User Profile

I am a poet / philosopher / artist / musician / performer / writer who is fortunate enough to also have an entrepeneurial spirit and a social consciousness for world justice. I think there's a big difference between fairness and equity, and in a perfect world we wouldn't care, because everybody would be happy with enough.

I am in the process of renovating a theater in an impoverished area of the US, returning an old Vaudeville matron to her roots. I do this with the understand that the arts provide much more than entertainment. They are a gateway to our soul, and bring us closer to the God that created us in His image, so that we might in turn create. Bringing arts to any community has more lasting value than, say, sports. Sure there is value to participating in sports, from a social and physical perspective. But merely engaging in spectating (like most of us do) produces nothing more than violence-hungry adrenaline-charged voyeurs, who, in spite of doing nothing to deserve it, develop highly competative drives, with no motivation to do anything about it personally. Clearly this is not bringing out the best in us.

Art, on the other hand, from either the producer or consumer perspective challenges us in far less temporal ways: intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. These are the things that touch on the immortal. No matter how fit we are physically, we will not live forever. But, through our thoughts, our emotions and our beliefs, we forge a lasting legacy that will live on into the generations to come.

I think this is why we, as a culture eschew the arts in favor of sports. We are afraid to know ourselves as intimately as loving the arts will demand. Sports make us feel good for a fleeting moment, and that is so much easier. Art makes us alive.