Notes From A Burning House

This dog I saw this morning on Burton Way, this dog should teach acting.  This dog demonstrates how attention brings you to life.  He was watching another dog intently, who was all the way on the south side of Burton at a distance of two roads and a median between.  This dog was on alert yet he was calm, relaxed yet ready to move, watching intently.  Watching with his tendons, with his bone marrow. 

Full-body listening - this is how the actor should listen.  Scenes go wrong because actors worry too much about themselves.  Am I doing the right thing?  Do I look interesting?  Do I look like I’m feeling the right emotion?  An actor by the name of Ed Shea, who is also a great teacher, has been known for saying, "The scene is not about you.  If it’s about you, you’re dead.  When it’s about the other person, you’re alive."

Attention encompasses the tips of our toes all the way up through the crown of our head.  Sitting Zen is a practice that concentrates attention to such an extent that mind, breath, and body are perceived not as three related things, but one event. Breathing does itself and we become attention.  (I shy away from using words like concentration because it tempts people to make some extraneous effort, knitting the brows and constricting their muscles and trying to be strong.)  Although it is not an aggressive activity, it is very active and even athletic.  Try it for a while and you’ll see what I mean.

Sitting Zen helps but it is not special.  This beautiful dog never sits Zen; he is just alive.  Zen is a beautiful pointing finger but Zen is not the point.  Joju famously speculated as to whether a dog has Buddha nature.  A better question would be, who thinks the dog needs it?

The scene is not about you.  If it’s about you, you’re dead. 

In the union of mind, body, and breath, it feels as though all ones strength is gathered and consolidated, and there is that lift of freedom.  And to lose it, all we have to do is attach to a thought.  In a second, the truth is converted into suffering.

The punch line is there is nothing to which we can attach, so the desire to attach to things becomes a dark comedy.   We think we can attach to things and thus we fall into chasing shadows and wondering when the happiness begins…

…even as we abandon ourselves.

Just seeing this dog was like another alarm clock this morning - the real alarm clock.  Catching his energy, I lit up.  It spreads like that.   The world explodes with true love, and on the walk between a car and the office, one flower is enough to draw tears of joy.

Here is something beautiful written by someone I don’t know on a similar subject.

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As you may know, I recently began writing for a new online magathing called The Blue Doodle.  My column, "Letters To The Moon," appears under "Regular Writers."  Each week, it brings you a different letter addressed to the man in the moon.  The first piece (currently on the page) was inspired by the music of the great Charles Mingus.  The second installment, which should appear sometime this Saturday, has a little more of a story behind it.  A tale of family life, insomnia, and teeth.  Enjoy. 

"Mr. D’Ammassa, we are casting for the role of a socially-retarded homicidal pervert, and naturally we thought of you."

Thus arrives my first audition in a year, and the first time I will have read for a lead role in a film.  How does one prepare oneself for such a role?  Herman is your garden-variety homicidal maniac character.  He kidnaps the female lead, keeps her in a box, and does vile things to her in his quest to be loved and understood.  It ends unpleasantly for him. 

My mother wouldn’t watch the movie.  She told me years ago she was sick to death of seeing me get beaten up or killed in plays.  When I was a child actor, even then there were directors working out their frustrations on me as when I appeared in Roberto Athayde’s Miss Margarida’s Way.  (Miss Margarida beat me up; then the local critics tore her apart, and they gave the director a few blows while they were at it.  The show soon closed.)

My poor mother has watched me get murdered in swordfights (King Lear and Richard III), beaten up and stabbed to death on Cyprus (as Roderigo in Othello), electrocuted (in an avant-garde comedy called December 3^rd: Worms), killed and resurrected as a zombie on a battlefield (Bury The Dead), and more in that vain. 

"Can’t you land a nice romantic comedy where you end up with the nice beautiful girl?" she says.  "No, it’s your nose.  You have that lethal blade of a nose.  You get the villains."  And by a large measure, she is right. 

From time to time I have gotten feedback from casting professionals.  The first was when I auditioned for an industrial at the age of sixteen, and I was told: "You are the best actor we’ve seen all week.  But we need boy-next-door types and you, well, you don’t look like you live next door to anybody." 

Another casting director told me years later: "You’re the guy who does the talking while your henchmen do the roughing-up."

And another: "I’m scanning you as a young Al Pacino."

Or, perhaps, a serial killer.  Sometime after Saturday, we’ll see. My father, a professional horror writer, would be proud.  In a strange way.  I think. 

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One of my favorite bloggers, the Rocketman, has paid me an enormous compliment.  As he is going on vacation for a few days, he has asked me to be a guest blogger on his space.  One day next week his blog will feature an exclusive piece I have written and dedicated to him.  The invitation is a great honor.  His own blog is a delight and I hope you will enjoy it. 

On Saturday, there will be another letter to the man in the moon at The Blue Doodle, and I hope you will check that out. 

The film shoot continues to move along.  The other day, I was ordered to stay away from the set and to spend my evening scripting a scene for the  film, which will be a 30-second spoof commercial for environmentally-friendly tampons.  After five years being the only person in L.A. not working on a screenplay, somebody ordered me to do one!

Then it’s back to the radio play I’ve been working on for a competition at the insistence of an old  conservatory mate who started an audio theatre company. 

And at some point, there is still this musical theatre piece banging around, based on the life and amazing story of Cagliostro, on which I hope to collaborate with adear friend from long ago. 

And when I have to explode with obscene and socially reprehensible madness, there is a demented fantasy I have been sharing with Mr. Nelson, a feverish scherzo of singing dung beetles, Greek gods, and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.  In Hollywood-talk, think of it as "Aristophanes meets French surrealism." 

A lot of projects, this may sound like, yet what is the grand scheme?  Nothing less than driving the English-speaking world to distraction.

People, like cats, sometimes need to be confused. 

As instructed, I took a number.  I held the green slip of paper prominently, to indicate I was waiting for service.  For my lunch, to get right to it.  I was very hungry.  I gazed through the glass at the deli counter admiring soups, casseroles, hams, sliced roast beef, breasts of chicken looking moist and fat, hummus, salads.  Even the lettuce trimming looked good. 

As I waited and waited, a boy in a cap approached me.  His gait was awkward, weighed down as he was on one side by a canvas bag full of papers. 

"Paper, mistah?"

"No thanks, lad."

"No, I’m not Lad.  He’s off this week.  I’m Boy."

"Uh, sorry.  Boy."

"We got a special on week-long subs.  We’ll bring you the paper for one week, right here, including the Sunday edition, for three dollars.  How about it?"

"No way.  The news has stunk lately.  Why would I pay for it?"

"Hadn’t thought about it that way," said Boy.  "Anyway, see ya later."  And off he went. 

The deli counter at Ralphs is a place where time moves at its own pace.  My body, however, had not adjusted accordingly, and as my hunger worsened and the clock hands spun ’round and ’round, I began to feel dizzy. 

A mailman arrived.  "Thornton?"  he barked, and another man at the deli counter raised his hand.  The postman nodded a greeting and handed Mr. Thornton a packet of letters and magazines.  "Here’s your mail." 

That’s when the picture began to get fuzzy around the edges.  I felt a cool hand clasp my shoulder just as my knees were beginning to give, and its kindness gave me a little boost. 

"You don’t have to stand there all week.  Come on over here and have some lemonade."  The voice, male, had the feel of mother’s home-made macaroni and cheese.  How could I resist?  I allowed myself to be led over one aisle to a tent village. 

By a large green tent that had been assembled near the shaving products, I was helped into a lawn chair and handed a glass of lemonade.  "This is ‘Santa Cruz’ organic lemonade," said my host through a kindly moustache.  "It’s on sale this week if you like it.  Aisle three."

I gazed around and found that I was sitting in a camp.  About a dozen tents were arranged, with people reclining inside or on lawn chairs, empty rice buckets, and the like.  Children played with balls found on aisle seven.  Magazines and paperback novels were passed around. Families browsed a display of back-to-school items.  Somewhere, somebody was playing harmonica.

"You came here for lunch, didn’t you?"

I nodded, suddenly feeling like I might cry.

"You aren’t alone, friend.  We all came here looking for lunch.  And we are still waiting for it."  My new and only friend in the world showed me his crinkly green tooth-shaped slip of paper with a number on it, a number far lower than mine.  "There’s room for everyone here.  Welcome to the community." 

Other voices chimed in.  "Welcome, friend," they said.

After several fruitless attempts to update this blog, with the craven Friendster blog editor automatically inserting hard returns in nonsensical places, erasing my punctuation, and making general mayhem, and refusing to accept my corrections, I have decided to give up on the worthless thing and simply post a link to another blog where I was able to post it:

Click here and enjoy.

The day is coming when we will show up at the airport wearing bra tops and G-strings, purchasing new clothing at the gate or at our destinations. 

The terrorists will respond by developing subdermal explosive devices that go under the skin, or eating explosives timed to go off when they come in contact with digestive acids.  The FAA will be obligated to respond to this by requiring that we doff our skins and check them with our baggage.   

We will then be a bunch of skeletons sitting on the airplane. 

You know what this means.  You know perfectly well the airlines will screw it all up and start misplacing our skins, matching them with the wrong people, and similar mayhem. 

"My vacation was ruined.  I am a tall black man and Continental gave me the skin of a short balding Armenian man.  What was I supposed to do?  I had a business meeting to go to!" 

This problem would compromise the integrity of our photo I.D.s:

"I could not even claim my proper skin when they found it, because I didn’t look like the picture on my passport anymore.  For heaven’s sake, they gave me the skin of a woman!  But you know, I’m sort of taking to it…"

And here is another disappointed traveler: "They unloaded everything from the plane, and my skin wasn’t anywhere.  I told  them, ‘I can’t go to my brother’s wedding like this!’ but they said all they could do was check other flights for it.  I was afraid to go out and get a taxi looking like that, and the airport security guy said, ‘Hey, show some back bone.’  I didn’t find that funny at all."

We are at Mr. Nelson’s house filming Scene 4 of Hollywood Heights.  The crew doesn’t know me and assumes I am some pervy onlooker as I set down my things.  Having no job description, my responsibility is to pay attention, stay out of the way, and be useful.  There are two cameras, shotgun mikes and lavaliers, five actors, and dwindling daylight.   

Since I know what the actors are concerned about, I get to watch and learn what the photographers are concerned about.  I watch the sound man experiment with burying mikes in bushes, taping mikes on people’s bodies, in exterior locations with cars honking, dogs barking, and people taking their rubbish bins down the concrete steps of their houses (bang, bangbang, bang, bangbangbangbangbang).  I watch the photographer count the repeat takes anxiously as the sunlight disappears, examining shadows, the play of bodies and negative space in his frame. 

Everyone sustains themselves on bottled water and red licorice candy. 

Scene 5 takes us to Myra Avenue, where they set up a Steadicam shot following the characters as they turn a corner and walk through a Silverlake neighborhood.  Richard straps on the apparatus that keeps the camera steady as he walks backwards in front of the actors.  Mr. Nelson and I keep him from walking into cars and tripping over garden walls.

During one take, a neighborhood dog runs through the group of actors and says hello.  Bloody Los Angeles!  Everybody is trying to get discovered! 

We spend most of the night in a parking lot in Echo Park, capturing footage of our intrepid band paying a visit to the Hi Ho liquor store, which shares a parking lot with a bicycle repair shop and a McDonalds.  We also shoot a scene in which a woman is ejected from an automobile (Plot Complication!  Screeching tires!  Broken hearts!  Intrigue!) and joins our cast of characters.

In this scene, my hat makes it into the picture: the unseen boyfriend who dumps the lady from his sleek grey Toyota Spyder has my hat pulled low over his face.  This is to cover up the fact that the driver is Mark Antani, who plays one of the other characters in the scene.  ("How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?") 

Mr. Schark, in his capacity as producer, sends me to the supermarket across the street to purchase a six-pack of beer in a brown paper bag, for use as a prop (and, presumably, to drink when the day’s shooting is done). 

Scurry, scurry, scurry, I enter the market and select a six-pack of Heineken, reasoning, "Low budget shouldn’t mean having to drink Miller."  I approach the cashier, a friendly-looking African-American woman perhaps a little bit shy of 40 years.  She asks me how I’m doing and I tell her I’m doing just fine.  Then, a plot complication.

"You know what, can I see your I.D.?"

Zounds!  My wallet is locked in Mr. Nelson’s car.  What am I gonna do? 

I bat my eyes.  "Oh, you.  Go on, now.  How old do you think I am?"

She laughs.  "I don’t know, now, I’m guessing over thirty."

"Thirty!?  Thirty?!?  Look at my baby-smooth skin!"

"Oh ho!  Look at that grey hair you got!"

"This is not grey hair!  That’s a trick of the light!  I am a babe of twenty-one." 

"Mmmm-hmmm.  You’re a babe of thirty-four."

"Thirty-f–??  I can’t believe this!  Here, check my I.D.!" 

"I checked your temples, darlin’.  You want paper or plastic?"

In the course of the evening, I guard equipment, I shepherd onlookers (including a very gregarious homeless man whom I lure away using red licorice candy), learn a lot, and try to be of service.

Approaching a vehicle where two women are taking refuge from onlookers, I ask if anyone needs anything.  I am met with languorous yet disdainful stares and am sent drooping back to the parking lot where I make the acquaintance of a frizzy, purple street cat with brilliant yellow eyes and the most expressive ears.  He takes everything in, sitting behind one of the camera people and chatting at her.  He watches the actors for several takes (yet we cannot tell what he thinks of the performances).  Yes, the cat seems very experienced at this, like he has seen film shoots before.

And likely, he has.  This is L.A.  Even the two men camping out to pass the night on the stoop of Hi Ho’s take the film shoot in stride - it’s part of the territory, and as we do our job, they do theirs.

What do you see when you look at the moon? 

Today I have been applying spit polish to a strange little piece that will launch my new weekly column for The Blue Doodle.  They were nice enough to invite me to write for them, and after scratching my head and pacing around a little bit, I thought it might be fun to write a column called Letters To The Man In The Moon or maybe just Letters To The Moon. 

So we’re giving it a go.  Like my bloglodyte weirdness, it is likely to be a mix of humor, fantasy, prose poetry, occasional straight talk and preposterous flummery you’ve gotten used to on this page.  You may get the feeling that every week a different character is writing their letter to the moon; or it might be the same character week after week; it might be the moon talking to itself out of boredom.  Or it might all be you. 

Whatever you make of it, I hope you have fun.  The column should appear this Saturday, and be updated every Saturday after that. 

Wednesday was the anniversary of a very difficult day in 1945.  A very innovative bomb nicknamed Fat Man, that looked like this

was dropped on the city of Nagasaki in Japan.  The bomb was of a very interesting design, an implosion bomb in which a subcritical core of plutonium was encased in a sphere of explosives.  A series of small explosions create a shockwave that compresses the plutonium, creating a pressure that causes a nuclear explosion.  Here’s what that looked like:

This happened at an altitude of 1,800 feet.  40,000 people were killed instantly and another 25,000 were injured immediately.  The numbers lost to radiation sickness over the decades, I don’t know but it is in the tens of thousands.  One day earlier, a bomb nicknamed Little Boy had wreaked similar havoc on Hiroshima. 

This capability is eagerly sought by many people.  Fat Men and Little Boys are much sought after, and they can fit in much smaller packages now.  The theory of deterrence depends on enemies who behave rationally, yet the parties seeking nuclear capability are not known for being rational, and so the threat of retaliation may not be enough to prevent someone from using these weapons.

Come out from under your desk.  What good is that going to do?  Come back here. 

What is within our power?  How does That Which You Really Are respond?  There is an old koan that asks: when the whole universe is on fire, how do you escape being burned?  The whole universe comes to you through your six gates, so this entire situation (indeed the whole universe) is inside you. 

Rather than ask myself what George W. Bush needs to do, or Mr. Ahmedinejad in Tehran, or Mr. Kim in North Korea, I ask myself, What is my job?  What is the meaning of a universe on fire? 

This is a group koan.  A biiiiiiiig group koan.  May we resolve it together, for all beings.

Today my thoughts are on a Senate primary in Connecticut.  Senator Joe Lieberman has been in some trouble, facing a strong challenge by a political neophyte, Ned Lamont.

Lieberman has long been an independent-minded and controversial leader in his party.  His name became nationally known in 1998 when he delivered a stinging speech rebuking fellow Democrat President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Nonetheless, the Democratic Party nominated Lieberman as the first Jewish candidate for Vice-President of the United States when he ran with Al Gore in 2000.  From the day he was selected, the GOP spun Lieberman as a Democrat who shared GOP views on many issues.  By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Democrats began to suspect they were right; and as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, Lieberman’s dogged support of that war became a liability. 

What has saddened me is not just Lieberman’s support for such a disasterous and deceitful military adventure by the Bush Administration, nor other policy stances he has taken with which I disagree.  I was saddened to see the surprise and outrage with which he reacted to his primary challenge.

Granted, we Americans have a reliable tendency to re-elect incumbents even as we complain about Congress.  Lieberman can be forgiven for feeling a certain sense of entitlement and security in his elected position.  Still, it being a democratic republic and all, Connecticut Democrats have a perfect right to nominate a different candidate if they feel he is not representing them well; and for Lieberman to spin this phenomenon as undemocratic, as he did in this interview, is a sad comedown.  Yet it got worse, with Lieberman’s camp lobbing the canard of anti-Semitism at his liberal opponents. 

I don’t forgive candidates for ugly conduct during a campaign.  I accept no difference in a candidate’s conduct when they are running for office: the way they campaign tells me something about their character, and gives me a clue as to who would be governing.  Lieberman has allowed his campaign to resort to throwing mud - some of it very brackish indeed - rather than stick to making his case and accepting the possibility that the party may choose another candidate, that this is part of the process and that the process is just. 

If he then runs as an independent, and he has declared an intention to do just that if he loses the nomination, instead of backing his party’s selected candidate, that is his right.  (And since I am not a Democrat, I won’t feel betrayed by such a move.)  He might yet be competitive as an unaffiliated candidate (or, officially, a ‘petitioning Democrat’).  Of course he can do it; but is that all that matters? 

In his 1998 speech, Joe Lieberman made a powerful argument for the importance of character in leadership and the political process; his tactics in 2006 have not spoken well of his own character, his regard for his own political party, or his state.  If indeed he loses the primary tonight, he has yet an opportunity to demonstrate good character in the way he accepts the loss. 

It is not often one encounters other people observing social etiquette with the elevators.  For instance, letting ladies get on the elevator first.   The trick here is to let them on first without seeming to defer, since there are women who object to being treated as ladies, and their concerns deserve respect, too.  When in doubt, I look away as if I hadn’t noticed the elevator’s arrival, so as not to appear gallant.  This is well since the best manners should be invisible. 

In addition, etiquette suggests that elders pass before you.  So I let females and men who appear to be older than me go first.   After letting everyone get out of the elevator, that is.  Any time I vary from these ground rules, I feel as if I’ve gone for a drive on the wrong side of the road. 

Rarely do I meet other people who follow this etiquette.  Today, I did: a bright-looking fellow who visited the office building where I work. 

And damn him.  Damn the impertinent little swine.  Because he let me get on the elevator first.

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The house shakes from a tremendous crash and then, half awake, I hear a voice moaning, quickly ramping up to a full-out shriek, the worst scream I have heard in a long time and before I am fully awake I am standing up looking for pants God in his heaven what happened down there

loud sobbing and another shriek now I imagine she has cut herself deeply or she’s lying under a bookcase or maybe something worse maybe found her room-mate dead move it mister heading out the door shirtless shit shit shit which apartment is it anyway

no blood or gore, nothing to see folks, move along - in fact, there is not a single neighbor out here looking around.  Lights are on, no one coming out.

Later on words come through the kitchen floor as it happens no one has been killed or maimed, it’s

just another couple breaking up. 

Drinking a glass of water while in another apartment someone I don’t know howls like she’s had a chunk of flesh ripped out of her and who’s going to blame her because, yes, it can feel like that all right,  I know, ma’am.  I know.

When my heart slows down enough, sleep comes again.

*     *     *

It’s a lovely living room and it could comfortably accommodate about half the people who are currently here, urgently discussing a project that just might be impossible: shooting a long sequence for a movie, involving several primary characters, several more secondary characters with speaking roles, and a crowd of extras - with no screenplay.  No, folks, the entire story has been built through actors’ improvisation, and it culminates in an elaborate party sequence to be filmed in the Hollywood Hills next weekend. 

Photography has begun on the film, which is entitled Hollywood Heights.

Meeting many of these people for the first time ever, I am moved with such affection for them with a feeling that I am watching them hurl themselves from the Hollywood sign in a creative leap over a logistical abyss.   I am supposed to ‘help.’  I nod and look as if everything seems to be going well, bring people red plastic cups full of Brita-filtered water, offer opinions about costume colors and hairstyles, count the number of times one actor says ‘like’ in a single sentence and make a note of it in order to check it out with Guinness later.

When the ensemble mentions that they will have to film a satirically cheesy tampon commercial, I grab a copy of the shooting schedule and a pen and write a spoof tampon commercial, a 30-second spot they could shoot in one day.  Several people read it including the director, and they like it well, so by sundown I feel like I’ve contributed something even if it is, um, scripted.

*     *     *

The elevator ride was smooth and silent, calm the way elevators can be.  It was strange to emerge from the artificial calm onto a street where a head-on collision had just taken place.  A wheel was still rolling down Pico Boulevard.  A Toyota and a Mercedes, both totaled, bled oil and gasoline which ran downhill and covered the westbound lanes.  A black Lincoln town car had been punched in the side and spun around, facing the wrong way across two lanes.  People staggering out of their cars.  The older woman in the Toyota was too stunned and weak to get out, and because of the gasoline and danger of fire, onlookers helped her out of the car and got her to the curb where she lay down. 

The man in the town car - mustachio’d, Hawaiian shirt, sandals with socks, and a brown straw hat on him - he wasn’t injured, but he felt dizzy and lay down next to the old woman.  A paramedic asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital.  He said, "I don’t want to go to the hospital.  But I don’t want to be here, either."