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

Welcome Week

“You’re the photographer from the New Yorker? Jesus, I thought Teddy was just making you up.”

In retrospect, not a good thing to say in front of your boss.

But then again, it wasn’t always clear who the boss was working on The Confidence Man, but then again, maybe that was part of the whole bit.

Between your directors, stage managers, costume designers, set designers, assistant stage managers and fellow actors, it wasn’t always certain who to listen to.

The boss in question in this particular circumstance happened to be a big one: Teddy, formerly a classmate of mine in an aborted improv class, who turned out to be the director of “The Woodshed Collective”, the company that was putting on the play.

My comment was meant as half-a-joke; Teddy had told us that the photographer would be coming by, a feat that we all marveled.

Then again, when you’re on a bot with the chaos of separate scenes, rehearsals, rooms, actors, characters, all in the moment–well, it was easy to not be sure what was really going to happen or not.

But there he was, a 30-something fellow who looked eager and a bit in awe of his surroundings.

I couldn’t tell how the photographer had taken the joke as his next motion was to take pictures of the other actors in costume around us as the sky kicked toward sunset and the surroundings became more scenic.

“Let me know if you need us to do any tableaus.” I told him as I climbed the gang-plank, as Teddy shot me a look-full of shut-the-fuck-up.

***

When I woke up this morning, Brennan McVicar was gone from my house.

It was not the usual routine.

The usual routine involved me waking up sometime pre-9ish, say 6:48 or 8:48 or just 9 on the dot, followed by a sleepy return, followed by a 10:23 awakening in order to face the day before 12, followed by as much video games as I could stand.

As the hour would broach 12-noon, I would stare up at Brennan’s lifeless hunk up in my hitherto unused sleeping loft and decide whether or not I would make fun of him for not being up.

Brennan had ended up at my place not through a lack of me not trying. That is to say, I had offered a few times before he decided to come.

Brennan, a lunky-tall short-haired sound guy, mild-mannered to-the-max, had found himself in that peculiar state of homelessness that one could end up in, in post-collegiate New York City, deciding to stay on but lacking dormitories of any kind or plans.

When we had discussed this over a walk down Bleecker St for Indian sandwiches, he had told me that his plan ranged from crashing on a guy’s couch who was gone but already staying there fairly rent-less, to having a friend charge him weekly for a not-even-a-bed to stay.

“Poppycock.” I told Brennan. “Stay at my place.”

And then with some pride:

“I have a sleeping loft.”

The decision to not sleep in my sleeping loft had made through a combination of bed-familiarity on the part of my oldie, bed-unfamiliarity on the part of the new and unexpected mini-loft and a substantial fear of rolling out of it in the middle of a drunk-off night.

Also, from there, I couldn’t see the TV.

My dad had warned me that a “free bed in New York City seldom goes empty” and, thinking he had a point, I set out to choose at least who’d be occupying it.

Brennan didn’t mind the video games and could be quiet during a morning of hangovers or just late-night-dregs.

So he fit the bill pretty well.

“Welcome Week has started again.” He told me this morning, the week that all the NYU students, the new freshman flood the neighborhood.

“Good.” I told him, trying to get back to some virtual demon-devouring action.

“Good that your neighborhood will be flooded with freshman?” He asked plaintively.

“Good that I don’t give a fuck.” I replied.

Except that I did.

In past years, Welcome Week had been one of my worst experiences at NYU. Not only had I failed to get laid at the inaugural one, but I had failed to get laid at my sophomore one too, moonlighting as a “Mentor” to incoming freshman.

(In reality, I flatter myself as to my skeeziness. I went on one date, not because I planned to, but because it was there.)

But really, the problem with Welcome Week wasn’t a reminder of failure or the crowd of stupid Freshman: it was the idea that these people had time, that life started anew, that it passed you by, et cetera.

You looked at all the kids smiling and congregating and singing in the park and you half-think:

“When was I that dumb” and “I wish I could go over and talk to them, too”.

I dream about it sometimes, being back in that one-room Hayden dormitory with the uncertainty of who we would become, what college and life would be.

I don’t feel much more certain, but when I woke up this morning, Brennan was gone to a film shoot and I was off to the boat for rehearsal.

And life started, again.

***

On a personal note, I’ve been missing writing.

I’ve been missing writing this and I’ve been missing writing my screenplay.

I’m starting to get the feeling that you can write and you can live but that it’s hard to do both in proportion.

I was talking today on the boat with a fellow actor with the comical name, Mike Piazza, about the acting studios at NYU, since he is  a young teacher at Atlantic Theater Company.

We ended up talking about the different studios folding into one another and the tensions between Strassberg and Meisner and Adler, since I had taken several overlapping classes that had talked about “The Group Theater”.

It was a theater company full of mostly middle-class Jews with Cliff Odets as its playwright.

They’d go upstate for the summer and fight and screw and act (before it was all cool), looking to develop their methodology.

In the end, they split up and all founded their own schools and influenced the way we see film and theatre acting to this day.

“It was amazing that they stayed together as long as they did.” I told Mike. “All that seething under the surface.”

“What can I say?” Mike said, suave. “In acting, you keep it together.”

And then added:

“For a while.”

A foghorn.

Rehearsal was on.

The photographer from the New Yorker didn’t need me for tableaus as he snapped and snapped away, while I averted my eyes lest his camera catch me peering in and turn away in turn.

“Wow,” I told the director of the part of the play I was in, the man who cast me, Michael Silverstone. “So people are going to see this thing.”

And he nodded as he walked and turned a corner on the boat.

And the music played.

The show was about to start.

Monsters in My Pocket, Acting on my Brain (And Also For Some Reason, Anne Heche)

“I wish I could be a Pokemon Trainer.”

“Then it would just be like I graduate high school and boom: just go around, going like, ‘Squirtle, go’ and shit.”

“Would be less lame than this.”

The conversations one has in one’s free time.

Frank and I were walking down Elizabeth St in Chinatown, working out ideas about unemployment and video games after a quick spin-by Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.

The ice cream was delicious–I got a one-scoop of half-Oreo/half-Red Bean which was creamy and chewy and felt good in the post-rained out afternoon.

Frank and I, who had never had completely overlapping interests, found ourselves diverging even more after college, and when we hung out we found ourselves bound both by old, shared nerdiness and present lack of employment.

Thus Frank’s wondering about a world where he could just not worry about jobs and instead be a Pokemon trainer.

“Yeah, that’d be pretty sweet.” I told him, not entirely mulling it over.

“Just go around winning Pokemon battles.” Frank said, ambling.

“You know the one thing I never understood was that you like beat up a kid’s pokemon and took his money. But where the hell did he get that money from in the first place? Did these kids even have a real job? Were there parents just loaded? Were you taking their lunch money?”

“That’s fucked up.” Frank said. “Then what would they eat?”

“Shit.” I said. “Puts a whole new perspective on the game.”

Just as I had dissolved into my writing and some attempt at artiness after high school, Frank had embarked on a more common-sensical path in his education, as he was always the more down-to-earth of the two of us. He studied business, Japanese, accounting; whatever interested him. He went to college, not knowing what he would learn or get out, on an ambling path down which he had found good friends, some of whom I had met upon my accompanying him to his other friend’s wedding. I had made friends of my own, in my own way, but I had always been so dead-set and concentrated in my education, treating film school more like a video game where one must “level up” and gain new powers than any sort of journey of discovery.

Moreover, just as we used to be fellow, shapeless nerds, in stark contrast to our built-superiors involved in athletics, I had maintained a relative flubbiness, while Frank complained to me on a daily basis that he was now a “Small” in shirt size and commented that you know you’ve really gotten a good workout when you have to puke afterwards.

“Not saying that’s a good thing.” Frank said. “Just saying you know, you really killed your body that time.”

By comparison, my father complained to me today that I should get some shirts that fit me. I was wearing a large.

We ended up going and getting, in addition to the ice cream, a “WiiMotionPlus” so I could play the new WiiSports Resort game (as close to the word “sports” as you’ll ever see me), but when Frank come over to help me set it up, we found out that in the process of moving my Wii had been somehow dismantled in a way irreparable by mere players of the system.

After that, we didn’t do much but hang out. The thing I’ve always liked about Frank is that we never really have to do something and even a day wasted, feels relaxing when you have someone to hang with, relatively tensionless.

Frank had come home from college, expecting to work with his father in home electronics installation, but his father’s business had slowed in the post-Madoff era and Frank could only work from time-to-time.

One of the effects of the mass joblessness my early 20s friends are experiencing is that there’s always a discussion of the future as if there might be one. My parents upon seeing Frank asked him if he would be a personal trainer, while I had been encouraging him to go back to school for cooking, another passion of his.

(I couldn’t say that it didn’t have something to do with selfishness–I’d rather hear more about food from him and less about exercise.)

And ask me that question, I keep thinking what I thought in college about my future: that, namely, wasn’t it supposed to be right now?

“That stuffs boring.” Frank said, upon voicing my thoughts. “And I’m tired. Good night.”

And upon that Frank conked out face-down on my couch with a murmur about gluts or biceps or something.

Talking about exercise in his sleep. God. Damnit.

Oh, well.

Time for more video games.

***

Introduction time.

This is what I get for asking for a little background on everyone.

The two other actors were at various levels of experience, one being a New Orleans-bred Downtown-character actor who had recently done a performance piece with his sister about Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire reimagined in a post-that-play, post-Katrina atmosphere of New Orleans while also summoning up Marlon Brando.

The other guy was even scarier:

A skinnier, more hipster-y version of myself with curly hair and a blond moustache who was a theater student at Fordham and was even ostensibly straight.

“Damn.” I thought to myself. “A straight, skinnier version of me at theater school? He must get super laid.”

They were staring at me.

Oh yeah. My introduction.

“Well, uh. Yeah. I’m just some guy Michael found in a line.” I told them.

Silence. Hanging smiles from the two of them. The director, Michael (the same), smiled uncomfortably.

“And uh, now I’m  making him look bad.”

I tried to goofily smile my way out of the situation and the hanging silence turned into some laughs.

You don’t know, I thought to myself. They are actors. Maybe they all just hate you now and are acting this way.

I was there for my first rehearsal, the first rehearsal of all of the rehearsals, I would find out, for this crazy play I’m in: The Confidence Man which is being put on by this group, The Woodshed Collective.

Michael, the good-natured guy who I’d met waiting in line for a show that was a one-man reenactment of Rambo: First Blood (the book, not the movie), explained to us that in the play we all were con-men and we were all being conned.

As I read the lines, I struggled towards character. As I had explained nervously to the pretty, also-NYU Assistant Director, what I was quickly figuring out was that I wasn’t an actor, at least in the sense that people who had been through four or however many years of school were.

In my mind, I thought about all these secret tricks they must have learned, ways of getting in touch with themselves to pull out emotions, beats that they could find in a scene, ways of relating to their character.

Me, when I read, was just trying to sound cool, just trying to embody some different version or affect of myself.

My rehearsal ended early, only three hours-long, for our first of a series that would stretch on every day until our performance.

As I left the room, dismissed, I turned around about five steps from the door and asked: “So was that okay and stuff?”

Everyone gave words of assurance.

I bet they were all talking about what a dick that kid was as soon as I left, I thought as I headed for the elevator.

The next morning I awoke to a facebook message from one of my actors praising me for “being natural” and saying he was “honored to work with me”.

Which made me think, wow, what a nice guy.

Either that or that he felt bad about talking about what a dick I was yesterday.

Neurosis.

***

Finally and on a completely unrelated note, I read an article in the New York Times magazine and am now attracted to Anne Heche.

She used to weird me out, pretty much, what with the whole Ellen/Lesbian thing break-up.

I admit to my own ignorance, that when I heard that she had proclaimed herself in a lesbian relationship, in love with Ellen DeGeneres, I could never look at her in the same way in the roles she was cast for as a straight romantic interest.

I would always try to read in to what was there, whether there was some attempt at representation, or a layer “put-on” of a hetero-normativity.

The ways of definitive attractiveness that stars like Nicole Kidman have fell away from her, melting into confusion of my male libido.

But upon reading the profile of her in the Times, her strange, southern, sexually-abusive childhood, her constant vulnerability that she brings to her roles, her attempts an all things to find love, bouncing around to different genders and types of lovers–suddenly I felt a heat towards her, an unraveling or deconstruction of all the times I had been made to feel uncomfortable.

Maybe it was the idea that she was vulnerable, honest. Maybe it was her craziness, her suppressed personality “Celestia”, a woman who thought aliens were going to take her away to the stars.

Maybe it was that suddenly it seemed like there was so much to know about this person.

Maybe I just have a lesbian fetish. Or a crazy one.

Who knows.

The crazy one, at least, would make a lot of sense.

***

CHINATOWN ICE CREAM FACTORY

One Scoop: Half-Oreo, Half/Red Bean– $3.75

Bayard St bet. Mott St and Elizabeth St.

NQRWJMZ6 to Canal St.