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Posted on 06.16.08 by Emily
Today you can see this photo I took of Robert Thurman standing in front of Mt. Kailash in the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying a great interview with Robert by David Ian Miller, “Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman on Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” about his new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters. In the picture, Robert stands near the Tarboche flagpole at the outset of our kora (circumambulation) around Mt Kailash. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Bön traditions all revere Mt Kailash as the axis mundi - the center of the world. From it flows 4 major rivers that feed Asia: the Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Karnali. Thousands of pilgrims arrive each May and June, but this year China has delayed the pilgrimage season and limited the number of participants, restricting all foreign visitors during the Olympic torch relay in that region. After four days trekking around the mountain and reaching an altitude of 18,600 ft, we arrived back here in time for the Saga Dawa festival, celebrating the birth and enlightenment of Sakyamuni Buddha.
On this occasion, the flag pole, wrapped in prayer flags, is raised by poles, ropes and trucks.
A perfectly upright flagpole signifies a good year for Tibet.
Musicians play throughout the festival. Thermoses of yak butter tea keep throats in singing and horn-blowing condition at dry high-altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.
Then, at the moment the flagpole is raised, thousands of windhorses (colorful squares of paper printed with prayers for happiness) fill the air and fly towards the peak.
Saga Dawa occurs each year on the 15th day of the fourth lunar month. This year, Tibetans will celebrate Saga Dawa on June 18, 2008 — may the pole stand upright and usher in a good year for Tibet! An excerpt from the SF Chronicle interview:
To learn more:
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Posted on 04.16.08 by Emily
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Posted on 03.12.08 by Emily
Just returned from a delightful talk with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara Legendre at the Rubin Museum of Art (filmed for her series on LinkTV, so surely you can see it soon too). It was too dark in there to take notes, but he read a couple of poems I love, so I’m sharing them here with you. Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came: Love After Love
The time will come and say, sit here. Eat. all your life, whom you ignored the photographs, the desperate notes, — Derek Wolcott The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad): Me from Myself — to banish –
Had I Art – Impregnable my Fortress Unto All Heart – But since Myself — assault Me – And since We’re mutual Monarch — Emily Dickinson During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead. Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.
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Posted on 02.20.08 by Emily
Copenhagen-based ISSUU invites everyone to upload and turn their documents into beautiful turn-the-page magazine experiences for free.    Once uploaded, people can bookmark, share and comment on it. Text is searchable so the document is easy to find. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of publications. Finally, you can also post and embed Issuu documents on any external site. Now actually, it’s still not a joy to quote, because you apparently can’t deep link in there, and you can’t copy and paste text and do all the things you could do with a standard webpage (or PDF for that matter). But it’s so close… you can almost taste it. And you can just embed the whole darn thing… In any case, this is a wonderful way to share the experience of a printed thing (without the waste and expense of printing and shipping). N.B. to those who like to tear, save and share the parts they like out of printed things… you’ll love Skitch.
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Posted on 02.19.08 by Emily
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Posted on 02.15.08 by Emily
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Posted on 11.05.07 by Emily
 Kenro Izu, “Druk #131″, Taksang Monastery, Paro, Bhutan 2003 Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts. Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.” Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.  Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily DavidowIzu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.” Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.
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Posted on 10.26.07 by Emily
 Mocha cream cake from Maira Kalman’s mother’s bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, NY (see p.246-247), served at a celebration for the release of The Principles of Uncertainty at the NYPL. Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you. Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.) Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:
Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?” I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.
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Posted on 10.21.07 by Emily
Recommended musical accompaniment: Deep Water (iTunes) by Seal  Claire Nouvian sailing in Penobscot Bay for a session on “Oceans in Balance” at Pop!Tech, off the coast of Maine. (More photos from Pop!Tech 2007)Claire Nouvian, a documentary filmmaker, thinks really deep thoughts about the ocean and its inhabitants. She’s especially concerned about how we relate to ecosystems that are far removed from our own. Even though oceans represent about 99% of the planet, they have only been looked at in detail since the 1950’s, and we’ve only sampled about 0.5% of the surface. The ocean remains the last frontier.
Because the deep sea is remote both horizontally — you have to go over the continental shelf before you go down to the depths — and vertically, it is literally out of sight and out of mind. Alas, it is not out of harms way. Creatures we haven’t even discovered yet are under threat from deep sea mining, deep sea dumping, co2 sequestration, ocean acidification, methane & oil exploitation and bottom trawling. Why should we care? Sure there are boundless medicinal and biotech discoveries to be made, but aesthetics alone are reason enough for Nouvian. And they are breathtaking. Tim Burton, HR Giger and George Lucas have nothing on nature. On the very first look through her magnificent book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, I fell completely in love. As it turns out, the deep sea is where the creatures from our wildest dreams live.
But seduction always has a price… once you fall in love, you’ll want to protect them. And Nouvian argues there’s no just reason not to do so: deep sea trawling provides only 5% of the worldwide catch and only 300 or 400 ships engage in the $400 million per year industry. Nouvian argued that we are “destroying a unique, unassessed planetary heritage at unprecedented speed and scale in an irreversible manner for no reason but the increased profit of a handful of people.” Nouvian recommends checking out SeaAroundUs.org, SaveTheHighSeas.org (the website of the Deep Sea Coalition), eating less fish and using seafood watch cards, and her new organization: the Bloom Association which aims to link people with the deep sea, rousing emotions through beauty.
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Posted on 07.31.07 by Emily
ROFLOL from Hanna Gersen’s “Sigh,” a hilarious mad-libbed urban feminist reframing of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.“
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