Recognito Ergo Sum

In the last week or so I’ve had two back-to-back disappointments regarding my Kid Prompts project. There was a brief flurry of excitement this summer when I thought it might be developed into a television program, sort of a Bob-Ross-Meets-StoryPirates-Meets-Recess-Therapy concept. Unfortunately, it has now been turned down twice by separate children’s television entities, both times for the same reason. Apparently the research suggests children don’t respond to “adult-centric” television - that is, me being the host and face of a show wouldn’t be compelling to child audiences.

While I have to respect that they have done extensive market research, it makes me incredibly sad to think that the days of Luis and Maria, LeVar Burton, Mr. Rogers, the cast of Square One and The Electric Company are gone and apparently no longer considered valuable. As one friend put it, so we just don’t care about role models any more?

But frustrating as they may be, disappointments are valuable educational tools, offering us the chance to evaluate both the content and intent of our aspirations. In regards to content, I am taking some time to look at what it is I’m making - am I not, actually, making a children’s television show? Am I (similarly to Recess Therapy) instead making a show for adults, featuring children? If so, as I continue to refine the pitch or decide if I will just make this myself (as I did with the project which eventually became Famous Cast Words) I have work ahead of me to figure out what it is exactly I’m making.

The question of INtent, however, I find more challenging. This weekend, in between staring at birds and chipmunks with my dad in Massachusetts, contemplating ways to spend more time in nature and less time in NYC, I’ve been grappling with a big question: why do I want to make TV? Why do I so badly want Famous Cast Words to be renewed for another season, why do I want to turn a simple art-making project into a show, why do I keep brainstorming travelogue treatments? Why do I keep professionally leaning toward a thing I barely even consume myself?

In Buddhism, one of the precepts we engage with is that of Right Livelihood. In the Buddha’s time, Right Livelihood was outlined as refraining from the following:

• Dealing in weapons

• Trade of human beings including slavery and prostitution

• Meat production and butchery

• Business in intoxicants

• Business in poison

As Maia Zenyu Duerr outlines in THIS well written article, it was a far more straightforward list 2500 years ago, before the complications of the modern and digital age.¹

In the case of the entertainment industry, I worry about intoxicants and poison. Though I don’t believe the kind of television or video I want to create constitutes intoxicants or poison, the system with which I disseminate it (YouTube, Instagram, even Substack) most certainly promotes both. Can one feed the content-hungry beast without fundamentally participating in the harm it causes?

Furthermore, what is it within me that insists on a large-scale dissemination of my visual art or interviews? Or, prior to my current work, why was I drawn to performing in the first place? The word that kept emerging in this investigation was “Recognition.” I, of course, dove down my usual etymological rabbit hole to gain new perspective, and the yearning is clear: derived from either Old French or Latin, both roots suggest “to know again.”

I seek to be known, repeatedly. I seek to not be forgotten.

I imagine a large swath of humanity desires this no matter what they do or have done for work. But I think it’s important to investigate the why underneath these perhaps unconscious strivings. What within me is unconvinced of its existence, unless it is externally recognized? What within me feels unknown - what of the Hungry Ghost remains starving - such that it demands I continue to engage in an industry about which I have so many misgivings?

I’m glad I am engaging in this line of questioning, though I have no answers. What I do have is this two-headed dragon, requested by an 8 year old...

Anders, age 8: “A scary, demon-like, two-headed dragon breathing fire from one head and lightening from the other”

Can that be enough?

1. Not to mention, I think the question of prostitution is much more complicated than this list would seek to suggest.