the new place...


I was talking to Zak a little while ago about twitter and he quipped, “This is pretty much the end of personal websites, huh?” and I pretty much agreed with him. I mean, I still find having a personal website very useful, especially for my acting work, but as far as sharing what’s going and voicing opinions and all that, twitter’s proven to be a really great tool.

That being said, I still should be doing a better job of keeping this page updated! As usual, life has been on overdrive, the most obvious result of this hyperactivity being that Whitney and I have finally moved to a new place. Honestly, I think a lot of people were getting tired of hearing us talk about hoping to move--we have been complaining about the hunt for probably eight or so months! But we loved our old place and had no reason to make any real major compromises when it came to what we wanted out of a new home...and then this place comes along, not a block and a half away, and, well, we basically had to take it. We’re still renting, which, honestly, is fine for me right now, owning sounds like a pain in the ass and I doubt we can afford anything resembling the place we are renting now.


The living room...slowly getting into shape

So, things are good. Work is super challenging right now, as I immerse myself into a totally new paradigm for our products (it’s a pain but it’s a good thing), and my Norton Table character made an appearance at our global sales and marketing conference in Las Vegas. It was a lot of fun, I got up on stage and basically introduced the senior staff in the consumer business, making jokes about each of them as I went down the list. What was crazy is how little I could actually prepare for the piece! I had a few notes about each person, but really, as I was standing backstage, I really didn’t have that much to go on, I was really relying on thoughts coming to me once I got in front of people. It was crazy--like, it goes against everything I’ve learned regarding rehearsal and preparation, but I have been doing these interview shows so often that I realize that once I hop into character, thoughts, reactions and jokes actually come to mind much more quickly than if I try to anticipate and plan everything out. I am a bit nervous--I certainly can’t depend on things coming to mind, but it was nice that everything clicked that one time.

The acting front has been irritatingly slow. I had a great pilot audition a few months ago, but nothing came from it, which doesn’t really matter because I don’t think the show is going to be picked up anyway. I have jumped back into acting class with Brian Reise, which has been great, and have been attending quite a few workshops with casting directors at ITA. Basically, I am trying to shake things up a bit, because whatever I have been doing for the past year or so just has not been working.

I’ve gleaned a few things from some of the workshops that I wanted to get down on “paper”. If you are an actor, you might find these tips useful. If not, you may find them interesting and useful in terms of keeping things in focus when interacting with folks.

• When auditioning, focus on the person you are interacting with. Like, really, it sounds so obvious, but it can be really hard to focus when you are in a room with a lot of people watching you, not to mention dealing with the camera, the monitor, etc. If you are being filmed, what is important is not entertaining the folks in the room, but making sure that you nail the performance as seen by the camera. The best way to do this, it seems, is to focus, intensely, on the person you are reading with, really listening, really engaging with them--this focus will be picked up by the camera and be seen by the producers. This was a big change for me--I usually entertain the room, you know? By grounding myself with the other person, it helps keep the scene moving from an honest place.
• If your character is asking a question, realize that this question is often the key to the character and, probably, the scene. Figure out why the character is asking it, understand the implications of the answer to that question--whether or not you get an actual answer. When the character is asking a question, the character is admitting a need--the character wants that answer, he has an intention to get that information. Like it or not, that old saw about needing an intention for your scene still holds up and, if committed to, will give the scene a strong foundation. I was trained to ask, “What do I want?” at the beginning of every scene (some teachers suggest asking that for every line) and I think I stopped doing that at some point. The scene is there for a reason--TV and film are so expensive that it would be cut unless it was absolutely necessary--that reason is the key to expressing that character as best as you can.
• When you are auditioning for a part, for those 3-4 minutes, that part is yours. No one else has it--you have booked it for that period of time Don’t think of the audition as a try out--it’s the job, it’s the actual opportunity to do the piece. I had some teachers insist we drop the word “audition” and replace it with the word “job.” This can be a useful tactic, not only because it helps you focus on the piece more, but it takes out the “this is just my best try at the part” factor. The audition, the interview, is you--it’s you doing the part, it’s you on the set, it’s you during lunch, it’s you working with the director, it’s you being hired.

From the Hotel Laguna, in Laguna Beach

Much coming in the next few weeks. I will be up in San Francisco for the Apple Developer Conference, I’ve got a wedding coming up, Ravi’s planning a big birthday, and, of course SDCC is coming up in July. My weekly article at iFanboy is back on Wednesdays, and I am working on at least two murmur articles as well. I’ve also submitted three treatments to a producer...we’ll just have to keep pressing on.


PS - My friend Matt Ferrucci has just started his new webseries, Real Men Real Issues, and he’s doing a great job adding new content to the show on a regular basis, unlike this website. Check it out and see what you think.

Tags: life, acting, auditions

Lobby floor at the Encore in Las Vegas

I am sitting here in a Caribou Coffee near Plain City, Ohio, watching with no small amount of dread all of my work email downloading to my machine. I am supposed to be on vacation, but I can't connect to my work email from my sister in law's place, so I thought I would check it out...oy, what a mistake--I have over 130 emails so far, and it's still sucking them in. Totally frustrating.

When I was at Razorfish, I went on this rather awesome leadership training program (I know how it sounds, but hey, I got to to Sweden!) during which we took a ton of courses, one of which was effective communications. I'll spare you the details, but the most effective was face to face...the least was email. I get over 1400 emails a month from work.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good trip so far if I choose to ignore how long it took to get here (17 hours). We had two cancelled flights, so I ended up going from LA to Phoenix to Las Vegas to Charlotte to Columbus. We got to spend 6 hours in Vegas, so we went to a few hotels (Whit wanted to check out the Encore, which was pretty nice) and ate and walked around.


and time passes.

Well, now I am in the air heading to Tokyo. It's been frustrating, I have to say---I just have had zero time to update this particular blog. I need to figure out how to channel my myspace updates to this page--I was uploading a lot of photos throughout my visit to Ohio and it was, honestly, just easier to share what was going on that way (damn you, Facebook! You and your convenience.) And then, with the weekly iFanboy article, ongoing Norton blogs, and more work for murmur.com...I'm just writing everywhere but here.

So far, the Tokyo trip is smooth, but sadly I am on United. While they didn't charge me for checking a bag, the food is awful--no surprise there, just disappointment--and now they charge for drinks! Not to sound like an alcoholic, but, I mean, wasn't that one of the fun things about flying international? So weak. Flying a US airline just sucks now and it will probably never get better.

I was in Tokyo two years ago to talk to various Mac press and, like I promised, I am back to talk about our latest offering. Unlike last last time, however, Whit's not coming, which makes it not as fun--- we travel really well together and she has a knack for finding fun activities and neighborhoods. We went through the guidebooks last night so I have a good idea of where I am going to be (this super, super hip hotel in Shibuya, the Cerulean Tower, a few blocks away from my office). I get in Tuesday afternoon, so, I hope to get some sleep here so I can out at night around the hood.

Pete, Whitney, Kim, Cindy...and Walter

Our visit to Ohio was a lot of fun, if shorter than we wanted thanks to US Airways canceling our flights--we were about 17 hours late. It was crazy--every other carrier was flying into Columbus, so we think they cancelled the flights so there would be no chance of their planes being snowed in the day after. So, instead of flying to Phoenix and then continuing on the same plane to Columbus, we waited four hours to fly to Vegas, where we found that they cancelled our second flight, so we were in Vegas for 7 hours and then went to Charlotte, then to Columbus that next morning. We made a night of it, though; I put our bags in a locker and we took a trip to the Encore hotel and proceeded to make our way to the Mirage. It was actually a lot of fun, so it wasn't a total waste of time. Still, though--I can't see myself paying for another US Airways flight in this lifetime.

Seeing Whit's family was a blast, though. I am very much myself with them and everyone gets along quite well. I met my nephew Walter (almost two years old), which was fun. Where we were in Ohio (outside of Columbus much of the time) could not be more different than LA, which was refreshing, for the most part (though I think we drove more there than I do in LA, since everything is spaced so far apart). We had our "second Xmas," complete with tree and turkey dinner, and as I looked outside at the snow, I felt very fortunate.

The rundown:

- My brother Chris leaves Wednesday morning to start bootcamp for the US Navy. He will be gone for two months, basically unreachable, as, as he puts it, "has every shred of individuality stripped away" and turned into a sailor. He was pretty nervous about it, but he's more excited now. It should be crazy interesting to hear his stories--we are not a military family by any stretch so it's all new to us.

- Acting has been slow, thanks in part to my having to be away from LA for two weeks. Basically, if I am gone for two weeks I am out of commission for three or even four (doesn't do me any good to audition for a part that I am not going to be around to film). I had a really solid audition for a great part on a Nickelodeon show, but I have not heard back yet, so I assume I did not get a callback.

- Work is good, but I am still overwhelmed with emails, as I mentioned above. It's super frustrating,and since I can't connect to anything while I am in the air (a good thing, for the most part), I am sure I will be flooded when I get back. Still, going to Tokyo is a huge perk and I am not complaining, just whining.

- Writing has been capsized by the traveling and online writing commitments, but I added two characters to a show that I am writing that really round the whole thing out. I have this idea that I honestly think could really be successful on commercial television. I am excited about it because the set up itself is a platform on which one can just write story after story. I just need to get the pilot written and sketch out the first part of the season. Then...well, I am not sure; I guess I send it to my agent and shop it around. But now that I have the cast rounded out, I feel like all I gotta do is lock myself away for a week and bang out the script. (And yes, I realized that I am actively not doing that now.)

Okay--let's get this posted. I’ll try to do daily Tokyo updates.

Tags: ohio, tokyo, travel, life

I have been thinking a lo about TIME these days, which perhaps is no surprise. Time passes and that's that. It's just been going very, very quickly, as I am sure you are noticing. I remarked to Zak this morning that I feel like I overslept in 2008 and I am about 15-20 minutes late for everything.

As I was falling asleep I was kind of thinking about acting and well, you know, how I fit in with the rest of the community here in LA. There's this young actor on a show that Whit really likes that has a role that's a real career starter. He's pretty good, he's good looking, and he's intelligent (he used to be an accountant, quit to be a model and actor, and now he's got a great series regular role on a primetime show)--and he's 26. I'll be honest--I'm not 26. I don't even want to be 26, but you know, you hear about how LA is obsessed with youth, blah blah blah--and I guess that's true, the extremes are certainly out there with all the plastic surgery and that kind of thing. But it's also just a place where young people gravitate towards, not unlike San Francisco and New York. You just kind of notice it a bit sometimes. I auditioned for a role to be a co-host of a Tech show where I was supposed to be a tech expert who knows how to help businesses with their technical infrastructure, who reads Wired magazine, who knows tech culture and what's happening in the tech world. I was basically auditioning to be me, right? The audition, which was just an interview with legitimately technical questions (what kind of freeware security software is out there? what kind of backup infrastructure should small businesses think about? what kinds of machines would you recommend?) went great--this is my life--but I also knew that they were looking for someone in their late 20s. And I told them that I was not in my late 20s and also told them that they didn't want someone in their late 20s, that they wouldn't know as much as I do. And it's true! I defy the vast majority of actors in LA to setup an office in afternoon. But if I don't get the role, I bet I know why...!

Of course, of course, in many ways, age is an illusion. Charisma, energy and optimism can really shift people's perceptions. But every once in awhile, you think about it, at least in this profession. The flipside, of course, is that as you get older, you tend to reflect on your choices and your history and wonder, "was this right?" It's useless, of course--but those thoughts can sneak into your head as your brain settles into sleep. I thought about it last night, how I have definitely been at the party and showed up at the right time, but I feel sometimes like I was in one room having a great time talking to people, then hearing uproarious laughter in the room next door. Once I finally made it into that room, the joke was over and though the people were still there, things had moved on. But still, the party's great, right? Life is good.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the difference between "hope" and "expectation". I was actuall talking with my mom last night about this and we basically discussed how expectation, as a rule, is an illusion, a situation or reality that basically can never come true as one imagines. Take the typical New Year's Eve dilemma--oftentimes, people will have expectations of the crazy party they finally decided on, or whatever plan they made, and most of the time, it will go differently (better or worse) and the expectation will probably not be fulfilled. However, hope is far more general and a lot more open-ended. You can hope you have a good time, but you are not expecting a good time, and the stakes become lower, more manageable. My mom suggested that expectations, being so much more personally specific, are driven by the ego, which makes a lot of sense. We also discussed this in acting class, where Brian remarked how he thought it was crazy for actors to come into LA expecting to have a career just open up to them with in a year or two, that things would just work out and all would be great. You can hope things work out, but you certainly need to be patient, certainly need to relax with the expectations so your hope can be maintained. I also think that it's been really interesting how Obama has been using the concept of hope to rally his supporters--it's easier for groups of people to agree on hope than expectations.

Ah, Friday morning thinking.

I have some cool things happening this weekend, but I am going to keep it a secret. Believe me, if it all works out, it's gonna be very, very cool and actually a nice checkmark in my little "to do in my life" book. Should have something to tell you in a few weeks.


What else? Oh, I am reading Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris. It's awesome.

Oh, and my uncle Toby just came out with a new book. He's been getting a lot of press on this. Let's see...the book is called Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. The press has been incredible. Check out this interview on KQED's Forum and this article from the LA Times Book Review. It's always amazing, really, to reflect on just how amazing a writer he is. It's really been amazing to watch his career and talent and legacy, really, grow as time has gone by. Very inspiring and proof, real proof, that if you just stick to it, you can do what you want.

Okay! two posts at once. I've got a lot of write today so I will end this here. Have a great weekend...

Tags: life, acting, people

Zak and I playing records a while ago, probably 1999 or something.
I wasn't working out back then, I guess.

A varied and harried day today. Work is stacking up and it's all manageable, there are just a lot of things happening and it's tempting to just sit back and let other people drive some of these efforts, but I am not that tempted and, anyway, I have an opinion about it and I want to get in the mix. It's good to be busy, but just once, it would be nice to be busy building a set or painting a very large painting or building a house or something more physical. My eyes are red not because of allergies or anything fun, I am just staring at screens really intensely right now. Stupid.

I got gently freaked out when I read that basically when you turn 30, it's half time, life is basically half over. At 30, your major organs start to decline, etc--it's all here. And, like, okay, I know--what's the point of worrying about growing older? Time, remember, is the absolute variable, uncontrollable and persistent, literally nothing one can do about it. We can improve the moment, sure, but we can't slow the sucker down. Now, I am not really freaking out, but I do admit, I really dislike the idea of growing older and pretty much have been that way all my life. I want to say it's related to not wanting to miss out on things, but...it's more about making sure I do what I want to do, to get what I want out of life. It does remind me of what Ravi said about life being a bottomless pit, where you keep adding experience after experience but are never satisfied, and kind of like what Steph was mentioning, how there is never a plateau in life, where you get to a certain place and it's all clear and easy from that point on. So life is an uphill battle as you slowly slide downhill.

Now, I do feel an artificial stress about this because of the acting career, I will readily admit. I am constantly reminded, several times a day, of someone younger getting some movie or booking some role, etc. Yesterday while I was waiting around for a callback, I listened to the other guys, all clearly older than me (3-5 years), discussing the parts they didn't get, the house they couldn't afford, the short films they were working on, etc, etc, and I gotta admit, it's distressing, you know? This one guy was talking about how it was getting so slow that he was looking for a regular job, that kind of thing. I mean, I have a regular job that I actually like, and I am always talking about how grateful I am to have a life like this, but it really did drive it home. Acting is not a good fit for people who have to responsible to other people. So rough. And it's 10 times harder for women, absolutely, so it's selfish of me to even worry about it, to be honest. My thoughts return to my upcoming visit to Santa Clara, where I have to talk to the students about the business of acting. I mean, I remember when older folks would warn me about how hard it was, how impossible it was to make a living, etc, and thinking, "Yeah, maybe it's hard for you, but [for some reason] I'll do okay." Well, you know what? I am doing okay--it's just been a very different path to this "okay" than I imagined.

Such is life, right? You have expectations of the future, expectations that are not based on any kind of real fact or experience, and then you get let down when things don't go according to this made up plan? You gotta let it go..Stumbling Upon Happiness talks about this in detail, actually, I need to finish it.

The one thing I know I will talk while I am there is the importance of actually taking care of your physical person. Not only because of the obvious benefits of a healthier heart and looking fit and healthy and basically better on camera/on stage, but because taking care of yourself is actually something you can control and be proactive about in the acting business. I may not be able to control whether or not I am going to book any of the last three spots I just got called back for, but I sure as hell know I can make spinning tonight so I don't get all chubby and tired looking for future auditions. The illusion of control, I think, is something that artists of all kinds need. Maybe not full control of everything, but something related to their craft. Painters can control their brushes and pencils so their tools will not fail them when inspiration strikes. Writers can control where and when they write. Musicians needs to make sure their instruments are in tune and ready to go. We can control aspects of our lives so that when opportunity strikes, we are ready. For actors and dancers and singers, we rely, heavily on our mind, our breath and our physicality. So, when I look at that picture above, I can at least appreciate the fact that even though I was younger and my internal organs were supposedly more efficient or whatever, I know for a fact that I am in the best physical and mental shape of my life, because I work out 4-5 times and do yoga 3 hours a week. And, happily, I don't do it because I have to, but because I want to--I actually really enjoy it, it makes me happy and fulfills very important aspects of my life...and that's the best way to approach any task, whether it's writing an article, singing a song, sketching a face, or teaching a class.

Speaking of which, it's time to get back to that work.

Tags: acting, life