At last!

requiem for a good thing

2010-02-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

This morning I picked up my camera with the intention of taking some pictures as I walked home through Central Park after work. I haven't taken any pictures for several months, for the same reason I haven't been writing as much as I should, and as I cycled through the memory card I came across several photos from my 30th birthday. My girlfriend had taken me to Mohonk in upstate New York, and most of the pictures are of two people very much in love spending a freezing cold November afternoon outside, holding hands and smiling in spite of the weather. There were other pictures too from the year we spent together, pictures of us on my bed finishing a crossword puzzle, biking across the George Washington Bridge. There's one of her rolling the dough of a pizza we made together. There's the first picture we ever took, taken by a stranger in Soho before she left on a business trip.

It was a relationship that, aside from a few brief mentions early on, went entirely unremarked in this blog, and of all the things that have happened in the world and to me since I last wrote anything here -- the election of a black president, turning 30, starting a novel -- it is most surprising to me that this relationship, easily among the most important in my life, left no paper trail. Beyond the pictures there are other mementos, certainly (ticket stub from a Sigur Ros concert, postcard from Budapest), all of which have taken on a terrible new weight whenever I come across them. The relationship was wonderful, and although it has been over for some time, I still find myself stunned in its aftermath.

Like most relationships, it probably would have made for uninteresting conversation. We did the things couples do. We played cards together. We cooked dinner and watched The Wire and did crossword puzzles. We grabbed lunch if I was working near her office. I usually bought her flowers at the bodega around the corner from where she lived. On Christmas we both flew to California to meet each other's families, and in July I ended it.

It's a dirty fucking trick that you can be so in love with someone who isn't right for you. A dirty fucking trick. And it's a dirty trick that you can be the one that ends a relationship and still be reduced to rubble. I loved her very much, and she loved me, and I ended it. On some days the reasons are clear to me, and on others they're so dim and far away that they seem to vanish, but even on the best of days I still feel her there, the way an amputee still feels the fingers of a severed hand.

It's a testament to the easy life I've led that the hardest thing I've ever done is break up with a girl. I've never had to pull a friend out of a pile of brick and metal after and earthquake, or care for a dying family member, or sleep on a vent in the sidewalk to keep from freezing to death. Life is a parade of far worse things happening to far better people than me, just one more asshole who dumped a girl and came to regret it. Yet it is also, I suppose, a testament to the weird emotional and biological impulses that drive us, that even as the world burns down it is love that fills our lives with purpose, and its ending that steals it away again. Part of me believes that. The rest of me just feels bad.

So then, the last few months have been chockablock with first (and inevitably last) dates, irresponsible drinking, a few meaningless one night stands thrown in to force me to realize that, oh shit, this isn't really that fun anymore. And while I've slowly been able to piece myself back together again, every once in a while I'll come across a ticket stub or a post card, a pink sock in the bottom of a drawer, and it all comes crashing back down again. One step forward, two steps back. You know how it goes. All together now.

Will those mementos, those artifacts of such an important time in my life, always haunt me? Will I ever come across one of them and feeling anything other than a sense of longing and regret? In the pictures she's shuffling cards, leaning out over a frozen fountain, walking toward me with a birthday cake, maybe just smiling at the camera. They're just pictures, straightforward and maybe even boring, the way other people's pictures usually are. There's nothing to suggest the intensity of emotion, the love underlying the moments of quiet domesticity caught in the camera's flash, overexposed, a little blurry.

Do I save pictures or delete them? Do I keep the ticket stub in my wallet or tear it up? Do I throw the sock away, or do I wait for the day I can hold it in my hands and feel absolutely nothing?

the president

2009-01-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

Because I've been busy working on my book, it seems that this blog has withered on the vine -- and while I plan on reviving it as part of an inevitably short-lived new year's resolution, I wanted to prime the creative well with this.

For reasons probably interesting only to me, I've make a conscious decision to keep my fiction and my blogging separate. However, in light of recent events, I'd like to share a story I wrote four years ago, a few weeks into George Bush's second term. In light of recent events, it seems to have taken on a whole new meaning.

-bw

The President sits changing the strings of his guitar, drawing the dense jungle of wire into agreement. Around him, people mill about, their arms laden with electrical cords, rolls of duct tape, fill lights, colored gels, planks of wood, amps, switcher boxes, scaffolding, effects processors, make-up kits, hammers, saws. Orders are barked indiscriminately through headsets or hipslung walkie-talkies, coordinating the movements of the chaotic mass as best as can be expected. The President is oblivious to the buzzing hive surrounding him because he is capable of profound concentration. Beyond the dark folds of the curtain, the hum of the crowd’s growing restlessness adds a note of urgency to the manic buzz. But the President takes an inordinate amount of time to tune his guitar. The jangling anemone springing from the neck of his guitar changes its dimensions by degrees as the President listens for changes imperceptible to those around him. His genius affords him his eccentricities.

The hive has been given strict instructions to avoid making eye-contact with the President, if not avoid looking at him altogether. It’s for their own good, as staring at the President has been known to induce hypnotic trances in those foolish enough to steal more than a passing glance. There is a persistent rumor circulating that a young girl of 16 was walking home from school when she caught a glimpse of a poster of the President and was immediately struck blind. Whether or not this is true or merely a cautionary tale is unclear, though certainly it’s true in a metaphorical sense. With all the heavy equipment being lugged about, it’s best not to take any chances. Anyone caught staring at the President for more than three seconds is docked a day’s pay.

The make-up artists, whose very jobs demand exemption from this rule, tend to the various unique features of his face—a face that, they assure him in their faggy, flamboyant lisps, will soon adorn the bedroom walls of brooding, horny teenagers everywhere, burrowing down into the fertile folds of their minds to fuel their first urgent, fumbling discoveries of sexual gratification, staring down from above countless beds to hold court over first kisses, over the first glimpse of a naked breast, over the slowly dawning awareness of an erection prodding desperately into a hip, over awkward and inappropriate confessions of love, over the hasty, slapstick shedding of clothes.

And his music will be the soundtrack to a thousand lost virginities, to a million, forever linked to the joy and panic of the moment, to the jittery cadence of belts being undone, to the awkward geometry of the back seats of cars, to the nervous, seasick swell of a stomach trembling beneath curious, inexperienced fingers. Teenagers will roll wet towels beneath their doors and stare together at his face through dense clouds of smoke, at the weird half-smile, the pensive crease in his brow, and argue for hours about what he must have been thinking at that moment. They’ll look at the way he’s leaning back, the way his head rests casually in the palm of one hand while smoke from what squares assume is a cigarette curls lazily around the fingers of the other, and they will thrill at this secret insight, this accidental window into the inner life of the President.

Pregnant mothers will play his albums and stand with their swollen bellies pressed against the speakers. Marching band instructors will condense his music into challenging but nonetheless playable medleys which, while inevitably sacrificing a level of its sonic complexity, do so in the hope of inspiring a new generation of musicians to reach beyond the vast, blank canvas of their lives, though the flutes and clarinets will warble away obliviously, unable to see how their repetitive, feathery trill fits into the larger picture, unable to detach themselves from the relative plainness of their part enough to recognize the vital role it plays in the President’s plan. After practice they will break their instruments down and walk to class utterly unaffected, cackling about the weather, or some cute boy, or a party one of them has heard about, and they’ll graduate and find good jobs and get married and have well-behaved children and stack issues of People in wicker baskets next to their toilets. In the mornings they’ll drive their children and the children of friends to school in blue minivans, and one day one of the President’s songs will come on over the radio and trigger some dim and untroubled memory.

But the trumpets, trombones and tubas—those poor bastards will wander the field in a shambles for hours, long after the sun has gone down and the lights of the city begin to sparkle in the distance, their hearts racing painfully in their chests, not from the physical exertion of marching, but from the thrill of touching, even in such a debased and impure form, the third rail of the President’s brilliance. They’ll spill blindly into the streets, fingers running over phantom valves, lips drawn instinctively into embouchure, staccato tongues darting against their teeth, and when passersby see them, see their hands fluttering spastically, hear the air hissing violently through their lips, they’ll gather their children close and quicken their step. They’ll leave school and pawn their instruments and use the money to buy motorcycles, and they’ll drop acid and ride into the roaring mouth of the desert, engines revving higher and higher, asphalt singing inches below the scuffed leather of their boots as skeletal desert trees rake the air around their heads and their bikes soar like black eagles beneath them, needles hurtling toward impossible speeds, and when their friends and family beg them for an explanation, beg them to come home in their small, sad voices, they will find themselves at a loss for words so complete and profound that they won’t even be able to say goodbye before hanging up the phone.

Middle-aged fathers and their irritated sons will fight over the radio while stuck in traffic, only to come across one of his songs and settle into a petulant but secretly grateful compromise, their bemused half-frowns masking the desperate fervor with which each clings to it, as one clings to the last disintegrating bridge stretching across a valley that seems to grow deeper and wider every year, and they’ll find themselves singing along despite themselves, singing along with the President and with each other, and for a few moments things will be the way they used to be before the terrifying possibilities of adolescence and the creeping panic of middle age took root like weeds. For a few moments they’ll again be fathers and sons, and only through a great deal of effort will the fathers be able to keep themselves from reaching over and grabbing their boys, to cradle them tight against their chests, to hold them like water in their cupped hands.

*

A final turn of the machine head and the frown of intense concentration melts from the President’s face. He stands. The makeup artists, their work finally finished, flutter away like the foggy halo of a dandelion.

The hive pauses, mesmerized by the unexpected movement, fixed in place around the President like insects trapped in amber. Some of the younger workers laugh nervously at the sudden stillness, the joyless laughter that bubbles up from the oily dark of a blackout in a crowded room. He steps forward into the mass of bodies.
A small-breasted woman with black glasses and bright red lipstick shouts urgently into the rosebud microphone jutting from her headset as she grabs dazed workers by the backs of their necks and shoves them out of the President’s path. The hive goes about its job with renewed urgency, parting around him like a river around a boulder, breaking upon him as waves upon the prow of a ship.

*

The President walks onstage to uproarious applause. If he is affected by it, it’s impossible to tell. The cheers reach a deafening crescendo as he approaches the microphone. The President adjusts the strap of his guitar and turns to face the band. The drummer’s sticks hover above the cymbal and snare. The bassist’s fingers arch over the strings. A quick nod from the President and they tense—the sharp intake of breath before jumping into cold water, the rippling leg of a lion crouched low in the grass. The crowd is a roaring black sea.
The President raises his pick into the air. A hush falls like snow. People cling desperately to one another in the coiled silence. They say to each other, When it falls, everything will change. When it falls we will become the people we want to be. The pick hovers in the air like a promise, like a dark cloud on the horizon, like something so important it doesn’t need to be said.

creasin' the deece

2008-10-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

When I was 4, my parents brought me and my at-the-time-only sister Sarah to New York. My memories of the time consist, as early memories often do, of large swathes of color and sound ripped whole-cloth from any meaningful context. Clanking up a twisting staircase made of green metal, until my parents decided to turn us around and fight our way back down through a crowd of jostling elbows and angry looks -- years later my dad told me that that was an unsuccessful attempt to climb to the top of the statue of liberty. Burying my face into my mom's neck while some horrible, growling black shape loomed over me -- top of the empire state building, some guy dressed in a gorilla suit. I remember the brown and orange chevron pattern of carpet, the bang and clatter of a pinball machine with an Indian head staring our from the scoreboard, my grandfather yelling at me for something -- the hotel in Philadelphia where they were holding a Wright family reunion.

When I was 12 I rode the London Underground with my dad. When I was 15 I got what turned out to be a life-altering blowjob from the daughter of my homestay in Osaka. When I was 17 I stumbled home drunk from a pub in Tromso, Norway, at 2 in the morning with the sun still beating down on my head. At 19, I played with the Trojan Marching Band at the opening of the American exhibit at the World Expo in Lisbon, and at 24 I was ordering beer phonetically at an inzakaya in a small fishing village in Japan. Bii-ru o hi-to-tsu ku-da-sai.

But until last year, those disjointed flashes of something too unmoored to be properly called memories were the sum total of my experience of the east coast. It took me nearly a quarter of a century to make it further east than Chicago.

Yet even now that I've lived in New York for a few weeks shy of a year, I haven't strayed too far beyond the five boroughs -- but no, even that's too generous, seeing that I only went to Staten Island for one day to shoot in an abandoned insane asylum (seriously) and the only two times I've been to the Bronx were because I'd passed out on the subway. So, Manhattan then. Brooklyn, parts of Queens. Went upstate once. Played golf with my dad in Connecticut. Couple of trips to drop off people or equipment in Jersey City. That's it.

And so it was with a sense of wonder at how little of my own country I've seen that I came to the Washington, DC, the Big Deece itself. Weeks of sifting through the crazed dregs of New York for roommates who seemed least inclined to cut my throat in my sleep (a process that brought me to the brink honest-to-christ homelessness) -- and that, combined with a worrying bout of semi-employment, left me with no choice but to get the fuck out of there for a couple of days.

So, DC. Staying in a Hilton and suckling at the teat of my girlfriend's meager expense account, nursing something akin to guilt at the idea eating withered strips of bacon and overcooked eggs on a nonprofit organization's dime. Fuck it, writers gots to eat too. So while she busies herself with the problems of the world, my days are free to tool around this strange patchwork city -- a slice of San Francisco here, a sliver of Chicago there, a strip of West Hollywood there -- all the while with an uneasy sense of deja vu scraping at my neck like a loose collar. Walking around Washington is like walking around in an amnesiac daze, snapshots of a familiar world that no longer fits together the way it's supposed to. Throw then the mindfuck of the capitol itself onto the pile of smoldering almost-familiarity, the smooth marble domes, the carved columns and snickering phallic symbolism of the capitol seen nearly every day of our lives on TV, in movies, our money. But then there it is, not framed by banners and curlicues and green text proclaiming our nation's trust in god, but sharing space with some shitty post-modern architectural disaster of an office building, the unmistakable round emblem of a Starbucks, the chattering street vendors selling five-dollar pretzels.

Still, there's a certain giddy thrill at strolling past the halls of power, at seeing firsthand the smooth alabaster walls and knowing that this -- this -- is where we all get fucked. Camera comes out, gawk along with the other tourists. At one point I framed up the Treasury Department and held out a $20 bill in front of the lens before a sighing, visibly annoyed man in a Brooks Brothers suit scoffed that, god, everyone does that. Minutes later a cop on a bike wheeled up to me and demanded to see my ID and my camera, adding under his breath that he was required by law to inform me I was under no legal obligation to show him either one. I gave him my license, but withheld my camera, so he barked at me not to move while he muttered something into his walkie talkie. After a couple of minutes he tells me I won't be detained, then pointed to the trees and told me I was being watched by a lot of very paranoid people. The experience was unsettling, to put it mildly.

I split the rest of the day between various other Washington landmarks. Frowning Lincoln, brow creased nobly in reflection of how awesome it is to be the most slave-freeingest of all the presidents, past the brackish reflecting pool and long lawns that only deepen the sense of this city's country-clubbishness, past the base of the Washington Monyment and a squabble of guffawing fourth graders, and finally to the Smithsonian, holding a retrospective on the work of Jim Henson, where the whole day was given a bizarre coda by the sight of a roomful of adults singing along to a video of the theme song to Fraggle Rock. Dance your cares away. Clap-clap.

And perhaps it's fitting that this image is somehow the most poignant, that this somehow captures the spirit of this town more than any picture or postcard or history book can. Washington is a city of a threatening familiarity too subtle for words, but too deep and omnipresent to go unremarked, because for all of it's dressed-up stateliness, for all of it's marble columns and elegant fountains and monuments to its own greatness, this city is just fucking weird.

Clap-clap, indeed.

8! 8! 8!

2008-08-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

Too tired to do much more at the end of the day than make my way home and collapse onto my unmade bed, splitting what scant free time I can cobble together from the scattered remnants of 14 hour days between pecking blindly away at my novel and spending time with the girl who, yeah, yeah, I guess is sorta my girlfriend. Two months of bottom-of-the-barreling it on another show for the Food Network (described in highconcept-ese as Myth-Busters-meets-food so many times that the words have become meaningless) has left me too tired, even, to summon much more than distant, vague indignation at the fact that, when it's all tallied up at the end of the day, I'm making ten dollars an hour. Sorry. A fucking hour.

Ah, there's the indignation. Of the various character defects pointed out to me over the course of my 29 years, being slow to anger has never been one of them, so it should speak to level of my fatigue that being pissed off at the situation in which I currently find myself -- being anything more than blithely accepting of my hours tracking down whole turkeys in July, or fighting midtown traffic while a two hundred pound block of ice slides around the back of the production minivan, or mutely pleading with gawking tourists to move from in front of the camera, to scraping chunks of putrid meat off of plates with a fork and a dribbling faucet that only runs cold -- is far too demanding of what little energy the long day leaves me.

But sigh, it is what it is, and coming to an end soon enough, and so now I find myself enjoying the last few hours of my Friday night and looking forward to two days of not a whole lot. Maybe write a little bit, maybe dim-sum tomorrow, maybe make a phone call, maybe just sitting around and watch DVDs. Friends, the world is my oyster.

a luddite comes around

2008-06-07T17:15:00.000-07:00

Too hot to do much more than sit my darkened apartment and listen to the lady downstairs scream at her bawling kid about-- christ, some shit. Can't quite make out the angry patois above the sound of the shouts and honking horns a couple of streets over, the bass from some reggaeton band playing down-block on a stage sponsored by a spanish radio station. I made it back home to Spanish Harlem today sometime around noon, still wearing the black shirt and black tie that had looked so good the night before but that was now wrinkled and stifling and may as well have been a camel hair coat, and found myself in the middle of the 116th Street Fair, known above 110th Street as Puerto Rico Day and below it (and by the gentrification set) as Oh God, Oh God, Close Up All the Shops.

I've been feeling every bit the shut-in as of late, spending most of my time plugging away at a bottom of the barrel post-production job and then spending the rest chipping away at the first few chapters of a novel, so I walked through the fair for a bit, past food stalls selling chorizo and cheese-filled plantains and mozzarepa and booths offering diabetes counseling alongside free packets of Tide. I grabbed a plate of rice and beans but the heat got to be too much so I came back home and sat in my apartment naked with the windows open and the blinds drawn. Then the woman downstairs started in on her kid, you little motherfucker, so I dragged myself into the living room and stuffed some earplugs into my ears and started a-bloggin'.

No, not exactly. First I checked Facebook. Checking Facebook has, in the two weeks since I semi-reluctantly joined up, already become a shamefully high priority -- and one which, like any of a number of other monkeys on my back, I just can't seem to shake. I have, over the last few weeks, given up with varying degrees of failure coffee, booze, sex, and videogames. The idea was that these things were too great a distraction while I pound away at the book, but the five minutes of Grand Theft Auto that I allowed myself this afternoon (which stretched into a full hour and a half, when the battery in my controller died) marks a colossal failure of will on all fronts -- and the triumph of witty sophistication and raw animal magnetism on one in particular -- within a single 24 hour period. And now Facebook. Jesus.

Ah, but truth told, wasting my time was not the reason I shunned Facebook for so long. No, the reasons for avoiding Facebook -- and social networks in general -- are similar to the reasons I don't like strip clubs. When I was 15, my friends tried to take me to a strip club across the border from Brownsville in Matamoros, Mexico. Octopus or some such, something vaguely pun-based. Octopus was full, or too expensive, or we looked too young, or we weren't dressed well enough, but for whatever reason we were turned away at the door by the chuckling bouncer so we drove through Matamoros until we found another club down some back alley, somewhere we could get into because my friend knew somebody. It was dark and hot and the stage was particle board laid out on top of a bunch of cinder blocks, upon which several women writhed distractedly about to the small tinny sounds of an old boom box. Walk into the sad, empty club and the women flock toward us, sit us down, ask us if we want anything and my friends buy me a lap dance. A woman starts rubbing her tits in my face, but I can't take my eyes off of the track marks running up and down both of her arms, and now I don't go to strip clubs.

My first experience with Friendster, too, left me gun shy. Initially it seemed like a lazy way too keep in touch with people while I was in Japan and would have evolved in due course to drunkenly entering the names of ex-girlfriends into the search engine as per usual, had I one day not typed in the name of my very first girlfriend and been brought to the page of a bald, scowling, tattooed lesbian. So, Friendster account left to die on the vine, Myspace passed up completely, the various life-paths of other ex-girlfriends and old flames unexamined. And you know what? It's better that way.

Then Facebook, and again I'm the guy explaining that he'd rather not go to the strip club, ha ha, see there's this thing that happened, but as the annoying din of talk about super-pokes and Scrabulous grew ever louder, not joining Facebook became in my mind a matter of principle. Then fuck, shit, yeah, one day I signed up. I was probably hungover and drinking a grande iced coffee while playing Burnout Paradise at the time, too. Happy?

And initially it was...well, shit, it was pretty exciting. Haven't talked to so-and-so in years, can't believe such-and-such is married, or divorced, or has kids, or any of the number of things that you come to find out as your social network slowly spiders outward to include people you haven't seen or talked to or thought of since high school. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of peeking in on the lives of the bank of familiar names in the lower left corner, of glimpsing the faces of your childhood friends, fatter or thinner, or bearded or with different hair, but unmistakably theirs despite bearing the weight of a full decade of adulthood -- beyond all of that, there's the promise of doing more than simply gawking at, say, the fact that Ana's son is now 15, or that Troy owns three companies.

I don't know if it's something unique to Facebook, something fundamentally different from the catch-all clusterfucks of Friendster or Myspace, or if it's merely that I'm now old enough to fully appreciate what it means to have lost contact with people I once cared a great deal for, but the best and most terrifying thing is that it has brought me a poke away from re-establishing contact with people I had no idea I missed so badly. Sappy, yeah, but no less true for it. And yet so far I've balked at actually saying much more to those people than "Friend me," which seems to be the Web 2.0 equivalent of calling up someone you haven't talked to in years and asking them to loan you a couple bucks. Someday soon I'll muster the courage to do something more meaningful than scrawling snark on their wall. Until then, I'll simply marvel at how we've all turned into a bunch of 30 year olds. Not forever, but just for now.

perspective

2008-05-20T18:10:00.000-07:00

Busy, but alive. Indeed.

The last couple of months have been quiet here, but just as still waters run deep, so does the seeming stagnation of this blog mark a span of months that have reduced me to a soul-sick, dead eyed shell of my former self. The beauty of working in film -- the terrible, bleak beauty -- is that there are literally hundreds of job for which you are wildly overqualified, and if you bust your ass you can squeeze a lifetime of futility into a few short weeks.

So then, a recap.

There was, as you may recall, my brief tenure as a PA on a Russian feature, the vast majority of which was split between driving a van between Brooklyn and New Jersey and telling tourists and angry truck drivers that they couldn't park there, and which, while it still managed to be an almost entirely a pleasant experience, culminated with me being roped into being an extra in a dinner scene and getting food poisoning when the director demanded, through a translator, that I actually eat the food.

Then there were the two days I spent as a PA on a cooking show shooting in a high-end kitchen showroom near Union Square. My job was, among other things, to stand outside the front of the store in the rain and tell people that no, the store isn't closed, but yes, those are cameras inside so if they could wait for just one second, we'd really etcetera etcetera. Luckily most people shamefully wealthy enough to cover their sink in gold don't like getting their diamond-studded umbrellas wet, so most of my day was spent silently commiserating with the passersby who, for reasons of their own, had been forced outside on such a miserable day. Then the coked-up head of sales stormed onto the showroom floor and accused me of scaring away a six figure deal and demanded that I be fired. Someone, some terrified millionaire, had called the store and said someone, a bearded someone, had scared them away from the front of the store before they could spend one hundred thousand dollars on their kitchen.

Then there was the day I spent with a director "organizing tapes," which, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be an obvious euphemism for "spending 14 hours cleaning out a garage for $100 and two slices of cheese pizza."

Then there was the month and a half I spent logging footage for the upcoming Margaret Cho reality show.

Ah, and so now we come down to it.

"Logging footage," it turns out, is also a euphemism. In a literal sense it refers to the act of transcribing the hours upon hours of inane, catty bickering that have been captured on tape. But in another, truer sense, "logging footage" means "seeing how long you can stare into the empty, baleful eyes of the angel of death before realizing that your entire life, every triumph and defeat, every moment of joy or sadness great or small, every time you've ever laughed or cried or hugged someone, the very sum of your existence is this, now, this very moment, typing 'Margaret mimes eating pussy' for the twenty-second time that day, or 'Margaret pretends to finger her asshole while her father tells everyone at the dinner table how proud he is of her success' , or copying down word for word a tearful exchange in which Margaret complains that nobody knows how hard it is growing up looking different to a fucking midget."

And that, sadly, isn't a euphemism for anything at all.

Busy

2008-04-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

But alive.

lament - the potato drinkers - times square - scientologists - 10 year old asshole - then exeunt inner child - food poisoning (xenu, slight return)

2008-03-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

When I started At Last!, my greatest fear was that it would, like all other web-logs before it, evolve along one of two distinct paths: It would become either a daily catalog of the mundane efforts, concerns and disappointments of my life in New York, or would wither from neglect and devolve into a stagnant, rarely updated puddle of loosely affiliated ramblings. It seems that, despite my sincerest efforts, the siren song of the latter is too strong to ignore. And so it goes, that weeks slide by with nary a post in sight.

Blame the Russians. For the last month I have been slaving away on a feature film semi-secretly funded by the Russian government. While there's no nondisclosure agreement preventing me from disclosing the details of the project to my heart's desire, the fact of the matter is that after spending almost every single day of the last month on set, after having the plot explained to me, even after reading the screenplay first-hand, I am no closer to understanding what the fuck the movie is about than I was that first day on set, watching the lead actor scream at a fur coat.

The majority of my time was split between babysitting the trucks that contained our equipment, driving said trucks through the traffic-choked streets of New York, and coralling/diverting/hushing onlookers and passersby whenever we rolled camera. All three brought me, unsurprisingly, into close contact with every asshole living in this city. I'd be remiss to recount every time I was bumped, jostled, pushed, or told to fuck off -- these are, after all, numbered as the very threads with which this city's grand tapestry of humiliation, resentment and failure is woven -- but there is one exchange that bears singling out.

About halfway through the shoot we had to stage a car accident in Times Square at 3 in the morning. Why Times Square? Why 3 in the morning? My guess is that it's part of some post-communist treachery designed to punish Imperialist stooges such as myself by giving us pnemonia and/or getting us stabbed by junkies, drunk tourists and the other assorted weirdos walking down 42 street in the rain-sodden early hours of a Monday morning. In order to secure our little corner of Times Square, we had to show up many hours in advance and stake out enough parking for our fleet of camera trucks, crew vans and winnebagos. Once the spaces were coned off it fell upon the production assistants - among whose shivering, numb-fingered ranks I count myself - to wave off the legion of angry would-be parkers, which we did with aplomb. Fuck you too, prick.

And that would have been that, a long, cold night of neck-veined aggression and casual profanity, had I not been stationed right in front a Church of Scientology building. More to the point, my night might already have been bitterly cold and unpleasant had I not been drinking coffee all goddamn night and been overcome by a powerful and obvious need. I ducked into the zealot-hut and greeted the empty-eyed cultist with a friendly Hello, Scientologist! and asked to use the bathroom. She said no, possibly because it's in accordance with their crazy religious beliefs to deny comfort and shelter to soaking-wet SPs whose bladders are filled to bursting, or it might have been because I accompanied my friendly Hello, Scientologist! by snapping my bootheels together and thrusting my left arm into the air. Either way, I walked out of the revolving doors smug but unrelieved.

And yeah, I might have said something like fuck scientology to one of my fellow PAs, something exactly like that, when out of the blue some chubby ten year old rushes up, calls me a shithead and takes a swing at me. Having been called a shithead and been nearly punched countless times over the last few weeks, I did what came naturally and told the kid to go fuck himself, then realized that I had just told a ten year old kid to go fuck himself. He told me that Scientology is a good thing and that assholes like me just don't understand. I said beat it, kid. It felt awesome. I recommend that everyone antagonize a pre-adolescent just to give them an excuse to say those words. It means strangling your inner child, stabbing it in the neck, setting it on fire and kicking it into a snakepit, but them's the breaks.

But for those of you that think it was grossly intolerant of me to impugn the pseudo-religious beliefs of a child, regardless of how deeply rooted in the nonsensical, paranoid ramblings of a terrible science fiction writer, know that Lord Xenu did look upon my transgressions and smite me with a wicked case of food poisoning which has, in a twist befitting the limited imagination of scientology's Great Hack in the Sky, turned the last few days into one long mad scramble through the streets of New York, looking for the nearest toilet or approximation therof where I can void my bowels with a minimum of embarrassment.

Somewhere, an empty-eyed 10 year old asshole is laughing. Goddammit.

it's easy to feel lonely when you're a mean-spirited cunt

2008-02-23T11:48:00.005-08:00

It was going to be sweet.

Like most plans for revenge, mine was both simple and petty. For weeks I had been keeping track of every insult, every indignity, every bizarre, paranoid accusation slung my way by the woman whose face swims up from the inky black depths when I close my eyes, whose very name has become to my ears the sound of a rusty door slamming shut. This nightmare of a woman, this swollen deer tick of prozac-fueled Stepford sensibility, burrowed her way into my skin and sat there for weeks, growing fatter and more entrenched with each passing day. Toward the end of the show, there were days when the only thing that kept me from hurling a dish of semi-homemade bacon-wrapped dates into her face was the knowledge that, in the end, it would be a temporary joy - a brief surge of adrenaline followed by the realization, probably as I stepped through the door to my apartment, that I was once again jobless in New York City, with several bridges burned.

No, in the end I knew that such satisfaction, though sublime beyond words, would be nothing more than a temporary and minor embarrassment. The makeup artist would scrape the bacon grease from her hair and teeth and she'd change into a new dress. By the time I reached the subway station three blocks away it would be like it never happened.

The plan, then, was simply to wait until the show was finished and, the very minute the non-disclosure agreement no longer applied, hit the internet and shout from the electronic rooftops that the host of the show is a horrible cunt. More than that, I would spell out, in excruciating detail, the exact manner in which she is a horrible cunt. On days when her behavior was particularly cruel or bizarre, the only thing that kept me from getting into a red-faced shouting match with her was the certainty that even the ugliest, most wretched names I could sling into the gaping blond void of her face would pale next to the merciless and infinitely more public excoriation I had planned - the very blog entry you're now reading.

I kept a piece of paper tacked up on the wall above my bed that listed, day by day, exactly how much money I would have lost had I quit my job. Next to it was a second piece of paper, crumpled and creased from weeks of being pulled from my wallet and hastily scribbled on. It is covered, front and back, by an exhaustive list of this woman's wrongs. They range from the mild and prosaic (SL told the head cook she'd be pretty if she didn't dress like a boy) to the aggressively unpleasant (SL told one of her guests not to say "please" to me when he asked me to get him some water) to the unsettling (SL hissed at me in the hallway that she knew I was putting soap in her food). And these a just the tip of the iceberg. The rabbit hole gets much, much deeper.

Two weeks ago, however, it fell upon me to stick around after work while SL talked with the director at a bar so I could drive her back to Manhattan. The idea of being in a car alone with a woman who had announced to a room full of people that she didn't like me made my head ache, so I sat in the van on the street outside the bar, arms crossed over my chest in sullen anticipation of the awkward half-hour to come, and told myself not to say anything stupid.

When she finally climbed into the car she started asking me about myself in that overly-friendly way that two people who dislike each other have when they're suddenly thrown into such close proximity for the first time. Plus she was drunk. I told her I had just moved to New York from California, she told me she was going to be on the weekend version of the Today Show, and so on and so on, in a robotic approximation of a real conversation. She asked me if I had any plans for Valentine's Day, I said not really and asked her the same. She didn't say anything for a while, and I assumed she either hadn't heard me, or the friendliness put there by the booze had started to wear off. After a couple of minutes I heard a small, choked sob and realized that she was crying.

There is something of a running joke between me and my friends that women - for reasons which, truth be told, I prefer not to examine too closely - are compelled to confess to me, in grim and unsparing detail, how lonely they are. And while there's something to be said for baring one's soul, there's also something to be said for timing. A lot to be said for timing. A lot.

Loneliness - desperate, cold, suffocating loneliness - has been confessed to me, among other places, in crowded movie theaters, in rambling five-minute voice mails, on flights to Japan, and in the middle of an up-until-then normal blow job. Add to that long and storied list one more: in a minivan idling in traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, by the host of a nationally televised cooking show.

The problem, of course, is that while growing up with three younger sisters has endowed me with the ability to mask my discomfort while a woman tearfully talks out her problems, I've very seldom said or done anything to warrant such a wide and sudden window in the deepest recesses of her soul - and whether it is simple unluck of timing, or some pheremonal signal, or a strange confluence of the two, when their confession is met only with understanding nod and generic shoulder to cry on, it hits them that they've spilled their guts to a sympathetic stranger on a plane, or in a voice mail, or to a guy whose dick was just in their mouths, and their desperate, unfettered honesty is replaced in quick succession by embarrassment - close cousin, I imagine, to the embarrassment you feel when you realize you've been talking into a telephone line that's gone dead.

So I found myself trapped in a minivan with a woman for whom I feel nothing even remotely positive, while she sobbed into her hands that she doesn't have anyone, torn between telling her that she'll always be lonely if she treats everyone around her with such contempt and saying something nice, however unheartfelt. In the end I said only that it's easy to be lonely in New York. She wiped her eyes and we passed the rest of the ride in silence.

The next day the woman who had once threatened to fire me for using the wrong towel to wipe up a spilled cocktail, who'd once accused me of putting a dead cockroach in her room, who'd asked me in front of a set full of people if I was gay, then followed it up by saying I couldn't be because she likes gay guys, was all smiles and please-and-thank-yous, all shoulder rubs and sweetie this and that. The transformation was, at the risk of understatement, noticeable, and even the makeup artist, a six-foot-four flaming queen from some Balkan backwater, told me that she'd stopped complaining about me by name and had taken instead to saying blandly unpleasant things about the crew as a whole.

And I now realize that I can't bring myself to expose all of this woman's wrongs, to call her out by name and show the world - or a very, very small slice of it - what an ugly human being she is. She is many things, but for all of her outward cruelty, for all of her acid-tongued spite, for all the many ways in which she brings upon herself every ounce of contempt burning in the chests of the decent, hard-working people who surround her, she is above all a deeply unhappy woman so burdened by the great weight of her own self-loathing that she is incapable of doing anything but hurling it at the people around her. She is, in the end, just another lonely New Yorker.

We filmed the final episode of her show last Friday, and I was once again called upon to stick around after work. We were scheduled to start dismantling the set the next Monday, and she wanted to use it for a photo shoot. Our crew went home, and I sat in the production office while a bunch of photographers from some magazine snapped pictures of SL out on the set. Around one o'clock there was a great commotion in the hall outside the office, and I stuck my head out the door to see a crowd of people standing outside the door to her dressing room, trying to coax her out. After a couple of minutes she emerged to their enthusiastic applause, eyes puffy and cheeks wet (though, as was pointed out to me in a flamboyant lisp, makeup still perfect). She was leaving the set for the last time, the last time ever, and dozens of hands fell upon her back in a round of good-jobs and we-all-love-yous.

The crowd moved toward where I stood somewhat uncomfortably by the craft service table, arranging and rearranging the packets of gum and candy and trying not to appear as if I were paying attention. As she passed me our eyes met and I mumbled something about, y'know, good luck sandie. She raised her hand for a high-five, which I met noncommittally and which collapsed into an oddly intimate half-handshake, with our fingers interlocking. We stood there for a moment, hands held in mid-air, and I was just about to pull away when she threw her arm around my shoulders and hugged me. Then she disappeared again into the sycophantic swirl of bodies, which carried her off to the town car idling outside.

Once everyone was gone, I took out the trash, shut off all the lights and drove home feeling angry, but not sure at what. I decided to take surface streets up to 119th instead of taking the highway, and at a stoplight near Union Square I saw a bunch of drunk NYU kids patting their friend on the back as she threw up onto the sidewalk. By the time I got home it was two in the morning and I was too tired to do much more than pass out.

At some point in the night, the list of her wrongs fell off the wall and landed on the bed, and when I woke up the next morning it was stuck to my face. I pulled it off and threw it in the trash.

a mad, dim, senile whore hates me

2008-02-06T17:54:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine recently complained that I don't update this web-blog enough. He's right, I don't-- and while my general laziness and the recent acquisition of an Xbox 360 may be in some way to blame, the relative quietude of At Last! is, to my mind, less a product of a lack of things to say than an over-abundance. In the parlance of our times, this blog has gone from being the sort-of funny new kid cracking lame jokes from the back of the class to being the weirdly placid loner drawing pictures of guns on his desk.

Blame it on the coked-out, paranoid spinster whose self-titled show I am reduced to anagrammizing. When I first got word that I'd be working on her show, my initial reaction was something along the lines of "Gee, I bet that crazy dame'll give me a whole lot to web-blog about." And while the crazy-fruit that springs forth from that woman has been plentiful, I am faced with two problems.

The first problem is that, as a condition of my employment, I signed a nondisclosure agreement. This would not be an insurmountable problem in and of itself, had I not overheard her screaming at one of the producers of the show mere seconds after I signed it that she'd googled herself and found nasty things written about her on the internet. This means that, if I were to write about her, I'd be forced to be vague -- A woman you've never met said or did something unpleasant -- or to come up with some tedious code -- SL snorts drugs on the set of her show, SHMWSL, on the food-based television channel FN -- which would be childish and obnoxious. Either way, I'd be depriving myself of the pleasure of declaring to the world and everyone in no uncertain terms what a miserable bitch she is.

Still, this too would not necessarily be enough to keep me from breaking a hastily written, typo-riddled nondisclosure agreement. No, the real reason At Last!, like that dried-up she-beast's lady parts, has lain barren for so long is because the minute I start to write about her, this blog will cease to be about anything else. It would, in essence, be nothing more than another hate site dedicated to that horrible woman, and as much as I'd love to vent my frustrations upon her in this one-sided semianonymous format, I want to believe I'm better than that.

So for now, allow me a few more days of coming home and playing Rock Band until I'm too tired to be angry. Allow me a few more days of funneling the righteous laser beam of my contempt into my work, that I may lift boxes faster and better. Taped up on the wall above my bed is a piece of paper on which I've broken down, day by day, exactly how much doing or saying something stupid will cost me. For now, allow me to think that this is enough.

a great way to get to hate new york

2008-01-22T16:45:00.001-08:00

Two weeks into the shoot, and for reasons that escape me I've become the de facto driver for the show (the name of which I am forbidden from mentioning but which, uncoincidentally, is a perfect anagram of "I am a worthless maiden, heed me"). The logic, for lack of a less sarcastic-sounding word, of putting someone who can count the number of months he's been in this city on both middle fingers in charge of piloting a massive 15-seat van through the traffic-choked streets of New York escapes me, but the upside is that every hour I spend screaming at some asshole triple-parked on Bowery is an hour of not being screamed at by a drug-addicted, alcoholic multimillionaire.

Short of the odd drunken taxi ride, I'd literally been in one car since coming to New York before starting this job, and my impression had been of a city composed entirely of tunnels. The subways are in many ways wonderful, as much for their convenience (which is ample) as for the voyeuristic, fight-or-flight thrill of being surrounded on all sides by an army of lunatics. And yes, yes, there's a certain...well shit, magic, to emerging from the dank tiled murk of the subway to find yourself suddenly in a different part of town.

And so for me this city existed as a series of islands. Go down into the subway and emerge in Harlem, Central Park, Union Square, Greenpoint, Bushwick. There are points of reference, yes -- the spire of the Empire State Building, the gaudy flash and bang of Times Square -- but the bits and pieces that make up the city never quite fit together. The Bronx is up, the Battery 's down. Everything else gets a bit hazy.

In the beginning, it's this simple dislocation that makes being anywhere for the first time so exciting. The simple act of decoding the geography of a place, of figuring out which roads take you where, is the first step to penetrating its mystery. Said mystery is stabbed, set on fire, pushed down a flight of stairs and then given the finger by a cabbie the minute you start driving. Yeah, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, and between them, an endless sea of douchebags.

Central Park, once a sanctuary of calm in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city, is now just a big green road block in between where I am and where I need to be, and shit, now I need to drive all the way the fuck up 66th to get over to the west side, even though the place I need to go to pick up the lens is on the same fucking street I'm on now, and jesus, for some reason the fire department has the street roped off so now I gotta go all the way up to -- the fuck?! The light's green you fucking moron! GO!! Don't honk at me, you prick, I'm not the asshole staring at a green light with my thumb up my -- Move your goddamn car! Yeah, you! And then once I have the lens I have to get all the way the fuck up to the Bronx to pick up some dry ice, of all fucking things, then back down to the lighting house in Greenwich that won't have our stuff ready until after lunch, which I'm goddamn missing right now, by the way, and after all that I have to make it back across the Williamsburg Bri--No, YOU fuck YOUR goddamn mother, lady!

Michiko Kata, 1959 - 2008

2008-01-11T17:46:00.000-08:00

I've been struggling to write this post for a couple of days now, and although I'm finally sitting down and running my fingers over the keys, I feel no more prepared to tackle the great weight that hangs over my heart than I was when I first received the news; and so it's with a tremendous sense of sadness that I report the passing of a woman who meant a great deal to me.

Those of you who know me from our time in Japan will know what I mean when I say that Michiko Kata was my J-mom. Michiko was a woman of unparalleled kindness and generosity of spirit, and during my four years in Japan she and her husband were as much a family to me as anything else. When I was sick she brought me food and medicine. When I was lonely she invited me over to her house for dinner. When I was bored she told me which hikes were the best and which onsen were the most beautiful. Whenever I got angry or frustrated with life in Japan, she listened to me rant until I felt better. She was an avid mountaineer. She was a painter. She was a mother and grandmother of two.

It is easy to say about anyone who has passed that they were wonderful, that they were kind, that they were a good mother or father or husband or wife; but I am confounded -- not only as a writer, but as man choked with grief -- that I can find no words to say anything more than that. I can say nothing that will give deeper meaning to her life, nor more weight to her death. I can say nothing that will make anyone grieve with me.

But perhaps it's for the best that grief is such a peculiar and private emotion, that it strips us of our ability to be grandiose. No matter how eloquent our praise, no matter how sad and beautiful, in the end we say only that the person who has died was dear to us, and will be missed. It is this, the simple fact of our grief, the irreducibility of it, that is our greatest tribute to them.

And so I say simply, that Michiko Kata was dear to me, and will be missed.

welcome to the working week

2008-01-06T14:35:00.001-08:00

One of the things I hate about web-blogs is the first line of the first post after a prolonged period of bloglessness. It's invariably something along the lines of "Hey guys, sorry it's been a while since I've written anything, but blah blah blah." And, as with a great many other things I've always hated about blogs -- monumental self-importance, coupled with a lack of structure and breathless, pathological fascination with the marginally interesting minutiae of one's own life -- I find myself wringing my hands as I search for a way to believe that what I'm doing is somehow fundamentally different.

There are two main reasons I hate posts like this one. First, and most aggressively obnoxious, is that it presumes the existence of a substantial readership and presumes that said readership is so ravenously dedicated that the three weeks you spent not blogging about the cute-slash-crazy things your cat does have not only been noticed, but have furthermore been a source of some anxiety in their lives. The second reason, and one that springs hydra-like from the bloody neck of the first, is that so much amazing shit has been going on happened that I don't know where to start! And so, the dilemma: Which funny/interesting/unsettling events and/or observations from the last month do I bother recounting?

Do I tell you about the heavily tattooed, sporadically toothed woman I met at Amoeba Records who was carrying her baby wrapped up in a sling over her stomach? Or how she saw me looking at Jackson 5 cds and told me how she didn't normally come into the Soul section but had started once her daughter had been born because she didn't think she should grow up listening to death metal? Or how, when I asked to see the baby, she said that her baby was at home with her husband, but that she carries a bundle of rags in swaddling clothes with her because when her baby is far away she has panic attacks?

Or do I tell the story about looking for the keys to my motorcycle that, y'know, isn't really about the motorcycle at all but is, like, a metaphor or some shit? Or do I tell you about the amusing subcultural/generational disconnect inherent in going out with a 22 year old straight-edge vegan? Or about the series of seriocomic near-disasters that constituted Christmas?

Each of these things is, depending on how far you lower your standards, blog-worthy. And, under different circumstances, each may well have led to a funny/interesting/unsettling entry of its own. But three officially heartwarming but secretly frustrating weeks with my family have left me criminally unmotivated, and so these things fall down the memory hole, however half-heartedly cliff-noted.

Lucky then, dear readers, that New York is so quick to offer up a bevy of bat-shit lunacy, for not two days have gone by and I'm already playing catch-up. From realizing half-way through our conversation that the oddly familiar woman next to me on the plane is a porn star, to seeing a lady blowing a guy in a car parked in front of the police station across from my apartment, to watching a drunk on the subway stand up and announce that he'd show everybody a trick, then puke into his hands.

Perhaps the best news, however -- beside the comforting knowledge that New York is still, as ever, awash in a sea of sex and vomit -- is that I have finally found a real live paying job. As of yesterday I am a production assistant for a show on the Food Network, and while I have yet to meet the hostess, almost every single person I spoke to on set described her using some combination of the words "crazy" and "bitch." The non-disclosure agreement I signed yesterday keeps me from mentioning her or the show by name, but I can almost guarantee that this job will not only line my pockets with sleazy green, but more importantly, provide me with access to a well of crazy so vast and deep that it promises to power this blog for months to come. Seems Every Major Indicator Has Offered Me Evidence My Argument Doesn't Err -- While I Truly Hope She Acts Nuts Despite Real Appeal, Let's Expect Embarrassment.

So. That.

there's no place like...

2007-12-27T12:33:00.001-08:00

When I was 14, my family moved to Brownsville, Texas, a sleepy little border town best known for being the birthplace of Kris Kristofferson and the site of the last battle of the Civil War, in that order, and was (and I'd wager, still is) a cultural black hole for anyone looking to do more with their lives than go to the mall or slink across the border and immerse themselves in the kaleidescopic debauchery of Matamoros, Mexico. At 17 I left for college, coming back as infrequently as I could. Though my emotional connection to it was always tenuous at best, with each passing year I felt further and further removed from the city and its inhabitants. Eventually my antipathy turned into outright hostility, and I spent the hot summer days in my room, marking time until the day I could leave again.

No, not my room. The guest room. When I left for college, my parents gave my room to my sister, Sabrina. And for good reason. Sabrina and Samantha had been sharing a room since we moved. So I got the guest room -- bigger room, bigger bed, bigger TV, bigger shower, but the guest room still, filled with dried flowers and cowboy art and other vaguely Southwestern bric-a-brac. By the fourth day back I was referring longingly to California as home and no doubt breaking my poor mother's heart.

In 1999 my family woke from our collective stupor and moved back to our house in Oakland.
The room I grew up in was again given to one of my sisters -- again with good reason, this time to Samantha -- and when I came home from college I was once again shunted off into a room bedecked year-round in autumn colors and filled with wicker furniture and scented candles.

Ah! Then Japan, and my own decorative instincts -- or woeful lack -- were allowed to run wild. Not fancy, not even coherent, but definitely, unmistakably mine. Four years of accumulated J-crap covering every square inch of my apartment, from a framed 1000 yen stuffed into my shirt pocket by the head of the Owase yakuza for helping push his car to a gas station, to a 3-foot high plaster statue of the English teacher in the town just north of mine, given to me by my office for reasons that never really became clear, to a Christmas cartoon drawn by a 13 year old boy that included the words, "SANTA, I WANT THE BIG PINIS!" My room. Mine.

Then the day came that I packed as much as I could into four suitcases and returned home. My room, my old room, sat unused at the end of the hall, still filled with Samantha's effects while she was off at school -- but my parents were reluctant to let me move into it for fear of Sam feeling like she'd been squeezed out, so I moved back into the erstwhile guest room. I did my best to decorate it, going so far as to fill the shelves of my desk with the a bunch of j-trinkets -- a plastic diorama of level 1 from Super Mario Brothers here, a miniature bust of Stalin there. That, combined with the inevitable pile of laundry and bedsheets on the floor, and the room began to feel like home.

It was, in fact, the process of rooting through crates of my old stuff for things to further solidify the mine-ness of my room that, choked with something I thought was nostalgia but turned into something more, I came across a box of 8-mm films I'd made in college. A month later I was sleeping on my sister's floor in New York. You know the rest. I planned to stay there through the holidays, not because I particularly wanted to spend Christmas and New Year's cold and alone but because returning to Oakland for the second time in less than two months without having found a paying job felt like an admission of defeat. But then my parents bought me a ticket, and I was give the choice of coming to California or saying that I simply didn't want to come home -- not something you want to drop on your mom and dad a week before Christmas.

So, I came home to find myself sleepin in a room that has again been transformed into a khaki and burnt umber panic attack. My stuff has been crammed into boxes and thrown into a closet, while the room down the hall -- the room I grew up in, the room I still think of as irrevocably, fundamentally mine -- is now Sarah's, having moved back home to live rent free while busting her ass at law school. Home for me now is a rickety futon and inflatable mattress on a floor in Spanish Harlem. So it will be, at least for a little while.

And so, the lesson relearned. You can't go home again, and again, and again.

Why, lo! I mop well! -- Who will employ?

2007-12-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

Reading over my blog so far, it strikes me that it has become less a chronicle of my time in New York City than a long list of humiliations, embarrassments and failures. Still, there's no denying that humiliation, embarrassment and failure are an integral part of the New York Experience, and they make for far more interesting reading than a bland retelling of what time I got up, what I ate for lunch, who I slept with, or how I'm feeling. But sometimes the unending wave of serio-comic tragedy that has thus far characterized my time in this city gets the better of me, and as much as I'd like to jump on the two-point-oh-happy bandwagon and blog about how OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1, I actually find it necessary to process my complex and contradictory emotional psychoscape like a healthy, normal, functional goddamn human being. And sometimes I just want to talk about what I did today.

Luckily for everyone, today was a conflation of the two -- I can manage my frustrations through obsessive listing and categorization, and you can take some small pleasure out watching me squirm beneath this city's thumb. Hurrah!

OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1 With no end to the writers' strike in sight, film and television production is at a stand-still, which means that any cachet my plucky-30-year-old-moves-to-the-big-city-to-start-all-over narrative buys me is being eroded on a daily basis. When you're on a set asking people for any leads on paying work having just flown into town the night before, you look like a fucking champ. When you're calling up those same people for those same leads a month into the most acrimonious, industry-shaking work stoppage in memory, you just look like an asshole with terrible timing.

And so today I took it upon myself to find a job. Rode the 6 train to Union Square around noon and resolved not to return home without some form of employment, however low-paid or debasing. By 12:30, there were a few important caveats:

1. I will not be a hot dog/pretzel/kebab vendor.
2. I will not sell DVDs on the subway, however hot/new the releases.
3. I will not busk.
4. I will not work anywhere that requires me to wear a hat of any kind.
5. I will not expose myself for money. For money.
6. I will not work anywhere that boasts of its number of locations, nor will I work anywhere that I can see two or more of without turning my head.
7. I will not work anywhere that requires me to remain behind bullet-proof anything.
8. I will not work anywhere that has punctuation in the name.

So, short of the myriad other jobs I am simply unqualified for, like lawyer or professional banking millionaire, the wide field of potential employers was quickly narrowed to bookstores, bars and coffee shops. Each has its relative advantages and disadvantages, but they all share one important thing in common: they are all, in the end, far too depressing to consider working there full-time. Plus I need to keep my schedule flexible so I can, I dunno, dick around. Write. Whatever. The dream is safe.

I. Coffee Shops

Advantages: Cute tattooed chicks, free caffeine, access to cork boards filled with information on improv workshops, open-mic nights, one-woman shows and classical guitar lessons.

Disadvantages: Low pay, incessant clicking of laptop keys.

Snobbery Level: Medium to High

The money isn't the best, but it's the only job I've ever held that was absolutely, irrefutably, cause-and-effect responsible for getting me laid. She and I were working the special midnight to 6 am shift during finals at USC. I was 19, it was late, we were alone and she was kind of crazy. One thing lead to another lead to a bit of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. So far so good, but I heard she tried to kill herself my senior year, which is why thinking back on it fills me less with the manful pride of the conquerer than with terrible, creeping guilt. Am I right, fellas?!

II. Bars

Advantages: Cute drunk chicks, free alcohol, tips, the irony of having been a drug and alcohol counselor AND a bartender within a year too sweet to pass up.

Disadvantages: Even nice bars reek of piss and vomit, don't own any skin-tight black shirts, couldn't mix a Cosmopolitan to SAVE. MY. LIFE.

Snobbery Level: <scoff> Is that how you always dress?

The advantages are considerable, but almost half of the bars I walked into require a headshot before the manager will even speak to me. And while the idea of a job where it is not only acceptable, but expected for you to be drunk at work is almost too good to be true, there's some small part of me that thinks it probably is. Plus, I don't know if I could bring myself to serve any thing with more than two words in the name or "-tini" affixed to the end.

III. Bookstores

Advantages: Cute nerdy chicks, free books, can say "Oh, well, that's Kierkegaard for you," and not have anyone call me on my bullshit.

Disadvantages: Air of quiet desperation, tried to hire me before I even asked for a job.

Snobbery Level: Can you start right now? How about tomorrow? Maybe you should fill out two applications, just to be safe.

Like most writers (or rather, like most people who tell people they're writers to make their unemployment seem noble) I love bookstores. My favorite used to be Book Soup on Sunset in L.A. I applied for a job there right after college, made it through the interview, and passed the drug and lie-detector(!) tests. I was set to start work the next week. That was on September the 10th. Then guess what happened? Maybe I should work at a bookstore just to stick it to Osama and finally even the score.

It started getting dark around five. With no job and no real solid leads I was feeling pretty rotten and decided to head home. On the way to the station I passed another intern on The Show Which I Am Contractually Forbidden From Naming. I told him I was walking around looking for a job, and we talked for a few minutes about unemployment and its general suckiness. I'm just a set intern, so I only go in on days we shoot. He's been doubling as an office intern, which means he is getting not paid to do five times the work. Or was. Turns out he was fired from the show last week. By Rosemary. He seemed reluctant to say more, but I said a few unkind words about her myself and he relaxed. Then he said a curious thing: "I thought you guys were friends." I assured him we aren't.

"Really? She talks about you all the time."

Suck it, Rosemary.

dream a little dream of me

2007-11-30T10:15:00.002-08:00

When I was in junior high school I spent a lot of time in the school library. Not in the studious, bookish way, but in the mopey, bad at sports way. Read a lot of Stephen King. That kind of way.
And as a kid who spent a lot of off-hours at the library (splitting my time between there and the band hall -- that kind of way) I was witness to a bit of behind-the-scenes action. I knew which students won the contest to come up with a slogan to increase interest in reading days before it was announced at a school assembly (one of whom was yours truly -- that kind of way). I knew that Bart Simpson had been elected both president and vice-president of the student body, but that Mr. Lorenzen decided to award the positions to Angela and April, the two twins who'd received the second- and third- most votes respectively, rather than hold a re-vote. I heard my science teacher Mrs. Keane admit to another teacher that the graffiti mural that had been sprayed onto the side of the auditorium one weekend and had been painted over despite overwhelming student protest was "Really fucking cool." And I remember that there were two books banned from the library, and that I was an accomplice in enforcing -- and subsequently undermining -- the ban on the second.

The first book was The Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks spin-off that contained descriptions of, among other things, the titular prom queen being raped by a ghost. Needless to say, the complex Lynchian meditation on sexuality, voyeurism and the fluid nature of identity was lost on the dick-dumb 13 year olds passing the book back and forth beneath their desks and breathlessly scouring the pages for the word "pussy."

Banned.

The second book to be removed from the Montera Junior High School library was The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams. It was, as the name suggests, a guide for decoding the various signs and symbols from your dreams, but with a special emphasis on the dreamer being gay. Naked in public? Gay. Missed a test? Gay. Was there water in your dream? Gay. Did a little girl say something to you in your dream? Gay. Were there stairs? Gay. Were you having sex with that girl from your pre-algebra class while Mrs. McCabe ran around the room setting everything on fire? Gay. And weird. Of course none of us really knew what gay was, except that it had something to do with the reason we all covered our dicks with our hands when we walked past Mr. Miller in the locker room, and why we all kind of snickered whenever Mr. Black referred to his "wife."

And so it was, that The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams (I swear to god that was the title) caused a number or problems for students and teachers alike, and I was in the library when the decision was made by the librarian, who seemed genuinely upset at the prospect, to remove it from the shelves. Unfortunately it wasn't where it was supposed to have been, so she asked me to help her look for it. I dug through a pile of returned books while she looked through the stacks. I found it and, after debating it for a few minutes, dutifully turned it in. She thanked me, put it on her desk, and went about her business. I wondered what was to become of it, and left.

Word soon spread that the book had disappeared, to the chagrin of the bullies and the relief of the bullied. The prevailing opinion was that it had been stolen, probably by some rules-flaunting badass, and I was hesitant to reveal my role in what was the decidedly non-badass truth -- less out of shame in being a tool of literary censorship than in ruining the fun. A couple of days later I was back in the library and saw the book sitting unattended on the librarian's desk. I stole it, along with a book on how to make sound effects with your mouth, written by that one guy who wasn't Michael Winslow. It was the first time I'd ever stolen something. I felt horrible.

The idea was to use the book (the former, not the latter) as leverage to boost my cred, but I made the mistake of letting my friend Robert McKnight borrow it. The next day I saw him in the hallway at school, holding the book and bragging to a bunch of people that he'd been the one who'd stolen it. And so it goes.

Eventually the novelty of the book wore off, replaced by pages ripped from Playboy and Penthouse and decidedly seedier fare, but from time to time I've thought back on it and decided that it must have been some sort of elaborate joke -- like those gag books that say "All I Know About Women" on the cover and are filled with blank pages. Still, every once in a while I'll wake up from a particularly confounding dream and wonder to myself, what would The Dream Dictionary: A Dictionary of Dreams say about that one? You know what? I think I already know.

Then there are dreams that are so obvious, so head-slapping blatant that, to paraphrase my friend Joe, you wake up kind of mad at yourself. Late for football practice, naked in public, that sort of thing.

And so, the point at last.

Last night I had a dream that I was back in school, taking a math test I hadn't studied for. I then realized that I was at least a decade older than all of the other students in the class. I stood up to tell the teacher that I must be in the wrong room, but she said she wouldn't speak to me until I put some clothes on. I asked where I could get some clothes, but she told me there was no time, because I had to solve all of the equations in order to defuse the nuclear missile headed our way.The kids started crying, and she told them to hide beneath their desks while I hurried to finish the test. Of course, it turns out I was also illiterate, so I tried to squeeze beneath my desk, but it was a children's desk and I couldn't fit. The missile exploded outside the window and I was caught in the blast. I survived, but I knew I'd been poisoned. No time to worry about that, because there was an army of faceless robots walking toward us across the rubble. I told the kids in the class to hide in the shadows, then realized that was a terrible idea and that's the first place they'd look. If I didn't do something everyone would be killed and it would all be my fault, so I came up with the idea to sing the national anthem in order to distract the robots and to inspire everyone to rise up and fight. I stood up and started singing, but everyone was staring at me, and I got nervous and forgot the lyrics. Suddenly the robot leader morphs into Condoleeza Rice, and challenges me to a sword fight. I said that that was completely unfair because robots can't be hurt by swords, but nobody was listening. I screamed and screamed that robots can't be hurt by swords, everyone knows that! But the kids around me just keep telling me not to let them down. Then I woke up.

Dreams are an important window into our own subconsciousness, and are a way to defuse the various stresses and anxieties built up within us. I just wish my subconscious didn't think I was such an idiot.

"...because if I don't say something, who will?"

2007-11-23T12:10:00.000-08:00

Well, the big day has come and gone, and I'm sitting in a cafe still fighting off the last of a hangover that, all things considered, is blessedly mild. My original plan of staying at home and eating a turkey sandwich in the dark didn't pan out like I'd hoped, and I instead went out to Brooklyn to celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional manner.

I met up with Cat, an old college friend whom the past six years have seem to have left untouched, save for her hair, now a decidedly un-Asian blond. Cat's roommate, boyfriend, boyfriend's brother and boyfriend's mother rounded out the night, and though I didn't know any of them, they broke out a bottle of Glen Livet and the scotch made us all fast friends. Dinner: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans. Talked a little about the state of the world but couldn't pin down each other's political bent and so kept things vague. Moved on to movies and literature. Cat's roommate likes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and No Country For Old Men and is pretty. Her boyfriend's brother has a copy of Moby Dick on his bookshelf, but also owns Spiderman 3 on DVD. By the time dinner was over we'd emptied a few wine bottles and I'd move back to the scotch. Fast friends.

Then the Scrabble board came out.

I'll get right to it: "reteed" is a word. It is the past tense of retee, which means "to place upon a tee again". As in, the wind blew my ball off the tee, so I reteed it. Then I used my club to beat the editor of the Official Scrabble Dictionary so savagely that his own children couldn't recognize him.

Now, I am a man of many inconsequential but nonetheless fervently held beliefs, and chief among them is this: Scrabble, like life, is so much more about the spirit of the law than the letter. If reteed steals bread to feed his family, then truly, what crime has he committed? If reteed withholds ten percent of his taxes to protest the war in Iraq, or uses the copy machine at work to make copies of fliers for his band, or doesn't wait for the light to change before dashing across the street to pull a child from a burning building, there are some who'd stamp their feet and shake their fingers and wave the scrabble dictionary in his face and call him a rule-breaker -- and though they may be right in the strictest sense, their stubborn adherence to such arbitrary and unjust rules flies in the face of the very social fabric that those rules are meant to protect.

I'm not saying that reteed can go around planting evidence on people he knows are guilty to guarantee a conviction, or that his drinking problem can be overlooked because he isn't hurting anyone other than himself. Addiction hurts everybody. Reteed is a really great guy in a lot of ways, and yeah, he's charming, he doesn't go around starting fights, he never drinks in front of his kids. Look, we can go around all day coming up with a list of reasons why we can look the other way, but it falls upon those of us who care the most about him to take a long, hard look at the situation. If we hesitate because it's uncomfortable or embarrassing, then we don't deserve to call ourselves his friends.

My point is this: reteed is a word. In fact, it is so obviously, irrefutably a word that I grabbed the Official Scrabble Dictionary from Cat's boyfriend's brother's grubby little hands and called the phone number for the National Scrabble Association, which they'd listed -- foolishly -- on the copyright page. After navigating the computerized menu for a few minutes I was directed to the voice mail of marketing coordinator Katie Schultz and left a reasoned, articulate and almost entirely profanity-free explanation of why reteed should be included in the next printing of the Official Scrabble Dictionary. (I did drop an F-bomb toward the end, but I was caught up in the moment and immediately corrected myself). And just to show I wasn't fucking around, I left my real name and real number just in case she wanted to discuss the matter further. That reteed isn't included among words officially recognized by the Scrabble people is an injustice, but it will compounded immeasurably if if their mistake is left uncorrected.

I'm waiting on the call.

not with a bang, but a meh

2007-11-19T12:26:00.001-08:00

As with most soon-to-graduate fifth year seniors, I spent my last semester of college not taking things very seriously. A go-nowhere internship at a third-rate production company and a disastrous string of PA gigs on z-grade indie flicks, coupled with my increasing focus on writing, and by the time my last semester rolled around I knew - knew! - that a career in film wasn't for me. My resolve was further solidified by a class called CTCS 466.

CTCS 466 was -- and, part of me hopes, still is -- the hot-damn end-all-be-all of blow-off classes. Taught (and I use the term as sarcastically as possible) by Leonard Maltin, it consisted of watching a movie that hadn't been released in theaters yet, then watching The Maltin bring on a guest speaker involved with the production and hold court over a sycophantic, uninsightful Q&A. Think Inside the Actor's Studio, but instead of James Lipton fawning over Sharon Stone's brave character-decisions in Gloria, it's Leonard Maltin fawning over the DP for AntiTrust. It was, in short, the perfect opportunity for a disillusioned film student to hone his contempt for the pomp and pretense of the industry to a stabbing point. My time in the class was one long, slow eyeroll, but there are three distinct memories I'd like to share.

The first is of Ron Livingston, who starred in a movie called Two Ninas. The movie had been listed in the curriculum as Two Ninjas, and when The Maltin informed us of the error the collective groan of disappointment was comically loud. After the screening Ron came out and answered our questions and was just an all-around cool guy. Afterward me and my friend Jen Bradwell went up to him and asked if he wanted to go drinking with us and our friends. And yeah, yeah, we were both kind of stoned, but it just felt right. He laughed and said that he was flying to New York that night but that he totally would've come out if he were sticking around. And you know what? I think he would've.

My second memory, and one perhaps more nakedly indicative of my mentality at the time, was the screening of Shrek. This was about a month before it was released in theaters, and none of us had any clue that it would become such an embarrassingly prominent pop-cultural landmark, let alone spawn two sequels which, I can only assume, saw a further drop in what the produders no doubt laughingly referred to as quality. As with most of the movies we watched, I didn't particularly care for it, but I was less bothered by the movie itself than by the guffawing, hillbilly adulation it inspired in the rest of the class. After the screening the two co-directors and a couple of animators came out for the Q&A and were warmly received by the audience. And for good reason, because they were funny and charming and very unpretentious and eager to talk about something they'd clearly worked very hard on. Comments from the class were of the "Omigosh, your movie was SOOO great!" variety which only irritated me further, so I raised my hand. The Maltin called on me, and I had an exchange with one of the directors that went something like this:

Me: Yeah, question. Did you guys choose the music yourself, or was there pressure put on you from outside?

Director: No, we chose the music ourselves.

Me: Because there were parts where it seemed like more of a marketing decision than a creative one. Setting a montage to "You're A Rockstar" seems, I dunno, a bit calculating and obvious.

Director: I, uh...

Me: It just doesn't feel like the choice of someone who, y'know, cares about the creative integrity of the project.

Director: That's your opinion, I guess.

In the excruciatingly awkward silence that followed, I heard someone behind me mutter, "Jeez, what an asshole." And shit, he was right.

My third memory, and by far the one that left the most lasting impression, was the very last class of the semester. With graduation and the terrifying prospect of life after college coiled next to us in the high grass, we piled into the theater one last time to see a movie directed by a recent USC graduate, some weird sci-fi flick that hadn't even found a distributer and that they were probably screening as a personal favor for an alumni. That movie was Donnie Darko.

I find Donnie Darko difficult to talk about, because I've never been able to separate myself from the mute, thunderstruck wonder I felt seeing it for the first time. The one thing I'd learned in film school, the one hard lesson I'd been bludgeoned with again and again, was that the mighty fortresses of personal vision invariably crumbles beneath the thousand kinds of compromise -- but here I was, faced with living proof that a personal vision, and one so demented and bizarre, could not only live to see the light of day, but flourish, and in one fell swoop, a movie nobody had ever heard of came along and knocked me on my ass. Quite simply, Donnie Darko left me speechless.

Or rather, almost speechless.

The director, Richard Kelley, came out to tepid and uncertain applause -- a far cry from the rapturous reception that greeted the director of A Knight's Tale, though perhaps the comparison is unfair. Nobody seemed sure of what to ask him, and after a few awkward minutes, The Maltin called for one last question. I raised my hand, grabbed the microphone from the usher, and said what, in my head, sounded like the following:

"Mr. Kelley, though I have grown disillusioned and cynical about the film industry and find myself on the verge of abandoning my plans to pursue film as a career, I feel I must say to you now with a sincerity so deep and pure that it scares me a little, that your film touched me in a way that no other film has. It is something that, until this very moment, I believed to be a cruel fiction: a film borne of a complex, powerful, and uncompromising personal vision. Nay, sir, not merely vision, but something deeper and longer-lasting. I hesitate to use the word "genius", because to do so would be an injustice to the towering monument of your work. And though it pains me greatly to clothe in such drab, clumsy words the glorious feeling that stirs even now in my chest (O! this pain twin to that of the fool who stares too longly at the sun!) I must speak now, or forever curse my stubborn tongue. I ask sir, humbly, that I be allowed to do your whatever bidding you deem fit, to be near you that I may sup on whatever scraps you may carelessly toss my way, to witness first-hand the strange alchemy by which you conjured light and sound and with it transformed mere celluloid into something so rich and sublime. There is no task too menial, no abuse I will not gladly endure if it means obtaining some small window through which I may spy upon the glorious mechanism of your brilliance. Sir, I prostrate myself before you. I am your humble servant."

Clearly this would have been embarrassing enough, had the movie not reduced me to a babbling wreck and mangled my wide-eyed admiration into something that sounded more like this:

"Uh, yeah, I, um...it's just that...wow, you know. Great, and just like wow. Movie, uh...can I, like, uh...you know, boxes, lifting boxes or whatever, see how it's done, see myself firsthand, how it's, y'know, it's like, really, really great. Also, can I have a job?"

His response was what you might expect, something to the effect of "Sorry dude, I can't really hook you up with a job right now." I thanked him and sat down, too blinkered to be embarrassed until, as everyone was shuffling out of the theater, a football player slapped me on the back and told me that it took balls to beg for a job in front of 200 people. From time to time I have thought about that moment and cringed, less out of a sense of personal embarrassment than out of a frustration that my sincere and profound fondness for it, however clumsily communicated, should have been mistaken for mere ass-kissery.

Cut to six years later, and it was with impossibly high expectations that I went and saw Richard Kelley's much-delayed and much-maligned sophomore effort, Southland Tales. It is, put simply, a convoluted and embarrassing mess that suffers not from lack of vision, but from an overabundance of it. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself -- or would be one balanced, at least partially, by sheer audacity and scope -- were Southland Tales not at heart merely a thematic retread of the ideas that drove Donnie Darko. But all the mindfuck talk of time-traveling souls and wormholes and wounds in the fourth dimension and the general sense of apocalyptic dread, which worked to such startling effect in the latter, come across as such pretentious, incomprehensible gobbeldygook in the former. The big ideas that drive Donnie Darko work because they collide with such a small film. Donnie Darko can be about the end of the world because, at heart, it's really just about one very troubled boy. But when Richard Kelley uses those same big ideas to tell a story about the end of the world that is so stiflingly, literally about the end of the world, the result is a frustrating wreck -- an enigma, to be sure, but sadly one that hardly seems worth the effort to sift through.

And yet aside from my disappointment, there's a symmetry to it all that I find comforting. Donnie Darko was a bittersweet goodbye kiss on my way out the door, a small reminder of what, exactly, I was giving up. Now I'm back in town, and Donnie has grown bloated and slow, and made one too many bafflingly ill-conceived casting decisions (Jon Lovitz? Really?). It's the guilty comfort you feel after running into a girl who dumped you and then, in the intervening years, went a little bit nuts. It wasn't satisfaction, it wasn't schadenfreude; but it was some kind of omen, a small but subtle sign that, fuck it, at least I'm on the right track. I left the theater and decided to walk the whole way back to E 119 from Times Square. It was cold and starting to drizzle, but by the time I got home I was whistling.

Well , they say it's your birthday...

2007-11-15T12:08:00.001-08:00

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in the third grade. Being a shy and easily embarrassed third grader, I kept the fact of my imminent bespectacledness a secret from my classmates until the morning I showed up to school wearing the set of frames that, after two hours of careful inspection, I concluded would provide the least ammunition for mockery and derision (incorrectly, as it turns out -- but that's a different, much more painful story).

It was the middle of third period by the time my glasses were ready, and when my mom dropped me off at school I put them on, summoned all the courage a shy, easily embarrassed third grader could muster, and walked into class. My feeling of maybe-it-won't-be-so-badness deflated the moment I set foot through the door as 20 heads whipped around to better gawk at the bulky gray plastic frames on my face. I could hear the shocked giggles percolating in my classmates' throats as I hurried to my desk, and I hadn't even put my backpack down when someone shouted out, "Hey, four eyes!"

Here's the thing. It was my teacher, Ms. Holan.

The first person to make fun of my glasses was my third grade teacher.

The day progressed as one might expect, with a seemingly endless parade of teacher-sanctioned jeers and name-calling. I spent most of the day with my head on my desk, desperately fighting back tears in an attempt to salvage some small scrap of what, at 9, I was beginning to recognize as dignity. Things finally began to wind down by the time school ended (though it erupted into glorious, blinding new life the next day when Alonzo Davis screamed into the side of my face that the glasses had a picture of Brainy Smurf at the temple -- but again, that's another matter entirely). The moment the bell rang I grabbed my backpack and bolted for the door before anyone else was even out of their seat. Ms. Holan barked at me to sit back down. Then, after releasing the rest of the class, she called me over to her desk, folded her arms, and told me I had a bad attitude.

I say all of this to say thus: that even at the tender age of 9, I knew a goddamn setup when I saw one.

Which brings us to yesterday.

Yesterday was my birthday, and instead of spending a rainy Wednesday dicking around my sister's apartment, I got up early and went out to the set in Brooklyn. The day went by smoothly. I discretely mentioned to a couple of people that it was my birthday and let the buzz build on its own. Wrap around 8pm, out comes the cake and a mercifully unharmonized rendition of Happy Birthday. Everyone is collectively impressed that I came in for an unpaid internship on my birthday. I shrug. Yeah, well, y'know.

The lovefest came to an end, and on my way out I was stopped by the associate producer. Let's call her Rosemary. Rosemary, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, has become increasingly antagonistic toward me since my arrival, to the point where she doesn't so much as look at me when I say hello. It's all very weird and uncomfortable -- all the more because I am absolutely dumbfounded as to where it comes from. Even so, it all felt very familiar as she pulled me aside, folded her arms, and told me I have a bad attitude. C'mon, you know this one. All together now.

I could only gape in dumbfounded wonder as she proceeded to accuse me of being, among other things, lazy, uncooperative, unenthusiastic, and disrespectful, the examples of which were baseless and vague, phrased thusly:

"Now, I'm not going to go into specifics here, but one time I asked you to do X, and you were all like, psssh."
"I'm not going to sit here and run through a list, but when I asked you to do Y you, like, hesitated for a second."
"One thing I won't do is dig up a bunch old stuff, because we're both adults. But I told you to pick up Z and, like, I got the feeling you thought it was beneath you."

I can't stress enough that all of this is utter nonsense. I have never balked at doing any work, I have never said so much as a cross word, and I have sure as shit never been all like psssh. But I stood there, growing quietly angrier and more confused as she listed each supposed wrong and perceived slight, and on my birthday no less. By the time she admonished me to think carefully about whether or not I want to continue to work on the show, I could do little more than assure her through clenched teeth that, in fact, I do.

And so I rode the slow train home, fists jammed sullenly into pockets, as the hot flower of righteous indignation bloomed inside my chest. By the time I got home I'd come to three important realizations. The first is that, as the low man on the film industry's totem pole, I am subject to Rosemary's every arbitrary whim and insecurity-fueled power trip. The second is that, if I want to continue to work on this or any other show, I have no choice but to stand there and take it. And the third?

This girl totally wants to fuck me.

cigarette butts and zombie unitards

2007-11-11T19:38:00.004-08:00

The life of an unpaid intern goes something like this

-Wake up shivering on the linoleum floor of your sister's apartment at 7 am, huddled beneath the travel case for your bass which, fully unzipped, barely fits over both arms, providing just enough warmth to make you feel like you're being mocked.

-Pile on a bunch of clothes and hustle down to the subway. Get on the right train going in the wrong direction.

-Arrive at the studio! Have everyone remember your name! Feel a surge of Fuck Yeah!

-Find yourself minutes later scouring the sidewalk in front of the studio for cigarette butts to fill up an ashtray in one of the shots.

-Tell yourself as your hands overflow with gritty, damp filter ends, to think of this as character building.

-Stride -- stride! -- up to the head of the art department with a mountain of cigarette butts spilling from your cupped hands.

-Stand there for a moment and wonder what you should do with the butts after the director steps over, looks at the pile in your hands, and turns his nose up at them because they look too dirty.

-Throw the pile in the garbage, then go make more coffee.

Yes, the duties of a pushing-30 intern on a stoner-friendly TV show are many, and unpaid. Still, when I made the decision to return to film-and/or-television, I told myself that it was not only important, but necessary, to start at the bottom.

Standing in front of a green screen while a man in an Italian leather jacket tells you that the muddy pile of trash in your hands is too dirty is the bottom.

This episode of the show I'm working on features an Internet Zombie attack. An Internet Zombie attack is like a Regular Zombie attack, but for the fact that the zombies are all wearing silver unitards. I jump at the chance to be an extra because it meant that the only trash I'd have to touch would be the actress I was chasing.

Count it.

Needless to say this was my first time wearing a unitard, and as such I'd never heard of a dance belt. (Actually, I'd heard the term used as a punchline on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I didn't get it, but I laughed anyway. Ah, the folly of youth.) A dance belt, for those of you who have never had the pleasure of wearing a unitard on a soon-to-be nationally televised internet-themed comedy program, is a swathe of fabric used to mask the contours of the wearer's naughty bits. I, being among the uninitiated, walk on set with the smothered tangle of my junk protruding from the otherwise smooth, sexless contours of my unitard. The director positions me and my fellow extras behind the actress and we run through the shot a couple of times, then get ready for a take. He calls action, we sink into our best zombie slouch and lurch toward the camera.

All of a sudden the director calls cut and announces that he can see my penis. The man who moments before had given me the business about the dirty junk in my hands is now giving me the business about the dirty junk in my tights. He phrases it more delicately than that, but his tact is somewhat offset by the fact that he announces it to a room full of people. Cue a five-minute pow-wow between the director, producer, DP, and various other interested parties, about whether or not the visibility of my man-bits was a problem.

It is ultimately decided that, because this show will be viewed by the children of America, I should be strategically positioned behind a waist-high wall. We get the shot, and the children of America are safe.

And so I come to the larger point: that no matter how bad you're feeling, no matter how put-upon, overlooked or underused, having an entire room full of people talking about your penis -- no, not merely talking about it, talking about how dangerous it is -- will lift your spirits quick-smart.

Welcome to Blogtown, Population: This guy

2007-11-10T10:40:00.000-08:00

Well, I've gone and done it. For years now I've carefully cultivated a sense of superiority over the blog-mad Web two-point-o-izens, pruned it and protected it and watched with almost paternal satisfaction as it bloomed into a beautiful, smug little flower.

But times they are, uh...well shit, a-changin', and it dawned on me that the smug prick who stares down his nose at bloggers in 2007 is the smug prick who stared down his nose (or over the collar of his vintage peacoat) at people who didn't buy vinyl records in 1997. Get with the times, pops.

Of course, all of this is needless preamble to one plain truth: the masturbatory self-regard that is the lifeblood of all bloggers -- among whose needy, self-important ranks I must now, it seems, count myself -- has become too much for me to bear alone. And so it falls upon you, dear reader (christ who am I kidding, mom and dad) to bear the brunt of my uninformed opinions, half-baked social commentary and miscellaneous, inarticulate rambling. But I mean, y'know. Over the internet. Web 2.0, etc.

At the end of the day my blog (short, as most of you know, for "web-blog", itself an acronym from the German Welfureinkreutzbuchen Braunleibeolandergreunblog) will serve as a record of my time in New York, and a much-needed substitute for the biannual Here's-everything-I've-been-doing for-the-last-two-years-crammed-into three-long-paragraphs-by-the-way-I-hope-everyone's-well emails I'd bang out on a slow day in the office in Japan. Now you can have front-row tickets to this carnival of the mundane: watch the inexorable transformation from spangle-eyed emigre to jaded New Yorker in real time! Web 2.0!

If I learned one thing from my time in Japan, it's this: you better share the weird shit while the shit's still weird. In the beginning, even the basest, most innocuous example of J-weird would spurn hours of heated emailing. By the end of my fourth year, however, even the sight of a video clip of a woman shooting baby eels out of her lady-junk barely warranted a tired sigh. And that's a goddamn shame.

So, let this web-blog stand as a corrective, lest the eel-infested vaginae of the world go unheralded. Huzzah!

B.W.