James Rotondi

Ian Astbury doesn't need to look very far for a reminder of his Buddhist beliefs. Tattooed to his wrist is the final line from the Tibetan Heart Sutra: "Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. O what an awakening, all hail!" Yet the 49-year-old singer of veteran English rock band...

With bare-knuckle book titles like Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up, author Brad Warner is not your hippie Aunt's idea of a tranquil, exotic spiritual master. With a pedigree in punk rock and garage-psychedelia, and a two-decade stint in the trenches of Japanese monster movie marketing, the 47-year-old...

In his hugely condescending review of the newly opened show, Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway, ("Another Long and Winding Detour," Oct. 26, 2010) New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood--who, though he freely admits that he "can't claim to be an expert in the intricacies of...

If the totalitarian nightmare portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 strikes you as an implausible portrait of state control and repression, a single viewing of the Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ; Reporting From A Closed Country will quickly jerk you into reality. Using raw, eyewitness footage captured by underground, internet-equipped...

This piece was originally posted at the MTV Music Blog

For those who only buy their music on iTunes, Amazon.com, or other online digital music services and retailers, the idea of walking into a "brick-and-mortar" record store and plunking down cash for a physical, mechanical reproduction of a...

Stephen Batchelor does not look like a man at the center of a storm. But the calm, bespectacled 57-year-old Englishman is in the eye of a hurricane of controversy taking place in the global community of Buddhism.

Batchelor is a former monk in both the Tibetan Geluk and Korean...

This is the second installment of a piece that begins here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rotondi/pretend-it-like-beckham-i_b_389880.html

Making sure that this motley crew of small business owners, actors, financial types, musicians, students, graphic artists and blue-collar workers begin to gel into an actual soccer team is the job of Coach Ralph Perez. With...

"The dream is still there," says the Frenchman, pulling on his official LA Galaxy game jersey, emblazoned on the back with his name and his favorite number--in his case, #10, the number associated with soccer greats like Zinedine Zidane and Diego Maradona. We're sitting in the LA Galaxy locker room...

Last Wednesday, as the New York State Senate voted down a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New York, they were, in essence, voting to require discrimination in the State of New York. That they did it, in part, with the guiding hand of the Catholic Church--who called...

"The Day the Dome Was Tarnished Forever."

So read the backs of T-shirts worn by some number of anti-choice protesters during President's Obama's visit to the Catholic University of Notre Dame over the weekend to deliver a commencement address, one which took a typically civil, sensitive and conciliatory stance...

If the current recession started last December, as the latest findings from the National Bureau of Economic Research clearly indicate, then it stands to reason that, considering things have gotten a lot worse since then, we're a lot closer to a depression than anyone has realized. Perhaps we're not quite...

"Yo, Barackulator -- you want a brew?"

President-Elect Barack Obama looked up at George W. Bush, the lame-duck 43rd President of the United States, who'd just ushered him into a private meeting in the Oval Office while their wives continued a tour of the White House. On this, his first...

Maybe I'm just a sucker, or perhaps some misplaced machismo makes me want to defend damsels in distress (even ones who can take down a moose), but watching Sarah Palin tear up during John McCain's concession speech Tuesday night, I actually felt a twinge of sympathy. "Nonsense," my tough, liberal-fighter...