Dancing Badly Transcript (043)

TERRY ROWLANDS, opening in full-on Irish: Dia daoibh, is mise Traoach O’Rotlain agus tá mé ag caint sibh as Baile Átha Cliath in Éirinn. [Hello, I’m Terry Rowlands and I’m speaking to you from Dublin in Ireland]—and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. When President Biden recently visited Ireland, he explained that he quotes Irish poets as often as he does because he believes our poets are the greatest poets. While he may not be wrong about that, the U.S. definitely does have some pretty good podcasts, and you’re listening today to one of my favourites. Stay tuned for Pete’s conversation with the Grammy-award-winning and multi-talented performance artist Rinde Eckert, and enjoy the show! 

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show …

RINDE ECKERT: What happened for me—which was the larger issue—was that all of this stuff became a metaphor for everything else I was doing.

[VO]: Rinde Eckert, an award-winning artist who has been reconsidering the basics of performance:

RINDE: Every instrument is the same way: Let the instrument tell you when it’s time. But first it’s establish integrity. Always try to play with integrity … and what is integrity? Then you have to ask, “What is integrity?” Well, integrity is the wedding of intention with action.

[VO]: He shares some of his strategies for engaging the humility of the Beginner’s Mind.

RINDE: We would do this thing where I would have them dance, and then I’d say, “I want you to dance badly.” They have to think about What is dancing badly? So already they’re in their bodies in a very different way, because they’re not thinking about the model of dancing. They’re now thinking about How do I contort myself? What’s my relationship to the rhythm?

[VO]: All that and much more, so let’s go!

[Underscore: Air from Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Rinde just before we recorded our conversation]

[02:17]

[VO]: Rinde Eckert is a celebrated writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer and director, but I’m not sure even this list of roles captures his extraordinary versatility. Just within the past year, for example, Rinde has danced with a San Francisco company, he played a benefit with a jazz ensemble in New York, he composed the score for a new play, he composed a new song for an old Shakespeare play, he sang lead in the premiere of a technically grueling yet gorgeous opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, he played an Irish warden in his wife’s update of Antigone called Kissing the Floor—I got to see that one in New York (awesome!)—and he taught interdisciplinary art, as he has done at Princeton University, the University of California, the University of Iowa, and numerous other schools across the U.S. Rinde has won a Grammy, was a finalist for a Pulitzer, is a Guggenheim fellow, and has been my friend for more than 20 years, which poses a problem this host has had the good fortune to encounter several times before: Rinde is someone I’ve wanted to talk with since I began dreaming about the possibility of a podcast; the trouble is that the better I know someone, the more conversations we’ve had without microphones, the more I worry that we could just get to talking about anything. After I made an episode featuring his wife and frequent collaborator Ellen McLaughlin last fall, I got serious about overcoming this challenge, and he and I decided to focus on his recent project of rebuilding his piano technique from the ground up. This is an artist who can play as many instruments as I can name, and here he is, a critically acclaimed musician, trying to forget everything he knows and approaching piano study as if he were a total novice. We spoke in early March at his home just outside New York City.

[04:26]

PETER: As you continue to have this career where it’s been decades now, creating original work, touring with it, premiering other people’s original work, performing in it, all throughout this country, all around the world … Here at the age of 70, you are in this project of taking apart your technique with the piano and rebuilding it from the ground up. You are approaching it again with the Beginner’s Mind. So I wanted to start with: what’s that like, and what inspired you to take on this project?

RINDE: Well, COVID was a big impetus, but I had started the project before. I’d been playing piano a lot. I would read through the Well-Tempered Clavier, and I would read through a lot of Bach, mostly Bach, at night.

PETER: And because we’re sitting at the piano, of course you can feel free, as you’re inspired, to to give us a few bars of anything by means of illustration. There are so many times with an audio podcast that somebody’s describing a picture and I can’t show that to them. But here we are at your beautiful Steinway …

RINDE: And one impetus is actually this piece, this particular piece, which is the C#—

[Rinde demonstrates a Bach passage on his Steinway] And so on and so forth. It was in the beauty of that … and occasionally I would play it well. Occasionally, I felt like I played it well—and I didn’t know why, I couldn’t repeat it—I would have one night when suddenly I was in touch with the instrument in a way that was surprising to me, and to Ellen, who was listening because I did this at night, it was always before I go to bed. It was like, go in, read through some Bach, whether it’s Bach suites, you know, English or French suites or the Goldberg Variations or the—

PETER: Inventions?

RINDE: Or the inventions, yeah. Partitas, too, I would go through, and so it was just a thing. And every once in a while, I’d hit it and she would go, “Well, that was good!” It was like a comment on—

PETER: Yeah, I hear you!

RINDE: It was okay before, but—and she was right! You know, she has a really good ear. And she was right. That was different. And it was wonderful, because she was listening and she would notice. Now that was different, you know, that was good. And I’d go, “Yeah.” And then finally I said, “I don’t know how to get there on a regular basis. I know it’s in there. I know I can get there. How do I get there?” And then she said, “You know, I have this friend Adrienne, who I grew up with, who was a concert pianist, and then decided to be a teacher. And she’s apparently a very good teacher.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know. You know, she’s probably way out of my league.” But you know, I kept thinking, well, I’m gonna call Adrienne—Adrienne Sirkin.” So I called up Adrienne and I went in and I finally said, “You know, I want to figure out how I can play.” She said, “Well, play something for me.” And I started out—[Rinde demonstrates the opening measures of the main theme of the Goldberg Variations]—and I played that, not actually that well [laughs], but I played the whole Air of the Goldberg Variations for her. And her response was “Well, you know, what’s remarkable is how your musical ideas are coming through, even though you have no technique!” And then she said, “Shall we get you some technique?”

PETER: And so, some basic talk for a non-pianist: what would constitute “piano technique,” as she was referring to it?

RINDE: Well, that, you know, that was what I needed to know! [Laughter.] Because obviously I didn’t understand what piano technique actually was. As it turns out, it’s a lesson in life is what it is—

PETER: Oh all right!

RINDE: In Adrienne’s hands, it’s a lesson in life. And she said, “How deep do you want to go?” First lesson in life: How deep do you want to go in your relationship to this instrument? And I said, “I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m not ever gonna be a virtuoso pianist. I don’t perform on this instrument. I mean, I perform, but I’m playing for myself singing. So it’s not like I have to be a virtuoso, but I would love to be able to accompany myself well, at some point on some Lieder if I wanted to—”

PETER: So [Lieder are] German art songs.

RINDE: “—or my own songs. Just being able to play the accompaniment well, but I have no pretensions. I just want to do as deep a dive as I can do. And I said, you know, what I’d love to be able to do is play the second movement of Bach’s D minor piano concerto really well”—[plays a quick passage]. It’s a beautiful thing. And I thought, “I want to be able to play that so well that it’s indistinguishable from a real pianist.” That would be great if I can get to that point where a slow movement—I’m never gonna be able to play really fast with any degree of integrity, but I would love to be able to just sit down and feel like, Man, you know, Bach was happy with that! So she said, “Okay, let’s go. But if you’re really serious, you’re gonna have to drop everything you’re doing.” So I had to close the Well-Tempered Clavier. I put the [Bach] books away, just put ‘em away. She said, “You can’t do that now. You have to rebuild your hand because your hand has habits. We have to break the habits.” So I have a strong determination to do this. And so she said, “Okay, good.” Then we stopped and we defined the project, which was Deep Dive. Great. And then you agree to the terms of that deep dive: You go with a master—in this case, Adrienne—who says Here’s what it takes to do the deep dive, from my long experience shepherding people through this process. So you submit to the teacher, and you say, Okay. And you try. And I had to master my impatience, which is really one of my great life failings—if I can master that at the end of my life! But this is one way to do it. And we started by just my relationship, just sitting at the piano. Look, let’s look at the keyboard! What is that? That’s, you know, that’s this mechanical thing. It’s in a row and it’s straight. All the keys are lined up. Everything’s very lined up. It’s very orderly. Very, very, even. All the keys are in the right place. They’re in a straight line, all the way. Now look at your hand. What do you notice about your hand? Well, the distance between the fingers is, you know, that’s not straight. So how are you gonna turn this organic and odd thing into a thing that plays on this very straight line? Well, what, are you gonna curl your fingers? Because your thumb is way out here! It’s two inches away from your next finger. So in order to get those fingers together to play next to each other, what’s gonna happen? How do you get your thumb and your index finger on that keyboard? So that was what we started with. After just getting our relationship, [next was] placing my hand on the keyboard, just getting used to placing my hand on the keyboard while keeping some weight in the arm, and working on constantly reinforcing the connection, the energy connection in the body so that if you move slightly forward, the whole body responds. It’s not just the arm that responds; the whole body responds when the hand goes to the piano. If you go up, the body moves with it. So everything is the dance of this energy through your arm into the keyboard. But what happened for me, which was the larger issue, was that all of this stuff became a metaphor for everything else I was doing. Every other instrument benefited. I discovered that I wasn’t actually playing every note. I was glossing over some notes. And we would do a scale and she would say, “Well, you didn’t play the G.” Technically, I played it, but my finger hadn’t actually gotten to the depth of that particular sound. She said, “You have to play every note.” That’s what you hear in great pianists: every note is played.

PETER: Would you be able to simulate with a scale what that’s like? I mean, you can take a couple passes. You don’t have to get it on the first time! [Rinde demonstrates with a quick scale.]

RINDE: That was sloppy. So I’m kind of glossing over the notes. [Playing again, more deliberately] That’s much better. And one of the things she said too was “Let the piano tell you when it’s time to go fast.” And that’s true of the drums too. [Rinde begins drumming with his fingers on the frame of the piano.] You’re also trying to figure out how fast can I go before the integrity breaks down? And you have to define integrity by going slowly enough to understand what the integrity of that is. And then the drum will tell you suddenly it’ll want to go fast. And every instrument is the same way: Let the instrument tell you when it’s time. But first it’s: establish integrity. Always try and play with integrity, and what is integrity? Then you have to ask, “What is integrity?” Well, integrity is the wedding of intention with action.

[16:34]

[VO]: So Rinde’s elegant working definition of integrity in performance is “the wedding of intention with action.” In other words, there’s a marriage between what you’re trying to do as a performer and what you actually do. I asked him about how he as a teacher challenged students to interrogate their own ideas about integrity.

RINDE: I taught interdisciplinary theatre at Princeton for about six or seven years. And in my class, we were talking about acting and being on the stage, and so one of the first things I do is I have them dance. I have them move their bodies just because they need to move their bodies because the blood is not flowing. We had morning classes, on Friday morning, and it was like everybody was just, you know—

PETER: It comes after Thursday night. Big night.

RINDE: And so they were not ready to think or do anything. They were ready to do what very smart kids, like kids at Princeton, do, which is: they know what thinking looks like [Pete erupts in laughter] and they can approximate thinking. And they’re very facile at that.

PETER: They’ve made an academic career of it, in some cases!

RINDE: Yeah. They’re basically rehashing what somebody else thought, you know? It’s not really their thinking. They’re not thinking; they’re just rehashing what they know other people think about something.

[VO]: Just popping in for a second to say that although I didn’t study with Rinde when I was in college, I did attend Princeton as an undergraduate, and I identify with kids who sometimes rehash other people’s ideas as if they were original thoughts. I was one of those kids! I’m sharing this less as a humble brag about the college I was lucky enough to attend and more as an explanation for my extra giggling in through here. I felt seen!

RINDE: We would do this thing where I would have them dance and then I’d say, “I want you to dance badly.” So then I would put on music and have them dance badly.

PETER: Can we just double-click? Because again, I think the Princeton context is important. You’re asking for a subpar, a suboptimal performance—

RINDE: Exactly.

PETER: —from kids who are trained not to do that.

RINDE: Right.

PETER: Okay.

RINDE: So they’re trying to dance badly and very often I’m exhorting them while they’re doing this: “No, it’s not bad enough! Worse! Worse than that, worse than that!” So they have to figure out, they have to think about What is dancing badly? So already they’re in their bodies in a very different way, because they’re not thinking about the model of dancing. They’re now thinking about How do I contort myself? What’s my relationship to the rhythm?

PETER: There is music for this exercise that they are dancing to—or dancing against?

RINDE: Yes, music that they’re dancing against, largely. We talk about dancing against the impulse in the music. So I give them some instruction to keep them moving, but then they have to do that. And then, once I’m satisfied they’ve got something going, then I say, “Now let’s exaggerate that by 50%.” And that’s an interesting equation. Then they have to think about, What is it that I’m exaggerating?

PETER: Thank God there’s some math!

RINDE: And then they have to figure out how they’re exaggerating, and they’re lost in the process. And their bodies now are wild! They’re lost in the process of getting this thing, this monster [i.e., their grotesquely moving body] to, you know, 150% of “bad.” And I say, “Okay, let’s bring it back to 125%.” And then 100%, and very often at this point I will solo someone, so that everybody can see the process. So I’ll say, “Okay, Anne—,” [singling out] particularly people who are very grotesque. It’s great because then you can see—“and now 125%”—and then we go back. “Now do 100% again. And now let’s go to 95%.” Then I start bringing them down to 90, 80, 70, 50% of what they were doing.

PETER: Are you tricking them into dancing well?

RINDE: I’m tricking them into dancing well. [Pete guffaws again.] But there are two aspects of this. One is that I’m tricking them into dancing well—

PETER: And it’s working—

RINDE: And it’s working. They’re no longer thinking about dancing at all. It’s working because they’re not thinking about it. They’re not thinking about dancing at all. They’re just thinking about what they have to do to get the job done.

PETER: They’re working on fractions!

RINDE: They’re working on fractions, and their body is just responding, and finally we get down to like 5%. And you know, they’re moving—and you can’t see this, but—[Rinde demonstrates rhythmic full-body movement]. And I tell them, I want you to keep the image of what that was. In order for you to be acting at 5%, you have to have an idea of what that was initially. So you have to keep the image of the grotesque dance at 100% so that you understand what 5% is. So their minds are involved in this, and they start moving. And sometimes in these really tiny ways—it’s only 5%. But you see there’s an impulse in the body that’s like a shorthand of this large thing. And by now, the rest of the class is watching this dance, and they’re fascinated. It’s so clear, the rest of the room is completely rapt and they’re watching this dance. And I say, “Okay, let’s talk about this. We were all fascinated. It was clear everyone was completely absorbed in your movement. And why is that? What is it about that? I think at about 20%, this started getting really interesting, really good. And we all started to be in the project. We were waiting for the next chapter! So two things were going on: We were taking you to a point where your physical capacity matched completely the image you had in your head. In other words, you are dancing this well: your body is not out of balance. Your body is in balance.” And most of the time, people become extremely balanced. Their bodies look like they’re on the earth. They look like they’re balanced. It’s as if you said, “Just sway back and forth. Now less, less, less! You have to define how much weight goes one way, how much weight goes the other way. And you keep on narrowing it until—but what you’re doing is teaching yourself about balance.”

PETER: [Trying to describe the movement Rinde is demonstrating] So that’s kind of swaying like the pendulum of a grandfather clock or something like that.

RINDE: Exactly. Because you actually took the time to assess your balance point. And you didn’t think, I’m assessing my balance point. You thought, I’m going left and I’m going right, and now, I’m going less left and less right. But that’s an assessment right there. It’s less this direction and more that direction and less this direction, less that direction, less this direction. Finally, you’re balanced. But the project had nothing to do with your idea of balance. It’s like saying to someone who doesn't know how to relax, “Relax!” They don’t know how to relax, you know!

PETER: Well, sometimes even if you do know how to relax, at the point where somebody’s telling you to relax, that’s not first on your list!

RINDE: Exactly. That’s not first on your list.

[Interlude: “Monster Groove” by Rinde Eckert, from his version of Pericles]

[25:48]

RINDE: There was one other aspect. I turned to the rest of the students and I said, “There’s another aspect to this that we’re not thinking about that’s important, which is we just taught the audience how to see this dance. We taught you how to look at it. You knew how to look at this dance. You could enter it as an audience and be rapt.

PETER: So the audience in this case would be when you’re soloing people—

RINDE: The other students.

PETER: The other students who are watching [the solo dancers.]

RINDE: The students who are watching them, who now are fascinated by this dance. Now what if we go into a situation where you as an audience aren’t prepped and this is all you see? Depending on what you’re there to see—if you think you’re there to see Hamlet, you may be totally confused and not enter, refuse to enter. It’s just odd behavior. You’re not looking at it, you’re not letting it play on you. So how do we prepare people for this? How do we prepare people? Now this has integrity, this has real dance integrity, but if you don’t understand the context of it, can we see that integrity?

PETER: Integrity again is the wedding of intention and action.

RINDE: Yes, and actually there’s another aspect to it, which is ability, your actual ability to do it.

PETER: Well, this was the question I wanted to ask. So I’m sure it varied from class to class, but just in a generalized class, about how many people would be comfortable with dance, or movement? How many had formal training with that, as opposed to people who maybe just come at [the interdisciplinary class] more from an acting standpoint or something? How comfortable were they? When you talked about ability, this was my question: how self-conscious were they to begin with, in terms of using their bodies to express—

RINDE: Most of these people were not dancers. I had some dancers, and they were some of my favorite students because they understood the power of abstraction within the performance medium. They were happy with abstraction. They understood what the body can convey. They understood what space meant. So there were some [dancers], but it was a small fraction of them.

PETER: You know, this is what’s interesting. We were joking a little bit about the use of percentages and probabilities, but of course I think that probably served this very useful function of kind of short-circuiting the mind’s editing. I mean, you were talking about the mind-body relationship. If a kid goes into this and says like, “I’m not really a dancer,” there’s a way that you are giving them something else to think about—instead of that doubt or anxiety or neurosis even—while they do this exercise, and it frees them up. It kind of liberates them. Kind of?

RINDE: Yeah, I think one of the things that bad dancing always did was it liberated the dancers as well, because everyone was on the same footing. If you had a dancer, they had to figure it out: I have to dance badly and I’ve been trying to dance gracefully or well. I know how to dance! And then they would see that they’re not as good a bad dancer as some of the [non-dancers].

PETER: That’s a great point.

RINDE: We would do this regularly, actually. It was a way of neutralizing their prejudices, in a way, and putting them on equal footing.

[Interlude: “Polaroid” by Rinde Eckert]

[30:06]

TERRY: Hi, it’s Terry again. My wife Elizabeth and I met Peter and his wife Robyn when we were all touring Cuba in January 2019. A few weeks later, Peter shared with me the podcast episode he made while in Cuba, which he called “Learning from Cuba,” which particularly looked at education in that island nation. I’ve been listening to Point of Learning ever since, as I particularly like receiving the American take on U.S. education and related topics of interest. When he invited listeners to contribute a few dollars—or Euros, in my case—per month to the podcast, I signed up straight away because I enjoy hearing new and wide-ranging ideas about what and how and why we learn. If you’re tempted to make a contribution of any amount—either per month or just once—let me remind you of what my fellow countryman Oscar Wilde wrote some time ago. He said, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Back to the show! 

[VO]: Thanks, Terry. Go raibh maith agat! [“Thank you” in Irish, literally “May good be at you”] At the end of our conversation, Rinde presented another life lesson he drew from working on a scale, a B-flat major scale in this case. I want to highlight this example because of my most influential performing arts teacher when I was in high school, my violin teacher Thomas Halpin, star of Point of Learning episode 009. When I was having trouble with some passage in an étude (a study) or a concerto, Mr. Halpin liked to say, “A problem is still a problem until you can get into it and out of it.” For confronting technical problems, he proposed a method memorable for its three initial I’s: IDENTIFY, ISOLATE, INTEGRATE. This is so deep I’ve applied it to many other kinds of problems I’ve faced: First, IDENTIFY or name the problem you’re having; then ISOLATE it to repair it; then INTEGRATE it, making sure you can get into the passage and out of the passage successfully. Back to Rinde and that scale! 

[32:18]

RINDE: We were playing one passage and she said, “Well, I believe everything but the B-flat.” It was a scale. You know, I was just playing this [Rinde demonstrates the end of a B-flat major scale]. She said, “I believe everything but the B-flat, and why do you suppose that is? How do you feel about that?” And I said, “Yeah, I know. I don’t understand it. I don’t feel like I’m prepared for the B-flat.” And she said, “But the problem isn’t with the B-flat.” She said, “The problem started on G, and it manifested itself by the B-flat. So let’s solve the equation of the G to A. It started there.” And that’s a life lesson too. This is, you know, my problem with impatience: by the time impatience manifests itself, you know, the problem is already there. And I have to learn when that lack of consciousness begins. And sometimes it can be early, it can be like, Oh this is a concatenation of mistakes! It’s like I started out the day out of balance, and I never corrected. And now I’m just a train wreck. I’m waiting for the moment when I hit the penny on the tracks and everything goes off. And so it’s like, This started way back then, and I haven’t corrected. It reminds me of this thing in Horizon.

[VO]: Horizon is a dazzling performance piece Rinde developed in the early aughts where he plays a character based on the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. At one point the actors start to build the foundation of a wall, one cinderblock at a time.

RINDE: In the piece, there are these two ancient workers who are working on this foundation, which never actually gets built. But at one point—I believe that’s in there too—is that idea: if you think that the foundation is perfect and that you don’t have to make adjustments, then the higher you build, the more grotesque the intrinsic errors are going to be—the more they will manifest themselves until the thing topples over. Because you didn’t make the initial correction. Your assumption was that it was perfect. And so you didn’t bother making the corrections that you have to make as you build. You have to adjust for the fact that no layer of this foundation is going to be perfect. You’re gonna have to adjust for the flaws. It’s not gonna be the ideal thing that you think it is. And so it’s like that day. It’s like, Okay, this is the first layer of the foundation, and I’ve already started ignoring the flaws. So let’s look at the balance already, right away. I started doing something which was helpful at one point. I should get back to it, actually. Every morning I looked at the fish on my shower curtain. There’s this beautiful school of fish on the shower curtain. I said to myself, “You know nothing. You know nothing. This is a vast—”

PETER: This is your pep talk? Your affirmation?

RINDE: Yes, this is my pep talk: “You know nothing. Let’s start out with the acknowledgement that you have no idea. You are a fish in water. You are in the ocean, and the ocean is vast and unknowable and mysterious, and you can’t possibly grasp the enormity of this. So let’s start with that. You are an ignorant thing in the middle of a large ocean. So let’s start there. You know nothing about the piano. Now begin. So it’s Beginner’s Mind: begin. And then what you have to remember is that every minute of the day, there should be a recapitulation of your understanding of your own ignorance.

PETER: And acceptance of your own ignorance.

RINDE: And acceptance of it.

PETER: Right? And that’s okay. You know nothing, and that’s the way it is.

RINDE: And that way you’re not surprised [Pete laughs] when things don’t turn out, so therefore you’re less impatient because well, Of course! It didn’t happen the way I thought it would happen, but I was ready for that!

[37:25]

PETER: Before we move from the wall, the image kept coming to me of this wise old Mainer named Arthur—that of course is pronounced like “Ah-tha”—who was a friend of my dear friends, Al and Maureen. And he said at one point: “If the stones of the wall won’t fit together by themselves, no amount of mortar will make it work.”

RINDE: I love that!

PETER: You know, because that’s sometimes what we do. That’s such a beautiful image to me. I’ve never actually put it out into the world, so I may stick it in here somewhere. Just because I think that that’s what we do sometimes. We look at something and we’re like, Yeah, this isn’t gonna quite work, but maybe I just put a little bit more of this cement in here … and you’re like, No, you gotta make the stones fit together before—

RINDE: You have to take the time to look at the stones. You can’t just assume. Because that’s the thing about mortar: you stop looking at the shape of the stone because you think, Oh I’ve got the mortar. What do I need to look at the stone for? So you have to look at each stone, you have to say, What’s its shape? What’s its size? What’s its weight? How does it fit in here? What’s the negative space here? You have all these decisions to make that if you think, Ah, I’ve got mortar, I’ll just stick it together, you don’t get there! And you don't make a wall with any degree of beauty or integrity. And that’s what Adrienne was talking about. She said, “You have to play every note.” You have to play every note. Every note has to have that same degree of integrity. Every note is both the end of the journey and the impetus to go further.

[39:21]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! May you go much further with many beautiful notes, of your own or others’ making, to lighten your step. My great thanks to Rinde Eckert for talking with me and playing for us. In addition to musical illustrations from his 1966 Steinway grand piano, Rinde composed all the other pieces featured in this episode, except, of course, for intro and outro, furnished as always by Shayfer James, who will be playing in Toronto on Saturday, July 15, if you’re not too far away and weren’t able to catch him on his recent international and U.S. tours. Now here’s the thing, you guys: if you’re not my mom—hi, Mom!—you probably listen to a range of other podcasts, and you may have noticed the team of editors, mixers, producers, sound engineers, et al. listed at the end of every episode. For Point of Learning, it’s just me. Now I love making these shows, and heaven knows, it takes me long enough to get them ready for you! But that’s because I want them to sound great, and be relevant whenever you listen—unless you already missed Shayfer’s Toronto gig, in which case I’m sorry about that. But my point is: please go ahead and share this episode with anyone you think would especially appreciate Rinde’s take on art and life. My most effective marketing team is you. Thanks for listening, and thanks for your support. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn! See you then!

[41:01]

RINDE: I’m gonna carry that image of the wall with me, that wall that you were talking about, your Maine friend Arthur, because it’s such a simple and beautiful way of describing that process of education. And it goes back to this instrument, these instruments and the movement, and all of the things that I’m talking about. It’s all about the individual stone and the space that that’s gonna go into. And then it’s like: Take it in! Take it in! And, you know, see it! And then you have a chance. If you don’t see it, then you don’t have a chance.

PETE: That’s gorgeous, man. I love it!