-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Welcome to my self-aggrandizing chronicle of things that I'm doing.
I am trying to make a concerted effort not to waste anybody's time beyond the mutual understanding you and I have that brought you here to begin with -- that is, you wouldn't be reading somebody else's journal if you didn't want to waste at least a little time. Nonetheless, as my first real blogging effort, I am going to try and write for you and not regurgitate every last idea, insecurity, and philosophy that pops into my head. I feel as though they still sell those nice, leather-bound journals at Barnes and Noble if you want to keep a diary.
Who I Am and Why This Blog is Better than Other Blogs
I'll answer the second question first: it isn't. That's the question I'd be asking right about now. "Who is this douchebag and what has he got to say that isn't being said by a dozen other Internet losers who think I care about their lives?"
Not a whole lot, but I promise that every effort will be made not to say something original, a task which is for me terribly draining and ultimately unsatisfying for both of us, but to say what has already been said in a particular, perhaps theatrical, occasionally insightful, definitely WASPish sort of way.
Now you know pretty much everything you need to know about me:
I live in New York City.
I work in the theatre business. My job is to appear in the morning before casting assistants and sing to them. If I do my job well, I get a laugh from a tired, overworked young woman (the ranks of the junior casting assistants seem disproportionately filled with young women) who has, at best, a marignal connection to the actual casting process of any real theatrical production.
If I don't do my job well, I see a tiny piece of that woman's soul extinguished in the ninety seconds allotted to me and hear the least sincere (but still somehow required) words in the entertainment industry:
"Thank you."
I cannot emphasize enough to anyone who has never enjoyed this confidence-destroying pasttime the extent to which myself or any of my thousands of unemployed colleagues will spend weeks developing material, reciting things in front of mirrors, and grooming ourselves just so that we might instead hear:
"Thank you!"
It is the most powerful piece of puncuation in the business.
All of this has an orthagonal relationship to landing a job and that is why most actors will tell you that they don't even consider whether or not they'll actually get the job before they audition. The right people are usually not present; the show is already cast; the young woman whose soul you are placing at risk (or, in the case of Andrew Lloyd Webber audition material, actively demolishing) is paid to fill a chair because the Union Requires It.
More on that another day.
I am not a waiter. I played a waiter for one scene in one show one time, and I was so horrible at even the pretense of waiting tables that I have never tried the real thing. Instead, I am a web developer, a business so excruciatingly boring to anyone who doesn't need a web site right now that I won't tell you about it until I have run out of other things to tell you. That's not to say I don't enjoy it; but enjoying something yourself and expecting other people to give a shit is a distinction that I often wish most people were better at and so I will do my best to make it myself.
There's also a motorcycle.
I have yet to stumble on any graceful segue from musical theatre to motorcycles (or web sites to motorcycles), and the general lack of crossover between those subjects is both responsible for the cute title I've given this blog -- the two or three words designed to jump out at you from a list of dozens of blogs, grab you by the back of the head and smash your face into the hyperlink that brought you here -- and one of the few honest insights into my own psyche I'm able to provide.
I should mention that I don't know a whole heck of a lot about motorcycles, and that by no means should this be considered a "motorcycle blog," lest my mother and anyone else who might read it make the mistake of thinking that they will learn anything about motorcycles from me. This is because, much like my involvement with technology and the entertainment business, I am a dilettante:
noun. a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler.
Specifically, I take up every subject in a desultory way. I am not sure what that means but it sounds very appropriate.
One of the reasons I am starting this blog today is that I am at the beginning of one such desultory adventure -- the one ingredient which, for whatever reason, makes the rest of the sauce edible (or at least remarkable) and without which I would have had to settle for a blog title like "another new york theatre guy with a computer."
Or just "desultory."
The brief explanation I can provide is that I have always understood there to be a sort of unspoken covenant between New Yorkers, an agreement to which you are made a party when you first move to Manhattan. That agreement can be described as:
Thou shalt not partake in any transportation without at least a hundred other people.
In other words, you don't have a car. It's not that people in Manhattan don't have cars; we all see them parked on the street, or sitting in traffic. But none of us know anybody who has one, leading to the idea that vehicle ownership in Manhattan is a sort of mystic quality granted only to the extremely rich or else the extremely car-obsessed, and in the latter case probably also daft as car-obsessed and Manhattan do not really go together.
Motorcycles are the loophole. Owning one does not catapult you into the sacred ranks of the extremely wealthy and, in fact, probably gets you nothing but animosity as those lucky few who drive in New York regularly regard bikers as nuisances who further warrant the idea that some BMWs really should come with machine guns.
And among the lay people who own no vehicle, owning one just makes them wonder about how long it will be before they might be in a position where they could inherit all of your stuff, or at least take care of it for you while you're in a vegetative state.
It seems unlikely to me that there are no other people out there, or even just in New York, who are stage actors, web developers, and who own a motorcycle. I would be delighted to meet you if you are one such person. But please don't blog about it. I'll run your shit right over.
I have yet to stumble on any graceful segue from musical theatre to motorcycles (or web sites to motorcycles), and the general lack of crossover between those subjects is both responsible for the cute title I've given this blog -- the two or three words designed to jump out at you from a list of dozens of blogs, grab you by the back of the head and smash your face into the hyperlink that brought you here -- and one of the few honest insights into my own psyche I'm able to provide.
I should mention that I don't know a whole heck of a lot about motorcycles, and that by no means should this be considered a "motorcycle blog," lest my mother and anyone else who might read it make the mistake of thinking that they will learn anything about motorcycles from me. This is because, much like my involvement with technology and the entertainment business, I am a dilettante:
noun. a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler.
Specifically, I take up every subject in a desultory way. I am not sure what that means but it sounds very appropriate.
One of the reasons I am starting this blog today is that I am at the beginning of one such desultory adventure -- the one ingredient which, for whatever reason, makes the rest of the sauce edible (or at least remarkable) and without which I would have had to settle for a blog title like "another new york theatre guy with a computer."
Or just "desultory."
The brief explanation I can provide is that I have always understood there to be a sort of unspoken covenant between New Yorkers, an agreement to which you are made a party when you first move to Manhattan. That agreement can be described as:
Thou shalt not partake in any transportation without at least a hundred other people.
In other words, you don't have a car. It's not that people in Manhattan don't have cars; we all see them parked on the street, or sitting in traffic. But none of us know anybody who has one, leading to the idea that vehicle ownership in Manhattan is a sort of mystic quality granted only to the extremely rich or else the extremely car-obsessed, and in the latter case probably also daft as car-obsessed and Manhattan do not really go together.
Motorcycles are the loophole. Owning one does not catapult you into the sacred ranks of the extremely wealthy and, in fact, probably gets you nothing but animosity as those lucky few who drive in New York regularly regard bikers as nuisances who further warrant the idea that some BMWs really should come with machine guns.
And among the lay people who own no vehicle, owning one just makes them wonder about how long it will be before they might be in a position where they could inherit all of your stuff, or at least take care of it for you while you're in a vegetative state.
It seems unlikely to me that there are no other people out there, or even just in New York, who are stage actors, web developers, and who own a motorcycle. I would be delighted to meet you if you are one such person. But please don't blog about it. I'll run your shit right over.
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