Thursday, December 30, 2010

Remember your morning poop. Or. Why I think about Jay Jennings at 8am.

What you do before 9am shows your level of commitment to success. Some people will swim 100 laps, run five miles, write a hundred pages, or build a doghouse before you even wake up. By the time you have drug your ass downstairs to start the coffeepot, somebody else has annexed a coffee-cultivating country. By the time you light up your first cigarette, somebody else has made a major step to curing lung cancer. I myself woke up at 10am today, but I have the day off, so shadddup.

My very first class in college was an 8am Movement class with a whimsical dancing old gay man winter named Jay Jennings. The man was always drinking a thermos of tea that we assumed had shrooms in it. There was also a serious consideration that the crane we noticed around the moat during smoke breaks was in fact, Jay Jennings. Whenever we saw the crane… we couldn’t find Jay… He spoke in a very soft, muzzled, throaty voice that shook along with his jaw and his eyes. Hmm… kind of like how a crane would speak… When he spoke to you, his eyes would dart back and forth between you and the grizzly bear that was sneaking up behind you. It made me very uneasy.

Annnnd …GO! AHHH!! You would perform the piece of crap that you assembled at 5 am because you were up trying to understand the genus specie family clusterfuck of a sunflower until 4! Then came his catch phrase! “This is DOGSHIT!” Which, depending on how high YOU were, would either make you laugh hysterically, or scare the poop out your butt. Note to self: Create a To-Do list. On To-Do list, write down to find a catch phrase.

                                                                              

The great white bird directed me in two beautiful shows, Rocky Horror Show and House of Blue Leaves. (More on those shows later…) He had an amazing sense for stage aesthetic and spectacle. (Shrooms) But his classes for the most part weren’t taken very seriously. I’m sorry to say. If he remembered your name, it was a good sign. I think this is a man who has been teaching for so long that he forgets what year it is and he doesn’t necessarily care either. Kind of like me waiting tables. Somehow, his presence would just ring as inspiration, anyway. Here I am thinking about him four years later and I haven’t even had my coffee, yet.

The thing I remember most about his class, (besides snorting a foot of powdered sugar in a dress for my Eddie Izzard piece) was when he introduced us to the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Julia suggested that in order to smash creative blocks, I had to wake up and shit out three pages of writing in long hand every morning. There is no wrong way to do the morning pages, Julia wrote. Whenever I DID do the morning pages, they were most often self-pitying bites and snippets of blob. Why did I eat that NutRageous before bed? I have to lose some weight. Must start doing 150 pelvis throttle lifts every morning.. BACKWARDS. Nobody likes me. I’m going to be a pharmacist. People will like me once I am giving them drugs.  But it wasn’t important how self deprecating, angry, stupid or lousy these pages were. The important thing was that they get DONE.

THIS is the big distinction of the artist vs. non-artist for me, I think. An Actor, acts. A writer, writes.  An Artist makes art. A non-artist does not. As for the distinction of what is art, writing, acting, and what isn’t… that’s an argument I can’t even begin to find a foot in, yet. The value of that person is subjective, but the POINT is, if you are not doing ANYTHING, than you aren’t going to get BETTER at anything, and you won’t BECOME anything. We occupy a magnificent fear of embarrassment and failure, but if you aren’t willing to be caught pooping out some drivel in public, then how do you expect to conquer yourself. As Michael Costello would say, you have to live in the shit.

So. Remember your morning poop. 

Jay Jennings endorsed this idea. And I have recently discovered that Jay is 156 years old. And still teaches movement.

Or take some shrooms?

*photo from http://www.theatreanddance.txstate.edu/department/faculty/jennings.html

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Now for the lesser known: 'Poor, Fat and Balding' Artist

I don’t mean to sound crass, but drop kicking a bite-size yipping dog must be incredibly satisfying. Perhaps I do mean to sound crass.

There was a time when I knew I would grow up to be great.
I didn’t know how or in what fashion, but I believed that I would be successful somehow. In my head, I ran thru the professional rolodex like a divorced house-wife. Michael Amendola the Cartoonist. Michael Amendola the chess master. um…basketball player? professional bowler. PUNK ROCK BASSIST! …poet, no, I mean journalist, playwright… I am so happy that I never bothered to order business cards… and then finally, Life handed me ‘Actor’. 

Life told me that, in being an actor, I would have a good chance to experience all of these other professions without having to earn a million degrees! In my eyes it was a GET EVERYTHING I WANT AT ONCE scheme. (yeah, brilliant, Michael) I wouldn’t have to limit myself to professions either, for example, I have played a dog, without the luxury of eating my own feces (although some theatres on the east-side would call for that).  My K-9 readers and method-actors-playing-dogs will feel me when I say that HAVING THE FREEDOM TO CHEW UP ONE SHOE AND POOP IN THE OTHER WITH AN OBLIGATORY UNDERSTANDING IS WONDERFUL.

‘Actor’ is a package deal. It includes self-obsession, self-deprecation and schizophrenia. It never gets old, there are multiple selves to obsesses over and deprecate all the time. Okay, Life. It is a deal. I’ll be an Actor.

I have never once had any intention of having a ‘normal’ job, dolling myself up in an uncomfortable uniform with pleaded pants and a shirt that would always look horrible due to my unevenly proportioned chimpanzee physique.  I would not be satisfied unless I got paid to vomit out the essence of what it is to be eternally angst-y, confused and gluttonous. In other terms, I wanted to be an artist.

How do I earn such a title? Am I an artist, now? Is there a check-list I can download? At the moment I am fulfilling damn near every cliché there is. My life is as follows: I work in two restaurants (check!), besides that, I spend all of my time in rehearsal for low/non-paying low/non-attended plays in low/non lit warehouses(check!) chain-smoking on the patio of coffee-shops, and chain-smoking on the patio of bars (check! Check!) 

And.      

I live in Austin, TX.(check x amillion!)

Keeping Austin Weird, Keeps Michael Incredibly Poor. (Please sign my petition to end KMIP) I would be considered a ‘starving’ artist if I really didn’t have such a lust for food. I am more like a cookie-binging artist that pays rent two weeks late.

Mmm…cookie.

I have to constantly remind myself that there is little worse than being both poor and fat. At least with ‘Starving Artist’ you get the romantic allure and the occasional beautiful (yet inevitably deranged) girl that wants to go slumming in Bohemia. The Poor, Fat and Balding Artist may as well kill himself. And I only earn that title if I HAVE in fact earned my ‘Artist’ stripes.

Does that mean I should kill myself? Note to self: create to-do list. On To-Do List, write down to write down the pros and cons of killing self. Or… just kill self. Jesus I am lazy.

Anywhoo. When I was in middle school and high school, I always carried a journal around with me. I would rarely give my teachers or friends my full attention because I was busy writing about how their mothers must have treated them or drawing the back of some squirrely-kid’s head. It got so bad that my pre-cal teacher would hand me sharpies at the beginning of class for my demented cartoon masterpieces. It was a miracle I ever got into college. Luckily Texas State University had incredibly low standards, as did I at the time, so we got along just fine. I abandoned my self indulgent journaling for Aderol, beer and script memorization and never saw my inner-monologue again. Too busy trying to survive to reflect on how I was surviving and what was going on outside of that.

Lately I have felt less than inspired creatively despite the fact that I have been working as an actor non-stop since graduating. The Service Industry will suck your soul dry and replace it with pure hatred for the human race. I decided that my goal for next year would be to not work in the Service Industry, and I am happy to say I will be escaping its cruel seedy talons in T-minus 6 months.

I will be moving to Staunton, Virginia to begin my 11-month contract with the American Shakespeare Center.  I am finally truly taking myself out on an adventure, and I thought this would be a wonderful time to re-ignite my relationship with the blank page. (Which I have just successfully filled with overly-wordy tangents)

So that’s it for my introductory return. Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a bite-size dog next door to be drop-kicked.

Dola