The Discarded Lecture

I do not let myself get carried away by my ideas. I discard 19 out of 20 of them every day.


(Gustav Mahler)

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Hello Jen

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I am a member of the Artists of Bristol on the Delaware, in Bristol, Pennsylvania. It's a group of mainly painters who are very supportive of each other, if they like you. Some of them don't like me.



Being a group of painters their arms are not open wide to any other form of artist, no matter what they claim, Musicians, writers or any type of performing artist are not recognized with the same sense of validity. Being a retired actor I do not qualify as being a true artist in the minds and looks of many of the members.



As you well know from the magazines and the TV gossip news, we actors are not artists. We are just artificial, self-indulgent, posers who just go around emoting all the time. We are promiscuous, insulting to each other in public and we live in mansions. You may go to see an actor in a play or a film and enjoy it very much, but you would never take an actor to lunch or let your daughter marry one.



It doesn't' matter that being a retired actor I now paint pictures and write stories. I'm still not accepted, I still carry the dreaded devil's cloak of show business around my shoulders.



We meet together once a month to talk about present and future art exhibits. The discussion never veers into any other topic. But also every month someone gives a presentation about some form of artistic expression in which they are involved Many of them are very interesting and informative. I have such a presentation to give to the group. I've been trying to get a night to give it for about 9 months, but I always get elbowed out for one reason or another. Finally, last November, I got a commitment to give it in the March meeting. I've worked hard on getting it ready. Today I found out that, over my head and behind my back, someone else has been moved into that slot. Since the next few moths are scheduled I'm out in the cold again.



My presentation is about drawing and its relationship to painting, music, theatre, writing and poetry, with a bit of history about New York City, The Art Students League and the Bristol Riverside Theatre. I have references from Henri Matisse, Marcel Marceau, Etienne DeCroux, Arnold Schoonberg, Shakespeare and ancient cave paintings.



I guess that wouldn't be of much interest to artists after all, would it? Maybe I'll discard it. Or maybe I'll wait until I'm out of debt, rent a hall, hire a musician and give the lecture someplace else.



Should I also discard the Artists of Bristol on the Delaware and perhaps find a writers group, or form one?

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Dana Bate

Vagabond Journeys

Never Give Up

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Relinquish

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.


(Abraham Lincoln)

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Hello Marty

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Even behind the masks of the slow, lazy and ignorant, the human being is a miracle of creation. Look behind the masks and start appreciating and loving yourself, and don't quit.



There are as many reasons to give up on life as there are people who do it. But there is one overriding reason to fill out your time with living, and that is because life is God. Giving up is an enemy to life.



The answer to my prayers, no matter what it concerns, is always the same, the one word "relinquish." I am led by life to relinquish, to give up on the bad,,harmful, evil and ugly things, to not cherish them nor let them occupy any part of my life. Everything that needs to be relinquished is thought. It is, after all, ideas that create, shape and run our lives.



We may hope to see our happiness and salvation come from the spin of a wheel, a lottery ticket, a government program or the right person to live with. But in the clear cold day of a winter sunshine we will face the fact that it is our own thinking that will bring any palpable result into being, good or bad.



So, what to do, what to do? First you have to clean out the mess. That means you have to learn to tell the difference between the truth and the trash. Some of those ideas you've been holding on to may be worthless, or even worse, harmful to you. Examine them and see what's worth saving. The rest? Introduce it to a big mental garbage bag.



Once the place is clean you have to begin to judge the visitors. Should they be admired and accepted or should they be shown the door? The thoughts from the past and the present may be negative ones. They will pop up looking for space in your head. And when you identify a guest you don't want to entertain give it the finger, or the fist, or just simply say "scram." The negatives are not yours, they're anti-you.



What needs to be relinquished? Everything that suggests you are not the best, most beautiful, smartest and most lovable creature that you are. Never give up on your special self.

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Dana Bate

Vagabond Journeys

Never Give up

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Blizzard

To my New York friends and my New England friends: May the big bad blizzard huff and puff and blow itself out to sea.


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DB - Vagabond Journeys

Never give up.

Midwinter Revelry

'Tis the season to be chilly.


Fah la la la la.

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Hello Arlene

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Today marks the beginning of the last half of Winter. According to the Farmer's Almanac you should have half your wood left and half your hay According to my almanac you should have your hat, scarf, overcoat, gloves and boots in good repair, because "It ain't over till it's over" (thank you Yogi Berra).



Winter begins with a lot of joy and celebration. There's Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Years Eve. Then comes a long Siberian stretch until the warm weather with it's tasty breeze blowing in from some magical place. There isn't much to break up the waiting period, to keep one from getting depressed, to cure the frustration of shoveling mounds of snow that's only going to melt away to mud one day, to calm the rage on the rare morning that for no reason the car won't start.



What we get is MLK Day, Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, St. Patrick's Day and a bouquet of birthdays, including my own. Otherwise it's Lent (yippee).



I like to celebrate, or at least make note of, birthdays. But not ages. "How old are you now?" "None of your business." Don't count the candles on the cake. Only children concern themselves with how old they are. She's not 14, she's 14 and a half. "Don't grow up too fast" I say. She doesn't want to hear that. She wants to be an adult as fast as possible so she can be free, she thinks. Give her a few decades and she'll wish she hadn't grown up so fast. Ah well.



But birthdays are good. Your birthday is a celebration of the fact that you are part of life, you claim, express, reflect and represent life. Your being, your existence contributes to life that is. It's your day to proclaim life to the universe.



Growing up is not amassing years, accumulating memories and moving toward oblivion. Growing up is growing out, growing out of age, growing up to discoveries. It is the expansion of life.



I think people who were born during the Winter have a certain destiny. Perhaps we are more serious about things, however I note that I and my near neighbors on the calendar have a good sense of humor. We can laugh in the darkness. Perhaps when we were babies and we looked out the window to see dark skies and falling snow we instinctively knew something that others had to learn.



Every birthday is a moment of reaffirmation. Growing up and out is an act of renewal. One doesn't have to wait for the Spring, or even a birthday to light another candle on the cake and celebrate the fact that life lives.

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Dana Bate

Vagabond Journeys

Never Give Up

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Limber Up

Jack be nimble,


Jack be quick,

Jack jump over

the candlestick.

(Unknown)

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Hello Ken

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An actor I know told me abut a year he spent in London. He went there to take a particular course in movement for actors. While there he occasionally went to the theatre and did a few other things, but almost his entire focus was on that rigorous movement training. He did no acting at all. At the end of the year he returned to New York and said he never was so limber in his life. It's an excellent and necessary thing for any actor to be nimble. Those who aren't are deficient.



After my actor friend returned he went out on auditions and started working again. But he complained that one year away from doing any acting work had taken its toll on him. He said he had lost his edge on some of the other aspects of the actor's craft and felt he had to catch up. He said the other actors around him were quicker at learning their lines, finding their characters and processing the director's needs. He may have been nimble of body but was no longer so nimble of mind.



Every play worth doing (and I admit some of them are not), from the silliest superficial farce to the most powerful thunder drama, has a lesson to teach. And that lesson reaches out across all time and humanity. As with any art, theatre has a right to affect and change people's lives. But it can only do that when the theatre artists are aware of what the lesson is and how to teach it. A play can be like a grand sunrise, a beautiful picture that exists in both time and space. It is the responsibility of the actors, and especially the director, to know what the play says, not just a chain of events but an unfoldment of discoveries about those events and the people they affect. They reach the other side with the author's flame still burning brightly. Those in the play who aren't alert to those things (I admit I've had the misfortune to work with some of those, sometimes) never get there. They kick the candlestick over and put out the flame.



Theatre is a metaphor of life. In every important activity of life one must remain alert, nimble, quick and limber in every way.

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Dana Bate

Vagabond Journeys

Never Give Up

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THE NEW NEANDERTHAL

He who thoughtfully and with a searching eye investigates the laws of Nature in all their immense variety is stricken with astonishment when he stumbles upon a wisdom he was not aware of.


Immanuel Kant

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Hello Ernie

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When I was a lad I loved reading the novels of Jules Verne. He was a Science Fiction writer but as with many such writers he was also a prophet. Many of his stories were about events that literally happened years later. He wrote "20 Thousand Leagues Under The Sea" before there were submarines, "Around The World In 80 days" before there was air travel and "From Earth To the Moon" before there was NASA. One book I remember well, "Trip To The Center Of The Earth" has yet to happen. It seems totally improbable. But when and if geologists discover more about what is under the Earth's surface, who knows what may occur?



Now George Church, a geneticist from the Harvard Medical School, is cautiously discussing the idea of cloning a Neanderthal baby from DNA extracted from fossils. He claims that he's not ready to do it right away, if at all, and the he's not looking for a surrogate mother.



The child would be one that was not born over 40,000 years ago before the Neanderthals were overcame by the early Humans. There are social, ethical. scientific and philosophical questions involved in such an enterprise and many opinions pro and con. There is no question that a successful result would be of enormous benefit to science. So far all the argument I've read against the idea are pitifully silly.



A surrogate mother would have be a very adventurous woman. But considering the "immense variety" of Human Nature such a person may appear. It would need to be someone who was experienced in child bearing and the gestation period would have to be carefully observed. But the possibilities have set my imagination and my memory to spinning.



My imagination because I wonder if the child is healthy and survives, is taught to learn and to communicate, what vestigial wisdom might exist in the collective consciousness of the individual, what lost knowledge may be lodging there and what might we learn about the evolution of ourselves? If the babe survives, is healthy, grows into a ripe age, male or female, and wants to mate, what then? If the Neanderthal girl or boy mares with a Human what will be the result. Sound preposterous? I have read that the Neanderthals mated with the Cro Magnons before they disappeared. They must have mated with the Humans of 40,000 years ago. Who knows, we may be carrying Neanderthal genes around with us right now. The Neanderthal kid might feel right at home with some of us.



It stirs my memory because a few years ao I was working on a novel about the same subject, a Human man mating with a Neanderthal woman and having a child. I never got to finish it because the computer gobbled it up one day. Maybe in the sense it was being prophetic in the Vernesian sense I should try to reconstruct it.



The cloning of a Neanderthal baby will probably happen some day. If we don't do it, China or some other scientifically advance nation will.



If a thing can be done, it will e done.

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DB - Vagabond Journeys

Never give up.

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Places

One way or another I already know everything, and yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.

Etty Hillesum

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Hello Jon

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If I ever became inexcusably arrogant enough to write my autobiography I would entitle it "Places." The few friends and acquaintances who have heard me say that have expressed the opinion that it isn't a good title. But I disagree (naturally).



The alternative titles others have come with for me display, I think, a gross misunderstanding and in some cases an unpleasant underestimation of me.



It has been suggested that I use the title of this blog, "Vagabond Journeys" but that title implies a life of adventures and discoveries still being lived, windmills still needing to be attacked.



Someone suggested "My Life In Art" but Constantine Stanislavski did a very good job with that title and I don't think I could match up.



One person even suggested as a title "The Actor Who Escaped Broadway." Now if that doesn't sound like a lolly-pop title I don't know what does.



No "Places" is the word. In the theatre "Places" is the last call you get from the Stage Manager after you've been given "Half Hour," "Fifteen" and "Five." "Places" means the performance is about to begin and if you're on at the beginning you'd better get your talented and highly gifted self to your place or the curtain will go up without you. When the show closes you don't hear that word again, until the next time. I don't know how many hundreds perhaps a thousand or so times I've heard that word in the 50 years of my career. In a very big way it has defined my lite.



When I was 4 years old my father died. 2 years later the family began a slow slide from a reasonable middle class life into poverty. From the age of 6 until I graduated from high school we moved 26 times and I don't even remember some of the places we lived. As a result of that itinerant childhood I never got into the habit of settling down somewhere and calling it home, or the opportunity. I also don't remember some of the places I've lived as an adult. I had a small meager hotel room in New York for 20 years but I seldom lived there. I lived with someone else or a theatre I was working for put me up in an apartment somewhere. But I do remember that some of those places hold ghosts of a former life, a record of events that formed and shaped me for good or not. An autobiography would have to name names, events and places.



I've been where I am now for almost a year having moved from a very uncomfortable environment of 10 years duration. This is by no means a home or a permanent situation. It's more like a clearing in the woods. But over the past decade or so I've discovered a different journey facing me with different places to explore. I awake from dreams and visions in the night to find a mind which has been used as a tea kettle, something in which to boil ideas. The mind is powerful, of course, to imagine, plan, create and make things happen. But released from such menial obligations it leads me to mountains that must be climbed, seas to be crossed, jewels to be dug out of its own ground and stars to be observed shining in its own night sky. I listen for the rhythms of things that exist in space and wait to see the bubbling source of agelessness. Those are the Places my heart sings to know.



Let another write of me if they choose. My life is written in the disappearing parchments of time.

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Dana Bate

Vagabond Journeys

Never Give Up

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