Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Frank Mellech I spent most of yesterday looking for work. Not for a job but work.
It was a loser but still what I plan to continue to do today.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about my puppy's blog. I need to write something for her. She's started it. Sometimes it hard to be funny. Or even just amusing.
One thing I keep thinking about is a conversation my friend and I had a few days ago. It was about actors.
She couldn't understand why actors even wanted to be actors. Who wants a career where all you do is pretend to be someone else?
At the time the only thing I could think of was for "Fame and Fortune". Note fame comes first in the list.
But that didn't and doesn't feel right. Its superficial.
Most of the problem is that I'd never thought about actors in that way before. I like actors. It was actors who got me to look past my adolescent homophobia. In person they make me laugh and are almost always entertaining. They feel things differently than non-actors, at least the best of them do.
And I've always thought that actors were always there, always a part of us.
I mean back when that crazy greek cat Antigones, or something, was writing comedies called Frogs and producing plays in pits in the ground there were actors willing to wear one of those cool masks and stand in front of a crowd of strangers and convince those strangers that he wasn't a peasant, that he was a a great and thundering god come to smite the world. He could make that audiences heart quell. Then the next night he was a poor beggar seeking a lonely dinar to feed his family and he could make the new bunch of strangers cry and beat their chests at his plight.
Actors are cool. They have a talent that I don't think can be minimized.
It was an actor who helped change the course of history. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln and leapt to the stage writing his own drama in real life.

Click images for desktop size: "Demon Forever" by Unknown I don't understand what makes an actor take the job. Maybe they're born to it and then they get to spend a few years suffering and working as hard as a coal miner to perfect his craft to the point where skill becomes art.
And I think a lot of being an actor is compulsion. I don't think its pretending to be somebody else. Impersonations wear thin pretty quickly. Its a willingness to be a tool in the hands of a director and a writer. A tool to espouse and convey ideas, feelings and emotions to strangers. The cheaper actors manipulate, the best of them use their tools to paint a human body that reflects ourself. They fool us by exposing a soul to us that we never imagined existed, a soul that exists only in at least 3 peoples mind and no where else until the actor unleashes it on stage or on screen.
I understand some of that compulsion. Every time I'm as broke as I am now I always think of one thing. Being in a band.
Its part of my adrenaline addiction I think. I like surfing, sky diving, rock and mountain climbing for the adrenaline rush. That feeling that evades words and rests only in a hungry brain. (except rock climbing has too much pain and fear to be a true addiction for me. I like thinking about what I did but I don't think I'd ever want to do it again.
Like the drunkard dreams of his bottle and the junkie dreams of his next fix the old and crippled musician dreams of being in a band.
Its gotten tot he point that when I listen to music I'm arranging the charts so that my cramped up little hands can play that song. Sometimes the charts in my head seem a little bit like fake book stuff but that's okay too. If I can transpose it to a lot of open chords and simple shifts instead of bouncing all over the neck I could probably get through a whole set.
I like bands. I like that moment in rehearsal when you finish a number a realize that it sounded just like a song. I like that first time on stage when the bands starts out and the crowd is continuing their conversation, shouting over you and then abruptly someone notices and says, "Hey, those guys are good!" and someone else says a bit later, "Those guys are really good!"
I like that we get paid for doing this.
I don't like the inevitable bickering that ensues. Usually the only things the band has in common is music. Most of the time you have different goals and different places you want to end up. Some where in all that the music gets lost.
It most often falls along the same lines. The front man thinks they're not getting enough credit. The lead guitarist wants endless solos to show off his most recent hard won plateau. The rhythm section wants to make a move into a different groove. The girl friends or boy friends all think that their special band member is getting screwed over.
Its fun even in its predictability.
Predictable. Like when the little girl shyly approaches you after the gig and her biggest compliment is that on a certain cover you sounded "Just like the record."
At first I thought the little girls were nuts.
Click images for desktop size: "Green Balls" by Sam Short Our version sounded nothing like the original recording. Once, in my last band we played a club out in the sticks. They wanted the Beatles and Stone Temple Pilots. None of the band except me knew any Beatles' tracks and only the drummer knew any Stone Temple songs. So we played a half dozen of each, faking it as best as we could. The crowd went crazy.
Each band member got told how we sounded exactly like the original recording only punchier, all by different people in the audience.
I know now that they didn't think we sounded like the record. We just transported them to a place they enjoyed when they first heard the song. Or they got overcome with the emotion for which the song was their soundtrack. Or, at best, we thought we were special and for a moment they thought we were stars and for that same moment they felt a joy they couldn't describe, a feeling that their own greatness was somehow a products of the bands thrashing around.
I like that too.
Maybe I could just go busking? Nobody is less critical than a passerby. I knew a lot of guys who at the end of the month would head out to the street and bash out some tunes. No worse than playing on Bourbon Street! They used to pick up 50 sixty bucks a day!
I've always been a bit shy for busking. I need a stage and at least 4 inches of platform to face a strange crowd. A crowd of strangers.
So yeah, I want to be in a band. That makes me think I've got the right to claim to understand why an actor needs a stage or a camera or a role.
Difference is that reality will smack me down like the last wave.
I'll get over it.
I watched a movie last night, "Closed Note". A japanese film that doesn't seem to be about much of anything. Its about a student who works in a shop selling pens.
In one of the scenes though she's in her music class and they're playing one of the Back Toccatas. It sounded strange until I realized they were playing it on some of those wild Japanese instruments, those fretless banjo and mandolin like things. It was cool and exciting.
There always be music. They won't miss me standing on a corner begging for change, selling them a song.
I say that with bemusement and gladness.