21 March 1994, Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Los Angeles, USA
[Long excited silence]
I'd like to thank the Academy for the honor of letting me be here today. I'd like to thank Jane, Jan and Holly for making this all possible. I'd like thank Eddie Campbell, Pat Quirke, and Beanie* for taking such good care of me during the making of the film.
24 February 2019, Los Angeles, California, USA
The word today is “irony.” The date, the 24th. The month, February, which also happens to be the shortest month of the year, which also happens to be Black History month. The year, 2019. The year, 1619. History. Her story. 1619. 2019. 400 years.
Four hundred years. Our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and bought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved. Our ancestors worked the land from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. My grandmother, Zimmie Shelton Retha, who lived to be 100 years young, who was a Spelman College graduate even though her mother was a slave. My grandmother who saved 50 years of Social Security checks to put her first grandchild — she called me Spikie-poo — she put me through Morehouse College and NYU grad film. NYU!
Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of its native people. We all connect with our ancestors. We will have love and wisdom regained, we will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment. The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right thing! You know I had to get that in there.
21 February 2019., Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia
This was a statement read aloud at the rally, which Paul Kelly couldn’t attend.,
I first started playing in Sydney in the late seventies.
French’s Tavern on Oxford Street was the first I remember.
Bondi RSL, The Trade Union Club, Graphic Arts Club, Kardomah Cafe, The Manzil Room.
Fuck we never got out of the Manzil ‘til after dawn.
Later on the Strawberry Hills Hotel, the Hopetoun, Dee Why, Salinas, The Annandale, War and Peace.
Many of these places have gone but their legacy lives on in the venues and the festivals under threat today.
You don’t learn how to write a song in school.
You don’t do a TAFE course in How to Play In Front of An Audience.
These places were my universities.
I still go to music festivals, pubs, clubs, and cafes all the time to do extra study.
Take a little refresher course.
Listen and learn.
This is where we grow and thrive, love and hate, compete and cooperate.
This where we make our communities, carve our sound, and develop our unique art.
Fight for it!
PK.
6 January 2019, Los Angeles, USA
Oh my gosh! Thank you so much Hollywood Foreign Press, this is such a great honor. And I'm so honored to be with my category sisters. And we've gotten to know each other a little bit so far and I can't wait to spend more time with you. Everything that you did this year—or, what you're here for—we all should be up here together.
I want to thank Meg Wolitzer for writing this incredible novel and Jane Anderson for adapting it, Rosalie Swedlin and Claudia Bluemhuber for the passionate—it took 14 years to make this film! I was attached to it thanks to my wonderful Kevin and Franklin who were behind me and said, "Yes, this is a great story and we need to stay with it until it happens."
You know, it was called The Wife. I think that's why it took 14 years to get made. To play a character who is so internal, I’m thinking of my mom who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life. And in her 80s she said to me, "I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything."And it was so not right. And I feel like what I've learned from this whole experience is, women, we’re nurturers, that’s what’s expected of us. We have our children, we have our husbands if we're lucky enough, and our partners. But we have to find personal fulfillment. We have to follow our dreams. We have to say, "I can do that, and I should be allowed to do that."
When I was little I felt like Muhammad Ali, who was destined to be a boxer. I felt destined to be an actress. I saw the early Disney films and Hayley Mills and I said, Oh, I can do that! And I’m here today. It will have been 45 years in September that I am a working actress, and I cannot imagine a more wonderful life.
Thank you Björn Runge who is here who directed The Wife, who trusted the close up, who knew where to put the camera and how to light us. Jonathan Pryce, what a great partner. My daughter Annie who laid the foundation of this character, I love you my darling. Thank you so much.
6 January 2018, Los Angeles, California, USA
Thank you, Chris [Pine], for those kind words! And Sam [Elliott, who narrated an introductory video], where is Sam? Oh, man. The stranger. Oh, man. Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press, this is really a wonderful honor. I’m so challenged up here, because there are so many people to thank, you know? It’s a collaborative art form here. I’m gonna, I’m gonna thank some folks. I’m gonna thank my sweetheart, Sue. My God! Forty-five years of support and love. I wouldn’t be up here without you, my dear. And my brother Beau. Sister, Cindy. Your love and support. And how lucky are we to have our folks, man? Lloyd and Dorothy! Aghhhhh. Thank you! I’m wearing your cuffs, Dad. I’m wearing your cuff links. They’re your dad’s, too.
Oh, man. I’ve gotta thank my representatives. I don’t know where — wave your hands, guys, I want to see if I can — they’re keeping the whole boat afloat. I can’t see ya. There they are: David Schiff, Rick Kurtzman, Jean Sievers, Bob Wallerstein, Liz Dalling, my trusty assistant Becky Pedretti. Who am I forgetting? Oh, Frank Page. You know who I gotta mention is Loyd Catlett. He’s my stand-in. We’ve done close to 70 films together. Can you believe that? He’s the thread through the whole deal, starting from “Last Picture Show.”
And speaking of “Last Picture Show,” I’ve gotta thank my dear friend Peter Bogdanovich, who kicked the whole party off for me, man. I’m so blessed to have him start my whole career. Let’s see, well, the brothers. The Coen brothers, c’mon. I mean, true masters. If I’m lucky, I’ll be associated with the Dude for the rest of my life. I feel so honored to be a part of that film. Great movie.
And look at my brother, Steve Kloves, right? “Fabulous Baker Boys.” First time out and he comes up with that great movie. I gotta thank him. I gotta thank Scott Cooper. I don’t know if Scotty is here tonight, but “Crazy Heart.” Yeah, man, huh? Scott, man. Sets a great vibe to make wonderful things happen.
Oh, another first-time guy I was so lucky to work with: the late, great Michael Cimino, who directed “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” That was his first movie. I can remember going into his office the day before we started shooting, and I said to Mike, “Man, I’m so sorry, but I think you made a terrible mistake. I’m not feeling this guy at all. I feel so inadequate. I’m giving you late notice, I know, but please fire me.” He looked at me and said, “Jeff, you know the game tag?” I say, “Yeah.” He says, “You’re it.” I say, “What do you mean I’m it?” He says, “You are the guy. You couldn’t make a mistake if you wanted to. You know, the life of this character is coming through you. It’s a done deal.” I say, “Oh, all right. That’s a wonderful vote of confidence and a great perspective to look at this thing.”
And I used it, of course, in that film — and in all the other movies that I’ve done, as well as my life. You know, I’ve been tagged. I guess we all have been tagged, right? We’re all alive. Right here, right now! This is happening. We’re alive!
Being in the life of the movies, you know, I kind of look through my life through the filter of movies. I find directors and fellow actors all over the place in my life. One guy, he had nothing to do with the movies, but I’ve taken a lot of direction from him. That’s Bucky Fuller. Bucky, he’s most famous for the geodesic dome, but he made a great observation about these oceangoing tankers. And he noticed that the engineers were particularly challenged by how to turn this thing, you know? They got this big rudder, it took too much energy to turn the rudder to turn the ship. So they came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s put a little rudder on the big rudder. The little rudder will turn the big rudder, the big rudder will turn the ship. The little rudder is called a trim tab.
Bucky made the analogy that a trim tab is an example of how the individual is connected to society and how we affect society. And I like to think of myself as a trim tab. All of us are trim tabs. We might seem like we’re not up to the task, but we are, man. We’re alive! We can make a difference! We can turn this ship in the way we wanna go, man! Towards love, creating a healthy planet for all of us.
So I wanna thank the Hollywood Foreign Press for tagging me, and I wanna tag you all. You’re all trim tabs. Tag, you’re it! Thank you!
28 November 2018, Sydney, Australia
I’ve got my speech in my shoe.
I had nowhere else to put it.
I’ve had the same roadie for thirty years. My best mate Worm. He’s not a musician, he’s not a singer, he’s not musical, one day he said to me, a long time ago, I got a line for you for a song, you can have it if you want. ‘Barricades and brick walls won’t keep me from you’.
I basically owe my whole career to my roadie, Worm.
I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Worm and his wife Bern, they’re my two best friends.
I think the two main things I’ve learned about how to survive in the music business is: always I have be true to yourself; and
To Find your tribe.
And I think your real tribe will always encourage you to be true to yourself, and won’t try to change you into something that you’re not.
And I have just had the most amazing tribe that you could possibly imagine.
My mum and dad, the two best role models that anybody could ever ask for, my Mum’s down there, she’s the most inspiring woman that I know, my mum has basically taught me over the years that being a bitch doesn’t make you strong and being strong doesn’t make you a bitch.
To know the difference, to know the difference.
You can be strong and kind at the same time.
My dad up there, the best advice my dad ever gave me, was ‘just don’t be dickhead’. I know it doesn’t sound very profound, but it actually has been the best advice to follow.
Seriously, you don’t need to be a dickhead to get ahead in this business.
You really don’t.
You don’t have to drag other people down to get ahead in this business. Don’t even worry what everyone else is doing. Just do your own thing and try not to be a dickhead about it.
Maliga Hodge, it’s such an honour to work with you for over 20 years, you’re my voice of reason. You’re so inspiring to work with every day. You’re so inspiring to me as a woman, and a mother, and I hope we’ll get another twenty years together, if you’ll put up with me.
My big brother Nash, you pick me up whenever I fall down. You drag me back down whenever I get my head too far up in the clouds. But you always walk beside me, you always have, and I just love you and Ronnie with all my heart, it really is as much yours, this Hall of Fame, as it is mine., So thank you.
Lastly my three greatest creations with the help of Cossie and Shane, my three kids Talon, Arlo and Poet.
Not only do you guys put up with the crazy life that we’ve given you but you also really embrace it, and enhance it. God knows you challenge it, but … I’m so proud to be your mum, I really am, and I hope that at the end of the day I have just inspired you to find something in your life that makes you feel alive, and work really hard, and always be true to yourself, and in the words of my greatest musical influence, just don’t be a dickhead!
Thank you, I never thought I’d be standing uyp here on a stage gertting something like this, honestly. I started out as a little girl around a campfire singing country songs on the Nullabor Plain. I am so proud to have become a strong woman. in the music industry.
But I don’t think I’m standing up here because I’m a strong woman.
I don’t think I’m standing up here in spite of being a strong woman either.
I actually think i’m standing up here because I’m just myself, and I think that’s all that any of us ever need to be.
23 January 1991, Grosvenor House Hotel, London, United Kingdom
You know, when Video Arts asked me if I'd like to talk about creativity I said “no problem!” No problem! Because telling people how to be creative is easy, it's only being it that's difficult.
I knew it would be particularly easy for me because I've spent the last 25 years watching how various creative people produce their stuff, and being fascinating to see if I could figure out what makes folk, including me, more creative.
What is more, a couple of years ago I got very excited because a friend of mine who runs the psychology department at Sussex University, Brian Bates, showed me some research on creativity done at Berkley in the 70s by a brilliant psychologist called Donald MacKinnon which seemed to confirm in the most impressively scientific way all the vague observations and intuitions that I'd had over the years.
The prospect of settling down for quite serious study of creativity for the purpose of tonight's gossip was delightful. Having spent several weeks on it, I can state categorically that what I have to tell you tonight about how you can all become more creative is a complete waste of time.
So I think it would be much better if I just told jokes instead.
You know the lightbulb jokes? How many Poles does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hold the bulb, four to turn the table. How many folksingers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: five, one to change the bulb and four to sing about how much better the old one was. How many socialists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: We're not going to change it, we think it works. How many creative art–
The reason why it is futile for me to talk about creativity is that it simply cannot be explained, it's like Mozart's music or Van Gogh's painting or Saddam Hussein's propaganda. It is literally inexplicable.
Freud, who analyzed practically everything else, repeatedly denied that psychoanalysis could shed any light whatsoever on the mysteries of creativity.
And Brian Bates wrote to me recently “Most of the best research on creativity was done in the 60s and 70s with a quite dramatic drop-off in quantity after then,” largely, I suspect because researchers began to feel that they had reached the limits of what science could discover about it.
In fact, the only thing from the research that I could tell you about how to be creative is the sort of childhood that you should have had, which is of limited help to you at this point in your lives.
However there is one negative thing that I can say, and it's “negative” because it is easier to say what creativity isn't.
A bit like the sculptor who when asked how he had sculpted a very fine elephant, explained that he'd taken a big block of marble and then knocked away all the bits that didn't look like an elephant.
Now here's the negative thing: Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating.
So how many actors does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: thousands. Only one to do it but thousands to say “I could have done that.” How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: Don't mind me, I'll just sit here in the dark, nobody cares about… How many surgeons —
You see when I say “a way of operating” what I mean is this: creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have.
It is, for example, (and this may surprise you) absolutely unrelated to IQ (provided that you are intelligent above a certain minimal level that is) but MacKinnon showed in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers that those regarded by their peers as “most creative” were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.
So in what way were they different?
MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood — “a way of operating” — which allowed their natural creativity to function.
In fact, MacKinnon described this particular facility as an ability to play.
Indeed he described the most creative (when in this mood) as being childlike. For they were able to play with ideas… to explore them… not for any immediate practical purpose but just for enjoyment. Play for its own sake.
Now, about this mood.
I'm working at the moment with Dr. Robin Skynner on a successor to our psychiatry book Families and How To Survive Them we're comparing the ways in which psychologically healthy families function (the ways in which such families function) with the ways in which the most successful corporations and organizations function.
We've become fascinated by the fact that we can usually describe the way in which people function at work in terms of two modes: open and closed.
So what I can just add now is that creativity is not possible in the closed mode.
Ok, so how many American network TV executives does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: Does it have to be a lightbulb? How many doorke–
Let me explain a little. By the “closed mode” I mean the mode that we are in most of the time when at work.
We have inside us a feeling that there's lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we're going to get through it all.
It's an active (probably slightly anxious) mode, although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable.
It's a mode which we're probably a little impatient, if only with ourselves.
It has a little tension in it, not much humor.
It's a mode in which we're very purposeful, and it's a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic, but not creative.
By contrast, the open mode, is relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we're probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful.
It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
When Alexander Fleming had the thought that led to the discovery of penicillin, he must have been in the open mode.
The previous day, he'd arranged a number of dishes to that culture would grow upon them.
On the day in question, he glanced at the dishes, and he discovered that on one of them no culture had appeared.
Now, if he'd been in the closed mode he would have been so focused upon his need for “dishes with cultures grown upon them” that when he saw that one dish was of no use to him for that purpose he would quite simply have thrown it away.
Thank goodness, he was in the open mode so he became curious about why the culture had not grown on this particular dish. And that curiosity, as the world knows, led him to the lightbulb — I'm sorry, to penicillin.
Now in the closed mode an uncultured dish is an irrelevance. In the open mode, it's a clue.
Now, one more example: one of Alfred Hitchcock's regular co-writers has described working with him on screenplays.
He says, “When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say “We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come.” And, says the writer, of course it finally always did.
But let me make one thing quite clear: we need to be in the open mode when we're pondering a problem but once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.
For example, if you decide to leap a ravine, the moment just before take-off is a bad time to start reviewing alternative strategies. When you're attacking a machine-gun post you should not make a particular effort to see the funny side of what you are doing.
Humor is a natural concomitant in the open mode, but it's a luxury in the closed.
No, once we've taken a decision we should narrow our focus while we're implementing it, and then after it's been carried out we should once again switch back to the open mode to review the feedback rising from our action, in order to decide whether the course that we have taken is successful, or whether we should continue with the next stage of our plan. Whether we should create an alternative plan to correct any error we perceive.
And then back into the closed mode to implement that next stage, and so on.
In other words, to be at our most efficient we need to be able to switch backwards and forwards between the two modes.
But here's the problem: we too often get stuck in the closed mode.
Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.
This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their non-political colleagues is that they become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.
And that's it. Well… 20 minutes to go… So, how many women's libbers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: 37, one to screw it in, and 36 to make a documentary about it. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer: only one, but the lightbulb has really got to want to change.
Oh, there is one, just one, other thing that I can say about creativity.
There are certain conditions which do make it more likely that you'll get into the open mode, and that something creative will occur.
More likely… you can't guarantee anything will occur. You might sit around for hours as I did last Tuesday, and nothing.
Zilch.
Bupkis.
Not a sausage.
Nevertheless I can at least tell you how to get yourselves into the open mode. You need five things:
Space
Time
Time
Confidence
a 22 inch waist
Sorry, my mind was wondering. I'm getting into the open mode too quickly. Instead of a 22 inch waist, you need humor. I do beg your pardon.
Let's take space first: you can't become playful and therefore creative if you're under your usual pressures, because to cope with them you've got to be in the closed mode.
So you have to create some space for yourself away from those demands. And that means sealing yourself off.
You must make a quiet space for yourself where you will be undisturbed.
Next: Time. It's not enough to create space, you have to create your space for a specific period of time. You have to know that your space will last until exactly 3:30, and that at that moment your normal life will start again.
And it's only by having a specific moment when your space starts and an equally specific moment when your space stops that you can seal yourself off from the every day closed mode in which we all habitually operate.
And I'd never realized how vital this was until I read a historical study of play by a Dutch historian called Johan Huizinga6 and in it he says “Play is distinct from ordinary life, both as to locality and duration. This is its main characteristic: its secludedness, its limitedness. Play begins and then (at a certain moment) it is over. Otherwise, it's not play.”
So combining the first two factors we create an “oasis of quiet” for ourselves by setting the boundaries of space and of time.
Now creativity can happen, because play is possible when we are separate from everyday life.
So, you've arranged to take no calls, you've closed your door, you've sat down somewhere comfortable, take a couple of deep breaths and if you're anything like me, after you've pondered some problem that you want to turn into an opportunity for about 90 seconds, you find yourself thinking “Oh I forgot I've got to call Jim… oh, and I must tell Tina that I need the report on Wednesday and not Thursday which means I must move my lunch with Joe and Damn! I haven't called St. Paul's about getting Joe's daughter an interview and I must pop out this afternoon to get Will's birthday present and those plants need watering and none of my pencils are sharpened and Right! I've got too much to do, so I'm going to start by sorting out my paper clips and then I shall make 27 phone calls and I'll do some thinking tomorrow when I've got everything out of the way.”
Because, as we all know, it's easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.
And it's also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we're not so sure about.
So when I say create an oasis of quiet know that when you have, your mind will pretty soon start racing again. But you're not going to take that very seriously, you just sit there (for a bit) tolerating the racing and the slight anxiety that comes with that, and after a time your mind will quiet down again.
Now, because it takes some time for your mind to quiet down it's absolutely no use arranging a “space/time oasis” lasting 30 minutes, because just as you're getting quieter and getting into the open mode you have to stop and that is very deeply frustrating. So you must allow yourself a good chunk of time. I'd suggest about an hour and a half. Then after you've gotten to the open mode, you'll have about an hour left for something to happen, if you're lucky.
But don't put a whole morning aside. My experience is that after about an hour-and-a-half you need a break. So it's far better to do an hour-and-a-half now and then an hour-and-a-half next Thursday and maybe an hour-and-a-half the week after that, than to fix one four-and-a-half hour session now.
There's another reason for that, and that's factor number three: time.
Yes, I know we've just done time, but that was half of creating our oasis.
Now I'm going to tell you about how to use the oasis that you've created.
Why do you still need time?
Well, let me tell you a story. I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues who seemed to be (to me) more talented than I was {but} did never produce scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem, and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though (I think) he knew the solution was not very original.
Whereas if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out, and finish by 5 o'clock, I just couldn't. I'd sit there with the problem for another hour-and-a-quarter, and by sticking at it would, in the end, almost always come up with something more original.
It was that simple.
My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.
So imagine my excitement when I found that this was exactly what MacKinnon found in his research. He discovered that the most creative professionals always played with a problem for much longer before they tried to resolve it, because they were prepared to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety that we all experience when we haven't solved a problem.
You know I mean, if we have a problem and we need to solve it, until we do, we feel (inside us) a kind of internal agitation, a tension, or an uncertainty that makes us just plain uncomfortable. And we want to get rid of that discomfort. So, in order to do so, we take a decision. Not because we're sure it's the best decision, but because taking it will make us feel better.
Well, the most creative people have learned to tolerate that discomfort for much longer. And so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.
Now the people I find it hardest to be creative with are people who need all the time to project an image of themselves as decisive.
And who feel that to create this image they need to decide everything very quickly and with a great show of confidence.
Well, this behavior I suggest sincerely, is the most effective way of strangling creativity at birth.
But please note I'm not arguing against real decisiveness. I'm 100% in favor of taking a decision when it has to be taken and then sticking to it while it is being implemented.
What I am suggesting to you is that before you take a decision, you should always ask yourself the question, “When does this decision have to be taken?” And having answered that, you defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time, which will lead you to the most creative solution.
And if, while you're pondering, somebody accuses you of indecision say, “Look, Babycakes, I don't have to decide 'til Tuesday, and I'm not chickening out of my creative discomfort by taking a snap decision before then, that's too easy.”
So, to summarize: the third factor that facilitates creativity is time, giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.
Now the next factor, number 4, is confidence.
When you are in your space/time oasis, getting into the open mode, nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.
Now if you think about play, you'll see why. To play is experiment: “What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that? What if…?”
The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen. The feeling that whatever happens, it's ok. So you cannot be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be “wrong” — something you “shouldn't have done.”
Well, you're either free to play, or you're not.
As Alan Watts puts it, you can't be spontaneous within reason.
So you've got risk saying things that are silly and illogical and wrong, and the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the break-through.
And now, the last factor, the fifth: humor.
Well, I happen to think the main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.
I think we all know that laughter brings relaxation, and that humor makes us playful, yet how many times important discussions been held where really original and creative ideas were desperately needed to solve important problems, but where humor was taboo because the subject being discussed was {air quotes} “so serious”?
This attitude seems to me to stem from a very basic misunderstanding of the difference between ‘serious' and ‘solemn'.
Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life (and I'm not talking about the film), and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious.
Solemnity, on the other hand… I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor, and it somehow freed us all, and made the services inspiring and cathartic.
But solemnity? It serves pomposity, and the self-important always know with some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor — that's why they see it as a threat. And so dishonestly pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial, when it only makes them feel bigger.
No, humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity that we need to solve problems, no matter how ‘serious' they may be.
So when you set up a space/time oasis, giggle all you want.
And there, ladies and gentlemen, are the five factors which you can arrange to make your lives more creative:
Space, time, time, confidence, and Lord Jeffrey Archer.
So, now you know how to get into the open mode, the only other requirement is that you keep mind gently 'round the subject you're pondering.
You'll daydream, of course, but you just keep bringing your mind back, just like with meditation. Because, and this is the extraordinary thing about creativity, if you just keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious, probably in the shower later. Or at breakfast the next morning, but suddenly you are rewarded, out of the blue a new thought mysteriously appears.
If you've put in the pondering time first.
So, how many Cecil Parkinsons does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: two, one to screw it in, one to screw it up. How many account executives does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: Can I get back to you on that? How many Norwei— Oh, sorry, how many Yugoslav— how many Malt– how many Dutch— I'm out of jokes.
Oh! One thing! Looking at you all reminds me, I think it's easy to be creative if you've got other people to play with.
I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own. But there is a danger, a real danger, if there's one person around you who makes you feel defensive, you lose the confidence to play, and it's goodbye creativity.
So always make sure your play friends are people that you like and trust.
And never say anything to squash them either, never say “no” or “wrong” or “I don't like that.”
Always be positive, and build on what is being said:
“Would it be even better if…”
“I don't quite understand that, can you just explain it again?”
“Go on…”
“What if…?”
“Let's pretend…”
Try to establish as free an atmosphere as possible.
Sometimes I wonder if the success of the Japanese isn't partly due to their instinctive understanding of how to use groups creatively.
Westerners are often amazed at the unstructured nature of Japanese meetings but maybe it's just that very lack of structure, that absence of time pressure, that frees them to solve problems so creatively. And how clever of the Japanese sometimes to plan that un-structured-ness by, for example, insisting that the first people to give their views are the most junior, so that they can speak freely without the possibility of contradicting what's already been said by somebody more important.
Four minutes left… How many Irish– sorry, sorry
Well, look, the very last thing that I can say about creativity is this: it's like humor. In a joke, the laugh comes at a moment when you connect two different frameworks of reference in a new way.
Example: there's the old story about a woman doing a survey into sexual attitudes who stops an airline pilot and asks him, amongst other things, when he last had sexual intercourse. He replies “Nineteen fifty eight.” Now, knowing airline pilots, the researcher is surprised, and queries this. “Well,” says the pilot, “it's only twenty-one ten now.”
We laugh, eventually, at the moment of contact between two frameworks of reference: the way we express what year it is and the 24-hour clock.
Now, having an idea, a new idea, is exactly the same thing. It's connecting two hitherto separate ideas in a way that generates new meaning.
Now, connecting different ideas isn't difficult, you can connect cheese with motorcycles or moral courage with light green, or bananas with international cooperation. You can get any computer to make a billion random connection for you, but these new connections or juxtapositions are significant only if they generate new meaning.
So as you play you can deliberately try inventing these random juxtapositions, and then use your intuition to tell you whether any of them seem to have significance for you. That's the bit the computer can't do. It can produce millions of new connections, but it can't tell which one smells interesting.
And, of course, you'll produce some juxtapositions which are absolutely ridiculous, absurd. Good for you!
Because Edward de Bono (who invented the notion of lateral thinking) specifically suggests in his book PO: Beyond Yes and No that you can try loosening up your assumptions by playing with deliberately crazy connections. He calls such absurd ideas “Intermediate Impossibles.”
And he points out the use of an Intermediate Impossible is completely contrary to ordinary logical thinking in which you have to be right at each stage.
It doesn't matter if the Intermediate Impossible is right or absurd, it can nevertheless be used as a stepping stone to another idea that is right. Another example of how, when you're playing, nothing is wrong.
So, to summarize: if you really don't know how to start, or if you got stuck, start generating random connections, and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting.
Well, that really is all I can tell you that won't help you to be creative. Everything.
And now, in the two minutes left, I can come to the important part, and that is, how to stop your subordinates {from} becoming creative too, which is the real threat.
Because, believe me no one appreciates better than I do what trouble creative people are. And how they stop decisive, hard-nosed bastards like us from running businesses efficiently.
I mean, we all know, we encourage someone to be creative, the next thing is they're rocking the boat, coming up with ideas, and asking us questions. Now if we don't nip this kind of thing in the bud, we'll have to start justifying our decisions by reasoned argument. And sharing information — the concealment of which gives us considerable advantages in our power struggles.
So, here's how to stamp out creativity in the rest of the organization and get a bit of respect going.
One: Allow subordinates no humor, it threatens your self-importance and especially your omniscience. Treat all humor as frivolous or subversive.
Because subversive is, of course, what humor will be in your setup, as it's the only way that people can express their opposition, since (if they express it openly) you're down on them like a ton of bricks.
So let's get this clear: blame humor for the resistance that your way of working creates. Then you don't have to blame your way of working. This is important. And I mean that solemnly. Your dignity is no laughing matter.
Second: keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable involves cutting everybody else down to size, so don't miss an opportunity to undermine your employees' confidence.
A perfect opportunity comes when you're reviewing work that they've done. Use your authority to zero in immediately on all the things you can find wrong. Never, never balance the negatives with positives, only criticize, just as your school teachers did.
Always remember: praise makes people uppity.
Third: Demand that people should always be actively doing things. If you catch anyone pondering, accuse them of laziness and/or indecision. This is to starve employees of thinking time because that leads to creativity and insurrection. So demand urgency at all times, use lots of fighting talk and war analogies, and establish a permanent atmosphere of stress, of breathless anxiety, and crisis.
In a phrase: keep that mode closed.
In this way we no-nonsense types can be sure that the tiny, tiny, microscopic quantity of creativity in our organization will all be ours!
But! Let your vigilance slip for one moment, and you could find yourself surrounded by happy, enthusiastic, and creative people whom you might never be able to completely control ever again!
So be careful.
Thank you, and good night. Thank you.
18 August 2018, Los Angeles, California, USA
Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Thank you. I’m just going to quit while I'm ahead! Oh, my goodness, goodness, goodness. This is very exciting. I thought the biggest, most exciting night I had ever had, I'm talking to Lorne Michaels now, was the night that he gave me an honor. But boy, you topped yourself tonight, Lorne.
(She stops to let Alec Baldwin kiss her hand.) You think i'm going to miss a chance when I get it?
Somebody said something the other day about 'First Lady of Television.' And I took it as a big compliment. And then I heard her talking to her daughter a little later, she said, ‘First lady, yes, she's that old, she was the first one, way, way back.’ But little did I dream then that I would be here. It's incredible that I'm still in this business, that I'm still -- and you are still putting up with me.
No, I’m thanking you. It's incredible that you can stay in a career this long and still have people put up with you. I wish they did that at home. I want to thank Lorne Michaels for doing not only this tonight, but all the wonderful things he's done with me -- no, for me. And all I can say is, it's such a blessed business to be in, and how lucky can I be, and how much I say, thank you to each and every one of you. Thank you so much.
15 November 2018, GQ Awards, Sydney, Australia
Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be the first award tonight so that I can drink. There are so many handsome men here tonight. I feel like a bogan at a Nickelback concert. Or a lesbian at Bunnings. My first date Harry Styles cancelled tonight - he says restraining order. So I'm here with my dad as my date. …
When I was fifteen I stormed into the kitchen and told my parents I was gay. Sorry ladies! And they said cool, we're having pasta for dinner. And I said, you didn't hear me, I said I'm gay - I can't eat carbs!
18 October 2018, Kennedy Center, Washington DC, USA
Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Stop, okay sit. Thank you. Thank you very much.
When Mark Twain first emailed me about the Mark Twain prize, I have to admit I totally misunderstood. I assumed that I was being asked to honour somebody else who was receiving the Mark Twain prize and I thought, oh my God what a hassle. I mean seriously, who would put me through this to have to go all the way to Washington D.C. which no offence, is a nightmare and make up flattering things to say about how funny someone else is. No fucking way.
And then I reread the email and I realised oh, it's me. They're giving it to me. I get the prize and my attitude about the whole thing changed. It really did. I don't know, honestly. I really don't know what I was thinking, this is a great night and a great honour and in beautiful Washington D.C. no less. Anybody would be lucky to be a part of a night like this honouring somebody like me, right?
As a great fan of the work of Mark Twain I was so sorry when I recently learned he was dead. My thoughts and prayers go out to the whole Twain family, especially the wonderful Shania. Unfortunately the President of the United States couldn't make it tonight either, even though he lives in the neighbourhood Mondays through Wednesdays.
I am so lucky to have been on television doing comedy for more than 35 years, isn't that ridiculous? The really ridiculous thing is that I am just as good at drama. Yeah, I'm going to tell you a little story, it's a little trivia. The very same week that I got cast in Seinfeld I was being considered for the juicy little part of Portia in director Sir Peter Hall's Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice. Apparently I didn't get the part since someone else eventually played the role on this stage and of course I'm happy that I didn't get that part because if I had I would have never have played Elaine on Seinfeld and without Seinfeld I would not be here today. So it worked out great, totally fabulous no regrets here, none at all. None whatsoever.
Anyway I think it's time for me to get into some serious thank yous. Abbi and Ilana thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. Just to be completely clear, I gave an excellent audition for Merchant of Venice, okay? I mean just objectively speaking now. I nailed it, okay? So I'm just a little confused as to why Peter Hall didn't cast me. That's all, that's all. I'm not upset obviously because I love comedy and I love my career. So, where was I? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Keegan oh, my god Keegan-Micheal Key thank you so much for being here on my special night …
Look Sir Peter Hall might have made a mistake, okay. My audition was Portia's speech about mercy. You all probably know the scene. I mean obviously I am not gonna perform it right now because that would be a pretty weird tangent to hear Shakespeare intelligently and energetically performed in a middle of a comedy tribute to me, so.
Camille thank you for being here. It is so inspiring that you were able to co-opt your wife's harrowing medical ordeal for an Oscar nomination. Bryan Cranston you are a truly incomparable talent and a pleasure to work with. When I think of us on Seinfeld …
Look I'm just gonna do it. You want to hear it, right? I can do Shakespeare, okay.
The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropeth as a gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed, it blessed of him that gives and him that takes.
Thank you. Thank you. And Stephen Colbert, my fellow Northwestern alum, thank you so much for being here. You are my every night hero when at 11:35 a nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo, woo, woo.
Stephen used to play a manic conservative and now he plays a depressed liberal - that is range ladies and gentlemen. It is so great to see Lisa Kudrow here, setting me up just like in the old days when Friends would set up Seinfeld and just like in the old days Jerry's got all the money. And my darling dear, sweet Tony Hale. If I weren't already married and Bryan and Keegan weren't already married and if you weren't already married then I'd definitely get your opinion about any guy I was dating before marrying him.
And Tina Fey you are a comedy genius whom I admire above all humans. Tina was honoured with the Mark Twain prize too before they got real serious about who they give these things to. And thanks to my wonderful neighbour Jack Johnson. I was going to make a joke about Jack Johnson but for the love of god can't something remain sacred this evening?
And finally to my wonderful friend Jerry Seinfeld. I learned a lot from Jer over the years, principally the importance of hard work. Jerry killed himself to make Seinfeld good. He and Larry David worked so hard it is actually it is impossible to describe and they didn't just do it to make the show successful because once it was successful they worked even harder. And I hope a little of that rubbed off on me.
I grew up here in Washington D.C. back during the quaint old fashioned rule of law period. Being funny was a big part of my growing up. My great grandmother Bessy was the first person I remember telling jokes. She was in her 90s and I was really little and she would do these extremely repulsive impressions of her first grade teacher having life-threatening seizures. At least I think it was an impression. Anyway, either way I realised now that it was offensive and she was way, way out of line. But when I was five years old, hilarious stuff.
My mom and dad got divorced when I was three, also hilarious. My mom is actually here tonight with 80 of her closest friends. Last year I was lucky enough to get an Emmy Award for my performance on Veep which was an incredible thrill and it set some kind of a record for the most Emmys by somebody for doing something or other and then about twelve hours later I was diagnosed with cancer, another hilarious turn of events. I'm only half kidding, of course cancer isn't at all funny, but a big part of dealing with it has been finding the funny moment. The old cliché about laughter being the best medicine turns out to be true which is good because that's what the current administration is trying to replace Obamacare with.
When I was getting my hideous chemotherapy I'd cram a bunch of family and friends into this tiny treatment room with me and we really did have some great laughs. Of course I was heavily medicated and slipping in and out of consciousness so I was probably a pretty easy audience. But my point is, is that laughter is a basic human need along with love and food and an HBO subscription. There's no situation, none that isn't improved with a couple of laughs. Everybody needs laughs so the fact that I've had the opportunity to make people laugh for a living is one of the many blessings that I have received in my life. Okay.
According to Wikipedia I have two sons Charlie and Henry. When you're a working mother, oh, you really worry about the time spent away from your kids. You try your best to be there as much as possible, but the truth is, is that you miss stuff and you worry that they're gonna get all screwed up and suffer all kinds of angst and neurosis when they grow up and then you get the Mark Twain prize. I got to say it's worth it.
I'd also like to acknowledge my cherished husband Brad Hall who I didn't just marry because his name sounds like Peter Hall and it kind of felt like I was getting the part, no. Brad never fails to show up at events like this, this very one he puts on a suit, he puts on a smile and is the most supportive and present spouse in the world. No, nope, no. Yes thank you.
Thank you so, so much dear Brad. Thank you. And finally thanks to Mark and Mrs. Twain and to everyone who has participated in this exhausting evening. Thank you so much and good evening and thank you.
Related content: Tina Fey, Mark Twain Award Acceptance, 2010
“I never dreamed that I would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour. Mostly because my style is so typically Austrian.”
Ah this is … this is …this is not normal.
The world has gone a bit crazy.
For somebody like me, a nobody from nowhere, gets this sweet gig. Free suit. New boots.
Just because I don’t like men! It’s just …
That’s a joke, of course, just a joke fellas, calm down, hashtag not all men, but a lot of them.
Um … it is just jokes, but what are jokes these days? We don’t know, nobody knows what jokes are.
Especially men.
Am I right, fellas? That’s why I’m presenting alone.
Another speech? Try Steve Martin’s tribute to Gene Kelly, American Film Institute Life Achievement special, 1985.
“Gene said, ‘But Steve, what’ll I do when I get to the lamppost?’
I said, ‘swing around it a couple of time, make it like a big deal.’”
21 October 2011, Prince of Asturias Awards, Oviedo, Spain
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Members of the Jury, Distinguished Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is a great honor to stand here before you tonight. Perhaps, like the great maestro, Riccardo Muti, I am not used to standing in front of an audience without an orchestra behind me, but I will do my best as a solo artist tonight.
I stayed up all night last night wondering what I might say to this august assembly. And after I had eaten all the chocolate bars and peanuts in the mini-bar, I scribbled a few words. I don’t think I have to refer to them. Obviously, I am deeply touched to be recognized by the Foundation. But I've come here tonight to express another dimension of gratitude. I think I can do it in three or four minutes -- and I will try.
When I was packing in Los Angeles to come here, I had a sense of unease because I’ve always felt some ambiguity about an award for poetry. Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I'd go there more often.
I was compelled in the midst of that ordeal of packing to go and open my guitar. I have a Conde guitar, which was made in Spain in the great workshop at Number 7 Gravina Street; a beautiful instrument that I acquired over 40 years ago. I took it out of the case and I lifted it. It seemed to be filled with helium -- it was so light. And I brought it to my face. I put my face close to the beautifully designed rosette, and I inhaled the fragrance of the living wood. You know that wood never dies.
I inhaled the fragrance of cedar as fresh as the first day that I acquired the guitar. And a voice seemed to say to me, "You are an old man and you have not said thank you; you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose." And so I come here tonight to thank the soil and the soul of this people that has given me so much -- because I know just as an identity card is not a man, a credit rating is not a country.
Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when -- when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.
And as I grew older I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.
And so I had a voice, but I did not have an instrument. I did not have a song.
And now I’m going to tell you very briefly a story of how I got my song.
Because -- I was an indifferent guitar player. I banged the chords. I only knew a few of them. I sat around with my college friends, drinking and singing the folk songs, or the popular songs of the day, but I never in a thousand years thought of myself as a musician or as a singer.
One day in the early '60s, I was visiting my mother’s house in Montreal. The house is beside a park and in the park there's a tennis court where many people come to watch the beautiful young tennis players enjoy their sport. I wandered back to this park which I’d known since my childhood, and there was a young man playing a guitar. He was playing a flamenco guitar, and he was surrounded by two or three girls and boys who were listening to him. I loved the way he played. There was something about the way he played that -- that captured me.
It was the way I wanted to play -- and knew that I would never be able to play.
And I sat there with the other listeners for a few moments and when there was a -- a silence, an appropriate silence, I asked him if he would give me guitar lessons. He was a young man from Spain, and we could only communicate in my broken French and his broken French. He didn’t speak English. And he agreed to give me guitar lessons. I pointed to my mother’s house which you could see from the tennis court, and we made an appointment; we settled the price.
And he came to my mother’s house the next day and he said, “Let me hear you play something.” I tried to play something. He said, “You don’t know how to play, do you?" I -- I said, “No, I really don’t know how to play.” He said, "First of all, let me tune your guitar. It’s -- It's all out of tune.” So he took the guitar, and -- and he tuned it. He said, "It’s not a bad guitar." It -- It wasn’t the Conde, but it wasn’t a bad guitar. So he handed it back to me. He said, “Now play.”
[I] couldn’t play any better.
He said "Let me show you some chords." And he took the guitar and he produced a sound from that guitar that I'd never heard. And he -- he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, "Now you do it." I said, "It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it." He said, "Let me put your fingers on the frets." And he -- he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, "Now, now play." It -- It was a mess. He said, "I’ll come back tomorrow."
He came back tomorrow. He put my hands on the guitar. He -- He placed it on my lap in the way that was appropriate, and I began again with those six chords -- six chord progression that many, many flamenco songs are based on.
I was a little better that day.
The third day -- improved, somewhat improved. But I knew the chords now. And I knew that although I couldn’t coordinate my fingers with my thumb to produce the correct tremolo pattern, I knew the chords -- I knew them very, very well by this point.
The next day, he didn’t come. He didn’t come. I had the number of his -- of his boarding house in Montreal. I phoned to find out why he had missed the appointment, and they told me that he'd taken his life -- that he committed suicide. I knew nothing about the man. I -- I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he he appeared there in that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I -- I was deeply saddened, of course.
But now I disclose something that I’ve never spoken in public. It was those six chords -- it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.
So now you will begin to understand the dimensions of the gratitude I have for this country.
Everything that you have found favorable in my work comes from this place.
Everything, everything that you have found favorable in my songs and my poetry are inspired by this soil.
So I thank you so much for the warm hospitality that you have shown my work because it is really yours, and you have allowed me to affix my signature to the bottom of the page.
Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen.
19 May 2018, Cannes, France
In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes.
I was 21 years old. This festival was his hunting ground. I want to make a prediction: Harvey Weinstein will never be welcomed here ever again.
He will live in disgrace, shunned by a film community that once embraced him and covered up for his crimes.
And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women for behaviour that does not belong in this industry or workplace,” Argento said.
You know who you are. But most importantly, we know who you are. And we’re not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.
11 June 2018, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, USA
I grew up on Randolph Street with my sister Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents Adele and Douglas, my grandparents Fred and Alice, and my dog Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the catholic church, the priest's rectory, the nuns' convent, the Saint Rose Of Lima Grammar School, all of it just a football's toss away across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God and, and all my relatives. We had cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, great grandmas, great grandpas, all of us were jammed in five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to very wedding and every funeral that arrived like a stale occasion in our neighborhood. We also had front row seats to watch the towns when in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes to be slipped in the rear of the Friedman's Funeral Home long black Cadillac for the short ride to Saint Rose cemetery hill on the edge of town. And there all our catholic neighbors, all Zirillis, and the McNicholases, and all the Springsteens who came before, they patiently waited for us. Now when it rains in Freehold, when it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafe plant on the town's eastern edge. You know, I never cared for coffee, but I loved that smell. It was comforting, it united our town just like our clanging road mill in a common sensory experience. It was a place here, you could hear it, you could smell it. A place where people made lives, where they danced, enjoyed small pleasures, where they played baseball, and where they suffered pain and had their hearts broken. Where they made love, had their kids, where they died, and where they drank themselves drunk on spring nights. And did their very best, the best that they could to hold off the demons outside and inside that sought to destroy them, their homes, their families, their town. Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple, crookedly blessed in God's good mercy one and all, in the heart stopping, pants dropping, race rioting, fricating, soul shaking, redneck, love and fear making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey.
I was eight years old running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick, steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around
This is your hometown
It's your hometown
Your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
14 May 2018, London, United Kingdom
Hello, that's amazing. I'm foreign, so I don't have much to lose in this country. So I'm going to bore you with a three hour speech on Brexit!
I am very grateful to receive this inaugural Nibbie for illustration. I’d like to thank my three main publishers: Macmillan, Scholastic and Nosy Crow; Kate Wilson, who has published me for thirty years; Julia Donaldson, with whom I have forged an extraordinary – and extraordinarily successful – partnership; and I’d like to thank readers – the parents and the children who have grown up with the books I have illustrated; and The Bookseller and the judges who chose me, an foreign EU citizen in Brexit times – that’s a nice gesture.
But I also accept it with a heavy heart and maybe even a slightly bitter feeling – it feels like a consolation prize. Or even a farewell gift. I know that this is not the place for long speeches, but as you are all gathered here, I can’t pretend it’s business as usual. I’ll take only a few minutes, and then the party can go on.
It’s just ten months until “Freedom Day”, the bells will be ringing over the country – next March – and I – and my fellow EU citizens, many working in the UK book industry – are still living in uncertainty. We have, so far, no guarantee that we can still live and work here in the future. In a worst-case scenario, I might not be allowed to stay here by the time my next book with Julia Donaldson is launched.
Michael Morpurgo wrote movingly, “My uncles fought for peace, not for Brexit”. He wrote that Britain doesn’t really like the rest of Europe. And he’s right. That hurts and it makes me sad and angry every day.
The UK has been my home for 36 years. There would have been no Gruffalo without the EU facilitating my study here. And, even if I had, somehow, studied in the UK, I would have had to leave after my studies ended in 1985. So there would never have been the successful Anglo-German joint venture Donaldson-Scheffler.
I know that my contribution is acknowledged here tonight, and, once again, I am grateful.
But I would like to mention another person who came from Germany under completely different circumstances who is here tonight: my friend, Judith Kerr. Here, in this room, you have a refugee from the Nazis and a peace-time EU immigrant giving something hopefully to the families and the economy of the UK. But after the Brexit vote it feels, despite our contribution, as if this country is saying, “It was all a mistake! We don’t really want refugees and migrants in this country.”
A Brexiteer would, of course, say, “Of course we want them when they make money for us.” But how can you gauge the future contribution of a young girl, as Judith was when she came here, or a 25 year-old student, as I was.
It makes me sad, and I worry when I think of a post-Brexit future for the UK families, especially the children, who are growing up with our books. What went wrong? What did they miss, the parents and grandparents who were reading Room on the Broom with its message of the importance of solidarity, partnership, friendship and kindness? The book wasn’t called No Room on the Broom.
So beware, Brexit Britain – if you have no friends in a hostile environment – the dragons may come and get you.
Here is a blog post Axel Scheffler wrote for Nosy Crow, 'Without the EU, there would be no Gruffalo'
21 March 2018, Eternity Playhouse, Sydney, Australia
Imagine a time when you could stand where I am now and look down the hill to the wetlands and sunset orange water of the harbour.
Imagine the sight of towering trees that reached for the sun, a sight that has long been replaced with concrete and steel.
Imagine the feel of the rock and dirt beneath your feet and the memory of familial footprints that go back millennia. Imagine the smell of rotting undergrowth, sweet flowers and a bitter taste of smoke from camp fires cooking fur-covered meats.
Listen to the sound of women singing songs whilst fishing from their nawi, the sound wafting over still waters and carrying up the hill to your ear. Imagine hearing the scolding of overactive children who threaten to tip their precarious bark endeavours.
This is where we are. That time is here now among us, not the past. Though the clocks, calendars and cartography tell us That World has passed and been shaped by other forces, we will forever live in the memory of the time we are using our imaginations to remember.
We may never have known it but that time lives in the memory of this place and The Now is a moth newly born, emerging from the underside of a leaf without knowing it is destined to live for three transits of the sun and moon.
It thinks now is all there is, without sense of the age of the leaf or tree or the connection of the tree to the ground and its roots and the cycles of droughts and floods or the scars in its bark or the many children it has around it struggling for the sunlight and place to grow.
The Now is a moth that eats and mates and dies without ever knowing forever.
Imagine now thousands of witnesses gathering on the rocky outcrops, beaches and bays; from high vantage points and low. Imagine as they see, almost 250 years ago, a travel-weary ship catching robust gusts in its grey white sails, like flapping wings, see as they saw the ship arrive.
A sense of wonder, a sense of curiosity, a sense of fear, a sense of story – stories told and stories to be told. These gathered Eora.
Now imagine the stories that are forgotten, the stories left untold and the great distraction that ensued. Do not be misled, the now time is a distraction from the lessons learned of the past, the now is a moth with no sense of the long deep memory of our history here.
The white sails have fluttered and blustered, ate, mated and inevitably will die leaving only the tree to remember the story of the moth-like now. The act of feeding ourselves, the cultural practice of welcomes, elders, the care of country, story, ceremony, teaching the next generation and remembering the generations that went before.
All this memory will lead us to a stronger place on this Land … if we learn to embrace it … or we will die like the moth.
In this I remember and give thanks to the elders who have gone before us, who even now are amongst us and guiding us. Their invisible hand has brought us here to this place and time, here in this room of tempers and temperance.
One such hand is the ghost white invisible hand of Nick Enright. And I will remember him here.
His was a hand that could support and guide, deliver a loving caress and a stinging slap.
His hand can be seen in the careers of many, in the institutions he was a part of, in his plays, his signature, in the quiet corners where conversations would happen and the pulpits from which he would sermon.
His handprint sits like a stencilled mark on my heart.
Put your hand up if you ever studied with Nick Enright, worked with him, if he ever did you a favour, if you ever ate a meal with him, if you’ve read his plays, seen them or acted in them.
Put your hand up if you heard a story told about Nick Enright, his ability to love and share. He is everywhere in Australian theatre.
The invisible and visible hand of Nick Enright is all around us and lives on in us. I even now have to imagine Nick is still with us when I face a moral or ethical dilemma and I think:
WWND – What Would Nick Do?
And several times when there has been a play that needs a senior guiding hand, a playwright in search of a dramaturg, or a student in need of a teacher I have thought:
WTFINWYNH – Where the fuck is Nick when you need him?
But mostly I think:
IMNE – I Miss Nick Enright.
The hand that could give a loving touch, lift you up in support and the hand that could slap you so hard you would sting for days, months, years.
His hand hit me once. It felt like a slap even though he never touched me. The slap came in the form of a preview ‘talking to’ where he criticised my lack of judgement on the work we had done together on The Sunshine Club.
This was a musical about black and white dance halls across the country post WWII. He had drawn my attention to the subject a few years earlier and championed me through the process with the great support of Robyn Nevin.
His criticism was harsh and personal and so, so right; he cut me, he slapped me away when I demanded to be cared for and nurtured. He was tough when I wanted him to be tender. I didn’t talk to him for almost three years, such was my shame. Not until he was sick.
He had pointed out my indulgence and refused to allow me to charm my way out the situation or play a race card or demand a different standard because I was Aboriginal and [this was] my first ever musical and my premiere season at the Opera House. He gave me no room to wriggle out. I didn’t know it at the time but he was teaching me even then. Like an old aunty’s tough love.
Never indulge in the self-referential sentimentality of autobiographic justification. The only real truth is the truth the audience demands from a story.
No matter how much you want to use your writing to heal yourself, write your personal story onto the public record, to be loved by others or pontificate about an injustice, your ultimate responsibility is to make sure the audience are receiving your story as it wishes to be told.
Nick was no saint but in his humanity he had this sense of selflessness and the honourable pursuit of writing that many of us share. To be the storyteller of the tribe. To tell the stories that answered a need, not necessarily for your own sense of ego but a broader need. I can’t say he never wrote his autobiography in his plays but I can say he never gave in to self-indulgence within the material.
He never wrote the play where the teacher falls in love with his student, but he came close with A Poor Student.
He never wrote the play about the childless man who ached to be surrounded by youthful exuberance and see the next generation flourish but he came close with The Man with 5 Children; he never wrote the play about being a gay man from the country but he came close when he wrote the book to The Boy From Oz; he never wrote the play about the crippling guilt of being white in a black country but he co-wrote the adaption of Cloudstreet and helped Jimmy Chi write his musicals, he helped me shape The Sunshine Club and many more.
In many ways he didn’t write his own story but he wrote for all of us and when he couldn’t he assisted us to write our own.
I will forever be grateful to Nick Enright. And in the deepness of time he will be remembered not only for his writing but also through his contribution to the many lives he touched, the many lives in this room and the countless others in the world outside. It is a great honour to deliver the inaugural Nick Enright Keynote. Thank you.
Smell the air
I believe storytellers play one of the most important roles in a society. They hold the history of the clan, the lessons learnt, they provide a vocabulary for change, they can entertain, educate, agitate, celebrate … storytellers excite a society, uniting them despite their differences by providing a single moment in time where you feel part of something bigger.
This is why the tribe hunts for us, gives us food, provides respite from the everyday pressures of survival, provides shelter… so that we can focus on telling their stories, refreshing the old and imagining the new. This is an unspoken contract with society.
We must be the best storytellers we can so that those storylisteners can understand their world better.
Growing up, my family and I would return to Stradbroke Island Minjeeribah across Quandamooka to attend family functions – weddings, funerals, birthdays. I have one memory of a wedding where Aunty Kath Walker – Oodgeroo Noonuccal – recited a poem for the gathering.
It’s a poem, I can’t find this exact line in her published writings and I suspect it was written for the occasion of my relatives’ wedding or an early draft of a later work.
I distinctly remember through the fog of time the breeze coming from the bay and the sun shining and her words – I am the Tree and the Tree is Me … She went on to ask the tree its history and memory of the world… in this one line I caught the sense of connection and responsibility.
Standing amongst my extended family, on an island that had seen countless generations birthed and marry and die. A place where stories had lain dormant and resurfaced, remembered and reshaped. It was the 1970’s, I would have been perhaps eight, and this line has stuck with me for the last 40 years.
The other distinct memory of that day was when Aunty Kath said the line – I am the Tree and the Tree is me – and another relative calling from behind saying, ‘She’d shit herself if the tree talked back to her’. Everybody laughed and the moment was gone. Whatever point she was trying to make evaporated. The transient laughter robbing that moment and taking me away from a time of thoughtfulness.
I have rewritten that line in my head over and over through the years… what if the call had been, ‘What did the tree say back to you, Kath?’, if he had included her so she could have responded. If he had broken the mood with a comic interruption but not departed the substance of the drama, if he had not set up a sense that we ‘the congregation’ were complicit in the rejection of the moment by addressing only us rather than the speaker.
It is weird how little things stick with you. I read this situation as apocryphal, the fate of a writer and the possible issues with audiences. Don’t get too serious for too long or you might lose your listener. Include their understanding of the moment for fear of them taking away your right to that moment as the storyteller.
Recently at APAM, Jacob Boehme gave a fantastic key note address where he played out an all too familiar conversation between a fictional black artist and white gatekeeper. The familiarity with the situation and responses were breathtaking.
‘I would like to give just one example of how the conventions of this sector and of a market such as this, could currently be interpreted from a First Nations perspective:
Whitefulla still has all the power, authority and autonomy to dictate what trading and economic system we operate under.
Whitefulla determines what excellence or quality is.
Whitefella still manages and has curatorial control of performing arts venues Blakfella could work in.
Whitefella still programs Blak stories either written or directed by whitefellas and determines the Blak narratives that audiences engage in.
Blakfulla says ‘fuck me’ if I’m gonna make a living from this, I better make the same kinda shit too’.
Blakfulla gets busy making that kinda work, that kinda narrative that intrigues, delights, traumatizes, tantalizes and satisfies the curious mind about Blakfellas culture, identity, traditions and modernity.
Blakfulla constantly talking about being a blakfella.
Blakfulla gets an opportunity to pitch their work.
Whitefella says ‘Not Aboriginal enough’ (true story).
Blakfulla has another go.
Whitefella says, ‘Now I want you to condense 70,000 years of ancestral lineage, of continuous culture and creative practice, of complex totemic, skin and ceremonial systems complicated by 229 years of colonization, survival, government and social policy that continues to actively oppress your peoples and sovereignty into a two minute elevator pitch or marketing blurb, but make it exciting and make it accessible.’
The audience were in stitches of laughter but backstage listening I was moved to tears. I couldn’t see who was laughing and it made me think in weird and wonderful ways. How often has this been the truth? How long has it gone unspoken? And why are they laughing? I couldn’t see their faces and I was concerned.
Who is this audience and their connection to what is being said?
Why should this truth telling be read as humour?
Why should we think that these words are entertainment? And is the message really getting through?
When I asked Jacob about this he said it was the blakfullas laughing the loudest – he said, ‘I totally understand the point you are making but my experience post speech was one of brother and sisterhood from our mobs and guilt and mea culpa from the words of non-Indigenous mob who spoke to me and in the eyes of those who wouldn’t.’ It is without doubt that Jacob had hit his mark.
But these two stories still have clear lessons for me – deliver your ideas too seriously and your message will be washed away – deliver your ideas too flippantly and you run the risk of your message being washed away – have nothing to say and you will be washed away. The pressure to fit a mould not always of your own making.
It is a very Goldilocks position – not too much, not too little but just right – but these two stories remind me why I wanted to be in the arts in the first place.
I wanted to tell the stories that were not being told, I wanted to speak up and say the things that were hard to say, I wanted to call out injustice.
I was attracted to the power of storytelling to change the hearts and minds of a congregation and through them the world. The artist tells stories to make sense of the world, to give an emotional vocabulary for the human condition in all its extremity, to help remember our collective history, to shine a light, to expose creation.
Idealistic? Maybe, but isn’t it the role of the young, the stubbornly progressive and the artist to be ambitiously idealistic?
Alas, the young grow more reasonable with age, the stubbornly progressive collapse under the weight of too too much disappointment, but the artist must continue to have ambitions for their community, society and country. For why else do we exist if not to stay true and hold a firm belief in our purpose and power, to help shape the world as we would want it to be?
Each of us here will have a story of the moment we felt that power. When the thrill of the voice excited us enough to motivate a life-long vocation. This moment gives us strength and pure, clarifying thought. It is this moment we return to at our darker times when confidence flees and the doubts pile up to block out the sun.
Everyone feels like this at some point. I remember one such moment on the Opening Night of The Sunshine Club at the Opera House. I sat eating jellybeans catatonic with doubt and felt abandoned to my own fears. The kind of fear that only others can help you escape but equally stops you from reaching out to them.
There is a balance between the need for professional confidence and professional doubt. Too much confidence can make you arrogant, too much doubt can cripple you. Artists need to negotiate with their demons and their cheerleaders and somehow never fully believe either.
We have to believe we are making a difference in the world, no wonder we gravitate to like-minded people to bolster our personal emotional resources, collaborators who agree with us, audiences who get what we are about, the good reviewers not the bad ones. I’ll come back to this idea.It is our sense of purpose we must constantly return to as a guide.
Why do we exist and why are we storytellers? Everyone will have a different answer but I would be concerned if any of you were primarily motivated by celebrity, cash and feeling safe.
Why are you an artist? A writer? A director? A performer?
I can also ask the same question of an audience member… why do you pursue an artistic experience? Fame, money, emotional security? Or in fact the exact opposite of these things – to experience something new, to share moments with others, to feel part of a group, to enrich my life, to be lifted to a state of ecstasy through extreme beauty.There is no long term artistic purpose in being agreeable, liked, or lauded.
There is no long term value in just telling a society what it already knows. Artists interrogate the norms and show the familiar from a new angle, perhaps as a warning, a clarion call to change or as a deep observation of human behaviour.
This is as old as time – from Medea to Hedda Gabler, from the creation stories of Maroochy and Coolum to The Drover’s Wife. But, in recent years I have witnessed a growing timidity in our cultural leadership and I include myself in this statement. Too concerned with upsetting audiences, politicians, sponsors, donors, funders so much so that we have become timid in our role as storytellers.
Have we forfeited the field and now find ourselves hiding behind remakes of classics, experimentations in form and a too often self-congratulatory malaise of irony and sarcasm?
Have we lost touch with our responsibilities to the tribe?
Let me digress here for a second. Is it just me or are we seeing more homophobia, racism, sexism on our stages?
And more often than not written by homosexuals, blackfellas and women. I’ve sat in a number of shows in the past few years and asked myself: are all these people sitting around me, laughing in the dark, laughing because they recognise the situation and the truth of it or are they laughing out of a sense of comic ridicule of the scenario playing out?
Are we laughing with or at? Are we the audience of like-minded people who can see the craft of the writer and read the nuance of the extremity being played out?Or are there some amongst us who recognise themselves on stage and easily side with the racist character/statement/situation with a forgiving chuckle.
As I sit in the dark engulfed by the sea of white middle class urbania and feel the tide of my own discomfort ebb and flow, I am struck with the thought – what are they laughing at?
When confronted I have heard writers say, ‘Yes I’m telling racist jokes but I’m doing it ironically’, ‘Yes I’m using the trope of sexualised female characters but it’s a parody’, ‘ but the prejudiced position I’m using is sarcastic, I’m inciting debate and discussion.I don’t believe in what the characters are saying’.
Call me old fashioned but I reckon if you are not busying yourself deconstructing the status quo you are making a decision to unconsciously construct it.
Can an audience read the difference between the ironic use of racist jokes, stereotypes or rhetoric and flat out racist slurs? Sarcasm and irony are very dull tools to sharpen a political message.
Like with the speech from Jacob, I get that the words are dripping with irony and sarcasm because I am part of the in-crowd but if you are not ‘in on it’ are you receiving the intention of the artist?
We can all name shows where we have laughed because we are part of a crowd who get it. The fabulous works by Declan Green and Nakkiah Lui, two writers I adore and get excited as they twist and turn the stereotypes in the best escalations of farce and comedy.
But I am left with a gnawing question – what happens if the audience don’t understand our history; if they have emerged from under the leaf and can only see what is front of them and think this is the whole world?
I can hear the defences – we can’t go at the pace of the slowest, we can’t ignore the pre-existing body of work, audiences are smarter than that, we Trojan Horse our messages inside the comedy, or you have to give the people what they want.
I think there is a shrinking body of contemporary Australian work that is so bold as to express big ideas clearly through characters that are unambiguous about their thoughts on the world. We are seduced by the recrafting of a classic, the popular forms of comedy and music theatre, of well worn paths, the acceptable and legitimate.
I know that it’s not easy. God knows you talk with Patricia Cornelius, Alana Valentine and Stephen Sewell and they will attest to the difficulties of writing the powerful stories of importance to our country and then getting them in front of an Artistic Director let alone an audience.
But I can’t help thinking we are conveniently writing, not for the whole tribe and welcoming them in, but for the small number who already agree with us. Hiding small Easter Eggs in our works in a kind of literary wink to our peers.
I wonder if we have become accustomed to subverting our messages and burying them deep in things that make them acceptable, tame and palatable? And along the way shaping the taste of the audience to the point that they have become less interested in the artist’s voice, lost the stomach for risk, and so it becomes a self-serving cycle – we modulate our work to not offend the audience, the audience becomes less skilled at dealing with big ideas, we further bury our voice and so on and so on.
And those who are seeking the voice of the artist to help explain their world, the audience who crave big ideas to shape new thoughts, explore the edge of human experience are left disappointed.
This is a time to be brave before it is too late.
Where is the play about Treaty and Sovereignty in Australia?
Where are the new voices talking about feminism and inequity, where is the artistic work that will support the #metoo and Times Up actions? Climate change? Manus Island? The greater class divides growing in our country? The intergenerational burdens?
We all know of artists creating this work with heart and nuance and the rare examples of where they have found their way to the stage. Maybe we are caught in a cyclical trap of fashion where we merely tire of the companies, artists and works who strike out to make a difference.
We fund and defund, support and drop as we follow the next wunderkind, international trend or cause celebre. Like the politics of our era we are scared to express our values through our work.
We don’t talk about our core beliefs or the national cultural project we are involved in.
We get caught in the economic justifications for supporting artists and avoid discussions about intrinsic value and the millennia old role of the storyteller.
We let that deep history sit in the background and allow people to forget the importance of Art.
We have vacated the territory we inherited and we are to blame.
We are complicit through our self-censorship as well as the censorship of others.
The growing disrespect of story and storytellers is because we are not mounting the winning arguments. I can hear it – I think I’ve even said it at times – it won’t sell, no one wants to hear that story, you need to build your audience up first, isn’t that a little old fashioned, do you want to be known as that writer, politics is a background not a foreground in a good play.
We have been conditioned in ways to shrink ourselves and in many ways shrink the cultural voice of our nation. We have abandoned bravery in favour of bankability, we have accepted commercial precedent and formula rather than succeed in our responsibility to the tribe.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-popular, I am not suggesting we should perform our work alone in a room and expect the tribe to support us. Quite the opposite. We must fiercely pursue the popular – Vox Populi Vox Dei – but we must embrace the discomfort of a forward-thinking vision for a future rather than the comfort of an imagined nostalgia when the world was easier.
I can tell you the world is much easier for me and my family now than 50 years ago. Any nostalgia would never have included me.
At the extremes, I think producers look to the comfort of precedent, the reliability of what has gone before, what has worked, the power of recognition for an audience. It is more known, predictable, more calming. Producers will give importance to the managing of risk, sometimes minimising risk, some would like to totally remove risk. This means looking into the past, analysing data and finding a formula to predict a future.
But an artist lets history sit in our creative landscape and we stare out to the horizon. A good artist is connected to their community, in constant dialogue and through their work speaks an osmotic truth. Artists and creative thinkers are spending their time imagining new futures, new ways of being, new inventions. And as in industry, the ability to explore and fail is so powerful and more often than not antithetical to market forces.
Market forces can often create stagnation in the creative arenas and that is why research and development departments exist in large multinationals. Google spent close to $10 billion dollars on R&D in 2014 or 15% of their revenue; Tesla, Apple, Boeing all realise that market competitiveness means you have to invest in R&D.
Artists are the research and development department of a society. We are attracted to the most dramatic and energetic situations in a community and we seek to expose it, explore it … to go where no mere mortal would dare go, is too scared to go.
We live the contradiction of being outsiders and deeply embedded in our community.
We play a national role to give voice to the silent, provide visions of a future, help create vocabularies for change, and to use our time on this planet making it a better place.
We play a role that comes with this responsibility but are we playing that role adequately?
Artistic Directors are the unelected representatives of a Cultural Parliament and as such they have many constituents they are indebted to, but they are artists: their role is to champion the artistic pursuits of an organisation, represent the conversations of artists in a community but I am increasingly worried that these roles are being diluted and Artistic Directors are being pressured to abandon the brave in favour of commercial yardsticks.
I know it’s a balancing act but the weight of safety cannot be allowed to crush the natural artistic need to risk it all.
As a side bar, I am interested in the role of these collaborations/dramaturgy in the supporting of new works.
Like Jacob, I am keen to have strong Indigenous voices that reflect cultural and artistic authority. Artistic Directors are making choices to change the status quo or not and are empowered to do so or not.
On two occasions in the past five years I have heard of literary managers of large companies taking the credit for ‘dragging the play’ out of First Nations writers and shaping it into the success it had become. I found this attitude a bit patronising and it raises questions about how works are shaped by the collaborators you allow in.
Oodgeroo writes in her poem Assimilation No – ‘Pour your pitcher of wine into the wide river, And where is your wine? There is only the river’.
How are we and our works being shaped by the gatekeepers and the shifting corporate culture of our publicly supported arts companies?
The more commercially interested the companies become the more they are under pressure to shape a program of activities around precedent, risk avoidance and the vocal minority of the offended. They provide feedback and shape works with this knowledge and inadvertently nudge and cajole writers into a box not of their own making. Like a wine flavoured river.
Alana Valentine writes in her new book Bowerbird, published by Currency Press: ‘Bad feedback will try to suggest how to make the play more like the one the dramaturg would like to write. Good feedback asks what you were trying to do in that moment and tells you that you need to work harder, more creatively, to achieve it. Great feedback pinpoints a problem you can see straight away.’
I am not rejecting the support from others but I am growing concerned that there is a superficial embracing of diverse writers with distinct voices, in this case Indigenous writers, but then no wholesale cultural investigation of where the work comes from and where is the right home.
I fear the writers know exactly the answers but are never asked or the companies are too scared to ask for fear that what is a precarious acceptance be complicated by messy differences and the writers are caught in a complicity of gratitude.
It is easier to comply and be rewarded by the like-minded, many who will eventually pay to see your work on their stage.
Do collaborators weaken your resolve or strengthen it? To the point eventually we end up getting a banana flavoured milkshake. We learn to accept that it is what it says it is but once you taste the real thing you realise it isn’t really. That stuff never grew in the ground.
The unspoken contract between our communities and us as storytellers demands that we are intrinsically intertwined, that we are responsible to be the eyes and ears for the people who are affording us the time to see and hear, and to think and speak.
To be a popular voice for the nation that we are shaping and which shapes us.
To pursue the hard to do more than the easy to say.
To not be reduced to our politics but be emboldened by the political.
To find the form in the content of the story and encourage deeper understanding.
To avoid the indulgences and the self-congratulation of the coterie of the like-minded whilst protecting our honourable and history laden vocation – to be the storyteller of the tribe.
The last word here I wish to give to Aunty Kath. Like all storytellers everything is filtered through a prism of what makes a good story, what makes the memory stick. I was talking to a family member about my memory of that statement ‘That Tree is Me and I am that tree,’ and they pointed me to a poem simply called ?
Sometimes you realise you are standing on the shoulders of giants, or in my case sitting in the bow of a tree that has been growing for over 1000 generations with a view out to the horizon and an imagination that stretches back to a time before time.
My 40-year-old memory may have chosen to recast her words to my own purpose or perhaps I had written and rewritten the phrase as a personal mantra but here is her poem.
‘Hello Tree
Talk to me.
I’m sick
And lonely.‘Are you old?
Trunk so cold.
What secrets
Do you hold?‘Talk tree!
Can’t you see;
My troubles
Trouble me.‘Silent tree
Let me see
Your answers
ANSWER ME.‘Tree!
You dare
Question ME?
How dare you
Dare, question ME.’
Thank you.
12 June 2014, Hyatt Century Plaza, Los Angeles, USA
Oh God, I'm out in public. Hmm. Thank you, Shonda, so much. You are such a gift to all of us, and the writer that you are has changed me as an artist, so thank you for that. I want to thank my whole team that's here — I have some pretty badass women on my team and they're all here. And the awesome men who have the courage to work with badass women, thank you. It's really thrilling to be in the presence of tonight's other honorees, I'm humbled to be in a group that includes my sister, Eva [Longoria]. Jennifer [Lee] I am totally fangirling because Frozen is on rotation in my house, and I just love it, love it, love it. And Cate Blanchett, you know how much I respect and adore you, and appreciate your existence. And Rose [Bryne], I'm a huge fan. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan, and it's really amazing to be in your company — all of you. So, I want to tell on myself, because a dear friend of mine, Pat Mitchell, who herself is a badass woman in the business, having run PBS and the Payley Center for Media, she called me a few years ago, because she for a long time worked for TED. I don't mean like a guy, Ted, like, TED, that thing where people give speeches and you watch them.
She called and said, ‘I’m going to be running TED Women and I would love for you to speak.’ And I said, ‘You know, gosh, you know what, Pat, I really appreciate the invitation, but I just don’t know really what I would say, I’m not sure what my story would be, I think I should decline, and maybe when I’m ready I’ll come do that.’ And Pat said to me, ‘Kerry, I’ve worked with TED for a really long time. No man has ever said to me, I’m not ready to speak, but for TED Women you are part of a long list of women who have denied me by saying they’re not ready.’ And I realized that what that meant is that we as women put ourselves in this situation of feeling like we can’t take a risk, like in order to step out there we have to be perfect, because we’re scared that if we don’t say the right thing, or do the right thing, that we’ll reflect poorly on ourselves and our community, whether that community be women, people of color, both.
So sometimes, we don’t step out there. And I’m telling on myself, because I didn’t [speak], even after Pat said to me, ‘This is so unfortunate, this is so wrong, women have to feel comfortable speaking out and stepping up, and standing in their light, and owning their voice.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Good luck.’ I don’t do that often, but when I do, I know that it’s not good for me, and it’s not good for other women.
I work for a woman, Shonda Rimes, who [to Shonda, on stage] I'm going to talk about you like you're not here, who because of her courage to step into her light, and step up, and own her voice, has provided an opportunity for so many other women to soar, in front of and behind the camera. That's what happens when we step up for ourselves — we create opportunity, whether it's because we inspire other people or [points to Shonda] we employ other people or both. This award is named after Lucille Ball, an extraordinary woman in television, because she was an actor, a comedian, a director, a producer, a studio owner [chokes up]. It's an award for excellence, and so I'm going to take it home, and put it on my shelf as a reminder of what I should be striving for, which is excellence.
And as a reminder that I have to continue to step up [mic gives feedback]. That was the sign: 'Step up.' And I need to not be afraid, and we each need to not be afraid of taking those risks, that Cate [Blanchett] talked about. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable, to be flawed, to be imperfect, to own our voice, to step into our light, so that we can continue to inspire other people and employ other people, and make room for more and more voices and presence. I really want to thank each of you for being here tonight, for each of you who donated, not just because you got fancy gifts if you donated, but because you believe in the mission of Women in Film. So, I thank Women in Film, and I thank you, Shonda, and I just thank each of you for sharing in this extraordinary evening. And while I do love the word 'exceptional,' I hope that it is no longer exceptional very, very soon for women to do anything extraordinary in this business. Thanks.
29 January 2014, Houston, Texas, USA
Alright! Alright, everybody sit down. Oh, my goodness, oh. [mouths 'wow’]
Oh, you’re gonna make me cry!
Creating Change 2014, how are you feeling tonight?
[audience cheers]
I-I don’t know if I believe you. Creating Change 2014, how you feeling tonight!
[louder cheers]
Oh, jesus. I love you back! I love you back, baby, yes I do. Ima that, muah! I love you. I, I’d like to thank Cate Clinton for that lovely introduction, make some noise for Kate Clinton. And I’d like to thank everybody at the task force who made me being here possible tonight. Special shout-out to Daniel Pino, Mark Daley, Rea Carey, and recent hire at the Task Force brother Kylar Broadus—where is Kylar, is Kylar in the house? We love you Kylar Broadus, yes, yes we do!
Oh my god, this feels so amazing, all this love that you’re giving me tonight, I have—I have to say that a black transgender woman, from a working class background, raised by a single mother—that’s me—getting all this love tonight, this feels like the change I need to see more of in this country.
Cornel West reminds us, you’ve heard me say this a billion times, but justice is what love looks like in public, and this feels so just right now, yes. But– but I have to tell you, I have to tell you that I am not used to receiving this kind of love, everybody. I’m not used to it.
I’m, I’m trying, you know, some days [laughs] some days I wake up and I’m that three-, four-, five-; twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kid in Mobile, Alabama who was bullied. Some days I wake up and I’m, I’m that kid who’s being chased home from school practically every day by groups of kids who wanted to beat me up because I did not act the way that people who are assigned male at birth are supposed to act.
Some days I wake up and I’m that sixth grader who swallowed a bottle of pills because I did not want to be myself anymore because I did not know how to be anybody else. And who I was, I was told was a sin, a problem, and I didn’t want to exist. Some days I wake up and I am that black, trans woman walking the streets of New York City hearing people yell, That’s a man, to me.
And I understand, I’ve come to understand that when a trans woman is called a man, that is an act of violence.
Some days I, I wake up and I am just a girl who wants to be loved, but I was told on more than one occasion by a man who told me that he loved me that he could not be seen in public with me, could not introduce me to friends and family because I am trans, and not only because I am trans, because people can tell I am trans. I am not passable enough by certain standards.
Some days I wake up and I don’t feel good enough. Because I’ve heard that over and over again. I’ve heard it from men I’ve dated, I’ve heard it from members of my own community who told me that I am not passable enough, that I should not go and get surgery for this and that and then I will be an acceptable trans woman.
Some days, I wake up and I have heard about another one of my transgender sisters who has been assaulted, raped, murdered.
[scattered shouts]
And there’s no justice.
Amen.
There will be justice.
Some days I wake up and it is just too much. It is too much to deal with, it’s too–there’s too much pain, there’s too much cultural trauma around being who I am. But. But then I think, I think we are a resilient people, I think about so many people—[applause] Yes. So many people who’ve come before me who made me being on this stage possible, people like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
[cheering]
People like Miss Major.
[cheers]
People like Monica Roberts, Kylar Broadus.
People like Candice Cayne, who in 2007 became the first trans woman to have a recurring role on a primetime TV show. I would not be here without Candice Cayne.
And in the face of so much injustice, we are a resilient people. We are a fierce people. We are a beautiful people. I– I am so blessed, this past year I’ve gotten to- to meet so many people in our community. I’ve traveled across the country, and I, one major event for me happened last year in March, in Chicago.
[cheering]
Chicago’s in the house?
And it was the first ever Trans 100. The realization of the dream of Antonia D'Orsay and Jen Richards—and I think they’re here tonight, yeah? How you doing. Love you.
And-and it was so powerful being in the room with , in in an event created by and for trans people—what we were celebrating each other, doing it for ourselves. It was major for me, it– it shifted my thinking about who I am and what is possible, and I, and I found out about Chicago House TransLife Center. If you don’t know about Chicago House’s TransLife center, you need to find out. They’re doing amazing work, amazing amazing work.
There are so many folks doing amazing work all over this country. I got to meet Ruby Corado last year. She is the founder of Casa Ruby in Washington D.C., and she does, she does amazing outreach to the trans, specifically the trans Latina, communities, and– and Ruby is doing this work with so few resources but a lot of love and a lot of resilience. Now there’s a lot of people in this room tonight that might have some access to some resources that Ruby could use. There, so Ruby’s right there so you need to go in and talk to Ruby. She needs– she needs the money to keep doing this powerful work, the—
[cheering]
The reality– the reality is there are a lot of amazing people who are unsung, trans people who are unsung doing incredible work all over this country. I, um, many of you know that I had the pleasure of spending some time with a woman by the name of CeCe McDonald.
As many of you know, CeCe is now free.
For those of you who don’t know, CeCe McDonald is a beautiful, vibrant, brilliant African American transgender woman who on June 5th 2011 was just walking down the street with a group of her friends. And she heard racist slurs, anti-trans slurs, anti-gay slurs. And a fight broke out, and one of her attackers ended up dead. White supremacist, by the way, he had swastika tattoos on his chest. And CeCe was arrested on the spot, the only person arrested that night, and CeCe had a glass slashed in her face, her salivary gland was severed, she was bleeding, defending herself because she refused to be a statistic.
In this room, we are all familiar with the unfortunate statistics of the homicide rate of trans women in our community. It’s the highest—over 53% of GBTQ homicides in 2012 were trans women; 73% were people of color. But CeCe said, I will not go out like that.
And I have had the pleasure not only of meeting CeCe but of meeting the people who, who made us aware of CeCe’s story. CeCe had an amazing support team—Katie Burgess, um, EdTyson[?], the Trans Support Network in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Billy, um, near—I can’t think of Billy’s last name [laughs] [shout from audience]— thank you, Billy Navarro! Billy’s gonna kill me— and Billy Navarro and so many others on CeCe’s support staff who, who made sure that CeCe, while she was incarcerated, was not going to be disappeared.
Billy said something really powerful to me – we’re making a documentary about CeCe McDonald, and about the culture of violence against trans women, and when I spoke to Billy for the first time, Billy said to me about the, the media coverage of CeCe in the beginning of her case, said the media was upset because CeCe had the audacity to survive.
And– and trans women of color are not supposed to survive. We so often, so often people seem to prefer us to be dead. We have our Transgender Day of Remembrance, where it seems like one of the few times where people seem to speak the names of trans women– usually trans women and trans women of color.
And CeCe survived. And there are so many survivors out there, but CeCe’s survival and and her , her resilience was made possible because – because she was brilliant and she was amazing and she lead her support team in a, in an amazing way. But it was also possible because of the work of grassroots activists in Minneapolis Minnesota.
If it were not for those activists, we would— the story of CeCe Mcdonald would be what mainstream media wanted to tell us about her. They made sure we knew the real story. They made sure that we knew that CeCe was attacked because she was black, because she was trans, because she was a woman. And that she was railroaded by the criminal justice system because of all those things.
They’re doing amazing work in Minneapolis, but it’s with very few resources. They can use some resources in Minneapolis, Minnesota, too.
…After interviewing CeCe for the first time I, I visited her in when she was still incarcerated, in November of last year. And it was really emotional for me, but my biggest takeaway from the whole experience is that, I said to Jack Garress[?], my director, um, for the documentary—CeCe knows that she’s loved. It was so powerful to me that she would have such a positive and upbeat attitude considering everything that she has gone through.
She was – she was like my character on Orange Is the New Black, she was denied the proper dosage of hormones. And she advocated for herself, her supporters on the outside advocated for her, and she got the correct dosage.
On three different occasions, she was placed in solitary confinement, which is the practice for housing trans people far too often when they are incarcerated, but she advocated for herself and people on the outside advocated for her and got her out of solitary confinement.
For me, the way in which CeCe advocated for herself and the way in which her support community advocated for her is a template for how we can do activism all over this country. And it started, it started with CeCe, and it started with her having this profound sense of love for herself that everyone around her felt. Everybody I talked to who’s come in contact with CeCe talks about this woman who inspired them and who had so much hope and propelled them to have hope to and to fight for her behalf. Love, for a black trans woman, freed her, and kept her safe on the inside. Loving trans people, I believe, is a revolutionary act.
[cheering]
And I believe when we love someone, we respect them, and we listen to them, we feel that their voice matters. And- and we let them dictate the terms of who they are and what their story is.
[cheering]
Now, now, um, Kate Clinton mentioned uh—an interview that I did on this show, on the Katie Couric show? [cheers] And, for me, that moment was a really amazing example of creating change.
[applause]
And I only want to take partial credit for it [laughs]. It was Carmen Carrera saying that [cheering]— Carmen Carrera insisting that there are certain things about her that are private, that trans bodies are not to be subject to everyone’s gaze, [cheering and applause] and and objectification.
And I was so happy and honored to be able to have her back, on national television. Trans women supporting and loving each other is a revolutionary act.
[cheering]
Someone tweeted to me—my dear friend Janet Mock—y'all know Janet Mock? Her book Redefining Realness comes out Tuesday, I hope you all pre-ordered it. It’s major. But Janet and I were tweeting each other, and and I, I support her and love her and she’s shown similar lonve and support of me, and someone tweeted hashtag-the-scarcity-model-is-a-myth, that, that that we don’t need to be fighting each other for resources. There is enough to go around.
There is enough spotlight to go around if we love each other, and if– and if we remain teachable. I think that the biggest thing about the Katie Couric moment is that she did a follow-up on that Friday, saying that that moment was a teachable moment for her. And many of us have watched, for my entire life I’ve watched television, and watched folks interview trans people and ask all these invasive questions. I’ve been asked these questions on television before. But never before have I seen, in mainstream media, a discussion about what is appropriate and not appropriate to ask trans people.
[cheers]
And that is the change. That is a change, that is a change that we really really need. We can set the conversation. Jennifer Finney Boylan, she tweeted to me that for the first time we are setting the agenda for how our stories should be told. In mainstream media. Because we’ve been doing it for a long time, it just hasn’t gone mainstream—right?
And I want to let you know that it is because of you that the change happened. It wasn’t just about Carmen and me. It was about all of the tweets, and the blogs that you wrote, and the articles that you wrote and the radio shows you went on to talk about it afterwards and the other TV shows you went on and said, this is not acceptable.
And this is not to demonize Katie Couric, I love Katie Couric, but Katie Couric was just following the lead of so many journalists and talk show hosts over the years. For the past sixty years since Christine Jorgensen stepped off the plane, the conversation about trans people and mainstream media has centered on transition and surgery. And even when there are humanizing moments, that the, it is my contention that the transition and surgery conversation becomes the big take-away, becomes the sensational moment, and our humanity is left in the dust. And so much of the injustice that too many of us experience is not talked about.
We are changing the conversation right now.
[cheers and applause]
I- I am so happy to be a working actor, I mean it’s just [laugh] it’s a big deal. And on Orange Is the New Black, I play an incarcerated trans woman who, who is in prison because um, she… stole some credit cards. To finance her transition. Healthcare for trans people is a necessity.
[cheering]
It is not elective, it is not cosmetic, it is life-saving.
[cheering]
But we are more than our bodies. [from audience: “Yes!”]
We are more than our bodies. The criminalization of trans people is, is so pervasive in this culture. CeCe McDonald’s case is one example, and I am sure many of you are aware of a sixteen-year-old girl in California by the name of Jewlyes Gutierrez. Sixteen years old and, and was bullied like so many transgender youth; 78% of trans youth in grades K-12 experience harassment and bullying in school. Seventy-eight percent—that is unacceptable.
And after being taunted over, and over, and over again, Jewlyes defended herself. She and the, and the folks who bullied here were all suspended, but the District Attorney decided he would arrest her for assault.
For being bullied and defending herself. And she is the only one arrested, this—this pisses me off.
[noise and cheering from audience]
There is a system in place which seeks to make trans people, particularly trans people of color, disappear. And part of that is the criminal justice system.
I live in New York City now where there’ve been a lot of conversations about the stop-and-frisk policy and reforming it, but there really hasn’t been enough talk about how that policy affects trans people, particularly trans women of color.
Trans women are far too often profiled as sex workers and arrested, if they have more than one condom in their purse. This is a practice that happens all over the world. Criminalized simply for wearing a short skirt in the wrong neighborhood.
That shit is fucked up.
But that is part of a larger culture which assumes that trans people are illegitimate, that we are fake, that we are always and only the gender that we were assigned at birth. Arizona tried to criminalize going to the bathroom for transgender people. [noise from audience] Amen. Give it up! That was stopped.
But these are the fights that we have to wage every day just to, just have a sense of, of legitimacy. But we are resilient people, and we’re strong, and there are so many of you creating that change right here, right now, and back in your home cities. I'm—I'm—wow. [deep breath]
[shots from audience of “We love you!” and then cheering]
I love you back. I really do, you really don’t know, it’s just– [deep breath]
It really is a big deal to, to have this kind of support, um, being who I am and, and I hope it, I want everybody to get this, I want everybody to get this kind of love, I want to spread it around. I want to spread it around, I-I want to close by um, talking about a dear friend of mine, um, Jeremiah Johnson, who’s here somewhere. He is a brilliant AIDS activist and we were um, I has having a little freakout about my talk here tonight earlier today, and we were sitting in my hotel room chatting, and Jeremiah reminded me that he and I have these really difficult conversations across difference. Jeremiah is, is HIV-positive, and um, he reminded me that we’ve had difficult conversations where I didn’t exactly know what was the right thing to say to him, as an HIV-positive person, and he has not always known what the right thing to say to me, as a trans woman, but we still have the conversations. And we have them—
[applause]
We have those conversations with love, and with empathy, and, and with a desire to get to a level of understanding that we didn’t have before. And we want to support each other, and we want to be there for each other.
And I believe these are the kinds of conversations that we need to have more of in our community, where we are really there for each other across difference, because we are all LGBTQ, queer, you know, we have, but we have all these differences. We have so much that, that we have in common, but we have so many ways that make us different. And we can have conversations across those differences with love, and empathy, and vulnerability.
And so as we embark on creating change 2014, I want to, to, to send a lot of love to each and every one of you and, and implore you to have conversations over the next few days with love towards one another and, and yourselves
You know the whole , I want to say the whole self-love thing has always been kind of baffling to me, I’ve always been like love myself, how the heck am I supposed to do that! And, and I believe now I’m starting to understand, a little bit of what it means—that I don’t internalize all the negative things and negative stereotypes that people have about trans women of color. I don’t do that number on myself anymore. I don’t– [cheering] I don’t date men anymore who are ashamed to be seen in public with me. [more cheering]
I am starting to believe that in the deepest core of myself, that I am beautiful, I am smart, I am amazing.
[THE CHEERING]
And I want to give that to each and every one of you because you are beautiful, smart, and amazing. Happy Creating Change 2014, I love you all!
Thank you so much!
17 October 2011, Four Seasons Hotel, Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA
…But what keeps me in the business is hope. And that’s the hope that women of color are also a part of the narrative, that our stories are just as potent because we also have the power of transformation. We also have the power to be quirky and sexy and different, funny, heartfelt, all of those things and I consider it to be larger purpose in life that keeps me in the business.
My mother has an 8th grade education and she started having children and got married at 15. Her mother got married at 15 and had babies – 18 children. My mom had 6. And she had all of her children in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother gave birth to all of us. And I happen to think that my mom’s story is very interesting and those are the stories I want to see on screen just as much as anybody else’s story. I always say I want to be Meryl Streep. And I believe and I really hope that we have the imagination and the courage to bring those stories to life because I want to do for other young women of color what Cicely Tyson did for me in that apartment with the slats showing the plaster and the bad plumbing and no phone and hardly any food and rats — is that she allowed me to have the visual of what it means to dream.
When I saw her in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman she threw me a rope and that’s what we do as performers, as actors, as icons we throw other people rope. And that’s what keeps me in it. And I stand in solidarity with everybody in this room sending a telepathic message to you every time some young actress of color comes into the room with a character they are auditioning for that’s not ethnically specific that you have a space in your brain that could open up and embrace them and allow them in because I’m telling you their lives are just as fascinating and multifaceted.
23 November 2008, American Music Awards, Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles, USA
From the man who said in a 2013 magazine interview " I am Warhol. I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh. Walt Disney. Nike. Google ..."
I'd like to thank everybody who accepted me trying to break new boundaries and music.
I wake up in the morning and just think about what stereotypes I'm gonna break.
Um you know we pushed the envelope, with the last album, with ‘Stronger’, with a record they thought wouldn't play on urban radio. And it's our responsibility as musicians to keep pushing each other and keep competing with each other. It's a really great competition. I see artists like Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Chris Martin all in the same room. And we're going to push music to the point where it was like in the 60s in the 70s where you talk about Led Zeppelin and Hendrix and The Beatles - we will be the new Beatles, the new Hendrix.
They say in any other industry, you're supposed to do better than the past, like computers should get smaller, and faster. But whenever you say, 'I want to be Elvis' they say, 'what's wrong with you?'
Well I want to be Elvis.
