bloggie blog

Just gotta respond to what Ryan Basham wrote on Facebook:

If I never see another webseries/short/indie film about actors and their pursuits, that’d be totally cool. Seriously, take your experiences and put them in any other setting. I say this with love!

Yo Ryan,
Totes agree! But I’m sure you don’t really mean that about *my* web series. It IS going to be different! It’s going to be called An Actor Pursues (get it?) and we’re in post right now. We just took the plunge, didn’t even worry about what the world wants or any of that haters gonna hate stuff that just slows you down, man! With the brilliant, and I must say, deftly inscrutable acting choices being made by my friends who totally didn’t even have to audition, with its amazing real writing about things that really happened to me and to some other actors I heard about, so you know they’re really real and really amazing, with its in-your-face sound quality that we got in this total bargain from this guy on Craigslist who also knew this director guy who was just awesome, and — this is the real key — with its editing that actually slows … things … down and lets the user spend meaningful time on each and every moment of what it *really* takes to be an actor — I mean, nothing happens in the first 5 episodes, and I really hope you GET that, man — well, I’m sure you’ll eventually see that AAP is really going to totally take off and prove you wrong once we get it set up with our new Tumblr account! So no hard feelings and thanks in advance for the “likes”!! And for watching!!!!!
Kevin

In the ninth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, he addresses the endless doubting and disharmony of his recipient. It is a short letter because his “hand is tired” because he’s “had to write so many letters” to others, too. But a portion of it resonated with some actorly experiences I’ve had.

And about feelings: All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

The italicization is mine because I’ve been trying more and more to do good acting work with my entire body. Good acting is often seen as concentrated in the face, or the voice, or the heart. The greater truth is that, more often than not, a truer experience for both actor and audience is achieved when the actor is having a full-body physical experience. That came to mind as I read Rilke speak of one-sided feelings versus something that is in your blood.

Find more brief posts on Rilke here.

Dear America, here is our sympathy card for you. No meaningful discussion or critical analysis will be offered, because we know you don’t want that. Instead, please tune in for plenty of trite soliloquies, a fair amount of inane verbal sparring between egocentric loudmouths, and a whole crapton of deeply felt maudlin blather. Signed, the “news.”

The eighth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is long, dense, hard to follow as I read it. Rilke writes about the sadness his recipient has had. (And his own sadness, of course.) One part struck me as lovely, where Rilke writes of the value in not blocking out all the pain we might experience:

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.

If you’re hoping for some change in your life, I hope this helps. Find more brief posts on Rilke here.

This is part of a series of entries on Making Ideas Happen.

A few things on Action Steps.

“Action Steps are to be revered and treated as sacred.”

“The most productive people pay attention to the finer details of their rituals to keep themselves engaged. As you develop your own system to manage Action Steps, you will want to make it ‘sticky.’ ”

Action Steps are best when they start with verbs. This is not something eye-opening for me as I read MIH. If I dig into past records on my computer, I see that most of my items have always started with verbs, but I see some random exceptions:

Dry cleaning
Quarters!
Discover payment due 6/22
Pics to State Farm

While these are pretty clear — clear and concrete is key — it’s still easy to see that these items become that much more actionable if I phrase them with a verb first:

Take jacket to dry cleaners
Put quarters for parking in my car
Make payment on my Discover card (due 6/22)
Email pics to State Farm

Now, as I wrote earlier, the word action jumps off the page for an actor. There’s talking and feeling and other gerunds that actors do, but more and more I’ve found ways in which the key to doing good acting work is in the doing. Similarly, writing Action Steps this way is simply more better (although there’s something powerful about “Quarters!” just the way it is, now that I think about it).

This is part of a series of entries on Making Ideas Happen.

From MIH: “A surplus of ideas is as dangerous as a drought. Without some structure, you can become an addict of the brain-spinning indulgence of idea generation.”

If you’ve sensed this to be true for you, it may help to shift some energy towards “project management.” So says MIH, but … yikes! I remember being introduced to project management in my first office jobs via complicated charts and convoluted software that later became Microsoft Project. That approach seems pretty craptacular still, and I don’t think that’s what MIH is advocating (though smart use of technology is encouraged).

What MIH recommends is the Action Method. It can be implemented in different ways (paper, computer, what-not), but it comes down to a few principles:

1. A relentless bias toward action pushes ideas forward.
2. Stuff that is actionable must be made personal.
3. Taking and organizing extensive notes aren’t worth the effort.
4. Use design-centric systems to stay organized.
5. Organize in the context of projects, not location.

I find the 2nd point a non-issue, as I’m a team of one and I care about my life. I find the 3rd and 5th points freeing. So many notes I’ve taken, then organized, then never looked at. So many times I’ve tried to separate “at work” from “at home.” I find the 4th point a vindication of the priority I’ve placed on aesthetics over the years. All of this is meaningless or crippling if you don’t like doing it, on some level. Beauty is a key component to me liking something.

That leaves mostly the 1st point to work on: A relentless bias towards action. Paraphrasing from MIH, the Action Method begins with a simple premise: everything is a project. Every project in life can be reduced into these three primary components. Action Steps are the specific, concrete tasks that inch you forward. References are sketches, websites, handouts you may want to refer back to.¹ Backburner Items are things that are not now actionable but may be someday.

As you go about your day, you’re generating Action Steps, References and Backburner Items at a fast clip, aren’t you? I know I am. Ideas in the shower, in the car, wherever. Much of this will be lost if not captured. When captured properly, I think it’s freeing, not burdensome, because the bigger burden comes from a sense of, “What was I supposed to be doing?” or, “What was that great idea I had yesterday morning?”

MIH advocates their own software to capture information and keep track of Action Steps, but I am using Things. I’ll confess that the jury is still out on how well this works, but so far I think this is my experience: Using Things well helps me. Using Things poorly makes life miserabler (if that’s a word).

Things uses different terms, but I found some keys to using it well on their forums.² Here’s my current approach, with the Action Method on the left, and the corresponding Things functionality on the right.

Action Steps: Next
Focus Items: Today
Backburner Items: Someday
Projects: Projects
Stuff I can’t figure out right this second: Inbox and/or Areas

I’d be curious to hear from you. What software are you using? If not, what lovely paper-based method are you using? (See point 4 above regarding my opinion that your method is best if it’s “lovely.”)

Up next, more details on Action Steps.

This is part of a series of entries inspired by Making Ideas Happen.

Organization and execution. “Organization? But I’m an artist. Get thee hence!” The creative mind is rebellious to restrictions and procedures, to anything corporate. Trust me, I know! But consider the value of organization and execution. I believe that I can be intellectual and a successful actor, that left-brain and right-brain are not mutually exclusive, that a lack of business savvy is one of the biggest problems in this town.¹ More and more of us in all fields in this country are freelancers, so we will increasingly benefit from embracing the value of organization to make ideas happen.

As a writer, I have great ideas. Yes, I switched there, but stay with me. As a writer, I have lots of great ideas for some seriously awesome web series.² I’ve created in my mind Vulvacious, Fur Elise and several other gems. The reason you don’t know me as a writer of amazing web serieses is simple: I’m all creativity, zero organization, zero execution. The creativity is high enough, but that alone means squat.

So, back to organization and execution. Disappointinlgly, MIH tells us that Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light,” excels in this area. I can think of some political people who excel at this, too, though their politics are even more hideous than a Kinkade painting. The quality of the idea is not necessarily what makes or breaks its success. More important is what MIH calls “The Action Method, work and life with a bias toward action.”

The word action jumps off the page for an actor. Hence my continued perusal³ of this book.

Relatedly, the best approach to acting, as I’ve come to learn via Stephen Book, is this: Acting is doing, and there’s always more to do. As taught to me, this mainly applies to the craft, that is, the moments on stage or on a set, but it’s also true of pursuing the acting work in the first place — or pursuing anything that’s hard to get.

Stay tuned for more on action and the Action Method.

This is my first entry inspired by Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality, a book by Scott Belsky that I’ve been reading recently. Don’t remember exactly how I stumbled on this book (pretty sure it was via some sort of bloggish something), but it comes at a good time for me, when the ways I’m using to get things done need rethinking, so I’m grateful for it. Since I see lots of good stuff in this book that applies to working as an actor, to working in the other jobs I’ve had and will have, and to personal tasks, I want to share a few passages that have jumped off the page at me.

To begin, whatever your idea is, Mr Belsky’s six years’ of research resulted in a good formula for making it happen:

MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN = (THE IDEA) + ORGANIZATION AND EXECUTION + FORCES OF COMMUNITY + LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY

That’s it. That’s what the book is about it. And regarding the first component, “The way you organize projects, prioritize, and manage your energy is arguably more important than the quality of the ideas you wish to pursue.” That alone is a lot to chew on, so we’ll end today’s blog there.

Meanwhile, if any of this resonates with you, the internet will quickly lead you to much more on Making Ideas Happen, the Action Method, the 99 Percent, Behance, etc.

In the latest issue of Screen Actor magazine, there’s a lot of talk about the union merger from our leaders. A lot. To the point of obscuring other important topics, which is one of my main concerns with the merger. I’m generally in favor of all performer unions merging, but I worry that too many people are concentrating on it as the only problem and/or as the only solution.

There are six leadership positions that always write letters for Screen Actor. Consider the six letters in this edition. What do they talk about besides merger?

Ken Howard: zip.
Amy Aquino: processing small residuals checks.
David White: the new Production Center and digital theft.
Ned Vaughn: zip.
Mike Hodge: zip.
David Hartley-Margolin: vote.

I think the non-merger topics above are important, so I’m glad to hear about them. But there are a ton of other important problems that we need to be working on, too. So a plea to all: don’t spend all your energy on merger. It might fail, and even if it goes through it cannot be a panacea to solve everything, and we do have other problems here and now.

My car was filthy. Dangerously dirty when you consider the summer driving phenomenon in LA that involves lots of evening sun hitting your windshield. As is my wont, I washed my car today to celebrate an acting victory from last week, and as I was washing, got the phone call for an acting victory for next week. My car is clean again!