this is a story of ghosts

Since last night I keep writing posts and erasing them. Nothing very deep, but just general dismay with my ability to articulate all the things that I was finding sad. I wasn't really sad myself (I'm not really sure why I need to clarify that), but just stuff that was making me disappointed in the world, or nostalgic for younger times.

The most recent Lucie-Brock Broido book arrived, and as with all her things, I wanted to post each and every one of her poems here, just because I love the language of them, like marbles in my mouth. But I thought they would be misconstrued as veiled messages by some and just boring by others. Also, her work has come to remind me of all sorts of strange things, it's an idea I'm trying to form into a poem (actually it's all tangled up in that thng I wrote the other day about beauty, about having the face of the dead, about the number zero, this connects to it too -- and the form of it all is in my head, but I just can't seem to put it together yet, but as New York is a 19th century city, we have been living in a city of the dead for some time, and have just noticed, and now it has come time to punish the ghosts).

My copy of My Own Private Idaho arrived as well, and in the little book that came with it are all these interviews from back when it was released in 1991, and everyone involved seems so sweet and giggly, and I never really cared all that much that River Phoenix was dead and certainly the subject matter of that film looks much different at 19 than 32, especially with the things that occupy creative space in my mind. I haven't even watched the film yet, but I was very sad -- because River died, because people don't get that even folks in the most horrible circumstances sometimes laugh, because I want to be in Sydney taking crappy DV video to make a rough construction of the navigation of the film I'm writing, because people forget things, because so many things are different for girls in a way that makes them so expected no one notices when our words are powerful. Certain wounds just seem ordinary.

I hate that so many people I know don't feel free. That they are adults and have people telling them they can't or shouldn't do perfectly ordinary things they would like to do -- or worse, they've decided they would not be allowed or would be scolded or mocked when maybe they wouldn't be at all. They remind me of the child I was who stared at ice cream, but never asked. I realize rationally that most, and often even I, would say -- this is just what being an adult is, it's called compromise and the appropriate supression of inappropriate desire. It's not that I don't believe in it. Hell, I'm often the diplomat when I am least obligated to be. It's that I think it's strange that we compromise on petty things and never discuss the big issues behind them. Compromise should be saved for the big stuff... and the small stuff -- shouldn't we all be happy to do what we will? I know life is more complicated than that, but I wish it weren't, or that more people would choose for it not to be. I know these little losses of freedom are not serious, I know they are easy, and I know they are rarely a slippery slope into much more than the type of life I don't want (and am, by all reports, misguided for shunning -- but I'm not highminded so much as too oddly socialized to make a good show of the mechanics). But I know what it's like to dread the mocking (and not the good-natured kind, if that even exists) I'm going to get for doing something that I enjoy that really has no bearing on anyone else -- is it possible to be intellectually weak in our tastes? I've heard it is, but I think those people must be liars or at least grossly misinformed. I also know what it is like to sit with a friend, and watch them half hiding under a table as they called home, ashamed at circumstances I didn't then know about and having to check in, not out of courtesy, but constantly as if some sort of slow child.

Also -- "it's not you, it's me" never works not because people want to hate themselves or think the speaker is lying. It never works because it never sounds like someone taking responsibility. It always sounds like "I'm sorry. You didn't exist."

It also makes me sad that I grew up in a particular old world New York, that is slowly shrinking, that is being devoured and comodified by the likes of Paris Hilton, reality TV and the Disney corporation, and that I will never ever really be able to explain it without having to deal with someone's thrashing rage. It was not a kind society. It was, in fact, awful but it was polite and unique and its slow loss deserves to be mourned; a casual dinner was once black tie.

Finally, two things:

- I was not deprived, injured and harmed in any way for having grown up in a city. I was never confounded by how to play, and while surely it made my interests different, I wasn't less a child for my home, or for that matter, for having no siblings. One could argue it's led to my resourcefulness and creativity. But mostly, it just doesn't matter. Children will be children no matter where they are as long as they are given permission and opportunity to be children.

- In the religious mania of our country and due to the recent papal transition I resent having to wonder if I'm going to hell for my trying to be a decent person often taking a different form than the next guy's. I know, I shouldn't wonder these things, and I don't really, but I'd like if we could all talk about something else for a little while. People shouldn't have to justify their lives. Not this ordinary small shit, anyway.

Additionally, I have this idea in the back of my head that I keep worrying like a sore tooth -- a one-woman (yes, woman) show based around Oscar Wilde's tour of America. Relevant, funny, sad... and when I was a teen-ager my mother always said I looked like him (being tiny quite aside). She probably regrets and denies this now. In the evenings, I've been flipping through the often bizarre letters he sent during that period.

Unrelated to any of this, but also weighing, has anyone heard from sandstar? I hope she's doing well.

Also, you all might want to check in on the further adventures of rezendi.

I am particularly proud of this sentence

From a cover-letter:

On stage and in film I have appeared as a wide range of characters, including a lonely psychic, a pig with totalitarian tendencies, a roommate perpetrating an elaborate con and a husband-stealing bus driver.

return of the interview meme

These questions are from tabraun. If you would like me to interview you, reply to this post and I will ask you five questions to be answered along with this opportunity for others in your journal.

1.What is your favorite food?

That's hard as I'm really into food. Short list: veal piccata, shrimp tempura, good gaucamole, coconut ice, angle food cake, hard Italian provolone, balsamic vinegar, potato pancakes, toast, dark chocolate.

2.What inspires you on a daily basis?

Depends on the department. Example: every day I want McDonalds. Every day. And every day I force myself to pull someone I admire and think is probably the healthy sort out of a hat and say "now would they have Mcdonalds? no they would not," and then I go to whole foods and get a salad or a chicken cutlet or sushi or something.

I'm really inspired by people's stories, both their own and the more veiled ones they feel impelled to tell. Part of that is the content of it all, part of that is also having the will to tell it. We're such a weird society -- all this over-share in the form of reality TV and to be honest, blogs, but yet it's still hard to tell the truth for so many of us about things of all sizes. People working to tell the stories they need to, in a way that's relevant to other people and even sometimes entertaining -- I think it's a tremendously powerful thing, and it's a big motivator for me, both in general and specific.

One sentence version? I am inspired by possibility.

3.If you could travel in time,to anywhere,any time period,where and when would it be and why?

Probably the Regency Era (well, more broadly 1795 - 1830 which is technically beyond the bounds of the actually regency) because that's my big thing right now. But the reason that is my big thing right now is because it was really the moment when social manners as well as technology began to resemble what we know today. I think there are also general political parallels, and I'm fascinated by the wardrobe of the time especially as it was so encoded with data about people -- now clothes mean nothing -- it might mean who you are in that moment, it might not, but it certainly means nothing beyond that. Being a woman in that era was horrid though -- 1 in 3 died in childbirth and all unmarried ladies were treated as children with curfews inability to drink spirits or go anywhere unchaperoned. A married woman had quite a bit of social leeway though, and there are many decently documented cases from the era of women doing things generally considered far outside the bounds of home and family.

My second choice would have to be Australia in the Victorian/Edwardian eras. Obviously the sense of the continent's isolation was much more profound than now, and I'm really fascinated by all manner of things that were such events there in that time. It was such a chore to get there -- it wasn't like crossing the Atlantic, which was also a chore by our standards. To go to Australia and leave it again would be extraodinary. And I'm fascinated by what the emotional reality of being there would have been like -- a place so real you could never leave it, but a nearly fictive place to the world outside.

4.Do you ever want to get married and start a family?

I used to, when I was younger. I think a lot of that was naivete, that there would be some sort of award, or I would feel like I fit in more if I did that. I also, I have to confess, thought it was sort of an erotic idea -- that notion of being pregnant and being claimed through that. And then I got older, got over it, and had a relationship that was a lot like a marriage in a lot of ways -- although more family and emotional ones than logistical ones. I won't say that soured me on it, but I didn't really have a tremendous amount of perspective about it (or maybe more accurately a useful amount of perspective) until later.

I'd actually like to get married, but I think what I want out of a marriage is in some senses the antithesis of why most people get married. I want space. I want to have seperate bedrooms so we can invite each other on sleepoevers and it's never awkward if someone says no. Seperate vacations to explore extraordinary places and report back and then taking each other to see those marvels later. I like going to the movies alone. I'm overly fond of my own domain, and of the stories that live in my head -- I would find marriage where both of us were not busy and probably travellers not stifling so much as tiring. I have a lot of fun being an extrovert, but other people exhaust me, and I can only do so much of it, which is generally much less than most people realize.

As to children... that's odder in a way. I'm 32 and find myself oddly ambivalent about it. That bothers me more than firmly wanting or not wanting the little buggars. I think realistically, I can't have children and pursue the things I want to pursue right now. I hate to predicate the idea of children on success, but I think I have to -- and honestly, that's less financial than logistical for me. I also have a pretty hard time dealing with medical stuff, and might be better served by adoption, marrying into children or something than actually having my own. All of that said, it does strike me as sad not to pass my DNA along, because maybe I won't manage to do the level of exceptional things I want to -- maybe my children could (in whatever field they wanted, this isn't an evil stage mommie thing).

Ultimately, one of the things that really troubles me about my having children is the way they effect power dynamics, professionally and personally. Do people view mothers and pregnant women with the authority they should? Do mothers and pregnant women excercise their power in useful transformative ways? How do children change a relationship? Does one partner always feel on the outside? I worry about being left behind either in the home or outside it. Of course, the solution is to wrap it all up in one big package, but it's hard to do and hard to find, and then if I don't feel left behind, does the other person, the other parties involved?

5.What advice would you give to someone who wanted to do things similar to what you do?

Find heroes. And choose your heroes not solely for what they do, but more for how they got to do it. Everyone in this business talks about Willem Dafoe who wanted to be a movie star and went on three auditions a day for seven years and got told he was too weird looking before he got to be a movie star. Or Danny Davito who got rejected by something like 200 agents. These are good stories, valuable stories -- they teach you persistence, and they're good to give to family and friends who will want you to give up when you're frustrated. I'm a big believer in the more obscure heroes too that you look up to for reasons you don't always want to go into, but if it makes you do the work, that's all that matters.

Do the work. This means taking classes, going to auditions, learning to market yourself and making yourself the best you you can be.

Don't be afraid to be ugly. There's tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of girls who want to be Julia Roberts. There are a lot fewer girls who want to create an exciting character. Perfection and attempts at it actually open you up to more competition not less. Look at that big fat guy on Lost -- how many people do you think were up for that role? A lot fewer than were up for the hot pregnant Australian chick, I'll tell you that. Don't be afraid to be who you are.

Learn how to market yourself. This is probably 60% of the battle. If you can do this, not only have you learned a skill you can support yourself with when you are not acting, but you're positioning yourself for success.

Expose yourself to stuff that excites you -- movies, plays, books, poetry, travel, dance, whatever.

Have a hobby. Nothing sucks more than an actor who is only acting. You're no fun at parties and you tire yourself out as well as everyone else around you. Have things you want to be good at an enjoy that you also don't live or die by.

Be a creative problem solver. You've got to figure out how to support yourself and make an acting career for yourself with the limited resources of time, money and your own health and energy. It takes a lot of weird juggling a lot of the time.

Consider not going into it too young. I'm pretty hard on myself, but I'm able to shake it off pretty quickly, in large part because I had this whole other life I was successful in before I did this. This wasn't a calculated choice -- and in fact was on based on fear and not wanting to displease those around me. But it's how it happened, and it's given me a resilience, drive and perspective that has been tremendously helpful to me.

Visualization. It may not make things happen, but it sure is fun.

A sense of destiny. If you can cultivate one while also being real, not dangerously insane, and capable of rolling with the curves you can't predict, it tends to help.

Good headshots are worth every penny. Spend a lot. Do it.

Cut yourself slack. Some days you get to be a tired ugly slob, and it's a good thing. McDonalds too. Make your bad habits rewards. Because conquering that crap ain't never going to happen.

Realize famous people are hotter than you because they are airbrushed and A-list folks have people with them pretty much all the time to make them look the best they can and be the most organized and charming they can. You don't have to be that -- you just gota show the raw material and the potential.

Always watch all the credits at the movie theater. It's not just polite, it's an act of prayer.

Do some background work to see how a movie set really works. Keep doing it if need be to get your SAG card. But don't put it on your resume, and don't think it's a career in and of itself.

Do it for the love. And that's your love of it, not its love of you.

Have a sense of humour about it.

For one year do everything that comes your way that isn't a scam or porn. Everything. Now you have a resume. Now get selective, do more by doing less. I learned this the hard way and I'm still learning it.

Worry about getting in front of casting directors, not agents.

Always Be Closing -- mainly because it's fun to quote Glenngary Glenross.

It's impossible to be fearless, so just don't get stopped by fear instead.

Trust your gut.