rm | return of the interview meme

ludimagist has revived the interview meme.

The Rules: You comment on this entry requesting an interview. I respond with five questions. The questions will theoretically be tailored to you based on what I know of you (or want to know). You copy and paste those questions into your own journal, and write the answers, along with these rules. Anyone wanting an interview from you continues the game by requesting an interview from you.

1) What are your most and least favorite things about being in theater?

It's funny, because while I have a lot more experience with theater, just because I think pretty much everyone does (although the advent of digital video is about to change all that -- after all, it's nearly cheaper to say "hey kids, let's put on a film" than "hey kids, let's put on a show" these days), I don't think I "get it" culturally as well. I don't feel like I know how to do it, mainly in a social sense.

I'll say that my least favourite things about theater include fucking cold theaters and that one person on nearly every show who just intolerable to deal with because they choose to be that way. I also hate never being able to see the finished product.

On the other hand, I love the adrenaline rush, I love that most of the team is together most of the time, and I love the constant "you do what you have to" challenge of it. In film, when something breaks, you hope you have the budget and time to wait for someone to fix it, on the stage you just keep going, and I get a kick out of that, and it appeals to me a lot in terms of my personal outlook.

2) You just took a pretty serious overland trip through much of America. Do you think this is the sort of thing everyone should experience? Is there a certain point in life you think it is better to do that sort of thing?

Well, I think ideally you do it in a vehicle you have control over, and I think ideally you do it when you have the physical stamina for it, which is to say, not at 31.

And yeah, everyone should do it, definitely, and physical stamina aside, I think it is somewhat lost on people say as a summer before, during or after college. The reality is, I think, that at that age, everything wows you, everything, without much effort is some weird reminder of your special (or not) place in the universe. At thirty-one, not so much, so to a given degree I think waiting is good. And I think if you can do the trip, just for the sake of the trip, that's best.

3) What's your best case scenario careerwise, within say... five years? How active are you in pursuing that scenario?

That's a weird question. In that it's asking me to put a top limit on things, and I don't really believe in that. Let's say the reality in life is that we only get five percent of what we want. Or whatever fraction you choose. Which means aiming not just high, but "absurdly" to hit that stuff you couldn't imagine completing a life without. Someone has be one-in-a-million, and I'm happy to have that be me. I'm just smart enough to know that my version of one-in-a-million isn't of a Julia Roberts variety.

I'll tell you my minimum goals for the five year plan - first, having my Equity and SAG cards. I know better than to see them as be all end all goals or "I want these now now now" goals, but the reality is that in five years I need the access they provide, even if that means I'm still not necessarily making anything resembling tolerable money doing this.

I want to be over my issues with monologue auditions. I want to be able to trust myself more and to really integrate the disparate skills I have. I want to learn how to stop thinking so hard.

I want to have had more than five lines in a film that's actually out there in theaters -- whether that's something big budget or some little indie thing that's only at the Angelika for a week and a half.

I want to have an agent.

And I think that's a list that sounds modest enough to sound really pathetic and naive too. But this has become what I do for a lot of reasons, and among those reasons is a very odd sense of adventure and a very genuine curiosity about people, and I think that lends itself to a tendency I've had in everything I do to take strange detours. And within the next five years, I'm going to know if that's going to serve me really well, or be something I have to conquer.

What am I doing to get there? Everything I can and not enough. A lot of dental work. My next financial expenditures on the adventure are monologue class, some speech classes focused mostly on slowing myself down, clearing up one or two speech tics I have that I can't stand and then accents (which I'm both good and bad at because I'm a natural mimic, which means cadence gets in the way of my hearing the shape of words a lot), and then some on camera classes. I should audition more than I do, but I'm also proud of myself for doing as much as I have as blindly as I have, so I just need to keep the pace and focus up there. I am absolutely unequivocably doing that month at NIDA in January 2005 -- which isn't even about my career really, but it'll make me happy and proud, which is generally how I need to feel to get anything done, so that's to the good as well. I need to figure out where, when and how to network. And I think it's important that I find myself in a situation where I have to travel for a show or to film something, just because I think that makes me uncomfortable, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later. I also need to make some sort of internal peace with my appearance. I think of myself mostly as "unlikely" looking, which is a description that pleases me in a personal amusement sort of way, but I need to decide if it's time to get comfortable with being beautiful or with being anything but.

4) What are 10 books everyone should read in their adult life? (I tend to ask that one a lot)

That's terribly challenging. Should is a really crappy word. How about books I'd like everyone to read in their adult life? Or the types of books I think are useful?

I think everyone should read a biography of a figure they've admired, that's honest or unflattering in a nonsensationalistic way. I think everyone should make an effort to find a book of poetry they actually enjoy reading, and finds informs them (I have mine and it's something I return to again and again). I think everyone should be very widely read in religion, and I think that's becoming increasingly the case in the world we've wound up with. I'm a great believer in reading works of the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers and historians, and even if you can't read the original language at all, I think it's worth perusing just to understand the role cadence and alliteration played in their writing. It's absolutely influenced how we communicate today, and I believe it's absolutely how anyone can learn to become persuasive. Everyone should find some period of strife they care about for some reason and read military history/strategy -- it's this weird combination of math and the way people tick, and I think it's good to learn to use those two parts of your brain at the same time. Find novels that you think are about you, and then discover why they're not. Then find new novels, and discover why they're not. Read biographies of people you've never heard of.

5) What attracted you to Blogging? Are the elements that attracted you to it the same reason you continue to use it? How much are you aware of the mix of friends and relative strangers who read your journal as you are writing in it?

I've been on the Internet since 1990, and came to it via mailing lists and then online communities such as Mindvox and The Well. My experience there was about telling my stories and eventually learning to shut the fuck up and listen to other people's. Regardless of whether that was appropriate to those mediums (and some people thought it was and some didn't), that very much solidified my way of communicating as being through stories. Blogging, which I intially resisted for reasons that were lame (people I didn't like did it, it was the hip Internet thing of the moment, etc.), is just a natural outgrowth of that. It's also a great way for me to vent when I need to, but also to explore other people at my luxury. A system like LJ has it's appeal, because there are layers beyond the content, made clear through interests, communities, friends and friends of friends -- all that shit that causes "drama" on a bad blog day is just narrative and character when you're outside of it. And I dig that.

One of the things, and this is sort of a side story, that's been compelling to me about blogging, are the people who don't write well. And I don't mean fourteen-year-olds who can't spell and use slang I don't understand. I mean the accomplished people with thoroughly-lived lives I've met in this medium to whom writing is not natural, and yet insist on telling their story here anyway. I've never yet really understood why any of them do it, but I am always moved by it, because what they choose to tell us, is often more moving than how we choose to tell things. It reminds me greatly of the people I have tutored in English as a foreign language, and the snippets I've learned about them.

As to who is reading, I have a lot of filters. I have individual filters for a few friends, just because I know they check this more than email, or it's easier for them -- and those are posts that get deleted after the communication is made. I've an inner-circle that includes my roommate, my best friend, my girlfriend and a couple of other people who are there for reasons I can't really explain. I have a filter that's just people I know in the physical world. I've set up filters to discuss gifts for another person on the list, etc. So, in short, I'm _constantly_ thinking about it, although I realize that my filtering behaviors are such as to be nearly meaningless. I do it for my own internal organizational principles, more than for any real sincere hope of keeping secrets, which is another rant anyway, as secrets are generally trouble only 'cause they are designated as such. We choose what to make currency and all that.