... we leave for Europe. As usual these days, when we travel, I will have my laptop with me and will be making entries in The Buddha Diaries as and when time and connectivity allow. I'm assuming it to be almost universal in this day and age. A year ago, I had little trouble getting online in Finland and Russia, so I imagine England and France will provide no obstacles. Still, you never know...
Anyway, I hope my blogging friends will stick with me. My entries may turn out to have more to do with family and friends, since that's the purpose of our visit, but I trust they'll continue to look at everything from my peculiar, quizzical, quasi-Buddhist point of view. I'll look forward to hearing from you when you're moved to comment, but will be visiting online friends less and responding less than usual. Good things to everyone!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Two Lions
I dreamed we adopted two lion cubs, very cute, one boy, one girl. We took them in because their previous owner could not keep them, even though our house (not really our house) was not appropriate for the raising of lion cubs. They were very frisky, particularly the old and larger one, the male. When he escaped, we thought to tempt him back with food. Not knowing what to feed a lion, we opened cans of dog food--the only thing we had available. That brought him back. Then we took them upstairs to our living room (not our living room) where we thought they would be safe and could not escape. We had neglected, however, to close several of the sliding window panes that opened straight out to the street, and I had to run from one to the next, trying to close them all before the lions escaped.
In "real life" last night, we watched the heart-breaking 60 Minutes segment about the poisoning of lions in Kenya, to keep them from killing cattle. The lion population there, it seems, as elsewhere in Africa, is dwindling terribly. It may not be long before there are no lions left in the world, aside from those in captivity. What will we tell our children and our grandchildren, when they read old story-books? That we allowed the eradication, at human hands, of this icon of beauty, power and sovereignty? Shame on us. Shame on all of our human species that we tolerate such treatment of our fellow-beings on this planet.
In "real life" last night, we watched the heart-breaking 60 Minutes segment about the poisoning of lions in Kenya, to keep them from killing cattle. The lion population there, it seems, as elsewhere in Africa, is dwindling terribly. It may not be long before there are no lions left in the world, aside from those in captivity. What will we tell our children and our grandchildren, when they read old story-books? That we allowed the eradication, at human hands, of this icon of beauty, power and sovereignty? Shame on us. Shame on all of our human species that we tolerate such treatment of our fellow-beings on this planet.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Blessing, Revisited
I had another thought this morning, during meditation, about the reticence I described the other day in my entry about blessing. One powerful lesson that was implanted in my youthful mind was that I should not grow "too big for my boots." I learned that modesty and humility were among the highest values, and that pride was not not merely reprehensible, it was sinful. At boarding school, too, this lesson was reinforced by the hard-earned understanding that, unless one had special skills in sportsmanship or intellect, the risk of targeting for scorn or ridicule could be significantly reduced by keeping a low profile.
Reticence, then, was a lesson that I learned well, and that served me in many ways poorly in later life. It served me poorly as a writer. For years I chose to believe that others had far greater skills than I, and this conviction kept me prisoner to what I now see to be a false image of myself. Thinking small is a self-fulling prophesy. Condemning what I judged to be presumptuousness in myself and others, I effectively choked my voice off at the throat and throttled the real, authentic communication that good writing requires.
I know that there are many much younger writers among my readers, and from the wisdom of my own experience I'd like to invite them with these thoughts to embrace grandiosity rather than modesty; that they accept and celebrate their own brilliance without reservation or reticence; that they worry less about the size of their boots than the wonderful sensation of feet on the ground--if only in preparation to take flight. It's from a place of generosity that good things come--including blessings.
Have a great Sunday!
Reticence, then, was a lesson that I learned well, and that served me in many ways poorly in later life. It served me poorly as a writer. For years I chose to believe that others had far greater skills than I, and this conviction kept me prisoner to what I now see to be a false image of myself. Thinking small is a self-fulling prophesy. Condemning what I judged to be presumptuousness in myself and others, I effectively choked my voice off at the throat and throttled the real, authentic communication that good writing requires.
I know that there are many much younger writers among my readers, and from the wisdom of my own experience I'd like to invite them with these thoughts to embrace grandiosity rather than modesty; that they accept and celebrate their own brilliance without reservation or reticence; that they worry less about the size of their boots than the wonderful sensation of feet on the ground--if only in preparation to take flight. It's from a place of generosity that good things come--including blessings.
Have a great Sunday!
Friday, March 27, 2009
Help!
The Spring is sprung
The grass is riz,
I wonder where
the birdies is.
Could somebody please help me? I've got this silly little rhyme running around inside my brain, and I've forgotten the second half. The poor old gray stuff won't let it go until the cycle is complete, and it's driving me up the wall. I know it has to do with the "sky," and I'm pretty sure there's a "why" in there somewhere, but I just can't put it all together.
Funny, though, that familiar need to complete a thought or memory, sometimes the snatch of a song. It's an itch that insists on being scratched, and it keeps on itching until you find the answer--or until the brain gets tired of this particular game it invented for itself.
The Buddhist thing would be to note its presence and then let it go. But the brain's a tough old bird, and the letting go is easier said than done.
So much for the morning's meditation, then. Oh, wait. Another line: "The birdie's on the wing." Okay, here I go:
Some say
the bird is on the wing.
But that's absurd.
I always heard
the wing is on the bird.
Phew! What a relief! (But I was way off about the "sky" and "why." Go figure.)
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Bad Citrus Karma
I know, it's a bit tacky to be abusing that wonderful word "karma" for a seemingly trivial purpose, but it does seem like a bad year for our modest citrus crops...
Remember, I wrote some two weeks ago about the fate of the little lemon tree, on the street side of our house. We returned from a weekend away to find that its entire crop had been lopped off the tree--not picked, mind you, but hacked away, heedless of the shape of the tree, with shears. It felt like a violation.
Now, this Sunday, we returned late afternoon to discover that the kumquat tree on the balcony behind the house had suffered a similar fate. When we left on Friday, it had been blessed with a generous crop of fruit, all ripening nicely, ready to be plucked. We had in fact already picked a few--you can't pick too many at one time, unless you're planning to make kumquat marmalade--to add to our fruit salads and dinner salads. Now, Sunday, there were two little kumquats left on the branches. The rest had disappeared.
Well, our balcony is built high above the ground. The only access to it is through the glass doors from the living room--unless you want to shimmy up twenty feet or more of cold steel column from the garden, access to which also requires a key to open the sturdy gate that blocks the long side stairway. Besides, unlike the lemon tree, the branches themselves were left intact. Clearly, this was not the work of human vandals.
The solution to the mystery soon became apparent. Rats. They are common denizens of the hills around us, not frequently seen, in our experience, but present everywhere. They had left their nasty little turds on the balcony around the base of the big pot in which the kumquat tree is planted. And they had made off with literally dozens of the precious fruit that we had been looking forward to enjoying.
We have been blaming the local squirrels for the loss of other fruit on the balcony. Now they're off the hook. I offer them my apologies for the aspersions and imprecations I seem have mis-cast in their direction. Our fellow creatures need to survive, I guess, as we do. At least this four-footed kind had the decency to respect the integrity of the tree from which they stole, unlike their human counterparts. Still, I do resent their thieving habits, and am wondering how to protect the remaining lemons from their predatory habits...
Any ideas, out there?
Remember, I wrote some two weeks ago about the fate of the little lemon tree, on the street side of our house. We returned from a weekend away to find that its entire crop had been lopped off the tree--not picked, mind you, but hacked away, heedless of the shape of the tree, with shears. It felt like a violation.
Now, this Sunday, we returned late afternoon to discover that the kumquat tree on the balcony behind the house had suffered a similar fate. When we left on Friday, it had been blessed with a generous crop of fruit, all ripening nicely, ready to be plucked. We had in fact already picked a few--you can't pick too many at one time, unless you're planning to make kumquat marmalade--to add to our fruit salads and dinner salads. Now, Sunday, there were two little kumquats left on the branches. The rest had disappeared.
Well, our balcony is built high above the ground. The only access to it is through the glass doors from the living room--unless you want to shimmy up twenty feet or more of cold steel column from the garden, access to which also requires a key to open the sturdy gate that blocks the long side stairway. Besides, unlike the lemon tree, the branches themselves were left intact. Clearly, this was not the work of human vandals.
The solution to the mystery soon became apparent. Rats. They are common denizens of the hills around us, not frequently seen, in our experience, but present everywhere. They had left their nasty little turds on the balcony around the base of the big pot in which the kumquat tree is planted. And they had made off with literally dozens of the precious fruit that we had been looking forward to enjoying.
We have been blaming the local squirrels for the loss of other fruit on the balcony. Now they're off the hook. I offer them my apologies for the aspersions and imprecations I seem have mis-cast in their direction. Our fellow creatures need to survive, I guess, as we do. At least this four-footed kind had the decency to respect the integrity of the tree from which they stole, unlike their human counterparts. Still, I do resent their thieving habits, and am wondering how to protect the remaining lemons from their predatory habits...
Any ideas, out there?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Blessing
I was confronted with an interesting question, last Friday afternoon, in the class to which I had been invited as a guest speaker. It had to do with blessing. Students in the class had been asked to read my memoir, “While I Am Not Afraid”, and the question arose from a scene in the book in which I asked for a blessing from my father on his deathbed.
As I watched my father in what the family thought to be the last hours of his life (he fooled us all, living on for more than a week after this moment,) I recalled the days when I was a small child, and he the rector of a parish in the diocese of St. Albans, just north of London. Too young to partake in the eucharist--not yet, then, “confirmed”--I was always led to the altar rail by my mother and would receive, each Sunday, a blessing as my father distributed the communion wafers and the wine. He would lay a gentle hand on my head and say a quick prayer before passing on to the next communicant. I could think of no better way to bring our relationship to closure. Since he was by this time too weak to move his hand, I had to take it myself and lay it on my forehead, and to say for him the words that came back to me then--but which I have since forgotten.
It was a moving and a memorable moment, and the student was curious to know what that blessing meant to me. The truth is that, as an unbeliver, I was for much of my life somewhat embarrassed by the notion of blessing. It seemed to me to suggest a call to a spiritual authority in which I did not believe, a paternal, not to say paternalistic act of faith that my skeptical mind found impossible to accept. It is only in very recent years that I have found in myself the wish--and I might even say the power--to bless, though without recourse to a "higher power" for the authority to do so.
It has come about perhaps in part as a simple function of age, because in the work I do in The ManKind Project, younger men have asked it of me. At first I was as embarrassed by their requests as by the act itself. Who was I, of all people, to offer blessings? What right did I have to give them? By whose authority? But I found myself, despite those hesitations, responding to the requests, finding simple words that somehow felt right for me without suggesting in any way that they came from anywhere but my own heart. (I was also embarrassed, for most of my adult years, by the very word "heart," but that's another—if related—story.)
So the student's question went to the heart--there I go again!--of something I had struggled with for many years, and I found myself formulating an answer to in the light of what I have learned from the Buddhist teachings: the kind of blessing I can believe in comes out of compassion. It's not that I have earned any right to bless, by means of my superiority to other beings; it's rather a heart-to-heart exchange, what I described to the class as an "I see you" moment, an act of recognition and oneness. Our culture tends, I think, to associate blessing with a hierarchical sense that the blesser has some special gift or qualification which he or she imparts upon the blessee from that superior place. I have come to see it otherwise, perhaps more humbly, as more of an expression of compassion and goodwill. As I told the student, I can receive wonderful blessings from the least expected quarters.
The act of blessing, then, for me, is no more than the conscious opening of the heart to another being at some special moment, accompanied, perhaps--though by no means necessarily--with words of recognition and appreciation. To return to my father's blessing on his deathbed: what I needed in that moment, quite simply, was to know that I was seen and acknowledged. The fact that he was approaching the God that he believed in lent a special gravity to the gift, but the meaning of the blessing did not require me to share in his belief, but rather to accept it from his very human heart.
I googled “Buddhist” and “Blessing”, and came up with this poem/chant…
…which speaks not of God but of the goodness of the human heart. Which is, perhaps more elegantly put, exactly what I’m trying to talk about. I don't know who to thank or acknowledge for this poem, but may whoever posted it enjoy those same blessings he or she has offered those of us who read it.
As I watched my father in what the family thought to be the last hours of his life (he fooled us all, living on for more than a week after this moment,) I recalled the days when I was a small child, and he the rector of a parish in the diocese of St. Albans, just north of London. Too young to partake in the eucharist--not yet, then, “confirmed”--I was always led to the altar rail by my mother and would receive, each Sunday, a blessing as my father distributed the communion wafers and the wine. He would lay a gentle hand on my head and say a quick prayer before passing on to the next communicant. I could think of no better way to bring our relationship to closure. Since he was by this time too weak to move his hand, I had to take it myself and lay it on my forehead, and to say for him the words that came back to me then--but which I have since forgotten.
It was a moving and a memorable moment, and the student was curious to know what that blessing meant to me. The truth is that, as an unbeliver, I was for much of my life somewhat embarrassed by the notion of blessing. It seemed to me to suggest a call to a spiritual authority in which I did not believe, a paternal, not to say paternalistic act of faith that my skeptical mind found impossible to accept. It is only in very recent years that I have found in myself the wish--and I might even say the power--to bless, though without recourse to a "higher power" for the authority to do so.
It has come about perhaps in part as a simple function of age, because in the work I do in The ManKind Project, younger men have asked it of me. At first I was as embarrassed by their requests as by the act itself. Who was I, of all people, to offer blessings? What right did I have to give them? By whose authority? But I found myself, despite those hesitations, responding to the requests, finding simple words that somehow felt right for me without suggesting in any way that they came from anywhere but my own heart. (I was also embarrassed, for most of my adult years, by the very word "heart," but that's another—if related—story.)
So the student's question went to the heart--there I go again!--of something I had struggled with for many years, and I found myself formulating an answer to in the light of what I have learned from the Buddhist teachings: the kind of blessing I can believe in comes out of compassion. It's not that I have earned any right to bless, by means of my superiority to other beings; it's rather a heart-to-heart exchange, what I described to the class as an "I see you" moment, an act of recognition and oneness. Our culture tends, I think, to associate blessing with a hierarchical sense that the blesser has some special gift or qualification which he or she imparts upon the blessee from that superior place. I have come to see it otherwise, perhaps more humbly, as more of an expression of compassion and goodwill. As I told the student, I can receive wonderful blessings from the least expected quarters.
The act of blessing, then, for me, is no more than the conscious opening of the heart to another being at some special moment, accompanied, perhaps--though by no means necessarily--with words of recognition and appreciation. To return to my father's blessing on his deathbed: what I needed in that moment, quite simply, was to know that I was seen and acknowledged. The fact that he was approaching the God that he believed in lent a special gravity to the gift, but the meaning of the blessing did not require me to share in his belief, but rather to accept it from his very human heart.
I googled “Buddhist” and “Blessing”, and came up with this poem/chant…
Just as the soft rains fill the streams,
pour into the rivers and join together in the oceans,
so may the power of every moment of your goodness
flow forth to awaken and heal all beings,
Those here now, those gone before, those yet to come.
By the power of every moment of your goodness
May your heart's wishes be soon fulfilled
as completely shining as the bright full moon,
as magically as by a wish-fulfilling gem.
By the power of every moment of your goodness
May all dangers be averted and all disease be gone.
May no obstacle come across your way.
May you enjoy fulfillment and long life.
For all in whose heart dwells respect,
who follow the wisdom and compassion, of the Way,
May your life prosper in the four blessings
of old age, beauty, happiness and strength…
…which speaks not of God but of the goodness of the human heart. Which is, perhaps more elegantly put, exactly what I’m trying to talk about. I don't know who to thank or acknowledge for this poem, but may whoever posted it enjoy those same blessings he or she has offered those of us who read it.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Unsettled
We leave for Europe in a week and a day, and I find that I'm already experiencing that feeling of dislocation that overtakes me every time I go away. It may be a function of age, but it seems to kick in earlier each time. Perhaps the roots grow deeper as we age, harder to pull up from the familiar ground. My head reminds me sagely that everything is in flux, but my heart and body resist the discomforts of change. More and more, when the time to leave approaches, I want to stay at home. Impractical, in our case, because our grandchildren live in England, as does my sister and her family, and the only way we can get to see them on a regular basis is to get on a plane and fly there.
This morning I woke early, filled with a gnawing anxiety. Its focus was not the coming journey, though. Instead, the anxiety was deflected into a different source: earthquakes--particularly the much-anticipated Big One. We are not prepared, as we know we should be. It's a foolishness I keep reminding myself to correct, and this morning I lay in bed thinking of those things we need: water, packaged foods, a new first aid kit (the last one we bought must be twenty years old by now,) sterno cooking equipment, gloves and tools... I promised myself the long-postponed trip to the Target store, or Costco.
Meantime, I have been thinking this past weekend about blessings. I plan to post some thoughts in The Buddha Diaries tomorrow. Unless the Big One strikes before tomorrow comes...
This morning I woke early, filled with a gnawing anxiety. Its focus was not the coming journey, though. Instead, the anxiety was deflected into a different source: earthquakes--particularly the much-anticipated Big One. We are not prepared, as we know we should be. It's a foolishness I keep reminding myself to correct, and this morning I lay in bed thinking of those things we need: water, packaged foods, a new first aid kit (the last one we bought must be twenty years old by now,) sterno cooking equipment, gloves and tools... I promised myself the long-postponed trip to the Target store, or Costco.
Meantime, I have been thinking this past weekend about blessings. I plan to post some thoughts in The Buddha Diaries tomorrow. Unless the Big One strikes before tomorrow comes...
Saturday, March 21, 2009
I Will Not...
(with apologies to John Baldessari...)
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend...
... except that I already did...
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend
I will not get anywhere near my computer this weekend...
... except that I already did...
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Teaching
Today, I teach. Well, actually, no. "Teaching" somehow traditionally implies that I, the "teacher," know something that "students" don't, and that my job is to transfer that piece of knowledge from my head to theirs. I "taught" for many years, always painfully conscious of how little I knew. And I think that this understanding contributed significantly to my having left academia more than twenty years ago, back in the mid-eighties. I'm still in recovery.
So I don't really "teach." What I do is participate in a forum in which I'm privileged discover a little more about myself even as I help others, I hope, discover a little more about themselves. I like to think that it's a more Buddhist approach.
I dreamed last night--no coincidence!--about teaching. I have been dreaming quite a lot lately, and remembering more of my dreams than I usually do. Last night I dreamed I had accepted a teaching job at a college somewhere, I thought, in the Midwest. I arrived to find a friendly campus, designed like a children's playground, all its constituent architectural elements put together out of colorful molded plastic parts. I was struck by the politeness everywhere, with students and faculty unfailing addressing each other as "Mr." this and "Miss" that. My living quarters, though, were tiny, with just enough room to sit, stand, or lie, and hang a few clothes. I was puzzled, but not particuarly unhappy with the arrangement. I thought I could make do.
My classroom, when I arrived there to teach (French language was my subject) was next to the college cafeteria, where students were working in a politely relaxed kind of way. Several of them turned out to be my students, taking off their aprons to join the class. But getting into the classroom, it seemed, involved a distinctly athletic activity, using handholds to haul oneself up a green plastic facade to reach the entry. Unwilling to undertake this hazardous journey, I led the students up a stairway to what I thought might be an easier back entrance--but alas, when we got there we found the back wall sealed. The dream ended as I wondered what to do next.
Maybe I'll start my class this morning by telling them this dream...
So I don't really "teach." What I do is participate in a forum in which I'm privileged discover a little more about myself even as I help others, I hope, discover a little more about themselves. I like to think that it's a more Buddhist approach.
I dreamed last night--no coincidence!--about teaching. I have been dreaming quite a lot lately, and remembering more of my dreams than I usually do. Last night I dreamed I had accepted a teaching job at a college somewhere, I thought, in the Midwest. I arrived to find a friendly campus, designed like a children's playground, all its constituent architectural elements put together out of colorful molded plastic parts. I was struck by the politeness everywhere, with students and faculty unfailing addressing each other as "Mr." this and "Miss" that. My living quarters, though, were tiny, with just enough room to sit, stand, or lie, and hang a few clothes. I was puzzled, but not particuarly unhappy with the arrangement. I thought I could make do.
My classroom, when I arrived there to teach (French language was my subject) was next to the college cafeteria, where students were working in a politely relaxed kind of way. Several of them turned out to be my students, taking off their aprons to join the class. But getting into the classroom, it seemed, involved a distinctly athletic activity, using handholds to haul oneself up a green plastic facade to reach the entry. Unwilling to undertake this hazardous journey, I led the students up a stairway to what I thought might be an easier back entrance--but alas, when we got there we found the back wall sealed. The dream ended as I wondered what to do next.
Maybe I'll start my class this morning by telling them this dream...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Catching Mackerel
Riddle me this one:
I'm out on a small boat on the ocean, catching mackerel. It's amazing. I put out multiple lines and the fish seem to just leap to the hooks. Not content with taking the bait I offer, they latch on to each other, fish biting fish biting fish... long silvery strands of the wriggling, plump creatures that I haul into the boat. I have an armful of them, big fish, bigger than your average mackerel, gleaming...
Sounds like a dream of abundance, right? But wait...
Next thing I know, I'm in the water, holding on desperately to one of the fish that fills my arms. I'm mesmerized by the sudden appearance of a two-hulled speed boat, dashing toward me through the waves. I know that I need to swim, and fast, to the left or right, to avoid being crushed by the speeding boat, but I just can't move. It's like one of those dream-moments when you know you have to escape but your legs won't carry you. I'm stuck there, treading water stupidly, trapped by my own inability to move, about to be run down between the hulls and smashed to pieces by the huge engines that propel them...
I wake, fortunately, before the ultimate fatal moment.
So, riddle me that one.
Here's what I think. I see this as a dream provoked by the anxiety of the economic crisis. The illusion of abundance at one moment, approaching disaster at the next.
And, on this topic, I might add how sad and angry I am that this new, young, visionary president should be distracted from the great promise that he brought with him to the White House by a crisis not of his own making, and one that will consume every last ounce of his credibility to resolve.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
This Morning...
... I am distracted. I have a couple of hours to edit down and stitch together the interviews I did yesterday for my next Art of Outrage. It's going to be a good one. And then early afternoon I have a date in the San Fernando Valley with my tax man. A new one. The tax man who has been helping us these past, I'd say, fifteen years, retired, and merged his business with a big operation that seemed to expect me to do all the work filling out their forms, then charge me for feeding the information through their computers. I prefer the old-fashioned way, person-to-person, eye-to-eye. Wish me luck...
Monday, March 16, 2009
Art Walk Weekend (for MandT!)
We stayed in town this past weekend to attend an art opening on Friday night and to catch up with some of the local galleries. I also had my Art of Outrage podcast on my mind. Having done this on an almost monthly basis for the past couple of years, I decided recently to cut back on the time that it requires and post instead every two months or so. It's past time for me to be recording a new episode, and I found what looked like the ideal opportunity in a new exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. I was attracted initially by a flier with an image from the artist Llyn Foulkes, whose highly idiosyncratic and uncompromising work I have admired for decades. I have a telephone interview with him scheduled for later in the morning today, and am looking forward to my first opportunity to actually meet him.
More of that exhibition later, or on my podcast later this month. From the Hammer, we drove on down to L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice to see "Poltergeist," a new show by the artist Rebecca Campbell. I have known her work chiefly as a painter until now: in the past, she has used often large canvases to recall moody scenes from a strict Mormon background that evoke all the inner emotional conflicts of childhood. Drawing on that same fertile resource in her current exhibition, she expands her medium to include the installation itself: the visitor crosses the threshold through a pair of wide front doors, brought in from the artist's childhood home in Utah and surrounded by a "wall" of individually painted "bricks"--each one a tiny painting in itself.
The "wall" has a nice title of its own: "I'll Huff and I'll Puff." The wolf at the door of childhood!
Inside, the visitor is greeted by the spreading branches of an actual tree, its trunk and limbs fiberglassed and covered with a layer of black velvet, its branches settles by a colony of charming bluebirds made from glass.
Nearby stands a floor-to-ceiling installation that looks at first sight like a hologram, home to a glittering swarm of golden bees.
Closer inspection reveals that each of these tiny sculptural elements is strung on a single one of hundreds of nylon threads, creating a shimmering, cylindrical chamber that hums with concentrated energy. Elsewhere,
the large-scale painting of a girl-child is installed as a kind of altarpiece, (the above, clearly, is not an installation shop) with a wooden railing surround and shag carpet designed to suggest gradated steps into the shrine...
To enter into the space that Campbell has created here is to step out of "our" time and into hers, an imaginary space-time continuum that combines experience, memory and imagination into a seamless, magical environment which is at once very real in its physicality and yet, at the same time, clearly of the mind. The visitor is invited to find a path in the mind-space of a human being who is at the same time wholly other and wholly ourselves. It's an Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass experience that I found quite enchanting.
We saw a good deal more on our rounds--too much to mention here. The state of art in Los Angeles is still vital, despite a "market" in the doldrums. A good time, then, for art, if not for the comfort of artists. I do want to mention, though, as a lover of this medium, two painting shows that I found different and bracing. Both artists are playing in the wide-open area between representation and abstraction, inviting us to join them in exploring the infinite possibility of meaning and tantalizing us into the journey with gorgeous, restless surfaces and textures. The first, at Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, was a bravura display of work by the Bulgarian-born artist Iva Gueorguieva. Here's one of hers called...
... "After The Boy Takes Everything", 2008, in crylic, oil stick, casein and collage on clayboard. It's a big painting, 45 x 50 inches, chock-a-block with activity and colorful play. The figure of the boy emerges clearly as the central image, and what goes on behind--as in many of these paintings--is somewhere between apocalypse and science fiction fantasy, nightmare and dreamscape. Along with the sheer virtuosity of paint, here's plenty of humor here, and oddly assorted narrative threads, if you look for them. An adventure for both mind and eye.
The second painter, at Thomas Solomon Gallery in Chinatown, is Brad Eberhard. Here's a big painting of his...
...entitled "UN Interpreter", 2009, oil on canvas over panel, 36 x 48 inches. It's a fine example of the way in which Eberhard uses color to divide up the surface of the canvas, creating images that, here, refer to the flags of many imagined nations and, overall, of the globe itself. I love the historical reference to Paul Klee, that Swiss painter of the early 20th century whose whimsical-seeming paintings held the bite of irony and the embrace of the universe in small. Read this one, if you will, as a vision of harmony in a world that too often lacks it.
And then there's our friend Kim McCarty, whose opening at Kim Light Gallery we attended Friday night. In her recent work, Kim has been using the difficult medium of watercolor to evoke images of children, male and female, on the cusp of blossoming into adolescence. They are risky, too--always flirting with the onset of sexuality. The children she paints are naked, vulnerable, open to exploitation and yet, importantly, manage to assert their innocence. They run the risk of provoking the viewer's inappropriate prurience, and at the same time ask us to think about our vulnerability, as children, to the adult world.
I was happy to see that Kim is also opening a new path for herself, in applying the same watercolor techniques to plants and flowers. Here's one of her irises:
The presence of these paintings alongside those of many of those depicting chldren sheds a good deal of light upon the latter. The pictures, like the medium in which they are painted, are all about evanescence and entropy, the moment of stasis and the moment of change, a freezing of time that never seems quite frozen, still in flux. There is a tenderness to this work, a feeling of compassion that we share because we, too, are subject to the continuing, inevitable flow of change that we experience in our lives.
There would be more, if there were more time. For now, I need to get myself ready for that interview. Have a great week!
More of that exhibition later, or on my podcast later this month. From the Hammer, we drove on down to L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice to see "Poltergeist," a new show by the artist Rebecca Campbell. I have known her work chiefly as a painter until now: in the past, she has used often large canvases to recall moody scenes from a strict Mormon background that evoke all the inner emotional conflicts of childhood. Drawing on that same fertile resource in her current exhibition, she expands her medium to include the installation itself: the visitor crosses the threshold through a pair of wide front doors, brought in from the artist's childhood home in Utah and surrounded by a "wall" of individually painted "bricks"--each one a tiny painting in itself.
The "wall" has a nice title of its own: "I'll Huff and I'll Puff." The wolf at the door of childhood!
Inside, the visitor is greeted by the spreading branches of an actual tree, its trunk and limbs fiberglassed and covered with a layer of black velvet, its branches settles by a colony of charming bluebirds made from glass.
Nearby stands a floor-to-ceiling installation that looks at first sight like a hologram, home to a glittering swarm of golden bees.
Closer inspection reveals that each of these tiny sculptural elements is strung on a single one of hundreds of nylon threads, creating a shimmering, cylindrical chamber that hums with concentrated energy. Elsewhere,
the large-scale painting of a girl-child is installed as a kind of altarpiece, (the above, clearly, is not an installation shop) with a wooden railing surround and shag carpet designed to suggest gradated steps into the shrine...
To enter into the space that Campbell has created here is to step out of "our" time and into hers, an imaginary space-time continuum that combines experience, memory and imagination into a seamless, magical environment which is at once very real in its physicality and yet, at the same time, clearly of the mind. The visitor is invited to find a path in the mind-space of a human being who is at the same time wholly other and wholly ourselves. It's an Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass experience that I found quite enchanting.
We saw a good deal more on our rounds--too much to mention here. The state of art in Los Angeles is still vital, despite a "market" in the doldrums. A good time, then, for art, if not for the comfort of artists. I do want to mention, though, as a lover of this medium, two painting shows that I found different and bracing. Both artists are playing in the wide-open area between representation and abstraction, inviting us to join them in exploring the infinite possibility of meaning and tantalizing us into the journey with gorgeous, restless surfaces and textures. The first, at Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, was a bravura display of work by the Bulgarian-born artist Iva Gueorguieva. Here's one of hers called...
... "After The Boy Takes Everything", 2008, in crylic, oil stick, casein and collage on clayboard. It's a big painting, 45 x 50 inches, chock-a-block with activity and colorful play. The figure of the boy emerges clearly as the central image, and what goes on behind--as in many of these paintings--is somewhere between apocalypse and science fiction fantasy, nightmare and dreamscape. Along with the sheer virtuosity of paint, here's plenty of humor here, and oddly assorted narrative threads, if you look for them. An adventure for both mind and eye.
The second painter, at Thomas Solomon Gallery in Chinatown, is Brad Eberhard. Here's a big painting of his...
...entitled "UN Interpreter", 2009, oil on canvas over panel, 36 x 48 inches. It's a fine example of the way in which Eberhard uses color to divide up the surface of the canvas, creating images that, here, refer to the flags of many imagined nations and, overall, of the globe itself. I love the historical reference to Paul Klee, that Swiss painter of the early 20th century whose whimsical-seeming paintings held the bite of irony and the embrace of the universe in small. Read this one, if you will, as a vision of harmony in a world that too often lacks it.
And then there's our friend Kim McCarty, whose opening at Kim Light Gallery we attended Friday night. In her recent work, Kim has been using the difficult medium of watercolor to evoke images of children, male and female, on the cusp of blossoming into adolescence. They are risky, too--always flirting with the onset of sexuality. The children she paints are naked, vulnerable, open to exploitation and yet, importantly, manage to assert their innocence. They run the risk of provoking the viewer's inappropriate prurience, and at the same time ask us to think about our vulnerability, as children, to the adult world.
I was happy to see that Kim is also opening a new path for herself, in applying the same watercolor techniques to plants and flowers. Here's one of her irises:
The presence of these paintings alongside those of many of those depicting chldren sheds a good deal of light upon the latter. The pictures, like the medium in which they are painted, are all about evanescence and entropy, the moment of stasis and the moment of change, a freezing of time that never seems quite frozen, still in flux. There is a tenderness to this work, a feeling of compassion that we share because we, too, are subject to the continuing, inevitable flow of change that we experience in our lives.
There would be more, if there were more time. For now, I need to get myself ready for that interview. Have a great week!
Saturday, March 14, 2009
"Brawl Street": Cramer vs.... Stewart
Have you been watching the Jon Stewart showdown with CNBC this week? I confess I don't stay up that late, but I have been recording the episodes and catching them the next day. Like many others, I think, I was surprised to note the serious turn his "Daily Show" took, and particularly by his ability to take a serious topic and raise the serious questions it calls for. Why does it take a comedian to ask the kind of questions the median should have been asking all along?
Jim Cramer, who happened to be chosen to sit in Stewart's hot seat last night and had been the specific target of his attacks throughout the week, held up his end as best he could, with at least a show of humility and regret. The central theme of his defense of CNBC, as I understood it, was that he and others on the channel had been lied to. What he seemed to neither grant, nor particularly to understand, was that it's the media's job to subject what they've been told to some rigorous questioning and analysis, not just accept it on face value. Our current economic catastrophe was caused, surely, in good part, by the failure to ask questions, the failure to put the bland assertions of self-serving executives to the test.
So what self-respecting reporter in any other field would neglect to question the veracity of his or her sources? Sure, those Wall Street folks lied. They lied about everything, in order to maximize their obscene and eventually hollow profits. For years. The real question is this: how were they allowed to get away with their lies for so long, at a time when the media's "experts" had no excuse for not knowing that the nation's financial house was in increasing danger of collapse? We were as ill-served by the media as by our financial moguls; and by the Bush administration, which also lied to them--and through them, to us--with impunity on every front.
Thanks, guys. You have a lot to answer for, and I'm glad that someone is asking the relevant questions--even if it takes a comedian to do the asking.
Jim Cramer, who happened to be chosen to sit in Stewart's hot seat last night and had been the specific target of his attacks throughout the week, held up his end as best he could, with at least a show of humility and regret. The central theme of his defense of CNBC, as I understood it, was that he and others on the channel had been lied to. What he seemed to neither grant, nor particularly to understand, was that it's the media's job to subject what they've been told to some rigorous questioning and analysis, not just accept it on face value. Our current economic catastrophe was caused, surely, in good part, by the failure to ask questions, the failure to put the bland assertions of self-serving executives to the test.
So what self-respecting reporter in any other field would neglect to question the veracity of his or her sources? Sure, those Wall Street folks lied. They lied about everything, in order to maximize their obscene and eventually hollow profits. For years. The real question is this: how were they allowed to get away with their lies for so long, at a time when the media's "experts" had no excuse for not knowing that the nation's financial house was in increasing danger of collapse? We were as ill-served by the media as by our financial moguls; and by the Bush administration, which also lied to them--and through them, to us--with impunity on every front.
Thanks, guys. You have a lot to answer for, and I'm glad that someone is asking the relevant questions--even if it takes a comedian to do the asking.
Friday, March 13, 2009
"The Reader"
I went to see "The Reader" yesterday, expecting great things. I came away confused, disappointed and, yes, not a little angry. I was confused by the counter-intuitive historical time-line of the narrative; disappointed because I had been led by the film's wide recognition in the awards season--and by reviews--to expect something different, and better; and angry because... well, I'll get to that.
Let's start with the confusion. The little dates flashed at the bottom of the picture as time sequences changed were entirely inadequate to orient this particular viewer in the historical context. Maybe they worked for others. Not for me. The character at the center of the story, Hanna Schmitz--superbly played, I have to say, by Kate Winslett--is a woman who of her own free will, it seems, served as a guard in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The story's narrator, Michael Berg, an attorney in current time played by Ralph Fiennes, looks back with infinite sadness and regret on his seduction as a teenager by this woman, and their subsequent summer-long passionate affair--an affair that centered around Hanna's almost compulsive delight in hearing the lad read aloud to her from the classics he was studying at school.
My confusion resulted from my initial--mistaken--understanding that the affair had taken place before the war. It took a while, and a good deal of mental calculation as the movie progressed, to adjust to the realization that it must have taken place after the war. The confusion was compounded, I think, by the lack of any effort at this early juncture to establish the visual, physical, or even psychological context of the after-effects of war. (I myself lived in Germany for two years staring in 1959, and believe me those scars were everywhere apparent.) It became clear later in the film that Hanna had to have been suffering, at the time of her steamy affair, from the trauma of her wartime experience; at the time we witnessed it, though, she could simply have been a rather straight-laced, closed-in Nordic type as I supposed, and of which there are many in this world.
Okay, mea culpa, I didn't read the caption. Or I missed it. And it all worked out eventually. Hanna was born in 1922. She would have been 17 or so at the start of the war, perhaps 20 plus when she went to work at Auschwitz. Young for the job, I'd say, but there you go. Michael was 15 when the narrative begins at the time of the affair, in the late fifties, when Hanna would already have reached her middle 30s. He was a law student at the time of her arrest and trial in the late 1960s. So, yes, it does in fact work out, but only after a lot of mental arithmetic that, for me at least, proved a serious distraction.
All of which is purely technical stuff, of course--the mechanics of narrative--and could be considered a quibble, more my fault than the movie's. It was compounded, though, for me, by a much bigger, and related flaw: the film's moral obtuseness. In the scene that is the critical turning point of the plot, at Hanna's trial, along with five other camp guards, for the murder of three hundred of their charges (in the context of the much larger crime of participating in the act of genocide), Michael arrives at the sudden realization that she can neither read nor write, and her conviction for more serious responsibility than her co-defendants hangs upon her refusal to offer a sample of her writing. Rather than reveal her illiteracy, Hanna opts for the life sentence that she knows awaits her. Her former teenage lover, Michael, now a law student witnessing the trial, refrains from sharing his exculpating knowledge either with Hanna or, as would have been the simple moral imperative, with her attorney or the court.
Does he do this in order to avoid publicly humiliating her for her illiteracy? Or to assure her the worst punishment for her crimes? Michael comes off as something of a moral and emotional wimp, himself incapable of accepting responsibility in his life. Whatever his reasons, though, the film drops from this moment into an inexcusable moral abyss, suggesting that the shame for the monumental crime of the Holocaust is trumped by the shame for the educational lapse of not being able to read or write. Hanna is convicted for her participation in the former, certainly, but her punishment is for the latter.
The moral ambiguity of the court scene is compounded as the film progresses by its increasing concentration on the theme of literacy--following Michael in his guilt as he records and mails audiotapes to Hannah to relieve the misery of her prison sentence, and Hannah as she uses the recordings to teach herself, finally, to read. And the more the film becomes about literacy, the more uncomfortable I become. It's a betrayal of the six million victims of the Holocaust, as I see it, to allow that historical atrocity to become the vehicle or pretext for anything other than itself. Are we to think that Hannah's complicity--and the complicity of the vast majority of the German people at that unfortunate time in history--can be deflected into a minor personal failing of this kind?
This context aside, "The Reader" is a touching love story. It would have reached my own heart more convincingly had it addressed the effects of shame and guilt on a passionate personal relationship more directly, without deflection, and with greater honesty. I'm sure there are those who disagree with me about this movie. I'd love to hear from them.
Let's start with the confusion. The little dates flashed at the bottom of the picture as time sequences changed were entirely inadequate to orient this particular viewer in the historical context. Maybe they worked for others. Not for me. The character at the center of the story, Hanna Schmitz--superbly played, I have to say, by Kate Winslett--is a woman who of her own free will, it seems, served as a guard in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The story's narrator, Michael Berg, an attorney in current time played by Ralph Fiennes, looks back with infinite sadness and regret on his seduction as a teenager by this woman, and their subsequent summer-long passionate affair--an affair that centered around Hanna's almost compulsive delight in hearing the lad read aloud to her from the classics he was studying at school.
My confusion resulted from my initial--mistaken--understanding that the affair had taken place before the war. It took a while, and a good deal of mental calculation as the movie progressed, to adjust to the realization that it must have taken place after the war. The confusion was compounded, I think, by the lack of any effort at this early juncture to establish the visual, physical, or even psychological context of the after-effects of war. (I myself lived in Germany for two years staring in 1959, and believe me those scars were everywhere apparent.) It became clear later in the film that Hanna had to have been suffering, at the time of her steamy affair, from the trauma of her wartime experience; at the time we witnessed it, though, she could simply have been a rather straight-laced, closed-in Nordic type as I supposed, and of which there are many in this world.
Okay, mea culpa, I didn't read the caption. Or I missed it. And it all worked out eventually. Hanna was born in 1922. She would have been 17 or so at the start of the war, perhaps 20 plus when she went to work at Auschwitz. Young for the job, I'd say, but there you go. Michael was 15 when the narrative begins at the time of the affair, in the late fifties, when Hanna would already have reached her middle 30s. He was a law student at the time of her arrest and trial in the late 1960s. So, yes, it does in fact work out, but only after a lot of mental arithmetic that, for me at least, proved a serious distraction.
All of which is purely technical stuff, of course--the mechanics of narrative--and could be considered a quibble, more my fault than the movie's. It was compounded, though, for me, by a much bigger, and related flaw: the film's moral obtuseness. In the scene that is the critical turning point of the plot, at Hanna's trial, along with five other camp guards, for the murder of three hundred of their charges (in the context of the much larger crime of participating in the act of genocide), Michael arrives at the sudden realization that she can neither read nor write, and her conviction for more serious responsibility than her co-defendants hangs upon her refusal to offer a sample of her writing. Rather than reveal her illiteracy, Hanna opts for the life sentence that she knows awaits her. Her former teenage lover, Michael, now a law student witnessing the trial, refrains from sharing his exculpating knowledge either with Hanna or, as would have been the simple moral imperative, with her attorney or the court.
Does he do this in order to avoid publicly humiliating her for her illiteracy? Or to assure her the worst punishment for her crimes? Michael comes off as something of a moral and emotional wimp, himself incapable of accepting responsibility in his life. Whatever his reasons, though, the film drops from this moment into an inexcusable moral abyss, suggesting that the shame for the monumental crime of the Holocaust is trumped by the shame for the educational lapse of not being able to read or write. Hanna is convicted for her participation in the former, certainly, but her punishment is for the latter.
The moral ambiguity of the court scene is compounded as the film progresses by its increasing concentration on the theme of literacy--following Michael in his guilt as he records and mails audiotapes to Hannah to relieve the misery of her prison sentence, and Hannah as she uses the recordings to teach herself, finally, to read. And the more the film becomes about literacy, the more uncomfortable I become. It's a betrayal of the six million victims of the Holocaust, as I see it, to allow that historical atrocity to become the vehicle or pretext for anything other than itself. Are we to think that Hannah's complicity--and the complicity of the vast majority of the German people at that unfortunate time in history--can be deflected into a minor personal failing of this kind?
This context aside, "The Reader" is a touching love story. It would have reached my own heart more convincingly had it addressed the effects of shame and guilt on a passionate personal relationship more directly, without deflection, and with greater honesty. I'm sure there are those who disagree with me about this movie. I'd love to hear from them.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Alice Neel: The Movie
Alice Neel is one of those many artists who were sidelined, for too many years, by the great sweep of 20th century modernist abstraction and the "conceptualist" trend that followed in the last years of the century. It was a time when portrait painting was given short shrift, and Alice Neel was a portrait painter. She has, of course, since been rehabilitated in the eyes of the art cognoscenti--what little they know!--and is regarded with belated esteem for pictures that penetrate their subjects' heart and soul.
Now comes this documentary movie, Alice Neel, from her grandson Andrew, just recently made available on Netflix. It's alternately touching and infuriating--the latter, for me, at moments when it gets to be entirely too arty, reflecting on the process of the documentary itself more than on its subject. Get over that, and you'll enjoy this tribute to a feisty woman who cared little for anyone's opinion save her own.
It's clear from this story that Alice Neel lived to paint. Marriage, children, and the other contingencies of life seemed to happen along the way to the studio--a tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem that was cluttered with the results of her labors. Here her sitters sat. She painted them most often face-on, wide-eyed, unsmiling, stripped bare--whether clothed or naked. Neel shuns superficial physical beauty in favor of the deeper human qualities her studies reveal. Her people evince a peculiar, unpretentious nobility, a kind of stoic acceptance of what life has brought them by way of both body and social standing. If her painting seems rough, even at times unkind in its realism, it also reflects a profound compassion for her fellow human beings. Rooted in the expressionistic, leftist social realism of the pre-WWII period, when she started out, her art never wavers from its attention to the human predicament. Here's her picture of a young pregnant woman, a striking image that evokes all the joys, the anxieties, and the physical discomforts of that condition.
And here's a self-portrait that speaks eloquently of the aging process:
And the portrait of a fellow artist, Faith Ringgold:
The movie is the portrait of an artist, a mother, and a grandmother, and the picture it paints is a complex one. Neel emerges as an energetic, focused, uninhibitedly emotional woman, intellectually sharp, with a touch of lively cynicism in her view of human nature. Even in the year or so before her death, when the film was made, the juices flow. Asked about the appearance of multiple penises in one of her paintings, she responds exuberantly that it's not that she enjoys looking at them, it's that she wants to have them in her! She quite clearly loves the human body, loves nudity, loves the flesh. We see her, in a clip from a videotape made years earlier, delighting in the nudity of her grandchild--later the maker of THIS movie--as he delights in it himself, as children do, prancing around the studio while she paints him. You have to love this joyful part of her, thoroughly engaged in fleshiness of life and its rendering, through painting, into art.
The film does not flinch, though, from exploring the dark side of this woman whose art-making came first and foremost in her life and who seemed unable to form a stable and lasting relationship with the men who were attracted to her. The outcome of early broken marriages and separations, her family relationships are almost too byzantine to follow. Andrew's film offers acerbic sidebars with another grandchild, the daughter of a daughter Neel virtually abandoned as a young mother, allowing the child to return to the father's family in Cuba--and failing even to recognize, let alone acknowledge her at an art event later in life. Neel's two sons, Andrew's father and his half-brother, appear in the film as adults clearly suffering, each in his own way, from parental neglect and maternal narcissism. Neel was too busy in her devotion to her art to notice that her younger son was being subjected to physical abuse by his stepfather.
A complicated family life, then, and one that bequeathed these two sons with a mixture of bemused adulation for their mother and--in the latter case, particularly--bitterness and barely concealed anger. In the broader view, this is not just a film about AN artist, it's about the self-involvement that drives some artists--not all, by any means--in the conduct of their private lives, outside the studio. It can lead to behavior that is destructive to the point of cruelty. Those who take a more romantic view of the artist than I do will argue that this kind of singleness of purpose is the necessary path for a great artist. I recognize the trait, but do not myself subscribe to the notion of its necessity.
At any event, I'm glad to have seen this film, and glad to be reminded of the celebration of humanity that is the work of Alice Neel, the painter. In one of my own former lives, back in 1983, when I was Dean of the arts at a Southern California university, I was proud and pleased that our gallery pioneered a substantial exhibition of her work in the days work before the "art world" began to deem it acceptable again. We invited her out to our campus for a lecture, and were captivated by the astute observation and the delightful wit of a woman who was already in her eighties and as full of life, it seemed, as ever. She died, as it turned out, just one year later. After seeing the movie, I pulled out a copy of the catalogue from our art library shelves and found it dedicated "To Peter Clothier from Alice Neel '83." Quite a thrill!
Now comes this documentary movie, Alice Neel, from her grandson Andrew, just recently made available on Netflix. It's alternately touching and infuriating--the latter, for me, at moments when it gets to be entirely too arty, reflecting on the process of the documentary itself more than on its subject. Get over that, and you'll enjoy this tribute to a feisty woman who cared little for anyone's opinion save her own.
It's clear from this story that Alice Neel lived to paint. Marriage, children, and the other contingencies of life seemed to happen along the way to the studio--a tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem that was cluttered with the results of her labors. Here her sitters sat. She painted them most often face-on, wide-eyed, unsmiling, stripped bare--whether clothed or naked. Neel shuns superficial physical beauty in favor of the deeper human qualities her studies reveal. Her people evince a peculiar, unpretentious nobility, a kind of stoic acceptance of what life has brought them by way of both body and social standing. If her painting seems rough, even at times unkind in its realism, it also reflects a profound compassion for her fellow human beings. Rooted in the expressionistic, leftist social realism of the pre-WWII period, when she started out, her art never wavers from its attention to the human predicament. Here's her picture of a young pregnant woman, a striking image that evokes all the joys, the anxieties, and the physical discomforts of that condition.
And here's a self-portrait that speaks eloquently of the aging process:
And the portrait of a fellow artist, Faith Ringgold:
The movie is the portrait of an artist, a mother, and a grandmother, and the picture it paints is a complex one. Neel emerges as an energetic, focused, uninhibitedly emotional woman, intellectually sharp, with a touch of lively cynicism in her view of human nature. Even in the year or so before her death, when the film was made, the juices flow. Asked about the appearance of multiple penises in one of her paintings, she responds exuberantly that it's not that she enjoys looking at them, it's that she wants to have them in her! She quite clearly loves the human body, loves nudity, loves the flesh. We see her, in a clip from a videotape made years earlier, delighting in the nudity of her grandchild--later the maker of THIS movie--as he delights in it himself, as children do, prancing around the studio while she paints him. You have to love this joyful part of her, thoroughly engaged in fleshiness of life and its rendering, through painting, into art.
The film does not flinch, though, from exploring the dark side of this woman whose art-making came first and foremost in her life and who seemed unable to form a stable and lasting relationship with the men who were attracted to her. The outcome of early broken marriages and separations, her family relationships are almost too byzantine to follow. Andrew's film offers acerbic sidebars with another grandchild, the daughter of a daughter Neel virtually abandoned as a young mother, allowing the child to return to the father's family in Cuba--and failing even to recognize, let alone acknowledge her at an art event later in life. Neel's two sons, Andrew's father and his half-brother, appear in the film as adults clearly suffering, each in his own way, from parental neglect and maternal narcissism. Neel was too busy in her devotion to her art to notice that her younger son was being subjected to physical abuse by his stepfather.
A complicated family life, then, and one that bequeathed these two sons with a mixture of bemused adulation for their mother and--in the latter case, particularly--bitterness and barely concealed anger. In the broader view, this is not just a film about AN artist, it's about the self-involvement that drives some artists--not all, by any means--in the conduct of their private lives, outside the studio. It can lead to behavior that is destructive to the point of cruelty. Those who take a more romantic view of the artist than I do will argue that this kind of singleness of purpose is the necessary path for a great artist. I recognize the trait, but do not myself subscribe to the notion of its necessity.
At any event, I'm glad to have seen this film, and glad to be reminded of the celebration of humanity that is the work of Alice Neel, the painter. In one of my own former lives, back in 1983, when I was Dean of the arts at a Southern California university, I was proud and pleased that our gallery pioneered a substantial exhibition of her work in the days work before the "art world" began to deem it acceptable again. We invited her out to our campus for a lecture, and were captivated by the astute observation and the delightful wit of a woman who was already in her eighties and as full of life, it seemed, as ever. She died, as it turned out, just one year later. After seeing the movie, I pulled out a copy of the catalogue from our art library shelves and found it dedicated "To Peter Clothier from Alice Neel '83." Quite a thrill!
The Ungovernable
The current spectacle of outrage, skepticism and mistrust amongst Americans is a reminder of a theory I have shared, I know with many others, for quite some time: that we live in an increasingly ungovernable country and an increasingly ungovernable world. We face a frightening prognosis for our future.
It turns out that freedom--and its political cousin, democracy--have a distressing downside: everyone wants good government, but no one wants to be told what to do or how to do it. Turn on the television set today and you'll find countless talking heads--political pundits, news reporters, elected officials, financial geniuses like Warren Buffet--spouting their negative opinions on what the President and his associates are trying to get done, or their superior wisdom in the matter of how to solve the crisis. Everyone, in a word, is his or her own expert. No one is able to put aside his or her doubts and certainties and simply trust. Without trust, no one of us is open to being governed.
The result of panic, of course, is chaos and delusion. That's human. And panic seems like an almost reasonable response to what we see happening around us. But mistrust of government is a phenomenon that has been skillfully exploited in the past few decades to empower those who use government as the instrument to maximize their profits, with the result that those who now mistrust government the most are precisely those who would most benefit from wise rule. The self-promoting and opinionated Joe the Plumber has become both the icon and the exemplar of the ungovernable.
More frightening than what has happened in this country and its consequences for the fix in which we find ourselves today is what it all might mean for the future of our planet. Everywhere we look, we see on the one hand the advances of the Western concept of freedom and its exploitation by the powerful, and on the other, the exponential growth in the numbers of the ungovernable. We're creating a molotov cocktail in which the interests of the rich and powerful and those of the impoverished and disenfranchised are already clashing violently and promise, surely, eventually, to explode.
What we need, perhaps more than anything, is a new understanding of what freedom means, and what freedom can deliver. The freedom to enjoy every last material comfort can only be fulfilled by the ultimate exhaustion of our planet's resources. If we look to freedom from hunger, freedom from avoidable disease, freedom from want (not "what I want" but "what I need") and freedom from oppression, we find goals that are achievable and unselfish, because their fulfillment ennobles us all, as human beings, and diminishes no one.
What's needed is not a political revolution, not the violent, perhaps global upheaval that will result if we continue on our present course; what we need is rather a revolution in consciousness--in the way we think. On many fronts, I see the beginnings of such a revolution. I see it, in part, in the election of Barack Obama. I'm not quite so naive as to believe him to be some kind of Messiah who can save us magically from ourselves. But I'm convinced that he does represent a different kind of thinking, a different human and political consciousness. I only hope that we can all find a way to share in that new consciousness before it is too late. Perhaps, as a good friend of mine already proposes, we will need instead to lower the lifeboats.
It turns out that freedom--and its political cousin, democracy--have a distressing downside: everyone wants good government, but no one wants to be told what to do or how to do it. Turn on the television set today and you'll find countless talking heads--political pundits, news reporters, elected officials, financial geniuses like Warren Buffet--spouting their negative opinions on what the President and his associates are trying to get done, or their superior wisdom in the matter of how to solve the crisis. Everyone, in a word, is his or her own expert. No one is able to put aside his or her doubts and certainties and simply trust. Without trust, no one of us is open to being governed.
The result of panic, of course, is chaos and delusion. That's human. And panic seems like an almost reasonable response to what we see happening around us. But mistrust of government is a phenomenon that has been skillfully exploited in the past few decades to empower those who use government as the instrument to maximize their profits, with the result that those who now mistrust government the most are precisely those who would most benefit from wise rule. The self-promoting and opinionated Joe the Plumber has become both the icon and the exemplar of the ungovernable.
More frightening than what has happened in this country and its consequences for the fix in which we find ourselves today is what it all might mean for the future of our planet. Everywhere we look, we see on the one hand the advances of the Western concept of freedom and its exploitation by the powerful, and on the other, the exponential growth in the numbers of the ungovernable. We're creating a molotov cocktail in which the interests of the rich and powerful and those of the impoverished and disenfranchised are already clashing violently and promise, surely, eventually, to explode.
What we need, perhaps more than anything, is a new understanding of what freedom means, and what freedom can deliver. The freedom to enjoy every last material comfort can only be fulfilled by the ultimate exhaustion of our planet's resources. If we look to freedom from hunger, freedom from avoidable disease, freedom from want (not "what I want" but "what I need") and freedom from oppression, we find goals that are achievable and unselfish, because their fulfillment ennobles us all, as human beings, and diminishes no one.
What's needed is not a political revolution, not the violent, perhaps global upheaval that will result if we continue on our present course; what we need is rather a revolution in consciousness--in the way we think. On many fronts, I see the beginnings of such a revolution. I see it, in part, in the election of Barack Obama. I'm not quite so naive as to believe him to be some kind of Messiah who can save us magically from ourselves. But I'm convinced that he does represent a different kind of thinking, a different human and political consciousness. I only hope that we can all find a way to share in that new consciousness before it is too late. Perhaps, as a good friend of mine already proposes, we will need instead to lower the lifeboats.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Rape
We returned from the weekend to discover that the little lemon tree on the street side of our house had been hideously attacked. Its whole, generously ripening crop had been lopped off with shears with no regard for anything but the theft of the fruit. Poor tree. I would not wish to trivialize the hateful associations of the word "rape," but this did feel like a particularly cruel violation. I can only assume that some person had reached such a state of desperation that they were reduced to stealing lemons to sell for pennies apiece at a neighborhood street corner. (The thieves who steal the lemons on the garden side of our house are of the four-footed and bushy-tailed variety: squirrels. I have to say, hold it less against them than against the human kind.)
Rape, though... I was much moved by the story to which "Sixty Minutes" devoted two of its segments last night--an investigation into the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The woman at the heart of the story, Jennifer Thompson, had so convincingly identified a black suspect, Ronald Cotton, as her rapist that the jury sent him to jail for twenty years. She herself was genuinely convinced that her testimony was reliable; she had, after all, taken great pains to take note of the physical characteristics of her rapist even during the crime. She remained convinced even during a retrial, when the man who eventually turned out to be the real rapist stood accused, and Cotton was reconvicted.
It was DNA that eventually proved her wrong, after Cotton had spent eleven years in jail. Mortified by the error that had cost an innocent man so many years of his life, she arranged to meet him in a local church and was astounded by the grace with which he was able to forgive her. Since then, this blond, blond woman, the mother of her own family, and this extraordinary black man have become friends and colleagues, traveling together to forums where they hold forth on the seemingly easy mind-trap of mistaken identity. As shown in the television story, it's a remarkably touching friendship, and one that has managed to turn what was certainly an outrage into something of great value to our justice system.
No doubt there are countless others suffering in jail on the basis of evidence of good people whose eyes have literally deceived them. Our minds do so readily transform the illusion they create into concrete, indisputable reality; and, once done, the damage can be difficult, if not impossible to undo. So this turns out to be yet another cautionary tale, whose moral is to question all of our beliefs, perhaps especially those most deeply ingrained and most intractable; and never to mistake our inner conviction for external reality.
Rape, though... I was much moved by the story to which "Sixty Minutes" devoted two of its segments last night--an investigation into the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The woman at the heart of the story, Jennifer Thompson, had so convincingly identified a black suspect, Ronald Cotton, as her rapist that the jury sent him to jail for twenty years. She herself was genuinely convinced that her testimony was reliable; she had, after all, taken great pains to take note of the physical characteristics of her rapist even during the crime. She remained convinced even during a retrial, when the man who eventually turned out to be the real rapist stood accused, and Cotton was reconvicted.
It was DNA that eventually proved her wrong, after Cotton had spent eleven years in jail. Mortified by the error that had cost an innocent man so many years of his life, she arranged to meet him in a local church and was astounded by the grace with which he was able to forgive her. Since then, this blond, blond woman, the mother of her own family, and this extraordinary black man have become friends and colleagues, traveling together to forums where they hold forth on the seemingly easy mind-trap of mistaken identity. As shown in the television story, it's a remarkably touching friendship, and one that has managed to turn what was certainly an outrage into something of great value to our justice system.
No doubt there are countless others suffering in jail on the basis of evidence of good people whose eyes have literally deceived them. Our minds do so readily transform the illusion they create into concrete, indisputable reality; and, once done, the damage can be difficult, if not impossible to undo. So this turns out to be yet another cautionary tale, whose moral is to question all of our beliefs, perhaps especially those most deeply ingrained and most intractable; and never to mistake our inner conviction for external reality.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
In Which I Lose My Wallet...
There are, of course, many and much greater pains in the butt than losing a wallet, but losing a wallet ranks pretty damn high on the list when it happens to be yours.
It happened to me. Yesterday. In Laguna Beach.
It was Patriots' Day here, the day of the big annual parade. Ellie and I had errands to run in town, and decided that we'd get into town ahead of the festivities. In the past, we have joined the event with a group of "Patriots for Peace"--an admittedly somewhat straggly bunch, placed strategically at the ragged end of the parade. George the dog has accompanied us in the past, tail held high and waving proudly like a flag. This time around we were tired after (for me) that weekend's training in the mountains and a busy-ish week in town, and decided that we'd skip our patriotic duty.
We walked downtown with George and stopped at the Cafe Zinc, our usual haunt for a cup of coffee, and shared a dish of scrambled eggs with leeks and a well-toasted bagel. We made another stop at the organic food market to buy some odds and ends of groceries, then on to the hardware store where Ellie had a previous purchase to return. (George very disappointed here, because they usually have a little doggie treat at the check-out counter. Yesterday he was out of luck. No cookies.) We went on down the main drag and stopped at the drug store and a t-shirt shop. Then on down to the beach, where we'd promised George a good run with his ball. George is a big fan of the beach. Before hitting the sand, we paused at a bench on the boardwalk to put on his long-line leash, since he's not allowed to run free and the animal control cops are much too fond of handing out tickets to miscreants. Then walked back along the beach for a half-mile stretch and back up the hill to the cottage.
It was here that I discovered that my wallet had slipped out of my jacket pocket somewhere along our route.
Oh, misery! It had a hundred dollars in cash, along with my credit card, my debit card, my driver's license, my Kaiser health coverage card, my press ID card, and all those other items that belong in a person's wallet.
I called the police. I called the lifeguard station. I called each of the shops where we had stopped along the way. No luck. I called the credit card company to put a hold on the Visa card. I went online to find out about driver's license replacement. A little later, the two of us drove down--sans George--to retrace our steps. Thinking the most likely place to have lost the wallet was the boardwalk, where I had taken off my jacket and stuffed it into one of the shopping bags, we returned to our bench. The area teems with the homeless and the hungry, and I worried that if one had found the wallet, he could easily have slipped the bills out and tossed the rest into one of the many, many trash bins along the way. He would have been welcome to the money...
There were a bunch of these guys near the bench where we had sat, so I went to ask if anyone might by any chance have seen my wallet. They were very sweet, a little tipsy, wanted to be helpful. But no result. We walked on to the life guard station. No luck. Back to the hardware store. Nope. In desperation, we decided that gelato was the only possible consolation and stopped at the ice cream parlor. Ellie had healthy yogurt. I had one scoop of mint chocolate and one scoop of pistachio. And we drove back home.
Now, next week, I have a lot of dreary chores ahead of me. Some sympathy, please... Though I don't deserve it, for my stupidity and inattention!
NEWS UPDATE: Blogger's Wallet Recovered!
After a day of imagining the horrors involved in replacing the contents of my wallet, I checked in with the voice mail at my Los Angeles office in the later afternoon. A message from American Express security. They had received a call from a man to tell the credit card company he had the missing item intact. He left a name and a telephone number. A fellow Peter. I called. I left a message on his voice mail. He called back at eight. He told me this was his second wallet recovery in as many months. I told him he must have good wallet karma. We arranged for a meet in ten minutes' time outside the Laguna Beach hardware store. He would be wearing a white sweat shirt...
I drove down. From his voice and his German-origin last name, I had imagined someone different. Peter turned out to be a very dark-skinned Latino, beaming with pleasure at having located the owner of his find. I gave him a big, spontaneous, genuinely-felt hug. I offered to buy him a nice dinner with some of the cash he had saved me, and he accepted graciously, at my insistence. We parted ways, and I drove back home with a song in my heart and a wallet in my pocket. Along with a little less than a hundred dollars in cash, my credit card, my debit card, my driver's license, my Kaiser health coverage card, my press ID card, and all those other items that belong in a person's wallet... Thanks to Peter.
The lesson from all this? Pay attention. Breathe. Be patient with loss; don't grieve your losses before you know they're real. Be grateful for blessings, great and small. Believe that there are good-hearted people everywhere. Pay attention. And breathe.
It happened to me. Yesterday. In Laguna Beach.
It was Patriots' Day here, the day of the big annual parade. Ellie and I had errands to run in town, and decided that we'd get into town ahead of the festivities. In the past, we have joined the event with a group of "Patriots for Peace"--an admittedly somewhat straggly bunch, placed strategically at the ragged end of the parade. George the dog has accompanied us in the past, tail held high and waving proudly like a flag. This time around we were tired after (for me) that weekend's training in the mountains and a busy-ish week in town, and decided that we'd skip our patriotic duty.
We walked downtown with George and stopped at the Cafe Zinc, our usual haunt for a cup of coffee, and shared a dish of scrambled eggs with leeks and a well-toasted bagel. We made another stop at the organic food market to buy some odds and ends of groceries, then on to the hardware store where Ellie had a previous purchase to return. (George very disappointed here, because they usually have a little doggie treat at the check-out counter. Yesterday he was out of luck. No cookies.) We went on down the main drag and stopped at the drug store and a t-shirt shop. Then on down to the beach, where we'd promised George a good run with his ball. George is a big fan of the beach. Before hitting the sand, we paused at a bench on the boardwalk to put on his long-line leash, since he's not allowed to run free and the animal control cops are much too fond of handing out tickets to miscreants. Then walked back along the beach for a half-mile stretch and back up the hill to the cottage.
It was here that I discovered that my wallet had slipped out of my jacket pocket somewhere along our route.
Oh, misery! It had a hundred dollars in cash, along with my credit card, my debit card, my driver's license, my Kaiser health coverage card, my press ID card, and all those other items that belong in a person's wallet.
I called the police. I called the lifeguard station. I called each of the shops where we had stopped along the way. No luck. I called the credit card company to put a hold on the Visa card. I went online to find out about driver's license replacement. A little later, the two of us drove down--sans George--to retrace our steps. Thinking the most likely place to have lost the wallet was the boardwalk, where I had taken off my jacket and stuffed it into one of the shopping bags, we returned to our bench. The area teems with the homeless and the hungry, and I worried that if one had found the wallet, he could easily have slipped the bills out and tossed the rest into one of the many, many trash bins along the way. He would have been welcome to the money...
There were a bunch of these guys near the bench where we had sat, so I went to ask if anyone might by any chance have seen my wallet. They were very sweet, a little tipsy, wanted to be helpful. But no result. We walked on to the life guard station. No luck. Back to the hardware store. Nope. In desperation, we decided that gelato was the only possible consolation and stopped at the ice cream parlor. Ellie had healthy yogurt. I had one scoop of mint chocolate and one scoop of pistachio. And we drove back home.
Now, next week, I have a lot of dreary chores ahead of me. Some sympathy, please... Though I don't deserve it, for my stupidity and inattention!
NEWS UPDATE: Blogger's Wallet Recovered!
After a day of imagining the horrors involved in replacing the contents of my wallet, I checked in with the voice mail at my Los Angeles office in the later afternoon. A message from American Express security. They had received a call from a man to tell the credit card company he had the missing item intact. He left a name and a telephone number. A fellow Peter. I called. I left a message on his voice mail. He called back at eight. He told me this was his second wallet recovery in as many months. I told him he must have good wallet karma. We arranged for a meet in ten minutes' time outside the Laguna Beach hardware store. He would be wearing a white sweat shirt...
I drove down. From his voice and his German-origin last name, I had imagined someone different. Peter turned out to be a very dark-skinned Latino, beaming with pleasure at having located the owner of his find. I gave him a big, spontaneous, genuinely-felt hug. I offered to buy him a nice dinner with some of the cash he had saved me, and he accepted graciously, at my insistence. We parted ways, and I drove back home with a song in my heart and a wallet in my pocket. Along with a little less than a hundred dollars in cash, my credit card, my debit card, my driver's license, my Kaiser health coverage card, my press ID card, and all those other items that belong in a person's wallet... Thanks to Peter.
The lesson from all this? Pay attention. Breathe. Be patient with loss; don't grieve your losses before you know they're real. Be grateful for blessings, great and small. Believe that there are good-hearted people everywhere. Pay attention. And breathe.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
A Pocket Watch, A Bowl...
... a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a pair of sandals...
How sadly ironic that these meager, humble possessions of one of the truly great men of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi, should end up on a Madison Avenue auction block! How much more ironic that these unprepossessing items should fetch $1.8 million! You can read all about it in yesterday's New York Times.
Okay, so these infinitely precious, intrinsically worthless items will be returned to India, where they rightfully belong as a part of the national heritage; they will hopefully be available to the people from whom Gandhi emerged to show an example to the world of the power of non-violence and peace. And okay, so the man who collected them, the filmmaker and peace activist James Otis, intended only that the proceeds from the sale go to further his cause and his commitment to the betterment of the world; and, once the brouhaha broke out, once the media caught wind of the sale, attempted to withdraw the items in order to avoid the controversy that suddenly attached to them...
Still and all, surrounded by the spectacularly dismal news of the day, the four pictures of these minimal possessions on the front page of one of the world's leading newspapers are a poignant reminder of how little our species has managed to learn from one of its great teachers. We revere the memory of the man as we revere the memory of our prophets, with hypocritical admiration. In their lives, they did the work that we signally fail to do in our own: they loved, they sacrificed, they embodied wisdom and compassion. Perhaps we think, collectively, that it is enough for them to have done it for us, that having allowed them to make the sacrifice of need and greed, it is no longer necessary for us to do the same.
Enough, then, for one man: a pocket watch to remind him of the passage of time, a bowl for sustenance, a pair of eyeglasses through which to see everything in the world, and everything beyond, and a pair of sandals on which to walk through life. Enough.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Paradise
Just a brief note this morning. Since I was gone last weekend, this was the first day to wake up in our little cottage in Laguna Beach for two long weeks. It's glorious here. The (redone) cottage itself so welcoming, the little back patio so beautiful in the morning sunlight, the birds in full, joyous song, the water glimmering down the Buddha's face in our Buddha fountain...
(CLICK ON PICTURES FOR A CLOSER VIEW OF PARADISE!)
With all the fear and chaos everywhere around us, we are privileged and blessed indeed to have this special Eden to escape to!
Passing on those feelings of peaceful joy to each of you herewith, in the hope that you're ready to receive them... Have a truly pleasant and peaceful weekend!
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Male Energy: Two Movies
I was quite surprised to receive just a single comment on my last entry, even though I had no fewer than usual readers. Hmmm. I had imagined this topic would arouse more interest. And here I am, back with it today.
I have recently played two movies, both from Netflix. Hancock, starring Will Smith and Charlize Theron, is one of those superhero movies with a twist: this one, that the hero in question starts out as a drunken lout, a lost soul whose superpowers spill out in spectacularly inappropriate results: to halt a single car chase involves shattered buildings, crumbled freeways, several dozen car wrecks, crowds of infuriated passers-by. He is, in a word used even by those he saves, an "asshole." Read it, perhaps as the myth of male energy gone awry, as it does so often in the world, wildly excessive, unfocused, poorly targeted and ineffective, even if well-intentioned. Hancock is living the nightmare of his own shadow, addicted, in denial, unaccountable, unavailable to those close to him, and disconnected from the results of his actions.
To satisfy the mythic necessity, Hancock finds salvation in being brought to recognize his vulnerability and acknowledge the power of the feminine principle... Don't ask. Be it readily admitted that this is a pretty silly movie, one that appealed to the little boy in me, as I presume it appealed to little boys everywhere--including the grown-up ones. It will certainly not appeal to anyone who finds the spectacle of car crashes, gunfire and explosions distasteful. If I were a better Buddhist, I might be more disapproving, but the truth of the matter is that I see all this as pure visual fantasy whose effect is much like that of a comic book, so far from the real world as to be (to me personally) innocuous in its absurdity. My wife, I hasten to add, disagrees.
Peaceful Warrior errs, for me, in precisely the opposite direction. Based on The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, the acclaimed book by Dan Millman, it is certainly well-intentioned, and Millman's story is compelling and inspirational. In "real life" a near Olympic-level gymnast, he suffered severe leg injuries in a self-inflicted motorcycle accident and was predicted never to be able to return to his beloved sport. That he did, the story goes, was thanks to the intervention of a (perhaps) mythical guide and spiritual teacher whose wisdom transformed his life from arrogant, self-involved youth to a new maturity and spirit of service.
The problem with the movie is not the story so much as its script, full of the kind of sententious wisdom that sounds trite, sometimes even laughable, when delivered with such a pitiless aura of importance. Nick Nolte, the sage, comes off as a blend between Mr. Miyage (in "The Karate Kid") and Yoda--though admittedly a slightly taller version than either of those two worthies. I have no quarrel at all with the fundamental truth of the movie's (and Millman's) message: "throw out the trash" that clutters the head, as the Nick Nolte character all too frequently insists, and allow yourself to be guided by the inner truth of the heart. How is it that this wisdom, when given verbal expression in the vernacular of today's brash world, can sound so very hackneyed and inauthentic? Perhaps, I have to remind myself, it's just my intellectually critical self raising its own insistent "head." I found myself resistant to what felt more like lecture than good story.
Two visions of masculine energy, then, embodied in two very different characters--and yet both attempting to show how that energy, even if once badly misdirected, can be transformed when channelled into a creative sense of mission and purpose. I did not regret the time I spent with either movie, and found it ineresting that they came to me--no accidents--to coincide with my weekend in the mountains.
I have recently played two movies, both from Netflix. Hancock, starring Will Smith and Charlize Theron, is one of those superhero movies with a twist: this one, that the hero in question starts out as a drunken lout, a lost soul whose superpowers spill out in spectacularly inappropriate results: to halt a single car chase involves shattered buildings, crumbled freeways, several dozen car wrecks, crowds of infuriated passers-by. He is, in a word used even by those he saves, an "asshole." Read it, perhaps as the myth of male energy gone awry, as it does so often in the world, wildly excessive, unfocused, poorly targeted and ineffective, even if well-intentioned. Hancock is living the nightmare of his own shadow, addicted, in denial, unaccountable, unavailable to those close to him, and disconnected from the results of his actions.
To satisfy the mythic necessity, Hancock finds salvation in being brought to recognize his vulnerability and acknowledge the power of the feminine principle... Don't ask. Be it readily admitted that this is a pretty silly movie, one that appealed to the little boy in me, as I presume it appealed to little boys everywhere--including the grown-up ones. It will certainly not appeal to anyone who finds the spectacle of car crashes, gunfire and explosions distasteful. If I were a better Buddhist, I might be more disapproving, but the truth of the matter is that I see all this as pure visual fantasy whose effect is much like that of a comic book, so far from the real world as to be (to me personally) innocuous in its absurdity. My wife, I hasten to add, disagrees.
Peaceful Warrior errs, for me, in precisely the opposite direction. Based on The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, the acclaimed book by Dan Millman, it is certainly well-intentioned, and Millman's story is compelling and inspirational. In "real life" a near Olympic-level gymnast, he suffered severe leg injuries in a self-inflicted motorcycle accident and was predicted never to be able to return to his beloved sport. That he did, the story goes, was thanks to the intervention of a (perhaps) mythical guide and spiritual teacher whose wisdom transformed his life from arrogant, self-involved youth to a new maturity and spirit of service.
The problem with the movie is not the story so much as its script, full of the kind of sententious wisdom that sounds trite, sometimes even laughable, when delivered with such a pitiless aura of importance. Nick Nolte, the sage, comes off as a blend between Mr. Miyage (in "The Karate Kid") and Yoda--though admittedly a slightly taller version than either of those two worthies. I have no quarrel at all with the fundamental truth of the movie's (and Millman's) message: "throw out the trash" that clutters the head, as the Nick Nolte character all too frequently insists, and allow yourself to be guided by the inner truth of the heart. How is it that this wisdom, when given verbal expression in the vernacular of today's brash world, can sound so very hackneyed and inauthentic? Perhaps, I have to remind myself, it's just my intellectually critical self raising its own insistent "head." I found myself resistant to what felt more like lecture than good story.
Two visions of masculine energy, then, embodied in two very different characters--and yet both attempting to show how that energy, even if once badly misdirected, can be transformed when channelled into a creative sense of mission and purpose. I did not regret the time I spent with either movie, and found it ineresting that they came to me--no accidents--to coincide with my weekend in the mountains.
Monday, March 2, 2009
A Weekend Adventure
Okay, I think it's true to say that men's training weekends have come in for a lot of misinformed rumors and a good bit of nervous mockery in recent years--particularly amongst those who might have reason to fear them the most. I'll tell you upfront that this one, the New Warrior Training Adventure, when I first experienced it in 1992, was a life-saver for me.
I had by then developed, over the years, a huge amount of self-protective armor which served only to cut me off from those I loved the most, not to mention the rest of the world. I was pretty much unreachable, at least at the level of basic human feeling. Like many men, I had learned that it was not safe to trust anything much in the way of emotions, let alone expose myself to the risk of actually sharing them with anyone else. When I first heard about the NWTA, though, I was in a barrel of emotional trouble in my life with no way of knowing how to extricate myself from it. Its title was enough to provoke my own intellectual ridicule and resistance. "Warriors"? What an obnoxious concept. "Adventure"? Please, we're adults, aren't we?
And yet the day after I first heard about it, I signed up and sent my money in. I don't know why. Call it an instinct that somehow superseded every other instinct in my body. I was not merely skeptical, I was petrified. But I showed up. I showed up, as one friend later described it, shrink-wrapped. And I emerged, if not a totally new man, at least a man who was open to looking at his life with emotional honesty and integrity.
Since then, I have served on staff for more than twenty weekends. I am privileged to be thought of as a senior staffer at this point, and to provide some significant part of the eldership our organization honors. I take enormous pleasure and pride in the response I get from men whom I myself honor enormously, and respect.
That said, as I think I have mentioned earlier in these pages, I have been on a kind of sabbatical from the weekends for the past couple of years and more. To be back, after this long hiatus, and in a position of real responsibility, was a challenge only intensified by a particularly challenging weekend leadership team.
And as is usually the case, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward. The location, in the mountains up behind Santa Barbara, was a gift of nature, beautiful and serene. (On Sunday morning, as I was leading a particularly... well, spiritual event, a half dozen red-headed woodpeckers were playing happily among the pine trees up ahead of me.) The staff men, thirty or more of them, were magnificent, fiercely present, challenging, compassionate. And the men who were there to experience the weekend for the first time came willing to put in the hard work--emotional, intellectual, physical--that we asked of them. On their way back home, they were eager to say that they got as much, if not more than they had bargained for. I myself see the weekend as a meticulously planned and passionately enacted piece of participatory theater, in which a man is invited--as in all good theater--to travel down into the murky depths of his soul, and to emerge with whatever gold he finds there.
Too many of us men, in today's troubled world, have failed to grow out of being little boys. We boss and strut and bully and control to hide our insecurities, we addict ourselves to booze or women or work to hide our fears of being seen for who we are. Too often we refuse to see ourselves and too often we deny accountability for our actions. Too often we carry around huge shadows without recognizing how our shadows can control us and damage those around us. We can, mindlessly, cause endless anguish for ourselves, the women we love, our families. I think of our (thankfully!) past president and see the dire, worldwide damage caused by one ungrown little boy.
And yet we are good people, we men, I promise you. We are inspired by mission, a sense of purpose, and a vision. We are powerful, each in our own way. We are capable of great deeds, of noble generosity, of amazing acts of selflessness. We can be smart, and subtle in our thought. Underneath the armor all too many of us were encouraged to put on as boys, we are also capable of experiencing and sharing love. It's these qualities I see when I serve on staff at a New Warrior Training Adventure, and these qualities we invite other men to find in themselves. It's a truly inspirational experience.
(As a concluding note for the men among my readers--or for the women who love them--the NWTA is now offered in many locations in the US and Canada, as well as in Europe, South Africa and Australia. The umbrella organization, The Mankind Project, is international in scope, and more than 40,000 strong. Its mission is no less than to change the world, one man at a time. We need more good, well directed masculine energy in this world. I happen to believe that this is one way to inspire and release it. Feel free to contact me personally with questions.)
I had by then developed, over the years, a huge amount of self-protective armor which served only to cut me off from those I loved the most, not to mention the rest of the world. I was pretty much unreachable, at least at the level of basic human feeling. Like many men, I had learned that it was not safe to trust anything much in the way of emotions, let alone expose myself to the risk of actually sharing them with anyone else. When I first heard about the NWTA, though, I was in a barrel of emotional trouble in my life with no way of knowing how to extricate myself from it. Its title was enough to provoke my own intellectual ridicule and resistance. "Warriors"? What an obnoxious concept. "Adventure"? Please, we're adults, aren't we?
And yet the day after I first heard about it, I signed up and sent my money in. I don't know why. Call it an instinct that somehow superseded every other instinct in my body. I was not merely skeptical, I was petrified. But I showed up. I showed up, as one friend later described it, shrink-wrapped. And I emerged, if not a totally new man, at least a man who was open to looking at his life with emotional honesty and integrity.
Since then, I have served on staff for more than twenty weekends. I am privileged to be thought of as a senior staffer at this point, and to provide some significant part of the eldership our organization honors. I take enormous pleasure and pride in the response I get from men whom I myself honor enormously, and respect.
That said, as I think I have mentioned earlier in these pages, I have been on a kind of sabbatical from the weekends for the past couple of years and more. To be back, after this long hiatus, and in a position of real responsibility, was a challenge only intensified by a particularly challenging weekend leadership team.
And as is usually the case, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward. The location, in the mountains up behind Santa Barbara, was a gift of nature, beautiful and serene. (On Sunday morning, as I was leading a particularly... well, spiritual event, a half dozen red-headed woodpeckers were playing happily among the pine trees up ahead of me.) The staff men, thirty or more of them, were magnificent, fiercely present, challenging, compassionate. And the men who were there to experience the weekend for the first time came willing to put in the hard work--emotional, intellectual, physical--that we asked of them. On their way back home, they were eager to say that they got as much, if not more than they had bargained for. I myself see the weekend as a meticulously planned and passionately enacted piece of participatory theater, in which a man is invited--as in all good theater--to travel down into the murky depths of his soul, and to emerge with whatever gold he finds there.
Too many of us men, in today's troubled world, have failed to grow out of being little boys. We boss and strut and bully and control to hide our insecurities, we addict ourselves to booze or women or work to hide our fears of being seen for who we are. Too often we refuse to see ourselves and too often we deny accountability for our actions. Too often we carry around huge shadows without recognizing how our shadows can control us and damage those around us. We can, mindlessly, cause endless anguish for ourselves, the women we love, our families. I think of our (thankfully!) past president and see the dire, worldwide damage caused by one ungrown little boy.
And yet we are good people, we men, I promise you. We are inspired by mission, a sense of purpose, and a vision. We are powerful, each in our own way. We are capable of great deeds, of noble generosity, of amazing acts of selflessness. We can be smart, and subtle in our thought. Underneath the armor all too many of us were encouraged to put on as boys, we are also capable of experiencing and sharing love. It's these qualities I see when I serve on staff at a New Warrior Training Adventure, and these qualities we invite other men to find in themselves. It's a truly inspirational experience.
(As a concluding note for the men among my readers--or for the women who love them--the NWTA is now offered in many locations in the US and Canada, as well as in Europe, South Africa and Australia. The umbrella organization, The Mankind Project, is international in scope, and more than 40,000 strong. Its mission is no less than to change the world, one man at a time. We need more good, well directed masculine energy in this world. I happen to believe that this is one way to inspire and release it. Feel free to contact me personally with questions.)
Monday AM
Hello friends! I'm back. It's Monday morning, but I'm making believe it's Sunday. I need a day of rest. Tomorrow, I plan to tell you more about the events of the past few days. I hope you'll find time to come back soon...
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