then there is the first great Indie album of the year Vampire Weekend's Contra. I admit, I was a bit apprehensive about hitting play on this one, but these boy have done it again. And they are generously streaming Contra from start to finish right now for us to check out to before we buy.

Happy New Year and Happy Listening!!

Oops, I Did It Again!

2010-01-17T18:45:00.000-08:00

Last year I posted 52 times on this blog which sounds like once a week but was more like a few one week and zero for four weeks. One of my New Year's resolutions was to post at least once a week. Happily I have already broken that resolution by not posting for seventeen days. I started the year by getting the MOTHER of all head colds that went into my lungs. This virus has done a good job of effectively kicking my ASS. Although not fully recovered, I find I can function at around 70% as opposed to the 20% of the last few weeks. One of the best parts of feeling better is that I am SO happy to be feeling better. Little things now bring me the greatest joy, like being able to have enough energy to read a book in bed. In the past, after being sick I always tended to over do it the moment I felt better. This time, I'm taking it slow.

I just started St. Nadie in Winter by Terrance Keenan and was blown away by the first paragraph.

"Reality is the last nostalgia. We look upon it with hopeful sweetness, yet we grip it with the iron tenacity of desperation brought on by the terrifying accident of life. Purpose. Meaning. Certainty. Truth. Or perhaps the other view -- Emptiness, Chaos, Doubt, Chance. However we seek to understand reality, whether through the scientific method, reason, religion, mysticism, philosophy, whatever perspective the conditions of our being compel us to use, we nevertheless wish reality to be so."

I think I shall make that paragraph my new New Year's resolution.

Musically, this year is wonderfully up and running. My favorite song at the moment is the first single from the upcoming release by The Knife. In collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, The Knife are to release the studio version of their opera Tomorrow, In A Year, on the 1st March 2010. "Colouring if Pigeons" is the first single.

Colouring of Pigeons by The Knife

And So It Begins Again . . .

2009-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

If I wasn't going to the Zen Center today, I can't think of a more perfect way to ring in the new year. If you're anywhere near Oklahoma City I would highly recommend that you attend this event.

And if, like me, that's just a bit too far away, you can always download the album. It came out last week as an iTunes exclusive, but it's available now at other digital download stores like here.

I'm not sure if this a sign of good or bad things to come in the new year. I suppose it's up to you.

Perhaps this will help, I offer you a link to the new Flaming Lips Video for "Watching The Planets" from their album Embryonic. Careful, there's lots of naked people in this video, including Lips front man Wayne Coyne.

And if you have some time on New Year's Day, here's the full documentary on the Lips called The Fearless Freaks. As far as I can remember, everyone has their clothes on, mostly. Double-click the video to open in Hulu.com and set it to full screen viewing.

Happy Birthday & Happy New Year!!

ZC's 2009 "Top Ten" Albums

2009-12-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

The holidays have been surprisingly blissful considering: A. my wife had an allergic reaction that sent her into anaphylactic shock last Tuesday. B. Northwest Flight 253 came into Detroit hours before I did, thus making the airport a little tense. C. I had a bad head cold. D. I cut my trip into a long weekend making it concentrated, like drinking frozen orange juice straight.

And now I find myself back in Phoenix reflecting on a year of music. This year for my “Top Ten” I’m doing something a little different. First, I’m making it a list of twelve. Second, I’m cutting out all the disks that feel have already been given lots of props on other lists.

Don’t get me wrong, The Flaming Lips are one of my all-time favorite bands and I played Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion non-stop last January, BUT I think some of the disks that I’m seeing on top ten lists this year, like Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix or XX are a bit over-hyped.

This is my attempt to stop my own cycle of listing the obvious buzz albums of the year and create a collection of interesting, complex, overlooked and yet accessible releases from 2009. Honestly, It’s not clear to me why these are not some of the buzz albums this year.

ZC's Top Twelve Albums of 2009

Sophia - There Are No Goodbyes
Lushlife - Cassette City
Jon Hopkins - Insides
Henrik Schwarz, Âme and Dixon - The Grandfather Paradox
Lightning Dust - Infinite Light
Taken By Trees - East of Eden
Discovery - LP
Ben Gibbard & Jay Farrar - One Fast Move Or I'm Gone
Florence & the Machine - Lungs
Los Pikadientes De Caborca - La Tenía Más Grande
Air France - No Way Down (Domestic Download Only)
Lay Low - Farewell Good Night's Sleep (Domestic Download Only)

A Few Words About The Music
Sophia There Are No Goodbyes (Flower Shop)
I tried not to include this disk. Being that it’s an import, it ain’t cheap. I can’t start a list of accessible albums with a small label import, I told myself. But this music is now thoroughly infused in the marrow of my bones. It is my favorite disk of 2009. The lead singer and songwriter, Robin Proper-Sheppard is actually from San Diego, California but he’s been living in and recording music in London, England since the mid-nineties. No Goodbyes is one of those albums that pull us in with its slow burning ache. I haven't heard that done this well since The National’s Boxer. (And it can be downloaded on Amazon.com for under $8.00 dollars.)

Lushlife Cassette City (Rapster)
Lushlife is the moniker for Raj Haldar. I have a deep love for DJ culture and an artist’s ability to remix and rebuild something old into something new. In this case, the mix-tape feel of Cassette City is just that, a feel. The beats, the samples, the instrumentation, the rapping is all Haldar. He builds this “mix” from the boiler-room to the rooftop and creates something original that smacks of something Old Skool and New Weird America. Lushlife’s website calls his sound Kanye West meets the Beach Boys. I call it bliss.

Jon Hopkins Insides (Domino)
Known more for his work with others, such as Coldplay and Massive Attack, than for his own, Hopkins is a classically trained electronic musician who brings the warm touch of life to the plastic keys he presses. The closest I can come to, as a comparison, for this mix of electronic elements with traditional classic instrumentation, is Max Richter’s 2004 disk The Blue Notebooks.

Henrik Schwarz, Âme & Dixon The Grandfather Paradox (BBE Records)
DJs Henrik Schwarz, Âme & Dixon have taken “an imprudent journey through 50 years of minimalistic music” and given us a map of the present through remixed moments of the past. You don't hear many DJ’s who include jazzmen Steve Reich & Pat Metheny with the avant-garde blind composer Moondog and minimal techno founder and producer Robert Hood in the same mix and allow it to flow seamlessly. If that wasn’t enough, a second disk of the originals is included.

Lightning Dust Infinite Light (Jagjaguwar)
This is the second album for Black Mountain's Amber Webber and Joshua Wells. Open. Flowing. Rich. Warbled. Amber’s vocals shine through Webber’s keystrokes like rays of sunlight through magnificent stormy clouds over a vast desert landscape. If Black Mountain is built on the foundation of early Tony Iommi riffs and John Bonham’s pounding beats, then Infinite Light is like Grace Slick singing White Rabbit with the Moody Blues as her back up band, in a good way.

Taken by Trees East of Eden (Rough Trade Us)
While Victoria Bergsman has been the voice of Swedish indie-pop band The Concretes for over ten years, she is best known for being the other half of the duet on the 2006 song “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. With much of East of Eden’s base elements recorded in Lahore, Pakistan, there’s that Peter Gabriel’s Passion feel mixed with Bergsman’s sold indie-pop sensibility. Eden is organically psychedelic with a poetic elegance. There is also playfulness in the track “My Boys” which is a reworking of “My Girls” from Merriweather Post Pavilion. And Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox adds backing vocals to the track “Anna”.

Discovery LP (Beggars Xl Recording)
Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles team up to release their first album together. This is a kids’ disk for adults. It’s big like the bangs on my sister’s hair in the mid-eighties. Wonderful slices of thick cheesy synth layered on disco beats and buttered with R&B.

Ben Gibbard & Jay Farrar One Fast Move Or I’m Gone (Atlantic)
This is the most contemplative album on this list. A concept album, One Fast Move Or I’m Gone is music inspired by a film that was inspired by a book, all of which was inspired by a magnificent place, Big Sur. Make sure you get the cd/dvd combination. This is an audio/visual, intellectual/emotional experience. Allow filmmaker Curt Worden to take you on his journey and then play the mp3’s on your ipod or the cd in your car as you allow Ben Gibbard & Jay Farrar’s music to be part of the soundtrack to what inspires your life.

Florence & the Machine Lungs (Universal Republic)
As a kid I used to scratch my head over the fact that I had to make road trips to mall music stores in Windsor, Canada, to buy Smiths & Echo and the Bunnymen records. Top of the Pops mainstream albums on one side of the river were considered “underground” back home on the other side in Detroit. Lungs is one of the biggest selling debuts this year in the UK and for good reason. Florence Mary Leontine Welch gives us a grab-bag of musical styles tied together with the timeless theme of passion, both its highs and lows, and she pulls it off in a way the only someone with her pipes can. Lungs indeed.

Los Pikadientes De Caborca La Tenía Más Grande (Sony Music Latin)
I got sucked into this disk through their quirky, mind-blowing cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and soon found myself listening to the whole thing over and over again. A southwestern drunken party disk with a Sonora, Mexico flare, this music is to traditional Northern Mexican banda what ska-punk is to reggae. It’s fast, playful, horn based dance music that says, “Hey Vaquero, get your boots on, crack open a cerveza, and danza!”

Domestic Download Only Disks:

As much as I hate to admit it, downloading music has become part of a music obsessive’s means of listening to albums that otherwise would be out of reach. Both of these disks were originally released on small labels in their native countries in 2008 and later were reissues on bigger international labels in 2009. But neither was ever made available in the United States in any format other than MP3 download.

Air France - No Way Down
Sweet, mellow, catchy, electronic pop music. Listening to Swedish band Air France’s No Way Down is stepping back into the sounds of childlike joy. Following in the footsteps of bands like Saint Etienne, Air France creates an atmosphere of sounds that is to be breathed in like the smell of pastoral hills after a spring rain . . . or something like that. Both Lala.com and Amazon.com have this album available for download.

Lay Low - Farewell Good Night's Sleep
Icelandic musician Lovísa Elísabet Sigrúnardóttir has created her second collection of beautiful music inspired by the American honky-tonk era (1950–1960). Farewell Good Night's Sleep is a modern take on old school country, roots, and gospel. The most interesting comparison I have read is that she’s Patsy Cline filtered through Regina Spektor. Right now, this album is only available in the United States as an iTunes download although I have read that it will finally be released domestically on March 9, 2010.

Happy Listening!

Merry Christmas from ZenCowboy

2009-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

And before I FINALLY head home for the holidays, a special Merry Christmas picture of ZenCowboy.

Daily Drama

2009-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

Twenty-four hours can make a big difference sometimes.

Monday: Helene and I are getting ready to head back to Michigan for the holidays with my family. Although she still has a bad cough, her bronchial infection is much better. She can talk and has energy for the first time in almost two weeks. I find Oberon is being served at Moto right down the street from my house.

Tuesday: At 2:00am Helene has gone into anaphylactic shock. Her body is covered in hives that look like welts and her eyes are swollen shut. She takes copious amounts of Benadryl. We lay on our backs on the bed holding hands and just breath. In my mind I am calculating just how fast I can get her to the hospital if her breathing stops. I can feel the beginnings and endings of all things intertwined like our fingers. By 5:00am she is out of danger. Her breathing is regular, and she finally goes to sleep. At 7:00am I am on the phone with Northwest Airlines to see what I can do about rescheduling our flights. For two hours the call goes directly to a message that says that due to the bad weather they are too busy to take my call but are sorry for the inconvenience. I too am having issue with the weather. Outside it is cold, cloudy and rainy. At around 9:00am I finally get through and am told that if I do not get on the plane today I will have to pay a $150 dollar penalty and buy another ticket at current market value. This essentially means I will not be able to fly home for Christmas. They also tell me that my return flight will be canceled if I don't fly out today but that I can re-buy the flight for over $300 more than I paid for it in the first place. The call ends with the line, “Sorry for any inconvenience, happy holidays.” Indeed. After calling all my family to tell them the news, I collapse into bed next to my sick little Sabel cat. We wake around 7:00pm and watch A Christmas Carol (1984) with George C. Scott. Helene goes back to bed around 10:00pm and sleeps for fourteen hours.

Wednesday: The sunshine has returned. On a whim, I call Northwest Airlines to see if I can work anything out with them in terms of reschedule a flight. “Good news!” My operator replies, “You qualify for the Midwest Winter Weather Waiver. Your reschedule is covered without penalty or any other additional coasts to you. Merry Christmas, Mr. Hull.” Looks like I will be able to fly out on Friday to see my family for Christmas after all. Although still coughing, the swelling around Sabel cat’s eyes had gone down to a reasonable level. She is curled up on the couch watching old movies on TCM. Tristan texts me the message, “Write Forest Write!” I make a new ZenCowboy video and spend the afternoon writing as I listen to Butter by Hudson Mohawke.

Thursday: To be continued . . .

Love Your Brother, Damn It! It's Christmas Time!

2009-12-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Motherland

2009-12-21T22:17:00.000-08:00

My world is collapsing in around me. On the eve of our deportment to the Great White North, Helene and I stop in for a quick dinner at my favorite local sushi spot, Moto. For some reason that I can no longer remember, we always sit at the bar. And just as I’m about to order my Spicy Asian Slaw with a Tootsie Roll, I see a familiar orange ball with a smiling sun on it at the top of a beer tap not five feet in front of me.

“Excuse me,” I say to the waitress, “what beer is that?”

“Oberon,” she replies.

“Bell’s Oberon!?!” I ask.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“From Kalamazoo?”

“Uh, . . . I don't know.”

“Bring me one. Now! Please.”

“Sure, no problem. You know you’re the second person today that’s freaked about us having this beer on tap.”

“How would you feel if you could get a pint of Kilt-Lifter in Tokyo?”

“Stoked.”

“Exactly. This is about the same thing for a beer-drinking guy from Michigan.”

“Cool, enjoy.”

The woman next to us is so intrigued she orders one too. We toast each other and then take our first drinks. It is at that moment, looking up at the sign above the bar that clearly lets me know I am drinking this Midwestern jewel in the Sonora Desert, that I feel as if my world is collapsing around me.

“The water, it tastes different,” she says after her first sip.

“Yeah,” I say, “that’s the taste of Lake Michigan fermented.”

The waitress comes back and asks if I’m enjoying my beer. I’m not sure if it could be more obvious that I am so I say, “Yeah, it’s good. But next time I come in I expect to see Brador on tap.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

“My youth,” I reply.

She looks me up and down and then says, “We sell beer and sushi, not miracles. You want another Oberon?”

I look over at the little orange ball on the tap and think to myself, “This certainly feels miraculous to me.” Then I look back into her sarcastic eyes and say, “You’re kidding, right. Of course.”

Mr. Bronner (another Michigan thing)

And as I type this, I feel the water of the Great Lakes coursing through my veins once again and the warmth of that cold little mitten has already smitten me. In a few hours I will be stepping into a flying elevator and then stepping out again onto the frozen tundra of my childhood. (Okay, so it’s not quite tundra, but it’s still a lot colder than Phoenix.) Just to make my point, here’s a video to a couple driving in Michigan. Notice their quaint Michigan accents:

The picture at the top of this post is from the 2003 Sufjan Stevens album entitled Michigan. In the summer of that year Helene and I went to Portland, Oregon and caught Steven on his first ever West Coast tour. It was in a small bar and half the folks seemed to be there for the opening act, Joanna Newsom. (Although I wish her well, I am not a huge fan.) The group had on blue Boy Scout Uniforms, U of M baseball caps and in the back was a handmade map of Michigan. Between songs, Stevens would point on the map to where he was taking us next. After the show, I bought Stevens a beer and told him that his album’s exploration of what it meant to grow up in the mitten had saved me years of therapy. He laughed. I smiled. We drank our beers and talked of The Motherland. Here’s a wonderful video from that disk:

Ahh Impermanence

2009-12-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

Last night, Phoenix was hit with a major storm. Today, December 8, 2009, there are many people without power. Including Dogo, as of this morning.

This tree is at the front of my complex. Had it fallen the other way, it would have smashed into my neighbors’ bedroom.

I always liked this tree when I walked past it to the grocery store. According to one of the old timers who were gathered around this morning, the tree was planted in 1968. The year I was born. We were the same age.

They are cutting it up now and taking it away. It is no longer considered a tree. The police officer on the scene referred to it as a road hazard.

It went down around midnight last night. Midnight last night I was asleep in my bed, like my neighbors. I am happy the tree fell in the road and not on their bed. Two people ran into the tree this morning with their cars, one at 4:30am and the other around 6:00am. No one was injured. One car needed to be towed. At 4:30am I was sleeping in my bed. At 6:00am the first bell rang for sitting on our zendo.

There is a giant eucalyptus tree hovering behind our house on city land. I have been asking that it be trimmed for three years. If it were to ever fall due west, it would land right on our bedroom.

Today is Rohatsu. On this day, 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama dropped his hand to the ground, looked up at Venus in the early morning sky, and understood that we are all Buddhas. And so the Dharma wheel turns and our tradition has grown over time to this day of Rohatsu, December 8, 2009.

A tradition that Shakyamuni Buddha said would end in 2,500 years, which is right about now.

This tree fell in the the garden next to the clubhouse where we used to hold zazenkais. It will be cut up and hauled away soon too. Hopefully, it will be used to create something new.
We no longer use this space for zazenkais.

Today, December 8, 2009, was the first weekday morning the Sitting Frog Sangha sat together in our new space. I anticipate sitting in the mornings as a sangha for many years to come.

A Sad Good-Bye

2009-11-23T11:53:00.001-08:00

After a week of diagnostic testing, techie consultations, numerous trips to Fry’s Electronics, countless software and hardware repair surgeries, and compassionate bedside manner, it is with great sadness I must report that on November 22 2009 at 11:33pm Mountain Standard Time the plug was pulled for the final time on my beloved BigBird G5 iMac. All that remains are our memories, memories that have been saved on an external hard-drive and will hopefully be transferred to a new iMac this Friday. I feel a bit cheated. Four years was not enough time together. We were a good team BigBird. I will miss you.

Just Plane Silly

2009-11-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

I've been flying a lot the last few weeks. Hence, this post:

An Afternoon in Sausalito

2009-10-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

BEFORE heading up to Spirit Rock in the morning for Martine and Stephen Batchelor's Halloween weekend workshop called The Secular Buddha, I'm hanging out in Sausalito. I flew into San Francisco International Airport and took a commuter bus up to the Spencer Street Exit. It's a trip I've made may times and normally it takes about a half hour.

BUT with the Bay Bridge out, every one has to head North over the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the Richmond Bridge further north to get to the east bay. My flight was almost two hours. This time the drive from the airport to Sausalito was also about two hours.

AND driving in Marin County is nuts right now because everyone from the other side of the bay must pass through here to get to and from the city. Hopefully, its good for businesses along the 101. And hopefully the weekend will be better traffic wise. And hopefully they will open the Bay Bridge soon.

BUT that is not why I'm posting this. I'm posting this to show you what I'm looking at at I type these words. The view behind this picture taken by Helene in October of 2008 is what I see right now, give or take 295 days or so.

This Vlog is from this afternoon:

Oh, and the name of that Island is Angel Island.

Happy Hallow-Weenie From Zen Cowboy

2009-10-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

Something New

2009-10-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

Local Color: Phoenix Flames

2009-10-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

Testing 1. 2. 3.

2009-10-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

WOW! Major HTML issues in the last post. Been off the horse for way too long. But I think I have an answer to my time and space issues. Look for VIDEO posts in this space soon. How about a real mashup? The video was produced by Boris B for “In-A-Gadda-Blue-Monday” by DJ Schmolli

Monster Mashups

2009-10-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

I must have Mash-ups on my brain right now, as the albums I am listening to the most right are musical collaborative mashups of a sort. The most well known is the Monsters of Folk disk. Mike Mogis and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes, Jim James from My Morning Jacket and M. Ward got together to record and tour an album together.

I told Helene they are like the Traveling Wilburys of our generation. She pointed out that: 1. She is a Boomer and I am an Xer. Thus, we are from two different generations.
2. The Traveling Wilburys were big in the 80’s during my youth. Therefore, Traveling Wilburys ARE the Traveling Wilburys of my generation.

Here are a few tracks (Monsters of Rock not the Traveling Wilburys):

The next disk is a collaboration between Collections of Colonies of Bees and Bon Iver called Volcano Choir. For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver was one of my favorites last year and this disk moves in a similar icy current. Here’s the video of the fist single, Islands, IS:

Then there is One Fast Move or I’m Gone, a collaboration between Jay Farrar (of Uncle Tupelo & Son Volt), Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie and half of Postal Service) and Jack Kerouac. Yup, Jack Kerouac. Originally, they got together in 2007 (Jay and Ben, not Jack) to put a few songs together for a film about Kerouac’s novel Big Sur and it turned into a full-length album. Luck for us!!

Here is a stream of the whole disk:

If you like it, go out and get the whole CD / DVD package. Yeah, it’s 26 bucks but that’s the price of going to a movie these days on a Saturday night. It’s a great package, and after watching the DVD I picked up a copy of Big Sur yesterday and plan on reading it at the airport and on the plain when I fly to San Francisco next weekend as I listen to the soundtrack on my iPod Here is the movie trailer:

And then there’s this:

One of my all time favorite bands, The Flaming Lips, has finally released their new album Embyonic. Feels closer to 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic but with the last fourteen years of putting out great albums mashed up in this new disk. It’s just a whole different trip than the last few disks. Another band that reminds me a bit of the 90’s styled Lips is Stardeath And White Dwarfs.

Their debut came out earlier this year and is called The Birth. These two bands have close ties and according to the LA Times:

“The Flaming Lips have already recorded a follow-up to “Embryonic.” The band will release a track-by-track interpretation of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” in the near future, which it recorded with Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, a band that features Coyne’s nephew Dennis.

Henry Rollins and Peaches make guest appearances on the album, Coyne told the crowd during a pre-concert question-and-answer session. A Flaming Lips spokesman says the album will likely be an iTunes-only release, at least initially.”

But what does this have to do with Mashups? Well, nothing really, but I think perhaps The Flaming Lips and Stardeath And White Dwarfs doing a cover together of Madonna’s "Borderline" might fit the spirit of this post.

You be the judge:

Steal This Post

2009-09-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

Two of my favorite albums this summer can’t be bought. They have to be downloaded.

This first is from the great French maestro on the decks, DJ Zebra. Anyone who has connected to any type of media outlet in the past few months was inundated with the fact that this summer was the 40 anniversary for the first Woodstock Music Festival. I was personally more interested in celebrating the 10th anniversary of Woodstock 99 which is remember mostly for violence, rape, fires, and an abrupt ending of the show. But I digress.

To commemorate this auspicious occasion, he remixed the whole thing and calls it BOOTSTOCK. You can't buy this one in any store or website near you but you can download it here at http://djzebra.free.fr/Bootstock.html

CAREFUL!! IT'S A BOOTLEG!! SOME MIGHT EVEN SAY YOU'RE STEALING!!

Here's a sample of some of his more contemporary mixing skills:

The second disk takes me back to the early eighties and the late night world of the Electrifying Mojo. Break Beats, Funk, Electro Boogie it all entered my soul through Mojo’s spinning on WJLB in Detroit. Fast forward 26 years later to the summer of 2009 and you have THE SOUND OF FUNKY BREAKS, an old school collection of electrofunk and breaks remixed by various artists and produced by Audiohacker It’s like someone pulled out the old reel to reel Cybotron styled tape loops in my brain and blended them with a few modern beats, bleeps, and bumps. It’s all right here for you, artwork and all: http://breaks.audiohacker.com/

I’m lucky. In Phoenix summer lasts until mid-October so I have at least one more month to Pump Up The Volume for Peace & Music

And Abbie Hoffman this one's for you:

Under Pressure

2009-09-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

"It's a snake's nature to move in a crooked fashion. But if you put it in a bamboo tube, it becomes straight. The control of the mind through samadhi is also like this."
Nagarjuna

Last Spring three of my friends went off to do a three-month training period at Yokoji-Zen Mountain Center. This happened to coincide with Tricycle Magazine’s The Big Sit 90 day Internet Ango. I wound up going to Mountain Center at least once a month to sit for long weekends and trained in my own householder way for 90 days. This fall, I decided to take the concept of a prolonged training period, create some group commitment areas and individual commitment areas, get a small group of non-Buddhists together to work with me, and call it 90 Days of Great Determination. So far, I’m sucking at this big time.

One of my commitments last winter and spring was to blog on a regular basis. I think I did alright. Summer rolled around and I slacked off a bit, but I was going to start at it again as part of my 90 training period commitments. So here I am two weeks into this and all I feel like is a failure every day. I intended to meet with my three participants at least once every two weeks. We can't seem to meet. I intended to keep a daily journal. It’s been weekly at the most. I am keeping up with SOME of my commitments but my small community component has so far crashed and burned. Still, I’m seeing how I should have begun it differently and when I do next January, I’ll make changes.

That’s not very specific, I know. For now, that’s all I can type.

One of the cool things about 90 days though is how long it is. Yes, I have been dragging my ass on several commitments from day one, but every day I look at my training schedule and see them shouting at me to get started. Hence this post.

And what has been coming up for me also is reflecting on how I would be handling this in a more traditional Zen training schedule. I used to think that just going to the zendo and following the schedule day in and day out was enough. Now, I see that I was always a failure. There was never a day when was present for the whole time. There was never a ceremony where I didn’t make some sort of a mistake or drift off in the middle of chanting.

I once said to Tenshin Roshi that I was enjoying just digging in and surrendering to the schedule. He smiled and said that we are always surrendering to the mountain’s schedule first and our Zen schedule second. I got this a little bit when I woke up last April one morning to a blanket of powder. Sandals in the snow made for a cold day. But how was I to know, it had been 90F in Phoenix when I left and 70F on the Mountain the day before. By the next day, the snow had melted and my feet were warm again.

And after an endless summer of 110F days I would happily walk barefoot in snow right now.

I suppose last spring was a honeymoon period or beginner’s luck. Looking back that 90 days seemed so effortless. But I can only be at where I am. I surrender to the mountain that is my life first and then dig in, surrender to the schedule, and keep moving forward through the tube. Hopefully, the pressure of this first post will press me on to the next.

A Sheep or a Goat?

2009-07-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes living with Helene can be like living in one of Plato's dialogues. The other morning, literally seconds after my eyes had opened to another day, her first words of awakened consciousness were, “Must life on this earth be violent?”

I assumed the question was rhetorical but when I looked over at her I realized I was expected to reply. Pre-coffee Socratic method is always a bit dicey but I answered.

“Yes, because it’s a good story. We are always looking for antagonists in our narratives to keep the illusion of a personal plot plodding along.”

I gave the example of the film UP that I had recently seen with my nephew. “The first ten minutes is a montage of this beautify domestic bliss lived by two people who found love early and followed through in turning the every day into awe by loving another completely and surrendering to that love. That idea may seem enchanting but it’s a boring story. The plot of the film gets interesting when she dies and he’s left alone as an old man with a life full of memories, pain, and problems. We are always adding drama, some if it violence, to our lives to keep the story interesting.”

“That sounds glib.” she said, “So if I’m on a beach relaxing and get hit by a sunami or I’m BBQing for my family and a faulty propane tank explodes burning me to death (This happened to a poor guy in Phoenix recently) I added this violence to keep my life interesting?”

“Well, now you’re talking about how we define violence. The eternal pounding of the ocean on rock until it was pulverized into sand created the beach you were relaxing on. The charred pieces of skin, muscle, and bone that you were grilling before you were burned yourself was also violent. The very act of eating, it be a cow or a carrot is a violent act of stomach acid breaking down a living organism to a chemical level and reconstituting it into ourselves. It takes death to sustain life. We just take it personally when our death or the death of someone we love is involved. Everything comes from friction and energy. The friction and energy we like is called a wonderful vacation on the beach. The friction and energy we don't like is called a tragic sunami.”

“Well, that’s true,” she said, “but what about all the violence we can control but don’t? What about Iraq?” (We had just seen the film No End In Site the night before.) Watch a clip here:

What moved me the most in watching is film was the total detached arrogance and ignorance that was used in the reconstruction of Iraq by our leaders and how this snowballed into the violent quagmire we have today. The concrete walls of the Green Zone are a physical symbol of our ability to cut ourselves off from the situation that surrounds us, to detach from the reality in front of our eyes. The maddening aspect of this film and it’s unpacking of the events that happened after Mission Accomplished is that it becomes clear the nightmare of the pain and suffering and violence that has occurred in the post United States of America invasion of Iraq could have been avoided.

Not wanting to sound like a hippy but at the same time not knowing where else to go in the face of such concrete momentous human pain,(warning, this link is graphic) I said, “The continued violence in Iraq could have been avoided if our government leaders had made their postwar reconstruction effort and decisions based on compassion for the Iraqi people not based on an outdated cold war political ideology and greed.”

“Yes, and . . .”

It almost hurt me to say it. The simplicity of my answer felt stupidly child-like, “And love. Had we acted out of compassion and love much of the suffering that is going on there today could have been avoided.”

“True, but what keeps us from acting out of love and compassion? What keeps a good Buddhist like you full of glib answers and removed from your heart? Why are you afraid so sound like a child, to sound like an old cliché hippy?”

“I don't know.”

“Walls,” she said, “Our incessant need for walls! That’s why humanity adds unnecessary violence to this world. Walls. We build walls, both literal and figurative, around ourselves to block out the pain of living and that very act creates even greater pain. In our desperate attempts to avoid pain, we detached from the world around us, which inevitably causes suffering for others and ourselves. When the walls come down we cannot help but act from love and compassion.”

“But when the top UN envoy for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, went to Baghdad he did not built a wall, like America’s Green Zone, he allowed his offices to be open to the people and look what it got him.”

“Killed in a bombing.”

“Yes, so what did he get for his openness but pain and death?”

“When we are in a place of openness we cannot help but act from love and compassion not matter what the outcome. Most of the time we do this instinctively without thinking about our own outcome; running into a burning building to save a child or stepping in front of an oncoming bus to push a stranger out of the way.

While these are noble acts they are not enlightened acts. The keys to heaven go to those who knowingly tear down the walls both inside and outside and move through this world naked and unafraid. Life on this planet might be inherently violent but we, as a race, have the conscious choice to not add to that violence.”

In that moment a Bible story from childhood called the Sheep and the Goats flashed in my head. After Jesus has left the temple in shambles he goes on a tirade about the end times. I remember that the Bible I read as a kid highlighted the words of Jesus in red. In this section Jesus is talking about how we will be separated like sheep and goats. “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty . . . The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” Matthew 25:34-40

For the goats the message was different: “’Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needed cloths or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment but the righteous to eternal life.’” Matthew 25:44-46

“So it’s not about doing something solely based on what I might get but doing something because it's the compassionate thing to do for others despite the pain it might cause me? And the rub is that if I break down my walls and reach out compassionately to others I will probably get hurt and hurt others and yet if stay behind my walls I WILL hurt myself and others.”

“I think so . . .”

And then I thought about Abu Ghraib and wondered if I was responsible for my goverment's sins againts others. “Helene, am I a sheep or a goat?”

“What are you talking about?!?”

“Nothing, I just remembered something from when I was a kid and it got me thinking. If the keys to heaven go to sheep not goats who sorts out who is who? Is eternal punishment to hell really a sound moral goal for goats? Where does compassion and love fit in there? Isn't hell just another walled prison we’ve built to try and protect ourselves from those we perceive as evil? Isn't heaven the ultimate wall made to protect ourselves from suffering and hell the ultimate attempt to make those we don't connect with suffer? Does hell have visiting hours? And if I visit, will I be allowed to leave? Sometimes I’m sure I'm a goat. Sometimes I know I'm a sheep.”

“And sometimes you’re ridiculous. Would you like coffee?”

“YES, I would. And I’m serious about this goat sheep thing.”

“With cream?”

“That would be delightful, thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

The Hazy Moon of my Life

2009-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

It's Helene's Birthday today and I am grateful to be celebrating it with her.

This is an older post from an older blog that I felt like revisiting.
I was lying on the couch with Helene this afternoon, when I was hit with an overwhelming feeling. She’s leaving tonight to spend the next few days with her mother, who is going in for her second major surgery in less than a year.

We have watched Helene’s mom go from an active, vibrant women who lived for operas, plays and her volunteer work at the museum to a women who lives in the shadows of her former self.

I won’t go into all the gory, sordid details, but over and over again I am constantly being given reminders lately of life’s absolute impermanence. Death’s cold breath has been giving me metaphysical goose bumps on the back of my neck.

About a year ago, I saw this movie on TV that took the footage of the moon missions in the 60’s and 70’s and added current commentary by the astronauts. It was fascinating to hear the reflections of old men as they watched their younger selves dance on the moon.

One of them said that being up there was like holding on to life by a string over the abyss of space. The dance on the moon was a dance with death, as they literally were kept alive by a small tube tied to a tin can. And yet, he said, it was the most alive he has ever felt, looking at the earth from a little rock in the vacuum of space.
Lying with Helene on that couch I felt the warm of her skin on mine and the rise and fall of her exquisite chest. I could almost hear the blood moving through her veins. Normally, this kind of physical awareness would move me. But I felt a calm stillness. A completeness in her arms that is normally reserved for when we lie together late at night after sex, not before.

I looked at her and felt as if I was looking into the face of the whole world from a little rock in the vacuum of space. I was brought down on my emotional knees by the shear beauty and total impermanence of it all. Of her, of her mother, of me, of my mother, of our love, of our lives, of your life, of this whole spinning blue ball in space.

I kissed her. We got up. She packed a small suitcase. And left.

I was hit with this overwhelming feeling today,
like breathing in a cold winter night,
like the warmth in my chest after a sip of single malt scotch,
like falling up into the vast expanse of a western sky,
like the simple sadness of a child,
like the death of an old, old friend,
like the shock of a scorpion sting,
like the closed fisted tension of my lover’s body just before she opens to release,
like an exposed palm with extended fingers spinning round and round in vast emptiness.

Like dancing on the moon.

Ever have that feeling?

Happy Birthday, Love!!

Happy Birthday Rev. Graham

2009-06-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

Today is the Reverend Graham’s birthday. Not Billy Graham, Dogo Graham. I’m not sure how old he is exactly. But I do know that at this point he looks so old that it’s hard to see the face of the young man that shared the brain cells with the wrinkled old geezer that I now find myself sitting across from most Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. I recently came up with a theory as a result of sitting across from Rev. Graham and that is that J.J.R. Tolkien modeled Gollum after the archetypal Scotsman. See for yourself:
In honor of this inauspicious day here are a couple of videos from a YOUNG NEW band (as opposed to old and warn out old man) from Dogo's hometown Glasgow, Scotland.
They are called We Were Promised Jetpacks and their latest disk, These Four Walls, came out Tuesday in Europe and comes out Stateside July 7. I’m not sure if the UK even had electricity when Dogo left but they do now and this band is putting it to good use.
I’m sure the house on the cover is in Glasgow and looks much like the house Dogo was born in. Whenever we are at someplace new together and people ask where he is from he always says, “I’m from Glasgow, Scotland. It’s like the Detroit of Europe.” Then he looks over at me and I say, “And I’m from Detroit.” For some reason we both find that bit funny. But I digress, on to the music:

This is a cool acoustic number entitled Ships with holes will sink. It was recorded on a pier with their lovely city behind them:

And this one is a single off the new disk entitled Quiet Little Voices.

Don't Even Ask

This last video had nothing to do with We Were Promised Jetpacks it is a public service announcement for anyone thinking of joining us at Sitting Frog Zen Center. I know for a FACT that Dogo insists on wearing his robes Scottish style in honor of his proud heritage. If you sit with us you will be dealing with this:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Reverend Graham
and many happy returns of the day!

May 09: Pictures in an Ann Arbor Alley w/ Tim

2009-06-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

May 09 Musical Notes

2009-06-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

Time for me to get back on the wagon and start blogging again. I’ll start with music. British musician Jon Hopkins released a disk last month entitled Insides. Right now I am in love with this album. It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite albums of the 21-century (so far), Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. It is a mix of classical and electronic sounds and beats. With Insides, Hopkins takes this mix even further. Insides is like a copy of The Blue Notebooks put in a food processor with Four Tet’s disks Pause and Rounds, mixed to a fine purée, poured into a pie tin, and chilled until the thick musical paste solidifies into a rich desert of sound.

Any fan of Coldplay has heard his work as their latest album Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends begins and ends with Hopkins’ song “Light Through The Veins.” Here’s the video to and edited version of the song:

And if you like this, Dutch musician Reimer Eising’s latest, Myam James 2 is a great side dish to go along with Insides on your iPod. Eising calls the musical stew he concocts Kettel. (Get it? stew . . . Kettel . . . side dish . . . desert of sound . . . I love “cheesy” extended metaphors.) Okay, I’ll stop now.
I’ll just stick with musical connections instead of food ones? Coldplay also has a new disk out entitled LeftRightLeftRightLeft. It’s a live compilation from their last tour and I’m bringing it up mostly because there giving it away as a free download on their website as a gift to fans. Which, in my opinion, is rather cool.
Let’s see . . . I was also quite into DJ’s last month in preparation for the Detroit Techno Fest. I intend to post a more extensive post on this but for now I’ll just focus on a cool mix that came out last month. U Can't Lurn Imaginashun by DJ Vadim is an eclectic mix of hip-hop, soul, reggae, and electronica.
In terms of an album with regular old pop songs I’m enjoying synth-pop trio Au Revoir Simone’s latest, Still Night, Still Light. I’m out of metaphors for music at this moment so you’ll just have to leave you with a "Sad Song" from their first album The Bird Of Music.

Happy listening.

Around the Well is Swell.

2009-05-27T17:59:00.001-07:00

Last week Subpop released an new two disk album by Iron & Wine entitled Around the Well. It's a collection of old singles, covers, and leftovers from various recording sessions. Generally, I am leery of this this type of odds and ends disk, but I love this collection. Around the Well has something for every Sam Beam fan. Those who are more into the early lofi will probably prefer disk one and those who loved his latest, The Shepherd's Dog will enjoy disk two. Speaking of The Shepherd's Dog, here is a link for eight tracks done as acoustic versions available for free download.

One of my favorite non-album tracks has always been the lengthy single, The Trapeze Swinger. It's the last track on this new collection and right now Subpop is offering it as a free download on Iron & Wine's website here. If you have a Lala.com account you can listen to the whole thing here and there's always a few tracks available here. Happy Listening.

Around The Well - Iron & Wine

Made in Detroit

2009-05-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

I went to the Movement 2009 Detroit Techno Festival this weekend with my friend Charity. We met two years ago on a Street Retreat here in the Motor City. It was a funny feeling to see people dancing in Heart Plaza by where I had slept. I kept wondering where all the homeless people were going to sleep the next few nights while the festival was going on. The last time I was here my pockets were empty. This time I was very aware of my keys, cell phone, camera, and wallet.

The last time I saw some of these DJ’s spin was in the 80’s. The scene has changed a little since then. It’s a lot whiter than I remember. There were no glow sticks, angel wings, state-of-the-art light shows, or neon colored spandex. We danced in crowed basements and old warehouses. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just different. Like the difference between walking the city with a wallet in my pocket and walking without. Both situations bring freedoms and constrictions.

The memory of the sad boy who dancing in this broken city over twenty years ago makes me smile. The memory of the man who made peace with Detroit two years ago through living on her wounded streets brings with it a feeling of tranquility as the beats move through the ground and I sit under the trees in the grass by the waterfront. The memory of this past weekend dancing in Detroit as I sit at my mother’s computer and type this brings a state of self-reflection.

My hometown continues to break my heart. It is through these deep cracks that compassion comes in.

It’s good to be in the bitter-sweetness of home.

Charity w/ glow sticks

Glow Stick Devil