Some Time

Posted 6:44 PM by sean
I find myself with half an hour or so before I have other things to do, and I realize that I am taking a piece of good news very badly. Now, I am not going to be able to disguise this enough should I begin to speak about it specifically, and disguising it is something I should do, so I will just have to ask a related question.

Why is it that some people, regardless of their staggering lack of competence and obvious blind ambition, seem to be able to trip their way up the food chain, whereas other people of enormous talent and at least medium drive seem to spend so much of their time completely stalled? It really seems painfully unfair, the kind of unfairness that requires and explanation.

Of the latter group I have only this to say: It should be hard to be successful. It should be enormously hard. Doctors have to study for years and years, hours every day, sleepless nights, thousands of patients, millions of intensely studious minutes before they are allowed to treat people, and that is a science where the answers are somewhat clear. As an artist, you are saddled with the responsibility of expressing the inexpressible, of soothing the savage breast, of being the food of love, and it should be extremely difficult.

Songwriters and actors should be one in a million, not a dime a dozen, and the glut in our market of purveyors is unfortunate because it allows complacency among the above average. If you get on stage and make it through your set without forgetting a whole song, then you've won the day, and the same is true if you remember all youor lines. Maybe if people weren't so damn impressed that we remember our lines, we would demand more of ourselves.

So ask yourself if you have worked as hard as a doctor has worked since he graduated high school. If you have, and you aren't successful, then, seriously, quit, because you obviously have no talent at all. My guess is that if you get an hour a day writing in, you feel pretty good, if you can write two songs a week, you feel great and if you are off book before tech starts you feel ahead of the curve.

I know for myself that I have never worked as hard as I need to. There are five or six phone calls, just phone calls, that I should make that will help my career, and I'm not making them. So, don't think I'm accusing you of anything that I don't hold myself responsible for. If you tell me you want me to produce your play, but then you don't keep writing me and reminding me, it's really your fault, not mine, that your play won't be produced.

But, allowing for the fact that it should be difficult, why do I hear about performances of plays either starring, produced or written by people who are really bad at their jobs? My friends Dan, John and Anthony are all three *amazing* directors. So why are so many bad directors working? I understand, they hustle, they have connections, they're handsome, some other bullshit (all of which I don't believe too deeply) but how is it that they *keep* working?

I have worked with a lot of people in New York on a lot of different projects, and I am proud of almost all of it, even the stuff that wasn't all that good. There is one project that I was barely attached to and the guy who was in charge of it was, hands down, the worst person I've ever worked with. And he is now enjoying a sort of success. He's unpleasant and untalented.

You don't have any answers, and there's no higher power to ask. Maybe it's absurd, on September 10, to ask why some things happen to some people, but the question isn't so much, "why is cruelty dealt out unevenly" but more, "why is financial success in the arts so heart breakingly arbitrary?"

Coupling

Posted 2:07 PM by sean
My friends Deb and Steve got married a few weeks ago. They were staying in my house right before the day and Steve was trying to find his toothbrush. Instead of looking through their bags he asked Deb, who knew exactly where it was (it was in the toothbrush slot in their bag) and asked him why he didn't just look for it. His defense was, "if I don't ask you where my toothbrush is, comedians will have nothing to joke about."

And it's true. What are you supposed to do about the fact that a lot of cliches are correct? One of the more disturbing ones to me is the fact that every person who is coupled up wants their friends to be coupled up as well. And it's not that we want our friends to find love, in fact that is *wildly* incidental. We want our friends to have a partner that they can bring to social events, and we want that partner to be awesome.

My friend Mac has a girlfriend that he loves and that Jordana and I adore, but he's failing us. Because she's busy. It just won't do. What's the point of my best friend having a girlfriend if she doesn't *accompany* him to stuff? We like her, she likes us, but it still isn't fulfilling our need to have *two goddam people at dinner*.

It isn't natural, it isn't right and it isn't kind. We have many single friends and about 14% of what Jordana and I talk about when we're alone is how to hook some of them up with the others. Would Scott like Amy? Or the other Amy? Wouldn't it be great if Carrie fell in love with Aaron? I mean, it is patently *RETARDED* how much we want our friends to fall in love with each other.

I don't know why. Have we ever suffered because Mac shows up without a date? I mean, totally the opposite. I am so jealous of the time I'm around Mac that no matter how many people are around I keep trying to find a way to slip off with him. Is it some kind of patriarchial thing? Absolutely not, our gay and lesbian friends are just as likely to get dive bombed with our coupling instincts (which has led to powerfully awkward "coffee dates" where Jordana and I stare across the table at two guys who are obviously here because we want them to date). Do we want to expand out group of friends? Jesus, no. I've got about six more friends than I have time to spend with them at any one time. I am constantly missing my friends because I never get to see them.

It's too self congratulatory an answer to say that we want others to find the happiness we've found, I'm guessing that it's more the opposite. Cult members must, at some point, want to ask someone not in the cult what they think of the cult, sure, but it's much better to ask smart people *in the cult* what they think of the cult. That way, they know everything about the cult that you know and they've still decided to stay in it. Mormons may question the validity of the church in their private moments to each other, but they'll never ask a Baptist.

There was a group of married or recently divorced men sitting on top of Ian's hill around a fire and Ian asked how often everyone masturbated. The answers varied from essentially none to an impressive 14 times a week, but it was interesting because we were all in similar circumstances and we were all using the same barometric scale, as it were. I could ask my single friends who live alone, but that answer wouldn't tell me anything about myself.

(I, of course, lied and yelled out "15!.. In fact I'm doin' it right NOW!" and belched)

(Also, I'm lying in the above paragraph. No-one said "essentially none".)

So, yes, the comedians are right. We're trying to get you coupled up. But please understand, we're doing it because we think you're smarter than we are, and if you do it then a) it'll seem like doing it is smart and b) we can ask you questions. Please know that we don't want you dating because we feel like you are pathetic without a life partner, we want you dating because we're scared that we are with one.

Labor Day Email

Posted 4:16 PM by sean
Mac said: Who's got the report on Labor Day at Ian & Tessa's? It was really boring without me, right? Right?

It was actually really fun, and by Monday morning I had one of those Carolina headaches, the ones that hurt from not enough sleep and too much liquor. I would say it was an incredibly fun weekend, except that at some point, when at Ian's, we always play a game and I always limp away from it wishing everyone was dead.

I hate parlor games more than I can describe.

Other than that, it was incredible. My bowling scores: Game one - 43, Game two - 158. It takes me a coupla frames to get the spin down. We had a fire up on the hill and drank scotch and talked about masturbation. Seth danced. My sister showed up, we explained to her that Megan Ketch would touch her in a way that would make her feel weird, then Megan kissed her on the mouth and ran her hands down Michelle's pants and said, "I love these pants". Salem got drunk and announced that while he didn't want anything going in his ass, he'd like things pulled out. Then he qualified that "anything" to "maybe a finger, y'know, just a little wiggle" and then he passed out. Seth danced some more. I beat the be-jesus out of all comers at foosball. We had a talent show which featured Jamie Block singing a song about his mom and Jordana singing a song about radioactivity and Michelle singing about conversations and heartache and me singing about cicadas and locusts and the shrieking of innumerable gibbons and Seth dancing. Brian Walsh slept in a tent up on the hill until he woke up because inside the tent it was 187 degrees. "I have an inside thermometer. It's Nordic."

We went to a fair and they had corndogs that I could write a blog about. They had a display of art from all the k-12 schools, and it blew my mind. There was a one weird cubist drawing of a woman in a green slip that was billowing up around her waist so you could see her bare butt and it was only after staring at it for a few minutes that I realized it was the statue of liberty holding her torch upside down and dropping her tablet as if in a giant wind. Painted in acrylic by some tenth grader. They had live animals and kettle corn, the latter smelling far better than the former. Off in a corner, I thought I saw Seth dancing, but it was actually a sheep contest. A gay sheep contest.

I golfed and did much better than I would have guessed. I'm a golfer now.

But yeah, I would have loved it if you were there, although you would have had to sleep in Brian's tent.

Why writers write

Posted 11:02 AM by sean
You've got to go read my friend Mac's blog . It is simply incredible, and it deals with not just the specific problem it addresses outright, but also with the problem of art in our world right now.

When Arthur Miller wrote The Cruible, it was us who saw it as a dressing down of McCarthyism. When I went and saw the movie "Hero", I thought it was a condemnation of Bush's critics and Jordana thought it was pro-communist propaganda. Politics is like air, even when you aren't thinking about what you're breathing, you're still breathing.