Forgot to mention

Posted 9:30 AM by sean
I was at 57th street and 7th Ave. in Manhattan the other day, and I was approached by a woman. It was snowing and I was wearing my hat and my noise cancelling head-phones, so she just started talking as if I could hear her. I pulled off one phone and said, "I'm sorry..."

"It's a cold night and I don't live far from here. Maybe we could go back to my place and have a little fun"

Matter of fact. This woman was... I mean, it's hard to know, it was snowing she was in a puffy jacket and a hood, but I'll say she was just this side of sixty. Just before I realized she was a prostitute, I heard myself say, "I'm flattered, but I really can't."

"You think I'm too old for you, that's it," she said.

"No," I almost yelled, now realizing what was going on, "No, nono, the thing is, I'm probably too young for you!" And I sort of laughed like I was charming.

She said, "look at this," and opened her coat enough just to reveal her cleavage. Which was nice. Well-maintained, the inside sections of her breasts looked almost polished. Buffed.

I just muttered something and walked on.

*****
Two days ago I was walking along 31st street in Astoria and a woman who was clearly in her 70s fainted right in front of me. I was barely able to get my arms out and catch her as she started going down. Another guy who was walking near me grabbed her other arm, and we held her, slowly lowering her to her knees.

I asked her if she was okay and she smiled and said, "I got so dizzy all of a sudden!" but she was clearly not looking right at me. I asked her if we should call 911, and she said, "be a dear and call a cab."

"Be a dear". I swear to God.

I went across the street and asked a cab if he could swing around. There are only gypsy cabs in Astoria, and these guys are mostly vultures. There was a third guy with us, and of course a gaggle of older women who all sort of gathered about in a second and clucked over this woman like an instant immigrant sewing circle. The third guy went to talk to the cops.

The gypsy cab swung around and waited for about thirty seconds. When he saw there was commotion and it might be a longer wait, he just took off. Of course, a minute later the third guy came back and said the police could call an ambulance, but they couldn't take the woman home.

The cab had spun another U-turn and was across the street, so I went to get him back. He turned and yelled in my face, "I cross street and you no get in cab, I don't have time for you."

I swear to God, I wanted to crack this mother fucker's skull in two. But years of spending time with a higher quality of person made me grab his jacket and quietly say in his face, "You're a bad man," and push him back into his cab door. That's it.

It took about two minutes to get another cab, and he pulled right up to the curb. I told him what was going on and he said, "I get her home, I get out of cab and make sure she get inside. Don' worry."

The second she was in the cab, the crowd evaporated like rubbing alcohol on a hot skillet. No-one in New York wants another goddam friend, we don't have time. The cab drove off and I walked away. For some reason I turned back and I saw the third guy, the one who went to get the cops, walking the other way and turning back toward me. We both just raised a hand to each other and then turned back and walked away.

Freelance

Posted 8:56 AM by sean
Being a "producer" is a difficult thing to explain. Unfortunately, it has very little to do with either creating something you can hold in your hand or even, y'know, produce. But it is putting yourself in a position where all questions come to you and all questions you answer become your problem. That a position most people want to avoid.

Being a producer, in most fields, means getting money from one person and distributing it to a larger group of people who are, in turn, doing a series of small jobs that, when put together, creates a larger whole. So, depending on the number of jobs and the size of the whole, a producer's job is either more important or less. Film producers employ thousands of people, sit through the credits of any movie and remember that half the people who worked on the movie aren't credited, and you can see why film producers are very important, very powerful people.

I'm not a film producer. I produce live theater and music recordings.

Live theater employs a few people and doesn't pay them well. This is an act of love we are doing. To call it a job is silly, we're doing what we want to do and, I swear to God, if you ever catch me complaining about producing theater, I want you to stab me in the inner thigh so it takes me a little while to bleed to death.

The music recordings employ a bit more people. Quite a few, in fact. I wrote a blog on this earlier, but the work I do creates jobs for arrangers, engineers, musicians, directors, and singers, not to mention the random assistants and software guys. I would say that every regular size gig, ten to twelve songs, that I get employs about twenty five people.

And we are people who live and die on the edge of this knife. We went to school. We chose a life of music early on. We spent hours every morning practicing, scales, do-re-mi's, bow position, hand position, breath control. We learned the circle of fifths, we learned figured bass, we learned how to use 7th chords.

And we are willing to be paid very little. As a producer, I fight like crazy to get these people paid a decent wage, but they will always agree to a pittance. And we agree that what we record is yours, you get to do whatever you want with it, you recorded it digitally so it's yours until our grandchildren die, and we'll never ask for another penny. Just the crappy wage that you pay me for the three hours I spend in the studio, not the thousands of hours I spent practicing, not the thousands of hours for the rest of history that what I recorded will be broadcast, just what we agreed on for the short time I actually play my oboe, sing my song, wave my arms, do my thing for you.

So, when you take that away... When you decide that the small budget that could go to freelance musicians scraping out a living, barely surviving, should go to you... when you think to yourself, "I am getting paid to be on staff at the publishing company because, despite learning some music in school, mostly I majored in business and got drunk at the frat and now I could easily do this stuff with MIDI and pay myself twice for this job...", when you say "it doesn't have to be *that good*, these are kids listening to this for chrissakes, what the hell do they know..." when you do these things, it makes you a terrible person. Plain and simple. These small acts of avarice are what makes the world base and mean.

Through the history of time, there has always been the Medicis or the frickin' Catholics, or someone who was demanding the very best of us. Someone who was willing to pay for greatness, if we were willing to try to achieve it. It isn't that way now. Our great musical stars are, for the most part, marketers, selling sneakers and kool-aid.

I won't kvetch. This is the world, aint no use in complaining. But if you read this and you buy a CD for your children and you can't stand listening to it because it is so bad, call the people who made it. Tell them that it should be *better*. Your kids are growing up ignorant. All of us are living in the gutter, but this music is reaching for nothing.

Working

Posted 9:36 AM by sean
I've been resistant about discussing the acting class too publicly for several reasons. I've also been hesitant about discussing As You Like It rehearsals for a whole different set of reasons. I'm not going to describe the ongoing "fat, have no work" despair, because I find it boring to be living it, I can't imagine you'd be all that entertained by reading about it.

I can talk a little bit about the class last night. Let me preface by saying that it's impossible to know what you are doing as an actor, thus matching it with maybe dance as the only art forms entirely ephemeral and entirely external. I've been in scenes with people where the director will say, "this isn't working" and they will go into long descriptions of the ways they went about creating their character, rhapsodic melodies about grandparents and journals kept and the striving, and I just want to say, "it doesn't matter what you think you are doing, the director said it isn't working."

So, talking about what I did or didn't do in class is absurd. If you are a writer, you get done writing and then, in place of anecdote, you show them the writing. And then they read it, and that's the shared experience. Music can be recorded, art hangs in museums for centuries. Don't talk to me about movies, movies are bullshit and you know it. Movies are to acting what music videos are to ballet.

So, let me work backwards. Jordana and I did a scene from "Angels In America" last night, and we were the last people to perform in class. At some point, afterwards, almost every single person congratulated me on my breath-taking work, which is your first indication that it wasn't that good. Actors don't tell each other that what they did was good unless it was only sort of good- good in that "good, but I could do it better" way. When Claire and I did "Dirty Juanita", no-one spoke to us after the class.

But it also could have been the look of humiliation on my face after the scene was done. I had to die in the scene. Actually, I had to pretend to die, and then really die. So, actually, I had to act like I was pretending to die, and then I had to act like I was really dying, except that you can't play that, I had to act like a guy who was a great actor who was pretending to die and then I had to act like a guy who was a great actor who then dies.

All of this while I'm faking out a woman who is actually a figment of my imagination.

So, I was a little "in my head" as they say.

For those of you following along in the script, it's the scene where Roy Cohn dies and he is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenburg. I did a bit of research on Roy Cohn, I read the parts of the play that he appears in, but I didn't watch the movie and I tried to block out the live performance in my head.

Anyway, our teacher was really cool about the piece, congratulated us on being so brave on chosing something that hard, and then went nuts for how good Jordana was in the scene. Which is actually nice. She really ought to be famous, and maybe she still will. If there's anything I know, it's how to hang my hat on the right hat-rack. But I'm supposed to go back and do the scene again on Friday, and I just don't know if I can get through it.

Three in German for you ...

Posted 10:42 AM by sean
Ihre lips hung was on my, and its kiss so good and dear that before pure Wolsein almost sad become wanted me. There I had to think: if I all these thousand songs of the world at the same time and understand sing can, sound and sing could of grasses and flowers and person and clouds and all, of the foliage forest and of the Föhrenwald and also of all animals, and in addition yet all songs of the distant seas and mountains, and that of the stars and moons, and whom that of all zuglech in me interior, then ware ISong new and jades would have to stand as a star in the sky. "Züruck goes away no," said it seriously and friendlily, "one must always vorwartsgehen, if one the world ergrundern wants." ---Alles is of a fairy tale of Hesse, that is named only "fairy tale".