don't let it bring you down

I feel like my performance last night was resoundingly mediocre. Whether this is true I've no idea, and I'm not really sure anyone in the audience could say either, as it's such an odd play, with so much intentional bad acting... well it worked, and that's all good, and tonight will be better.

I now have three auditions for paid gigs on Monday, one for a film (they just called me and woke me up before I was ready to face the world). This is all good in a I am doing the work I am supposed to be doing to do what I want to be doing -- but I'm PMSy and everything is tending to seem anticlimatic or impossible right now. Anyway the three things are in quick succession all of town -- an appointment at 10:30 on the UES, an appoitment near Lincoln Center at 12:30 and an open call in Times Square from 12:30 - 4:30 which hopefully I'll get to early enough to actually get in to get seen. Should be, but depends on how many people show up.

Part of my current problem is my voice is particularly bothering me right now -- there isn't a thing sitting in it again, but the bad school play singing thing definitely has it back in old uncomfortable habits for the moment. This combined with the solving the voice thing being more important to me of a spastic sudden... unfun.

Backstage this week has a piece on the importance of having a dream role, which isn't the form my ambitions have generally taken until exceedingly recently. Backstage's happy encouraging cheeriness on the subject is nice and good, but I've yet to hear anyone extoll the virtues of lying awake at night thinking foolish things.

(no subject)

Livejournal, among other things, raises a lot of issues, for many of us I think, about "friendship" and "fans". It's the nature of the whole, "On the Internet, Anyone Can Be a Celebrity, Well, Kind Of" thing that is further complicated by the irritatingly named "friends" lists. For me, wanting to achieve the type of success that conveys fame, there's an additional level of peculiarity in matter, which has to do mainly with wondering if there's a balance between Not Being an Asshole and "If you wanna be a star, you better behave like one."

People toss the word fan around casually. We say things like "I'm your number one fan!" to cheer our friends, and throw support towards people we know more casually through this and other mediums. All of which makes me wonder what the criteria are for certain things, and how those things interact.

That is to say -- at what point do I know any of you?
At what point are you a friend?
What is a fan?
And if you're a fan can you ever be my friend?
And if you're my friend, do you have any business being a fan?
Is fan a word used too casually or too seriously?
How to role-models and aspiration fit into the fannish equation?
And where is media and image-making going in a world where everyone isn't famous for fifteen minutes, but everyone is famous in the eyes of fifteen people?

I don't bloody know. And I don't know that knowing the answers (presuming there are clear cut ones) would solve the non-specific dilemma I find in all this.

When people tell me they are my fan (just to be clear, this is yet to be another more than the occassional Internet occurance or related to my writing), I often respond with an incredulous "Why?" which makes me sound like an asshole. It is, among other things, not my business and can seem like and be fishing for compliments, which is bad. On the other hand, it is helpful to know what it is that I do that matters to people, so I can look at those things more closely. I remain uncomfortable saying merely "Thank you" because while probably appropriately gracious creates a power dynamic of distance, where notations of worth are conducted in only one direction. Similarly, the impulse to respond to someone liking or approving of their perception of some facet of myself, with an invitation to friendship ranges from a good idea to a bad idea to just plain stupid.

Having written this now, it occurs to me that one of the most egregious problems with the notion of fans, in any sense of the word is that our cultural set up for it forces both sides of the equation to be necessarily estranged from each other and unhappy, even as both provide so much to the other.