== Let us get drunk and meditate = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Here is your Zen green-tea liqueur and your Enlightenment Visa card. Go forth and levitate

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/10/notes101007.DTL&nl=fix

Ah, Zen. Sweet little name. Delightful and austere and hugely, strangely, wildly overexposed subset of lovely Buddhist philosophy and also of course the pseudo-slogan/catchword of a thousand products and attitudes and cliches strewn all over American pop culture, T-shirts to coffee mugs to wall calendars, pretty much the epitome and the poster child of the excessive and slightly annoying hyper-Westernization of Eastern spirituality. Well, except for maybe Tantra.

And now, a swell kicker: Zen is also the name of a new booze product, a liqueur, something allegedly flavored to taste like green tea and ready to mix with your fave vodka or sake or whatever the hell you can think of because nothing says "deeply calming ancient spiritual practice" like, you know, knocking back shots of artificially sweetened moss-green liquid containing 20 percent alcohol by volume. Mmm, nurturing.

Actually, I sort of love the silly audacity of it. You almost have to. I mean, isn't it just the cutest thing, the warped and shameless co-opting of all things divine and succor-iffic to a crazed populace starved for meaning and sustenance in every purchase and in every desire and in every vice, and never really finding it? It so absolutely is.

Seems the Zen people (the booze company, not the monks) bought some ad space all over SFGate recently, and hence I couldn't help but notice their ad campaign, part of which is apparently a photo contest wherein you send them Zen-inspired pix in an effort to win a coach-class trip to Japan, the birthplace of Zen (except for China, ahem), and the shots are presumably not supposed to be of you getting completely hammered on their product and then stripping naked and molesting a cat and crashing your BMW into your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's Saab and then getting arrested for peeing on the smooth and handsome stones in the minimalist garden of the local Zen center where she goes to meditate. Right. ...


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/10/10/notes101007.DTL&type=printable

[ixion]

1. kicked and recommended

Morford rocks!

[lonestarnot]

2. OMG funny.

:rofl:

[madokie]

3. he is by far, to me anyway, the most enjoyable to read writer since Dr Hunter S Thompson

but then again I liked bob boudalang