Chump change

Hey John - trying to tinker with a new post and am just low energy tonight. Also read this new book by David Loy called “A Buddhist History of the West.” Right up my alley, obviously, and it’s kind of knocked me back a bit. Loy is a Zen practitioner and a professor at Bunkyo University in Japan, accomplished and well-versed as a historian and he’s got a very detailed and comprehensive take on Western history as an on-going effort to locate some solid ground, psychologically and culturally, from which to engage with experience. The search is quixotic of course, because solid ground does not, in fact, exist. Gary Snyder quoted on the back…Norman O. Brown cited throughout…you should get your hands on a copy.

Nice to be back on line, so to speak. Following up on the topic of the Oscars I have to again confess that I find it difficult to generate much interest pro or con. I think they should happen but nobody should pay too much attention to them. It’s the same thing with celebrities in general - they should exist but, again, nobody should pay too much attention. It’s not that idolatry isn’t interesting, it’s rather that we’re drowning in much more interesting forms of idolatry, so who has time for the chump change.

Someone mentioned being surprised that Werner Herzog had not received a nomination for the remarkable Grizzly Man. Herzog for some reason has been surfacing a lot lately, and is eminantly worthy of a post or two. The New Yorker ran an interesting profile a while back, and I was struck by how in conflict he is, as a filmmaker, with the way his American crews perceived the process of making films. Herzog rebelled energetically against the limits they imposed on what it’s appropriate, for example, for a director to do with a camera. I’m always struck, when I encounter film crews in LA, by how chock-full they are of super-hip looking individuals, and then it always turns out to be some completely dorky and worthless film. All the interesting and innovative cinema is taking place around the camera and the lights - the strutting gaffers, the dreadlocked and tattooed art department guys and gals too self-aware to do more than the minimum for someone else’s artistic vision…and stubborn old Werner, still tilting at windmills to make these remarkable films that really, truly shouldn’t exist. I think of that opening shot of Aguirre - the armored mule train threading its way down the steep Andean trail and there’s that remarkable score by Popol Vuh - it’s the sequence that launched a thousand film careers, I think, it was so haunting and transcendent. And now all those would-be directors choke the film sets and the whole endeavor is capsizing under its own top-heaviness. Maybe this is why I find the “academy” and all its doings so depressing. Still, there were some good films made, as we’ve noted, and Werner is still active and worth discussing more. Did you by any chance see The White Diamond, for example? It’s a gorgeous artifact that manages to be dreamlike and completely real at the same time. Full of mystery, in other words.

And with that, I lob the first volley ball of the new round up toward the net…

Guy Zimmerman