Wow. Lookee. I got a big ol' article in the Associated Press. A writer named Eric Talmadge showed up at our retreat in Shizuoka in September in order to write a story about it. Though he had no great interest in Zen, he made it through the entire retreat, all those millions of hours of zazen, work assignments, meal services, ceremonial crap and the whole bit. That's a dedicated writer! Heck, Jim Krane, my old friend and bandmate from the legendary Eric Nipplehead Project, writes for AP and all he does is run around Iraq interviewing soldiers and militants.
Seems like this Eric -- Talmadge, not Nipplehead -- had a fine time at the old temple. You can find about a hundred variations of the article by typing in his name and mine into Google. MSNBC picked it up as did AOL and a bunch of local newspapers including one in Taiwan. Here are a few links I found.
Honolulu Advertiser
CBC
Taiwan News Online
MSNBC
Lubbock On Line
The El Paso Times
The Ventury County Star
The Clarion Ledger (this one uses a different photo from the others)
A list of various other places that carried the piece
It's always the same article with different titles, sometimes edited or expanded a bit. It's nice. The quote about "letting your mind shut off" doesn't sound like me to me. But who knows what the heck I say sometimes.
Recently I've been feeling that zazen itself in unassailable. If I can use a big word like that. What I mean is that zazen goes on as long as you hold the posture, no matter whether you're happy with it or not, or whether it feels like you think it ought to or not, or whether your legs and your ass hurt or not. Doesn't matter. When you go to a Zen thing just imagine it's like a weird yoga class where they only do one pose and they hold it forever.
Got gigs in Ohio I should remind you about:
November 7th at 7PM I'll be at the Akron Public Library downtown.
November 7th (same day) 0DFx (the hardcore band I played bass in in the early 80s) will play the Matinee in Akron after the talk at the library.
November 9th my movie Cleveland's Screaming will be shown at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland. There'll also be live performances by 0DFx, CD Truth, Cheap Tragedies and This Moment in Black History.
November 10th 0DFx plays at the Spitfire Saloon in Cleveland.
November 12th I'll give a Zen talk at Lambert's Tattooing and Body Piercing (I kid you not) in manly, he-man Mansfield, Ohio at 7PM.
Some of you been complaining I don't write enough "dharma" on this blog anymore. Stop yer whinin' ya cry-babies!* I do an article every two weeks for Suicide Girls, which always has a link on the blog. Plus -- shee-yit -- I used to have to walk 15 miles through the snow at 3 in the morning to get just one little dharma sentence before I got booted in the face by my teacher and told to fuck off and die. Deal with it. Besides, I'm getting to the home stretch on my third book and the blog articles were getting to be a bit of a distraction from what needed doing there.
Rock on.
* Oh my God he insulted us. The Buddha said DO NO HARM!!!!!!!!**
** Get a life, numbskulls.
