thekenshow's blog

What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.
– Hakuin

When...

...We have an itch, we scratch. Later, we may notice the itch is gone and conclude it was because we scratched. So it is with erratic drivers, rude waiters, frustrated lovers and the wrong skirt. But every thing comes and goes. Why scratch?

Things will be a bit different around here for the next couple weeks. I'm at an amazing Zen center in Salt Lake City and won't have time to write anything remotely thoughtful. Remotely thoughtful is of course my blogging standard ;-) so failing that I'll just post pictures, insights and other tidbits as I'm able.

I'm here for two weeks of facilitator training in Genpo Roshi's Big Mind Process. It's a potent technique for personal development and it's been very effective in creativity training too. My time here will be a mix of traditional Zen and Big Mind training. It's only day three and I already feel like I've inhaled the ocean!

(Time Loves a Hero, Part IV)

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

– Basho

I once believed the ability to make music was a gift only a few people possessed. The rest of us, apparently, had a gift for being in the audience. This seemed as immutable as gravity, so even while I longed to create music I was resigned to this split.

It took quite some time for this delusion to wear off. I have a picture of my eighth or ninth birthday party and the cake was shaped like a guitar, complete with strings made of icing. I had hounded my parents for a guitar and they had come through with not just the cake but a small, inexpensive guitar.

I have no idea where that guitar went, but I do know that not much happened while I had it. I didn’t have a clue how to play it and neither did my parents. Guitar lessons might have worked, but I don’t recall any. It would take a broken leg from a motorcycle crash at age 18 to get me started again. I figured I couldn’t do much else, why not rent a guitar and take a few lessons?

Thanks to Ben at Jett Landry Music* in Sudbury, Ontario, I learned how to play a few basic chords, manage a barre chord, do some rudimentary finger picking and a render handful of song fragments. It was enough to see me through to buying a black Ibanez acoustic after college; enough to keep me playing intermittently for another decade.

The shift came for me when I began playing with other people at local music jams. I discovered that music was deeply communal, a shared creative experience. Making music together can enlarge our spirits and soften our edges. On a good night, sharing music entirely dissolves our boundaries. We become better players and better people together.

Joseph Campbell spoke of the hero’s journey in which an ordinary person chooses or is forced out of their everyday world and launched on an adventure. The journey has its trials, eventually culminating in a transformation. That voyage, like the marvel of a sunrise or sunset, is available to us every day. Choosing to create music, starting wherever you are and edging out from there, is a perfect first step.

* During one of my lessons, I heard some incredible guitar playing in a nearby room. Ben noticed my reaction and said, “Oh, that’s Reg. He’s only 12 but there’s nothing left I can teach him. So he’s teaching here now.” That kid would grow up to play with Chet Baker and George Shearing, among others. I don’t believe the ability to make music is a rare gift, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t rare musical gifts.

(Time Loves a Hero, Part III)

We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal. Does anybody remember laughter?

– Robert Plant

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be Robert Plant (yep, I’m that old :-) It was the 70s and the rock star as hero model was in full swing. The seeds of this adolescent yearning were planted when I first heard the Immigrant Song – on a 45 – while still in elementary school. In the ten or so years following that epiphany, I spent far too many hours listening to Led Zeppelin. Much of what I still love about music, from syncopation to exotic guitar chords and a broad dynamic canvas, was ingrained in me back then. Plant was, to me, the perfect embodiment of musical expression, freedom and power.

I never did see them live, having foolishly missed a shot at front row seats in Minneapolis around ’74. I was ultimately cheated by drummer John Bonham’s untimely death in September of 1980, just months before they were to launch a North American tour in Montreal.

I bring this up as a roundabout way of saying I do get some of what the Guitar Heros and American Idols are about. In part, they call out to the same youthful longing to express yourself fully, to be heard and free and loved. The catch, even more so than in my example, is that these are businesses whose success depends on amplifying this desire, not in satiating it.

For every person who’s inspired to make music because of an American Idol, there are 99 more who conclude they’re not slim enough, young enough, beautiful enough or good enough. The effect is not to encourage and spread the making of music, but the consumption of it. It’s better business to keep us stoking our creative dreams by purchasing the CDs, movies, concerts and ads of the latest hero/heroine than to have us singing around the piano. Voices are free and you only need to buy a piano once, after all.

Tomorrow: Beauty of the Sunrise and Sunset

(Time Loves a Hero, Part II)

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

– Bela Bartok

I like tennis. I don’t claim to have much skill, but I enjoy playing it and watching it, even on TV. Tennis fascinates me not strictly because of the talent on the court, but because of how that talent plays out in competition. Unlike, say, skateboarding or rock-climbing, tennis is inherently competitive. It makes no sense without the winner-take-all structure. The ultimate test is not the court, the ball or the racquet, but your ability to handle all of those under pressure from your opponent.

In Out of Control, Alfie Kohn eloquently demonstrated that competition is not a secret sauce that improves every dish. The data shows quite the reverse: the stress and distraction induced by adding a competitive dimension leads to poorer results, not better ones.

Unfortunately, these days competition resembles an out-of-control brand that shows up where it makes no sense, or even where it make things demonstrably worse. Music has become one of those places. From Guitar Hero and American Idol to Kiwanis and Musicfest, competition looms large not merely as the path to excellence, but increasingly as the very point of musical performance.

Why on earth would we take an activity as mysteriously unifying as music and add the divisive power of competition? What can it possibly mean to win at jazz? My mother used to say someone was “playing to beat the band” but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she had in mind. Time will tell how far this pattern can extend itself. In the meantime, I’ll be over here making music for no reason at all.

Tomorrow: He's a Zero

(Time Loves a Hero, Part I)

Well they say time loves a hero
But only time will tell
If he's real, he's a legend from heaven
If he ain't he was sent here from hell

- Little Feat, Time Loves a Hero

I was walking around downtown London, Ontario a couple months ago when I spotted a sign in the window of a brewpub and restaurant: Thursday is Guitar Hero night! Come out and show us what you’ve got! Guitar Hero 3 (GH3) is of course the latest incarnation of the insanely popular video game that lets you “play” well-known songs on a special guitar-shaped controller. It requires only one player, but for most people competing is where the action is.

I’m not particularly for or against video games. They’re often an improvement over watching television, especially in terms of engaging and challenging the mind. If you think comparing to TV is setting the bar a bit low, all I can say is that’s where I found it. Like TV, some game content is intriguing, some is banal and some is downright offensive. The GH phenomenon, however, stakes out some peculiar new terrain.

To play a GH “song”, you must first learn to operate the controller, a device replaces a real musical instrument – the guitar – with one that cannot make music. The GH controller has five buttons instead of the 72-plus notes on a guitar fretboard, and they don’t correspond to conventional musical notation. You play by using the controller buttons to reproduce a flowing visual pattern of “notes”. When you make a mistake, you hear it. The faster the song and the more complicated the pattern, the harder it is to keep up.

The result is obviously entertaining for the gamers, but it's a strange kind of music-making that rewards obedience and competition over exploration and cooperation. The point of GH3 is to reproduce someone else’s music, on their terms, all without actually learning how to play an instrument of any kind. An entire industry has sprung up around the game, cranking out everything from custom guitar controllers to songbooks. A lot of money is being made and fun is being had, but what does this foretell about creating music?

Tomorrow: Only Time will Tell

(I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, Part IV)

- Unmon

The physicist David Bohm and the teacher J. Krishnamurti proposed that we define thought as the response of memory. The beauty of this definition is the way it includes every response we trot out from storage, whether emotional, physical or mental. The problem Bohm and Krishnamurti recognized was not simply that nearly everything we do, feel or think is a conditioned response from the past, but that we live as though this wasn’t the case.

The difficulty in working with thought is that it’s a lot like trying to pound a wedge into the top of a loose hammer – the first thing you reach for is the hammer. As you read these words, your thought tries to grasp and contain their meaning. So if I ask, “is there more than thought?”, who or what can reply?

The creative process offers a way out of this maze by stepping over the question and into the answer. When you give yourself fully over to a garden, poem or sketch, you merge with life instead of responding to it. Instead of subjects and objects clattering around and colliding, only verbs remain: gardening, poeming, sketching.

What the struggle between atheism and religion overlooks, and what Lao Tzu and the platypus hint at, lies beyond asking questions and compiling answers. In thought, we run and run but get no closer. The tiniest genuine act of creation, however, reveals more. We’re still running, but no longer just running.

(I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, Part IV)

Every day priests minutely examine the Dharma
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters
Sent by the wind and rain,
The snow and moon.

- Ikkyu

Tomorrow: Still Running