Word: zens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When I was growing up, there was a book in our house that my brother and sister and I all read. It was a very odd book, a rattlebag of art, mathematics, music, philosophy, symbolic logic, computers, genetics, paradoxes, palindromes and Zen koans among many, many other things. Most of it went way over my head--my precocious older sister, who later became a mathematician, and even later a sculptor, was the real target audience--but it was playfully written and deeply weird and off-the-charts smart and generally just the thing for a household of pretentious, alienated adolescents...
...lose, in the end, a Zen mentality prevailed...
...struggling to build inner peace from the ravages of the Vietnam War. He's published more than 80 books, built monasteries in France and the U.S. and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., who said his anti-war stance was inspired by the Zen master's teachings...
...amid all this Zen-whatever-man flow of it all, as he picks at his sashimi and salad (he's too enlightened for wheat, dairy, alcohol or sugar), little bits of the $10 million-check-writing Carrey show up. He's given lots of thought, for instance, about how to present himself for this interview, whether to hold off on the enlightenment stuff or share it with the world. (He went with the sharing, apparently.) And he's torn about whether to wear this damn blingy ring the stylist gave him for the photo shoot that is just...
...Zen as he is, Rubin is ruthless with his professional time. He's inundated with requests for his services, so he asks most prospects to drop by and play him whatever songs they've been writing. This eliminates most applicants. Few pop musicians, it turns out, are used to regular writing, and even fewer show enough promise in their songs to interest him. "One of Rick's favorite phrases is 'metaphor deficient,'" says Rock. "If people write things that are metaphor deficient, even he can't help them...