March 15, 2015
Here
are some dates for Peter's upcoming book signings for
THE RAINMAN'S THIRD CURE. From Library Journal - "Remarkably
forthright and insightful, this memoir may inspire
others to add a bit of Zen to their lives."
April 14: 6:30 pm - Diesel Bookstore,
2419 Larkspur Landing Circle, Larkspur, CA
April 16: 7 pm - Central Library,
1000 Fourth Ave, Seattle, WA
April 20: 7:30 pm.- Powell's City of
Books, 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR
April 21: 7 pm - Barnes & Noble,
Americana Way, Glendale, CA
April 23: 12-1 pm - The Strand, 828
Broadway (& 12th Street), New York, NY
Last
month GIRL ON THE EDGE was screened at the Sedona
International Film Festival and this past weekend it was
presented at the San Luis Obispo International Film
Festival, where it won best narrative feature during the
independent film awards. The film, originally titled
"The Secret Place", is directed by Jay Silverman and
besides Peter, it stars Taylor Spreitler, Gil Bellows,
Mackenzie Phillips and the late Elizabeth Pena. This is
a very personal story for the director because his own
teen-age daughter had been sexually assaulted.
Herbert Payne of Broadway World praises the film
with
"Girl on the Edge is a poignant and uplifting
film of hope, powered by Ms. Spreitler's compelling and
heart-wrenching portrayal of Hannah whose obstinacy is
the thin veil of a vulnerable soul. This young actress
masterfully captures the complexity of Hannah's
character. Mr. Coyote, as ever, is steady as a
rock, playing the counselor everyone wishes they had."
Film & Theatre critic, David Appleford writes, "From a
sharply observed script from writer Joey Curtis and
solid support from a mostly adult cast, including Gil
Bellows as dad and Amy Price-Francis as mom, there’s
also a comforting, take-charge presence from Peter
Coyote as the man who runs the center and an
appearance from the sadly missed Elizabeth Pena as
Esther." The photo below shows Peter on location with
the director, Elizabeth Pena, Taylor Spreitler and
Mackenzie Phillips.
The
Greensboro Symphony Orchestra of North Carolina
has announced this year's classical Masterworks season,
which includes a Coyote appearance. He will narrate
Aaron Copland’s "Lincoln Portrait" on the season’s
opening concerts on Sept. 24 and 26. That concert also
will feature Grieg’s epic drama "Peer Gynt" and
Strauss’s "Don Juan."
A
74-minute documentary called "Angel
Azul" shows artist Jason deCaires Taylor create
statues from live models, then submerge them to take the
place of dying coral reefs. Taylor's work highlights an
underwater crisis as algae encroaches. Peter Coyote
narrates the film, which won best documentary from the
Breckenridge Film Festival and best cinematography from
the United Nations Association Film Festival. Cravat’s
playful yet deliberate filmmaking style contextualizes
the creation of Reclamation – presumably the 'angel' in
the film’s title – within the larger goals of Taylor’s
work and the acute threats to coral reef health. As
invasive algae begin to smother the hundreds of existing
underwater sculptures at MUSA, environmental experts
including Dr. Sylvia Earle deliver an urgent message
about the solutions necessary to save reefs while
narrator Peter Coyote provides further insight
into how our choices will decide the fate of these
exquisite and valuable ecosystems for generations to
come."
Peter
has completed another film called NO DEPOSIT.
Filmed last year in Canada, it was written and directed
by Frank D'Angelo and stars Frank D'Angelo, Dominique
Swain, Michael Madsen, Margot Kidder, Doris Roberts,
Robert Loggia, Paul Sorvino, Daniel Baldwin and Peter as
Police Chief Williams. The film's official web sites
gives the following synopsis: The story begins when a
family man, Mickey Ryan, falls from grace through no
fault of his own due to a series of downward spiraling
events beyond his control. With his life turned upside
down, Mickey tries valiantly to resolve his issues but
hooks up with the wrong people who blind him with anger
and hate. Then his life takes an even worse turn as evil
infiltrates his life and he becomes involved in a series
of hate crimes that seemingly give him no way out. Just
when everyone is about to give up on him and he is
poised to fall off the edge of life, one person finally
steps up in a moment of redemption and forgiveness and
saves him from the ledge of desperation.
Another
unreleased film has undergone a title change. The
French film, EVA ET LEON, written and
directed by Emilie Cherpital, has been re-titled
L'ÉCHAPPÉE
BELLE. It will premiere in France on June 17,
2015. Eva is a 35-year-old free-spirited soul
living a single, independent life, emcumbered by
nothing. However a 11-year-old boy named Leon will soon
change her life as she helps him find his mother.
February 13, 2015
The
upcoming release of Peter's newest book, "THE
RAINMAN'S THIRD CURE: An Irregular Education" has
already been garnering wonderful praise! The publication
date for this 288-page book by Counterpoint is set for
April 14, 2015.
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"The rainman gave me two
cures
And he said, ‘Just jump right in.’
The one was Texas Medicine
And the other was railroad gin.
And like a fool I mixed them
And they strangled up my mind
Now people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time.”
--Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis
Blues Again” |
Amazon.com description:
The guiding metaphor in Peter Coyote’s new spiritual
biography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan
song. For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as
Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the
competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and
ecstatic world of love with the competitive,
status-seeking world of wealth and power. The
Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man
caught between these apparently antipodal options and
the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of
power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the
White House, lessons from a man who literally held the
power of life and death over others, to government
service and international success on stage and screen.
Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the
1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his
lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall,
Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors
that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop
Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised,
a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men
can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who
initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in
Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and
marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to
Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino
Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde
Europe available to him.
What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen
deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a
priest, and finally the road to Transmission -
acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be
an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a
third option that offers an alternative to both the
worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status
seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but
what he discovers on the inside is actually available to
all humans. In this energetic, reflective and
intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is
the way out of the box. The way that works.
Kirkus Review:
An imperious and flawed father figure looms large
in Coyote's artfully rendered chronicle of his
intriguing journey from confused, privileged youth to
enlightened Zen practitioner. Not long ago, Coyote,
international screen star and veteran countercultural
revolutionary, had a transcendental experience that he
had arguably been searching for his entire life. But
while the author's Buddhist practice is a vital
component of his often descriptively brilliant
biographical odyssey, it is by no means the only one.
Coyote's story, the follow-up to Sleeping Where I
Fall (1998), is as much about a boy's initial
introduction to the great wide world as it is about one
complex human being's lifelong hunger for inner meaning.
Coyote presents a fascinatingly intricate portrait of
what it was like being the peculiar scion of wealth and
power. As a child, the young Peter Cohon found himself
languishing in neglect, floating in the staid world of
his conflicted parents, Morris and Ruth. Soon, however,
he was propelled headlong into a parallel existence
where he met lively figures hired to run the family's
Turkey Hill farm and Englewood, New Jersey, abode. "For
the next ten years [caretaker] Susie Howard was the
North Star around which my heavens revolved." The
impressionable young boy eventually encountered jazz
legends, intellectual radicals and rough-hewn
outdoorsmen. In addition to an imposing gangster uncle,
each of these individuals managed to shape the boy who
would later become not only a central figure in
America's nascent youth movement, but also a dusty
pioneer in communal living, a left-wing rabble-rouser
working inside the political system, and a struggling
father trying to support a family with a heroin monkey
on his back. Astonishingly, well into middle age, the
author accomplished another remarkable turn, evolving
into the well-respected film actor many know him as
today. Presented with so many well-defined faces,
there's guaranteed to be at least one Coyote, and
probably more, that readers enjoy meeting.
For further reviews, please visit
the new book page.
January 12, 2015
In
November I reported that Peter had been invited to speak
at DePaul University in Chicago, sponsored in
part by Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. You can access
two of his speeches at their
web site . Here are a couple more photos from
that event.
"An
Evening with Peter Coyote" will be presented on
January 29th at the Harris Center for the Arts in
Folsom, CA. Peter will share his reflections on a life
that includes "doing the Sixties" in San Francisco and
chairing the California Arts Council in the '70s as an
appointee of then and now Governor Jerry Brown. Tickets
for the 7:30 pm event are priced at $19-$29; Premium
$39; Students with ID $12. Tickets are available online
at www.harriscenter.net or from the Harris Center Ticket
Office at 916-608-6888 from 10 am to 6 pm Monday through
Saturday, and two hours before show time. Parking is
included in the price of the ticket. Harris Center is
located on the west side of Folsom Lake College campus
in Folsom, CA, facing East Bidwell Street.

Peter has narrated a new documentary called "Rise
Above the Mark" about the heartbreaking realities of
public education. It's the story of what happens when
politics enters the classroom. Public schools are boxed
in by current corporate reforms. Rules and regulations
restrict vision, depreciate funding, demoralize
teachers, and turn students into test-taking machines,
robbing them of time to foster creativity. This film
focuses on Indiana’s struggles with public school
reforms—the same types of struggles experienced in
schools throughout the United States. Experts Diane
Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Pasi Sahlberg and others
discuss how America can make positive changes to provide
an exceptional public school system for all children.
Another
recent narration was done for "Nicklaus: The Making
of a Champion", which will debut on Sunday, January
18, on the Fox Broadcast Network. The documentary
chronicles the life, career and legacy of Nicklaus,
winner of a record 18 professional major championships,
including four U.S. Opens, tied for the most all-time.
His eight USGA championships include two U.S. Amateurs
and two U.S. Senior Opens. The one-hour documentary
features archival footage and interviews with family,
friends and golf icons. The film's list of interviewees
includes his wife Barbara, son Jack II, and daughter
Nan, as well as golf legends Johnny Miller, Arnold
Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson and Tiger
Woods. Prominent golf journalist Mark Mulvoy and USGA
Senior Historian Michael Trostel are also featured.
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