Wednesday in Santa Fe
Today the sky and the snow are of the same color, white. This is what I woke up to:
Tuesday in Santa Fe
Went to Upaya in the morning, to listen to Stephen Batchelor give a talk.
He is the most brilliant speaker I have heard. He speaks “book-ready”. Things that stuck out for me – as I remember them:
The Pali language has neither an equivalent of the English “the” nor any capitalization, which means that when Buddha is translated as speaking about “the Unconditioned”, “the Truth” or “the Unborn”, those capitalizations are a deliberate choice, an edit if you will, of the translator.
Emptyness should really be translated as Emptying. Nothing stays empty for long. Things need to be emptied all the time. And then they fill up.
He also spoke of an ancient Tibetan, Dharmakirti. I will ask Stephen to suggest books that contain Dharmakirti’s thought, because Dharmakirti sounded very interesting.
Nirvana is not the end, but a means. There is no end.
After his talk Stephen Batchelor asked Roshi and me to take a few photos, as he needs a pic for his upcoming book. Here are a couple I took:
Here is DMV of the Buddha outside the hall… out-of-focus and in…
Sound-art on Vimeo:
Monday Medley
Here is a medley from a concert in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2004. The band was the quartet with Robby Rothschild and Ron Wagner on Percussion. I had forgotten all about this medley of three songs:
You can download the 320kbps mp3 file here.
After soundcheck that day, I took that photo of Robby alone on stage.
Monday in Santa Fe
An inch of snow overnight. Car battery dead and now re-charging.
350.org
On 24 October, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.Over 15,000 photos have been submitted so far! See them all on Flickr
Here is the fantastic photo Jennifer Esperanza took for Santa Fe.
Art as concept versus art as craft… here is an interesting new article:
What is Damien Hirst really up to? | Jonathan Jones
He can’t do that at all; can’t paint his way out of a paper bag. But don’t kid yourselves. It is not just Hirst who is implicated in this exposure. It is an entire idea of art that triumphed in the 1990s and still dominates our culture – an entire age of the readymade stands accused by its own creator of being a charade. No critic has even come close to the total dismissal of 21st-century art implied by Hirst’s turnabout.
This is rather interesting. Always nice when people realize the need for investment in ecology, education and social justice:
BBC NEWS | Europe | Rich Germans demand higher taxes
A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.
Thursday in Santa Fe
The upcoming Japan dates:
Ottmar Liebert – Tour Schedule: Fall 2009 – Luna Negra
Nov 14 – Yokohama, Japan – Motion Blue – Tickets / Info
Nov 16 – Tokyo, Japan – Blue Note – Tickets / Info
Nov 17 – Tokyo, Japan – Blue Note – Tickets / Info
Nov 18 – Tokyo, Japan – Blue Note – Tickets / Info
You know what goes together well: greek yoghurt, honey and toasted sesame seeds.
Thursday Morning breakfast with Jon was even longer than usual as we talked for two hours.
Been listening to this one piece of beautiful improvisation a few times every day; it’s from the album Keith Jarrett: Paris/London Testament, and it’s track #7 called Paris, November 26, 2008: Part VII. It sounds brilliant in 24/96k, but it’s still lovely any way you can hear it.
chris jordan photography
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
Direct link to the photographs here. Images are graphic – you have been warned. We need to examine every aspect of how we live. Cradle to cradle, reduction of waste, reduction of consumption…
