Celebrating the creative spirit....

JournalNews column

It’s not been a good week for pacifists.

In the weeks and months leading up to this war, I’ve remained steadfast in my belief that this should not be happening. Our country should not be so aggressive as to pound another part of the world with such force, to expect armies to stand aside while our military bullies its way to the capitol. There’s an arrogance and a hypocrisy to our nation’s foreign policies that sickens me.

We tell our children that two wrongs don’t make a right, then send them off to battle to kill the evil dictators of the world and the innocents who get in the way. We should not have let the situation in the Middle East degenerate to the point where there is no other option than “shock and awe.”

My pacifism is not a political belief, but a moral one. It’s wrong to do violence. It’s wrong to kill. It’s far better for humankind to exercise its capacity for love and mercy than its bloodlust. I’m not against the Iraqi war. I’m against war.

Is this idealistic? You bet it is, but if we don’t have ideals of world peace, then we — all of us, not just Americans — have absolutely no hope of ever overcoming the part of us that insists on greed and violence.

I get a lot of e-mails and phone calls when I express my utopian desire that we should all just learn how to get along. Most of my correspondants thank me for having the courage to speak out for my faith and my beliefs, but there are those who ridicule me, even threaten me. I’ve been called “ignorant” and “a big fat nothing,” and I’ve received anonymous e-mails from people forwarding stories about journalists getting kidnapped and killed.

Being called ignorant doesn’t bother me a lot, except that I feel sorry for people who have been so hardened by the world that they feel like they can make those judgments about someone they don’t know.

It does bother me that people will call me “un-American” for speaking my mind, because I’m being very American, believing our founding fathers who wrote about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The love of “life” — and not just my own — is the foundation of my anti-war beliefs. Dropping bombs and shooting other people only deprives them of their life, so how does that kind of violence harmonize with being a good American?

“Liberty” is my right to express my beliefs, no matter how unrealistic — or ignorant — they may be. To those who say, “America: Love it or leave it,” I have to say: “America: Love it and work to make it better.”

I can only imagine that “the pursuit of happiness” is going to get more and more difficult while living in increasing fear of terrorists and other nations who do, indeed, hate America and Americans. “You just don’t understand evil,” one reader e-mailed me. Maybe I don’t, but I understand that we reap what we sow, that death and destruction leads to more death and destruction. We may take out Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq, but we’re also giving the next generation of terrorists another reason to hate America.

The only righteous way to fight evil is with love. I saw on CNN that each one of the Tomahawk missiles our military shot into Baghdad cost over a million dollars.

In my idealistic view, I can only imagine how much food a million dollars would buy. And I would rather have a young Iraqi growing up remembering how when he was hungry Americans gave him food than remembering how when he was oppressed, Americans killed his father.

Posted by /0/ at 12:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column

I didn’t know that looking inward would be such a workout.

More than 20 seekers turned out for the Hamilton Zen Center’s first introductory workshop on Saturday to receive instruction from Zen Master Dae Gak from the Furnace Mountain retreat, located in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The local Zen Center is a sort of grandchild of Furnace Mountain by way of the Cincinnati Zen Center, where Fairfield Township residents Dennis and Robin Kurlas have been practicing for the last 10 years.

I like that they call it “practicing.” It implies that you’ll never get it right. Even Master Dae Gak said that after practicing Zen for over 30 years that he still wonders why he’s doing it, what he really gets out of it.

Although Zen grows out of Buddhist traditions, it is a spiritual practice, not necessarily a religious one. It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, the practice of Zen can enhance a search of spiritual enlightenment, a way to get closer to your own personal Jesus. Indeed, its easy to come up with Biblical verse to support Zen practice. Psalm 46 is a good place to start: “Be still and know that I am God.”

I attended a seminar at a local church a few weekends ago where the speaker spent a great deal of time talking about how to hear the voice of God in the quiet moments of your life.

Until you know what the voice of God sounds like, you’ll never be able to hear it above the din and drone of everyday life, he said. It’s like trying to find a distant radio station late at night when the dial is full of static and the signals seem to shift frequencies.

Practicing Zen as a form of prayer helps hone in on the right frequency. But it’s not the kind of prayer where you complain to God or seek relief for yourself and others. Rather, it’s the kind of prayer where you learn to listen.

Indeed, Master Dae Gak’s philosophy is all about listening. On the Furnace Mountain website (www.furnacemountain.org), there’s a link that appears to be Dae Gak’s biography, but when you click on it, there’s a photo of him on a motorcycle and the only text is his variation of some Zen verse:

All beings cry out ...
Listen
All mistakes point the Way ...
Listen
Everything is Truth ...
Listen
Put aside self interest and help others.


Robin and Dennis told me that they felt the need to organize a local Zen center partly because they’ve met a lot of people in the area who want to know more about the practice, but don’t want to make regular trips to the Cincinnati Zen Center in Oakley.

But we live in dark and dangerous times and many people are searching for inner peace in order to deal with the violence and sadness we are constantly confronting.

“We get the feeling that a lot of people are searching right now,” Dennis said. “Times are changing and people are unsure about where to look for answers other than the escape of reality shows on television.

“Our culture always seems to be looking at the outside. Zen is a way of looking inward.”

Mostly by sitting still. And it does take practice. After six hours of sitting, my legs felt the strain the following day, the same kind of sweet ache you get from a healthy work-out, a reminder that you’ve made progress.

And I’ve learned there’s only one way to condition the muscles from suffering from such aches: Practice.

Posted by /0/ at 12:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column

There are a lot of reasons for our involvement in the Middle East, a lot of reasons why we are in conflict.

So while it’s not especially accurate to describe it as a religious conflict, there’s no denying the religious overtones of it all. Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden both see themselves as warriors for Islam, and though our nation tries to be more subtle about it it’s pretty clear than many Americans, including a lot of our leaders, believe that our conflict resonates with Biblical prophesy.

Although “Salam: Divine Revelations from the Actual God,” a new book by New York businessman Shyam D. Buxani, doesn’t address the Middle East conflicts directly, his revelations about the mysteries of the universe could have healing power if both sides would open up enough to consider them.

Buxani said that he wasn’t raised in any religion at all, but his family was very strict in its rituals of fasting and meditation for personal enlightenment.

Then around 1984, he’d reached a point of prayer and sacrifice that merited divine enlightenment and he began to write down his revelations in a notebook, which are now collected in his nearly 600-page book.

While some of the specific revelations may be subject to debate, Buxani said that his premise is irrefutable, that if we pray and sacrifice directly to what he calls “the Actual God,” without intercessors, intermediaries or visual images, only then we can attain spiritual enlightenment.

“If I tell you to worship a tree, you can dispute that, or someone who is incarnate of God, you can dispute that,” he said. “But if I tell you to worship the Actual God, you cannot dispute that.”
Although he never mentions any religion specifically, it’s easy enough to see the implications of his writing. The world’s religions, he said, are based on books that make worship restrictive and regressive rather than liberating and uplifting.

“Because of their restrictive beliefs, religions are forced to defend themselves,” he said. “They cannot alter their books because it is written within them that they cannot. It is very difficult to change people’s set thinking.”

While his revelations ultimately succumb to the very same weaknesses he describes in established religions — demanding, for instance, that unless you follow the practices described in his book, including rules about shaving and hair length, bad things will happen to your eternal soul — section 3.5.1.22, “Do Not Harm Anyone in the Name of Religion,” contains an interesting enlightenment on the subject of religious conflict.

He writes, “(D)o not vent your anger on any living prophet, saint or guru who preaches visual worship. While the teachings that person is trying to propagate may be so nasty, remember that in religion, the size of a prophet’s following is directly proportional to the sacrfices performed.

“If you were to bring any physical harm to that prophet, saint or guru, you would only be compounding the level of his sacrifices, and accordingly aiding him in spreading those evil teachings by increasing his following.”

That’s a revelation to be considered by both sides of the conflict, especially if one side feels the leaders of the other to be the embodiment of evil.

The attacks on the World Trade Center empowered our nation to wage a “war on terrorism,” so what will the consequences be when we make a martyr of Saddam Hussein. Who will be empowered then?

Posted by /0/ at 12:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column


I tried to be nonchalant about it, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for a middle-aged man sitting on a mall bench turning balloons into flowers.

This is a skill I picked up last fall in preparing for a church comedy sketch that called for me to make a balloon sculpture and get it all wrong. I figured in order to get it wrong, I ought to know a little about getting it right, so I bought a package of sculptural balloons and used the illustration on the package to figure out how to make a dog.

That was easy enough, so I set out to discover what else I could make. I explored a menagerie of balloon animals, but they never looked much like what they’re supposed to be. I liked the flowers, though. The colorful balloons and fanciful shapes seemed suited to floral designs, so I became a specialist in creating what I’ve come to call “clownflowers.”

It didn’t take long for me to discover the joy my clownflowers could bring to the world, and I started carrying a bag of balloons with me all the time. Children, especially, are drawn to clownflowers, but I’ve seen certifiable curmudgeons laugh out loud at the sight of a balloon flower bouquet.

We live in dangerous and fearful times, and I’ve come to believe that if a quarter’s worth of latex can generate a priceless amount of joy — for who can put a dollar figure on even a fleeting smile? — then I’ll gladly pay it a hundred times.

I won’t deny a selfish motive. I believe in karma, that what you reap what you sow, that if you plant a seed of joy, then bounties of joy will come back, and I need joy in my life. Who doesn’t?

Last Sunday afternoon, I put my clownflowers to a test.

I had taken my family to a nearby mall and got separated from them. I soon tired of window shopping and took a seat on a bench near a fountain to people-watch, one of my favorite pasttimes. When someone would make eye contact with me, they looked expectant somehow, as if wondering what I was doing there and wondering what was in it for them, as if they sensed I had something to offer.

So after a few minutes, I brought out my balloon bag, and even though I wasn’t putting on a show, it’s hard to be inconsipcuous while blowing up a 60-inch balloon. People look and wonder.

The eyes of the passers-by were no longer wanting, however, but amused.
I finished the first one just as a family came walking by with a little girl about 9 or 10 years old.

She didn’t seem happy about being there, trailing a few steps behind her mother and an older child. She eyed me suspiciously — the appropriate response — as I silently offered her the flower, then looked to her mother, who said, “Go ahead and take it if you want it.”

Her face brightened as took the flower, and I watched how her body language changed from sullen and mopey to cheerful and energized.

In the 45 minutes it took for my family to catch up with me, I unleashed a dozen or more clownflowers, each one carrying with it a prayer for joy. If no one happened to be walking by as I finished one, I put it in a planter by the fountain, brightening their plastic greenery with rubber flowers. But I never accumulated more than two or three, because as people would notice them and laugh, I’d say, “They’re free if you want one.” No one declined. One family gave me two bucks anyway, though the accumulation of money was not my objective and didn’t even cover the expense.

My mission was to spread joy and clownflowers, and I won.

Posted by /0/ at 12:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column


Before the spring of 1937, there was a fair every Monday in the Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain.

Shoppers and merchants packed the village square on the afternoon of April 26 that year when church bells started sounding alarms.

For the three hours and 15 minutes, the German Luftwaffe, in support of Francisco Franco’s Nationalist army involved in the Spanish Civil War, launched an attack on the surprised villagers.

More than 25 German bombers dumped 100,000 pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs until the Guernica dissolved into rubble. Villagers fled for cover, but fighter planes strafed machine gun fire upon them.

"They kept just going back and forth, sometimes in a long line, sometimes in close formation,” said one eye-witness. “It was as if they were practicing new moves."

Fires burned for three days, 70 percent of Guernica was destroyed and 1,600 civilians — of a population of 5,000 — were killed or wounded.

German spin doctors claimed the target was a bridge on the edge of town, chosen in order to cut off the fleeing troops that opposed Franco. But not a single hit was scored on the bridge — nor any other conventional targets such as the railway station and small-arms factory nearby.

History tells us that Hitler ordered the attack on Franco’s behalf to break Basque resistance to his Nationalist army, and that Guernica served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy.

Guernica was apparently destroyed for bombing practice.

Pablo Picasso, the greatest and most misunderstood modern artist, had already agreed to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the upcoming World’s Fair in Paris when word of Guernica’s bombing spread through Europe.

Inspired by newspaper photographs detailing the horror of the bombing, Picasso worked quickely and three months later delivered a mural — over 25 feet wide and 11 feet high — to the World’s Fair. He used familiar imagery — bulls, horses, melacholy women — but the nightmarish tableau of twisted forms and agonizing faces in stark black-and-white shapes were a clear indictment of the violence and brutality of war.

His mural — titled “Guernica” — succeeded as both an artistic masterpiece and an effective political statement. For months and years afterward, “Guernica” became a symbol of anti-war sentiment, first touring Europe for anti-fascist causes, then later in America to raise funds for victims of the Spanish Civil War. The Museum of Modern Art became its semi-permanent home, a location Picasso approved. “It will do the most good in America,” he said in 1956.

It has since become one of the most recognizable paintings of the modern era.

In 1981, “Guernica” went to Spain for the first time in honor of the late artist’s 100th birthday, and in 1985, the estate of Neslon D. Rockefeller donated a tapestry copy of “Guernica” to the United Nations, where it has since hung outside the Security Council’s chamber, a frequent backdrop for U.N. news reports and a fitting symbol of the ideals of the United Nations.

But on Feb. 5, 2003, U.N. officials covered up the reproduction of “Guernica” with flags and blue curtains so that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell could present the American case for war against Iraq.

Posted by /0/ at 12:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column


The difference between art and entertainment is this: Entertainment is for the moment, an escape from the rigors and frustrations of our daily lives. Art is for the ages, a commentary on the universal aspects of the rigors and frustrations of our daily lives.

There’s a lot of overlap there. Art can be entertaining — and needs to be in order to get the message across. Likewise, events presented purely as entertainment can be artistic, but there’s probably less pressure for cross-over in that direction since most of us will turn on the television when we wake up and even if we’re not directly basking in the glow of the tube, we let it play in the background of our lives the entire day.

One friend suggested that the reason the quality of television and movie programming seems to be so low these days is because screen time — big and little — are less precious than when there were only three channels broadcasting.

That is, with 150 channels clamoring for our attention, producers often turn to titillation or special interests to keep people from flipping so quickly through the channels.

That’s not to say that popular programming has nothing to say about our culture, but most of the time it’s done without the producers knowing just what kind of statement they make.

It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that “Trading Spaces” or “The Bachelorette” getting much air time in the year 4403.

But a play written some 2,400 years ago will enjoy a remarkable and unprecedented revival next week as 694 (and counting) readings of “Lysistrata” will take place across the country and around the world. Theater groups in 41 and all 50 U.S. states are participating in the mass reading.

“Lysistrata,” a comedy by Greek dramatist Aristophanes, tells the story of a group of women from opposing states who unite to end the Peloponnesian War.

After matronly stormtroopers take over the building where public funds are kept, the women rise to end the war by withholding sex from their mates until, desperate for intimacy, the men finally agree to lay down their swords and see their way to achieving diplomatic peace.

In many ways, “Lysistrata” does contain material specific to its time. Although we’re still not at a level of totally equality between the sexes, women of today certainly have more political clout than women of ancient Greece, who felt that using their sex was their only recourse — and the only way to get a man’s attention on the matter of war. So withholding sex from men may not be as effective of a protest in the modern era, said one man.

A mass reading of the play is better and will serve as a way to begin the dialogue: What can we do to stop our nation’s policy of “diplomacy by invasion”?

I’m aware of two nearby readings. At Miami University, students will conduct a reading 7:30 p.m. Monday in Studio 88, the black box theater in the basement of the Center for Performing Arts. A panel discussion with faculty from the classics, political science, theater, and women's studies departments will follow.

Readings will also take place 7:30 and 10 p.m. at the Monmouth Theatre in Newport, not only to raise awareness of the pending war in Iraq, but also to raise funds for two organizations, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) and MADRE, a women’s human rights organization.

Posted by /0/ at 12:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column


I had a lot of people give me the “Amen” from last week’s column when I lamented having over a hundred television channels, but never being able to find anything good to watch.
“Seems we had it better when there were only three or four channels to choose from,” said one person not so much older than me.
I remember those days, but I’m not so sure the programming was any better. We just weren’t so spoiled and television was still enough of a novelty and luxury that we weren’t as particular about what we watched.
I can look at most of the shows I grew up watching and see how hopelessly dated they were — and are.
There are a few exceptions. I still think “The Andy Griffith Show” is one of our entertainment industry’s finest accomplishments, a weekly show that was story-driven and that its humor arising from rich, solid characters, not snappy one-liners and put-downs as so much of the so-called situation comedies are today.
But over the weekend, I watched an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore” show with my kids, and even though it was a popular show during its day, it now seems pretty thin, the characters lacking depth and warmth. I saw a few minutes of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” too, one of the favorite shows of my youth, and couldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of the corny and infantile jokes.
I guess what bugs me most about the television industry today is that most programs seem to be based on some kind of formula or trend. Why have there been so many shows lately, for instance, with a family in which the father is a fat and/or dumb guy and the mother is smart and beautiful?
The technology has advanced so far to allow so much more potential than is being realized, but we can hope. What I hope for is that the cost of producing a documentary or narrative video and having it streamed into our homes on demand will go down enough to let anyone with a story to tell have a venue, just as anyone now with a computer can launch a web site on the Internet. The television producer of the future will only need a digital camera, a home computer and a group of willing and talented friends.
While it’s true that there will be a whole lot more garbage to wade through, it will also allow writers and directors to have their say without having to convince a TV executive that it will attract so many millions of viewers. It could bring a sense of artistry to the medium of television that it has never had.
But we really needn’t wait. I read a news story a few weeks ago about a guy in New York City who brings new meaning to the words “home theater.”
Every night, Ed Schmidt admits and audience into his Brooklyn apartment for a performance of “The Last Supper,” playing a variety of characters in a one-man show that presents a modern take on the New Testament, putting the Gospel story in the context of a murder mystery. He charges $25-$40 per person, including dinner of gourmet cheese appetizers, Belgian beer, home-cooked lamb stew and good wine.
That’s the kind of trend I’d like to see people pick up on, to have live theater right in your home. Or to take it a step further and create a home-invasion theater company, in which the cast comes to my house and puts on a show for me and my friends.
In a culture that values the enormity of things, we need to find ways to step back and personalize our experiences instead of relying on those who cater to the lowest common denominator.

Posted by /0/ at 12:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews Column

I find it astounding that in the current state of television technology, with so many channels to choose from and the opportunity to receive programs “on demand,” that I still find so many occasions to say, “There’s nothing on TV.”

I’m particularly quick to turn off the so-called “reality” programs, those shows that seem to want to make us forget about our own troubled, pathetic lives by showing us the troubled, pathetic lives of others.

After I mentioned “Joe Millionaire” in last week’s column, I had more than one person agree with me that it’s one of the worse concepts ever, representing everything that’s wrong with popular American culture. Then after conceding the point, they’d say, “I watched it just out of curiosity.”

Well, maybe. But like they say, “If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
No, I prefer my reality programming to really be real.

Even in the middle of my 14th season reviewing theater, even when I’m thinking that I’d rather be somewhere else because I don’t feel well or because I have so many other things to do, I can feel my pulse quicken when the house lights go down.

I get lost in the theater in a way that television can’t even approximate. Several years ago, for instance, I went to the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati intern production of a Sam Shepard play in a dance studio off of Short Vine in Cincinnati. It was the middle of June, at least 90 degrees outside and hotter inside, but the play took place in a bleak Wyoming winter. There was no set, just a door and a few wooden chairs, and when the characters spoke of a howling blizzard outside, it was over the sound of a fan struggling to create a breeze in the hot-box of studio.

Maybe it’s my own power of concentration, or maybe it was that the young actors were performing with the thought of their careers being on the line. Whatever. I believed, and I forgot about the heat, the sound of the traffic outside the studio, and was transported to rugged Wyoming, battling the severe elements, immersed in the lives of those characters, and six years later, the experience is vivid in my mind.

A year or two later I saw “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a classic American drama by Eugene O’Neill in a production by the Rising Phoenix Theatre Company in Middletown. Hamilton actor Dan Britt played the lead, James Tyrone, and because I couldn’t come to one of the scheduled performances, they allowed me into the final dress rehearsal, so I was the only spectator.

The play runs over four hours in three acts, living up to the title, and it’s draining for both the actors and the audience. But that worked to my advantage, because during the third act, with James Tyrone drinking and spilling his guts to his family, everything else went away and I was there with them, tired (but not drunk), watching this drama being played out not by characters in a play, but by people living the parts.

Even in the best of circumstances, television can’t touch those experiences. You can turn off the phone, turn off the lights, send the kids and the dog to the skating rink or neighbor’s house and still never achieve that state of transcendence, never become a part of the experience, will always be aware that you’re glaring at a two-dimensional glow.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one kind of reality programming, but you’ll never find it in your local cable listings.

Posted by /0/ at 12:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column

When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in 1861, he had no plans to interfere with the right of the Southern landholders to own slaves. But just two years later, without the consent of his cabinet and against the advice of his advisors, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although the proclamation didn’t really end slavery, it had a lot of positive political effects — discouraging European nations from joining the Southern cause, allowing the Union Army to recruit black soldiers. It also changed the focus of the Civil War. After the proclamation, it was no longer a war to preserve the Union; it became a war to free the slaves.

Consequently, many believe that it was the political benefits that convinced Lincoln to issue the document.

But speaking last week at the Hamilton Civil War Roundtable, local historian Thomas Stander posited another theory: That it was Lincoln’s spiritual growth and the convictions that came with it which gave him the courage to change his mind.

“It was through the benefit of his pure, homespun style of critical thinking that Lincoln realized that Thomas Jefferson’s dream, that all men are created equal, could be realized,” Stander said.

Stander pointed to the differences in tone between Lincoln’s inauguration speeches to illustrate the change in Lincoln’s character.

Track down the texts at www.bartleby.com and see. In the first inauguration address, Lincoln delivered more than 3,600 words. None of them are “God.” In fact, the whole speech is bogged down by its logical argument-making, legalistic tone, citing the Constitution of the United States as the guiding authority and exploring its ambiguities as it applied to the pending war.

The second inauguration speech is barely 700 words, nearly half of it exploring the paradox that both the Union and the Confederacy believed that God was on their side. He uses “God” six times and cites the Bible, not the Constitution.

Stander said there’s no evidence that Lincoln had a “born-again” experience, but that his spirituality evolved. I suspect that seeing this nation in a bloody war against itself, he began to wonder why God allowed such carnage on our battlefields, forcing him to question whether God was really on the Union side, and deciding He wasn’t.

Rather, Lincoln comes to the conclusion that the war just might well have been God’s retribution on this nation for perpetuating the sin of slavery, and could continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.”

Our current leaders would do well to consider this before we cast another stone in another war that — no matter what rhetoric gets spit out over it — is about a commercial commodity. Not slaves this time, but oil.

Our leaders seem to need a clearer picture of the complicated issues surrounding our nation’s involvement in the Middle East, and they need explore what evidence they have that God is on our side because I don’t see any.

On the contrary, I suspect that if God watches television, if He sees even the promotional spots for shows like “The Millionaire” or “Real World,” or if he catches a few minutes of the so-called religious programming (credit cards gladly accepted), He just might have some more divine retribution to dole out.

Posted by /0/ at 12:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

JournalNews column


I suppose that if I received an engraved invitation to join the game, I might be willing to participate in the next “Survivor” series.

But I can’t imagine waiting in line for five or six hours for a two-minute shot at impressing whatever intern or Assistant Production Assistant to the Assistant Producer is screening all the tapes now piled high in an undisclosed Los Angeles location.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to observe hundreds of hopefuls as they braved the queue for just such a shot, and for the most part, I wasn’t impressed.

No disrespect intended to the nice people that I interviewed there, but even those who came with props and costumes failed to show much creativity or enthusiasm for the possibility of getting on national television.

I fully understand the desire to be in the spotlight. I became a writer, I believe, because of the attention I got from the comic essays I wrote while still in elementary school. And ever since Pat Ganz pushed me out onto the Ross High School stage 30 years ago, I’ve not been able to shake off the urge to perform. Although being an arts reporter and critic severely restricts my opportunities, I still find an opportunity every now and then to make my way to the other side of the fourth wall or play a song on my guitar for anyone willing to listen.

My guess is that most of the several hundreds of people lined up at Newport on the Levee on Monday don’t have much show business experience. But since it’s such a challenge just to get through our day-to-day lives, most of those there believe that they could eat worms for a million dollars.

But daily life isn’t show business.

Several of the people I talked to ahead of their auditions said that they were just going to “wing it,” then got frustrated at themselves for forgetting something. Many of the interviews I witness lasted a mere 15 or 20 seconds: “Hello, my name is Joe Doe and you should put me on the show because I survived 30 years on an assembly line.” Or something equally lame.

Some folks did show up with a bit of entertaining schtick. Patricia Porter, a Cincinnati teacher, rode into her audition on a tricycle and brought a stuffed, singing gorilla. And to show how creative and resourceful she can be, an off-camera friend pelted her with balls and toys that Porter had made.

Stacey Stine of Hebron, Ky., brought in an empty toothpaste dispenser to show the producers how frugal she can be by cutting it open to get at the dregs of the tube.

“I also recycle Kleenex,” she said, and I’m glad she didn’t get into the details of that process.

“Survivor,” I suppose, is one of the more benign reality games, certainly with a lower sleaze factor than the dating-and-marrying competitions. I can imagine that it would be a lot of fun to participate a game like “Survivor,” although I can’t summon up the interest to watch others play.

But many of the reality game shows have a meanness about them that I find distasteful. I’ve talked to people who get a kick out of watching the judges insult and degrade the people who appear on the talent shows that are so the rage right now. While it’s true that they’ve lined up for their chance to be ridiculed, but there’s something rotten about preying upon a person’s dreams and then taking delight in shattering those dreams.

It’s all fun and games and entertainment for the masses — unless you’re the person whose dream is being shattered.

Posted by /0/ at 12:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Monday, October 21, 2002

JournalNews column

Sometimes it seems that we’re doing little more than running in place — always on the move, always involved, but apparently accomplishing little, waiting for something to happen.

A friend was trying to get me to help her make some sense of it recently over a tall sip of suds, and I remembered a passage from a book by Joseph Campbell, the late expert on mythology, in which he describes how rituals are sometimes designed to lull us into a higher state of awareness. He wrote, specifically, about primitive festivals lasting several days, a frenzy of dance and drum that would end in a sacrifice, sometimes a human sacrifice.

Campbell’s says that a ritual is the acting out of a myth. We can see it in some of our own religious practices, though our ceremonies rarely last more than a couple of hours and hardly ever involve human sacrifice — although taking marriage vows involves self-sacrifice for the sake of the union.

Consider how taking communion symbolically re-enacts Christ’s last meal to provoke a meditation on his resurrection. If we’re lucky and “in the moment,” we might achieve a moment of enlightenment.

Indeed, there’s a deep and enduring relationship between ritual and spritual awakening, and it’s hard to imagine having a moment of the latter without the former.

“Ritual” is, etymologically-speaking, embedded in “spritual.” “Spritual” comes from the Latin noun “spiritus,” or “breath.” “Ritual” comes from the Latin “ritus,” which means the same thing, a ceremony. Both words share the comes from the Greek for “to fit,” which is also the root word for “arithmetic.”

(Oddly enough, tracing it further back to the proto-Indo-European word “arete,” which means “virtue” or “qualilty,” we can also see the root emerge in our words “art” and “right.” Words are wondrous things, aren’t they?)

Consider how much of our lives are spent in routine activities, things we can do with our eyes closed and our minds on other things. If you’re like me, you can play the tape of the first hour of this morning and not be able to distinguish it from every other morning of your life. It sounds boring — and it is — but either in spite of the boredom or because of it, I get some of my best ideas in the most mundane situations, while showering or exercising, for instance.

A great novel on this topic is “Something Happened,” by Joseph Heller, his first book after the classic “Catch 22.” For several hundred pages, nothing happens, and the only thing keeping us interested is the promise of the title and the beautiful way Heller describes the fears, jealousies and joys of the narrator’s life.

And so, I tried to assure my friend, that perhaps by leading lives of quiet, mind-numbing routine, we’re simply preparing ourselves for some great spritual awakening, but we won’t know what that is unless we tend to the grind of maintaining a home and a family and a job and a church and a body and a car and so on.

If it seems as though we’re simply running a treadmill, then maybe we need to imagine ourselves in a giant hamster wheel generating enoromous amounts of energy to power something.

But what? That’s the key, and something for each of us to decide on our own.

Our lives are like great novels and myths in that the narrative itself is not as important as the meaning we derive from it.

Posted by /0/ at 12:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)