A Tribute to Brian
Tribute to Brian at the website of John's Place restaurant in Victoria BC.
Remembering Brian
Great profile remembering Brian on the blog of the University of Victoria Fine Arts department, where Brian taught.
Article in Victoria Times-Colonist about Brian and The Beauty of Certainty
Thanks to Michael D. Reid for this profile on Brian and the documentary.
Beauty of Certainty Interview Transcript #1
To shoot Beauty of Certainty, Brian and I spent a day together just walking around Vancouver and talking. Sometimes we set up and shot while we were talking, and sometimes we just talked. I had prepared a list of questions which gave us a framework for the day. Some of the questions were pretty tough. Questions I can't really imagine having the gall to ask anyone else. But Brian was fearless.
As Brian says in the documentary, he was on a hardcore health regime at the time, but without even really discussing it we stopped at corner store and bought some cigars for the day. I was a bad influence, I guess.
Anyway, we walked and talked and shot until we lost the light and all my batteries were dead.
I thought that you might like to see the transcripts from our interviews. Obviously we covered many more topics at a deeper level than was possible to capture in a watchable documentary. You can see that in the transcripts.
So, here is the first transcript. We had set up at an outdoor cafe at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I have edited these for readability and to make us both look smarter. I'll post more.
Beauty of Certainty Interview Transcript #1
CLIP: ART GALLERY P1180471
TIMECODE 00:00:00 BRoll of Brian outside with his dog, at a cafe table, drinking coffee.
BRICK: All right. Well, anytime you’re ready.
BRIAN: Okay. I’m going to start now with question number one, which is what has it been like having cancer in my life for the last six years?
My initial answer to that is that it’s been a blessing. And I say that because of what I experienced when I was first diagnosed six years ago Halloween. When I got the news I went out to the backyard and took a deep breath and felt this ridiculous sense of peace that I hadn’t felt since I was a child. I realized that from this moment forward all I had to accomplish of the 700 things that come into my mind every day, is stay alive.
So the diagnosis gave me that. But of course it’s illusive because you can’t stay in that zone forever. But, it gave me a sense of being present that does stay with me everyday. And I realized that I was well armed for this. I had written about the beauty of uncertainty, about how it prepares us to face life in the face of death. I had written about Carl Jung and his statement that most people spend the first half of their lives afraid to live and the second half of their lives afraid to die.
So, there I was at fifty, in the dark woods and suddenly having a chance to really confront and overcome my fear of death. That also led me to new levels of compassion and empathy for other people. Everyone has his or her equivalent of my situation in some way. And mine was just an opportunity to step it up and to get better at who I am and to live more fully as well. To live unencumbered by fear and the things that a fifty-year-old man would normally be thinking about.
So obviously its has been filled with all kind of nuances and ups and downs. But overall I’m literally the guy who’s going say, if I could go back six years ago to Halloween and get a different diagnosis . . . of course I would, knowing what I know now.
But, I really wouldn’t, because the things I’ve gained through having cancer, can’t be attained any other way.
BRICK: Nice. Excellent.
END OF CLIP
CLIP: ART GALLERY P1180473
TIMECODE 00:03:39:00
BRIAN: So getting back to this topic of my experience having cancer for the last six years now. And, being given an opportunity to prepare for things that otherwise I wouldn’t have been at all prepared for. And perhaps deconstruct and dismantle things that I had been building that no longer really had any direct purpose.
I always like the line by Orson Welles: I made it to the top of the ladder and found it was against the wrong wall. It stopped me in my tracks, because without even really knowing it, this had happened to me. I had so much on the go at the university. You know, I was fourteen years into nonstop teaching. I was surrounded by, literally hundreds, thousands of students that, that I was kind of living off of their energy and supplying that energy. And building these fires of enthusiasm and inspiration.
I had written this screenplay with KT Tunstall that, you know, was kind of floating. And, at any given time, I thought maybe something exciting was going to happen with it. At Hobo Magazine, I had done some good interviews with Philip Seymour Hoffman. And so, I was kind of at that point where there was that part of me that was fulfilling my dreams of all the stuff that I thought was cool and important and kind of fed into my image of myself.
And then I got the cancer diagnosis. As a matter of fact, it happened the very same day that I got an offer to move to Philadelphia and, do some film work there at my old alma mater. And uh, the fact that the—
END OF CLIP
CLIP: ART GALLERY P1180475
TIMECODE 00:05:57:00
BRICK: All right. Anytime.
BRIAN: So yeah.
BRICK: So here’s the question. A consistent theme with you is that you seem to have these periods where everything is going really well and you’re fully engaged, but then you seem to get fatalistic, and convinced that it will all end – and not only end, but end horribly. I mean, is that . . .
BRIAN: Yeah, it’s kind of uncanny. I almost have a sense of humor about it. Like I hope that really good things don’t come my way because I know something bad will follow. When I interviewed Ethan Hawke for Hobo Magazine, he said he experiences the same thing. I was just rereading that interview I did with him. He married Uma Thurman. He had all this great stuff going on. His life was at its very best. And he just had this sense of dread that something was coming down the pipe, and sure enough, that was the case.
So just recently again, I started thinking like this. You know it’s like I almost was keeping myself uh under wraps because I thought if I get too excited and too inspired about something then it could encourage this other force to come. But, having said that . . .
BRICK: I was going to say, one way you seem to be different than other people is that your fatalism doesn’t seem to temper your enjoyment of the upswing. While the great stuff is happening you’re not like, “oh this is going to be terrible because it is going to end.” Instead, you’re fully enjoying the ride.
BRIAN: I’m fully enjoying the ride and in some way I get even more excited when bad things happen. There is almost this subconscious thing that happens. Like you want to feel that level of risk or that level of like urgency.
I used to tell my classes about the guy who was stuck in the crevasse in Arizona desert and had to cut his arm off to free himself. And then he wrote a book called of course, Between A Rock And A Hard Place. And he went on the inspirational speaking tour. I have no idea whether he’s as blessed as he says he is. But he was adamant about the fact that cutting off his arm was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. Just being alive was the most important thing.
So, I used to ask my classes, how can we get to where this guy is without having to cut our arms off?
And you know, maybe the answer is there are no shortcuts.
Maybe some people just have a bigger appetite for life than others. But in a perverse kind of way, or in a whatever kind of way, I do feel the most blessed and the most alive, and maybe the happiest when I’m up against things that most people would consider to be absolutely the worst thing that could happen to them.
BRICK: So, what do you think you’d be doing now if you hadn’t gotten the cancer diagnosis six years ago?
BRIAN: Wow, yeah. Such a good question. I don’t know. I have no way of knowing. I guess I would still be at the university fighting the fight there. I probably would not have become quite as controversial or radical in my teaching method of totally handing the whole thing over to the students. And maybe I would have conformed into more of a tenured type position where I’d be spending most of my time still golfing. And having less and less interest but doing a decent job. Worrying about not having enough money for retirement. Trying to pay off the mortgage. Hopefully I would have figured out ways to look after my health better. Because when I get obsessed with my health, I go crazy and I do things like give up my car. I run. I canoe, I ski, I golf. I go to the gym everyday. I used to do that in the winters but then, never really had the consistency to keep that going.
BRICK: What are the downsides?
BRIAN: One big one would be intimacy with Sandy. The hormone treatments have basically taken away my libido and my testosterone. So, I can get used to that, and in some ways you don’t miss what you don’t have. But Sandy has obviously been robbed a normal kind of intimacy that we might be enjoying otherwise.
Also a sense of, whether you want to call it guilt, or just a sense of remorse and sadness that, at any moment, my kids or my parents or my friends or my brothers and sisters have to worry about their own health, their own mortality, their own chance of getting cancer. Or just a sense of knowing what I would feel if I was going to lose my dad or if I was going to lose my son of course.
Perhaps it is more appropriate to be sad than it is to be seize the day and think "how exciting it is to have cancer.” Because it’s really not that exciting. But you know, wherever there’s darkness, there’s light and the light becomes . . .
END OF CLIP
“Follow your bliss. Imagine. Seek the high road. Know thyself. Embrace the earth. Stay awake. I welcome you to the journey and to the beauty of uncertainty.
- Brian Hendricks, “The Beauty of Uncertainty,” 2005”
The Beauty of Un/Certainty - Origins of the Title
When I stumble across art that I love, I want to know everything about it. I'm not going to wax nostalgic about poring over CD liner notes because who wants to hear that and besides CD liner notes were pretty shitty compared to the kind of "relationships" we can have to our favorite artists today and besides if I am going to invoke fake nostalgia I should use LP instead of CD although LPs were before my time. That's how not old I am.
I'm going to share some background info on The Beauty of Certainty. Some of you might find it interesting. If you don't enjoy it, then go read one of those manipulative click bait listicles on Upworthy that I won't even justify with a hyperlink. Are you gone? Ok cool.
Of course there is the whole other argument that you are supposed to let the art speak for itself and be all cool and minimalist when it comes to the project and sure that is fine, but I am thinking about this stuff and it is interesting to me and isn't that what the long tail is all about, doing things that are interesting to you?
The brilliant Joe Peeler suggested The Beauty of Certainty as the title for this project. We were midway through editing, and my working title was Life Expectancy. I thought this was a clever pun, i.e., Brian is talking about how long he has to live, and Brian is also someone that expects a lot from life - he expects life to be meaningful and profound and maybe even magical.
During the editing process I shared a piece of Brian's writing called The Beauty of Uncertainty with Joe. It is reprinted below. It was an editorial Brian had written for Hobo Magazine while he was the associate editor there (2002-2007, 2009-2012). It was a seminal and influential piece that readers really responded to as a kind of mantra. Search for the title online and you will see the evidence.
Brian uses an elliptical, stream-of-consciousness writing style in the piece, which makes it difficult to easily summarize, but in effect the message seems to be that happiness can only be found by embracing the uncertainty of life. This is the foundation of many philosophical and spiritual practices - learning that you are not in control, so you can either hate that, bear that, or embrace that.
The title of this project, then, is kind of a reaction to that philosophy. Or perhaps a logical extension of it. Only one thing is certain: death. There is a certain kind of clarity, insight, and truth in accepting or embracing that certainty, as we see Brian attempting to do in the documentary.
The Beauty Of Uncertainty
Brian Hendricks
February 2005
““Doubt is not a pleasant situation, but certainty is absurd.””
People with missing children. Children without parents. People without food or water. There are many who are destroyed by not knowing what the future holds. For those of us more fortunate, the beauty of uncertainty is that it motivates us to seek certainty. We are compelled to replace doubt with conviction, to replace confusion with clarity, to be more fearful of old ideas instead of new ones.
Nothing is more disparaged than the person who is lost, hesitant, and anxious. Yet the true path to fulfillment comes from these conditions. Uncertainty becomes truly beautiful when connected with the certainty that there is a better life beyond the life that is known. The artist, scientist, entrepreneur, athlete, and traveller: all embrace uncertainty as their muse. What is going to happen next is more enticing than what is happening now. The thrill of anticipation, the mystery of the unknown, the open road, mistakes as portals of discovery, the inevitability of change, purpose from chaos, questions leading to answers, failure as the threshold of knowledge. All of these conditions inform the life of the adventurer, the human being who is engaged in becoming. The beauty of uncertainty is that it prepares us to embrace life in the face of death. Allows us the strength to deal with the freedom to choose. To willingly exchange the fear of uncertainty for the security of certainty is to admit defeat. To surrender to the fear of actually living your life. As T. S Eliot observed, “Where is the life we have lost in living?” Nothing moves forward except by the craving to seek certainty from uncertainty.
“For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.”
We are prone to fear. The world is a mass of confusion. Traditions are ridiculed. Mythologies are forgotten. True freedom is a curse. Natural disasters are unnaturally common. Celebrities have replaced heroes. Ideals have been replaced by images. Many are running scared and only too willing to embrace the forces that offer a respite from the winds of change. What can we believe in? God, country, ourselves? What can we be certain about? Death, decay, oppression? What are we willing to risk, defend, support and dream? What would we like to be certain of: life span, love life, finances, and security? Can we gain anything without giving something up? Is there faith without risk? If you knew without question what was going to happen next, would there be any real satisfaction in it happening? The greater the risk, the greater the faith. Embracing uncertainty is to say yes to life: to say yes to the death and destruction, the success and failure, the tragedy and the triumph. Lord Byron said that the great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain. The beauty of uncertainty is that it allows us to overcome our fear. It allows us to take risks so we can experience faith. A life without uncertainty is the end of the imagination; the death of the imagined; the negation of faith.
“I think the main reason I travel, if I were to sum it up in one word, is for ambiguity.”
Why are the least informed so certain and the thinkers so full of doubt? Our culture is a business and we are the shareholders. We strive to maximize our profits, to eliminate ambiguity in favour of certainty. What is the film we all want to see, what is the book we all want to read, who is the icon we all want to emulate? How can we be different yet all be the same? Amuse us. Distract us. Assure us. Guide us. Tell us what to do and how to do it. Let Martha Stewart design our kitchen, Dr. Phil will raise our kids, Dreamworks will provide our narratives, and ad execs will supply our thoughts. Where can we even find true ambiguity in a world of invented certainty? Who’s dreams are we dreaming? We travel to experience ambiguity. To remind ourselves of the diversity of landscape and the spontaneity of existence. To feel the sheer exhilaration of a new experience. To remind ourselves of the endless possibilities that our lives consist of. The journey we are on is fraught with difficulty. No one here gets out alive. We are constantly challenged to perform, to succeed, to overcome our difficulties and win the race. We come to realize that performance itself answers the challenge. That life is ultimately defined by our difficulties. The race is won in the opportunity to run it. The beauty of uncertainty is that it is ambiguous and ambiguity encourages us to create, search, explore, and to travel. As one of us once said, “When you are tired of change, you are weary of life itself.”
“It’s one thing to be certain. But you can be certain and be wrong.”
The world has never been more chaotic despite assurances that the situation is under control. The only thing under control is the manipulation of perception. Global warming is a scare tactic. None of George’s friends are getting rich from Middle East oil. Freedom is America’s greatest export. Baghdad will get its Disneyworld. Let’s not quibble over details like weapons of mass destruction. Osama Bin Laden? Axis Of Evil? Crusades? The American Presidential election was a victory of certainty over uncertainty. Tell us what we want to hear and we will follow you. The message was there is little beauty in uncertainty. That uncertainty is ugly, and dangerous, and destructive. We must have resolve. We must kill or be killed. You are either with us or against us. Confusion is a luxury we can’t afford. The religious right is never wrong. Give us your fear of the unknown and we will turn it into the security of the known. Go back to sleep where you will be safe under the intoxication of your agreeable illusions. If you shine a flashlight in a dark room there is light everywhere the flashlight is pointed. We live in a world wherein we are compelled to follow whoever is handling the flashlight. We ignore the reality of the darkness that exists wherever the light is absent. The darkness is the uncertainty and the light is the beauty that helps us overcome it. But we need to hold the flashlight ourselves and recognize that the darkness exists. The people who are selling us certainty can indeed be wrong. As Goethe said, “When ideas fail, words take over.” The beauty of uncertainty is it allows ideas to cultivate and grow and hopefully transcend the tyranny of the untested word.
“Man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
The recent tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Thousands killed, millions displaced. Entire villages gone forever. Unparalleled uncertainty. Where is the beauty to be found here? How limited our vocabulary becomes when confronted with the often devastating forces of nature. All perspective is lost. Better to remain mute than to scream obscenities at the storm. But perhaps the beauty is to be found in the stories of the survivors? In the stories of people helping people. The rich helping the poor. Christians embracing Muslims. Warships dispensing medicine instead of missiles. Already we have witnessed one of the most humane and heroic aid operations in world history. Unprecedented acts of compassion and generosity. Combatants have paused in their battlefields to reflect on their own inadequacy in killing fellow human beings in comparison to this subtle shift of the earth’s weight. Will this holocaust of uncertainty lead to the resolve necessary to eliminate the disparity between the first world and the third? Will we gain the wisdom necessary to create a future rather than add to the destruction? Hopefully we will stay reminded of how fragile life can be. Learn to appreciate what we have, instead of what we think we need. Realize we are all in this together. Recognize the unparalleled beauty that comes out of unparalleled devastation. Our thoughts and tears go out to those who have lost everything and everyone. There is no one to blame. We can only accept the uncertainty and continue on.
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”
Living with uncertainty. Who reads us? What do we have to say? Why are we compelled to say it? Who is willing to advertise with us? Who wants to come on board and travel with us into the future? What makes us think the world needs another magazine and are we even a magazine? William Blake said, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Let’s hope so. We venture into 2005 with the hope that Oscar Wilde was just being facetious when he observed that it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. We have gathered some writers, photographers, thespians, models, artists, thinkers, and people of the planet who have contributed to and therefore have an understanding of the beauty of uncertainty. We welcome the chameleon prowess of actress Naomi Watts. We revisit the diverse film worlds of “Barfly” and Jean Luc Godard’s “Notre Musique”. We travel to the realm of the grizzly bear and the enigmatic landscapes within Ibiza and Japan. World music is celebrated with profiles of Feist, John Frusciante, and Donovan Frankenreiter. The life of the artist is appreciated through encounters with Seu Jorge and Joana Preiss. Fashion takes us to the west coast of British Columbia. Hobo continues to travel to mapped regions of the known world in pursuit of evidence that curiosity will conquer fear as much as courage will. We venture into unrecorded areas of the imaginary world to ascertain that life isn’t about finding yourself - life is about creating yourself. We don’t want to live in a world that is so small we can comprehend it. We collectively welcome you to the magic of the mysterious and the infinity of the unknown.
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
Follow your bliss. Imagine. Seek the high road. Know thyself. Embrace the earth. Stay awake. Hobo welcomes you to the journey and to the beauty of uncertainty.