Do I want to be a good actor... Or a good artist.

Photo by Daniel Smith Coleman.

Okay, going to write this and try to not stab myself for being so pretentious.

Hours today for SA: Zero. I know.

Back to reality a bit today. Happy to say it wasn’t the depressing move I had imagined on Sunday, and for the first time since moving here I was able to sleep at a reasonable hour (midnight). So frequently I lay in bed at night trying to sleep and my body’s just like, ‘What’s this?!’

Had a friend visiting from Wednesday night to Sunday and I got to be a tourist and remind myself why I moved here. We saw, in order: Lower East Side, Washington Square Park/NYU, One World Trade, Sept. 11 memorial (beautiful, stunning, good lord so beautiful), Trinity Church, NYSE, Staten Island Ferry, Soho. Canal Street, Little Italy, Central Park from 90th street to bottom, Halal Guys, MoMA. Walked the Brooklyn Bridge, Highline (also very cool, had not been), 2 Bros. pizza, 42ndstreet library, Grand Central Terminal (also had not been, good lord so beautiful), St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, Zoralie’s (Puerto Rican food), Times Square. It was amazing!!! Shout out to Elias Rivera for being the first person to visit me.

On Sunday, I went to a show in midtown that a friend put up, to expose people to female composers in opera and musical theater. It left me… with a strange feeling.

I’m constantly assessing my progress, my state of being. Constantly searching for ways to narrow my focus and be more efficient. It’s my life’s pursuit to be a machine. Which is difficult, because I’m an INTJ and live and breathe by my intuition. There are no hard and fast rules in my life – or, there are very few. Especially as it pertains to how I live my days, the minutiae.

So I’ve been asking myself – do I even want to be an actor. Since I left LA – which I don’t think I fully understand still – it’s like, I’ve been removed from the bubble, and I’m like… Maybe I don’t? How is it possible to question something I’ve wanted to do my entire life. And then, it gets to the root, which is – well, why do I want to do it. Do I want to do it because I love acting, or do I want to do it because I love the thing itself – the product – and not necessarily the doing of the thing. Or is it all for validation. Because writing I don’t question ever. That’s never a question. And maybe that’s because I don’t have any particular ambitions with writing. I enjoy it so much just for itself. With acting--there is so much bullshit attached, so many questions. So many other things I could be doing. Well, one, actually. Writing. So I sacrifice writing for acting. Or that’s how it feels.

Planning my year.

(I’ve also asked myself how important family, relationship and kids are to me. I’ve asked that so many times, in so many different ways. I think I have those answers, at least for today, but I’ll leave that for myself.)

In watching this opera, it reminded me of this question - of deciding what really speaks to me. Because I cannot relate to opera at all. At least, that which I have seen. And maybe partially it’s that I don’t know the language, and so I literally cannot understand it, but in a bigger, more important way, I don’t get story from it. It is either angry or sad. That’s what I get. Idk. And that’s fine, because I do not need more hobbies. So it goes into the category of ‘things I don’t want’. Which is just as helpful as things I do.

There’s a lot of acting, theatre, film that I like. There are also a few things I have almost no use for. Musical theater – usually. Improv – I like to watch it, it intimidates the hell out of me, and when it works, holy fuck I love it. I do not feel at home in the improv world tho, and never have. I will probably take improv classes again, but more for myself and less for trying to build a career around it.

I also think I don’t care about most network shows or multi-cam comedy. And like – I know. I should want those roles right??? And the thing is – I do! But maybe… I shouldn’t want or pursue those kinds of things. If I don’t love it, does it matter if I’m good at it. If it could help my career, make me money… If it could help my career, then yes, I would say. So I pursue something I don’t really want, because it’s a means to something I do. I think that's a question each actor has to answer. Because on the one hand, I feel like knowing your worth, or knowing what you want and sticking to your guns - you gotta do that. I've never found that being 'more easy going' or more broad or I'll take anything - has ever really worked for me. So much of it is energy and intention - as crazy as that sounds. If I look away for a second - my auditions careen to a halt. I see it happen time and again.

Photo by Leonard Nimoy.

But in regard to ‘selfish actress’ – I’ve been thinking a lot the past week as to what qualifies as ‘acting work’ or ‘learning’. Because part of being a good artist is having lots of influences. Spanning many cultural genres and not specifically theater or film. So, if that’s the case, does reading ‘The Feminine Mystique’ count. Does going to MoMA count. Does reading a novel count. Am I working toward being a good artist or being a good actor, and are those the same thing. I need to stop asking so many questions. I think this is the Virgo in me that has to neurotically label everything. These questions will literally strangle me to death.

Again - a personal question. A smart actor would probably focus on acting and acting alone. And technically, this is called ‘selfish actress’. But because nothing I do is smart – I hinder myself and follow my intuition wherever the fuck it leads, usually to comparatively useless places – I will probably choose the other. As in I’ll focus on art as a totality or process of evolution and not specifically acting/film, although it will always come back to acting. I don’t think I can just enjoy something for enjoyment's sake. I’m always figuring out how I can use it - what I can glean. As far as creating work, I think this is helpful – for the filmmaker angle, it is helpful.

I read this quote in ‘The Feminine Mystique’: “high school and college girls facing or evading the question of who they were”, and it made me think – no, this is a good thing to read. Because that quote, for whatever reason, helped me solve, to an extent, an issue I am having with the protagonist of my latest script.

So this goes back to filmmaking, then, and not acting. Filmmaking is a beautiful blanket that encompasses all things and would remove all of this. Fuck.