Posts from — April 2008

Nothing like a trip to Eel Island in Steve Canyon Comics (circa October 1951). Here we discovered the cruel anarchist resistance leader, Sookie Susie, who took the trouble to kidnap the US officer’s wife, Delta Index. The question is, did Delta actually do a day’s work in her life? Probably not. You have to wonder if the vixen, Sookie Susie, had any connection with Steppenwolf’s Sookie Sookie Sue, perhaps via some weird armed forces joke. Yet another case of trying to unravel memes as they worm their way through pop culture.

Great weekend spent on Buddhist teachings. Here we are recording Rinpoche’s talk on the 8th Century pandit, Kamalashila, and his teachings on the stages of meditation. This took place at the Hunneman Hall of the Brookline Public Library on Saturday. The following day, we held a full day meditation workshop on the basics of Shamatha and Vipashyana meditation techniques in Arlington. Hopefully, when I get the basic audio files cleaned up, we can post them on Rinpoche’s teachings website.

By the way, if you are interested in Kamalashila and the debate about “sudden enlightenment” vs. “gradual enlightenment” you may be amused by this dialogue between my original Ch’an Teacher, Master Sheng-yen and the 14th Dalai Lama, which took place at Roseland, New York in 1998.

The interesting cover on Arthur Sellings The Uncensored Man attracted my eye in a San Francisco bookshop on Polk Street several years ago. It featured a sort of typical 1960s collage of a man’s face on a stark white background. I wondered who the cover artist was for quite a while, but it wasn’t until Boskone 2008 when I purchased a copy of West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn, that I finally found the same artist. West of the Sun credited the cover illustration to one: Hoot V. Z. A little Google sleuthing turned up a terrific gallery of covers by the one and only Hoot von Zitzewitz, which are characteristic and interesting all by themselves. But who exactly Hoot Von Zitzewitz was remains a mystery.

img source: flickr page

Do you remember those trails following your arms around as you glided down the grassy slope in the park? And those sounds that seemed to flow around you when the traffic light changed color? Well, you can trace it all back to Albert Hoffman’s accidental ingestion of 250 mics of pure LSD-25, as recorded in this Chick Tract.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands dead, I can’t help but think of the original assessment by the brilliant Bush-Cheney team, that the operation would be a cakewalk. After all their belly-aching about imminent doom, one really wonders why they should at the same time predict that we would be greeted with flowers. It’s almost as if some terrible misinterpretation of reality took place, which brings me to the amusing comic above. I found this book in San Francisco a few years ago, Komikaze, by Turkish artist Erdil Yasaroglu. You really should check out his amazing website! He draws with a naturalistic sarcasm, reminiscent of Gary Larson, and ought be translated into English. So, here is my contribution, the above strip translates roughly as:

“Waiter, this is scandalous! There is a fly crapping on my cake!”

“But let the fly perform, sir, it’s our exotic dancer!”