Month: July 2007

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The Dhamma Brothers

For anyone who found the film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana interesting (about meditation in prisons in India) here, fresh off the camera, is a film about the same practice in a high-security prison in the US.

The Dhamma Brothers has its own website complete with trailer and details of a book of letters from the prisoners to accompany the film which is being published by Pariyatti Press.

That last link indicates financial support was being sought for the book. The film, clearly a labour of love, benefited from support from Rivers Cuomo of Weezer.

There’s an interview with the film’s director, Jenny Philips, which gives some interesting background to the project:

In the fall of 1999, Phillips, a licensed psychotherapist and cultural anthropologist, was researching meditation within Massachusetts prisons when she heard about a group of men at Donaldson who gathered on a regular basis to meditate. “I’m not sure why I went down there,” she said. “But I did.”

After an examination of the prisoners, through observation of their meditation as well as one-on-one interviews, Phillips found their lives to be filled with apprehension and danger and, even though many of these men were serving life sentences, they were still searching for some sort of meaning in their lives. “There was such a sense of misery and hopelessness there, but also such a sense of survival of the human spirit,” she said…

Phillips, a meditator herself, knew that meditation could offer the prisoners relief from suffering. “If you can find peaceful ways to live in prison, you’re going to be much happier there,” she said.

Getting a camera inside the prison proved difficult. “Prisons like to do what they do quietly and be left alone,” Phillips said.

But, after pulling some strings with Dr. Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment at Donaldson, Phillips was able to capture the transformation of the prisoners on film. “I think it was the only medium,” she said. “The written word can’t quite capture them — and I think film is the most powerful medium anyway.”

I’m not sure how I might get to see this film but for anyone living in Massachusetts you can watch it at the Woods Hole Film Festival later this month.

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After the storm

after the storm

The crap gets washed into the dips depressions.

(The camera on my phone is a higher quality and has far more options than my first digital camera.)

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Stormy weather

Two hours the dry rasp of thunder had coughed its threat as blue gave way to cloud. Now the whole sky was layered with sheets of gunmetal grey. The leaves, stirred from their silence, hissed and seethed in dry warning of rain to come. I moved slowly across the darkening park, uncaring.

From the top of Primrose Hill the approaching storm was drawn like a dark curtain around our vantage. All others there had run aghast at the bruising of the sky. We sat enfolded in each other’s shelter watching the light shine through jagged rents closed over by skeins of rain.

The first flash of lightening was followed, seven seconds later, by a ripping crack rattling the ill-fitting sheet-iron of the sky. I always count the seconds between lightning and thunder, a habit from childhood. How far away? nearer or further?

We counted the gaps as the storm moved back and forth across the bowl of London spread before us. Five miles away, then six but seeming closer because dead ahead of the bench where we sat. There is something about the straight and forward which gives an illusion of proximity the oblique, the ascance, lacks.

Fat, lazy drops first. Plopping, big-polka-dotting the path.

When it was obvious it was headed right towards us we ran to meet it. Holding hands tumbling pell-mell down the steep slope. As we collided with the curtain of rain we stopped and kissed. Mouths mingling in the streaming water. My hands, spread, pulling his face to me as rain-rivulets washed over us, sealing in a seamless caul of water.

When the real rain came it was staccato, angry. Beating on bowed head, battering tears.

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links for 2007-07-06

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Snakeoil

Hahahahahaha. Sorry, gotta laugh.

A company in Ireland purports to have made a perpetual motion / infinite energy generating machine.

A gallery in London is putting it on display. The exhibition/demonstration was due to open yesterday, 5 July.
Astonishingly, there appeared to be some problems.

KINETICA OPENING DELAYED: Due to some technical difficulties caused by the intense heat from camera lighting, Steorn’s demonstration of its ‘Orbo’ free energy technology has been slightly delayed. As a consequence, Kinetica Museum will not be open to the public today (6th July). A technical assessment is currently underway and information will be posted on the websites of Steorn and Kinetica as soon as it becomes available. We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.

So glad I went and had a nap yesterday instead of schlepping down to Spitalfields for the alleged opening of the exhibition.

Napping. Yes. I find napping the most effective form of energy generation, and it’s entirely unaffected by camera lighting. I know the laws of thermodynamics are soooo last millennium but I’m an old-fashioned girl.

And what do you know, turns out (as I browse around) those technical difficulties have turned out to be insurmountable…

Further to Steorn’s announcement yesterday (5th July) regarding the technical difficulties experienced during the installation of its “Orbo” technology at the Kinentica Museum in London, Steorn has decided to postpone the demonstration until further notice.

Sean McCarthy CEO stated that “technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.”

He continued that “we apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online.”

Over the next few weeks the company will explore alternative dates for the public demonstration.

What, I wonder, is the purpose of all this. Some kind of elaborate campaign to publicise the gallery/museum? An elaborate hoax? An extreme form of self-humiliation? Because surely to goodness they don’t actually believe….
Title courtesy of Slashdot‘s tagging beta goodness.

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links for 2007-07-05

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Meditation in prisons

Doing Time, Doing Vipassana.

A documentary film about the success of Vipassana courses in Indian prisons. In 1993, Kiran Bedi, a reformist Inspector General of India’s prisons, learned of the success of Vipassana in a jail in Jainpur, Rajasthan. A 10 day course involved officials and inmates alike. In India’s largest prison, Tihar Jail, near New Delhi, another attempt was made. This program was said to have dramatically changed the behavior of inmates and jailers alike. It was actually found that inmates who completed the 10 day course were less violent and had a lower recidivism rate than other inmates. This project was documented in the television documentary, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. So successful was this program that it was adopted by correctional facilities in the United States and other countries as well.

The film, now 10 years old, is on YouTube cut into six nine-minute sections. Here’s the first.

and here are parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Fascinating and compelling viewing. I really recommend watching all of them.

As is the way of things I discover these films the same day that I receive in the post a copy of The Fires that Burn. This is about the Canadian Catholic nun and Zen roshi Sister Elaine MacInnes who has been teaching meditation in prisons for thirty years and is a former director of The Prison Phoenix Trust in the UK.

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Pearl River pigeon

Pearl River pigeon

My very dear friend feng37 is translating poetry again as he watches the bodies floating down the river.

So he translates poems from Chinese, an act of love and an act of homage to the writers, I’m guessing, and makes art. There’s so much happening in this one, between the characters and the paper and the river. I’ve put it all down here but go there to see it alongside the Chinese. And read here about the young migrant worker, Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poem this is.

Paper Tiger

She’s a tiger on paper, or a rhetorical figure of speech
From the air, she sucks bodies dry, an illusionist’s symbol
Her shelter is a scream from the ashes, as eye-piercing as the setting sun
She’s concealed in the shade from a narcissus, sunset’s gentle sigh
She opens her mouth to speak the darkest sonant in a hush, the flesh of speech
A monstrosity among tigers, from its open mouth on the paper, between its teeth passes
The bright dusk of things past, the pumping sound of recollection
But it’s too slight, the sound as faint as the bug on the tree leaf
She’s too little, the rain’s too much, her fate like the humid thunder
Bringing in from afar a barenaked dusk or dawn
Whose sheens come from the tiger’s hard, pointy bones on paper
The sound of rain falls, we drink our liquor, the rain like the liquor pours over us
The rhetoric we so adore knocks us unconscious, leaves us among the beasts on the paper
The rain left to fall outside, how much does it wash away
The shyness of my youth, sigh, a tiger that’s ceased to exist
Rinsed away by the rain, it slowly left, towards the twilight

The beast on paper, a limpid planet, I will pass through the wall and leave
The wall in the air, it comes from a rusty place
The stooped tiger, slowly and silently rises up from the paper, its iridescence
Is the shadow in a word, a phrase, a poem, where there appears another
Tiger, its masculine muscularity, lush like a treetop, gives the paper
Vigor and cool shade, from up on the paper it looks down, then rushes toward the monsoon
It wants to look you in the eyes, its iridescence, like dense rain, weaves together
The nearby night flies off in fright, its eyes a bundle of remote blue light
Its hair points toward autumn’s escape, turning ashen and white
The tiger on paper, it makes no sound, just leaves tracks worth pursuing
It is a symbol or an allegory, the trees on paper begin to whither
It holds its head way up high, standing in a dry and scraggly patch of meadow, a colorful and vivid oil painting
But you cannot see its bones and its sprint, those tiger bones more solid than steel
Crouched in the dark, on the paper, bending, stretching, gathering strength
Like an exclamation, the blade of a knife piercing flesh or thought
This near nothingness of a beast, its tyranny, fills me with a feeling of being oppressed
From the paper I breathe in the inner panic it brings, still it grows
A tail much more distinct than the trees, its eyes and forehead hidden deep in the monsoon

Imagine a tiger on paper suddenly jumps up, bringing with it the sound of wind
In clarity, it presses close to my skin, the rain of a shadowy autumn day drifts down
Its senses are like a woman’s intuition, stubborn and sharp
The woman in the dark, on whatever page the tiger happens to be haunting, is calculating the moonlight
More vast than the night, in the bending of some sentence, the tiger leaves
Leaves almost imperceptible signs, the woman predicts the falling and flowing of light and flesh
The tiger on paper runs, through its deep-rooted misery
Its sharp teeth are polished smooth on mutiple lusts, one tiger and one woman
Bow to each other, like two boxers sizing each other up in the ring
The lights go bright, then go out, leaving the black ink to narrate
A tiger, it shifts, in the hidden woods, the tiger on paper drifts down
The dark red blood, red like truths are, a rain of thin wires
Rusting on the paper, creeps up like a drop of ink
In the green silence, a tiger is laid to rest in the whiteness of the paper

I’ve signed up for a short course on photo-etching at the end of the year and a slightly longer course on digital image making at the beginning of next year. I want to play with pictures and get them off the screen and onto paper. And plastic. And metal. And, oh, almost anything really. It’s scratching the itch to make things. The pigeon above is a first thought.