Everyday life offers depths of inspiration for Hollywood production, so fittingly, writer, actor and director Ben Sinclair of High Maintenance translates his personal experiences into astute observational comedy. He shares with hosts Susan and Todd the challenges and opportunities of writing for television in this time of despair, and his hopeful conviction of what the post-pandemic future will bring.
Show Notes:
"Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye
I'm Susan Barrett, and I'm Todd Thomas. At Barrett Barrera Projects, we believe that ART IS A VERB — it’s the ongoing process of de-constructing and re-constructing our world.
This season, we'll delve deep into the creative processes of some of our most inspiring friends and collaborators, to understand how they are navigating this pivotal moment and working to transform our existing systems, reimagine the status quo, and support each other across disciplines, in order to create a more sustainable, and equitable future for us all.
Welcome to ART IS A VERB, a Barrett Barrera Project.
In today's episode, we're speaking with writer, actor and director, and our friend Ben Sinclair - also known as "The Guy" from his hit show on HBO, High Maintenance.
We'll be discussing how Ben transforms his personal experiences and observations into successful, poignant comedy, how he’s activating nomadic living and the future of entertainment in an uncertain time. Ben, welcome.
Susan: [00:00:00] Hi, this is Susan Barrett.
Todd: [00:00:02] and Todd Thomas.
Susan: [00:00:04] You are listening to Art is a Verb, a Barrett Barrera project. In this episode, we invite writer, director, actor, producer, Ben Sinclair to share his thoughts about storytelling and making memorable experiences.
Ben: [00:00:18] Ben is best known for his show High Maintenance and his role on that as “The Guy,” but he's a lot more than that.
Susan: [00:00:24] Hi, Ben.
Ben: [00:00:26] Art Me! Art me up, guys. I'm going to get “arted” today. It's nice to be here with you.
Todd: [00:00:39] Do you remember we met a few years ago at Rachel Comey’s dinner show? You were shooting an episode of High Maintenance that featured Rachel in the storyline.
Ben: [00:00:48] That's true. That's where you first “arted” me. And I think about that as a night, as a watershed moment of my life, actually. No, no, not even joking--that night, when we were shooting that episode of High Maintenance, it was entitled “Rachel.” I still think it's probably the best episode we ever made. And meeting you and Rachel, and I mean, getting to know Rachel--we met her before--but, all of the people that evening, it was a life changing moment. It put me in a new stratosphere of the New York art scene that I've never arted in before, and it felt good to art with you there.
Todd: [00:01:32] Aw. Rachel's really good at that, at bringing a lot of people together. It was also kind of a moment that was pivotal, where you were in taking off with High Maintenance too.
Ben: [00:01:47] It's true. We came back a year later to have our first real premier through the Vimeo Project at Pioneer Works, which is where Rachel was having her show. It was stage one of the great evolution of what has now turned into something that feels inseparable yet also something to move on from, at the same time. So we can get into that later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Susan: [00:02:14] And Ben, I'm sure you remember the night we met as another watershed moment in your life--at the gala where you kept squeezing my knee all night.
Ben: [00:02:23] Yeah, that was the beginning of the end for me! That was the moment when I was--certainly it would all come crashing down after that. And, really I'm here, like I said, to learn. And, you know, this is about me, we're saying you're interviewing me, but I'd like to hear your point of focus right now, in that moment in your mind.
Todd: [00:03:34] Well, it's interesting, Ben, it's new, it's a new development. The idea was about bringing together all of these different people that Susan knows, that I know... I mean, Susan and I have had this conversation many times of just about how we all kind of rely on each other to build our visions and how our specific milieus don't really operate on their own. And that's kind of the premise of bringing people together here, and speaking about that and the reliance on others, the parallels, the intersections... and also seeing how we're emerging from current conditions, really.
Ben: [00:04:56] Of course. Well, interacting with people, this catastrophe we'll call it--coming after touching Susan's leg, has really been, kind of in tune with what was already happening with my life. I just finished the last sound mix for High Maintenance of Season 4 on February 28th, or February 27th. And then I left New York for LA on February 29th to come out to LA to do some press. And then by the time I got to LA, it was day-by-day became more apparent that I wasn't going back to New York. By March 13th, I was like, “Oh, did I accidentally move to LA at the end of this post production process?”
And then, I had already spoken with my co-creator, Katia, that we were going to take an extended break with the show, at least until after the election, because the way it would have worked out before is we would have been making a bunch of content before a different world. We didn't know how different the world was gonna be. And since we've been in quarantine, there's been some stuff on social media and just friends being like, you know, I've been thinking a lot about High Maintenance, the show in quarantine, and how good those episodes could be. And certainly me too, but there's no way to go back and do it anytime soon. And I don't think we, as creators were wanting to do it anyway. So I don't know if this was, I wanted to put an ellipsis on the show, this season four, just to have a dot, dot dot, and maybe the world was like, “how about we take two of those dots away, and make a big period?”
Ben: [00:07:06] But I don't think it's a move on. I think that that show--we will come back to it. And I am interested in what post-quarantine New York will be.
Todd: [00:07:15] Right. How would that be integrated, or how do you approach that? Or do you have any, even an idea?
Ben: [00:07:22] I mean, I have as much an idea as we all do of what New York is going to be. I mean, the white flight has been pretty intense already. I have read articles. It's impossible to know anything about if people will even want to live in cities for the next couple of years, cities plural. And if New York will continue to be a beacon for a world now accustomed to being isolated in their own places--and, scared of each other. That's the other thing.
So, I think it would be interesting, ‘cause the last episode we see my character hop on a plane to New Zealand, make a last minute decision to do that. Sorry to spoil it. That's what I mean, not sorry--sorry, not sorry--but I'm sorry, Susan, for everything! But I definitely think, what would it be like if he came back from New Zealand, stuck in a postcard, so to speak, where the COVID was under control, where there weren't riots... and came back, you know, Rip van Winkle’d his way back to the US, and here's what's left. It might be an interesting... because, oh my goodness, how much content will there be about people actually in quarantine and...
Todd: [00:08:47] Right, totally.
Ben: [00:08:48] I mean, that's going to be every single damn thing. So, I would like to enter that idea, not even through the back door, I would like to break through the wall with an axe and into the house that way, if I was going to tell that story.
Todd: [00:09:03] So, Ben, not too long ago, you were speaking about taking High Maintenance to other locations. Is this part of that?
Ben: [00:09:13] Yes, we started working with a production company in Mexico City, and that's kind of our first foray into that world. And hopefully as an entirely different show, with an entirely different main Guy, maybe even a Girl--who can say? That would be a whole different set of short stories. It's the format that we want to export more than anything, not my character. I would love to see that, of course, it's really starting to get crazy down in Latin America now with COVID.
So, you know, we're all in waiting patterns, and this week in particular, I had a bit of a depressive spell, because I had a big bout of hopelessness for all of the things that I was excited about making and, you know, every week, I find people are checking in--or maybe I'm just checking in less and less with people, you know what I mean.
Todd: [00:10:12] Yes, it does seem that way, Ben. Yeah, it's just like the longer it goes, the more it’s kind of like the longer the tether gets.
Ben: [00:10:22] Yeah. For sure.
Todd: [00:10:48] Ben, you're doing some stuff on Cameo, the platform for shout outs, what's that?
Ben: [00:10:54] I did read good research on this Cameo website, which is where you can get, you know, celebrities like Rachel Dolezal, to make a shout out for your friend on their birthday, or, you know, your Andy Dicks, your Gilbert Gottfrieds, your John Lovitzs, your A-list celebrities, I should say. And you can get them to say, in theory, anything you want, but the celebrities still has the chance to write their own script. And on 4/20 of last year, 2019, I went off Instagram on my 420th post because I found that Instagram, I didn't like giving you know, there's a dopamine addiction, there's a time suck. There's all these reasons to not do it, but more than anything, I just didn't want fucking Mark Zuckerberg owning all of my creative content for free.
So, when I started playing around with this Cameo website, at first, I thought it was like, what mo st of us think about, which is like, “Oh no, they've got to do Cameo, how like, that's like, low or whatever.” I had an opinion of, it was like depressing and something worthy of mockery--but now that I've done it, and the use that it's kind of blossomed into, people who it means a lot that I speak to them, I'm not just, like, blasting out content, hoping that somebody is going to give a shit about it.
Todd: [00:12:38] Love you.
Ben: [00:12:40] Yeah, exactly. I'm having people who tell me up front that it would mean a lot to them if I said something to them. And I've taken it from like, an easy, cheesy buck to something where I'm trying to tell people what I'm learning through my meditation teachers and my practices, which is that, it's not as it's going to be okay, it's that everything changes and everything falls apart. Everything falls apart. And the sooner you can get on board with hopelessness, and, you can stop wishing for something that is not now, as soon as you can stop hoping for something better to come along or to be a better person or to live in a better time, you can relax into your “nowness” and you can relax into who you are.
Susan: I'm having trouble with the people who aren't accepting the fact that it's change--you can't judge whether it's good or bad, it just is.
Ben: [00:15:19] Well, we can have compassion for them because they're in a state of grief. They're in the first state of grief for their lives, which is denial. So, I guess as best we can, we can view those people as souls and we can view their karma differently, because they're all dealing with their karma of not wanting to be unsafe. It being so unconscionable that life won't be the same, that they actually can't believe it right now. So I feel like you know as soon as...can I read a poem that I read about kindness?
Susan: [00:16:00] Please.
Ben: [00:16:01] This is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye--and it's called “Kindness.” And maybe this will happen after all this bad shit happens to everybody.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was somebody
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Susan: [00:17:26] That’s beautiful.
Todd:[00:17:28] Nice. Thanks, Ben.
Ben: [00:17:29] Yes. So maybe it has to get totally shitty or anybody can be nice to each other.
Susan: [00:18:37] It's so interesting because your show is really so affirming, and you had mentioned a couple of times despair--and it's that sort of fine line between despair and hope and what your poem was about, kindness and empathy versus you need to see the, the horror too. So how does despair... How do you make that funny?
Ben: [00:19:03] Well, I think when people are funny, the people who are making us laugh are taking what they're talking about very seriously. Whenever somebody is winking at us while they're performing, it's not funny anymore. The character has to be fully invested in trying to get what they want and being thwarted in their process of getting what they want for us to laugh. And I think more than it being funny, what makes us laugh is recognition of that frustration or that despair.
It's not so much that they're in despair--It's more the detail of the despair that we can recognize. The exact detail of like, oh my God, that feeling of texting the three people, the same thing, just hoping one of them gets back to me in a row, that copy paste, you know, just seeing that ritual happened. Observing these little rituals that we thought we did while nobody was watching. And then for somebody to present them to you, I think is what's exciting, because it makes us feel seen and understood. Sometimes, I'm quite moody. The truth about me is I'm very moody, and I wouldn't really want it any other way. Well, that's not true--I think it would be sometimes really nice if I could go with the current more and try not to swim against it.
And I think that's where all suffering comes from, is wishing for what is to not be--or, it shouldn't be that way. But the truth is because of my moodiness, and because of my propensity towards despair and depression, when I see somebody there, I know for certain that they don't want to hear non-acknowledgement of their--they don't want to hear “buck up, shake it off.” And I feel that our whole show has been about promoting this, we say it in the last episode, we're not broken and we don't need to be fixed, we're all just trying to maintain, and we each have our own way of doing it. That's pretty much the thesis of the show.
Susan: [00:21:38] Isn't that interesting, how I was just thinking of the parallels between what you're talking about in terms of individuals versus now collectively we, as a humanity, are facing that too. And what if we're not supposed to fix it, but you know, we're supposed to lay down with it, which is what you're talking about, and go through the despair.
Ben: [00:22:00] Yeah, because running away from pain and pursuing pleasure ad nauseum has not been working for us. And unwillingness to accept responsibility for our own sadness has led to a bunch of blaming other people as the cause of our sadness. And every time you jump on a polarity, you take a stand, an equal and opposite polarity forms. And then you two are just circling around each other without any possibility of becoming one, because we are so identified with our beliefs.
A belief is a thought, it's not necessarily real. I heard this, maybe it was Ram Dass said it, ‘cause I'd been into Ram Dass a lot lately, but I think he said, “It's not the belief that's important, it's the prayer.” And I've been thinking about that a lot. Of just the act of praying, the act of getting together in a group of people and singing songs. So I grew up in a reform Jewish congregation, my mother became the Cantor of it when I was around bar mitzvah age, and I ended up going to a lot of Friday night and Saturday morning Shabbat services. And I know these prayers by heart in a language I don't speak. And I don't know what the words are, but when I do hear them, I'm able to, I don't know, I can't speak to how I feel, but I can speak to --
Susan: [00:23:34] It's the intention.
Ben: [00:23:36] The action of coming in and singing a bunch of songs that you don't know the meaning of, is more helpful than not, during that. It's the intention--and whether the intention is gratitude, whether the intention is to just be around some--we don't have to make so much meaning of it. The belief is the meaning-making of it. And then people start disagreeing over the meaning, and then we have fights. But the doing of it, the art of it, the singing--is really the verb you're talking about. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to have a beginning, middle and end. It can be just this never-ending chant that we can just jump in and jump out of, and understand that there is something beyond our intellect.
Todd: [00:24:28] Yeah. For real. In speaking about Ram Dass, is there anything that you have developed out of that?
Ben: [00:24:35] Yeah, I'm hoping that my next big, big project is a story about him. Cameo just sent me a way to support the NAACP Empowerment Fund! So, it is doing great things, just wanting to plug that there… So, I opened page 15 of the book Be Here Now that Ram Dass helped put together in 1971, and I saw--the listeners won't be able to see it, but I saw this--this was drawn in the book.
Todd: Wow, it’s you!
Susan: [00:25:04] It's a mirror for the people who can't see.
Todd: [00:25:10] And there's the portrait of the person in the mirror is the spitting image of Ben Sinclair. And what does it say, Ben?
Ben: [00:25:33] Around it, it says, “If ‘I’ am not speaking, if ‘I’ am not who ‘I’ thought “I” was, how did ‘I’ get into this? Who am ‘I’?” And “I” always has quotes around it. “And if ‘I’ am not who ‘I’ thought ‘I’ am, then imagine what is possible.”
At the top of that page, is says, “The crazy thing--it's all about paradox.” And then it has an infinity symbol with “paradox” written in front of it. “The greatest paradox of it all, is that however long you want power, you can't have it. As soon as you stop wanting the power, you'll have more power than you ever thought imaginable.” What a weird thing! This is like, I memorized the top part of it, because it struck me so much, about power.
So for me, I've always wanted to be thought of as a smart person and as clever and witty. And that would translate to, as soon as I don't need to know that I'm funny... as soon as I can be funny without knowing that I am funny, or making sure other people know that I'm funny, then I'll be hilarious. Uh, right now I'm just, uh, trying hard now... but.
Susan: [00:26:49] I think you’re funny!
Ben: [00:26:52] Oh, yeah! Well, it doesn't matter to me, Susan. It doesn't matter to me what you think.
Todd: [00:26:59] So you're taking this idea into a show, or the concept of how that would be.
Ben: [00:27:05] The wonderful thing about Ram Dass is that he was a wonderful orator and lecturer, for anyone who doesn't know who this is, he was born Richard Alpert in 1933, and he became a tenure-track professor at Harvard in psychology in the early sixties. And he was like the golden boy at 28, had four chairs at Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard. And then he met Timothy Leary and they started the Harvard Psilocybin Project together, and they both got fired from Harvard.
And the whole time Richard Alpert was, he identified as a bisexual, but he was a gay person who was really in the closet. And when he was a teen in boarding school, somebody was watching him wrestle naked with a friend through a hole in the wall. And then he was like an outcast in his boarding school, he was totally humiliated. And this was like in the forties, early fifties. So he was a super overachiever who dropped out with Timothy Leary and who, after they went through the psychedelic revolution, they separated and while Timothy Leary became like the most dangerous man in America and had this fight with Richard Nixon or whatever, Richard Alpert went to India, met his guru Baba Neem Karoli, and became Ram Dass, who brought the whole notion of “be here now” back to America from India in a way that no one had ever distilled into a message like that before.
And then he became a spirituality lecturer the whole time who was, instead of trying to become somebody, he was helping people try to become nobody and give up their ego trips. And what's so wonderful about his lectures is he uses his life as a mirror to help people understand what they might be going through. He uses his own prime, and a lot of people do this, but he especially, so he just has hours and hours and hours and hours of lectures of him telling these anecdotes and these stories and about his life, and how he arrived to this conclusion of “just get on with it!” You're living right now. So drop your shit and just get on with it.
And this comes from like an, a highly intelligent social scientist who worked on childhood development, and who then came under the, he devoted himself to somebody who is completely outside of Western medicine and philosophy. And this was at a time equally divisive as our time right now, in 1968 is when he left the United States to go to India for the first time and was coming back with these notions of non-attachment, and non-aggression. And it's so interesting. I was listening to him while I was paddling around on the canal the other day, and I was listening to the helicopters circle overhead and the demonstrations. And he would have said, if you run at somebody screaming for peace, you're going to get exactly that scream right back at you.
He died in December, 2019, and I'm not sure how he would have dealt with this moment with all of his wisdom, except to say I'm loving awareness and probably do nothing. They had a falling out in roughly 1966, or ‘65, one of the Rockefeller, I think it was the Rockefeller heirs, gave them a 22-room mansion in the Hudson Valley, the Millbrook Institute, they called it, in Millbrook, New York, and Richard Alpert was basically raising Timothy Leary's kids while Timothy Leary was running around. And Dick was also in love with Timothy. There was no doubt about it. He had a romantic love for him, and they were not friends until they came back into being friends before Timothy died in the mid nineties.
So they had a reconnection in the late eighties, early nineties. But they had decades of hurt and alienation between them. So there's a lot there. I think that there's a lot there for a show, and I think, and I know what it's like to work closely with somebody and then not work with them anymore, but feel somehow like my destiny is tied to them, so I would definitely love to explore that whole thing through this other story.
Susan: [00:31:57] How did you come to Ram Dass? Were you always sort of interested?
Ben: [00:32:04] No, no. I opened that book and I saw that and I was like, what? And then I forgot about it for a little while. And then somebody sent me that book--Emma Allen from the company Everyday Oil. I became a big fan of her scented oil, it’s so good. She sent me that book, and I finally read the book and I remember it was not until January, or late December of this year, when I was feeling in despair about something--I don't know. And then I read the first 20 pages, which is where he gives his autobiography, and I thought to myself, this feels awfully familiar. And then I just put it away and then it just kept coming back. And I did listen to Buddhist psychologist, meditation teacher, Tara Brach, and I listened to her podcast a lot. And they were all running in the same circle. Her, Jack Kornfield, all of these mindfulness teachers.
Susan: [00:33:06] How does the meditation with the psychedelic drugs? How does that exist?
Ben: [00:33:11] Definitely. I had a resurgence of LSD in my life when I was 32 or 33. And before that, I had grown mushrooms in my own home. I remember on Christmas of 2013, I had a mushroom trip in my house and I was sitting in front of a candle, so my shadow was projected onto the wall of my head, really big on the wall and it scared the hell out of me. And about a year later around when I met you, Todd, I had a big graffiti head on a wall for High Maintenance. And I felt like that was another watershed moment of me being alone. But I have what Ram Dass will keep telling you about drugs is it can be wonderfully instructive of getting high and understanding the connectivity that you have. And, feeling your soul, so to speak. Feeling that you are a soul connected to a greater universal network, but you always have to come down from that. You always come down, and I think he was trying to stay high off psychedelics–for years and years, he was doing so much acid, and his whole path was to meet somebody who didn't come down. That's what he was looking for: a sustainable way of being in that mind space. And he met somebody who didn't come down, and he devoted himself to that.
Susan: [00:34:40] Who was it?
Ben: [00:34:42] Baba Neem Karoli, the Maharaji he called him. But there was a lot of mind reading happening with him and that part, I think I might be at the stage if my life were it to run parallel to his, I think I'm at the stage of right before he went to India. I'm hoping that one day I'll find somebody to devote myself to, or not somebody--something to develop myself to, because this whole individualism thing, it's not, it.
Todd: [00:35:12] Couldn't agree with you more.
Ben: [00:35:14] Yeah, I'm cult-bait. I'll do it.
Susan: [00:37:55] I have to tell you, I went to hear Timothy Leary at a lecture that was mind-blowing. Loved it. I've always been a Timothy Leary fan, and it was so great to see him in person.
Ben: [00:38:09] Yeah. He's a complicated person. Very complex, but who’s not?
Todd: [00:39:03] Ben, thanks for doing this.
Susan: [00:39:05] Yeah. Thank you so much.
Ben: [00:39:07] Total and absolute pleasure and thank you for everything. I appreciate it and I loved you guys.
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