Saturday, July 11, 2009

july 17th... why, that's next weekend!!

Okay, so remember my post about being an extra on 500 Days of Summer?

I mentioned that the director did a shot where the camera seemed to be pointed right at me.

Well, yesterday I managed to get a sneak peek at The Scene that I was in. I'm not linking it because I'd rather not spoil anything, but there IS a link out there, if you really look hard enough.

And yup -- I'm in it. For two stray seconds, I'm in the movie, in my band uniform, with my saxophone, getting my dance on. Marc Webb and company basically used two quick shots of the band, and I was in one of them: the close-up shot.

Hell to the yes!!!

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I had a couple very quick reactions when I first saw the clip. First came the inevitable "I'M IN A MOVIE, OMFG". Then it quickly switched over to "I'M IN A MOVIE IN MY BAND UNIFORM... OMFG?"

But then I realized without that uniform, I'd never have been in this movie. So you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. Unless you're Andrea Yates. I'm not even going to link that one either, you'll have to look it up.

----

All of this to say... go see My New Movie on July 17th when it hits theaters in limited release!

Also, if you would, make sure to call Fox Searchlight and let them know how much you enjoyed the performance of the alto guy in the marching band. If they're interested, you can refer them to my blossoming IMDb page. I also have a resume available.

Anyone? No?

(Tangentially -- wouldn't it be awesome to get a credit for 500 Days of Summer on my IMDb as "Alto Guy #1"? I should look into this.)

Sunday, July 5, 2009

doubt II: electric boogaloo

"Doubt" -- revisited.

You know, I'm really not that insecure of a person.  I just like writing drama -- and sometimes I use insecurity as a dramatic tool.  It's a color in the paint box that most writers are afraid to use.  In this day and age, confidence is currency.  But then again, perhaps it's a mark of real confidence, to be honest and open in those moments when you're lacking confidence?

In reality I'm just working on my craft.  That's all this blog is, that's all it ever will be.

Whatever dark crevices I can pull inspiration out of -- I'll pull.

The truth is, doubt is something that all of us deal with on a daily basis.  Doubt is with us when we wake up, it sits next to us in the car on the way to work, it pops up on billboards and TV screens and advertisements, and in our daily interactions with friends and coworkers alike. It lives in our house, sleeps in our bed, steals food from our kitchen, pisses in our sink, and shits in our shoes.  It looms around every corner -- behind every reflection -- under every shiny facade.

Don't try to tell me you don't know it's there.  You feel it, too.  You see it everywhere you look.

And guess what... It's OKAY to acknowledge that doubt is there!!

Yeesh.  When did it become socially unacceptable to express any sort of psychological weakness?  When was it that everybody suddenly got "better"?  Are there no damaged people left anymore?  Did they all die out, or go into hiding -- or are they just "faking it" like everyone else? Why do we feel this crazy need to "fake it", as though we want other folks to believe our lives are perfect?  Isn't that the definition of insecurity??

Think about this.  The next time you ask someone "how are you?" -- see if they answer you honestly.

Here's a hint:  they won't.

Because in real life, nobody answers that question truthfully. When you ask how they are, the "proper response" is something like "Good" or "Great" or even "F-in' Fantastic, thanks for asking".  Nobody wants to tell you how they're really doing.  They know you just want to hear a positive response!  So they give you what you really want.  That's a socially accepted rule.

So we hide our flaws.  We value perfection -- but not only that -- we value the ability to project perfection.

Here's a weird, radical idea: That is bullshit.

No way should that be one of our social values. We aren't perfect, none of us.  Let's stop pretending we are.  Let's celebrate our flaws -- because they make us human.

[/soap box]

Friday, July 3, 2009

adam west > al pacino

Holy hell, Batman!!



Things are getting pretty bleak around here!

It's an affront to the very spirit of the American Dream! That dream for which we all fight day after day!

Don't you think you're sending the wrong message here with that threatening stance?

"You're right, Robin. I'll put down this Bat-amarang and we'll discuss it. By the way, is that a new cape?"

...Yeah.

"Cute."

All right. Let's hit the brakes on this little Batman intro.



.....

When I become the greatest writer-director in the world I'm going to give Adam West more work. Look at the expression on his face! Pure concentration. With every bone in his body, he commits.

I don't have much else to say. Fireworks are going off everywhere right now. I guess Independence Day Eve is good enough for some people. I'm out

sean's story

I was fifteen years old when I first met Sean. He was a year older than me, a sophomore (I was a freshman), and he played the trumpet. We were bandmates -- we went to the WBA state championships in San Diego that year. We had several mutual friends. We even dated the same girl (though not at the same time). Yet neither of us said a single word to each other the entire school year.

It wasn't my fault, and it wasn't his. Some people just never find a reason to talk to each other.

Sean was an only child, and a military child. His father was a high-ranking leader in the United States Army. The job implied a singularly strange definition for the word "home". He'd lived in about twelve different cities, in five different countries. Now Sean was in Orange County, California, and for the time being, California was "home". His father spent most of that first year commuting to Camp Pendleton, meeting with other commandants day and night, organizing tactical battle plans for American military action.

It was 2003, and the country was at war with a feeling: terror. U.S. troops were mobilizing in the ruins of Afghanistan. The corrupt Taliban had been crushed two years prior, but insurgents were slowly gathering, pooling their resources, reorganizing the remnants of its army. Now a true test of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would begin -- and to withstand it, they'd need a good senior operations officer.

As the quiet summer drew to an end and my sophomore year began, Sean's father approached my mother with an unusual request.

The two had met the previous year in band parent meetings, and they'd developed a fairly close friendship. So the news must have been a bit shocking -- but not altogether unexpected: Sean's father was being called into active duty in the war in Afghanistan. Sean was to be left in California, alone and unsupervised at their small apartment, with no relatives who possessed the means to care for him.

Somewhere along the line, an idea was hatched: "Wait wait. Hold on a sec. Doesn't Iggy have a bunk bed in his room? Isn't one of his beds usually empty? After all, he's only one person, and one person doesn't sleep in two beds! Who needs two beds, anyway? So there's one empty bed in Iggy's room, right? One empty bed."

And so it was that Sean and I became roommates for the next nine months.

We developed a tenuous friendship, out of sheer necessity. I learned a lot about Sean within a matter of days. He was quiet, geeky, with a wicked dry, pitch-black sense of humor. He had a tight group of friends and didn't push far beyond it. He was extremely proud of his trumpet ability and intellect, which was enormous, but in school he refused to apply himself. He was clinically depressed, and he also suffered from mild ADD. He spent the majority of his waking hours playing Everquest on an old Pentium III we set up for him on the dining room table.

I genuinely liked the guy. I did. Because I knew his problems weren't any fault of his own. He'd had a right shitty childhood. Moving constantly, never having time to make friends or create a healthy social life. Divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse ran through his family like bloodlines. For all the hell life had put him through, he'd come out the other side as well-adjusted as I could possibly imagine. We had a lot of good times together.

Sean eventually took medication for his depression, but not at first. The diagnosis was finally confirmed about a month after he moved in. My mother told me confidentially, and also mentioned she would be paying for his treatment. I wasn't wild about the idea -- I'd never been wild about any of this -- but I let her run the show. Plus, it was about time. His attitude had become a problem, around the dinner table and throughout the house. He was consistently negative and often insulting toward every member of the family. He didn't respect my mother's authority, and he had only contempt for our new puppy, a shot-in-the-arm black ball of life named Rory.

So we started him on pills. And for a time, it was good.

But after a couple months, the pills weren't working anymore. He was back to his old ways. I didn't really mind, as I've always been somewhat of a cynic myself. I think it was hardest on my mom. She desperately wanted to help him, to heal his wounds somehow. Wounds that had been gashed years ago, wounds that had transformed and scabbed over and gnarled into ugly scars. It couldn't be done. She'd tried church -- our youth group. It didn't take. She'd tried the pills. She'd tried counseling. Nothing was working.

It was April 2004 when my mother finally gave in. We were driving somewhere, just the two of us. It didn't matter where we were going. This was an emergency meeting, a summit for a mother and her firstborn son.

She was nearly in tears. She told me what Sean had become to our family: a vortex of negative energy, a black hole of sarcasm and depression. She feared that we as a clan had been clouded with his bad juju. In a way, she was right. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had so little interest in things that used to bring me joy. We were having more arguments per week than ever before. Everyone was a little brusque, a little disgruntled, a little snappish. And she was convinced it was Sean's depression that had done this to us. She wanted him out.

I told her it would only be a couple of months until his dad returned from Afghanistan. We shouldn't be so hard on him. He was a good kid at heart, under all the layers of defense. In fact, I told her, he and I were making progress. We were becoming real friends. I told her to reschedule a doctor's appointment, find a different medication, give him another chance.

So we did.

At this point I think we could all see the finish line -- me, my mom, my sister and even Sean. His dad was coming back in a matter of weeks. The overall mood lifted as we charged ahead, through testing season and up to the end of the school year. Things were changing. He'd found a regimen of medication that was working for him, I'd fallen in love with a girl, and my sister was graduating from middle school.

It almost snuck up on us when it happened. Sean's dad arrived in California two weeks ahead of schedule -- and just like that, Sean was out. I had my own room again.

Just like that.

The dining room table almost seemed empty without him there, sitting at his old computer, leveling up his warlocks.

In the years that have passed since then, I've seldom thought about what happened during those nine strange months. But I think Sean's legacy stayed with us in some ways, and though I can't speak for my family, I know he's stayed with me.

Sometimes I catch myself in a particularly bad place, or a particularly foul mood, and I wonder how Sean must have felt, dealing with what he had to deal with on a daily basis. Occasionally I've entertained the notion that I might be mildly depressed myself. I've seen it firsthand. Insomnia. Loss of interest in daily activities and social life. Loss of appetite. Loss of weight. Loss of wonder. Loss of joy. It's like a quiet buzzing some days, white noise in my head. Other days I can barely get out of bed. I've even wondered, in the back of my mind, what pills my mom eventually found for him -- and whether I could find a solution in the same vein. Of course I don't entertain these thoughts out loud. Even speaking them here is giving me goosebumps, and not the good kind either.

If you were hoping for a conclusion to this story, there isn't one. Sean and I parted ways after that year; he went back to his friends, and I went back to mine. We saw each other around school the next year, and apart from a certain familiar understanding between us, we hardly ever spoke. He left for community college in 2005. I haven't seen him since. Our families no longer keep in touch.

If he ever reads this, and I highly doubt he will... I'd like to catch up. Maybe hang out, play some Burger Time or NES Ninja Turtles, for old time's sake. I'd like to sit down somewhere and talk about things. Maybe even get some advice. I don't really understand what's happening to me, and I think you'd understand it better than I could. And one more thing -- I'd like to know if life got better when you went to college -- or if it got worse.

I sincerely hope it got better.