ODIN'S AVIARY ~ a home for wayward thoughts & memories
I've
about my recent exploits in (read: surrender to) teh Facebookz, and how I think it relates to my general life and specific creative journey, blah blah blah. Embracing my past yadda yadda savoring the moment etc. etc. and so on. And so on. As usual when I'm writing about anything in the moment of experiencing it, I have found that I was completely wrong or, at least, utterly naive. That's a bit harsh: I was assumptive in my appraisal of the over-all effect of going all-in on a "social networking" site. Teh Facebook(c) has reached deeper into my history than I had imagined it would and, owing largely to the way in which it is structured, has allowed me to contact and be contacted by people I
really am curious about
from my sordid suburban past. Last night, I reconnected with my first-ever drama (you called it "drama" in my neck of the woods) teacher. This is the guy who got me seeing what I do today as something more than showing/goofing off, something that was done. And now I can check in with him anew. Madness.
One interesting personal side-effect I've noticed from this world-wide-interwebz experience of mine is that people I know, know one another, too. This is not surprising in the big picture; actors tend to spend much of their social time together throwing out names to establish connections by association with one another (an occupation I loathe...but could probably benefit from learning to enjoy, somehow). People know people. That's how people are. This isn't Russia. (Is this Russia?) This isn't Russia. [ <-Ahoy, movie quote! ] It's not absurd to find connections between dots when you bother to search. I just don't search very often, and now the Internet does it for me. Thanks, Internet!
The other interesting thing that I've noted brings us back around to the actual mission statement* of Odin's Aviary (*Now 12%** more missionier! [**Actual missioniness subject to personal experience and position of Saturn at time of missionesque experience.]). Specifically, I'm invited to re-explore the origins of my bizarre and unnatural quest to infuse my life with acting gigs. Some people you get back in touch with are naturally from your later life, or even as far back as the transition from youth to adulthood. Still others show up from times of sleep-overs and recess. Most recently, owing in large part to being found by my old theatre teacher, I've begun to get back in touch with people I knew in that most developmental of educational stages:
. Or: middle school. Some even call it "junior high." But in my aforementioned neck of the woods, it was "drama class" and "intermediate school." This was the time in my life when a real stage entered it -- as in the wooden kind, with curtains and lights and EVERYTHING. The smell of sawdust in an largely abandoned school building on tech day. The temper tantrums of students and teachers alike. The declamatory style of eleven- and twelve-year-olds playing middle-aged characters (my particular forte at the time). Intermediate theatre.
In so doing, the people I used to know now know that I'm still doing what we did. Before. Which is to say, not everyone who participates in theatre in high school and junior high continues to do it. I know: It's SHOCKING. I kid (ALL CAPS = sarcasm), but I keep getting notes from people saying that it's nice to see I'm still at it, and all I can keep thinking is,
You mean you're not?!
Yet another thing I haven't thought through. I believe everyone is inclined to imagine the people they used to know in the same or similar context as that in which they used to know them, but for me to assume everyone found as formative an experience in their 7th grade as I is a bit beyond the pale. Still, I can't help but mirror their surprise at my continued involvement, and marvel at their lack of involvement. I want to ask them when the last time they set foot in a theatre building was. I want to know where that all went for them, if anywhere.
And then: Is it surprising that I'm still doing this? I mean, discounting for a moment the possibility that the people I grew up with might view a career in theatre as a childish or irresponsible thing (and I really hope to give them more credit than that), was there anything about me in my youth that suggested I wouldn't keep at it this long?
Come to think of it, there may have been a thing. Or two. Let's face it: Every effort up until one is old enough to reap a few consequences can be filed away as experimentation, or a learning experience. There are even some times of life when this is so expected as to be nearly ubiquitous, such as the teenage sexual experimentation, or the toddler this-whole-walking-thing learning experience. I know people who've written off everything that happened to them prior to year 20. Plus, when I started theatre, I had far fewer advantages than now. Theatre taught me a lot about how to effectively interact with people, gave me tools for overcoming my social awkwardness, and a good dose of metabolic puberty didn't hurt, either. Come to think of it, if I had known me back then, I would have penned me for an English teacher myself. So there were a few reasons why my far-flung friends of yesteryear might be surprised to find me treading the boards to date. Oh, and one more reason, at that.
I didn't learn to act for about a decade.
In some sense, one is never done "learning to act," of course, but that's not what I'm referring to. No, I mean to say that for the seven-odd years prior to my college theatrical experiences, I thought I was acting, and I simply wasn't. I was working hard, and I loved what I was doing, and I was doing a great many things as well or better than some, but acting was not one of them. It wasn't until I got to my third official acting teacher, in college, who had a penchant for axioms and anagrams, that it sank in. He says, "Acting is reacting." I don't know how many times he said it before this happened, but one day: PING! Acting is reacting. There's a lot of ways to express this idea (or, really, host of ideas) -- listening is key, don't "act", stay in the moment, make the other person look good, etc. I try to comfort myself for what would seem like wasted time with an idea from Sanford Meisner -- that it takes at least twenty years to learn how to act -- but of course all the years spent
not
acting were in fact necessary for me to learn this lesson. Some people understand it intuitively, even at eleven years of age. I was not such a one.
What I did understand from a young age, even before I understood that I understood it (take a moment; that was almost as self-referential as an actor's 'blog), was that I wanted to do this, whatever it really was. I remember watching older actors doing their thing, kids in higher grades than I and movie stars alike, and thinking,
God, what do they do that makes this so good?
That's a question that has driven me a long way, down a windy road, and it still takes over the wheel now and then at that. Good thing, too, because I still have a lot to learn. When I would see videos of myself on stage in intermediate school, I would wonder why it looked and sounded so different from my inner-perception of it. At age eleven, when most of my friends were doing their damnedest to get off school property just as soon as they could each day, I was disappointed if I didn't have rehearsal to stay for. I didn't realize I had made a choice about the rest of my life, but every time I got to take the stage, my world aligned somehow and I meant everything I did, even without really knowing what I was doing.
It's good to remember that. Thanks, friends, both old and new.
Recently, I was honored to receive the coveted "Brilliante" 'blogger award from
. This is an award that functions rather like a chain letter or, perhaps I should say, it's rather an ever-expanding, world-wide web of love and appreciation. I was honored more by Patrick's comments about the Aviary than by the award itself, I must admit. It may be my recent grapples with a theatrical competition, or my reading about the founding of American business practices within the first three decades of the 20th century, or it may simply be my elementary-school self rearing his pudgy head, but I'm a bit turned off by the appearance of competition of late. (Not just the
practice
, but the
appearance
, mind. I hereby willfully acknowledge that such is silliness. Nevertheless.) So I wanted to move this honor of Patrick's forward, but eschew the conventions of the award itself. Plus, I kind of wanted it all to relate to this here 'blog's
. So instead of listing here my choice of seven honorees, I'm going to do a few entries, now and then, in honor of fellow 'bloggers within my circle who help me with my struggle to live fully, freely and honestly. This being the first.
It's only proper to begin with Friend Patrick. His was one of the first 'blogs that I added to my little sidebar of links, and he's done a lot with
. It's probably the strongest of his web presences in terms of representing him, as I'm not aware of any website he has set up. If you poke around a little, you may find
, and various mentions of him as an actor or director in various biographies and reviews. You could be inclined to mistakenly take him for the un-photographed "Patrick Lacey" who appeared in
, but you'd be wrong. I think. At least, I hope Patrick would have told me already if he (in particular) appeared in a movie with talking animals.
I met Patrick doing one of my first New York City shows--
--that self-same show that introduced me to the colorful world of circus-theatre. He was playing a dog. Brilliantly, I might add. Some time later, certain of the creative relationships formed during that show maintained, and he,
,
and I formed our informal creative-artist support group, The Exploding Yurts. We would meet with semi-regularity, and mainly discuss whatever self-initiated projects we were working on or toward. We were mixed disciplines, and Patrick and I were the actors of the group, so there was an immediate affinity there. Patrick also creates beautiful masks, so I consider him to be a talented visual artist as well. I'm not sure what came first with Patrick, that feeling of comradeship or the feeling of loving friendship, but we gots both now, and that's the way I likes it. You know how you never have friends quite like you did when you were young? Well, I think the same can be said of the first real friends you make upon moving to a new place. Patrick is one of those.
So I'm a little biased. I admit it. And you are free to judge for yourself how brilliant Patrick is; after all, you can read all about his mental processes at
Loose Ends
. You can decide if I'm off my nut when I say he's one of the most sensitive and daring actors I've had the pleasure of working with, who uses his body in such imaginatively expressive ways that I'm often stunned. You just go ahead and tell me if I'm off when I say of Patrick that he commits more concentration and thought to all his work--acting, writing and other craft--than anyone else I know. And hey: If you think his 'blog doesn't evidence a passionately intelligent mind, one that takes nothing for granted, as well as a beautiful spirit, one that reaches always for truth and beauty, you go ahead and comment to that effect. Plus he's viciously funny. Or so I think. You're welcome to disagree.
You'd just be wrong. No crime in that.
But to bring things back around to self-aggrandizement for just a moment: I've learned a lot from Patrick. Our differences and similarities are very well-matched, if you ask me, and I regret not having made more opportunities to date to work with him as an actor. We've only done so twice, in fact. In the aforementioned show, and a one-act play in mask:
.
Icarus
was itself a learning experience for me that could probably take up a whole entry, but one of the plain ol' techniques I learned from Patrick in that process was how to rev up an internal engine of sorts of performance energy, so there was a lot of drive there, but allow it to translate into simple, specific, one-at-time movements, so elemental to gestural work. There are myriad little technical things like that I've picked up from Mr. Lacey. Most significant to me, though, have been our shared moments of empathy and discussions about life as an artist. Not specifically as actors, mind you, but as artists. Patrick has an abiding and unashamed affection for the notion of our work being artful, and that as much as anything else has fueled me through some very tough times indeed. We both acknowledge all the difficulties of being an actor, living in New York, being young, growing older, trying to love more and hate less, etc., etc. And what we come up with is that someday, yes, we will have it all. And in the meantime, despite all its worries and tribulations (or perhaps [for me, at least] because of them) the struggle can be pretty great, too.
Now,
Loose Ends
is great for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it isn't the first thing you'll notice upon visiting, but Patrick is tied into an incredible network of 'bloggers. He gets anywhere from ten to 30 comments per entry, from folks of a similar mindset philosophically. Whereas
Odin's Aviary
tries and tries to stay within the borders of a kind of set of rules,
Loose Ends
weaves its way through every aspect of Patrick's life, rather like the trequetra that holds so much meaning for him. It's style is personable, and you never can be absolutely sure what you'll get. One day it will be a dialogue, the next a theory paper, the next a nature observation. The commonality is Patrick and all that goes with his personality, which is a lot. With other people, this kind of online journal might quickly be mired in ridiculous self-interest and immolating detail or preachy self-importance, but owing to Patricks's personal insight and outward-reaching philosophy you get quite a different experience. Identification and, occasionally, a much-needed pause to consider life outside of the rush of it all.
And so, this award goes to Patrick Lacey.
I'm a silly, sentimental S.O.B. It probably doesn't seem like it much anymore, because I so frequently fail to email people back, or forget they gave me such-and-thus, or throw away show cards the moment I get them. (Sorry 'bout that.) All this behavior, however, has been built up over the years to combat the horrible side-effects of being a sentimental sort of person. Getting sucked into the past is second-nature to me, and the real trick is extracting myself completely once I am, and so I avoid going through old photos, reading old letters, attending reunions . . .
. . . signing up for services like Facebook(TM).
Way back 'round about when I started this here 'blog, I signed up for teh MySpace(r). I've pretty much loathed it ever since. Why I can't exactly say, but I attributed it to my general reluctance to be reunited with people from my past. This theory has since been disproved by how much I'm enjoying the constant and nigh senseless connectivity of teh Facebook(U). Maybe I've changed in the past couple of years. I'd like to think so. Maybe too, however, it wasn't so much that I feared reunion with my past, as that I feared falling into old patterns as much as I feared getting stuck in nostalgia-land. That's a lot of fear, I realize. What can I say? I'm good at it.
An actor is expected to live in the moment, at his or her own peril, and to his or her own possibility of great reward. As with some of the techniques and methods employed by actors, we can occasionally take such rhetoric a bit far, in my opinion, shamelessly extending a psychotically permissive or artificial attitude into our daily lives. It's very easy to do. Imagine spending several hours each day, with great regularity, practicing a certain approach to living. When you leave the rehearsal room or stage, some of that practice is bound to stick to you and your actions. This, in many cases, is a helpful thing. It can make the sensitive and responsible actor more honest, self-aware and receptive in his or her personal life. It can also mean that for two hours following an intensive
workshop, an actor is inclined to repeat every sentence another person says before responding to them. Which, though initially novel, gets old. Fast.
As I've mentioned here before (see
), I've found a new priority for embracing my past. This is a personal choice, but it is also somewhat motivated by observations of my progress and personality as an actor. As we've had ground into our ethos...es (ethi? ethae?) by innumerable history and civics classes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This, I think, includes the details of our personal histories as much as any war or natural disaster. I can never make up my mind about the nature of humanity and our propensity for change, so philosophically I take a very balanced (ambiguous) view. I believe people can make choices for change, and that there's a core to each person that is uniquely theirs, unaffected by circumstance. To put it another way, I think we should always strive for positive change in ourselves, with a constant forgiveness prepared for those aspects of the "me" that may simply be given. I do this better some times than others, and I believe that getting my feet snared in nostalgia happens when the balance between ambition and acceptance falls a little heavy on the ambition side. One never feels so much a failure, I think, than when one regrets the person--or people, if we do change--they have been.
"The moment" is good to live in, certainly. The best formula for happiness probably comes from a life so lived. However, if we fail to embrace our past, particularly the best and worst bits, with love and acceptance (not just tolerance), we may never change. We might not grow. I know I can't love myself without loving the fallible adult right along with the naive kid.
Nietzsche was fond of the phrase
amor fati
, which is Latin for "I meant that our
need
for God is dead, you morons." Wikipedia contradicts my translation, however, insisting
amor fati
refers to a love of one's fate, and since everything I ever needed to know I learned from Wikipedia, I'll run with that. It's been a favorite phrase of mine since my (somewhat) more pretentious days of youth, because it's helped me to understand a lot of touch choices and a few (too many) disappointments. Somehow I always applied it, in my thinking, to my future. Perhaps this is because we tend to think of what's ahead of us when we consider "fate." I would look ahead to the daunting choices to be made, and the ones I had already made yet not acted upon, and be comforted. The mantra applies just as much to our pasts as well, though. Maybe we have regrets, and definitely we have mistakes back there, but those can be loved in their way, too.
But I'm not posting my high school yearbook picture. Uh-uh. No way. There are limits even to loving, after all.
Srsly. I can has releef? Frum LOLcats nd all ther kaind?
I feel like such a freaking doof (read: doofus, only less significant). I was generally aware of the LOLcat phenomenon when it began to crystallize into what it is today, but then I forgot about it. I mean, it's pictures of cats, with blocky fonts applied. It will not affect my life. Or so I assumed...
For those of you not in the know, worry not:
. It includes gems of explanation for the LOLcat phenomenon like a link to the brief
Time
(get it?) article devoted to them, and paraphrasing their use grammar thusly -- "Common themes include jokes of the form 'Im in ur
noun
,
verb
-ing ur
related noun
.'" It also links me to
, which helps me to understand why I am so enamored of teh LOLcats. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I must explain my love-hate relationship.
Everything about teh LOLcats seems engineered to piss me off. (For [nigh endless] examples, go
.) I mean
everything
.
First of all, it's pictures of cutesy animals, which reminds me utterly of those cat and/or dog and/or other-small-animal mavens one finds in any office of America. You know, she's usually a she, and she has a cubicle covered in pictures of baby ducklings or some such. It just reminds me of porn. Sick, I know, but it does. Those people covet animals like others covet wealth or sex or spiritual fulfillment.
Second, LOLcats are self-generating inside humor, which is just irritating. There's nothing quite so grotesque as when people revel in how "inside" their jokes are. Exclusivity is practically a disqualification from the category of humor, altogether! ("Exclusivity is practically...") Humor is a tool in communication, not exclusion, and though I'm not accusing the LOLcat-erz of intending to do so, they're nevertheless excludin' teh masses. But I lie: A running gag that is largely unappreciated is even more grotesque than a simple inside joke.
Thirdly, the spelling and grammar are intentionally wrong. Do you understand? THE SPELLING AND GRAMMAR ARE
INTENTIONALLY
WRONG. That is so messed up! I get irate over misplaced apostrophes, and I'm subjected to dialogue superimposed over cat photographs and written out in "texting" language and gobbledy-gook? Holy sack of hammers! I ought to be trying to eradicate all LOLcats and their makers, not writing a 'blog entry about them.
Yet. I love the LOLcats. It's driving me crazy that I can't get their syntax out of my head. They're responsible for a lot of time wastage of late. They are obnoxious, and not remotely cool, and they are inside and ridiculous, and I heart LOLcats.
I'm beginning to understand why, too. In the first, for reasons inexplicable by modern science, I've been wanting a cat lately. I have been an adamant dog person my entire life, and I still prefer dumb-and-loyal animals (I relate to them better), but cats are more appealing now. I don't know. Maybe it's living in the city this long. I want a pet who knows where to poop and how to get there. More significant for me, however, is this use of language in the photos.
Language is simply cool. In general. It rules. Language is fascinating and mysterious to me, and I enjoy anything that plays with it. Correction: Anything that plays with it
and contains an interior logic
. So people constantly confusing the uses of "take" and "bring" drive me up a wall, and a text message that says "ill talk 2 u later" (You'll talk to me later, or you're ill, and I should bring you soup?) drives me kabonkers. But LOLcats, partly through the profusion of them, have developed a rather complex psychology behind their lunatic ravings. They've even developed a mimic
. Stupid? Oui. Ma forse, anche genius.
