Italics are mine

Fall Issue of Tricycle Magazine

I find myself very fortunate to have discovered Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine a few years ago. This is one of the highest-quality magazines I’ve ever read, on par with Harvard Business Review, but obviously in a very different register. Every issue I find myself in awe of the writers and editors who produce such consistently fascinating material. I often read the magazine once from cover to cover, and then read it again when I’m done, but for the Fall issue I actually did that three times before I could stand putting it down.

I knew I was in for a treat when I discovered an excerpt of Pema Chödrön’s new book, due in bookstores in a few months, on living with uncertainty. I’ve long struggled with that, given that I’d like to move away from the area I currently live in and am not getting any younger, and at the same time don’t know how to make the change to create a real improvement, and still have a job (a nice plus, we all agree), especially a job I can be good at. I’ve joked a few times with friends in the same situation that it’d be so much easier if we could just have some sort of dream where the name of the town we’re supposed to move to and the date of the move would flash in front of our eyes and we’d know exactly what to do and when to do it. We all realized, though, that our issue was with handling the not-knowing, trying to escape the discomfort of uncertainty. And Chödrön nails the issue on the head, as if she’d been writing for us, or at least me.

The excerpt starts with: “As human beings we share a tendency to scramble for certainty whenever we realize that everything around us in flux.” And later: “Is it possible to increase our tolerance for instability and change? How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?... How can we relax and have a genuine, passionate relationship with the fundamental uncertainty, the groundlessness of being human?” Without going into the details of the article, Chödrön explains that our discomfort arises from “our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation” (so true!) and that “we can counter this response [of running away from the feeling] by training in being present.” The key is not to fuel the story line.

I really enjoy her writing, which I find more straightforward than that of many other writers on Buddhism without dumbing the knowledge down. Needless to say, I’ll be picking up a copy of Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change when it comes out in October.  

Stephen Batchelor provides fascinating insights into secular Buddhism, which is about “the moment-to-moment flourishing of human life within the ethical framework of the Eightfold Path here on earth”, as opposed to concepts such as reincarnation and karma due to previous lives. Secular Buddhism is probably as close as I’ll ever come to identifying with a religion, so I found his wisdom truly inspiring. He also gives an interview about his “atheist pilgrimages”.

The article “Buying wisdom” doesn’t pull back any punches in criticizing the shallowness of a “conference on mindfulness for the Silicon Valley crowd”. An excerpt: “There is a world in which the works of Dogen and Esai [about Zen Buddhism] as human achievements are indistinguishable from a game that encourages users to buy and trade pastel-colored animals on social media sites. To attend conferences like Wisdom 2.0 is to enter that world.”

I thought “What’s at stake as the dharma goes modern?”, about immanent vs permanent goals in Buddhism, was a touch self-righteous at the beginning – it starts with recounting how the author, at a retreat, asked the following a professor who’d been lecturing on laboratory studies of meditators: “Given the depth of suffering in samsara and the possibility of a solution to it; given that the very texts we study outline a path to that solution… why would be devote our precious human lives to exploring whether meditation can lower blood pressure?” For me the people you want to initiate to meditate by telling them it can help their blood pressure aren’t the same who are interested in studying the texts in depth, so bringing a medicine aspect to it is a valuable and important way to broaden the reach and appeal of meditation.

But the article is really about the new secular environment that surrounds Western Buddhism, which the author objects to, and as such it does raise valuable questions regarding what Buddhism is becoming. I feel close to secular Buddhism, but at the same time I identify myself as “spiritual but not religious”, and while I try to practice Buddhist concepts such as the eight-fold path and meditate, I don’t pretend to be Buddhist. People who do view themselves as Western Buddhists do have the right to wonder whether their religion is being diluted or dumbed-down. Unsurprisingly, the article is the longest feature in the issue, and I’m sure it’ll touch a chord with the Buddhist community. 

Other favorites include the interview with Richard Gombrich on “what the Buddha thought” and early Buddhism, and the feature on the late United Nations leader Dag Hammarskjöld. 

I’ll end this post with a quote of his: “The other day I was forced by a journalist to try to formulate my views on the main requirements of somebody who wishes to contribute to the development of peace and reason. I found no better formulation than this: “He must push his awareness to the utmost limit without losing his inner quiet, he must be able to see with the eyes of the others from within their personality without losing his own.””

Paul Taylor: Dancemaker

When I was in Paris this summer I decided to attend a spectacle at the Palais de Chaillot, whose Jean Vilar auditorium I find gorgeous and whose foyer has a famous and stunning view of the Eiffer Tower. It turned out that only the representations by a modern dance company matched my schedule, and I'd never heard of the company (I'm not usually into modern dance), but I thought: why not.

It turned out the company was the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to like modern dance in general, but I most definitely love Paul Taylor's work. The company, which is based in New York City, danced at Lincoln Center this past March, and I didn't even pay attention to it. (I probably saw advertisements walking around the Upper West Side, but since I haven't been a modern dance enthusiast so far I must have forgotten them as soon as I saw them.) It's funny to think such wonderful dances were so close to me all along and I had to go all the way to Paris to learn of their existence. The program in Paris was different every night and the specific dances I saw are: Roses (1985), Syzygy (1987) and Piazzolla Caldera (1997).

So I got the DVD of the 1998 documentary about Paul Taylor, Dancemaker, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and watched it avidly. The movie captures both the incredible brilliance of this former dancer turned choreographer, as well as his dark side: the pain that learning he was living in a foster family (i.e., the people he loved as his parents were actually receiving money for his care) when he was young, which made him an outsider, his callous way to talk about a dancer he has just fired, his attitude toward union musicians vs non-union ones vs taped music. (I believe in people getting a living wage for what they do.)

As luck would have it, Piazzolla Caldera is described at length in the DVD, which includes some of the process of its creation and excerpts of the finished dance by the dancers Taylor created it for. I remembered it very well from seeing it in Paris while I watched the movie. Here is an example of how forward-looking Taylor (born 1930) is: he deliberately includes same-sex pairings at times - not many times, but some times - and explains that he is an observer of how people live, and this is what he sees around him. It also reflects the situation of his own dancers, a few of whom talk movingly of losing lovers or fellow company dancers to AIDS. I had noticed the same-sex pairings in Paris, and I think it takes a real amount of backbone for a choreographer not to be afraid to do and talk about that, given his dependency on wealthy patrons and philanthropists. He strikes the right balance where the pairings can't be missed but don't overly attract attention - the amazing movements of all the dancers do, and in particular the lead female dancer of course steals the show. If I'm not mistaken, it was the superb Michelle Fleet.

For a long time I thought the modern dances I saw didn't tell any story whatsoever - or maybe a tiny bit of a story, but an uninteresting one at that, and I just admired the technique of the dancers. But with Paul Taylor's dances I really felt he was saying something, about love, mankind, human nature - and he did so masterfully.

I also liked how the dancers are very honest about the pain they inflict their bodies - one describes getting out of bed after a performance, his whole body sore, his ankles stiff, another one mentions he always thinks he's going to run out of energy during a dance and won't be able to finish, but he always makes it through somehow, another one answers the questions of the reporter sitting near the sink in a lavatory, with her feet under the water. On stage all of them make their art look effortless, and I thought it was an important message to tell the public that even accomplished dancers don't reach a moment in their career where they are so good and athletic they no longer have pain. They just learn to push through it.

But what really sold me on the dance company is that I learned about Taylor 2 while I was browsing through PTDC's website, which states: "Paul Taylor established Taylor 2 in 1993 to ensure that his works could be seen by audiences all over the world, unhindered by economic or technical limitations. Mr. Taylor worked... to create a company that could accommodate performance requests as well as teach and provide community outreach." You can watch a video about Taylor 2 here. I was enormously impressed by the efforts of Paul Taylor and his Taylor 2 dancers to bring dance to a wide range of communities, both through performances and master classes. This can make such a big difference for students, even those who choose not to become professional dancers.

I'll definitely go to a performance by PTDC next time the company dances in New York, and by Taylor 2 if it comes close to my neighborhood during its travels. Current PTDC and Taylor 2 performances are listed here. Do consider attending if you have a chance - it's worth it!

Review of "Clybourne Park"

I went to see "Clybourne Park" on Broadway for my birthday earlier this summer, and was hugely disappointed with the Pulitzer-winning and Tony-winning play, which had such a fantastic premise: the first act is about the white family that sells a house to the black family portrayed in the outstanding A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, and the second act is about a white couple that wants to buy the same house in 2009, now that the black neighborhood is being gentrified.

The ad material on the play website states that it is "wickedly funny and fiercely provocative". Well, it's not. The main - unwitting - lesson of the play is that, if you decide to write on important issues that resonate with the epoch, there will be a lot of people willing to give you a free pass and not point out the lack of plot, character development, emotional tension, or anything that'd make you care for the characters. Oh, and I forget the lack of funny lines, with the exception of a joke about a Whole Foods.

The relevance of the issues in the play does mitigate its many flaws to some extent, but I can't help thinking about the masterpiece the play could've been and the missed opportunity. Instead, the characterization of white people - very caricatural - made me shake my head several times: that's not a good sign to start a discussion on the topic. For instance, apparently according to the playwright you can't really have black friends if you're white, and the white actress earnestly suggesting she had a few drew a lot of laughter. Well, my best friend in middle high was black, and I'll grant you that she was from Africa and this was in Europe, so the US history and African-American ordeal obviously don't apply to her - history that the black actress mentioned to great applause - but I'm not sure how insisting that inter-racial friendships only exist in the eye of the white person represents progress. And I'll spare you the joke about the white woman, uttered by the black actress, which drew reactions in the audience that I found scary, at least the day I saw the play. (The reactions probably vary a lot depending on the crowd.)

A review that echoes my opinion can be found in LA Weekly, of all places. I would add that the acting of the two black actors was stellar and that of the white male actors quite good, but the acting of the female white characters (especially the blond woman) was full of over-the-top mannerisms. In particular, it's hard to believe the leading female white character would be playing her character as such a caricature if the director hadn't wanted it that way, to whom my only question will be: why?

I also agree with the reviews by readers of the NYTimes who gave the play low marks, such as "This is like the winner of a junior playwrighting contest for "important issues". There is no drama! Just a lot of chit chat and clunky obvious moments [...] And the direction! The tone is all wrong. The cartoon quality of the performances!"

The play would have been tremendously improved by better direction of the actors, so I'll have to reserve my judgment on the text itself until I see another production of it. I was so disappointed by this one that I headed straight to Barnes & Noble to get books about the theater as a way to salvage my theater-themed day (birthday, if you recall) - including The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Free for all: Joe Papp, The Public and the Greatest Theater Story ever Told by Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp (about Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival). Only when I started reading these two spellbinding books did I feel reconciled with the theater.

Read of the Week

This summer I’ve tended to read issues of the New Yorker in groups of two or three, so I only discovered “Letter from Rangoon: the Burmese Spring” this past weekend. I’ve been following the developments in Burma with a lot of interest, and read “Freedom from fear” by Aung San Suu Kyi back in June, so the article offered very valuable answers to my main question, which I guess is shared by many: how did this all happen, in the hands of a general (Thein Sein) no one expected to enact such sweeping reforms?

Of course, it’s too early to tell what this will lead to – and especially if lower-ranking officials will let the reforms hold. But the article provides thoughtful reporting of the recent events and analysis of the challenges that lie ahead. This is for that sort of pieces that I began to subscribe to the New Yorker again last year, after a years-long hiatus (I couldn’t keep up with the weekly issues, and I hadn’t become as starved for intellectual reporting as I am now, hadn’t realized what a treasure the magazine is, so I have to admit I didn’t care for it. I won’t do that mistake again. Times change, I guess. Or maybe I grew up.) If you have an interest in human rights, Burma, or Aung San Suu Kyi, you want to read Evan Osnos’s piece.   

Reviews of “A Common Pursuit” and “Once”

Back in July I had the opportunity to see the play “A Common Pursuit” at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre on W 46th St and the Tony-winning musical “Once” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on W 45th St.

The play “A Common Pursuit”, which was written by Simon Gray and directed by Moises Kaufman (of “33 Variations” fame), was described as “a sharply comedic tale about the promises of youth and the compromises of adulthood”, chronicling “twenty years in the lives of six friends, from their ambitious collegiate days to their surprising discoveries in the real world.” According to a newspaper review, quoted in the publicity material: “If you’ve ever struggled to stay true-blue to your dreams and ambitions, you may recognize yourself in The Common Pursuit.”

Well, that play was a big disappointment for me. It was very well staged and the actors were excellent, but the story, about classmates at the University of Cambridge in England, who start a (doomed) literary magazine called “A Common Pursuit” (along with the unavoidable relationship entanglements), struck me as of the nazel-gazing variety, and I say this as someone who holds a doctorate from one of the best schools in the country.

It was impossible for me to relate to the characters when so many young college grads nowadays struggle much more mightily to make their dreams happen. What about the middle-class student who is admitted to a great university but can’t afford to attend? The one who has to take part-time jobs to stay in school and goes for the safe career choice after graduation instead of pursuing his dreams? The one who drops out and never completes his degree? The one who’s way overqualified for the job he does end up finding? Or even those would-be actors who head to New York hoping to say the words of Shakespeare and end up in commercials for shampoo or hair products? The actors and director did a great job, but the play will resonate with only a tiny sliver of the population. (Care for more reviews? New York Times, New Yorker.)

As for the musical “Once”, the short version of my review is: I liked it, and it’s not for everybody. In particular, it’s staged in a very conceptual fashion, which makes it great for Off-Broadway, where it originated last year (after being adapted from an Irish indie movie), but probably disappointing for the crowds of Broadway theater-goers who bought tickets because the show got 8 Tony awards and who could legitimately expect something more “razzle-dazzle”.

Now, I don’t like “razzle-dazzle” (and I like few conventional musicals), so for me “Once” was a treat, but given the price of the tickets and the very simple décor, people who do like musicals could be forgiven for wondering what exactly they paid for. I do have to say that the first half is uproariously funny and the actors sing, act and play (music) very well, so the show does deserve its awards, but it seems to be a case of critics forgetting who goes to see Tony-winning shows and indulging in a bout of high-mindedness after watching too many mediocre productions designed for mass appeal.

One more word about the décor, so you understand what I mean: it’s a circular space with mirrors on the wall, that is supposed to remind of a bar. There are chairs or benches along the walls and the actors, when they are not playing, sit there until a scene change. Because it is, as I told you before, a “conceptual” production, there is no décor change: instead, the actors bring and move chairs or tables around in something that looks like a choreographed ballet, so you have to understand that now we’re in the Guy’s apartment with his father and now in his room. (You can see a picture of the set in this review, which was updated - the review, not the set - here when the musical moved from Off Broadway to Broadway.) That sort of modern staging gets me really enthusiastic, but it is probably a little vanguard for most.

 

In addition, the actors speak with a strong made-up accent (some play Irish characters and some Czech), which made them hard to understand at times. Given my own foreign accent, that wasn’t a big deal for me – I didn’t mind, but an elderly gentleman behind me did, because he was incapable of understanding their words. Obviously if you’re a foreign tourist who’d like a taste of Broadway this is not going to be the musical you should choose.

 

If that wasn’t enough, the actors speak in English even when the Czech characters are supposed to be speaking in Czech to each other, so the Czech words are displayed in some sort of super-title fashion on the set. At first it threw me off, since the Guy asks the Girl what her roommates are talking about and the roommates are right there, talking in English. The audience has to understand they’re really saying what is shown on the super-titles, and speaking the translation. I loved it, but again, it might take a bit of time for people to get used to.

 

The bittersweet ending, which for me was unexpected (I should have read more reviews before going), left me strangely deflated and uninspired. I wasn’t the only one – I overheard a mother explain the ending to her pre-teen daughter as we were exiting the theater. But apparently the musical is about the man or woman who got away, someone who put you on your path and disappeared from your life, and all this is depicted in a very fatalistic sort of way. What “Once” has going for it, though, are the mesmerizing performances of its actors/musicians, who are truly multi-talented and deserve every bit of acclaim they’ve been getting.

 

I recommend “Once” for music-inclined hipsters with a taste for modern art and doomed love stories. If you go, remember to show up early – maybe by fifteen minutes – because the performance is preceded by an improvised song-and-dance on stage while the theater lights are still on. (Then the lights dim and the musical begins, without transition.) The pre-show performance provides a great taste of Irish music and makes you really enjoy the musical, and its outstanding actors, so much more.  

Update on Novel

So, I’m done. Really done. Sort of.

Of course in that sort of endeavors “done” is relative, so whether I find an agent or go the self-publishing route, I’m probably looking at one last round of revisions later this year, but I’ve finally completed the most substantial part of the revisions (changing the voice and the point of view, no less, among other “details”). The book went down from 80+k to 65k, by which I mean 65,000 words, which is a bit lower than I would’ve liked – I took out one of the subplots, and from a practical standpoint it means some of the agents will probably shudder because it’s below 200 pages. I don’t care as much, since the French have much more of a tradition of short novel, and I can always add an essay about the historical facts underlying the novel at the end, or include a CD with airs related to the book. We’ll see. Frankly I’m happy with what I’ve done, although I realize the book isn’t perfect: simply, it’s time to move on.

I hope the book gets published, I hope some people find it resonates with them, but I’m not doing this to become rich or famous, and I’ve spent enough time on it. I’m particularly proud of the new narrative mode, because I realized I’d been spending a lot of effort trying to abide by some “rules”, imagined or otherwise, of American fiction writing, which in hindsight made the book quite dull, because my heart was in the content but not the form. (I’m not someone who like abiding by rules. I prefer making my own.) By daring something a bit different – and you’ll have to wait until the book materializes in a bookstore or on the Internet to understand what I mean – I feel I get to express more my unconventional side, for better or for worse. I thought I was proud of the book before, but the changes I’ve made have increased my pride in it quite substantially. And I’ve got new book ideas I want to act on, so it’s a great time to close this chapter and open another one. Wish me luck!  

2012 TEDxEast conference

Back in May I attended the TEDxEast conference in New York City – that was just around the time I took my summer break from blog-writing so I didn’t write a post on it, but after I read a piece about TED in the New Yorker I decided to share my experience of the conference.

TEDxEast was held mid-May at the New York Times Center in Midtown NYC, a very cozy auditorium with cushy seats (much more comfortable than the folding chairs of the BigApple conference in February, another TEDx offering). The organization was stellar, with plenty of food – such as Kind bars and sandwiches from Wichcraft – donated by sponsors, a smooth flow of attendees and talks that mostly ran on schedule. I found all the talks very good, with some truly inspiring. Here are highlights of my TEDx day, followed by comments on the New Yorker article.

I cherished the opportunity to see the PS22 chorus live – they’ve received a lot of publicity over the years and I’d watched their experience on YouTube, but seeing them in person made the experience truly memorable. Dean Obeidally was uproariously funny in his standup comedy act about being a Muslim and using comedy to counter Islamaphobia. The pictures of photojournalist Antonio Bolfo mesmerized many of us in the audience.

The excerpts from performance act Beauty by Jane Comfort and Company made me think about the way women view beauty today – the piece was unequal, maybe because we couldn’t be shown the whole thing due to time constraints, but the part where a woman’s picture is Photoshopped taught me a thing or two about the photographs I see in magazines. Of course I knew that they’re retouched, but seeing the full scale of things that Photoshop can do was an eye-opening moment. Another piece of performance art, The Creation: Plus 40, by Carmen Delvallade, fascinated me from beginning to end.

Helen Fisher’s talk on Biology of Mind: Who We Love articulated in an elegant and convincing fashion what I’d already observed for myself, so it was very helpful to have her framework to put words on all this. Matthias Hollwich spoke about one of my favorite topics, architecture, and specifically, the process his team used to create a winning entry for an architecture competition. Peter Wegner’s description of his work, especially his moving sculpture that “uses the flip-digit technology seen in European train stations, but substitutes color for arrival and departure information”, made me want to see it in person. I’ve got to read more articles by Pasi Sahlberg, who came from Finland to advocate for public education and an alternative course of education reform, and truly energized me.     

The last moment that sticks in my mind – and I’m writing this months after the event itself – is the talk about the song inspired by The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, and the live performance of the song by singers from the musical. Now, I don’t exactly remember who gave that talk, but looking at the program brochure (which, very unfortunately, only has contributor bios and titles, not abstracts, of the talks), my guess is that it’s Michael Friedman, who spoke about The Song Makes a Space. The book is about the “knitting and unraveling of [the] friendship” between two boys, one white and one black, who both grow up motherless in the Brooklyn of the 1970s, with music as the backdrop. The song the actors sang on stage was full of emotion – dreams, disappointments, disillusions – and Friedman (?) spoke so eloquently about all this that I bought Lethem’s book.

The New Yorker article, published in the July 9 & 16 issue of the magazine, is entitled: “Listen and Learn – TED Talks reach millions around the world. How has a conference turned ideas into an industry?” It describes in some detail the preparation for a TED talk that reminded me of the worse talks I’ve heard or watched online: “As a research report, [name]’s talk was basic and rote: he offered no proprietary information, and although his arguments dovetailed with any number of articles and books on crowd wisdom (not least, James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”), he did not cite them. As a performance, though, it was delightful.” In other words, some people are better at selling ideas than their own inventors, and at getting the limelight for it.

For those of my readers who hope to give a TED talk someday, here is the basic formula that the New Yorker journalist identifies, including in the talk mentioned above: “Those elements – an opening of direct address, a narrative of personal stake, a research summary, a précis of potential applications, a revelation to drive it home and an ending that says, Go forth and help humanity, form the basic arc of many TED talks.”

Elsewhere, we read that “TED may present itself as an ideas conference, but most people seem to watch the lectures not so much for the information as for how they make them feel… The appeal of TED comes as much from its presentation as from its substance.” I have indeed read a book or two by authors who’d given inspiring TED talks – books that subsequently became best-sellers due to their authors’ talks – and found them hopelessly overblown, of the kind that should’ve remained a magazine piece and yet sold tens of thousands of copies in a heartbeat. I’ve also looked into the work of some TED fellows in detail, when they work in an area I’m familiar with, and was disappointed when one was very much of the “hot air” variety, coasting off the publicity boost while being far too early in her scientific career to have anything to remotely justify the excitement, and that’s something the selection committee should’ve seen through right away.

I’ve got to point out somewhere in this post that the price tag of attending the yearly Long Beach conference runs in the high four digits. Maybe it’s worth it for people who get a high from short talks, and it might subsidize the creation of the videos that we all enjoy watching for free online, but is TED in danger of promoting, on occasion, empty shells with stellar public speaking skills and no substance? Something that was created to promote ideas might in the end only promote shiny, glib, shallow versions of it.

Thankfully the “bad choices” are outnumbered by the good ones, so far. For rightfully selected fellows or speakers, the publicity can truly help them set their goals in motion and achieve their dreams of a better world. Check out the New Yorker's take on "five key TED talks" here, on incarceration & injustice, multi-touch technology, introversion, brain strokes and the most popular TED talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson's talk on education. Fascinating stuff.

At TEDx I talked with some interesting fellow attendees and some uninteresting ones, people you’re happy to exchange ideas with and people you think are just “faking it” or (and that might be worse) well-intentioned folks who don’t give the impression they’ll ever be able to make their little dream come true. I did think that the crowd seemed one notch above the one at BigApple (in terms of aspirations, work situation, potential and accomplishments), but that is only based on my perfunctory observations – maybe I just didn’t talk with the right people at the other event.  

TEDxEast planned for long breaks to favor conversations, with plenty of coffee and snacks in the room downstairs, and that was the best attempt I’ve seen so far at developing a dialogue about what was going on, rather than just force-feeding us a lot of information. Some people are perfectly content with absorbing new things and not using them, but others want to create more of a community where they can bounce ideas off each other – and how to achieve that remains the million-dollar question.