Innovator Series Summaries Leading the Charge Americans for the Arts Annual Convention June 11–13, 2005 Austin, TX

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Innovator Series
Presented at Leading the Charge, Americans for the Arts 2005 Annual Convention, the Innovator Series allowed arts leaders to “listen in” on conversations with innovative and pioneering individuals working in and around the arts. The following is an edited version of those discussions.

Abel Lopez: Welcome to the Innovator’s Series. I have the privilege of spending a couple of hours with four individuals over the next three days at the conference. I previously conducted these interviews two years ago and I said “but of course” when I was asked to do these interviews again. These conversations are somewhat informal and low-key for us to think about some issues with leaders in the field. I want to look at their own journeys in their lives. All four are individual artists. They have become pioneers in different areas and have wrestled with questions that we all face today. This provides us an opportunity to look at the field and how these issues relate outside the field.

• Moy Eng
• Donald Byrd
• Ben Cameron
• Louis Black

Innovator Series with Moy Eng
June 11, 2005
2:30 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

Moy Eng is the program director of the performing arts program at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is one of the leading arts funders in California and provides support for arts organizations and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to December 2001, she directed the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation’s grantmaking programs in energy and human rights; maintained a consulting practice; and worked in senior development positions in nationally known arts organizations, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In 2003, Ms. Eng received leadership awards from the California Arts Council and Americans for the Arts.

Abel: How did you first get engaged in the arts and how did that impact you?
Moy: The gateway of music brought me in. I was a daughter of two immigrants and the oldest daughter in a Chinese family. Arranged marriage at 17. My voice was not my own. It was of my family’s and ultimately my husband’s. Music was a place of creativity and transformation. Metaphorical power of music touched me.

Abel: What was your family’s reaction when you went into the arts?
Moy: Horror, surprise, disappointment. From their standpoint, the arts were lazy. My idea was always finding the resources to help the arts grow. In high school, I was training as a singer but then started producing theater—I could be there at the beginning of the creative process. Because of my heritage, I could get the stories that were not mainstream. How could I not be touched and conflicted by the arts and their emphasis on the value of the individual vs. my heritage and my family and the emphasis on the power of the group.

Abel: How, as a person of color, has your difference informed your experience in the arts? Your work with immigrant rights is an example: Arts and culture can be a way to strengthen immigrant communities.
Moy: One of the key forces that I am seeing from this seat and at the Hewlett Foundation is that demographic shifts is one of the key issues in the arts and it is unfolding before our very eyes. Since the late 90s, early 2000, immigrant, refugee, and newcomer issues are informing new art. How can we support both indigenous art and art by newcomers working in the Diaspora? It is not only a personal question but a professional one as well.

Abel: What are the challenges that we face in our industry?
Moy: Here is where Hewlett is at—our primary focus is supporting a broad range of organizations in the Bay Area. Since early 2000, money has decreased immensely. The asset base of a number of foundations went down. The Ford Foundation went down 22 percent overall. While the entire country was affected, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area got hit particularly hard.

Abel: Were you thrust into those conversations? How did you deal with that? Clearly the Foundation retained its priorities, but you were out there talking about the impact to those most affected in the community.
Moy: It was a mixed reaction. People were very articulate. I was not the only person who was out there in the community discussing the difficult issues. While the arts were certainly impacted, it was even harder to realize that elderly were losing their social-welfare programs and that children were losing good teachers. I was lucky that we had a committed board to continue the arts program.

Abel: Will you tell us about Project LINC (Leveraging Investments in Creativity)?
Moy: The Ford Foundation and 36 others supported a study that proposed ways to enhance the structures that facilitate artists’ work and their contributions to American life. There is another project currently under way where Ford and Rockefeller have made a combined $30 million pledge of direct grants to artists. The work that is happening in the Bay Area is to increase philanthropy. $500,000 of direct grants must be matched 1 to 1 for direct grants to artists. In other cities, other projects are being spearheaded.

Abel: What other issues we are dealing with that are not on others’ radar?
Moy: First, the Foundation continues to spend 70 to 80 percent of all arts funding on general operating support. Space needs are ranked very high in the Bay Area and New York. It continues to be an issue for artists. The space issue is not going away. We are supporting specific projects for artists to have sustainable, affordable space. Right now, Hewlett is attempting to create 200,000 square feet of affordable space for artists.

Abel: How will you make that available?
Moy: When available, I will share the space report.

Second—Arts education. We are cooking up something in arts education, looking at ingredients. We do not have a specific budget for arts education but we look at young audiences, after-school programs, core curriculum. We are looking to match academic standards. We are asking if there is an opportunity to fertilize the notion of sequential arts education for K through 12 in California. What are some key obstacles that we would face if this opportunity arose?

Third—Grants for new ideas. We are trying to tackle issues in new ideas. One grant is for new concert companions, which are really extended program notes that enhance the classical music experience for those who are not as knowledgeable.

Abel: You mentioned advocacy earlier. What advocacy efforts have you seen that have really worked? What have you become involved with?
Moy: I am interested in increasing interest and momentum for working in advocacy in the region and looking at the issues of public value of the arts. There is currently discussion in a regional arts summit to engage high tech partners to the arts. It is in the very beginning stages.

Abel: Going back to the early stages. Tell us about Ailey.
ME: I was his last director of development before he passed away. I worked on the annual fund and on corporate sponsorships. I was there for four years. Afterwards, as a consultant, I worked with state arts agencies, government agencies, and earned income organizations.

Abel: How different is it on the other side? Are arts organizations today dealing with the same issues?
Moy: I attempt to do what I did with my consulting firm. I listen and give guidance when asked but now, I have a budget. My challenge and aim is to level the playing field by having honest conversations. Where are these organizations now? What do they need now and into the future? Since Hewlett works with long-term programs, the dynamic is shifting towards more strategic planning.

Abel: What other things from your practical side of life, even your singing, have informed your work as a grantmaker?
Moy: I am so glad to be sitting in the Hewlett Foundation. As a longtime singer and a management person, all of those facets come together in this job and feed into it. All of the cross-sectional work comes together. The key questions that I ask are 1) Why are you doing this? What is the fire about this work? 2) What are you most excited about?

Abel: You have two wonderful, great daughters who are in the arts—they sing. You may be thinking of the next generation. What do you see as the next level of leadership? What are some of the issues that they must grapple with?
Moy: Young people have a lot more information available. People are facing issues much earlier on. It’s much harder to create your own community that is not your childhood community.

Participant: What do you think are important elements to creating a successful legacy?
Moy: Institutional development, capital development, building capital capacity, international exchange. We had just as good culture as New York, but it came from a much different political and ethnic dynamic. It is now our turn to shape the world. There are many changes, environmental, etc., that we must address.

Participant: Do you believe that there are certain elements of the Blink way of knowing that inform grantmaking (As in, is there a certain amount of intuitive, gut-based decision-making)?
Moy: I think that Malcolm Gladwell has begun a very public conversation about experts and intuitive decision-making. It has begun a number of conversations at Hewlett. Ultimately it is a combination of both. Who is doing it? Who is the leadership? Leadership, artistic vision, what’s happening on the stage? What is the path you are on? What is the strategy you intend to get you there?

Participant: There is a certain tension that grantmakers face as they try to plan for the future but must still help organizations deal with challenges that face them today. How do you try to resolve that tension?
Moy: I listen a lot and I ask questions about the organization as it stands today: How do you deal with your own strategy? How do you deal with your own vision? The median time that Hewlett supports an organization is 10 to 15 years. We care about the arts. We think they are important to the community, so we ask questions like what are the values that are driving your work?

Participant: In finding new spaces for arts organizations, what do you look for in anchor groups?
Moy: Strong artistic vision, impact on audience already established, financial stability to launch a second or third capital campaign. Pursuing a permanent space cannot implode the organization. Ultimately it must be the right place and the right time because the last thing we want is for art organizations to become real estate organizations.

Participant: When applying for a grant from Hewlett, you require that applicants go through a logic model (requires an organization to see its biggest, grandest goal). Some organizations have already gone through this process beforehand and some go through it for the application. How do you be helpful without being overly directive?
Moy: As a practitioner, Hewlett is a really good process but it is a pain in the butt. It is quasi-academic. From a grantmaker’s perspective, strategic planning is an important tool. We spend a whole lot of time reviewing those proposals. For newer, younger organizations, we decide whether or not they need it. For older, larger, and more established organizations, they are already entrenched. It is those organizations that are most often at risk, the midsized organizations that can stand to benefit greatly from this process.

Participant (as a follow-up): How can foundations nudge us along but simultaneously not tell us what to do?
Moy: That is why we ask our applicants to do this process. What are the most important questions for us to ask? Is this tool useful? There is a certain amount of hubris behind the grantmaking process. To avoid it, Hewlett shies away from large name recognition. We are making strategic grantmaking decisions and throughout the process, we most of all try to listen to the organizations.

Participant: On a scale of 1 to 10, where does advocacy rank in terms of important activities in which arts organizations should participate? It falls high there for me. But the time I have to commit to it is minimum. Is that something we should always be focusing on?
Moy: Promoting public value of the arts should always be high on the priority list. The response of advocacy on a specific issue can be highly valuable. And then we link it with other communication and programs. It is up to the organization what emphasis it places on advocacy.

Participant: Arts education, in general, what do you feel is the role or responsibility of the cultural community and institutions in adding to the arts education conversation? What should we be thinking about?
Moy: I am at the beginning of this search and am not ready to answer that question.

Participant: You spoke of initiatives to promote direct funding to individual artists. My question is how foundations address the notion of sustainability about donated income to these artists with what ultimately will need to become earned income.
Moy: I am beginning that conversation, too. We made a $1.5 million in direct artist grants; those recipients included new, maturing, and respected artists. New England Foundation for the Arts is also involved in examining this issue.

Participant: San Jose Symphony closed two years ago. People are very concerned seeing the symphony disappear; what are your thoughts? What is your perspective on this loss?
Moy: With larger organizations it often is difficult to think outside of the box because it is an archival organization with an older audience. Some have made outward promises but it is a long-term process to build an audience. For many of these organizations, it will simply take time to rebuild their audiences.

Participant: Do you feel the dearth of seasoned development professionals?
Moy: Right now, it is a matter of timing issues. Those who are good are relatively transient. It is at the senior level were there is a drought. It is because of a lack of stability in many of these organizations.

Participant: Hewlett is a leader in the arts. What would you like to see five to 10 years in the future? Do you see yourself as a leader in private artist funding?
Moy: We must grow and sustain this funding better than we are doing it right now. The nonprofit sector is just way to hard. Many of these artists are moving into the media and technology sectors. It is hard for foundations to be agile.

Participant (as a follow-up): Do you see other foundations listening?
Moy: They are laughing.

Participant: There has been much stress over the issue of sustainability. Small organizations may believe that institutionalization is the best idea. How can we refrain from encouraging institutionalization?
Moy: It is hard to end something and to call it a day. Even if you end it gracefully, it is difficult, especially when you hear it from your funder. I have had those discussions. We are not proposing that people be bigger and better but that it is about your place in the community. I think it’s hard and a delicate balance.

Abel: Share your thoughts on where using an intermediary can be beneficial to your work.
Moy: Identifying the organization that can assist as a collegial assistant to the foundation in some of our decision-making where we may lack a certain expertise.

Abel: Where?
Moy: We have used some outside assistance for our Artists Space program and also provide a level of business development up front for a number of our organizations.

Abel: What do you see as the sectors of this ecosystem?
Moy: I would welcome your suggestions and questions in this process. It would be helpful for the community if we all come together.

Participant: Are you finding that the distinction of disciplines is not serving us well?
Moy: Yes, we still use those definitions but those gray areas—the mix of media and discipline-specific art—is where the exciting forms are being created.

Participant: When you spoke of the importance of real estate, you also encouraged the importance of coalitions. Could a group of organizations do better work? How do you see coalitions working?
Moy: We support coalitions and collaborative work when it makes sense. When you have less money and fewer resources, they can often be mutually beneficial. But, there must be a core reason for you being there in the first place. The reason a coalition is building a new media center is because on your own you could not afford it.

Participant: From your Ailey experience, what worked to sell to potential donors? Was it the institution? Was it because it was arts?
Moy: It was his voice and his vision that attracted donors. The challenge was in changing the mindset of the board to see the company as something bigger than a modern dance troupe. When I suggested that we should approach Bill Cosby, they could not understand why he would be interested in the company. They did not see themselves as the preeminent black dance troupe in the nation. It was not until that mindset changed that major donor solicitation could begin. And in the end, Bill Cosby did get involved.

Participant: What role does the board play in your evaluation of what grants to award?
Moy: Sometimes it’s the board member driving the board or a board member setting the tone. The board sets policy.

Participant: Is there a more efficient way to centralize where individual artists may find support? What are the elements that make it successful?
Moy: To access the arts, as an artist, there is no centralized place for artists to look, There is no place to go for all; you must either go by discipline or region.

Abel: From your work with immigrant and human rights, are there models from these experiences from other parts of your life?
Moy: I often take past projects, like using microfinance as a way to address certain aspects of the fight against AIDS, from work from the past and use it for informational purposes.

Abel: What are some issues that immigrants are facing today?
Moy: Lack of information, lack of resources, flying under the radar, lack of information-expertise by the grantmakers. These issues are not dissimilar from other new initiatives that have logistical and expertise issues.

Abel: Are there some programs that you feel have made a difference and have been able to impact immigrant communities?
Moy: Most of the work is being done by local arts councils, community-based organizations, and churches.

Participant: What do you see as the advantages of the term limits instituted at Hewlett for grantmakers?
Moy: The benefits are that you get a core staff that works with issues for six to eight years; you have to be very clear; and you have to work very quickly. You have to hire someone very experienced who is close to the end of the job path. Furthermore, if you want to do issues that have social impact, the scale of those problems takes more than six or eight years to address; they take a lifetime or more.

Participant: What are your thoughts on leadership development in the arts?
Moy: It is a larger challenge for the arts as a whole. There are very few places to develop sequentially. The onus is on the individual because it is so decentralized. You have 20 to 30 years to see if something sticks. It takes a lot of patient capital. Many people are not into the process of individual development.

Participant: Do you believe your M.A. made a difference in your career path?
Moy: I chose a path to be a producer. And it helped me learn how to get and how to spread resources around. I grew up in a Western world as a Buddhist from a traditional Chinese family shaped by the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Rights movement. I felt that in order to ratchet up my arts connection and learn the New York scene, I needed business training in the city. The alumni group from this program was incredibly open and I continue that openness today.

Participant: I was struck by your discussion of your experience outside of grantmaking and in the industry itself but many grantmakers today are decades separated or never had the nonprofit experience in the first place. What are your thoughts?
Moy: Philanthropies’ real histories lie in the support of ideas at the earliest stages, in developing intellectual capital, and in allowing them to expand to implementation. The practitioner-as-a-grantmaker often makes sense for our program but that may not work for Rockefeller. Hewlett tries to support the process of creation. With that goal in mind, I talk to people who are not artists and I can speak to them as an arts practitioner, as a grantmaker, or as any number of the different roles I have played throughout my life.

Abel: When we began our discussion, we spoke of Moy’s youth; her checkered background is what has made her a leader in our field. Thank you for coming and thank you to Moy for her openness.

 

Innovator Series with Donald Byrd
June 12, 2005
10:45 a.m.–12:45 p.m.

Donald Byrd became artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater, a contemporary dance company in Seattle, in December 2002. Prior to this position, Mr. Byrd was artistic director of DONALD BYRD/THE GROUP, a critically acclaimed contemporary dance company, which came to closure in 2002. He studied at Tufts, Yale, and the Martha Cunningham School of Dance and worked with Twyla Tharp. He has created The Prodigal; The Beast; Still; and A Different Life. He has choreographed numerous stage productions throughout the nation. Since 1976, he has created more than 80 works for his former company and Spectrum Dance Theater, as well as for major modern dance repertory and classical companies and stage productions. Mr. Byrd currently serves on the board of trustees for the Dance Theater Workshop in New York and was appointed to the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs (Seattle Arts Commission) in July 2003. Projects he is currently working on include Motown Classics 2, a work based on the paintings of Jacob, and the stage production of The Color Purple. He is a master artists and a pioneer of our arts community.

Abel: Good morning and welcome back. These conversations are designed to be intimate and you will have the opportunity to participate in the conversation. We have the time to spend with artists who are leaders and pioneers in the field and learn how they have contributed to the cultural community, both locally and nationally. Today’s conversation is with Donald Byrd. He is an artist, a choreographer, a dancer, and arts administrator; he’s a public servant. That in and of itself of a conversation—how he does it all and does it so well. He has been doing this for a number of years. His involvement in the arts is not only as an artist but also as an administrator and founder. How did it all begin and how did your interest develop?
Donald: I was always interested in the arts. When I was a kid, I always wanted to dance. I was a hyperactive kid and I took dance classes. When my parents divorced, I began studying classical music and that is where I was focused for much of my teenage years, along with theater. There were two things that happened. I saw Edward Villella and Patricia McBride, two principle dancers, do a master ballet class and it did something in my head. And I knew about Balachine from classical music but I actually saw Alvin Ailey Dance Company after that. That was a profound experience for me. I remember the whole program. After Revelations, the whole audience was screaming and clapping and I was crying, so moved. And at that moment, I realized that anything that moved people so much was something I wanted to do. Consequently, I went into an open audition and pretended like I had had a dance class before. I was obsessed; they could not get rid of me. I was 19 at the time.

Abel: What motivated you to start your own company?
Donald: I started choreographing with Gus Solomons, Jr. The company went with him to California, where he taught in an academic setting, for part of the year. When I arrived, the students asked me what kind of work did I make. And I answered that I just danced. Our hours there were cut short and in that time, I began choreographing. And all those ideas could be a medium to bring all the experiences I had in music and theater together. In 1976, I choreographed my first piece. At the time, we were touring and David White initiated a program at DTW (Dance Theatre Workshop) that was a choreographer’s showcase. There, I auditioned one of the pieces that I had created earlier that year. I showed my first work along with many other contemporary choreographers. After I did that, David had a night that was free and gave me a space for an hour and after a month, when I originally only had 10 minutes of work, I made an hour’s worth of dance and I had my first concert in New York. Afterwards, I went back to Los Angeles and I felt like I had to have a company since that was what everyone did.

Abel: Did your company have a specific philosophy?
Donald: I did have a philosophy. I wanted a place where I could explore and investigate things. And the way you could do that was through a company. And there would be a way to bring in popular culture into the serious medium of dance. For example, the name “DONALD BYRD/THE GROUP” well, it kind of sounded like a rock group and it was the name of Martha Graham’s first company. Accordingly, we didn’t perform in standard dance halls; we performed in places where rock groups would play.

Abel: Did dancers come and go?
Donald: There was a core group of people that stayed the same. Along the way, Los Angeles, which I had been very enthusiastic about, lacked the infrastructure and mental attitude to fully support concert dance. There was no community and I felt isolated. And there are some good things about being isolated since there is no pressure but it can be depressing. I decided to go back to New York and invited everyone to come with me. When I went back to the city, dance had become a career. Before, there were dance artists and there was an expectation that you did what you could. There was the Next Wave Festival. They were going about the business of doing art and I had no experience doing that.

Abel: Did you find a support system amongst other choreographers and dancers?
Donald: I think it helped that there were people that I knew. I saw other dancers and choreographers who understood the process of what I was doing. I had to manage the feeling of being competitive and fighting for limited resources. I was mad and angry. It moved some things forward; after receiving enough “No”s, I developed a philosophy that eventually the rejections would stop. I tried to stop looking at artists as competitors and look at how we were feeling about the environment that we were in. I could then begin talking to other artists.

Abel: Did you begin to see yourself as an administrator?
Donald: One of the things that drives me is to look at what I am mad about. For example, how come the presenters weren’t presenting my work? So, I looked at it from their point of view. And I had a chance to talk to presenters. And they told me that their concerns were not only about my work but all work. I began to start seeing things better as an administrator. I am good at the big parts and looking at how things fit together. What can I do as an artist to make an administrator’s life easier?

Abel: How long were you in New York? How would you describe the composition of your company?
Donald: At first, my company was all white and people did not understand why it was all white. I didn’t know either; it was who showed up at auditions. There was a dance writer who told me my work would communicate better with a more diverse company. At Black Choreographers Moving Towards a 21st Century, I had made excuses about why there were no black dancers in my company. I needed to make more of an effort to demonstrate to these dancers why my work is relevant to them. After that, Alvin Ailey invited me to do work with his first company. Number one, I want to work with this level of dancers. I began to draw dancers from that environment and then from African American dancers who were not interested in the Ailey experience. Some people do not think my work is black enough. If you have a mixed company, maybe you are not so black. If your work does not fall into a context of what people think you should be interested in, then it’s not black. It was viewed as being experimental and provocative.

Abel: Why did you close your company?
Donald: I felt driven to make that decision. My organization did not have the infrastructure to support the growth of the organization and it grew from a $500,000 to a $1.5 million organization. There was nothing that could prepare us for that growth. There was a lot of accumulated debt ($800,000). That was 100 percent of our operating expenses. It became really difficult to do. That weight was always on top of the organization and me. I began to make decisions that were increasingly based on financial decisions and not artistic. I was interested but I was not as interested as I could have been. I had a responsibility to these dancers and we needed to work. I did the Duke Ellington piece, In a Different Light: Duke Ellington, because we could sell the piece to presenters. In one piece, audiences were outraged when two men would hold hands for 15 seconds. The question then had to be asked, what will they think if we travel? And we needed to make money so I was doing these pieces that pleased, but I wasn’t doing the best work that I could do. I had two conversations with people about closing the company. In the first conversation, my friend told me if you are going to do it you need to let people know you are going to do it. And I had a conversation with Michael Kaiser whose attitude was you would move pass it and forget about it. We did our last performance as a company out in Santa Fe.

Abel: As a founder, you close your company and then you go to Spectrum where you are succeeding the founder. Tell us about that experience.
Donald: Not to sound critical—People should plan succession better. I don’t think the founder thought about what would happen if he left. I walked into an environment where people were not prepared for my style. I was not going to be there 24 hours a day killing myself for no money and die emotionally, physically, and spiritually. There was no infrastructure to support the work. He did not create new work; he brought work in to the theater. He did tremendous things with the school and making connections with the community. And he was sweet and I am astringent. They were not prepared for a person like me to come on. Half the board was gone within the first four months. We operated with one-third of an optimal board size until six months ago. This board had no experience fundraising since the founder did it all. The board just sat back. I did not want to be loved. I just wanted to get the job done. My goal was to get the board to understand what their job was. We will go out and get the work done together. I am more committed to the success of Spectrum than to my own company, mostly because after I could see what the problems were at Spectrum, I couldn’t just walk out the door. For the remainder of my contract I will never threaten to leave again. We will try to make this work. And if it’s not working, that’s what contract negotiations are for.

Abel: You have spent time in the university setting. Tell us about your experience. What were the challenges and opportunities?
Donald: It depends. At CalArts it was fabulous. It was easier; they let me do whatever I wanted to do. Your first responsibility is to the students. I learned to be attentive to the students and respect their needs. I had to serve them not vice versa. By serving them, I got something to serve me. You have studio space and dancers who are enthusiastic. The heads of the institutions are supporting your work. But, the academic world has more pressure than the professional world. You have different departments of the university jockeying for position. I don’t think I could deal with that on a day-to-day basis. That is hard to do that. You learn a lot about how to deal with people, negotiate, and find consensus.

Abel: Tell us about your time at Harvard.
Donald: That was one of the best times of my life. The question every summer was what was the advantage of opening your work up to the community before you think it’s ready? What role can your work play in animating and engaging communities in a real sense? The work that I did there was really profound for me. I did a reworking of the Minstrel Show, which brought up a lot of issues for Cambridge. Those communities came together and created animated discussions. I think the experience of being around people who were interested in questioning work kept me from shriveling up and dying. We do often see people who go to the theater to reaffirm their ideas. There they want to be stimulated, get going, and angry. There was an incredible sense of aliveness. So many people pointed out that it was a failure. But to me, these were people who found that theater is a place where they are stimulated. They believed in it as a secular, spiritual place.

Abel: Has that experience influenced what you do?
Donald: I still provoke. I provoke all the time in my work. Sometimes it’s in areas that I don’t even know are provocative until asked why I am doing that type of work. The first piece that I did at Spectrum was Cruel New World, which was a reaction to the Patriot Act. There is a sense that you are imprisoned by fear. You feel alienated by the person next to you.

Abel: During your Seattle Arts Commissioner experience, what do you think you brought to the table as an artist?
Donald: I rant and rave about the lack of leadership. A lot of the cultural community was shaped by what happened at the 1962 World’s Fair. The mature institutions were founded or came into maturity around that time. It was then that the partnership between the business, entrepreneurial, and the city community was created. They did not understand what it meant but they went ahead. The environment was that there were six white guys in a back room and they would decide what would happen. The thing that it demonstrated is the importance of leadership. Seattle has been coasting on that leadership. The major organizations are doing ok. The Ballet, Seattle Rep., Opera…they are all doing fine. They produce products that people want. All of the midsized organizations are dying. One of the questions is where are the new people who will step up and make it happen. At the commission, we need to step up in that leadership, so that in 30 or 40 years there is a cultural community that is a result of the work we do. The arts community is not a reflection of the innovation of the city. There is no desire to change things. It does not reflect who is coming into the community. There is a large influx of Spanish-speaking people, African immigrants, and more Asians. None of the cultural institutions reflect this ethnic mix.

Abel: What are the needs that need to be addressed? What are some of the elements that must be addressed?
Donald: We beat ourselves up. We frame it in economic development. There is value other than economic development. It is one of the hooks that you bring to business people and entrepreneurs. We have started undervaluing quality of life when we solely focus on those arguments. How do you broaden the conversation when you speak of what a community should look like? At Spectrum, we came up with this idea that healthy communities are predicated by healthy arts organizations. We must look at the arts as being part of the solution to community needs.

Participant: When you reach a certain level, you can delegate authority. When you were at the stage of developing both your new works and your company, where did you put yourself in a place to create works?
Donald: There is not a lot of delegation in Seattle. I am writing e-mails at 3 a.m. I look at all of it as part of the creative process. It is all part of what it takes to be an artist in the 21st century. One of the advantages is that I actually get the chance to go back and do what I used to do. I am more thoughtful and I get to consider more things. I believe in what I am trying to do. I can articulate what the challenges are and can use it as a roadmap to accomplish what I need to do more efficiently. It is more strategic.

Participant: How can we make a transition for the tech people to consider themselves part of the creative process and not just consumers?
Donald: Some may just be consumers. I try to bring young people on the board. They say that innovation is a part of relevance. We did a piece called Bhangra Theater. The piece was about globalization but it used a popular medium that spoke to people. We must examine the idea of partnerships with this sector and how can we partner with them. I don’t think that is a corollary. We must encourage critical thinking. People in the tech world want to party hard and think intellectually. It turns them on. I think Austin and Seattle are very similar with this audience.

Participant: I want to thank you. Could we speak of diversity issues and trying to combine communities and create a dialogue? What are your thoughts?
Donald: I don’t know. You must continue to come up with ideas. What do you need to do to get them to the table? I use myself as the glue. You come up with some idea; you float it out there. You keep trying until you reach a critical mass. You find people with similar interests who hook up with your values. Right now in Seattle, the grandchildren from those old, established families are in a band, so you bring them to the table to get some new blood. You need to create interesting “fly paper.” I am impatient and things seem to go slowly. You need to have a certain level of patience. Whatever it is I am trying to do, I will likely be dead before it happens, but I need to be a part of the initiation.

Participant: For many years, it has been told that Seattle infused the arts in the school system. There seems to be a disconnect right now.
Donald: The parent organizations have begun providing arts programs in the school. The Seattle Foundation commissioned a study that found that it did not create adventurous arts consumers. Opera has recently become very popular. Dance, other than ballet, is not a strong audience. We must build and cultivate it. There is a great experience that can be had with small and midsized organizations, but it is an ongoing process. It’s like politics—the pendulum keeps swinging. Arts education and arts literacy conversation is continual and you must continue to train the next generation. For me, the wonderful thing about Seattle is the coffee shop. There, the kids have energy, volunteer, and engage with the community.

Participant: The debate continues about the supply side versus the demand side. Many people think we have overdeveloped. It touches on organizational capacity and financial stability.
Donald: I am conflicted about it. Sometimes I believe that there is too much and there are too many organizations that are making too many demands on the public for their money and attention. At the same time, there is some redundancy in the programs that these arts organizations provide. Some of the companies could partner up (i.e., education programs where they can share resources) and then they can make the art that can reach consumers. I think consumers have different taste. I have been thinking about options. I believe people want options and they have to know that the options are there. It’s an ongoing question to engage them and discover what works. The Darwinism type of approach is not the best approach for the arts. The big organizations have a chance to eat you up and just because smaller organizations are leaving does not mean the community is being served.

Participant: What would investment on the demand side look like?
Donald: We need to encourage amateurism. You gain an understanding that way. I am a real advocate for increasing literacy in the different art disciplines. If people are more literate in the art form then they have more appreciation for it. Then they will be taking larger risks in what they see. They value the experience even if it does not align with their tastes. Where you try making art and then you experience art at a high level, it is a part of your experience as a human being. The head of the NEA announced that they would have programs for newspapers to educate them on the arts programs. But it is not the journalist but the publishers also who need to be educated.

Participant: Does Seattle have any sense of interdisciplinary interaction and partnerships?
Donald: It does on occasion but those collaborations do not last. What kinds of experience would encourage people to have a repeat experience? Seattle Arts Commission looks at ways for people to collaborate but people are protecting their turfs. The Opera may say that they are doing fine so why should they look out for others.

Participant: How would you describe your roles as a commissioner?
Donald: We officially advocate for the arts in Seattle and we make recommendations to the Mayor on funding.

Participant: Do you fill the dance slot?
Donald: Yes and no. One guy is just rich and he thinks the arts are really important. He is excited about small organizations and is invigorated by encouraging small boards. He is almost like a playboy. There is a movie star. We fill a number of roles.

Abel: You work a lot in regional theater. How has the environment been in the for-profit theater?
Donald: The difference is having people looking over your shoulder. The producers are protecting their product. I am used to being my own boss and it’s a little different that way. This show (The Color Purple) is a challenging show anyway. There is a delicate balance of how you take something so challenging and create a new product, without losing the integrity of the original. In for-profit theater, you do not have to worry about the money at all. They ask you how much you need and then they just cut the check. That is extremely different.

Abel: How was moving from dance into the regional theater experience?
Donald: I wanted to not be the front man for a little while. How I am going to serve the director? When the director was smart, how could I could learn from the director? How can I help you realize your vision? Someone else can take all the heat. I love to learn by seeing them solve problems and hearing them talk about things. Anna Deveare Smith moves me to tears—the way she thinks about things, how much courage it takes to confront these issues, and what in the pain in the butt it can be. She can get away with that and I cannot. How these theaters operate and work is usually stable and there is a lot to learn from that. Also, I have been doing movies, which is another experience altogether. There are a lot of resources. It is you doing something with a support group five times that number. They ask “do you need more money?” They want to help in a whole new way. The reason that I cannot go that way, I love putting it together and trying to get it on stage. The challenges give me a kick. Some people question my motives at Spectrum but I can do that sort of thing in New York or Los Angeles. I am trying to serve this organization to the best of my ability.

Abel: If you were advising a young person going into the arts, what would you say to them about the future?
Donald: Now is different than what I thought the future would be. You must love it. If you don’t love it, it is too hard. Love of getting it out to the public, believing it, it has to get you up in the morning. I can rant and rave about the things I hate about being in Seattle and Spectrum but it gets me up in the morning. It has to turn you on and it may turn you on to something really hard and challenging. People often don’t take on tasks that are impossible. Sometimes you need an impossible one.

Abel: What is still out there?
Donald: I think I just want to see the people that go see movies, go see dance. They think to themselves, “oh, these are all valuable experiences.” Maybe they do not go see dance in the same numbers that they see movies, but both have relevance for them. They don’t make distinctions.

Participant: What are you working on now?
Donald: The Color Purple. The Sleeping Beauty Notebook, which examines the themes and concepts that are built into that story and how they are relevant to contemporary theater. I am really interested in storytelling; How to tell the story—whatever that is. Not necessarily in the linear form but in ways that engage the audience members. I am working a lot. I am also doing a movie version of Petrushka. I am looking at what was relevant about those stories and how that relates to audiences today. I am also interested in what was happening in the early 20th century and working with Bartoch’s Miraculous Mandolin on the same program. In the early part of the 20th century, people believed something terrible was happening. Sometimes I feel like that is how we feel now. Either that horrible thing will happen or we will turn that potential into something that is positive. It is a kind of storytelling that is interesting. It is one of the ways that we can engage the audience. I am in love with that and how to do it with movement. I want them to move as much as possible and not talk too much. I think the movement has a way of getting through defenses that language cannot. The specificity of language pulls people back. Movement gets through the defenses we put up.
 

Innovator Series with Ben Cameron
June 13, 2005
10:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Ben Cameron is the executive director of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for nonprofit theaters, with a membership of 440 professional theater members. He supervised a $51 million giving program at Target. He was director of the theater program for the National Endowment for the Arts and has held position at Indiana Repertory Theatre and Playmakers Repertory Company. He has taught theater at several universities and is a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University. He received an M.F.A. in dramaturgy from the Yale School of Drama; a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and honorary degrees from DePaul University and the American Conservatory Theatre. Mr. Cameron currently serves as the secretary of the American Arts Alliance, on the board of Grantmakers in the Arts, and on the Tony Awards Nominating Committee. He writes the monthly editorial for American Theatre. His first role was playing the Caboose in The Little Engine That Could.

Abel: How did you prepare for that role?
Ben: It prepared me for a life of bringing up the rear.

Abel: How did you get started in the theater?
Ben: I was a late arrival to the world of theater. My town in North Carolina did not have access to the arts or theater. The real glory was the Community Arts Series. When I was eight or nine, I saw Isaac Stern and many others. I studied piano with Bess Gale who taught Norah Jones. When I was in college, I was asked to be in a play, which peaked my interest in the arts. I really got into theater when I did summer stock for Tom Haas, the head of the Yale School of Drama who was infamous for putting Meryl Streep on probation and for bringing summer stock to North Carolina. Tom said that I should go to drama school for dramaturgy. Now, I didn’t know what dramaturgy was. Tom and I had a bet and whoever won the bet would pay the application fee. And I got in and I thought, oh god Yale, and I never thought I could say no. Tom then gave me my first job in theater. Tom said “If you come to Indiana, we will give you a stage-managing job.” I pulled into Tom’s theater and he told me there had been a change of plans. “You’re not stage managing the show, you’re directing it.” And I had never directed before. He said they had cast the show but that I would need to write the show, in a week. By the end of the summer I had directed seven shows, including two on the main stage.

Abel: How long did you stay with Tom and the theater in Indiana?
Ben: I was in Indiana for three years. I left in 1984, after three formative years, as family circumstances brought me home. At that moment, Chapel Hill was looking for someone to be a literary manager at PlayMakers, and I was close to home but not too close.

Abel: Did you continue directing later?
Ben: When I went to the NEA in 1988, they said that we believe it is a conflict of interest for grantmakers to be directors, with the caveat that if someone said “You are such a fabulous director that we must have you, and consequently, we will not apply for funding from the NEA for four years.” The two exceptions, where I continued to direct, were for Tom. Tom was hit by a board member’s car, totally on accident, and was killed. I returned to the summer stock to help direct in the wake of that tragedy. I joined the NEA as a fellow and when I went to Virginia Tech, I realized that I was not ready to settle into a tenure position. I believed that it was too early, that it was disavtangeous for me in my career at that time. So I left for the  NEA, for a job as the senior manager in the theater program and then I became the assistant director of the theater program. And then, the fool was on the throne.

Abel: Given the time, what were the challenges that you faced? That was a really important time during the cultural wars.
Ben: The administration of the NEA and I were not always in synch of our roles. As program director, one hand was for the NEA and one hand for the field, with the goal of bringing those fields together. I thought that was what I could offer coming from the field, as opposed to being a representative from the government. That was not always an easy distance to negotiate. At the NEA, they believed that I wasn’t a good enough advocate for the agency. I would give my feelings. On a personal level, those were difficult times. I remember in particular sitting in the National Council for the Arts meetings and frankly feeling as though we were fighting for exactly what we were accused of not doing, and that tension was deeply painful. You would feel like someone had just punched you in the stomach and that was really hard. There was the sense of having to monitor. I felt that after John Frohnmayer left, I came to believe that I was a problem.

Abel: You didn’t go back to the theater?
Ben: I went to TCG for two minutes. And then I went to the foundation.

Abel: You were in corporate life. Did you not have a desire to go back into directing or running a theater company?
Ben: I am a perfectly fine director. I stage a play as clearly as the next guy. Did the theater lose a great director when I chose not to direct anymore? I didn’t find it necessary; my burning need is not to direct. If you do not have the burning need, you do not need to follow it.

Abel: How was the move to corporate philanthropy, with its unique approach to giving?
Ben: It is a holy war. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Then it was a $51 million yearly budget; now it’s $140 million a year. Target Corporation is great. I am a big fan of corporations. At that point in time corporate giving was very different. It was amplified from the three different divisions—Target, Mervyn’s, Marshall Fields. I got a 25 percent discount, at that point, they paid me to take stuff. But at that point, there was a difference between a job to deeply invest in a community and it was with unrestricted general operating support to both arts and service organizations. Now, corporate investment is different. It is just the Target Foundation, and their giving is based on marketing opportunities.

Abel: You have spoken a lot about value and how Target defines value and how we look at value.
Ben: The big light bulb went off when I went to Target. One of the things they taught me at that point was the central importance of value. You can have the best toilet paper in the world on the shelves, but if people don't see the value of coming in the store in the first place, they don't get to see if you've got the good or bad—and p.s. if you promise them the best, you better have it, or they won't come back twice. But value precedes quality when determining where to invest time, money and energy. Target told me that we in the arts field don’t get it. You look it at how good or bad you are. You talk on quality terms. When you are at an arts organization you are looking at quality from the first term. That’s what rehearsal is about. People in America do not invest based on quality. Value precedes quality. Their point is that people look at value as a return on investment. We inform our decisions with quality-based answers and we have conversations that do not intersect with the interests of our audience. We tend not to value-based questions

Every organization, whether the arts or not, is, I would suggest, guided by core values--as is each of us in our personal lives. Core values in my mind are those two or at most three things that you or your organization will go to the mat for every single time--not most times, but every single time, beacons of sorts, manifest principles that guide us every time we face a hard set of decisions.
 
How do we argue for these core values in a meaningful, valuable way? If you don’t know what those values are, how will you ever gauge the choice you are about to make? You have to know the values so you can appreciate the life you are living. It’s true for both an organization and an individual. Burn out and fiscal exhaustion are two different animals. Think about what happens when you are deeply connected; you will work 18 hours. If you are burning out, you have a disconnect from your core values. The answer to burn out is finding a connection to your core values.

At Target, you have your core values displayed everywhere.  One of the core values was to have fun =and as a manager, I knew that it was my job for my staff to have fun--to find ways to celebrate their achievements through excursions for pizza or breaks midday to go to a movie, through the weekly staff meeting where an horrific Santa statue was awarded to the staff member who had done the stupidest thing during the week.

Core values also have an equally viable and opposite value.

Diversity is one of TCG’s core values. We have really taken a step to use that to inform all of our decisions – race, age, geographical representation, problem solving.

How do you capture your value to the community and to your audience in a value statement? Target uses “expect more, pay less” as a reason to patronize the store. Walmart uses “always below price, always.” I have been taken with how few of us can talk like that. “We produce high quality theater” relates to a small universe. Why are you important on a deeper level? The core value of American Red Cross is “we serve to the most vulnerable.”

 In a comparable way what is the value that the arts uniquely give to the community. Every arts organization must be able to answer three basic questions. First, what is the value of having my organization in my community? Second, what is the value that my group alone offers, or that my group offers better than anyone else?  A Duplicative or second-rate value will not withstand this test.  Third, how would my community be damaged if we close our doors and move away tomorrow?

I think organizations that have clear value statements can take an assessment of what their market value is.  One way to do this is to examine how the organization affects the seven levels of consciousness.

• What is the audience’s emotional response to the value statement?
• Is there a positive aesthetic connection?
• Does the organization make an impact?  For example, Volvo’s impact on the market is that it provides safety.
• Differentiation: What distinguishes your organization from others?
• How high if the quality of the product you are offering? This is the ultimate trait that determines re-investment.
• Ergonomics How easy if can your organization be accessed? This is harder for theaters.  You can get so much on line right now but you can only see a show if you are at the theater at a specific time on a specific day.
• How predictable is the product you will get? You don’t want to buy a car to find out you got a lemon.  In theater, one show may be a flop and the next one is fabulous.  But, it makes your product less predictable.

I am jazzed about how value is transformed. I am currently reading two books—Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, which is a business marketing book. Using the initial example of Cirque du Soleil, the authors discuss how the circus industry was declining and that by responding to the external reasons to this decline and re-imagining the possibilities, Cirque reinvented the circus and achieved a real sense of value innovation. The Great Influenza by John Barry focuses on how the flu forced medicine to be re-examined and reshaped. It had been predicated on observation and the imbalance of the body. At the beginning of the 20th century, it looked at the outside of disease. Then you didn’t need to study chemistry, all you had to see was the patient. As a theater and arts community, during this moment of crisis, when will we be willing to engage in the most honest reassessment of our value?

Abel: What did you mean by moment of crisis?
Ben: I absolutely recognize that we are a bipartisan community. I think we are doubly in crisis—certainly in fiscal numbers. Even though some new numbers have come out on our website, foundation giving, corporate giving has been going down. What we certainly know about corporate giving is that it’s been refocused. We all know the California Arts Council story. The degree of the downward slope has been alarming. What happens and what is the conversation? We see that as feedback from our audiences that we’ve got to be listening to. On the other level, we’re in a deeply critical moment as a country. We are at a moment of a huge paradigm shift. There was a great thing in The New York Times yesterday with graduation speeches this time of year. This is what I love the most from the Wesleyan’s commencement speech:

“Mutual respect is not about walking on eggshells. It is not about playing down differences. Rather, it is about giving serious consideration to our differences and disagreements and working through them. It is about pursuing common goals in a constructive spirit of engagement— even when many differences remain, as they always will in a democracy.

Mutual respect is the lifeblood of democracy. It allows you and me to pursue our own happiness also for the benefit of our fellow men and women. It allows even fierce adversaries to seek common ground.

Think about the champions of democracy and freedom. Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa. They hated unjust laws and institutions—hated them! And they fought with all their might to overthrow them. But they never acted hatefully in confronting their adversaries.

Alas, these are not the best of times for mutual respect. We are witnessing a steady erosion of respect for the opinions of others and for the institutions and democratic traditions that have helped to safeguard life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The signs of disrespect are all around us. In the ferocious assault on the judiciary. In the shrill debate over Terri Schiavo. And worst of all, in the hateful, ad hominem attacks that issue daily from the radio and TV talk shows.

We are living in a smash-mouth culture in which extremists dominate public debate to the point of hijacking it. You cannot have a reasoned discussion about abortion when one side is slandered as "baby-killers" and the other side is smeared as "religious wingnuts."

It is hard to pursue a reasoned debate about the Iraqi War when opponents of the war are accused of treason and the President of the United States is compared to Hitler.

Reach across the aisle, pursue collaborative solutions, or explore the shades of gray on any charged issue, and you are likely to be ignored or dismissed as indecisive. That's if you’re lucky. More likely, you will endure crude and often malicious attacks on your intelligence, faith, and patriotism. You may even face death threats—as did Judge George Greer did after ruling on the Schiavo case.

What a waste of the privilege of living in a free society.”
      Amy Gutmann
      President, University of Pennsylvania
      www.wesleyan.edu

This is a critical moment in the history of our country. Linda Rondstadt said that she is going to dedicate a song against the war and she was shunned. If we in the arts are about true civil discourse, what does this mean if we won’t sit in a room any more and talk about these issues? We’re snoozing at the wheel and it’s led to this ranting, lopsided public coverage of news, and I am deeply concerned about this country. The crisis that we are experiencing in the arts is related to this. We need to embrace our responsibility to this issue.

Abel: At the same time, you say that the arts are at a Renaissance moment.
Ben: I focus on three things:

• Trends around diversity
• Trends around young people and receiving information
• Trends around how we socially congregate

In the late 50s and 60s, there were two professional nonprofit theater companies in my company. Now there are 400. I think this is about magazine articles in the 60s promoting the arts; it’s about the NEA and its impact; I think it’s about the Kennedy assassination and reaction to it; I think it’s about the GI bill. Those GIs went to college in unprecedented levels; we rode away in the nonprofit community on the heels of this.

Now much of the nation is polarized, we’re all worried about education. What I think about the Renaissance is what it means for us in terms of how we reinvent ourselves right now. What different behaviors, different ways of thinking, will we use?

Abel: Which ties into another phrase you use, which is cultural citizenship.
Ben: Well again, as arts organizations, so much of our role is to be willing to be engaged in civic society—to be involved in voting and polling. I want voting machines in theaters. I say it to every board now, you have to have an advocacy component/committee that is willing to write letters to the editor, build consciousness, because that is what will make the change and raise awareness.

The solution is how you direct the guest’s eye every time you’re in the store. You go to a theater, and you see pictures of Virginia Woolf in a production. We direct those eyes every time they come into our space, if they walk out and don’t get it, that’s our fault. The arts are the only nonprofits that sell tickets. Girl Scouts don’t sell tickets. We sell tickets. I never thought of that.

Why should an audience know that we’re not making money? Bring an actor out, in half of his costume, and say 55 percent of his costume is from your general contribution. Have the house manager give announcements in half light. We must explain to the audience the lack of funding. They cannot understand why they should contribute above and beyond the price of their tickets.

Abel: You refer to the arts as weapons of mass salvation.
Ben: One, we are living in an interesting and profound time. In times of wars, arts have the ability to cut across violence. They are a reminder about the importance of international exchange. We also forget in the theater, we always transform ourselves when we take an international approach. International connection transforms. Two, beyond that, though, I feel more and more in New York that I’m so cynical about messages that are being told, in terms of their efficacy. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, I had a pair of scissors in my suitcase. Between that and on my subway system the single thing you hear most, “Ladies and gentlemen, please report suspicious behavior.” This is about a psychological attempt to be suspicious, it’s due to our airport security and the message is “Keep those suckers out of here.”

The arts can be a deeper harbinger of peace and mass salvation rather than mass destruction, and right now, that is important.

Participant: Have you ever considered running for office?
Ben: I’m not sure I’m best suited for office. I think politics more and more is about raising money and that’s the part of my job today—development—that I enjoy the least. I won’t put my heart through it. Not in this moment. It’s not fair to my family. And I don’t know that this country is ready for an openly gay man in a committed openly gay partnership to take office.

Participant: In the arts community, whose responsibility is it to organize a discussion amongst ourselves on the assault against free speech and then how, as an arts community, can we add to the national discourse on this issue?
Ben: A movement almost never has more than three core values. Threes are ideal. Punchlines are always threes. Fairy tales are threes. We need to be very clear what our three core values are. We stand up for 25 different values right now.
 
We need to have a discussion about how we can be supportive of core values that might not be our own. Freedom of expression is absolutely critical in theater. For each cause, we must ask to what degree will we rally under a cause that we’re willing to stand behind?

 We need to attach ourselves to values that nonarts community folks can embrace. Remember to focus on how you frame an argument. Instead of focusing on gay marriage, perhaps there would have been greater progress if instead, we talked about fairness of gay couples. Fairness, justice, inclusion, we can stand behind as a community. Those are three great values. Dana Gioia said, “A great community deserves great art.” We need to be singing the same song with the same language. I’m looking at Bob Lynch and smiling because I don’t know how much I can share right now but as we speak, TCG and Americans for the Arts are solidifying an alliance that would allow TCG members to enjoy certain automatic benefits from Americans for the Arts. In regards to getting the national service organizations working together, it’s like the junior high dance, when no one will leave the wall, and I’m willing to get out on the dance floor.

Participant: I followed your three values but how do we then relate them to our work?
Ben: Transform the values. What you’ll ultimately reconnect to is what is most profound to you. You ground yourself in the deepest origins of the art form.

Participant: Coming from breakout sessions on emerging leaders and cultural diversity, in this value system, how do you get boards to be more inclusive?
Ben: Let’s acknowledge that in an arts community we try to create diversity backwards; we’re willing to give you a million dollars if you diversify but that is not how you truly make an organization diverse. Part of what I love the most about one of our grant programs is that we will only consider you for a grant if you can prove that you’ve already been doing diversity work and build on what you’ve done. We’re not going to bribe you.

True diversity requires every person to be willing to commit to walk into this room with an open mind. My background really comes from being raised in North Carolina. My hometown went from being the Furniture Capital of the world to the hometown of Fantasia from American Idol. Clearly values are shifting. The one thing that is true about growing up southern is that you grow up knowing what the rest of the country thinks of you. The media reinforces it. Bigoted characters are given southern accents, even if there is nothing in their character to show they are from the South. I remember my Granddaddy Brown from Appalachia. On his 92nd birthday, when I was 4 years old, we went down those back roads, and everyone shouted “Dr. Brown’s coming! Get out of the way!” We would go to the market for a side of beef, pound cake, and come home with $5 in cake. Reason I tell this story is there are things about the South. The South is a place of unbelievable generosity. When I return to the farmers market and ask, “did you know Dr. Brown. He died in 1957.” They answer, “Sure I did.” “I’m his grandson.” They’ll say “Come here right now.” Swear to God. They’ll say “Take this pound cake.” There is an unbelievable religious connection, sense of humor that gets you through the hard times. I read a William Faulkner book in 12th grade; for the first time, I heard the story of the South told by someone from the South. A child of color that goes to the theater time and time again and never sees someone like them on stage and will not relate to the stage. From what I know as a southerner, it’s not hard for me to understand this. I think we’ve got to find the road in to this discussion. We need to own up to who tells these stories of our history. Miss Saigon, Tony Kushner, Spike Lee, they did not get their voices heard through major entertainment. That’s the shift that we’ve got to make. My experience for the most part, is that when you give people an opportunity to look within themselves, they will do it.

TCG historically was set up with 23 theaters in the country. We would tell people how to operate, we began to deposit this vertical model leading up to the highest theaters being the institutionalized ones. It was like a mountain, vertical image of the theme. “We know that visual arts are not as important as those theater folks, which are not as important as the museums” Well, those days are gone! We are an ecosystem. When you endanger one art form, the whole thing is off. The gay and lesbian theater needs to work with the African American theater, etc.

After five or six years, I have never seen such generosity in a field because we’ve said “This can’t be any longer. We’ve got to change this.”

Abel: You had talked about trends in diversity and a conceptual framework of children, communities, and social congregations. Talk more about that.
Ben: A study was done where TV footage from NBC, ABC, and MTV were given to two groups of people—40 people under the age of 20 and 40 people over the age of 40. The division was based on the notion that for people under the age of 20, they had never been without technology one day in their life. For those over 40, they panicked at MTV but had no problems reporting back the headlines and news from the major networks. For those under 20, they could look at MTV and know what’s important. She concluded, we’re facing a new generation that had great hand-eye coordination, and so we’re going to have wonderful fighter pilots and laser surgeons. We think differently than people under 20. They don’t think linearly in the same way that we do.

Initially, there were a lot of people who heard this and panicked. On the one hand, we are better positioned than we may think. For example, I think kids are hungry for learning and narratives—Blues Clues is a dog that solves mysteries by taking acute details and creating a larger picture. Seven-year-old children are reading 900-page Harry Potter books and retelling the plot lines with fantastic accuracy. And you’re telling me children don’t want narratives? You want your kid to be fluent in Spanish, start them at age 2. We need to ask how we can offer them sustained digestive thinking. Because if we don’t, we’re in deep trouble.

What always comes home to me is that if you remember nothing else then remember this:
Morals is right and wrong.
Ethics is the difference between two rights.

Paradigms 1, 2, 3—George Bush has a big moral debate about capital punishment. Is capital punishment right or wrong? But, I worked in Washington during Clinton and Monicagate. How do I respond—out of honesty or loyalty—to strong virtues in conflict? If we are raising generations for unethical actions, we better be thoughtful about our role.

We don’t congregate like we used to. And the joke is that the air conditioner was the death of the southern neighborhood. Now people slam doors right away. But, today there is virtual rather than geographic communication. Three exceptions:

We come together online. Telephone introduced, telephone was the “death of the neighborhood” and it wasn’t. The Internet is not the death of the neighborhood either. If anything, it is an expansion of the term neighborhood.

We come together in activism. Pro-choice or pro-life grassroots political movement. We show up in record numbers.

Thank god for book clubs. People come together to talk about ideas. Talk about positives. A lot of theaters are thinking about how to respond to this great idea. Minneapolis is great example. At the Tony Awards party, artistic director Bob Rosen and his wife, choreographer Shawn McCongelungh, told me the greatest story about a new audience movement in the Twin Cities, spearheaded by artist Michael Sommers. As many of you may know, Michael is an exquisite visual and theater artist—his designs for Jeune Lune's The Juniper Tree a number of years ago still linger in my memory—beautiful, haunting, evocative work.
Michael is now producing "driveway shows." Anyone wishing to be a producer is responsible for putting up neighborhood posters advertising the event, providing refreshments, and offering the driveway where the show will be performed. Michael then arrives, loads in, and offers a theatrical performance—one that not only is rapturously greeted, but one that has brought the neighborhood together—often letting neighbors really meet each other for the first time, underscores the connection between the arts and socializing and reminds folks of how great the arts can be. If Michael were in New Jersey, I'd be a neighborhood producer in a heartbeat!
Participant: How do we improve our theater community? How do we begin the dialogue?
Ben: I’m a cheap date. I’ll go anywhere. One way to begin a dialogue is to do what they did in Cleveland by convening meetings in schools, post offices, etc., and ask three questions:

1. Do you go to the arts?
2. What are the things that concern you most?
3. Can you imagine ways in which the arts can address your needs most?

The organizer captured the names of everyone that answered those questions and listed them as consultants on the Cleveland Arts Planning Committee.

Beyond that, in terms of best professional practices and technical assistance, it may be that your town is ready to take off but needs to increase capacity. In a moment of change, you need to use all your resources. During times where change is needed, I think of an exercise a facilitator once ran for us while I was still with Target:

Pair up with someone, look deeply at each other for a minute. Turn your back, change five things about your body, turn back, turn around, and say “find five thing.” Ok now change 10 more. Take off shoes, jackets, don’t strip, etc., turn around and change 20 more. Everyone inevitabely revolts. Ok, come and sit down. Needing to make quick changes, this is what it’s like to live in this world. Five lessons learned from this exercise:

1. Change is back and forth. It is constant and certainly not slow anymore.
2. When they first asked us to look at each other, people got anxious. Time is permeable. Anxiety is a by product of change. You have to think about how you manage anxiety, not how to avoid it.
3. People went to five things they could hide most, not that would be easiest for a partner to spot.
4. The reason why you revolted at 20, at a moment of change, you wanted to hold on to what you control and own personally. No one ever looked between partners and what we own in an attempt to share resources or make the burden easier.
5. You are far more comfortable making changes at the end of the exercise, but you’ll revert back to old ways if put in competitive, uncooperative moment.

Participant: Ben is a celebrity in our town. My question comes out of the government sector. Our arts commission is now in economic development with the intention to exploit artists to bring capital into my community.
Ben: They said that advocacy is speaking to where your audience is listening. When we talk about values, we put our eggs in three baskets—economic development (Richard Florida); education benefits (education test scores compendium, champions for change that are a fantastic and powerful tool); and looking forward to the future. The sense that education is out of joint with the times, as it were, continues to grow. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times quotes Bill Gates as saying, "American high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and underfunded…. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools—even when they are working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today….Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year." We have to invert the hierarchy. We need to cultivate creativity and this is an area in which we can clearly position ourselves as part of the solution, not part of the need. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink is another book you need to read. He argues that the keys to success in the new and changing economy are in developing and cultivating six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Third piece for us is improving social relations —it’s about targeting. That alone feels inorganic. We did not do this to raise test scores. We don’t go to the theater to leverage five additional dollars in the economy. The RAND study is trying to chart what are the intrinsic values so that we may better advocate for them.

What I’m finding is that when I talked to boards of directors, if I start with the intrinsic values, they are hungry for the extrinsic, at the same time, if I speak to CEOs who I don’t assume are arts people, I start with economic stuff, and you end up with music, theater, and architecture. Target and Walmart, they know the arts in a different way. When I went to speak to a group once, I asked them to think about the store and take away all the art, all the design, all the ads, one by one until all you are left with is really just toilet paper. The keynote after me said “I’m not going to read my remarks. I hope at some point in your life, your life was changed when some lights came up on the stage. I’m going to tell you about the Seattle Repertory Theater, the night I saw Hamlet, and how my life was changed.” If you start with touchy feely, you will not get anywhere. You’ve got to get there introducing them to extrinsic.

Participant: There was a piece on NPR about how an M.F.A.  is becoming the new M.B.A.
Ben: Emotional intelligence—the ability to inspire others and the ability to listen are in high demand right now. It is easier to teach a person how to read a pie chart than it is to have that same person run a lunch. You look at the Fortune 500. The most popular majors of Fortune 500 CEOs are history, art, and English. These are the people who need to look at broad systems. In the nation, 400,000 M.F.A.s are currently graduating from our training program today. How we think we can absorb that number is ludicrous. If we’ve done our work right, many of these graduates will go into many, varied industries and sectors.

Abel: Since we’ve been speaking of moments of transition, what’s next for Ben Cameron?
Ben: I don’t know. One of the things: The longer you’re in philanthropy, the less people will tell you what is true. You should always treat yourself as a guest at the table. It would be a mistake to work in my company for more than a decade. I hope there are things that I’ll accomplish during my tenure that will outlive me. If I don’t make a change very soon, I don’t know that I will be able to continue doing my jobs as well, with the same sense of urgency. I’m in my eighth year, and the succession committee has to be thoughtful about that moment. What’s next? I don’t know.

 

Innovator Series with Louis Black
June 13, 2005
3:15–4:15 p.m.

Louis Black moved to Austin, TX, in 1976 to attend graduate school and never left. Shortly after receiving his M.F.A. from the University of Texas in 1981, he co-founded The Austin Chronicle, of which he is currently the editor and co-owner. In 1987, he co-founded South by Southwest (SXSW), a two-day regional music festival that has grown into an internationally renowned, 10-day event concentrating on music, film, and new media. Mr. Black has been involved in the Austin film scene for over 20 years as a founding board member of the Austin Film Society and co-founder of the Texas Film Hall of Fame. He is an executive producer of SXSW Presents and Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt.

Abel: You were in Teaneck. Did you do film growing up? How did you get interested in film?
Louis: I only realized five years ago that I had a great childhood; growing up was hard and I was dyslexic. The first weekend I went into New York City and saw Charlie Chaplin. When I was 13 or 14, I met Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. We would go into the city, my friend and I, to see three or four movies a week and we would go in to see museum exhibits and then hit movies. A neighbor had a huge animation collection.

Abel: When did you begin to study film?
Louis: I went to school at Boston University to study film but didn’t do well enough so I went to school in Vermont.

Abel: Why did you go to graduate school in Texas?
Louis: I had friends in Austin and I fell in love with it. I went back to Boston because of a relationship. We came down together and I got into the English program. I hated graduate school because it was book after book after book. I met a professor who was a world-renowned Buster Keaton specialized. I transferred to the film program, which I originally thought was not legitimate, and it was the first time I was a star student. I became an expert in blaxspoitation films. I was writing, teaching, and making some films that were doing ok.

Abel: How did you get involved in journalism?
Louis: I was in a Ph.D. program and my friends told me they were starting a paper and I decided to join and there were six of us originally and by the end of the first year there were only two of us. We spent the next five difficult years figuring out how to run the paper.

Abel: What did you want the paper to be?
Louis: We started the paper because we thought Austin needed a paper that took an in-depth look at the power of culture. I don’t believe in separating politics and culture. So we started this paper to fill the void. The first year was traumatic.

Abel: What was your role in the paper? Were you an editor or reporter?
Louis: Nick Barbaro and I were partners. I did a lot of marketing and branding. I had a sense of branding before there was a sense of branding; I did press releases, marketing, conceptualizing. Nick was really crazy and he made us talk for three to six hours two to three times a week since we were starting a paper and trying to figure out what it was. We used to get into fights but it turns out we really compliment each other. I became editor because Nick could not say no to writers and I have been editor ever since.

Abel: What were you covering?
Louis: We reviewed local albums. In the early days we weren’t interested in being a general interest entertainment publication. We were really interested in local music and politics. It was mutually beneficial, and as that scene grew, and as we helped it grow, we grew as well. We have always walked the fine line between promotion and criticism.

Abel: What impact did the paper have on the city?
Louis: It raised the bar for cultural product. I think the theater is better and film is better. The music scene is international and I believe South by Southwest helped that. I will talk to interesting directors, young photographers; we provide extra support for local artists.

Abel: Did you do your own film?
Louis: No, I didn’t have time. We were biweekly for seven years and then we went weekly. The first 10 or 11 years were a struggle and were often more ugly than not. For one of our covers, we did a picture of Richard O’Brien from Shock n’ Treatment and from Riffraff that ended up because of exposure, being total purple with whites in his eyes. The writing was good and the covers were good. The scene was much smaller then but from the beginning the emphasis was always on good writing.

Abel: How did you start the festival?
Louis: We decided to host a regional festival to work around our awards. We didn’t think many people would show up, but we had over 700 people show up for our first festival. There was a softball game and a barbecue and a number of bands. By the third year, it was enormous and international. It was packed up the wazoo. In 1994, we added film to the festival. Richard Linklater’s prominence was just beginning; Mike Judge was there. Paul Stekler was brought in from the university and he brought in other documentary makers and got the university behind it.

We were brought in as a boutique press. And then because of the prominence of the city, the film became better. We showcased SpellBound and the political documentaries took off and we could fill the Paramount for these works. A Chavez documentary brought in more money that skewed our income for years because it did so well.

Abel: What is the program like for the festivals?
Louis: Film festival kicks off first. Saturday the interactive conference begins. Sunday to Tuesday is the interactive festival. Wednesday the music festival attracts 12,000 to 13,000 individuals. There are some similar events. This year we had 1,350 bands. Franz Ferdinand, The Thrill, The Killers all broke out at South by Southwest. We had bands from around the world. Two stories from sometime in the 80s: the Monday after the event one year, a band wanted us to help them defect. A few years ago a band come from Uzbekistan and played in the lobby, dismayed since they were not guaranteed to play. The festival started very small and now every hotel is out of rooms and sold out.

Abel: Is the reception from the political and social communities supportive?
Louis: Austin loves to walk the walk but never talks the talk. They just passed a complete smoking ban and when you support live music there is a disconnect. The city never helped us during the first four years because they thought we were punk asses. For the past three of four years, they have been much better.

Abel: Are you for profit?
Louis: We are for profit and we get much sponsorship and it’s not from the city. We did everything to get ourselves through and be proud of our product. If we can’t do the paper we want to, we’ll just walk away from it. The paper is not that profitable but it is outrageously successful. Our market penetration, our revenue, and our impact reach much further than the Los Angeles weekly, for example. We are considered the slightly retarded duo that succeeds despite themselves. Nick was a math savant who would be considered as dirty and unintelligent but by the end of meetings, with bankers and investors, they would consider him a genius. Nick succeeds beyond odds at all times and knows so much about printing presses.

Abel: What has the impact been on bringing in these artists to the city and the creativity within this community?
Louis: What is it now versus what it used to be? It used to be cheap. You could eat for nothing, hear music for nothing, and not sit in traffic. There has been huge change. The festival has brought a lot of the world to Austin. It presented a lot of Austin bands to this audience. They were ambassadors for us—the film groups, the artists, writers, and theaters were all taking chances. When you hook up the high tech economy and the boom in technology with the creative class, the product is excellent. Robert Rodriguez is a leader in technology, a leader in film, and a leader in film technology. It is impossible to get around now but the level of cultural creativity is much higher than it has ever been.
 
Abel: What about the mainstream coverage?
Louis: The daily paper tries to make it their festival. We are the big story now and we get lots and lots of media coverage.

Abel: What have been some of the highlights of the culture in Austin?
Louis: Some remarkable stuff happens here. Rick Linklater decided to start screening great movies. Two of these movies did extremely well and they began to do films more regularly. And he asked us to serve on the board of directors for the Austin Film Society. For the first years it was very sporadic and he was always the driving force. In 1989, Rick asked me if I would see a movie he was making, Slacker. I had one line, “Stop Following Me.” Months later Rick gave me a copy of this video. I knew it had long sections and I fastforwarded it and I realized that this film was about something. Slacker launched 1,000 filmmakers. They made a still shot of the photo of me. They went on to make Dazed and Confused and called me in the 1990s and told me to start fundraising money for media projects. We would do movie screenings with high prices to give away since then close to $70,000 a year for new media works and equipment. We wanted a place were media creation is media understanding. We weren’t looking for the next Rodriguez. Filmmakers have gone on to see success from our funding, but that is not our main goal. We began getting together to look at the old hangers at the old airport to make them a home for filmmaking and any money we made would go back to improving the space. It’s just been one of those things that worked. We have programs from the high school, east side productions.

Participant: We have started a digital festival in Kansas City and was wondering if there have been similar festivals in other cities or would this give us a good distinction from other festivals?
Louis: The difference between digital filmmaking and filmmaking will be almost scientific. Digital filmmaking is the future. The buzzword will be digital conversion. I don’t think a digital film festival is the first. I think calling it that will give it some momentum. We are a leader of digital filmmaking because of Robert Rodriguez; they use no set. He is the one leading the charge. He knows what he wants the equipment to do. There is a lot of high tech stuff in Austin and there is more and more production.

Abel: What has the impact been on the community?
Louis: There used to be no connection between the community and the university. Many wanted the university to become connected to the community. Robert Rodriguez never finished his degree and he entered a film competition. At a competition, Robert screened one of his films and by the end, everyone’s jaw was hanging down and Robert won and he went back to the film program and they let him in. That summer he went into one of the pharmaceutical companies. He went in and made a list of what he had available and wrote the script based on what he had. And he went and shot El Mariachi and when they finished it sold for $1 million. Rick has a social mission and he gets celebrities to do things with the community because he believes that culture is such a necessary part of the community. Robert and his wife wouldn’t do much for the community and so when Rick asks them to do stuff they do it.

Abel: Do you teach?
Louis: I am working on my book.

Abel: Any new projects?
Louis: Austin has been great. Be Here to Love Me was in Toronto and it will open in a few theaters and hopefully it will do well and go to DVD. Jonathan Demme, who made Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs, and I are working on an album. I am working on a number of books.

Abel: You mentioned several time the impact of the tech industry. Is there support from that community?
Louis: There is some support and they tend to get involved in one nonprofit. It is still a six-day-a-week, 15-hour-a-day job. There is an effort to reintegrate the community but right now it is not as strong.

Participant: You have so many original, large-scale ideas. Will you tell us how they come to fruition?
Louis: In the early days, you just do it and that caused a lot of pain. One never raised money in advance. Now we will, for example, line up people first. Who do we want on board and who will do a good job? Then we think that if we both like something and then we think its good and then we would go to the Chronicle staff. If the idea is really good, I think through ideas real quickly and if it sounds like a good idea, I get involved, even if I don’t want to. If we don’t have the money, I might as well not do it. We were working on a documentary of the festival and shot the first six episodes for $6,000 and then we got a grant for $50,000 so we did 12 more.

We wanted an annual event that raised money. And so we flirted with the idea of a gallery. And that’s where the idea of the Texas Film Hall of Fame started. It is easy to market celebrities. In recent years, the annual Texas Hall of Fame gala has raised $300,000 to $400,000 for Austin Film Society's educational and artistic programs. in its final years.

Ed Bailey, vice president of brand development for Austin City Limits: You cannot capture what Louis Black influences in one conversation. When you talk about starting something that stimulates other things. Louis Black and his vision. Louis Black is Spartacus. Louis Black interviewed me to get involved and do my business. He inspired me that I could do my work here and that was a personal thing to inspire me. Norah Jones, Franz Ferdinand, they are way in front of Austin City Limits. This leads me to my question. People want to know how to get how we, in Austin, got here. How do we get going in Tampa and Kansas City?
Louis: One, Ed is very generous. Two, the city is awesome. After South by Southwest many other cities tried to do this across the country. Austin was unique in its ability to put on the event. We started the event and we had more cult bands than almost everywhere else. They needed the event almost as much as we needed them. None of them were big stars. We had club-sized bands with national and international attraction. What we do is Austin times 20. When we first got to the city, we would go to film, hear music, and then write until we passed out. This has always been Austin. South by Southwest runs the city but it also brings a huge audience. Having someone like a Rick and Robert Rodriguez is important. We began the monthly documentary club. Someone asked why we don’t do a high school film festival so we set it up and now there is one. It’s a culture and you don’t try to make it somewhere else. We were very, very lucky that most people in Austin wanted to do creative things.

Participant: Do you have any ideas or relationships in mind that you want to see happened with local artists or regional/state organizations? Is there any direction you would like to see?
Louis: First and foremost, my son Eli is 14 years old. I would like to see Y-chromosome control. So much of what we do is by no means just me. The creative force was not me but I am always looking for a new good idea. We want to smash the next generation. There is a moment where we are all looking for something to excite us. If there is something that I like in a new filmmaker, I pass them along. You can be talented and love your field but not doing something interesting. If you are doing something amazing, people will see. When I see stuff that should be happening, I try to make it happen. Now I can sit down, talk rationally, and listen. It’s so exciting for people to come to you with an idea. So much of the best stuff comes out of activity. So many people come together to nurture the next generation of musicians and filmmakers. Rick is not a figurehead. He is out there mentoring. This is a community that cares. The pot that makes the water boil is knowing one another and getting as much stuff as possible going. I have had such an incredible time. I love work. I can’t wait to get out of bed and go to work. There used to be a critical writing where they would say how much it sucked and then how great of a time they had. Now we have less unsung bands than we used to and then they would be the hot band and the hot club. When you stood on the streets they would run to get to the next band, or people would argue about what they saw. You do it because it is fun.

Abel: Are there are things you would still like to see?
Louis: I want to write. I want to remain exec-producing film. I want to relish the success. I always want to do more of that here and there. I want to do more stuff with the colleges. I would like to have an equipment clearinghouse. Figuring out how you monitor it and who qualifies for it does take effort.

Abel: What about the Chronicle?
Louis: It mostly runs itself. Sometimes I suggest a story. They have enormous ownership of it. They are proud of what they do. Nick and I get paid more than everyone else. I work there one day a week and it doesn’t impact the newspaper too much. I love both of my jobs but South by Southwest is my favorite time of year. Right now I am writing these books. I’ve never produced a CD before.

Abel: Since you have worked in both commercial and nonprofit fields, what do you think will be the issues that artists and audiences will have to face whether or not they are in commercial or nonprofit?
Louis: Media is changing so rapidly and as rapidly as it’s changing, it’s not changing. I think paper will be around for a long time to come, but not forever. How to transition is the question. People who work for me who are in their 20s and 30s blog, are in bands, make movies, etc., because tech has changed. Rodriguez has four kids with one on the way and he’s going to get to the point where he can do it either with the family or not at all. With levels of tech you can shoot digitally, see what you’ve shot and edit the same day. We’ll see the lines fall down. With the current administration so far right, young people are thinking about technology but that work is a lifeboat. I think that’s the way a lot people think about media and communication. These kids take in a lot of information and they process it so quickly and act on it in away they never could beforehand. When I was a film student, when we found a director, we would watch every movie that the director made and today if they like a film they watch it over and over again. We couldn’t do that; movies did not stay around in our area, if they made it there at all. I think they think about it differently than we do. I think people are so used to thinking about media as the past. But this generation will be thinking of things in new ways.

Participant: What do you think are keys to Austin’s continued success?
Louis: Austin is a city with a lot of people who share interests.

• Large community in Austin that values culture and takes it seriously.
• People hang out beyond their immediate cultural community. You go to parties looking to meet new people.
• There are no boundaries. Not even economic.

Participant: The power of good ideas is contagious. In our community, the music folk decided they needed a presence at South by Southwest. They have raised enough money to do a Tampa day, which brings four or five bands to South by Southwest.

Louis: There is so much of that activity now. Being a musician is about perfection. When they come to South by Southwest, they see so many bands. They get to really think about what they do and the creation of art. You see so many bands and musicians and more people add to that energy.

Participant: It has brought our community closer together.
Louis: Bringing the community is what it is about. We are not so small that we can’t do things; we are not so big people are segregated.

Participant: What are your thoughts on the current administration’s view towards free speech?
Louis: I believe really deeply in democracy. I am pessimistic and I haven’t been pessimistic since I was 17 or 18 years old during Vietnam. I think they are crazy and they have no policy to implement so they beat up on the press. By killing it, they have done nothing to help the deficit. I am saying things now that used to make me hate people. Late-term abortion makes no sense. What I am saying is that late-term abortion really only exists medically. Our governor signed two bills at a fundamental church against gay marriage and late-term abortion. I am terribly pessimistic about PBS and public art. The Paramount Theater may be in trouble. I love that theater and if that theater is in trouble we will help it out. The problem is so much wonderful stuff is being butchered; we will have to start over.

Abel: Thank you.