President's Day Pimple

Behold, if you will, the greasy, post-Neaderthal countenance of your fellow man. “O what a piece of work,” as the Dane would say, profiled against an unearth’d skull, theatrically attired in melancholik black, his eyes damp with mourning. “How noble in – etc . . . “ “How infinite . . . etc. etc.” And et al and et alia.

All very well, one should say, for those that are smooth of visage, trim of beard, their imperfections merely charming or else dexterously photoshopp’d. But alas, for the man who is besmirched with Nature’s unwashed seblum -- elbow’d, as it were, from Creation’s table -- tossed as one would dunk soiled linen, down the chute and to the scullery –- the way is hard, I say! and uncompanioned. Behold, therefore, the bepox’d face! -- its pores sebaceously stoppered, its surface irregular and ensanguined, its owner disgraced before the world and god.

O, Physick! Have ye no cure but the blunt art of popping?

This Is New York

The first person I spoke to when I arrived in the city on Monday night was Dave’s girlfriend Elaine, who was lugging boxes from the house on 113th Street to her car. In a nimble bit of symmetry, it turned out that she was leaving the city for Los Angeles, while I was just returning. The weather was disconcertingly warm that day, not all that different from winter in Hollywood, and I had to remind myself that, “Yes, I am back in New York,” as though I was trying to wake from a nightmare.

When I awoke the next morning – in my old bedroom, where, as it happened, everything was pretty much exactly as I’d left it – I drove the rental car down to 34th Street. It was like my days in LA, waking up and jumping into the car before I’d eaten anything and then getting pummeled by an onslaught of traffic. Only this time, after I ditched the car, I stepped underground and onto a waiting train. And there is nothing quite like a subway car – with its noise, its smell, and the stoic, unimpressed faces packed inside – to determine one’s location as unmistakably New York. You could be nowhere else. For that reason, when I got on the Downtown One the other morning – my first subway ride in over two months – the feeling was an unexpected sense of relief.

Yesterday I painted my “study,” as I like to call it - the small room which precedes my bedroom – and I assembled a cheap, but great, desk which I purchased at the Reston, VA Target. May God bless this desk. I am so happy with it. In all the time I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never been pleased with the desks I’ve had. The last one was a shoddy, cramped piece of furniture that was made out of pine and was in a steady process of reconstituting itself as sawdust. My parents and I found it at a crappy resale outfit in a part of Astoria that a girl I was seeing had told me was a great place for furniture. Ah, the naïveté of the young.

And speaking of the young, has anyone noticed that it’s 2008 and therefore the year that I turn 28? Has anyone taken note of this fact? My younger self certainly did. There is a document somewhere in my parents’ house in which, as a ten year-old, I predicted not only fame and fortune, but also marriage, children, and “a TV show” by the time I hit 28. Well, it couldn’t come at a better time. And with that in mind, I say to you, 2008: hit me with your best shot.

It’s good to be back in New York, where no one can relax and nothing is easy. It is, as I am now grimly certain, better for me.

The Search For American Freedom

There is a massive hole in the middle of the Arizona desert and I’m not talking about the Grand Canyon. The hole is south of Winslow and can be reached by a short detour off Interstate 40 where its approach is proclaimed by a series of increasingly importunate road signs that remind one more of the cardboard placards painted by panhandlers rather than directions to the site of a serious scientific oddity.

For it is a meteor crater which we’re talking about here, not the biggest ball of yarn, or the tallest cross in the western hemisphere (which I drove past today in the Texas panhandle; it looked like unusually thick telephone pole). The Barringer Crater, as it’s called (named for mining engineer Daniel Barringer, whose family still owns the site), was formed by a piece of intergalactic rock that managed to plummet to earth about 50,000. It's supposed to be pretty impressive and, if you want its stats, here they are: it is approximately 4,000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. Moreover, it rises dramatically above the surrounding desert by about 150 feet. On the other hand, it costs $15 just to take a peek and for that amount of money I could purchase about 70 miles worth of gas, so I drove on, choosing, as I have done most of this trip, to view America at a speed of 70 miles per hour, stopping only as necessary to refuel and sleep.

I just did this two months ago, so please view the archives for an account of the more leisurely and, it has to be said, optimistic drive west. Now the car is in reverse – not literally, of course – and I find myself retracing my steps and assuring myself that what must seem to the world like a retreat is really an advance, a renewal of sorts, a more determined settlement in New York after some sort of western epiphany. There is, however, the distinct possibility that I am returning simply because I am tired of driving.

I am typing this post, by the way, in a surprisingly pleasant Starbucks near Oklahoma City. The Cadillac sits outside, loaded with everything I brought to California and more. This morning I greeted 2008 in a motel room in Amarillo, Texas, wondering at the old face I encountered in the bathroom mirror. I have not been carded by any of the gas station attendants who’ve bagged the 40s I’ve bought and brought back to the motels to numb my evenings. It is amusing to reflect that I once fervently desired the cessation of the intrusive practice asking for identification for the purchase of alcoholic beverages. Now its occurrence is pleasant and reassuring.

So, what’s next? A thousand or so miles back to Virginia to pick up the rest of my things and then a swift resettlement back at 113th Street, followed by unpacking and perhaps some repainting and recarpeting. When I left Santa Barbara on Sunday morning, I removed my sweater at a gas station and drove all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona in shirt-sleeves. But there was snow on the ground in Flagstaff and the temperature plunged that night to a low of nine degrees. I put on my sweater again and added a jacket and unpacked my suitcase. If the past few months have provided anything, they have inured me to almost any displacement.

The photo above was taken on Monday morning, as I left Flagstaff.

Of Human Bondage

Last night I finished Somerset Maugham’s opus Of Human Bondage which, at 600+ pages, is lengthy even by the generous standards of the bildungsroman. The middle part of the book is occupied with what is arguably the novel’s best-remembered episode: young Philip’s miserable love affair with the horrid Mildred. In the introduction to the Penguin edition, University of Saskatchewan professor Robert Calder describes her as having “few redeeming qualities,” but I would go further and venture she has none whatsoever. Philip’s love for her is by turns baffling, enraging, and fascinating. Calder posits that Philip is enslaved by the need to redress her initial spurning of him. In this, he is abetted by the insecurity of his deformity (a club-foot) and an undeveloped sexuality.

Harrowing as it is, the portions of the novel which spoke directly to me--especially at this point in my life (especially, in fact, this week in my life)--were not so much those which pertained to Mildred, but rather Philip’s casting-about for meaning and direction in life. Raised by his uncle, an unaffectionate and miserly country curate, Philip, in the first of many characteristic acts of rejection, declines a scholarship to Oxford and elects to study German in Heidelberg. From there, his wanderings take him eventually to Paris, where, upon the suicide of a fellow art student, he becomes disillusioned with the bohemian life. Next, the protagonist returns to England and London where he becomes apprentice to a chartered accountant, a position he botches totally and is forced to leave. Finally, he settles on medicine, his father’s profession, and he sets off again to London to attend school.

Throughout it all, the meager inheritance left to him by his parents depletes, and in the novel’s final quarter Philip is made destitute by both a loss on the stock market and an astonishing act of cruelty on the part of Mildred. He is forced to leave medical school and live on the street. It is here that, as I was reading in Sabor y Cultura on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I felt that Philip’s plight touched a nerve with me particularly. A few choice passages which set my heart racing with uncomfortable recognition are here reprinted:

“It was because he could not believe in the reality of his experience that he did not give way to utter despair.”

“His uncle and the solicitor would of course do something for him, but he dreaded their reproaches [at his profligacy]. He did not want anyone to reproach him: he clenched his teeth and repeated that what had happened was inevitable just because it had happened.”

“He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading.”

“Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was the same now as if he had never lived.”

Philip eventually rights himself, but it does not come without a cost. The dreams which had given his youth such a fire are virtually extinguished by the novel’s troublingly upbeat ending, and Philip’s attempt to convince us (and himself) that he is satisfied with the dull bourgeois safety which awaits him in a passionless, anodyne marriage is not entirely convincing. That being said, the misery of poverty, which Maugham depicts with vivid immediacy, convinces thoroughly--and the novel is uniquely frank in its treatment of fiscal affairs and their importance to the life of the soul. Two years after leaving medical school and being reduced virtually to a pauper’s life, Philip at last receives a modest inheritance from his uncle who dies after long illness. Having finally become solvent, Philip remarks upon the folly of romanticized poverty:

“He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance.”

This assessment squares with my own limited experience and the notion that although money itself may not make one happy, its lack will almost certainly bring unhappiness, if not, as in Philip’s case, outright despair. As the bitter and aged art instructor Foinet remarks to Philip in Paris, “money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five.” “There is nothing,” he continues, “so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.”

These days, my own anxiety encompasses both income and the search for a meaningful life. Philip is thirty when Of Human Bondage ends and he finds himself married and settled into a steady profession. My nearness in age to Maugham’s surrogate/protagonist notwithstanding, I would like to think my story diverges completely from Philip’s in that I have always been certain of my desire to act. Where Philip’s journey was marked by its continually changing aim, my own life has consisted of constant recalibration of means to the same, consistent end. It is only very recently that I have allowed myself to consider abandoning that very end which had once, almost exclusively, defined me, but to which I have lately felt a slave.

No one, of course, should be made to feel a slave to anything, and I am perhaps exaggerating the pull of acting’s promise. In Philip’s case, it is a revelation late in the novel of life’s meaninglessness, which ironically sets him free: “If life was meaningless,” he notes, “the world was robbed of its cruelty.” True enough, I say. The question is not whether there’s a point to life, but whether one can find one’s happiness in the rubble. That remains to be seen.

In California

Los Angeles averages about 15 inches of rain a year, which is roughly equal to the average annual snowfall in Washington, DC. This morning, two strange things occurred nearly simultaneously as I lay in bed emerging from a dream about acting in a play. The first thing was the sound of my housemate’s footsteps and then the unlocking of the front door. The predawn hour of his departure was highly unusual and, in my dream-like state, slightly unnerving. I was about to drift off again to sleep but I started to hear something else. It was the sound of rain.

I got dressed and showered an hour later and drove to Santa Monica for a job interview. The air is mysterious in LA and whether it’s the heaviness of smog or the grayness of the marine layer, there is a remarkable variety to the sky’s personality, despite its sunny reputation. Leaving Santa Monica and heading to Los Feliz on the 10, I listened to Neko Case’s “In California,” whose opening lyric could hardly be more fitting: “In California, I dream of snow . . . “

It was cold as well today and I wore my turtleneck and jacket, which I haven’t worn since I left New York, and used the beige, portable umbrella which had been sitting in the bottom of my suitcase. At Sabor y Cultura on Hollywood Boulevard, I dropped off my résumé with a woman who wore her hair short and dyed red and sported a silver ring through her left lower lip.

“Do you have any experience?” she asked me, and I told her I did and she said they weren’t hiring at the moment but they might be soon. She pulled out a file-folder which contained a stack of résumés and put mine inside.

“There,” she said, “Right on top,” and she showed me how she’d placed my résumé on the top of the stack.

“Thank you. I appreciate it,” I said, and I left.

I’ve left New York twice now, it occurs to me. And this last time was anticlimactic and somewhat dull, with my father arriving in the station wagon, and us filling it so quickly we were home in time for a late dinner. This, opposed to the first time I left New York when I was very much alone and heavily romantic about it. That was in January 2000 when I was nineteen years-old. It was a Saturday. I’d spent the morning working my final shift at a packing and shipping company in the West Village and on the train back to Brooklyn Heights I told myself that I would be back and that I would specifically be back to Brooklyn.

Later that evening, after loading down my 84 Volvo with my possessions, including an enormous Hewlett-Packard printer, I said goodbye to Apartment 5R and drove north on Clinton Street towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I double-parked on Clinton & Joralemon and ran into the corner deli to get a cup of coffee for the drive to Pennsylvania. Inside, two girls whispered to each other, and before I left one of them came up to me and told me I was cute. I have no idea what I responded, but I left pretty quickly. I had to hurry because it was late and it was supposed to snow pretty heavily that night---which it did, the first flakes falling, I recall, as I approached Princeton. It’s amazing the detail with which one is able to remember certain days.

There was a leaf lodged between the blades of my windshield wipers all afternoon today and I knew I should have pulled over to remove it, but I couldn’t be bothered. Sitting on the Hollywood Freeway at two in the afternoon, I thought about this and what it said about me. A nagging “to-do” list began to scroll through my mind, with each item signaling the brain’s neurons to remember another one. To wit: send in the rent check; buy shoelaces; check the car’s oil; call the podiatrist; call mom; write Katherine; send out another dozen resumes; apply for a library card; return DVDs to Blockbuster; respond to David’s e-mail, console him for the loss of the cats, apologize again for being so out-of-touch for so long, promise it won’t happen again.

In Studio City, I parked the car on Moorpark and thought, “Everything’s so green here,” and listened to Neko Case:

“They try to tell me LA is beautiful / When it rains.”

Katherine, thanks for the umbrella.

Reston

I wanted to talk to Katherine on the phone but it was late and I couldn’t reach her. I didn’t want to talk in my parents’ house, where I was visiting for Thanksgiving, so I grabbed my phone, got into my mom’s car and drove. I drove to the south side of Reston, which is the older side, or at least the side on which fewer new development is occurring. It is also the older side of Reston as far as my own life history is concerned. I grew up on this side of the Dulles Access road, in a neighborhood called Boston Ridge, in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac.

I crossed the Access road and turned left on Sunrise Valley Drive and as I approached Boston Ridge, I decided to turn in. It was dark. There aren’t that many streetlights in Reston. Boston Ridge was built in the late 1970s in the middle of old forest and the place is still thick with trees. It was late November and the road was strewn with dead leaves which clumped in piles in the gutters where cars had scattered them.

I pulled up in front of our house, which, of course seemed small to me now. I sat there and looked at it for probably less than three minutes, enough time to notice the same brass pineapple doorknocker which I remembered from childhood, which I remember using occasionally but mainly when hoisted to its height in the arms of my mom or dad. We moved out of this house when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I think at some point I had been back to this neighborhood since then, but I don’t remember it.

I pulled out of the parking space and spent a few minutes looking around, seeking with the headlights of the car a playground which had been, as I recalled it, hidden in the woods nearby. I could not find it. The trees were thicker than I remembered but everything else was diminished. The hills and rises—the gradient of the land—which seemed so troublesome to a kid on a bike now seemed insignificant.

I didn’t feel any sadness or nostalgia indulging in this sudden trip down memory lane. Perhaps it was the darkness. Boston Ridge was familiar to me in sunlight; when you’re a kid you don’t go out after dark. Viewed through the headlights of my mom's Volvo, the neighborhood looked familiar but in a somewhat generic way. Piles of leaves and bare trees, moreover, are intrinsically nostalgic anyway. Winter is just evocative for some reason; perhaps it's the attendant notion of death.

I drove on to the Langston Hughes Middle School where I went for seventh and eighth grades, and South Lakes High School, where I went for ninth and tenth before I convinced my parents—through unabashed pleading—to transfer me to Interlochen and thereby save my soul.

Or whatever. I did feel something as I sat in the parking lot in front of South Lakes and it was a profound sense of regret. What a privilege it is to be young, I thought, and relatively innocent. But I spent much of that youth being unduly hard on myself and on those around me. I was always looking for the next thing, the thing that I did not have, as though unattainability was itself a virtue. I’ve never been one to linger and I didn’t linger that night. The school is currently undergoing a major renovation and there were trailers and construction equipment everywhere. But I didn’t stop to look around. I didn’t even get out of the car.

Strike One

Here’s what the writers strike is like, for those of you who were wondering. It’s festive. Outside CBS Studios in Studio City, a Gatorade truck pulls up and delivers bottles for free to picketers. On Veterans Day, writers brought their children to the picket line. If you approach these strikers you will hear, mixed in with the chants, the unmistakable murmur of gossiping and, yes, networking. For those on the ground, the strike seems to be about, as much as anything, the rare chance in this impenetrable city to see people outside in large groups.

This is not to say that the strike isn’t being taken seriously. If there’s something a little unreal about the middle-class marchers enjoying their free food outside the studio gates, the fearful undertone of murmured conversations in Hollywood coffeeshops is real indeed. In fact, no matter where you go, it's difficult to escape discussion of the strike. Everyone, including people uninvolved in the industry, is talking about it, because in LA everyone is ultimately involved in the industry. Some of these conversations are amusing. When you overhear gas station attendants and maintenance men discuss residuals, you feel like you’ve learned something about the character of Hollywood.

My reaction to the strike can be characterized as mild dismay. As fate would have it, I arrived in Los Angeles on the very day that talks between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down and hours before writers “walked off the job.” This was not the full-steam-ahead start I’d hoped for in Hollywood.

It has not, however, been uninteresting. One learns, among other things, how begrudgingly close the filmmaking community actually is. It is, in fact, a little like attending a large university, with Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter as the student newspapers. Gossip flies, even among friends of mine I’d never suspected were privy to much insider information. They aren’t really, of course; it’s just impossible not to overhear certain things. Four people, for instance, assured me within days of the strike’s initiation that on the last day of talks the writers and producers “were really close” to a deal.

“They came very close,” one friend said, “and then everything fell apart.”

Another friend told me, “You know, they nearly made a deal and then it fell apart.”

Later, when I found myself speaking with someone else about the strike, I made my own contribution to the narrative.

“You know,” I said, “Apparently, they were really close to making a deal before things fell apart.”

“That’s right,” my friend nodded sagely. “They were really close.”

I felt like I’d learned a lesson not only about how word gets around in the entertainment industry, but also about how to appear like you’re a part of things when you’re really not. And, at this point, I, of course, am decidedly not. Not that I’d necessarily hoped to be “above the line” within two weeks of setting up shop, but when the walk-out was announced, it was as though I could see my prospects visibly dim. The longer the strike goes on, the longer it will take the industry to recover once the strike is ended. And that, I assure you is not simply the popular line that I’m regurgitating.

Thankfully, today it was announced that the warring parties have agreed (much earlier, it should be noted, than many had anticipated) to go back to the table. This comes within days of the announcement that Local One, the Broadway stagehands guild that’s also currently striking, and the League of American Theatres and Producers have decided to start negotiating again. It’s too early to tell, but perhaps this won’t be the winter of our discontent after all.

Tour Americana! Part Three (The West)

I arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona as the sun was setting and after finding a motel on Route 66, I headed downtown to get a drink. I gave myself a quick walking tour and then ducked into one of the many sports bars and I sat at the bar and read The New York Times on my iPhone.

It got dark early and when it did it became very cold. Although the high temperature that day had been in the 60s, the low dipped down to around 28 degrees, which I thought was delightful. Downtown there was a mixed crowed of college students and retirees on the streets. There was a large number of high schoolers as well and they gathered at the town square to hear a local band play. It was too cold for me to linger, though, so I kept walking.

Flagstaff has a city ordinance that keeps its streets dark at night as a courtesy to the Lowell Observatory, which is nearby. The darkness seemed to enhance the coldness which, combined with the town’s frontier architecture and nearby alpine mountains, made me feel more like I was in Alaska than Arizona. I liked Flagstaff a lot.

My mother’s parents met in Flagstaff, incidentally, but I don’t know much about the circumstances and I don’t know if they ever returned.

All the motels are located along the northern side of Route 66. Railroad tracks run parallel to the southern side, and if you stay in one of the motels, prepare to have your sleep interrupted at irregular intervals by the thumping of machinery and the high shriek of the conductor’s horn. Katherine, when I was talking with her on the phone that evening, asked me what the noise was. “You can hear that?” I asked.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into town for breakfast. I looked at the map and saw how close I was and determined that I would make it all the way to Los Angeles that day. I was on the road a little after eight.

Arizona along Interstate 40 is a mostly flat and barren desert and after a few hours I was getting bored. I decided, without much forethought, to take a detour. A few miles south of Kingman, I pulled off the Interstate and got on Route 66.

The glory days of this storied highway are long past but I am pleased to report that it lives on in the hearts and minds of many a bearded motorcyclist and they were pretty much my only company on the lonely two-lane road. The pavement itself is narrow and cracked. There is no shoulder. Its two lanes, one in either direction, aren’t very commodious even for a motorcycle, and my Cadillac felt like a quarterback in a laundry chute as it thundered down the road.

It started out as flat and dull as the Interstate. I had been hoping for some roadside attractions, like a diner or a gas station, but there was nothing. There were some pretty serious mountains up ahead but they didn’t impress me much. I was looking for signs of life.

It was boring and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The road, which had been straight as a rod, became more curvaceous and irregular. Then, very quickly, it became impossible. Without realizing quite how I got there, I found myself hugging the side of a mountain and terrified for my life. There was no quardrail. The highway seemed to have become narrower and it curved at ninety, one-fifty, and nearly one-eighty degree angles every hundred yards. I could barely manage five miles an hour. Any faster and I would plunge to the most pointless death imaginable.

Moreover, I was alone. The motorcyclists had long since passed me and I was now on my own. There were few roadsigns but those I saw mentioned a town called Oatman which was about five miles away.

They were surely the longest five miles I had ever driven. Route 66 was horrifyingly switchback the entire way. Moreover, as I was driving west, I had the privilege of being on the edge of the mountain rather than the inside. Even though there seemed to be no one on the road, I could hardly straddle the lanes since every few yards I was rounding a corner into god-knows-what. I sweated through my shirt and sat on the edge of the seat and after forty minutes or so I traversed the hellish five miles.

And then I arrived at Oatman. It basically meant rounding a corner and then finding myself in the company of aged motorcycle anarchists and their sunburnt women, Arizona mountain men, bearded survivalists, and packs of burros roaming the street.

Oatman is an old mining town that began as a tent camp in 1915. Aside from the t-shirts and touristy knick-knacks, not much seemed to have changed since its founding. I got out of my car and walked around, careful to avoid the burro shit clumped along the street. There were leathery motorcycle geezers everywhere, drinking beer at two in the afternoon. The largest—and oldest—structure in town is the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard improbably honeymooned (he liked to gamble with the old prospectors).

I stayed for a little while and took a few pictures. It was a strange experience. The town is literally in the middle of a mountain, nestled between peaks. Its eastern approach had been treacherous, and its appearance suddenly along the road had been startling. And welcome—I was glad to simply see some other living humans.

The rest of Route 66 as I took it leading back to the Interstate was mercifully straight—or at least manageably so. It took me less than an hour to reach the California boarder, in a town called Needles. I stopped there and put some gas in the car and thundered on toward the coast.

Tour Americana! Part Two (Little Rock)

My mother spent a portion of her childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, but when I stopped there around noon on November 1st, I was unable to locate the street she lived on. She had told me it was near the Governor’s Mansion, which I did manage to find—a modest two-story Colonial behind a wrought-iron fence in an otherwise iffy neighborhood. She also remembered that it was close to Little Rock Central High School, which she said she remembered well, although she did not go to school there. Then again, anyone, I would suspect, who lived through the 1950s in America, remembers this school. It was here that the 1954 Supreme Court integration mandate from Brown vs. Board of Education ignited a firestorm of southern bigotry. In September 1957, nine black students arrived to enroll at Little Rock Central High, but were met by an angry mob determined to resist integration. Eventually, the threat of violence swelled to such a point that the students were sent home.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, as righteously indignant as he was ornately named, wasn’t much help. He sided with the segregationists, who, determined to block the black students’ entry, had set up camp in front of the school. Governor Faubus sent in the police—not to disperse them, but to augment their numbers. The next day, at the request of Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann, President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school. At the same time, the President federalized the entire state’s National Guard force, effectively taking it out of Governor Faubus’ hands.

The students were enrolled and did attend classes that year, during which they were the victims of their white classmates’ racist calumny and occasional violence. Meanwhile, the protests from Little Rock Central High’s parents continued. By the end of the year, the Little Rock School Board—with the support of Governor Fabulus and the Arkansas State Legislature—decided to cancel classes for the entire next year rather than integrate the schools. Eventually, further court decisions forced the School Board’s hand, and classes were reopened in 1959—and begrudgingly integrated.

The school itself, it should be noted, was constructed in 1927 and is outlandishly beautiful—and immense. Its entrance is reached by two grand, mirrored stairways, which rise above a series of Italian archways, and a small reflecting pool. The building is triangular in shape, with twin two-story wings jutting outward as you face its front. Its size is all the more astonishing in the neighborhood of modest one- and two-story houses in which it sits. Across the street is a new museum, run by the National Park Service, which tells the story of the Little Rock Integration Crisis and honors the “Little Rock Nine,” as the black students who integrated the school came to be known. The museum opened just over a month ago, in September 2007.

Tour Americana! Part One

Last week I drove from my parents’ house in northern Virginia to Los Angeles. The trip took six days and covered about 2,700 miles and seven states. I started on Tuesday, October 30 around noon. Earlier in the day, I’d stopped at my mother’s sixth grade class to say goodbye to her. She introduced me to her students and told them that I was moving to Los Angeles which, I was disappointed to note, didn’t seem to impress them very much. We hugged, and one of the students asked my mom if she was going to cry. She didn’t, as far as I could tell, and in any case, in about an hour I was on Interstate 80, heading west.

In Roanoke, Virginia, I stopped at a Triple-A travel office where I was given several heavy bags full of books and maps. The agent I spoke with asked me if I was driving alone. I told her I was. “So,” she said, “Do you have a job out there?” "No," I replied, "Not really,” as though there were varying degrees between having and not having a job. Maps in hand, I saddled up again and drove south to the town of Wytheville, Virginia, which is where I ended up spending the night.

I awoke the next morning to a frost and I used the plastic Kaplan ID, which I still carried in my wallet, to scrape the ice off my car. I stopped in at several Wytheville eateries, hunting for breakfast, but in each, the stench of cigarettes and grease overwhelmed the appetite and I decided to wait until Knoxville to eat. Actually, the biggest struggle of my journey consisted in locating food. Driving the Interstate Highway system, one is presented with endless opportunities to gorge on fried mystery meat of questionable nutritional value. I became obsessed, as never before, with finding fresh fruit and vegetables. In Knoxville, I found a brewery downtown where I was served pasta and beer and that was about as good as it got.

There was something strange about Tennessee, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. In the brewery, for instance, they were playing John Carpenter slasher films at two in the afternoon. When I stopped at Nashville later in the day, I encountered several odd characters walking the streets, and in a downtown coffee shop I was served by a suspicious-looking man in a comically oversized cowboy hat. Something was going on here but I was dazed from driving and hardly knew what day it was, let alone that it was Halloween.

Downtown Nashville was dead at five o’clock, which suited me fine. I walked around for about an hour, took some photographs and moved on. This was pretty much what it was like the whole trip. Most of the cities I visited were moderate in size—in any case, much smaller than New York, of course, and getting into the center of them and then getting back out proved to be pretty simple. I could usually manage a quick survey in about an hour or two and finding a place to park was never hard. The density in these places was largely confined to a few square miles, and all of the cities were well-served by freeways, so entry and escape never included the stop-and-go misery that’s de rigueur in New York.

After Nashville, I drove on for another hundred miles or so until I came to Jackson, Tennessee, where I found a cheap motel room. Finding affordable motels was usually easy, especially as I only had two criteria to fill: 1) that the rooms don’t reek of cigarette smoke, and 2) that the hotel have Internet access. By the time I reached Jackson, I had crossed into Central Time, and it was eight o’clock in the evening. I ordered pizza and after a few hours was asleep.

Why I'm Moving To Los Angeles

Well, it’s not for the weather, that’s for sure. LA weather basically sucks in my opinion because it’s too goddamn nice out all the time. If I could I would move someplace like Manchester or Dublin or, ideally, one of the darker pits of hell where it’s perpetually gray, gloomy and rainy out and people huddle up over pints in old stone taverns and have a generally pale, miserable look about them. Southern California, by contrast, is cursed with a pathologically temperate climate, sandy beaches, and rows of imported palm trees and everyone there is expected to maintain a buff and bronzed glow, which falls somewhat short of my ideal appearance. For me, the iconic image is that of a man under cloudy skies, clad in hat and overcoat, with a beer in his hand, darkness in his soul, and a limp fag dangling from his lips. That is the man I would like to become. But, alas, I am translating myself—in more ways than one—to a foreign shore where the automobile is king and happiness is a house in the hills—hills which will tumble into the ocean one day, as sure as the sun will set.

Not that the sun ever really sets in SoCal, but you get the idea. I’ve allowed myself to be tempted by the lure of film and the limitless reach that it promises. It occurred to me when I was out there last that my friends who had done television but no theatre after college, are now considerably better positioned than I am to snag roles on the New York stage, despite the fact that I’ve actually done theatre here. It’s the way of the world, I guess, and it’s nothing I can really be angry about if I’m honest. Theatre is and always has been an iffy economic proposition and I can’t really blame producers if they feel they require the ballast that “stars,” however dim, can provide. It’s not a great system artistically, but it does make a certain amount of economic sense—again, hard to argue with. Similarly, I find it eminently understandable—even laudable—that a Juilliard degree matters only marginally to the LA casting director, where to the NY casting director it’s the golden ticket. There’s a certain mischievous logic in this. Why should four years of Suzuki training and Alexander technique be a prerequisite for a guest spot on Scrubs? In this way, Hollywood seems a bit more egalitarian than the New York theatre world, currently in the throes of its MFA-worshipping phase. In Los Angeles your vowels will not save you; credential yourself up as you will, it’s still tough for everyone.

The matter of the weather, of course, will resolve itself and I may even grow to like it, but I wouldn’t count on it and in any case I’m going to seriously miss walking. But it’s time to move on. As Joan Didion put it in her mournful essay about switching coasts, “Goodbye To All That,” “I began to understand . . . that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” This essay was written in 1967 when Didion was 33, but I don’t feel like I have a head start on her. After all, she’d lived in California before, so, for her, this was a return. It will all be new to me, of course, and that’s fine and I have friends out there and I’m resourceful, so I should be okay. But I can’t escape the feeling that moving to New York felt like such an accomplishment—like storming the gates somehow. And moving to LA feels like . . . just moving anywhere, really. Here’s some more Didion:

“Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.”

“Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited.”

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.”

And there you have it. A 27 year-old shouldn’t find himself besieged by thoughts of mortality, at least not with any regularity. And while the number itself—twenty-seven—seems improbably high to me as I utter it, I can hardly say that I feel old. But I do not exactly feel young, either. I don’t know if New York is a city so much for the young, as Didion suggests, as it is for the romantic (a temperament which, for some, may only seem attainable by the young). Well, I suppose I’m feeling a little less sentimental these days, a little more hard-nosed. New York has toughened me up, I guess. And, not without gratitude, I will now say goodbye.

Where I Live Now

Moving is such an unbelievable pain in the ass. By the end of this week, give or take a few days, I will be out of New York for good, which, although I’m doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with the city per se, still feels like a betrayal. And I’m really gonna miss my house, a completely illegal NYC real estate anomaly that I landed in by pure happenstance, the details of which I will withhold for the sake of my housemates. (Yeah, Aubergine!) Suffice it to say we lucked out big time, those of us fortunate enough to set up camp in that huge old manse in Morningside Heights.

The house has been compared by many visitors to the one featured in The Royal Tenenbaums, and it bears a similarity. It is full of books, old furniture, and unexpected nooks and crannies (there are multiple rooms I've never been in), and it has a bright color scheme. (Furthermore, many of its residents, like the characters of that movie, seem to have a suspiciously large amount of time on their hands.) My room is on the second floor, overlooking the stoop. When I arrived, I spent the first three days of my tenancy painting it dark green and removing a spidery light sculpture that its previous resident had screwed to the wall. The radiator’s clang kept me up at night, but I fixed that, and once I had my bed, my couch and my books set up, I felt at home. It hasn't all been blissful and rosy, but it's certainly been affordable. Again, I won’t go into the details of the place, but I will say that some of the bedrooms are double the size of some one-bedroom apartments in this city and, by New York standards, we pay practically nothing. I mean, really, why the fuck am I leaving this place?

By comparison, I expect LA to be pretty pricey, and I know I'll have a lot of miscellaneous expenses to look forward to that I never had to deal with in NYC, from gas to health insurance to minor plastic surgery and teeth whitening (when in Rome, etc). Nevertheless, it feels like the right thing to do. I'm ready to be a little more ambitious. Oh, and I think the cross-country drive will be fun. It promises the chance to see the London Bridge in Arizona (I’m not making this up) and I'll be able to catch up on my podcast listening (unfortunately, I’m not making that up either). Ultimately, it's the opportunity to do film that’s really the impetus behind the move. Otherwise I never would decamp from the felicitous (cheap) housing arrangement I now enjoy. Whatever. I'm fine with it. Really, I am. I've no doubt the next few days will pass languidly, in a drunken stupor, enhanced by a slow motion slide-show of my life's possessions as they march slowly into a dozen cardboard boxes which will then be closed, taped, labeled and shipped to an undisclosed west coast address.

I’m looking forward to experiencing my first earthquake.

One more thing about the house. Last night Dave divulged its final secret to me. While we crossed Fifth Avenue and 13th Street, I asked him how much the current rent is for the whole house. He told me the number; I asked him to repeat it and he did. I was then promptly hit by a flatbed truck and declared dead.

Ten Reasons Why I’m Thinking About Taking Up Smoking

1. Anxiety. Mainly about my own life and the directions it may or may not take, but other sources that contribute heavily include: the 2008 Presidential Election, NYC congestion pricing, supply-side economics, the Electoral College, Internet piracy, faith-based education, flash floods, and urban blight. Although puffing on a cancer-stick is hardly the same as popping a Xanax, it’s certainly cheaper and it doesn’t need a prescription. Furthermore, nicotine’s adrenaline rush would be a nice counter-balance to the depressive effects of my daily martini, making my evening disposition slightly less apocalyptic.

2. It Gives You Something To Do With Your Hands. This actually isn’t that much of a problem with me. I’m an actor so I’m pretty good at figuring out what to do with my hands (don’t saw the air too much!) Nevertheless, every once in awhile you do find yourself at a bit of a loss, either due to an awkward conversation or general nervousness in front of others. In cases like these, often a simple mechanical task would do the trick and lighting up is as simple as it gets. It’s considerably cooler than stuffing your hands down your pants and jiggling your change with one hand and adjusting your underwear with another.

3. Fire Is Cool. Well? Fire is cool, and if you don’t believe me, set something ablaze and tell me you don’t see the poetry in it. Me, I like to listen to the cigarette paper crackle and watch the tobacco smolder like a piece of burning coal. Lighting the cigarette is cool too, whether with a match or a Bic. Cup your hand against the wind and watch the flame lean into the end of the cigarette like a white-hot river encircling a piece of driftwood. Suck in the oxygen, light up, and inhale. There’s nothing like holding a bright-red glowing nub close to your lips to make you feel one with the elements.

4. Smoke Is Cool. Truer words have never been spoken, unless they were spoken by a mouth emitting smoke. What is it about smoke, anyway? It is essentially dirty air, waste matter dissipating itself into the oxygen we breathe. And yet it has a beguiling presence, billowing from the mouth, the nostrils, and expelled into the air like a cloud. One’s face is always more mysterious and appealing behind a smokescreen, and when smoke is released in an airless room, it rises in seductive circles and vanishes like a ghost. Poetry, people!

5. It Pisses People Off. Smoking’s also great because it pisses a lot of people off, which is always a worthy goal. Talk about huffing and puffing! Yank the chain of the feverish anti-smoking contingent and prepare yourself for a barrage of self-righteous vituperation. This is first-rate fun, I say. The only drawback is, despite their self-satisfied shrillness, they’re usually right. Smoking, as they say, “kills.” But, whatever! Light up on a weekday afternoon in front of an elementary school and watch the ensuing hijinks!

6. It Forces You to Go Outside. I wouldn’t have thought that this would be a big selling point for me, considering that I live in New York City and I’m outside all the time (To those of you tree-licking outdoorsy environmentalists tsk-tisking at the city slickers in their unnatural asphalt jungles, consider this: we don’t have cars and we do a lot more “hiking” probably than you do just getting to work. Think about it.) Nevertheless, it is appealing to be engaged in a task that forces you, by and large, to just be outside—not walking or sitting on a park bench, but just to stand there and get some damn air and appreciate things, dammit. And smoke.

7. Smoking Looks Cool. Yeah, so, smoking looks cool, obviously, or Humphrey Bogart wouldn’t have done it and neither would have James Dean, both the coolest movie stars ever, Q.E.D.

8. Politicians Don’t Smoke. Except for Obama, and he’s basically quit, thus further inhabiting the role of a “bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” that Joe Biden cast him in. Otherwise, this is a big check in the “pros” column as far as I’m concerned. The fact that none of the smarmy, hypocritical, K-Street-funded asswads on Capital Hill have the balls to light up a Satan stick and suck in some tar proves that smoking has something going for it.

9. It Would Anger My Parents. A delicate point this, as they will no doubt one day read this blog entry. Nonetheless, with apologies to the folks that set me going, this final point still retains some residual adolescent appeal. Hey, my parents are great people and as such they never really gave me reason to piss them off, a lost opportunity that still stings. Here then is my chance finally for some pointless, angsty rebellion. Cocaine’s a little pricey, and kind of illegal, and heroin involves needles, which hurt. Smoking would be just the way to piss off my folks a little bit—but not so much that they would disown me.

10. We’re All Gonna Die From Global Warming Anyway. It’s happening faster than even Al Gore says! There were melting ice floes on the North Pole this summer and last week was the hottest in October in New York since the Dutch set up tent! I’m giving it fifty, sixty years tops. In the meantime, you can find me in Siberia, purchasing land and rolling coffin nails with happy Slavic shepherds. Peace out.