I LOVE TO PAINT

I love painting. It’s a very absorbing activity.

I was trained in Spain and in Northern California many years ago by a spanish master named Miguel Arguello, who changed my life by teaching me this, and other very useful things.

I studied intensively with him for about three years when I was at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also in Galicia, Spain. I found it very, very challenging, but I did persevere, and to this day I know what I’m doing with oils and charcoal, thanks to my dear friend Miguel.

Today, I paint very infrequently, but I can get a lot done very quickly when I need to. I’m addressing this subject today because I’m on the eve of completing a commission, and I have been enjoying the process very much.

I’ve also noticed that I have retained my ability and improved as a painter, even though I haven’t painted very much for years and years.

Like a lot of things, painting doesn’t really involve luck. I always try and pull in some luck, but the reality is, you have to know what you are doing; the luck sometimes will show up, but it generally isn’t anything to hang your hat on. You have to know the rules and understand the materials.

That’s what was so rough when I was in Spain, trying to learn how to paint. That, and actually seeing what was in front of me.

The funny thing is, painting is one of those things that even I wonder why anyone does it anymore.

The art of painting would obviously have never gone anywhere if the camera had been invented about five hundred years ago. Most of our modern image making now rightfully utilizes a camera, and painting has never been less necessary to modern society. Still, it holds a deathless fascination.

I told a good friend of mine that I was working on a painting, and I could hear the relief and contentment in his voice when he acknowledged me. I know what that feels like, when someone tells me, for instance, that they spent the day doing something artistic, for its own sake. You’re happy they are doing that.

I think that the very thought that somehow there is space and time to work on something as out of step with modern culture as an oil painting, just because it is fun or interesting to do, is one that gives people relief.

The action of painting, for me anyway, is rather rough on the body, since one has to stand for hours, move very little, keep the palette arm immobile and the attention nailed to the canvas a few feet a way for hours at a time. Sometimes my arm or wrist is asleep from the stiffness, or hurts like hell when I notice it. But I seldom do notice it, or for that matter, notice the passage of time.

The fastest way I can think of to make time whiz by like in an Olympic swim meet is to pick up a pencil and paper, or a palette and some brushes. Six hours go by in the blink of an eye. It’s very dramatic.

There is a secret benefit to the artist, to the activity of painting.

The secret benefit of painting is not much spoken of, and I only within the last ten years really noticed it, and it is this: when one has been painting for a few hours and then stops and looks around his environment, the colors of the world absolutely SING. Even dreary things have a hyper-real, vivid quality that they normally lack.

Everything and everybody gets really beautiful.

Why is that? My teacher Miguel smiled in agreement when I told him about it a few years ago. He might have painted mainly for that reason alone. One thing I never completely grasped from my studies with Miguel was why he did it, and devoted so much time to it. It wasn’t the money or the fame. It wasn’t even to have an effect on a viewer. Maybe it was to see the beauty in the world and enjoy it for its own sake.

I’m not sure why the act of painting produces this heightened perception. Dali said once, “Dali doesn’t take drugs; Dali IS the drug.”

Perhaps one, in studying and painting from reality, begins to grant more beauty to reality. As you see something in front of you, you have to “Be” it, to create it. You get into “Being” lots of objects, the fall of light, the textures and colors of the world. Then you stop painting, but you don’t stop granting life to what is in front of you.

After I clean my brushes at the end of a day of painting, I look around, and all the hard work I have done, (which might not even look very impressive on the canvas) results in a world that to me appears bright, orderly, colorful and full of life.

I enjoy painting. It may well be an obsolete practice, and paintings may well be a curiosity only to the public at large, without real purpose except to art dealers and museum curators, but something about a painting, and the experience of painting, is worth more than the finished piece. And it’s nice to know that that has value to the people around one, who are just happy to know that somewhere, someone has time and reason and opportunity to paint.

FIRESIGN THEATRE CONTINUES TO THRIVE

I have discovered, as I’m sure others have, that almost any dissonant sound, even a jackhammer, or that awful truck-in-reverse beeping, can be neutralized by harmonizing with it; one can simply sing away a lot of the discord by making use of the cacophony.

The same purpose, and much more, is served by the illustrious Firesign Theatre, whose show, Forward Into The Past I attended recently at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood.  Their cerebral/aural creations effectively neutralize the caterwauling and nonsensical noise of current society and, by blending, harmonizing and steering the babble into unimaginable departures from established motifs, they achieve symphonic, yet relentlessly silly, symbiosis.

To quote Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, “For this relief, much thanks.”

Unlike the majority in attendance I was not familiar with the Firesign oeuvre, but I found that my appreciation of  brilliant wordplay and radio show flights of fancy were preparation enough.  Any “in” jokes I could guess at, and enjoy quite satisfactorily from my position as an “Tirebiter” tyro.

What I enjoyed probably most of all is the youthful spirit of creation that these brilliant writer/comedians exhibit, even though they are all pushing 70.  (Actually, they weren’t pushing it, exactly, they just made it look so good, I wanted to run out and get some for myself.)

By means of just a simple stage, four mics, four performers, some prerecorded music and sound effects, the assembled Firesign devotees were taken on a trip,(somewhat different perhaps than earlier “trips” when the group’s 60’s trajectory began) far above this cruel universe which has rewarded fans with graying ponytails, spreading waistlines and feet requiring sensible shoes.  The laughter, which rolled out as steadily as a roll of court stenographer’s paper, was an acknowledgment of the necromancy of this group’s ability to (at least temporarily) free their fans from the shackles of their culture, using the iconography and vocabulary of that culture, simply by applying a twist, breaking into a slightly offbeat rhythm, or turning the sky inside out with their formidable imaginations.

I’ve become a fan and friend of the ingenious, generous and hilarious Phil Proctor, (seen our short on YouTube?) and it was to see him that I chiefly made it a point to attend Forward Into The Past, but the ensemble, which also includes Peter Bergman, Phil Austin and David Ossman was irresistible; I came away marveling at the way the four could be so individual, so bright-spark creative, yet so aligned and harmonious at the same time.  They have mastered so many vocal styles, and even have their way with Shakespeare in a devastatingly clever “undiscovered comedie”,  but the fact that they have maintained this unique relationship since the days when I was learning how to play tether ball at Wilbur Avenue school is perhaps the most amazing thing of all.

If you don’t know of them, you can remedy that easily by going to www.firesigntheatre.com, or better yet, see them live if they happen to beam themselves down to your town for a live performance.  Late as I am to the party, I plan to become a devoted fan, and be able to quote non-sequiturs from their beloved albums when they come around again.

Long may they bray!

Meskimen Classic Movies Clip #1

Tamra and I are big, BIG fans of classic films, and we watch TCM religiously.

Robert Osbourne is a terrific host, and whoever programs the movies is really doing it right; I’ve been introduced to hundreds of films that blew my mind, that I otherwise would have never seen.

I’ve always enjoyed good black and white films and the classic, unambiguous acting style of the actors and actresses that helped immortalize this amazing art form.

It is a great cultural gift to have these glimpses into the distant and recent past, a link to the speech patterns, manners, styles and habits of a few generations back.  Was 1936 a better time to be alive?  Well, it sure had a lot more style.  And people said what they meant, darn it all!

The voices of characters from these old movies, particularly the bit players, echo in my mind.  So it inspired me to get them out of my head, and perhaps into your ears.

Here’s my version, in audio form, of what I call MCM: Meskimen Classic Movies, and your host, Robert Yawnsmore, of a scene from my imagination called “Stoat Flu OUTBREAK!”  (The voices you hear in this clip are all mine and Tamra’s.)

Happy listening, and ask yourself… are you really getting enough Black and White in your film diet?

Birthday Message

The author looks forward at his next exciting chapter, with a quick glance back, or to the left, or down, or...

Call this essay, The Second Fifty.  Better yet, call it what it actually is for me; the NEXT Fifty.

September 10, 1959.  Do the numbers of the date of your birth look special and kind of magic to you?  Mine always do to me.

Fifty years ago, my mother gave birth to a premature little yellowish baby boy, jaundiced, feeble and squalling, at St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica, California.

From that time on I have been trying to use my voice to get people’s attention.

When you reach fifty, you tend to want to look back at your life.

But that’s inaccurate.

One doesn’t actually look back at one’s life.  There is no “Back”.  Everything important is right there in front of your face.  The good, the not so good, even the completely random and trivial.

I have it all to hand.

Looking at the previous fifty, I can tell you that I’ve been very fortunate, mainly because of all the wonderful people I’ve met and known.

That same mom that grew, warehoused and gave birth to my little pink body turned out to be about the best mom an artist like me could have had; a truly giving and tenderly appreciative person.

I didn’t know how rare that was until I was a lot older.

Whew!  Dodged that bullet!

That she actually became an international icon of modern mom-hood (1950’s style anyway) was a strange and disorienting coincidence…

I’m fortunate for that reason.

And fortunate that I lived through things that I did early in this lifetime that were patently and unalterably stupid.
Stuff I will not be writing about in this or any other Blog, thank you very much.

Trust me, I’m FORTUNATE.

So, what of the future?

For the next fifty, I want to get into high gear as a creator.  There are things I like to do, and I want to do more of them.  Make art, perform, create marvelous things.  Help my groups, my wife, my daughter, my friends.

I know myself pretty well after the last 50, and if I enjoy doing it, it’s probably something worth doing.   Luckily, I also know that many things I enjoy creating are also enjoyed by others.

I do like to please.

I’m a rather polite guy.  My beloved, late father  F.H. Meskimen went through periods when he liked to drink a little too much, and was consequently a bit unpredictable in his moods, so I gave myself a childhood education on how not to upset volatile people, and how to make uncomfortable situations more bearable.  That’s one of my jobs.  It may be one of my flaws, too.

The Next Fifty might be the time to fight a little more.

Notice how I use the phrase “A little more”?  That is to make an uncomfortable concept more bearable.  What I really mean is more definite.

Being definite is not always comfortable.  I think it makes some people nervous, because then they might be expected to say something definite too, and that can be looked on as an unreasonable demand.

But, what’s this about a fight?

You know, in fifty years I have never once actually had the real necessity to punch someone in the face, or clank them over the head with a heavy object.

Any time I thought I did, it turned out it would have made things a lot worse.

Obviously, these needs do arise.  Somehow so far I have escaped.  Maybe this is never going to be my kind of fight.  Anyway, I think it is too late for me to concentrate on developing the skills of applying deadly force; that seems like just asking for a serious ass-kicking.

Force begets force, so why concentrate on it, for God’s sake?  (That simple observation apparently is not one that many people in government, for example, are falling all over themselves to make.)

The coming fight, as I see it, will be for fundamental human rights.  Because there is a lot of insanity and criminality around, and every reason for it to grow and get out of hand, like the Morning Glories that took over our backyard a few years ago.

It’s nicer to think about crime, violence and societal decay in the image of beautiful flowers, don’t you think?  Even when those same flowers work like mad to overwhelm and choke the life out of every shrub, bush and tree in their path.

Must there ONLY be Morning Glories?  That would be my question to the God of Morning Glories.

Must there only be super-controlled slaves?  That would be my question to the would-be Gods of man, if there were any sense in asking them about it.

So, human rights are key.  I’d like to make it legal to be a human.  There’s so much legislation against it these days.

I love mankind.

That last sentence has a loaded, sort of stupid aspect, as if I had just written, Coke adds life.  But the truth is, I don’t have to try to love mankind, I just find myself loving it.  I love the species.  I love the shapes, the activities, the expressions, the problems.

Some people love rats, snails, terriers, ants… Sure, I guess I love them, too.  But I don’t marvel at them like I do people.

You guys are GREAT.  Well done on doing the impossible: being people.

The Next Fifty may have some unpleasantness and some responsibility to fight back against enemies of mankind.  I think that is a given.  So, with my many earned gray hairs, my “altitude” as a mature-ish fellow, and my junk mail from AARP, my possessions may now have to include some occasional bad manners.

I may start to say and do some definite things.

Possibly.

(Okay, you saw that one coming.)

Tell you one thing: I will be striving for more truth.  More effectiveness.  More expression of who I actually am.

That may piss some people off.  (I kind of hope so, nice as I am.)

The striving for truth will no doubt get kind of hairy for me, from time to time.  We all know how that goes.

I see it as my job to communicate from my unique viewpoint.  It’s my job even more than that other job I mentioned, the one about not upsetting anybody so that they get all dark and brooding and ruin the evening.  (I think I’ll retire from that job.  I may do it on weekends.)

I appreciate you, fellow human being.  I think you are good and really extraordinary.  You are capable of so much; probably if we weren’t in the middle of a “Death Culture”  you would be appreciated a lot more for what you actually bring to the party, and would find greater satisfaction in living.

I daresay in a more orderly world, you would be valued a lot more for yourself, rather than how much you can put on your Amex card.

Well, if it is true that the cycle of society is gradually moving along the line of decay into a period of bondage, as some philosophers and social critics claim, then the hour when we will all be obliged to truly deliver whatever we can for our fellow man is not too far ahead of us.

And if, on the other hand, all things start to grow and get a little brighter, and our future starts looking less like a nightmare, (and we can make it look any way we want it to, appearances and past history notwithstanding) then I think it will be delightful to be a part of it with you.

If I can make the next fifty any easier to bear, or any more fun for anybody, then I’m doing my job.  I know  you’ll do the same for me.

It’s now two hours into my next fifty.  I’m already pooped!  Oh, that’s because it’s two a.m.  Sheesh!

Hey, thanks for reading this.

Food, Love, Laughter… and One Hard-Boiled Egg

Last weekend my mother threw a birthday party for my step father, actor Paul Michael.  As with any party at Marion’s, it was a unique creation, and a wonderful time.
My step dad celebrated his 83rd birthday, and there was much to celebrate.  He and my mom have been together for more than twenty years now, and each has enhanced the other’s life beyond measure.   Finding each other later in life has worked out to be a complete blessing to the both of them, and for the whole family.

Marion met Paul onstage while working on the play, “The Whole Half” in Los Angeles. They’ve collaborated on stage many times and are scheduled to do so again in 2010 down at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, reprising roles they originated in Joe Dipietro’s “The Last Romance”.

They have also done many movie and television appearances together.  The chemistry is infectious.

Paul does the cooking for family gatherings, and is a marvelous cook, specializing in dishes from his Lebanese family heritage.  For his 83rd, Paul prepared a huge spread of homemade spanikopita, babaganoush, tabouli salad, stuffed olive leaves, a lentil and onion dish called Mujadarra, hummus and lamb kibbeh.   There were no survivors amongst the side dishes; everything was eaten to the last lentil.

When the sun started to go down, we all walked over to the lot next door that my mother owns and has dubbed, “Sophie Park” after her award-winning character on the Gary David Goldberg created TV series Brooklyn Bridge, and had dessert and coffee by the bocce court under a canopy of Mulberry trees and decorative lights.

Then, as the special treat of the evening, we went into the little park area where a projector and screen had been set up, and we all watched the Marx Brothers in “A Night at The Opera”, seated in our chairs on the lawn.  There was even an old fashioned popcorn machine on hand, and boxes of movie candy.

What a hit!

Watching the film outdoors on the lawn, there was one brief moment of drama–I could swear I heard the sound of the sprinklers beginning to go off.  But thankfully, it was a false alarm.

“A Night at The Opera”, if like me you haven’t seen it in a decade or two, is still breathtakingly funny and brilliant; a perfect capper to a lovely evening.  I can still hear Paul roaring with laughter at the hilarious scene where Groucho’s stateroom rapidly fills up with people as they sail to New York.

The thing that most struck me this time, now that I am a bona fide grown up, is the amazing range of entertainment in that film; it’s not all just a ridiculous romp– there are moments of high, high aesthetics.  When Harpo eventually stops tearing things to pieces and plays the harp, it is so timeless and elegant, it made me weep a little bit, out of sheer appreciation.  I wept too, I think, to recall a time when moviemakers had the sensitivity to recognize the beauty of a classical music interlude, and the fine, fine wavelength of virtuosic expression.  In amongst the pratfalls, the ketchup on the pancakes, and Harpo tearing the skirts off the showgirls in the opera finale.

Also what struck me was the genuine and “uncomedic” acting demonstrated by Groucho and Chico in their now famous routines… I knew them by heart when I was a teenager, and so I was now just observing how they played them, rather than what was being said.  It is interesting to me that they were completely unself-conscious throughout their long routines, such as where they go over the contract for the opera singer (“…the party of the first part shall be known hereafter as the party of the first part…”)  It is just as neutral as can be.  Astonishing!

What is interesting to me is the lack of display of comedic awareness.  They are just “being themselves” (characters honed from a decade in vaudeville, as unlike their real selves as a porcupine) and not reaching in the slightest way for a laugh or for approval from anybody.  That sort of performance then, is completely timeless, since it isn’t serving anything as disposable as the current fashionable way of being funny– a fleeting language that changes with the headlines.

Not that some of the jokes weren’t a bit shopworn, but very few.  Very few.  And the physical comedy was still 100% riotous.

The laughs rolled over the lawn all night and over the hillside in Woodland Hills where Marion and Paul make their home.  May it echo for many, many years to come.

(Have you seen “A Night at the Opera” lately?  I can’t recommend it enough.  Taken as directed, it can bring you into states of robust hilarity.  If prolonged laughter persists longer than four hours, consult your doctor.)

ABUNDANCE

My mother, Marion Ross, believes in Abundance.  That’s Abundance with a capital “A”. And to know her is to understand perfectly what she means; she truly seems to want for nothing.  It makes it hard for us to buy her presents at Christmastime; she already has everything.

Part of her abundance is expressed by absence, in the NOT having the unnecessary, like the latest digital hoo-haw; it means as well as the Abundance of having a surplus of the things that really matter to her.  And though some of these things she possesses are somewhat materialistic and could even be considered extravagant, those are not the things, which she places any real value on.

She places a high worth on glamour, but not at the expense of actual value.  For instance, she often wears big, showy earrings, but will proudly report that they came from “Tar-get”.  She still has her big, white 1960 Rolls Royce, but has a jar of Grey Poupon mustard in the back seat, lampooning the sort of people that take Rolls Royces seriously.

Many of her life’s experiences have granted Marion an understanding and mastery of Abundance.  Her faith and spiritual beliefs have given her confidence in the concept of an infinity of possibilities and limitless attainment, which are a kind of spiritual entitlement.  Maybe she had an innate understanding of this all her life, and found agreement with her ideas in the Bible.  Certainly through the practice of a busy lifetime of application of the principle of abundance has shown her that it is a winning and satisfying way to operate.

Where she got it or how is unimportant, that she recognizes it and has it as a part of her daily life, where so many do not, is.

I’ve observed an amazing ability in my mother to create her own world, liberally decorated with comforts, style and beauty, and share it abundantly with others.  I’ve seen her approach a project, such as remodeling a house, with no immediate way to finance it, then instantly attract the necessary money to do the job properly, without compromise or delay.  I have witnessed this so many times; I recognize it as the expression not of poor planning or chance, but of a fully realized personal strategy.

So, what is this idea?

If you ask her, Marion will say that the universe wants her to have everything she wants.  Not exclusively, but that all people deserve it as their birthright, as God’s creations.  She believes in a God of plenty, of generosity, of Abundance with a capital “A”.

I don’t myself know how to talk about God and garner a lot of instant agreement, but I have broken it down to my satisfaction without having to know or defend the whys and wherefores of the authorship of this universe.

Really, it’s as plain as a kid making a crayon drawing.  Something can be made out of nothing.  Happens every minute of every day.  As a former kid with a long gone crayon or two, I can attest to it with confidence.

This world has a lot of creations and creating going on.  Where social or artistic creations are not flourishing there is usually trouble being created, at least.  The level of quality of creation has everything to do with the kind of shape that particular part of the world is in.

There are many forces, it seems, that would try to negate this simple fact.

Sometimes, because of economic pressures, advertising, and other manipulations, we begin to feel that everything is running low.  Everything can be seen in the physical universe to shrink, break down, if but slowly and become scarce.  Whole industries start and thrive because of real or imagined scarcities, which seem reasonable because of the self-evident rule of gradual decay.

It’s a safe bet that any object in this world is going to need a call to technical support one day.  Even the Egyptian, who somehow managed to sculpt things out of granite, would recognize the need for spackle.

And it seems that few opportunities exist to witness the opposite effect, the creation of something.  Where they do exist and can be seen, they are considered to be remarkable, otherworldly, magical or unbelievable.  Some people consider creation to be kind of edgy and dangerous.  And there have been tricksters, con men who “created” things out of thin air… or your thinning wallet.

The universe is large, so we are reminded, but earth seems to be all we ever experience of it.  Really it is a vast thing, full of more objects and conditions than anyone can easily envision.

And an infinity does exist, of creatable things.  And abundance is the result.  And who does the creating?  Well, apparently God does.  But, so do you, and I.  It’s all around us, once you start looking.

Somebody created all the money that has recently “disappeared” or the debts, which are popping into existence daily.  I guess God could take credit for the invention of money or sub-Prime mortgages, but I don’t think that would be very canny public relations.  I seem to remember that actual human individuals might have had something to do with that concept, and for the various currencies and chicaneries that exist today.

So, if money can be created, surely anything can be.

This still doesn’t answer the question of “How does one live a life of Abundance?”

The first thing to do, is conceive that this Abundance really can be so, that the scarcity of things might not be as true as the apparency would lead us to believe.  I think this is an innate thing for people to do; when we say, “it’ll all work out” or “it’s going to be fine” we have done a little creating right there.  We decided, in a way that fundamentally is no different than Michelangelo deciding, “I’m going to make that sibyl’s garment pale rose” that something is going to happen, just because we say so.

What follows then, of course, are steps to bring the final result about, but the initial thought is “It shall be”.  Voila!

So, a world of abundance may not seem like the world you currently live it.  But I have seen my mother pull things out of the hat that no hat could possibly contain, and not once but many, many times.  And as her many close friends know, she happily shares all that she has yanked out of the void and into this physical plane.

That’s Magic with a capital “M”, and around our house, M is for Marion.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

Cultural High Water Mark:
The Return of Return to Forever

Last year Tamra and I had the great good fortune of seeing Chick Corea and Return to Forever perform live at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

The recordings that were made of that tour are now available, and I just heard the CD and relived the experience.  Man, I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was a freakin’ RELIGIOUS experience.

I know how boring it is to be “explained to” about a concert. I openly resent anyone trying to convey to me why the show I just missed was the greatest thing ever, life-changing, awesome, blah, blah, blah.

The ONLY REASON I am taking the time to write (and hoping you will take the time to read, and then further take the time to LISTEN) is that there IS now an excellent recording, beautifully produced, of a show I feel marks a new high point in the aesthetics in our culture today.

I mean, if you couldn’t pick up a CD to listen to it, I wouldn’t have the effrontery begin to describe it to you just to expose you to my own verbal embroidery.  But you can, and you really oughta.

You know when some artistic collaborations just achieve so much that it makes a new summit to aspire to?  That’s what these guys have done.

I’m not a musician.  I can’t tell you why the show was so transporting and marvelous.  I was just one of several thousand mesmerized audience members, (and when I looked around, a LOT of them looked like musicians to me.)  And believe me, they were MESMERISED.

Not mesmerized like audiences that are being clubbed with monster bass and head splitting volume, holding on to consciousness thru an assault of rhythm and noise.  Mesmerized like a little child watching The Wizard of Oz for the first time.  Admiring, captivated, enraptured, totally absorbed in the fantasy.

These were grownups.  Tired, beaten down grownups from the Valley!  BLISSED OUT.

Crazy, right?

It was jazz, and I guess maybe a lot of people say they don’t care for jazz.  But you couldn’t HELP but enjoy this, even if you can’t stand jazz.  It was so beyond any one style and so embracive of all kinds of music, it was like Jazz 2.0.

This is jazz that Beethoven would love, that Queen Elizabeth would love, that Thomas Jefferson would love, that Edison and Tesla and Carleton Fisk and the Marx Brothers would love.  It was pure creative genius.

I’m so bloody GRATEFUL they did such an excellent job producing the CD so I can remember what the heck the dream was all about.

Okay, I know this much about music: the first CD is electric instruments, the second is ACOUSTIC.

The acoustic set is just phenomenal.  Stanley Clarke made his big upright bass sing like a whale, like a wind going thru a canyon, like a lover’s croon… okay, I didn’t want to try to describe, but you just HAVE to hear it.

Stanley is out of this world, and in a world I want to go live in.

Al Dimeola played guitar.  Okay, this guy is like Shakespeare with the guitar.  He paints like Botticelli and like Rembrandt and like Basquiat with the guitar.  He has no capacity for fatigue.  None of these guys do.  They play a mile a minute for a couple hours, not even panting.  They smile, they groove, they blow.   They break land speed records, and then they break World Harmony records and Universal Elegance records.  Are they even there?  They seem like projections on a piece of lightweight silk with all the substance of a candle flame.

Lenny White is the drummer.  He is a mind reader.  He knows what is going on in every dimension that intersects with the space containing the players onstage, the past, present, over to the left ten miles… and he lays down a multi-colored net that the others dance all over, then scoops up the net catching the whole audience inside, then he breaks the net into pieces, then he builds a series of ladders that go to Mars and back… Sheesh.  Even he doesn’t pant.

Mr. Chick Corea is the fellow who apparently runs the show.  Apparently he is well known to the other musicians.  They seem rather interested in what he is doing onstage.  I felt they must have met one another before the show.  Maybe worked some things out ahead of time.

Chick sits at his piano and creates an entire universe about fifty times bigger than this one made famous by the Hubble telescope, and then takes the whole audience on a fast tour, no seat belts.  He is a God.  He hits ninety seven billion eight hundred and fifty five million notes in perfect sync with the other Gods in the group and never gets one out of place, not ONE.  And each note is a story, and the story gets completed in the mind of each beholder, all mixed up with their past, their experiences and feelings and dreams.

I don’t know what else to say to you, except to beg you to do yourself the supreme favor of accepting the invitation to dive out of this crazy, unkempt, ratty, nasty universe of force and punishment, and dive into the universe of Return to Forever on their new live concert album, available wherever deathless, sublime monuments to the aesthetic potential of the human spirit are sold.

Or go to http://www.return2forever.com/

An Appeal to my Fellow Commercial Actors

I’ve been a professional actor now for over 25 years.  During that time I’ve been involved with the making of many hundreds of TV and radio commercials.

Commercials are one of the ways we actors stay alive thru times between other, more artistic projects like plays, films and television shows.  One can make a good living indeed in commercials, although this has become increasingly rare for the “workaday” actor.

For an audition recently I was sent a piece of copy (the text one is to speak in a commercial) that caught my eye.

I don’t audition for absolutely any sort of product under the sun; I have particular prejudices against certain classes of products and services and refuse to support them just for a paycheck.  Most actors have similar scruples.

By accident, I was sent a script for a sleep medication.  I have instructed my agents long ago that I don’t pitch pharmaceuticals in commercials for personal reasons.  So I rarely have actually seen in bold type this sort of narration:

“Sleepwalking, and eating or driving while not fully awake, with amnesia for the event as well as abnormal behaviors have been reported.

In patients with depression, worsening of depression, including risk of suicidal thoughts or actions, may occur.”

Now, I have heard things like this on TV and have guffawed, as perhaps you have, at the juxtaposition of cheery, sunlit scenes of fun and recreation that typically accompany this kind of voiceover.  But I didn’t really credit what revulsion the words inspire on their own without the rosy scenes of harmony filling the screen as eye candy.

Yikes!

So, if I read the above correctly, (which is, after all, my job) what the warnings for this pill infer is that you might, after taking this drug, fall asleep, then get into a car, drive around for an indeterminate amount of time STILL ASLEEP and then awake later with possibly no recollection of what you’d done or where you’d been.

That seems to me to be a pretty good guarantee of homicide.  I know what it is like to drive when drowsy from lack of sleep; I really have no experience at all, thank God, with driving while completely unconscious.  But, I can’t imagine a scarier thought than waking up in my own car and realizing I must have been doing some driving while asleep during the night.

And what about the last bit: “worsening of depression, including risk of suicidal thoughts or actions, may occur.”

Okay, “suicidal actions.”  What are they?  Cutting one’s wrists?  Stepping out in front of a semi?  Walking on a high ledge?  Taking an overdose of the same pills that caused the suicidal feelings in the first place?

The warning goes on to instruct the viewer to contact a doctor immediately if any of these symptoms occur.  That’s nice.  But would there be necessarily time or even the inclination to do so?  If one is feeling and acting suicidal, doesn’t it seem unlikely they would reach for help?  And what if the suicidal actions occur during that time when the guy is unconsciously driving down the highway?

Okay, so all that is very grim, but my argument is really not about the drug companies, who have evidently made peace with their consciences long ago regarding “side effects”.

But what of an actor who would read these lines for money?

Here’s how I look at it.  How comfortable would you feel explaining to a child, say, that medicine they were taking, or that their parents were taking, might possibly cause them to kill themselves?  Or that dad or mom might be driving the family car around while dead asleep, probably not stopping on red and going on green?

It gets clear to me when I look at it from that angle.

Look, I’m no angel.  I’ve done commercials for banks for crying out loud.  (Many of which don’t exist anymore.)

But to claim that a product is a wonderful solution for a common problem, then pleasantly add the caveat that one reason the problem won’t be a bother anymore is because the user will be too dead from the treatment to notice it, is a bit beyond the pale.

So, if you, like me, depend on advertising for some of your income, consider what I’ve tried to convey here.

The world would be a better place if we all treated each other with more kindness.  And telling harmful things thinly disguised as boilerplate “side effects” is no way to express kindness, or earn a living.

THANKS, but NO THANKS

Okay, so here we are, living our lives, doing our jobs, doing our best… and yet if you are incautious enough to give it a moment’s thought, you have to ask yourself, where in the hell is this train headed?

These days even the most tough, never say die, “put a bold face on it” friends of mine are uneager to mouth the usual platitudes like, “It’ll all work out in the end”, or “It’s just a phase”, or even “it could be worse.” I tell you, I find myself expending quite a bit of energy these days making sure I don’t meditate on the theme of “Could it be worse?” or “Exactly how MUCH worse could it get?” That way madness lies!

In fact, that seems like one of the legacies of these days, the production of a whole new crop of convincing, yet non-specific platitudes to take the place of expressions that used to be a kind of safe harbor. Maybe we’ll start saying to one another things like, “Well, nobody detonated a bomb in my yard today, so I guess I’m doing pretty good”, “Not talking to you through barbed wire, am I?”, “Any day you don’t have to sell your family’s blood to buy groceries is a swell day in my book”. You know. Keeping it light.

But it is a nagging computation that keeps running in the abstract problem solving section of my mind: what is going to become of mankind at mankind’s hands? It comes up like an annoying pop up ad on my mental desktop, usually when I least want it to, like at 3 in the morning.

Okay, GIVEN: The politicians have sold out long ago. They aren’t even trying to put up a good front. The media are owned by somebody who couldn’t care less if you live or die. The Banks, well, they are a strange breed of Uber Vampire that have developed the ability to walk around during the day or night, draining anything with a heartbeat of every life-sustaining droplet. The police state keeps on gearing up and developing new means of tracking normal people, “protecting” us through more and more super control.

Protecting us, for example, from hoummus.

Hoummus, that thick, Middle Eastern chickpea spread that tastes great on pita, is a suspicious enough substance that the TSA confiscated a container of it from my 18 year old daughter at the airport recently.  Explosive?  Maybe if you eat it with melon.

It’s easy to cogitate on things like this and shortly find yourself babbling. And of course nobody wants to look like a “conspiracy theorist nut job”.  But which is worse? To look like a nut, or to fail to ask the impertinent questions while one still can?

The needs and wants of ordinary people aren’t terribly hard to understand. Decent, normal folks want to live, work at a meaningful job, raise a family, enjoy something of the life we share on planet earth, and grow to a ripe old age, shuffling off the mortal coil in a stress-free, painless and dignified manner.

We’d like to see a bit of the world, enjoy exotic foods. Make friends of interesting and entertaining people, talk over things with them, learn their language or at least see thru their eye for a while, to compare it to what we have gathered. We’d like to enjoy beauty, and the creative parts of life. We’d like to have a chance, at least, to maybe do something to leave our own little positive mark on the world, even if it is just a better looking front yard, or to have the garage cleaned up at last.

Who wants to be a slave? No one. For that matter, who would want a slave? Only the mentally toasted. And yet, if you listen close, late at night, the soft rumbling of trucks delivering the slave economy are rolling into town, setting up the equipment and hauling out the manifests.

What the hell for? Is that a game worth playing? Rule by force? Was Rome a good game? Maybe it made a good B movie, but a broad activity for modern, thinking people? C’mon! Aren’t we light-years beyond that?

Could it even be done? Could a whole population of a planet be enslaved? Count on it.  Oh, maybe not every single person, fine. Maybe a small covey of Finlanders will escape it, and live off of black market yogurt for a few generations. But earth as a multi-cultural sanctuary will be over.

Okay, so. So what can one do, provided one agrees with the premise?

Let us DO something about this. Let’s acknowledge this… ENTHUSIASM for slavery whenever we see it, for what it is. When the poor scared souls who feel that mankind is too threatening to be allowed a free existence in the world clamp down on yet another basic human right, or make it difficult for a man to be productive, or control his own destiny, or help another human being, or labor without unjust, arbitrary limitations that slow his progress down to nothing, let us say “Got it.” “Thank you very much, I see what you are doing. Enough.  THANK YOU.  That’s IT.”

It’s the same weapon mothers use to quell childish rebellion.  “THANK YOU, Bernard, now please get off the mantle.”

And let’s not forget to acknowledge it in ourselves, in our own thinking and acting; are we acting like enslaved people, tacitly agreeing with the “inevitable”? Acknowledge it and BANISH the thought.

People are too good to be slaves. We are natively free. To enslave is a short term, destructive waste of resources and an unaesthetic, chaotic, brutal mess, long proven to be of no use whatsoever.

Freedom is the bright thing, the desired and also the effective thing, for only in freedom do we find alignment with the basic intentions and personal goals of the individual.

No slave will fight and die and risk all for a slave master. Any production you obtain from them will be of the smallest fraction of the quality that they could achieve.

Hello? It’s BAD for BUSINESS.

So, let’s acknowledge, and stridently, those who try and enforce enslavement of any kind, and work toward greater and greater freedom. Everywhere. Give it a big acknowledgement, too, so that they can really hear it: “THANKS, but NO THANKS.”

And in the stunned silence that follows, start to put there a culture of mutual respect, based on kindness, understanding and help. Using that as mortar, we will have something that will support the positive efforts of the billions, and give them a solid foundation for mutual survival.

The other stuff, that slave mentality, that GOO, wouldn’t hold together a Roach Motel.

Embarrassment and the Zeitgeist

Okay, so we are all very different. Got that. Thanks to TV we know that we are all basically the same kind of species, anyway, and most of us individually have the same worries and concerns, family, income, health, blah, blah, blah. Right?

But we have a lot of different interests and totally different dreams and reactions to the world around us, this world we created– okay, maybe you don’t think we created this world we live in, but maybe if you look around at your immediate, like, ROOM you can see how SOME of the responsibility or blame or CREDIT, you know, lies with you. I’m not blaming the whole thing on any one person. You’re off the hook for right now.

Billions of people on the planet. All shapes and sizes, colors, creeds etc. etc. etc. Billions. And as those digital readouts like to tell us by madly flipping so fast you can’t even read ‘em, we’re growing every millisecond.

Okay, fine. Nice to know. No lack of people.

What I notice is an overriding sense of something among a lot of us today. And the word I have found best describes it is “Embarassment”.

What are we so embarrassed about?

Well, for starters, that things are so crumby. Crumby is an old fashioned word, from the last century. It not the same as “Crumbly”, like a three day old scone. it means “Whack”.

Okay, “Whack” is an old-fashioned word, from the eighties. What I should have said was, we’re embarrassed, and rightly so, that things are so… craptastic.

I don’t have an answer, by the way. I just notice things. And I also am embarrassed. Here’s what I’m embarrassed about. And it isn’t anything on YouTube. That I’M in, anyway.

I’m embarrassed that human beings still go around figuring out how to murder each other and take stuff away from each other. Like that’s a game. Like that didn’t get old back in Egyptian times. Like we don’t know any better. C’mon. We know so much better by now.

Okay, sometimes you have to kill someone. How often? I’m almost 50, I haven’t killed anyone the whole time. Not even close. And I don’t live in a bunker! I’m out in the world! I deal with A-Holes all the time, just like you– I mean, just like you do, not that you are an A-Hole.

Okay, we all hate war. Well, not everybody. A whole lot of somebodies actually must dig it a lot, because there are always a few going on. War is a kind of murder, usually, but for some reason, it makes sense at the time, and nobody puts it in the same category, unless they are on the receiving end of all the murdering. THEN, they are very clear about it.

Sometimes you hear people say, War is inevitable. War is a human instinct. Blah, blah, blah. Bad breath is inevitable. War, as far as I can tell, IS evitable. That means avoidable.

Take you, for example. How much war did you accomplish today? Not counting what was done with your tax money, which after it leaves your bank account is on its own. For the purposes of this discussion.

You probably didn’t do a lot of warlike stuff today. Unless you are in that profession. Then that would be about all you did.

And weirdly, I respect that. Because at least you are not being embarrassed about it. Some of us are warriors, or wannebe warriors. But often, too I find that the people who are closest to war, who actually prosecute, by which I mean in a fancy way, DO war, are the ones least committed to the idea that murder is the only way to fully handle certain kinds of human disagreements.

So, maybe it is safe to say that war and murder are a couple of things nobody is very proud of. We don’t like ourselves when we murder, we don’t like it when the neighbors do it, when your kid calls up and says he was doing a little murdering at school… not a great day. And when all the big governments of the world get slap-happy about the idea, we REALLY aren’t proud of it.

Remember the Nazis? They were nuts about murder. Murder was the magic bullet. Of course, they didn’t discriminate; any kind of bullet was fine with them. And none of us should be proud that there were once a bunch of governments, big and small run by those guys. That, not to belittle the Holocaust, is embarrassing. I mean, humanity let that happen on their watch. And we pretty much always have the watch. Why? Because we run the show. Not the shrimp, not the quail, not the orang-u-tans… we do.

So, barbarity, cruelty, murder, torture, all these different flavors of the same thing, are embarrassing because I feel, and maybe you do too, that we are WAY past that.

I mean, thousands of years of civilization, man! Technology. Communications. Literature, plays, films, television. Cultures, and great thinkers. Awesome people.

Do we really need to keep repeating the same dumbass things over and over again? I don’t think so. I don’t keep repeating the same dumbass things I did when I was eight, so why should we put up with that as a civilization? Why can’t we actually MAKE a civilization? A nice one, for a change.

I gotta believe we can. I mean, we can do everything else.

Okay, if you agree, you agree. I obviously hope you do, and I’m trying to figure out how to say all this so that I don’t create a lot of argument, although God knows some people love a good rhubarb.

So, what I want to do, and maybe you will agree, is to try and BE LESS EMBARRASSED. Because as a species, although you hear all the time about how mankind is a plague and we’re killing everything and warming everything up too much, and that guy in The Matrix said we were just “a virus”, we still can do some really cool, respectable things. So that is redeeming, as far as I’m concerned.

My message today: Don’t Be Embarrassed. Be effective. And by that I mean: Do what you know is right.

And ease up on the murder, ‘kay? You’ll save yourself a LOT of embarrassment.

Okay, over to you.

Jim Meskimen

April 21, 2009