xtcian

6/8/02 I just read a

6/8/02

I just read a fascinating article in Salon about the "creative class" in America and the elements some towns offer that make them so desirable. Author Richard Florida has many indices that explain the "supercreative core" and the "bohemian index" and other catchphrases that seem to be the trade of pop sociologists, but his thoughts seem to bear truth in my experience. He says that "gays are the canaries of the creative economy," and I told Tessa the day we looked at Park Slope that I only wanted to live in a town that had a rambunctious, healthy queer population. Good things happen around gay people; the bookstores are better, the music is louder, and the attention to politics is, at worst, more interesting.

Florida says (again, in pop sosh talk) that "three T's" make up the perfect creative community: technology, talent and tolerance. I think Chapel Hill succeeds in this regard to a certain extent - the University brings in talent, the Research Triangle is awash in technology and as far as civil rights go, Chapel Hill is making a decent go of it - but it's still just too damn small to feel important. Durham and Raleigh are more interesting; despite a vocal gay community in Durham, I think both places suck because they're so fucking ugly. North Raleigh is an abomination taken straight out of the Anaheim, CA School for Disastrous City Planning, with no decent public transportation, Arthurian-themed planned living spaces mowed out of ancient forests, strip malls and car dealerships that stretch for miles. The only way to meet someone in North Raleigh is to hit them with your car.

The ironically-named Florida also says that southern towns (mentioning my old hometown of Norfolk, VA by name) are dying on the vine because of the lack of the "new creative class." I find it satisfying that racists, both North and South, ensure their own cultural and economic poverty. The more gays you hate, the farther from a fun place you get to live.

Which brings me to Brooklyn again. People know each other there. The pharmacist remembers you. Skate rats go to Halcyon on Smith Street and listen to breakbeats. Lesbians hold hands. I feel like it's the place that people think they're getting when they move to Manhattan, but the truth is, Manhattan long ago priced itself out of society's most interesting members. I'm still trying to figure out how any truly vital art can possibly spring forth from someone able to pay $3200/month for loft space in SoHo. The only place a beginning artist could possibly live in Manhattan is in Harlem; with a roommate or three on the Lower East Side; or at Ground Zero with a government grant. But if you want what you were looking for, come over the bridge to the town the Dutch called Breuckelen. The "creative class" and I are waiting.

Or, you know, stay where you are. Far be it for me to know what's best for anyone anymore.

Tessa endures my attempt at another picture of a foggy, early spring day in Prospect Park

6/7/02 Despite my lengthy, lugubriously-explained

6/7/02

Despite my lengthy, lugubriously-explained and relentlessly documented paranoia, spending the day in midtown Manhattan can still be quite fun. After meeting with the animator Todor (all of our animators have Cher-like single names to me) who brought terrific ideas to the beginning sequence to the Pink House movie, we trekked up to Harlem (where I'd never really been, strangely enough) to see Andy London's models for the "Hang in There" archetype. Suffice to say the guy is totally brilliant, and absolutely has the right dynamic. He made a little sample Quicktime movie that had unicorns, stuffed reindeers, kitty cats floating on hearts, and all kinds of sappy, girlie ephemera that had me doubled over. I love the fact that we're culling from so many worlds; everyone who works on this movie gets to dork out on something they adore, which is the definition of how I want to live my life.

From there, Tessa and I went to Fortunoff to get her engagement ring resized back to a 6 1/2 - which kind of sucked, since that was the original size of the ring. Moronically, I stole the wrong ring out of her drawer, thus causing them to resize it up to an 8. It was cool, though, because I geeked out and asked the lady to show me an example of tanzanite, peridot, and citrine. Tanzanite was cool, except that it's so weak that you can hardly ever wear it - you'd be better off spending the money on a sapphire. The peridot was the winner, as it was chartreuse-colored and interesting. Citrine was kind of a bust; it looks like weak amber, and is a little reminiscent of brown beer bottle glass. I feel sorry for November birthdays, stuck with citrine - us May babies get emeralds.

Stalling for time before the Erin McKeown/Norah Jones show at Town Hall, we screwed around at the Gap, Banana Republic, Nine West and the NBA Superstore - basically, we were behaving like good, cheese-filled beefy Americans.

Erin was brilliant as the opening act of the show, playing my favorite song of hers ("The Little Cowboy") and generally upstaging the considerably more pedestrian allure of the headliner Norah Jones, who sang beautifully, but not interestingly. Plus, Tessa hated Norah's guitarist, who was a sort of annoying jazz minimalist taken to little arty bleeps and blaps when the mood hit him. We stole away after the third song, feeling as though we'd heard enough, very glad to see Erin kick ass in front of a huge New York crowd.

Now we're up in Columbia County with my mom, snoring away in the front bedroom. The walls are thick, my white noise maker sonorous, my fatigue complete.

graffitti seen at the corner of 3rd Ave and 11th Street, looking oddly like my brother Kent's handwriting, even though he's in Iowa City

6/6/02 I've decided that freelance

6/6/02

I've decided that freelance work as a writer - while occasionally lucrative and while it certainly kept me in enough bourbon & cokes to last me through my 20s - isn't going to be enough if I plan on being an Actual Person(tm). I'm still going ahead with my plan to pitch ideas to my friends at Marie Claire and Self, and to finish the chapters for the "Dork" proposal, but I just can't live the sort of ham-n-egg lifestyle that carried me from Chapel Hill through California. That sort of living keeps you wearing awful shoes and makes you put off dental work until long past any good can be done.

The only catch is this: I can't take having a real job anymore, the kind of 9-to-5 slog that brought me to New York. I can't face getting on the 2 train and staring at the linoleum floor specially designed to camouflage barf flakes and urine trickles. I hated every second I was at my last job, and spent a year gritting my teeth, just so I could say I got through it. I know that's hopelessly bourgeois and there are scores of Americans drudging to their suck-ass day jobs every day for forty-five years, and that I am stunningly high-maintenance, but at least I can see myself for what I am.

After stints in the regular workforce, I came to understand what having a job really means: they pay you for the irrational act of being somewhere other than your beloved home at 10am. They don't pay you for the work (most people could do a year's work at their job in about two weeks) or even your attitude. They pay you for your physical body to consistently inhabit a strange place.

Thank god I had the internet, Napster, and Starbucks Frappucinos (with whipped cream) or else the sheer ennui of That Internet Job would have bored me into saliva-drooping states of post-shock-therapy catatonia. As it was, I was beginning to run out of songs to download. I already had the whole Schoolhouse Rock series and "Baby I'm A-Want You" by Bread - what more could I possibly want?

So the solution is to have a regular gig, but not a regular way of doing it. I have many ideas about the subject, and not all of them are unsavory.

6/5/02 We began to tackle

6/5/02

We began to tackle the major problem currently afflicting The Pink House movie - basically, the beginning is a bit of an incoherent mess. Things get cooking by the time the main characters settle into their respective house meetings, but until then, it's hard to tell who anyone is and why they're fighting each other.

Which brings me to the delightful topic of "pickup shots." If you feel as though your movie has some undeniably hole somewhere in it, a hole so big that it threatens to swallow up all but your most observant audience members, you can plan another 4-day shoot and viciously insert whatever new footage you want. In our case, we need Charlotte and her coven of sorority girls to make it obvious that they are:
a) evil
b) running for student body president
c) ruling the school
d) in a blood feud with the Pink House residents next door.

Most things in movies are accomplished with strategic edits, the wisp of a facial expression, or the minor strain of a soundtrack. Your characters don't even have to say anything. For instance, having Charlotte staple-gun her campaign poster over a "March for Peace" poster accomplishes a) through c) above. One of the things you learn as a first-time filmmaker and writer is that you literally need to squirt kerosene on at least 1/5th of your original dialogue.

Anyway, Tessa, Jessie and I brainstormed all kinds of things we can shoot upstate at the farm in order to fix all these problems. Between those shots and the animation, it's almost impossible to consider the movie even close to done. It's taking on the sheen of an impossibly overdue library book, but at least we're getting a sense of the whole.

Charlotte and her coven of girls in "The Pink House" - little did they know they'd have to revive the characters a year later

In a sine/cosine/tangential related story, I did my first "acting" tonight in about six years. Not since we put on "As You Like It" in 1996 have I pretended to be someone else in front of people (I mean, you know, besides the psychological personae we foist in order to quell our deep, lingering pain) and it felt funny. I never act; I hate it, and there are so many people clamoring for even the most shitty roles that I feel guilty even contemplating it. At least fourteen times we were nearly compelled to stick my ass in "The Pink House," but we always found someone else at the last minute, thank god.

I think I was pretty good, though. You know, for someone who has my neck.

6/4/02 Even though I didn't

6/4/02

Even though I didn't bother mentioning it last night (I was way too caught up in singing the virtues of Afrin Nasal Spray) we went to see the 24-hour plays and while the plays weren't entirely up to snuff, the night was again a fun one. I live in constant fear of being stuck in one of the endless, treacherously unfunny 20-minute train wrecks that occasionally plague these evenings, but last night, even the bad playlets had the courtesy to be short.

Lindsay is pretty funny when he gets into Producer Mode, storming around the Atlantic Theater with the officious "on message" look that newly-appointed school prefects have in schoolboy London, but he runs a great show. He's proof that the world is desperate for competent people to lead; he never tires of telling people about the plays, and his radar for new talent is unabating.

Onstage, my sister Michelle played a spurned woman out for revenge on some guy who broke the hearts of too many chicks - again, sort of poorly-constructed, but the guy playing the Lothario - and Michelle - were mindful of how little they had to work with, and played it up for the crowd. That's the thing about the 24-hour plays: there is simply no better audience. They'll laugh at anything, and always pull for the actors to succeed. Our friend Duncan actually walked offstage, in the middle of a scene, to look at the script - and he nearly got a standing ovation.

Michelle explains to her captee (Beresford Bennett) why he is being doused with lighter fluid

The last play was written by our friend Dan Kois, and Dan clearly understood the most important thing about writing a 10-minute play with no rehearsal: set up your joke, escalate it, implement a nice reversal, and do it quickly. His not-so-subtle jab at the current hot baseball rumor about the "gay player in the majors" starred Sean and Tessa's friend Garrett, and it was really funny. Sean actually looked like a baseball player up there, sort of beefy like Mark McGwire with the insouciant, staccato delivery of the ballplayers interviewed on ESPN (which, no doubt, he is watching right now - 2:27am).

Lindsay keeps saying they're going to do a "Best of..." night and hints that my play from August 2000 may make the cut. Writing that play - and seeing it performed with flawless brilliance by Sean, Seth, Sarah Clarke and Randy Quaid's daughter - marked the end of the cycle of despair I'd clung to since the day I set foot in California in 1997. Having that kind of experience the third week I was living in New York was a huge metaphorical victory, and it convinced me that I could still write, and that I was not, as LA had whispered in my ear, a worthless sack of shit.

6/3/02 I have been in

6/3/02

I have been in a pretty bad emotional state of late, so I wanted to give thanks to the synthetic, technical things in life that make things for me a little bit easier.

First off, I want to thank LASIK surgery for giving me brand new eyes. I will never have to have foggy glasses coming in from the cold, and I will never go back into LensCrafters, even if just to avoid a tornado.

I'd also like to give thanks to Afrin, the nasal decongestant spray, without which I'd would scarcely be breathing right now. Yeah, I know it's addictive and bad for your mucous lining and all that shit, but it's the only thing that works. Do not write to me with your home remedy. It will be as effective as squirting Smucker's up my nose.

I'd like to give thanks to the drug Allopurinol, even though I haven't taken it in a year. It counteracts gout, which is not nearly as cool a disease as it sounds.

At this juncture, I'd also like to thank the new synthetic fabrics that make playing sports more fun. Yes, fans, I'm talking about wool that wicks, lycras, spandex blends, and whatever moon-rocks my new bathing suit is made out of. Let me also thank the new Hoover WetVac, the DeWalt 5 1/2 inch random orbital sander, the Thor washer-and-dryer-in-one, the tangerine iBook, and caffeine-laced analgesics like Excedrin bought in bulk. I am thankful for these things.

Let me not forget Coke, and behind it Cherry Coke, Dr. Pepper, Orangina, Aranciata, and cranberry juice mixed with seltzer. I would like to thank the state of North Carolina, and especially one of its residents, Dean Smith.

I need to thank extension cords, cordless phones, Fedex, Clearasil, tuna, and a pre-emptive thanks to the antidepressant Celexa - the jury's still out on you, but I have faith you'll eventually deliver.

To close, I'd like to thank the store Target, for a flawless redesign of product, and for providing so much cool stuff to a kid in the 1970s. To prove my gratitude, here is a picture of Tessa at the Target in Breckenridge, VA (although I mostly posted it to see it in congruence with the picture below it). Nature and nurture, I worship both of you the same.

6/2/02 Even though I have

6/2/02

Even though I have to shrink these pictures down and save them as jpegs at an abysmal quality, I hope you understand how beautiful the Harlem Valley Rail Trail truly is. Tessa (above) and I took some bikes down to Copake and cycled four miles towards Dutchess County. Being on a bike again, after two decades of not really riding, reminded me just how much of my youth was spent on a bicycle growing up in Cedar Rapids, IA. When we were speeding through the valley walls with the sound of endless farmland being mowed, I swear to god I almost pulled the same time travel trick Christopher Reeve used in Somewhere in Time. When I was a kid, the bike meant freedom - from other rotten kids, from school, towards fishing, swimming and Cokes from the service station about two miles away uphill. I pedaled furiously in 100-degree weather to get a Coke, or a Fanta, or grape soda, or any of the other sugar drinks that weren't allowed at home. Mom and Dad, I blame my Coke habit on you!