Shame Of The Talk

Posted October 12th, 2005 by Sean Williams

It’s easier for a mind like mine to divide the world into bivalent camps. I don’t mean only the types of people or types of approaches to the world, although I certainly do mean that to a degree. But there is also the actions that all types of people take. And the massive problem to this way of looking at the world is pretty clear, I don’t really have to even say, but just to make sure that I am saying what I mean to say, the problem with this binary view of the world is that even if you find a way to set up only two camps, people keep switching between them, and are often in both at the same time, so it’s essentially useless.

Except when it isn’t, which is in any kind of discussion of theory, be it political or artistic or, I don’t know, mathematic. I mean, obviously in basic math, things either are or they aren’t, but the moment you get into real life applications of math, shit falls apart, and the same can be said in political theory. Is the right really up in arms about Bush’s nomination for the court? Or are they *saying* they’re up in arms so that she will be confirmed? Who knows. I don’t get to vote on it, and all you fuckers who voted for Bush thinking that your civil liberties would be protected are gonna be marching with me when Roe gets overturned and I’m gonna get to say I told you so, and really, that’s all I want out of life.

Artistic theory is the place where I find that I get the most use out of creating simply yes or no situations, where I can either embrace or disregard something simply. If I can start large, and then work my way down, then I can get to useful answers for myself. I spoke the other day about the actor serving the work and the work serving the actor, the artist vs. the careerist, and that’s a useful thing for me because it allows me to feel all high and mighty when actually what I’m doing is not calling the right people and hassling them to cast me in a commercial.

The real problem I have is that this blog is a big hindrance to me being able to do the things I want to do. It’s either/or situation. Those who talk about how things should be done vs. those who do the right things. I’m a big fucking talker, and it’s that aspect of my life that I am both ashamed of and seem to be powerless to do anything about.

Yesterday, at rehearsal, I had one of those moments of profound shame, and I trace it back to wasting time on writing blogs and discussing theory. Where most people look at their own fat and feel like it is a testimony to their laziness, I look at bad acting and dropped lines as a complete lack of discipline. When a moment comes and goes, when I chose an easy path or fall into a trick or, God help me, if I panic and don’t know where I am in a script, I just want to fucking die.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, despite the fact that I spent hours working on my script this morning I do have to come to terms with the fact that I spent hours working on it over the last two weeks and I still lost it in rehearsal yesterday and fell apart so completely that I had to actually look at the script to know what the lines were. And I’m writing this blog, the twenty minutes I’m spending writing this blog, I could be spending running the lines from the scene I totally fucked up yesterday.

But if I am going to write this blog, then I’m gonna write it, and if I can stand before you and claim that careerists don’t know how to make a good performance, then I will also stand before you and say, yesterday, the careerists were way fucking better than I was, and for all I know, when the show happens, it may be exactly the same. The people with the polished resumes and mailing lists might actually be better actors if I spend all my time talking shit about their resumes and mailing lists.

Plus, I have a great resume and a whopping mailing list. Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m drawing lines that will make me feel better, as if to say “the brown hair and brown eyes I have are what make me special, compared to George Clooney and Salma Hayek”. It’s bullshit, and I’m just calling myself out real quick before I swallow my disgust and go back to my script.