Vitro Nasu

Chögyam Trungpa (February 28, 1939 – April 4, 1987)

In 1974, Trungpa founded the Naropa Institute, which later became Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was the first accredited Buddhist university in North America. Trungpa hired Allen Ginsberg to teach poetry and William Burroughs to teach literature.

“When we talk about compassion, we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up.” Trungpa Rinpoche

photo via

Trungpa had a number of notable students, among whom were Pema Chödrön, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Peter Lieberson, José Argüelles, David Nichtern, Ken Wilber, David Deida, Francisco Varela, and Joni Mitchell, who portrayed Trungpa in the song “Refuge of the Roads” on her 1976 album Hejira.
Shambhala vision is described as a nonreligious approach rooted in meditation and accessible to individuals of any, or no, religion. In Shambhala terms, it is possible, moment by moment, for individuals to establish enlightened society. His book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, provides a concise collection of the Shambhala views. According to Trungpa, it was his intention to propagate the kingdom of Shambala that provided the necessary inspiration to leave his homeland and make the arduous journey to India and the West

Merwin
My feelings about Trungpa have been mixed from the start. Admiration, throughout, for his remarkable gifts; and reservations, which developed into profound misgivings, concerning some of his uses of them. I imagine, at least, that I’ve learned some things from him (though maybe not all of them were the things I was “supposed” to learn) and some through him, and I’m grateful to him for those. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to become a student of his. I wish him well.

Jim Bauerlein

I love Trungpa…a very special being..he was deep, complex and not cut of the ordinary cloth..

So many buy into pop publicity about Trungpa…he was elusive, strange, and a brother from another planet..What he created, Naropa is a great place…if we look at those who call him a teacher we can see that many fine minds and spirits found him a source of enlightenment…He was whimsical and taught through humor and shock.

The story of Trungpa Rinpoche’s connection with Alan Watts, as told by Sam Bercholz.
Alan spent his last days with Rinpoche.

Romy Schneider & Claude Sautet

Romy and Claude sing La Chanson D’Hélène (Les Choses De La Vie)

César and Rosalie

Un coeur en hiver (review on youtube)

Claude Sautet

Claude Sautet

b. February 23, 1924, Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France
d. July 22, 2000, Paris, France

Via Senses of Cinema

There is a sense of melancholy and a certain quietude that permeates Claude Sautet’s cinema, and it is in keeping with its pace, a languid but deliberate slowness, that we are able to enter into his world. Sautet’s world is a richly textured one, and requires attentiveness and a careful eye to its details. Populated by fully formed and complex characters, its skein of images is the weaving together of a series of looks, gestures, annunciations, utterances and moods of its inhabitants. Both limpid and opaque, this world and its denizens ask us to be thorough and mindful not only of what we see, but also what we hear — to listen to the conversations, the music, the ambience, as well as the silences. In this way, his films ask us to surrender our senses, to give ourselves over to them, so that we do not remain on the ‘outside’ as mere viewers or voyeurs to the intimacy on screen.

Described as a “discrete and elegant man,” (1) for many this director is a humanist whose films may be described as “intimate-realist” (2) films, a meticulous study of lived lives whose characters, despite their social standing, are nonetheless part of the quotidian.

Agnus Dei, Museo del Prado – Francisco de Zurbarán

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The Goat and Øivind

The goat I met in Lombok on a silent sunday. We had some good conversations together before I had to head back to Bali on a motorbike

Oslo to Bali –Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen is Citizenfive.. ( previous post )

Marguerite Yourcenar

Personality of the Sheep
People born in the Year of Sheep are tender, polite, filial, clever, and kind-hearted. They have special sensitivity to art and beauty and a special fondness for quiet living. They are wise, gentle and compassionate and can cope with business cautiously and circumspectly. In their daily life, they try to be economical. They are willing to take good care of others, but they should avoid pessimism and hesitation.

Strengths
gentle, softhearted, considerate, attractive, hardworking, persistent, thrift
Weaknesses
indecisive, timid, vain, pessimistic, moody, weak-willed

Photo of Navajo lady by Laura Gilpin Master photographer of Southwest

Map Goat (Literally every goat in the United States)

Philip Levine.Who Found Poetry on Detroit’s Assembly Lines, Dies At 87

Philip Levine at New Yorker

Read A Sleepless Night here..

Portrait of Philip Levine by Michael Hafftka

Louis Jourdan star of Gigi dies at 93.

Talking about his long marriage..(youtube)

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L’immoralist (Andre Gide)
Louis Jourdan and James Dean

Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen

Drawing comparisons to, among others, Dante and Beatrice, Abelard and Héloïse, he says of the couple that they are “together in eternity because they never could be together in earthy life.” Indeed, Kierkegaard and Regine’s story often reads like the stuff of folk tales and verse epics (cryptic notes and secret gestures abound). For instance, the 31 letters Kierkegaard sent Regine between their engagement and its dissolution a year later, Garff says, are “not ordinary communication; they are art” (the passage in Regines gåde appears word-for-word in Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography):

[…] by virtue of their indisputably aesthetic qualities, the letters make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer. So they were actually farewell letters, grandiose exercises in the art of indirect communication: With enormous discretion and employing the entire panoply of the most nuanced shades of language, they try to make Regine realize that the person who sings her praises in letter after letter has long since disappeared from her life because he has lost himself in recollection of her and is thus utterly unsuited for married life. Indeed, recollection, from which fantasy draws its life, is also the source of the death that divides the lovers. In looking back upon events, Kierkegaard claimed that the very next day after Regine had said “Yes,” he had already realized that he had “made a mistake.”
Thanks to Garff’s book, we can more fully appreciate the extent to which the perception of Regine as a woman cruelly seduced by an eccentric philosopher is inaccurate. On the contrary, she proved to be at once selfless and cunning; her final gesture, this glorious double-act, allowed her to reveal the nature of her relationship with Kierkegaard while simultaneously disappearing into posterity, the innermost secrets of her being intact. Though their graves at Assistens Churchyard in Copenhagen are separated by just 50 yards, it is in the papers Regine received on an island in the Caribbean that the remains of their love are buried. “Posthumous papers are like a ruin,” the aesthete A writes in Either/Or, “what haunt could be more natural for the interred?”’

Leap of Faith

See “Leap of Faith” gif animation from Post Mutant Eggplant: Gravity and Grace – (scroll down.. down down down)

Happy Valentine!

Film still from Kokoro.

Kon Ichikawa directed Kokoro with Masayuki Mori (a prominent actor from Rashomon, Ugetsu Monogatari, Uki-Gumo, A Woman Ascends the Starirs)

Kokoro means “Heart” in Japanese.

Michiyo Aratama from Kokoro

Natsume Soseki was born on February 9, 1867

Politics, Philosophy, and Myth in
Natsume Soseki’s First Trilogy

The role of the literary artist in Japan ‘s long history is an honored one in large measure due to the power of language and literature to lift consciousness through imagination. Among Japan ‘s most gifted literary artists is Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), regarded by Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo as Japan ‘s “national writer”

Kojin Karatani and Natsume Soseki (previous post)

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran to Die before the end of month.

Update:

Bali Nine drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran will be executed before the end of the month, the Indonesian government has said.
Indonesian authorities have informed Australian officials of the decision, who in turn visited Kerobokan prison to pass the grim news on to the death-row prisoners.
Meanwhile, the family of Bali Nine drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran has issued a tearful plea for his life as they wept outside the walls of the prison where he will spend his last days.

Video by Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen

Drug trafficker’s art classes are so popular that many former prisoners return to prison to keep taking them.

Visiting the class photo via Zahlsen.

Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen via FB

Myuran always give of himself to others, cheering up his inmate students in the prison, giving them hopes.
As I was in the prison together with the Consul-General from Australia and the Norwegian Ambassador on the 22nd of January, the message about the final denial of clemency for Andrew Chan was delivered on the door. This opened for executing both of the Bali Nine boys together at any time. The first reaction from Myuran was taking me softly aside whispering: If something bad happens to me now, I will leave a list of people for you who can run the project”
Myuran is helping other inmates choosing a better path, giving them chance to establish a new positive identity and giving their lives a new voice. Please let Myuran stiill alive so he can keep up this mission in his life

On Feb 6 via FB..

There is talk about replicating it across the country, and while Zahlsen would like to see that it would also “leave a bitter taste”.
“This is like taking the life of the architect whilst admiring the building,” he said. “That, I think, is another very, very sad part of this.”

On Feb 9 via FB

Amnesty Internationals department in Norway is now engaged in the ongoing work to stop executions in Indonesia. They demand from The Indonesian government to abolish death penalty and immediately cease killing prisoners. The death penalty contradicts article 3 and 5 in The Human Rights Convention focusing on all human individuals right to life and personal security and freedom from torture and inhumane treatment.

Update: Feb 12
Bali Nine duo to be moved for execution

Update: Feb 13
Australian war artist Ben Quilty has described his goodbye to Bali Nine death row inmate Myuran Sukumaran as the “most difficult thing” he has ever done.

Oslo to Bali –Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen is Citizenfive.. ( previous post )

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Marlon Brando, Beatrice Lillie, Stewart Stern

Stewart Stern dies

Twice Oscar-nominated screenwriter and Emmy-winning television writer Stewart Stern, who wrote film classic “Rebel Without a Cause,” Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie” and seminal telepic “Sybil,” starring Sally Field, died February 2 at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle, after battling cancer. He was 92.

James Dean Story – Robert Altman directed, written by Stewart Stern.

Going through splat or not with with Stewart Stern

Dennis Hopper and Stewart Stern

Dennis Hopper The Last Movie (previous post)

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See full film Unknown Known..

Errol Morris

Morris was born on February 5, 1948, and raised in a Jewish family in Hewlett, New York.[2]

After being treated for strabismus in childhood, he refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.[3]

In the 10th grade, Morris attended The Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris’ future collaborator Philip Glass.

via wiki

Monday
In the year 5000, my birthday falls on a Monday, I won’t be around.
Somehow, this makes me unutterably sad, weeping.

Our span is so short, we all know that, but this, this concrete
instance, tears through me. And I won’t make it, to be sure, past
2020…

February 5000

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28

Happy birthday Alan Sondheim.

Coming event..

ALAN SONDHEIM PRESENTATION AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
February 6th, at 7, at the Granoff Center (see below)
Broken World, Steerage
thinking through blankness, terror, and broken worlds
There is material from distorted motion capture employed in
virtual worlds; considerations of terror and genocide in terms
of anguish and the unutterable; phenomenology of blizzards and
whiteout; revrev ? live reverse reverberation or anticipatory
music; and practical-theoretical issues of gamespace/edgespace.

Join Alan Sondheim for a talk and presentation at 7pm on Friday,
February 6 in Englander Studio, Granoff Center at Brown
University. This event is free and open to the public.

One more poem..

Philosophy, Simple, Pretention

Phenomenology doesn’t rhyme, all the time.
Philosophy in this form isn’t serious.
Aphorisms are always suspect, unpacking
revealing the dirty laundry of language.
You have to develop an argument and
neologisms help with their wayward vacuity.
Pictures are more suspect, and Wittgenstein’s
formulas appear to be the bones of an
irrelevant animal.
On the other hand, the formulas of physics
and cosmology contain an absolutely
untranslatable grain of truth, do you hear
that, Badiou?
Our place in the world is indeterminate but
that doesn’t interfere with description and
the latitude or epigenetic landscape of the
resulting deep sketching.
Violence threatens everything but not the
world, nor mathesis.
Violence is not violence until you are
physically touched by it, and philosophy
in this form, that of the witness, is always
serious and always correct.
Do unto others is senseless unless one
believes in the imperative.
There is nothing that can be _said_ about
cosmology.
A picture is the decay of the word; neither
mathematics nor mathesis are languages.
Mathesis and the world is closest to the
film which binds, not sutures, the viewer.
Meaning washes out of the aphorism; meaning
washes out the aphorism.
There is no point to decay.
On the phenomenological level, decay is
everywhere and inconceivable.
One can never explain oneself; and the
attempt to explain one’s writings just
increases the bulk of them.
Hence the mark is always and already the
same, every mark the same mark, except the
number; it is the number which may
function as the sign of violence, and the
word which becomes the diacritical mark.
Narrative never understands that thinking
is thoughtless.
The philosophical example is already lost
in thought.
Philosophy is what I am; writing is what I
do.

Karl Pribram
Dr. Karl Pribram at his home in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Harvey Wang

Yesterday (Jan 31) on FB Alev Croutier informed us the sad news that her friend Karl Pribram passed away.

The Holographic Brain

Pribram

Karl Pribram, Margaret Mead & Moshe Feldenkrais
Photo via

Via Alev Croutier

Karl Pribram 1919-2015

Karl H. Pribram, the eminent brain scientist, psychologist and philosopher, died of cancer on January 19, 2015, at age 95, at his home in Virginia. Dr. Pribram has been called the “Magellan of the Mind” for his pioneering research into the functions of the brain’s limbic system, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and their roles in decision making and emotion.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1919, to a Czechoslovakian father and Indonesian mother (both distinguished bacteriological researchers) Pribram attended grammar school in Gstaad, Switzerland, and high school at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, from which he graduated in 1936. He received his BS degree from University of Chicago in 1939 and received his MD in 1941, becoming one of the first 300 board-certified neurosurgeons in the world.

During his years as a practicing neurosurgeon (1941-1948) first in Memphis, Tennessee and then in Jacksonville, Florida, he began his collaboration on primate research with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, where Pribram succeeded Lashley as director and also introduced numerous human surgical techniques to the field of animal research. During Pribram’s subsequent ten years (1948-58) on faculty at Yale University in New Haven, CT, Pribram simultaneously established a research lab at the Institute for Living in Hartford, which “became a mecca for students intensely interested in the relationship between brain and behavior.”

In 1958-59, Pribram joined the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto. During his subsequent 30 years at Stanford University (1959-1989), Pribram pioneered the field of neuropsychology (a term that he coined), leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind. Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford in 1989, Pribram was named Eminent Scholar of the State of Virginia, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the BRAINS center (Brain Research and Informational Sciences), a research laboratory created for him at Radford University. Over this same period (1989-2013) he was also appointed Distinguished Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Department at George Mason University, and (simultaneously, up to his death) also served as Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Pribram authored more than seven hundred books and scientific publications, including: Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter, 1960), which is credited with launching the “Cognitive Revolution in Psychology”; Languages of the Brain (1971), an early influence upon neural networks and pattern recognition; Freud’s Project Re-assessed (with Merton Gill, 1976); and Brain and Perception (1991) which expands Pribram’s long-established holonomic theory of memory and perception, and has become the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, among many others. He edited the publications of the proceedings of a series he founded of international brain conferences with papers presented by distinguished scientists and Nobel laureates, through the 1990s. Pribram’s recent and final publication, The Form Within (2013), provides the 200-year history of brain research from his 70-year-long insider point of view. (Pribram’s theory and data papers may be found on his website KarlPribram.com.

Pribram was the recipient of more than sixty major international awards and honors, including a lifetime grant from the US Office of Naval Research; a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health; a Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Society of Experimental Psychology and from the Washington Academy of Sciences; honorary doctorates in psychology and neuroscience from the universities of Montreal, Canada and Bremen, Germany; and an Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. Pribram was also the first laureate to receive the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award for uniting the sciences and the humanities.

Karl Pribram is survived by Katherine Neville, and his five children: John Pribram of Charlottesville, Virginia; Joan Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; Bruce Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Cynthia Pribram-Byrne of Bruce,Wisconsin; and Karl S. Pribram of San Francisco, California. Also surviving him are five grown grandchildren: Sarah Pribram of Shelburne,Vermont; Megan Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Aurora Pribram-Jones of Tustin, California; Thomas Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; and Andrew Pribram-Riddell of Prague, Czech Republic; as well as one great-grandchild, Aiyada Pribram-Jones of Thailand.

A memorial service and tribute to Karl H. Pribram will take place in October, 2015, in Washington, DC; the date, when determined, will be posted at KarlPribram.com. Letters may be sent to website contact form.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in support of The Smithsonian Libraries’ Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Awards, established in 2013 by Karl H. Pribram and Katherine Neville. To learn more click here or call 202-633-2241.