Addendum: A Comparison

I didn’t think this deserved a separate blog post, but as I sit outside the Cinematheque Francais, locked out, due to the apparent inability of one cashier to sell me a different kind of ticket. (“Monsieur Americain.” they snickered at me before a previous film), it seemed like the right time to expound on a comparison that came to my head, drunkenly wandering this city.

New York is like my mother, though I know it may not be to many. It’s my home, the place I know best, where I come from and where I sometimes need to escape from.

And if New York is my mother, then Paris is my douchebag friend.

Hear me out! I have a reason for this. These words chosen carefully and if that carefulness came at an intoxicated time, let me elucidate them in a time of lucidity.

See, Paris is frequently late, snobby about shit and making fun of you (and everyone else it seems like). It’s more fashionable, better looking, it is *constantly* reminding you how much more sex it is having than you. It likes shitty European house music and “the best of” American Jews (Dylan, Cohen, Woody Allen) and sometimes it just totally fucking bails on you.

So why do you keep it around?

Well you don’t always hang out with Paris. Sometimes you try ditching it and talking to your New York friends on G-Chat or playing video games, just to piss it off.

But at the same time, let’s be honest, Paris is fucking interesting. It’s really, really cool. And for every time the Karaoke at the Pub St. Michel won’t start (with its pitiful list of songs) because they don’t know or care where the DJ is, there’s the cinema you discover doing dual Cronenberg-Scorsese retrospectives, the video-game district you didn’t know existed, the conversation about Clint Eastwood’s “The Rookie” you have with an Abu Dhabi TA who you never meet again. Even on the shitty nights, Paris can sometimes turn around and make you feel like it really does care about you, like you’re special because you’re chilling with it. Like you got your own cool rapport.

I’m still pissed off that the Karaoke didn’t work. The alternate joint I went to our of frustration with waiting closed as I got there and said they didn’t know when they’d be open (really?). And it’s annoying to be sitting on the damp bench across the street from the closed bistro across the street from the Cinematheque.

It’s New Year’s Eve and if I was in New York City, I would be near people who care about me, with places to go and be warm and taken care of, I’d have a plan. And I’d be sure to check in with my mom.

But sometimes, you don’t stay at home, because you want an adventure, because you want something new in your life. Because you want to see what can happen.

So you call up your douchebag friend Paris. It knows a few parties it’s heard about vaguely, though who really knows, man. Maybe we can try to find some chicks from Latin America and get ‘em dancing. Or talking about how depressed you are or whatever you do, Nick.

Yep, Paris, whatever you say.

It’s going to be a new year.

Breakdowns/Breakthroughs

 

I let this make me feel bad for a little while.

A friend of mine seemed to be having some sort of psychotic break, or “social media meltdown” as I heard it referred to which, unsurprisingly, is a real thing.

Apparently some sort of traumatic or inferred-as-traumatic event caused her to begin going on a massive Twitter and Facebook rant that lasted for days, literally, without sleeping, going off much in the character of the things posted above, about “rich white people with penises”, smoking “rainbow blunts”, ranting at the CIA, Barack Obama and, perhaps most strangely of all, Judd Apatow in an attempt to have all of her political anti-male/society rants as some sort of case that she should be hired to help him explore “#FemaleComedy”.

Of course, I was fucking stupid.

This had been going on for days when I first saw it (and as far as I can tell is still going on). It seemed clear to me that this was some sort of psychotic-break, some sort of Charlie Sheen-level of lack or disregard for self-insight. What’s more, as the internet is prone to do, people were fueling her rage with re-tweets and likes and sympathetic comments. She even called out people who would try to message her or text her trying to help her or talk her down.

Which is why I thought it was a great idea to publicly write on her wall, trying to gently call her out on her behavior and tell her I was worried about her.

Dumb, I know. This whole thing was a social media rampage from which making yourself identifiable to the government by tweeting at them about your drug use was not enough to calm her down, why would I be able to?

“Well,” My pops said when I showed him over an iced coffee. “It’s always attractive to think that you’re the one person who can reach somebody.”

Truth.

I did just want to help this girl, as I wanted to help myself. She was a friend, someone who’d I gone through traumatic experiences (not her fault) with before and she supported me when I had gone through similar, mostly non-social media fueled rants based on my anger at authority figures. I also wanted to not see this anymore, the stream of information brought to my face by Twitter and Facebook by this person off-the-rails. As my friend John Beamer would tell me “I’m addicted to hating it” and I was until I finally stopped following her, stopped looking, fearing I was just playing in to whatever was hurting her.

Which this might too, for all I know. I defended her from my friends when they belittled her, because she obviously seemed like someone who was sick to me. But in posting this am I feeding into the frenzy? The obvious answer is yes. But this person has already chosen to put this out into the world and the internet. We’ll see what harm posting this will do. It’s just that I haven’t yet isolated how to feel about all this or how others do. Is this what Charlie Sheen’s friends think before they disconnect with him? Is this what I think when people tell me things about my sister? Is this the work of a crazy person who cannot be helped until she comes down, or some sort of crazed inside joke as she so frequently claims it is?

It struck me at the wrong time, anyway.

I had just been turned down by yet another lady, who had made me very excited via our obvious mutual nerdiness and the sense of excitement/electricity we felt talking to each other before an improv show. Too sweet, it would sound except it fulfilled my fears when it turned out whatever I thought wasn’t real and even asking her out to dinner was a step too far. I struggle frequently with my own sense of “creepiness” or “unattractiveness”, the sense that girls want me at a distance, fine to talk to, but any move I make is unwelcome. It’s this sense that keeps me tentative from making strong romantic moves, having confidence in myself or feeling good or hopeful when I meet someone. It’s a sense founded in my own history and one which I feel many people struggle with and find ways to overcome with booze, pot or experience.

Getting turned down for dinner was, of course, something I did appreciate since it was a clear move that told me to back off, rather than the once-upon-a-time “oh you don’t like me, six months in?” but of course, the value of that honesty (appreciated) is always tagged-on-the-end with that sense that you are unloveable.

Which is what lead me to text my ex, when I was downtown one day and wanted to get coffee. It wasn’t that I wanted to “get back together” with her, though I still miss our times together. I just wanted the sort of friendship I had often mocked among my friends who kept their exes close; the sense that even if there’s not something romantic going on, there’s still that part of you that cares deeply for the other person. That doesn’t want to see them hurt. There’s still all that knowledge and love, somewhere there. Not all the things you once shared, but something. A reminder.

I saw her and I didn’t find that. We caught up and talked a while about what our friends were doing, our families. It wasn’t a disaster and I didn’t try anything stupid. But there wasn’t that informed interest anymore, an excitement at familiar things, but no connection. I tried to make myself vulnerable, telling her about stupid things I’d done, my family, even asking her as we left if she still thought of me, thought of us, at all.

“Well, I mean. I remember you.” She said. “You are in my thoughts.”

But that wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear.

I broke down crying the next day in therapy, wondering if she’d ever loved me, if I’d ever been loved.

And then, of course, I talked to Rob who has his own complicated relationships and friendships as well.

“Of course she loved you.” Rob told me. “Anyone could see it, see how close you were. Maybe because of that, she was afraid to be close to you.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Rob continued. “But maybe she thought if she made herself vulnerable to you or showed affection, you’d take it the wrong way.”

Rob was right, of course. Even if I hadn’t, it was a legitimate fear to have. A man desperate for love seeking affection in his life can run mistakenly at what’s in front of him, as I’d done so before.

“But also don’t take this the wrong way.” Rob said. “But you’re also a lot cooler now than you were then, Nick. You kinda woke up, grew up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, towards the last two months before the breakup, whenever anyone would ask you howsit goin, you would give them a list of everything wrong in your life and then just list Eva as the only thing right. But there was so much more going on in your life than that, so many other good things.”

“It changed you after that. You started cheering up a little. It’s nice to see, frankly.”

With that, Rob provided the insight I hadn’t had in so long.

In the wake of my first meaningful relationship, I’ve felt a lot of nostalgia and longing and pressure to find that sort of happiness again, an edenic vision of something that I had lost.

But the reality is that I was so caught in remembering how I great I felt, that I missed that I really felt like shit back then.

So to Nina, who is still there on the internet, ranting for all I know, stuck in some place of disconnection from reality, this is what I say to you:

Find your friends, find the people you trust, the people with beards (if you’re me) or whoever in your life cares about you. Just check in with them, be honest.

Because it’s easy to waste your time feeling angry or sorry about things that have no relationship to reality, the truth, and the possibility of really kicking ass in this world.

That night, I wrote my first new web series episode in 5 months, full of Matt Chao beating me up on crutches, a party where I drank too much and insulted filmmakers and a conversation with Rob where he sets me straight over the internet, while talking about Shelly Long from Cheers.

Everyone enjoyed it and, even if they didn’t. the writing group happened, we drank and we talked about movies and caught up.

We went to the Odessa Diner, because Rob wanted a good grilled-cheese sandwich and I drunkenly ordered some Chicken Parmigiana that ended up being surprisingly good.

Crispy and crunchy on the outside.

Some good cheese, some good pasta, a nice waitress who tolerated the circus of a bunch of film kids coming at 11pm and gabbing drunk-loud about whatever.

I felt good about my life.

And didn’t tell anyone, anything else.

***

ODESSA DINER

Chicken Cutlet Parmigiana (w/pasta upon request)- $13.95

Avenue A bet. 7th and 8th. St, near many homeless people.

6 to Astor Pl, F to Lower East Side, 2nd Ave. L to 1st Ave.

Role Players

I should reveal, I don’t watch myself on television.

“Why not?” Chadd asked me as we walked down the side of Union Square.

It was a beautiful day out, the type I enjoy and others see as dreariness, not so sunny and probably around 57, with just that edge of chill that keeps you going, makes you remember you can feel the world around you.

More importantly, it was the day the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck re-opened and we were off on a mile-walk pilgrimage.

“I don’t know.” I replied. “Maybe I’m too self-conscious. I just don’t he said.”

“Well, I think you were awesome.” He told me with his definite Ohio certainty.

“Yeah, you gotta admit, it was a great scene.” chimed in my quasi-roommate John Beamer, along for the trip.

Saying I was self-conscious was easy and mostly true, but the truth is that seeing myself on screen is knowing how I’m portrayed to America. It’s one thing to be on these shows, to be in the moment, to try to be yourself or at least show your best side and another to see what you’ve created, pass judgment upon it, another level of reflection.

Who is the Nicholas I am? A question I thought I was past back in film school where I made movies about failed dates-that-weren’t and awkward family moments, and cast the non-daters and my family respectively. Who was the Nicholas on screen there, that version of me, that other me, that character? Was it just a side, an exaggeration or some aspects of myself? A “Persona” like in the video games I so enjoyed or, more frighteningly, was it the real me that other people saw when they saw me, was this the finished product?

These all seem like strange, reflexive questions, but take for example how we experience our own voices, something I feel I’ve brought up before.

When I speak I hear myself with a deeper voice, an octave lower, coming deeper with the vibrations of my vocal chords creating a base that permeates in my body. At the same time, my brain paints over the parts of my voice that are undesirable, a lisp, a stumble, a slurring of words. I don’t even hear them unless they’re very pronounced; they’re the part of the “white noise” my brain tunes out.

Such is an example of the gap between self-perception and reality. The person listening to me hears the lisp, hears the octave higher, there’s that difference and it’s difficult to change, barely known or recognized.

Such measured ignorance is what I persist on in my life now, as I’ll choose to read my tweets, but not google myself, choose to hear about the show, but not watch it.

People tell me not to change, to be myself. I worry if I see the person these people like on TV, that need in me to feel like I have to correct myself, to hide my weaknesses, to present a stronger front, it’ll coalesce, I’ll become closer to that Nicholas and farther from me.

And so when the two pretty girls on the Big Gay Ice Cream line in front  of us recognize me, I talk as myself. I give them food advice. I go into the zoned-out, gesticulating trance I go into when thinking about restaurants.

And I make it through, ice cream in hand and that much better.

“Dude.” Chadd told me. “I will tell you why this fame thing is good. The hardest part of meeting someone is just saying hello and now you have beautiful women coming up to you, doing your work for you.”

“Whatever, I’m not going home with them.” I said, neutralizing it. Who knew which me attracted them?

“Well, anyway, the brunette was pretty hot, I checked her out.” Chadd said.

And went back to eating his Bea Arthur.

***

Rob Malone stole my iPhone at a warehouse party.

I guess it was too tempting to him, or at least, at that party, he was too cool.

It was a Saturday and a welcome one at that.

After the usual struggle of my Improv 401 class (more on that later), I came home to a mostly naked John Beamer, lying face-down in his loft-lite John-cave, mostly passed out.

“Wake up,” I told him. “Najia and my dad are coming over.”

“Which one first?” He groggily replied.

My friend Najia had just been dealing with a med-school break-up and wanted to come over and chill with some filthy bros for a while, knowing at least hanging with us would be different than the collection of hard-studying, hard-binging med students she saw every day.

My dad just came over to fix a couple light bulbs.

John eventually got dressed and showered, while Najia and my dad and I took part in a guessing game over speakerphone with my mom looking for wine she could use and my dad answering with a head shake while we translated, all while he stood on a step-ladder trying to fix a fixture.

Eventually, Dad left and Rob and (the villain) Andrew Parrish came over and we sat around watching Buckwheat Groats videos on my TV for a while and trying to figure out what we would do.

Najia and I bonded a little over love lost and found and the small steps we’d take in getting over (kind of) our exes. It was refreshing how un-weepy it was.

But eventually we headed to the party, where I couldn’t drink due to a sinus infection and to which John war a blazer I told him “you could probably pull off if you had a mustache.”

“Definitely.” Najia added.

The party was hopping, a warehouse/studio space, nestled deep in Hasidic Williamsburg off the J train.

As we walked down Lorimer, I was struck by those same uneasy contradictions present in me due to my Jewish heritage.

We crossed the street and averted our eyes, to avoid the pack of 8-14 year old girls, dressed in black who ran up into their vesitbules turnings their heads from us at their mother’s behest, or out of instinct.

“This must be my fault.” Najia said, indicating her brown skin, though they couldn’t have known she was Kashmiri Muslim.

“Actually, it’s all of ours, a little.” I told her. “They’re turning they’re heads because we’re unmarried men and women walking together. The Haredim do not allow young and men women to intermingle as such and don’t allow their children to see such behavior as common. They’re not allowed to watch movies or television that show such things either. When I sat on a plane with a Haredi couple back from Israeli, even the married wife covered half the screen during ‘The Sound of Music’, covering the male characters when they appeared.”

“That’s a little intense.” John said. “You’d think New York would be a bad place to hide from the world.”

“On one hand, they want to maintain the culture they’ve created, to honor God, to preserve a set of values they see as degrading in our society.” I answered. “On the other, is the explanation I tend to: Jews, throughout history, were always isolated in the ghetto. When others stopped doing it, we did it ourselves.”

But I still felt that tinge of sadness as I passed people who could be my cousins and saw the shame and fear they felt towards me, as I headed towards illicit activities, while they celebrated the sabbath.

The party was good. Sam Baumel who threw it in honor of the expansion of his production company, did a good job enticing artists and performers to show up, giving the whole shtick the feeling of an old-school Chelsea-style opening.

He also had the good graces to use Ro-beardo Malone to promote the event, which later got Rob and his beard some hot-girly attention for his dance-worthy celebrity.

I had fun, wandering the sea of people, climbing the many flights to the beautiful Williamsburg roof, seeing Najia and John unwind a bit, each talking around, falling into their own and swallowing the social bit, which weirdos like us sometimes neglect.

It can be good to remember there are other people in the world to talk to.

Rob borrowed my camera for a while, took some shots, before I tracked him down and grabbed my phone. He seemed pre-occupied anyway and even Andrew couldn’t find him when we went to leave.

We left without Rob, saw the Groats perform in the East Village and headed to respective homes.

Najia had a good time. John wasn’t hungover. Andrew in slightly less villainous (or deceptive) fashion even invited me to Fast Five the next day with his hot GF Kelly Hi-Res.

And I–

“The girls surrounding me had one question.” Rob told me the next day. “How do you know ‘Nick from Bethenny’ and how did Sam get him to come here?”

***

It’s not every day I eat pasta for lunch.

But this day, I could use something.

I was burnt out from replying to tweets like they were text messages (they are kind-of), trying to figure out my friends prompts of “how cool I was” and dealing with a slew of shifting demands from an ending workplace situation.

Add to this my sinus medication keeps me from tasting things as normal and having an appetite (“a blessing” John thinks, a curse in my mind), I figured I could use a treat.

Pepe Rosso, the original one, still reminds me of my sophomore summer in Italy.

The middle-aged man behind the counter cursing loudly in Italian.

The Roman Catholic church next door.

The Salumeria and Latticini on either side of the street.

And a place you can get a bowl of pasta and a salad for 8.95.

I did the honorable thing and brought the couple nearest the window their paninis; there are no waiters at Pepe Rosso and I was in the way.

I sat down with my WTF podcast in m ears and poured spicy olive oil and vinegar and parmesan on a small, provided plate and stewed it together with a warm piece of bread.

I soaked up the oil from my simple salad, I sloshed the fresh mozzarella in my pasta around the sauce.

I didn’t lick the bowl out of some sense of class.

I bussed my table and thanked the man, still cursing in Italian on the phone.

“Ciao, saluti.” I told him.

“Thank you very much!” he replied liltingly.

And with a smile, I was gone.

***

PEPE ROSSO TO GO

Penne Tomato Basil with Mozzarella and Mixed Greens Salad- $8.95 (12-4 only)

Sullivan St bet Houston and Prince Sts.

CE to Spring St. R to Prince St.

***

One last thing, as promised earlier, about the improv from last week.

Recently, there’s been a surge in my blog traffic due to my recent… semi-celebrity and my posts on some larger sites.

I figured with that traffic I owed some more explanation in my state of mind.

Improv classes can be stressful, particularly when there’s that air of competitiveness. As John puts it, if the UCB aims towards sort of ideal society, its “the most cutthroat sort, a society founded on always being ‘on’.”

But there’s also the ways that improv has improved my life, meeting new people, giving me a community, learning to play me and accept my choices and instincts on a base level, with grace.

When I finished a class I took with a great teacher, Ms. Ashley Ward, she did what none of my improv teachers had done before and took us all aside, one-by-one at a bar, and gave us notes individually.

“You’re real hard on yourself, Nick.” She told me, sitting across from her at the Triple Crown. “You think being hard on yourself will make you better. But it won’t, it’ll just hurt you. Don’t think you need to be better than you are right now given you’re experience. You’re just where you need to be. You’re doing great. Believe that.”

In the competition of it all, in the craziness of not knowing your life, it can be easy to assign blame to the things that are stressful. To be hard on yourself and others.

Ultimately, who am I to pass judgment on what brings others happiness and me as well?

When I went up to my current teacher, the pretty objectively funny Will Hines, and told him that I thought I was struggling and did he have any advice, he told me: “Why do you think that?”

Ultimately, in improv or in life, there’s that sense of narrative that need to say that you’re improving, that you’re better, that you’ll go somewhere, you’ll succeed.

It’s part of the uncertainty of being my age as much as the uncertainty of most other ages I’m guessing too.

It’s harder to just accept where you are for as messy and strange as it is.

Where I am is taking comedy classes, sketch and improv, most of which I enjoy.

I spend a lot of time laughing and thinking and interacting with people who I respect.

That seems like a good template for a life.

Virtually Defriended

“So I guess I can never write you anything again.” Chadd told me. “Otherwise it’ll just appear on your blog.”

It was the night before Halloween and Chadd was dressed up snazzily as The Invisible Man, with gauze, a suit and a trench-coat, while I was wearing a quickly splintering beard as a Hasidic Jew.

“I guess you should probably be careful what you say then.” I told him. “I’ve got a good memory for these sorts of things.”

And he laughed.

After opening last week with a mixed-critique, Chadd clarified that he didn’t want to get me down with his criticism of my script, something I knew well. The point was it just sucked to hear bad news, even though I had rather hear the truth than lies or nothing (or at least, what I can accept).

The party we were at (actually the disused fire escape of the party) was one of the big, expensive-ish open bars I was surprised to hear about on Halloween, but which apparently existed universally for that date.

My costume had gotten me some looks up-and-down the street and later a man in an inflatable stripper suit would try to rub up on me, presumably to make my costumed character uncomfortable. For all my discomfort growing up in New York, dealing with my own perceiving and perceived judgment by the ultra-Orthodox community here in NY, my Halloween costume ended up being a strange lesson in “walking a mile in their shoes.”

After all, when I came into work my co-workers couldn’t recognize me for a while. They look puzzled or stunned, or as if they didn’t know how to react. I felt uncomfortable thinking I was the source of such emotions until they were broken with laughter, recognition.

I ended up missing out on a hangover from that pre-Halloween night (though I had one for Halloween, later), heading home early and not taking full advantage of my open-bar privileges.

Eva wasn’t there and, without her, I mostly don’t see the point of parties, anymore.

I awoke Halloween morning to John Beamer in his now continuously-labeled John-Cave (my laddered sleeping-loft), who at least had a decent story.

***

For one of the first times my therapist asked me: “What are you talking about?”

I should explain.

I’m not sure what sort of relationships people have with their therapists (if any), but mine amounts to somewhere between a Jewish confessional and a conversation.

My talk with her usually has to deal with things I am uncomfortable about, things I want to change, but also whatever is on my mind, to which she replies.

She is obviously a warm, intelligent woman, of around my mother’s age, who shares at least some of my interests. We could discuss politics, or film, or the merits of the book Holes (many).

Our talks are not usually a cryptograph, in my mind at least, where I recount my vivid dreams seeking to explore past trauma, though to be truthful I don’t know where my therapy is going.

Rather, our talks are usually processing how I am feeling and how I can most accurately portray what’s on my mind to her, so she can take it in, so she can see it.

I remember when I read a review of In Treatment, the show I like especially because of how it contrasts/compares with my own experience, I was made uncomfortable by the assertion that “therapy, on the part of the patient, is often a series of defensive lies”. (Which I guess I could see as being some of the play of the show.)

That’s not what I want to do, what I am doing, I thought with less than certainty.

Which brings me back to the explanation that I tried to give to my therapist to understand:

“Dealing with people that are being guarded makes me uncomfortable. It just makes me feel uneasy. I have been told or accused in the past of having some mild form of Asperger’s, a convenient excuse for some of my less social behaviors, but one quality I have is that it can be difficult for me to tell whether someone is being serious or not. So I guess when I talk to people, in social situations, and they seem guarded, they seem not present, not there, it feels like a trick. Like they’re deceiving me. It makes me feel uncomfortable, as if someone was calling me stupid. And worse, it makes me unsure of myself and the world around me and how to judge it.”

When my therapist asked for more, I tried giving it. I talked about “a wall” I felt around some people, I talked about meeting people at the UCB, after classes or a show, telling them a story and seeing the disconnect on their face. I guess the context of the lack of connection/understanding mattered almost as much as the situation itself. If this was going to be my life, how would I get people to deal with me on my level.

At film school it was easy, since there was more time to feel around an angsty crowd, to grab friends and leave friends and adjust socially to a place that was comfortable. But maybe the added context of my life is what adds the pressure and not just the “wall”.

At home, John Beamer tried to tell me that if I followed comedy, this would be the way of the rest of my life. People would be guarded, people would be fake.

“People leave themselves for on-stage.” John said. “Anything that’s unsavory or strange they leave there, to use in their comedy. Because in real life, off-stage, you can’t be that jerk you were just lampooning, you have to be a winner.”

“A winner”.

After I voted yesterday, I broadcast my vote for a local NY politican and internet-meme Jimmy McMillan and defending my vote, I managed to offend an ex-co-worker so badly that she de-friended me on Facebook.

I said the wrong thing at the wrong time I guess, but I was shocked when it happened. I had just talked to this woman, a talented up-and-comer, a few weeks ago at her request. We’d had a nice long conversation that had gone amicably and well.

And that was enough that she absented herself from my life. I couldn’t see it, but I just felt bad.

That night, I couldn’t sleep, until I did.

***

When heading home from the aforementioned, mind-bending therapy session, I had another mind-bending thing happen to me: free food.

I actually did a double take to stop on the street. A truck called Malaysian Kitcken had pulled up and was offering samples (in 45 minutes) of Malaysian food, in order to promote it as a viable NYC take-out option.

Free food that has the word “asian” in it you say?

I was there.

For 45 minutes.

Waiting in line for a small plate.

Which this was not.

Because those Malaysians (actually white PR guys repping Malaysian food) did their job and right after my sample, I went barreling over to Laut, the much lauded super-stealthy Malaysian joint on the side of Union Square which recently (and to me, totally unexpectedly) received a Michelin star, despite offering Thai-style take-out lunch specials!

Which is in fact, the sumptuous picture you see before you, a Malaysian Chicken Curry lunch special stuffed full of string beans, sauteed okra and savory bits of chicken.

My stomach rumbled for it as I gulped it down, licking the box after completion.

The curry was neither the gulpy-creaminess of a “Tikka Masala” nor the dry mild-spicyness of a “Massaman” curry, nor even a doubly hot “Vindaloo”. Instead it was peppery, probably influenced by the advertised “fried chiles” and bound together by coconut milk, which made it light and cut the spice while keeping the flavor.

In the end at home, I was kicking myself for not going to this place when I lived, for almost a year, a block away from it.

But what can I say: Chipotle was new then.

Ah, what a time.

***

LAUT

Malaysian Chicken Curry Lunch Special w/Brown Rice- $10

17th St bet. Broadway and 5th Ave

NQR456L to 14th St.-Union Sq.

Happy Jew Year

I got this email a few days ago and I showed it to Chadd yesterday.

“Wanna see a preview of my new blog post?”

He was sitting in the corner of a small Alphabet City apartment, drunk, moody and uncharacteristically quiet, wearing an angsty Vincent Gallo t-shirt and so I thought I’d give him a little pepping up.

“Like I need one, like everyone should care.” Chadd told me.

But he did a double take when he saw it.

I had shown up barely announced to the cramped apartment with my best friend Frank and his friend Army Rob in tow, with a six-pack of Labatt Blue out of the sort of courtesy that one brings to a party in the form of beer or beer-like substances.

The main attraction though was a “Return to/from Russia” theme, espoused by the fur cap Bobby Olsen was wearing when I entered and the horseradish vodka shots, chased with mini dill pickles, that Dan Berk made us all take.

“I want to go to the vodka closet!” Dan declared after one particularly strong whiff of horseradish. “At these clubs around the city, you can go into an icy closet and there’s just a shit-ton of vodka and you can drink as many shots as you can take–30 shots, whatever.”

“Yeah, how much is that?” I asked.

“Nothing, it’s part of the club.” He replied.

And I nodded and chewed on my pickle.

Chadd looked at me seriously and tried to convince me that this was an augur that I should write a short film for Colin Quinn.

“Give him something he won’t expect, man.” He told me. “You’re good at that.”

I wasn’t so sure, about the idea or the script, but I took it.

Soon Chadd left and so did the rest of us. Frank and Army Rob were happy for the funny vodka, but complained heavily about the walking load of going anywhere from Alphabet City.

Army Rob wanted to try Karaoke for the first time, so I got him jazzed up with some pointers, describing to him my strategies versus the balladry of the other Ro-beardo Malone and how he belts out Celine Dion songs like they were covers by a one-Rob-Malone-band, but Army Rob not having Rob-knowledge, it was somewhat lost on him.

Planet Rose was packed full, though, of “bridge-and-tunnel” folks and the new place I tried, The Karaoke Cave (a Matt Chao rec) was also packed with 30-minute wait times on songs.

Frank and Army Rob went home, to Frank’s karaoke-less relief and Rob’s only slight disappointment.

For me, the horseradish vodka was enough to get me to bed.

***

Working in the movie theater lately has alternated somewhere between frustrating and fulfilling.

It’s always better when I have something else in my life, something to look forward to, some hope that this isn’t my endgame.

“I’m taking classes, somewhere, anywhere.” One of co-workers told me. “Because if this is the only thing in my life, I’d go insane.”

And while I reached a periodic low sometime last week, recoiling still from blowing my one audition, this week I had a good meeting with a manager, booked another audition and, most importantly, found a new video game to play.

I also gained some confidence from a writing group session which reached a good 6 or so people when I thought that no one would come. I made some revisions to a script, drank some good beers, and chatted about Mochi with a tipsy Emmeline Wilks-Dupoise while I escorted her to a dinner-date near by.

Andy Roehm liked my script so much that he ended up bugging me about it at work.

“Dude,” he began, in his usual So-Cal invocation. “I know those characters. I’d do justice to it, man. I’d do it right. You know it.”

It was fun being pursued like this, fun to know that people still like what you gotta say.

And it was funny seeing Andy say this, while wearing a black visor, preparing to clean a bathroom.

It was somewhere between feeling bad and feeling better that Mr. Quinn came by.

His show was over, so he must have lived the near the theater. He recognized me from an earlier time I took his ticket.

We chatted for about ten minutes, during the n0t-busy hours, about comedy, filmmaking, my posture (which he told me could be improved by “Alexander Technique”) and my favorite podcast, “WTF with Marc Maron”, which he said he was going to be on “just because you asked.”

“You’re the only reason I’m going on that show.” He told me and I probably blushed.

He solicited seeing my movie when I told him I was a film student and got back to me that same night.

It’s always a pleasure when someone like that is a decent fellow to you.

I guess working at the movie theater has its’ ups.

***

The downs, I suppose, came when I worked my first ever double shift: 17 hour straight.

It was going to be an event, opening and closing on a Friday. I told all my friends to come and see movies and drink coffee and soda and eat popcorn and candy: anything I could offer them for free.

Anything really, to have at least someone come and keep me company through what was bound to be a stressful period of my life/day.

As it happens, noone came. At least not to see a movie.

J.D. Amato came almost incidentally, as part of pre-show ritual of getting out the jitters through visiting multiple coffee shops.

Mr. Amato had amazed all my friends upon graduation college a year later than us, by landing a big corporate ongoing gig. Even though he wasn’t there anymore, he still seemed to be walking on air, producing shorts for the UCB’s website (which he created) and for Funny Or Die. In his “spare time” he also improved on teams, putting on shows in cool-sketchy venues.

In short, he seemed to have the sort of creative-artistic “progress success” that seemed to elude me and my friends, who found ourselves in various degress of “working in a movie theater.”

It was nice of J.D. to come though, and our talk precluded a long relationship we hav had now, playing Words With Friends on our iPhones.

The other person who showed up, was my Mom with two slices of Two Boots pizza, one my favorite, one hers.

It was a very nice gesture and one that I appreciated. So much, in fact, that that picture is all I managed to take of them.

The one slice, my favorite, the Mr. Pink, has marinated chicken, plum tomatoes and roasted garlic on an otherwise normal slice. It’s chewy and chicken-y and spicy with greasy cheese binding everything together, kind of like a streamlined chicken parm.

My mom’s fave, she was loathe to tell me about it, but turned out well, the Tony Clifton, which has Vidalia onions and wild mushrooms and some nice sauces.

I usually don’t like mushrooms and onions on my pizza (why my mom was scared to tell me), but really you just appreciate anything in that sort of circumstance and I warmed to Mr. Clifton quickly.

I got through the shfit somehow and went back to work the next day, still burnt, and somehow I feel like weeks later, I still haven’t recovered.

I celebrated Rosh Hashanah recently with my family and told my mom how much I appreciated the slices.

The next day, Eva’s Rochester-Irish father took me out to brunch and brought up the new year.

“Blessings on your face.” He told me.

“What?”

“I think that’s what you’re supposed to say on the new year.” He said.

I wondered if my acne had gone away.

***

TWO BOOTS

1 Mr. Pink (Chicken, Tomato, Garlic) and 1 Tony Clifton (Vidalia Onions, Mushrooms)- $7.50 (or free if your mom brings it)

Bleecker St between Broadway and Crosby St.

BDFM6 to Broadway-Lafayette/Bleecker St. R to Prince St.

A Happy Whatever

As a Jew, I had two Christmases this year, neither mine.

Unfortunately, I was sick for all of them.

And the cure, well, the cure might be worse than the medicine.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Even though I feel like I made this blog specifically not to review movies, coming off a gig doing just that, I feel both a need to voice my opinion in this holiday-awards-season time as owed to my viewers (hi, mom) and also, I understand the complete hypocrisy/ridiculousness of that notion.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is: here’s some more reviews.

If you’re here for them, you can read ‘em and move on. There will even be a nice “***” thing I do separating the reviews from the rest of everything.

But if you’re here in part or whole for my fucked-up crazy-life or lack-thereof, then stay tuned.

Cue Looney Tunes theme.

***

Why did everybody think that Milk was such a bad movie? Sure it was somewhat conventional, somewhat stylized. But it had some good gumption some attempt at honest feeling, if not always honest representation. What it did, which I thought admirable, was to bring gay themes into the mainstream in a way unlike Philadelphia or even Brokeback Mountain for that matter. It was trying to make an (excuse me) “straight” gay movie. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. If the alternative is something like A Single Man, then I’m not sure what everyone’s compaining about. Not to say that A Single Man, fashionista Tom Ford’s directorial debut, is a terrible movie (or a terrible “gay movie”), but that it’s art-house preen-and-sheen feel inauthentic and often inappropriate. The film features the chance of a lifetime for Brit actor Colin Firth, who had previously been mired in Brit-pop Rom-Coms. Here, Firth gets a chance to try to show not only the longing of a British college professor deprived of his lover by a car accident, but the restraint and distance that both British culture and the still-closeted early 60s enforce upon him. Sounds pretty good, right? And when we focus on Firth’s performance it is. But the film is shot in such a way that is showy, as in ostentatiously, self-consciously arty, showing strange angles, saturated lighting and boring fantasy sequences. The world Firth inhabits is lush when, based on the tone of the film and the Isherwood novel upon which it is based, it should be spare. One longs for Mike Nichols or David Cronenberg to swoop in with their opposing, but well-championed views of matters of the heart and home, just so we could get a clear picture unsullied by all of Ford’s excess. Still, Firth never missteps and co-star Julianne Moore (over-shown in the publicity, offensively to make it seem like an actual “straight” movie) phones in a decent performance as Firth’s fag-hag. Overall though, perhaps I’m too harsh. Ford has some bad stylistic tendencies, but he at least picks good actors and some interesting source material. Like other new directors this year, if he can learn to pair down his stylistic flourishes, he might amount to something interesting.

Chalk one up to Chadd Harbold. I know he gets a lot of mention on this blog (what, the guy sees movies with me constantly), but he had bugging me since our time drinking espresso up at Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival to see Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Now, to be fair, Chadd can have a much different taste than me in movies. The classic example is (as I’ve mentioned before) where Chadd wants to see some French movie about some bored artist who can’t decide between his two or more smoking hot women (I think this is why Chadd originally wanted to see Nine) and where I want to go see something like Ninja Assassin, because it has a lot of ninjas. All of this is basically saying that Chadd has a more “European” taste in film perhaps, while mine might be a little “continental”. Anyway, I usually lump Haneke in with a European sensibility but when my frenemy A.O. Scott of the Times got on his high horse to say he hated the film, while the critic from the New Yorker who hates everything, Anthony Lane, called it a masterpiece, I decided it might be worth my time. What I got for the crowd I was surrounded by at the first 1pm showing at Film Forum, I have to say, was very satisfying. As I understand it, the theme that pervades much of Haneke’s cinema is an indictment of the perversion and degradation of an idealized world, the idea that the kids are not “alright”. When I saw his original Funny Games (not the remake, I hate Michael Pitt), I thought this message was shown both too obviously and too pessimistically. It’s not interesting for me to see total misanthropy in cinema. But I didn’t get that from The White Ribbon. What I got was almost a film-noirish type detective story about where the roots of a seemingly idyllic community in 1910s Germany went wrong. We see the story through the eyes of an imperfect, but generally well-meaning character, a schoolteacher, and what’s more there are other well-meaning characters as well. Unlike the rootless monsters Haneke dredges up in Funny Games, we are always given a pathology of evil in Ribbon, to explain how these good townsfolk went so bad. Even more than that though, crucially, like horses led to water, we are allowed to determine when we drink. Haneke never forces meaning on us or makes the connections concretely. Instead, he allows the audience to witness his characters without creating a morality play. By doing so, he actually manages to show more respect for the atrocities committed in the film, showing one of the better uses of violence I’ve seen in filmmaking in a while. So, bravo, Chadd. You win this one. But it doesn’t mean that all those things I just said about The White Ribbon couldn’t just be applied to Ninja Assassin. I just blew your fucking mind.

The three friends I went to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with were stoned but, due to my cold and my extreme sensitivity to stimulants, I was actually significantly more fucked up than them. Which was a good place to be seeing the film, Gilliam’s newest venture, since it allowed me not to care about some of the more tawdry examples of CGI-effects the film presents (particularly poor when compared to 250-mil Avatar) and also, somehow, allowed me to pick up the plot clearly despite the unanimous confusion of my three friends and all the reviews I had read. Basically, Gilliam’s latest craze-fest is a parable about storytelling, about imagination and the way that we frame our own lives and ultimately, how that understanding frames the choices in life we make. Christopher Plummer plays the titular doctor, once a great monk tasked with “telling the world’s story”, now a shabby sideshow-attraction carting around London in retro-fashion by horse. He has a daughter who’s due to the devil (an excellent Tom Waits), a street ragamuffin (this is London after all) who pines for the daughter and a con man who can’t remember who or what he’s supposed to con. This last part is played by Heath Ledger, in his last incomplete role, but also by Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp and Jude Law, all of whom deliver top-knotch work. And regardless of what you might think or what one might suppose about the movie going into it, it’s not about Ledger, even though the theme might tangentially touch on his death. What it is is a look into an imagination beyond James Cameron’s, a place of fanciful storytelling and meaningful moral stakes. Gilliam may not be as grand a filmmaker as Cameron and Imaginarium isn’t as grand a film as Avatar (what is?), but it’s a smarter, wiser film and Gilliam, for all his years, never lets the magic not feel fresh.

I slept through most of Police, Adjective, though later my girlfriend Eva would tell me that about three things happened in the movie total and that I was awake for one of them. She seemed generally well disposed towards the film though.

***

And why did I sleep through a potentially important awards-season movie that was part of the Romanian film movement that I often enjoy? For the same reason I slept through a bunch of Christmas and passed out on Eva’s mom’s bed with Family Guy: Volume Seven playing on the TV: because I’ve been effing sick.

When I went for my first Christmas, a Christmas Eve celebration with Eva, her father and her father’s girlfriend, Rebecca (Eva insists that all girlfriends be mentioned by name on this blog, herself included), I had a pretty great time, since I was in the fortunate position of some empathy from her parental’s, I was in my home-base Manhattan and Rebecca had cooked some delicious Dal with carrots and sweet potato. It might seem strange that while some people get claustrophobic in the low-ceiling limited atmospheres of New York City environs, I feel the most comfortable knowing I’m in a box. As a Jew on Christmas, I marveled as Eva received present after present, including a strange custom I knew nothing of: a large red “stocking” full of small gifts like Silly Putty and fake moustaches and miniature dogs (four of the same kind , looking in the same direction). When I later discussed this phenomenon with my friend, producer and fellow Jew, Dave Broad, we remarked on the relative paucity of Hannukah gifts.

“I got a sweater that was my dead grandpa’s. And another sweater that wasn’t.” I offered.

“Hah,” Dave chuckled in a swarthy base tone mismatched to his skinny NY-Jew frame. “My mom gave me a wooden block for Hannukah once with words that said like ‘peace’ and ‘ceremony’ on them.”

“Shit,” I remarked, with genuine surprise. “Why not a lump of coal?”

“Well, I remember growing up that I wasn’t allowed to play video games or watch a lot of TV, you know.” Dave told me. “And when the Nintendo 64 came out, my brother and I wanted it desperately. So to my surprise, my parents relented and we got jobs, walking dogs and stuff, the kind of jobs you get that age, to make some spare bucks. And we worked and saved and we got a tag, because back then you got a tag or a receipt to pick up a big thing like that and then you’d go to the store to pick it up. So my parents picked up it for us, wrapped it up and said ‘Happy Hannukah’. Like, they had just gotten it.”

“God, that’s balls.” I remarked.

“Yeah, but I might try to ask them for a computer, since they didn’t get me a graduation gift yet, pull some of that Jew guilt right back on them.” He suggested.

“A dangerous tack.” I replied. “I had asked my parents for something along the lines of a college graduation gift only for them to shake my hand and say ‘Congratulations on that diploma; we paid for it.”

Then Eva came and we ordered some French Toast.

Anyway, Eva was showered with gifts in her pop’s Battery City flat while I, unbeknownst to me, was being showered in something quite different.

You see, Eva had a dog, Audrey, named for Audrey Hepburn, whom I told Eva she reminded me of in Funny Face, when she showed up to my house in a turtleneck sweater. And while I’d been aware of my cat allergy for some time and the deleterious magic it works on my sinuses, my dog allergy had only been recently discovered and so the avoidance of it had not yet been ingrained. By the time the night was coming to a close, I realized as my nostrils and then my ears swelled up in their interiors, that I needed to step outside for some air. But of course, once you know you need to, it’s already far too late.

My allergies made me susceptible to a cold or a sinus infection and god, if I had never prayed for an infection so hard in my life. You see, a sinus infection can be cured with antibiotics overnight. But I’ve never taken anything that’s made a cold last any longer.

Through Christmas day, to my second Christmas at Eva’s mom’s house in Jersey, I could not taste, smell or talk in an un-funny manner and worse yet, I was passing out in the middle of the day even more than my own famed father, reknown for his ability to fall asleep not mid-word or mid-sentence, but mid-syllable. It was tough, all the moreso because I’m sure I didn’t make a good impression on Eva’s mother or her dinner party by passing out to Family Guy, drooling on her bed while a meet-and-greet was going on in the living room next door.

And god also, if a cold doesn’t remind you of how you depend on other people, for with proper distraction a cold’s only an inconvenience, but alone, unfocused, it’s a menace.

But the flipside, as I emerge from my disconnected Christmases into my New Year, is that I see the people around me getting sick and I smile.

My girlfriend, my dad, my sister–excuse me, my girlfriend’s name is Eva–they’re all getting sick and it’s because they love me enough (or are stupid enough) to interact with me even when I’m like this.

It warms my heart. Partly with Schadenfreude but mostly with love.

And after all, isn’t that the meaning of whatever this end of the year jumble is.

Everybody gets fucking sick of everyone else and then starts over, all over, again.

What a lovely rationale for a life as a disease vector.

Highway to the Danger Zone

I don’t know why I chose that title.

I’m not sure it even makes sense.

I was interviewed this morning. The interviewer was Austin, a handy/capable (not handi-capable) grip and actor from my short-film shoot. I was obliged to work on it, by the law of film-school-favors, wherein if he works on my film for free I am obliged to work on his. What he in turn needed me for was to ask me about life after film school for a documentary project he was doing on recent film alums for his documentary class, ironically the same one I had taken in the same semester he had taken it, with the same teacher.

It was raining, the sporadic, tantrum-style rain of recent New York City days–brief, in intense and varying spurts–and I huddled across the street on the bench in front of the old-fashioned coffee shop, after an early morning wake-up that consisted of leftover sitcoms and an over-dose of repetitive, concurrent video-gaming.

Austin was late by a couple minutes, but staring in to the faces of his crew was like looking in a funhouse mirror into all the ways you might be reflected. One of them was Israeli talking on the phone to his mom in Hebrew and comparing how our recently cut Jew-fros might have matched up had they been present. One of them was talking about an introductory film class disdainfully, since he was unsure he would be able to make a “serious” movie in it, as he said so with a “serious” face. A final one was ministerial, overseeing the others as he picked out restaurants around the street he might take his crew out to, in exchange for their willingness for a film-school school-project schlep.

“Was there any point when you realized that you weren’t going to have a job when you got out?”

Austin came and the interview began. I sat on the same bench facing Austin trying to chose between playing my bravado to him or the camera, knowing my old teacher Sam Pollard would be seeing this and trying to figure out, somewhere in my head, how to make him laugh.

“You know, I’m optimistic.” I told Austin as he assumed the squinting stare of the nouveau-documentarian. “I’ve only been out of school for 6 months. It’s true I used to think that I would have a job when I got out of college, that the people who didn’t have jobs were losers. But I work somewhere I like, even if I don’t get paid and I’m part of something I believe in. Now you can talk to me in another six months when I’m unemployed and my film’s been rejected and I still don’t know what to do with my life. But I live my life in horizons and when this job ends I’ll have one. And I’ll try to find the next one from there.”

The questions continued, but I’m a bad/good interview and every time Austin gave me a question, it was another excuse for me to tell a story, to give a viewpoint. Talking for me, conversation, sometimes feels like a theater in which I can relive the best moments of my life, revive the confidence and energy that I’ve felt previously, or just even articulate and work out what’s in my head, like a shower or a good BM. In any case the kiddos looked on enraptured and I felt like I had a job well-done. I told them whatever success stories I could think of, from my friend Zach Weintraub who had shot a good feature for nothing on a digital-picture-camera, to my friend Chadd, whose star-studded-celebrity-event I was attending the next day. But as they left, I realized the stories I told them, I told myself and that it was time for a self-revival.

***

The truth is, denizens of Feitelogram: I haven’t been writing enough.

Or even more than that, more simply, I haven’t been doing.

When I met with Antonio Campos, he told me to make another short film. There’s nothing stopping me from doing that except for me and my own head. If I wrote something, I could gather friends, shoot on weekends, ask my parents for money probably and they’d probably shell out.

I could sit at home and finish a screenplay I haven’t touched in three weeks, or at least begin the process of beginning.

The truth is, having a job, an internship, some structure, has both stabilized me and squelched me.

Since I have structure to my life, times that I am busy for much of the week, I have less need to write, less emotional, desperate lashing (though I still seem to do much of that here). At the same time, I have less energy to write, less drive, since my job has made it so I can’t attend or even schedule my writer’s group, meaning that I’m not even around anyone who is writing.

In short, I need to work harder or smarter or both to carve out a niche for myself if I want to continue to be creative. When I think of the people who I told stories about to that film crew this morning, it was people that decide to do something, to only worry so much about how good it would be and just get it done. To be creative in the literal meaning of the word.

That’s what I need in my life and that’s where my blog comes in. Where y’all help.

As I once told Jason Lee, whose blogposts have now returned to a consistent diet of job hunting and Nicholas Cage film-blogging after a queasy experience as an Asian-food-deliveryman, blogging is writing, it’s working out your muscles, it’s keeping in shape. It’s a lifeline back to the world of your mind, the world it is easy to get out of touch with when you are forced to explore the questionable territory of your own value by a job or an internship.

It’s good just to keep it out, keep it going.

And if I’m posing, I’ll be damned if I ain’t posing here.

***

If there’s a reason if I gotta self-analyze that I chose this title for this post, it might be an unconscious need for Karaoke.

Much like my lapsed writer’s group, Karaoke has been something missing in my life as I face challenges to schedule it that I did not face in my grand summer of after-school unemployment. It’s become so distant that I often can’t even think of singing my own songs, like I once did, when I spent a whole couple afternoons listening to “Thunder Road” on repeat so I’d get the cadences right as to not embarass myself, which I’m sure I still did.

Instead I think of my friend Rob Returning-Beardo Malone and think of songs for him to do. As a gesture, when we went together, I’d often write his name down for a song I’d thought for him to do, something I had anxious anticipated. As I’ve written before, Rob has a crooner, eccentric-PA style that often goes well with campy songs sung un-ironically like “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris or “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates.

I feel like he could do a good rendition of “Highway to the Danger Zone” if he tried, but recently, while brushing my teeth, my Pandora Radio put on “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day, an iconic song of 90s teen angst which seems anathema to Rob, but which I pondered what his spin would be like. Would he croon it, or go for a straight-up Billy Joe-impression? Or would he simply pass and give me a withering “come on, Bro-ham-amus!” kind of look? I couldn’t say honestly and I smiled through my brushing teeth.

“You know,” I told Austin playing this one to the camera. “Last night I had a friend invite me to see 2012 at midnight. And most people when they would do that, they’d do it with excitement or not at all, dismissing the movie, rightly, as trash. But my friends I made in film school can do it someway where it’s ironic and it’s genuine and it’s a fun time for both of it all at once.”

I paused.

“Doesn’t mean I fucking went, 2012 looks awful.” I said. “But if I hadn’t gone to film school, where would I have ever met people like that?”

The Feeling of Deep Depression Accompanying The Realization That One Hasn’t Seen Enough Movies at The New York Film Festival And That It Is Now Over

“Nicholas Feitel has been a writer, an actor and a college student for some time now.”

“As a writer, his work has appeared in New York City in print and on the web.”

“As an actor, he has appeared in theater Off-Broadway, in commercials and on The Tonight Show With David Letterman.”

“As a college student, well, he’s almost graduated from NYU Film School.”

“Currently, he splits his time between writing as a Contributing Editor for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and his beautiful girlfriend, Eva.”

***

This was what I came up with, more or less, at the prompting of a field titled “Director’s Bio” on the website for the South by Southwest Film Festival.

Actually, it’s what I came up with about the fourth-or-fifth time after my work was erased, abandoned, rethought or, in one particularly savage case, X-ed out by some unsuspecting or malicious malefactor at my work.

“Drat.” I cursed mentally, secretly glad on some level that the situation had given me permission to use the word “drat”.

In fact, it was my work that had persuaded me to submit my thesis, LOSER to that particular festival, since I had met a young lady I knew from high school who happened to work for Jim Jarmusch’s production company, and as we took the awkward “I haven’t seen you in 4 years and wasn’t even sure if you were really cool then” walk, she mentioned that SXSW was good for “first-timers” as I indicated that in fact the arriving “E” was my train.

I had gotten done with 13 or so other applications, met with various degrees of ease through the past couple months and culminating in a recent bout of hysteria over the incompetence of the United States Postal Service.

Namely, I had shipped something Priority Mail, only to see it delivered 7 days later (as opposed to the “2-3″ advertised) on a Saturday morning when, of course, the festival offices were closed.

When I used the tracking service I had paid so much more for, as an additional option on the automated machine, to figure this out, I found out I could not schedule a “redelivery” as advertised by the website. Instead in was in the festival’s hands to decide whether to send someone to go pick up the film from the one numb-nuts stupid enough to ship via U.S. Mail.

“It’s more expensive, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t get there.” I announced unceremoniously, headphones-in-ears at the late-night-services of a FedEx facility.

And I walked out proudly.

Only to discover that the receipt containing the tracking number that would give me so much joy in the minutiae of where my package was, had blown away down Hudson St, down the shutter-closed driveways of nearby UPS and down toward Tribeca.

“Shit.” I said to the wind, disappointed that it wasn’t “drat”.

***

One would think with all the pomp and circumstance of my self-appointed/created “Director’s Bio” that I might actually have it in me to see the films put on by the company for which I was supposedly a “Contributing Editor”, capital C, capital E.

But of course, I didn’t.

Or I mean, really I did.

I saw Kanikosen and Ghost Town for the actual job at Film Society, which I reviewed here and here, respectively. I saw Trash Humpers, the new Harmony Korine film for fun, which had a cool, if sophomoric effect when the filmmaker recognized me. I saw Hadewijch and Everyone Else in a case of Harbold-ian misunderstanding, wherein my friend Chadd blearily misinterpreted a mid-morning “what’s up” as a “Hey, will you buy me tickets for that Bruno Dumont film that you are seeing later this evening?”, which ended up well (even though the Dumont film was French-weirdocratic stuff) since Everyone Else was an ok “Germ-blecore” time (Trademark Pending) and we got to go out with Whit Stilman, by luck, after the film, who was nice enough to buy Chadd and I our drinks and discuss the modern cinema with us, even though we collectively bit our tongues when he dissed Johnny Guitar as “definitely a bad movie”.

I even got to see one of my favorite films of the year from perhaps the filmmaker I most aspire to, Todd Solondz, which I did write about for Film Society, though I’d have seen it for fun too.

But still, the feeling set in on me, on a Saturday morning, when I headed uptown perhaps ambivalently and missed my comped screening of Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, only to find out that there were no more screenings left of the film.

When I think of the New York Film Festival, I think not only of the movies I see there, but the experience as a whole and the past I’ve had there. I remember contentious or ludicrous Q+As, last minute viewings of 3-hours-films, the satisfaction of getting in to sold-out screenings for just 10 bucks waiting in what felt like the winner’s line outside the theater, or just the high caused by too-many free-espressos from the “gratis” Illy guys who seemed to serve you endlessly like bartenders who just don’t know when to stop.

It’s an experience each year, one best served with a liberal helping of filmie-type friends, with whom you can share conspiratorially, the nerdy glee of knowing that you’ve seen the new (insert douchebag-y filmmaker here) movie 2.5 weeks before the rest of art-house crowd of New York City will see it, that is, provided that most of the art-house crowd didn’t just attend that very same screening you just did and realizing that yes, they probably did.

So I mourn even though I’ve seen more movies than most at the festival, the lost opportunity in not seeing more.

And, simultaneously, I feel happy that I even feel sad about it.

If that makes any sense.

***

Finally, a word on something.

I have been much maligned (in my eyes of course) for my lack of anticipation for Where The Wild Things Are, mostly stemming from my (mostly one-sided) feud with superhero enthusiast and professional douchebag Dave Eggers.

However, at MoMA on Sunday, I had the opportunity, extremely begrudgingly, to see what was billed as a “making-of” documentary, but what turned out to be a portrait of Maurice Sendak, author of the book of Where The Wild Things Are, called Tell Them Anything You Want.

The movie was lovely, the best sort of short documentary, the one that attempts not to know it’s subject, but to understand him on his level, for a moment.

Sendak is a unique talent and Where The Wild Things Are is only one of his magical books that I was lucky enough to enjoy as a youngster and which have changed the lives of many a youngster before they did me.

He’s also a daringly funny person, extremely morbid, constantly discussing his own death. He’s filled with a uniquely Jewish blend of the ability to put himself down while simultaneously pointing out how great he is.

In the documentary, he discusses in the same breath, his loving relationship with his caretaker and his mother’s failed attempt to abort him. When the interviewer gawks, he shows incredulousness.

“What?” He asks, with his old crotchety Jew-tude. “It’s the truth. They told me flat out: We couldn’t afford you.”

Sendak is too great a character to describe in a blog post, but one thing the movie (which was recently itself shortlisted for this year’s Oscars) reminded me of is how much I like Spike Jonze.

Jonze, another Jewish kid, was sorely missed in such films as Synecdoche, New York and The Science of Sleep, that he could have tamed with his unique-but-limited sensibility as a director.

Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are both brilliant films and owe much to him, though they also are considered “Charlie Kaufman” movies.

What’s clear from Tell Them Anything You Want though, is that Jonze understands Sendak. He knows his story, his emotions and the feelings behind the book.

As such, with much humbling-and-bumbling, I recant some of my pessimism towards Where The Wild Things Are.

I like Jonze. I admire him.

And I feel like anyone who can make such a loving-compelling-understanding documentary about Maurice Sendak and his work, can bring an understanding to a film adaptation of his book.

Reviews have already come out for the film, ranging from Ed Gonzalez’s mostly positive Slant review to David Denby of the New Yorker’s review which is significantly more mixed.

As I said, nowadays, I hold out hope for the movie that it might be good or at least well-meaning.

But for now, at least, I can rest assured that if it’s bad, I’ll have a name to blame that’s not Jonze:

That *motherfucking* Dave Eggers.

What a douche.

Triple Feature on the Down and Out

“Nicholas, a thing you should know: Excuses are for the weak.”

At an unpaid job, it’s easy to find yourself somewhere stuck in adolescence at the same time as you might be trying to free yourself from it.

After all, you’ve just spent the majority of your life at this point referring to your superiors (teachers, professors) as Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. (or later as merely, “Professor”), all as part of a system of pedagogy that seems to ensconce you in its own rules separate from reality.

The transition from school to unpaid work then is different from a job, where addressing your bosses like you once addressed those old superiors only entrenches their perception of your stance in adolescence, while you are simultaneously guided from that stance.

Thus the security guard, among many others at my work, had taken up a mentorship of me, that included such bits, as the phrase about excuses.

I think at the time, the phrase was meant for a failure to deliver a package.

But I feel it draw on.

***

I’ve found myself not writing and not for lack of things to write about.

I’ve been seeing films at the New York Film Festivals, plays on Broadway and downtown and living life at a general pace.

If this blog is mostly comprised of the write-able moments from my life, then I haven’t been at a lack for them.

Monday evening, I returned to Planet Rose Karaoke with a mix of shame and uneasiness. I had skipped a week again, after not being able to go for so long due to my play. Not only I had skipped the week though, but I had also missed my friend Colin The Bartenders’s birthday, who I consider my friend due to our mutual affinity for Karaoke and the compassion that he would show for Rob or J-Sam and I on a slow-down Monday afternoon.

Then again, it’s always hard to gauge with people who are paid to be friendly to you (or paid to sell drinks or both).

But either way, he’d invited me to his birthday party and I had flaked out and not gone and instead come crawling back to his establishment.

But as I talked to Colin he accepted my apology and I as sat there and did my first song and friends poured in, I felt a flash or a convulsion through my body, a slight spasm or charge of energy.

A sense of uneasiness flaring up as it left my body, a sigh.

Finally at Karaoke again, as I waved from some light Beatles to Neil Young to Springsteen, finally, I was at home.

***

Or the day I went to go see a Triple Feature on Faith, consisting of A Serious Man, The Invention of Lying and Anvil!: The Story of Anvil.

A Serious Man, I saw with my mother and Eva, after a lunch with waiter service at Katz’s on a busy Saturday morning, the first I’d ever had for waiter service. For me going to Katz’s personally, it was always more satisftying to get your sandwich from the guys at the counter, preferably the old Russian Jew who seemed both worn and timeless. It satisfied that New Yorker element in me that wanted personalization, attention and that satisfying sense of oversight, as if the sandwich maker was working for you personally, in your one-man-enclave of meat.

Still, the ‘rents were taking me out and a lunch at Katz’s is a lunch at Katz’s and was particularly appropriate for that movie.

A Serious Man was the most Jewish film I had ever seen, in more ways than one.

My mother had told me, after the film, that somehow, a friend of my grandmother, the Time critic Richard Corliss, had found the movie “anti-semitic”, a claim I find both difficult to understand and oddly fitting with the film.

You see, for all you goy readers out there, A Serious Man is very much about the questioning nature of being Jewish and the way that life can be interpreted. As a story, it can be seen as a retelling of the book of Job, with the suffering of a righteous Jewish man before the whims of G-d. However, as a film it reads like a Jewish text, with many questions poised to the viewer, ethical and otherwise.

Even from the prologue we are given a whopper:

Was the husband, attempting kindness, right in the prologue? Or was the wife right in her attempt to defend her family?

Either a way a man is dead and it is left for G-d to judge.

Which is the point of the film, as beautifully illustrated in the story of “The Goy’s Teeth” (The Sheherazzad of the film). God is unknowable, his workings a question, the answers to which we create in our decisions in our existence.

This is not an easy thing to accept, or even a rational one, but it is a very Jewish thing.

Which is probably why, in The Invention of Lying, a very un-Jewish film, religion is posed as a massive lie of useless proprotions.

The first film directed by Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras), the story is a parable unsure of its own meaning. It tellls of a world where everyone tells the truth, unable to lie even by omission, talking incessantly even when irking other people.

As a concept, this should be close to my heart, but on screen it gets tired fast and when the movie veers into Gervais (the main character) inventing religion as part of his sole capacity to lie, it becomes as saddled with concepts it can’t handle as was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by its unwieldy invocation of Hurricane Katrina.

For The Invention of Lying, religion is just another lie people would rather cling to than the unfortunate circumstances of “the truth”. But part of the failing of that film is that faith in itself is not a lie, but a gamble. When there is no certainty people try to find a concrete answer (the search in A Serious Man), but the absence of an answer is not a meaningless void, but a vast, unknowable expanse (think glass half-empty/half-full). In Lying, Gervais attaches his pessimism awkwardly to a standard “rom-com” shell, but his failure is to understand the forces he wrestles with.

In the final film of the triple-feature, Anvil!: The Story of Advil, possibly the best film of the three, seen lying in bed with my girlfriend on VH1, using the Time Warner Cable “Start Over” feature, we finally get characters comfortable with their faith and place in the world.

Lead singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, are best friends, Canadian Jews and what would be referred to explicitly by most people as “failures”. Once grouped among bands like Led Zeppelin and Metallica, their band “Anvil” now only supports them through three-quater-empty European bars and small-but-dedicated parties around their native cold home. To support himself, “Lips” is forced to work as a porter in a catering service that supplies middle and pre-schools with their bland, pre-packaged lunches.

Despite intense oblivion and ignominy though, the band still acts like a band, replete with the love and fighting, wives kids and dedicated fans that a band that released an album called “Metal on Metal” should have. Some could say these two long-haired, mostly ridiculous Jews are fools or throw-backs, high-school dropouts who barely seem to function in the real world. But much like The Mountain Goats’ song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton”, even in their 50s, these fellows are convinced they are headed for “stagelights and leerjets and fortune and fame”.

To this end they pursue their goals doggedly, at times pathetically, but never with a lack of enthusiasm or heart.

To this end any success they have is a genuine one, as a reward for their faith.

This is most eloquently expressed in an interview where Robb recalls his dead father, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who supported him when he dropped out of school to become a drummer. When he saw his son’s enthusiasm for drumming, he dropped his original insistence that his son go to college. “Just do whatever makes you happy.” Robb tells us. A cliche, but one that is pregnant with the faith of multiple generations.

Rock, like Judaism and Baseball, is a religion and Anvil! is a religious movie in the best sense, a companion piece to A Serious Man and a response to the cynicism of The Invention of Lying. Because, for Lips and Robb, no matter what G-d or man throws at this band, they make their own answers and keep on rocking.

***

Yesterday, I realized that I couldn’t write new pages for my script because I no longer had a functioning copy of Final Draft (I’d lost my old one when I went from PC to Mac).

I guess that’s when this all crystalized for me the sense that I was making excuses in my life, as the security guard had attempted to inform me upon my package-ery.

The sense of disappointment in myself snowballed from a question of disappointing the people at my writing group, to whether I would lose my ability as a writer along with my adolescence to whether I was self-destructing as a person and destroying my future in a mass that overwhelmed logic.

But as I talk about Katz’s Deli and Karaoke and seeing movie after movie about faith, it strikes me that the cure for excuses is action, as my security guard would tell me.

And that the only way to cure a guilt caused by lack of writing, is to begin writing.

And thus, here I am.

…And I Knew That I Should Start Writing Again When My Mom Left A Comment To That Effect On My Blog.

My mom reads my blog.

Have I mentioned that before?

My dad does too, but he’s sometimes a little more discreet about it.

Or at least, he likes to comment on it in person, in a wry self-deprecating manner as in “So are you sure Eva isn’t your ‘not-girlfriend’, har-har”, as opposed to my mother, who leaves comments on my post like:

“Great job!”

and

“Another well-though-out post! I am so proud of your writing abilities!”

To be fair, such things are not pure embarrassment/mortification.

I should be thankful for a doting mom in some ways, since I am aware of the alternatives, from friends who talk about their parents in past participles to the ones who think “twittering” is a sound attributed to certain avians.

It is a nice thing to hear some encouragement from time-to-time, as well as in some ways, a wholly expected thing from a well-meaning-but-over-bearing Jewish mom.

But it always makes me groan and sigh a bit (i.e: saying the words “groan” and “sigh” out loud) when I check my phone and tell my friends, whoever around me, that my mom just commented on my blog.

Then again, those actions might be appropriate for most things that happen in this forum.

So maybe, I just shouldn’t sweat it.

***

A showdown, recently.

Mexican-style.

Or more like Hipster-Williamsburg-style.

Or Post-Hipster.

At work one day, gathered around the conference table, biding our time, one of my fellow employees, a recently arrived out-of-towner, described how she now lives off the Bedford stop in Williamsburg, to which we all replied with raised-eyebrows-comma-rolled-eyes.

“Hip.” One person said.

“Really hip.” Another.

“Benn to any Yo La Tengo concerts yet?” I asked.

“Actually,” She told us. “It’s not even a hipster neighborhood anymore.”

“Well, what is it?” I said flatly.

“It’s, well, post-hipster.” She described.

“It’s like all the hipsters who lived there five years ago left and now the people showing up are people from all over who heard about that it was a hipster neighborhood and who want to be hipsters but aren’t.”

We all took in this description and it sunk in.

“Wow,” I told her. “Apt.”

And there I was, a few days later for a friend’s going away party, in that “post-hipster” neighborhood trying to figure out whether I belonged as a hipster, a post-hipster, a faux-hipster, or just a guy with unceremoniously long hair.

Anyway, I was with Eva, my girlfriend, so the evening was mercifully light on these sorts of contemplations and more heavy in the “stopping ever half-a-block to make-out” department (Yes, I did mention that my parents read my blog.)

In recent days, Eva and I had been trading anxieties about our relationship, with friends simultaneously complimenting us on our new-found happiness and turning a suspicious eye to the alacrity of our affections. Personally, I was most comforted to find out from Eva that we both shared a deep-seeded fear that both that we would lose what we had together and that even if we did stay together, it would be the death of us artistically as writers.

As I walked down the street today, I realized that my perspective on being artist was formed by the book and later the movie of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, about a young girl who smart and intensely stifled develops amazing powers of mental acuity, which she loses upon the happy ending of the book.

For me that book was tragic, because I felt I was living at that age in a stifling hell, but that if I ever got happy, then I might lose something.

The whole thing seemed a metaphor for artistry, one of the dark messages embedded in Dahl’s children’s books and a message I took on, like many messages and commands we hang on to unconsciously from childhood.

But here I am writing and maybe it’s time to grow past that story.

And so much to tell, anyway.

I spent that night, like I said, making out with Eva as she finally got to have her showdown–as Jonny-Jon-Jon arrived at the bar.

He spotted us making out, like bandits in a dark corner and came over.

I introduced him and, as expected, he responded with some witticism.

“Well, you shore know how to pick him Nick.” He commented.

And Eva, bizarre and wonderful, having heard all of the stories about him from me, just laughed at him and stared weirdly as she stuck her tongue in my ear which caused me to make a sound like “Brrrr-oo-ooh!”

Which successfully won her the showdown, as Jonny-Jon-Jon, unable to pick off/mock or try to fuck the girl I was with, went to go find a girl who would react more kindly to his intoxicated state.

Knowing him, I bet he found’er.

But I had my girl, already.

***

Opening night was this past week and it was really, like most other nights.

I feel I gave one of my most intense performances, the one where my character, often played as a goofball, got serious and tried to con the con-man.

I played him exasperated and intense, a feeling motivated by a need to “step up to the plate” or something when pressure is applied to me.

I don’t feel I’m doing the sensation justice, other than to say that I feel a burning sensation, a tension or a boiling, when faced with something I feel is momentous and I try, or something more than my conscious mind tries, to do it justice.

As I ran around the boat that’s my play-thing though, I noticed my sister who greeted me during the show in-between scenes but who I did not converse with.

When I saw her later, it was walking out of a scene to take a couple phone calls, which I saw her do in full-view.

Later, during one of my lulls in the show, I talked about how charged I felt by the night and the energy and how the audience really seemed to dig.

“I haven’t even seen anyone leave.” I told my fellow actor, a curly fellow named Brendan

“I saw one person leave.” He told me.

“Bathrooms?” I asked.

“The other way.” He told me.

And in the pit of me I knew it was Cecily.

When I saw my parents and my grandparents waving to me as I went to get changed, she was gone., a spot on my night.

Days later, I would call my parents and complain about her, ask how she could take phone calls in the middle of the play, how she could be the only one to leave, how she could upset me on my opening night, but I realized that just as they hadn’t been able to give me answers for the last 7 years about her, they couldn’t give them now.

I confronted her on the phone about her behavior, her lack of sobriety, how she’d been staying out late and hanging with the same people she did before her conviction, before rehab.

“I’ll go to meetings. I need structure in my life. I need a job. I don’t have any friends.”

“You said you’d go to meetings three weeks ago and self-control comes from you and if you want structure go volunteer somewhere. If you want friends, go to NA.”

“How could you do that at my performance. How could you think that was appropriate?”

“I was having a bad night.”

“You seem to have a lot of those.”

“Is your girlfriend going to help me get a job?”

“I don’t want her to help you.” I replied. “I don’t want her to stick her neck out for someone who I can’t trust.”

“So you won’t help me then.”

“It sucks, but I’ll help you when you’ll help yourself.” I told her.

“Call me when you think you can be a functioning sister to me.” I told her and hung up the phone.

That was a few days ago.

The reviews came in later, from Variety and Time Out New York and they were both very good.

I don’t know how good I feel about it all, but as they say, there’s one more week and the show–

Well, it goes on.