Kinderpunk Musings: Random bits

I feel like this journal entry will bounce around a bit. I am looking at 4 notes in my folder, and I'm not really convinced that any of them go together. Well, we'll see where we go.

The Buddha

I watched this PBS documentary last night and enjoyed it. Well, I'm pretty sure I fell asleep before it was over, but I saw enough of it to be allowed a general opinion.

I'm not really Buddhist, though I know I wear Buddha charms quite often. I can't really say with certainly any more that I "am" (there's that verb again) anything in the strict sense. I spent a long time trying to figure out what that might be, and I think I'm of the age now where I'm totally ok with practicing (or at least willing?) a mixture of beliefs. It's the aspects we find a little universal from narrative to narrative. What Campbell referred to as the Hero's Journey. Buddha obviously fits into this tradition. So it's the "idea" of Buddha that I'm most attracted to. Quoth the lost 13th apostle Rufus in Dogma

"I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea, changing a belief is trickier. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant.

So the thought that came to me last night, which may not be quite an epiphany to someone who has perhaps been a practicing Buddhist for some time is that this notion of Reflexivity seems pretty crucial to Buddhist thought. To bend back on one's self and examine. To learn not only from this life, but all lives, to circle back in order to ask those hard questions. And there is also a paradox inherent in this, or so it seems. To bend back and reflect on one's self, to fully grasp the dukkha (suffering) one is presently in as first step to understanding and perhaps transcending that dukkha. The paradox comes in when you consider that it is also core to Buddhist thought that there ultimately is no self.

And could one consider the meditative act as a reflexive tool? It could be argues as a total-being reflexive turn.

Pang, Steier, theater

I was also struck by the Steier quote in Pang's article for this week:

"we understand and become aware of our own research activities as telling a story about ourselves."

You may, very easily, change out "research activities" for a great number of other personal decisions we make and the statement holds its truth. I was thinking primarily of choices I make in choosing/directing shows. But I suppose you can substitute "choice in clothing" or "religious practices" or "leisure activities" and it's still just as accurate. To be sure more of us would think it less strange that those personal examples would say something about us than a work-related example, but that likely says something about how many of us split ourselves into an individual and a professional who never get together and hang out.

I am aware though of the stories my choices tell. It's of course easier to sort through what the story is trying to say after the fact than it is while it is still coming together.

I was also considering a few threads from Pang and Jorgenson in relation to my directing work. Pang talks about her association with her subjects influencing the project, and Jorgenson talks about the shifting relationships between researcher and the interviewed, particularly in the instances where she was pregnant and somehow part of the "team" and how that seemed to really change the hierarchal dynamic going on in the interviews to be more on a single plane.

These threads led me to think about my work as a director and where the overlap may be there. I have noted that actors tend to respond differently to two classes of directors: those who are Capital-D Directors (those who only direct and are pretty clearly on the "other side" of the actor line) and those who would consider themselves artists who lowercase-d direct. I consider myself the latter as I am not necessarily a trained director (but a trained actor who took two directing courses across those 6 years). This is a broad generalization, but maybe something to explore later, but I might point out that it seems to me that actors respond better to and create more of a unified true ensemble in circumstances where they work with lowercase-d directors. Similarly, it's easier for it to become "us and them" with Capital-D Directors. This relationship is of course constructed and maintained from both sides. I do not imply at all that it's only the actors or only the director responsible for this. It is truly a mutual product.

Fun stuff

I really only wanted to note in the journal the idea brought up in class about multiple perspectives, perspective in general, and how different positions give you different views and different eyes see different things. This is exemplified on TV when we consider the episode that employs this device of showing a single event through all of the main character's eyes - typically to comic effect. I can, just off the top of my head, think of a good half-dozen shows that have done this over the years. My favorite perhaps is the episode of the X-Files, Bad Blood. This episode is even centered around getting at "the truth" - the two FBI agents are attempting to "get their story straight" on what happened in a small town.

This device is so common I suspect because we do fundamentally understand this notion of perspective and allow for us all on a personal level to be able to see things as individuals. Somehow though this has not moved to a point in our collective psyche where more do not question concepts like "truth," "certainty," "scientific fact" and so on.

Please watch this video, it's less than 2 minutes long. They even admit they got the idea from an old Van Dyke Show episode.