Rockport, Mass. Rudy N. Colao died suddenly on Saturday, Oct. 4, 2014, while on his way home from one of his frequent walks to downtown Rockport. The news came as a shock because just a short while before he was to all appearance in good health and spirits and was planning to attend an event that evening at the Rockport Art Association. He was 86 years old.

Rudy was born in Peekskill, N.Y., the eldest of the four children of Rudolph Colao and Philomena (Minnie) DeMaria. He attended the local schools there and was drafted into the US Army at the end of WWII. After that he attended the Art Students League in New York City on the GI Bill. There he studied painting under his revered teacher Frank Vincent DuMond. Here he also formed many life-long friendships and met his future wife, Camila McRoberts.

After art school and marriage they started a family and settled in Manhattan in a landmark building commissioned by a group of artists including Frank DuMond and Childe Hassam at the turn of the 20th century. Rudy worked as an artist, participating in the Village Show in downtown Manhattan in the early years, occasionally teaching classes and enjoying an active social life with friends from art school and their upper West side neighborhood. At this time he painted almost exclusively florals and still-lifes.

In 1971, he left New York with is family and moved to their summer home in Canaan, N.H. He had a space in one of the barns on the property converted into a studio, which he successfully used as the subject of a series of paintings.

They divorced in 1976 and Rudy moved back to his old neighborhood in New York where he used the studio in his apartment as the subject of more paintings. During this time he reconnected with old friends, met new ones, travelled to Europe and came up to New Hampshire to visit and spend holidays with his family. At this time he had his paintings featured in galleries around the country, and occasionally held workshops in the South West.

In the early 90s he moved to Rockport, an art colony which he had first visited in the 1950s. He established himself there and became an integral part of the art scene. During his years in Rockport he painted landscapes and seaside scenery in addition to florals and still-lifes.

In 1999, he bought a dilapidated but historic house and had it renovated with the addition of a new studio section where he continued to work until the day he died. He went on several painting trips to Europe with local groups, frequently visited his family in New Hampshire and Vermont, and kept involved with the art scene in Rockport and Gloucester, exhibiting his work in regional galleries and winning prizes in area shows.

Rudy was very sociable and good natured, always willing to be helpful to others and had a lively sense of humor. He was full of vitality and enthusiastic about his interests in people, language, culture and art. He especially enjoyed listening to and sometimes attending the opera. Some of his favorite reading was Alan Abelsons columns in Barrons and The New York Review of Books (co-founded by a former neighbor). Painting and his family were the centerpieces of his life. In the early 1980s he began to take a serious interest in Zen Buddhism which he maintained for the rest of his life. He is featured in a couple of magazine articles and in Whos Who In American Art.

He was predeceased by a younger brother and sister as well as his former wife and good friend Cam and their daughter Meg. He is survived by a younger sister Renee, his daughter Marta and her husband Jeff Pentland and their three children, Lilian, Harry and Camila of Hartland, Vt. and his son Will of Cannan, NH. There will be a private burial in Canaan. Contributions in his memory may be sent to the charity of your choice.

To View an online memorial and/or send a message of condolence to the family, please visit, http://www.rand-wilson.com.

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Rudy N. Colao

Murakami meditates on disaster

Having portrayed himself as a cartoonish Buddha and created a series of monumental portraits of the founder of Zen Buddhism, Takashi Murakami continues his transcendental meditations next month at Gagosian Gallery. On 10 November, the gallery opens a show at its 24th Street location of the Japanese artists latest work, which deals with the role of faith after a natural disaster, such as the earthquake that struck the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011. In the Land of the Dead: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (until 17 January) includes an immersive installation, entered through a 56-ton replica of a sanmon (sacred gate) deliquescing clones of his fictional creature Mr Dob; and karajishi, the mythic lions that guard Japanese Buddhist temples, according to the gallery. To me, religions are a story, Murakami says in a statement. Natural catastrophes, earthquakes, are things caused by nature. Evil is natural, but we have to fight it somehow, and so we had to invent these deities, and I wanted to paint them.

From In The Frame Published online: 03 October 2014

The Muse d'Orsay in Paris has launched a crowdfunding appeal to raise funds for the conservation of Gustave Courbet's enormous 22 sq. m painting The Artist's Studio, 1855. The complex restoration will cost 600,000 but the museum hopes that the public will contribute at least 30,000 (more than 6,800 had rolled in on 2 October). Donors receive prestigious tokens of appreciation (5 gets you a mention on the museum website; a VIP dinner at the museum is yours for 2,500). Conservators will work on the painting in full view of the public. Courbet explained the composition, saying: "It's the whole world coming to me to be painted. On the right, all the shareholders, by that I mean friends, fellow workers, art lovers. On the left is the other world of everyday life, the masses, wretchedness, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, people who make a living from death." The artist himself takes pride of place in the centre.

From In The Frame Published online: 02 October 2014

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Murakami meditates on disaster

This undated file image provided by Joy Mazzola shows Christine Svanemyr, a victim of a hit and run incident in San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco will pay $15 million to the family of a woman who was fatally struck by a city pickup truck last year while she lay with her baby in a public park.

The city's Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the legal settlement Tuesday to 35-year-old Christine Svanemyr's widower, Vegar, and their child, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Svanemyr was relaxing with her 11-month-old baby and dog in the grass at Holly Park in the city's Bernal Heights neighborhood on Sept. 5, 2013, when she was run over by a city Recreation and Park Department truck.

The parks gardener who was driving the truck, 58-year-old Thomas Burnoski, was charged with vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run. The city fired him, and his criminal case is ongoing.

Burnoski says he veered onto the lawn from a paved pedestrian path to avoid an unleashed dog. After hitting the woman, he drove to a work meeting. His lawyer, Robert Waggener, says Burnoski didn't realize he had hit a person and that the case was a tragic accident.

In November, the family filed a legal claim against the city, which is a precursor to a lawsuit.

Earlier this year, city officials said they wanted to resolve the claim without putting the grieving family through litigation.

Svanemyr was a West Virginia native who earned multiple college degrees, trained life coaches and belonged to an African dance group. She met her husband in Salt Lake City, where they were studying Zen Buddhism.

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San Francisco to pay $15 million in fatal park hit-run

Ever since his stark 1967 musical debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen, the Canadian performer, poet, and songwriter has earned more than his fair share of accolades and awards. He's sold over 23 million albums and published 12 books of verse. Through it all, Cohen has remained both unique and consistent in his attention to his most important themes.

For example, his 1971 Songs of Love and Hate was just that, an exploration into the conflicting deepest drives of the human condition. In 1992, The Future was the call of an Old Testament prophet crying for the need for hope, perseverance, and reformation for all of us living in dark times. In 2012, his Old Ideas was taken by many as a restatement of these concerns from the point of view of an elder statesman of verse looking back over a long career through the lens of Zen Buddhism. His new Popular Problems, Cohen's 13th album, is a continuation of these themes, juxtaposing hope and despair, grief and yearning, and, yes, love and hate. It's also another illustration of how words can mean very different things on the page as opposed to an audio performance of them.

Released two days after his 80th birthday, Cohen's nine-song Popular Problems is a collaboration with co-writer Patrick Leonard. As with Old Ideas, Cohen still draws from the same philosophical and spiritual wells of his past, and he again paints his lyrical mysteries from the perspective of a sage who's earned his world-weariness. For example, the atmospheric opener, "Slow," is built on a low-key organ base with horn section punctuation in which Cohen looks back over his life and claims he always liked things slow. It's not age, he sings, that makes him want to "finish last."

The equally moody and percussive "Almost Like the Blues" has Cohen revisiting tropes from The Future, this time a little uncertain about the possibility of salvation in a world of murder, rape, and "bad reviews." There's a wry wit present in Cohen's vocals that might not be obvious when reading lines like, "So says the great professor of all there is to know/But I've had the invitation that a sinner can't refuse/And it's almost like salvation/It's almost like the blues."

A sad violin provides the middle and coda for one of the set's most distinctive offerings, "Samson in New Orleans," which sounds like one of Cohen's oblique hymns where he moves from the first to the second person to address a modern Samson who thinks New Orleans is better than the USA, but he needs to take the temple down. As usual, such obscure pronouncements sound more revelatory than they actually are.

Likewise, the elliptical "A Street" has Cohen saying the party is over as he addresses a colorful friend who wears military uniforms, telling him the poet is standing "on a corner where there used to be a street." Cohen acknowledges the illusory meaning of words in the dirge, "Born in Chains," chanting "Blessed by the name, the name be blessed."

In a similar vein, Cohen revisits the topic of war in "Nevermind" where Cohen muses over what is truth, what comes from "a bowl of lies," with the lyrics interspersed with a chanted Middle-Eastern counter-melody. When it comes to love, Cohen sends mixed signals. A plucking dobro gives "My Oh My" a haunted bluegrass dimension where Cohen admits, "It was easy to love you, I didn't have to try." But the surprising "Did I Ever Love You" is a list of unanswerable repeated questions about love delivered in shifting tones and settings. Once again, there's nothing easy about nailing down Cohen's feelings on anything.

Perhaps the least mysterious song is the album's closer, "You Got Me Singing" which is as straightforward a personal statement as Cohen has ever shared. Supported by acoustic guitar and violin, Cohen confesses he's inspired to sing even if the world is gone and everything seems bleak. "You got me thinking that I'd like to carry on/You got me singing/Even though it all looks grim/You got me singing the hallelujah hymn." But these hymns are sung by a man who claims, "There is no God in heaven/And there is no Hell below."

The principal difference between Old Ideas and Popular Problems is that the latter has a fuller, more spacious sound. That's perhaps due to the presence of Patrick Leonard in the control booth. That's not to say Popular Problems has the same depth and punch of The Future, but all the musical support evokes the kinds of settings Cohen has employed from the beginning. In particular, he still likes the gospel harmonies of female backing singers, horn sections, and strings that make the songs more affirming and sometimes celebratory than the lyrics would suggest. In other words, Cohen is to be experienced as an artist and no one should pretend to understand when he is being ironic, deliberately vague, playful, or too mystical for simplistic explication. And that's what poetry is all about.

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Music Review: Leonard Cohen - 'Popular Problems'

Last Updated 7-17-2014

Alternate titles: Chan; Seon; Sn; Thien; Zen Buddhism

Zen,Chinese Chan, Korean Sn, also spelled Seon, Vietnamese Thien, important school of East Asian Buddhism that constitutes the mainstream monastic form of Mahayana Buddhism in China, Korea, and Vietnam and accounts for approximately 20 percent of the Buddhist temples in Japan. The word derives from the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning meditation. Central to Zen teaching is the belief that awakening can be achieved by anyone but requires instruction in the proper forms of spiritual cultivation by a master. In modern times, Zen has been identified especially with the secular arts of medieval Japan (such as the tea ceremony, ink painting, and gardening) and with any spontaneous expression of artistic or spiritual vitality regardless of context. In popular usage, the modern non-Buddhist connotations of the word Zen have become so prominent that in many cases the term is used as a label for phenomena that lack any relationship to Zen or are even antithetical to its teachings and practices.... (169 of 3,634 words)

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Zen (Buddhism) -- Encyclopedia Britannica

The tagline of a famous coffee brand: a lot happens over coffee, is penned by my friend, a former ad man. With a proclivity for tea, I said in jest: More happens over tea. Whats the more? he asked.

For that, I delve into a facet that no other beverage possesses mysticism. Tea is associated with the great awakening of Chinese Buddhism, which believes tea drinking helps sippers calm the mind, achieve self-enlightenment, revive from sleep and confusion, part with annoyance, and regain consciousness. Zen Buddhism seeks tea to get in touch with the inner workings of the self in the most direct way; Chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony, being the most practised form. This I see as the more in tea.

And yet, this attribute is esoteric and limits itself to a few practitioners and to the connoisseurs of the brew. This more is therefore less. It lost to the zillions who savour their cuppa as just an eye-opener. My cup of tea; Gods in heaven; alls well with the world.

But where more is truly more is in the sheer number of cups drunk daily. Tea consumption equals all other manufactured drinks in the world including coffee, chocolate, soft drinks, and alcohol put together. Here it is an obvious more.

At all this my friend looked thoughtful and we had some tea reading Kenneth Cohens The Buddha In A Cup of Tea

I am not I, and tea is not tea!...

What is tea? Just this, just this, just this

Some more, I asked.

Much more, he said.

More here:

More happens over tea

As Justin Smith was nearing graduation from UW-Madison, he met with a career counselor to see what job options were out there for a pony-tailed guy from Waukesha with a degree in East Asian religious studies.

During the meeting, the counselor asked if Smith had ever heard of Zendesk, the San Francisco-based company that makes help desk software for handling customer service issues. The firm was hiring people for its new office in Madison.

Since Smith had an interest in Zen Buddhism, he was intrigued with the company name and ended up applying.

On Wednesday afternoon, Smith was enjoying a bottle of craft beer while working in the new Zendesk offices in the Glass Bank building at 1 S. Pinckney St. on the Square.

Just look at the view, he said, gazing down East Washington Avenue from the sixth floor offices.

Smith, 23, is one of about 60 employees working for Zendesk in Madison. Its the largest office for the company outside of San Francisco and the primary support center for customers around the world.

Zendesk has now joined Google, Microsoft and Dell in mining for tech savvy graduates coming out of UW-Madison. But rather than relocating staffers to the company headquarters, firms are finding it easier and in many cases less expensive to simply to open a satellite office here.

Zendesk CEO and founder Mikkel Svane says he isnt sure how much the company is paying to rent the swanky space in the Glass Bank.

But Im pretty sure its less than in San Francisco, he says during a tour Wednesday of the new office space.

Getting more firms like Zendesk to take a look at Madison raises the standard for every other employer in town in terms of office perks and community benefits, says downtown Ald. Scott Resnick.

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Zendesk staffer: 'It's nice to have options other than Epic'