jackwernick

It’s the anniversary of 9/11, which happened 18 years ago. A friend mentioned this morning that she intended to keep an uncharacteristically low social media profile today because of all the photos and dour memorials that were to be inevitable speed bumps on her social media commute. I hadn’t thought of that and thanked her for the tip.

I decided to take the day off to reflect in the middle of the week. Instead of thinking about the Twin Towers and how the world has changed, my thoughts are toward obtaining more remunerative work as an educator. I’ve been juggling substitute teaching, tutoring, and teaching a weekend class for a year now, not to mention teaching summer school at an Ivy Prep League School. This past August was a welcome break from all that. Now it’s early September and I’m still somewhat on holiday. I’ve decided to switch up my routine and go for a permanent teaching job. I’ve received follow up interest from a couple of selective charter schools and might have an offer by the end of the week.

A middle aged white male without a Masters in Education or the attendant teacher certification is hardly the target audience for your garden variety permanent teaching position. Many schools seem to favor educators with Masters degrees, particularly in Education, and certification to boot. I sense I may benefit from the start of the school year blues some administrators face; having empty positions to fill due to beginning of the school year firings or abrupt departures or the fact that most in-demand candidates are already in place. I’m hopeful that applying after Labor Day proves a winning strategy.

I want to go on for a Masters, a degree I was halfway from completing when I was in a car accident near Union Square years ago. That injury derailed my plan to complete the degree, as I was unable to commute from Manhattan to Queens via public transportation. I’m ready to return to grad school once again and earn a Masters. Will I go for an Education degree or a Fine Arts-Creative Writing degree? That depends on the results of this round of applications. If no perm offers are tended I plan to pivot from the poverty wages of a substitute teacher to the less dispiriting salary of an online teacher. As for next summer, I see myself returning to grad school by then. That leaves August and the prospect of visiting friends in Spain.

As for this solemn day, I too am limiting my social media foraging until tomorrow. It’s a sad day and pics of the Twin Towers only inspire a sense of PTSD. I don’t feel obligated to relive the shock, horror, and bewilderment of that day. I watched from the top floor of my Union Square office building as the South Tower was engulfed in smoke, moments after it was struck by a hijacked airplane. I’m grateful I returned to my desk moments later to resume my media work, while my colleagues remained on the top floor, unwitting witnesses to the North Tower being struck. I saw that grisly image many times on TV in the disorienting days following the attacks.

It’s Sunday and it’s not yet noon and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the day, this early spring weekend technically-still morning and the sun and promise of over-50-degree-F weather and the robin’s egg blue skies all are conspiring to harmonize at my window to sing, “Come out and play” in California harmony, whether it be Beach Boys or Fleetwood Mac or even Mamas and Papas. Does that date me? Do I care?

I’m one of those polymaths with writing and editing and teaching on my mind that I’m not always sure which direction to turn and run in for at least a meaningful moment or two. See, I’m working on a series of short films, a new venture for me, and am excited to finish my first, a true story I’ve embellished about a famous fashion model’s experience being stranded in a Paris hotel room at the start of the May 1968 student riots. The film is in that purgatory called post-production when the waiting starts for the composer and the sound editor to perform their auditory magic after the acting and filming and editing and titles and subtitles have been applied. Oh, and the editing, always the editing. Film or video editing suits my temperament and my background as a text editor.

Spring always finds me in contemplation mode, as spring means summer is next and with that season I can’t help but tirelessly mythologize the inevitable income downturn of an educator such as myself. This year will be different, I repeat like a pop song chorus and I try to think I’m learning how to make it mean something different this year. To that end, I have been folding in more time to job hunt during the daytime work week and have had some success. I can’t shake the sense that a bit more elbow grease might provide a more robust bounty but it’s a balance between taking up the time to hunt for work and enjoying your life as is. That is, I’m a freelance writer and editor and thus work means looking for work often, although in this gig economy that job hunting treadmill may be a more popular exercise than it used to be.

All I know is it’s a beautiful day and I’ve spent much of my free time this weekend indoors and thus it’s time to motivate toward the door. I do have a new film project in the works and then still more in mind. There are 2 mini-series actually, 1 being a continuation of this 1st film’s inspiration, that of a true story of a famous female actor, in this first instance a certain fashion model-turned-film-actor. The second script is shaping up to be about another film siren who’s a personal favorite. Her story may be one that she’d rather I didn’t dredge up but maybe if it helps rekindle even a scintilla of interest in her brilliance, she might not mind. If she even ever finds out about it. 

New Year, new week, new(ish) season. I’m feeling a new year sense of renewal more than I can recall from years past. A couple of friends asked me about my New Year’s resolutions and I replied that I preferred “goals” instead. The former is seemingly custom-built to expire within a week like groceries. I sense that the hordes are setting themselves up for disappointment by rushing in with their resolution checklists. Goals sound more like a permanent life fixture. 

Guess I’m feeling the new year heat more than usual because I’ve been in a relatively steady spot for a few years now and my biological clock may be yearning for a sense of change. I moved from Manhattan to the Bronx almost four years ago following the end of a long-termer and subsequently rebooted my life. I resumed a full teaching and writing schedule, enjoying the latter from a home office perch with a lovely view of the courtyard tree in front of my building and cityscape beyond. A notable step up from the arse end of an elementary school on the Lower East Side.

Highlights of my New Bronx Life have included creating an after-school drama program for low-income, bilingual students in the Bronx, and becoming Regional Managing Editor for a global performing arts pub. As for my scriptwriting, I met my filmmaking partner and morphed from playwright to scriptwriter. I still write plays but became a filmmaker through my friendship with a cinematographer/scriptwriter/actor. We enjoyed numerous inspired conversations about film and art before focusing those talks towards forging a collaboration. I’d long yearned for a dedicated creative partnership, with the model of the writer/director who works with a loose collection of actors and other creatives. I seem to have at least one repeat offender in my friend. We’re in post-production on our first project. 

“6 Hours in Paris” is my imagined story of a fashion model stuck in Paris at the start of the Paris Spring of 1968. I wrote and directed and Ben shot and edited it. I still need a composer to write incidental music and someone to create subtitles for a brief French-language interlude. While I work to complete #6HrsInParis we’re already planning our next film, about an actor with a speech impediment who yearns to shake his stammer. We both plan to act in this project. 

Film has provided a sense of newness for which I’m grateful. Another promising opportunity is the prospect of going abroad to teach English. I have a pleasant roommate and an appealing apartment to call home. Am I running away from my seemingly staid life by going overseas? Is going abroad to teach English something younger folk do in their first decade out of university? I’m thinking that I might start by teaching summer school and decide over the course of July whether I wish to extend my expat teaching assignment into the 2019-20 school year. Last summer I taught English at an Ivy Prep League school. Is that another opportunity I’m leaving behind in my proposed exodus to the EU?

I keep meaning to maintain my blog on a regular basis. I wonder when I will achieve that goal. I have a few recently published articles on theatre that I plan to share on here. For now, I plan to natter on about what’s on my mind that seems worth sharing out. 

Having grown up in New England, I am very much a creature of seasonal habit. I live in NYC and have for years and thus still hew to a 4-season climate. While NY is warmer than Boston it’s still a 4-season city. While I’m grateful for its milder, shorter winters, this past summer was a steam bath. I used to live in Manhattan until a few years ago when I moved up to the Bronx. There’s more space where I live now and thus the air seems to move around more, making summers generally milder. 

This past summer found me taking the plunge and exploring the local public pool at last, after walking by it many times on my visits to nearby Van Cortlandt Park. See, I taught summer school at a nearby private school and had occasion to walk directly by the pool during this just-ended summer. The weather was simply too sultry to allow inhibitions to dictate and thus I lost my Van Cortlandt Pool virginity. I relished the casual rituals of the joint, from opening my canvas tote for inspection to eschewing a top to having to flash the fact I was underwearless under my plaid swim trunks. Oh, and the obligatory pre-pool shower. The whole experience was utterly charming.

I grew up in the suburbs and had occasion to frequent one particularly memorable country club when I was a tyke. Mom used to park the non-airconditioned Nova, her very first new car, in the shade of the parking lot, the better to minimize the burn factor of the heat-seeking back seat missles. Lakewood Country Club was a lovely spot yet, having nothing to compare it to, I simply enjoyed its sprawling splendor yet shunned its piddly kiddy pool. Later we traded down to a YMCA that was nonetheless a green sprawl with an ample outdoor pool that more closely resembles the Van Cortlandt Pool. While the latter is indeed an NYC public pool in the Bronx it’s still a relatively quaint, clean and relaxing spot.

I’ve been neglecting my blog for too long. I plan to get back into the habit of posting on a regular basis. That’s sometimes what happens when one's mental resources are stretched to cover teaching and editing, not to mention writing and directing. 

My current creative project is a short film, my first as writer/director since my university days. I’ve written and directed several plays in the past few years and am now venturing into the plastic arts, where it all seems to be happening. Theatre does thankfully still seem to be robust these days or at least viable yet I’ve been wanting to make a film for over a year now.

I was fortunate to make a friend, a fellow film enthusiast, and I’ve been hosting a series of conversations over dinner at mine. He’s cameraman to my writer/director and we’re planning our first outing together for a shoot later this spring. The script is based on an idea I’ve had floating around in my cranium, gestating longer than any script idea I’ve ever had. I can’t recall spending much time or energy on turning to the stage to tell this story. Somehow I see it was bashert that the story wait to be told when I had a collaborator to bring it to the screen.

But enough talk of what will be. As for the present, I’m working to morph my daily bread and butter towards more remote work and away from in-person teaching. I yearn for the greater flexibility of being able to work from home and not need to be somewhere or at least wake at an ungodly hour. Time to get to those applications for tutoring and freelance writing gigs.

Once again I find myself thinking and writing, “It’s been too long since I last wrote here.” Yet there it is. The new tends to inspire me and this new year, new semester, is no different. As an educator, I find myself thinking of work in terms of semesters. I find that sense of halving the work year, with summer as the glorious exception, helps me think in terms of cycles, of academic seasons. As a teacher, lately and belatedly a Drama Teaching Artist, I find the educational framework a beneficial prism with which to view my work and, by extension, my life. 

Speaking of that life, I am grateful that this new semester, which vaguely starts for many by the end of January, finds me relishing a busier schedule than that which I managed to cobble together last fall. Last year was a year of change, with a move to a new home in a new borough. I switched out my long term perch on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a larger apartment in the Bronx. Unlike much of New York City, my new neighborhood has the distinction of having not one official name, but a variety of such, depending on who’s name-calling. 

Having spent over two decades in Manhattan, the LES to boot, I bring with me the innate zeal to dub my new nabe something fresh and, well, new. I’m close to both undulating Van Cortlandt Park, the city’s fourth largest park, and Riverdale, arguably the city’s greenest, toniest nabe. I mentioned the newfangled moniker “Kingsdale” to an acquaintance, a New York native, and he bristled at that term. I presume he thought it uppity to concoct a new name for a place that is the nabe-with-many-names. 

I’m still new here and am open to suggestions. I like Kingsdale and occasionally use the name when people ask where I live. Some would say “that’s Kingsbridge,” while others have invoked the local park’s name as part of, or all of the nabe’s name, as in Van Cortlandt Village. That’s a name that has been used, at least historically, for the general area that is my home. 

All this talk of home has me overlooking other facets of change, or newness in my life. There are new students, my promotion to Teaching Artist after years as a practicing theater maker, and new plays that have either been produced in New York in the past six months or are being polished in preparation for first readings, or those that find me in the early stages of pregnancy, months away from delivery. In other words, I’m brainstorming, and seem to have at least two or three ideas for plays jostling for space in my brain at any given time.

My students just presented a performance this week and that too was a new benchmark for me. I directed and helped gather the students’ vignettes into a semblance of order and cohesion, with a bit of my own writing added to help connect the various scenes. I also contributed a brief monologue that my inventive students took and turned into a staged scene, as a bit of a climax to the disparate but congruous stories of their young lives.

Every year I vow to glide into the holiday season more prosperous and content, and what a few years of dedicated yoga practice have helped me achieve is the latter. I am grateful I found my voice as a scriptwriter later than not at all. I am grateful for my irrational sense of faith, despite the slings and slaps of the life of the urban-dwelling artist. I have found a sense of focus, of inner peace that I must tip my hat in credit to the wonderful yoga studio where I practice, for helping me keep my head from the occasional sense that it is about to explode.

I have devoted the better (or worse) part of the past six months, half a year, working to secure a financially stable future in a satisfying, suitable career. I am grateful I managed to reboot my lapsed teaching career just in time for summer school. I likewise was pleased to be offered an opp to remain in place for fall. So far, so good. Alas, I was not clocking in enough working hours, despite plenty of commuting hours, to solve short-term financial worry. When I did manage to expand my teaching workload for fall, my income mysteriously failed to reflect more time in my still part-time schedule. I was unpleasantly surprised. 

Luckily I managed to shift gears to tutoring for a business which pays me what I earn. Again, I am grateful. I love teaching and tutoring is a form of teaching, a cozier, more intimate form but a form just the same. Would I like/do I need more hours/income? You betcha. Am I working harder than since I can remember to alleviate that predicament? Si, senor. Do I wish it was easier to juggle teaching and my theater work, particularly playwriting? You know it. 

To that end, I see how appealing the prospect of college teaching can be, particularly with its promise of more free time to write and submit scripts to festivals and contests than the role of full-time secondary school teacher promises. I have professional credentials that might sway some colleges to forego the "Masters or terminal degree required" slogan on their job postings, but I sense there is plenty of competition for English instructor positions in the NYC area. Until I earn that MFA in Creative Writing, I see myself happily teaching the younger set. 

I researched the local job market, only to discover there were lots of people employed as educators. No surprise there. I found that info comforting, made me feel I was barking the right tune. As with most everything in a world-class city like NY, education is a competitive field. I am grateful for my tutoring work but need more work and more income. I am hopeful that more opps will materialize, and soon. 

If nothing else, these past several months have rebooted my skill set and knowledge of the current job market. It is a changing creature. I've been told the job market is improving. I have been traversing opps in a few different fields, including education, writing, admin assistant, and performing arts opps like stage manager and light and sound board operator. 

Am I tired of looking for work? Yes! Is it a necessity like washing the dishes and doing the laundry? Affirmative. Thus, I persist, using my creative genes to resume my daily search with a fresh outlook and approach. I have revised my CV and my cover letter and have received offers for jobs in fields I possess no experience in. I have accepted invites for interviews and am grateful when anyone wants to meet me in my power suit in person.

What do I really want to get paid to do? Write and teach. Ideally a combo platter of the two. What am I ready, willing and able to do? Teach full-time, either as an Assistant or Head Teacher, tutor part-time for more than one org, generate a decent sideline income in freelance/copy/content writing, and still find time to write and revise scripts before sending them on to the occasional festival, contest or lit pub. I wish I was more fluent at marketing myself. I am getting better at feeling less guilty about exhorting myself. In a recent job interview I found myself saying, "Not to boast but," and the interviewer wryly reminded me, "This is a job interview." 

Why are artists or at least creatives genetically disinclined to possess sparkling marketing skills? For the pious, the devout, the act of self-promotion may seem to require a lobal shift that requires a step out of the comfort zone of the active imagination, an imagination that in my case has resulted in an Outstanding New Script award nomination and a Best Play award, all in the past two years. When I finally got down to the business of scriptwriting, I decided to give "it" two years of diligent dedication. The resultant award recognition from two acclaimed NY theater fests left me feeling satisfied, that my time was well-spent.

I have thus returned to cultivating a day job as an educator. I used to teach full-time. It is both rewarding as heck and draining as well. I found it difficult to do much else during the work week when I was teaching. It's possible that the more experienced teacher learns habits that foster more effective time usage and enable them to pursue other activities in their lives like getting to the gym regularly, practicing yoga, nurturing friendships and romantic relationships, keeping a tidy home, preparing healthful meals, and partaking of a scintilla of this great city's immeasurable cultural offerings. 

I recently learned that a short play I submitted for publication was chosen as a finalist. That info quietly thrilled me. I yearn to be a published playwright. Or screenwriter. Yes, one lesson I've learned in my research into lit pubs that accept drama is that some also specify they accept screenplays. For the uninitiated, it might be puzzling to think of pursuing something as financially unremunerative as seeking publication for one's creative writing. Alas, that is the reality of the lit pub world.

In this ever-increasingly corporatized world, or at least country, it seems everyone is selling something with their job offers. Everyone's a salesperson. Everyone seems to have a tradeoff with their job offer. Everything seems to have a price tag on it. Everything seems to be possible to be converted into dollars and cents. "Why do it if it doesn't generate short-term cash?" is the spoken or silent question that seems to be a popular refrain in our dollar-sign society. 

Alas, not everything can be reduced to a numeric equation. There is the matter of legacy. I know, in our disposable culture, it may seem quaint and archaic, but people do still write poems and get them published. Hell, some poets even get paid to teach poetry in college! Many lit pubs still focus either exclusively or primarily on poetry. Poetry collections seldom crack the bestseller lists. Yet poetry seems unlikely to be rendered redundant as either a publishing niche or an educational one. Many MFA Creative Writing programs offer a poetry concentration. There is hope.

I am grateful that my genre, scriptwriting, lends itself to a potentially edifying degree of accessibility and exposure. There is the nascent web series and free, online video posting format that is suitable for the short form, episodic script. There is the short film that can be shot on an iPhone or other dumpster-diver-priced video cam. A festival-hosted play can be produced on a shoestring budget. The full-length screenplay can be sold for a tidy sum. It can also generate a decent cash prize in one of a number of contests.

Lately I've been preoccupied, obsessed even, with the Jane Campion film "The Portrait of a Lady." Campion's first feature following the artful triumph that is "The Piano," "Portrait" is an adaptation of the sumptuous novel by Henry James. That I am currently reading the novel may be a factor in my fascination with the film. Maybe the fact of the film drew me to the paperback copy at the Strand Bookstore recently. Whatever the reasoning, this story/film/novel is my current tale of choice.

The film is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because of the fact of its imperfection, rendering various sterling elements that much more compelling. In particular, there is the matter of the beautifully nuanced score by Polish master Wojciech Kilar, as imbued with powerful feeling as the film's finest moments. Amongst the emotional flashpoints in the film, none is more moving, more memorable, than Barbara Hershey's devastating unraveling.

A brilliant actor and a curiously underrated one, "Portrait" earned Hershey her sole-to-date Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. She deserved to be nominated with fellow "sister" Dianne Wiest, who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" several years earlier. In both films, it is Hershey's vulnerability that draws one magnet-like to her and sustains one's fascination. It's tempting (irresistible?) to consider whether Hershey might have won for "Portrait" had the film enjoyed greater success.

Another notable facet of this period film is the robust scenic and costume design and art direction. Alas, it was the costume design, by Janet Patterson, that garnered the film's sole additional Oscar nomination. Campion deserves credit for bringing such a dense, layered yet subtle story to vivid cinematic life. Her stunning work on "The Piano" laid claim to her as one of modern cinema's most distinctive artists. Alas, it is the relatively compressed nature of that film's pared down story of an adulterous woman, her husband, lover and daughter, who form the core of its tragic tale, and speak to Campion's strengths as a storyteller.

James and his laundry list of characters necessitated a far different approach, one that may have proved more challenging than Campion realized when she chose to tackle one of the classics of American literature, one that had studiously avoided adaptation, and which was deemed unfit for screen adaptation. Perhaps that designation had somewhat to do with the panoply of characters?

Whate'er the reason, the whole is somewhat less transcendent that the sum of its parts. "The Piano" was so imaginatively cast, with a largely silent Holly Hunter in daguerreotype-black hair and Harvey Keitel as a Maori native. Those utterly contemporary actors were reinvented as characters from another century; character and actor were not only fluidly matched, but were transformed in the process. Hunter won the Best Actress Oscar, and Keitel's performance boosted his film career.

Casting "Portrait" was a stickier prospect, as the novel features over a dozen main or supporting characters. The inspired pairing of such disparate actors as John Gielgud and Shelley Winters as husband and wife is casual brilliance, as their relationship is one of distance and fundamental, even infamous, incompatibility. Other gifted actors featured in the cast include the justly-praised Martin Donovan and the immensely appealing Viggo Mortensen, both of whom suggest layers of complexity their previous film work seldom offered them the opportunity to showcase.

Ultimately it is the lead actors I have avoided mentioning until now. Both Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich are powerful film actors and have more inspired work to their credit. However, it wasn't until the former's breakthrough in "The Hours" a few years later that she proved to be much more than a pretty face and good actor. In that film, Kidman's face reveals wellsprings of emotional reserve. Here she is opaque, struggling to hold the center of such a solidly cast ensemble work, when she needs to command that center, even when embodying Isabel Archer's fragility. She is intermittently compelling but doesn't deliver the emotional knockout her journey requires.

As for Malkovich, his perfectly satisfactory performance inescapably conjures a distracting degree of deja vu. It is impossible to shake his signature performance in "Dangerous Liaisons" several years earlier. Casting him as Gilbert Osmond makes theoretical but not logistical sense. There is little sense of uncertainty in his potential to destroy Kidman's Archer, robbing the film of an essential element of suspense. Malkovich may have seemed an obvious choice, but proves an uninspired one. Who could have played the role more effectively is a question I have no ready answer for.

Thus it is the unsatisfying center of the film that ultimately proves its undoing as the transcendent work of cinema that seemed its destiny. It's possible that, like Christopher Hampton's accomplished screen adaptation of "Dangerous Liaisons", scriptwriter Laura Jones could have rewritten a few characters as composites. I wanted more of Donovan and Mortensen, less of Mary-Louise Parker's anachronistic modernism.

As for the prospect of who might have provided a more compelling portrayal of Isabel Archer, a friend and I agreed that Kate Winslet would likely have been a more engrossing choice. Call me an Anglophile, but surely there is a British actor who could have portrayed Osmond and had us forgetting anything else the actor had done before.