Feeling

Oh, we're getting into dangerous territory now.

One of the earliest and more difficult realizations that I came to in the semester was that much of what we're learning isn't up for deliberation. As someone who has always prided himself on being fastidiously deliberate, that was a tough pill to swallow to say the least. I'm tempted to use the phrase 'to take on faith' but that carries with it a nexus of associations that don't quite fit the bill. It's not that I'm blindly following my professors and their lessons towards some unknown destination that they tell me is 'being an actor.' It's more that what they're trying to help me see is that the mind and the body more often than not inherently know what action to take and that stopping to think, to weigh A vs. B vs. C and so forth, often mutes the immediacy of the knowledge I already have within me - the feeling becomes less potent and consequently less interesting to an audience.

A strong qualification here - I'm talking about acting, not day-to-day life. Natsuko has a story about an actress she was coaching who after a while became convinced that her husband needed to come in and be coached himself to improve his life. When she told Natsuko that her husband was a surgeon the response was an emphatic "Absolutely not." Do you want a surgeon to not be deliberate in his or her actions? As I've said before, being an actor isn't a normal thing and, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, day-to-day life and replicating day-to-day life take very different sets of skills.

At the same time, this isn't to say that thinking and deliberation are not vital in acting, they absolutely are. This is what textwork is all about. It goes back to the Paradox of Freedom - to do the work of knowing the text, weighing the actions of all the characters with respect to the others, using my mind and my logic to see the flow of the plot, imprinting all this work on my mind and body, and then throwing it away. All that work will still be there if I've been disciplined enough to absorb it but when I'm there, in the moment, I can't be anywhere else but feeling what I am then and there. But that's the question, isn't it? What is feeling (for an actor, at least)? Well, as it's something that nobody can really discuss except in relation to themselves, I guess that's a place to start.

I started my first relationship in August of 2008. A late bloomer, obviously. I entered into it understandably excited, eager, and not just a little bit desperate. Twenty-four years of delay, in some ways this was more an act of deliverance than a relationship. Obviously I had no way of knowing what I was getting myself into. Yes, I had fantasized, I had created jumbled amalgamations of relationships I had been witness to both real and fictional and I'm sure a part of me thought that, while this was going to be something new and thrilling, that there would be no reason it couldn't be handled the way I felt I handled most things in my life - with thoughtfulness and deliberation. Those more experienced readers out there can now take a moment to smile and shake their heads or just laugh outright.

Almost immediately that part of me that thought that I could handle this with any kind of logic went straight out the window. I was blindsided to find myself in a situation where feeling - irrational, illogical, often stupid - was the singular factor in everything I did with respect to this girl. It's hard to describe just how disturbing this was to me. Here's the point though: thinking over it now I see that rarely over the course of this relationship was I ever not squarely in the present with my feelings regarding the situation. Plans were made and the past was talked about, sure, but everything was in service of trying to maintain the immediate feelings that accompanied being in a relationship. And when it ended (messily)? It was the other side of the same coin. Every thought was still rooted in the now only the thoughts of affection were replaced with those of betrayal.

So what am I getting at here? It's ultimately the idea of engagement, I think. When all I'm concerned about is how I'm feeling right now and if I let that dictate my actions and my responses then I will be engaged in the dialogue. If in that moment I'm thinking ahead or thinking about what has already been said then I will necessarily not be engaged in what is going on in the present. Of course I must be aware of what has been said/done and of what will be said/done but that awareness will be in service of my intentions in the present.

Oftentimes we're told that acting is a strange thing partly because what's essentially being done is normal interaction, only backwards. In reality we enter a dialogue knowing what has happened and the text is created from that knowledge. In acting, traditionally speaking we're given the text and we know how it's going to end and we must construct the history of that dialogue ourselves. The challenge is to do this, to have this knowledge, and to not let it in any way mute the true feelings that would be generated by the interaction in normal life. It's where imagination and experience are really the only tools at our disposal.

My experience of my relationship, of all the factors that went into its formation and the pain that resulted from its end, these are things that won't soon be lost on me and will serve as touchstones for my acting. I think many, myself included at times, scoff when people say that being an actor requires courage but here's an instance where that idea comes to bear. If I'm truly committed to acting, to the act of providing an image of reality, then in this one way I can't leave anything in the past, it's too useful, and I must be prepared to revisit those past feelings both joyful and traumatic, over and over and over again. The skilled ones can deftly separate this clinging to the past in their work from their everyday lives. For those of us still in training all I can say is that it's a constant struggle. That's the way it feels anyway.

Ensemble

Funny how I started the last post intending to write about this topic. Took a turn somewhere there.

I started talking about the idea of theatre and how so many of the aspects of theatre may be unfamiliar or seem antiquated to most people. One of the cornerstone ideas here, I think, is that of ensemble. I'm in a class of eleven people. All of us have very different backgrounds, some are just out of undergrad, others have had full performing careers already. We have students in their 20s, 30s, and 50s. It's an intimidating amount of experience. And yet we're all starting from the same place, from a desire to improve ourselves as actors and to learn this craft. If we have nothing else in common, it's that. Here is where we start on the idea of ensemble. So what are we talking about here? Honestly, I don't have a full grasp on it myself, but let's explore.

First and foremost, we're being brought together in order to do work, in order to support each other through the training that we're going through and then to ultimately produce acting work. This is what every cast is tasked with and, especially in the theatre, each member of the ensemble must be able to produce their best work possible in relation to the other cast members for the process to be deemed successful. So the question then becomes, what has to happen for a grouping of people to be able to work together smoothly and successfully? A level of respect, certainly; a recognition of the other ensemble members as your peers, no one being superior to the other.

Here we run into a serious stumbling block though. That is, the risk of confusing respect with friendship. Our class gets along very well, I think. We all have a certain amount of deference that allows for understanding. But it's a social situation like any other and throughout the semester conflicts did arise. They were dealt with and learned from and we all moved on, but when it comes down to it, this is a grouping of people that none of us had control over. In our social lives we pick and choose who we befriend based on innumerable factors. In the program we've been given our ensemble and the significance of that shouldn't be underestimated. Again, I think we've been relatively lucky to have a class that, while incredibly diverse, demonstrates a relatively uniform kindness one towards the other. But, let's be clear here, it is not a necessity for an ensemble to 'like' each other, only that they're able to work effectively with each other. In fact, there are those instances when friendship might just get in the way of doing the work. If you need something from your fellow actor and you're hesitant to voice that need in fear of hurting their feelings, this is not productive. No matter what level of friendship you have with your fellow ensemble members, there must be an agreement that, in the work, demands are known and addressed. This is, after all, a workplace.

So often people think of acting as a fun diversion, as a chance to get together with a bunch of people and put on a show and have a good time. And I'm not saying that that's not the case. But at a certain level, certainly the level that us MFAers would like to believe we're at, this becomes our life, what we aspire to make our means of support and the last word that we would want to associate with it is 'diversion'. In short, things get serious and when things get serious it leads to all kinds of unpredictable things. Tempers start to flare, boundaries start to get crossed, authority starts to be seized, all of these things can constitute a threat to the work at hand. At the same time remember that we're talking about acting here, which is a strange animal in these sorts of situations. Heightened emotion can lead to great work. So is it a matter of channeling those emotions when/if they arise? Is it best to try to avoid such chaos? That's something I can't answer, I guess we're not really there yet.

What it comes down to is that we're all moving ahead both on our own and as a group. By the end of three years we will no doubt have developed our own unique dynamic and I'm very interested to see what that will be. I think we've seen glimmers over the least few months but I look forward to the time when we're so comfortable with each other's work processes that putting up the most successful products possible becomes second nature.

Freedom

One of the reasons acting school can be so hard to explain, especially in America, is that the fundamentals of what is learned are based in the world of theatre, a world that most of America hasn't been familiar with in decades. But what's important to note here is that while the foundations of the training may be based on ideas that were formed around acting for theatre, the goal of the training is to make us better actors regardless of medium. All of our instructors have based their careers in all three formats - theatre, film, and television - you can't make a living as an actor if you don't. And it's not as if they 'endure' their film and television work just to support their 'serious' theatre work, it's all acting work. If you're given an interesting part, if you're given the freedom to explore, and if you're treated with respect, then as an actor fulfillment shouldn't be difficult to attain. Yes, there are unique things about acting for a camera as opposed to acting for a live audience and we will be learning about these unique requirements in the years to come. But we're talking about maybe one class per semester for two semesters. Knowing how to act for a camera is not something that takes three years of conservatory training. Knowing how to act(.), well, three years barely covers it, I would think.

Obviously this isn't to say that everyone must go through this training before they can act. Talent is talent and anyone can name those actors throughout the years who simply possessed and possess the freedom of self to go out there and act flawlessly without all this three-year mumbo-jumbo that we're doing. And that's really what the training is all about - freeing oneself in order to be and transform oneself. Yes, I know how flighty that sounds but it's actually a lot more functional than it would let on.

For so many of us, we approach our work as performance, we go out there and we try to BE other people. We try to BE Hamlet, we try to BE Willy Loman, as if that meant anything. Hamlet doesn't exist and so for me to say that I'm going to go out on stage or on set and BE Hamlet, it's a lost cause. What I can do is to take the words Shakespeare has given me and internalize them, marry them to my imagination and reach a point where the words become mine. Oh, but your uncle didn't really kill your father, you're not really a traveling salesman, there aren't really super-powered villains trying to kill you. Well, yes he did, yes I am, and yes there are. I mean, honestly, what are we talking about here? We're talking about playing make-believe. We're talking about pretending. This isn't the grand search for some platonic ideal of a character, this is putting oneself in the situation the text ordains and acting accordingly. Which is not to say that this is a simple matter. It means you have to know the text intimately, understand it to the point where it's second nature. And then, after you've done all that work, slaved over the words and the context and the connections, then you have to abandon that to a certain degree and just be there and trust that the work is there too.

I watched Tropic Thunder last night and while, yes, it's a farce and in most ways it's lampooning the entire idea of the 'actor,' the couple of exchanges between Stiller and Downey Jr. about acting, the roots of those conversations ring true in a fucked-up kind of way. Also true is the image the movie creates of both of these characters as complete fools because the goal of all of this is to get to that point where you don't go on and on talking about your 'process', your character - you just do it.

So many aspects of this training are paradoxical. I'm making things harder for myself and yet, at the same time, I'm shying away from the real challenges of the craft. I have to do the work and then I have to abandon it. And I don't think that the answer is 'balance' either. The last thing you want to do in drama is to find a middle ground. That's boring. Freedom and awareness, those are the things we're striving for - we want to have the dexterity to be aware of ourselves, our emotions, our bodies, and the freedom to express our desires openly and without reservation.

Los Angeles

Since winter break started last Wednesday I haven't really been taking advantage of the time. I did promise myself I'd let myself be as lackadaisical as I wanted for a few days but the 'few' is over and now I need to actually be doing things. So today, just to wet my feet a little, I drove down to Venice Beach. I also got my brand new GPS unit today so this was a good opportunity to test it out. Of course I planned the whole thing horribly taking no cash for lot parking and with about 35 cents in the center console of my car for a meter. In the end I drove about an hour and fifteen minutes to walk along the beach at sunset for 20 minutes. But, honestly, it was worth it.

I've had no time since getting here to really explore Los Angeles. We had a 'get to know you' beach party in the second week of classes but since then my experience of the city has been limited more or less to the half-hour commute. Weekends were normally filled either with seeing shows on campus or I simply didn't muster up the motivation to go out and discover what LA is all about as a city. I will say though, that having direct access to the beach is a real treat. Yes, I guess I did have this in San Francisco and just didn't take advantage but the beach just isn't as much a part of the culture in SF as it is down here. I walked along the sand today, watching the sun slowly lower down into the water on one side and a perfectly lined row of palm trees swaying in the wind on the other and, I don't know, it all felt so right.

Outside of that little slice of serenity, of course, is a concrete jungle with highways stretching every which way and traffic that is hellish half the time. Funny thing is though, and maybe this is just because I haven't driven a car on a consistent basis since high school, but I've found driving, even the city driving, to be enjoyable enough to the point where it's not one of my primary concerns about living here. Being stuck in traffic and searching endlessly for parking are pains, no doubt, but sitting in my car listening to the radio or my music, I find genuine pleasure in that. I fully expect this state of affairs to end sometime in the near future but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

But, like I said, I really don't "know" LA as of yet. I have these moments though, I'll be driving down Hollywood Boulevard with a pink sunset in front of me framed by curved palm trees and I think "Holy crap, I'm living in LA" and it's both jarring and exciting.

Starting From Scratch

It feels impossible to describe the process that's been going on since I started the MFA program.

When I was still in SF I had a friend crash at my place for a night who was in from the east coast where he had just finished up his first semester at the MFA program at Brown. His eyes were wide, his thoughts vast, his enthusiasm seemed limitless. He saw great things for what he would accomplish, where he would go. Frankly, I thought it was all a bit ridiculous. I was in the real world, toiling in bit parts but working consistently for respectable theatres which counted me amongst the lucky ones in the area. Part of me thought he was being just a little bit ignorant since he hadn't really been hitting the pavement like I had over the last year or two. But even then I also knew that he was on the path that I wanted to be on. I needed more training and an MFA always just seemed in the books. But certainly I would be a bit more realistic about the whole thing.

So am I? I really can't answer that. The three years I spent working in SF were invaluable, no doubt. I know, even to the smallest degree, what professional theatre is like. It's fucking hard and it doesn't pay the bills. You meet fascinating, wonderful people, and you meet assholes. The work can be fulfilling and fun and glamorous. It can also be empty, soul-sucking, and depressing. But once you're in, you kind of know if this is what you're going to be doing and until it kicks you out, you'll just keep coming back. Normal people don't do this. This isn't a normal thing to do. If I learned anything, it's that.

So I do think I have some perspective on this. Still, if you try and ask me about what I'm experiencing in this program thus far I'll answer with words that will scream hyperbole. So keeping that in mind I'll try to maintain some measure now.

I don't know to what extent, but I think I've always considered a lot of acting as an intellectual exercise. To take the text you're given and to find the intricacies of the plot, to breathe life into the words by finding creative use for them. What I'm beginning to realize more and more, though, is that all that effort I would put into flourishing the words, into linking themes and ideas, these are all things we do naturally. When we're talking and we're engaged and we're actually in the moment of speaking, we do all these things and we don't think about it, and if somehow we don't do it or we neglect it, it's for very specific reasons. That's the goal here; when we form our words from ourselves, that's when things get interesting, that's when an audience perks up and pays attention. When we put constructs onto the words, when we decide how they should be said and what would be the most effective delivery of a line, that may well end with an adequate product, but it will always be limited to what we can think of, not what we can create.

Describing it is so innately castrated. All I'll say is that in the last few months I've experienced moments when I've acted in a way that I've never acted before in my life. In those moments I felt I wasn't standing there saying the words, I was needing to say the words, there was something I was desperate to say and I was saying it. And that something was my text. It was thrilling, bewildering, and exhausting. And watching the ten other people in my class go through the same process? It was the most engaging theatre I've ever been a part of.

I feel ridiculously lucky to be here. And not only for all the obvious reasons of the audition process but in a very real way, I think, this program as it is right now, will be fleeting. Again, the lack of objectivity here is overflowing but I really do believe that USC has gathered a core faculty of four that are so dedicated, so engaged, so committed to their students and so amazingly talented largely because the majority of them are not accustomed to teaching in this rigorous manner. Andy and Charlotte are actors through and through, they're not career teachers who have gone through the slog of decades' worth of students. As such, they give every inch of themselves to the craft, to the students. Natsuko, while she has coached the best of the best, has never committed to a full program. David is the only one who has spent much of his career teaching and he's brilliant, a genius. And he's a director first and foremost, which permeates the movement work we do with him. But a part of me sees them and feels their energy and can't help but feel that this is a flame that will burn bright and hard and then go out. To be replaced by another flame, no doubt, maybe one that matches or surpasses this first one, but this grouping of faculty, it just feels like lightning in a bottle. This is the fourth year of this program's existence and I wonder if all the great MFA programs started off in this way. To be here now and to know that I might be one of the few students to learn from this grouping, I almost feel undeserving at times.

So obviously my first semester has made me enamored with the program. I've never been this engaged and, consequently, exhausted in my life. And it only gets busier from here, which I look forward to. This coming semester will see us work on our first limited production which promises to be exciting. Will all this enthusiasm wain? I don't know. Watching the second and third years the dynamic of everyone is just so different. There are definitely those who feel that they're ready to move on and others who still speak of the program like I'm doing right now. It's inevitable, I guess, that that's the way it is.

I saw my friend from Brown a year later when he was visiting the Bay again and he was markedly more down to earth, talking about going back to his hometown, starting a small theatre company. I never asked him what exactly had changed if anything. At the time I was happy to see him being more realistic but now I'm starting to think that one's reality is what one strives for. You go for a goal until your interest turns to another one. My goal right now is to grow and to work and I feel the last six months has seen me take a steady pace towards it.

Resurrection

It's been a year and a half since my last post and here I am in a new city with a new life and in so many ways a new man. Updates for those interested:

1. Not posting for a year and a half had to do with basically three things: starting a relationship, break-up, getting over it. All that took up so much thinking and feeling time that I just really didn't find the motivation to share those thoughts and feelings with the world. So there ya go.

2. I'm in LA now. I was accepted into the MFA acting program at USC and I just finished up my first semester. This I'll make a separate post because it's been such an amazing, challenging and fulfilling few months that it deserves to be ruminated upon separately. Leaving the Bay was an interesting experience. So many things happened to me in those three years I spent working in San Francisco and I'll forever be indebted to the Bay for keeping me motivated in my acting. I was so fortunate to work in so many shows and meet so many wonderful people. It's the people, the friends, that I miss the most. I'm not a Bay Area native, is the thing. Even though I haven't lived there in almost eight years, my heart still longs for Canada when I think of "home." So moving away wasn't the difficult thing. It was actually pretty easy since the break-up was only a month or two before I left so getting the hell out of there was a relief beyond words from that perspective. But the Bay was great to me and I'll never forget it. But I'm in LA now and looking forward to seeing what it has to offer.

3. I did one last full show in San Francisco right before leaving which was Mr. Marmalade by Noah Haidle at Custom Made Theatre. It was a fun, dark script with a great cast. And I was able to reunite with one of my favorite people from King Lear, Daunielle Rasmussen, who directed it. I also did a whole bunch of staged readings, including a pair for the Asian American Theatre Company and a new Eugenie Chan play which was a treat. One of the readings for AATC was for a play by Christopher Chen, a good friend who was one of the first writers I worked with after I graduated Cal in 2006. It was actually the only time since 2006 that our schedules coordinated well enough to work on a project. Ending on such a note of symmetry was great, a real sign of a chapter ending and another beginning.

5. I am officially a car owner! I bought my first car in April in preparation for coming to LA. Much meticulous research was done and I finally found a great little 2008 Yaris in Fremont with less than 13,000 miles on it for a price I was more than happy with, especially as I discovered recently that it has a built-in bluetooth system that I don't even think the dealer was aware of. Luckily the upholstery did not need to be replaced after the gadgetgasm that that discovery caused.

There's so much to write about and I'll give all the topics their own posts. For this first one in the resurrection of this blog though, I'll just say this: I'm a richer person thanks to the last year and a half. I've experienced so many things, wondrous, beautiful things that will live in my memory for a long, long time. I've also seen these things crash and be destroyed. I've felt love like I've never felt before, diddo with betrayal. And while I wouldn't say at this point that I'm a happier person because of it, I would say that I'm a richer person, a fuller person. And, perhaps most importantly right now, I've learned over the last semester that being this more complete person makes me a better actor. How can you hope to imitate love, pain, and persecution until you've actually experienced those things? In my admittedly limited fashion, I feel I have, for the first time, felt these things and moving forward I know I need to seek out and feel more.

Crossroads

I'm in a pickle. Which is nothing terribly new, but it's a pickle which has forced me to confront some rather daunting aspects of my desired career as well as forced me to make some preliminary evaluations on my own self-worth. I'm not good at self-evaluation. It's one of the reasons a person becomes an actor, I think, they need others to validate their worth. Being raised in an environment where you're never really lauded for your accomplishments tends to deaden one's ability to objectively give oneself credit for one's merits. At the same time, what little I've learned about being an actor to this point has taught me that one risks much the minute they start considering themselves "above" anything. You take the gigs you're offered, if one gig is better than the other, you take the better one, simple as that. But recent events have made me question what constitutes the 'better' gig and where, exactly, my so-called talent-level lies in the larger sense of the theatre "community". There are echelons in the theatre industry just like any other industry and, to a certain extent, it is somewhat important that one recognizes where they stand in those echelons so that they know just how far they have to go in order to reach the heights they desire. Problem is, in this industry, it seems like things are constantly in flux. So much rides on who you know, on people knowing, liking, and trusting your work to the point where they'll get you work later. This lends credence to the idea of "work wherever you can, with whomever you can" since you never know just where those people might end up. But, at the same time, when you're just trying to scrape by and line up gigs, you can't get caught up in what might be best for you five or ten years down the line, you have to do what's best for you here and now. It's a paradox that I'm sure isn't exclusive to the theatre, but it's within the context of theatre that I'm facing it right now.

I think maybe it's more useful to not look at it within the context of "Am I above X?" and look at it more in terms of "Will X aid me in accomplishing my career goals?" In that sense, if X is your only prospect, then the answer would be "Yes." But if you have X and Y, then the question becomes "Will X aid me in accomplishing my career goals more than Y?" And that's where things get trickier. Because that's where this paradox comes into play. You look at each project and decide their worth in terms of the people working on them, the merit of the script, the notoriety of the producing company etc... Again, though, it's ludicrous to hinge your decision on the idea that Director X will be somewhere far beyond Director Y in ten years. There's no way for you to know that. So, in the end, you just have to do what's best for you at that moment while still considering just how much it will help your resume in the process. The "intangibles" are just that, intangible, and since you can't measure them, since your entire evaluation of them is nothing more than masturbatory guess-work, there's little merit to the conclusions you would draw from them. But it doesn't keep us from doing it, now does it?

This whole thing may be a non-issue. I may be in no pickle at all. I might not even be in a cucumber. Only time will tell. But, until then, things are needlessly complicated and I just hope they turn out for the best.

Neglect FTW!!!

Why, hello there little Blog. How are ya doin'? Gosh, it seems like weeks since - oh my god! What happened to you? You look terrible! Emaciated! Haven't you been being fed? What monster did this to you? Tell me! Come on. Stop wimpering in the corner like that and tell me who should be punished for allowing an innocent online diary to suffer such - OW! Why'd you slap me like that? Stop hitting my head! Why are you - oh, right. Hey, gimme a break, I've been really bus...I've had a lot on my pla...dammit. Okay, fine, so I really haven't been busy at all. Whatever, you needed to lose weight anyway.

So, yeah, three months to catch up on. Hm. How sad is it that I can't really think of anything substantial to say? "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at CenterREP opened and closed. A successful production and a helluva lot of fun to work on. A lot of enthusiasm on the cast, probably because there was a fair amount of younger cast members as well as a crew made up entirely of teenagers. Great, responsible, organized teenagers, mind you, all very hyped-up on theatre. I tried to make the most of my Mechanical role and the run went very smoothly. I'd love to work there again. The theatre works out of the Lesher Center for the Arts which was built by the City of Walnut Creek and while CenterREP is the only professional company that uses the building (other productions are all pretty much community-based), the facilities reflect perfectly the obscene swaths of money floating about that part of the Bay Area. Great green room, spacious dressing rooms, fully hooked up for wireless internet, it was pretty sweet. At the same time, working in a city-run building meant that we were forced to deal with levels of bureaucracy not normally associated with a theatre such as daily door-passes and restrictions on when you could and when you couldn't be in the building due to the availability of security staff. That definitely got annoying at times but all in all it was a worthwhile trade-off.

Since then, it's been the all-too familiar routine of the unemployed wannabe actor with a dayjob. The same fear that no one will ever call again, that I've exhausted the well of fortune that has gotten me cast before. Well, I guess it's been a little more active than that. I had a week where I did three staged readings in a row, one of which was instigated quite suddenly. So that was an interesting week but all too soon those were over and here I am at my desk again, contemplating where to turn next.

My urge to take a visit back home to Edmonton which was whispering, then talking, then screaming in my ear has long gone hoarse and now stands in the corner of my brain, glaring and making a "See! See what I'm trying to tell you!" gesture everytime tedium sets in again. However, as I've recently discovered that my passport has been expired for two months, the poor mute is shit-out-o-luck for at least the next few weeks.

So, seeing as how my professional life is on one of its all-too-frequent hiatuses, I guess we could take a look at what else has been occupying my time.

Only movie I've seen recently was the new Indiana Jones. Now, I'm not an aficionado of the series. The only one I remember with even fleeting detail is Last Crusade. I remember liking it fine. This new one...I dunno. It's stupid in the way that I get the feeling old-school Indy fans will appreciate. Things happen that are patently outrageous no matter what your scale, but I don't think any of it pushes into the realm of the 'offensive.' More often than not my thought process would be "They're not actually going to - oop, and there it is." I'd laugh at the sheer preposterousness of it all and I guess that's worth something. Had Cate Blanchett not been Cate Blanchett, I would have forgiven her performance, but I have to say that she seemed to put in a rather lacklustre effort, especially with an in-and-out accent. Normally it would be alright if the actor couldn't quite get the accent to work on a particular word, but when that word is "Jones"...well...it becomes a bit of a problem.

Moving on to TV - or, well, TV through Netflix and the Internet since I haven't had actual TV in, gee, must be almost 5 months now - only Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica have been holding my attention. At this point I'm pretty much obssessed with Deadwood and the days between Netflix deliveries are almost unberable. It's amazing how effective, entertaining and moving a series can be when the honest effort is made to make every character human. There isn't a single character on the show who isn't somehow redeemable and irredeemable at the same time, it's uncanny.

Maybe some vague spoilers? I dunno, be mindful.

My favourite moment so far and what I think to be the most emblematic of the entire series: Tolliver discovers that a teenage brother-and-sister pairing have been playing innocent whilst swindling his saloon. He confronts them and they make a break for it. They make it outside in front of the saloon before Tolliver and his men catch them and proceed to beat the living shit out of the two innocent-looking-as-fucking-baby-seals children. The action causes a stir with onlookers yelping in disgust. At one point Sol Star, one of the 'good guys' on the show, generally portrayed as a sympathetic, honourable, bleeding-heart sort, starts to protest the beating. Tolliver warns everyone not to interfere, that the kids had been stealing from him. After a wonderfully short bit of hesitation, Star answers "Well you don't have to do this out here in the open." Tolliver takes them back into the saloon for the rest of their punishment. That's Deadwood. Star is no less honourable a man for accepting what will happen to those kids, it's simply that the code of honour in Deadwood is its own creature, and anyone who doesn't recognize it ends up with the other cocksuckers in the pig-pen. Gotta love it.

As for BSG, I'm not quite sure what to make of the show at this point. This is their last season and so shocking deaths and revelations are being thrown about with reckless abandon. It makes for a helluvan entertaining hour but the hectic pace of it leaves me feeling a little baffled every time. As has been noted by others there's very little Happy so far this season. Characters generally range from confused to desperate to miserable with all the angsty shades in between for good measure. The constant baiting is sometimes just shy of annoying but keeps us engaged. The payoff better be momentous the way they're playing it up at every possible corner, is all I have to say.

I also took a day or so to watch the first season of "Dexter" which Netflix has streamed on their site. I find it useful to look at Dexter and Deadwood and see how they're both effective but in somewhat opposite ways. Deadwood takes a broad, somewhat generic premise - life in a town in the Old West during the gold rush - and infuses it with vigor through the complexity of its characters and their interactions. Dexter starts with a very specific, very jarring premise - forensic analyst is a serial killer who murders the people he investigates - and relies on that premise to carry it through. The characters, save the main protagonist, aren't nearly as nuanced as those on Deadwood, which is fitting given that Dexter is more of a procedural with hints of serial (so to speak) while Deadwood is a full-on serial drama. Overall my heart is still with Deadwood, but I thoroughly enjoyed Dexter for its dark-romp qualities.

Not that Deadwood is without its failures. The depictions of Chinese immigrants might very well be historically accurate, but they still rub me the wrong way a little. And at times I just want to chop down Timothy Oliphant with an axe and make a cabinet out of him, he's so wooden. But none of that keeps me from wanting more, which is somewhat of a mixed blessing given that I'm led to believe that the series ends rather poorly. Might just be setting myself up for disappointment, but I'm having fun getting there.

So, there you have it, a nice longish post to get myself reacquainted with rambling on about nothing.

Well Said

I'm a fan of Penny Arcade because it often fulfills both my computer game geekery and my rhetorical fussiness. Case in point, Tycho's post today, discussing the merits of the recently released "Army of Two" also contains one sentence which does a good job of summing up the discord between effective rhetorical writing and personal intellectual trepidation:

"I like to speak in declarative terms here in this space, but I always operate under the assumption that I'm wrong about virtually everything."

By and large I'm of the same mindset. I know that an effective piece of writing isn't filled with "I think"s or "Perhaps"es or "I might be wrong, but"s - these are tools of the unsure and the unresearched. They suggest a lack of confidence in what you're saying and if the reader senses that the author isn't certain in their statements obviously they're not going to be as easy to convince of their veracity.

But I, and I would wager many people, just don't really think like that. We're conditioned to leave room for error and to never assume we're right. It's arrogant and unbecoming and people won't like you if you think you're always right. They might follow you, but chances are they'll think you're a dick. And, let's face it, who wants to be seen as a dick?

In the context of an argument this intellectual sheepishness isn't ignored so much as masked. There's the idea that if you can predict the possible refutations to your argument and then smash them to smithereens, then you're appropriately addressing the possibility of your being wrong. Or, rather, that you're effectively dismissing that possibility. While I'll agree that doing this makes for a much stronger and more persuasive argument, I wouldn't say that it really succeeds at its goal or that it even deflects the possibility of the author being refuted. You can't predict every single argument that could be raised against your own partly because many of those arguments could simply be outside the discursive context in which you're operating. That is, they may be 'unreasonable' as defined by who you think your audience is and at what level you're addressing them. Can you really argue against "I don't believe you because you smell" or, perhaps more topically, "I don't believe you because you're not the same race as me"? You could take the time and effort to address such counter-arguments, but it would ruin your work and you could never predict every unreasonable thing someone might throw at you.

So the argumentative writer does what they can. Be concise, be thoughtful, and be prepared for conflict - it's a mantra that I think most writers (most PEOPLE, really) should ascribe to but in the end I can't shake the feeling that it's based on a fallacy for many people. Their strongly declarative writing doesn't accurately reflect their true thought processes. I dunno, it just feels like there's something missing there, a disconnect that prevents the real will of the author from being expressed.

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Did I mention I like video games?

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Penny Arcade