GRATITUDE SUNDAY
Appreciating:
PW; conversations over tea about making art; breathtaking apartment views of the New York skyline; successful errand running; The Artist’s Way; morning pages; homebrewed black chai tea; skype pillow fights; Forever21; new silver SIGG bottle; Ronen; jazz bands and impromptu swing dancing in Union Square; Mario Brothers Galaxy 2; making new friends; cocktails of gin, grapefruit soda, and elderflower liqueur; Scott Pilgrim v. The World; walking through the Rumblers NYC meet up under the BQE; Kerry; the outdoor pole installation at PS1; walking on hundreds of wooden bats in 5”+ platforms; sprouted brown rice risotto; boys skating on longboards; my single-speed Mr. Bianchi; defiant gelato consumption; gifted the Journey of Awakening by Ram Dass; rereading: Art & Fear: the Rewards (and Perils) of Artmaking; Cookie the Play; a suitor with promise.
Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Return of an old tradition.
I promise you…
that while I have not written, I am more than alright. In fact, I am unbelievably alive. I hope to return to regularly scheduled programming next week, upon my return from a girlfriends-only roadtrip.
Until then, please accept this picture of Donald Glover and I as a peace offering. He says I’m so fucking awesome hello.
Thoughts Lately
- Heartsick for surf. Impatiently waiting for Nicolle, Al, and a sandy shore in August (fingers crossed).
- Daydreaming of Spain.
- In desperate need of an intense pressure massage.
- So excited that my beloved bike is getting shipped to me from California.
- The
boysmen of New York look a lot hotter than they did last year. - Want to put my skateboard to use but too neophyte embarrassed to do so. Waiting for my tipping point.
- Could use a full-on, drag out makeout sesh… and you know, stuff.
- Need to meditate (but, confession, not meditating).
- Feeling as though I’ve been anti-social lately as a byproduct of being so deliciously, masochistically busy with school (where I interact with the same 15+ people for 8 hours a day).
- Very proud that I am making my bed every morning as promised.
- Sick of eating like crap. Eating healthfully again.
- I pity the fool who gives me my next pedicure (by that, I mean me).
- Acting well is much harder than one might assume.
ACTING SCHOOL: WEEK THREE POST MORTEM
On Tuesday, after a restroom break in repetition class, we returned to a room full of chairs paired off and facing each other. “Does everyone have a partner?” our teacher, C, asked. “Everyone needs a partner for this exercise.”
“What we’re about to do,” she continued, “is based on the recent Marina Abramovic exhibit at the MoMA - did anyone see it?”
“I sat with her,” I said quietly. I was seated at the front of the class across from J, our resident charming Spaniard.
The teacher glanced at me. She paused. “Oh my god. You’re-“
“I think she’s her!” A, a classmate who also took the Spring Comprehensive, blurted out.
“Are you her?”
“You’re her!”
“Wait - you watched me?”
“You have to tell us what happened!”
“What happened?” A classmate asked. And our teacher shared her account of my sit with Marina Abramovic. She had taken her entire Spring class to ‘The Artist is Present’ exhibit the morning I sat with Marina.
“I don’t know what happened before she bowed her head - you’ll have tell us - but the moment Marina bowed, Nancy came alive. The way she looked at Marina - her whole body - she was absolutely in the moment,” Our teacher said. “That is what you have to be when you are acting. You have to take in the whole person across from you with your full attention.” Turning shades of red as she spoke, in turns flattered and embarrassed, I became her lesson in being present that afternoon.
That’s not a coincidence, that’s a sign, DG insisted that evening.
_______________
“We have to choose a song,” I said to P before our Movement Class. We were partners and our assignment in Movement was to select two action verbs and a song which would aptly describe the relationship in our Script Analysis scene. We had chosen to play ‘Married Woman’ and ‘Student’ from David Hare’s The Blue Room. I came to P with a playlist which included Lady Gaga, Weezer, Annie, Hot Chip, Feist, and Shakira.
“Or we could do it to this,” I gave P a listen to the lesser-known Francis and the Lights.
He took my ear buds and listened to the first 30 seconds. “Sure, let’s do it.”
And we spent the week playing with our characters’ relationship with ‘For Days’ as our soundtrack. It was the highlight of my week and soundtrack of my summer all in one.
Picture of ‘Francis Starlite approaching, through peephole’ via & from
Reblogged from francisandthelights with 55 notes | Comments | Permalink
Note: I know the iphone pictured above is not the 4.
SMARTPHONE RAGE!!! (REVIEW)
I have serious smartphone rage right now. Please note this is my first time choosing a wireless carrier in five years and choosing a smartphone ever. Against the suggestions of tumblrs in June, I purchased an HTC Evo 4G. Although it was a new telecommunications plaything that I enjoyed, I conceded a week later - much like Marco - that I am not a bleeding edge technology adopter. As much as the publicity machine wants me to believe that the Droid application market - one-third the size of the iphone’s - suffices, I personally found that it does not. I am not even talking about sophisticated fancypants apps. For instance, it is so wrong to want my tumblr dashboard to ‘load more posts’? While I can pontificate on whether this is the responsibility of Droid or Tumblr, placing blame doesn’t help me as a consumer get my fucking dashboard to load properly. And while I can wait until one day, some day the code gets fixed, it means I am paying expensive monthly fees in the meantime while not being able to leverage a smartphone the way I want to. Moreover, I thought about my music situation - particularly if I decide to be a yoga instructor again - and realized that an iPhone would be the most convenient smartphone to play music on other people’s stereos: not only can I plug the device into speakers via its audio jack or its proprietary charger.
So boom: on June 28th, I got in line outside an AT&T store a week later and got the iPhone 4.
Reader, I am not exaggerating:
I fucking HATE the iPhone 4 and the AT&T high horse it rode in on.
This phone’s shitty reception is not a techie legend but a truth I have been living for the past three weeks. Last weekend, I received 3 text messages and a voicemail up to two hours late that caused me to miss a Saturday brunch with my friend; a text message which came 90 minutes late which almost caused me to miss Sunday brunch with a fellow tumblr; and a text message Tuesday night that came 30 minutes late which almost caused me to miss dinner with another friend. At first I thought I was deaf, crazy, and a shitty friend for not seeing their messages in time. It wasn’t until Tuesday when I didn’t receive a message for the full 30 minutes I was playing on my phone that I could confidently say, it’s not me.
This completely made sense when I read Caveat #1 in Marco’s review of the iPhone.
The antenna’s reception severely decreases when the phone is held in an extremely common way. If you hold the phone with your left hand, you probably cause this problem to happen regularly.
I’m fucking left-handed, people! I already am going to die nine years earlier as a southpaw, do smartphones have to discriminate against me too?!?!!
I spent the last two days and four phone calls with Apple Support and AT&T. They offered me two zero-accountability solutions:
- In addition to the money you are already spending, you should also buy a bumper for the phone so you’ll stop holding it the extremely common way that fucks with reception.
- And if you still get low / no reception and you think that’s wrong, restart your phone. You should do this at least once a day but don’t hesitate to do it more!
I’m sorry AT&T and Apple but this is 2010. I am not shelling out more than $2K for a fourth generation smartphone whose tech support solutions are the telecommunications equivalent of me blowing on an 8-bit game cartridge before I put it into my Nintendo Entertainment System.
For the past day I’ve been borrowing a friend’s iPhone bumper which has not wholly solved my issue. When I arrived home this evening I watched my iPhone get ‘No Service’ for twenty minutes before restarting the phone to receive 4 bars of reception immediately thereafter. WTF?
Apparently, there is supposed to be some big, stupid fancypants announcement today about WTF Apple and AT&T plan on doing to make up for this. It is going to take A LOT to get me to stick with the iPhone 4 right now. I luckily have yet to return my HTC Evo 4G, so my weekend project might be to see if Sprint will have me back. I feel like they will as their customer service was so kind for the week plus I was actually using their service. With AT&T the attitude seemed a little “shitty reception? i will now talk in circles and not answer your question or admit you are wrong until you give up. We already have your money, sucker!”
I know I’m hatin,’ iPhone Lovers. But I can’t take it and it’s really worn down my morale and standards on how phones are supposed to operate. (Like, you know, at all.) I can’t imagine being contractually obligated to two years of this. Any last words?
Update from this morning: Daniel Radcliffe is rehearsing two doors down from us today.
ON BEING HONEST
I confess I have been protecting myself lately. I have been unforthcoming; I have not been sharing. (My Greek Chorus of Readers respond: Thank you, Captain Obvious.)
Although I initially wanted to write a long and eloquent entry about what I’m up to now that my Writing Intensive is over, the words are not coming. So rather than trip myself up all over the exposition, I’ll just come out with it then.
I am currently an intensive acting student at the Atlantic Acting School.
It is the school founded by playwright David Mamet & actor William H. Macy. The affiliated theatre company also produced the original off broadway production of Spring Awakening, among the many plays in its repertoire. (If ya don’t know, how ya know.)
Careerwise and educationwise, acting is quite a departure from what I have done..though a fine art I have participated in before. The same, however, could have been said about yoga until my experience last year.
I’m taking everything as it comes.
If you are or know someone who is a working actor in New York, I’ve love to pick your brain, ply you with drinks, etc. on the harsh realities and silver linings of this crazy career. Get in touch!
via flickr somewhere
