Good Deeds, Great Seats: Hallelujah! (Ottawa Citizen 5/16/09
Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 8:09 pm
Good deeds, great seats: Hallelujah!
Why an Ottawa man is raffling his tickets to Leonard Cohen to the holiest bidder
Bruce Deachman
The Ottawa Citizen and Wire Services
Saturday, May 16, 2009
In a somewhat inward twist on the Golden Rule, Leonard Cohen has said that if you act the way you'd like to be, you'll soon be the way you act. And admittedly, this uplifting sentiment certainly seems in keeping with the handful of years Cohen spent in seclusion in the late 1990s as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk.
Still, it doesn't seem a perfect fit to equate the Montreal-born singer-songwriter -- ranked just behind the late Johnny Cash and Death himself on the list of celebrities with entirely black wardrobes -- with innate goodness and light. After all, it was Cohen who didn't think of himself as a pessimist because pessimists, in his view, were people who waited for it to rain, while he, he bleakly noted, was already soaked to the skin.
Regardless, it's goodness that an anonymous 40-year-old Ottawa public servant -- who goes by the pseudonym Calvin -- is looking for, while a pair of tickets to Cohen's May 25 concert at the National Arts Centre is the reward that someone wearing the right pair of goody shoes will receive for their selfless deeds.
To discover who fits this bill of goods, Calvin has launched a website -- http://www.projectkarma.ca -- where people can nominate the most commendable among their friends and family, and explain why they'd be worthy recipients of a pair of orchestra-level seats to Cohen's first tour in 15 years.
The tickets, Calvin admits, came as the result of his own greed, when he decided he might be able to improve on the pair he'd already bought by searching the e-Bay auction site. There, he found a pair that had no minimum or reserve bid, and got them for a little under face value.
He thought he could then sell his extra tickets -- with a face value of $502, plus $40 in service charges -- at a great profit, but began to have second thoughts about the plan.
"I started feeling guilty about that," he says, "because of the whole TicketMaster debacle and people having problems getting tickets. I just felt badly about it."
He considered simply advertising them for cost, but thought that whoever bought them would simply scalp them for an exorbitant amount.
"I thought, on what basis do you award these?" he says. "You can do it by money, but then I thought, people say that being good is such a great thing, but you rarely get rewarded for it. So I thought, let's make it that and keep it vague."
By midweek, Calvin had about 700 visitors to his website, and slightly more than 50 nominations. The deadline for nominations is
8 p.m. Monday. After that, Calvin will winnow the list to 10 and, after confirming that the nominees and nominators actually exist, choose one at random.
The winner will be notified on Friday, but will only receive the tickets at the show, in an attempt by Calvin to prevent the tickets being scalped.
The nominations sent in so far have covered a wide range of philanthropy and rectitude, some noting specific acts of kind-heartedness, and others focusing more on generally sterling characters.
"What's surprised me -- in a good way -- is that a large percentage of the nominations are these very day-to-day, mundane, never-gets-a-lot-of-attention kind of things," says Calvin.
"Like someone who marries somebody's mother and totally became part of the family, brings out the grandkids, volunteers at the local community centre. Nothing astounding or out of the blue, but just this genuinely good person; people who just go out of their way for others."
This is the first time Calvin has done anything like this, and while the website refers to it as "Project No. 1," he says he'd rather leave the good karmic planning to others.
"I like little fun things," he says. "I have this view that life is short, so make it interesting.
"I had no idea where this would go when I started the website. I could have 1,000 people nominating, I could have 10.
"But I thought, the website is there; if somebody is interested in doing a project like this, I'm happy to host it. I mean, I had to pay for the web-hosting for a year anyway. I won't administer it, but if someone has an idea, I'm happy to talk to them about it."
In fact, he says he'd love to see the website transferred from one person to the next, each adding their own curious project.
But for the time being, there are those Leonard Cohen tickets to get rid of.
"But I just thought it would be interesting," Calvin says. "There's no underhanded thing behind this -- I'm not this religious person, I'm not trying to promote anything.
"I thought this would be a fun idea."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2009
http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/ne ... 897c0c2533
Why an Ottawa man is raffling his tickets to Leonard Cohen to the holiest bidder
Bruce Deachman
The Ottawa Citizen and Wire Services
Saturday, May 16, 2009
In a somewhat inward twist on the Golden Rule, Leonard Cohen has said that if you act the way you'd like to be, you'll soon be the way you act. And admittedly, this uplifting sentiment certainly seems in keeping with the handful of years Cohen spent in seclusion in the late 1990s as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk.
Still, it doesn't seem a perfect fit to equate the Montreal-born singer-songwriter -- ranked just behind the late Johnny Cash and Death himself on the list of celebrities with entirely black wardrobes -- with innate goodness and light. After all, it was Cohen who didn't think of himself as a pessimist because pessimists, in his view, were people who waited for it to rain, while he, he bleakly noted, was already soaked to the skin.
Regardless, it's goodness that an anonymous 40-year-old Ottawa public servant -- who goes by the pseudonym Calvin -- is looking for, while a pair of tickets to Cohen's May 25 concert at the National Arts Centre is the reward that someone wearing the right pair of goody shoes will receive for their selfless deeds.
To discover who fits this bill of goods, Calvin has launched a website -- http://www.projectkarma.ca -- where people can nominate the most commendable among their friends and family, and explain why they'd be worthy recipients of a pair of orchestra-level seats to Cohen's first tour in 15 years.
The tickets, Calvin admits, came as the result of his own greed, when he decided he might be able to improve on the pair he'd already bought by searching the e-Bay auction site. There, he found a pair that had no minimum or reserve bid, and got them for a little under face value.
He thought he could then sell his extra tickets -- with a face value of $502, plus $40 in service charges -- at a great profit, but began to have second thoughts about the plan.
"I started feeling guilty about that," he says, "because of the whole TicketMaster debacle and people having problems getting tickets. I just felt badly about it."
He considered simply advertising them for cost, but thought that whoever bought them would simply scalp them for an exorbitant amount.
"I thought, on what basis do you award these?" he says. "You can do it by money, but then I thought, people say that being good is such a great thing, but you rarely get rewarded for it. So I thought, let's make it that and keep it vague."
By midweek, Calvin had about 700 visitors to his website, and slightly more than 50 nominations. The deadline for nominations is
8 p.m. Monday. After that, Calvin will winnow the list to 10 and, after confirming that the nominees and nominators actually exist, choose one at random.
The winner will be notified on Friday, but will only receive the tickets at the show, in an attempt by Calvin to prevent the tickets being scalped.
The nominations sent in so far have covered a wide range of philanthropy and rectitude, some noting specific acts of kind-heartedness, and others focusing more on generally sterling characters.
"What's surprised me -- in a good way -- is that a large percentage of the nominations are these very day-to-day, mundane, never-gets-a-lot-of-attention kind of things," says Calvin.
"Like someone who marries somebody's mother and totally became part of the family, brings out the grandkids, volunteers at the local community centre. Nothing astounding or out of the blue, but just this genuinely good person; people who just go out of their way for others."
This is the first time Calvin has done anything like this, and while the website refers to it as "Project No. 1," he says he'd rather leave the good karmic planning to others.
"I like little fun things," he says. "I have this view that life is short, so make it interesting.
"I had no idea where this would go when I started the website. I could have 1,000 people nominating, I could have 10.
"But I thought, the website is there; if somebody is interested in doing a project like this, I'm happy to host it. I mean, I had to pay for the web-hosting for a year anyway. I won't administer it, but if someone has an idea, I'm happy to talk to them about it."
In fact, he says he'd love to see the website transferred from one person to the next, each adding their own curious project.
But for the time being, there are those Leonard Cohen tickets to get rid of.
"But I just thought it would be interesting," Calvin says. "There's no underhanded thing behind this -- I'm not this religious person, I'm not trying to promote anything.
"I thought this would be a fun idea."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2009
http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/ne ... 897c0c2533
