Nicholas Feitel’s Home For Pigeons

I awoke one morning to taps, squawks, coos and the sounds of fleeing flight.

In other words, I awoke to this.

“Yeah, I noticed it awhile ago.” Eva told me, as we sat on a pier in the Hudson River Park.

“There was the one pigeon in the nest. And then there was– well, I guess it must have been the male pigeon on top of your air conditioner guarding it.”

“Strange.” I replied, sidling up to her along the ledge-bench we sat on.

I decided the circumstance called for some role playing.

“Coo.” I stated plainly and began pecking Eva’s ear.

“Gross.” She replied, pushing me away.

“Think I could eat pigeon eggs?” I asked her.

“No! Then the pigeons would attack you!” She stated plainly.

I started to laugh.

“What? That’s my worst fear!”

I kept laughing, tears.

I gasped, gasped: “Pigeons…”

And then we made out for a while.

***

I didn’t know my neighbor across the way, whose air conditioner had been appropriated by the pigeons for their nest.

Eva later suggested that maybe they’d moved away.

I think she said this because, really, who would want pigeons living on their air conditioner and wouldn’t they just do something about it?

But I think the state of things in New York unless disturbance occurs is more live-and-let-live.

In most cases.

My movie theater training not withstanding.

“When you go to rinse the soda machines out, you have to use Windex when cleaning the drains.” I was instructed.

“For one, it loosens the pipes, helps make things run more smoothly, keeps things from breaking down, that costs the theater money.”

“For another, if you don’t use Windex, use have a bunch of sugar and water down there so you get gnats?”

“Gnats?” I asked.

“Gnats,” My supervisor told me. “It’s happened. They go there cause there’s sugar water and they lay their eggs and get pregnant and then we got gnats flying out of the soda machine.”

I imagined.

“Kinda intense.” I said.

“Yeah, gnats.”

This was only one of many steps of learning how to close out the movie theater, a process that only seemed more daunting to me since I hadn’t been formally trained in it.

It was a Sunday and all I kept thinking was what I was told: that it was the closing usher’s responsibility to make sure everyone was gone, everything was clean, everything was ready for the next day.

It was all on me, all of this responsibility.

“And after that?” I asked.

“Then you do what you do.” My trainer said.

“Which is?”

“Your life. I don’t know man, that’s on you. Get your drink on, get your girl.”

“Whatever you’re gonna do, do it. Because this job takes some stamina and so you’re going to want something nice to keep you from snapping.”

My training supervisor was tired. He hadn’t slept. He’d gotten home at 4. I was off at 1 that night and despite the anxiety, I spent and hour or so reading a magazine, waiting for the last shows to get out and it seemed like everything was ok.

I’d had my first semi-rush time at the movie theater and it hadn’t been bad, only a little stressful.

“The customers will piss you off here.” My trainer told me. “And your coworkers will piss you off worse, cause you got deal with them hour after hour.”

I was getting hit with so much information, I just nodded after nodded as I heard all the stuff about what I was supposed to do.

I got my first taste of this later though, when one of my coworkers requested my break be pushed back by half-an-hour to 10 o’clock, calling the assistant manager to make it official.

She was worried about getting theaters ready, but I was just thinking about the food I’d ordered sitting upstairs for going on 2 hours cold.

It was tense then, but it was better by the nights end and I was surprised how I bounced back at the end of the evening.

One of my co-workers, an energetic girl, came down in the middle of the night to tell me she “appreciated my personality”.

“Thanks,” I told her. “I usually don’t know if people appreciate it or if they’re actually just secretly pissed off.”

The joke was that by the time she came downstairs my personality was running thin, between theaters getting out and bathroom checks and the rush of all that training.

When I saw my bouncy co-worker out of uniform 30-minutes after her shift, hanging round the theater, I took a heavy-eyed look at her, proclaimed her crazy and went to sweep.

The last thing I noticed on Sunday when I was leaving were the aspirations people had in my job.

They were young, 19-21 mostly, and they had plans for themselves, careers.

One girl wanted to be a sound engineer, another a journalist, another a singer. One girl wanted the air force.

A manager was an aspiring cameraman.

My trainer wanted to know how to get into film school.

One person even asked about my movie and I showed it to them, to the usual mixed response I had come to expect.

As I looked over my schedule for the upcoming week, I realized that I would have to switch it around if I wanted to do my writing group this week.

And I thought for a second: “So is that the end of me as a writer? What more do I have left?”

The truth is I have more time than ever now to write, now that I’m free in the mornings.

I helped Eva bounce off some ideas for her script the other day.

But I guess I don’t have that certainty anymore.

I don’t know what I’m good at, what I should be.

I feel like all the people I meet want to go somewhere.

But I’m not even sure where I’m supposed to be.

***

“Foursquare sucks, bro.” Rob told me over Facebook.

And according to Facebook, Blake LaRue and Jason Lee agree.

I’ve been using it lately, as I’ve discussed before, to find places and to mark off where I go. It seems a natural extension of my usual random tweets or inner-outer self-dialogue.

How it works is I “check-in” somewhere and write something about my experience, short.

If you check-in somewhere more than anyone else, you’re the mayor of that location.

I became the mayor of the Angelika pretty fast.

I tried to show my boss this, saying maybe they could use Foursquare to drum up visits to the cafe with a promotion, like some places do, but who knows.

Maybe it was just an excuse for self-publicity, much like Foursquare.

It did do me well, reminding me of some places I hadn’t been though, that I’d wanted to try.

So on Sunday morning, I went off to Quinto Quarto, an Italian joint in the nieghborhood, for their $14.50 “reduced menu”, a prix-fixe of an appetizer, an entree, a cup of coffee and a glass of wine.

I declared myself at least a little perplexed by the last item.

Why, I wondered, would someone want a glass of wine and a cup of coffee at 12-1pm on a Sunday morning. Would they negate each other?

Or worse, cause an upset mind and stomach?

So I ditched the wine and went for the coffee, which was an excellent and Italian, a cappucino.

I told the waiter: “Bring me whatever’s good”, which is what I tell waiters on bleary Sunday mornings.

(On a side note, from my supervisor: “Working here has made me more conscious of people in the service industry. I will endeavor to be nicer to them.”)

Anyway, here’s what I got:

“Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe” I was told.

Spaghetti with cheese and pepper in a butter sauce.

It was rich and thick, and Pecorino-coated.

The pasta was al dente, as it should be.

As noted by my sophomore year roommate, a crypto-Italian: “Americans overcook their pasta.”

I could eat half of it though, staring at the bottom of the bowl.

When I woke up this morning and looked outside my window, the pigeons’ nest was in shambles and the birds themselves were gone.

***

QUINTO QUARTO

Reduced Menu Lunch (app/entree w/wine+coffee)- $14.50 (available 12-3 daily)

Bedford St. bet Downing St and 6th Avenue.

1 to Houston St. CE to Spring St.

“Hipster Goes On Food Stamps” (or “I Quit My Job”)

“That’s what I’m going to call my next one.” I told Rob.

“What?” Rob asked loudly.

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon in a quarter-crowded movie theater up at the Walter Reade Theater of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Rob (of moderately well-groomed beard) had convinced me to come out to see two Clint Eastwood movies (“A Perfect World” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales”) with him, mostly through lack of anything better to do with a Sunday afternoon on my part.

I got to the box-office early and thought about trying to mug the whole “I write for you guys” thing to get in free, but I didn’t know the dude at the box office so instead used my one-month-left student ID and forked over my 8 bucks.

I sat around playing video games as Rob showed up late, or on time, depending on who’s telling the story.

“Hipster goes on food stamps.” I told him, again oblivious to the surrounding crowd trying to watch the movie.

(Actually not that oblivious; the people behind us were poppin’ beers.)

“But you’re not on food stamps.” Rob smirked.

I gave him a face in the dark theater that amounted to “fuck you”, but I’m afraid it was lost somewhere near the pro-Confederate Clint Eastwood smackdown on screen.

The reason I had decided that would be my blog title was not in fact that I was on food stamps (though I was recently unemployed, more on that later) but that our mutual friend and Bummer-filmmaker Zach Weintraub had apparently recently gone on food stamps.

“How’d he do that?” I’d asked Rob during the first Eastwood flick.

“Just applied, buddy.” Rob told me. “Gaming the government.”

Rob knew something about this, as he’d spent the last few weeks working a temp government job that comprised mostly of reading the collected stories of Rambo.

The thought hit me kind of odd. We had been making fun of Zach, whose new movie The International Sign For Choking we had recently read in our bi-weekly writing group, for living out in hippie-capital Olympia, Washington and going to work in a suit everyday for a not-even-film-related job.

“He made a fucking feature.” I told Rob over a chief-on-squaw Eastwood love-scene. “I mean, c’mon.”

“Don’t mean nothing bro.” He replied, looking forward. And then:

“Do you know you can used food stamps to buy beer?”

“Great.” I replied. “So that’s why Zach is going on food stamps, so that he can trade them for beer.”

My thoughts went racing back to my extremely limited knowledge of food-stamps, wondering whether any of the drug dealers on The Wire had accepted them.

“No he isn’t.” Rob told me disgustedly. “That’s a fucking lie.”

“And whatever you do don’t print it on your blog. Zach’ll fucking kill me.”

“Yeah.” I replied. As I wondered at Civil War-era Native American virility.

The movies were both pretty good. A Perfect Year ended up being about a surprisingly top-form Kevin Costner kidnapping a Jehovah’s Witness kid who doesn’t have a dad and their relationship.

It was sort of like a non-sexual Badlands except for the scene where the little kid shows Kevin Costner his dick (I shit you not).

The Outlaw Josey Wales was fun too, a good western, though I admit little tolerance for that “The North was evil” civil-war crap, as I’m one damn Yankee.

Rob and I ended up eating too much popcorn and coffee and Belgian pastries as we struggled to kill a Sunday.

***

So I quit my job on Wednesday.

I wish it was some sort of long-brewing Jason Lee act of defiance or else the opposite, a professional-style exit, complete with two weeks notice.

But the truth was my bosses were some sons of bitches who were going to fuck me no matter what I do.

A cynical attitude? Perhaps.

I remember marveling in a previous blog-post about my friend Selom’s optimism and how it found her  interning endlessly until she got a big-name gig, before the rest of us.

But my bosses weren’t just underpaying me (illegally) or threatening me (implicit and/or explicitly).

No, in my mind, they committed the greatest sin they could have: they made it not about the movie.

I had been working on an indie feature film and that comes with what you’d expect: long hours, a lot of running around and a constant invocation of Murphy’s law.

But I really never had a problem with that. As I say on all of my job applications, I’m looking to be a part of something. To make something, of a movie, of a company, of myself.

But the problem was by the end, I wasn’t working on the film: I was working to suit my bosses’ petty whims.

It wasn’t all so obvious.

Sometimes it was, with people asking me to pick up scripts or copy DVDs or even, doing personal accounting work (something I almost quit over several times).

But other times it was just in the way they treated me, calling me with no respect for my time, not to problem solve or fix something desperate, but just to complain, yell or ask me to do something later.

I was the personal gopher, paid for 4 days a week, but on call for 7.

I ended up spending each day and hour tense, worrying not about the movie, but about another stupid thing I’d be called about, another call I’d be required to answer.

Because if I didn’t pick up, there’d be more calls, text messages emails. There wasn’t any telling these people I didn’t have time. All that elicited was an argument, bargaining. They held on to my time like they would die if they didn’t get it, going through the stages of grief for it.

And then there’s my initial comment, that it wasn’t about the movie.

I remember working for my old teacher, Robby Benson, a mentor to me at school. He brought me on for a feature he was making, as a makeshift script supervisor. I ruffled a few feathers with bad jokes I’d have gotten away with on a student set and I found myself not getting in edgewise with his crew, shunted farther to the back with the PAs. When I asked him at lunch what had happened, he was honest with me and told me to just keep my distance on set.

“You messed up, you’re learning.” He told me.

“But I can’t do my job.” I told him.

“Then someone else will.” He replied. “Just remember: it’s not about you, it’s about the film.”

The next day I came to set with no attitude. I was super-polite, super high-energy. Suddenly, everyone took a shine.

I didn’t make jokes, but I laughed at other ones. What mattered was the shot. The film. We were all working towards.

The breaking point came for me on this project when I got a call at 8:30pm asking me to be available at 10 to be chastised and then 9am the next morning in a group session.

There were problems about the film, but these meetings were not about them. They were about seeing how well my bosses could control me.

And suddenly I snapped. I consulted my friends. I told them I was too busy to work on their film anymore.

And I felt great.

Until the next day when I was ambushed by both of my bosses and forced into work and more pointless excoriation.

I ended up feeling pretty bad about it.

Until my bosses asked me for help the next week and I said I wasn’t able to help.

Or something like that.

I want to say that there’s a good ending to this tale.

That I was rewarded quitting a bad job. For getting out of there when I could. For not causing a big “scene” like what happened in my last few jobs.

Well, at least not as big of a scene.

I’ve got some interviews. Some semi-paid day-PA work.

Theoretically speaking I’m a “freelancer” at an agency.

I’ve written nice thank you emails and sent out nicely-written cover letters, I didn’t have time for before.

I’ve thought about Alaska or Prague or wherever the hell my dad wants me to go.

I’ve even thought about graduate school, though thankfully, it’s way too early in the season to think about applying.

Which is when I went into see my therapist, who I had left five minutes early last session, I described it like this:

“I no longer live in a state of constant terror; only a state of vaguely uncertain and occasional terror.”

“Sounds like an upgrade.” She told me.

And I agreed.

***

My old net-obsessed boss Amanda, who Rob still asks about for DTF availability, invited me out with fifteen minutes notice to a hoity-toity museum gathering.

“Free booze.” She told me and I was there.

We talked about mostly how I wasn’t an art person and she wasn’t a theater person and how neither one of us belonged there.

She also ordered a bourbon on the rocks that she ended up pouring most of into my bourbon-and-ginger-ale.

“Can’t drive drunk.” She reminded me.

“Bike drunk.” I corrected her, as we’d just locked up her bike on the Bowery.

“That too.” She replied, sipping the remains of her drink.

It was only a few minutes there, looking at some mash-up hippie stuff and discussing job politics.

A typical bit of conversation: “I can’t log on to Foursquare.”

Our two-person nerd-fest ended quickly as she unchained to go back to her beer-brewing-boyfriend in Brooklyn.

As I stumbled home, half-drunk, I picked up some cupcakes from a place I had not initially impessed by, called Baked by Melissa, famous for selling you 3 button-sized cupcakes for 3 dollars.

This did not exactly excite my Jew-boy value-meter, but my Jew-boy low-alcohol tolerance wasn’t paying attention and I got the ‘cakes.

Surprisingly, alcohol or no, they were near perfection.

For some reason, their small size concentrated their cupcake-richness and made you value each bite.

It almost seemed like prophetic insight: that part of the problem with any cupcake is “too much”. To make such a large thing too rich would make it inedible, while erring toward heartiness would cause the same.

The cupcakes (Cinnamon Bun, Cookie Dough and Cookies and Cream) were just rich perfect little morsels, concentrated nuclei of a flavor and rich texture.

What more did I need, I thought?

They came in a coffee filter and soon they and the coffee filter were gone.

***

A final note.

When I was getting ready to write this post, I called up Zach to give him half-a-warning.

“You’re kind of the main character in this one.” I told him.

“I’m touched.” He replied. “Now why don’t you hurry up and tell me what you thought of Choking.”

The last time I had talked to Zach after all, had been when he had sent me a text message referencing the film “Babies”, saying “THEY’RE COMING! I’M COMING!” (NSFW, kids.)

When I woke up this morning, I found this on my pillow.

And I decided to keep the byline.

Sorry, Rob.

***

BAKED BY MELISSA

3 Micro-Cupcakes- $3

NW Corner of Spring and Broadway

6 to Spring St. R to Prince.

_________ the point

“Wow jason it’s like you’re in film school again”

I guess one of the residual benefits of forfeiting your soul to something like Twitter is that you get to see pictures like that.

For those of you who don’t know, the person featured above is quite-possible better writer, Feitel-described “depressed asian” and current Austinian Jason Lee, prepping sound equipment and re-entering the production world that he forswore (or at least complained about) on his blog, in favor of writing short-short stories, complaining about his boss and reinterpreting the bible through intermittent poetry.

In fact, I’m just making a good-natured jab at ole’ Jason, since if you know the figure crouching in the corner to the lower right, you’d know it was Zach Weintraub of the 500 Days Of (Bummer) Summer, filming his new movie on the road with Rob Malone, “Fresh Starts For Stale People” which will (begin insider reference here) apparent be marketed as “the Couch Potatoes movie” (end insider reference, for more information see here).

Anyway.

Zach and Jason and Rob are old friends, all of whom get off on saying ridiculous things to me in deadpan and watching me try to squirm to figure out how serious they’re being which is always a little serious at least.

Which would mean it would be normal for Jason to help Zach and Rob.

But I guess the reason I thought of this is because Jason did something else I never thought he would do.

He resumed his massive “on-air” job search on his blog, which had amassed hundreds on listings from which he had been abused, humiliated or simply not called back.

And me?

I just got fired from a volunteer job.

Which I didn’t know could happen.

But here I am.

Courtesy of http://blog.lotlmovie.com

***

It was Wednesday.

I had a morning meeting with one of those “gatekeeper” people in the film industry, a friend of a friend, a person who makes her living finding financing for indie films, something I thought I’d only afford with my short in a festival and some good buzz.

But there I was with a DVD in my overstuffed jacket pocket, scrambling to find the email on my iPhone that had my script attached to forward her and trying to explain that the budget would be apparent “through the tone”.

All in all, it went well. I came back later to give her a copy of Frownland, which she hadn’t seen, and a tube of Chocolate-Covered Espresso Beans from Jacques Torres, which she promptly told me “of course” she’d given up for Lent.

Being a Jew, I am always unaware of Ash Wednesday.

I always assume that some people just have dirty foreheads.

It’s New York.

After all.

But I’d told my supervisor that I’d be in late for my volunteer job at the syringe exchange and that I’d try to come in quickly since the paid person was off today and I’d be the only one there.

I grabbed my “saddy meal” from Popeye’s, my usual depressing 4-dollar lunch, before heading over, my New Yorker in hand.

Someone else was on the computer in the exchange when I got there, so I stuffed my coat in a cabinet and went to talk to my supervisor more about movies and whether he still might be down for March.

I was beginning to feel at home, or at least a little comfortable in the exchange.

Like I had hoped, it was a place where I could get some reading or blogging done. Where I could meet some real people and provide a service. Where I could maybe be nice to people who might not get anyone else to be nice to them otherwise.

I also felt more at home when I learned about some of the mysteries I wondered about from Jamal, my Paki-bro co-worker, who had turned out to be friendlier every day.

It turned out that the people who hung around the drop-in center, not the exchange, were mostly not active heroin users.

“Why not?” I asked Jamal.

“Because the heroin sucks nowadays.” He said cheerily. “They cut it with so much shit that you get very little bang for your buck.”

“But these guys are definitely out of it.” I replied, gesturing back toward the drop-in center, its large metal door shut for a support group.

“Yeah. That’s true.” Jamal  said. “See what they do, is there’s a methadone clinic around here, not too far. And methadone gives you a buzz, but it doesn’t get you good like heroin. So what they do is they get there metahdone, take some benzos like Xanax or Clonopin, prescription shit and then they’re good and out and have that heroin feeling and get to kick back.”

It made sense. The people did act real out of it, like the kids I’d known in school who’d used pills.

“Thing is, the methadone and the benzos use two different pathways. So it’s very easy to OD.” Jamal finished.

It was the most helpful thing anyone had really told me at the exchange the entire time I had been there. I had read the volunteer manual, but it was mostly about respect and what a needle looked like and not as much about the reality of the place.

I guess on Wednesday, a week after Jamal had told me that stuff, I finally felt like I knew what was going on.

And with no one else to man the exchange, I even felt important.

When my supervisor and his boss busted in to the exchange and started yelling.

“Whose water bottle is this?” James, the boss, asked.

I was taken aback. I had been told not to have water in the exchange but I had never seen the harm in it. I kept it in my drawer or in my jacket for most of the day but figured it was easier to drink it at my desk than risk leaving.

“Mine.” I fessed up.

“No water in here!” He yelled, turning to my supervisor. “What the hell, man, you’re this close!”

James kept on yelling at my boss about things I had done wrong, most of which I hadn’t even known about: my magazine, the NYTimes website I was on, my coat stuffed in a closet. He yelled like I wasn’t there.

“Hello, are you James, my name is Nicholas.” I tried to intercede at one point. But he just ignored me.

At some point, my supervisor just told me to go on break while James just kept on yelling.

As I left the exchange I was upset. I felt like  I had been disrespected. I had just had everything that was wrong about me yelled at and used against someone I respected. I had been shamed. I felt like I was treated like I wasnt even there when I was giving my time to be there.

Yeah, and that’s right. I was a volunteer. They had to be nice to me! They couldn’t offend me like that! Ignore me! If they treated volunteers like that, no one would ever do it! And if no one volunteered then they couldn’t function!

I was indignant. I was offended. But most of all, I was pissed off.

So first I called my pops and asked him what to do, him being the resident expert on office politics. But when I talked to him, I remembered, remembered the stupid project I had been spending all my Saturdays on, the tape transfers I had been digitizing.

Digitizing for the executive director of the program!

Done!

I called her up and spoke to her and told her how upset I was, how this guy had yelled at me and ignored me and treated me like I was nothing. I told her I didn’t know what to do. She told me to come back after my break and talk to her and we would sort it out.

Checkmate, I thought. Done and done. This motherfucker would find himself flanked by me. He done fucked with the wrong volunteer.

I got a bowl of ice cream at the old-style luncheonette on Canal and returned head-high to my work.

“You feeling better?” My supervisor asked me.

“Hell yeah.” I told him. ” I talked to Raquel and told her how that guy treated me. She told me she would sort it out with me. I figure since I’m doing this video thing for her which is pretty irreplaceable, she’ll probably back me up.”

“No, she’ll back him up.” He said in a dull tone.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He told me.

And sure enough, five minutes later, James walked into the exchange pointing his finger at me, “We need to talk”.

“Look, first off, I know who you are. You’re Nicholas. You’re that film guy.” He told me, closing the door to the intake room behind him.

“I’ve introduced myself to you before. I’m James. But for some reason you keep calling me Ajami. I don’t know why that is.” He paused for effect. “But you’ve done it like four times.”

I felt a pang in my chest. Ajami was another co-worker at the center. They were both black, with similar haircuts and glasses. Still, the intimation was clear.

“But let’s be clear, did I yell at you?” He asked.

“You yelled about me, in front of me.” I told him.

“But did I yell at you?” He asked again.

“No. You treated me like I wasn’t there.” I replied.

“You don’t work for me. You work for the gateway coordinator. It’s his responsibility to tell you these things. So I told him that. If our partners and funders see somethings wrong, they go to Raquel and Raquel goes to me. I go to him.”

“You continued yelling and talking about me, even after I left” I told him.

“Well I didn’t know you were there.” He said. Bullshit.

“So, I know who you are. You keep calling me Ajami. But I know who you are. And if you choose to stay here, I hope that all is clear.” He told me.

And offered his hand. I took it and averted my eyes.

***

“What are you going to do?” My boss asked me.

“I’m going to get my stuff.” I told him.

“Are you going to come back?”

“I don’t know. I just gotta go.”

I felt like shit.

I felt betrayed by Raquel since she had never talked to me and let James sic himself on me as soon as I got back.

I felt stupid for ever thinking she might value me more than one of her top lieutenants.

I felt angry that I had only been humiliated further.

And lastly, I hated myself for having a public fuck-up on this scale, since along with what had happened at my last job, it made me feel like a child, like I couldn’t handle it, like I couldn’t even hold down anything.

“I know a suicide prevention hotline you could volunteer at.” My boss suggested as I tried to ignore him, walking up the stairs to retreive my jacket.

“But,” he said as I opened the door. “It’s the same bullshit everywhere, the same people.”

I took my jacket and I left.

Later, I got a text message from my boss telling me that with what was going on with my sister I wasn’t “in a place emotionally where the job was right” for me, which was his way of telling me I was fired, except he called it “too hard”.

He took a while getting back to me and when he did, he sent me an email with the info for the Suicide Prevention Hotline and a line saying “shudder island was great”.

In other news, I saw Shutter Island this weekend.

I thought that it sucks my dick.

***

CUP & SAUCER LUNCHEONETTE

Scoop of Cookies+Cream ice cream in a small dish- $2.50 (plus whatever tip)

On the NW Corner of Canal and Eldridge Sts.

BD to Grand St.

The Job Song

I came up with a song the other day.

It goes like this:

“All-I-Do-All-Day-And-Night/Is App-Ly-For-Jobs”

And then repeat.

I wish I could get the cadences down, but without knowing the musical notes it’s hard to get the real sentiment across.

Then again, when I was G-Chatting with my friend Jacob LaMendola the other day, I shared with him that I had created the song off-handedly, a tack which caused him to immediately start offering help to me in whatever way he could. I’m not sure if this is because Jake’s a nice guy, or the fact that I had created a song about my obsessive searching of job sites that consisted of one sing-song-y line caused him to recoil so much that he felt the need to restore some hope-slash-humanity to me.

Really, it’s probably both.

Either way, the search and struggle for jobs has been consuming my friends left and right, so I’m hardly the only casualty.

Take Dan, who last month was ecstatic when he found a census-taker’s test (only later to find out that the Census doesn’t hire till April. He’s been fretting about emails and recommendations, as we continue to duke it out for the same jobs that are often lo- or-no-paid. Or Zach, whose job working at an upscale hipster-clothing store seemed safe when they signed him past the holidays, only to find that they had engaged in hour-cutting everyone to try to thin down the employed so they didn’t have to pay firing bonuses. Eva even found out that from her co-workers that her bosses wanted to fire her, even as they prostrated themselves before her to come in and work the weekend shifts that interfered with their party schedules. But the worst thing, worse than the struggle, is the radio silence maintained around it. I could only discuss Eva’s case since she quit her job to go back to school. Another friend I can’t even name, since even though he’s being exploted working 13-hour days for a deferred 50 dollars per-diem, I’m scared to even name him since it’s a job he wants to keep.

Looking at this might seem absurd, since I see my friends for their worth and intelligence and as my dad once told me “the people in these jobs you’re looking at aren’t a race of superhumans”. But instead I see advice ignored and the tale of my friend and Armond White Love-Hater Jason Lee, whose struggles to find a job in Austin seemed entertaining and story-like at a distance but when I feel myself approaching his number of applications (though the hundreds which he reached is still in the distance), I begin to admire his sense of dry humor in dealing with those hundred-something rejections, scams and blighted-opportunities.

Even I’ve found myself scammed a few times or begin to wonder, other than the few places that I’m contacted for interviews, which places are just stealing my information, or getting my email to send me spam. It seems like such a pointless endeavor, until it nearly happened from a few phone calls I got asking if I wanted to do extra work. When I came in for a “casing session”, I saw what I like to call an “anti-lawsuit plaque” detailing that the place I was going to was in no way an agency, but a photography studio charging for headshots. I left with some dignity, but not as much as Rob who’d received the same girl and not even bothered to show up for his appointment. I guess that was the problem: that I feel like in my increasing desperation around work, I keep feeling like I’m setting aside judgment for naivety and self-worth for self-prostration. It’s a slippery slope.

And what I find to do in the meantime?

Movies mostly. Dates with friends and seeing Eva. My pops told me the other day that I’d want a job until I got one at which point I’d wish that I didn’t have a job. But even Dan who hated his holiday-time suit-selling at Macy’s was talking about working anywhere to get structure back in his life too.

I also started volunteering finally at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center. On a trip last month to see my cousin/uncle, the Rabbi, he talked to me of his experience doing good sometime in his early 20s. His opinion mattered to me, as he remains the symbol of my tenuous connection to the religious parts of Judaism, which I felt like I would connect to if I volunteered somewhere. “Tikkun Olam,” I thought, looking back on words from my Hebrew school education. “It means, to repair the world.” Such thoughts were romantic, but such romanticism was needed along with something resembling a pragmatic order. I’d do good, I thought, I’d do good.

Or at least, maybe, it would give me an excuse, finally, to read.

***

The Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center was a place I had been before I decided to volunteer there, about one year ago, when I had been producing Dan’s movie. It was a site of some shame for me, as I had entered into the production with some cock-sure attitude about getting Dan’s film, an intermediate project, done, but hadn’t counted on his want for extras from the Center, who turned out to be the active users who patronize it. They were nice and courteous, but I always felt uncomfortable around them, because for the most part they seemed so normal, yet in my eyes, in what I could see of their presentation, something had been taken or robbed. When I would later meet Lou Reed, whose hand I shook too vigorously, I saw the same thing: Youth, taken prematurely. Not youth, like the state I was in or the vigor of a 15 year-old. But an energy or a chi or something stupid that I didn’t have answers to like that. A sense of a reserve of years, of something to take from within them; It had already been taken.

My only humiliation there came when I tried to cater for the crew and the extras from Tuck Shop, the Aussie joint I’d later use to cater for my job at Colbert, only to hear politely from one of the staff that the extras didn’t like food like this and could I get something else.

“Like Popeye’s?” I asked.

And he said that was fine and I took orders and went.

As I came back I felt wounded, somewhat because of a perceived slight to my sense of self-superiority, that I had guessed wrongor catered incorrectly, that I didn’t know the people and the situation well enough. But it was more thinking that I didn’t know these people who were in the film’s world at all, didn’t know what they liked, what their lives were. After years of film school and of characters and neurotics, I had gotten a sense of the world I was in. In some ways, this was my first experience out of it.

When I came in a year later and earlier this week for training, I learned I’d be the volunteer at the Syringe Exchange, dealing directly with users as they brought in used needles and I gave them new ones. Days later, when I saw Dan who had worked in a place like LESHRC in Worcester, Mass (the inspiration for his film), he picked at my unease, asking me if I had felt odd with the “moral ambiguity” of what I’d be doing.”In some way, you’d be in enabling them.” He told me cryptically. He meant that by giving them needles, I was putting myself as part of their using, but I never saw it that way. In a mix of pity and guilt, the only thing I could think that Friday I went in for training was how nice all the people were who came into the exchange and how I felt bad thinking about what they were going to do next. In my own life, in the people there, figuring with the commonality of drug use is something I can avoid easily, through video games or social interactions or anything else in my life. But sitting there watching a man pick used needles out of a shoebox as he tries to avoid touching blood–his or someone elses–well, it’s difficult to avoid thinking.

***

Sunday went on for me and got better and I didn’t apply to any jobs.

I saw a movie and I saw some friends and I saw Eva.

In short, it was good.

But on Monday, I’m sure of it.

I’ll be back to combing Craigslist and Mandy.

And singing the job song.

***

Finally my kudos to Jacob, who I mentioned here earlier. His film STONEY won an award at the Festivus Film Festival for Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography. It’s a great film and Jacob’s a great guy and Adam, a talented DP.

When Jacob sent out a congratulations today to all the people involved with the film, I saw numerous congratulations as many people hit “Reply All”.

One of them was “Congrats everyone! -Tom N” from Tom Noonan, the star of Jacob’s film.

It gave me a laugh on a rainy day.

Off-Week (or Tweeting on Empty)

“In 65, I was 17 and running up one by one…”

The soundtrack at Barnes and Noble was surprisingly good.

Not only was there was a cool cover (non-Nouvelle Vague) of “Dancing with Myself” but there was also some Fine Young Cannibals, Devo and Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff”, which was partially an inspiration for a one-act play that ranks among the favorite things I’ve written.

I took out my phone to send out a multi-text, a common occurrence for me, distinguished from a mass-text message (“Hay guyz new phon numba! Just tlln u 4 kiks!”) by that it usually contains selective information, as in “Hey you want to see a movie?” to people I usually see movies with, “Brother/Sister plays tomorrow” to potential play-goers and “If it wasn’t Oswald, then who gave Ted that brain cancer and who’s next, you?” to Ro-shaved-off-his-fucking-beardo Malone and Jason Lee simultaneously.

This time it was a simple askance that came out before its recipients:

“Opinions on Devo?”

As a youth, I’m sure I had heard the song “Whip It” around, unexplained, but I didn’t gain full consciousness of it until, like several other musical discoveries, I found them through parody, with a licorice-whipping Smithers on The Simpsons singing some lyrics in a brief aside during a performance of “I Want Candy” by “The Simpson Family Smile Time Variety Hour”. It was a good episode. Looking back on that show, I credit it for much of my good familial experiences and interests (similar to Animaniacs in that respect) but still resent the writers for being Harvard grads.

The people who went to Harvard from my school were douches.

I don’t remember who they were but yeah, I’m sure of it.

Except for that one kid who got a scholarship and whose single mom raised three kids.

And that other one from the projects who got to go to Italy as a result.

Fuck.

Anyway, the obvious recipients were taken care of first. Consider, this was an extremely esoteric text coming out of nowhere on a random subject that could possibly disrupt the day of somebody doing something important. So of course, I had to send it to Rob and Jason Lee, since the only thing Jason was probably fucking with Photoshop and Rob’s idea of “something important” was playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

Next were spacial considerations. I had found out from an article or somewhere while trolling about movies that Devo was from Ohio. Thus I was probably obligated to text-message the two Ohioans I knew most prominently: Chadd Harbold and Mike Sweeny. There were problems with both of these recipients. I had just ditched out on Mike after a good 4-hour of chunk of waiting with him at his job selling Christmas trees on Hudson St and playing pool at the off-duty policeman’s bar nearby. It’d be a little strange to send him a text, 15 minutes after leaving him to fend for himself at Filene’s Basement (no thanks).

As for Chadd, the last time I had tried to do something Ohio-y for him it was singing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio” at a Karaoke night, with a dedication to “Chadd from Ohio”.

It turned out you can listen to a song with a funky beat and some good guitar solos and never realize how depressing it is.

Shit, man. That song’s about people getting gunned down who are like 20. That it happens in Ohio is like a fucking travesty.

The point being it can be hard to figure this out until you are face-to-face with the lyrics on a blinking electronic-blue screen, highlighted for your following convenience.

It turned out to be kind of a downer.

I didn’t text an old not-girlfriend of mine who I knew was a fan because I already knew her opinion and I thought I had drummed up a solid group.

Jason never answered.

Rob said “They’re fantastic. Now what the fuck do you want from me?”

Mike said “They’re from Ohio, thus awesome.”

and Chadd said “what’s that?”

“Chadd’s from Ohio and he doesn’t know ‘em.” I told Mike.

“We sure he’s from Ohio?” Mike replied.

“Well he’s actually in Ohio right now. So where’s your cred?” I texted.

“I AM Ohio.” He proclaimed.

And there was nothing really I could say to that.

I went back to reading “The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide” in the auditorium section of the fourth floor of Barnes and Noble, trying to learn what I could and excited to read the book and steal the serial code from the back of it so I could sign up for the author’s “member-only one-hundred-percent film-festival resource-guide”.

I signed up using the same phone I’d sent all the texts with.

Hours earlier, when Mike Sweeny and I had been walking to Barnes and Noble, he almost ditched out because I was replying to a text while walking.

“Don’t you think you’re missing out on a certain degree of reality when you do that? Stare down like that?” Mike asked.

“What? I’m trying to reply to a text message, jesus Mike.”

“That’s the problem.” Mike said. “You’re always in it, you’re not experiencing life.”

“I think this is how people experience life nowadays, or how they will.” I posited, putting forth some questionable phiosophical futurism.

“Well, that’s a sad world then.” Mike replied.

“What?” I asked. “Sorry, another text.”

***

Normally a vacation might inspire relief, but free time only makes me anxious and waiting, all the more.

It was a dark week at my work this week and so I was given dispensation to stay at home, see movies, do whatever I do. I only have two more weeks left at my job though and I’m not getting paid, so I feel like somehow I’d rather be at work. Instead. I took time out to see plays, watch a movie or two, spend time with my girlfriend and go completely ape-shit insane about Sundance acceptances, a call that was supposed to be made on Wednesday.

How insane you might ask? How bat-shit-bonkers have I gone over waiting?

I joined Twitter.

It’s very, very depressing.

The story goes something like this.

I spent the week, as I’ve spent the past two virtually, refreshing the Withoutabox “Submission Status” website, checking it periodically throughout the day to make sure that there were no message from festivals, no rejections or missing DVDs, no requests for press kits or other crazy things. To be honest, I didn’t know what I should expect: I had never seen anything but tranquil information from my Withoutabox home page. But in the startling event that there was, that there WAS something. Well, damnit. I would be there.

As the week and then the day of phone calls arrived, I took it to another level, coordinating via text-message on a tri-hourly basis with my friends who had concurrent submissions to Sundance, combing the web for information and reporting back.

It’s unclear why this Sundance mania had taken me. I had bearish about my chances there to everyone, including myself. I had been much more enthusiastic about Nashville, where one of my lead actors had been asked to speak last year, or Cannes Cinefondation who, presented with my endorsement from the filmmaker Antonio Campos, literally “cooed” at me over the phone from France.

But perhaps it was the club-ishness, the secret notification-before-a-notification of it all that had me wild, that there was a supposed “day” in which your fate would be decided and that all of us, the whole film’s-cool-crew–we would all know at once, like a bolt of lightning at the pearly gates (that I’d believe in if I wasn’t a Jew).

It was struck by this mania that I joined Twitter.

First, I just searched without joining, figuring that short filmmakers were probably in to that whole “new media” thing. If senator could do, then why the fuck not them? It was instant, I didn’t have to know the people, like on Facebook. Like my Google Voice account, I could search “Sundance” and people’s voices, their conversations would appear.

But then when someone said they were accepted, I wanted to know more, wanted to see more, wanted to hear what that meant. As Wednesday passed and none of us heard, I took the leap and joined.

It’s Friday now and the offices at Sundance are closed for the weekend, the same break that anyone at any other job would get, including my parents.

My friends and co-conspirators have concluded that notifications will be given next week, a sentiment echoed by a sage teacher of mine, who I talked to on Wednesday, Sharon Badal.

For now, the “Twitterverse” is quiet, with my search results only turning up feature news (which Sundance releases in spurts) and deals on spas and sofas.

Next week will come and go and what may happen will.

But the mortgage on my virtual soul that has been made.

That is something much more troublesome.

Won-Ton Movie Over-Load

Awards season is almost here.

In some ways, the inanity of it all gets you.

A whole year full of movies and indie producers and pushers expect you to pay attention for just about a span of one month.

Is the Academy to blame? Sometimes. They certainly do pick shitty movies to win their awards from time to time (Read: Crash, Slumdog Millionaire) but in honest and in earnest, it would seem, they’ve attempted a feat of getting people to see-slash-consider more movies throughout the year by expanding their roster of “Best Picture” nominees to 10. This means that good movies from the summer that might be partially forgotten by the time academy season rolls around (Read: The Hurt Locker) might actually not only be in contention for an Oscar, but with a potential split between Oscar-hogging movies, might actually sneak in and win an award.

It’s exciting, in a way. But still, the fact remains: unless you are unemployed, down on friends and are hell-bent on depleting whatever savings you might have left on going to a theater to sit in seats where you’re lucky if what you just stepped on was gum, you haven’t seen most of the movies worthy of consideration in this small time.

Who could possibly have such an insane bent, such an aversion to daylight, anti-social behavior and participation in murky, unsavory activities?

If you guessed one of the vampires from that new-fucking Vampire-hyphen-Werewolf movie that made a lot of money while maintaining Mormon value overtones, you probably guessed incorrectly: I’m a jew.

Anyway, here are the films.

***

I’ve been a fan of Andersonian melodrama ever since Rushmore, which appealed to the stifled low-performing nerd in me, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which still stands for me as Anderson’s masterpiece. I discovered Bottle Rocket afterwards and deemed it a worthy debut, if not overly affected by the Reservoir Dogs fever of the day. I panned the last two films he’s made, justly as it would seem the community has vindicated those choices (though mob-rule doesn’t always speak right). The Life Aquatic seemed to airy to me, too focused on style, too obsessive about Anderson’s own love of his wacky compositions: too concentrated on the quirkyness of his story as opposed to the story itself. The Darjeeling Limited suffered from the same sort of flaw, an attempted homage to Indian cinema that was all about Whitey, as brashly colonial and ignorant of its surroundings, as the Brit-influenced train of the film’s title. In short, Anderson had drank his own Kool-Aid, embraced his own narcissistic qualities, sometimes abetted by fellow hep-cats Noah Baumbach and Jason Schwartzman. The Fantastic Mr. Fox offered him a way out of that narcissism, a chance to create a movie of pure imagination without branding it as a “Wes Anderson” movie in a way that drew attention to itself. Like Tim Burton, he could lose himself in animation every so often to rejuvenate his sense of the possible. I admit worry when I saw Meryl Streep and George Clooney heading up the cast for Fox, but they were fine in the film and I shouldn’t have worried about Streep particularly, an actress capable of disappearing when the part calls for it, like she did in Mamma Mia!. The movie itself felt fun and mostly sly and glib and occasionally triumphant as a movie about a fox (or a Roald Dahl book) should. But what it wasn’t was great. Like Where The Wild Things Are (the superior of the two, by a bit), Fox suffers from some poor music choices, rock and brit-invasion stuff, that Anderson peps in. There’s also some stuff about karate that feels tacked in, a weird character called Kristofferson and a bumbling subservient (like Pagoda or the kid whose mom Max wants to bang in Rushmore). In short, Anderson has made Fantastic Mr. Fox into a Wes Anderson movie, to its detriment. Every element is composed and planned: wacky, but only ever in the exact way Anderson intended it to be. There is no joy of discovery to be had as we had meeting the Things in Wild Things, nor are their ways to think about the way that memory evolves, like the best animated film of they year, Up!. Instead, we get what we planned for, what we paid for, nothing more. Anderson would be a better filmmaker if he took more risks and let a wacky world evolve from his characters organically, even a little bit. Instead he’s only a good-kind of children’s storyteller:

The one who tells the children what he wants to tell them and not what they want to hear.

***

The Messenger feels like the exact sort of movie I wouldn’t see in an off-year. An “American indie” with its street-cred from Oren Moverman (I’m Not There, Jesus’ Son), it tackles “difficult” “contemporary” “issues” with some hottie Shia LeBoeuf wannabe and a fat Samantha Morton. And what I described is essentially just accurate. But those missing The Messenger will miss the best performance of the year so far and one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a man left behind by history I’ve ever seen. Sgt. Stone, as portrayed by Woody Harrelson, is a veteran of Desert Storm, “the first Gulf War” who speaks admiring of Kuwaiti prostitutes as he tilts back in forth between nights of pretty bartenders and messy alcoholic binges. He is required by his duty, as he’s assumed, to inform the relatives of men killed in action that their child is gone, a task he is both perfect for and which destroys him utterly. A soldier, a “POG” as Ben Foster accuses him of being in the film, who is a victim not of gun-fire or PTSD, but of the Army’s machismo: that he joined to be a hero, but never got the chance. Instead he crawls with envy, hatred, sympathy and distance as he coldly approaches the designated Next-of-Kin. He is the most complciated non-warrior I’ve seen in cinema and it’s Mr. Harrelson’s performance (and to a lesser degree, Mr. Moverman’s writing) that has created him. If the only the movie was aboout Mr. Harrelson’s Sgt. Stone as opposed to the over-acting Mr. Foster’s wounded private and his relationship with a terribly miscast Samantha Morton. Still, to see Harrelson act in such a movie and such a way, is something retro in a good way, a call back to when good actors worked in hack jobs for money in the sort of films that got made because they were on schedule to be made and for little other reason.

***

I almost feel like side-stepping the controversy around Precious. In all honestly, I don’t feel qualified to speak about it. Perhaps I’ll just put it my two cents and then just bow out. As I might have noted before, Lee Daniels, the director of the film, had what amounted to a monstrous portrait of himself and his movie in The New York Times (“The Audactiy of Precious”) which seemed to be entirely justified in its villainy of him. It depicted him as an opportunistic joker, accosting Helen Mirren when she broke her shoe in the sidewalk and looking at his watch hand to see how long/hard a European audience would clap for an “authentic” portrayal of “American black folks”. In short, it seemed like exploitation and those often guilty of such things (Oprah, Tyler Perry) joined in with endorsements, making it seem all the more true.

All of this seemed to be at odds with the film I saw, which while melodramatic and over-the-top, seemed to strenuously avoid exploitation and condescension to its obvious target protagonist. Terrible thing are heaped upon Precious–two unasked-for children, thrown TVs, sexual-abuse from all sides and AIDS just for starters–but in a seemingly non-forced way, she just never gives up. As a protagonist, her strongest resemblance is to Jake LaMotta of Raging Bull, whose only real obstacle was his own lack of character and intelligence, but is the only other leading character I can remember with such believable tenacity. Precious doesn’t give up because she realizes her own strength, because she is able to accept and experience everything that happens to her. Because she sees and is articulate. Obviously, she is a symbol that transcends race and position, a metaphor for the need of self-expression and transcending obstacles and boundaries.

How it does it without feeling exploitative? I couldn’t tell you. Except there seems to be humor and reality in Precious’s classroom and none of her desires seem absurd. The actress Gabourney Sidibe portraying her plays it easy and never assumes an “acting” stance.

Honestly, I’m befuddled. I don’t know how to reconcile the Daniels I read about with his film. But as it is is going now, he could be the first gay or black person to win best director or best picture. Hollywood does love that sort of story.

***

What can I say? Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?

Well.

It was fun.

As my friend Rob-Mostly-Gotten-Back-His-Beardo pointed out, like its predecessor (in whatever way), it was a well-done B-movie with an ace leading performance. Is Harvey Keitel a better actor than Nicholas Cage? I would say yes, or at leas the’s more to my tastes, though Cage is often excellent and here especially.

Cage has a devotion in BL:POCNO that verges on the insane, something that Werner Herzog is, well, perfectly poised to understand. All I can really say is good job Edward R. Pressman. I’m sure a million fucking people told you were absolutely bonkers to make a sequel to an indie NC-17 B-movie wihere a nun gets raped and devirginized by a crucifix, also with none of the same cast. But somehow–SOMEHOW–you got a pretty perfect combination here of wacky actors and wacky directors, all using their style in good harmony with the script. In short, you made a good movie.

Bravo.

Are their problems? Of course there are problems! It’s a B-movie! I assume as in Entourage, Werner Herzog didn’t give Eva Mendes any direction because he thinks she sucks (and thus she does, a self-fulfilling prophecy). Also, the script is often questionable, verging on the fact that this “bad lieutenant” is particularly sanitized from Abel Ferrara’s mad-cap Catholic fuck-a-thon. He’s not actually that bad. He saves peoples’ lives at great risk to himself, he gets his criminals, he even gets his hooker girlfriend on the straight-and-low. He doesn’t murder anyone and there aren’t even the crazy-long shooting-up scenes from the first film. “Unorthodox and Probably Insane but Pretty Damn Effective Lieutenant” could have been the title of this movie, if not for space constraints.

In the end though, a simple question, one often asked to movie critics: Should you see this?

Answer: Of course! Where are else are you going to get crazy Nic Cage antics, Werner Herzog-induced fish-eye iguana-shots and a cackling performance by mid-level rapper Xzibit?

I bet my friend Jason Lee just creamed in his pants.

***

One last note.

I recently saw The Brother-Sister Plays over at the Public Theater with curly-gurl Christa (for the first one) and my sister (for all three). I was glad I found people to see them with, which was difficult even after Brantley compared the playwright to Eugene O’Neil and Sam Shepard in the same paragraph. As I expected, the comparison is not really true, or at the least, overstated. Both of those artists have an emotional connection in their dialogue that push pin-pricks and stabs into the audience’s mind. They are unafraid to grab at your thoughts and hold them against the wourld they are trying to show you, a twisted tableau out of their minds that you know, when translated, might echo back to you. Another obvious comparison to the playwright of these plays, Alvin McCraney, might be the non-naturalist Suzan Lori-Parks, who is also black and whose plays tackle with ebullient style “the issues” as they might be.

Mr. McCraney doesn’t have that skill yet. He’s only 29. But what he does have is storytelling ability, the ability to connect myth to reality and sprinkle in history and family too, in a way that might be attributed to his old master August Wilson, or probably more accurately, to another gay minority artist, Tony Kushner. Mr. Kushner is above all else an alchemist, spinning the many worries of Jews and men into concoctions that are often funny and outrageous and always broadly ambitious. If Mr.McCraney doesn’t dream on this scale yet, he’s on his way with The Brother/Sister Plays. The first play, The Red and Brown Water is the weakest, but still memorable, a tale of a young runner and the things she can’t escape. The second and third plays, The Brothers Size and Marcus involve family and the search for identity. All of them involve the issues of the world, the details of everyday life and the inter-connectedness of community.

To my peers, the plays are only 20 dollars a piece (40 for all three). They can be seen all on a Saturday, a Sunday or both as I did.

Theater is a throwback which stirs thoughts inside you. It may not always be as crafted as film. But unlike film it is immediate and cannot be denied.

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?”

Two Plugs (OK, I guess 3)

I passed this place yesterday.

Once upon a time, it was a small un-pretentious Pueblo-Mex restaurant called Pio Maya that specialized in delicious roasted chickens.

But now, it specializes in video games and comic books while you eat burgers with guacamole in them.

Stuck in a small corner near the NYU stretch and the West 4th Street Subway Station, “Planet Action” seemed both willfully bizarre and too nerdy to exist.

Also, it seemed like a terrible idea to combine these things (though I heard from Ro-formerly-Beardo that a place called “Barcade” does something similar).

I could only imagine, your controller would get greasy, not to mention the comic books.

You would spill some pico de gallo on your X-Box and then you would be in real trouble.

Microsoft wasn’t going to repair that shit.

No way.

On top of that, no self-respecting gamer would go someplace to play Madden or Oblivion in front of other people when he could just order in and do so at home in his underwear with a 2-liter soda or malt liquor of his choice.

Still, I felt like trying it since, by virtue of its willful insanity, it seemed still like the sort of place a gamer might open.

Alas, there was no non-meat entree.

When I asked about a turkey burger advertised on the menu as “TOP SECRET BURGER X!”, the owner said he had made them but nobody had bought them so he had given up.

I left disappointed, but I still would like a meat-eater to try it and see if they find the experience satisfying.

Or Gamer-licious.

LAN-tastic.

***

As I have said in the past, it’s my belief that my friend Jason Lee is a better, if not much-much more depressing writer than I am.

His most recent post is a meditation on his job search upon reaching the holy land of the savaged post-collegiate coastal-intellectual: Austin, TX.

There he lists over 46 places he has applied for jobs, some for which he is ludicrously overqualified (Test Prep, Bookstores) and some for which is he under (Administrative Assistant, Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Government) but all of which, through numerous follow-ups seem to only irk him further on a plateau of post-jobless-despair boredom.

The list would be funnier if it wasn’t true and is also funnier that it is.

In any case it’s a sad and true attempt to depict the difficultly for the post-collegiate in getting jobs which previously were assumed to be shitty enough to hire anyone (a story about an ice cream-chain in Jason’s post particularly comes to mind).

Anyway the post, along with the rest of his deadpan, Scandinavian-misery blog is worth checking out, whether you know Jason or not.

He’s linked on my blogroll, but here’s the post direct.

***

Finally, come see my show.

We’re sold out but last night was the first night I felt I did really well.

I feel like as previews go on, I am beginning to get freer with my performance to ease up, to try things, to become more “natural”.

I remember meeting with Michael, my director, in Washington Square Park where he showed me the lines for one of my scenes and asked me to just read them naturally, which I was amazed when I was unable to do.

I felt a queasy feeling, like I had gipped him, considering that he had hired me as a non-actor for my natural persona. But the problem was is that I only knew how to portray the exaggerated character of “Nick Feitel” in performance and not the way I was daily added on to a script.

“You’ll do it when you know it better.” He said. “You’ll do it when you know the lines so well that speaking them is like talking about girls. Or magic cards. Or whatever else you talk about on your blog.”

Last night was the first night I felt that ease as, seasick with a headache from my second show of the evening, I settled in to a scene with an uncaring ease, using my pissy-ness for the work.

“Fuck, that was good.” I felt afterwards, the first time in my performance of the show that I hadn’t panicked about my own performance looking towards Michael for some brand of reassurance he couldn’t offer considering the 10 other actors he had to manage along with the one he was replacing temporarily as she headed to a Wendy’s commercial.

Last night, the actor I grew up downstairs from, Jay O. Sanders, came to see the play with his family (including a rambunctious son Jamie who had Facebook-snubbed me as a building dweller, but added me after the show).

He was, as always, professional and in good cheer, willing to support a “friend” as he generously described me to another peer working the show who he knew. Mr. Sanders was always like that, leading a cheer for me on my on film set and inspiring the people around me.

In the swirl of emotion and Tylenol and passing seasickness I even did something crazy and invited my last interviewee, the writer-director Whit Stillman to come see the show, who I barely knew at all and who had just been nice to me when I interviewed him.

I emailed him at 12:05 and was amazed when he responded to me within the hour saying that he’d love to come “if it wasn’t too shocking” and that he would let me know what day when he returned from Los Angeles.

He’s a generous guy and I won’t hold it against him if he can’t come, but nonetheless the giddiness of a filmmaker I admired coming to see a show.

Still, it didn’t stop me from feeling the pain from my shin I had bumped during the show, throbbing through the Tylenol I had taken for my headache earlier in the evening.

“I can’t see you tonight” I told my girlfriend over text-message. “I don’t think I would be any fun. I’m feeling a throbbing mix of abrasion/head pain and seasickness, also I miss you.”

“Three Similar Sensations!” She exclaimed.

And I kissed my phone in a way that I had told her was less a desire to french my iPhone and more about missing her, as I tucked the phone under my pillow and tucked myself to sleep.

***

PLANET ACTION

A Burger and an hour of video games- $5

8th St bet 6th Ave and MacDougal St.

ACEBDFV to West 4th. R to 8th St-NYU

Vacation’s All I Ever Wanted

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

They had to ask.

My parents were going away, much to my protest, to a small island off the coast of South Carolina called “Kiawah”, a family resort we had gone to as a family in my youth, which I best remembered for a child performance act known as “Rick and his Kazoobie Band”.

I say “much to my protest” because I was not in favor of them returning to Kiawah, somewhere I had only middling memories of anyway, when they could use their hard-won vacation-time to go somewhere exotic like the south of France or beautiful like Vancouver. After all, it hadn’t been a good year for just about anyone (unless you were selling guns or bibles) and it would be nice to get somewhere far, far away.

That is, if you were going to get out of New York City to begin with, something I had no intention of doing.

“I’ll be fine.” I told my mom, with an air of boredom steering towards blankness.

New York was a place I had left neither for college nor vacation in quite some time. Unlike my wayward friends who’d come here expecting something, I did not have any sort of delusion that New York was trying to eat me, nor that it was out to get/stab/rape or mug me.

It was a place I was content in being and I chocked up my parents uneasiness with leaving to an uneasiness at relinquishing an accustomed proximity.

“I’ll be fine.” I told them.

“I have things to do.”

***

I spent one-half of today trying to convince someone I was competent and the other half realizing I wasn’t.

Competence, as I would describe to my friends, was a virtue that I held above much else in film school.

“Most of producing is just basic competence.” I told to a first-time student producer at lunchtime on a friend’s set.

“Can you fill out paperwork? Can you get it in on time? Can you make sure lunch happens? Can you call everyone to see if they’ll come?” I listed.

“You’d be surprised,” I told the first-timer. “How many people are completely incapable of doing this.”

Yet I, who supposed myself an expert on competence was being traced for it at once.

“Basically, the interns are all shit.” The interviewer told me. “And me? I’m trying to de-shitify the bunch.”

The woman interviewer was matter-of-fact, which I appreciated, but obviously more than a little p.o.-ed.

“It’s just like I’ll tell one of them to do something and they’ll be like (insert nasal voise ‘Well why do I have to do it that way?’ and I’ll be like because that’s the best damn way to do it and they’ll be like ‘yeah, cool’ and no it’s not cool, it fucking needs to get done, am I right?”

It was a testament to her experience that she wasn’t breathless after saying this.

Her explanation for all this–that she was the alpha-intern who became paid and she wasn’t going to have any shit-intern fuck it up–made sense. But I felt like the questions she was asking me bored on the “Are you stupid?” brand.

“Do you feel comfortable getting coffee?” She asked. “Can you go to the grocery store?”

“If we ask you to go to Kinko’s, do you think you can handle that?”

I smiled and answered yes.

The catch-22 of internships is that if you’re applying for one you either have no experience or weren’t good enough at your previous internship. Because, well, if you were good enough at your previous internship, then really, what the fuck were you doing here.

So as I tried to explain to the woman, my life story in short, my path as an “aspiring screenwriter” and what I saw as my abilities towards basic-level competence, she seemed to relax slightly, even though we both knew that me being here on some level was an admission of some sort of personal failure.

As this grew, so did her smile, her confidence. By the end of the interview, for all the incompetence of her interns, she was the lord of them, the success story, just interviewing another groveling failure. She could return to that now.

I thanked her for her time, took my New Yorker and empty water bottle and left.

***

I was cast.

I’d imagine this would be an admission of joy to someone like an actor I’d know from school, most of whom are attempting to concentrate on their careers in the service industry before they even get a chance to think about auditions.

But as I looked over the cavalcade of scripts, schedules and assistant directors, stage managers, rehearsals and previews, I realized that perhaps now was a good time to shit my pants.

“Are you comfortable with lines? With memorizing?” The director had asked me.

The prospect sounded good and I’d remembered advice that people had given me to say yes to everything when you’re young and have nothing to lose.

“It’s not that memorizations so hard.” The director added. “Just giving some feeling to the lines can be hard for people.”

“Well,” I told him with a smile on my face. “I’m good at Karaoke. Or at least not bad.”

And I didn’t have any problem doing a dramatic reading of my lines as I looked over one of the scripts I had received. The play was a massive structure of three different casts of actors doing different strands, variations on a theme simultaneously, all in a boat anchored on the Hudson.

But as I gave my casual reading a cocky shimmer of that Feitel charm, I realized I would have to remember all these lines. That unlike Karaoke they wouldn’t be up there on the screen, an obvious relization but one that hit hard when I thought to myself, amidst confidence fleeing, as to a plan:

“Oh wait. I’m not an actor.”

This was the “oh shit” test I might have gotten some time in my career, the realization that I had neither the training nor the discipline ready to do theater, having not memorized lines since my eigth-grade production of Starmites. Even if I fancied myself a web comedian of sorts and some sort of occasionally funny presence, I just didn’t have the simple technique for getting down the most basic elements of theater.

I, Nick Feitel, who so worshipped and exuded competence, who reviled and derided incompetence had found myself, in a situation, incompetent.

And, dread setting in, I didn’t know what would happen, but I knew I had to wise up quick.

***

Karaoke this week didn’t feature Andy Roehm, who bowed out due to lack of funds, but J-Sam Bakken, another friend with a curlier Jew-Fro than mine and a propensity for shaking his bee-hind while singing songs.

I had always had a strange mixture of admiration/frascination and weirdness from J-Sam who could be seen as another foil for myself, but with clear distinctions.

Unlike a “doppleganger”, J-Sam didn’t bear too much physical resemblance to me: his hair was curlier, his manner more reserved and his social graces ranging from intensely awkward to smooth with what seemed like little between.

But we both made movies about ourselves and acted in them and other projects. But while I was donning a swimsuit while taking a bath and playing with rubber ducks, J-Sam made movies where he was aggressively naked, showing cock to camera to much repute. While I could only mine a version of myself to play a character, drawing on awkward caricature, J-Sam had a method to his acting, a tenderness and a strangeness that came out of his lack of affect.

Even Karaokeing, he seemed to throw himself into it with a verve, shouting and “ow!”-ing, only to return to a quiet, cataonic state on the zebra-striped couches of Planet Rose as if to observe all the weirdos, sipping his beer.

In short, J-Sam was a study in extremes, but in so he seemed more admirable to me, since he threw himself into things, sometimes literally unprotected, but always seemed to drag himself out.

After the good night of beers and shots and a raspy rendition of Bob Seger, I headed back walking with J-Sam over to his job as an RA for the Summer High School Program. He invited me up and drunkenly I accepted. I said hi to his roommates, housed in an old room of the old dormitory, Weinstein, I used to frequent as a freshman. I said hi to my actor, a student there in the program and said hi to the high school kids who were partying down.

As soon as I left them by the door to their festivities, I realized the livels of regression involved in being here:

-The last summer of camp counseling and the decision not to return to the hills of Vermont.

-The year as a freshman, sitting in a room-full-of-smoke, waiting for someone to clear it all up or for something funky to occur.

-Being in camp and being a high schooler somewhere else, afresh to your new-found powers of sociability and experiencing the dilation of emotion of summer camp.

All of these were new experiences, at their times and they all represented steps away from the old: a risk-reward model.

I went to Taco Bell much to my misfortune that night, as I left the summer dorms behind.

I regret the burrito I got there and the remembrance of new things old.

***

I added to my blogroll in my last entry the blogs of my friend Jason Lee in Iceland and Rob Malone’s zany adventures on set in Washington state.

Both seem to put in to focus their respective people.

I can conjure up in image of Jason somewhere near a fjord looking peripatetically out towards a friends camera, a slight sneer from behing his glasses.

I can imagine Rob in the Washington mud, haaving tussled hair-ily with Zach Weintraub over the last bar-b-que potato chip, the angle askew in the camera of mind, so as to emphasize the action.

By their remove, just like a lens, they come into focus, having been too close to imagine before.

As I think about New York, my past experiences here and the ghosts that seem to float around me of prior expectations and future responsibility, I wonder what I’d look like, at such a remove.

***

Post-Script:

If you’re interested and have the time/movie interest, I’d ask you to check out the pieces I’ve written recently for my editorial gig over at FilmLinc. I’ve got two up right now, one on Almereyda’s Hamlet, the one with Bill Murray as Polonius, in the post-recession world and another, probably worthier, piece on the Nicholas Ray retrospective at Film Forum.

Check them out.

They make me look good to my boss.

Additions and Subtractions

A couple updates to my blogroll:

As much as I despise them for taking my friend Beardo (now beardless, thus via Zach Weintraub, “Chin-o”), Rob asked me to put up their movie blog on my blogroll while they are filming. Their film, an indie no-budget feature is called (unfortunately) Land of the Lost and follows some adolescent youngsters as they head off on a road trip to find out, well, something about what people find out when they head out on road trips. Zach is best known in these parts for his erstwhile mumblecore web series “Couch Potatoes” he effected with my other friend Jesse Fisher. Zach is a tall Jew with an interesting artistic sensibility and a good voice for singing Poison on Karaoke nights. I wish him well and look forward to seeing the movie somewhere around.

Also, I’ve added friend-of-the-blog Jason Lee’s blog up there too. Jason is known around as a “cynical, glasses-wearing Asian” who is reportedly anti-Armond White but pro-Twilight and also was challenged in these pages to have an emotion off with J.D. Amato and/or a robotic showdown with White.

He’s also probably a better writer than I am and his dispatches make up a visual survey of his time spent in Iceland among things too glamorous and downtrodden to describe here. It’s worth a read, especially if you’re a depresive artist-type considering your own trip eastward to Europe.

As for removals, I’ve taken off Beardo’s Blog, since it was mostly a beard-bortion and Jonny-Jon-Jon’s blog since he’s spending his time nowadays “downloading 25 hours of archival footage with which to make a movie.”

Have fun.