#lifeCRAFT DAY 7 - FOCUS is an action

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

— Haruki Murakami

I'm just going to say it: searching for a fun and blissful life is dangerous if we're working with a shallow definition of 'fun' or of 'bliss.' In fact, I would argue that doing that will lead to our missing out on more than half of our human experience. Here's the problem. We live in a commercial culture that has gone way beyond basic laws of supply and demand, of production and consumption. We now live in an environment in which a disproportionate amount of a business' resources is allocated to the manipulative effort of selling us things that, in rational terms, we might not need... or even desire! Nevertheless, we convince ourselves (with expert help from those selling us things) that signing up for yoga or the gym will make us fit, that buying high fashion couture will make us classy, or buying vintage will make us hip, that reading purposefully dramatic and misleading headlines will make us knowledgeable about current events, and that getting 30% off a purchase is actually a favor from the store and a one-time opportunity to save money! 

Too many of us are feeding only the side of the equation that defines escapism. At some point, we have been led away from the Epicurean definition of pleasure as 'the absence of pain' and we've been operating on a manufactured pathway to 'fun' and life 'fulfillment.' And now we're conditioned to not only run away from any conflict or discomfort, but to label those who accept it as a reality of life as stupid, or unreasonable, or overachieving, because, say we, they're not smart enough, progressive enough to know how to get things without discomfort. The best things in life are free... have you heard that? NOTHING IS FREE. And certainly not the best things in life. ENERGY IS REQUIRED BY ALL PROCESSES. 

And here's where an actor's FOCUS comes in. Wherever my focus goes, my energy goes. In real life, and given the choice, I will choose to place mostly my focus on things and people that give me the sense of pleasure, or comfort, of gratifying personal aesthetic. I will choose to spend the least time on those things I find challenging, tragic, insurmountable, and self-defined as 'ugly.' But as an actor, I train to engage in the latter in almost every scene. Good plays, good scripts, place the characters in difficult situations through which they have to struggle if they are to achieve their objective. We are trained not to deflect, but to take things personally and to deal with them relative to the value of what we desire. And the one weapon that trumps them all in this fight is the actor's sense of truth. Truth of the situation. Truth of the nature of the relationship. Truth of my intentions. Of course, the character may behave in escapist or self-manipulating ways, but the actor knows that the source of that is insecurity, or fear, or an overwhelming sense of greed, etc.. However, in real life, we sometimes 'act ' the self-deluding scene so often that we start believing we are the behavior, and forget its source. An actor knows that words don't mean anything until we've grappled with searching where they come form... that is, until we search for, and find, the truth.

Self-deception and escapism create a malignant tumor that eventually manifests. Facing our own truth, no matter how painful, is the only thing that eventually creates positive and lasting change.  Running away from problems in a relationship can cost years off your life. Lying to yourself about your motivations, your capabilities can rob you of your otherwise invincible sense of confidence. Escaping into behaviors that treat the symptoms but leave the virus intact will rob you of your health. I say that because I've experienced them all.  If only I had had the strength and the focus of an actor battling for his character. If only I had know the value of going through the pain of honesty and its ability to then set you, and everyone else, free. If only I had not run off the stage, but stayed and dealt with the obstacle... If only I had accepted that pain is, indeed, inevitable. Maybe then I wouldn't have chosen to suffer through it.

But now I am an actor. And now I know. Stay in the room. Move through it. Not around it.

#lifeCRAFT DAY 3 - MIND your own business

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Two days ago I shared that I hired my MIND as my acting coach to help me navigate through my ‘real’ life the way I would navigate working on a play or film character. In other words, someone to help me be an actor in my own life, not just on stage or on set. Yesterday, my ‘coach’ and I already had our first disagreement. I asked Mind what to do regarding something that was bothering me. His reply disturbed me. “Do whatever you want.” The conversation derailed from there…

Sebastian
This is why I hired you? So you can tell me to do whatever I want?
MIND
Precisely. I enable you to do whatever you want. And even when I try to protect you from discomfort or harm, I’m still here to ultimately enable you to do whatever YOU want.
Sebastian
But you’re my coach! I count on you to advise me, to… to tell me when I’m wrong, when I’m making the wrong choices, when I’m about to do something stupid!
MIND
(laughing)
And when, exactly, was the last time you listened to me, may I ask? When I told you not to eat the French fries last night cause you’ll regret it the day you get your new headshots… did you listen? When I yelled in your ear this morning: GET UP! WORK OUT!... did you listen to … my precious advice. You. Did. Not! So let me repeat it for you just one more time. My job is to do whatever YOU want me to do.

… long beat. I understood. I didn’t want to, but I did. The whole relationship had turned on its head and the dependent party was slapped, walloped, pummeled in the face with the responsibility of choice, of decision, and of accountability. 

You see, on stage (or on set) the actor has nowhere to hide. He steps onto that battlefield and wages war on behalf of his character’s objectives and there are only two possible outcomes: win or lose, … the job, his lover, the inheritance, or his life. There are no ‘I’ll start tomorrow,’ ‘I can always get this another time, or from somewhere else,’ ‘I guess I don’t really need this that badly,’… The actor COMMITS on behalf of the character and doesn’t quit until he comes back either a winner or a loser. Why then, in the scenes of our own lives, do we so often fall prey to rationalizing, to deflecting, to lying to ourselves? Where is the bravery we show on set, on stage, in rehearsal? ALL the world’s a stage, ...remember?

And if you’re not an actor, make it your New Year’s resolution to take an acting class in 2016. If you get a good teacher, like I was fortunate to get, you will amaze yourself at your inner strength. It lies deep beneath decades of social conditioning that have taught you to be a character that society needs you to play. That’s the fake.  And this is what many don’t understand about acting. Acting is about the truth that we all too often need to or are forced to hide.

Both actors and non-actors have one very powerful tool they can use to start the search for truth. Hope you come back to hear about it… cheers & love

#lifeCRAFT DAY 1 - BE an acting coach

"An unexamined life is not worth living." - Plato quoting Socrates

A friend of mine challenged yesterday this notion that I should spend the next 30 days approaching my own life in the same way I approach crafting a character as an actor. 'Do you want to be yourself' he asked, 'or a carefully crafted character?' Great question.

The short answer is 'what's the difference?' Much of the answer depends on the personal perspective on what life is, what life's supposed to be. Who I'm supposed to be. I don't know exactly what drives me to take the little free time I have to do this, but I do know that serious study of the performing arts, namely dance and acting, has shown me much that I feel is lacking in the experience of those foreign to the arts. So maybe it's as simple as... I want to share.

I've been taught that ACTING = DOING. So the verbosity of self-expression will quickly fade. The loquaciousness of over-analysis will bow in the face of visceral exploration. Because, for an actor, building a character is a process of discovery, whereas in our everyday lives the formation of our own character is too often a process of conditioning or, worse, of manipulation. I begin.

There's no plan. No structure, save that of an acting process I've learned at Esper Studio in New York. But that's OK because process creates structure, not the other way around.  I don't have an extensive acting resume. I've spent much of my post-Esper time writing screenplays, directing a short, and teaching/coaching actors. All I know is that 'I'VE JUST CAST MYSELF IN THE ROLE OF... (wait for it Austin Powers) MYSELF!

STEP 1. Get an Acting Coach. It's a little know fact outside of the industry that many film and TV productions have acting coaches and/or dialect coaches on staff to work with the cast while filming. This luxury is also sought by actors who are prepping for auditions, or to attend casting director workshops, or who want to maintain their acting 'chops' sharp for that elusive legit audition that runs on the same schedule as most comets. Three things will be important for me in choosing a coach for such a personal role.

First, looking at my own being as a fictional character (all the world's a stage, he said) is scary to me. In fact, most actors are terrified of taking on the responsibility of 'giving birth' to a human being that wheretofore existed only as words on a page, or solely as an idea. Excited! ... but terrified :) 

Second, this person has to balance the task of asking the appropriate and tough questions that will challenge my assumptions, my tendency to deflect, to rationalize, to dilute, to misappropriate, to label shallowly - you get the picture - with the task of keeping me taking action towards the objectives I want to reach in the 'scene.' This scene is going to last a month. That's a long scene. So...

Third, this coach needs to be willing to be on speed-dial 24/7. I will need to ask questions. Clarify doubts. Have my hand held. My tears dried. My breakthroughs affirmed. Because I am heading into something of which I have yet to know anything about. Into a place that hasn't been charted yet, no matter how much I may think I've learned about it from books, from experts, from history. And that place is... tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that. Scary shit. Or exciting shit. Who decides? My coach. Who can do all this for me. My coach. Who's the most valuable coach I can have in my life? My MIND.

"Be honest. Don't judge. Contribute."

Our differing beliefs about heaven, or hell, or the afterlife may well turn out to be irrelevant. But the ephemeral concrete of our lives is built on moments. And each moment is the result of the sum of all actions and experiences which existed before it. That sum is our life.

We can never, therefore, lose our connection to our past because we are our past. We are the past that exists in the present. It follows that the now is our contribution to the past and, therefore, our contribution to ourselves.

My father was part of the building blocks of me. Although painful, I find value in sometimes deliberately acknowledging his departure. In a time when everything in our society drives us to and manipulates us into charging forward toward 'success' and sacrificing for 'achievement,' it may be more valuable for our sense of humanity to adjust the pace of our lives enough to remember that all of our pasts are, in fact, one past. Since every single human being alive can say that they've lost someone into this common space of the past, we all have one thing in common that is much more important than our DNA: we're all on the same journey. A journey on which we've been both propelled and sustained by our collective past.

My father's life taught me that a meaningful and 'successful' existence can be simple and it can be peaceful. "Be honest. Don't judge. Contribute." I strive for that every day, despite the pressure of a society in which being honest doesn't always seem to pay off. In which judging and labeling others seems the only path to our own validation, as prescribed by a barrage of commercial and political interests. A society in which we really no longer know to what or to whom all of our daily work actually contributes.

But I will continue to fight these pressures. It is the most important fight in our society today. To lose it or, worse yet, to not fight it at all is to surrender the meaning and purpose of your present to, at best, misguided forces, thereby poisoning our collective past, ... poisoning yourself.

Be honest. Don't judge. Contribute.

R.I.P. dad. October 19, 2005.

Morton's Fork & the ExpoMilano 2015

Two days ago I returned from a wonderful vacation/work trip to Italy. Since I've been getting up at 5am, still feeling it's 11am, I started to mentally list my touristique accomplishments (use of French ending is deliberate... but not actually correct). My wonderful friends Roger Mazzeo and Federico Badiali catered to my every request to stay off the beaten-to-death path, while still exposing me to exciting experiences. And they did that with the style of a seven-star... Galleria!

Indeed, we treated ourselves to James Beard's American Restaurant at the ONLY official seven-star hotel in the world, where I got to go to heaven via Edward Lee's ridiculously good mix of American Southern and Asian food cookin'. I feasted my eyes on Lake Como's villas and magical towns. I spent two days on the well-run beaches of Loano. And, for the first, but hopefully not last, time in my life, I gazed on daVinci's impressive and humbling 15' X 29'-masterpiece, The Last Supper.

But the experience that touched me the most came on the last day there, on our visit to the Food Expo in Milan. And the emotional charge didn't stem only from the Nutella Concept Bar, or the Citterio’s Italian Salami Academy lunch (... I can't even describe how much fun a human being can have eating ham and salami). The feeling that I still can't seem to shake off came from the energy of the Expo, from its purpose and mission easily sensed, from its theme: Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life. 

The Expo's literature says that the aim is to reflect on and try to find solutions to the contradictory realities of our present and, therefore, of our future. Morton's Fork, a paradox that contemplates choosing between unpleasant alternatives, applies well to the choices our species has established for itself. Here's some quick, yet sobering, data from the Expo's website:

• from 2010 to 2012, about 870 million people were undernourished WHILE about 2.8 million people died from diseases related to obesity or to being overweight (I'll let you muse about what regions of the world respectively account for those figures).
• about 1.3 BILLION tons of food are wasted every year

How can this happen in 2015? As Dickens might say, if he hadn't an ounce of creativity, 'no one's to blame, everyone's to blame.' But one of the central causes for this tragedy was captured powerfully by a display in Pavilion Zero: a giant global food stock exchange screen, showing the fluctuating prices of foods, and pointing out that foods have become commodities. If you take a moment to think about what that means, you'll realize the implications of treating food the way we treat shares of stock: food production and distribution becomes vulnerable to economic manipulation and to political and corporate leverage. Those that produce are no longer necessarily masters of their destiny but likely dependents on the desired economic outcome of governments and private companies. 

Divinus halitus terrae: the divine breath of the earth.  The slogan above Pavilion Zero welcoming visitors to the Expo is a positive reminder that we all breathe the same air, so to speak. That we occupy the same time and space. Indeed, the design of the library entrance into the Pavilion was inspired by Saint Augustin's concept of time, where past, present, and future all co-exist in the soul.  The human soul. But an honest observant would argue that the definition of 'humane' has changed dramatically in practice. It has lost its soul.

But there is hope - about 150,000 daily visitors to the ExpoMilano 2015, from every single corner of the world, are walking along each other, exposing themselves to each other's cultures, as well as to critical challenges of the future. And 150,000 daily visitors might gradually understand that, on this little spec of the universe called Earth, someone's problem is everyone's problem... eventually. You might want to think about being one of those 150,000 before the end of October. Saint Augustine also said that "the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." What can we possibly understand about this book from reading just one page of this ephemeral journey? 

I remain optimistic. Respect your journey, and we have a chance.

'An exercise' is just a label for 'doing'

I was lucky enough to work with a wonderful director, Missy Hernandez, and a talented actress, Angela Washell, on a directing 'exercise' for Missy's Columbia University Film MFA. Missy's mission was to take a pre-written scene and materialize it in a cozy NYC apartment, with a DSLR and minimum crew. The thing that struck me as interesting is that this was an 'exercise,' but we were all doing the same work we'd be doing on any film set. So what differentiates a filmmaking 'exercise' from actual filmmaking? In my opinion, nothing. 

The dictionary definition of 'exercise' is "the use or application of a faculty, right, or process." To me, that sounds more like the definition for 'living.' Nothing is an exercise... or, everything is an exercise. Both are probably right since we're always doing everything for the first time - that's something that those involved in the arts are especially aware of. One might play the same piano sonata fourteen nights in a row, but each time one does it, it is a different experience than the ones before - the sonata is played for the first time in that incarnation, each time.

This awareness gave me both comfort and freedom that day. The freedom to live each moment as a discovery. We weren't practicing anything. We were living something. It allowed me to take in everything Missy was guiding me through, and to connect to this woman I had just met with more intimacy than I've offered people I've known for years (another challenge actors face on such one-day shoots). As is always when I get the chance to do what I love, this was a good day!

Oh, and here's some of that experience, courtesy of Missy Hernandez.

GAVIN & HANNAH  |  Directed by Missy Hernandez  |  co-starring Angela Washell