One more week

One more week before the end of my undergraduate career, possibly my career as a student. Am I flipping my shit? Surprisingly, no. And this isn't the standard "Putting off the anxiety until the problem hits me in the face" kind of thing. This is genuine Zen acceptance. Who the fuck have I become?

I guess I have two things going for me: 1) I'm passionate about something with which I have a certain degree of talent. A lot of people don't have this skill, this being good at something they really love doing. I can feel good knowing that I have taken at least one step that most have not. 2) I have a bunch of friends who believe in me, and whom I believe in, and we are all willing to help one another along this really difficult road of trying to pursue a career in something that is by its very definition useless. If I did not have both of these things, I would be far more nervous than I am. But such as it is, I am more excited than I am terrified, more jazzed than confused. This may change once the realities of post-graduate life smack me in the solar plexus, but for now, I'm cool.

I almost wish I didn't have to do all the work I need to accomplish in the next week so that I could just chill and enjoy myself. Such as it is I have a lot of work to accomplish. Maybe I should get on that right now.

The Show Went On!

Good Woman of Setzuan ended its run tonight. All in all, I'm amazed at how positive people have been about it. I was expecting the show to be a bit more divisive than it ended up being. People were engaged with the story, blown away by the set, and no one seemed irritated or bored by the style of acting. At least that's what they're telling me. Hopefully there's not some big cadre of people mumbling and grumbling about how over-blown everything was. Regardless, this was one of the most fun experiences I've had being in a show. It was a little crazy, but the camaraderie that developed among the cast was unlike anything I've seen in a show with this many actors. In summation, it was a damn good show to go out on.

*Side Note* I seem to have the most fun when I'm being directed by friends and peers. The whole Radio Play process was really fun, and although rehearsals for On Air Off tended to be strange, performing the thing was awesome. I guess that makes sense though, working with friends is a much more supportive environment than working with strangers/people you're intimidated by. *End Side Note*

Now that the show is over I'm gonna have so many oodles of free time it's gonna be like "woah." But I will miss being around those folks. And I will, in my own crazy way, miss being Paul (the name of my homeless man character). True, he's just another crazy repressed pedophile who got run out of a small rural town and is now homeless in the big city, but he was still a great guy to embody for a few hours of each day. I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to do something like that again, unless I become Daniel Day Lewis. And I don't want to become Daniel Day Lewis. Cobbling doesn't suit me.

I just don't...Christ...

Probably no one reads this anymore because I never fucking post on it with any degree of regularity. But I'm going to keep writing, dammit, despite the fact that three months have passed since my last entry. Did anything happen during that time? Fuck yeah, it did. Christmas happened. That's one thing. Then New Years pretty soon after that. January 3rd happened just a few days after that one. Then I visited Los Angeles for a week, which was pretty cool in a "I Am Going To Live Here In a Little Less Than A Year Oh My God That's So Frightening And Kind of Exciting In The Most Frightening Way Possible" kind of way. Then in between I glutted on movies, as I normally do when I'm not beholden to work. Then I came back to school. Hurray!

I'm in a show now called The Good Woman of Setzuan, or, as it's normally known, The Good Person of Szechuan, by Bertoldt (sp?) Brecht. I play the Carpenter, the Policeman and the Priest. Even with the triple-casting, it's a small role, but it might very well be the last time I do any acting, so I'm trying to relish it as much as possible. The process is really cool. The concept behind this staging is that it's actually a group of homeless people with no real training or education putting on a play, not a bunch of student actors trying to develop their characters in more traditional ways. So in order to build our characters on stage as though they were being performed by homeless people, we're actually rehearsing as though we were a group of homeless people. That is, we're improvising for hours at a time, building and developing these homeless characters that ultimately the audience will never get to see, all so the performances on stage will have a certain weird, removed quality which is kind of what Brecht was going for. It's a really cool way to rehearse, but it makes me wonder what the final product is going to look like, and whether people used to regular ol' stage acting will respond to it in a positive way. Regardless, I'm having a great time with it, which is all I could really ask for.

I applied to the Fringe Festival with Every Pilot yesterday, under the new title Despite Everything. It was a long process trying to get every little detail perfect, from the application to the cover letter to the script itself. I hope I got everything right, otherwise I'll be feeling pretty awful about myself come April when I sit by my mailbox and get nothing after weeks on end. But there'll always be next year! ...When I'm living in L.A...*sigh*

Sweet Bargain-Hunting Christ...

What's been goin' on, G? Been a while since I seen ya! Been a while since I updated, numsayin'? Kick back, dogg, and read on. Got some truf I wanna lay down. For real.

I'm gonna be perfectly honest. As an underclassman, I'd look at graduating seniors with a certain degree of judgement. If, when they left Skidmore, they went straight on to the working world and got a good jump-start on their careers, I admired them. If, instead, they went on to loaf around with a few stupid, degrading jobs...well, I kind of turned up my nose and went "Well, look at Mr. Utter-Lack-of-Motivation! Why don't you make somethin' of yourself you no-account good-for-nuthin'!" Now it's about three months from my graduation, and well...I'm starting to think that maybe "loafing" isn't so much the right term as much as "journey of self-discovery."

I've mentioned this before, small internet community, but I know what I want to do. I have a passion. It's story-telling, in any capacity, be it acting, writing or directing. The issue, of course, is that getting paid for artistic pursuits is a pretty big long-shot. I heard one actor describe being successful in Hollywood as "winning and inter-planetary lottery." I believe him one-hundred per cent. What I write are small, moderately funny but overall deeply miserable dramas about the shallowness of modern friendship, the finality of death, and the insignificance of humanity in the face of an incomprehensibly vast universe. This is not what Hollywood is looking for. They're looking for CGI talking puppies and Vin Diesel with a sub-machine gun in each hand. In the past two days I've heard two different stories about deeply personal visions being butchered and sanitized by Hollywood studios. Obviously there's more than two people...likely there are hundreds of thousands over the years who tried to produce something meaningful, only to have it butchered in the name of corporate thinking. And those were the lucky ones who got something produced.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. We'll see what I do.

Opinions on People Pt. II

This is a public blog. It means that I publish things that I think would be of interest to other people. Sometimes my life is pretty interesting. Other times it is desperately, inconceivably dull. The past two weeks, it has been the latter. I've been going from class, to Ad-Libs, to girlfriend and back, and very little in between. None of this is particularly interesting to the casual observer. So I'm gonna write up a few little paragraphs on my personal heroes.

Thom Yorke. This man is legend. Most of the time, when you really delve into the personal history of an artist, you get these awful glimpses of their very real, very obnoxious personality. Thom Yorke, I imagine, is just a pretty decent guy. Yeah, he's probably a bit prickly. Not the most fun guy to hang out with at a party, I imagine. I'm betting a fun evening for him is spending four hours on moveon.org and then writing a song about his feelings. But I'll be damned if the guy isn't the most uncompromising, virtually ego-less talent around. He's anti-establishment, but without all the Bob Dylan cruelty or the Kurt Cobain self-absorption. He's political without having a Bono-ish, self-aggrandizing messiah complex. He's got no unfortunate past, no illigitemate children to speak of, no addictions: he's just kind of a sad guy from Oxfordshire who really likes making music. And has no other ambitions than to make his music, and to let other people enjoy his music. That's what I love about his. He has no cares but making good, revolutionary art. And no one is quite like him.

Patton Oswalt I would imagine that if Thom Yorke were American and capable of laughing, he'd be Patton Oswalt. Oswalt has the career that I want. He's doing a lot of really great comedy, he stars in sitcoms, is a working screen-writer, and has gotten moderately more famous for being a cartoon rat in a Pixar movie. He's also the funniest comedian around, in my humble opinion. And unlike Will "Kicking and Screaming" Ferrel, or Mike "Cat in the Hat" Myers, he's doing what he wants on his terms, not going for stardom or big paydays. If he wouldn't mind handing his life to me, I'd appreciate it a great deal.

Chris Onstad Who's this guy? Go to www.achewood.com and find out. Here's why I admire him: he's a particularly funny computer programmer from the silicon valley. He makes an ugly-ass website with an ugly-ass cartoon. He sells a few tee-shirts and stickers on the side just to make the site profitable. Slowly but surely, through the STRENGTH OF HIS WRITING ALONE, he develops enough of a fan-base that the comic turns into a full-time job. He's supporting himself and his wife and child in Silicon Valley, which is probably the most expensive place to live that is not on a cloud made of diamonds that were spun in a cotton-candy machine. And the comic is awesome. It's ass-ugly, to be sure, but the characters are so vivid that it doesn't even really matter. At least not to me.

The through-line in all this? I guess it's artists who do subversive, strange work, yet, through the strength of that work alone, manage to support themselves, to varying degrees (really, descending degrees: Thom's a rock star, Patton's a somewhat-well-known stand-up and script-writer, and Chris is making ends meet in a California suburb off a cult-y website). Sound like anything anyone wants to be?

College Thoughts

It is Senior year for me. This is my last few months in college, and I can see already how quickly they're going to whip by. In a few months I'll have my own share of responsibilities and needs. Have I made the most of my time here? Have I grabbed every precious youthful moment by the balls, twisted vigorously, and sucked the sweet juices from its darkest chambers? Have I successfully carpe'd the diem?

The answer, some might argue, is no. In terms of the drug pool, I didn't venture particularly deep. In terms of the sex pool, I didn't wade particularly far, and certainly not with very many partners. I have not tried anything that could be chemically addicting, and I have not gotten my "pimp on" as some may say.

What have I accomplished? I wrote two fucking plays, and both were awesome. I've grown as an artist in every respect, be it my writing, my acting, and I've developed an entirely new skill as a director. I've grown intellectually, from someone who dipped a finger in a thousand different pots to a person with a genuine intellectual curiosity. I can relate to people now in an unfamiliar social situation, whereas before I found myself muttering and mumbling with an extreme degree of awkwardness. I have grown more comfortable in my skin. And in doing so, I discovered something: I don't really value the "experience" that people usually equate with college. This is not a judgemental call. This is not me saying that I disapprove of people who experiment. I disapprove of people who get addicted to anything, but that's a different story. I simply believe that, for me...I could do without 'em. I could. I'd like to try some again, before I have a family and everything, but I could not just as easily. That's not where my mojo is. Just ain't me.

So do I regret not smoking more, not snorting more, not fucking more (or at least more people)? No. That's not who I am.

Here's what I do regret: my mawkishness and my depression makes me introverted. It's manifested itself in a number of ways, but the way that I find I most regret is not reaching out to people. Allowing people to stay at an arm's length, never contacting people who I consider my friends, never fostering my friendships in any meaningful way. That's just not cool. I'm very sorry I've done that, not been a better friend to more people. I feel I'm not close with so many people I could very easily have been close with. This year I'm going to try and do better, but...we'll see how it works out.

What next now? What the fuck do I do? The world calls, and I feel as though I have something to give, but it's all in arena's that are fraught with competition and despair. Acting? Fuckin' A, can I get by being six foot two, slouchy and slim? Writing? Yeah, me and about eighty thousand other Jewish college graduates who can type kind of fast. Journalism? With what experience or credentials, exactly? It's not that I don't feel like I'm ready to do something. It's that everything I chose is just so hard to do.

Give me some love, professional America. I'm an okay writer, I'm pretty personable. I'd just like some kind of assurance that I could maybe at some point live above the poverty line. Can you give me that without me going to law school? I hope you can, professional America. I hope you can.

My show

My show is a good show. I don't often say this. I don't often admit to myself that I've accomplished something. Even when I do a good job, it is often tempered by a feeling that I could have somehow done better. All my performances, with the possible exception of my role in Proof senior year of high school, have felt like this. Rufio, despite people enjoying it a great deal, felt this way. But I've worked on this damn script for a good three years, and after so much re-structuring and revising, I think I've finally made something that I am happy with. This is saying a lot for me.

To everyone who is important to me and couldn't come see this play, I hope to God this play doesn't end here at Skidmore College. I hope to show this to everyone I come in contact with on my long, dark journey towards artistic success. God willing, someone will take it, and they will treat it well. When this happens, I hope you can make it to whatever converted church basement in Greenwich Village is willing to take this thing. I think you'd really like it.

This is not a funny post. I am sorry about this.