In Memoriam: Daigan Lueck, 1931-2015
Let Daigans Be Daigans Daigan and his partner Arlene at Tassajara, summer 1995 In May of 1995, I was perched nervously on a chair at the yurt in Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery deep in the mid-coast California mountains, waiting for an evening talk to begin, trying to draw keep my spine straight and look stern yet serene, as I imagined real Zen students to be. A newly arrived resident at Zen Center and at Tassajara, one question was uppermost in my mind: Am I doing it right? Of course, other questions were waiting in the hold as well,...
read moreThe Power of No Images
The punk versus the monk In the wake of the recent horrific attacks on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in France, there has been a vigorous debate waging in my online circles and in much of the media. While all unequivocally condemn the violence with which this attack was carried out, there are those who pose the matter entirely as one of free speech and the rights of cartoonists to lampoon whom they please, while others (many of them Muslim, or members of other religions) say that the cartoons are indeed offensive, and show an arrogance born...
read moreTrayvon Martin and categories
The writer is aware of the propensity for categories. She has different names for the ways she spends her time and fills in spreadsheets where these types of work are duly recorded. She knows and employs known categories for food, weather, terrain, books, and people. When the furor over the Trayvon Martin case erupted, she figured that one’s reaction to it would vary depending on the group one belonged to. African-Americans would be certain that Martin was deliberately murdered for being black, as has happened so much in their history in...
read moreRatcheting it up
I suppose I should be offended by Joan Rivers’ recent remark about German model Heidi Klum that referenced to gassing Jews, and by the casualness and callousness by which mention of the Holocaust is tossed around. But it’s hard to find the time, for soon a fresh form of outrage—some racial or homophobic slur, or just a slaphand nasty remark—will hit the airwaves, now crowded with smartphones, cell phones, iPods, iPads, and laptops. Soon some other politician or revered cultural figure will be photographed with his pants down...
read moreCountry Diary, mid-winter 2012
You get up on a Sunday morning and discover the water is off. You ran the sinks three nights in a row to avoid freezing pipes, but you overdid it, and now the water tank is dry and you cannot pump until your landlady reinstalls the pump mechanism. But she is out of town, and when she gets back she says that nothing can be done for a few days, for more freezes are expected and the pipes must stay drained. She delivers you two jugs of the good water that runs on the land: you pour it into water glasses, take a bottle upstairs to brush your...
read moreMediterranean Seas
We are now a week past another week of senseless killing in that skinny hinge of land on the eastern s Mediterranean Sea known as Israel and Palestine. How you know it, what you name the land, and what part you view as legitimate depends, of course, on your point of view. It’s been a hard week for me and many of my progressive-minded friends on various spots on the map of the Jewish community (religious and Zionist; religious and anti-Zionist; non-religious and anti-Zionist; Zionist-agnostic; mildly religious and not interested in Zionism;...
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“A photographer wants form, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.” –Robert Adams
read moreO Scorpion of Mine
I don’t know why I am afraid of scorpions, as opposed to other crawling, biting, shellacked and fangy creatures that inhabit the countryside where I live. I’ve listened with neutral interest as bears rattled garbage cans a few yards outside my door, and ho-hummed my way through warnings of mountain lions prowling the paths where I take my walks. I’ve had bees, yellow jackets, and others of their ilk sink their stingers into my flesh, but I don’t flinch unduly when a buzzing creature flies into my path. The one time I...
read moreMaps & Legends Radio, Sept. 28, 2012: Yowlers, Mumblers, and Crooners: Exploring Rock and Roll Vocal Styles
Tune in tonight from 7-9 pm at www.kzyx.org I have been so taken with Creedence Clearwater Revival front man John Fogerty’s yowling vocals that I once named a cat after him. Some vocalists like Fogerty sound as electric as the plugged-in guitars that accompany them. Others, such as Al Green and Norah Jones, specialize in smooth styles that may belie the painful emotions they are singing about, or help the medicine to go down. Some rock vocalists like Bono and Björk wow us with their belting, full-bellied singing, while still others,...
read moreGood new music: Dwight Yoakam–“Three Pears”
Dwight Yoakam’s newly-released album Three Pears is straight-up classic rock and roll without a chaser. The sound throughout is remarkably fresh, even while several tracks feel like they could have topped the charts back in 1954 or ’64. Yoakam, who released his first album in 1986, is an independent-minded singer-songwriter whose twangy vocals and steel guitar arrangements hearken to country music, while his songs’ punchy, 4/4 beats and bare-bones structure have endeared him to punk rockers. Whatever category you slice this...
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