I have 6,178 emails in my main AOL account and about 500,000 emails clogging my Yahoo account(mostly because of Facebook updates every millisecond). I had planned on semi-reading my 3,000 emails almost half a year ago but I did not, so here I am with a shitload of emails. Most of them are from Jagger Kaye's casting calls for film and theatre work. The last time I went to an audition or applied for an audition was nearly two years ago when I was still eager to audition in CUNY schools and unfamiliar rehearsal spaces in between my classes and homework (mostly in summer actually). I think about why I haven't returned to acting. It is because I want to focus on my music and allow myself time to go busking. If I returned to auditioning I would have to return to a mindset for acting and be my dramatic self and memorize monologues, etc. This sounds brutal and more vexing than busking. Busking is more accessible and feasible because I can do it whenever I want and I don't have to be screened in front of strangers who call themselves film directors or student filmmakers. I remember a few months ago Liz wanted me to be in her webseries; I had enlisted to help her recruit actors and find locations for filming but I teetered with my word and did not keep it. The idea ended up sliding off the plate and so did ideas she wanted to flower when we met up at John Jay steps half a year ago. I seemed to have lot sight of her projects and veered away from helping her. This is because I turned my back on film and I acknowledge what I told Thomas half a year ago which was that I gave up on film and acting. It seems that I am fully honoring this pseudo-lie and turning it into reality. I have not returned to filmmaking because it is more of a risk than anything else, especially financial risk I have noticed in a small project that failed over two years ago. I had hired Alan Lawless to be my cinematographer and Christina Raia to be my assistant director. For three weeks I played main character to Serena, a friend I met at a Chinatown audition, and alongside a male actor who beat me up a few times enough to attract attention from 62nd Street drivers. That was an indelible scene in Thomas's mind especially because he witnessed the whole thing and he tried to placate the drivers who thought I was being beat up by Betim for real. These memories were fond and benign but the worst part was the money I owed Christina and Alan, for they traveled all the way from upstate and New Jersey to help me. All I compensated them was a pizza pie after at least five shoot days. They became livid and walked off the project which they had hopes for in the beginning but it only dwindled when they realized that I was not treating them with respect and compensating them respectfully. However in the season of complimenting, I am very happy that Christina got her film successfully funded and she will be shooting her first horror film in a few months. My donations to her are a way of reparations for the time and effort she spent on my project a few years ago. It was the least I could do.
I remember I promised John that I would seek roles for him, but I stopped reading my casting calls and I wonder if he ever signed up for casting calls and notices. After his internship at Warner Brothers record label I believe he disappeared off the face of Facebook again, or maybe because I did not communicate with him at all, I have no clue what he's really up to. The fondest memory of working alongside John was when we worked on a short improvised drama called Deep Creek almost three years ago on the coldest, most iciest day of the winter. I treated my small crew Chrissi and Marina to Burger King hot chocolate as we treaded our way into an unmarked wooded territory west of Home Depot. This stretch of land was where I shot Back For my Brother with the brothers Frank and Vito six or seven years ago during the infancy of my filming days. The brothers called the land "the trails." I remember at first I was extremely paranoid and fearful that someone would rat us out or even kill us, but the brothers ascertained me that they had traveled there many times and that nothing would happen. I suppose peer pressure took over one way or another and we made a half hour excursion deep into the trails. There was one moment when we thought that someone had entered with us and spotted us, but it was false alarm when we started to run out as fast as we could. Being a paranoid kid I was I almost turned the situation into a huge fiasco and failure. The trails was a place for risk and hidden danger especially if one cannot find their way back out and forever be lost inside its bushy, branchy twists and turns. But this is nothing compared to the wooded land next to Dyker Park near the B1 and B64 bus (now these bus numbers have switched). Six years ago I went in with a group of kids I met at the park and we filmed a five minute scene about peer pressure. The characters finally buried my character in the woods. The film ended up being on Youtube for no more than a few months on my initial Youtube channel, but I grew tired of its lameness within half a year and moved on to greater script ideas rather than just teen peer pressure/bad boy/Brooklyn gangsterness themes. John and I exploited the idea of peer pressure and shot Deep Creek where his character enlists my character to dispose of a dead body into the trails area called Deep Creek. But after I start to freak out and decide to tell the police he runs me over with his car. I suppose my earliest days of filming go way back seven or eight years to my freshmen year of Dewey when I ventured into the abandoned hospital with Frank, Vito, and Ian. I believe I still have footage of our sporadic ambulatory trip on my old hard drive. We did plan out the trip actually a few days in advance; we knew that we would not get caught because other teens had already snuck in and all they saw were bums and possible casual drug addicts. I was afraid that there would be murderers lurking inside or other people who would harm us. But all I saw was darkness, graffiti, old furniture, and steel beams and columns. I was relieved when I saw daylight on the second and third floor. The roof was the most boring and scariest because of heights and structural damage fear. But all of this light was achieved only after passing through the first floor which was pitch black and boarded up. So our five minutes of fumbling in the dark nearly gave me the chills. When we tried to find our way out on the first floor we heard a sound and we ran to the exit as fast as we could and never looked back.
I don't understand where my passion went; I reflect on my earliest days of filmmaking and I want to recapture, refeel that sense of commitment and yearning to capture events on film. I want to relive that energy and vivacious spirit that I embodied so well before I was rekindled with music and before I started solely acting in my own films. Whatever that energy was and wherever it came from, I know that it was pure and forwardlooking, unlike the lack of passion that I experience now. To be clear, I think the lack of passion for performing has become a blend of frustration and negative association. I am fully frustrated because I am not getting my fifteen minutes of fame other than in the subway station. I have been complimented numerous times that I think I deserve to be on stage somewhere famous like the Bowery Ballroom, but then I look at myself and I know that I have no followers and no fans that really remember me. I am not popular or good, for if I was, I would be making more than fifty to six dollars a day; my box would fill up with dollar bills and even twenties by the hour, but the cash only trickles in. It does vary according to the day and time, but still, I feel that if I was incredibly good I would be able to garner a lot more money than I am making now. In addition to the pentup frustration, I have a negative association with busking. Busking indicates the economic drive to make money is relevant and attached to playing guitar. Busking is a form of work for me now especially because I count the hours I play my guitar and how many days I visit the station. These amount of hours I work and the amount I make by the end of the day only cause me to associate busking with work. Work is always negative to me because of manifold horror stories shared by my friends, homeboy, and homegirl alike. They all tell me that work sucks. Once I involuntarily make the association between busking and work I start to enjoy busking less and I begin to see it as work, pure work to accrue capital. This causes me to lose sight of my passion and I begin to see playing guitar and singing as work, as something less desirable and more bodily-demanding and more emotionally-taxing especially after a twelve-hour long day has absorbed the vitality from my body and the support from my legs.
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