So this summer I'm right where I was last summer. Acting in some obscure plays at some obscure theatre in a meeting room tucked away in a state resort park tucked away in a corner of Kentucky, tucked away in one of the more obscure parts of America, tucked away like all the other countries in the world are tucked away, just as tucked away as the earth is tucked away in an obscure part of the universe, which is in itself a very obscure, tucked away thing.
My life is obscure and tucked away, I guess.
I get to start every day in a bed by a window where sunshine shouts at you at eight a.m. telling me to wake up and live. And then I get to drink coffee (out of a bowl because we have a limited amount of coffee mugs) that my roommate made because he always wakes up before me to read books I've never read. I then spend the first part of my morning watching the sun shine off the surface of the lake, interrupted by ripples to create this spectacle like nature's disco ball, but I never want to get up and dance because I still have the sleep in my eyes that I accumulated the night before because I stayed up way longer than I should have, locking myself in my roommate's car to find some sort of real quiet (car's can unsurprisingly function as silent sanctuaries) so that I can play music and sing and write and create and stuff.
Hey so acting is fun sometimes. I'm learning a lot about it. At least, more than I knew before, which is a lot for me and maybe not that much for you if you're an actor.
I'm learning from who I think to be a great actor, Charles Edward Hall, who has played Santa Clause in radio city in New York for the past twenty-six years. He has a lot of insight about the art. He talks about how as an actor you need to first know yourself. In order to fully understand the character you are playing on stage, you must first know who you are, how your character relates to the character. The emotions, the state of mind, the objectives and the tactics of the character, are all things that you can access only if you know how you yourself function. So Socrates's two words "know thyself" is pretty applicable.
Anyway, so that's acting right now.
Right now I'm reading Walden by Thoreau, which is a pretty heavy book. It was written around 1869, but it always feels like his words are more applicable and necessary for this day and age than it was then. He is seeing everything that is wrong with his society and how, if we truly wanted, we could make it better. We are born into one way of doing things-- not necessarily rules and regulations, but ideas that we accept unconsciously as just being the way things are. And these ideas are, in his words, forcing us to "dig our own graves," while we voluntarily reach for the shovel because we think it's the only thing we can do. He, as a philosopher, sees this problem, and offers a solution, which is pretty much why he wrote the book.
And recently I have been listening to:
The National's new album Trouble Will Find Me
Sigur Ros's new album Kveikur
Eisley's new album Currents
Radiohead, as always.
Yup. I think I sufficiently caught myself up with what's going on with me.
