Good news: I have a job, and it's starting on monday.
Good news: Becky's coming to visit this weekend, and David is coming to live here.
Good news: Ratatouille comes out this weekend.
Things are looking up, generally. Until my first paycheck, I'll still have to live off my housemate's day-old offerings from their job at a bakery (Mrs. London's...faaaaaancy!), but after that, it'll be sunshine and lollipops, I think. Or I hope. God, I hope.
I feel like a tirade. If you have interest in the minutiae of my life but have no interest about things that aren't related to me, please leave. Really. Go. Now. I told you now!
If you've seen Amadeus, perused the special features section of the Citizen Kane DVD, or read even the slightest shred of a fact about Kurt Cobain, you'll have a passing familiarity with a very sad fact: really talented artists can also be horrid, miserable people. Everyone's been through it. You come to love the artist, feel an almost personal connection with him/her, and decide to gently dip into their biography. What do you come up with? Megalomania, pig-headedness, cruelty and shame. It happened to me with John Lennon, who, judging by interviews with the press and his incredible body of work, seemed to me to be the coolest guy that ever was or will be. Then I learned about his heroin addiction, his total abandonment of his first wife and son for Yoko "Fucking Pretentious Little Bitch When Will She Learn To Just STOP" Ono, his capacity for being just a total prick. It made him more interesting in a way, but before I learned these things, John Lennon was my #1 famous guy I'd want to be friends when I meet him in a non-denominational afterlife-type setting. Now I'd like to meet him, talk to him, but I'll be damned if I'd want to get close to him. Now a similar thing has happened with another artist: Mr. James Stewart.
I was watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the other day, which I love and if you haven't seen it please do, and I felt an urge to look up Jimmy on the ol' Wikipedia. Every movie I'd seen Jimmy Stewart in, especially his Hitchcock movies, I'd pretty much loved. And it seemed like he was just the sweetest, nicest guy you'd want to meet. Then, the facts start slamming. Jimmy Stewart did the following things, ranging from kind of unfortunate to just plain awful:
1) Supported America's continuing involvement in the Vietnam war.
2) Was an informant for J. Edgar Hoover during the HUAC hearings.
3) Refused to share the screen with any black actor.
This guy? The guy that read the constitution on the fake Senate floor? The guy who's the richest man in that fake town? The guy who loved that fake, invisible bunny so very, very much? I guess that's what happens when you grow up in Indiana.
Thursday, 28 June 2007
Thursday, 21 June 2007
The slow descent into madness
Here's why I hate the job-search process, especially at my age:
When you're a twenty-year-old college student looking for a really basic summer position, you're applying to very simple, slightly-higher-than-minimum wage jobs in the service and retail industry, most like. In my case, I have little to no experience doing these kinds of things. My summer jobs have been at summer camps, theaters and office buildings. Here in Saratoga, I'm looking for your average service industry job. Unfortunately, the town seems to be glutted with students, high school and college, who want a summer position, and it seems like few people are hiring a really average little guy like me who has no previous experience.
What does that mean for me? It means I spend my days twittling my thumbs, calling places I've applied to and applying to new places, hearing my very simple first name getting mangled in all kinds of ways (So far: Max, Michael, and Arthur. Yes, Arthur.) When you're an unskilled kind of guy looking for a few hundred bucks in your pocket, people treat you like offal floating down the great river of humanity. I get referred to managers who aren't there, owners who come in when they feel like it, and on-line applications that I know never get looked at.
What makes this whole process worse is that I just learned what the Radio Play schedule is going to look like: 10 am to 5pm, Danny tells me. Which is essentially when most jobs will ask me to work. I can try and talk to Danny and Adam. If I find a night job, that'd be great, and if I found a job in the evening that worked from, say, 6 to eleven or so, that'd be great too. But I'm at a place right now where I can't be very picky. If it really comes down to it and I can only find jobs that will hire in the afternoon...well, something's gonna give, I'm not sure what. I have a paltry seven-hundred fifty in my bank account right now, which is about two hundred short of paying for the next two months rent...plus I have to pay Ben back for the money he forwarded for the security deposit, which is about two hundred fifty. And I also have to eat. I've managed to stick to the housing-project diet of pasta and tomato sauce, with the occasional gift from Margaret's Mrs. London's job. But at some point I'm going to need some vitamins in my system. Lord knows I ain't getting any of those right now.
The shitty thing is that this is my first glimpse into my life for the five years, maybe more. I'm gonna be an actor/writer, god dammit, and that means making extremely little money for long periods of time. Now, hopefully it won't be this bad all; after all, I could probably find temp jobs to keep me afloat, wherever I'll be, so I won't be scrounging for pennies and sighing wistfully at the Barnes and Noble "new music" shelf (White Stripes, your album calls to me). But it won't be too far off from this. And boy, does that ever depress me.
When you're a twenty-year-old college student looking for a really basic summer position, you're applying to very simple, slightly-higher-than-minimum wage jobs in the service and retail industry, most like. In my case, I have little to no experience doing these kinds of things. My summer jobs have been at summer camps, theaters and office buildings. Here in Saratoga, I'm looking for your average service industry job. Unfortunately, the town seems to be glutted with students, high school and college, who want a summer position, and it seems like few people are hiring a really average little guy like me who has no previous experience.
What does that mean for me? It means I spend my days twittling my thumbs, calling places I've applied to and applying to new places, hearing my very simple first name getting mangled in all kinds of ways (So far: Max, Michael, and Arthur. Yes, Arthur.) When you're an unskilled kind of guy looking for a few hundred bucks in your pocket, people treat you like offal floating down the great river of humanity. I get referred to managers who aren't there, owners who come in when they feel like it, and on-line applications that I know never get looked at.
What makes this whole process worse is that I just learned what the Radio Play schedule is going to look like: 10 am to 5pm, Danny tells me. Which is essentially when most jobs will ask me to work. I can try and talk to Danny and Adam. If I find a night job, that'd be great, and if I found a job in the evening that worked from, say, 6 to eleven or so, that'd be great too. But I'm at a place right now where I can't be very picky. If it really comes down to it and I can only find jobs that will hire in the afternoon...well, something's gonna give, I'm not sure what. I have a paltry seven-hundred fifty in my bank account right now, which is about two hundred short of paying for the next two months rent...plus I have to pay Ben back for the money he forwarded for the security deposit, which is about two hundred fifty. And I also have to eat. I've managed to stick to the housing-project diet of pasta and tomato sauce, with the occasional gift from Margaret's Mrs. London's job. But at some point I'm going to need some vitamins in my system. Lord knows I ain't getting any of those right now.
The shitty thing is that this is my first glimpse into my life for the five years, maybe more. I'm gonna be an actor/writer, god dammit, and that means making extremely little money for long periods of time. Now, hopefully it won't be this bad all; after all, I could probably find temp jobs to keep me afloat, wherever I'll be, so I won't be scrounging for pennies and sighing wistfully at the Barnes and Noble "new music" shelf (White Stripes, your album calls to me). But it won't be too far off from this. And boy, does that ever depress me.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Here comes another one!
Let me explain the situation behind my possible upcoming flirtation with professional theater:
A man named Gary with an extremely Italian-sounding last name owns a company that essentially flips towns the way antique automobile dealers flip cars. They take a large portion of real estate that's fallen on hard times and they gentrifying it, encouraging retail, restaurants, malls and (most importantly for me) theaters. This man Gary has been working on Asbury Park, a very extraordinarily run-down old town on the Jersey Shore. Bruce Springsteen got his start there; think of the kind of people who'd intimately relate to the lyrics in "Born in the USA" and you've got the general vibe of the place. Gary hired Chris Barker, another young theater artist like us, to start a new theater company in the giant space they have on the boardwalk. Chris heard Matt Schwartz's CD of Rufio, and decided that a good original project for next season would be a flashy Peter Pan musical, and so contacted Matt and Danny and spoke to them about getting it produced.
Nothing is official right now. Until the season is over and the ticket sales are accounted for, Chris can't sign off on a contract saying "I will produce this play for x amount of dollars". I'd like to think it's more likely than not that we'll be produced, but the nagging pessimist in me keeps telling me to prepare for disappointment. In the meantime, this fellow Gary with the extremely Italian sounding last name heard some woman write a song about Frankenstein and bells suddenly started sounding in his head and he asked Chris if he could produce some kind of Frankenstein musical for Halloween. Chris subsequently asked Matt and Danny if they would write some songs for it.
Now we have no idea who this "woman with a Frankenstein song" is, and I personally don't understand why, if she wrote one song already, she wouldn't be interested in writing all of them. Also, my name apparently did not come up in this Frankenstein conversation, so it's not yet certain whether I'd be invovled in this show at all. She could just provide a story outline with a few song ideas, then give it to all of us for a good flesh-out, or she might want to write the whole script around the songs Danny and Matt will write over the course of the summer, etc. So, at the moment, there are two projects way up in the air, one so much so that it needs oxygen supplements to survive on a regular basis. I guess this is the life I'm going to lead.
A man named Gary with an extremely Italian-sounding last name owns a company that essentially flips towns the way antique automobile dealers flip cars. They take a large portion of real estate that's fallen on hard times and they gentrifying it, encouraging retail, restaurants, malls and (most importantly for me) theaters. This man Gary has been working on Asbury Park, a very extraordinarily run-down old town on the Jersey Shore. Bruce Springsteen got his start there; think of the kind of people who'd intimately relate to the lyrics in "Born in the USA" and you've got the general vibe of the place. Gary hired Chris Barker, another young theater artist like us, to start a new theater company in the giant space they have on the boardwalk. Chris heard Matt Schwartz's CD of Rufio, and decided that a good original project for next season would be a flashy Peter Pan musical, and so contacted Matt and Danny and spoke to them about getting it produced.
Nothing is official right now. Until the season is over and the ticket sales are accounted for, Chris can't sign off on a contract saying "I will produce this play for x amount of dollars". I'd like to think it's more likely than not that we'll be produced, but the nagging pessimist in me keeps telling me to prepare for disappointment. In the meantime, this fellow Gary with the extremely Italian sounding last name heard some woman write a song about Frankenstein and bells suddenly started sounding in his head and he asked Chris if he could produce some kind of Frankenstein musical for Halloween. Chris subsequently asked Matt and Danny if they would write some songs for it.
Now we have no idea who this "woman with a Frankenstein song" is, and I personally don't understand why, if she wrote one song already, she wouldn't be interested in writing all of them. Also, my name apparently did not come up in this Frankenstein conversation, so it's not yet certain whether I'd be invovled in this show at all. She could just provide a story outline with a few song ideas, then give it to all of us for a good flesh-out, or she might want to write the whole script around the songs Danny and Matt will write over the course of the summer, etc. So, at the moment, there are two projects way up in the air, one so much so that it needs oxygen supplements to survive on a regular basis. I guess this is the life I'm going to lead.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Aw shucks!
Well I'll be dang-blammed if it isn't hard to actually come up with a solid job in a week's time, or at least for a fellow like me. The last one, the hospital typing job, came pretty damn easy after only four days of waiting by the phone for the temp agency to call. This time I got to make phone calls to people who sound like they're extremely busy, who then refer me to people that sound really disinterested in talking to anyone period. I've been calling restaurants this whole week, and they usually tell me to call back in two or three days, which means today is follow-up day. I want to check restaurants first because that has waitering potential, which in this town would probably give me a good three-hundred a week pay or so, which isn't substantially less than I was making back at home. And anyway, all I'm looking for right now is two hundred a month for food (I eat a lot of spaghetti, like the man said), and the rest is to put in the ol' savings account for future "Oh my God I am an actor/writer and I have absolutely no source of income right now" kinds of situations.
Speaking of acting, I'm in Erin Daley's show "A Fine Piano", which is kind of like an hour-long composition on Chekhov's "Three Sisters", where it's all a dream that Irina is having and such theater-type concepts. If you're in the area, come and see it. If not, I understand gas is expensive and that sometimes a nice night at home can be just the thing after a long week.
Speaking of acting, I'm in Erin Daley's show "A Fine Piano", which is kind of like an hour-long composition on Chekhov's "Three Sisters", where it's all a dream that Irina is having and such theater-type concepts. If you're in the area, come and see it. If not, I understand gas is expensive and that sometimes a nice night at home can be just the thing after a long week.
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