Photos: No. 2 Road Bridge

reeds 1

reeds 2

pylons

ramp

pale blue

two roads

Photos: Kitsilano

breezeway

Jericho Pier

orange stucco

after Bard

Photos: Brakhage roses

"Sex And Zen & A Bullet In The Head"

I am so damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.

Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.

Gun wounds again?

Same old rules; no eyes, no groin.

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries.

Damn, Ill burn you into a BBQ chicken!

Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants.

Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?

Quiet or I'll blow your throat up.

You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken.

I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!

You daring lousy guy.

Beat him out of recognizable shape!

I have been scared shitless too much lately.

I got knife scars more than the number of your leg's hair!

Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.

How can you use my intestines as a gift?

Damn you, stink man.


Actual English subtitles gathered from Hong Kong movies by afficionados Stefan Hammond & Mike Wilkins, in their book "Sex and Zen & A Bullet In The Head"

Photos: From VGH

Photos: Night Market

Photos: Steveston shadows, sky

Abbas Kiarostami, "The Job Of A Filmmaker"

I don’t believe the job of a filmmaker is to excite or move the viewer merely through creating special moments. By simply showing the reality, one can make people think about their own and other people’s acts or behaviour, and see and accept reality as it is. It’s from this point that the viewer’s duty to complete a work or a film begins. The viewer must be enticed into reflection on himself and the surrounding world. The combination of the filmmaker’s and viewer’s mind creates a film which will be more durable, original and fruitful than a film which merely aims at telling a story and impressing the viewer.

This is the most essential difference between this kind of cinema and that of Hollywood. In this kind of cinema, the most important subject matter is human beings and their souls. In this kind of cinema, man and his complex inner problems comprise the most important material, whereas in presently fashionable cinema, technique, special effects and exciting stories are considered more important.

*

In many films, music aims at giving viewers guidance or imposing something on them. Be happy here. Be sad here, scared here, moved there. It’s as if the director is standing by the screen like a conductor, calling on the audience to show their feelings. And the more worked up the audience gets, the more the director gets excited. “I can keep the viewers on the edge of their seats!” But I don’t know how necessary it is to take the viewers hostage. These days technology also helps such hostage-taking with Dolby surround sound systems and other new things. I don’t know how far this game of intimidating poor viewers will go.

Cinema is really a wonderful thing. Any viewer sitting in a seat in a dark movie theatre is turned into an innocent child. And there’s nothing quite as magical as light and darkness. It can send viewers into raptures. Under the circumstances, I suppose this is akin to picking pockets in the dark. By captivating the viewer, we rob him of his reason, which is even worse than emptying his pocket.

What I’m saying is not against music, nor am I against the appropriate use of music in cinema. I’m talking about abusing music.

*

I don’t believe a film is to be understood. Do we understand a piece of music? Do we understand a painting, or the exact meaning of a poem? It is ambiguity that attracts us to a work, not understanding the subject or story. However, human beings are standing between heaven and hell because of their existential ambiguity, and art displays this ambiguity. Pascal, a French philosopher, said that you cannot show a single event in somebody’s life and claim to have said everything about him. The secret department of the soul prevents this, and this is what becomes the plinth, the basis of the art of cinema.

I believe we can make the viewer experience mental effort by using omission. He can become involved in the making of the film through his imagination. For the creative viewer, this involvement is more involving than false climaxes or the playing of ridiculous guessing games. Once again I would like to quote Bresson, who said “We create not by adding but by subtracting.” This is exactly the opposite of resorting to symbols, allegories and signs.

Abbas Kiarostami, "10 On Ten"

"Soul Food Movies" cover

They say you can't judge a book by its cover but, alas, many people do. So I've decided to start working on mine. You don't want to leave these things until the last minute.

Of course I'll need a really cool graphic for the front, but I don't feel like starting on that right now. Also a good blurb describing the contents. And I'll have to make up a bunch of stuff about the author, so I'll need to get started on that as well (I think a career behind the camera would be a good starting place. Okay, there's the fact that I'm married to Carol Reed! That's for starters. And then I can figure out how to graft Uncle Rex onto the family tree. Hey, this isn't as hard as I expected.)

But where I want to start is with those all-important quotes. I've got a real good one for starters, from the New York Times Book Review! And it's by one of the Kennedys, so that should count for something.

This is fun! And I'll keep adding more as I find them. Make the publisher's job a lot easier...;

*

"The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
- William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review

*

A reader of this blog has submitted another suggestion;

"Ron is so kind and funny! I laughed until I wet my pants! No book has given me a warmer feeling..."
- T. Anderson, Kultur Svenska Kanadiana, Summer 07

Thank you, T. While your contribution is appreciated, I'm not entirely sure it is what we are looking for. I don't think you are famous enough.

Thoughts on criticism from Past The Popcorn

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and [Shaw], enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. And they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. —G. K. Chesterton

It is dangerous for an individual to assume that any attempted work of art actually is what it appears to himself. I have known a child to assume that his grandfather, kneeling for prayers, was a horse to be mounted and ridden. —Booth Tarkington

People ask me all the time, “What does that song mean?” Well, if I could say it in other words than are in the song, I would have written another song, wouldn’t I? —Elvis Costello

The best audience is one that will be fair enough to suspend judgment until it has first found out what [the artist] is trying to do; then is competent enough to discover how well he does it; and finally is so all-wise as to know whether or not it’s worth doing. —Booth Tarkington

The aim of the critic, as Chesterton once remarked, is to show what the artist did, whether the artist meant to do it or not. —Robert J. Reilly

Egoistic instinct is subtle and glamorous. It can even mistake itself for authoritative judgment upon works of art; but if we avoid being carried away by its eloquence we needn’t share in its error. That is, by making ourselves a little hard-headed we can escape the confusion of mind that damns an ostrich for not being a giraffe. —Booth Tarkington

I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. —G. K. Chesterton


These quotes are shamelessly lifted from the Past The Popcorn film review website

Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" and "About Schmidt"

FIVE EASY PIECES
I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes. Tomatoes instead. A cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?
Only what's on the menu. You can have number two, a plain omelet. It comes with fries and rolls.
I know, but it's not what I want.
Make up your mind.
I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.
I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast. I'll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.
No side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?
Would you like to talk to the manager?
You've got bread and a toaster of some kind?
I don't make the rules.
I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like a plain omelet and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee.
A number two. A chicken sal san.
Hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee.
Anything else?
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for a chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
I want you to hold it between your knees.
You see that sign, sir? You'll all have to leave, I'm not taking any more of your smartness and your sarcasm!
You see this sign? He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for her, sending dishes, menus, cutlery crashing to the floor.

ABOUT SCHMIDT
I awoke from my night in the wilderness completely transformed. I'm like a new man. For the first time in years, I feel clear. I know what I want, I know what I've got to do, and nothing's going to stop me ever again.
Can I take your order?
Um, I'd like a plain omlette, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
Oh. Fine. I'll just have the potatoes.

W.H. Auden, "The Unknown Citizen"

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Anton Chekhov bits

From one of Chekhov's letters;
"I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live! The main thing is that people should understand this and when they do, they will surely create for themselves another and a better life."

Tolstoy to Chekhov;
"I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord"

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Upon This Rock"

Another link for you to check out. John Jeremiah Sullivan had a Christian conversion in his teens, but moved on. A GQ assignment to cover Christian rock festivals prompts a re-examination. Funny, insightful, frank, exceptionally well written.

First appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly, February 2005. The piece was selected for inclusion in The Best American Magazine Writing 2006.

Christian Wiman, "Gazing Into The Abyss"

"The sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a hope toward God.”

I've requested permission to post Christian Wiman's essay "Gazing into the Abyss." For now, I encourage you to go to The American Scholar and have a read.

Wiman is the editor of the acclaimed literary journal "Poetry."

David Ball, "What Comes Next"

Some well-meaning teachers do their pupils grave disservice by making them read a play when the students are about to see it in a theater. Do such teachers think plays on stage are better if you already know them? How contrary to a playwright's intentions! Or do such teachers believe students can't comprehend words spoien out loud, and might be confused with all that color and movement? Alas, poor student!

Don't deprive students (or anyone else) of theater's greatest pleasure: the delicious, often suspenseful thirst to know what comes next. Imagine seeing "The Merchant of Venice" not knowing in advance if Shylock will win or lose. And imagine a teacher (or textbook) undoing that pleasure. In our not knowing lies the play's adventure.

David Ball, "Backwards & Forwards" (page 33)

Joseph Mankiewicz, "The Theatuh"

The theatuh, the theatuh - what book of rules says the theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris, or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the theater is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band - all theater. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience - there's theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and the Lone Ranger. Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse, Eleanora Duse - they're all theater. You don't understand them, you don't like them all - why should you? The theater's for everybody - you included, but not exclusively - so don't approve or disapprove. It may not be your theater, but it's theater for somebody, somewhere...It's just that there's so much bourgeois in this ivory greenroom they call the theater. Sometimes it gets up around my chin.

from ALL ABOUT EVE

When DID he teach the band to play? Forty years ago today?...

Photos: No. 2 Road

Annie Dillard, "Notes For Young Writers"

After I left Chapel Hill, I thought of many things I wish I'd said to you. Here are some of them.

Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.

A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigamarole. "Why," he said, surprised at the question, "in honor of physics!"

(Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen. The driver who picked him up chatted with him for five hours, and recognized that the boy had a genius for mathematical thinking. Consequently the driver educated the boy, through his doctorate abroad, at his own expense. This sort of thing happens in Arabic countries, where the people actually practice their religion.)

*

If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country.

Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression. You have to be doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need exercise, too, and people.

Read for pleasure. If you like Tolstoy, read Tolstoy; if you like Dostoevsky, read Dostoevsky. Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness.

You'll have time to read after college.

Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. It's not what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.

People in the arts, I read once, take about eight years just to figure out which art they're in! Notify your parents.

MFA and MA writing programs are great fun, and many are cheap or free.

Learn grammar. Get a grammar book and read it two or three times a year (Strunk and White is a classic.)

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.

Check the spelling; proofread. Get someone else to proofread, too.

Don't use passive verb constructions. You can rewrite any sentence.

Don't misspell dialect. Let the syntax and words suggest the pronunciation.

Don't use any word for "walk" or "say" except "walk" or "say." I know your sixth grade teacher told you otherwise. She told me otherwise, too, and is still telling her sixth graders otherwise.

Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.

Don't describe feelings.

The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.

If something in your narrative or poem is important, give it proportional space. I mean, actual inches. The reader has to spend time with a subject to care about it. Don't shy away from your big scenes; stretch them out.

Writing in scenes doesn't mean in television scenes. No dull dialogue: "Honey, I'm home! Where's the beer?" "In the refrigerator!" (I think most fiction contains far too much dialogue.)

Capturing the typical isn't a virtue. Only making something new and interesting is. If you find life dull and people hateful, keep thinking until you can see it another way. Why would any reader pick up a book to read a detailed description of all that is most annoying in his daily life?

Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.

Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don't buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.

Buy books from independent booksellers, not chain stores. For complicated reasons, chain stores are helping stamp out literary publishing.

(Similarly, register and vote. If you don't vote, don't complain.)

Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the reader. Of course it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful. Put it away and rewrite it later. Don't keep reading it over, or you'll have to wait longer to see it afresh.

Don't write about yourself. Think of books you like. Isn't it their subjects you like best? Boring people talk about themselves.

The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go.

Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don't waste much time polishing this; you'll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway, once you finish the work and have a clearer sense of what it is about. Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don't need it now. This is why some writers say it takes "courage" to write. It does. Over and over you must choose the book over your own wishes and feelings.

Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful. When you are young and starting out, often it is better, however, to write something else than to labor over something that was a bad idea in the first place. Write something else; then write something else; then write something else. No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it.

When you are writing full time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings. If you skip a day it will take three painful days to get to believing in the work again. Have a place where you can leave the work out and open, so you don't have to get it all out and spread before you can start again.

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. You have many years. You can develop a taste for good literature gradually. Keep a list of books you want to read. You soon learn that "classics" are books that are endlessly interesting almost all of them. You can keep rereading them all your life about every ten years and various ones light up for you at different stages of your life.

Don't find an interesting true story a life, say, or a historical incident, and decide to turn it into a novel instead of a biograpy or a historical account. The novel based on fact is a muddy hybrid; readers can't tell what's true. Publishers won't touch these. Write it as nonfiction if you want to write it.

If you want to write novels (and if you buy hardcover novels regularly), go ahead and write novels. Publishing has changed, however, and novels are very difficult to publish. If you want to improve the odds that people will read what you write, write nonfiction narrative.

For fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, the more research you do, the more materials you will have to play with. You are writing for readers a very educated bunch in this country. It's hard and interesting to tell them something they don't know. The more you read, the better you will know what they know.

No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.

Publication is not a gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties, who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what the older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is 1 in 3,000. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)

When a magazine rejects your story or poem, it doesn't mean it wasn't "good" enough. It means that magazine thought its particular readers didn't need that exact story or poem. Editors think of readers: what's in it for the reader? There is a cult of celebrity, too, in this country, and many magazines publish only famous people, and reject better work by unknown people.

You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write.


from IMAGE: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS & RELIGION, #16, Summer 1997

Photos: Remnants

Photos: greenhouse at No. 2 Road Bridge

Photos: NYC

Billy Collins, "The Movies"

I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.


from "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins


Garrison Keillor reads this - wonderfully - at The Writers Almanac for Thursday, April 12, where there's also a link to buy the Collins book. You can subscribe to Garry The K's podcast through iTunes. Thanks, Spencer, for the tip.

More about the movies at Soul Food Movies

J.R.R. Tolkien, "Tales That Really Matter"

"I don't like anything here at all," said Frodo, "step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid."
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."

from The Lord Of The Rings, Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", by J.R.R. Tolkien

Wendell Berry, "The Story In Which We Are Taking Part"

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part. If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concern. "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as Macbeth says when he has "supp'd full with horrors" and is "aweary of the sun."

If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance.

from "Christianity And The Survival Of Creation" by Wendell Berry

Ron Reed, "Redeeming The Time: Live Theatre"

Is the theatre really dead? Everyone asked that question in the early Fifties, and it probably wasn't new even then. Simon and Garfunkel reiterated it in 1966 and now, a few years into this media-saturated new millennium, it's as timely and embarrassing a question as ever.

We were a dominant cultural force a mere hundred years ago, the place to go for communal stories, public dreams. Until our flashy celluloid kid sister showed up to hog the spotlight, joined onstage by her even brasher little broadcast brother. Their economies of scale and marketing muscle mean live theatre now occupies a dimly lit corner of the public stage, shabbily costumed and almost unnoticed, somewhere near the stage-left exit.

Post-modern culture is notoriously – and increasingly – word-resistant and image-oriented, not to mention fractured, hurried and advertised-to. Fast, cheap and out of control. (Maybe it's not theatre that's dying, maybe it's our culture that's killing itself). Consumers – which is what we're being reduced to – aren't likely even to hear about what's going on at the local skit factory: we can't afford the billboards, and electronic media looks after its own. Even when word does leak out, this language-rooted art form lacks the jump cuts, digital effects and – let's face it – graphic violence and sex that sells its flashier sibs.

So. Is the theatre really dead? If by dead you mean we're not the most visible cultural juggernaut in the neighbourhood then, yes, we're as near-dead now as thirty-five or fifty years ago – not completely, but pretty much. Us and the poets, the string quartets and the speakers of Esperanto. But if you mean dead as in dead - not breathing, no pulse, stage lights off, nobody home – I must report that the rumours are, as always, greatly exaggerated. Theatre is live. Very much so.

And that's the point, really. Liveness. Because people still, and always will, need that one essential, irreducible distinctive of our miraculous, marginal, indispensable art form. Maybe now more than ever.

A lot of us are getting more than a little sick of the whole franchised, hyped, impersonal show. Forget Reality TV, we want Real. It became obvious in the Eighties that TV church wasn't church at all – however postmodern we might get, we'll always be human, we'll always need human contact, flesh and blood and bread and wine. And what's true of church is true of theatre – screens won't do. It's not just our sermons and small groups that need to live and breathe, it's our stories. We crave this – to breathe common air, feel the actor's closeness, smell the grease paint, roar with the crowd. We're wary and weary of words, but what if those words take flesh and live among us?

Stuart Scadron-Wattles rightly observes that the best, truest and most vital theatre – Necessary, not Obligatory, Theatre – does powerfully what we've always needed story to do. Without preaching message, it nonetheless proposes an order to the chaos of fragmented lives – and God knows they're as chaotic and fragmented as ever, just now. It engages audience and artist in a tangible kind of community, as co-creators held together by the distinctly participative and permissive imagination that can make theatre an experience of transcendence. Far from being culturally peripheral or irrelevant, Necessary Theatre is essential to its community, and to the lives of its audience: "it reports from the front of cultural change," and because it is produced locally (rather than shipped in bulk from massive narrative warehouses thousands of miles away), it speaks distinctively and potently to the specific concerns of its community.

Theatre & Company, which Stuart founded, is as committed to serving its region (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario) as it is to a particular spiritual or artistic mandate. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the company's spiritual/artistic mandate is worked out within the particularities of a specific geographical calling. This dynamic distinguishes all the professional theatres expressing a Judeo-Christian mandate, from Lamb's Players in San Diego and Seattle's Taproot Theatre, for example, to the remarkable proliferation of such companies north of the border – Toronto's Brookstone Theatre, Rosebud Theatre in Alberta, Pacific Theatre and the Chemainus Theatre Festival on the west coast. Live theatre may not be as visible in the trans-continental mass market as film, television or published media, but it survives by tuning its ear to its proximate community, telling the specific stories those particular people are hungry to hear. What guarantees that this home-grown, humble art form remains Necessary and essential is its very smallness, its intimacy, its specificity. Generality, as Stanislavsky said, is the enemy of art.

It is fascinating to me that, by and large, these companies were founded by evangelical Christians, even though – and this must be stressed – their mandates were and are not evangelistic. (It may also be significant that many of these people would now be wary about labeling themselves "evangelical," though all are still Christians). There have always been Christians involved in the theatre, though thirty years ago they mostly operated undercover, and I'm going to guess they were mostly Lutherans and Catholics and Anglicans who lacked their evangelical cousins' guardedness toward the arts. But I find it remarkable that so much vital, culturally-engaged work that Christians are now doing springs from soil that until so recently grew mostly gospel singers and evangelists.

Forty years ago, the prevailing Evangelical stance toward theatre was the same as its stance toward culture in general – guarded skepticism, even outright antagonism. But Baptists made the mistake of buying TVs, to watch Billy Graham and Monday night football. Once those square-eyed Trojan horses infiltrated evangelical living rooms, the mighty fortress of cultural separationism was breached and it was only a matter of time until the kids were going to movies and trying out for the school play. When they left home for theatre school twenty-five years ago, they were hard-pressed to find believing peers, let alone role models or mentors, but their children are now signing up for actor training and playwriting workshops with no clue that their grandparents didn't even go to the movies. Indeed, the theatre program they attend may be at the very college where Grandpa learned his anti-culture theology. I don't know if Wheaton students were allowed to go to plays thirty years ago: now they're making them.

Other signs of life. After a decade or more when no new religious-mandate professional companies were birthed, recent years have seen new initiatives in New York City (the Salvation Army's Theatre 315), Orlando (The Vine Theatre) and Atlanta (Art Within), with a some Baylor theatre grads about to raise the curtain on a new venture in Dallas. Even the theologians are catching on: Jeremy Begbie, whose notion of "doing theology through the arts" is all the rage in certain circles, and Hans Urs von Balthazar, the It Boy of Catholic theology, share an appreciation for theatre their pastor-shaping predecessors lacked.

Good thing. Increasingly, the churches those seminarians end up pastoring have ministers of drama, acting workshops and even well-equipped theatres. Congregations are mounting full-scale productions of real plays, embracing the power of theatre-making to forge community and appeal to a generation of non-church-goers who don't want to be preached at, but are hungry for both story and authentic human contact.

The church is catching on to theatre just as theatre is catching on to church – or if not church, at least what churches have been reaching for all these years. I don't know if it's because everybody got all superstitious as the millennium approached, or if the collapse of the World Trade Towers put not only fear but the fear of God into people. Or maybe it's just because Christians have been emerging from their hidey-holes and getting involved in the culture, until we've reached the point where enough of them know enough of us that we all realize there's not really an Us and a Them anymore.

Whatever it is, there's no denying that the arts community's suspicious antipathy toward Christians and Christianity is being replaced by – dare I imagine it? – an almost respectful interest in what we've been on about all along.

Live theatre is an up-close and local thing, which makes it harder to generalize about Theatre In North America than about, say, film or fiction, which have a geographically dispersed audience and impact. So let me reflect on what I've seen over the past twenty years here in Vancouver, on the Emersonian principle that what's true of me is true of the universe.

When Pacific Theatre was founded in 1984, the Christians portrayed on stage – or screen, for that matter – were hypocrites, manipulators and sex abusers. Most new plays didn't deal with spiritual things, except in the vaguest and flakiest terms. Now I see spiritual enquiry in every second play I attend, and as often as not Christian characters are portrayed with the same humanity as anybody else – neither more nor less fallen, neither more nor less holy.

For the first decade of our history, Pacific Theatre was excluded from pretty much every aspect of the cultural mainstream: no government arts funding, no reviews, no admission to the Theatre Alliance. But the second ten years of our story has seen a dramatic reversal. Critics cover all our shows and even applaud the company's religious mandate, government agencies fund and encourage our work, and the professional theatre community welcomes us at the table, gives us our fair share of award nominations and committee assignments, comes to see our work.

Have we "won the right to be heard"? I suppose, partly. Sheer survival counts for something, and eventually people had to realize we weren't the proselytizing monsters they feared we were. But more, I believe, something has shifted in the zeitgeist. People are not only willing to tolerate us, they want to hear what we have to say, find out our spiritual survival strategies. Modernism, and its mystery-denying faith in science and pure rationality, has all but expired. Post-modernism's scorn for narrative and meaning don't wash any more. People – some people, anyway – want Mystery and humanity.

It astounds me that the Pacific Theatre plays which end up being produced at companies with no religious mandate are our most religious ones. Who would ever have believed that Tent Meeting, a play about gospel quartets and revival meetings and climaxing with an altar call, and Espresso, where the pursuing lover is Christ himself, would be performed at regional theatres across Canada?

Twenty years ago, non-propagandist scripts exploring spiritual experience with any sort of Christian resonance just weren't out there – we had to write our own. Which was fine: it made us nurture playwrights who create highly specific works for our context which – Emerson, again – end up having far wider impact than anything confined to our stage. But that's no longer our only recourse: my next season includes two new works from Canadian theatres with no faith mandate; Halo, in which the face of Christ appears on the wall of a Cape Breton donut shop, and The Domino Heart, about the spiritual consequences of an organ transplant. We're no longer the only game in town. Thank God.

Still, as spiritually open as theatre may now be, our days as Belle of the cultural Ball are long since passed. But they can't stop us from dancing. There will always be people born with story in their bones, and a compulsion to incarnate them in front of other people. Because the movies only need a handful of us – a flick with maybe fifty speaking parts will be seen by how many million people? – we find other ways to live out our calling. That's what the stage is for.

Something is stirring in live theatre on our continent. It may be that ours is the most peripheral of the narrative arts, with the least visibility and the lowest attendance. But if the invisible God is indeed moving in the arts, it wouldn't surprise me to find him in the midst of the least and the lowest.

Originally appeared in IMAGE Journal #42, Spring 2004, as part of their 15th anniversary symposium on the future of the arts, "Redeeming The Time."

Steven Soderbergh's Oscar Acceptance Speech

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think the world would be unlivable without art.