HBO has made their new documentary series The Alzheimer’s Project available online for free download. I’ve embedded each segment below, and I especially encourage any health care chaplains out there who might be reading to watch them.
The Memory Loss Tapes
Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am? with Maria Shriver
Momentum in Science, part one
Momentum in Science, part two
Caregivers
Here’s what’s been happening in Burma this weekend:
The New York Observer has a slight but informative piece about the New York City premiere of film festival sensation Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country and the film’s distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, which is headed up by Beastie Boy and Tibet activist Adam Yauch.
The Beastie Boys were the organizers of the immensely popular and influential Tibetan Freedom Concerts, and some of their Buddhist-inspired songs appear in Gary Gach’s absolutely wonderful anthology What Book?!: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop. Yauch, who identifies as a Buddhist, is married to Dechen Wangdu, who was active in Students for a Free Tibet. His Buddhist faith has been the subject of substantial articles in both Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and Interview. Though active mostly in film distribution, Yauch directs as well: he helmed the experimental Beastie Boys concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (2006) under the pseudonym Nathaniel Hörnblowér. For a sample of his work as both a filmmaker and a musician, take a look at this…
["Andres Ostergaard, Sara Bernstein and Adam Yauch." Photo by Getty Images.]
SnagFilms and YouTube have made available online for free download Jerry Aronson’s The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. I thought it might be good to post the film (below) because of the great poet’s involvement in the American Buddhist movement: Ginsberg, who also studied Krishnaism and traveled through India, become a devoted student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche after meeting him randomly on the street in New York City. Along with fellow Beat writer Anne Waldman, he founded the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University (my graduate alma mater) in 1974. He was also the basis for the character “Alvah Goldbook” in his friend Kerouac’s much-beloved “novel” The Dharma Bums. For more on Ginsberg and his extensive relationship with the Buddhadharma, take a look at Tony Trigilio’s Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics and Michael Schumacher’s Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg.
A posting at MahaSangha News brings us the news that John Daido Loori Roshi, the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery and founder of the Mountains and Rivers Order, will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, during their upcoming commencement exercises. The report continues:
During the award ceremony, Daido Roshi will be introduced by Joan Epro, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Roshi will speak briefly on the theme of “Individual and Community.”
Congratulations, Roshi!
[Image via Zen Mountain Monastery.]
