“In the popular Buddhism of Tibet and China and Japan, people worship the great bodhisattvas—as saviors.”
“People loved Guanyin because she/he—could be a buddha, but has come back into the world to save all beings. The Japanese call he/she Kannon, and they have, in Kyoto, an image of Kannon with one thousand arms, radiating like a great aureole all around this great golden figure.”
“These one thousand arms are one thousand different ways of rescuing beings from ignorance.”
“I remember one night when I suddenly realized that Kannon was incarnate in the whole city of Kyoto; that this whole city was Kannon.”
“That the police department, the taxi drivers, the fire department, the mayor and corporation, the shopkeepers—in so far as this whole city was a collaborate effort to sustain human life, however bumbling, however inefficient, however corrupt—it was still a manifestation of Kannon with its thousand arms, all working independently, and yet one.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere to find nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.”
The Buddha’s of Bamiyan. They were made somewhere between the 4-5th centuries.
In 2001 they were destroyed by the Taliban with heavy artillery and dynamite.
“This work of destruction is not as simple as people might think. You can’t knock down the statues by shelling as both are carved into a cliff; they are firmly attached to the mountain… Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them. We are destroying the statues in accordance with Islamic law and it is purely a religious issue.”
That has to be the silliest shit I ever heard. “I’m going to destroy it! Why? Because I don’t like it!” It sounds like an angry child talking.
There is a difference between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit it hard on the head, nothing happens. You break your fist. But if you hit a living Buddha, he/she may say ouch. Buddhas are human, they are not devas, they are not gods. They are enlightened men and women.
So what did they destroy? Nothing. Silly terrorist.
Long live this man, Robert Shaw. He played as Quint in the movie Jaws.
And also long live the real-life inspiration for Quint, Frank Mundus.
Jaws was one of the first horror films I watched when I was a little kid. From there I became fascinated with sharks.
But when it comes to Quint, he’s my kind of dude. A fuckin drunkard fisherman. It kind of reminds me of a modern day pirate. The actor even portrayed a pirate in the movie Swashbuckler. I felt that those same characteristics were also seen in his acting in the movie Jaws. Even though that movie was released after Jaws, I feel maybe others seen those characteristics and suggested that he can play a good role as a pirate. The way he strikes your mind with his dialogue is what creates suspense, as if you’re there.
I always want ahi poke… I eat so much ahi poke, I got mercury poisoning. Anyway.
Whenever I eat Hawaiian food I somehow always think of how I used to visit TeamRice and Dohcresearch religiously, back around 2003ish.
That was my first taste of the Hawaiian car culture. Just as their food is a mixture of different cultures, the way they style their cars has a mixture of different cultures as well. It’s like a cross between JDM style to Islander style with a little mainland love somewhere in there.
Even if the car looks mad ghetto to some, it’s still mad fresh.
Like the car seen here that belonged to a member of Team Ultraspeed back in the day:
Whether there was a meaning behind it or if they just did it to do it because “why not?” it’s something that stands out and catches my eye of interest (maybe they did it to be ratchet?). The fact that it’s rugged and boro boro, that’s what makes it appealing to me. It’s something you do to a car that will be used to take abuse on and off track. Kind of like how kanjozoku’s treat their cars.
That was when Hawaii still had a racetrack…
Another thing about Hawaiian style of tuning that will always attracted my attention in photos is the background. The cars are the cherry on top and the background is the icing. It’s almost like seeing these cars in the wild type of feeling.
Team Ultraspeed is a Virginia based team, but they expanded beyond that. To Hawaii for example. I remember a team profile of them on some old 360vm issue back in the day.
A well known Hawaiian member of Team Ultraspeed owns this famous golden EG
Him and his team owned the blue rugged and raw EG seen above as well. The “boro boro” Civic ended up throwing a rod through the side of the block at a track day. I don’t know what happen to it after that, but I do believe some of it’s parts remain floating around…
“In the early 2000s there were almost no social media, no YouTube how to’s, basically no internet. Hawaii basically was blocked off from the world. We got our inspiration from going out there and experiencing other cultures and bringing back home what we thought were cool. A melting pot of ethnicities also became the melting pot of car culture. Also technology wise, it was and still is, expensive to get new things done and what not, just because we’re out in the middle of the Pacific. So if you see something replicated here like let’s say a k swapped MR2, when they became popular, then chances are, that person went far wide to get it done.” – PVT La Rosa
Amen to that homie.
Thank you Hawaii for always and continuing to inspire me.
Michael Muller needs to be on Shark Week. That would be my kind of opening for a whole week dedicated to sharks.
Here’s a video review of the film:
“Through a special partnership with Stanford University’s Neurology department, the project is also part of an ongoing research project on the benefits of VR for people with PTSD, anxiety and other stress disorders. VR has been shown to alleviate many of the symptoms of PTSD and anxiety, making VR an invaluable therapeutic implement.”
That’s what’s up. Hopefully the film can make its way over to San Diego…
San Diego felt it’s first heat wave of the summer. It got me reminiscing of those days in Sacramento where it’s 100+ degrees everyday… I was driving around in a gutted car in that heat too… I don’t know how I did it, that shit felt like a furnace! Haha man those days are over! No more dailying the hatch. With that being said, I already put it in hibernation. I hired someone to check on it occasionally, but until I have the time to drive it and have fun with it, it’ll be locked up deep inside of the 36 Chambers. The day I sealed it up, I found some old photos during its process of being a typical Honda you’ll see on Honda-tech, to what you see today. Visually it doesn’t look like it has changed at all, but it’s the inside that counts.
The current state which it is in now reflects how a JDM Civic from the 90’s should be like in my mind, and though it mirrors kanjozoku cars in Osaka, it’s more of “game recognize game” type of shit. While others try go to for that kanjo look, this shit is second nature to me. As I stated in previous blog posts in the past, I got inspired by the Osaka culture back in the early 2000’s. AND TO BE QUITE HONEST, IF IT AINT GHETTO, IT AIN’T KANJO.
And that’s exactly why I hit the streets. That shit is my freedom. I couldn’t sit still. But you see I am now in a stage in my life where I do sit still. Back to taking it slow, and as the kanjozoku stated how he’s not in pursuit of enlightenment, that’s exactly how my mindstate was when building this car. I built it to wild out.
I am a different person now. I have set my mind on a goal that’s outside of the car culture. But I still include myself in it, P. Runner is still here. I’m never going to leave. I just put it on hold. I have been and always will be, watching from the shadows. Just like how The Private Runners Street Family are the watchful inconspicuous eyes that you over look and don’t see. Most people when they hear that someone is from the streets, they automatically think of a gang banger or a hustler etc. But no, when I say streets I’m talking about a person who kicked it with the homeless, a person who wandered the streets in search of answers and truth. Just as KRS ONE left his home at a young age and lived on the streets, lived with the homeless and stayed outside the World Trade Center. Just as Siddhartha Gautama left his kingdom and roamed the country in search for his enlightenment. PVT Runners are not just about car culture. Cars are just one of our mediums. We are about awareness and consciousness. This is my new journey.
“If I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. Because if I allow you to leave here this evening, under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever. So that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object, showing you the limitations of words and of thinking. Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There’s nothing you’re supposed to believe in and it’s not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like water, it always slips through the net. And in water you know when you get into it there’s nothing to hang on to. All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you’re thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you’re not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water.”
“In this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. ‘Ten thousand functions, one suchness,’ and we’re all one suchness. And that means that suchness comes and goes like everything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it’s the yang and the yin, and therefore it consists of ‘now you see it, now you don’t, here you are, here you aren’t, here you are,’ because that is the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs. Only we, being under a kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest, the yin, or the dark principle, is going to overcome the yang, or the light principle, and that ‘off’ is going to finally triumph over ‘on.’ And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion. ‘Hey, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn’t that be terrible!’ And so we’re constantly trembling and thinking that it may, because after all, isn’t it odd that anything exists? It’s most peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been so much easier for there to have been nothing at all. Therefore, we think, well, since the ‘is’ side of things is so much effort, you always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is just the other face of energy, and it’s the rest, the not being anything around, that produces something around, just in the same way that you can’t have ‘solid’ without ‘space,’ or ‘space’ without ‘solid.’ When you wake up to this, and realize that ‘the more it changes the more it’s the same thing’ as the French say, that YOU are really a playing of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that, that IT is YOU. But that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as someone else altogether. And so when you find that out, you become full energy and delight.”
