Man my left bicep ached all yesterday afternoon just from trying to play those Zero Defex songs. We had a rehearsal yesterday and got back into shape for tomorrow night's gig at Pat's in the Flats. It should be good. We're debuting two new songs, the first new songs from Zero Defex in over 20 years. One is by our first guitarist and chief songwriter back in the day Tommy Strange. The other one I wrote. If we get it together we'll also do Mickey X-Nelson's tribute to Tommy, "Hey Tommy Strange!" which appears on our new CD (still waiting for it to show up on CD Baby).
Thanks to Element for providing this link to a page about Kodo Sawaki's quotes from Brian Victoria's book Zen At War. I haven't made it through the original Japanese versions of the quoted material, which are provided on the page. But it seems that some of the quotations come from from a dubious "autobiography" of Sawaki written after Sawaki's death by someone else in first person as if Sawaki wrote it. In the quote in which Sawaki is said to have stated that "we gorged ourselves on killing" the phrase "hara ippai" is translated as "gorged." Anyone who'd been in Japan as long as Victoria would know full well that "hara ippai" carries more a sense of being fed up with something than having gorged on it. That's just inexcusable. And I say that as a guy who spent a decade in Japan often deliberately mistranslating stuff in this same fashion, though my intention was usually to make people sound less stupid than they actually did rather than to trash someone's reputation. Makes me wonder about the rest of the book... (though, yes, it is certainly true some people in the Japanese Zen establishment did pimp for the Emperor during the war).
Gotta go. Here's the gig list yet again...
Saturday May 3rd at 3PM you can see my movie Cleveland's Screaming at Last Exit Books in Kent, Ohio.
Also on May 3rd my band 0DFx will play at Pat’s in the Flats in Cleveland with This Moment in Black History.
And on May 4th, 0DFx will play at the Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio in commemoration of the 38th anniversary of the infamous shootings by the National Guard.
On Friday May 10th we'll play an in-store show at Square Records in Akron's Highland Square. Starts at 7:30.
Saturday May 10th at 7 PM (or maybe 6, they need to decide yet, call before you go) I'll do a book signing and talk at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Ohio’s Tremont neighborhood. I think we're showing my movie Cleveland's Screaming! afterwards.
On May 17th and 18th I'll lead a 2-day retreat at the Milwaukee Zen Center.
I'll be one of the teachers at this year's Great Sky Zen Sesshin August 9-16. Check out their webpage for details.
The annual Dogen Sangha retreat in Shizuoka, Japan will be September 20-23.
