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Today’s soundtrack: with the box of flash

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Today at 10:09am: turning my cell phone off

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Hey, so I blew that movie audition. Which I didn't really mind because acting is not my thing. Not getting this part was like losing out on a chance to date a really great guy, when I'm not even gay.

Then again, maybe I should be sorry I didn't get it; maybe being in a movie would have been really fun and interesting to write about. And that's where the gay parallels end.

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The auditions were held in some theater up in midtown on the east side, so the deck was stacked against me from jump. I go down to 50% power above 14th Street, and anything too far off the spine of 5th Avenue subtracts what little scraps of mojo remain.

I showed up at 10am on the dot. The actor waiting there ahead of me was apparently not my competition; I was auditioning to play a Japanese guy and this cat was blond.

Blond Actor Guy was corn-fed and good-looking, with hair that required at least ten minutes in front of a mirror, an appropriately distressed wardrobe from Urban Outfitters and clear blue eyes. Midwestern kid I'm guessing. He seemed like one of those guys who took the bus in from Iowa six months ago with five hundred dollars and a dream, and now he does auditions when he's not telling you the specials at T.G.I. Friday's through a forced expression of cheer that belies a sad, reticent fury. In some ways New York is not a very pretty town.

The waiting room was filled with mismatched Salvation-Army-style chairs. Blond Actor Guy sat in one of these. We acknowledged each other with a curt nod--actually the inverted curt nod, where you kind of jerk your chin upwards and raise your eyebrows.

"You the ten o'clock?" he asked.

"Ten ten," I said. "Yourself?"

"I'm the ten o'clock," he said, making me wonder why he asked.

Next he began behaving like a crazy person, muttering to himself and making all sorts of emphatic gestures to no one. At first I thought he was telling the T.G.I.F. specials to an invisible customer, but when I didn't hear him say "bacon cheddar potato skins" I realized he was rehearsing his lines. I've never been to an audition before, you see, and I don't have much experience with actors.

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The actress who came in after me--in her fifties, but trying to pull off someone's thirties--had peroxide hair, so I found myself sandwiched by blondes in the waiting room.

A door at the end of the room opened, and a short brunette with a clipboard called the blond guy in. "You'll be auditioning for the part of the drunk," she said, though he already seemed to know this and bounded through the door gamely.

The brunette turned to me and the other blonde. "Help yourself," she said, gesturing to a metal folding chair that sat just outside the door. On it was a half-dozen half-sized bottles of Poland Springs. The door shut.

"You the ten-twenty?" I said to the bottle blond, and she nodded. I felt a weird little moment of satisfaction, like I had correctly completed some inane equation.

There was a few moments of silence, then from the other side of the door came a pretty damned good rendition of drunken screaming and yelling. It went on and on, with foot-stomping and what sounded like a chair being slammed around. If you didn't know what was going on in the next room you'd have called the police. Blond Actor Guy was going for broke.

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I'd memorized my one page of dialogue, but figured a little more practice couldn't hurt. At the other end of the waiting room was an open doorway.

I walked through it to find a depressing little room filled with dented lockers along the wall. Mismatched scraps of fabric were taped crookedly across dirty windows, filtering the sunlight. A single Oliver-Twist-style metal twin bed with a headboard and footboard made of vertical bars sat in the corner. The striped, worn mattress was bare, with two crumpled blankets of different patterns scrunched up on the side. This looked like the type of room you move into after you've just murdered your wife and child and need to figure out what your next move is.

After several minutes of pacing and saying the lines in my head, I headed back into the waiting room.

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Presently the door opened and Blond Actor Guy came out, shiny with sweat but with a calm face. The brunette came out after him. "You did very, very well," she said. "You responded very well to the direction. Great job. Great, great job," she said. He thanked her and left. She called me into the room and I walked through the door.

At a table on one side of the room sat a middle-aged guy with a beard. He had presence, like he was a Somebody. I expected his eyes to be cold and evaluative but they were calm and inquisitive. Behind him sat two younger guys, hipster-types in their twenties. A tall actor in his twenties stood in the middle of the room near me. The brunette introduced them all, then sat in the corner next to another woman.

"Okay," said the director at the desk. "Andy will be acting opposite you," he said, indicating the tall guy. I addressed Andy, and launched into it.

I recited every line and pulled every scripted pause exactly the way I had rehearsed it. I forgot nothing, and each word came out of my mouth just the way I had practiced it. After forty, fifty seconds I was done and I looked up.

"Okay," said the director. "Have you had a chance to look at the script?"

"Just the one page," I said, which was all they sent me.

"Okay, he said, calmly. "Let me give you a little background on your character. Now, he's very [this*]. And he's feeling very [this]. So try to show us that," he said.

Holy cow. I had spent so much time practicing the accent, getting all the enunciation right, I had totally overlooked the fact that there would be actual acting involved.

I addressed Andy and ran through the whole thing again...and delivered exactly the same performance. Like a robot programmed to deliver the same twelve lines in a monotone Japanese accent.

"Okay," said the director, after I'd finished Take Two. "So, here's the situation: Yesterday, your character [did this]. And tomorrow he's going to [do this]. So you can imagine, he feels very [this]. So you've got to make us feel that."

I could see a floating red line that said "In order to succeed at acting you must be above this line," but it was floating about three inches over my head. I tried it again anyway...and it came out exactly the same as I'd done it the first time.

The director's expression stayed the same. He tried prompting me with more emotional cues and I tried it a fourth time with identical results.

"Okay, thank you very much," he said, and that was that. The brunette escorted me to the door and opened it.

The blond in the waiting room had been joined by the ten-thirty and the ten-forty. One was a short, rotund metalhead type. The other was one of those tall, broad-shouldered Asian surfer-looking guys that has no problem getting laid in the East Village. The bottle blond and I traded room positions.

The brunette smiled at the ten-thirty and the ten-forty, and gestured to the bottles on the metal chair. "Help yourself," she said, and after she'd shut the door, I did.

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Out on the street I opened my free water and made for the train while I drank it. I'm not really sure why I do the things I do. Sometimes I feel like a character in some Mario-esque videogame, running around dodging obstacles and jumping high into the air to collect inane floating prizes, in this case a half-bottle of Poland Springs. With any luck I'd find a power-up or an extra life on the subway ride home, and maybe one of these weeks I'll figure the board out and get to the next level.

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The towers know things.

The countryside lacks civility, with its absence
of two crucial ingredients: concrete and density.

The rich sail their boats in the harbor.
The poor write about it in their blogs.

Occasionally in Manhattan, certain buildings lift free of their moorings
and float off into the sky. In lucky times I am there to capture and
document these moments, even if I cannot always recover the buildings.

Oh, to be righteous.

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This is one of the weirder things I've ever seen: Conan O'Brien being interviewed on a talk show in Helsinki--by two Finnish boys.

This is kind of interesting, this girl looped together 3 years of daily headshots of herself:

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Today’s soundtrack: All I learnt at school was how to bend not break the rules

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Today at 12:02pm: receiving a book by Uta Hagen as a gift

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There are exceptions to every rule, and I know this because I've broken my own. Case in point: I've always disliked actors, and now I'm not only dating one, I'm behaving like one.

Not that that latter part is exactly new; back in 2001 I had a co-starring role in some independent movie. Since there are thousands of independents shot in the city each year, that's not a big deal; trust me, all you have to do is live in New York, go to a couple dinner parties with creatives and sooner or later you will wind up in an independent film. (Incidentally, the film I was in never picked up distribution; it would be fair to say I ran the production into the ground and maybe ruined some lives along the way.)

After that I was in a couple student shorts. My friend Wendy went to grad school at NYU Film, and when she asked me to be in her projects, I did it without thinking. (If you've got fifteen minutes to stop putting the new cover sheets on your TPS reports, you can read about the experience here.)

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Well, apparently some "real" cinematographer saw Wendy's flicks, and thought I'd be good for some new project she was working on. Last week I get a phone call from said cinematographer.

"We want to know if you'd be interested in auditioning for this movie," she says. She goes on to describe the project: Full-length feature, three weeks shooting in September, the budget is less than a mil, I'll be paid at SAG rates.

"Sure," I say, standing in my kitchen in my underwear. It's 9pm but I'm eating cereal.

"The role is that of a Japanese guy. Can you do a Japanese accent?" she asks.

"Oh absolutely," I say, overselling myself.

"Great, I'll give the Casting Director your info."

#

On Monday I get a call from the Casting Director, who gives me an address in midtown and an appointment time for Thursday. "I'll e-mail you a 'side,'" she says. "On Thursday, be sure to bring your headshot and resume."

"Headshot and resume, right," I say. "See you Thursday."

I don't have a headshot, or a resume, and I didn't even know what a "side" was until recently. (It's a specifically-chosen excerpt of a script that you memorize for an audition.) I finish my cereal, then drink scotch in the kitchen until I get sleepy. Works like a charm.

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I get the side in the e-mail, print it out and start memorizing it. It's less than a dozen lines of dialogue. But reading it out loud, I realize something: my Japanese accent sucks. For someone who lived in-country for a year, I've got a tin fucking ear.

So I go down the hall with an iPod recorder-attachment and force my neighbor Yuka and her two Japanese co-workers to read the script into my iPod. Then I take the files back to my computer and listen to them. But while the three girls were sweet enough to help me out, the tentative readings and high-pitched, giggly voices are not great reference material.

Thankfully Ryo, one of Yuka's male assistants shows up, and I Shanghai him into making me a recording. Ryo's is much better. I edit the breaks and stutters out of it, create a WAV file, put headphones on and start drilling. After some scotch I sound great.

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"Hey Mike...I need a favor."

On Wednesday I realize I've forgotten to get a headshot, but my buddy Mike lives right down the hall. Mike's a big-shot Beauty photographer, flies all around the world to shoot high-end cosmetic campaigns, he just shot Zhang Ziyi and Adriana Lima for chrissakes. Getting Mike to shoot my headshot is like getting Mario Andretti to drive me somewhere in a taxi--the job doesn't behoove the talent.

But Mike's a good sport, and he comes down to my place (with a fucking $35,000 camera!), sets up some lights and starts snapping away.

I'm bad in front of a camera. Mike's used me before as a model stand-in for when he's testing lighting, and the shots always come out horrific. When light bounces off my face, it goes through a retard filter before entering the camera aperture, so in most of the shots my expression suggests something heavy has just crashed into the back of my head.

This time is no different, and Mike, used to working with professional models, is at a loss--until he spies the bottle(s) of scotch on my counter.

The second round goes fine, mostly because I've got a glass in my hand, a pleasant burning in the back of my throat and because Bartender Girl stops by. She can see I'm uncomfortable so she starts jumping around in the background, making animated faces until I laugh and relax.

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An hour later I've got professional-quality headshots being spat out of an obscenely expensive, desk-sized printer in Mike's studio. He even retouched the image. I asked him to duplicate my birthmarks and put them on both sides of my face, for symmetry, but he declined.

Later that night, I practice and practice my Japanese accent and mock up a crappy little resume.

Part of me wonders what the fuck I'm doing. Hopping from random odd job to random odd job, working on my book only when the mood strikes, with no consistent outlet for what I consider to be occasional, sporadic bursts of unfocused creativity. If I were a deeper man I'd ask myself certain questions: Where the fuck are my goals? What the fuck happened to the last thirty-fucking-five years of my life? I've never aspired to be an actor, so why am I sitting in my kitchen half-naked trying to say "Hey everybody" while butchering the pronunciation?

By all rights I shouldn't get this part, yet I find myself hoping to ace the audition. I'm starved for new experiences--I haven't been writing much lately--and I suspect being on-set of an actual feature-length film would be a new kind of interesting.

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On Thursday I'll take the train up to midtown and do the audition. Afterwards I'll walk out of there and traipse home past all the tall shiny buildings, the whizzing taxis, the slack-jawed tourists, the important businessmen, the poor people on the bus, the rich people in limousines, the successes, the failures. And I'll ask myself the same thing I ask myself all the time, whether out of arrogance, or fear, or hope, or despair: I wonder if the rules apply to me.

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