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.

...

Did I mention I like video games?

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Penny Arcade

What Now?

A little blog-neglect, as usual. Sure, a short little bit on my bday, but that doesn't really count.

So it seems I stand at somewhat of a crossroads, once again contemplating where I'm headed with myself. MFA auditions were a glorious failure for the second time. Not unexpected but no less disappointing. The worst sensation is probably that of learned puzzlement. You come to accept that there's no way you can know what it is they're looking for and that it's useless to speculate. Sure it may offer some twisted form of catharsis to look back and say "They already got their minority" but, come on, eventually you have to realize that that's a bullshit idea made up by bitter rejects. Just because it might be true doesn't change that fact. But I was hoping that this might have been my year for a program, even if I did unreasonably restrict my choices. But there ya go, no overpriced theatre-camp for me this year.

Easing some of the disappointment is the fact that I at least have a gig to reassure me that I'm not completely delusional. Not just that, but I actually seem to have a parent who is at least paying some lip-service to this 'career' choice. She still hasn't and probably never will buy into it unless she sees me on TV or in a movie, but the fact that she's accepted that I need to give it a go is nice, if not a little disconcerting. Just wasn't really expected, I suppose.

But, so here I am, all pleased with myself for getting my name out there and starting myself on the road to becoming a 'professional' yet somehow becoming more and more restless with my situation. Is a move in order? A change of dayjob? The former just seems so drastic and considering the fact that I do seem to be getting some credentials and building union points here in the Bay Area, a change of that magnitude just seems uncalled for. As for the latter, well, it's definitely more plausible but it's very difficult for me to shake the fact that I'm damn lucky to have a job that affords me some flexibility and that until I can have some modicum of assurance that I could support myself by other means, I really shouldn't go shooting a healthy horse, even if it's not...the one I want to be riding? That was a weird metaphor.

And I'm not saying that a change has to occur, that I feel some deep, pounding inevitability to the decision. I'm just getting a bit anxious, getting that feeling that that risk of stagnation might be rearing its head just a little. But, then again, if I'm working then that means things are going better than they could be, and I should be and am grateful. I'm just not sure what to make of it all, I suppose.

Oh yeah, also

Happy Birthday to someone very close to my heart. They surround it, in fact. It's kind of creepy.

New Energy

I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" this past weekend and found it to be alternately compelling, entertaining, and downright scary. Will it motivate me to green-up my life? Well, I hope so, but we'll have to see. At the very least it's made me more aware of my consumption. I also watched a documentary called "Helvetica" which has also made me more aware, although in a much more trivial manner than the former.

But on this environmentalist string, I present this:

Love

I love this.

And this.

And, finally, this.

Year in Review, Part 2

Well, it's taken long enough to stir up the drive to continue with my review. I suppose it'd be a good idea to leave the acting aspects be for now. There were things in my life outside of the world of acting, even if they might have been intimately tied to it.

Bill Paying

Or, rather, "dayjob". Very soon it will be two years at the firm, the amount of commitment they had asked of me when they first offered it to me. Things have been rather turbulent around the office in the past few months with an attorney leaving but two new attorneys coming in. It's hard to know what to make of it all. As far as the firm goes, it seems to be indicative of a growing success. Which is a good thing, I guess. But, in the end, this job is exactly that - a job. I'm lucky enough to work in an environment with some really great people and with bosses who not only don't object to my acting pursuits but in some cases have actively supported them. These are the same bosses, remember, who were more interested in my role in "King Lear" than in the fact that I had to take a month off to do the show. And it's paying my bills and even allowing me to save some money every month. I'm lucky to have this job and I'm grateful for it and I know that there are a whole lot of other wannabe actors who don't have it as good. Still, I'd be lying if I didn't say that there's a malaise growing about me. It's not that the job is hard or taxing, it's just that I know that this isn't what I want to be doing. This is what I'm doing so that I'm not destitute, but frankly everything I'm striving for is to get me in a position where I don't need to be in that office. I know that that's about as "Well, duh" as you can get, but that's just how life is sometimes. I was IM'ing with my paralegal friend in Portland and at the exact same moment we both typed in: "It's getting old". I know how to do this job and there's nowhere to grow. Oh sure new projects come up where I have to do certain things that I haven't done before, but all of that is irrelevant because this isn't going to be my career. I don't resent having to do my job, I just know that it's not leading anywhere substantial. It's an inner-tube keeping me afloat when what I'm looking for is a ship to take me ashore.

Personal

Why the hell did I say there was 'a lot' more to say about my personal life? This is by far the least interesting of any of the already-uninteresting sections. Like I said at the beginning of the last post, I have learned this year that being on one's own isn't a terrible thing. Of course one can't live a comfortable life without friends to give love to and to receive love from, but there's this absurd idea promulgated by commercials and sit-coms that one should be constantly seeking companionship by any means necessary. Frankly I think I struggle enough to remain mindful of myself, much less a love interest. That's not to say that there weren't pursuits in that direction this year. Ok, there was one. And it failed. But considering how green I am to the whole 'asking girls out' thing, that's something of an accomplishment.

So that's about it. This year might bring change. Or it might not. Strangely enough that determination both is and isn't in my hands.