Cowboy Confessional

Gawd, now I’m an actor. I’ll understand if you walk away shaking your head.

I spent last night playing a bit role in an independent film. The San Francisco area has slightly more independent film makers than it has homeless people (the primary difference between these two groups is that homeless people have higher annual incomes). Being loosely connected to an indy film fan group (I once dated the founder) I get all manner of borderline incoherent emails from regional indy fans.

The other day a surprising lucid email arrived from a director.

Maimone Attia is his name, and as best as I can tell he is composed in equal measure of jet fuel and Starbucks double espressos. His email called for extras to mingle in a party scene. This job sounded as if it required no skill whatsoever, and having sipped my way through a few thousand cocktail parties I figured I could do this by rote. Also, I have long wanted to witness the film making process, suspecting that film directors need the combined talents of a touchy-feely psychiatrist, a mad scientist, and a concentration camp social activities coordinator.

I discovered my preconceptions about directors were fairly accurate.

As Maimone and his two-man production crew set the frame, he described the scene to all us extras. He then asked me my name, pointed to a spot on the floor and informed me that I would have lines to read. This caught me a bit by surprise, and I hid my reaction like a cat hides its … well, perhaps that analogy is too precise. Evidently the lines were so simple that Maimone assumed even I could pull it off.

This was not type casting. When shooting a low budget indy film with volunteer extras, you can’t be too picky when casting. So there I was — a southern-born ex-cowboy and former computer jockey — suddenly playing the role of a Shakespearean actor at a cast party following a production of King Lear (the one bit of Shakespeare I despise more than a cattle rustler running for office).

To act like an actor I had to develop an ego on the spot. This was not easy as I don’t have an ego of my own. My ex-wife won it as part of the divorce settlement. She wanted my testicles, but since I had long term plans for those, we negotiated. She got my ego and Satan now has deed to her soul.

Poor Satan. He doesn’t know the mess he has gotten himself into.

If you ever have the burning desire to act in a film, don’t. Working on a picture involves two terrible things: waiting and talking to actors. The waiting is endless as the director, grips, lighting technicians, audio engineers — all the job titles that you ignore during the credits — set the scene, argue the technology, change their minds, reset the scene, and repeat the process until out of sheer frustration an actors slaps the director into a neighboring zip code.

To kill time and the dull aches between your eyes, you’ll strike-up a conversation with any senseless item: a table, a flower pot, an actor. Don’t get me wrong. Actors are amusing people. It is their job. The downside is that to be a good conversationalist you talk about the interests of the other person, which gets actors talking about acting. Next a Barack Obama speech, there is no monologue on the planet seemingly more devoid of substance. I’m sure to a trained and experienced actor the nuances of their craft are fascinating. To an extra with an unanticipated field promotion, it had the same effect as qualudes but without the pleasant narcotic side effects.

(The exception to this rule about actors is my old pal Fred Ochs, a working thespian in L.A. Aside from being bloody good at his craft, he had a life before acting and thus has multiple tangents to his personality, making him delightful company despite his disreputable trade.)

So instead of listening to the actors, I told jokes instead. Think of it as return fire.

When a director has a budget, certain things are easier and faster. Modern cinematography equipment captures multiple digital camera and microphone feeds into a central server. This lets the director shoot a scene once (or twice if he is paranoid) and later edit all the different angles and sounds into a meaningful bit of entertainment.

When a director has no cash he must shoot the scene, move the camera, shoot the scene again, move the camera, shoot the scene again, move …. I think we shot one 20 second fragment of a single scene 1,320,147 times (that’s a guess, it might be more). Since nobody is being paid for their time on an indy film, time is the cheapest commodity involved and the one used in excess.

In this scene fragment I’m chatting with fellow “actors” at a cast party while the female lead is escorted up to us. I hug her friend (which given how damn cute she was made the 1,000 retakes the best part of the evening), make introductions, and wait for the male lead to stumble into frame. Sensing that a zillion takes might make my fellow extra-actors stale, I decided to ad lib different conversations with each take, inventing on the fly wild stories of stage productions gone horribly wrong. When the director shouted action (yes, they actually shout that) I would jabber something like “I was doing the graveyard scene from Hamlet, and Yorick’s jaw bone fell off, bounced off the stage and into the audience.”

If nothing else I kept part of the cast amused. Hmmmm. Maybe I’m devolving into an actor.

Film production and diaper changes are the two things devoid of reliable scheduling. The shoot was supposed to start at 6PM and finish by 10PM. It started somewhere around 8PM and lasted until midnight. The male lead had flown in that morning from Dallas, Texas. His bio-clock was convinced that it was actually 2AM by the time the director said it was “a wrap.” Despite endless takes, constant delays and a set where the air temperature rivaled Hades in July, the cast and crew kept their wits and humor about them, improvised everything (including putting a man with a boom mic under a dinning room table while nearly inserting it vaginally into the female lead) and we all managed to make believe without losing our collective minds. Well, the male lead may have lost his earlier that day while shooting a scene on location where he was to fall of a mountain. I trust he got stunt pay.

If anything ruins this movie it will be that that made us all dance. I may have some talent for writing and maybe even tune crafting. But rave dancing is not on my resume and nobody in their right mind should ask me to do so. Sadly, the unsightly horror of my dance moves are forever digitally captured, which no doubt means they will be the next laugh fest on YouTube.

Acting, dancing … I think I’ll stick to writing. It is less honest, more profitable, and a damn sight less annoying to the public.

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For a political party that talks constantly about unity, the Democrats seeming strive for divisiveness.

And there is a reason for it.

In the blood sport of American politics, Democrats clearly represent the worst aspects of democracy. Stripped of flowery rhetoric, democracy is merely organized mob rule whereby the tyranny of the majority subjugates and steals from the minorities. I have to give the Republicans half credit for retaining some slim adherence to the functioning of a republic and egalitarianism.

But only half credit. They too often err.

The recent sausage mill of Democrat intraparty politics has shown the divisions quite clearly, and the only aspect uglier than the divisions themselves are the naked pandering to various groups and the wholesale rule-changing that exaggerates the gulfs between the groups. It is like watching a herd of cattle stampede off a cliff …. in slow motion.

Yesterday, the Democrat National Committee (DNC) Rules Committee (out motto - “We don’t need no stinkin’ rules!”) decided to put Florida and Michigan back into play. Originally, the DNC decided to disqualify all Floridan and Michiganite votes because their state governments (not the state Democrat committees) had moved their respective election dates up in the calendar. The DNC Central Committee (for you readers who love the parallels between the Democrats and the Soviets) originally decided to not count votes of their own members because of the actions of state legislators, only of which was almost complete composed of Republicans.

Strike one against fairness.

Reinstatement is what the Clinton camp wanted because Hillary campaigned in both states, won votes in both states, and reinstatement would give her trailing campaign a boost. Funny that she didn’t care much about the fairness and “counting all the votes” early in the campaign when all pundits thought she would be coronated by acclimation. When Queen Hillary’s carriage did not come she sent her foot soldiers to storm the castle.

Naturally, the Obama campaign complained. Since they did not campaign in either Florida or Michigan, and even withdrew Obama from the ballots in Michigan, they knew reinstatement would work against them. So despite a complete lack of interest in running in those two states, the Obama camp demanded to get votes from both. In Florida this made sense since Obama got 59 delegate votes there … a might lower than Hillary’s 105. Michigan is a different horse. He wasn’t on the ballot in Michigan. He did not run, did not obtain a single vote, and thus did not earn a single delegate. So the DNC awarded Obama 59 delegates (46%) from Michigan for reason nobody could articulate.

Strike two against fairness.

Clinton apparatchik Harrold Ickes did offer an opinion of his own party leadership:

“I am stunned that we have the gall and the chutzpah to substitute our judgment for 600,000 voters.”

Michigan used to have a lot of manufacturing work. Now it has a lot of rust, and that rust is maintained by blue collar ex-workers. Many (including your humble commentator) note that blue collar Democrats dislike Obama, seeing him as an elitist. This is a clear demonstration of the wisdom of the common man. When the DNC shifted 46% of the blue collar’s votes to Obama without their permission, this widened yet another division in their party.

“I won’t cast my vote in the general election for the first time in my life, primary or general,” said Mike Grady, 53, a factory worker from Scranton, Pa. “I don’t understand why the DNC hasn’t received that message yet.”

When your own party members are sitting out an entire election cycle, you have problems. If this were not terrifying enough for the Democrats they may have created an unnecessary black/brown divide as well (and folks, this is the end result of having a national policy of anointing and rewarding one group over others).

Being a rather colorblind fellow, I hate race politics. Or class politics for that matter. But race politics is an amplification of existing race relations in America and how one party bribes one or more races. I’ll again give a nod to the Republicans. They may suffer the racism of utter indifference, but that is a damn sight better than the active racism of pitting one group against another — a Democrat expertise.

Strike three against fairness.

In the States, there is some friction between people of African decent (blacks) and those of Latin American decent (browns). I won’t detail these differences, but note that in most cases the friction comes from how politicians have pitted each race against the other by giving one or the other unfair legislative advantages. Hell, if the government said I would get less than my neighbor because of my skin color, I’d be annoyed too.

Thankfully I avoid interacting with government and thus I rarely suffer from their neglect.

Hillary understand the black/brown wedge. She swam over to Puerto Rico and campaigned there, knowing that the place is primarily populated with Latinos. It worked too as she swam back home with 2/3s of the Democrat vote. This will not win her enough delegates to take the party’s nomination, but it gives her a talking point for the party’s “super delegates”, the party chieftains who will ultimately decide everything … despite the popular vote, despite the delegate count, and despite any sense of propriety.

Strike four against fairness.

After bagging the Puerto Rican vote, Hillary said to the media and through them to the super delegates:

“Which candidate best represents the will of the people who voted in this historic election?”

Rephrased to remove ambiguity: “Are you going to give me the nomination and win the growing Latino vote, or let Obama win the nomination and lose to McCain in November?”

It is a calculated argument. Anyone who looks at demographics and attitudes comes to realize that Latinos tend to be on the conservative side of the spectrum, embracing basic liberties, strong family ties, and a solid work ethic. This also explains why Latinos enroll in the Republican party with regularity, a situation that has caused DNC chairman Howard Dean to continue screaming. Given a choice between Obama and McCain, Latinos would likely drift to the GOP in November. Hillary was trying to prove to super delegates that she could halt that tide. In other words, she is pitting her clout with Latinos against Obama’s connection to blacks.

Strike five against fairness.

This all assumes that a message of fairness doesn’t surface. Already the blogs on the left and right are hitting a fever pitch about the Libertarians and Bob Barr’s candidacy. And if Bob can wipe that dower expression off his mug, he might communicate the basic Libertarian message to these overly manipulated groups. The messages is namely “Less government results in less political favoritism, and is fairer to everybody.” The media is picking up on it and Barr is appearing on the Sunday news shows with some regularity, including this morning.

Letting a third party candidate get quality television coverage? That’s fair.

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