My notes on my stay at Eiheiji have been put up in French translation on the web site of a Paris-based community led by Eric Rommeluère, “Un Zen Occidentale”. I hope they prove of some use to French zen students.

Today the NYT carried the obituary of Gordon Onslow Ford, an American surrealist who I never heard of. I found it interesting, though, that they described his paintings as having “a cheerful decorative appeal and a spiritual optimism informed by Carl Jung’s psychology, Zen Buddhism and the artist’s own metaphysical and aesthetic theories.” Must be the first time in recorded history that some one has described Zen Buddhism as “optimistic”, although it certainly makes sense to me.

“Matrix” held out incredible promise. I just watched the first movie again. The premise, the writing, the execution were all acts of genius—which is, unsurprisingly, why the movie was so successful.

The Wachowski brothers then set about squandering the franchise. Essentially nothing happened in Reloaded. They insulted movie-goers and Matrix-lovers around the world with a vacuous, poorly-executed story. They completed the travesty in Revolutions. There were some good effects, but the story lacked any imagination. At the end of the third installment, the series stands at the brink: they need a sequel to complete the story (if they could figure it out), but they had pissed away the market receptivity to any such sequel.

Even a beginning screenwriter like me knows what the right conclusion should be the Matrix story. Keanu will eliminate the matrix, but first he has to free all the humans in the farms to keep them from dying. He does this in an incredible guerilla raid (together with Bruce Willis, of course) on the farm, with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of humans detached from their connection to the matrix and sliding down those great slides they had in the first movie into the river or whatever it was.

Then Keanu goes into the Matrix, which by now is populated only by bad guys, and does the kung fu thing to kill them all. Keanu cannot really act but that’s not that important since all he needs to do now is to find the computer where the matrix is running and finally shut it down for good.

Keanu and the newly freed humans all return to Zion, and have a fabulous party lasting for days and weeks. This part of the movie should contain lots of sex.

But then Keanu notices a black cat walking by a doorway. A few seconds later, he notices the same black cat walking by the same doorway. If’s deja vu all over again. That’s right. Zion is just another matrix. All the people there, including Morpheus, are just creatures in the larger matrix. Now we see what Keanu’s real purpose in life is—to break through this greater matrix. His first surprise comes when he finds that Trinity is nothing more than a creature from the new Matrix, one of the bad guys/girls sent in to prevent Keanu from figuring out what’s really going on and trying to kill him if it looks like he is going to.

That’s a sequel that I would have given my left arm to see.

The world’s best newspaper, the New York Times, reported on how the rights of sex offenders are being grievously infringed by them being kept locked up for years and decades after their debts to society are paid, under the rubric of vague psychological diagnoses made within a system where there is no accountability, or appealability. They report that in the NJ system 304 people have gone in over the last 15 years and a grand total of 11 have come out.

They tell the story of a man condemned to another year in custody based on the testimony of a pyschiatrist who had never actually met him that he had a personality disorder of unspecified nature. Another prisoner was about to be released when he had the misfortune of brushing up against a female guard when passing through a narrow doorway; a pyschiatrist testifed that he “might well have had” rape fantasies as he did so; that was good enough to put him away for another year.

We have to understand that the law defines the punishment for crimes and when that punishment has been fulfilled the person comes out. If we don’t like the punishment, then we can change the law. What we can’t do is arbitrarily keep people locked up forever after they finish serving their sentences based on a vague fear that they might repeat their crimes. (Actually, sex criminals repeat their crimes less often than other types.)

I’ve finished the first draft of my translation of Bendowa. This is Dogen’s great overview of zazen. (2004-03-25: now also available in HTML format without footnotes.)

Amazon has released a full-text search capability. I already used it to do some research on my upcoming biography, searching for books containing the word “Saptian”, the language spoken the by the Indians of the Columbia Basin. It has all the pages of most books on-line, and even highlights the term you were searching for—how on earth do they do that? They prevent you from browsing more than two pages in either direction, because they don’t want to become a free on-line book reading service, obviously.

Sure, a few people will buy a few more books from Amazon due to this cool new feature. But more basically, this is a shot across Google’s bow. Google has been sitting there saying, well, we own the index to all of the world’s information. Amazon is saying, wait a minute, there is also a little of information in this other medium called, uh, books. And guess what, we now own the index to books, so take that, Google.

I’d predict that Amazon will be monetizing this feature within six months, via the obvious routes such as ads, or possibly even with a subscription that lets people do more on-line browsing—although that would probably require some kind of agreement with the copyright holders, a-la-iTunes.

You’ve heard about the girl in Florida whose husband is trying to take out her feeding tube and whose parents are trying to keep it in.

President Bush came out yesterday in favor of putting the girl’s feeding tube back in. He issued a statement saying it was part of his policy of creating a “culture of life…at all stages”.

But where’s the culture of life for the US soldiers who were killed in Iraq, or the civilians killed there? Where’s the culture of life for tthe hundreds of death-row inmates Bush let go to their deaths while he was governor of Texas? Bush cares more for the life of an 8-cell embryo than that of a retarded black man.

The Florida state legislature passed an obviously unconstitutional bill to allow Jeb Bush to order the feeding tube reinserted, after 19 judges had reviewed the case and determined that the comprehensive law passed five years ago to cover exactly such cases as this clearly allowed the husband to make the health care choices for his wife. Jeb Bush then signed that law, himself knowing it to be unconstitutional, and then took the action that the unconstitutional law supposedly allowed him to.

Now George W. Bush has come out in favor of his brother’s signing and taking action under an obviously unconstitutional law. Our President doesn’t even understand the basic concept of separation of powers in a modern representative democracy. Must have been playing hooky the day they covered that in his eighth grade civics class.

Joe Lieberman, of course, supported this unconstitutional course of events as well.

Older people especially should be concerned about the idea that their lives could be extralegally prolonged against their wishes and those of their guardians and duly appointed agents by legislatures and elected officials. Think about it.

An absence of oxygen reaching living tissues.

Bob has written a nice overview of the game of Go, also known as weichi or paduk together with Sangit Chatterjee. It ws published in the July-August 2003 issue of “Science and Culture”, a respected Indian periodical.

Bastide is considered one of the top new restaurants in LA. Esquire named it one of the twenty best new restaurants of 2003 in America. And it’s just walking distance from our house, on Melrose Place! We had to try this out.

But wait! It’s supposed to be impossible to get reservations there! Wrong. We were eating there about four hours after our phone call.

There’s no a la carte menu here, just three tasting menus. The “fig” menu looked interesting; that’s right, every course had something to do with figs. We had the “traditional menu” for $90. The Bastide menu has an extra course or two for $100. We were offered another 10-course menu called the “Chef’s menu” for $125. We went with the traditional menu—which had two choices for each of the major courses.

We started off with some champagne, with some guidance from the rather haughty sommelier. But I guess all sommeliers are haughty, right?

Amuse-bouche was a little scallop in a sweet wine sauce with caviar on top.

For the first course, Sakiko had a salad, shrimp on a bed of ratatouille-like vegetables, very finely diced, with a pronounced tarragon flavor, encircled in a cucumber strip, with an herby green on top. The vegetables were good but the shrimp lacked personality. Bob had a melon crab tortelloni, on a very sweet jello made from a Sauterne-like wine, a single chive on top. I have to admit that the juxtaposition of crab and melon was interesting, but I’m still not that much of a melon fan. I found the crab filling to be uninspired.

For the second course, Sakiko had Mediterranean fish soup, poured over cheese and bread. The waiter went to great lengths to explain to us that they could not call it a bouillabaisse, since it was made not out of Mediterrean rockfish, but local rockfish. In any case I think fish stew is one of the most surpassingly good flavors our civilization has invented, and Bastide does this as well as anyone.

Bob had eggplant caviar, eggplant mousse, and trout, in almond sauce. Little caramelized almonds on top of the eggplant mousse tied the dish together a bit. The eggplant dishes were lovely and had great texture. The trout (which I guess was French, since they called it a “truite”), was fine but nothing to write home about.

For the third and main course, Sakiko had ribeye along with a tender ossobucco-like piece of meat, and crunchy tasty salty good stuff in a bone. Sakiko’s dish was quite the artistic layout. The mushroom ragout was possibly the best single preparation of the entire meal. But I found her ribeye both less flavorful and tougher than I would have preferred.

Bob had pieces of squab, and zucchini flower stuffed with chicken pate. I found the chicken pate to be flavorless; actually, I forgot what it was and couldn’t even tell, so I had to ask the waiter!

We were competently paired with a glass of interesting wine for all of the courses. I didn’t study the wine list in depth, but there seems to be a lot there at reasonable prices.

Bastide has a great dessert menu. They have eight or so preparations, each around a particular theme. Sakiko had “Lavendar”, a fabulous thing involving ice cream and meringue. Bob had “Apple”, which meant apple crepes, caramelized apple, and apple ice cream. The lady at the next table had “Chocolate”, which among other things some chocolate soup which I thought I’d like to try next time I go back.

Bottom line: this is a great restaurant, one of the best in LA. It could be nearly perfect if it drilled down and tuned some of its dishes. But even then it’s questionable whether the experience is worth $200 per person.