bang! bang! bang! - alt theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part three

my friend renee got cast in a short film awhile back. sometimes when we hung out, she'd let fly with all of these tidbits about what the process was like. she thought that i should meet ed durante the director of the short film because he seemed to be as much of an anomaly as me. and strangely, he was. after we'd met, renee showed me his reel of short films. i thought that much of what i saw was filled with beautiful imagery that was compelling and, well, interesting. clearly, he knew how to tell a story with visuals. that alone was enough to put him a cut above a lot of people who called themselves filmmakers. i was intrigued. okay, i thought. he knows how to do what he does -- no small feat there. now what does he want to say?

but i digress.

where did the initial introduction take place? there are so many moments that blur together, like some strange syrupy goo: the video shoot for renee's dance project, where a hardworking focused ed (surprisingly) gave it his all, with beautiful visuals and real direction; the sit-down dinner at ed's girlfriend's place, wherein we showed up later than expected because we expected something a little more casual, much to ed's bemusement and (slight) chagrin; ed, telling me that i was really onto something with my whole "black americana" thing and how we should make a video of the song "stand by your man"; ed, looking at my photos on myspace.com and telling me how bad he thought they were; and of course there was the burlesque show at the slipper room, wherein during the go-go section of the show, ed's righteous black friends asked rather indignantly how long to we have to watch these flabby white girls jiggle around, anyway? what a fun night that was. i distinctly remember that ed freaked himself out when he realized he was turned on by little brooklyn's clown moment.

i'm not sure when it happened but somewhere in there, ed and i connected. and then we bonded. renee's project brought us together and i figured another one would probably happen along, but i had absolutely no idea what it might be. and besides -- i wasn't sure ed would work with me because i didn't have a lot of film experience. there were a few el-lay moments when he'd go on a little too long about what someone looked like on camera that he wanted to work with, not knowing or caring whether they could actually act. as an actor that can act, that bothered me. but whatever. for some strange reason, he called me in to read for his first feature length film and for some strange reason, i auditioned well and for some strange reason, he kept calling me back until he finally offered me a part.

the first problem, it seemed, was that we would shoot on the weekends in april, which meant that my hair had to be consistent. so my first question was, do i have to straighten it? needless to say, ed is progressive enough as a black man to find black women attractive in their natural state -- so we agreed that my hair would stay the way it was. i was warming up to the fact that my character seemed to be such a smarmy high-brow back-stabbing two-faced hedonist. all that detail right below the surface seemed drama-ready -- and after giving the script a thorough read, i realized that really, that was the whole idea.

film is a funny thing. you can read a play and know if it's good but you don't really know what you've got with film until you're looking at the final edit. (and i mean final.) to be honest, it's hard for me to trust anyone. and here i was, trusting ed. he knew what he was asking, of all of us.

before i left his apartment, i remember him telling me, "this is going to be a crazy adventure and you're going to hate me by the time this is over, but you're going to be glad that you did this." and i think he said something or another about making me a star. i can't remember. i was too busy thinking about the crazy adventure and the hate and the happiness.

i remember walking down the street thinking, ed may be nuts -- but he is talented. and he is my kind of nuts. so this just might work...

the real thing

i had a strange conversation with some twenty-something year old who thought that mary j. blige originated that chaka khan classic. does it really make me "old" to know that this isn't true? maybe it just makes me aware. please. i know that thelma todd was murdered by her idiot boyfriend but that doesn't make me anybody's grandma.

everyone should have a healthy dose of their own history, whether they have to catch it on basic cable or wander through a museum or get lost in somebody else's record collection to pull it off. so here's something for everyone: rufus featuring chaka khan performing sweet thing.

Chaka Khan & Rufus - Sweet Thing
Uploaded by PeteRock

hey! is that thing loaded or what? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part two

the real reason why i never bothered to audition for film or tv before was because what you looked like seemed to matter way more than whether or not you could actually act. frankly, i didn't think that i was light-skinned enough or conventionally pretty enough to seriously pursue it. i didn't believe that most film actors were especially talented because most of them had never done any theater. film is not an actor's medium, contrary to popular belief. theater is. to my way of thinking, an actor that's never done any theater is like a surgeon that's never actually operated on anybody. and truth be told, when film actors did do theater, they almost always sucked at it.

and another thing. film people -- directors, editors, producers, the whole lot -- were freaking annoying. they walked around like they were breathing some rarified air that the rest of us knew nothing of, for the sake of a genre and the fame that somehow elevated all of them. i would go into these auditions and they would say, what have you been in and they would look at my resume like it was a blank piece of paper because i didn't have any film work on it. well. a lot of them just flat-out didn't know what they were doing. it was disturbing: all of these people, wallowing in gobs of money, running around hob-nobbing, and for what. wouldn't i always be too old, too young, too black, too patently unattractive, too strong, too...something to these people? why should i have to convince them of anything? wouldn't success make me beautiful (ie bankable) in their eyes? it certainly seemed to work that way for everyone else.

it didn't help that i had befriended one too many film majors when i was in college who would sit around and and argue endlessly about who was brilliant, who wasn't and why. hardly anyone was making any art -- and if they were, it was derivative and boring and encrusted with scholastic excess. i suppose it was way more interesting to trash everyone else's work than come up with something original. or at least cool.

by the time i decided to take acting seriously, i already knew rejection -- the hard way.

i was called a white girl in grade school like that was my name and roundly ostrasized because not only did i know how to read but i actually enjoyed it. thanks to intellectual pursuits that included reading dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun along with the clothes that my mother lovingly made for me turned me into a garden variety wierdo in the african american community and made me the object of ridicule amongst my peers for most of my youth. somewhere in there, when i was 8 or so, my mother accidentally dropped a straightening comb on my neck. i told myself that there was nothing wrong with my hair in its natural state when everything in my world told me otherwise. afterwards, i promised myself that when i grew up, my hair would be natural. i never fully understood why i had to straighten it to be considered pretty but that's a whole other conversation.

so i had already endured a lifetime of "no" by the time i hit puberty. what i endured in my early years in new york city was nothing in comparison. it was luncheon and an afternoon nap in a field of wildflowers and daffodils. it was a walk in the freakin' park.

circumstances of my youth may have convinced me that i was fugly, but no one ever disputed my intelligence or my talent -- expecially the people who ridiculed me in the first place. i put all of it behind me and i kept going and going and going...

just as i'd hit a wall with alt-theater/off-broadway, everything shifted gradually towards tv/film and commercials. the first step was bravo's the it factor. i did it because i had little or no camera experience and i had no money or time for on camera classes. i needed to learn how to be comfortable in front of a camera and i figured having a crew follow me around for six months or so would compel me to break some bad habits. it worked. i got my SAG card when i got RENT but i finally used it when i got a part in Marci X that didn't end up on the cutting room floor.

the next step was auditioning like crazy. but there were obstacles. to find them, i had to be objective about my physical self. i quickly learned that how things look in a camera's eye can be very different from my own. i had to see things differently. there were some concessions i wasn't willing to make -- like straightening my hair, for example -- but now that i got rid of those annoying tics that seemed to happen if i was on camera for too long, i had to work hard to lose the chunk that made me look heavier than i actually was and get my teeth fixed, an extremely expensive proposition. most importantly, i had to learn how to audition on camera well. this would take time, but i was up for the challenge.

i had a million auditions and callbacks before i got anything. but finally, something happened: in october, i got my first national commercial, for ocean spray. two weeks ago, i got another national commercial, for prego. and somewhere in there, i met filmmaker ed durante, and his feature length project "jake gets paid" happened.

how did i meet ed durante? now that's a long story...

what are you going to do, shoot me? - alt-theater blackgrrl makes good on camera, part one

a few years ago, it seemed that i couldn't sit through a movie preview without seeing someone that i knew onscreen. i'd think back and remember which off-off broadway play or musical we'd done and when, and in my head i'd feel a strange sense of pride and glee for them, that they'd gone hollywood and "made it"-- not fame, really. just steady work. and to my way of thinking, that was making it. mazeltov.

but then one day i turned on the television and they were there, too. almost every commercial break meant having to sit and watch someone i knew hawking cookies or room sanitizer or God knows what all -- which was hysterical, if you really stop to think about it. i even recognized a few here and there with roles on sit coms and tv series. eventually, a passing conversation with an actor-acquaintance who gave me a ball park idea as to how much they were probably making made my jaw drop. was i missing the boat here?

when i had this epiphany, i had been doing theater in nyc professionally for about 10 years. i don't dance, so i knew that the broadway chorus wasn't anything for me to consider. once i understood that the great white way tends to favor heavy-set black female performers, i began to lean towards a much less conventional approach. eventually the breakthrough happened when i made the original cast in the national tour of RENT on a cattle call -- no representation, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. but for several years before that happened, when i got here from down south and everyone pretty much ignored me, there was no work. so i developed my own ideas -- in alt-music and alt-theater. with the two one person shows that i wrote and performed, i proved that i was an originator. with the various roles in george c wolfe's "harlem song," i proved that not only could i could carry the lead in a broadway caliber musical but that i could originate work on a grander scale.

after one evening's performance, my mentor the director jeff cohen met me at the stage door. somewhere in the conversation that ensued, he said, "you'd better enjoy this moment, because this probably won't happen again for you for another 10 years." he was right, of course. downtown rags described me as an "alt-diva." casting directors said that i was "quirky." the general vibe was that i was "unconventional" -- simply put, that i wasn't the black girl that they thought i should be, the black girl that they could easily recognize from their deepest imaginings or the most innocuous media saturation or even around the way. the fact of the matter was, i was unlike anything they'd ever seen. or heard.

more often than not, my uniqueness was percieved of as a threat. why? because i wasn't behaving like a stereotype. because for some, the unfamiliar and the unknown are things to be afraid of, especially where black people are concerned -- and especially with black women. because i wasn't sitting around trying to figure out which black girl to turn myself into, to get the job. i wasn't desperate -- and to be honest, that must have made me look like an uppity negress. but because i actually am an uppity negress, i really didn't care. and i still don't.

i was just being myself. was that so wrong?

moving right along

somewhere inside of the past week, i had a callback for a reoccurring role on All My Children, i committed to another guitar class at NYC Guitar School (Blues Guitar Basics) and i started work on Ed Durante's indie shoot, Jake Gets Paid.

all in all, not a bad way to end the first three months of the year.

A Strange Thing Happened On The Way to The Beacon...

there i was, on the every edge of the stage at the beacon theater taking pictures of greg allman with the digital camera that tracey moffatt and franco mondini-ruiz gave me for my birthday, surrounded by drunken freaks that were dancing in a haze of pot smoke, and all i could think was, how did i get here?

i'm glad i asked.

some weeks ago, i wrote about a book i'd read called layla and assorted love songs on allconsuming.net and posted it here. it was about layla and assorted love songs the album by derek and the dominoes. it basically told the story behind the music and delved into the legendary 7th century islamic poem that tells the tragic love story of majnun and layla. riveting stuff. i loved it.

some weeks later, i get an email from john lyndon who offers me an orchestra seat ticket to see the allman brothers. it seems that he and 66 of his friends are making the annual trek to new york city for march madness. how did he find me? the essay i wrote was sent to him from someone's rock and roll list -- it even reached the author jan reid somewhere down the line, who wrote to me as well -- but strangely enough, bobby whitlock's wife coco was the one who found me initially. the author was the real surprise. his family is close friends with linda wetherby, someone i shared a stage with for three years as a member of rotel and the hot tomatoes when i lived in austin some years ago. for all either of us know, i probably met him in passing somewhere on sixth street. the world isn't small, folks. it's teensy.

john and his friends make sure that they come to new york city for march madness every year. he's been making a habit of seeing the band and hanging out backstage since '69 when his brother twiggs was the allman brother's original road manager and his brother scoot was their guitar roadie. john is now a divorce lawyer in athens, georgia. sweet man. he even had a backstage pass for me. i met up with him and about 20 others at ruby foo's up the street from the beacon. they had all read the layla remarks and were very much interested in meeting me. one of them, a rather perky apple-cheeked mom of a blonde said that she was surprised that i wasn't older. "i thought you'd be in your fifties or something," she shrugged. she almost sounded disappointed. after i plopped down next to her and she took a good look at my uppity negress t-shirt, she laughed and said that she wanted one.

the show was everything i wanted it to be: acid trippy visuals, top-notch musicianship and an audience that was absolutely on fire for their band, their heroes. it was crazy, hearing so much music coming at me all at once, music that i was so deeply connected to, emotionally. so much of it was a part of my southern childhood. flashes of relatives long gone played out against my mind's eye -- bits and pieces of conversation and situations and happy times i thought i'd long forgotten. it was completely overwhelming. later, there would be an ever-churning hoarde backstage, laughing and talking and leaning against the walls, with greg allman was secreted away on another floor, far from the maddening crowd. i was introduced to jaimoe backstage and i even got his autograph for nicole's boyfriend pete, as a surprise birthday present. but that feeling that exploded in me when i heard those songs out loud, that still hasn't left me.



i think that's the whole point, really. when you're emotionally attached to a song, it belongs to you. what you're buying (or downloading illegally, whatever the case may be) is that emotional pull. the thing is, there's so much crap out there music-wise that does not move me whatsoever that i think i'd forgotten what that pull felt like. it took this show at the beacon to remind me.

now i want more. but where will i get it?

hittin' the sauce

this was a good-time shoot, from start to finish. even though everyone was all about business, it was really breezy and relaxed and fun. they built a kitchen in the middle of this gigantic space that seemed to be carved out of concrete. first make-up and then we got into costume and they set the lights around us and then there was lunch and then we got down to brass tacks. once we actually got going, we cranked right through it until they got what they wanted. we stopped periodically when it was time to reload the camera and then sometimes we'd tiptoe over massive cable lines to the monitor to see what we were or weren't doing.

of course craft services kept the snacks coming. thankfully, i've learned the hard way to eat the fruit and vegetables and avoid the candy and processed snacks. i distinctly remember watching him put a tray of devils on horseback into a toaster oven and wondering if i'd be able to have a few when they were done. he was sweet enough to let me have a container of blackberries on my way out.

i drank everything in, from the gum-popping boom mic operator to the first a.d. who ran a tight ship. and i asked lots of stupid questions.

two days before the shoot, we had a costume fitting. i was told that it would take an hour but it went on all afternoon. in and out of clothes, against the wall for this polaroid, that digital shot and over and over it went. somewhere in there, the director wandered into our area, leaned against the wall opposite me, smiled and said, "about your hair..."

i balked. i didn't have the wig on so obviously my goose was cooked to a crisp. we talked about hair options. it was a strange conversation. he asked me what my hair was like under my hat. when i told him that it was natural, his face went completely blank. a guffaw came out of me so abrubtly, i snorted.

i took off my hat and showed him my hair. his eyes floated above my head as though he were seeing a halo resting there. "i love it," he said. "it's beautiful just the way it is."

i felt like an idiot. this wasn't about me figuring out what they wanted. this was about me being what they want, simply by being myself. what i presented to them in that initial audition was what they were looking for. i didn't need the wig. i was enough, just as i was.

"i didn't think i'd get this if i didn't wear that wig," i blurted. and he waved his hand in the air and said, "oh, you never know about those things." as he spoke, he looked at my hair and nodded to himself. as it turned out, he would have to convince 10 other people. and the thing is, they already saw the wig over and over on tape. they were used to the other look. it had grown on them. they liked it.

out of curiousity, he asked me why i thought i should wear an afro instead of the wig. i told him what i really thought: that television informed so many of our choices because it's in our homes and it's such a big part of our normal everyday ordinary lives. every household has one. especially the impoverished ones. commercials work best when they reflect who we are and when they're inclusive. most commercials feature black women with their natural hair -- the reality. movies feature the weaves, the perms -- the fantasy. no way is miss thing with a weave down to her hips and fake nails out to there going to be clipping coupons and changing diapers and trolling the grocery store aisles looking for that just-right antacid.

of course it's just hair. and it's a free country. everyone can do whatever they want. but it's a beautiful thing, to see black women on television simply being themselves with the way that they look and not apologizing for their blackness -- or obliterating it or multilating it -- by straightening their hair. it meant something to me as a kid, to see roshumba with a natural. it was and still is an important statement -- that as a black girl, you don't have to have straight hair to be considered pretty.

eventually, it turned into a lively discussion with salim and basia pitching in their opinions, too. and he agreed with us but it wasn't up to him. i just thought it was wonderful that he listened to us and that he raised the issue with everyone else. i didn't care one way or another. it's their commercial. i felt that they should do what they want with it, and it's my job to look the way they want me to look. still and all, it would have been nice to have an afro in the mix.

this is the "before" shot


and this is the "after" shot

(note the coral lipstick. how fort worth is that?)

when we went out to show them our costumes, one of the producers, the woman who liked what i did in the audition, said that she googled me and that she found my website and really enjoyed my music. as a matter of fact, she went on, they were listening to it earlier in the week. all i could think was, wow. the internet really works, doesn't it?

this is the set


and this is me on the set with my husband/boyfriend/significant other, salim

(doesn't really look anything at all like me, now does it?)

it's supposed to run in may. we'll see.

in the meantime, i have a big day tomorrow. the movie shoot starts at 7:30am. there's a double date at brother jimmy's on the table around 6pm. and thanks to a very strange series of events, i'll see the allman brothers for the first time at the beacon with my friend. here's the real kicker: i've even got a backstage pass.

life is good.

craaaaaaazy busy!

back from ATL at 8:30am.
a severe amount of errands to run and then the games begin.
audition for a reoccurring role on All My Children at 1pm. (and yeah, it's good.)
another audition for a Maytag (national) commercial at 2:20pm.
and yet another go-see.
the beat goes on...

the shoot, the wig and the fun i had

here i am, ready for work.

i had just come from 125th street, where a beautiful african woman from ghana named tata cornrowed my hair in about an hour. i insisted on getting my hair done in spite of the fact that production called to bump up my call time to 10am instead of 11am. i knew that the wig would fit better (and i was right). i spent the next half hour or so in and out of four different gypsy cabs, trying to convince someone to give me a ride to silver cup east in queens. in retrospect, i suppose it would have been easier if i spoke more than just a little french -- but that's harlem for you. in the end my not so spectacular spanish won out -- a very polite non-english speaking Mexican who knew exactly where it was took me straight there for $35. of course, he made me pay him first. and of course, they reimbursed me.



and here is the finished product. i think i look fairly lacquered. frances was a great make-up artist. really wonderful to get to know. she's from california, a former graham dancer and yoga enthusiast. this process took about an hour. she even trimmed the bangs on the wig. overall, the look was exactly what they wanted.



and here i am, on the set with salim who's from chicago by way of southern california and who lives in central harlem. we had a lot of fun improvising and in the end they were totally elated with what we did.



this is the set, which was an absolute blast. what a whole new world for me. everything that everyone did -- from the director and the producers staring at the monitor with each take to the best boy and the key grip to the catering crew -- was fascinating. all of it came together seamlessly. it was like becoming an ant and stepping into an anthill -- everyone crazy busy, moving in every direction and somehow moving as one and getting an enormous amount of work done in a minimal amount of time.

they were there from the wee hours of the morning until 11pm or so. they must have shot at least a half-dozen commercials, including ours.

funny thing. as the crew began to break down the set and we watched the last few takes on the monitor, one of the producers remarked to no one in particular that i was ready for a sit-com. when i tilted my head and looked at her, she looked at me and added, if i wanted it. she's the one that googled me, found my website and read up on me before we met at the costume fitting two days earlier.

i knew that she was right. i don't know what else i can do to make any of that happen, other than continuing to audition my brains out strategically. i've always been a bit of a purist about acting, which is why i stayed in the theater world for as long as i have. and i'm grateful that i did because i know what i'm doing and there isn't much that i can think of that feels better than that -- especially in those moments when i'm surrounded by actors who don't really know how to act.

the thing is, i don't know if i could say no to $25,000 a week. at this point, i'm not so sure that i should.

happy birthday, daddy

my father turned 90 on saturday, march 24th. there was a formal black tie party in his honor in ATL. complete with a four course meal, old family friends, footage from family reunions past, and of course pictures. ramon and i serenaded him. nothing elaborate. just a few standards that he would have heard as a young man in the 2os and 30s. i think a lot of my not-so-distant family members were genuinely surprised that i could actually sing. at the time, i was more amused by that than annoyed but it was definitely a mixture of both.

my father grew up in the deep south -- south Georgia to be exact. interestingly enough, he made the first wave of the great migration north in the 20s and eventually the first migration south in the 70s. i don't know very many people who can make that claim.

i don't even want to think about the trouble he's seen. but believe it or not, sometimes he actually tells us about it.

just so you know that he's not hobbling around in a diaper with a drool cup around his neck and talking to himself: here he is the next morning after breakfast on his excercise bike.



the day before i got to ATL, we had this long wierd argument about debt and how he thinks it's better to pay things off over time than all at once, in one lump sum. i mean, really. he practically drew a flow chart for me over the phone. not that i needed one. i had to keep reminding myself that he was about to turn 90. he sounded like his usual self. remembers absolutely everything. still thinking everything through, still scheming. and even though he's calmed down a lot since i got work, he's still arguing with me about my future, my finances.

that's his job, i suppose. God knows he's good at it.

surprised?

i got the prego commercial.

the prego callback: notes of an interloping negress

went to the callback wearing the wig that i just knew wouldn't work in the initial audition and my favorite diane von furstenberg wrap dress. instead of changing shoes, i wore flat rugged boots because there was snow and muck outside and i didn't feel like dealing with all that yanking off and putting on. besides, i figured they wouldn't shoot me from the waist down. (and i was right.) that's why there's a diane von furstenberg wrap dress in the smithsonian -- pumps or combat boots, you can literally wear it any way you want. i don't know why, but wearing her dresses makes me feel more confident than usual. and somehow i knew that i would need all the confidence i could get.

everything dragged to get me there, even time itself. the L train, which is usually pretty zip-a-dee-doo-dah at that hour, took an astonishing 20 minutes. i almost gave up and took a cab but of course, that wasn't a real option. not for me, not at midday and not in new york city. once i arrived and surveyed the situation, i was more than a little dismayed to see that there wasn't one black woman at this black commercial callback with natural hair. they all had the same look -- some of them tall, some of them tall-looking, but most of them slim-jims and all of them with perms of varying lengths. and white features. the black woman who sat next to me was light-skinned with dark green eyes, a pointy nose and shoulder-length curly hair. (yes, it was contacts and no, it wasn't a weave.) something in me flat-out panicked: i'm a brown-skinned black girl with an african face. why did these people call me in for this? i felt like an interloping negress.

what did the guys look like? i'm glad you asked.

to tell you the truth, they weren't all that nappy, either. they had a look of their own as well. most of them were bald, strong, tall and quite masculine. maybe one or two were light-skinned but all of them were on the very brown side. i recognized one of them. he was shorter, light-skinned with twists. he was supposed to go in with me at the audition but he wouldn't because he "needed more time." i think he was a little startled to see me there.

someone came out eventually and paired us off. they put me with this really nice looking kind of bulked out guy, maybe six feet tall or so. we leaned against the far wall of the room and chatted about the business for awhile. he did a royal carribean commercial recently and got to spend more than two weeks in the bahamas, pretty much hanging out and doing nothing.

the callback was an obvious call, as far as he and i could tell. figuring out what they want and giving it to them was the trick. i looked at all the women and i realized one very important thing: they were wanted some verve, some personality. they weren't hiring pretty. not necessarily. they were hiring funny. and that's another thing: its one thing to be funny with a script but there wasn't one. most actors can't improvise. most actors aren't funny. aw, heck. most actors can't act.

the thing is, it's rare that i go into any room to audition and feel loved. (actually, this has changed drastically in theater/musical theater since i did "harlem song." more on that later.) usually, i feel ambivalence. i feel them thinking, not this one, or they're thinking maybe this one, or oh, definitely not this one. some people show up and get the job. i have to show up and change their minds.

i didn't need the dress to give me confidence after all. i carried this epiphany into the room with me. i cloaked myself in it. i mean, really -- i may not be what some corporate white guy behind a desk thinks of when he imagines a conventionally pretty (read: safe) black woman . but i am a funny girl -- with or without a script.

let me bottom line my day for you: i showed up around noon. my call time was at 12:15. they got cracking around 12:30pm. i didn't get out of there until after 1:30pm. at 4pm, my agent called me to tell me that i had a second callback. it was for that evening and then it was for the next morning and then it was for the next day. who cares? it's on.

believe it or not, the funny interloping negress is still in the running. stay tuned.

i almost forgot!

here's the good news of the moment: i got cast in a truly indie feature length film called Jake Gets Paid. i'm calling it "truly indie" because the director Ed Durante wants to shoot 12 pages a day for 7 days, every weekend in april -- starting saturday march 31st -- from 8am to 3pm. coffee, bagels. no pay.

it's an interesting role. i'll definitely have a significant amount of camera time -- and that is what i wanted when i started to seriously pursue film/tv. here's the deal: as a vocalist and a theater performer, i don't have much of a reel -- so when someone offers me a film role, it would kind of behoove me to take it. the thing is, you can't necessarily read a script and tell if a movie is going to be worthwhile. you have to trust the director and his vision and his process -- and hope that it comes out well in the end. on the one hand, if the director has a reputation, you have something to hang your hope on. but even that's no guarantee. on the other hand, if it's just this well-intentioned enthusiastic and probably even talented guy standing there with a bunch of short films to his credit going, trust me -- well, that's a whole other ball of wax. just ask alan arkin.

mr. durante says it's going to be tight and he promised me that i'll hate him when it's over but in the end he says it'll be worth it. thankfully, i get to keep my hair very natural: no wigs, no extensions, no nothing. that fills me with sweet relief. one thing, though -- i'm getting my body back and since he'll probably be shooting this movie out of sequence, there'll probably be some scenes that'll have me looking chubbier than others. that'll be funny. chubby me in one scene, lean me in the next one. ha.

let the adventure begin.

prego. it's in there!

i thought i looked like crap. i wasn't exactly in love with the wig i wore. i didn't think that i was dressed casually enough. and i was so sure that what i did on camera was sub-par, i practically ran out when it was over. yet in spite of all those things, my agent called this afternoon and told me that i got a callback for the commercial i auditioned for last week anyway -- the national for prego.

i'd like to say "wow" and get happy about being one step closer to my second national commercial -- but at this point, i know better. it's only a callback. even if i actually get the part, i can't get excited about it. getting the part is like starting all over again with this process. getting it doesn't mean i'll shoot it. shooting it doesn't mean that it'll air. having it air doesn't mean that it'll run for very long. the bottom line is that in film and television, there are no guarantees -- especially after you get the part.

my agent was right when he told me to forget about that ocean spray commercial i got last fall. he was right. i shot it in october and it has yet to air. they could send me holding checks for the next three years and not use it at all.

still and all, it's a callback. i've been getting a lot of them lately. let's see how this one goes.

...so you want black rock, huh?

now here's a little something you'll really like: the one and only ornette coleman in italy performing at some festival for national television, circa 1974. (wow. you really can find anything on youtube.com!) it's almost absurd, how young and lean and how hungry to "do their art and make their mark" everyone looks. and yes, of course -- that's james "blood" ulmer on guitar with a dark wide-brimmed hat on, refusing to look up.

blood can't stand having his picture taken -- and he doesn't like video cameras at all. once when we were in poland, he stopped playing towards the middle of a show until everyone cleared away all the cameras. and there were a lot of them.

enjoy.

what is black rock?

"Black Creator + Rock Music = Black Rock, case closed. Or is it? This definition assumes that before Black Rock, “Black” and “Rock” were independent entities that fused to become Black Rock. Jazz-Rock is a better example of two styles that were independent of each other merging to form something new, and there are clear examples of Rock artists going in a Jazz direction (Santana) at the same time Jazz artists went towards Rock (Miles Davis). Given the historical roots, how can anyone assert that Rock and Roll is not Black? How can anyone who would make that assertion expect to be taken seriously?"

from ralph white's blog, "new harlem online"

busy signal

prego commercial audition today.
on camera audition for an indie movie tonight.
guitar class tomorrow.
more netflix.
busygrrl.

this might explain it

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos (Rock of Ages)

by Jan Reid

i can’t remember when the song layla sank into my consciousness.

i was a proper church-going little girl, i was in the deep, deep south and hee-haw was on tv every week. i was surrounded by cousins and sweet dirt and sky, and the sun was always shining, even when it rained. everything was drenched in twang and rock and gospel. i remember a little battery operated transistor radio in my bedroom that had a strap on one side of it. i remember lying on my stomach, playing with my paper dolls with that radio right next to my head, listening to the allman brothers.

no one told me that what i was listening to was for white people, that i was supposed to be at the r&b end of the table because i was black and that’s what black people listened to. i instinctively knew that table was mine and i could sit whereever i wanted. later, much later, in college and even in my early time in nyc—when i was supposed to be surrounded by smart cool talented individuals—i can distinctly remember them (black and white) balking when i said which butthole surfers record i preferred or how much i liked bands like husker du and captain beefheart and the pixies or how i loved mudhoney way more than nirvana for that supermuff but cobain wrote catchier songs or how i was going to go see john doe somewhere downtown the next night. the question hung in the air like pastel colored streamers at a mexican prom: how did i know so much about rock? rarely ever would anyone ever actually ask. (too bad.)

“you’re an anomaly,” some white someone told me once.

“oh really,” i said flatly. i couldn’t believe that he meant that as a compliment. but he did. “maybe i’m the norm,” i casually suggested. “either way,” i continued, “how would you know?” (and no, that's not all i said. not by a long shot.) i'm probably always going to remember how his face changed as that one sank in.

that whole blipster thing is just one more stupid chapter in a continuing bizarre racist saga of “how to sell music to america” that some yahoo set up when they figured out how to make money off of records back in the day. now that they’ve come up with a name for The Only Black Person At The Show, they can patronize with some degree of accuracy and still be completely off the mark.

but i digress.

i think duke ellington was dead-on correct when he said there’s only two kinds of music—good and bad. unknowingly, the song layla set it off for me. or was it freeform fm radio? i don’t know.

i never thought much of eric clapton as a vocalist or as a guitarist (yes, he’s great—no, he’s not a deity) but i did love derek and the dominos. the more i listened to the music, the more i wanted to know more about where all of that passion and feeling and desperation came from. i heard snippets of stories here and there. and what happened to the drummer sounded like a wierd urban legend. but then i found this layla book and had it all explained to me, in such lurid detail that i could almost feel their collective exhaustion after some drug addled binge in the english countryside.

all of that 70’s excess—the heroin, the alcohol, the ferraris that were paid for in cash, the hookers that duane allman had imported from macon for their sessions in miami—that’s in there. but the love story at the core of it all is compelling stuff. and ultimately, the way clapton takes his feeling and pain and makes art is effing brilliant.

but it's the never-ending twang of that slide guitar that embraces something inside of me -- that something that knew sacred steel in a traditional church setting before elmore james made his presence felt and then duane allman turned it into something else. my southern ways are still there. they're completely intact and ever-present. thank Jesus.

oh. and duane and greg look like some hayseeds i went to school with, for real—which made me love them even more and miss the south of my childhood.

i don’t want to meet eric clapton. i want to meet bobby whitlock.

See more about Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos (Rock of Ages)

today's top five

1. yesterday, after many fitful dreams and sleepless nights, i wrote the beginnings of a song about red ryder -- and i think it might be good. but i can't tell from here. it just won't leave me alone -- and neither will warren. i can't imagine going back to austin and not seeing him again. that's really going to break my heart.
2. i'm going a little nuts because i cleaned up my apartment so thoroughly that i can't find this blank book that i filled with bits and pieces of songs that i was sketching out. (and that's not all i can't find...) i have to find it. all i can think is, it's in here somewhere. if everything was a complete mess, this wouldn't be a problem -- and that book would be right where i left it. so much for spring cleaning. (well. at least i didn't leave it at my parent's house in ATL.)
3. i'm losing my winter weight, finally -- not because i'm working out, either. it's because i'm drinking water all day and not eating late at night. (well. actually, i think this contraption might be helping me, too.)
4. freakin' bar chords are tearing my fingers up. i can't remember when i had a manicure but this is ridiculous. i have the hands of a day laborer -- and i don't like it. one thing's for sure: when i finally learn how to play guitar really well, i'm going to be one arrogant bastard. God help me -- i'm actually planning that last detail. (ha.)
5. talk about "escape from new york" for real: my friend wants me to show him austin, texas (the nation's capital!) -- so he can finally see what i've been going on about. we're planning a 5 day visit. his idea, not mine. i'm not sure the austin i remember and love is still there. i guess we'll both have to find that one out when we visit my friends this spring.

now, this is living!

it's japanese restaurant week, as of yesterday. throughout this week, participating japanese restaurants around the city will offer specially designed gourmet menus. i'm giving serious thought to showing up at sushi samba (brazilian/peruvian/japanese fusion -- and yes, it's as incredible as it sounds) and eating until i can't move...