Humanity needs a group project. From the cave paintings at Lascaux, and the pyramids of Giza, to the national parks of today, there is something beautiful about human beings working on something they will never see fully realized. I am by no means the first person to make this point, two millennia ago Cicero wrote about it, by quoting the poet Statius: “He plants his trees to serve a race to come,” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the dozens of Cathedrals I have visited during my numerous trips criss-crossing Europe.

Given their intimidating size, one would be forgiven for being tempted to dismiss a cathedral as merely a tool intended to project church power. As a friend of mine is so fond of remarking on cathedrals, and their pipe organs in particular, “We got the biggest pile of rocks, and the loudest thing.” But to view these structures as only a church-led enterprise, one that common folk participated in as a last resort in the hope of getting a scrap of food, is to miss the evidence right before your eyes at many a cathedral.

More than once I have stared up at a menagerie of fantastical gargoyles on the side of a gothic pile and seen something far more familiar. Doubtless you can bring an image of a traditional waterspout creature to mind, a stone dragon or lion with a gaping maw which vomits water during heavy rain. Now picture, instead of the pipe emerging from the jaws of a beast, it comes spouting fourth from the spread buttocks of a human figure. This image is rendered all the more amusing in its posture; clinging to the side of the cathedral in pose more reminiscent of a horny teenager’s depiction of spiderman than anything one would associate with sanctity. Elsewhere I have seen Adam and Eve rendered with larger than usual breasts, genitals, and buttocks, a nursing baby Jesus with an all-too-knowing grin, and of course countless improbably shredded Christs. This last group often looks more like something from a recent Marvel film, than anything you’d plan on encountering at church.

Please understand, I am not drawing your attention to all of this bawdy stonemasonry for mere jocularity, but rather to make a point. Cathedrals were such large enterprises, and took so long to complete that many details were either beneath the notice or beyond the care of their supervisors. I like to joke about this by remarking: “Remove the butt gargoyle? What do you want me to do? Climb up there and take out the flying buttress support?” But it is more than that, I believe some of these things were permitted in order to allow everyone to feel invested. These things were giant community art projects.

Cathedrals often brought prosperity and tourism to the towns where they were constructed, especially if you could throw a relic or two in there to encourage pilgrimage. The downside was that they were usually being built in whatever time could be spared from the important tasks of day to day life. It often took decades, if not centuries, to build a cathedral. You could work your entire life on one of these structures and not live to see it have a roof. They were truly investments in the lives of hypothetical future people you would  never see.

It is my personal hope that the colonization of space could be our modern cathedral. I owe this comparison to none other than Ray Bradbury who noted that both enterprises are a “vast, ambitious, multigenerational undertaking, a shared vision to work toward together as a culture.” This sentiment obviously fills the pre-2006 installments of the popular Star Trek franchise, but has been seen more in more recent works. Take for instance Neal Stephenson’s 2015 doorstop of a tome SevenEves. This book depicts millions of people working to launch a precious few into space, before a disastrous event wipes out all life on earth.

But these are pie-in-the-literal-sky science fiction musings! Perhaps we should be focusing on more earthly problems? Sure you could make that argument. But I find it interesting to look at what an intelligent young person could hope for if they studied hard in the fifties and sixties. They could work at NASA, they could be involved with sending people to the moon! In the middle of the last century intelligent people were drawn to the promise of space travel, and they congregated in the United States to help realize that dream. Out of the ashes of the Second World War, a new space age would dawn. For a moment it seemed that it would, but now? If you work hard in science and math you could one day go work for Amazon, Google, or Tesla; enriching a billionaire! Wow! What Fun! The only reason those giant technology companies exist is because previous generations were sold the promise of outer space, only to find themselves chained to desks solving earthly supply chain and video streaming problems. It’s no wonder the world seems to be descending into chaos, we’re making our finest minds do drudge work.

We seem to have lost sight of the potential we possess, we have stopped looking up. We have once again become obsessed with our problems down here on our pale blue dot. I am sympathetic to those who insist that earthly poverty is a huge issue, that climate change threatens us all, that there is no “Planet B.” But I think if we only look down we risk falling into petty in-fighting and sectarian conflict. We need to strive for the stars for the exact same reason people living in tiny mud huts poured so much of themselves into their cathedrals. Because they make us look upward at something greater than we could ever hope to achieve alone. I find that when I’m looking up, it is easy to overlook my differences with the person next to me. To stand side-by-side and wonder. 

So, let’s go build a cathedral.

I believe there will always be a place for live performance art. Of course some kind of future, generative Ai coupled to a high-res VR headset might be able to conjure anything and everything, but I don’t think it likely many people are going to enjoy it. I think humans will always want something they can believe is “real.” 

Perhaps I am far too much of a pollyanna about this. I have dedicated my entire adult life to creating live experiences as a performer. On top of that I just spent a year in rural Norway learning to build traditional wooden boats! Granted, anything I have to say is going to be anecdotal, but I think that is why you come to someone like me. If you wanted hard facts and figures you would turn elsewhere. Data I do not have, but I can tell you what my gut says.

There is an essential quality to knowing that the thing in question is happening right in front of you, in the same room. Years ago when I was a teenager my friend Margie told me she had gone to the opera in New York City. This was back when I played violin so my interest in classical music, and thus opera, was a shade more than passing. I balked when she told me how much it cost.

 “Why would anyone pay that much to see… opera?” I asked. 

“Well, there was nudity,” she replied, “you could see naked people live, but it was classy.” I suddenly found myself developing a hankering for Puccini. Sure, I already had a primordial idea of how to look up naked people on the internet, but the idea of being in the same room, held a kind of magical quality. I think this is also why people go to art galleries to look at famous paintings, even if it’s only to take a selfie to prove they were in the same room.

Walking around my hometown on Halloween night with a friend we passed an enormous line of people that caught our eye. They were not queueing outside a bar or or a club, but rather a sex-toy boutique. While a sudden urge for amorous assistance on Halloween makes a certain degree of sense, it was not the boutique’s products they were interested in, it was a haunted house. These folks wanted to walk inside a building and experience something live. Even when higher quality visuals and atmosphere are doubtless available via a film. (Blue or Otherwise) And yet, people go. 

I don’t think it’s just the immersive quality that draws the crowds, I think it is also the crowds themselves. You can see that you are not experiencing this alone. Why else would the rise in lonely at-home viewing over the past three decades also see an attendant rise in online forums and social media geek culture to discuss such things. People don’t just want the art, they want to share their experience of the art.

I think this is also the origin of “smash rooms.” You may have noticed a business like this arriving somewhere in your town. A storefront with a name like “The Rage Room,” promises you can come inside and break stuff. They might have a padded cell where you can throw yourself at the wall, or a pile of crockery that you can bust up with a baseball bat. Why again, would someone want to leave their home to do this? To borrow the popular meme, “We have stuff to break at home.” I don’t believe it is just that at a business where you pay it is someone else’s job to clean it up. I think it has something to do with a more fundamental urge, a desire to do human things near other humans. To be observed in our participation, as much as to participate. 

This all comes together nicely in the artform in which I have what you could very charitably call a career. I call it Cabaret, but you might also use Vaudeville, Sideshow, Circus, Muppet Show, or any number of other monikers that conjure a similar vibe. I don’t just play accordion, I juggle, I do magic tricks, I lay on a bed of nails, I perpetrate the occasional striptease. At precisely none of these things am I the best in the world. One need look no further than a single search on youtube in every single one of these categories to find things far more spectacular than myself. So why do people come out to see me?

Obviously I have spent no small amount of time pondering that very question, and what I have arrived at is that people want to know they were in the room where it happened. It is the same reason you continue to pursue and enjoy romantic entanglements with real live human beings even though hotter ones exist online. Some part of your brain might acknowledge that the person in front of you is not as hot as the tightly controlled public image of a given celebrity, but they are here and the celebrity is not. So I guess I come down on the side of the bird in the hand, and not the two in the bush, and I think the vast majority of humanity does as well. Do we fantasize about something bigger, better and faster? Sure, but then we settle down with what is in front of us and go on about the business of living in the real world.

Sure this is all anecdotal, and coloured by what I personally like, but my gut says people will always leave the house to go do something. There is something real to be had out here in the world, and we want to find it and share it with each other. Perhaps not as many as in a previous epoch, but certainly enough for us artists to keep trying to entertain.

When I graduated high school I felt that I had already missed the boat on numerous things I had always wanted to do. Things like learning a foreign language, a new instrument, or juggling. I had read somewhere that the human brain reaches a point where it stops growing, and thus your ability to learn complicated tasks with any meaningful proficiency disappears. Forever. This seemed backed up by what I perceived as a truism about mathematics; that all great magicians produce their best work before they turn 25. (Shout out to my sophomore year high school math teacher, who killed my love of math.)

I bring this all up because it was such an easy thing to fall into, this idea that your brain calcifies and you are stuck being what you are at 20 for the rest of your life. Now having lived almost twice that span I can assure you that such things are nonsense. And I have video games to thank for that.

When I was in my early twenties I lived with a bunch of flatmates, and many of them played video games. I had dabbled in Xbox and PC gaming in high school, but had not planned on continuing the hobby into my adult life. Consoles were expensive, and a recent brush with the absolute time-sink of World of Warcraft had me a bit gunshy of anything involving repeated activity and a screen. Enter Guitar Hero. Many nights after work I would come home to a living room full of exuberant drunk friends taking turns shredding away at rock and roll hits with an oversize controller shaped like a guitar. Guitar hero is a beat-matching game, similar to Dance Dance Revolution, where you press combinations of buttons to match a pattern being shown on screen. If you match correctly the song continues to play, the on-screen crowd cheers, and the beguiling illusion that you are making the music is conjured. I was hooked at once. It felt like anyone could be a rockstar, even me!

It all came to a crashing halt one evening when I had someone cute over. I fired up Guitar Hero and flawlessly shredded my way through “Sweet Child of Mine.” Instead of being impressed, my crush playfully said, “Imagine if you’d spent as many hours practicing the real guitar as you did playing that game.” A crushing disappointment to be sure, and yet, also a revelation of sorts. I’m sad to say I didn’t exactly get the broader point at that moment, choosing instead to take the advice literally. That night as I lay in bed, I estimated the total hours I had practiced Guitar Hero, roughly 150, and decided I would spend that much time learning to play guitar. The next day I made a little chart, bought a cheap guitar, and started practicing.

I finished my 150 hours in about two months and was surprised at how well I could play the guitar. Nothing special, but enough to entertain my friends and play simple comedy songs at local open mics. I had discovered the idea of grinding. Just like in a video game, where you can decide to apply a given amount of your time to “leveling up,” you can do it in real life. I have since applied this mentality to learning to juggle, performing close-up magic, and playing accordion, all with great success. But to date, my biggest achievement was finally learning a foreign language.

When I launched myself into the project of moving to Norway for a year to study wooden boat building, I also committed to learning the language. To that end I spent roughly 500 hours studying Norwegian prior to moving. I accomplished this via a variety of means including, books, films, television, internet courses, podcasts, and, yes, Duolingo. Although I must confess this last one had little utility beyond expanding my vocabulary with some truly bizarre sentences, “Jeg har atte edderkopper,” [I have eight spiders.] being a particular favorite of mine. (Perhaps that’s the genius of that method, I’ve never forgotten that sentence…)

I am not the best judge of how good my Norwegian is; but I have heard from enough people that it is workable, a rough-hewn hammer made from a stick and a rock with a hole in it. Will it pound nails? Probably, not always, and not with great accuracy, but it’s better than no hammer at all. I am probably being too hard on myself. Stone hammer or not, I was able to tell jokes in Norwegian that made people laugh. I ordered food in restaurants, negotiated the purchase of second hand goods, discussed philosophy with friends, and on one memorable occasion convinced the staff in a museum to let a friend and I go in without paying in order to see a taxidermy giraffe. At the age of 33 a decade and a half after giving up, I decided to learn a foreign language by investing increments of my time, with the same mentality as working at a video game.

I am a huge fan of the Dark Souls series of video games. This is because nearly everyone has the same experience the first time they play one.  They happily toodle along for a while, some longer than others, and eventually hit a wall. An area, enemy, or boss fight that just seems, well, impossible, unsurmountable. But the beauty of a video game is that you have unlimited tries, you can dust yourself off and run at the wall again, learning, incrementally, bit-by-bit, how to press forward. If you invest that time, the triumph is all the sweeter.

Comparing the grind of a video game to learning a new skill is by no means a novel realization, but I am sharing it with you because of the particular way it changed my own perception of what was possible for me. I had given up, because I thought that since I had passed some arbitrary point of no return where learning was now impossible. I have since learned that there are numerous such points, age 27, age 30, age 35, whatever, where you lose facility to learn new things well, or at least as well as you used to. I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. I think it just takes more practice, and maybe a bit more willpower as you get older.

In the fall of 2019 I had a notable visit to The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. In my mind I always think of it as just “The Museum,” because it is my favorite Museum. To explain anything about the inner workings, or even contents of this venerable institution is, in my opinion, to spoil it. This reticence doubtless comes from the fact that upon my first visit, I entered wholly in the dark as to what I was about to experience. I have since insisted upon this policy with any friend I bring to the museum. I’m sure I’ve piqued your curiosity a little bit, no? If you enjoy history, literature, puzzles, beautiful art, or total commitment to a concept, then I believe you will love it like I do. I beg of you, get thee hither to Culver City and see The Museum for yourself. Allow the gentle madness to wash over you, and be inspired!

It is my hope that my artwork inspires people to feel something, and the artwork that this place embodies has certainly engendered feelings in me. In the hope of sharing one of those, and at the risk of violating my own policy about this wondrous piece of educational-installation-art I want to tell you about the time one of their exhibits moved me to tears. But first, I need to tell you about Ricky Jay.

Ricky Jay was a magician, historian, actor, and tale teller. He appeared countless times in films and television programs, many of which he worked on as a consultant, and was the author of over a dozen books. While composing this essay I have tried to think of another artist, that I have not met, who has had such an impact on me personally. I have been unable to. For me, Ricky Jay changed not only how I perform, but also what I perform. 

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants might be my favorite magic show of all time, at least the filmed version released as an HBO special. Not only that but it contains my single favorite magic trick. The trick, which ostensibly draws upon astrology, sees him pulling a woman out of the audience and purporting to use the discipline to determine… “something.” After she signs a card it disappears back into the deck, after which he attempts to bring it back. And fails. Fails repeatedly, fails copiously, conspicuously and, somehow joyously. Once the card fails to appear the act descends into a parade of vintage wind-up toys, pulled from a large suitcase beside the magic table. Mechanical rabbits, demented ducks, and strange chimeras all appear, each one ostensibly set loose to find the volunteer’s chosen card. They all fail. Eventually in frustration Jay shouts, “Behold! A suitcase I have not opened in a month.” He then proceeds to produce the chosen card from inside it. 

Herein lies the key to why I love the bit so much. It is a classic thing in a magic trick that a magician will tell you something wrong, in order to muddy the waters of your memory and thus make the trick more impressive. Something like, “Now I have shown you both sides of this cricket bat.” In reality the magician has done nothing of the sort. Jay has just pointed to the selfsame suitcase he has been opening over and over again for the past ten minutes! This is because this piece of his show is not about fooling anyone, although many bits of impressive magic are still present within the bit. Rather, it is because this whole thing is a comedic bit, one that Jay is presenting to create amusement, and to share something he loves. In this case, the windup toys.

Jay was a collector, he would comb through bookshops, antique malls, rummage sales, and archives. Looking for things people had forgotten about, old books, playing cards, dice, windup toys, concepts, ideas, stories. He would take these bits of the past, dust them off, and shine a beautiful light on them. A friend of mine once remarked to me that, “An artist should be an arrow, pointing at beauty.” 

That is precisely what Jay did, and it drives so much of what I do as a performer. I am trying to showcase something outside myself, even if the way I do it is by telling a story about my own experience. Jay showed me that a magic trick was about so much more than just fooling someone, it could be about telling a story. 

The fact that Jay told his stories with a narrating voice that was so particularly his own made them all the more compelling to me. Jay’s public persona proffered peculiar patterns of speech, aided by a vocabulary of frightening breadth. He had a gift for making centuries old poetry and dialogue feel alive, as though an actual human being might have one day uttered “Zounds!” with the same conviction you or I might utter a word like, “Fuck.” In the hope of understanding this quality I have studied this speech for years, listening to recordings of him over and over, some of them hundreds of times, working hard to track down obscure ones. I like to think this effort has paid off in some way, though after you engage with his work dear reader, you may be the judge.

If you’re looking for a bite-sized introduction to the writing, and narrating style of Ricky Jay, you need look no further than his series of bite-sized radio essays, “Jay’s Journal.”  Every episode of the show was only 4 minutes long, a delightful little window that you could gaze out of for approximately the same amount of time it takes the kettle to boil. The Subjects were as wide ranging as Jay’s interests; Chickens, Detectives, Three Card Monte, Coffee, and Mynah Birds all received their due.

Which brings me back to the museum. Jay died in the fall of 2018, and this visit roughly coincided with the one year anniversary of that passing. I knew from my reading that he had spent time and the museum and even contributed a thing or two, but I was unprepared for what I found. In a small hallway connecting two larger exhibits was a presentation of a few choice objects from Jay’s collection. A small button on the wall triggered a narration he had recorded years ago explaining the objects. I was startled, I thought I had heard all available recordings of him before, yet here was a new one. Somehow, this one particular voice still had more to say, even from beyond the grave. 

Happy Halloween Everyone!

 Photo by: Sam Teigen

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