“Another blog about music and movies?” you ask. Why not just … pave a road with asphalt, or paint a picket fence white, or pick my nose with my finger?
But this one is going to be different, you see. This one is actually going to be worth it. Well, I guess that’s not for me to decide. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that position will be held by someone else, I couldn’t say (although I can make gratuitous Dickens references). I feel like intentions have to count for something, though.
First, a few thoughts. You ever work on a story, or a painting, or a concerto, or a sailboat, and work on it, and work and work on it, and you still don’t think it’s quite right? You can see the perfect version of it in your mind – touch it, taste it, fondle it even – and you can see the version of it that exists in front of your face, and they’re not quite the same thing?
In other words, this is supposed to be the introductory essay to my new blog. It’s supposed to feature just the right amount of wit, charm, wisdom, substance, humor, and self-deprecation that it needs, nay, requires. Think the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, where Vonnegut manages to dance around the topic of atrocity while still sounding like a total mensch. Well, I left that version in the pocket of my other jacket, so in the meantime, this one will have to do.
A part of me wonders if I’m going to come off sounding like some kind of Scientologist, or Objectivist, or a Scientological-Objectivist, but I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit on the whole thing and at a certain point you’ve just got to say “Fuck it” and put it out there. At times I’ll re-read it and think, “I can’t believe how brilliant this is. It’s like Aristotle’s Poetics – but with better dick jokes.” Other times I’ll re-read it and think, “Oh God, this is just like all the obnoxious internet writing I mock mercilessly.” But hey, even da Vinci’s The Last Supper ain’t what it used to be, so I might as well just get it over with. It’s like a colonoscopy: good to get out of the way, even if it’s a hassle and you’re sore afterwards.
A couple of years ago, I was reading a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, and I was chatting with a friend about writing, and I said to him, “Damn it, I want my writing to be as good as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, you know?” He responded, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing sort of … sparkles. Nobody can really make their writing sparkle.” So how about this? I can sleep at night if my writing doesn’t sparkle. I just hope it doesn’t grow moldy after I leave it out for a couple of days, that’s all.
I Am The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru
Yes, that’s what I’ve decided to call myself. No, I am not high.
James Brown dubbed himself “The Hardest Working Man In Show Business,” Reno is apparently “The Biggest Little City In The World,” so, all the good ones were taken.
The first thing you’re probably asking yourself is, “What the hell is a part-time Buddhist pop culture guru?” You know what? I don’t need to answer to you, or to anybody. I can call myself whatever I want, whenever the hell I feel like it, OK?
The truth is, if I had a proper answer, I might actually tell you. Let me continue stalling by asking this simple and yet unanswerable question: At what moment does a cloud cease to exist?
Exactly.
And just as a cloud is never one fixed “thing,” so a part-time Buddhist pop culture guru is never one fixed “thing.” The answer to the question is everywhere, and yet…
It is nowhere.
The real answer is: Everyone needs a gimmick. This, as they say, is my gimmick. So, even though I am nakedly admitting that I don’t know what exactly a part-time Buddhist pop culture guru is, I am going to attempt to describe one. But before I can describe what a part-time Buddhist pop culture guru is, I should probably attempt to describe what part-time Buddhism is.
“Part-time Buddhism? Come on man, you’re just making that up.” Oh, it’s a thing. It’s totally a thing.
Religion. What a pesky, bewildering creature religion is. Is it a set of guidelines meant to outline model behavior? A flexible value system intended to be molded and revised to one’s own purposes? An attempt to provide tangible meaning to the apparent chaos that is human existence? To paraphrase Edwin Starr: “Religion! Huh! What is it good for?”
Here, if you will, is my personal experience with the organized religion known as Buddhism. I have read a few books on Buddhism. A few. I do not belong to any particular Buddhist temple or organization. I do not wear a robe, or shave my head. I do not attend a meditation group. I don’t even meditate at home!
Several years ago, I actually did make a concerted effort to attend, with some regularity, two different organized meditation groups, but I didn’t end up sticking with either one of them. First of all, I was sort of hoping I would make friends at these meditation groups, but it turns out that other people don’t go to meditation groups to make friends. They go to meditation groups to – get a load of this – meditate! Also, it was really depressing sitting there in silence, surrounded by a bunch of attractive women, but not really getting the opportunity to meet them. I guess most women don’t attend meditation groups to pick up guys. I mean, the whole idea was that I would go to these meditation sessions and feel more “connected” to people, but the thing is, when I went, I actually ended up feeling lonelier than I did before I bothered to go to the meditation session! I eventually realized that, counter-intuitive as it may have seemed, I felt a lot better about myself when I just stayed in my apartment and watched a movie or listened to some music instead. Maybe I should go back sometime, I don’t know. It’s probably all via Zoom now anyway.
Mostly I guess I’m just a very free-thinking person and once I felt I got the general idea of Buddhism, I really didn’t want to hear any more lectures. I didn’t feel like bowing down to some guy in a robe either. What the hell was that all about? Every now and then I’ll pick up a book on Buddhism and see the author recite all these “tales” of “lessons the Buddha gave,” and toss out all these terms in Sanskrit, and see, those guys are actual full-time Buddhists. They’ve really studied the traditions and the customs, not me. They know their Theravada from their Mahayana. They can spot the minute differences between one type of Buddha statue and another type of Buddha statue. Gotta be honest, the statues all kind of look the same to me.
Allow me to demonstrate what a full-time Buddhist writer sounds like. One day, while attempting to kill time in the local library (as one does), I came across a curious little book titled Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies, by a certain Dean Sluyter. Buddhism … and movies? Count me in. In fact, for a split second, I felt the twinge of threat, and freaked out just a teeny tiny bit. “Don’t tell me someone’s already stolen my idea to combine Buddhist thought and pop culture criticism?”
Alas, I need not have worried (and as a part-time Buddhist, I shouldn’t have been worrying about such trifling matters anyway). See, Sluyter is what I would call an actual “full-time Buddhist.” According to the blurb on the back, “he is the chief meditation instructor of Aikido Schools of New Jersey and leads the Dzogchen Center’s New Jersey practice group.” “Aikido”? “Dzogchen”? No center I’ve ever been a part of has ever had a “D” and a “Z” as the first two letters of its name, I can tell you that much. But Sluyter’s a true believer. He’s spent years studying in temples in Thailand and all that shit. He’s the kind of author who routinely drops words like “bodhichitta,” “wu wei,” “shunyata,” and “ananda” like he’s picking up the morning paper off the lawn. Sluyter’s idea of film writing, and my idea of film writing, are not quite the same. For instance, here is an excerpt from his essay on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
Still sighing, Snow White carries her scrub bucket a few yards to a well, peers into its depths, and sings about her wish for “the one I love” to “find me today.” Our inner nature wants, as it were, to be found. It’s not enough merely to be that luminous clarity; we must somehow come to know it. This knowing is not an idea or a feeling but a direct experience – in fact, the experience, satori, nirvana, rigpa, the peace that passeth understanding, the kingdom of God within. Here it’s represented by the Prince, the one who can draw Snow White out of the background to which she has been relegated. Sages in all traditions say this ultimate experience cannot be adequately described (“The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao”), and, fittingly, the Prince is the one character the Disney artists were never satisfied with.
Mm-hmm. And an excerpt from his essay on Jaws:
Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s first great work, is usually seen as a movie about terror, but I think it’s about insatiable hunger – our hunger … The star of a film is usually the character with whom the audience identifies. That is, the shark is us; the shark is the self. Hooper, Brody, and Captain Quint are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self – what we could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana approaches – with three very different results … Quint … goes after the shark with harpoons and rifles and then tries to drag it ashore with his boat’s sheer horsepower. This is the fundamentalist approach to the self and its hungers, the two-fisted attempt to pound it into submission … This is the way of aggression, rooted in dualism. It’s spirituality as a perverse struggle against an adversary conceived as other than the one who struggles … The young shark expert Hooper is type B to Quint’s type A, embodying a shrewder, gentler approach … Hooper has specialized equipment, designed more intelligently than Quint’s crude weapons … This is what is called upaya, skillful means, the smarter alternative to Quint’s dualistic antagonism … Hooper works with the shark’s nature rather than against it. Since its nature is to eat everything it sees, his plan is to go down into the cage and shoot a cylinder of poison into its gaping mouth. This is the path of gentle, systemic transformation rather than heavy moralizing: if the self wants to consume, don’t clobber it but give it something new to consume that will eventually kill the unbridled appetite.
Well naturally. And an excerpt from his essay on Goldfinger:
M delineates Bond’s mission and Q issues the equipment to carry it out. Our dharma mission is to clear away the obstacles to our enlightenment, while our upaya comprises such specific methodologies as breath work, mantra, meditation, and visualization … The supreme gadget is the Aston Martin, which in itself neatly sums up several important characteristics of upaya. When we think of this fabulous car we usually focus on its secret weapons and exotic features, just as we tend to focus on the most exotic aspects of dharma practice. But in both cases, what’s most important and most overlooked is what’s not there. This is a sports car, not a tank. Its sleek, aerodynamic lines suggest the elegant simplicity of just being, abiding in the natural state – “meditation,” as we are obliged to call it. Both meditation and sports cars work by being streamlined, coming as close as possible to being nothing at all. Every moment the mind spends resting in the just-being state, it’s discovering that quality of “just,” so that, when we return to action, walking becomes just walking, running a corporation becomes just running a corporation, without all the fussing and fumbling, blame or self-doubt or ego-tripping that often attach to action. In other words, we’re training to be 007 cool.
Right. So. My writing about music and film … is not going to be like this. I don’t know an upaya from a papaya. Sluyter is a genuine, licensed, officially certified, card-carrying Buddhist. Me? I’m just some guy. I like some of the stuff, and I don’t like some of the other stuff. There are people who say that Buddhism is a practice and that you really must commit to the practice to understand what it’s about. Which I don’t feel like doing. Hence: part-time Buddhist. I’ll let those people go sit in their corner and have their full-time Buddhism, and I’ll go sit in my corner and have my part-time Buddhism, and we’ll all be happy. I won’t argue with real Buddhists. I’ve made my own version and I like it.
And now, without further ado, I would like to present my very own Four Semi-Noble Truths of Part-Time Buddhism (subject to future revision). These are not to be confused with the Four Noble Truths of actual Buddhism. Let’s call it “Variations on a Theme by Buddha.” I don’t claim to be some great, all-seeing authority on the complexities of the human condition – I just play one on TV:
1) The Purpose of Life is to Achieve Happiness.
Shocking. But hold on, I’m not finished. You ever hear that common joke that’s been recycled in a number of variations, where someone facetiously asks somebody else, “What’s the meaning of life?,” as if it’s a question that nobody could possibly answer? But, the thing is, arrogant as it may sound … sometimes I think I could actually answer that.
The meaning of life is to find happiness.
All right, all right, I can hear you smart alecks in the back row preparing your snarky reply: “So the meaning of life is to have a good time, and make lots of money, and marry a supermodel and live in a mansion and travel to exotic locales and basically be Sting? But maybe that’s not really happiness. Maybe that’s just pleasure.” A-ha! So the question then becomes: what is happiness, really?
And the answer to that is … well, look, if I answered that question right in the introduction to my blog, then I’d be grossly negligent in my blogger marketing duties. But that’s the proverbial million dollar question, my friends. Who can answer “What is happiness, really?” in one snappy sentence? But here’s my thought: if writers or artists aren’t actually asking themselves that question, then what the hell are they doing? Playing Uno? I mean, they can do whatever the hell they want with their lives, but, in my humble opinion, if they’re not asking themselves that, then they’re wasting their time. And I guess the whole point of my blog is, if a work of art isn’t also trying to answer that, then maybe it’s wasting my time.
2) All Is Impermanence … and the Sooner One Can Appreciate That, the Better.
Nothing lasts forever – not even Tom Brady. The only constant in life … is change. We’re all going to be six feet in the ground someday, whether we like it or not. Now, I could become sad when I realize that nothing I love – my family, my friends, the planet Earth, the sun, my bicycle, my favorite restaurant, that pint of Cherry Garcia in my freezer – not a single thing – will last forever. But if I were able to stop and appreciate the beauty of impermanence, then actually, I’d be in a pretty good spot, right?
Think about every conflict in human history. Have you ever read about all those European wars? You know, the ones before Napoleon, where they spent all their time bickering over whether Catholicism or Protestantism was the one “true” religion? Or, as the great philosophers Jagger and Richards once put it, “I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made”? Frankly, I still don’t know my 100 Years’ War from my 30 Years’ War from my War of the Roses (I’m sure a solid afternoon on Wikipedia would set me straight). My point is: can you imagine how many perfectly healthy and productive human beings were sent to their deaths over these little ideas that, I’m sure at the time, someone thought were so incredibly important? I wonder what people five hundred years from now are going to make of the conflicts of today. I’m guessing they’re going to ask themselves, “Why the hell did these people think that ____ was worth killing other people over?” By the same token, what about all the small daily battles that people have with each other? You might not even need five hundred years to gain some perspective on the merits of your argument with your spouse over the dishes or the laundry. People think their lives are so … important.
Look. The universe doesn’t give a shit. We’re all sitting on some extremely fragile rock that’s floating in the vast emptiness of outer space. Nothing we do really matters in the grand scheme of things.
However, I would also like to suggest that what we do matters very much. To us. It’s sort of a contradiction. Nothing matters, and yet … things matter somehow. If you can’t stand the contradiction heat, then get out of the part-time Buddhist kitchen. Besides, when I try to appreciate the impermanence of all things, and I fail, I don’t worry about it for very long, because … my failure is just as impermanent as everything else is.
3) One Should Try to Appreciate the Present Moment Exactly As It Is, and Not As One Might Wish It Would Be.
This can be a tough one, because sometimes I want to appreciate the present moment about as badly as I want to, say, listen to Cher’s 1999 comeback hit “Believe” [note: if I’ve just grossly insulted your personal favorite song of all time, please insert an appropriate example of your choosing]. But anyone who thinks they’re only going to be happy when something very specific happens to them in the future … is an idiot. I mean, what if that one specific thing never happens? They just spent all that time banking their happiness on something that never happened, and now they’re screwed. Not only are they not happy, but they just spent all that time beforehand being unhappy, when they could have been happy! Maybe the journey is the destination, buddy.
4) Exercising Compassion, Experiencing Companionship, and/or Feeling Connected to Other People Is One Key Aspect of Human Happiness
Some people think that happiness is “getting what’s yours,” “looking out for #1,” “killing the other guy before he kills you” – basically, going throughout one’s existence under the belief that the only person in the world whose well-being matters is oneself. It’s a fun idea, but I don’t think it’s a creditable one.
Once upon a time, at the tender age of 19, I read a book by this mysterious author named Ayn Rand. I got to thinking about this notion that focusing solely on myself was my path to happiness. Which didn’t mean harming other people, she was careful to point out: her philosophy was clearly anti-murder, anti-theft, and anti-rape (that one questionable rock quarry scene in The Fountainhead aside). But what was the point in spending all your energy trying to “help” other people? Then one day I came upon a potential flaw in Rand’s philosophy: what if helping make other people happier … was actually something that made me really happy? What if another person’s happiness … and my happiness … were, like, intertwined?
Whoa. Dude.
This reminds me of an obscure author my friend and I once came across, who claimed to have immersed himself headlong into Objectivism, then immersed himself headlong into Zen Buddhism, became disillusioned with both, and then decided to invent a new philosophy he promptly dubbed “Dark Buddhism.” “Dark Buddhism?” my friend joked. “Isn’t that what Sauron practiced?”
My point is: treating life as a zero-sum game, and believing that all those “suckers” who want to run around and “care” about other people are fools, is a seductive worldview. If you think that’s happiness, then hey, go ahead and practice it, I won’t stop you. But in my experience, trying to dominate people and “win” the game of life doesn’t really solve your actual problems. It might make you feel good for a couple of seconds, and you might feel a brief moment of “safety” and “security” … until the next threat comes along. Because the reality is, you’re a fragile little creature, and no matter what you do, you can’t keep death from destroying “you.” But what if you’re actually “more” than you? Where does “you” end and the “other” begin?
How about this: maybe we’re all just a tangled collection of molecules that are bouncing around and colliding with other tangled collections of molecules. I mean, we’re all basically the same stuff. I like art that seems to be aware of this, and I’m not as fond of art that doesn’t seem to be aware of this.
So there you have it. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I state that happiness, like the British royal family, can be a complicated thing. Everyone finds happiness in different places. Some people meditate. Some people go deep sea diving. Some people build ships in a bottle. Personally, I’ve found that my most reliable source of happiness has always been what you might call “art,” or, more specifically, music, film, and literature (or even more specifically, late 20th century popular music, film from the birth of the sound era to roughly the present day, and 19th century and early 20th century novels). Some people go to church and read the Bible. I listen to music, watch movies, and read books. Ever since I was about seventeen, that has been my form of prayer. That has been my temple. That is where I’ve found my “inspiration.” That’s what “speaks” to me. I pray to the God of Art, in the Church of Culture. Sounds like a funny church, but I’ll tell you one thing: I haven’t been molested by a single priest yet.