Peter Cunningham

SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT

A stage artist is a cross between a poet and a shaman. Spinning beautiful illusions, artists transport us to higher realms while linking us to human connectedness hiding under the surface of our daily lives.

Under the bright lights of a stage, an artist stands, naked and vulnerable, while we in the audience, sit unexposed in darkness. But as if watching a magic mirror, we are suddenly moved when we witness our own deep unarticulated feelings played out before us -- audience and performer, interdependent spirits groping in the night for meaning and transformation.

Backstage 1973

Bette Midler & Bruce Springsteen

MUSIC BY JANIS IAN / PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER CUNNINGHAM. A FILM: 7 minutes.

In order of first appearance:  Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Lena Horne, Van Morrison, Julio Iglesias, Richie Havens, Elton John, Bo Diddley, Carlos Santana, Bill Graham, Rod Stewart, Miles Davis, Capt. Beef heart, Neil Young, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright, Peter Tosh, Tanya Tucker, Roberta Flack, Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin, Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen, David Bromberg, Ashford&Simpson, Placid Domingo&Gloria Estefan, Jesse Winchester, Tom Waitts&Bette Midler, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bette Midler, Mandy Patinkin, Stephen Sondheim, Stephan Grappelli, Richard Thompson, Mark Knopfler, Jack Bruce, Thelonious Monk, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Taj Mahal, Dr John, John Belushi, Joe Cocker, Madonna, Mariah Carey, George Benson, Pete Townshend, Doc Watson, Dion Warwick, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Odetta, Bonnie Raitt, Darlene Love, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Peter Allen, Ry Cooder, Jimmy Cliff, Al Jarreau, John Prine, Earth Eind and Fire, Heart, Tony Bennett, The Clash, Meatloaf, Peter Wolf, Joe Jackson, Bette Carter, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, K.D.Laing, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Janis Ian.

In order of first appearance:  Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Marvin Gaye, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Lena Horne, Van Morrison, Julio Iglesias, Richie Havens, Elton John, Bo Diddley, Carlos Santana, Bill Graham, Rod Stewart, Miles Davis, Capt. Beef heart, Neil Young, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright, Peter Tosh, Tanya Tucker, Roberta Flack, Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin, Barry Manilow, Bruce Springsteen, David Bromberg, Ashford&Simpson, Placid Domingo&Gloria Estefan, Jesse Winchester, Tom Waitts&Bette Midler, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bette Midler, Mandy Patinkin, Stephen Sondheim, Stephan Grappelli, Richard Thompson, Mark Knopfler, Jack Bruce, Thelonious Monk, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Taj Mahal, Dr John, John Belushi, Joe Cocker, Madonna, Mariah Carey, George Benson, Pete Townshend, Doc Watson, Dion Warwick, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Odetta, Bonnie Raitt, Darlene Love, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Peter Allen, Ry Cooder, Jimmy Cliff, Al Jarreau, John Prine, Earth Eind and Fire, Heart, Tony Bennett, The Clash, Meatloaf, Peter Wolf, Joe Jackson, Bette Carter, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, K.D.Laing, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Janis Ian.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF PERFORMING ARTISTS BY PETER CUNNINGHAM. A BOOK: Volume 1 / Volume 2

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the seminal Zen Center of Los Angeles, a book: (full screen preview here)

In 2011 Roshi Bernie Glassman asked me to prepare an unusual lineage chart.  Rather than make a vertical down-through-time chart listing our historical Buddhist ancestors, he wanted a horizontal chart. He wanted a cross-section of time as it manifested in my particular life. He wanted a chart of living persons who collaborated with me to created what we call Peter/Kuku. In the original version Bernie asked me to begin with pictures of my parents and grandparents, pictures of my teachers, friends, lovers, my nation and my creations, but I’ve left that out of this version. Here you will see my co-creators from the Buddhist world, I am very grateful to have had them as friends and teachers.

The title, I Am The Buddhas and the Buddhas Are Me, is drawn from The Gate of Sweet Nectar, an ancient Sanskrit to Chinese to Japanese to English Buddhist chant,  To my ears, that line rings true. The colorful squares are the colors of The Five Buddha Energies, which is a similarly ancient system of categorizing personal styles. 

The chop says Ku-Ku in Japanese, or Kong-Kong in Chinese. In English the literal meaning is cloudless sky, one might say it translates as Nothing-Nothing or Emptiness-Emptiness or even Emptiness-Fullness. The name was given to me by Maezumi Roshi’s Japanese brother, Junyu Kuroda Roshi, who wanted to give me a Buddhist name that would also serve as a clown name. When it came into his mind, the audience at a quiet Lincoln Center dance concert witnessed a Japanese man in monk’s clothing break into rolls of raucous laughter. 

The people in this book represent the first and second generation of American and European Zen teachers. There are others.

Peter KuKu Cunningham.  

June 2017

Link here to Tricycle film by Denise Petrizzo

1982, as a young Zen student of Bernie Glassman, Peter Cunningham joined Bernie and his first successor, Peter Muryo Matthiessen, on a pilgrimage to pay respects to their dharma grandparents—some of the great living Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. In this video exclusive, Cunningham, keeping it all in the dharma family, reunites with Matthiessen and his dharma son, Michel Engu Dobbs, at the zendo on Matthiessen’s property in Sagaponack, Long Island. The three discuss their lineage, which combines elements of both Soto and Rinzai Zen, and the nature of dharma transmission within it.         -from Tricycle Magazine

Photograph made for Shambhala Sun aka Lion's Roar Magazine in promotion of "The Dude and The Zen Master".

Saisan Saunders Roshi is President of The White Plum Asanga, her practice is centered along the border between San Diego and Tiujuana.

With his Mom in Tokyo / Central Park.

The journey of Buddhism over centuries, from India to China and then to Japan, is the stuff of mythology. But now, in our own time, we have witnessed and documented its historic crossing of the Pacific and its subsequent evolution in the Americas and Europe.

In 1982, writer Peter Muryo Matthiessen, the first dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman, traveled with Glassman to pay respects to the teachers in their lineage, some of the great living Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. What took place was an important meeting of minds representing the past, present, and future of Zen practice, an intimate connection between ancestors and descendants marking a critical point in the Zen journey from the East to the West. This historic event was captured in the moment by the selective lens of Peter Cunningham. Matthiessen’s exquisite poetic accounts of this pilgrimage, which formed a part of his book Nine-Headed Dragon River, accompany the photos.

Available on Amazon

Bernie Glassman and Maezumi Roshi 1981

35 years of study and adventure with Roshi Bernie Glassman. (a full screen preview of the entire book is here)

Double Daibutsu in Nara, Japan

I am fortunate in my life, to have spent time in places where I am wholly insignificant, dispensable, irrelevant. Where my passing will not be noted. These are places where the stones underfoot, wind burning the face, and the dominance of other animals is unavoidable, where the scent of my own species is easily blown away. My experience is not in the Antarctic or the Kalahari, but still, in my life I call it "Wilderness."

Stories from Grand Manan Island (2017)

link to book preview (view full screen)

Peter on Kent Island by his father's weather station.

California agriculture and climate change

links: BOOK with text by Mark Schapiro

WE'VE GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN OUR HANDS

Mark is an accomplished investigative-environmental journalist based in Berkeley. He is currently finishing a book on seeds.

Manhattan and The Black Hills

California and Japan

Birkenau and San Diego

Samos and Ohio

Beijing and Manhattan

Marrakech and Jerusalem

Brooklyn and Amsterdam

Amsterdam and Lublin

South Carolina and Beijing

Warsaw and Shanghai

The Bronx and Beijing

Tribal symbols

Jerusalem and Shanghai

New York and New Jersey

Beijing and Kigali

Soldier in Prague and Gandhi in NY

Blinders (what we don't see)

from "Blinders"

Glenda Jackson

Amy Irving & Rex Harrison

Robin WIlliams

Glenn Close 

Al Pacino in American Buffalo

Raul Julia in Nine

Into the Woods

Stephen Sondheim 

Nine

Miss Piggy

Penny Marshal & Melanie Griffith

Bebe Neuwirth

Rosemary Harris

Barney Hughs, Mary-Louise Parker, and Tim Hutton

Chris Eliot and his father Bob Eliot

Ellen Foley in Beehive

Derek Jacobi in The Suicide

Brooke Adams  (The Heidi Chronicles)

Chita Rivera in Merlin

Tyne Daley

Phantom of the Opera

Carie

Ron Rifkin & Sara Jessica Parker in Substance of Fire by Robbie Bates

Gary Sinese & Terry Kinny

Sid Ceasar 

August Wilson - Nat Turner is Come and Gone

Mandy Patinkin

Sam Waterston & Robert Prosky in A Walk in the Woods

Richard Nelson

Jason Robarts & Colleen Dewhurst in Long Days Journey into Night

Ed Asner

Tommy Tune and the cast of Nine

A Day in the Life of Martha Myers (a booklet)

 A FILM: Christo turns Central Park orange in 2005

Music by Andy Friedman

Composer Andy Freidman says, “I love how the music sets up the death metaphor, rendering the images as a commentary on the futility of life rather than just a photodocumentary of Yankee Stadium.  The song selection pretty much filters out any kind of sentimentality that could be associated with such a collection of images. “

Photographer Peter Cunningham replies, “Yeah Andy, a limitation inherent in the form of photography is that each picture must originate in a specific time and place, and each origin-place comes packed in a particular set of associations for the viewer. Yankee Stadium for example. If a photographer aspires to write his own stories, to use his images as a string of metaphors like a poet does with combinations of words, pairing them with a song like yours is a good place to begin.”

A FILM: There is a space between the MATERIAL WORLD of our daily lives and the SPIRITUAL WORLD we might access through meditation or prayer. That is the space where SCULPTURE comes fully alive.

DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Photographs by Peter Cunningham / Music by Hale Appleman

Murals of immigration in The Mission District of San Francisco. Music by Theo Croker.

Music by

Kate Wallace wrote about my life on Grand Manan in The MARITIME{EDIT} , a glossy life-style magazine based in Saint John, NB in Canada. READ the article here.

I saw Mr. Springsteen play in small clubs about 50 times before 1975, then again in 1992. I haven't seen him since, though I feel a certain ongoing kinship with this continually evolving artist. I understand this show on Broadway harkens back to those days at The Main Point, and Max's Kansas City, and The Bottom Line. I like that this pair of pictures features both a large looming corporate edifice, and a dwarfed workingman shoveling snow on 48th Street across from the Walter Kerr Theater. Bruce's writing is grounded in common experience, it's a reason we can easily identify with his characters. Plus, in my experience, he's an honest and decent man.

My Dad collected fog here for 70 years.  MY FATHER'S GRAVESTONE is a new weather station antenna mounted by Russell Ingalls and my brother Jim Cunningham. He will forever broadcast to the world current atmospheric conditions from The Bay of Fundy.

the rift

just widened again;

it moves with the tide

this plankway was never built

to sit tight –

the strut and stamp

of grand and willful exploits

requires loose

but solid build,

extremes need space

to breathe –

still, beware:  the wear

comes from all fronts,

the angry waters may desist

but the season

has just begun

and there is just so much beating

that even a democracy

can take

--jennifer pinard

350 Bleecker Street Gallery (at Charles) in New York City  October through December 2017

The Zen Center of Los Angeles was founded 50 years ago by Maezumi Roshi, the older brother of Kuroda Roshi. Successors in this lineage run numerous Zen Centers throughout the Americas and Europe.. Most are members of

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the seminal Zen Center of Los Angeles, a book: (full screen preview here)

In 2011 Roshi Bernie Glassman asked me to prepare an unusual lineage chart.  Rather than make a vertical down-through-time chart listing our historical Buddhist ancestors, he wanted a horizontal chart. He wanted a cross-section of time as it manifested in my particular life. He wanted a chart of living persons who collaborated with me to created what we call Peter/Kuku. In the original version Bernie asked me to begin with pictures of my parents and grandparents, pictures of my teachers, friends, lovers, my nation and my creations, but I’ve left that out of this version. Here you will see my co-creators from the Buddhist world, I am very grateful to have had them as friends and teachers.

The title, I Am The Buddhas and the Buddhas Are Me, is drawn from The Gate of Sweet Nectar, an ancient Sanskrit to Chinese to Japanese to English Buddhist chant,  To my ears, that line rings true. The colorful squares are the colors of The Five Buddha Energies, which is a similarly ancient system of categorizing personal styles. 

The chop says Ku-Ku in Japanese, or Kong-Kong in Chinese. In English the literal meaning is cloudless sky, one might say it translates as Nothing-Nothing or Emptiness-Emptiness or even Emptiness-Fullness. The name was given to me by Maezumi Roshi’s Japanese brother, Junyu Kuroda Roshi, who wanted to give me a Buddhist name that would also serve as a clown name. When it came into his mind, the audience at a quiet Lincoln Center dance concert witnessed a Japanese man in monk’s clothing break into rolls of raucous laughter. 

The people in this book represent the first and second generation of American and European Zen teachers. There are others.

Peter KuKu Cunningham.  

June 2017

FREE PREVIEW OF ENTIRE BOOK HERE

I’ve lived my entire adult life on two islands, Grand Manan and Manhattan, I love them both dearly.

The creation of this book has been a kind of mourning ritual in which I bear witness to a way of life that is ‘disappearing before my eyes’.  I’ve tried several titles for the book, but when that phase came to mind it resonated and I wondered why.  I soon realized it applied equally to both my home islands. Here in Manhattan the possibility of living an independent original life is also disappearing. This has been particularly true since the the World Trade Center tragedy in 2001 and is capped off by the cold realities reflectedin the current American election. We have experienced an erosion of trust and a rejection of common values.  We are modern Noahs being “swallowed up in the belly of a beast”. 

Here in the big city the enormity of change is often too amorphous and borderless to perceive. The island that is Grand Manan is just large enough to sustain a real economy, yet it’s small and isolated enough so one can at least pretend to an understanding of the change that’s going on.  This book poses as an ethnography but is reallya metaphor, a way of viewing what is a core issue for all of us: the loss of individual independence, and the loss of what we used to claim as our highest values, freedom and liberty.                                                                                         — Peter Cunningham, April 2017

Opening night, May 12, 2017

photograph by Anton Maria Storch

A Russian poet who came of age in tricky political times, but did his best to find a vein for expression, a vein that allowed his voice to be heard by young Americans whose curiosity was peaked by rumors that Russian poetry readings were, at the time, the equivalent of arena rock concerts. Yevgeny Yevtushenko passed yesterday in Tulsa where he taught; if memory serves, this picture was made at The Bottom Line in about 1975.

Rwandan Senator Jean de Dieu Mucyo meeting in April 2010 with Fleet Maul of Zen Peacemakers. At the time he was Minister of Justice, there are those who think he was bound to become the President of Rwanda. He impressed me as a real prince, a man who stood up for principles of justice, but also a man who had his feet firmly planted in reality in a country that had suffered through genocide 16 years before.  He suddenly died today at age 55 falling down stairs at 9 am in the Rwandan Senate..  The nation is in shock. More pictures here.

October 3, 2016

Alison Hawthorne Deming is my sister from another planet. We know one another from Grand Manan where we explore together extreme tides and cheap Canadian wines, but met this night on Manhattan Island where she came to read from her new book of poetry, STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. She also read new poems from her recent trip to The Galapagos Islands with her grandson Lincoln Bliss, a literary guy whose day (night) job is to  serve drinks to young Wall Street buckeroos in the East Village. Lincoln (above) sits in the front row of the packed Cornelia Street Cafe.

P.T. Barnum responds to the American election: he is offended by being compared to Donald Trump and advises Hillary Clinton on the subtleties of showmanship. (an excepted 5 minute version is here)

Written and performed by Ara Fitzgerald

Directed by Peter Cunningham 

Click the arrow and go, lower right, full screen.

Hale is a family-member and a gifted actor who for ten years has been living the familiar life of actors: auditions leading to callbacks and more auditions, big rolls in small plays, small rolls in small movies, catering jobs; repeat twice, keep your ego and your body healthy and audition again. But now Hale has a "real job", he is THE KING OF FILLORY  on SyFy's, THE MAGICIANS from the series of books by LEV GROSSMAN. We recently walked around the block together in Greenwich Village and encountered this fantastic new mural at Houston and Bowery. It was painted by Spanish artists Pichi & Avo", the space is creatively curated as a legacy of Tony Goldman, a Soho real estate pioneer, it changes regularly. As do we all.

a poem by Jennifer Pinard

a poem by Jennifer Pinard

a poem by Jennifer Pinard

a poem by Jennifer Pinard

40 poems by Jennifer Pinard with paired images by Peter Cunningham,

available in full screen preview or as a printed book

Photographs of words.