See Barb in Washington, DC

Renewing the Culture: A View from Hollywood

A panel discussion, featuring:

Barbara Nicolosi of Act One, Inc.

Karen Covell of Hollywood Prayer Network

Michelle Suh of Hollywood Connect

Three Hollywood professionals and entertainment industry ministry leaders discuss
what Hollywood Christians are doing to transform the culture,
and what you can do to help.

When: Thursday, June 29th at 7 pm Where: Mclean Bible Church
Community Room A
Admission is free. 8925 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA 22182

BARBARA NICOLOSI (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ACT ONE, INC. )
Barbara is founder and Executive Director of Act One. She has an MA in Film from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. She has been a director of development, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a consultant on many film and television projects. She wrote The Work, a full-length feature set during the Spanish Civil War, for IMMI Pictures of Beverly Hills. Barbara recently co-edited the book Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture from Baker Books.

KAREN COVELL (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOLLYWOOD PRAYER NETWORK)
Karen Covell is a TV producer and director of the Hollywood Prayer Network. Her producing credits include Headliners & Legends with Matt Lauer for MSNBC and America's Throwaway Children. Karen and her husband, Jim, have authored two books, How to Talk About Jesus Without Freaking Out and The Day I Met God, both published by Multnomah Press. They speak across America challenging the church to see Hollywood as the world's most influential mission field.

MICHELE SUH (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOLLYWOOD CONNECT)
Michele received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Southern California in Violin Performance. She has performed with artists including Leann Rimes, Rod Stewart, David Benoit, Guns N Roses, Burt Bacharach, composers Lalo Schifrin, James Horner & Michael Kamen, and world renowned classical conductor Zubin Mehta. She has also performed with Christian artists John David Webster, the Kry, and Morgan Grace. With an equal passion for unifying faith-based artists in the arts and entertainment ministry, she has served on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ's music ministry for 12 years, started and led an Industry Women’s Support Group for four years, served as the Assistant Coordinator for Media Fellowship International Los Angeles, coordinated the Hollywood Prayer Network Studio Lot Prayer Walks for five years, and in 2003 through Hollywood Presbyterian Church, started the organization Hollywood Connect, an arts and entertainment ministry helping to equip industry Christians to realize their God-given calling.

For more information about the panelists and their organizations, please visit:
www.actoneprogram.com, www.hollywoodprayernetwork.org, www.hollywoodconnect.com

Half a Million Served!

Hey, I just noticed that at some point today, this humble blog logged its 500,000th visitor!

How cool is that?!

Thanks all of you for stopping by - even you obnoxious trolls, for you too add to the glory of my site meter!

Waiting for Karen.

This photo belongs to a whole genre of pictoral moments which are forever etched in my brain under the category "Waiting for Karen." Here is our third companion Sr. Anne, waiting with me for Karen in a shoestore in the Madrid airport. (Don't ask.)
















Here, on the right, is our cab driver waiting with me for Karen outside our parador in Santiago Del Compsotello.

There was waiting to go to the airport while repacking was done. Much, much waiting in hotel lobbies, restaurant foyers, church vestibules and outside souvenir shops. Pretty much every memory of the two week spread could be bookended by the obligatory "Waiting for Karen" moments. Waiting to go. Waiting to come back.

And on the scale of one to one thousand, with one thousand being my most hated thing to do, waiting falls probably right around 999.98. Which means that this trip was a spiritual pilgrimage for me on a whole other level.

It got to be funny, which shows real growth I think. Ahem.

But it was worth it. Absolutely worth waiting for.

Here is my forever memory of the Pope's Penetecost 2006 gathering with all the New Religious movements. I took this after I realized that I was hopelessly separated from my companions who were out there, somewhere behind a barricade.

All you have to do to experience the glory of that day in St. Peter's Square is carry this photo under a sun lamp set for 82 degrees while you have ten or so friends shove you from all sides....

Can't you almost smell the crowd? Ahhhh....

St. James the Patron of Nicotine?

I loved this.

Here's a happy old fellow who hangs out in the square in front of Santiago Del Compostello. Dressed like St. James the Apostle, he poses for pictures with the tourists for tips.

I just loved catching him on a cigarette break in full apostolic pilgrimage regalia.

What is it with Europeans and smoking btw? Didn't they get the cancer memo? Every where one looks in Europe, young and old can be seen sucking on cigarettes with cel phones pressed to their ears.

Thanks God St. James didn't get a call while I was watching him. That would have totally ruined my day.

From Barb's Mail Bag - A Professional Artist?

The following is a question I get quite often, followed by the answer I give just as often.

It isn't so much that people are wondering if they are supposed to be artists, as they are wondering if I can make it easier for them to pursue a professional artist's life. I can't. And according to JPII, we shouldn't want to. It is the sacrifice of the artist's life - its brain-wrackingness, its plenitude of rejection, its isolation, its instability, etc. - that makes the artist's life a way to holiness. For them and their work. And then us through their work.

But, anyway, here is the latest permutation of this question and answer...

---------------------------------


Dear Ms. Nicolosi:

[Extravagant praise for Barb and Act One deleted in humility.]

I have been wondering lately how I know if I am an artist. How can I know?

M, in Minneapolis

Dear M:

Everyone should be an artist at something. John Paul II said we are all called to be the artists of our own lives - making our lives a masterpiece.

Artistic talent, however, usually shows up early. What is it that you were better at in kindergarten than all the other kids? These things aren't subtle. You could sing or draw or dance or act or write better than everybody else in your class. And you liked doing it. Or else you couldn't and didn't.

But I think you are wondering about whether you might be called to be a professional artist. A professional artist is one who has a heightened level of natural talent in some area, and has been rigorously trained. So the sign of a professional is that he or she can summon their craft to serve their will as needed. You know you have enough talent to be a professional artist if the work that you have done routinely elicits emotional responses in people. Powerful ones. Ones that people are willing to pay for.

Hope that helps. Good luck to you and God bless -

Barbara

More Santiago Del Compostello

The Parador at Santiago Del Compostello. (I know I'm not spelling that right.) This was a medieval hospitality house for pilgrims...rich ones. It was full of castlely things and royal chapels and massive courtyards.

But the best thing is that it was diagonally across from....

















...this. The MASSIVE basilica of St. James the Apostle. Photos are impossible, folks. You just have to go there.

It has been the destination point for pilgrims for nearly two thousand years. Very holy place.

Don't think. Just go.

Just when you think you've seen the greatest churches....

...you end up in Leon. "Now, there," I thought to myself, "is another one the Archdiocese of L.A. can try!"

































The whole story here is the windows. Amazing. Monumental. Not made for us down here because we can't see their fabulous detail from ten stories below. They were made beautiful for the gaze of the Divine.

Which points to what is wrong with our liturgical art today. We are making stuff for us.

Covadonga!

This is the Marian shrine for Asturias. It is dedicated to Our Lady of Covadonga, in whose honor the Spanish king Pelayo halted the Muslim invaders who had conquered the rest of Spain. There was a great symbol carved all over Covadonga of an "M" over a crescent.

I'm thinking we should be propagating this devotion lots more these days....

More of lovely Asturias

Here is the backyard of the Parador at Cangas de Onis where we stayed for a night. It is a first millenium Benedictine monastery that has been refurbished by the Spanish government to now serve as a hotel. We stayed at several of these and they were all truly awe-inspiring.


















Here is the front yard of the Parador.
























And for my Dad, the fly-fishing is great in Asturias...




































Are you jealous yet?

From Oviedo in Asturias

My friend Cris (shown here next to the statue beside whom everyone apparently must be photographed in Oviedo) has been telling me for several years that her place - Asturias - is the best of all Spain. Well, it turns out she is right.

Asturias is wonderful. Green rolling-hilled vistas and ocean views, with hearty, ountain food and great wines. Oviedo is a true gem - fashionable and smart but still a small enough town that my friend met three people she knew while we were walking the streets.


























Here is a shot of the majestic cathedral of Oviedo which is dedicated to Christ the Savior. (I think anyway, my Spanish isn't what it could be.)

On one of my two visits too the Cathedral, I was being escorted by a charming Spaniard journalist guy. As we were standing in the back of the Cathedral looking up into the massive Gothic arhces, he was whispering to me how he used to believe in religion but then he grew up. I looked at him and then gestured around to the Cathedral and whispered back, "Are you kidding me? If you can't believe religion, can't you at least believe in this place?"























And, once again in Oviedo, we saw great devotion to Our Lady. This statue was adorned in the Church of St. Isidore of Seville, in Oviedo. The people had brought many bouquets of flowers as it was the Feast of the Visitation the day we were there - which is my mother's birthday. Iit was cool to attend Mass and, not understanding a word of the service, just sit there contemplating the beauty of Spain's Marian devotion and pray for Mom.

Stepping all over my point...

Here is another visual paradox of the artist's offerings separated by five hundred years. I call it "Medieval Majesty Meets Modern Metal Poop."

What is wrong with us? Honestly?!

Xavier Castle, Sanguissa

If you want to raise a kid to baptize 200,000 pagans, all you have to do is have a place like this for him to play as a child.



















So, Francis Xavier certainly went whole hog on the "God is real" side of Pascal's wager. He gave up a lot.

The best thing about going to the places the saints frequented is the realization that they were just like us. We have plasterized them too much. But when you can reach out and touch a wall that the saint must have touched thousands of times, or look out over a vista that was probably remarkably similar to the one he looked at, you realize what truly, truly ridiculous schleps we are because we are not what the saints were. They weren't special. They had just made up their minds and then acted on it.

My favorite church in Spain, the Basilica of Zaragossa, and not just because it figures prominently in my screenplay about St. Josemaria Escriva. A gorgeous, astounding structure, it is the site in which Mary appeared to St. James standing on the column of a broken down Roman temple. She indicated that a church should be built on the site. And so, the main devotion of the church is to the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Pilar. The people bring all of their cares and worries to the tiny image standing on a pillar in the church.

A great Zaragossa anecdote... The first time I visited Zaragossa a couple years ago, the regional team had just won the national soccer championships. The whole team, led by the mayor and town dignitaries made its way in a procession to the basilica the day we were there to present the soccer trophy to Our Lady of Pilar. Inside the basilica, the little statue had been draped in the soccer colors of the Zaragossa team.

At first I was scandalized. I could only imagine the general ridicule in the secular and religious media in the States, if we ever draped Our Lady in a Boston Red Sox uniform. (Of course, it would be a sacrilege to drape her in pinstripes...but that's different.)

But then I realized that I was the perverse one in Zaragossa for not getting that Mary is mother in every sense to the people of Spain. It's great.








































These other two images are from a wall in the basilica in which two bombs are attached to the wall. The bombs were dropped on the basilica by the communists/Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War to try and destroy the people's attachment to Our Lady of Pilar. Well, they kind of just bounced. There are two holes in the roof of the basilica which have been left to show whered the two direct hits crashed through the roof and then the bombs just bounced along the floor of the church and never went off.

Astounding. "For those without faith, no explanation is psossible. For those with faith, none is necessary."

Anyway, I did think as I was walking around looking at the glorious five story green alabaster altarpiece in Zaragossa, if the bad guys ever attack the L.A. Cathedral, please let the bombs go off...

What I'm talkin' about!

I snapped this on the grounds of Montserrat. I call it, "How Art as Political or Egalitarian Statement is Always Ugly and Sometimes Really, Really, Really Ugly."

This was one of several "statues" (it doesn't feel right to use the same word that defines the Pieta and the David as this monstrosity) around Montserrat that are efforts by the contemporary keepers of the shrine to bring in a touch of modern art.

HORRID! My friend asked me how to describe it. I said, "It reminds me of that old joke about why Nikita Kruschev's mother named him Nikita. ...Because she couldn't spell 'bleeeeeccccccckkkkk!'"

More than anything, this kind of work manifests a lack of craft. If you had any talent at all, you wouldn't be satisfied to stop in your work and call this thing done.

We saw this kind of thing in several places in Europe. In every place the old stuff made the new stuff look cheap and inadequate. I was embarrassed for my age.

Ah, Montserrat!

You just have to break down and go to this place some day. It's one of those holy places to which Christians have been trekking for over a thousand years.

The Madonna of Montserrat is seated and her face has turned black. The people come from all over Spain - and the world - to climb up the steps over the main altar to venerate the statue and place themselves under her care. It's lovely and childlike and I know is one of the reasons the world hasn't been turned over to the demons.























We stayed for a night in the hotel on the grounds of the monastery. Very cool. (Thanks, Karen.) Of course, the fact that we were overnight retreatants did not sto the annoyed Benedictine priest from tossing us out of the Basilica promptly at 8:30pm. They don't believe in keeping churches open in Europe. When they want to eat or siesta, the churches close.

Karen kept saying that it would be a good idea to plan any spiritual crises around the hours convenient to the European eating and napping schedule.

More Barcelona

Here are some native Barcelonans dancing in the square in front of the Cathedral. It was so charming. They all knew the steps of the dance and they were all very engaged in doing the dance well. Again, I was struck by how different Europeans are from us Americans. Just try and get a few hundred Americans to dance in front of one of our cathedrals. You know, for free.

Of course, we do regularly go in to our cathedrals, which many of the Europeans do not....















Sr. Anne "Nunblog" Flanagan, fsp, and Karen 'Some Have Hats" Hall on the waterfront in Barcelona. We were on our way to our first of many servings of sangria and paella.

I don't really like Barcelona. It feels a little out of control to me. And a bit decadent.

In Barcelona

This is the Church of St. Maria del Mar. It was the church in front of which St. Ignatius begged shortly after his conversion. I took the shot of the people sitting in the square in front of the church doing nothing becuase it is such a typical European sight. They aren't in as big a rush as we are to be doing something productive. They sit alot in front of beautiful things....I suppose if we had as many beautifuk things, we'd sit in front of them too. (Somehow, I don't think the newly renovated St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood is going to fit the bill...)

There was a wedding going on in the church while we were there and all the locals didn't seem to realize that their plain old parish church is one of the pureest examples of Gothic ecclesial architecture on the planet. My dumb old camera doesn't do it justice. It is breathtaking.

At the coliseum

It's hard not to cry in this place. It's one of those weird places on the earth in which history is powerfully present. I kept imagining the Christian martyrs being led here to be slain in front of the mobs. What they were feeling and thinking...and how it certainly WASN'T that Jesus of Nazareth was just a nice guy with a cool message.

I took a few crumbs of brick off one of the walls. And, no, I can't really excuse that because if every visitor did it we wouldn't have a coliseum, but I'm a dramatist, and I got this idea in my head that it would be cool when our time of matrydom comes to be clasping some of the coliseum.








Here are bloggers Karen "Some Have Hats" Hall and Sr. Bernadette "In Rome" in front of what our completely secular guide assured us was an entertainment complex no different from those we frequent today. It was hard not to laugh as our guide vented weird wrath on Western civilization, and seemed to be pining away for the days when 100 lions and 20 elephants were set upon each other for the amusement of the Roman mobs.

I love them, but Europeans can be very odd. (Let's not even start on bathrooms.)

Here are two people I don't know being granted clemency outside the Coliseum by the Emporer of Imperial Rome and a handy centurion. I know he is a centurion because of his hat.