June 14, 2007 by webmaster.

Having just made my way back across sinew, bone, wasted nerves, and the Pacific Coast Highway from a Fourth Grade camping trip where eight nominal adults withered under the attack of thirty ten and eleven-year olds; I am happy to be alive and only slightly regretful that I failed to return with the next, “Joseph Campbell Book Study.” I will use this next week to recover from that Orwellian vision of my past and have at the ready the latest installment promised, and not delivered today, of our study of the Hero’s Journey.

In the meantime, by way of an apology, and so that your endlessly active minds can have something to rest upon; I have brought you the following:

This is a section from the, “To The Reader” introduction that prefaces the novel, “Look Homeward Angel” by Thomas Wolfe in which he explains, (and in essence apologizes) to any readers from his hometown who might be offended by his deeply insightful, (and sometimes quite personal) account of life in rural North Carolina:

“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives – all that is ours is in them: We cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”

Thomas Wolfe was born in Ashville, North Carolina in the year 1900. He began work on, “Angel” at age twenty-six, finished shortly after, and died of milary tuberculosis of the brain in 1938, at the age of thirty-seven. “Look Homeward Angle” was his first novel and to this day is widely considered one of America’s greatest works of fiction.

On this note, young friends, I welcome you to the practice of the art of acting.

Cameron Thor

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June 14, 2007 by webmaster.

Every feeling an artist has is good.  The artist lives in the realm of feelings, impulse, and poetic action.  We routinely play, paint, write, sculpt, dance, and sing about the experience of fear and hope.  If you want to get a good sense of what art looks like in denial of fear and longing, I invite you to spend an evening listening to the songs of the Cultural Revolution in Communist China, or the Positivist writings of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Both state sponsored art designed to have a galvanizing positive effect on the population, totally in denial of the human heart, and both miserable failures.  Art, what Joyce calls, “Real Art”, asks the viewer to examine their own longing and fear, connect to the hero who is the inevitable subject of the art, and push out to a new understanding of themselves and their human experience.  This can be subtle and nearly subconscious in the paintings of Picasso, or it can hit the message on the head in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Fear is strong: fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of being found out, fear of losing control … and the list goes on.  There are as many specific fears as there are people to have them. To one degree or another we all live in haunted houses, the ghosts that live there rattle chains that we have forged with our own actions. Fear is strong. So what do you do about it?  It seems the most common reaction is to resist it.  Los Angeles is peppered with on-camera classes, networking groups, and the dreaded showcase.  All designed to help you feel that you’ve got your arms around the way of working that will help you feel certain of success.  People look at me like I have horns growing out of my head when they audit the class for the first time and I tell them that I don’t care a wit if they get work in movies or television.  “Bu … bu … but why take a class?”  Because a good class is about growing with no focus on the end result - booking a job, getting an agent etc.  Growth and daring are what the camera survives on, it runs screaming from security.  I teach because I’m addicted to human growth.   I find the arts, and acting in particular, to be the most enjoyable path to growth.  Don’t wait for the universe to come to you.  Dress up like someone else, kiss people you hardly know, have a sword fight, and find through the arts that life itself is one big play, one big pulse.  Self-realization is a dance … so get out on the floor!  Actors don’t wait for self-realization; they go after it with the blood lust of a warrior.  So as ass backward as it may seem to say welcome to an acting class that doesn’t care if you succeed in a town where success is king, it’s the only path that works - Both professionally, and personally.

There is a lot of fear in the air right now.  Don’t turn from it.  Find its value.  Suck it up.  Ask it how it will help you be more creative.  You are an artist.  You eat feelings and turn them into something people can use. Chaos  has great, positive power . Use the art to find the way that waits for you.  Stop telling it what to do, it’s not listening.  Run screaming with joy into the breech.  Give up the illusion of control and the path that has been laid out since time began will emerge for, and from you . In your art, in your acting, feel longing, lust, love, play, abandon, search, discover, and find that all your feelings, including fear … have value.

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June 14, 2007 by webmaster.

My successes are not my own.  The way to them was prepared by others.  The fruit of my labors is not my own, for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another.  Nor are my failures my own.  They may spring from the failures of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement.  Therefore, the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements.  It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, my own society and time.

Thomas Merton
“No Man Is an Island”

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