Marty Barrett: The Flight of the Mavervorl: September 2005

--9.30.2005--

Brilliant

This trailerizing of a very familiar movie emphasizes how big a part music plays in setting the mood of a film, and how Peter Gabriel must be terribly conflicted about how popular "Solsbury Hill" has become. Thanks to Steve and Mike.

****

Some wrath

My friend Wayne took this picture of his neighborhood in the northwest San Fernando Valley. "It's God's wrath, Wayne," I said. Luckily, he's a Buddhist.

Great bar, horribly indefensible name

--9.29.2005--

Rollin' in mah 6/4

Runyon Canyon is a park in the middle of the Hollywood Hills. I hiked it with my pal Alicia the other day. We took the unpaved part, and that made all the difference, for it smelled less like dogs.

In this week that marks my fifth anniversary in Los Angeles, it's fun to go to places in my adopted city that I haven't before. The park offers a steep hike capped by a great view of the city, the Valley, the Hollywood sign, and sports bras. We even saw a rattlesnake, but I think that had been placed there by Disney.

Two days before, I had gone to an event downtown and decided to drive home on surface roads. I took a wrong turn on Alameda and wound up in Compton at about 3 a.m. I'd never been to the City of Compton. I wanted some tacos. I looked around for a bank machine and, finding none, looked for one of those usurious gas station ATMs.

I pulled up to one gas station, got out of the car, and shapes moved from out of the shadows. Then I checked my posture and the shapes moved back into the shadows. This happened at the next gas station I stopped at, too. At both gas stations someone told me that "we don't let no one in" at that time of night.

It was sad. Maybe if I'd been let in to the gas station I wouldn't have been forced to jack the taco stand with my 9.

The Los Angeles of Tom Petty and Jackson Browne so rarely meets the Los Angeles of Dr. Dre. I am often called upon by the city to bridge that gap.

--9.24.2005--

Rear window

Today is the fifth anniversary of my move from Boston to Los Angeles. The drive across the country took eight days. It is also my late father's 85th birthday. It is also the first anniversary of my daughter's return from the hospital (she was in the ICU for two weeks after her birth).

As one gets older, it is inevitable that each day of the year will become more and more commemorative.

Rather than live in the past, I have decided to adopt the Plutonian calendar. A Pluto day is about six of ours, and it takes 248 terrestrial years for Pluto to make it around the sun. That way each day won't be so fraught with reflection.

--9.22.2005--

Chien Lunatique

The partner of one of my more likeable editors writes his blog, Sturtle (named for how Charles Nelson Reilly might say "turtle") from Lafayette, having been displaced from New Orleans. These two lived in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, where I once got lost during one of my three visits to N.O. in the early nineties.

It's just one of what I bet are hundreds of survivor's blogs, but the only blog of someone I'm somewhat connected to. Its post-Katrina posts are especially touching.

But since I don't actually know him, looking at his blog entries seems like poking through his private stuff. I'm sure I'll get over it.

--9.19.2005--

My daughter is an American Apparel ad

(not really, but she's wearing socks.)

***

Mano Penolo

So what the realtor didn't tell us when we moved in was that someone had been brutally murdered in the apartment downstairs. I found that out from my brain-damaged tattoo artist neighbor, the guy who calls me "the night stalker."

"Lady stabbed her husband to death on Halloween night. He was a nice guy, too," he said. Then: "My wife is white, too, so it's OK."

"Halloween, 2004?" I asked, getting him back on the subject.

"Yeah," he said. "And the people who lived in your apartment liked to sleep in coffins."

Awesome.

Anyway, the apartment below us stayed vacant for about a month after we moved in. Then TAARG announced one day that a serial killer had rented it.

"Why is he a serial killer?" I asked.

"Just the way he acts," she said.

It turns out he wasn't a serial killer, but instead grew up in Billerica, MA, about five miles away from where I did. Ian quickly proved that he was anything but a serial killer. In fact, he's the first neighbor since David Grupper I have ever been friends with. Apartment living just doesn't lend itself to that sort of thing, for some reason.

Ian heard about his apartment's grisly history from some local kids who offered to help carry boxes the day he moved in. "Somebody died in here," they said, pointing to a spot in his living room.

"Awesome," he said.

So Ian is moderately worried when the wind blows shut a door or something is in a different place than it was the day before, but he doesn't freak out. And he comes up every now and then to drink Jagermeister and watch movies on the wall.

I have a projector hooked up to my stereo and DVD player. The sound is great. As Joe Piscopo said in Johnny Dangerously, "It shoots through schools."

When I have the sound turned up and Ian is downstairs, sometimes he will knock on our door and ask us to turn it down. This happens rarely, as he is usually upstairs with us.

But the other night we had the sound up and I heard a banging on the wall downstairs. I turned down the sound and the banging stopped. I called Ian the next day to apologize.

"I wasn't home," he said. (He had been in North Hollywood with an ex-girlfriend.)

Well, as Halloween draws nearer, Ian is getting more and more concerned. "Are you sure it was from my apartment?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied, and was hesitant to add, "and it sounded like it was coming from your bedroom."

"And it wasn't the shades?"

"No." Unless he meant "the shades" in an Edgar Allen Poe sense.

Ian is very kind to the neighborhood kids, Brian and Carlos, whom I've no patience for. They long ago learned to never come up the stairs to my apartment, but they will bang on Ian's door until he gives them cookies. He's a kinder person than I am. Yesterday I was working upstairs and I heard some of the neighbor kids come by.

About twenty minutes later, Ian came to my door and said, "What I'm about to tell you is wicked weird."

Brian and Carlos came by and, in between tracking dirt into Ian's living room and trying to play with his computer, said, "Sometimes when you're gone there's a light on in your bedroom."

(This is one of the reasons I don't let those kids in the house - when Ian doesn't answer his door they knock on his bedroom window.)

I asked Ian at this point if he ever tries to avoid them by not answering the door and retreating to his bedroom. I know people who do that.

"No," he said. "And then they said, 'We saw a woman dancing in your bedroom.'"

As has already been established, Ian goes to North Hollywood for that sort of thing.

"'And then we heard El Mano Penolo.'"

"What's that?" Ian asked.

"'The heavy hand.'"

I am not relating my recent spate of horror movie-worthy nightmares to this. Nor, after a quick Google search on that name revealed there is a popular Mexican (Brian and Carlos' parents are Mexican and don't choose to speak English) radio show called El Mano Penolo dealing with scary topics, am I moved to exorcize the house.

But it is interesting that I, too, heard a heavy hand.

*****

TAARG was the model for the heavy hand in the photo. I give her full credit for her model duties. If investors ever ask for my original artwork, I will make sure she gets a huge chunk of the money.

--9.18.2005--

Here's an Irish journalist's interview with Sir Paul McCartney

It's pretty good, and full of U.K.isms.

--9.16.2005--

Dial M for Xmas

Here is the graphic for my show in Boston in December.

--9.15.2005--

Promotion pt. II

Various legal scholars have chimed in (The Flight of the Mavervorl is required reading in the halls of American jurisprudence, particularly for its insights into Jaws and Ronnie James Dio) to say that both Earl Warren and Warren Burger, the two Chief Justices immediately preceding William Rehnquist, were nominated and sworn in to their executive posts without ever having been an Associate Justice. That the Warren Commission report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy advanced the idea of a "magic bullet" is probably incidental.

In fact, out of the sixteen Chief Justices starting with John Jay, it was more likely that the Chief would go John Roberts' probable route than Rehnquist's, who was an Associate Justice first. This was surprising to me.

John Jay would be the first Chief Justice without any Associate Justice hazing period because, well, the Supreme Court didn't exist. And William Howard Taft sailed right to the top but he had already been President. Plus, he promised he would render all his decisions from his specially-made bathtub.

I still don't get the logic behind nominating as Chief someone who hasn't even been an Associate. That is why I am that much more bitter for having been passed over as Pope.

I have linked a very handy Supreme Court Who's Who above.

--9.14.2005--

Promotion

When I was one of the orphans in The Cider House Rules, I admit that I was bitter when other tots got to go to a good home before I did. Maybe it is this small-mindedness that makes me wonder at John Roberts' nomination to the post of Chief Justice before he has even been confirmed to the post of Associate Justice.

I can only apply situations from my own life. I wasn't promoted to Crew Chief at McDonald's before I even got my Shift Cook visor; I wasn't given an Eagle Scout ceremony before I got out of Webelos. Why? Because only a Crew Chief knows how to turn on the carbonator and has the keys to the sauce closet.

Furthermore, what must the other Justices be thinking? If I were Antonin Scalia, I would be all like, "He'd better not get paid more than I do." If I were Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I wouldn't let Roberts cut me in the robe-delinting line. This is like becoming Governor of the world's seventh-largest economy while only carrying the title of honorary presidential physical fitness advisor, or becoming President having only bankrupted some oil companies and become a paper born-again Christian.

Doesn't it, in a way, sully the executive office by stating "no experience necessary - will train"?

Can Roberts, whom I believe would be the youngest member of the Supreme Court, fulfill the duties of Chief Justice -- approving vacation requests, doing the schedule and reading the time cards, giving out petty cash for car emergencies, and training the new people with the appropriate mimeographed forms and film strips? Wouldn't Clarence Thomas, who has been on the Court far longer, know where the whiteboard and dry erase markers are?

Since I made it to Crew Chief and since I made it, at least, to Life Scout (which is like a peerage), I should probably be the next Chief Justice. There's no stare decisus when the quarter-pounders are getting cold.

--9.13.2005--

Some pictures from Austin

There were some paparazzi snapping away at my show, but I was undaunted.

I do not have those pictures, however.

Instead, here are some taken on my camera from my recent trip south-by-southwest.

*****

Enter the Cleansing Dragon

A Bosnian town is erecting a statue of Bruce Lee to symbolize the unity the country hopes to achieve. I'm so glad they scrapped plans to bronze Gavin MacLeod.

*****

--9.12.2005--

Power

The power went out in this part of Los Angeles for about 45 minutes today ... another ten minutes and I'm sure the shooting would have started.

TAARG and I decided that if the Al Qaeda threat turned out to be true, we would put the cats in the garage and set out on foot, roaming the earth and solving crimes in our inimitable style. We would pick up and dispose of cars as the need suited us as order gradually broke down. I would grow my beard but she would be required to continue shaving. After all, we would still need to carrry some America around with us.

ACI, now one year old, might be pressed into military service.

The power came back on and I immediately got back on the Internet.

--9.11.2005--

You know we'll have a good time then

I'd spent time in Austin in the early nineties and liked it then, but this time, doing my solo show at their improv festival, I had an especially good time.

In 1993 I'd visited my friend Navin's sister in medical school. The group of us went to a restaurant called the Oasis on Lake Travis, drank margaritas (I date my going steady with alcohol to this point) and watched the sun go down over the mountains. When the sun went down, people cheered (because they were fearful of the sun, being primitive).

I have always thought of Austin fondly because of this.

This weekend was a lost weekend because I was traveling solo as well, leaving my wife with her mother and my daughter with hers. I worry what I'll find when I get back; it would be terrible if all my hard behavioral and social conditioning work had been undone in the course of a weekend.

I won't bore you with figures about how little money a nice home with its own shooting range can be purchased for here, but I will say Austin remains an excellent walking city with an (antedeluvian) New Orleans feel to it. The University is right up the street and I met about ten people who said they came fdrom other places and would "never leave" Austin. The city is a liberal-enough island in the middle of Texas.

About a hundred people from the festival played miniature golf on Saturday. Most were from improv groups; I was one of three solo shows. The kids in the picture were all about 15. The boy on the left had been grounded for having alcohol in his room. He said that, if he hadn't lied about where he got it, the punishment would have been worse. We weren't able to get out of him where he got it, because it was time to hit the links.

Today is Marisol's first birthday. I'm spending most of it flying back to her. I am going to buy her some authentic Texas gin at the airport.

--9.06.2005--

Maynard G. Krebs Is Dead

We're sorry that Bob Denver is gone.

Here is a beatnik joke:

Hipster walks into a restaurant and asks, "Dig it: you got any pie?" Waitress says, "The pie is gone, man!" Hipster says, "Groovy - I'll have two slices!"

****

The people we might have been

Lettuce from our readers

I don't know if Crack'd magazine is still around, but that's what their letters section was called. As with Entertainment Weekly, I suspect they wrote the letters themselves.

The following, however, is authentic. I received this e-mail this weekend:

"Are you the Marty Barrett that lived in Weymouth many years ago on the Navy base? Did you have a brother that whacked my brother in the ear with a golf club?"

Every now and then I am made aware of the way my life might have been had I made different choices, like: might I still enjoy Strawberry Schapps with gin if it hadn't made me throw up so utterly my freshman year of college?

Neither I nor any of my family has ever lived on a Navy base or, to my knowledge, played golf. Furthermore, our weapon of choice has always been the Turkish scimitar.

--9.04.2005--

Austin this week

The tripod that supports my performing career is comprised of my height, my inability to see, and my preternatural brilliance. But mostly my inability to see. Here is an article about this week's Austin Improv Festival that mentions all three elements of my triple-threatedness.

Representation

This week I was let go by my agent. I have a couple of interviews with other agents next week.

The beginning of my sixth year in Los Angeles comes on October 2. In the five years I've spent here, I think I've made about six months' rent in the performing arts (and not at the same time). That even that is a good record, considering the competition, is disheartening. In my first two months here I attended three going away parties for people who'd given Hollywood their best shot and were now going home.

Beginning late last year, I started actively going on auditions for things. In quick succession I landed a national commercial, a guest spot on a cable show, and a print campaign. As this represented an audition-to-booking ratio of 1:1, I thought it best to get an agent and maximize my phenomenal potential. Dizzied with my own power, I signed some papers with a firm firmly rooted in Beverly Hills-adjacent.

For the next two months I proceeded to go out for (audition for) and get called back to (be shortlisted for consideration for) several low-paying projects. That these auditions also seemed inappropriate to the types of characters I usually play (Greek fishing magnates) confused me. What's worse, I wasn't booking anything. I called my agent and asked what I might do differently, to change my routine callbacks to routine paying jobs.

On the other side of the line, it seemed like another person had walked into the room and my agent, distracted, spoke to him instead. She said:

"Your job isn't to think."

There was a pause as I waited for her to get back on the line. Then another question occurred to me.

"Did you just say that to me?" I asked. In fact, she had.

A week later a writing job opened up that would make me unavailable for most auditions. I took it without hesitation because my agency didn't seem to be delivering for me. I was also unwilling to track down auditions for myself, because scoring jobs would still mean paying some commission to these guys. So I gave up.

And check this out: Agents usually take 10 percent of an actor's wage. This is to cover all the phone calls and paperwork an agent does on behalf of the actor. For print jobs, an agent takes 20 percent. This is standard. Usurious, but standard. All agency commissions can be justified with the simple understanding that, if it weren't for an agent, an actor wouldn't have gotten the job in the first place.

But in the case of the last job I got before signing with my agency, my friend had recommended a stratagem. The friend who referred me to the agency, to whom I am grateful for sending a lot of work my way in my consulting business, suggested that I bequeath the commission of my final, pre-agent print job to the agent as a sort of dowry gift. The best thing about it was that the 20 percent agent fee would be on top of my wage, rather than a 20 percent deduction from it.

"Excellent thinking," I said to my friend, and my new agent was well pleased with the arrangement.

Since I had done the legwork for this print job (rather than an agent), I knew all the telephone numbers and contact people of the firm that was running it (it was a Microsoft campaign; perhaps you've seen my picture in your local airport), so I knew the payment schedule.

When I hadn't received a check in a long time, I called the New York firm who'd hired me. "We sent the check to your agent a month ago," they said.

I called my agency and they denied having the check. They said the company hadn't issued the checks yet. I told them I was just on the phone with the company in question, who had said different. My agent put me on hold and found my check. It was then that I had the conversation that ended in my being told not to think. Then my agent told me I could come and pick up my check the next day.

"Can't you mail it to me?" I asked.

"Did you leave some SASEs when you were here last?"

"You can't put a 37-cent stamp on an envelope?" I asked.

"We send out so many checks a week that that would be a big drain on resources," she said.

I regret to admit that the obvious response to this didn't occur to me until later 1.) because I am mostly non-confrontational (that is why I have a blog) and 2.) because I am only bright half of the time. The other half I divide between sleeping, drinking, and being not bright.

The obvious response would have been, "If each check represents a job you received a commission on, your begrudging a starving artist 37 cents is the most ghetto thing I've heard of next to LA Family Magazine."

So the next day I drove down to BH-A to pick up my check. I suppose I could have saved the gas and sent several pre-stamped envelopes, but the way things were going, the postage rate would rise by the next time I landed work and then I'd have to send those two-cent filler stamps to be paid.

My agent (there are two people in the office, one who works as the agent one week and one who works as the agent the next. The man and woman alternate with, I guess, general secretarial duties when the other gets to be the agent) handed me the check while he was on the phone. It was one of those things. Not even a "Hey, can I call you back? I need to reassure someone about my competence."

Back in my car I opened my envelope and quickly discovered that not only had the agent taken 20 percent on top but 20 percent out of what I had been led to believe was my cut. I called New York to confirm that I was right about the numbers, then called my agent who confirmed that, yes, he had taken 20 percent above and 20 percent below, for a total of $1,000 for, very simply, opening the mail.

I called all the working actor friends who weren't jealous that I was working, too, and they all agreed that that was bullshit. Still, I did nothing but quietly take myself out of availability.

After four months and freelancing again, I was very reluctant to rejoin my agency so, when I got a notice for an audition for some inappropriate, low-paying part that would shoot, if I landed it (which I wouldn't because even I knew I wasn't right for it) on the day I'd be flying to my gig at the Austin Improv Festival, I sent a tactful e-mail to my agent saying that I would be unavailable for this part but more available in the next few weeks and, if they would spend some time thinking about it, could they please send me out for more appropriate things?

I'll only say that it's a little head-scratchy, most of the stuff they sent me out for while I was active with them. It was as if they'd forgotten what I looked like, what I'd done, and who I was.

They severed my contract immediately, what with my outlandish request and expectations of them. I sent off another e-mail, just to see what they'd say, suggesting they refund my dowry gift, minus a little commission for all their hard goddamn work.

"The contract was quite clear," came the response. I forget what the contract said, but I believe that I am well shut of them.

This was my first go-round with representation. People I know have been through several agents. I like to think that, even at my low level, they are not all bottom feeders and that, when I start paying commissions again, I won't feel like I'm being robbed.

--9.02.2005--

New Orleans and Snake Pliskin

The link above begins with an unsubstantiated but credible-considering-the-circumstances report of cannabalism in New Orleans and continues through several dozen replies, giving a good picture of the strains of public discourse these days.

A guy I talk with regularly on the job wondered how the U.S., et al could deliver thousands of tons of supplies during the Berlin Airlift (even lifting people out) but not do it for the Superdome. There is news from Canada that the U.S refused task force help, but accepted donations from Sri Lanka.

It has become an occasion for people to blame the citizens who are stuck in New Orleans (some were too poor to afford the costs of mandatory evacuation) as well as wag fingers at the survivors' quick descent into anarchy.

It has become an occasion for people to blame President Bush, though his predecessors similarly ignored Crescent City levee repair and were similarly slow to respond to other landfalling hurricanes.

When the twin towers fell, people were saying, "How could this happen to America?" and now people are saying, "How can this happen in America?"

People are saying the sluggish response is a racist one, that if a hurricane happened to a predominantly white city that relief would have come sooner. You think so, or is it just a matter of poor planning? Louisiana, after all, voted red last year, too.

But the Big Easy has become America's second post-apocalyptic city (after Los Angeles) and, if anything, the art that emerges out of this second disaster of the millennium is going to seem a lot less self-conscious. Sir Paul McCartney's "Freedom" was an outstandingly bad song.

--9.01.2005--

Word from New Orleans

I made a couple of visits to New Orleans during my Road Trip period, staying at a youth hostel both times. The hostel is now destroyed, and the road it was on can't be seen in satellite photos.

A couple of friends of mine, one of whom is one of my editors, evacuated this past weekend. One made it to Lafayette and the other is in Memphis in a hotel with the Neville Brothers. They've received word that they cannot go back to their homes for at least a month. With the news that someone had committed suicide at the Superdome, friend #2 said, "I'm not the only one I know who lost everything and who left his pets to die."

Of great concern to me is the looting of non-essential items. I heard an NPR report yesterday that quoted a National Guardsman as saying, "we're not saying it's legal, but we're not stopping it, either."

I wasn't here for the L.A. riots, was in Cabo San Lucas for 9/11/01, and have never been close to an occasion of national disaster (unless you count certain ex-girlfriends), so I don't understand how the course of 48 hours can make someone think it's OK to toss a brick through a store window and load up on cosmetics. Food and water, yes. Alcohol, undoubtedly. Tents and camping supplies, yes. Travel Scrabble, no.

When I heard about the looting I thought, "bad form." The image of someone pulling a stolen TV/DVD player combo through the streets of New Orleans or Baghdad sort of levels things off in my mind. It doesn't take much to turn poverty into savagery, because poverty is all about lack of choices.

You can't convince me that looting a plasma screen TV during a hurricane is either a victimless crime or plucky American opportunism. I might feel differently if Godzilla comes back.