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Third Meisner class

I’m totally exhausted. Problem is I was exhausted before the class tonight. I was flat all night and everyone knew it. The good news? I get to do it all over again tomorrow night! … Super.

This stuff is just plain tough. I constantly feel like I’m trying to build a house out of toothpicks and I can’t seem to do any part of it right. I can’t seem to get out of my head and overcome my own inhibitions.

I think, when this course is over, I’ll be a lot more comfortable with working off a script. I think the next course offered is a scene study course; I expect I’ll be more comfortable with scripted scenes after this course.

Anyway, it’s been tough and I can only hope that I’m learning in spite of myself and how I feel. If I was to judge, I’d say I’m just spinning my wheels in this class. But, an acting coach has told me repeatedly not to judge myself and to do the best work I can do. I’ll have to go back tomorrow night with the mindset that I’ll do the best work I can and continue to learn.

Friday, I have an audition for Noon Preview. I’ve been working through my monologue for a while and I feel pretty comfortable with it. I’ll be curious to see how it goes.

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Second Meisner class

This one, while more emotionally and physically draining, was much better overall and I feel like I made a lot of progress from Monday to today. Monday, we started with the repetition exercise and we’ve since been adding levels to the same exercise. As I understand it, this is really the core of Meisner and I expect we’ll be doing it throughout the course.

Tonight, we were to bring in something to ‘do’ that fulfilled three criteria: It had to have personal significance, had to be done under tight time constraints and it had to be difficult. I brought in my guitar and tried to re-string it. It was right on for difficulty, but the time constraint and personal significance had to be embellished. Basically, I ended up trying to restring my guitar while my girlfriend broke up with me and the lead singer of a band yelled at me–the roadie–to get his guitar ready ASAP.

Anyway, I felt a lot more comfortable tonight and I was surprised by the spectrum of emotions I experienced. In general, I’m pretty even keeled, so busting through several emotions in a short period of time was really exhausting for me.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll sleep better tonight than I did on Monday.

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First Meisner class

I had my first of eight two-hour classes tonight. My first reaction is a feeling of serious inferiority and inadequacy; my second reaction is that I learned a lot and this is going to be a very productive month.

My first reaction was due to, I think, the instructor’s style–very candid, blunt and sometimes abrasive–and the fact that two of the four people in the class have studied acting and Meisner before. It was stressful and very humbling for me and I hope I can really step it up on Wednesday.

My second reaction came in hindsight as I drove home. I realized that, although it was really difficult and I felt inferior, I learned a lot and came out of my shell some. My biggest problem is not that my mind won’t keep up, but that my body won’t do what my mind knows it should. I often spend too much time analyzing and not enough time reacting; but that’s what this class is all about. “Getting out of your head” is a phrase I heard several times tonight. I also heard “Being real in imaginary circumstances” several times.

Ironically, a huge part of the class seems to be reading and reacting to people. I normally do this very well, but in the class setting, I was thinking too much and overanalyzing to the point where I wasn’t trusting my reads and everything to stay flat. Mostly, I think it’s a self-confidence thing. In situations where I feel outgunned, I often fall back on thinking to bail me out. That doesn’t work with this stuff, so I have to dispose of a long used crutch.

All in all, it’s going to be a difficult four weeks because I don’t think I’ll ever be at the level of the other three in the class (at least not before the course is up). So I feel pretty ignorant, naive and slow. That being said, I guess it’s not really how I do in relation to the others in the class, but how I do in relation to how I was before the class began.

One other side effect of the class: I’m freakin’ tired. I haven’t been this tired in a while. I’m going to sleep.

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Laptop

I finally got one. Dell was having a big fat sale today, so I took advantage. It’ll be a couple weeks before I have it, but I’ve been waiting to buy one for about 3 years, so what’s a couple more weeks? Anyway, it’ll be good for traveling, playin’ poker on the couch, yuppy-ing it up at Starbucks and ‘going wireless’.

Busy time comin’ in November

Things I could/will be doing in November:

  • Going to Cali again–strictly business this time
  • Going to Florida for Thanksgiving
  • Taking the Meisner short course
  • Auditioning for Noon Preview (a local showcase by a group called S.T.A.G.E.)
  • Hopefully performing at Noon Preview
  • Shopping for an agent

I guess it doesn’t look like much ‘on paper’, but I’m gonna’ be busy next month. I’m pretty excited about it because I haven’t been doing much since my coach split for L.A. I’ve enjoyed my time off, but I’m ready to get back to progress.

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Back to school

Looks like I’ll be starting a short course studying the Meisner technique starting next Monday. I’m excited about it and a bit nervous, but not nearly as nervous as I was when I took my first class a couple years ago or when I started taking private lessons earlier this year.

Anyway, I’ll probably post what I’m learning about there once the class begins. That is all.

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Being self aware

I few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’ve been experiencing a time of self-realization. I guess that time started in January when I moved to Texas, but it’s hard to say. Mostly, I think this is attributable to my living situation. Since I’ve been living alone, I’ve had nothing but time on my hands and I’ve found that I spend a lot of that time thinking. Sometimes I think out loud, sometimes I write things down, sometimes I just sit and think.

But most of that thought has been me finding out more about myself. I’ve spent a lot of my time working through things I’ve believed for a long time. Really, I’ve taken time to scrutinize those beliefs, so I understand them better and I’m more confident in what I believe and who I am.

I guess part of this process culminated on Friday when I went to see Garden State again. It sounds silly, but going to see a movie alone was a big deal for me, and I think it was a pretty big step that I needed to take toward being a confident actor. Really, going to see a movie had nothing to do with that so much as the fact that I did something that has been so far out of my comfort zone for so long.

I’ve also been intent on continually learning. Mostly, I’ve been studying acting, but I’ve also been studying cinema and poker and reading books by Christian authors. Earlier, I was talking to a friend and she mentioned that she’s been learning a lot lately. It hit me that if I’m not learning something, I feel like I’m just sort of wasting away, standing still. Turns out that, lately, the biggest thing I’ve been learning about is me.

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Old egos die hard

For a long time, I’ve had this thing about not going to movies alone. A few weeks ago, I started thinking about that and asking myself why I had such a problem with that. Well, I discovered it was basically an ego thing: I was too cool to go to a movie by myself because that was lame and that’s what lamos do.

Obviously, this line of thinking is totally ridiculous and smacks of insecurity. I realized I had invented a stigma associated with lone movie-goers. Not only was that silly, but the irony is that it seems a person needs to be more secure in himself to go to a movie alone. So, tonight I went to see Garden State again.

It’s still a good movie and I was really impressed by Natalie Portman this time around. Her character just seems so genuine, it’s impossible not to believe her.

The bizarre world of choosing headshots

My proofs have been online since Monday night and I’ve been agonizing over finding the perfect shots ever since. I think I’ve got it down to three, but I just can’t seem to commit. Fortunately, my acting coach has given me a lot of input as to what is good for the Dallas market.

The funny thing about headshots is that ‘civilians’, as my coach calls them, usually don’t pick shots that are actually good for use as headshots and they all pick differently from each other. I got input from several of my friends and only 1 of about 6 chose even a single headshot that my coach recommended.

Job hunting in SoCal

I’ve submitted my resume to a company in Southern California. I guess I’m starting to make strides toward eventually moving out there. I’m a little nervous, but I’m also excited about being closer to where I want to be. I don’t know how promising this opportunity is, but I’ve been told a few times that there are jobs available for people with “my background”, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m in kind of a tough spot because my lease is up here in February, but I have to sign a new one by December. I would like to be in L.A. mid-year next year, so that means either going month-to-month or signing another year-long lease. Either way I’m gambling, and I don’t like that.

Workin’ the website again

I’ve asked my buddy to consider building up my website, so I can start using it to ‘advertise’. I’m thinking I’ll probably break it into three sections: weblog, engineering and acting. That way, everything will be central, but distinctly separate. I’ll use it as a place to post my resumes, headshots and thoughts. Seems like good use of a webpage.

Of course, this all depends on my web-designer buddy, who’s a big fat slacker. I’m trying to guilt him into doing it.

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Back from L.A.

I’ve been back for a few days, but I’ve been too lazy to post. Go figure.

Anyway, my time in L.A. was great. I went to the Santa Monica Pier, hung out with a good friend, met a VP at Sony Pictures and got a free lunch, got a free tour of Sony Picture Studios, got hooked up with a free copy of Angels & Demons (I hear it’s good), got my headshots done, and saw Garden State.

Now, let’s get right to Garden State, shall we? I remember a teaser a long time ago where the announcer guy said, “Rolling Stone calls it the seminal movie of this generation” Obviously, I was interested because I wouldn’t want to miss something so important to my generation. I knew Zach Braff (“Scrubs guy”) was in it and I heard Natalie Portman co-starred, but that’s about all I knew. Turns out it’s a fantastic movie. I’ve been seeing a lot of those lately, but this one took the cake.

The plot is solid and poignant, the soundtrack is awesome, the acting is perfect and the movie comes together nicely to tell a great story that I can largely sympathize with (I chose “with” as the preposition to end that sentence with). I don’t want to spoil anything, but the movie just hits so many things right on the head; relationships first among those things. The movie explores many different types of relationships and seems to understand each type completely.

I need to stop rambling because I’m not even beginning to do this film justice. I’ll be buying it when it comes out on DVD in December.

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Wow.

Yeah, that gets its own sentence, its own paragraph. What a fantastic film. Charlie Kaufman simply has a knack for writing unusual but wonderful screenplays and in Eternal Sunshine, just as in Adaptation, his writing is complimented with fantastic acting.

This film defies those who would insist on pigeon-holing it into either a plot-driven or a character-driven piece. It’s both and it’s neither; it’s really about something that is written so well between the lines that it is the lines. I sound like I’m trying to be profound, but I’m not. It is profound and I’m simply having trouble processing everything.

Kaufman floats the idea of a true love, but he contradicts that idea with a persistent lust of a kind that manifests itself almost identically. Even as I’m writing, other contrasts and comparisons are coming to mind. The entire movie is about points of view, perspectives and human nature.

Gaudry does a fantastic job of capturing things so etherreal as the mind and memory, and does an even better job of showing us what it might look like to have one’s memories erased. I was also impressed with the overlapping sets that are frequently utilized and the use of light as a sort of character in itself.

I expect Oscar nods for Kaufman, Carey, Winslet and possibly Michel Gondry and I look forward to Kaufman’s next screenplay.

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List of stuff for my new place

When I first moved here, I kept lists of things I needed. At one point, I said I’d post the lists for future reference and, I guess, in case anyone else could benefit from them. Well, I’m finally posting a list:

Silverware holder
Hand towels/wash cloths
Bath mat
Kitchen in a box
Paper towel dispenser
Drinking glasses
Computer desk
Living room furniture
Dining room furniture
Entertainment center
Stamps
Envelopes
DSL
Honey
Salt ‘n Pepper
Butter
TiVo/DVD player
Wireless USB Adapter
Audio/Video Cables
Aluminum Foil
Cling Wrap
Air Fresheners
Measuring Cup
Knife Set
Can Opener
Dish Soap, Sponges
Toaster Oven
Sugar
Flour
Surge Protector
Vacuum Cleaner
Resolve Carpet Cleaner
Endust, dusting cloth
Coasters
Napkin Holder
Color Ink Cartridge
Black Ink Cartridge
Dish Drainer
Wall Clock
Lamps/Shades
3-Phase Lightbulbs
Windex
Ironing board
Iron
Hammer/Nails
Wireless Router
Placemats
Shower Curtain
Spray Starch
Brown Sugar
Office Trashcan
Chair Mat
Plunger
Post-its
Batteries
Door Mat
Handsoap
Broom
Mop
Dish Detergent
Laundry Detergent
Dryer Sheets
Box Cutter
Kitchen Trashcan
Trash bags
Tissues

I know some of this stuff seems silly, but I found I needed all of it at some point after I moved in. I’m sure I’ll be moving again and I’d hate to have to rewrite this entire list.