perspective

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

But alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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.