Saturday, I went on the Lower Town Art Crawl.  I was with friends Shelley and Betsy.  I got waylaid by heated glass earrings and Betsy was grabbed by an artist's spinal xrays.  When we found Shelley, she was talking to videographer Mike Hazard.  He and Deb Wallwork have co-directed a film called Cold Mountain.  It will be released Fall 2008.

The film is about Han Shan, a famous Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.  Mike writes:

Over a thousand years ago, a man laughed up and down the slopes of a cold mountain in China. He wrote poems on trees and walls of caves and on leaves. He limped. He sported a birch-bark hat, big wooden clogs, a patched robe, a pigweed staff and a demeanor interpreted by others as craziness.

He was Han Shan, and he wrote poems for everyone, not just the educated elite. A man free of spiritual conceit, it is unclear whether or not he was a monk, whether he was a Buddhist or a Taoist or both.

By great good luck, we flew to Japan and China to videotape a story about Han Shan, also known as Cold Mountain. We interviewed Burton Watson and Red Pine, two of his key translators. Then we recorded with Gary Snyder, whose Han Shan translations he published in his first book.

Mike and Deb's website is at: http://www.thecie.org/  Scroll down to Sept. 10, 2008 for Han Shan.