Brad Warner's Blog, page 19

Health, Fitness and Zen

Sorry I ain't been writing much. I've been working hard on finishing up a novel I wrote way back in 1998. It's called Gill Women of the Prehistoric Planet.

Back in those days I was trying hard to become a professional writer. I wrote dozens of short stories that I used to send to science fiction magazines and get rejection notices for. I managed to publish three of them, I think. All fairly bad. I was writing stuff for Ultraman, some of which was used uncredited. I also completed three novels...

Young And Dumb

Here's me and my 14 year old niece Skylar Goldman performing the Rubber City Rebels' single "Young And Dumb" in my sister's kitchen on August 1, 2010.

Corrupting the youth! YEAH!

(By the way, I'm not left-handed. We did this using Mac's Photobooth application, which automatically makes a mirror image video.)

Time Passes Quickly

I'm back in America now. World Tour 2010 is officially over and done. I'm hardly finished with touring this year. I have a new book coming out in September, Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between, and one I edited and co-wrote with Nishijima Roshi, Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika. So I'll have a lot of touring to do ahead of me once those come out.

Still, it's a weird feeling to be done with s...

じゃまたね、日本！

I'm leaving Japan this afternoon. It's sad to go. I like this country. More than anywhere else in the world, Tokyo feels like home to me. Weird, huh?

I'd like to thank Ren Kuroda for putting up with me all this time. Thanks Ren! And thanks to Nishijima Roshi for the talks and the calligraphy. Thanks to everyone who joined this year's retreat at Tokei-in.

Thanks to Morishima-san ex-prez of Tsuburaya Productions for the pizza. Thanks to Norman England for Birdemic and I Drink Your Blood. Thanks ...

It's Not Just About Sex

Today a link to this article by James Ford appeared in my Facebook news feed. It's a good article. I read it twice and want to make some comments about it. So read the James Ford article and come back here and we'll chat.

So you've read the article now? Good! Remember I'm saying here at the beginning that I like the article a whole lot and I agree with most of it. I want to be very clear about that right from the outset before saying some things about it I think need to be said.

Much of the art...

FLAT EARTH SOCIETY and MOTH

Over the last couple months while I've been traveling two more Dimentia 13 downloads have become available. I've been scurrying around too much to promote them like I should have been. So here goes:

FLAT EARTH SOCIETY

Flat Earth Society is Dimentia 13's pop album. It was 1989 and I had been making Dimentia 13 records for five years. Two years before the first Dimentia 13 release I'd been a member of the hardcore punk band Zero Defex who had also been on a few compilation albums. After seven yea...

Zen Hobo

Here's another one of the shots I took of the Zen(?) monk in front of the Zen Mall. I originally didn't use this one because it's kind of blurry. It's the first of five shots I took and I was rushing to get it, hence the blurriness. But in retrospect this one shows the monk better.

I've been scratching my head over one of the comments regarding the previous post. It says, "I guess Brad does not know his Buddhist monks. Funny for a guy who says he was trained as a Buddhist monk in Japan. Oh, su...

My Trip to Japan

Last night I went out with Hiroshi Maruyama, Takeshi Yagi, Norman England and Jim Ballard. Those of you who don't know your Japanese monster movie stuff will not recognize those names. Which is fine. I don't wish the level of geek-dom required to recognize that list of names on many people.

But if you are geeky enough you might even be impressed. Maruyama designed most of the Ultraman characters and the monsters they fought from 1995 till maybe 2007 or so when he, like me, was fired from Tsubu...

JAPAN RETREAT and AM I A MONK?

I'm back from the retreat at Tokei-in temple in Shizuoka Japan. A fun time was had by all.

Usually we get about 20 people at these things. But with the change from September to July we didn't have so many participants this year. But that's no big thing. In fact it was kind of nice to have just nine people. It makes things a lot more manageable and provides an opportunity for everybody to get to know each other. I thought it was great. And the weather, which I'd feared would be intolerably hot ...

HELLO FROM JAPAN

First up, here's a link to some of my talk in Nijmegen, Netherlands. It starts off with the same old autobiographical stuff and then goes to the Q&A.

For those who complained about the Podcast, as John said in the comments last time, I do that same talk a lot and then I get to a Q&A, which is different each time. The upcoming podcasts will not be endless variations on my autobiography! In fact, sometimes when I'm taping a talk I don't even start recording till I get to the Q&A.

Odd thing is tha...