February 19, 2012
A
few days ago, the Mill Valley Herald ran an article on
Peter. You can
read it here. As
a longtime Buddhist and recently ordained priest in the
layman lineage, he was asked if he believed that true
change takes more than one person's lifetime to achieve.
He replied, "We call our Buddhist work the Thousand-Year-Project; we think it’s going to
take 1,000 years for Buddhism to soften America … I won’t see the end of
it."
Book
Passage of Corte Madera, CA, will be presenting an "In
Conversation with Peter Coyote" event with Terry
Bisson on March 29th at 7 pm. A longtime friend of
Peter's, Terry will discuss his new book, "Any Day
Now". Publishers Weekly has called Terry's prose "a
wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision,"
and John Crowley hails the author as a "national
treasure!" "Any Day Now" is described as a poignant
excursion into the last days of the Beats and the
emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from
Kentucky to New York City and daringly unique. This road
movie of a novel, which begins as a fifties
coming-of-age story and ends in an isolated hippy
commune under threat of revolution, provides a
transcendent commentary on America then and now.
For
those interested in Peter, the narrator, you
might want to check out this
5-minute interview with David Rosenthal as Peter
discusses his voice-over work. I believe the interview
took place in December.
The
French telefilm,
VALPARAISO,
was aired on ARTE TV on February 3rd. The political
thriller, shot in Luxembourg in November 2010, is
Jean-Christopher Delpias' first feature-length film.
Peter played the story's villain, Edward G. Drexler.
Balthazar Paredes is the director of an oil company and
has a good (but unobtrusive) relationship with his
daughter Emma, who represents the Greens in the European
Union. Their public and private worlds collide when a
oil freighter causes an ecological disaster on the
French coast, and Emma is responsible for investigating
the incident. Eventually Balthazar realizes that the
chief executive of Oil & Co has been involved in dumping
nuclear wastes at sea and decides to blow the whistle on
these criminal practices.
January 25, 2012
Here's
an update on the upcoming Ken Burns project, "The
Dust Bowl". The Coyote-narrated film will premiere
at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival. The two-part PBS
documentary series is slated for television release in
the fall of 2012, but it will first be screened during
the festival weekend, May 25-28. Burns will attend the
festival and discuss his film with Mountainfilm
audiences.
I
just came across the June 2011 issue of Sun magazine
in which Peter gives an interview. Here's the
link to the article called "Against the Grain:
Peter Coyote On Buddhism, Capitalism, And The Enduring
Legacy Of The Sixties".
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"I don't think theater has ever been a vehical for
radical change. Theater is a vehicle for deepening
knowledge about the human species. I am not even sure
that the system has to change. People have to change. If
people behaved with self-restraint, generosity, and
compassion, even capitalism could work. We are never
going to create a system that generates fairness,
equity, goodwill and justice. I became a Buddhist in
part because I believe that change like that has to
start internally and be expressed one person at a time.
It is true that a system can advance to repress certain
attributes of human behavior, but no set of rules is
going to make us perfect."
...Peter Coyote |
Speaking
of theater, here's one of our "blast from the past"
photos taken of Peter in costume as he performed
with the San Francisco Mime Troupe back in
1967.

January 13, 2012
Filmmaker
Ken Burns has announced his next project: a PBS
documentary called "The Dust Bowl", to be
narrated by Peter. about one of the worst man-made
disasters in U.S. history. The documentary will
highlight one of the worst man-made disasters in U.S.
history and will rely on interviews with people who
lived through the crisis as well as Depression-era
footage. The “dust bowl,” words coined by an Associated
Press reporter in 1935 to describe the southern plains
that rain had forsaken, was the worst man-made
ecological disaster in American history – in which the
heedless actions of thousands of individual farmers,
encouraged by their government and influenced by global
markets, resulted in a collective tragedy that nearly
swept away the breadbasket of the nation.
It was a decade-long natural catastrophe of Biblical
proportions encompassing 100 million acres in Oklahoma,
Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico – when the skies
withheld their rains, when plagues of grasshoppers
descended on parched fields, when bewildered families
huddled in dark rooms while angry winds shook their
homes and pillars of dust choked out the mid-day sun.
Burns will discuss his latest film this summer with a
PBS broadcast later this year.
December 30, 2011
Here’s
an audio interview Peter recently did with a woman named
Rebecca D. Costa. According to Peter, Ms. Costa wrote a
brilliant book called "The Watchman’s Rattle" about the
way our old habits of thinking leave us unable to cope
with crisis. Peter admits he didn’t remember the book
when they spoke or he’d have been tongue tied. The
interview is at:
http://www.rebeccacosta.com/the-costa-report.
December 15, 2011
A
new sports series! This week the National Hockey League
and NHL Original Productions announced the debut of the
day-in-the-life series "NHL 36", narrated by
Peter. The first episode, which aired on Wednesday on
VERSUS, featured Patrick Kane, a forward for the Chicago
Blackhawks. The series will include10 episodes that will
shadow NHL players for 36 consecutive hours. "We are
excited about the opportunity to create individual
player portraits with unprecedented depth, at home with
family, out with friends and in the workplace," said
Ross Greenburg, executive producer, NHL 36. "Wherever
they go, whatever they do, our cameras are there,
capturing what a day in the life is like for some of the
biggest names in the NHL."
Sigma
Corporation of America has teamed up with underwater
photographer, sculptor and conservationist Jason
deCaires Taylor to help photograph the artist's
oft-unseen work and share it with the world. In addition
to using the Sigma lenses to capture still images of
Taylor's project, the sculptor and a team of underwater
filmmakers are using the lenses to document his work in
a movie called "Angel Azul". The film is being
produced by a group of environmentalists and will be
narrated by Peter.
December 10, 2011
 From
a rich and diverse field of almost 90 submissions from
over 20 countries around the world, "Cages of Shame,"
a feature-length documentary by Martin Guinness, about
an inspiring mission to rescue moon bears from a bear
bile farm in China, has won The Humane Society of the
United States' sixth Animal Content in Entertainment
(ACE) Documentary Film Grant. The film is narrated by
Peter and is currently in the final stages of
post-production. Guinness responded with, "I'm proud to
be associated with The Humane Society of the United
States, and I'm enormously grateful to them for
recognizing the inhumane and iniquitous maltreatment of
bears in cages in Asia. When I first heard about bear
farms I could hardly believe it. That humans could treat
thousands of these wonderful animals this way - and not
even for any necessary purpose - was beyond my
understanding, which is why I knew that I had to make a
film to draw the world's attention to the plight of
these bears."
I
just came across the Fall 2011 issue of the Grinnell
College magazine in which Peter and fellow alumni
and friend, Terry Bisson, write about their political
activism back in 1961 when they and 12 other students
from the Iowa college decided to drive a thousand miles
to Washington, D.C., and fast for three days in front of
the White House. The goal was to protest the nuclear
arms race and the resumption of atmospheric testing of
nuclear weapons, to support President Kennedy’s proposed
test-ban treaty and “peace race,” and to force the
subject into the public forum. Here are some wonderful
photos from that event and, if you want to read the
article, you can
access the PDF at this link. Don't you just love
their jackets, ties and London Fogs!

Last
week Salon’s founder and CEO, David Talbot, moderated a
panel discussion and Q&A in San Francisco with veterans
of social movements and organizers of Occupy San
Francisco, Oakland and the University of
California, at Berkeley. Peter was among the panel,
which also included Dan Siegel, civil rights attorney;
Matt Haney, executive director of UC Students
Association; Rebecca Solnit, author, contributor to
“Occupy!: Scenes From Occupied America”; and
Melanie Cervantes, activist, artist and co-founder of
Dignidad Rebelde.

December 2, 2011
Aldo
Leopold is considered the most important conservationist
of the 20th century because his ideas are so relevant to
the environmental issues of our time. He is the father
of the national wilderness system, wildlife management
and the science of ecological restoration. "Green
Fire; Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for our Time" is
the first feature-length (72 minutes) documentary about
Aldo Leopold’s life and contemporary legacy. Peter lends
his talent as the voice of Aldo Leopold, and the film’s
on-screen guide is biographer Curt Meine. The film
explores Leopold's life in the early part of the
twentieth century and the many ways his land ethic idea
continues to be applied all over the world today. In
partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, premiere
screenings in select cities will also celebrate the
100th anniversary of the Weeks Act, the law that lead to
the creation of many of our eastern national forests,
and sparked the long-term effort to replant and restore
forests that still continues today.
 Many
of you may not know that Peter's wife, Stefanie,
has a gifted voice as well which she lends to a San
Francisco area band for hire called "Olive & the
Dirty Martinis". The musicians include Eric
Lyons, Steve Rifkin, Justin Ganz and a famous name,
Jamie Redford - yes, Robert Redford's son. The band
shares a mutual love for rock and soul music from the
60's and 70's. From Zeppelin to Airplane, from Aretha to
the Doobies, from Stevie Wonder to Stevie Winwood, the
Martinis rock the house and inspire their audiences to
dance all night and sing along with some of the greatest
hooks and choruses ever written. For a live performance
video, you can check out the
band's web
site.
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