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				QueryLily "...I would never have thought of asking How you'd got that peculiar name..."

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Lately, I have been listening a lot to the excellent new Ray Davies tribute album, This Is Where I Belong . Now I have my own little Ray Davies tape playing in my head.

[31 May 2002]

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The last day of May, the grand-son's seventh birthday. We're going to a party tonight. Which reminds me, two weeks after my own seventh birthday...my baby sister was born. Hmmmm...that was nineteen fifty-eight. Eisenhower in the White House. ooooo...that was a long time ago.

[31 May 2002]

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In spite of getting work done this weekend, I have managed to catch some movies.

Friday, I saw Insomnia which was okay, it not enthralling me as much as it seems the critics. The scenary was beautiful. It was nice to see Hillary Swank on-screen again. Robin Williams was quietly intense in his role. But Al Pacino. Is it me? Does anyone else think he was channeling the vocal mannerisms of Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lector?

Sunday, the Drewster and I ventured over to the Castro, met up with several of his friends and watched The Cockettes on the big screen. I wasn't disappointed, though it dragged in places. To a young, closeted, Southern hippie queer, rumours of the Cockettes' very existence in the faraway Bay Area were a beacon of hope. I still remember my flush of excitement in reading the Rolling Stone spread, and yes, looking at the fab photos.

Also this weekend, on DVD, I watched Hannah and Her Sisters, appreciating the richness of the ensemble acting, and finally got around to seeing the excellent A Simple Plan.

[27 May 2002]

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Fab paintings of men with beehives, via the artistry of Ella Guru. Mmmm...I want one, I want one.

[25 May 2002]

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Okay. I admit I'm a little excited about finally getting to go to see The Cockettes at the Castro. At least that's the plan for tomorrow. Would have gone earlier, but work and the rest of my life have been intervening.

[25 May 2002]

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Less than a month before the Yoko Ono show opens at SFMOMA. My excitement builds. Her book Grapefruit was a wonderful inspiration for me. "When was that dear?" Well...that was way way back in the...early 1970's.

[25 May 2002]

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Au revoir Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle, also known as Niki.

I read her obit in today's New York Times, noted a link via Der Schockwellenreiter and found that there's a museum devoted to her in Japan.

[23 May 2002]

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I took the family to see the new Star Wars movie yesterday at the Metreon. Two firsts for me: The first time ordering tickets on-line and the first time seeing a film digitally projected. It was also a fairly decent film, probably the best Star Wars film I've seen since The Empire Strikes Back. Buying the tickets on-line was crucial as by the time we made it to the City, the 2:10 showing was otherwise sold out. Afterwards, we wandered over to Virgin where they have a not too bad sale going on for selected DVD's. By one, get half off on another. The selection wasn't too bad, either. No Criterions as far as I could tell, though.

[19 May 2002]

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I've taken a few detours in my reading of late. I'm currently going through John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, which was meant as a brief diversion from my reading of Mark Epstein's Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, which I started after finishing off Michael Downing's Shoes Outside the Door.

I enjoyed the Downing book. He has a way of moving the narrative along, as befits, I suppose, a novelist by trade. One of the pleasures I receive from reading is in coming across passages like the following from "Shoes":

"Zen Buddhism occupies a space in the world that does not exist. This might explain its persistence. Its detractors logically argue that there is no there there, and its adherents agree.

It's nothing. That's the Buddha's teaching, which is the dharma. Nothing. But as soon as you say it, it's not nothing. It is something shaped by intention, conditioned by karma, and clotted with all kinds of dust. This is why Transmission of the dharma is not a matter of words or rites, really; it's immaterial, heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind enlightenment that doesn't happen until it is possible for the student and the teacher to understand what each other means to say when either one says, "It's nothing."

Fleeting and fragile as such understandings are, this sort of thing often works out well when the Transmission is a one-on-one affair. We know this much from our daily lives. If someone bakes a cake for a loved one, and the loved one expresses gratitude, the baker might say, "It's nothing." Of course the cake and the baking of it are not nothing, but the loved one and the baker know it is nothing between them. This is enlightenment. This is kensho. This is satori. This is nothing.

This is the Buddha, and this is the dharma-two of the Three Treasures in which Buddhists take refuge. All that is missing is the sangha, the community, or the wholeness of intention among many people. The Buddha's original recipe for sangha is nothing but an endless repetition of the one-on-one dharma-Transmission method. It is time-consuming at first, when there is only one master chef, but as more and more sous chefs get their credentials and start working their own ovens, the business grows exponentially. Eventually, everyone gets a cake, and everyone knows it's nothing, which eradicates the delusional desire to eat the cake, which means there is no longer any cause to bake a cake, and then everyone does nothing but rest on a worldwide cushion of cakes, and that is nirvana."

I was especially taken with the phrase "...the sangha, the community, or the wholeness of intention among many people", as it made me appreciatively reflect on the various communities to which I belong. In all of them, "the wholeness of intention" is not often achieved, and perhaps therefore is not "nothing", but is something that is sought after, so that it too can be "nothing".

[19 May 2002]

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