 |
|
After another day of city adventure, Jacob takes a quick snapshot overlooking the Manhattan skyline from the Empire State Building.
|
Scholar's Journal
6/24/04
I just flew into New York on Saturday. I've been here a total of 6 days, I'm still not completely on East Coast time yet, I've sweated off thirty pounds in the heat and humidity - and I’m struck by the incredible LACK of time I suddenly have. It seems like it's going to go by way too quickly. So, what am I doing to combat this sense of impending doom? Like any good writer, I'm using the biggest tool in my arsenal: I'm procrastinating.
Yesterday I spent a couple hours going through iTunes and deleting duplicates, organizing my songs into the right albums, and deciding which ones to sync with my iPod. After a grueling afternoon at slaving away in front of my computer, I thought I had finally taken care of this critical task, and gotten it off my plate. Finally, I'd be able to write. Until I had dinner with my brother, who gave me a whole new way to procrastinate with iTunes, by giving me another way to categorize my songs.
I don't care what you say, it's part of the creative process. :-)
I also contacted a couple theatre groups here and talked to people involved with their process, and made appointments to meet with them. Everyone I've spoken with has been incredibly supportive and welcoming, and that experience has been very encouraging. I was (and am) most nervous about meeting with theatre professionals who are doing the kind of work that I'm writing, so their generous reception has mollified those fears somewhat.
7/5/04
So I'm writing a play "incorporating advanced forms of digital technology which examines questions of identity raised by media theory," but I bet you didn't know that part of the play is about my mother's death.
Now, just in case you got the wrong idea - my mother's not dead. So I should put that as -- the narrator of the piece, who is calling himself "Jacob Coakley" is talking of his mother's death in 2001, and his subsequent descent into alcoholism in Las Vegas and how he miraculously got accepted into Cal. Now, the details of my life are CLOSE to that - I did work in Vegas, I did get accepted to Cal - but the actual reality of my life is worlds apart from that.
It’s a little creepy to dumb my life down, make it a little more tragic, and make my reactions to it incredibly against what I would really do. On the other hand, it's certainly great to know that my mother can come see this play and absolutely know in her bones that very little of it is true. I mean, it's one thing to write a play about how your title character loses their virginity and wonder how your mother is going to take it. I mean, c'mon, after Biloxi Blues, when the character based on Neil Simon loses his virginity to a whore outside his boot camp in Biloxi, Miss in the final weeks of WWII, don't you think his mother winced just a little? Can you imagine that conversation? "No, Mom, of course I'm still a virgin, no I did NOT lose my virginity to a whore. It's a *character* mom, it's not me - it's just a character! It's fiction! Fiction!!!!!" "Of course, Neil, whatever you say, Neil. I believe you completely. Take this casserole to the rabbi and then have him bless you, you dirty filthy boy!"
7/23/04
As I write this a torrential summer thunderstorm is drenching the city of New York. I'm sitting at a window desk in the Writers' Room on the 12th floor of 740 Broadway and am looking vaguely north-west. Usually I can see the Empire state building, today it is obscured in clouds. This is fine - if I have a view, I can spend a lot of time looking at it. I should be writing.
In the past few weeks I've seen a lot of plays and changed my own a lot. I've thrown out the adaptation of The Diamond Age because it opened up a whole host of copyright issues that I didn't want to get into, plus there was just WAY too much exposition to deal with that was very novelistic, but not very dramatic. So that's gone.
I've decided to axe myself almost completely from the play. Trust me, it's better this way, but it does mean that I have to come up with new characters. For the past week I've been trying to finish a small story about the backstory of my new main character and somehow it's kept growing and growing and growing and its still not finished. I'm getting great information, but who knows how it's going to be used.
I saw a play last week that was about Nerds, and the making of computers, and before that I saw a play with a narrator about a really smart girl in a dual structured fairy tale about sound, and before that, a play about pirates. (Which in case you didn't know, mine is also about.)
So here I am sitting with a play with a barely sketched out main character, who's a nerd, reading a fairy tale about a girl and pirates. Did you ever get the feeling that you've just been screwed by fate?
8/9/04
I have 16 days left here in New York City and my "so friendly and helpful" theatre companies at the beginning of the summer has turned into - "Where the @#$%#% are you!?!?!???" All the theatre companies have had other things to do - like leave the country or put on shows in other states -- but that means that I haven't been able to see them, or they haven't been able to see me. So I have 16 days left and I'm still trying to get my first interview. I'm no longer even pretending to be cool or chill about this - I'm calling these people up at 9 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon and at random intervals in between trying to get in the door. Sigh. It's a little anxiety making. I can't believe the end of the summer's here and I'm going to have to go to school and multi-task again, either. Crap!
8/26/04
Flew in to sunny Oakland yesterday afternoon. Feel really weird that my summer is over. Anxious about all I didn't get done, and all I still have to do. Trying to be upbeat about what I did get done. Including meetings with all the theatre companies I wanted to meet with. Somehow in the past two weeks I’ve managed to pull together all the interviews I wanted. All of them, every one of them, were all very supportive and really interested in what I was doing -- including asking to keep them posted on how my project was going. So I'm hoping that all my current anxiety will have such an abundant outcome as that anxiety did.
