I gotta admit, this is one cool thing.

Next Rockstar Show: Tuesday, November 25th: 7pm, BLB

How about some video?

Or maybe just the article from the Camel website [after the jump]

Okay, the copy isn’t right here, but here is a user name and password for this site to see it without signing up:

user id: 818740550
password: jamesb18

Thanks to everyone for being friends, family, and fans.

After the jump, the piece that I’m doing for Rockstars tonight.  Since this is what will most likely become the jumping off point for Myth Me, I thought I’d post it as today’s blog.

I had a temp job about a year ago for this man I’ll call Big Boy—a real estate developer who worked out of this fancy office in Wayzata.  He also happened to be a major player in Mac Hammond’s Living Word church: an evangelical non-denominational sect that capitalizes upon what I like to call the “ministry of the prosperity”.  They feel they are God’s chosen people because he has blessed them with material wealth.  I guess they pretty much ignore that whole “it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven” teaching. 

Big Boy often got some interesting mail, which I’d look through and give to him, then he’d promptly throw away.  One day something came across my desk that was so amazingly awesome that I had to take it.  It was a newsletter from The Kingdom Oil Christian Foundation.  Their logo is an oil tower with a cross on top, and the main article that month was “Are You Living Like a Pipe or a Bucket?”  And I think I need to share it with you.

A bucket holds what it receives.  A pipe transfers what it receives.  So it is with worldly wealth.  We hold it believing we “own” it, or we transfer it believing the Lord owns it and has entrusted it to us for His purposes.  The difference is in what we believe, and how that drives our behavior. 

When we keep what we have in our own bucket, that bucket gets dumped when we “kick the bucket”.  We take none of it with us, and we get no credit in eternity  for what we have regarded as our own.  When we give, we “pay it forward.”  What flows through us is credited for eternity.  God measures throughput. 

Token giving is like using a ladle out of a bucket.  It might be a big ladle, but the bucket is much bigger.  The key to this critical issue for God’s Kingdom is the mental shift from being a bucket to a pipe.  When we prioritize wealth and become pipes instead of buckets, God promotes our existence to a place where what delights us is what delights Him.  That maximizes our ride on planet earth. 

Money should be a big deal to us.  It sure is to God.  It is consistently referenced throughout the Bible.  While the concepts noted above are often naturally offensive to those who have accumulated wealth, the real purpose here is to bring great joy and fulfillment.  Pipes are much happier and fulfilled than buckets.  If you have not already done so, choose to be a pipe.  We stand ready to assist you.

Yeah, I’m sure they stand ready to assist.  As long as that wealth is flowing right into the Kingdom Oil Christian Foundation.  There was an article in the Star Tribune the other day about how the Living Word church had to sell their private corporate jet because they were falling short of their weekly offertory budget—by 40 to seventy thousand dollars.  I admit, I laughed really, really hard.

I was raised Baptist, in a church which has since dropped “Baptist” from its name because they wanted to attract more members.   I was wary of the people at that church—it seemed like the kids my age all accepted faith because that’s what their parents told them to do, they didn’t really understand what it meant.  I was never baptized in that church, mainly because I can’t stand putting my head under water and when you’re Baptist, it’s a full-body dunking by the pastor.  I was in eighth grade when I realized it wasn’t working for me anymore.  We had just switched to one of the mega-churches in town, and my parents sent me on an overnight retreat with the youth group.  This was during the 1992 presidential campaign, and some of the kids on the bus were bad-mouthing Bill Clinton.  I turned to them and said, “you know, I’m friends with his daughter, and I know him.  Could you, like, not talk bad about him around me?”  They all stared, and then one of the youth group leaders, not another student, but a figure of authority, turned to me and said, “You’re friends with Chelsea Clinton.  How can you be friends with someone whose dad is a baby-killer?”

And I was done.  It’s one thing to try to live your own life by the inferred moral code that we feel is set up by the Bible, but it’s another thing entirely for a leader of the church to try to dictate who you are friends with—apparently “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love they neighbor as thyself” only applies to people not connected to liberal politics.  

For the next few years, I floundered in some dark times.  Health, high school, the silly pains of adolescence.  I missed having faith in my life.  I knew that I, on some level, was a believer.  But coming out and learning more about science seemed to relegate faith to the back of my mind.  It seemed naive, like something that my brain should know better than to believe in some unseen God looking down on us. 

And then I went to France.  I was on a literature seminar through Concordia College, the Lutheran College I had ended up at my freshman year because it was the only school I got in to, since I’d been too proud to put on my applications that my grades had turned abysmal because I’d gotten sick.  I was bored out of my mind there, surrounded by students who were all copies of those kids from my youth group, holding strong convictions and judgments but they really didn’t know why.  I had written a paper on the lack of spirituality and spiritual journeying in American Culture, and my professor had told me to go on this seminar because she thought I would “get something out of” this nightly ritual at Mont-St-Michel, a medieval abbey on an island off the Northern coast of France. 

We bought our tickets and entered into a pitch black corridor that opened into a large room, the only light directed onto a large statue of St. Michael squashing the devil.  A sentinel for his stronghold, we had to walk right under his gaze, and a distinct feeling came over me that only those worthy or free of sin would make it through.  Another door led out to the Abbey wall, overlooking the flooded mudflats, eerily bathed in the fading sunset.  A lone bird circled the Abbey spire.  Sounds and music mingled from different rooms.  A green light flickered in the distance, sending my mind back to Jay Gatsby, his light at the end of Daisy’s dock, a literary symbol of hope coming to life in front of me.  A man sat quietly, holding a bible, chanting prayers in French.

I moved on, back inside, through the rooms with illuminated pillars of light, mideval tapestries projected on the ground, Gregorian chant and various other types of religious hymns piped in through unseen speakers.  I watched my friends standing in the light, closely admiring the beauty.  But I wouldn’t—no, I couldn’t—move out of the shadows.  In the next room was a single image, an illuminated manuscript rendering of Jesus on the cross.  I hugged the stone wall until I found a bench, wanting everyone else to keep going, leave me alone, until I could wrap my brain around why these pictures were fucking with me so much.

On and on, through the rest of the Abbey, I hugged those cold stones until I came to the last room, the kitchen.  On a large wooden table sat two jugs of wine and a loaf of bread bathed in bright, white, cleansing light that even I couldn’t avoid.

And suddenly, I yearned to have both the wine and the bread. 

Afterwards, I sat there on the Abbey wall, trying to figure out how it was that I had ended up there.  It couldn’t have just been by chance.  I started to think back through my life and tried to pinpoint the moment that had brought me there.  And it was in the winter of 1967, twelve years before I was born.  A college freshman went to the University of Iowa to major in Pharmacy, and realized that science really wasn’t her bag.  That college freshman was my mother.  She switched her major to German, which led to her living and working in Germany and developing a borderline unhealthy obsession with all things German.  At age seven, I was sent to Concordia Language Villages to learn German, and spent the next seventeen summers there, nine as a camper, eight on staff.  If I hadn’t gone to Concordia Language Villages, I never would have applied to Concordia College.  If I hadn’t gone to Concordia, I never would have ended up in France.  It felt like, even though this was all human free will, there was something guiding me.

But there was one troubling spot.  If I hadn’t gotten sick, I would have done well and who knows where I would have gone to college.  I ruminated on that, and realized that maybe getting sick was a course correction, if you will.  A force that had nothing to do with free will or choices that I could make, that was helping point me on the correct path.  And that force, I decided, must be God.  Taking care of his flock.  Sure, there’s misery and hardship, but human life is magic, a blessing.  I thought about the fact that none of my direct ancestors died before bearing children.  Wars, plagues, whatever.  All of them had kids.  If they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.  Life truly is a lottery where only the winning numbers are showing.  And that couldn’t be some happy accident.

Nine months later I started Catechism, and while living in Dublin was baptized.  In the Catholic church.  Yes, I am a gay mensa-member who willingly converted to Catholicism. 

I don’t go to the Baptist church often any more.  I think the last two times I’ve been there have been for funerals.  The first was my aunt’s a few years ago.  One of the current ministers stood up there and said “I spent a lot of time with Janet while she was in the hospital.”  Which I’d like to believe, but if she had, she would have known my aunt’s name was Janine.  And then the pastor who’d led the church while my mom and her sisters had been kids got up to say a few things.  During his talk he said “My favorite memory of Janine was when she was a child at bible camp.  I remember watching her rededicate her life to Christ, throwing faggots in the fire.”

I sat there in the front pew, my mouth agape, and said to myself, “huh.  This is what happens when you belong to a church where there is no ritual in your services.”

The second funeral at the Baptist church was for my grandpa.  But to make sure they got his name right and didn’t talk about throwing faggots in the fire, I took matters into my own hands and asked if I could deliver the eulogy.  I sat in front of my computer, trying to figure out how to honor my grandpa’s life.  And I thought about all the stories and goodness and beliefs that he’d passed on to me. 

Maybe the Kingdom Oil Christian Foundation has it right.  Maybe we are supposed to be pipes.  But not for wealth.  For good.  Because, to me, that’s what being religious and a Christian is all about.  Loving our neighbors as ourselves.  Doing unto others what we want done to us. 

So I will live my life for good.  And I will accept hardships as course corrections.  And I will keep the faith.  Against all intellectual arguments, I will believe.

Just a general PSA that the next Rockstar Storytellers show is tomorrow night, 10 pm at Bryant Lake Bowl.  We’re taking on religion tomorrow night.  Curt Lund, Courtney McLean, Rik Reppe, Amy Salloway, and myself are performing, and phillip andrew bennett low is hosting.

And I hope to answer the question for you before the end of the night: Are you a pipe or a bucket?!

In case you needed any more incentive, City Pages gave us a pitch yet again.  Yee haw!

I just uploaded new pictures to the Rockstar Facebook Group.  Check ‘em out!

Well, that was just cool.  I’m proud to say that six of the ten Rockstars recorded stories tonight for “In The Loop: Story Slam”.  The show will air on MPR on March 2nd, but we recorded a couple hours and they cut down to an hour, so there’s no guarantee that I will make it on.  However, if I do, click below to read the text of the story I did tonight.

When I was young, I had a picture book detailing the story of Christopher Columbus.  How he discovered the US, all the good he brought to the natives, the rest of the Western Fiction we choose to teach our children.  The one image that I still remember was at the beginning of the book, when a young Chris held up an orange and said “this is what the world is like.  It isn’t flat”.  Not only was he right, of course, but I realized how something round was a symbol of courage.  If the world, or life, is flat, you can not go to the flip side because you’ll fall off.  But if it is round, you have the ability to explore all the things you can’t see, in an infinite number of combinations.  There’s no end, no beginning, nothing to fall off of.

I thought about that story as I sped across Greece on a train from Athens to Nafplion.  How could anyone have ever looked outside their window and thought this world was flat?  If our ancestors had come from the plains of the Dakotas, sure, it would be a logical assumption.  But not in a region where mountains interspersed with green valleys and the water beat against the rocky shoreline.

I had gotten to Greece by accident, as a result of a drunken night with two friends in Dublin.  Our welcoming committee in Athens was a gaggle of young men who chased us down the street wielding pink plastic squeaky clubs.  We took refuge in a nearby taverna, where the owner explained in very broken English it was “today, is the day, before the day, in which we eat no meat.”  I was confused for a minute, forgetting that the Greek Orthodox church ran a week later to the Irish Catholic calendar, because I was pretty sure Fat Tuesday had been the week before, when the barkeep had come around at midnight, snatched a half-full pint from my hand, and told me, “It’s Ash Wednesday.  Yeh can’t drink ’till yeh been smudged”.

Athens was a mystery.  It was the first time I had been anywhere where I couldn’t even read the letters on a sign, let alone guess at its meaning.  Men rode their motorcycles on the streets to hit on us.  We walked by a crowd one night, throwing eggs at the American flag.  And yet betwixt the modern chaos rose the Acropolis, the Parthenon looming over the city, a reminder of the storied past of this nation.

I had heard about a town called Nafplion, Greece’s answer to Venice, except instead of canals, there were staircases.  The entire village was built into the cliffside on the Peloponese peninsula, and I needed to check this out.  I booked a room at a place called “Dimitri’s Bungalows”–really, how could I resist that name?  Dimitri gave me directions from the train station: go to the top of stairway four.

The station was the end of the tracks with a construction barrell in front of it.  I walked towards the hills, found the staircase, and began to climb.  Someone should have warned me that this was probably not the best destination for a smoker.  Red-faced and breathing hard, I knocked at Dimitri’s door who took one look at me and offered me a smoke.  I liked this guy already.

I spent the afternoon sitting on the rooftop deck, switching between looking at the ocean on one side of the cliffs, and the valley on the other.  Ruins of a castle was the only thing higher than I was.  I sat and wrote in my journal, wondering if I had made the right choice in coming here.  It was beautiful, yes, but I was alone.   In a place I didn’t speak the language.  Couldn’t read the words.  A 20 year old woman in a country where men tended to be quite forward with their actions.  Shouldn’t I be back in Dublin studying?  Or at least celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a Guinness?  I was hoping for some kind of signal, reward, payback from the universe that I was in the right place at that moment.

As the sun began to set, Dimitri joined me on the roof and brought with him two Cuban Cigars.  We chatted, and he asked me to take some pictures of his hotel the next day, and in return he’d discount my room.  I agreed, and we shook on the deal while the first evening stars began to peak out over the Aegean Sea.

I walked down staircase four to a place Dimitri recommended for dinner–an Italian restaurant, run by Italians.  Their menu was in Greek, even though they didn’t speak it either.  I pointed at something on the menu that looked like a short word, hoping it would be something recognizable.  The waiter brought my spaghetti and glass of chianti–lucky guess–out a while later, and I think bemusedly watched this punk foreigner diligently writing while twisting the spaghetti strands around the fork.  When my plate was clear and glass drained I signaled that I was done, and went back to my writing.  I heard a plate slip onto the table and looked up expecting to see my bill, but on the plate was a orange.

A symbol of courage.  Beckoning me to explore in infinite possibilities in an infinite number of combinations.  And that comfort, that meatloaf from the universe, was exactly the reward I needed that night.

Actually, through Monday at 9pm:

1, 9, 36, 42, 45, 70, 106, 138

I will not say why.  Don’t want to jinx anything.

But the tags probably give it away.

BLB.  10pm.  It’ll be good.

I have big ideas a lot of times.  Most of the projects I never start.  However, once in a while I actually start something, and few and far between on those projects, people take notice. 

I gotta say, it looks like the Rockstar Storytellers are getting noticed. 

Evidence?  Why, we just got ourselves A-Listed in City Pages for this Friday’s show.  Here’s the text:

Let’s face it—storytelling may be the primordial art form, born at the dawn of language. However, modern performance telling, with its small but dedicated, heavily middle-aged audience, has just never managed the same level of cool as rock ‘n’ roll. But this year, a group of 10 younger local performance artists banded together to take back some of the cultural cachet storytelling deserves. Optimistically calling themselves Rockstar Storytellers, they come to the stage from a multiplicity of backgrounds, from mime to radio monologue to traditional theater to slam poetry to competitive speech. Laden with Fringe Festival credentials, the cast promises to not just twiddle your emotional dial, but to take a monkey wrench to your presuppositions about what storytelling should be. Highlights include the evening’s host, Allison Broeren, a standup comedian and co-Slam Master of the Minneapolis Poetry Slam, and philip low, a highly energetic and physical teller who’s been known to take the stage wearing nothing but boxer shorts to illustrate the transformation of a character. — Ward Rubrecht

And that?  Is pretty dang cool.

We had our first Rockstar Storytellers show last night, which I think was quite a success.  Not quite the audience numbers we were hoping for, but we gotta start somewhere, right?

People often ask me why I work off a script.  It’s partly because it’s my trademark now, partly because my memory’s really not that great, and partly because if I don’t, I am not to be held liable for what comes out of my mouth.

Last night I hosted the show, so wasn’t working off anything.  I started off the show reading the definition of the word “betrayal” and this was one of the first things that came out of my mouth:

“Let’s see, definition of Betrayal: ‘to deliver or expose to an enemy by treachery or disloyalty’.  I guess that’d be like Benedict Arnold, Brutus, or Judas Iscariot.  I think it’s kinda funny that the biggest betrayal in Christianity is one guy kissing another guy.  Maybe that’s why they have such a problem with homosexuality.  Or, on the other hand, if Judas hadn’t kissed Jesus, then there wouldn’t have been a crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.  Which means, you know, there wouldn’t have been Christianity.  So maybe they should like gays!”

I swear to God I’m Catholic.