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It seems hard to believe I'll be back in America in just a few days. There are all sorts of things I feel unprepared to deal with, from the politics (which I expect will get worse with whatever gets announced at the innaugeration and have otherwise gone off the deep end with Today's NYTimes' piece on the war against Spongebob -- I can't take this, people... one day I'm into a Rufus Wainwright song and the next day I'm defending Spongebob????) to the scale of it. Other than eating at Sushi-e (4th Floor) I've not been higher than the second floor in 3 weeks.
There are scores of things I'll miss about Australia, but I won't necessarily miss their whinging about the state of their film industry and their belief that the second non-Australian money touches a project they loose all control and it's no longer an Australian story. Obviously money, control and Hollywood add up to lots of misery and stress and control issues, but this whole wacked out "Well, that's not really Australian" thing that they do about things that damn well are Australian makes me kinda crazy, especially sitting in an acting class where I'm hearing it's all my fault as an American that there aren't enough jobs for Australian actors. There aren't enough jobs for actors. Period. Want scapegoats? Reality TV would be a fabulous place to start and Europe, not America, unleashed that. But just in general, I wish that they would understand that Hollywood treats them badly, not because they're Australian, but because they've gone to the door of poweful dark forces that treat everyone badly. Australians are funny, so proud of themselves, but often only to any extent when they believe no one is watching, like singing into your hairbrush in the bathroom, but here it's lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Today I didn't dare ask, although I wanted to, what they would think of a non-Australian writing an Australian story (i.e., a story that must be set in Australia for the narrative to work).
Sydney has had a drought for the last several years and while it's been cloudy and intermittantly rainy while I've been here it waited until I was dressed for the opera to bloody pour. Which is all very picturesque and what not, and this dress looks stellar windblown, but I feel like a soggy cat right about now.
When I was a child, Sedutto made Cantelope icecream which has been discontinued for over two decades. While Sedutto doesn't make it here, it does exist, just as "melon" but it's distinctly cantelope and not honeydew. This is one of many food things I'll miss like crazy -- also coconut ice, sausage rolls and Anzac biscuits.
My earlier rant about the stuff going on in my head was of course incomplete. There's another digression in all of that about how I have to stop wanting to be adopted into other people's worlds, and just make my own and put myself on the other side of that power dynamic.
For such a weirdly whimsical city -- afterall, I just saw an opera that contained both a chorus of whores and a chorus of sharks (yes, the fishies), a group of spirits intoning the names of Sydney's neighborhoods, and an entire scene devoted to a recovering alcoholic who has found god, channeling the voices of a pair of one night stand gay lovers in a public park -- the ways in which people seem to strive agressively for uniformity (the nightlife and bars here puzzle me on every level, from the music to the clothes) really deeply saddens me. But I imagine it must be strange to be this far from everything -- do you try to connect or do you just let it go? It reminds me of listening to strange music in the dark as a child -- do you turn on the radio eventhough you don't much care for it because the shared point of reference is such a goddamn relief?
We storyboarded scenes in class today to try to understand film stuff from the behind-the-camera perspective. We had to choose three key moments, and of course somehow I came up with a 40-frame storyboard. Whoopsie. So yeah, I be going through a "thing"... and to make up for my crankiness about the industry ranting down here, I will say that every single Australian actor I've met at every stage of the game has such a deeper understanding of all aspects of creating artistic product than 99% of American actors I know -- I really admire that multi-tasking jack-of-all trades thing (which is probably why I'm surprised that Americans, for all I think we're rather lazy and stupid on the whole, find it so much easier to just, well, do what needs to be done. Cue: "Selling Out" from Absolute Beginners, I suppose, although that's British. But hey, who said I had to be consistent in my rambles?).
We also did some on-camera stuff today that I was really unhappy with, but it was my own stupid fault -- we had to just be ourselves on camera and talk about something that made us really happy without specifically naming it, and I really regretted what I chose and how I approached it. They didn't deserve it. And whatever... it was an exercise to just help us see our mannerisms. That I dwell on it, it just a testament to my being a nutjob. Tomorrow we're doing a practice screen test and reshooting the scenes we've been working on all week.
There are scores of things I'll miss about Australia, but I won't necessarily miss their whinging about the state of their film industry and their belief that the second non-Australian money touches a project they loose all control and it's no longer an Australian story. Obviously money, control and Hollywood add up to lots of misery and stress and control issues, but this whole wacked out "Well, that's not really Australian" thing that they do about things that damn well are Australian makes me kinda crazy, especially sitting in an acting class where I'm hearing it's all my fault as an American that there aren't enough jobs for Australian actors. There aren't enough jobs for actors. Period. Want scapegoats? Reality TV would be a fabulous place to start and Europe, not America, unleashed that. But just in general, I wish that they would understand that Hollywood treats them badly, not because they're Australian, but because they've gone to the door of poweful dark forces that treat everyone badly. Australians are funny, so proud of themselves, but often only to any extent when they believe no one is watching, like singing into your hairbrush in the bathroom, but here it's lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Today I didn't dare ask, although I wanted to, what they would think of a non-Australian writing an Australian story (i.e., a story that must be set in Australia for the narrative to work).
Sydney has had a drought for the last several years and while it's been cloudy and intermittantly rainy while I've been here it waited until I was dressed for the opera to bloody pour. Which is all very picturesque and what not, and this dress looks stellar windblown, but I feel like a soggy cat right about now.
When I was a child, Sedutto made Cantelope icecream which has been discontinued for over two decades. While Sedutto doesn't make it here, it does exist, just as "melon" but it's distinctly cantelope and not honeydew. This is one of many food things I'll miss like crazy -- also coconut ice, sausage rolls and Anzac biscuits.
My earlier rant about the stuff going on in my head was of course incomplete. There's another digression in all of that about how I have to stop wanting to be adopted into other people's worlds, and just make my own and put myself on the other side of that power dynamic.
For such a weirdly whimsical city -- afterall, I just saw an opera that contained both a chorus of whores and a chorus of sharks (yes, the fishies), a group of spirits intoning the names of Sydney's neighborhoods, and an entire scene devoted to a recovering alcoholic who has found god, channeling the voices of a pair of one night stand gay lovers in a public park -- the ways in which people seem to strive agressively for uniformity (the nightlife and bars here puzzle me on every level, from the music to the clothes) really deeply saddens me. But I imagine it must be strange to be this far from everything -- do you try to connect or do you just let it go? It reminds me of listening to strange music in the dark as a child -- do you turn on the radio eventhough you don't much care for it because the shared point of reference is such a goddamn relief?
We storyboarded scenes in class today to try to understand film stuff from the behind-the-camera perspective. We had to choose three key moments, and of course somehow I came up with a 40-frame storyboard. Whoopsie. So yeah, I be going through a "thing"... and to make up for my crankiness about the industry ranting down here, I will say that every single Australian actor I've met at every stage of the game has such a deeper understanding of all aspects of creating artistic product than 99% of American actors I know -- I really admire that multi-tasking jack-of-all trades thing (which is probably why I'm surprised that Americans, for all I think we're rather lazy and stupid on the whole, find it so much easier to just, well, do what needs to be done. Cue: "Selling Out" from Absolute Beginners, I suppose, although that's British. But hey, who said I had to be consistent in my rambles?).
We also did some on-camera stuff today that I was really unhappy with, but it was my own stupid fault -- we had to just be ourselves on camera and talk about something that made us really happy without specifically naming it, and I really regretted what I chose and how I approached it. They didn't deserve it. And whatever... it was an exercise to just help us see our mannerisms. That I dwell on it, it just a testament to my being a nutjob. Tomorrow we're doing a practice screen test and reshooting the scenes we've been working on all week.
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Looking forward to hearing about this in person though!