Th23

• Class was cancelled.
• I read.
• I saw the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane dance company. It was transforming.
• I stayed up later than I should have.

Social moralities are relative; individual moralities are absolute.

W22

• "Scenes are not performances." I am referring to the two person scenes we prepare and present in studio and I am, of course, lying. When one performs one's work for the class and the instructor, it is part process and part production. For each part, one judges the showing by a different set of criteria. As process, one recognizes shortcomings, acknowledges accomplishments, gains understanding, and (usually) achieves progress. As production, one suffers another judgment which has little - if anything - to do with reality. A scene is either "good" or "shit" on the whim of one's humors, audience reaction, and, above all, teacher praise. While the former judgment is the objectively valid of the two, it is the latter that assaults one's piece of mind at bedtime. By every logical system of observation, my work has steadily improved over the last three and a half semesters. Logic notwithstanding, I have felt my most successful work thus far to have been "The Real Thing" which Scarlet and I performed this time last year. That changed today. With historically brief preparation, Patrick's and my "The Importance of Being Earnest" is the new gold standard in ego stimulation.
• We repeated the Crucible and it is now lain to rest. At last.
• Poor roommate is terribly ill again.
• Gymnasium.
• I intended to go to bed early, but plans change.

I'm a picker. Nits, buggers, scabs; I pick.

T21

• Waking can sometimes be a joyous, gentle transition from peaceful void to sensual reality. Today it was not.
• One does much walking in New York. I probably average an hour or more of walking the streets in a day. Podcasts - God bless them - fill the time nicely, but when one is all out, one must invent more creative methods of amusement. Enter the Imitate-Other-Peoples'-Walks game. It is a game to be played alone and is ideal for young actors training in the art of human observation. I will skip the description of the rules and share an anecdote from my game today. I passed a man with a stiff limp in his right leg on 2nd and 17th. I adopted the limp for some blocks, imagining the cause of my malady (army, accident, defect, disease) and I was trucking along pretty well for a fellow with a hindrance, when I passed a man without any legs. I dropped my limp with guilt.
• "The Politics of portraiture" continues to demonstrate its bullshitiness.
• "721 Broadway" is both the address and the title of the building that headquarters the Tisch School of the Arts. It is strange for the building of an art school to bear so utilitarian a name, but the business school had a previous claim to "Tisch Hall." Seven Twenty One is an attractive, well-equipped facility with 12 floors. It is the high level of decor that further emphasized the anomaly of floor #9. When Chrissy suggested we conduct our Crucible rehearsal on the ninth, I imagined some wonderland of sound-proofed, climate controlled rehearsal studios of which I was unaware. Instead I stepped from the elevator into a destitute, deserted, half-demolished Twilight-Zone-esk dimension of trash and exposed insulation. It was as though a single floor from some abandoned building were wedged into the middle of our high-tech tower of tasteful lighting and Ikea furniture. How truely bizarre. Interestingly, there were two or three other groups of actors rehearsing elsewhere amongst the rubble (I assume from a few glimspes that they were actors; they might actually have been angry, drug dealing squatters). After failing to open a number of locked rooms, we came upon the doors without any doorknobs. A small and relatively uncluttered room proved a fine practice space and we had a productive time. I must return some day soon to this Bermuda-Triangle-Like paradox to take some serious pictures. Until then, I can only hope this Creepy Narnia respects my wishes and STAYS THEY HELL OUT OF MY DREAMS!
• Despite two semesters of groupmatesmanship, Pat and I have never had a scene together. So you can imagine our glee last Wednesday when Jimmy paired us up for The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, it was so great, we totally forgot about it! The three day weekend came and went with nary a thought to the scene slated for the coming Day of Wednes. It wasn't until today that a fuzzy little memory ticked the backs of my eyeballs. "Oh Fuck!" I may have said. I called Pat immediately and discovered that he had rehearsal until 9. Since another scene scheduled for that day had already canceled, there was no way we could pull out. With script in hand, I trek down to Water St. at 9pm for the cram jam of a lifetime. Well, suffice to say, it was crazy. We cut a third of the lines, drilled the remaining dialouge, watched the Daily Show, ate hotdogs, ran lines some more, paced up and down, took turns on and off book, ran the lines more, until, by 1:40, all of my brains had leaked out through my ears. I crashed on Pat's couch with the script under my pillow. How will this fadge?!
  

Beauty is youth.

The Three Day Weekend

I've spent most of my three day weekend embarking on a new project. It involves subways and computers. I went through the arduous task of setting up a server and reacquainted myself with PHP and MySQL. I've hacked together a nice little website that uses Google Maps to display the location of every subway station in NYC and which trains stop where. That's not a terribly special achievement: there are already sites out there with such info (in fact, I bummed the whole data set from someone else - though getting their data into MySQL involved a brief detour into Python). The cool thing I've done is add the ability to overlay the route of each train. So, for the red 1 train, you can see a red line showing the train's entire path, not just the stations where it stops. The code-writing has been slow and steady (as it always is for me) but fun. The Google Maps API is a joy and, despite a lack of forethought and some atrocious naming conventions, I've build a nice, flexible system. The site lives on my machine, so it's only up when I'm on and running the server. Feel lucky? See if it's up. If it's not, try again later.

F17

A pretty standard day with all of the usual suspects:

• Studio.
• Meals.
• Sleepiness.
• Greater-than-usual joy.
• Only mild sadness.
• Gym.
• Computer.
• Pictures.
• Music.
• Humor.
• News.

"If you're feeling sinister, go off and see your minister." - Belle And Sebastian

Th16

• Missing Crucible rehearsals seems to be a chronic problem for me. I feigned illness to excuse my absence. Is it an evil thing?
• I made my glorious return to Realism vs. Naturalism.
• I've got a great new idea, but it requires a meter wheel. My search for one was fruitless.
• Gym gym.

Saddam says, "Vote for gravity, or else!"

W15

• The alarm when off. It was 9, but I was still so tired. I gambled a snuggle back into bed.
• Oops. Spider-sense went off at 11:20 and I made my mad dash for 11:30 studio class.
• Beating teacher to class was all that mattered. Success.
• Pat did his monologue: Mercutio.
• Lunch comes right after V&S and I used that half-hour to run home for my costume.
• Made it back, suited up, ran the scene (a repeat of "A Woman of No Importance" for Jimmy's scene study class), and apologized for forgetting our Crucible rehearsal that was suppose to happen over the lunch break.
• Today was our Reprise Day for Jimmy (every scene goes for the second time), and what a class is was! Some of the best performances I've seen from my classmates, across the board. No one sucked it up, and some - like Chrissy - made major strides. Jimmy was a gas, as always, and Stacy and I reached a very satisfying climax to our scene partnership. (Pics from class are on Flickr)
  
• We ran five scenes and still finished early, so I took the hour to get pizza (I woke too late for breakfast and I used lunchtime to fetch my cloths) from the great pizza place that everyone keeps talking about (I forget the name and I can't find it on Google). Stac joined me.
• The pizzas are oblong and they have sea salt as a condiment. Stacy and I had a lovely talk while I wolfed down the delicious pie (it really was great!).
• Don finished out the day with one very complex scene and then we blew that joint.
• Patrick treated me to a burger at the Silver Spurs (that one is in Google) as a thank-you for fixing his computer on Monday.
• I had a great time at the gym.
• I got home just in time to apply for mixed sex housing before the midnight deadline. I'm living with Nick N., Alexis, and Antonietta.
• The End.

The best work of your life is a most frightening thing. It means you can never do anything less.

T14

• Happy Valentine's Day!
• I'm back (see post below).
• I wandered all over town taking pictures (Check 'em on Flickr).
• I did a film student's "TV Project." It was a scene from That 70's Show. It was a good time. I'll post video if I can (it'll be a few weeks).
• Got home and uploaded my photos to Flickr. I exceeded the 200 photos you get with a free account, so I popped for Pro status. Which means everyone better damn well better look at these pictures!
• This meant that I couldn't hit the gym. I'll recover.
• That's about it for V-Day. It feels good to be back.

Valentine's Day

A funny thing happened on the way to the blog. A long story made short, I was called upon by the world governments to save Planet Earth from the evil menace of a Martian Death Rocket. Just when I had hacked the alien computer system and snuck a nuclear device deep within the vessel of doom, a Zombie Robot Wizard Nazi King resurrected from a race of six-thousand-year-old Egyptian God-Aliens popped out, wielding a Photon Sword and a Time Scepter. Needless to say, I thought I was SOL, but then I remembered the magical enchanted amulet given to me by the Virgin Elven Princess Queen Bride as a thank-you for boning her out of her mind. I bartered the amulet for drugs and the Zombie Robot Wizard Nazi King and I smoked some bowls, fucked some hoes, and killed some Jews (we had a list) until the sun rose over the smoldering ashes of a decimated Planet Earth. Then we sang about giving his car a paint job, knitted a quilt for Boo Radley, and snuck into the mountains for gay sadomasochistic butt sex. Some days later, I was thumbing through my positive AIDS test results with my prosthetic arm when I remembered, OH MY GOODNESS, I'VE NEGLECTED MY BLOG! I waited until Valentine's Day to break it off with Lester (that's the Zombie King's name) and here am I: ready, willing, and reporting for duty!

LET THE BLOGGING RESUME!!!