post-weekend sundries

[rm]

We're home from New Haven. We had an excellent weekend, even though it was very crowded and would have been more relaxing had we gone up on Friday night as we have in the past (but couldn't this year because of BAM tickets.

Aside from the usual suspects, I also go to meet kdsorceress who proved, once again, that the world is always smaller than I think.

I'm still being moderately bothered by a professional blip that happened a few weeks ago, because the matter managed to pop up again, at least on my own personal radar. My life wants more yes, less no, and more patience too.

I should totally get new headshots, which is a thing that requires a lot of thinking, including about my self-marketing and representation. As a woman, logic would demand that my best bet is to present myself as an actor as young and femininely as possible, despite the fact that that, in and of itself, is already a performance, and I've long been told that my affect is more suited to older roles and blah blah blah. I think, _think_, that the right plan is to get the hair cut I really need, make it messy and go for the tough sci-fi chick look or something. I dislike the obvious yet inevitable complexity of this problem and the truth that if I really wanted to be a star, I'd grow my hair long again. This was a topic I was able to avoid for a while on the basis of headshot expense, but that's not currently the case, so I need to sort it out. On the plus side, I know myself well, and I know I'll feel the solution when it comes to me. There was something, someone very specific I was being when I got my first headshot done and it worked, it was a talisman and it saved me and got me work over and over. But now it's time for someone and something else, and she's not as sad or as quietly pleased at that picture.

The narrative of my sorrowful nature is no longer my finest currency as a performer or as a person. I wasn't sick when I had my first headshot done; and it's funny, because now I am sick, which means I'm not sick anymore, since now I don't eat the thing that poisons me. So yeah, new headshots.

I must note here that if an actor ever seems stupid to you? It's usually because it's easier that way. I actually have a good deal to say about this and plan to write a post about it soon. Not sure when. I'm still navigating it in my head, since I expect a certain degree of wank out of the examples I may use for the point I would be trying to make.

Patty is watching Goodbye, Lenin!, which I saw when it came out, but it's a good film and nice to see. And strange to me, because the fall of the Berlin Wall was such an odd, critically emotional thing for me as a teenager: I'd been obsessed with David Bowie's Heroes (yes, I know all the stuff about the story in the song and all the things it may or may not be) and had had a penpal, a daughter of a Soviet dissident scientist. I'd wanted to study abroad in Germany, and would have been there when the wall fell, but my mother is Jewish and said it was not for me. I can't watch this movie and not be sixteen-years-old. It's very evocative of a certain mythology of things that really happened for me. Patty was four, so I'll be curious her feelings on it.

NaNo novel update: Io Station stuff is amusing me so much. I've been sending Amanda some of it. Um, I've got aliens that don't communicate verbally except in intimate situations, political marriages, a canonical lesbian relationship and a very-well developed fictional fandom (hi, shipping wars!). Other than naming a bunch of things, characters and actors in it, I'm probably close to done with what I actually have to do for the Io Station background. Scarily, I actually want fanfiction about it all now. I've quite fallen for this story within a story or at least what the fandom rewrite of same would be.

Goodness, this is all very Sunday night, isn't it? Introspective, but not introspective enough to be useful. Maybe I will go write some Vitya/Max. I mean, I've better things I should be doing, but I finished a handful of articles on various film festivals I had due, but even the fictional people of my fictional people cheer me.

Comments

[saomigray.livejournal.com]

I was around 13 or 14 when the Berlin wall fell and living in West Germany.

Even though my family traveled a good bit across Germany and in the surrounding countries we never made it to Berlin and never saw either the wall or where it had stood once it fell.

I don't think my parents understood the historical significance somehow. I remember quite a few of my classmates went to Berlin and came back with chunks of rock or brick or whatever the wall was made of that they'd pulled down. There were also street vendors in the military shopping center who had pieces of the wall packaged with certificates of authenticity, so it became a commercial thing.

It was a weird time for us all in that we knew this was important but we were too busy being kids to really understand just how big a deal it was.