"This is me breathing . . . "

says John Cusack's character, Martin Blank, as he prepares for his ten-year high school reunion by almost unconsciously loading a clip into his handgun and checking the chamber. I love

Grosse Point Blank

. It's an incredibly irresponsible movie with nothing but reverence for a by-gone era, some violence, and a whole lot of cynically glib dialogue. Love it, love it, love it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm constantly searching for open calls for the casting of

GPBII: Son of Blank

. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Movie quotes play through my head with about the same frequency as songs do, so there's nothing unusual about having one take up residence there for a little while, and the more I enjoy a movie, the more I've seen it, and there you go. Still, I try to take notice when one seems particularly stubborn about hanging onto my hippocampus, and this is one that has done just that. I'm not saying that a quote is recalled just for the purpose of trying to communicate something to myself. Rather, I think that when I do recall a quote, or snatch of song, some part of brain is working tirelessly away on some worry or other and recognizes the meaning. The old gray matter can be like a room full of people, and one of them can recognize something in another and say, "Oh man, don't leave yet. So-and-so's just

got

to meet you." And so, on the three-hundredth and sixty-second internal repetition, a connection is made.

This is me breathing . . .

I'm a nail-biter. I don't mean that as a colorful expression of my anxious personality. Rather, I am literally a nail-biter. I try to be better about it. I generally fail. It's called chronic onychophagia, by the way, and only about 10% of men past the age of 30 engage in it. It's a rather complicated little symptom/condition. Lots of theories surround it. It's often coupled with other supposed compulsive behaviors, such as hair removal, skin removal, excessive washing, etc., and so often associated with obsessive/compulsive disorders. But it can also be diagnosed as a simple ingrained behavioral response, or an addiction, or as a kind of sublimated grooming instinct. I don't know quite what to make of it, except to say that I do it when I'm bored and when I'm anxious, occasionally without conscious thought, and that I find it enormously gratifying for some reason. I'd also like to stop.

This is me breathing . . .

I have many habits. I have a lot of trouble distinguishing between my habits and possible compulsive behaviors. I'm just not sure where one draws the line. My chronic onychophagia (it's just a fun way to say it) is probably the most physically destructive h/pcb I currently engage in, though my sincere and abiding love of good beer is obviously not a huge benefit to my person. I've had worser ones in the past -- such as smoking -- but really, most of these behaviors are a little more mental than demonstrative. They may occasionally creep out in behavior, like finger-tapping or object-arranging, but as I've matured (ahem: grown older at least in terms of years) these demonstrations have lessened, either by will or accident. Because the h/pcbs can be so inexplicably internal, I often wonder just how unique they are, how many others experience them in the ways I do? I know I'm not alone. I know that. But is it maybe everyone, in their own ways? Is there a norm after all?

This is me breathing . . .

They sometimes say (They being rather fond of sweeping generalizations) that life happens in cycles, and not just the easily observable variety, such as birth-life-death, or spring-summer-fall-winter. Coincidence, in the purest meaning of the word, occurs over and over again. When a celebrity dies, we await the next two to follow. Read a book about little people and, though you'd swear it's never happened before, you'll notice nearly a dozen just going about your day. The cause-and-effect is difficult to track here, though plenty of people will chalk it up to simple mental association. The brain does have a habit of seeking out patterns, rhythms and symmetries. Yet I'm inclined to believe that the world outside our minds meets us halfway, more often than not. I'm not proposing anything particularly mystical here; linear logic simply doesn't explain everything. Take, for example, weddings. What is the explanation for my attending four weddings in the next four months, including my own, and the three others that friends of mine are attending during that same period? Incidences align, and it seems to me that attributing such alignments solely to human behavior is at best naive, at worst arrogant. It's just that we're a little obsessed with ourselves, and a little in love with answers. We're also a little in love with mystery, which I admit keeps me returning to a sense of wonder when I'm given the option.

This is me breathing . . .

I've been using

The Big Show

to help motivate me in recent efforts to curb my chronic onychophagia, which is in one sense apt, and in another, ironic. The last time I was particularly successful in ceasing the mania was during rehearsal for

The Glass Menagerie

, way back in 2002. I was playing a guy bent on self-improvement, who cared a lot about the impression he made on others, and it helped. Wherefore, then, ironic? Because one thing I have figured out about this behavior is that it is provoked by anxiety. When I got my first job, with a moving company, they told us that the two most stressful occasions in a person's life are a moving day and wedding day. Well, I'm here to tell you that the days leading up to said day are no piece of cake, neither. Planning a wedding is rife with reasons to return to old, comforting cycles, from the politics of negotiation to the inner-searching of a person preparing to make the change of his and/or her li(f/v)e/s. God bless. It's enough to make a fella' return to smoking.

This is me breathing . . .

Where experience and discovery meet, that's good acting. You want your performance to be informed by all you've seen and done, to be true to your understanding of the world, but also to embody the questions that live in a new, first-time moment. Acting in the theatre can satisfy both my compulsion for repetition and order, and my appetite for surprise and wonder. The ultimate balance between the two is an incredibly fragile thing: It only exists for half moments, most of the time, and most of the time such moments can't be savored, lest one risks destroying them. They must simply be, and then pass. As a younger actor, I became pretty obsessed with rehearsing a role to mechanical perfection, with making good choices and being able to reproduce them exactly. The majority of my adult craft has been a process of learning about the other side of that coin, about the incredible necessity for surprise and improvisation. Hell: You can't possibly see enough possibilities to be effective without inviting forces of chance to have their say. We're at the mercy of chance -- from found money to global financial market crises -- every moment of every day, so it is in some ways natural to value ritual, to seek cycles.

This is me breathing . . .

We are not, however, our cycles. (Much as we may sometimes like to be.) We're not even our choices. (Although I imagine most of us would desperately insist that is exactly what we are.) No, we're something altogether else, a synthesis of choice and chance, a combination of forces creating . . . what, exactly? Well, us. I don't know how else to say it. With every inhale, and every exhale, forces are at work, within and without. It's a little frightening to think of things this way, but fear and excitement are a couple of those component forces. When I look at things this way, it seems apparent to me that my habits are in substance simply misdirected energy, force that could be applied to making more choices or, perhaps, appreciating more chances. Then again, maybe they're leading me toward their own chances and choices. The best one can do is to keep breathing, through whatever may come.

Buzz Buzz

This morning I woke with my usual weekday alarm, at 6:00, but pressed the snooze for a luxuriant nine-minute extension. I think I had a little too much salt in my dinner last night, and it made me especially dehydrated and imbalanced. Once I was up, I dallied in my rituals, adding little preparations for the weekend until I felt capable of safely getting out the free weights and plugging into my headphones. I'm back on a schedule of each morning alternating between upper body and lower, and today was upper. The advantage of a lower-body morning is that I can stretch, check in a little and then just get out and start jogging; my mind will clear eventually in the course of the run. On an upper day, I have to rally my mental facilities in other ways. If I dived straight in to push-ups and curls in a fugue state I would undoubtedly succeed admirably at hurting myself, either by exacerbating old injury(ies) or collecting a new one by dropping a lump of iron onto my person. Either way, it's best to be alert before beginning.

As I shook out, and rallied (with admittedly pitiful momentum) my resources, I had this thought:

Life is pretty difficult.

Not

my life

, mind you:

Life

. As in, living. It occurred to me this morning that just getting by, living a life that one doesn't hate, is in itself a pretty big accomplishment. I think this is true to varying degrees for everyone. Some obviously have more difficult lives than others. I wouldn't want to compare my struggles to save enough money to move into a bigger apartment to, say, the efforts of any given Sudanese refugee to avoid a death full of indignity and suffering. No contest: New York real estate wins every time. But in the strange and ambiguous state between sleeping and waking this morning I had this kind of clear, unexpected insight. Living is tricky business.

I sometimes think the major reason I continue acting is because otherwise I would feel stifled and bored. I believe that is entirely possible, but I also believe that it's an irrational fear, because life itself, the day-to-day efforts, are endlessly complex and engaging. They ought to be, anyway. Ask yourself, is there any activity in the world that I can't be improving myself in, that can't lead to something more, that won't at any given moment surprise me completely? Cooking, for instance. For the past few evenings, in the interests of banishing

Fiancee Megan

's lingering cold and using more of our extant groceries, I've been making soup for dinner. The past three times we've had it, I've made it three different ways, according to what was at hand and what I felt might improve the balance of flavors and the health effects. Last night, upon tasting it, I thought I'd nailed it pretty good. It tasted appetizing, strong and rather complex. I congratulated myself. Then, this morning, I was forced into the realization that it didn't work. I could probably work on my basic vegetable-broth soup for the rest of my life and always be surprised and, since I enjoy cooking, I just might. Which, I suppose, is the key: enjoying oneself. It makes for being alert, observant, emotionally invested -- all things that help the appreciation of the complexities of a given activity come far more naturally. At the start of college, my then-girlfriend and I went to dinner with a fellow freshman acting major and he asked us why we were there, studying theatre. I labored over a personal and meaningful answer. She simply said, "I suppose because it's one of the few things in life that makes me genuinely happy."

I try to exercise every morning for two basic reasons; I'm vain and mildly masochistic. No really: I am. No, really, I (try to) exercise every morning because I want to be ready to perform acrobalance and other physical feats whenever they're called for, and because good habits breed themselves. I've learned to enjoy it, at that (though I'd much rather be lifting a flyer than weights). I try to make it a part of my regular ol' life. Even if I

gave up acting tomorrow

, I'd want to keep it up. It's a choice not just for my

Third Life

(TM) but for my first life. It makes for a slightly trickier life, of course. Time must be made, bedtimes must be adhered to, diet must be balanced, injury must be courted, etc. But, then again, everything we choose for ourselves makes for a slightly trickier life, doesn't it? It's always one more thing. The simplest life would be about just getting by, and even that life is usually fraught with struggle and surprise.

I have on occasion been accused of taking too much on, especially in the way of theatre work. At such accusations I generally scoff with a scoffing scoffation. I can get spread thinner than is good for me, of course, but I work because it makes me happy. I like work. Of a certain variety. Theatre work most of all. Acting in general next. Wedding planning ... mmm ... somewhere in the middle. Day job, not so much. But in a certain sense, it's all good stuff. I thought that during this time of so much change and planning I would have nothing to report on the acting work front. I've been intentionally avoiding travel and long-term commitments in the interests of keeping things as simple as possible for the next month or so. Yet today I updated

Loki's Apiary

and noticed that I had more entries for this month than any other yet this year. There are any number of explanations for this, but at least one of them is that life is tricky. And I like tricky.

Reading Room

I've got to learn not to resent . . . well: anything; basically. Resentment is not a helpful emotion in general and, if you are allowed a little perspective, you often have the double-pleasure of experiencing both the pleasantness of resentment and--later on--the pleasantness of realizing, "Oh God; I was such an ass to resent what I was

about two weeks ago

resenting."

Yesterday I worked. I worked two smallish jobs, actually:

this one

&

this one

. (It's a good day when an actor can be excused from his or her day job for paying acting work, but it's a great day when said actor be similarly gainfully employed and make more money than he or she would at his or her day job.) I had, in brief, a very lovely day indeed. It was only today, after sitting down to consider it, that I had a brief pang of realization that yesterday seems as though it were structured to point up my aforementioned fault. Well, regret is probably an even less useful emotion than resentment, so I shan't linger on it, lest I propagate it. I will, however, stop getting all Charlotte Brontë on my syntax and specify my observation in the hopes that it keeps me from getting stupider (i.e., more [ah regret!] resentful) in the future.

The first gig was a film gig, of sorts: an industrial for a company known as

Lancer Insurance

. This was, in a sense, a cushy gig. All I had to do was be familiar enough with the script to be able to perform it convincingly off a teleprompter. It was my first experience using a teleprompter, in fact. (Those of you familiar with

Anchorman

-- it's absolutely true; if it had been on there, I would have read it aloud.) It was essentially an interview, my scene, and a bona fide lawyer was off-screen asking his side of the interview off a paper, while I read my responses off the teleprompter, trying as hard as I could to make it look like I was looking a guy in the face. The screen had a couple of stationary arrows on each side, the which are supposed to be where I was reading at a given moment, though an operator was pacing the scroll specifically according to my the rate of my performance. He did a pretty good job, too, save a couple of times when I thoughtfully paused and had to tamp down terror as I noticed the scroll, in fact, didn't. The hardest part for me was avoiding left-to-right eye movement; I tried to look between the arrows and enforce peripheral perception, a little like looking at one of those hidden-picture stereographs. ("

Over there?! That's just a guy in a suit!

")

What struck me about the gig was that, in spite of having no lines to learn -- or perhaps, as a direct result of it -- this job ought to have been rather difficult. I mean, acting itself often requires us to accept a huge amount of ridiculous non-reality and to play for truth right along with it, but here was a complete and utter refutation of the actor's need for believable circumstances, environment, or even a scene partner with whom to make eye contact. I was sitting at a table, mic'd up, against a giant green screen, reading from a projection with a backdrop of cameras, lights, technicians and the various tools of the trade to be found in any film or photography studio. My imagination was the only recourse I had, and it served me well, but on top of all that, I was being asked to read and make it alive. Why wasn't this more difficult? Where had I been doing this, getting such good practice that I barely registered the challenges it presented?

My latter gig that day was a return to NYU for the Steinberg Lab, which is a program in which undergraduate playwrights get to workshop their writing, in part by way of casting actors to perform readings for them and a few of their closest colleagues. Most of the work I get through NYU involves some sort of staged reading, live or for film, and as I proceeded to wing it with an especially abstract script on Monday, I realized that this plethora of readings I've been doing of late is exactly what allowed me to be perfectly relaxed in the surreal environment of the teleprompter. In fact, teleprompters are easier than scripts in many respects. The key to a good staged reading is stealing as many moments away from the page as possible to make eye contact, all without losing your place (or, at least, being able to effectively fill moments spent rediscovering your place). Though you're deprived of eye contact with a teleprompter, you're also saved the logistical struggle and potential whiplash of a script-in-hand read. Either way, the unique skill of reading something as though it's just coming to you, motivated by the moments before, is like how one gets to Carnegie Hall.

I do not mean taking the N/R/Q to 57th Street.

So thank you, one and all, you workshopping playwrights, you producers looking for backing, you theatre-philes and patient givers of feedback. Thank you university teachers, new-works encouragers and experimentally inclined venue managers. Thanks everyone, for all the reading work. I knew not what a valuable skill reading could be!

"3: We are now held within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. Discuss."

The comment thread on my last post (see

9/17/08

) has me seriously jonesing for a good

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

quote match. For those of you unfamiliar with the

play

and/or

movie

, it's essentially an absurdist retelling of Hamlet from the vantage point of the two minor characters made titular ("of a title," you perverts). It's a fave. It's often

the

fave, depending on mood, time of day, strength of coffee and relative distance of Saturn from Venus. So, some favorite quotes, checked against

Wikiquote

, from which even more can be found...

Rosencrantz

"Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure."

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect."

"We'll be all right. I suppose we just go on."

Guildenstern

(

clearly the part I want

)

"I mean, you wouldn't bet on it. I mean, I would, but you wouldn't."

"It must be indicative of something besides the redistribution of wealth."

"What could we possibly have in common except our situation?"

"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque."

"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."

"Don't you discriminate at all?!"

"If we had a destiny, then so had he, and if this is ours, then that was his, and if there are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him."

"...now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real..."

"Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer?"

"No, no, no…death is

not

. Death

isn't

. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat."

The Player

"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."

"We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."

"Hamlet…in love…with the old man's daughter…the old man…thinks."

Cobbled dialogue

"So there you are...stark, raving sane..."

"I don't believe in it anyway ... What? ... England. ... Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?"

Wills On Film

Ha-ha; that's

Duran Duran

stuck in your head all day, sucker!

What? I'm old? Yeah, well . . .

. . . sh'up.

Actually: I've not been recorded on film recently. (

"No, no...what you've been is not on boats."

) What I've been, is a guest in another of Denny Lawrence's film classes at NYU. This time, it was a sort of introductory directing class for freshmen who had not been there yet three weeks. I and

Colleague Christa Kimlicko Jones

served as actors at a first read, as Denny demonstrated his communication techniques, and encouraged class discussions. In addition -- the very next day, in fact -- I was cast in an industrial that is filming next week, the details of which are available over at

Loki's Apiary

. (Loki's motto: Idle hands are the Devil's playground...and besides: busy bees make more money, honey.)

The class was outstanding, and afterward was even better, as Denny, Christa and I lingered to discuss the same topics we were outlining for young minds in the hour before. What's very interesting and necessary about the work Denny does for these students is that he includes a priority for the process involved in creating not only a good film, but a film that is recording good acting work. It may seem basic, this priority for good acting, but it's not at all. Many filmmakers, be they young or old, come close to disregarding any kind of process related to the actors at all. Hitchcock is famously quoted as comparing actors to cattle, and this sentiment is a tempting one for someone with all the power and responsibilities of a film director. After all, unlike theatre, a film never leaves their control (barring editorial exceptions, of course). They get the final say in the editing room, and I suppose it can be tempting in these circumstances to regard the actor's work as simple raw material that is spun out, manufactured. But it's not, and Denny appreciates this, and encourages his students to be intimate with an actor's process in order to better communicate with one. So this class was, for many there, the introduction of that idea.

The next morning, in the audition for the industrial, I was reminded of the class over and over again. Like the class, the audition was held at a table and with scripts in hand. I read my side of a scene with the casting director, and for the first time had that connection while reading it. Though quite straight-forward, it was not a simple scene. My character had to relate details of his life that created strong, involuntary emotional responses in him, yet he wanted above all to remain strong in the face of the challenge. In other words, as an actor I needed to make clear and believable my emotional reactions without baring them, or making the scene all about them. (It's kind of the secret game of acting, this pretense on both the actors' and the audience's parts that what they're there for is the plot or themes . . . we all know what we're really there for.) Anyway, typically the way I approach this kind of challenge is to play the intention of the character, what he wants, and listen. Just listen. When I really hear the words being said, the emotion comes of itself, and I can play the intention of continuing with strength through the challenge of those emotions.

"Intention" is just one of many terms we bandied about in class on Tuesday while trying to explain an actor's process and priorities to so many neophytes. It's difficult to say how much of our acting vocabulary actually made sense to the students, being as most of it is conceptual in nature. Words with simpler meanings in the rest of the world -- intention, obstacle, process, action -- are used as signifiers of things otherwise unnamed and intangible in an actor's world. Aptly enough, whether or not our words made sense to them, I could see our demonstrations, our "actions," getting through. Before one run, a student would look confused about, say, why it was important not to lead an actor into a certain goal. Then we would run a page, with Denny's coaching, and the same student would ask a very insightful (not to mention interested) question about how to direct an actor without determining the specific outcome. At the same time I was working to put years of practice into comprehensible words, the students were working at discovering the value in what they were witnessing. In this way, it was very similar to the feeling one gets from a good and productive rehearsal: a mutual and inclusive process of exploration and discovery. And we talked about that feeling in class, at that.

Another good feeling is when you get to the end of an audition and the casting director says to you, "Great work. Thank you. You've got the job." The occasions for this feeling are

extremely rare

, if for no other reason than that normally the casting director wants to get to the end of his or her day before making any decisions. I had occasion for this feeling at the end of my audition yesterday, and I'm probably still glowing just a bit. I mean, really, it's just an industrial -- less than a day's work, and for corporate purposes. But I can't fight this feeling (

anymore

). It's not at all a humble emotion. Uh-uh. No. I, plainly, rule. For now. What's curious for me to consider is that I think I did so well in the audition at least in part because of the activities of the day before. Having that time with colleagues, to consider and talk about how we work when we're working well, probably had a lot to do with the calm and clarity with which I approached the challenges of my audition. I could use more of that.

In the conversation amongst us all after class, we got to talking about the actor's process more, and specifically how it relates to a film set. It's encouraging to know that there are people like Denny out there making films with care about the acting aspect of them, and spreading that priority to future film makers. I really love film (et al), as a medium. I'm a big fan of theatre, and a big fan of photography, so the merging of the two is and always has been a very worthwhile prospect to me. I'd really like to act in a film -- anything with a narrative, in which I play a character with significant dialogue -- and do it soon. I've stayed away for a variety of (mostly lame) reasons, and one of those is a misconception of the film set being a place where the actor doesn't actually have a lot to contribute, or a process to be nurtured. The emphasis is on crank it out, get it right, edit and print it, or so it's always seemed.

Now? Now I'm rethinking that.