From the mouths of a**holes

About ten years ago, shortly after I'd decided to give up the uncertain and (for me) unsatisfying waters of advertising for a sensible career in acting, I thought it might be a good idea to take a class or two, since I had no idea of what I was doing. Of course, being hopelessly goal-oriented and a perennial skipper-of-steps (a whole nuther post), instead of taking, say, a good scene study course or a class in text analysis, I elected to take a seminar in cold reading, which, for the uninitiated, is the dubious-but-necessary practice of to picking up "sides" (a chunk of a full script) and giving a decent audition at the drop of a casting director's hat. (Because as a 33-year-old actress who was not particularly good-looking and had zero training and experience, I was for sure going to be highly sought after for many parts in film and television. Uh-huh.)

There are various teachers of cold reading technique in Los Angeles, hotbed of auditioning activity, but I had the great good fortune of landing at Margie Haber's studio, and, after being vetted and prepped by her excellent associate, I got to study with Margie herself. Who hated me. Hated me. Wait, did I mention she hated me? Because she did.

Okay, she didn't hate me, personally. How could she? She didn't know me from Adam. She hated my acting. Excuse me, my hackting (hack + acting = hackting^®). All the other boys and girls seemed to be able to just...be. I was acting up a storm, and it was almost unbearable to watch. But we had to watch, since the classes were all taped. That was part of the deal: see your shame; get motivated to fix it.

Many, many years (and classes and rehearsals and bad performances in worse plays) later, I finally "get" a lot of what Margie was trying to teach. Like any other kind of knowledge, good acting technique, and by extension, good acting, is born of many, many days/weeks/months/years of effort. And, frankly, just logging the miles. Getting the lessons off the page and into your bones. And as the lessons worked their way into my acting, they also affected my life. Understanding character made me a much better theatrical writer. Learning to really listen created a heretofore unrealized depth and richness in all my relationships.

And Margie's technique for successfully playing characters different from oneself, as in, with nuance and depth rather than broad strokes and caricature, got me through this last election.

It's gorgeously simple, really, although not at all easy. Let's say a quick skimming of the sides reveals that the character you're being asked to play is a Murdering Vampire Prostitute. You have neither spilt blood (on purpose), sucked blood (with malice aforethought) nor traded sex for goods or services (not going to get into the traditional marriage paradigm here, you know what I mean). How do you relate? By scanning your mental Rolodex® for previous stage-'n'-screen examples (read: stereotypes) of undead bloodthirsty whores? Or, perhaps, by finding the similarities between you and these ladies you were so quick to judge?

A caveat: any examples should either be lifted straight from the script or ever-so-c a r e f u l l y extrapolated. In other words, if the character is yelling in the scene...well, you ask yourself, have I ever yelled? Do I live in a city/smoke/swear/use contractions/scratch where it itches?

Does this person maybe feel passionately about a cause...just like I do? Does this person perhaps feel frustrated and overwhelmed by the situation at hand and scared for the future...just like little old liberal/conservative, pro-choice/pro-life, anti-war, pro-sports, antidisestablishmentarian me?

My own personal bias for years was, you guessed it, against actors. Years of exposure to the Stupid Flaky Self-Absorbed Artist myth was probably mostly to blame, although ten years of screening commercial audition tapes didn't help. I was incapable of putting myself in these poor schlubs' shoes. I was an overworked, underappreciated, universally loathed copywriter and so I ate my sandwich and took calls and all the rest of the careless, insensitive, self-absorbed agency behavior I now hear commercial actors complaining about at auditions. I was wrong (and I'm sorry).

It's funny: if I'd had a little Margie Haber Technique back when I was a copywriter, maybe I wouldn't have had to become an actor. And if actors could see the hideous process by which excellent copy gets beaten into shapeless wads of marketing goo, maybe they'd be kinder. Maybe they'd try harder to make that hack copy sound good.

Maybe if we could all see each other, the world would be a little bit nicer place to play in.

At the very least, the ads would be better.

xxx c

Me & the Zen Mistress of Business

I got to meet one of my blogging idols yesterday, and I'm delighted to report that the smart and talented Evelyn Rodriguez is every bit as terrific in person as she is on the web, plus way cuter. And yeah, there's kind of an online-datey feel to the whole thing that's sort of trippy: you're surfing and clicking through to a narrower and narrower set of specs when all of a sudden, wham!, you stumble upon what seems like a like-minded soul, or, as I like to call it, someone with whom you share Significant Areas Of Overlap. You eagerly devour statistics, stories and other wares that your Shiny Object has laid out for you to view. Then, if you're me, anyway, you project yourself into a fantasy world where the two of you seamlessly slip from talk of business ethics to sociopolitics to favorite experiences at sleepaway camp (and finally, if your point of entry was nerve.com, into dessert, the sack and a fabulous little Craftsman bungalow in Echo Park that you painstakingly rehab together in perfect harmony).

Meeting an online presence in the flesh yesterday, there was (for me, anyway) that customary, brief loss of equilibrium at first as I adjusted to a real, separate human being who moved and sounded and even looked slightly different than the 2-d version I had in my head, but after a little chit-chat about traffic and turkey dinners, we were off to the races and I couldn't stop talking. (Well, I stopped to let Evelyn talk from time to time, but only because she is very smart and interesting.)

Suffice to say it was a thoroughly energizing and enjoyable meeting, with the bonus-extra goodie of generating new blog entry ideas for (I think) both of us. Not that we couldn't email and post and IM back & forth to create a dialogue (well, no IMing, because it gives me heart palpitations), but there's something about meeting in person that kicks it into a higher gear, I'm a big fan from way back of the epistolery novel, but eventually, you want those see those scribblers meet up and watch the sparks fly. It's why I don't think cities will die off anytime soon (and I'm not alone: go here for lively discussion on urban splendor or the lack thereof). We're social creatures, even us crazy-geeky hermit types, and cities are a great way to keep us in proximity to one another. (According to an interesting article in The New Yorker a ways back, dense, old-style cities, like New York, may also be the most ecologically sound way to collect us, but I can't cite the source because in an insane cleaning frenzy, I pitched that issue. I am an asshole.)

So Evelyn, and any fellow bloggers (or, um, online dates) I might like to meet, here's to the next time fate throws us together geographically. And until then, let the Internet do its magical work.

xxx c

P.S. Evelyn, even though the other photo had better light, I had to use this one. The starbust-halo effect just seemed like some kind of summit endorsement from on high.

Alexander the "enh", part deux

How much do I love David Edelstein? Not that any half-sighted monkey couldn't tell this movie was gonna blow from frame one of the trailer, but Edelstein does the ninja-critic moves on Alexander. I was driving back from the gym when I caught this bit of his review of Oliver Stone's shiny turd on NPR:

Listening to Alexander appeal to his exhausted, irritable army to continue on to the heart of Asia instead of heading back to Babylon or Macedonia, you find yourself fearing not for his men, but for Colin Farrell's vocal cords, which sound as if they're being shredded to a powder. Farrell had a stylish bully-boy presence in Daredevil and in a terrific Irish ensemble movie called Intermission. At his best, he's shrewdly small-scale. You can imagine him firing up the lads at the pub before he gets too stuporous. But all the armies of the Western world? He doesn't begin to have the stature, or the lung power. And those pouffy blond locks don't help. Quite a bit has been written about Stone's inclusion of Alexander's (historically accurate) bisexuality. The point seems to be that Alexander knew no boundaries, that his sexuality was as fluid as his notion of geographical borders. But it's tame stuff: moist looks traded with a eunuch and with Jared Leto, an actor with bright blue eyes who's too self-intoxicated to be much of an erotic force.

Heh heh heh... (Yeah, I'll spend an extra couple of months in purgatory for my inappropriate glee, but it's worth it.)

Edelstein also has a pretty bitchin' quotation for the ages, in this case, about crazy/compelling Angelina Jolie:

I don't care how nuts she is, Jolie is the real deal: a gorgeous, epic-scaled actress who can transform herself from the inside out. She could eat Colin Farrell for breakfast and pick her teeth with Jared Leto. Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great.

Take that, boys.

xxx c

My creative process, defined (by Cy Coleman)

The music world sustained a huge loss with the death of Cy Coleman last week. He wrote some world-class jazzy pop tunes (Witchcraft, The Best Is Yet To Come) and collaborated on a number of hit musicals (Sweet Charity, City Of Angels, Barnum, On The Twentieth Century), winning a slew of Tony awards in the process. A couple of things interest me about Coleman. The first is his apparent comfort level with collaboration. For practical reasons as well as icky, glory-hogging ones, I've always wished I was one of those artists who could go it alone, but the truth is that my best work has come out of working with others. Having created those hits with someone else (a variety of partners in his case) didn't make him any less-so; it just made the work even more so.

I'm also intrigued by what seems to have been his unassuming, charming nature. It's not something I grew up expecting to find in a great talent, although as I've met more of them, I've come to realize that the Difficult Genius stance is as much of a cop-out as Tortured Genius or Starving Artist. In his capacity as journalist, my multi-talented friend, Rob Kendt (one of many great friends who pitched in on my play, #1 & #2), interviewed Coleman last year. In a recent blog entry devoted to Coleman, he recaps highlights of that interview, coming up with a few great quotes, the first of which is about the importance of looking forward, or at least, not looking back:

I asked him whether he'd been approached about doing a major Broadway revue of his hits, and he said he wasn't very interested: "A lot of these things happen because the composer goes after it. I'm just one of those people who don't want to go back and look at all that; it's over. I just keep moving and looking forward; it's my nature. People ask, 'What's your favorite song?' I say, 'The one I'm writing.' They get very disgusted with me."

There's also one of those neat artists-helping-artists stories where La Fitzgerald takes on the role of wise elder further along on the path:

"I played Bop City opposite Ella Fitzgerald and Illinois Jacquet. Ella said nice things to me; she was a very sweet woman. I had to follow Illinois and her doing 'Flying Home'; I didn't even have a drum, I had guitars in my trio. And she said, 'Cy, calm down. You're never going to play louder than me and Illinois doing "Flying Home," so why don't you just cool it, do your thing? They'll come to you eventually.' It was sweet advice, the best advice I could have possibly gotten at that time."

And finally, a terrific quote on the mystic chaos that is the creative process:

"People ask, 'When you see a beautiful sunset, do you go home write some wonderful thing?' I say, 'No, I'm more like Beethoven: opus 1, 2, 3, and 4.' But that's not true exactly; I'm affected by things, but it has to come into my blender and then it comes out.

"For example, in The Life, the duet at the end between the two girls, that's a killer. I was in Scotland looking at the fog and the ducks flying and a melody came to me. Now, it's a very raw, R&B kind of score, but I decided to use that melody; it had a very rural feeling. There was a purity there."

Funky Scottish ducks. You gotta love it...

xxx c

The Communicatrix...Listens?

Like most of you, the communicatrix has an agenda. Don't know what yours are, but mine is to share certain hard-won truths. Well, really, a bunch of petty, not-so-hard-won truths, best thinking-man's hoochie site, kick-ass theater, worst phone ever, and one Big Fat Mama Truth, the Truth, if you will.

I have some tools in my communicatrix arsenal already, relentless enthusiasm, reasonable facility with language, considerable experience shilling...er...communicating my message to others, but I'm still not really conversant. I still can't talk to anyone and have it land.

No, really, that's huge. That's everything, really. Imagine the possibilities: speak to a n y o n e...and have it land. I guess it would be easy if you had a really, really good weapon in your arsenal, like a burning bush or thunderbolts or some other groovy, god-like accessory, but I don't. I don't even have Vocal Amplitude. (Seriously. Tiny ribcage = no vocal amplitude.)

The secret for mere mortals, I think, is listening. Simple, right? Easy? Um...no.

Really listening requires a detachment from ego I'm generally reluctant to muster. I don't think I'm alone, here, either, based on the number of conversations I've had where I actually catch overtalking happening in mid-sentence. Not the end-of-sentence, I-had-that-idea-too overtalking: full-on, hands-over-ears, I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA!!! overtalking.

And this sometimes happens with really good friends who really care about me, not just garden-variety buggers in sales calls and ad agency pitch meetings (ad agencies are notorious hotbeds of overtalking, trust me).

I won't even get into the red vs. blue histrionics that have been flying fast & furious from both sides of late except to say that they're largely a catalyst for me getting off my bony ass and fixing my own nasty little listening problem.

My new-favorite pundit, Evelyn Rodriguez, who's all about the critical importance (and true power) of real communication, has written a couple of great posts recently about what happens when we stop listening and the magic that can happen when we start. She posits a really wise theory on the root of it all:

Being unheard, unappreciated and unlistened to is intimately linked with unwantedness. The isolation is overpowering. We can move away from the separation by remaining open-ended rather than closed meme-attractors ourselves.

Every relationship advice source worth its salt says that if you're looking for something in others, first find that thing in yourself. (Hell, even Dorothy figured out that if you're looking for happiness, check the backyard before you go running off on some poppy-induced, yellow-brick road to nowhere.)

More than anything in the world right now, I want to be heard. So I'm gonna start listening.

Anyone with me?

xxx c

To do: #1. Make list

Wherefore, this compulsion to make lists?

I wish I could say it was purely motivated by my lifelong, Virgo-esque pursuit of efficiency, but that thesis was shattered when I found that I derived exactly as much joy in composing a "have done" list as I did a "to do" list.

It's got something to do with order, alright (pun intended); the more chaotic and random life seems, the greater my desire to exert some measure of control. Here are the steps I'm going to take to ensure that: (a) I buy my house before I'm too old to tend the garden I want surrounding it; (b) my cupboards don't have three more jars of duplicate condiments moldering away in them; (c) I have clean underwear next week.

But clearly, the truth goes deeper than that. Because at some point, I can no longer resist the urge to tell the world, or the person next to me, or hell, myself, for that matter, that these are: (1) the best cover songs ever written, (2) my favorite 20 movies, (3) the blogs I think are worth visiting.

And what, or who, is left off: (i.) the best- or worst-dressed lists; (ii) the bazillion incarnations of red or blue lists; (iii) the most-viewed TV shows of last night lists; is as telling as who, or what, makes it on.

For me, lists are a way of getting at the truth, albeit in code. I have an intention to buy a house, therefore I make a list. I have fascination with cover songs, movies and the Internet, so I make a list. I don't have enough time (or courage) to write essays declaring my love, so I make lists.

Of course, I'm not alone in rockin' the list. Lists must be inherently fascinating to most humans or they wouldn't have such a presence on late-night talk shows, Apple's fascistic music delivery system and people's personal websites.

Which reminds me...

To do:

1. make list of lists I want to make
2. code lists with links
3. upload to blog

xxx
c

"Drive, drive, drive; branding, branding, branding."

Back in the go-go '80s, my art director and I made silk purses out of some serious sow's-ear assignments and so were let into the inner sanctum: pitching spots for the second pool of a wildly successful TV campaign for the agency's big, fat American car account.

The campaign was the first (yes, really) to use Boomer music to sell to Boomers. It was such a radical notion back then that many of the artists passed on the opportunity to score cash, either for fear of compromising their art or of tarnishing their image among their fanbase (i.e., diluting their own brand). Hell, it was such a new thing, maybe no one knew what to ask for. End result was the client had to pay scads of money for really expensive soundalikes for many, many executions.

Anyway.

Kate (art director) & I were pretty passionate about creating good work back then, and, in my Virgo-perfectionist-good girl way, I was even then concerned with adhering to Campaign Strategy, Brand Personality and Unique Selling Proposition. Not really a problem; to the contrary, I enjoy working within the confines of an assignment way more than blue-sky creativity. Blank pages make me panicky.

And we could be mostly honest! The cars had been restyled to look hipper. They had even re-engineered some stuff to make them...um...drive better and stuff. So we wrote spots to tell (boomer) America how these cars were made just for them, with (boomer) music and (boomer-relevant) stories to match. But for the client, there was always one thing missing: enough "branding."

We puzzled and puzzled over this: the campaign had, we thought, successfully redefined the brand. People were talking about it (buzz), people were buying cars (sales), what exactly was the problem here?

Our older, wiser creative director, a real Car Guy from the three-martini-lunch days, explained: frames on the storyboard that featured close-ups of the car brand doohickey affixed to the vehicle. Lots of them. So we added them, alternating them with driving shots, until there was an acceptable ratio. Which Kate, as an Advertising & Branding Specialist, would point out when she took the clients through the visuals: "Drive, drive, drive; branding, branding, branding."

So the magical, mythical marketing tool of "branding" came down to this: two young women slapping more product shots on a storyboard so we could get this sucker in the hands of directors, producers and stylists who would do the real work of making this product seem meaningful to the consumer. And this was considered successful branding. By everyone. At least, everyone I came in contact with back then.

And in a way, it was. The process (of advertising, movies, film, etc) has become so transparent to consumers that even the hipper advertising of the 1970s, 1980s & 1990s seems quaint, if not outright camp. The emperor is buck naked; branding is dead. Hugh MacLeod speaks of it elegantly (and way more concisely) here. (He'll also lead you to lots more great links on the topic because he's good like that.)

I've no doubt that as the marketplace has shifted, the processes at agencies have gotten more sophisticated to try to adapt to the new reality. I doubt that our impertinent display of cynicism would be tolerated in a meeting, especially a client meeting, today.

But while I've been out of the development game for awhile, I'm still a consumer. And an employee: I act in these masterpieces of marketing that I then see on TV (as often as possible, I hope, if they're airing National Network). And I gotta say, I think there are still a lot of marketing peeps out there more interested in ramming a USP down someone's throat than they are in initiating a dialogue.

xxx
c

Art RULES!!!

I was having a pretty good night anyway (improvisational, my favorite kind) hitting the Eastside galleries, catching up with friends, nursing a bourbon at a local watering hole whilst scribbling notes for the show's big patter number--when out of the blue, I got blindsided by this breathtaking painting by Gary Taxali:

Could I afford it? Um...no. "Volume is down," as my agent is wont to say these days, and residuals aren't money in the bank until...well, until they're money in the bank.

But this damned thing started screaming at me from across the room. Nay, worse--it was whispering softly, the bastard! That hasn't happened for awhile with a costly piece of art (thank jeezus), but I've learned the hard way to listen to The Voice. So there are less something-or-others (steaks? shoes? heat?) for awhile. So be it.

Connection is everything. I've been a little out of touch with two-dimensional art as a form of connection.

It's nice to be back in the pool.

xxx
c

43 years buys you something.

I'm not an especially fast learner when it comes to life lessons, but the silver lining there is that having had all those extra years of crappy stuff makes me really appreciative now.

This eye-popping revelation on the heels of a great couple of nights of rehearsals: the first, for someone else's play; the second, for the one I'm co-writing with a friend (link to come).

Art may not be everyone's thing, but it's pretty clearly mine. As my writing partner (who works a f/t, six-day-a-week day job) put it: "I've never been more tired or stressed out. And I've never been happier."

Roger that.

xxx
c

No buy...do!

A few years ago, I was given to doing (unsolicited, oddly enough) an incredibly poor take on Yoda dispensing advice. I think the original exhortation was along the lines of "there is no 'try'; only 'do'" or something similarly zen-by-way-of-Lucas-like. Anyway, "no try...do" became my credo for an embarrassingly long time ("embarrassingly" because really, if it's a Guiding Principle, shouldn't one make sure it's elegant as well as succinct?). And now, equally embarrassingly, I am adopting this rather pathetic, semi-pithy anti-consumerist credo. Dorothy Parker, I'm not.

Worse, I will be buying things still: I must eat; my landlord has this thing about rent. But lately I've found myself resorting to Retail Therapy a bit too often for my tastes. Sure, it's all tax-deductible and/or purchased at the local Goodwill, but still -- it's the principle of the thing. I'm running from something and I done give up runnin', son.

So I'm turning inward. I'm shining that big, fat spotlight on the interior of my soul and scattering the cockroaches. Thank you, my virtual friends. Let the cleansing begin...

xxx c