Month: May 2018

Living in the New York was always a dream of mine, and I have wanted it for so long, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want it. I know for sure that I wanted it when I was in the 11^th grade, and I feel it was something tart I wanted when I started theatre in the 9^th grade which puts me about 14. But, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t a goal. It was so much a goal that I have kept a New York quarter with me, in my pocket since 2001, when the Fed started issuing those quarters, as a daily reminder where I was going.

I believe in the power of a goal, because I am here now, and I seem to have etched out a life and family in this place. I might not be top of the heap, but I am in the heap.

And having a goal was something that my Grandma always kidded us about. “You gotta have goals. If not, then you have nothing to look forward to.” Rather sage grandmother wisdom. This phrase, and I can hear it coming out with that Midwestern accent of hers, has stuck with me. Usually, when things get down and I wonder what it is I am doing in life, her phrase will come back to me.

Get a goal, any goal, and work towards something. No matter what, the feeling of accomplishing something, even a little thing, is better than the feeling of having wasted a day.

Superhero movies used to be fun for me, and had an element of “Wow, they found a way to film the impossible…” but being that everything is a superhero movie… it has lost its magic as far as I’m concerned. They aren’t special, but now the expected norm.

And it feels like I am being force fed this steady film diet of blow up more stuff and violet conflict is the only answer.

Is this the American philosophy post 9/11?

That we can’t take care of ourselves and that someone or something with super powers, god like beings, are the only thing out there that can save us? There is something that doesn’t sit right with me as an American watching these movies. That what seems to make someone a great American is that we are all normal people from all over this world who band together to confront problems and solve them.

At least that’s my thought…

It reminds me of the use of the Western in movies. I feel almost all Westerns are about bring order to the world, either moral authority or physical dominance. The west was tamed, or the good guy wins, or what makes someone the good guy. It was the metaphor for a burgeoning nation that lacked a moral mythical foundation story, that has to exist after the Civil War, as that was the war that “solved” the original sin of the foundation of the country. And all of these stories are about normal people.

The Western came out of fashion by the 70’s and think was replaced by the super hero, but super heroes didn’t truly catch on till after 9/11.

What does that say about us?

There was a school shooting today…

Ten people have been killed as of writing this…

It has happened again in America…

And this only happens in America…

Over and over again…

I truly fear that we will soon become a society where everyone will know someone who has been affected by gun violence…

We are becoming desensitized to gun violence…

Not by movies, or tv, or video games, but because real people, humans we know in our daily lives, are being killed in our schools, streets, offices, and homes…

All using guns…

When I was high school, I had a humanities teacher, who passed on an insight that has stuck with me;

A true artist doesn’t create great work, a true artist is always creating work.

This idea is always bouncing around the back of my head. The older I get, and the more I learn about the artist that I respect, I find that all of them, pretty much, fall into the guidelines of the insight. True artists are always making something. Either it is a compulsion to create things, or like Tom Wolfe, who wrote 10 pages a day, no matter what. They create.

So… I have to create all the time then.

I have been trying to get better, not that I think I am in the “true artist” group, but I feel more artist than not…

Which gets me to this old debate that I have been having with myself, and other, since high school, what is an artist? And can I consider myself one?

“No one should call themselves an artist unless they are paid for it.” – I think that’s how the line goes in KAFKA.

I do think it is like acting, such as the hardest part is just committing to character, and leaving all pretense of yourself behind. If you want to call yourself an artist, then you just have to own it, right?

I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I think I’m giving a pep talk to myself now…

I read a heartbreaking blog this morning about a mother finding out that her little son has stopped liking things because the other boys at his school teased him about it. The mother spoke about how she cried for 10 minutes because the world of peer pressure has started for her son, and the unseen machine of societal control has started its march of shaping her boy into a different person.

It stung me, coz I was that little boy. I can still feel the looks from the other kids when I talked about liking learning and school, and reading, and musicals, and an endless list of things I loved but was made to feel inferior for liking them. It happens to everyone, and the pressure does take a toll. Somethings I fought to keep, others I discarded in shame… It happens to everyone.

I just don’t want it to happen to my daughter.

And that is never going to happen.

But I don’t want her to react the way I did. Folding, and not standing up for myself. That is the trick as a parent; making our children stronger than we were.