Show Overview
My kids will tell you I cry when my heart is moved by something…a poem, a story or a piece of music, heck…even a television commercial can bring on the tears. It’s something I’ve accepted about myself and don’t deny.
But that something has to be truly exquisite, poignant or deeply beautiful, something that reaches into the broken puzzle I call my heart and brings forth a salient emotion.
FaceAge had that effect on me. This award winning video program weaves together interconnected chapters in which young adults and aging individuals reflect on life while studying and describing one another’s faces. The FaceAge experience meets audiences through an immersive three-screen video environment presenting interconnected video chapters built around these cross-generational encounters.
I had the opportunity to experience FaceAge in Washington DC earlier this year, and after wiping my eyes and blowing my nose, I just had to meet the person behind this ground-breaking work of art and science. That’s when I met Andrew Belser, who is presently a professor of Movement, Voice, and Acting at Penn State University, as well as Penn’s Director of the Arts & Design Research Incubator, a studio/laboratory where artists and designers join with scientists, writers, philosophers and others to research and create artistic projects for national and international venues.
If you long to see the gaps between people bridged, as I do, then you will want to learn more about FaceAge, which helps us see ourselves “through the lens of old age,” as Andrew puts it. FaceAge is more than just about intergenerational connection…it is about human healing, and there is nothing more deeply beautiful than that.
What you will learn in this show about FaceAge:
- What FaceAge is, and how to experience it
- About the six “chapters” of FaceAge: Assumptions, Mask & Deceptions, Memory, Mortality, What the Face Holds, Being Seen
- How age can cause one to become more, or less, visible in different cultures
- John Prine’s song “Hello in There”
- How the “lens of aging” helps to melt other kinds of differences, like between the races or genders
- What the film Crash taught us
- Relationship insights from Alain de Botton
- How the human nervous system is the most complicated thing in the universe
- Why we cannot be put in discreet boxes. We are complicated!
- What does it really mean to be “old” anyway?
Bring FaceAge to Your City!
To learn more about how to bring FaceAge to your city, and the associated opportunities for intergenerational training, please contact Greg Wolf at gregorywolfwmg [at] gmail [dot] com
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In this second and final part of my interview with death ritual photographer Klaus, we talk about food. That’s right! When the living come together, even for a funeral, food is often and important part of that ritual.
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
