Open Buddha

I went with friends on Sunday night to see the Custom Made Theater Company's adaptation of Cory Doctorow's young adult novel, Little Brother. As most of my friends know, I am a fan of Doctorow's work in general, finding him to be both an excellent writer but also someone speaking on things that I care greatly about as someone who works at Mozilla on open source and keeping the web as open as possible. I am also a particular fan of this book, having given a copy to my own daughter (who is now 15) to read because I think it addresses a lot of important issues in our current times. When I found out that a stage version of the play was being done and done locally, I was excited and determined to see it.

Josh Costello did the adaption from Cory's book and directed the play as well. We actually had a Q&A after the show so he spoke about it a bit. While he was in contact with Cory, both for the obvious legal reasons and wanting to keep him in the loop with what was done to his baby, Josh did the adaptation on his own without any real outside input, from what he said. The play is done with a cast of three actors, primarily playing Marcus, Ange, and Darryl. (Technically, this isn't true in that Cory Censoprano who plays Darryl actually has very little stage time as Darryl but he does start and end there.) While Daniel Petzold always plays Marcus, both Cory and Marissa Keltie (who plays Ange) rotate through all of the other characters encountered in the course of the story. For example, when Marcus is confronting his parents, a sweater and a shawl are added, along with a change in intonation or accent, in order to convey that it isn't Darryl and Ange (if that isn't completely obvious). The conceit of the play, really, is that Marcus, Ange, and Darryl are telling the story of what happened to them after the fact in the storefront they've set up in the Mission following the incidents being related. Josh discussed afterwards that having the actors play the other characters so transparently (as opposed to really pretending that you couldn't tell it was the same person) involves the audience as kind of co-conspirators in their doing so. I do agree that it was effective.

Another thing that worked well in the production was their use of video. The story of Little Brother is one that heavily involves technology. How to show this in a small stage play is an obvious challenge. One thing that was done was to have video intermixed at various points, especially when the characters are working online or texting, but to have it reversed so that the projected video showed them typing or texting (but no details) while the actors, right in front of us, explained what they were doing or acted it out. When Marcus does his press conference in Clockwork Plunder, a clockwork driven online pirate MMORG, pirate hats, plastic cutlasses, and, I believe, an eye patch or two were donned as the avatars in game acted out the conference (to some hilarity).

Overall, all of this worked out well. Obviously, I'm a fan of the original book so I'm predisposed to like the play but a bad adaption or approach to the story, which had to be condensed mightily to fit into two hours, could easily have ruined it. Using only three actors could have worked out very badly as well. I found that it flowed and was true enough to the essential story that I was satisfied. One of my companions did complain that his favorite line by Marcus from the book was left out (which was "I had a boner that could cut glass") but even he was happy overall.

One of the things that makes the story continue to work well, which the cast and script writer/director acknowledged in various ways, is that even though it was written in 2008 to deal with issues of the post-9/11 world, Little Brother is very much of the current times in which we find ourselves. We've had the Arab Spring and the ongoing attempts in Syria and even Iran where people are using technology as a lever as they try to overthrow tyranny. We have our own Occupy movement (especially here in Oakland, where I live), which is very much trying to change the discourse in our nation and to raise awareness. This has lead to protests in the streets, here in America, and subsequent crackdowns. Against this sort of backdrop, I found that my emotional response to Little Brother was much stronger than it might otherwise have been. The idea that we need to stand up for ourselves, no matter how otherwise powerless we might be, and "take it back" is something I think that many of us understand much more immediately than we did in 2008 as the economic crash leading to our "Great Recession" began and everything that has happened to lead to the current very vocal dissatisfaction with business as usual. I wanted to post a quote a quote from Little Brother that covers the sentiment exactly:

"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! *Take it back!"

"TAKE IT BACK!" we roared. She jammed down hard on her guitar. We roared the note back and then it got really really LOUD.

Of course, in the story, this is followed by the kind of beatdown of the crowd by the authorities with pepper spray and clubs that would make the Oakland Police Department grin like proud parents.

I think that the play is definitely worth seeing and I see it has been extended two weeks through the end of February. You can get tickets at goldstar. You should go!

It is now January 1^st, 2012 so I suppose it is time for year end (beginning?) review and announcements.

For the most part, this has not been a year of changes. I've been at Mozilla for four and a half years, working with the seminary for the past few years (first as a student and now as an instructor), been in the same house, married to the same wonderful woman, and running the same hackerspace.

This year I turned 40, which is considered to be entering mid-life by some. It really doesn't feel much different than 30 except I'm, perhaps, wiser or at least more aware of what an idiot I can be. I think that is all we can really hope for with "maturity" anyway. I do find it true that our conception of ourselves seems to freeze sometime between 25 and 30. It isn't that we aren't constantly changing as people still (nothing is constant except change, after all) but the shorthand we use to view ourselves is still that person we thought we were when we were that age. It could be different with others but, based on talking to people and what people have written in books and whatnot about themselves, I think this is a common feature. So, I'm old enough to know better, not that old still, but have to remind myself I'm not quite that loud-mouth I was when I got divorced in my late 20's.

This is where I will announce, beyond Twitter and Facebook, that my work is changing. I've been doing Quality Assurance ("Software Testing") since 1996 with the exception of a six month stint with a generic "Project Manager" title right before I left Microsoft in 2006. For most of the last four and a half years, I've run the QA side of security updates for Mozilla Firefox. This has meant triaging incoming bugs with devs and others, verifying fixes, and generally making sure the updates don't destroy your computer or the usability of Firefox. Right now, I'm officially in transition to leave QA and to join Mozilla's Security Team as a program manager. My duties at this point appear to likely focus on communications with various parties, such as bug reporters, looking at incoming issues, and helping out other Security Team members on wrangling projects. This is a pretty natural transition given that I've been working with much of the team for years and I'm likely reporting to one of my triaging partners. Obviously, lifewise, this is a big change as I'll be leaving QA after 15 years for a new career shift into program and project management. Given the intersection of my work at Mozilla and helping found and run a hackerspace, this feels very "right" to me and organic as an evolution of what I'm doing and the space in which I wish to work.

Speaking of the hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys continues to do well. We're up to about 30 paying members (+/-2) with a few more coming to events and meetings that are not members. We're in the process of finishing our federal nonprofit paperwork in the next few weeks (we're a California nonprofit right now). We had tables at the main Maker Faire and the local East Bay Mini Maker Faire this year and got a lot of attention at these. We were on the Make Live Hackerspace Roadshow with a video we made giving a tour of the space. The goals for this year are to have more regular workshops and classes for the public and to generally grow the membership.

Within the Buddhist side of things, I've been fairly busy. The Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary went through a name change within the last two months, becoming the Prajna Institute for Buddhist Studies, to help differentiate ourselves as a non-denominational Mahayana Buddhist seminary from our Five Mountain Zen lineage. We continue to pull in a few new students on a regular basis and we're examining how to increase our offerings and improve what we already have. I continue to teach a few classes every quarter, working with something like eight students on average.

My primary Buddhist teacher and the head of the institute, Rev. Jiun Foster, received Inga (Inka) this last week, recognizing his accomplishments and realization as a Zen teacher. As part of this, his Dharma name was changed to "Myo Gak" (or "Myogak") by his teacher, Rev. Paul Yuanzhi Lynch. Not directly related to this but associated with ongoing developments in our Zen work, I've received a new Dharma name as well, which is "Ji Gong" (Jigong), written in Chinese as "智空," and meaning "Wisdom of Emptiness" (or is it "Empty of Wisdom" as the joke goes). This is because I've been appointed Dogam or Vice-Abbot of Great Cloud Zen Society, of which more details will eventually be forthcoming. This is based off of Rev. Myogak's work in Cincinnati over the last five or so years and will be an evolution of our continuing Zen work.

I've also begun to hold open Buddhist retreats in the Bay Area under the moniker of "Open Sangha." I held a two day retreat in November and have begun scheduling monthly one day retreats starting this month. As I say on the site, "The Bay Area Open Sangha exists to allow people to practice and study the Buddhadharma, the teachings of the Buddha, without concern for sectarianism or the historical lines between traditions of Buddhism." The retreats are a place for people to practice meditation, usually sitting and walking forms, without being tied to a specific school or tradition of practice. I realized that there are already quite a few Zen, Vipassana, and other groups in the Bay Area (and elsewhere) but few that allow Buddhists of all traditions of practice to come together. I feel that this is a useful space in which to work as I really question the value of too much sectarianism within Buddhism, though I do agree with the value of learning a coherent tradition of practice.

On a personal front at home, my wife, Rebecca, and I continue to do well. We've both embarked on a variety of fitness focused routines during the last year (and some). Part of reaching 40, as a fellow priest pointed out, is realizing that you can wake up in the morning having hurt yourself in bed without doing more than sleeping. Working a rather sedentary job (technology) combined with sedentary habits like reading, writing, and meditation, it is easy to just begin (continue?) to physically fall apart. I seem to have made a successful transition in the last year and a half to being a bit of a jock. I work out with a trainer once a week, do at least two cardio routines every week, and lift weights four or more days a week. Basically, I now work out almost every day compared to never working out or getting any exercise as recently as two or three years ago. A year ago, my trainer, who is a competition Olympic style weightlifter, taught my how to lift weights, which is something I'd never learned as a young geek who avoided the jocks at the gym. My garage is now filled with multiple lifting racks, two olympic barbells, and about 500 pounds of free weights (plus some dumbbells and a range of kettlebells up to 53 pounds). It is amazing the amount of difference working our daily has made in my energy levels and my outlook on life. I feel strange now if I don't work out on a given day for at least an hour and feel a sense of accomplishment in my gradually increasing ability to bench press, deadlift, or otherwise lift heavy things. On the other hand, I've hurt myself pretty well a couple of times being ambitious but, given my age and habits, I really do need to work to be healthy.

Additionally, in October I had LASIK surgery on my eyes, which Rebecca had done about four years ago. While it took a month to fully heal (and aspects of it are still healing and adjusting), it has been a life changer. Having worn glasses since I was twelve, it is hard to impart how incredible it is to have at least 20/20 vision and to be free to run around without glasses. To any of my glasses wearing friends, I cannot recommend the procedure highly enough if you qualify. It is easily the best money I've spent in years for the most return. As it turns out, I'm only a couple of years away from needing reading glasses, which this doesn't help, but in all other respects, I have perfect vision now. (I also had new portraiture work done by a photographer friend, to commemorate having no glases anymore and thus changing my appearance.)

In summary (for the "too long, didn't read" crowd), I have a new job at Mozilla, am still running a hackerspace, and have a new ordained name. I'm also running retreats open to anyone in the Bay Area, teaching in a Buddhist seminary, and lifting a lot of heavy things often. I must say that turning 40 has been a lot better, a lot more even, than turning 30 was by any estimation. This last year has been good overall and I hope that this coming year is even better.

I just read a recent interview with Hakim Bey today, In Conversation with Hakim Bey done by Hans Ulrich Obrist from e-flux.

As many of my friends know, I ran one of the longest running Hakim Bey sites for many years on hermetic.com before I gave the site away to a new curator. Back in my undergrad days in the early 1990's, I was the person that (with permission) reformatted Bey's T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism for posting on Usenet, the old discussion forum sort of area on the early Internet. I have been very influenced by his thought at various points in my life, even as I moved beyond my earlier enthusiasms (and despite the personal controversies around Hakim Bey).

I noticed in the interview that Obrist asked Bey about the origins of T.A.Z. and I thought it worth quoting. It was interesting to read (as was the whole interview).

I'm not sure when in 2011 that it was done but I do find it interesting that nowhere in the discussion below does the Occupy Movement come up. Given its natural tendency to do so, I suspect that this interview was done early in the year before it became much of a well known phenomena, especially since Bey is in the Hudson Valley in New York. I'm kind of curious as to what he would say about it.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I also wanted to ask you about the origins of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a book that changed the way I approached exhibitions when I began working as a curator. Growing up with this idea that the exhibition has a master plan and the curator is the one who does a checklist, reading T.A.Z. for the first time in the early ‘90s really triggered a whole set of exhibitions for us, like Life/Live, Cities on the Move, and Laboratorium. Most of my exhibitions in the ‘90s, and then also Utopia Station in the 2000s, relinquished the curatorial master plan in favor of being temporary autonomous zones in which we would basically invite collectives and artists to curate shows within the show. So for me it was a toolbox for curating, and I always wondered how you came to write that book, how its genesis came about?

Hakim Bey: Well, the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook. And of course the main criticism of this activity is that it didn’t last. But these things tend to be very ephemeral—if a secular commune lasts in America for ten years, it’s a miracle. Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation—and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. I’ve noticed that the exciting ones tend to disappear, and as I began to further study this phenomenon, I found that they tend to disappear in a year or a year and a half. In the ‘60s we had a lot of communes that lasted for a year and half, two, three years. I think the only one that survived was The Farm, and that’s due to a number of things that made it very different, such as the fact that it had what I would say was a rather authoritarian leader, Steve Gaskin. What a brilliant guy. I think the place held together because he was willing to be its leader. A lot of the other communes fell apart because they were so anarchistic that they had no leaders, and so nobody washed the dishes. The movement was still going on in the 1980s. I had friends who were deeply involved in intentional communities, and I myself got involved. And everybody in the ‘80s was giving a good deal of thought to the whole idea of what intentional community could mean and how it could improve your life to be in one, or if it even could at all. That was the question. I think it unquestionably does. People have great fun for at least a year or a year and a half, and then when the problems start, that’s usually when it breaks up. After thinking about that for a while, it occurred to me that, well, it’s not such a great tragedy that these things don’t last. You shouldn’t condemn the experience of the people at Brook Farm, for example, just because it only lasted a few years. Those people had an incredibly deep experience that changed their lives. They had fun while they were there. They had a more intense existence, with everything geared up to a higher charge. All you have to do is read a little Emerson and a little Thoreau, see what the people who visited Brook Farm had to say about it. It was buzzing with energy and good vibrations.

HUO: Emerson said, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.”

HB: Exactly. So it occurred to me that you could make a virtue of the temporary nature of these things. If these organizations fall apart after eighteen months or so, well, let’s just plan on it. Let’s have these communities and say that they’re only going to last for a short while. And as soon as the intensity fades, then it’s over. It’s finished. We wrap it up, go somewhere else, do something new. But I also have to admit that by the 1980s, waiting for the revolution for thirty years had gotten a little tiresome. When I was really young and full of enthusiasm in the 1960s, we really, actually, sincerely believed that a major transformation was imminent. And as it turned out, we were all naïve, perhaps like those Christian fundamentalists who are so certain that the end of the world is imminent. I don’t know. It could have been a form of millenarian insanity, but we believed in it in any case. The older we got, the more this receded into history, at least for me. And for others it became a futile, youthful dream they had to give up. But I’m still working for that transformation, though I’m no longer convinced it’s around the corner, or that it’s going to happen in my lifetime. So as I began wondering how we could have a taste of revolutionary life without the revolution, since it was apparently not going to happen, this new Temporary Autonomous Zone seemed the only possible answer to that. There was no single moment of genesis really, but a whole series of light-saturated moments throughout American history—including the 1960s, which I had lived through myself—that all culminated in that theoretical work.

HUO*: So if one considers Temporary Autonomous Zones as these pockets of anarchy, do you find any now, in the twenty-first century? Where are they? Can they be expanded? And what forms do they take?

HB: Well, I’ve always said that I didn’t invent the TAZ. I just noticed that it existed. It’s always existed. For some reason, most people have to believe that what they’re doing is going to last forever in order to find the enthusiasm to do anything at all. The only thing that changed was thinking of the temporary itself as a possible good, instead of an obstacle. A good dinner party is a Temporary Autonomous Zone. Nobody tells you what to do at a good dinner party. Nobody gives orders. Nobody collects taxes. It’s an experience of giving and being given to, of filling the body and emptying the mind, having good conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.conversation and good wine and so forth. This is already a TAZ, but you have to conceptualize it that way for it to be that way. It’s simply a matter of consciousness. But once you find that consciousness, the forms of organization begin to open up. You begin to see all the different forms of organization that this could take. It could be anything from a picnic by the riverside to a community that lasts for two years. Where is it actually happening? Well, I have to say that the current moment at the end of this decade is, to me, one of the low energy points of history. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I feel that it’s actually hard to find a good TAZ now. And it’s more important than ever to do so. One reason being that communism is no longer. We now live in the world of the triumph of capital. And in this world, it would seem that the TAZ is, perhaps, the last possible revolutionary form. I hope that’s not true, but it may be. Either way, the idea is certainly more important now than it was around 1989 when I dreamed the idea up in the first place.