A force of light...

I'm  going to have to give up my room where I'm staying.

 

I can't afford to pay $700 a month when my income is $0. I'm not very good at maths but I know that doesn't work out. My friend has said I can stay on her couch until I get on my feet Allah bless her! She is Iranian, has traveled India and does yoga, so immediately we had a connection. She is studying Ayurveda in a small, out-of-the-way school slap bang in the middle of Beverly Hills. Such a natural and exotic art being practiced in such a modern, opulently manicured environment! When I sometimes drop her off there to go study this ancient technique of healing I can't help but smile to myself at it's contrast to the place in which it is being taught.

It is as though a force of light is holding firm deep within the bowels of this modern darkness of consumerism and commercialism and is working it's magic in the very eye of the storm! Marvelous!! I respect her very much. She hates it here and yet it's a five-year course! She endures being away from her family in a place that repels her because she's following her dream. A bit like me I suppose! But I have traveled a great deal and spent time in many places on this earth and have come to realise that it doesn't REALLY matter so much where you go. No matter where you think you're escaping to your discontent will follow you and catch up with you. It's inside you see. It's like a shadow. It can't help but follow you. You created it! The only way to deal with it is to face it. To find a still, quiet place and take the time to look deep into it's eyes and meet it. And when you shine your light into it you'll laugh at what you find because you'll realise you yourself gave it it's power many moons ago.
So I'll stay here and follow my goal. Los Angeles may be gaudy, uncultured, ostentatious, polluted, and crammed with people trying to do the same thing as me! But it's as good a place as any!

Broke...and a battle-plan...

It's a bright and breezy morning in Los Angeles!

 

Yes, Los Angeles! That's where I live! Can you believe it!? It's a dream really. You can so easily lose perspective in this life unless you regularly take stock. I've noticed in myself that the habit tends to be to awaken in the morning feeling a sense of lack and focusing on the things I haven't done instead of the things I have.
For instance, I haven't booked a job in a while, I didn't have the money to pay the rent this month, in fact I haven't got ANY money, I haven't got any work. I'm an out of work actor with less than twenty dollars in his wallet!
Now, another way of looking at the same situation is:
 I have achieved my goal of moving to L.A. I have acquired an agent and am on the verge of signing with a manager. I have a great head-shot. I have worked with Apple, BMW and Porsche. I am fit and healthy. I am not addicted to any drugs. I'm not overweight. I have a computer and an iPhone. I have the potential to be a great actor. I am competent in some accents and with training could be proficient in many more. I can play guitar and sing. I know a meditation technique which brings peace and happiness to my life. The sun is shining. I'm free!!!

There you go, that feels better!

Yes, I'm in this place the people have assigned as LA. My goal here; to make a decent living doing something I love - acting. I feel as though I'm doing everything I can within my means to make it happen. I have an agent. My agent is getting me commercial auditions; around three a week on average, with names like Toyota, Smart Car, Samsung, Porsche and Motorola. Commercially I don't have that much to complain about. However, my agent is not pushing me into the place I WANT to go: TV and Film. I get the feeling they are limited in their theatrical connections. Also their theatrical department doesn't seem very professional: little to no communication and short, garbled emails are saying to me that I am not important to them. I may have to change things up there.
So, what is my actual clout in this town? What ammunition do I have as an entity in this industry?

I have an Apple commercial. A BMW commercial. A Porsche industrial. And what I have when I walk into the room: my looks and my charm. Being British is an arrow to my bow also as it's something which makes me stand out in a good way; the British accent is sexy and exotic here.

The ability of a few different accents (Irish, Scottish, French, South African). And a good singing voice. That's what I have. But on paper it's my big commercials that form my ammunition. And because of them I'm not quite at the bottom of the ladder in this town. I've got something to bargain with. They will get me in the door of agents and managers here and the rest is up to me.
So, what's next? What can I do to move toward my goal?

- Apply to auditions every day through Actor's Access account
-  Keep in shape.
-  Get a new agent
-  Find a good manager
-  Sign up with some acting classes
- Get some new head-shots to reflect versatility and image I want to put out there
-  Work with accent coach to improve range of roles I can play
-  Join organisations online to keep abreast of what's going on in the industry
-  Be seen in as many ways as I can
-  Produce my own work i.e writing, directing, shooting, acting my own scenes
-  Make connections with people and organise people's details so I can find them easily and know who they are

Marvelous! Now, I'd already be doing all of those things IF...I had the resources. And what I mean by resources is money. Money, money, money! It's something I have very little of, this resource. So, let's get some! Now, that's all in hand right now and can be saved for another post.
In the meantime what can I practically be doing without that resource?
I could be keeping in shape, applying to auditions, researching managers, organising shoots with friends for head-shots, enlisting help of friends with my accents, making connections, and producing my own work. I am limited in some ways by my lack of cash, but there are lots of things I can be getting on with without it! Charrrrrge!

 

Acting like an actor...

Went for ANOTHER casting today. Must be my fifteenth one since hitting this town and still not a whiff of a bastard booking! L

The project was code-named as they sometimes are. Companies do this sometimes because the product they’re shooting usually hasn’t come out on the market yet and they want to keep it all hush hush, so I had no idea what it was for.

Had a new experience though. In this casting I was tag teamed with another actor. A taller guy with a beard and shoulder length hair. He had been assigned the director role and I was trying out for the driver. It seemed we were attempting to give the impression we were shooting a commercial WITHIN a commercial so they needed an actor to play a director, and one to play a driver. An actor playing an actor playing a director and an actor playing an actor playing a driver! I was already bloody confused and I hadn’t even walked through the door yet!

Turns out it was pretty straightforward. You really don’t need to be a brain surgeon or even a good actor to do well in these things. You just have to have confidence and charisma. Some days you have it, and some days you don’t. The castings I tend to get call backs for are the ones I walk into relaxed and feeling happy regardless of the outcome. In other words, carrying the knowledge into that room with me that my happiness does not rely on whether I bag the job or not. And I guess that’s true of everything we try for. Ultimately there is nothing in this world which, once attained, will make us truly happy from bone to balls forever! Because everything changes, and NOTHING is permanent. The only true happiness comes from deep within us and is something that never changes. Buddha taught me that! Well, he didn’t actually teach it to me. He pointed the way with his jolly, golden finger. The rest I had to do myself. I wish I could say I DID it, found IT, and now everything’s a piece of cake. Turns out it’s an ongoing project. Bollocks!! I can hear Buddha laughing now!

Anyway, there I was behind a steering wheel in front of a camera acting like an actor acting like a driver. And there was this other actor sitting behind a screen acting like an actor acting like a director. With all these double identities I kind of forgot who I was for a moment, which I suppose is a good thing in acting. I’d pretend to drive, he’d say cut, then come over and make like a director and direct me a bit in how to act like a driver. Having already shot a BMW commercial in San Francisco last year I already had some knowledge of the bullshit that’s involved in these things and so I made like an actor asking the director where to look and requesting some kind of marker be fixed in front of me for something to fix my eyes on.

            The other actor seemed pretty nervous and rigid and I felt for him. Afterwards we shot the shit with the two facilitators of the casting about some YouTube video they thought was hilarious and then I was out of there. I still didn’t know what I’d auditioned for!

Then I got a call from my agent in San Francisco with good news. Even though I hadn’t been able to make an audition in SF last week Buick decided they wanted me for their shoot anyway just from my resume and picture! Score! Probably a print job for a magazine or something advertising their latest model. Thank Jehovah! I’d been watching my bank balance diminish with a horrifying assiduousness ever since I quit all my jobs in San Francisco and heaved all my crap down here to follow this dream. Things were getting tighter than a duck’s asshole and it wasn’t fun! This Buick job should bring in around   two and a half thousand beans! BINGO!

Banana

Hollywood!

Before it was just a word. The name of a place. A kind of make-believe, imaginary place far, far away that magically produced stories which somehow made their way to me across the ocean and helped to brighten the murky, mundane existence of the dismal little island (Britain) on which I lived.
Let me try to explain to you how far removed a place like Hollywood is from the average chap living in England. In England you can go weeks without seeing a ray of sun. In the winter it get’s light late and dark early, which means you’re making your way to work in darkness, and returning in darkness, possibly in wet drizzly weather. If you’re lucky the wind won’t be attempting to batter your senses at the same time. A wait at the train station can be a dice with death at this time of year. Not because of dangerously speeding trains or the presence of vicious thugs, but of the very real possibility you’ll suddenly get the urge to commit suicide by hurling yourself onto the tracks. A train station in Britain at this time is possibly the most depressing place on earth.

 An Englishman does not get up in the morning and pour himself a cup of coffee. He makes himself a cup of tea. Nine times out of ten he won’t step outside into a world of sunshine and feel the heat of our nearest star on his body. He will step out into an endlessly grey existence and have to turn up his coat collar against the cold. The life of somebody living in England is not intrinsically infused with light and warmth. It grows surrounded by damp and mould under a murky, suffused sky. There is very little glamour or exoticism in the life of an English person. Confidence and belief in oneself is not something to be nurtured; it is something to be stifled, and encouraged as little as possible. You have no right to attempt to raise yourself above your peers, financially or otherwise. You have all made a silent pact that you will all remain miserable together, forever, and that happiness will always remain something that exists, but is never reached. God forbid an English person should ever attain a small amount of contentment or even joy. Traitor!!

I have a theory that the witches who were hunted and drowned in the dark ages around Britain were not meddlers in magic but simply people who had been foolish enough to have expressed some amount of happiness in their lives. These bouts of buoyancy may never have been witnessed before and somebody acknowledging people with their eyes, curling up the sides of their mouth exhibiting their teeth and even engaging in whistling from time to time may very well have been quite a frightening spectacle! Something funny going on.  

What am I going on about?? Oh yes, I was attempting to convey the stark differences in reality between life in Hollywood and an English person’s existence.

So I hope that gave you some idea. I guess what I’m trying to get at is the total absence of glitz in England. It is the most unglamorous, unglitzy, most real place that the planet has to offer. And when I say real I mean that the place has a tangible sense of solidity. The rocks are really rocky. The air has a sense of solidity about it. And even the people have a crusty outer layer to them that takes time to penetrate.

A simple test to prove this theory of England’s unglamouresness is to apprehend a banana on English soil. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there is something very incongruent about a banana in England. This sweet, fragrant, bright yellow fruit hanging out in all it’s exotic opulence in a fruit bowl in Stockton-on-Tees is simply irreconcilable!

The beginning...

Well, I packed up all my stuff in my place in San Francisco and I moved out. I got a ride share down to L.A and I’m currently residing on a guy’s couch in Beverly Hills. I haven’t seen Axle Foley yet. The houses are amazingly immaculate with palm and banana trees growing outside and the lawns are bright green and finely trimmed by small, jovial Mexican men. Frankly, this is the LAST place I would have thought I’d be looking to reside in. A commune in the outback of New Zealand. Yes. A small yoga retreat on the outskirts of India. Yes. An isolated temple in the nether-regions of the Himalayas. Probably. But smack bang in the middle of the epitome of Western culture with all it’s disconnectedness and technology and superficial trimmings!!? Didn’t see it coming. It sure is an unexpected and original turn. But then, I guess that was the only way it was ever going to go. I like to keep myself on my toes!

So what the fuck am I doing here? Well, I’m going to be an actor aren’t I! This is Hollywood. The only thing to do is to become a rich, successful actor! It’s my agent’s fault in San Francisco.  If they hadn’t have got me those big Apple and BMW commercials I wouldn’t have realized that anything is possible! Getting those jobs and experiencing the process behind them gave me a taste of something that I dreamed a long time ago in college when my heart led me to take Theatre Studies A/Level. I wanted to be an actor almost right from the start. But then things happened out of my control and I had to let go of it. Now I realise that I can still do it. I’m thirty four, not a fresh-faced spring chicken anymore! But it’s not too late! And it’s taken this time and experience to make it to this place where I can say YES, I can do this! It couldn’t have happened any other way. I needed to walk the road that led up to this. Now I feel seasoned, confident and able to do ANYTHING I want! And I want this! I want to live in L.A for a while and go to auditions and get picked up for a sitcom. I want to start making a few thousand dollars every week. I want to get a nice place on the beach with a veranda to do yoga on and some bedrooms so my brother’s and friend’s can come and stay. I want to start working more and more and be flown to New York to make a movie! I want to make another movie! I want to be able to put money towards charities and projects which do good in the world! I want to have chunks of time off between projects and take a road trip across America. Spend some time in Bali in a yoga retreat. Go on more Vipassana courses and keep getting rid of old, useless tension and baggage and keep getting lighter and lighter until I start to float away and people have to grab my ankles and stake me down to keep me earth-bound! And it’s all going to happen!

That’s the thing about living in America. You feel as if you really can accomplish anything. No-one will try to pull you down no matter what you try to succeed in. There is the liberating idea that anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it.



For now though I’m on the couch. I just got here and I’m settling into the place. I met this chap on the last day of a ten-day vipassana retreat. Neither of us had been able to speak for the first ten days of being in the same proximity due to the noble silence rule. Making eye-contact is also discouraged so basically the only thing we knew about each other was the way each other walked. But on the last day when everyone’s talking again we connected and he offered me a place to stay if ever I found myself in his neck of the woods. So now I’ve taken him up on it. His name is Jasper. He’s middle-aged, slight of frame , black, greying shoulder length hair, big, blue curious eyes, affable and a little nervous. He owns half a photography studio in Silverlake with another guy, Silvio.

Jasper's a great guy and seems to be a big net worker who everybody knows. So he goes off to work in the morning and I rise, have a cup of tea, meditate, do some yoga, do some work on getting my L.A acting profiles up and running, work on my tan, skype, and marvel and give gratitude at how incredible life is!!

There is another resident at Jasper's: Doug. He resides temporarily in a room for which he’s paying Jasper rent for. He’s a New Zealander, middle-aged, medium build, shaved head, small squinty eyes, slightly greying beard. He’s teaching at a university here for a while, but he usually lives in Amsterdam with his wife and small child, Lewis. He is a magical man of profound and joyful idiosyncrasies. As soon as he gets in from work he engages in what he calls “putting on the green helmet” which involves rolling and smoking a big spliff outside on the veranda. He’ll then lie down in his room with his eyes closed for about half an hour, which is lit by a naked, solitary, red-coloured bulb. He’ll then emerge, engage in some choppy, jovial banter, perhaps inquire about dinner ideas, head outside for another donning of the Green Helmet, groove to the smooth tunes being played on the radio, engage in some stimulating conversation, perhaps diving into theories about the failure of the American education system, maybe chop some vegetables, skype his family and make funny, muppet voices at his son, then go lay down in his red room again with his Green Helmet firmly fastened and rest for another half hour until he emerges once again to continue these activities in a slightly different order with a never faltering sense of energy and twisted, brilliant intellect! Sometimes I find myself paralysed with awe and hilarity at the profound and tantalising images and descriptions he pulls out of nowhere to describe the moment we’re in or a situation he once experienced. Like the time he had an enlightening experience with one of his friends, who, as he says, ‘peeled him apart like an onion and then put him back together again to show him that all the things he feared were bullshit and simply not worth being afraid of’.

In the mornings the first thing I hear is the sound of Dougie energetically stirring porridge. The first question I’ll be cheerfully asked in a broad Kiwi accent as I make my way to the toilet is “Do you want your name on the pot this morning Clarence??” Which is an inquiry into if I want to be included in the porridge offerings that morning.

I really couldn’t have found a couple of better individuals to have hooked up with in my transition than these two gentleman!

I have been a little impatient with my agent here so far though. One and a half weeks and not so much as a send out to a margarine commercial! (“Where is my agent?? Bastard must have died!”) Maybe I’m being a bit harsh though. It is the slow season right now. I almost fucked it all up this morning when I sent them an email telling them to pull their finger out! They sent me an email back telling me I was high maintenance and that they were terminating my contract and relinquishing me of all my contractual obligations! Shit!! There was a little confusion last week as somehow all the responses they were sending to me were being sent to my old email address and I wasn’t getting them so I thought they were ignoring me and so I kept at them. Found out Monday that they had been responding all the time! I explained it and somehow managed to smooth things over and they’ve taken me back. Jesus! Sometimes I feel as though I’m in a Hunter.S.Thompson novel. I can understand how this fast-paced, gaudy-coloured, bizarre side of America shaped the man’s inspiration for the drug fueled crack-pot characters who inhabit his twisted worlds.

Phew! It’s hot here. Hot and dry. I must say it’s actually doing wonders for my constitution! My body likes this climate. It never did feel at home growing up in the damp of England. Give me desert! And heat! There’s nothing as satisfying as seeing those first few beads of sweat appear on the skin in a yoga practice in this arid environment!

Looks like I’m the new kid on the block once again then. I was enjoying having been in a place (San Francisco) for three years and feeling established and like I KNEW the streets and the place and could help newcomers get what they needed. I’d established some good, steady work from my agent, made some friends and was secure and comfortable. Life wasn’t exactly as I wanted it though, but I’m getting the feeling it never can be if you’re looking to the outside to make it so. Now I’m the new boy once again. A newcomer in a strange land. The needy one. God, I hate being the needy one again! I’m contacting my agent too much, one of my acquaintances here has stopped texting me because I might be bothering her too much, I’m reaching out, help me help me!! Feed the hungry bee! I know this place. I’ve been here a few times now. Clarence, you just need to relax. You’ve been here before. This is how it is when you’re starting out in a new place. You’re just the new guy again, that’s all. Nobody knows you here yet. Everyone is living their lives with lots to do, while you have all the time in the world. Make the most of it because it won’t be like this for long!