Over the last few months I have discovered many amazing things about myself. Most notably, I have rediscovered my love for creation. More specifically, the creation of art in many mediums. I have started acting again, something that I had a huge passion for while I was in high school. It's amazing! Why did I stop doing this? It was not a conscious decision to take a lengthy hiatus but just a situational happening that I did not intend for. Now, for the first time ever I am engaged in a very personal process with acting. I am learning how to breath while speaking and stay on my voice rather than close my throat and speak in an airy-tone. This has given me much more confidence in my speaking voice and allowed me to share my thoughts more clearly to others. It feels great to communicate clearly. I have also realized that I am becoming a better listener....most of the time. I started about a month ago as an experiment to repeat every word that immediately hear back in my head. If a teacher is speaking, I will repeat what they say in my head. Am I driving myself insane? Maybe. But this exercise required me to be 100 percent fully engaged with the person I am conversing with. Imagine if when you read, you just scanned your eyes across the words but did not actually read them in your head. How much would you absorb from this scanning compared to the reading in your head? It is a worlds difference in comprehension. Why did nobody tell me to try this, ever? I think it's even helping me with my reading abilities.
Acting: It's a cool things we do with our minds and bodies. Breath, relax, concentrate - act.
While at school this year, I have tried to take any and all opportunities to create anything and everything. And I'm loving it, every time I do. There is nothing more satisfying for me than communicating my thoughts through an artistic medium - I work with many mediums. Right now I'm working on separate projects that involve me to be the director, actor, editor, writer, cinematographer, sound recordist. When I am involved in these creative activities and the soothing music of James Blake or The Shins are playing in the background, I get in the zone. This is life. Live and create. Experiment. Fail. When I fail, I succeed because I failed. Laugh, smile, be. In a perfect world, I would create these things without worrying about making a living. But making a living is important to well, live. So, that's always in the back of my mind. How can I balance this love of creating to making a living and support myself now and in the future? Sometimes sacrifices have to be made but most importantly, I need to keep in mind that if I want to live, I must create.
In my younger days, I thought I had it all figured out: I'd live in a nice suburban house on the outskirts of a larger city, have a few children, a lovely wife and a science lab in my basement where I did most of my work and research. You know, like Bill Cosby in The Cosby Show. The tacky sweaters and never-ending jokes were of course included in this future of mine. I didn't really know what a scientist was supposed to do but I liked the science fair and building computers and The Cosby Show. I soon discovered my curiosity could be quenched with making art and acting and most recently directing. Still, I incorporate science in nearly every situation I am in. In, The Human Quest - The Way of Science, British scientist Roger Bingham says, "We tell stories to feel at home in the universe and science tries to make sense of the universe." Thus, I could argue that although I do not deliver babies in my basement or make serums that change me into a devilishly attractive yet pompous man, I am still a scientist. Storytelling, Bingham argues, is in fact one of the purest sciences to exist. We talked about a Scientist's WOK, some elements of this WOK are: Hypothesis, Question, Curiosity, Observation, Experiment, Conversation w/nature. How is storytelling any different? Bingham talks about how ever since birth, we are hardwired to have questions, seek answers and form conclusions. Inspiration for everything I have ever made has come from a curiosity- maybe a curiosity to explore the subject or to find answers I did not know before. Hopefully the discoveries I make can enlighten others and inspire them to find their own curiosities. A couple of years ago, I wanted to explore optics. I stumbled upon a group on the internet that made their own hommade optics for their DSLRs. They were all shooting photos with their optics and I was so curious about how I could utilize the lenses I would come to make in a film. This is a different blog post on the subject and a few photos with the lens that I created: http://quarkandbeans.blogspot.com/2012/04/diy-lenses.html
This is the film I created:
Sometimes my curiosity can be disruptive in situations where I question situations and reasonings to the point where it becomes obnoxious.
Two years ago, I directed a performance piece in Sarasota, Florida. At the time, I was attending Ringling College of Art and Design and we were exploring what art meant to us. Not only did I learn about myself as an artist but the performance piece turned into a social experiment and statement. I dressed an actor in clothing that resembled that of the Elephant Man. The costume was a very close replication of Joseph Merrick from David Lynch's The Elephant Man. A video of the photos I took are below.
Why are we so cruel? Why do we possess so much hate? Who are we to stare at someone who is dressed as a "freak". Why do the children react and act like he is a normal person? These are all questions that I have asked myself since the experiment.
Equality is a very difficult subject and problem. How do we fix these societal problems of bigotry and racism? It is extremely difficult, I have found to change someone else's self. Through conversations that I have had, I have realized the self can only drastically be effected by exploration by that person. They can be aided in the process of opening their mind to other things, cultures and people but it is not until they are willing to explore that the self can be adjusted. Since this Elephant Man experience, I was so disgusted by what I discovered, I decided that I would never be afraid of the world.
This fear that we have, where does it originate from? When my speakers make spontaneous static sounds in the middle of the night, why does my roommate think that a black man has broken into our house? What would this world be like without these fears? I was in Boston this summer teaching at an acting camp. On the first day of camp when the students arrive, I was instructed to pick up a couple students from the bus station. After a couple hours of waiting at the station, an older Jamaican homeless man sat next to me and began to converse with me. I did not think for one moment that this man was going to hurt me, he just wanted to talk and I accepted. He eventually went on to tell me that I needed to make babies as soon as I could because "that is the way of life". "Love and making babies are the most important thing", he told me. As crude as he often was in the conversation, talking about sex and child birth, there was a completely innocent morality to him that I could not criticize. I told him about my life and he told me about his. I hope he learned something from me as I certainly learn things from him. Whether or not I wanted to hear some of the things he said is another issue but I certainly went to sleep that night with a comforting feeling that my fearless and accepting intuition is the way that suits my self the best.
Another incident occurred while I was also in Boston when a man stole my friend's phone from a pizza place we were eating at. She began chasing after him and so I followed. We were running through the streets at 10:30 while people were helping us find where the man ran to with her phone. Eventually I tracked him down in an alleyway and said, "HEY, WILL YOU PLEASE GIVE US THE PHONE BACK". He dipped into his pocket, took out the phone and handed it to me. For a split second, as his hand ascended into his pocket, I did not know if a phone was going to emerge or if a weapon was. But I was significantly faster than this man, so I didn't worry too much about that possibility. That's consistently the thing I tell myself, "well, I'm faster than most people so I've got that going for me, there's no reason to be afraid." I have had this conversation with females about fearfulness and it is very hard for me to understand the unfortunate fears that society has instilled on women. I road the bus with my friend in a very small town in Virginia and she was absolutely stressed and terrified the whole time, even when sitting next to me. There was a man with half a face almost straight out of boardwalk empire. Even the half faced man did not scare me, because I was definitely faster than him. No doubt. Jokes aside, I would like to explore fears that people have and why our society has instilled them into our daily lives. It effects us in a terrible way and creates stress that is not needed. I want to be able to communicate with people who have half of a face and who are from Jamacia and have many children. Making films is one of the ways I attempt to do that. So, let's get some tea and maybe a couple board games and let's talk about some things. No fear. No stress.
The class is going to organize a
solution to the self, society and the cosmos problem. We will be examining
primary sources relating to the topic.
Ways of Knowing – WOK
1.Scientific
2.Intellectual
3.Spiritual
4.Aesthetic
We are going to examine the issue in a
3D visualization. The shapes of the 3D images change according to your
temperaments.
How do I view the world? What are the
ideas about my reality. How can I continue to examine how I look at the world.
What questions can I ask myself to help explore my ideas about reality.
How can I change these problems? Are
there things that I just need to accept in the world?
Projects will introduce solutions to
these problems but also may introduce more problems with more solutions.
Sometimes information may be presented first, then a project is formed or the
other way around.
Exploring self and conversing with
others will be our main practice in the course.
