My bedroom:)
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
had I become addicted to crisis...
"I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my (family) mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)
Friday, September 17, 2010
Little Prince
*"For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?... Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, even without realizing what he's doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?"
*People have stars, but they aren't the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they're nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they're problems. For my businessman, they were gold. But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you'll have stars like nobody else."
"What do you mean?"
"When you look up at the sky at night, since I'll be living on one of them, since I'll be laughing on one of them, for you, it'll be as if all the stars are laughing. You'll have stars that can laugh!"
And he laughed again.
"And when you're consoled (everyone is eventually consoled), you'll be glad you've known me. You'll always be my friend. You'll feel like laughing with me. And you'll open your windows sometimes just for the fun of it... And your friends will be amazed to see you laughing while you're looking up at the sky. Then you'll tell them, 'Yes, it's the stars. They always make me laugh"
*** Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same**
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Keeping my Journal
I've seen Ken Burns speak at school... and he is just one of a kind! The type of people that make you wonder about your life...... here is a similar speech... and a very touching one... just like the one I heard!
Also was this part that gave inspiration for this journal about my journey at this planet!
"write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history."
BE ON GUARD - KEN BURNS (My favorite parts)
I am in the business of history. It is the avocation I have chosen to practice my craft of film making. Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is a not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is an inscrutable and mysterious and malleable thing. Each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past that gives its present, and most important, its future new meaning and new possibilities.
I am interested in that mysterious power of history, and I am interested in its many varied voices. Not just the voices of the old top-down version of our past, which would try to convince us that American history is only the story of Great Men. And not just those pessimistic voices that have recently entered our studies, voices which seem to suggest that our history is merely a catalogue of white crime. I am interested in listening to the voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those voices, those stories and moments, that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes dysfunctional Republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind. That, quite simply, has been my creed, my mantra, the lens through which I have tried to see our shared past, to understand its stories, for more than 30 years.
The superb preparation this extraordinary school has given you; the rich experiences that you have accumulated here; the friendships and trusts you have built here; the knowledge—and the ability to synthesize that knowledge into real understanding—you have gained here; the memories that have accrued here, almost imperceptivity, like the layers of a pearl, will stay with you for the rest of your lives, influencing all that you will become. Soon all of this will be history and it will be important for each of you here to have a place in your minds and in your hearts to keep this history alive and useful.
A story. Early in 1861, at his first inauguration, on a cold and blustery March day in Washington, D.C., when he still hoped somehow to keep his country together, our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, implored the mostly Southerners in his audience not to go to war. “We must not be enemies,” he pleaded. “We must be friends. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” But then this remarkable poet-president, the best we have ever had, I believe, went on in a final sentence so magnificently constructed, so eloquently structured, that it comes down to us as one of the greatest sentences ever written in our English language, a sentence that speaks to us today of themes that go way beyond the tragedy that was about to befall Lincoln’s country, a tragedy even these stunning words of his could not stop. A tragedy, I am sorry to say, that we are not completely free of today, a tragedy that can and will repeat itself if we—you graduating seniors specifically—do not heed its implicit message, its deep and timeless warning.
Recalling the glorious and much celebrated Revolutionary past those in the South still shared with their Northern brethren, Lincoln uttered these now to me immortal last words of his address: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” It is a truly astonishing sentence. The “better angels of our nature.” I love that; so certain as it is of our essential goodness and the perfectibility of these so obviously flawed creatures who like to call themselves human beings. And the “mystic chords of memory.” Another great phrase, don’t you think? Those “mystic chords,” ladies and gentlemen, were not c-o-r-d-s, cords of some rope that would bind us by force together, but c-h-o-r-d-s, musical chords, signifying some celestial harmony that would unite us through all time in common purpose-- in a common anthem, if you will.
Lincoln’s optimistic words resonate with us today precisely because they are so forward looking, so positive in the face of the harsh realities of human existence: the collective cruelties we have visited on each other across the time and space of our shared past. He offers a vision, an utterly American vision I think, that confidently swims upstream against the currents and treacherous undertows in the stream of human history.
And yet buried in his inspiring words is an essential worry that we human beings too often stray from our pursuit of happiness and pursue instead baser, cruder instincts. You have experienced this first-hand: on a personal level, of course; but also in a broad national sense. You are the second graduating class to have spent your entire school experience under the pall of September 11th. As we struggle to redefine ourselves in the wake of that rupture, it is interesting to note that we come back again and again and again to our shared past, and Abraham Lincoln, for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree to cohere, why unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas. We return to our past for a reminder, a sense of unity, conscience and great national purpose.
But, alas, today we find ourselves in the midst of a new, subtler, perhaps more dangerous crisis than Abraham Lincoln faced, where the rules have changed and they don’t always favor the truthful and the virtuous. The reaction to September 11th, which sponsored so much unity and renewal of that national purpose in its immediate aftermath, has now ironically metastasized into an angrier, more divided posture: where we emphasize what differentiates us from the other, rather than what we share in common; where suspicion rather than trust is inculcated in us all, where we retreat behind false ramparts of mindless consumerism to ward off a stultifying loneliness brought on by that very same retreat from each other.
The great jurist Learned Hand (and could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand?) once said that, “Liberty is never being too sure you’re right.” But somehow we have today replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy; we’ve begun to start wars instead of finishing them; begun to depend on censorship and intimidation and to infringe on the most basic liberties that have heroically defined and described our trajectory as a nation of free people; begun to reduce the complexity of modern life into facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, sometimes, in moments, become what we despise.
It is into that world that you now plummet, unprotected from the shelter of family and school, but drafted nonetheless into a new Union Army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been our hallmark and beacon. You have no choice, you’ve been called up, and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help reverse this alarming tide and set us right again. In short, you’ve been drafted to help clean up this mess; you can’t gradually adapt to this new expediency, you actually have to change the world. You’re joining an army that must be dedicated above all else—career and personal advancement—to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against this new separatism that has infected our ranks, a vanguard against those who, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.
It is important, as in all struggles, to know the enemy. What we are seeing today is a secession of ideas and identification from the mainstream, a worrisome fundamentalism we rightfully decry in the larger world that has been creeping into our own normally tolerant and progressive society. Be on guard.
As you move from an adolescence of pushing limits to an adulthood where much of the self-discipline you learned here will have to be applied, you will immediately notice a monumental hypocrisy out there among supposed adults, growing in the land. Be on guard. You must stand as a bulwark against this hypocrisy.
It manifests itself throughout the political world, on both sides of the partisan divide, in utterly childish and dangerous ways, as those with mostly selfish motives test the limits of greed by passing laws that favor the privileged over the less fortunate. You are the privileged—do not be seduced by short term gains. We are enriched only when everyone has the opportunity to be enriched. Be on guard.
It manifests itself by those whose false faith has steadily eroded the once mighty edifice erected by our Founders between church and state, suggesting an orthodoxy so terrifying in its certainty that the once shining example we set for the world for more than two hundred years has become tarnished. Be on guard.
It manifests itself in a brave new world where the sciences are betrayed by those whose intolerant superstitions are now given equal footing with the true, the verifiable, and where these self-same advocates of religious confidence sanctimoniously select only those teachings convenient to their political agendas, jettisoning important faith-based values such as “Thou shall not kill.” Be on guard.
It manifests itself among those who when faced with the most obvious fact of God’s handiwork—the extraordinarily beautiful natural world around us and our own human fallibility, set out to destroy the former and imprison the latter without a backward glance or the compassion their own faith supposedly teaches them. Be on guard.
Be on guard, but know you have help. These dark and divisive forces are not without their natural enemies. Seek the community of allies, they are all about you. We are in fact obligated to find community, to replicate the important lessons you learned right here, the idealized visions of responsible citizenship that most of us here aspire to.
At the heart of this compact is the idea that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. Make that your goal. One plus one, as you have learned in your exhilarating studies, often equals three. Follow that seemingly impossible mathematical possibility. Demand to know and examine the difference between those disparate parts and the unified whole. Ask the question, what is that “more”—the difference between the sum of the parts and the whole? And then pursue that “more” for the rest of your life. That is what life is about, that mysterious ingredient, that mysterious “more” that is the building block of the universe. More on that in a moment.
Another story. Many, many years ago, not that long after I graduated from college, while working on my first film on the history of the Brooklyn Bridge and its great designer John A. Roebling, I decided—rather rashly—that I had to interview the now late playwright Arthur Miller, and he had, after several pleading phone calls by me, rather reluctantly agreed. Miller had of course written a play called "A View From The Bridge," and I was sure he would be able to shed some light on what I had come to believe was the greatest suspension bridge in the world—that remarkable amalgam of stone and steel, which after its improbable and dramatic construction became a source of sublime inspiration to artists and poets, photographers and filmmakers for more than a century.
But on the way to Miller's Connecticut farm, I had picked up a copy of the play and discovered to my horror that there was not a single mention of the Bridge—it was merely the background for a drama completely unrelated to the themes of my film. I was mortified, and it seemed like only a few panic-stricken minutes later that we pulled into his drive and I nervously rang the great man's door.
The first thing a very tall and a very imposing and a very gruff Arthur Miller said to me when he opened the door was, "You know, I don't know a damn thing about the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't help you."
I stood there for several moments in abject shame and my own humiliation, when he finally relented again and said, "Okay. Perhaps, I can give you something. Come with me." Now, I had been planning to set up an elaborate interview around a favorite chair in his house, to take several hours to adjust the lighting, to film several rolls, but Miller directed me to his back yard where the late afternoon shadows of a perfect fall day were lengthening. "Let's go—now," he said, and we all knew he meant it. Clearly, in his mind, this was not going to waste any more of his time than need be—and we weren't going to be staying long either.
We scrambled to take a quick light reading, and put the 16mm camera up on the tripod. There was only a few minutes left on the roll of film that was still in the magazine from the morning's shoot. The sound man fumbled with his reel to reel tape recorder, checking the levels. But now, Miller even refused to sit down. He would do it standing up or not at all and we scrambled to find an apple crate I could stand on to approximate his height—but of course never his stature. “Let’s go—now,” he said again, clearly impatient with our, in retrospect, utter ineptitude. And we were completely flabbergasted; we had never done an interview where the subject wasn't quietly posed in some study or living room. My heart was pounding out of my chest; I can remember to this day the nausea I felt.
To this day I do not remember what feeble question I asked him to get him to speak. It doesn't really matter now I suppose, but Arthur's few sentence answer constituted the sum total of the interview and it has stayed with me, like the panic, the rest of my life. I know it by heart. He said: "You see, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention and it always was. And then suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there and it's a shock. It puts everything to shame and makes you wonder what else we could have done that was so marvelous and so unpresumptuous. It carries its weights, it does what it's supposed to do and yet...I mean they could have built another Manhattan Bridge and [Roebling] didn't. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. So it makes you feel that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful."
That was the whole interview. "Maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful." Those words became the final words of my very first film and in a way they became, like the declaration of principles the young and still idealistic Charles Foster Kane tacks to the wall in Orson Welles' great masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” my guiding principle as well.
I am not sure how well I have been able to live up to the creed Arthur Miller so generously gave to me that afternoon, but I could not help but think of his words again as we all gather together to celebrate your spectacular achievement. Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a bridge—or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or in a simple garden you tend. But be on guard: do something that will last and be beautiful.
As you pursue your goals in life, that is your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.
Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier. Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.
Don't confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once told me that "careerism is death."
Travel. Do not get stuck in one place. Visit Yellowstone or Yosemite or even Appomattox, where our country really came together. Whatever you do, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen to jazz music, the only art form Americans have ever invented, and a painless way, Wynton Marsalis reminds us, “of understanding ourselves.”
Give up addictions and habits. Try brushing your teeth tonight with the other hand. Try even remembering what I just asked you.
Insist on heroes. And be one.
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all—not the car, not the TV.
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history.
Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within this favored land. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the defense of the country -- they just make the country worth defending.
Finally, one last short story. One of my own daughters, Lilly, is just where you were three, four years ago—starting her college experience. On one of her applications last year a prospective college asked a short essay question, “What will you bring to our campus?” That is to say, what qualities and values would the applicant bring? In her utterly appealing, clever and devilish way, Lilly wrote that she would bring the Beatles’ album “Abbey Road.” I loved that, too. The school, by the way, thrilled to her insouciance (as nearly everyone does) and accepted her at once; one over-eager administrator even commented on looking forward to listening to the album with her when she came in the fall.
Well, Lilly didn’t go to that school, but her choice of music couldn’t be better. It was by the way the most popular album when I was a senior in high school. In the last real song on the album, there is the best single line in all of music, a line good enough for Lilly, good enough for me and I’m pretty sure good enough for all of you. It’s about the “more” I was speaking about earlier; the mysterious building block of the universe. Go home and listen to it when you can. It too will help you be on guard. It too will help you get through the darkest of times. It too will help to repair anything that is broken. It too will help you remember the memories created here.
The lyric goes: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
So we come to an end today—and for you a beginning. God speed to you all. Go out and make.
Ken Burns
Walpole, New Hampshire
Here's the text of Ken Burns' commencement address delivered to the Class of 2006 on May 22, 2006.
Also was this part that gave inspiration for this journal about my journey at this planet!
"write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history."
BE ON GUARD - KEN BURNS (My favorite parts)
I am in the business of history. It is the avocation I have chosen to practice my craft of film making. Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is a not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is an inscrutable and mysterious and malleable thing. Each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past that gives its present, and most important, its future new meaning and new possibilities.
I am interested in that mysterious power of history, and I am interested in its many varied voices. Not just the voices of the old top-down version of our past, which would try to convince us that American history is only the story of Great Men. And not just those pessimistic voices that have recently entered our studies, voices which seem to suggest that our history is merely a catalogue of white crime. I am interested in listening to the voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those voices, those stories and moments, that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes dysfunctional Republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind. That, quite simply, has been my creed, my mantra, the lens through which I have tried to see our shared past, to understand its stories, for more than 30 years.
The superb preparation this extraordinary school has given you; the rich experiences that you have accumulated here; the friendships and trusts you have built here; the knowledge—and the ability to synthesize that knowledge into real understanding—you have gained here; the memories that have accrued here, almost imperceptivity, like the layers of a pearl, will stay with you for the rest of your lives, influencing all that you will become. Soon all of this will be history and it will be important for each of you here to have a place in your minds and in your hearts to keep this history alive and useful.
A story. Early in 1861, at his first inauguration, on a cold and blustery March day in Washington, D.C., when he still hoped somehow to keep his country together, our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, implored the mostly Southerners in his audience not to go to war. “We must not be enemies,” he pleaded. “We must be friends. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” But then this remarkable poet-president, the best we have ever had, I believe, went on in a final sentence so magnificently constructed, so eloquently structured, that it comes down to us as one of the greatest sentences ever written in our English language, a sentence that speaks to us today of themes that go way beyond the tragedy that was about to befall Lincoln’s country, a tragedy even these stunning words of his could not stop. A tragedy, I am sorry to say, that we are not completely free of today, a tragedy that can and will repeat itself if we—you graduating seniors specifically—do not heed its implicit message, its deep and timeless warning.
Recalling the glorious and much celebrated Revolutionary past those in the South still shared with their Northern brethren, Lincoln uttered these now to me immortal last words of his address: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” It is a truly astonishing sentence. The “better angels of our nature.” I love that; so certain as it is of our essential goodness and the perfectibility of these so obviously flawed creatures who like to call themselves human beings. And the “mystic chords of memory.” Another great phrase, don’t you think? Those “mystic chords,” ladies and gentlemen, were not c-o-r-d-s, cords of some rope that would bind us by force together, but c-h-o-r-d-s, musical chords, signifying some celestial harmony that would unite us through all time in common purpose-- in a common anthem, if you will.
Lincoln’s optimistic words resonate with us today precisely because they are so forward looking, so positive in the face of the harsh realities of human existence: the collective cruelties we have visited on each other across the time and space of our shared past. He offers a vision, an utterly American vision I think, that confidently swims upstream against the currents and treacherous undertows in the stream of human history.
And yet buried in his inspiring words is an essential worry that we human beings too often stray from our pursuit of happiness and pursue instead baser, cruder instincts. You have experienced this first-hand: on a personal level, of course; but also in a broad national sense. You are the second graduating class to have spent your entire school experience under the pall of September 11th. As we struggle to redefine ourselves in the wake of that rupture, it is interesting to note that we come back again and again and again to our shared past, and Abraham Lincoln, for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree to cohere, why unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas. We return to our past for a reminder, a sense of unity, conscience and great national purpose.
But, alas, today we find ourselves in the midst of a new, subtler, perhaps more dangerous crisis than Abraham Lincoln faced, where the rules have changed and they don’t always favor the truthful and the virtuous. The reaction to September 11th, which sponsored so much unity and renewal of that national purpose in its immediate aftermath, has now ironically metastasized into an angrier, more divided posture: where we emphasize what differentiates us from the other, rather than what we share in common; where suspicion rather than trust is inculcated in us all, where we retreat behind false ramparts of mindless consumerism to ward off a stultifying loneliness brought on by that very same retreat from each other.
The great jurist Learned Hand (and could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand?) once said that, “Liberty is never being too sure you’re right.” But somehow we have today replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy; we’ve begun to start wars instead of finishing them; begun to depend on censorship and intimidation and to infringe on the most basic liberties that have heroically defined and described our trajectory as a nation of free people; begun to reduce the complexity of modern life into facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, sometimes, in moments, become what we despise.
It is into that world that you now plummet, unprotected from the shelter of family and school, but drafted nonetheless into a new Union Army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been our hallmark and beacon. You have no choice, you’ve been called up, and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help reverse this alarming tide and set us right again. In short, you’ve been drafted to help clean up this mess; you can’t gradually adapt to this new expediency, you actually have to change the world. You’re joining an army that must be dedicated above all else—career and personal advancement—to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against this new separatism that has infected our ranks, a vanguard against those who, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.
It is important, as in all struggles, to know the enemy. What we are seeing today is a secession of ideas and identification from the mainstream, a worrisome fundamentalism we rightfully decry in the larger world that has been creeping into our own normally tolerant and progressive society. Be on guard.
As you move from an adolescence of pushing limits to an adulthood where much of the self-discipline you learned here will have to be applied, you will immediately notice a monumental hypocrisy out there among supposed adults, growing in the land. Be on guard. You must stand as a bulwark against this hypocrisy.
It manifests itself throughout the political world, on both sides of the partisan divide, in utterly childish and dangerous ways, as those with mostly selfish motives test the limits of greed by passing laws that favor the privileged over the less fortunate. You are the privileged—do not be seduced by short term gains. We are enriched only when everyone has the opportunity to be enriched. Be on guard.
It manifests itself by those whose false faith has steadily eroded the once mighty edifice erected by our Founders between church and state, suggesting an orthodoxy so terrifying in its certainty that the once shining example we set for the world for more than two hundred years has become tarnished. Be on guard.
It manifests itself in a brave new world where the sciences are betrayed by those whose intolerant superstitions are now given equal footing with the true, the verifiable, and where these self-same advocates of religious confidence sanctimoniously select only those teachings convenient to their political agendas, jettisoning important faith-based values such as “Thou shall not kill.” Be on guard.
It manifests itself among those who when faced with the most obvious fact of God’s handiwork—the extraordinarily beautiful natural world around us and our own human fallibility, set out to destroy the former and imprison the latter without a backward glance or the compassion their own faith supposedly teaches them. Be on guard.
Be on guard, but know you have help. These dark and divisive forces are not without their natural enemies. Seek the community of allies, they are all about you. We are in fact obligated to find community, to replicate the important lessons you learned right here, the idealized visions of responsible citizenship that most of us here aspire to.
At the heart of this compact is the idea that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. Make that your goal. One plus one, as you have learned in your exhilarating studies, often equals three. Follow that seemingly impossible mathematical possibility. Demand to know and examine the difference between those disparate parts and the unified whole. Ask the question, what is that “more”—the difference between the sum of the parts and the whole? And then pursue that “more” for the rest of your life. That is what life is about, that mysterious ingredient, that mysterious “more” that is the building block of the universe. More on that in a moment.
Another story. Many, many years ago, not that long after I graduated from college, while working on my first film on the history of the Brooklyn Bridge and its great designer John A. Roebling, I decided—rather rashly—that I had to interview the now late playwright Arthur Miller, and he had, after several pleading phone calls by me, rather reluctantly agreed. Miller had of course written a play called "A View From The Bridge," and I was sure he would be able to shed some light on what I had come to believe was the greatest suspension bridge in the world—that remarkable amalgam of stone and steel, which after its improbable and dramatic construction became a source of sublime inspiration to artists and poets, photographers and filmmakers for more than a century.
But on the way to Miller's Connecticut farm, I had picked up a copy of the play and discovered to my horror that there was not a single mention of the Bridge—it was merely the background for a drama completely unrelated to the themes of my film. I was mortified, and it seemed like only a few panic-stricken minutes later that we pulled into his drive and I nervously rang the great man's door.
The first thing a very tall and a very imposing and a very gruff Arthur Miller said to me when he opened the door was, "You know, I don't know a damn thing about the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't help you."
I stood there for several moments in abject shame and my own humiliation, when he finally relented again and said, "Okay. Perhaps, I can give you something. Come with me." Now, I had been planning to set up an elaborate interview around a favorite chair in his house, to take several hours to adjust the lighting, to film several rolls, but Miller directed me to his back yard where the late afternoon shadows of a perfect fall day were lengthening. "Let's go—now," he said, and we all knew he meant it. Clearly, in his mind, this was not going to waste any more of his time than need be—and we weren't going to be staying long either.
We scrambled to take a quick light reading, and put the 16mm camera up on the tripod. There was only a few minutes left on the roll of film that was still in the magazine from the morning's shoot. The sound man fumbled with his reel to reel tape recorder, checking the levels. But now, Miller even refused to sit down. He would do it standing up or not at all and we scrambled to find an apple crate I could stand on to approximate his height—but of course never his stature. “Let’s go—now,” he said again, clearly impatient with our, in retrospect, utter ineptitude. And we were completely flabbergasted; we had never done an interview where the subject wasn't quietly posed in some study or living room. My heart was pounding out of my chest; I can remember to this day the nausea I felt.
To this day I do not remember what feeble question I asked him to get him to speak. It doesn't really matter now I suppose, but Arthur's few sentence answer constituted the sum total of the interview and it has stayed with me, like the panic, the rest of my life. I know it by heart. He said: "You see, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention and it always was. And then suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there and it's a shock. It puts everything to shame and makes you wonder what else we could have done that was so marvelous and so unpresumptuous. It carries its weights, it does what it's supposed to do and yet...I mean they could have built another Manhattan Bridge and [Roebling] didn't. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. So it makes you feel that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful."
That was the whole interview. "Maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful." Those words became the final words of my very first film and in a way they became, like the declaration of principles the young and still idealistic Charles Foster Kane tacks to the wall in Orson Welles' great masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” my guiding principle as well.
I am not sure how well I have been able to live up to the creed Arthur Miller so generously gave to me that afternoon, but I could not help but think of his words again as we all gather together to celebrate your spectacular achievement. Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a bridge—or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or in a simple garden you tend. But be on guard: do something that will last and be beautiful.
As you pursue your goals in life, that is your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.
Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier. Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.
Don't confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once told me that "careerism is death."
Travel. Do not get stuck in one place. Visit Yellowstone or Yosemite or even Appomattox, where our country really came together. Whatever you do, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen to jazz music, the only art form Americans have ever invented, and a painless way, Wynton Marsalis reminds us, “of understanding ourselves.”
Give up addictions and habits. Try brushing your teeth tonight with the other hand. Try even remembering what I just asked you.
Insist on heroes. And be one.
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all—not the car, not the TV.
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality. Remember, there is nothing more incredible than being a witness to history.
Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within this favored land. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the defense of the country -- they just make the country worth defending.
Finally, one last short story. One of my own daughters, Lilly, is just where you were three, four years ago—starting her college experience. On one of her applications last year a prospective college asked a short essay question, “What will you bring to our campus?” That is to say, what qualities and values would the applicant bring? In her utterly appealing, clever and devilish way, Lilly wrote that she would bring the Beatles’ album “Abbey Road.” I loved that, too. The school, by the way, thrilled to her insouciance (as nearly everyone does) and accepted her at once; one over-eager administrator even commented on looking forward to listening to the album with her when she came in the fall.
Well, Lilly didn’t go to that school, but her choice of music couldn’t be better. It was by the way the most popular album when I was a senior in high school. In the last real song on the album, there is the best single line in all of music, a line good enough for Lilly, good enough for me and I’m pretty sure good enough for all of you. It’s about the “more” I was speaking about earlier; the mysterious building block of the universe. Go home and listen to it when you can. It too will help you be on guard. It too will help you get through the darkest of times. It too will help to repair anything that is broken. It too will help you remember the memories created here.
The lyric goes: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
So we come to an end today—and for you a beginning. God speed to you all. Go out and make.
Ken Burns
Walpole, New Hampshire
Here's the text of Ken Burns' commencement address delivered to the Class of 2006 on May 22, 2006.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Brazilian Day in NY!
So... last weekend I went to New your again! It's so exciting to go in a trip... I always have this cool feeling in packing, planing, checking in.... I know is stupid but I like it... I also like airports an HOTELS (I could live in one)!!!!
This trip I went to "brazilian day" or as Josie's husband would add "Brazilian Day em Nova Yorque"... brazilians are weird!!! Also the weirdness carried trough the trip... on the already packed streets of NY, somehow got even more packed... of "popozudas" and look alike, also people shouting to talk to each other in a kilometer of distance... hahaha... and all the "good stuff" that is so remarkable from brazilian culture..... I could go off on this for hours about what I don't appreciate in my culture but also I seem to do repeatedly!
But despite all that.. I had a great time... It was low budget... low expectations type of trip... also I got to see Ivete Sangalo and it was quite a show... despite her "popular status". It was a weekend packed of energy.. from NY streets to the brazilians that "sold out" Madison Garden... who danced for 3 hrs non-stop....therefore that type of energy that only comes from a bunch of brazilians hanging out! and I really appreciate it!
This trip I went to "brazilian day" or as Josie's husband would add "Brazilian Day em Nova Yorque"... brazilians are weird!!! Also the weirdness carried trough the trip... on the already packed streets of NY, somehow got even more packed... of "popozudas" and look alike, also people shouting to talk to each other in a kilometer of distance... hahaha... and all the "good stuff" that is so remarkable from brazilian culture..... I could go off on this for hours about what I don't appreciate in my culture but also I seem to do repeatedly!
But despite all that.. I had a great time... It was low budget... low expectations type of trip... also I got to see Ivete Sangalo and it was quite a show... despite her "popular status". It was a weekend packed of energy.. from NY streets to the brazilians that "sold out" Madison Garden... who danced for 3 hrs non-stop....therefore that type of energy that only comes from a bunch of brazilians hanging out! and I really appreciate it!
Monday, September 6, 2010
Rosemari's Time Machine
HI Rosemari,
I want to let to know that I do admire you... that you are a very strong person... that you overcame a lot of obstacles and as far as I remember you have a great sense of humor...
The most of people complain about it is that you are so bossy. I call it strong at my opinions.
It's been a happy summer and you been enjoing a lot with friends, pool partys, drinking, going out, working and trying to take care of yourself as usual.
+ You make a lot of good choices in life (not always tho) but I'm proud of you... you always manage to stay out of big trouble.
+ You just started a new job at the Latin American Company.
+ Your school is back this semester at GSU -(Major Biology).
+ You have meet Peter.
+ You love your puppy dog and Rosana.... they are always very close to your heart.
- You are probably not the most awesome daughter... since you talk to your mom once in a blue moon..
- You not the best sister... can't seem to shake that relashioship off with Rosangela... it's just weird kind of love..
This particular time you are not home sick... actually don't miss Brazil at all.. but often you do... and wonder what are you doing so far away. Also there is other times when you are just so glad to be apart, to live like a gipsy.. to change address every 6 months... to not be so worried about most of the people around you... because they come and go all the time!
I want to let to know that I do admire you... that you are a very strong person... that you overcame a lot of obstacles and as far as I remember you have a great sense of humor...
The most of people complain about it is that you are so bossy. I call it strong at my opinions.
It's been a happy summer and you been enjoing a lot with friends, pool partys, drinking, going out, working and trying to take care of yourself as usual.
+ You make a lot of good choices in life (not always tho) but I'm proud of you... you always manage to stay out of big trouble.
+ You just started a new job at the Latin American Company.
+ Your school is back this semester at GSU -(Major Biology).
+ You have meet Peter.
+ You love your puppy dog and Rosana.... they are always very close to your heart.
- You are probably not the most awesome daughter... since you talk to your mom once in a blue moon..
- You not the best sister... can't seem to shake that relashioship off with Rosangela... it's just weird kind of love..
This particular time you are not home sick... actually don't miss Brazil at all.. but often you do... and wonder what are you doing so far away. Also there is other times when you are just so glad to be apart, to live like a gipsy.. to change address every 6 months... to not be so worried about most of the people around you... because they come and go all the time!
Friday, September 3, 2010
Curitiba
UNDER CONTRUCTION
So this is where I was born and grew up, until I decide to move to United States. My whole family still living there... I try to visit often and since I've moved away... I seem to appreciate more this city.
So this is where I was born and grew up, until I decide to move to United States. My whole family still living there... I try to visit often and since I've moved away... I seem to appreciate more this city.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
It is such a secret place, the land of tears
"I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more. It is such a secret place, the land of tears"
Sooo.. this week i lost my dog... and felt the most sad that I have been in awhile!!! It's so weird to lose something so meaningful to you!....
Thankfully he is back!!! we found him hiding under the couch.... when I had almost lost hope!
Don't take it for granted... what's here now it's not guarantee to be here tomorrow!
Sooo.. this week i lost my dog... and felt the most sad that I have been in awhile!!! It's so weird to lose something so meaningful to you!....
Thankfully he is back!!! we found him hiding under the couch.... when I had almost lost hope!
Don't take it for granted... what's here now it's not guarantee to be here tomorrow!
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