Keith's Page on the Internet

Paraphrased from Ben Kamine

2011-11-12T13:19:00.001-05:00

You are your own worst enemy – and that's wonderful news.

Possible Mantras

2011-10-25T18:12:00.002-04:00

Precision is heroic.

Commitment is heroic.

Commitment does not preclude doubt.

The Life of an Actor

2011-10-25T18:04:00.003-04:00

"This doesn't smell as good as it did yesterday."

– Lauren Cipoletti, on her dinner

Side Effect

2011-08-16T22:55:00.001-04:00

I don't know if this is a fringe benefit or a fringe drawback of being in India, but I've had the Aerosmith song "Taste of India" stuck in my head for a solid week.

Drunk Man's Secret

2011-07-19T14:57:00.000-04:00

It is every drunk man's secret that he is not really drunk.

A Better Goal

2011-07-15T17:55:00.002-04:00

Don't think about what you want to have; think about what you want to earn.

A Nasty Little Irony

2011-07-15T17:53:00.002-04:00

The obsession with freedom is itself a kind of prison.

Cosmology

2011-06-19T08:38:00.000-04:00

Make small things matter. They are the only things.
Love is nothing without its tells;
Family is that glass of orange juice you are now pouring
For your sullen daughter;
And history means nothing
Unless a farmer wakes tomorrow,
And yawns, and stretches, and feeds the cows
In boots he only bought last week.

The Perils of Comparison

2011-06-19T08:36:00.000-04:00

Tricky to craft a steady life
With a brain that’s tuned to changes –
Wired for difference, hog-wild for contrast,
Seeing what is only as not what is not.
Delight makes habit, and habit blunts delight,
And new delights are dangerous
To the dangerous old ones.
Boredom is Charybdis,
And desolation Scylla,
But boredom is desolation too.
Risk, or atrophy;
Venture, or keep.
Let accustomed music tire the ear,
Or brace for wretched screeching.

Or make no simple answer.
Navigate.
Weave, dodge, and dare the chicanes.
Outsmart your change-mad brain
With cunning modulations
That keep alive the melody –
But never say I told you it was easy,
Or that I failed to warn you
About the whirlpool
And the sneering cliffshackled beast.

The Search

2011-06-07T14:45:00.001-04:00

If I knew what I was looking for, I wouldn't be looking for it.

Career Goal

2011-05-08T14:26:00.001-04:00

The goal is not to peak early, nor to peak late, but to peak as many times as possible – and with interesting slumps in between.

Excuses

2011-05-04T12:04:00.001-04:00

Excuses are like oncologists: it's much better not to need one than to have even the very best.

Winter Comes

2011-04-21T11:26:00.001-04:00

The leaves are brightly dying,
In desperate, festive hues;
New hats and coats are lying
Along the church’s pews.

And you and I, in summer dress,
Are drifting through the fall;
Not speaking what our hearts confess,
In frantic hope we stall.

But frost will not be bargained with,
And fate will not be shy,
And having nursed a tender myth,
We weep to watch it die.

Our long agreements splinter;
Cold armies brain their drums.
We gird our souls for winter,
And winter comes.

Harlem, Afternoon

2011-04-21T11:19:00.002-04:00

Black shadow-birds dart up the sides of buildings,
Mimicking the real birds, who mimic each other.
The bright sun carves their outlines
Against the stoic brick,
And up they glide into nothing,
While the real birds breach the sky.

Theater 2

2011-04-21T11:02:00.002-04:00

The theater stands against entropy. In a chaotic, ever-dilating world, the theater says, Hold on. Stop for a moment. For two or three hours tonight, the laws of thermodynamics are suspended, and we will be, against all odds, bringing things together.

Theater

2011-04-18T23:51:00.006-04:00

You are standing on a stage. There are three people in the audience. One of them is a child, nine years old – bright and attentive, in a theater for the first time in her life, ready and eager to be taken on an unforgettable journey. The second is a banker, here at his wife's insistence. He has no interest in theater, and is thinking only of intermission, when he will have a scotch. The third is a critic. He knows all the tricks of the trade, and is hoping to see them deployed with cleverness and skill. He believes that nothing can surprise him any longer. His notebook is open, and his pen is poised.

What do you do?

I believe I know the answer. Speak to the child. If you can thrill, delight, and transport that expectant child, the other two will sense that you do not need their indulgence or their approval, and they will straighten up in their seats and begin to take notice.

Delight the child. This is not easy. It is not lazy, and it is not pandering. Nor does it mean that you have given up on the banker and the critic. On the contrary, it means that you are taking aim at their hearts.

Resolution

2011-01-29T20:04:00.001-05:00

I will become superstitious.
I will stuff secret meanings into
Ordinary places.
I will endow, imbue, animate, sanctify,
Making the simple stand for the sublime.
No more arid searching after truth;
I will make myself prehistoric,
Believing in signs and demons, and the angry spirits
That heave up the swallowing sea.
I will make sacrifices.
Burn a virgin, if need be.
Some scoff at prophecies that self-fulfill –
But what could be more elegant? And after all,
Belief in a false thing is a real thing –
A dangerous, beautiful, useful thing.
So let me bow to idols, tremble at symbols,
Decipher the unencrypted entrails of dead birds.
Let my lips mutter and my eyes roll back;
Let the cynics laugh their dry defeated laughter
While I, ridiculous, conquer the world.

Glad? Well ...

2011-01-12T22:08:00.001-05:00

The books of Malcolm Gladwell are basically fact porn.

Happy New Year

2011-01-04T20:00:00.003-05:00

Walking through Times Square the other night after watching the final performance of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the streets were still littered with New Year's confetti. Looking up, I could see it blowing off the nearby rooftops, spiraling down slowly like flat, overgrown snow. As I started down 42nd St., I turned back to get one last look at the ghostly flakes, and a working-class, red-haired, middle-aged man addressed me.

"It's still falling, isn't it?" he said. I agreed. "It'll be falling in a week still," he continued. "Seriously." I smiled. "Happy New Year," I said. And he said the same, and we both walked on.

Resolutions 2010: A Triumphant Failure

2010-12-28T17:37:00.018-05:00

And now for the darkest hour of the year: the moment when I look back at my New Year's resolutions for the past year and see how I've measured up. It ain't gonna be pretty. What follows is not for the faint of heart.

First, here's the original list of resolutions:

1. I resolve to watch the following movies, all of which I am deeply ashamed not to have seen already:

-- The Godfather

-- Psycho

-- Jaws

-- The Shawshank Redemption

-- Lawrence of Arabia

-- Seven Samurai

-- The Battle of Algiers

-- Caddyshack

-- Reservoir Dogs

-- Clerks

-- Unforgiven

-- Hoop Dreams

2. I resolve to read at least one book every month. ("Graphic novels" don't count.)

3. I resolve to write at least one feature-length screenplay.

4. I resolve to write at least one full-length play.

5. I resolve to write in my journal at least once a week.

6. I resolve to take bass lessons.

7. I resolve to finish Keeper completely, to the point where I can thrust a cool-looking DVD into the hands of complete strangers and beg them to watch it. And also, I'll submit it to film festivals.

8. I resolve to submit some of last year's short films to film festivals.

9. I resolve to go to Russia.

10. I resolve to marry a baby.

So how did I do? Well, I didn't go to Russia. I didn't read a book every month. I made a lot of progress on Keeper, but didn't finish it. I did write a full-length play, and I cowrote a feature film with Mike Lavoie. I did send out some of the 12in12 films to festivals -- kind of abortively and haphazardly, but let's say it counts. I didn't take any bass lessons. I kept up the journal-every-week assignment for about two weeks. Of the twelve movies listed, I watched six (mostly in December). And, despite my most fervent and dedicated efforts (and long conversations with both civic and religious authorities), I did not manage to marry a baby.

All in all, that gives me a dismal score of 3 out of 10 (since Resolutions 1 and 3 were both about half-completed, I gave myself half a point for each). On the face of it, that's reason enough to hand the reins of my life over to somebody more competent and reliable, like the DMV.

But let's look a little more closely. Okay, I didn't go to Russia -- but I did go to Singapore. And I had a 16-hour layover in Dubai, so technically I went there too! Okay, I had help (well, that's an understatement) writing my screenplay -- but I did produce and direct that screenplay, and the result is already out to a sizable handful of festivals. Plus I directed a new short film, and wrote and acted in another one. I met wonderful new friends and potential collaborators at the LAB Intensive Ensemble. Oh, and I completed one semester of an MFA program, and met some cool people through that, too. And then there was that rafting/camping trip in Idaho ...

Now, I'm not saying I had a banner year. There were as many fallow periods as fertile ones, as much stalling as striving, and far more Sporcle than I'd like to admit. But it wasn't the kind of drastic failure that my Resolution Success Rate (RSR) would seem to imply. It was a year, take it for all in all; we shall not look upon its like again.

So what does this tell us about New Year's resolutions? Nothing we didn't already know, I guess. Resolutions are problematic because they threaten to lock you into a prescribed pattern of behavior, and thus cut you off from the opportunities that organically arise. Not only that, but they tend to make you regret the detours and distractions you were plagued by -- despite the fact that detours and distractions are, arguably, the very stuff of life.

And yet the impulse behind resolutions is both laudable and natural. The dawning of a new year is a perfect time to take stock of one's life and ask oneself the eternal questions: how am I living my life, how do I want to live it, and how can I bridge that gap?

So here I am, once again on the cusp of a brand new year, torn between the desire to set goals and an ever-growing sense of their futility. Which way will I jump? Or will I manage to reach some kind of compromise? Stay tuned.

The Wisdom of Devin

2010-12-26T19:25:00.003-05:00

"Wow. Rednecks never tire of songs about rednecks."

-Devin

A Folksy Expression

2010-12-08T10:21:00.002-05:00

Yeah, well, that and a dollar will get you pooped on in Thailand.

Good News!

2010-10-22T13:18:00.004-04:00

Anne Bogart, speaking at the New School on Monday, October 18th, 2010, made this highly reassuring announcement:

"I propose that post-modernism is over. It's done. And the only way that happens is, you say it."

I'm very glad to hear that post-modernism is over. I was never really very into it.

Poem or Lyrics or Something

2010-10-22T13:15:00.002-04:00

Some girls think they're clever
Just because they're ugly;
Some girls think they're pretty
Just because they're stupid;
Some girls think they're funny
Just because they're bitter;
Some girls think they're independent
When all they are is lonely.

A Possibly Inspiring Thought

2010-06-20T23:58:00.002-04:00

Your whole life has prepared you for what you do next.

The Greatest Sentence of All Time

2010-04-18T18:49:00.004-04:00

Seen on an informational plaque in the Evolution Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens:

Something magnolia-like used to be considered the primitive flowering plant, but recently an ancestral waterlily has been proposed.

UES

2010-02-22T11:17:00.004-05:00

Overheard between a young child in a stroller and her Asian nanny:

NANNY: I'm not Mommy. I'm Mamu.

CHILD: (insistently) Mommy!

NANNY: Stop that. Mommy gonna be mad at me.

A Reassuring Thought

2010-02-15T10:24:00.002-05:00

At some point, it's going to seem like it was all meant to be.

A Motivational Thought

2010-02-15T10:23:00.002-05:00

Today you live in the world you made yesterday; tomorrow you will live in the world you make today.

Every Once in a While

2010-01-31T14:06:00.002-05:00

Mike Lavoie, standing at the top of a ski slope looking out across a stunning mountain panorama: "You know, Keith, sometimes you have your shit together."

A Sure Sign

2009-07-09T16:43:00.002-04:00

"Your kitchen looks like a couple of geniuses live here."

-James Fauvell, on our hellhole of a kitchen

Fat Man Moments

2009-07-06T14:23:00.003-04:00

Last Friday, when "Captivated" was finally up and my sanity was gradually returning, I took a twenty-minute walk down 2nd Street towards the canal. It was a one-block walk down a dead-end street, but it was enough. Passing the open bay of a garage, I saw a fat man sitting in front of a giant fan, beside an old car. It was just about dusk, and he was practically immobile. I turned around at the canal, and as I passed the garage again, the man had stood up and was hosing down the car.

Maybe it was my mood, but in that moment, this pair of images was odd, funny, poignant, and rich with meaning. And I thought, The world is full of beauty and humor and pathos and strangeness, and I sit all day in front of a computer trying mightily to contrive exactly those things. And I felt like a bit of a fool.

Last night, sitting on the roof after the "Script 2" shoot, I mentioned this moment to Mike, and he saw it a little differently. "That's the beauty of it," he said. "You exhaust yourself all week until you have nothing left. You're empty. And then you take a twenty-minute walk, and that's all it takes to fill you up again."

He's got a point. What a great job we have.

An Unwise Combination

2009-06-25T13:52:00.007-04:00

"It remains to be seen what will happen with this film, because it involves so many children and so many alligators."

-John Arthur Kelly, cinematographer, on a film he turned down

Vehicular Mailslaughter

2009-06-18T15:33:00.002-04:00

This afternoon I walked up to Smith Street to mail a $7 check to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over the years, I have been a major financial supporter of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, mostly through the medium of speeding tickets, but in this case, I was making a tax payment. I did a little acting-for-hire in Northampton last summer, and despite the fact that a tax payment had already been deducted (sorry, "withheld") from my paycheck, the Commonwealth apparently felt that I had not quite paid my debt to it. Hence the $7 check.

Anyway, I had reached Smith Street and was waiting to cross the street to the mailbox on the other side when the envelope, which I had tucked under my arm, came loose and wafted into the rain-soaked street, where it was immediately run over.

I waited for the traffic to let up, picked up the envelope, and deposited as planned into the mailbox.

As always, Massachusetts, it was a pleasure doing business with you.

An Observed Paradox

2009-06-18T15:32:00.002-04:00

We are much more likely to care about people's personal troubles if they are not the sort of people who bore us with their personal troubles.

A Totally Neutral Observation

2009-05-27T21:04:00.003-04:00

There's something in Rachel McAdams's eyes that seems to dare the world to be as good as she knows it can be – but she's not holding her breath.

A Vindication of Prejudice

2009-05-25T14:28:00.002-04:00

To live without prejudice is to live without expectation.

To live without expectation is to live without surprises.

To live without surprises is hardly to live at all.

Note to Self

2009-05-13T14:19:00.003-04:00

If I cry, it's not that I'm not happy; it's just because I'm sad.

A Perfect Moment

2009-05-10T19:43:00.006-04:00

It's a lovely May Sunday in Manhattan, and I'm walking up Central Park West, when I see a mother and her son – probably six – coming slowly towards me. The boy is eating a blue popsicle; as I watch, it falls off its stick and onto the ground. He looks down at the sullied blue ice, then up at his mother, as if uncertain how he should react.

At this point, I am directly alongside them. It is the only moment when I am close enough to overhear their conversation.

"There's always tomorrow," says the mother.

I swear to God.

The Long Walk

2008-11-10T00:47:00.006-05:00

He pulled the cold air into his lungs; held it for a little, warming it; and released a long, slow breath of steam. He pulled on the short warm gloves, took a step or two across the platform, and stared out vaguely at a few high pines. He flexed his fingers. He stretched his neck. He entertained a smile. As the train's noise faded into the dim gray distance, he stuffed his gloved hands into lined pockets, hunched his shoulders against the chill, strode down the steps to the crusted ground, and trudged off, head down, eyes turned inward. It would be a long walk.

Past the Border

2008-08-04T00:08:00.004-04:00

There is a feeling
for which no one ever taught me a name.

It has to do with home, with childhood.

It's a wakefulness, a wistfulness,
a chill at the top of my spine;
it is silence, and knowing, and ecstasy,
and somehow it's New England --
the outside world alive inside me.

I have put great faith in words;
they, godlike, have rewarded me.
But sometimes, when I turn to them,
they shrug,
as if to say:

"This is not of us. This is not for us.
This is of you. For you.
This is you."

Zephyr

2008-06-30T00:46:00.002-04:00

The summer come, she took to sleeping just outside
the door that keeps her out of where we sleep.
I stumble on her in the dark; she starts,
but not from pain, and arches toward my hand.

I give her the expected rub; she licks
the air between us with a yearning speed.
I lean my face into the reeking maw,
and she anoints me with her hot loud kiss.

A dog’s true needs are few, but love is one,
and when it’s rare the hope of love will do.
The name is pretty, and it suits her well,
but dogs, of course, are not much like the wind.

The wind is wild, rapacious, pure, and free;
A dog is flesh that craves a touch from me.

13 Possible First Sentences for a Novel

2008-06-22T23:58:00.004-04:00

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, eighty-seven years old today, gazed out over the Alps and smiled.

Life at the morgue was unremittingly dull, unless a supposed corpse happened to wake up and begin thrashing around in its drawer, screaming and moaning and crying out “Milwaukee! Milwaukee!” in a kind of primal mania, and that only happened once.

“Fuck rice pudding,” he screamed venomously, and for one sick, desperate moment, he meant it.

A man can only take so much, Herbert mused, as he duct-taped the dynamite to his prize heifer.

A hundred years later, people would still ask Harold how he had done it.

Marilyn had never been all that good at apologies, but then again she had never been dangled out of a building before.

If I had known then what I know now – about motorcycles, about women, about voodoo prophets and Cold War grudges and the moon landing and pyromania and the strange habits of Saudi princes – I probably would have stayed away from the Westminster Dog Show altogether.

You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what Marcy was getting at, but Philip was a genius, and his mind had (as it were) a mind of its own; so while she went on talking about how bored she was, and how lonely, and how really stupid most boys were, and how Philip was different, he really understood things, Philip found himself making dinosaurs out of the freckles on her neck, and then wondering if that was pointillism, and then reflecting that in a sense reality itself was pointillistic, if you considered atoms and sub-atomic particles, although perhaps those too could be broken down, in ways were just beginning to understand, and in fact that would be an exciting field to go into, although he also liked astronomy, which was what he had been practicing when Marcy had come out onto the porch and interrupted his telescope session with her pleasant but largely incomprehensible chatter, which she was just wrapping up by saying that she was going to go read in bed and she would be in her room if he needed anything, which was very nice of her, but he was pretty sure he’d be fine.

God laughed.

He was born; he lived; he loved, he suffered, he died; and he assumed that would be the end of it.

Half a million dollars on a single hand is a little rich for even my blood, but I knew Bubba was bluffing, because he had kicked me under the table.

For eons he floated in the thin cold soup of the universe, not really aware, not really alive – tickled by stars, twisted by nebulae, pull this way and that by the massless winds that rake the in-between – until the probing, yearning thoughts of a few frightened creatures on a muddy little planet far from the galactic center coaxed him into a shape, a place, and, finally, a name.

Thermometers don’t lie.

intro, and "Elegy for an Old Self"

2008-06-14T17:40:00.005-04:00

Mike Lavoie has encouraged me (at gunpoint) to start a blog. I've put his name in the title, with the (convenient) (and correct) implication that this is all his fault. The requirement is that every Sunday, I post a new piece of "creative" "work" on here, for your perusal and execration. Mike is doing the same thing on his own blog, and for all I know other people are too. After this initial introduction, I'll try to keep the self-deprecation to a minimum, but I make no promises, because I am a weak, spineless, often-malodorous twerp.

This week's offering is below. Enjoy! Feel free to post comments, if you really want people to know how bored you are.

Elegy for an Old Self

I had the bright blind will of a child;

I had the hot pure faith of a saint;

I was all; I was all, or was nothing;

Life was painful, but never faint.

But the bloom of me started to mellow,

And the green of me started to turn,

And I moved from the heat of the footlights

To behind them and watching them burn.

Now I laugh at my old affectations

With the laughter of envy and doubt;

And I know I can live with perspective,

But what am I living without?