Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Can you find a better way to spend 65 dollars? ... a two-day course of enlightenment for less than the price of an SUV's tank of gasoline


I hate to brag, but here's the visual proof that my Sunday and Monday made up for the fact that I couldn't make it to Washington DC on Saturday.
What can you say about a football stadium, "The Birthplace of College Football" at Rutgers, being sold out and silent as the Dalai Lama talked informally and with great humor and seriousness about war, peace, compassion, attachment, and reconciliation to 36,000 new friends? It was a Sunday morning I'll never forget.
And Monday night? I expect that in a year or two ECM will release a record by Keith Jarrett called "Keith Jarrett Solo at Carnegie Hall" or, more likely, "The New York Concert" (to fit neatly with the solo improvisational concerts that made Köln, Vienna, and Paris famous) and you'll wish you were there in the sold-out hall too for his only US solo concert in the past decade, from the first note through the five encores. I've been to a lot of concerts since I first saw the Allman Brothers and Johnny Winter at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1971, and this one ... one man alone at an unamplified piano in Carnegie Hall for two and a half hours ... beat them all. Or maybe it was just that seeing the Dalai Lama the day before had opened my mind to fully accept this music on this night.
(Sorry if this post seems insufficiently engagé, but Bush and Cheney and Brownie and the rest of our gang in DC just seem so small and insignificant after brushes with spiritual and artistic greatness over the past two days. Some atrocity will get TBL back on the case of these petty greedy thin-skinned "men" soon, but right now I'm listening to Radiance, so excuse me if I don't give a shit.)

2 comments:

Virginia Gal said...

You got to listen to the Dalai Lama speak? Wow!
I love him, he is the kind of person I want to be, so peaceful, kind, humorous, generous, forgiving. The lessons he teachs about life are so universal.
World would be a better place if all of us could listen to the Dalai Lama daily.

True Blue Liberal said...

VG, He's going to be speaking closer to you (assuming you are in Virginia) at the MCI Center on November 13 http://www.dalailamadc.org
You can see video of his appearance at Rutgers Stadium on video here: http://www.president.rutgers.edu/dalailama/video.shtml

We saw him on my son's 16th birthday. My son is now seriously researching Buddhism because of its stress on nonviolence. Can you imagine a Buddhist America carrying out its current crusades?