How to Cook Your Life, a film by Doris Dörrie featuring Edward Brown and his cooking dharma

A Zen Life - D.T. Suzuki - a film by Michael Goldberg

Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology - Lew Lancaster on YouTube. The intro says: A distinguished scholar of Buddhism, Lewis Lancaster founded the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to use the latest computer technology to map the spread of various strands of Buddhism from the distant past to the present. Series: "Burke Lectureship on Religion & Society"  Lew writes:

5-29-08 - A friend just sent me a link to Alan Watts Theater, not realizing it had been featured on cuke last year. But I've got high weed mowing both here and at Clay's school tomorrow, so be reminded oh dear cuke reader of this bit of wisdom from Watts and the gang who makes South Park. I've coincidentally been dealing with Mark Watts, son of Alan, because Mark has been an archivist not only of his father's voluminous works - see Alan Watts dot com - but of Shunryu Suzuki tapes.  Mark said that one day he got a call from Matt Stone saying you he and his friend Troy Parker had a little adult cartoon show you probably don't know about and we're interested in doing some work together. Mark, like me, was and is a South Park fan and went and spent three weeks in LA and that first link up there is what they came up with. Now it's also got a home in cuke-The-arts film-video section. And thanks for reminding us Delsing.

5-05-08 - Just saw the Tassajara Alumni Reunion Video that was part of the Report on the SFZC's Early Tassajara Alumni Reunion posted three days ago and think it merits this plug - and not just because yours truly is in it. Quite the opposite - I cringe to see myself thus reflected - it may be time for more diet and exercise on my part. Now I must make a note to get the outtakes from that video for the archives. - Good work Timothy O'Conner Fraser and the rest credited in the video. Incidentally, in the image above, from right to left that's Peter Overton, Susan Burns Overton, and yours truly dc. - A tiny error - I make a mistake in talking to them when I say we were dropped off at the beginning of the national forest - it was way before that. - dc

I'd like to put something here about the Zen film festival (or was there more than one?) that Michael Wenger put on. Through that he got to know Doris Dörrie who made the above mentioned film on Edward Brown and Wenger had a workshop with her on filmmaking at Tassajara.

Michael Wenger has also worked with the Shunryu Suzuki films with Timothy O'Conner Fraser (both of the SFZC) and they came up with a really good compilation of the three source films and still footage.

Now I remember that the SF State film department (or whatever it's called) did five student films on Shunryu Suzuki using that footage and interviewing people.

Anyway, this should all be available but it's not as far as I know. Let's look into it. - DC

Current Events type nonZen documentary films

Saw Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders, a documentary film, one of many I've seen and enjoyed perversely in the last few years exposing various evils of how our society functions, or should that be - of our dysfunctional society?

There are so many of them that have been full of good information so lacking in the MSM. I can't list all that I've seen or liked. Just thought I'd mention it. Here are a couple more that come to mind:

The Corporation

Out-Foxed

And of course, the big ones - An Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko.

Remember the importance of The Last Epidemic.

And then there's Dark Circle which I set up a screening at Greens for twenty-five years ago or so. It was about the connection between nuclear power and weapons and focused on Rocky Flats near Boulder, CO. It was made by Judy Irving who also made The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Here's her Pelican Media website for these films. And here's Mark Bittner's website - he's the author of the exellent book of the same name about those parrots. One of them was named Suzuki - or was it Shunryu? and he mentions reading ZMBM and Katrinka, Clay, and I went to the premier of it in SF (I think that was the premier).  - dc