The word “artist” is a weird one for me, and brings up some quite conflicting feelings. I’ve been called an artist since I was little and I would always think: “Why’d you have to go there?” Of course it was always meant as a compliment, but I hated the word, just like I once hated the word blogging. Yeah…
With the word artist I associated a self-pitying guy in skinny jeans lying on top of his paintings, tears about the suffering he endures for his art mixing with the randomly splattered paint. As if someone is forcing him to devote his life to painting. Yet a little more than a year ago, I was doing exactly what this image describes… Continue reading
Dear lovely loyal readers, after more than a hundred posts, 500 000 words, two years, a million ups and downs and hopefully quite a bit of advice and inspiration I am thinking of making some changes to this blog. And I’d love your opinions!
It is with absolute delight that I announce to finally have completed all the work for my O-1B visa. No more late night Skyping to accompany LA work hours, no more early morning stressing over alarming inbox messages and no more nagging in the back of my mind, wondering if I’ll ever get it done. Of course I won’t be happy until I get the verdict and the verdict is an approval of my visa request, but it’s a step in the right direction. No, a joyful skip in the right direction, a Charlie Chaplin jump in the right direction!
In Hollywood not everything is as it seems and that’s only logical. Take toilet paper, for example. An entire team of marketing and communication and design people have worked on that, from the “image” of the toilet paper to the lay-out of the packaging to the actors in the commercial. None of it is coincidental or random. And the same goes for anything that makes money. And thus when people start becoming products, especially products that are guaranteed to make millions, a PR team will carefully try to construct their image too.
When I started researching the US visa process I felt like I was back in my first week in LA again, navigating from North Hollywood to Venice by bus without Google Maps, lost at every intersection. Not to mention it took three hours each way, all that just to check out an apartment that might not even work out. It’s actually quite a perfect analogy for the visa process: spending a lot of effort searching, a lot of time finding, and a lot of work collecting documents, hoping it will work out.
No, I haven’t seen all the movies on the planet and no, I also haven’t been around since the beginning of time. Although, in a way I have been, but that’s another discussion. Either way, every once in a while there is a performance that just sticks with you because of its creativity, intensity or ability to make you feel.
Famewhore, attention seeker, naive/delusional, unstable, childish… If you want to go to LA to become an actor you are obviously either one or all of these things. According to those certain kinds of people you encounter in daily life anyway. And although there’s no need to justify yourself to them, I do ponder sometimes why it is we have this unwavering desire to play dress up and pretend to be somebody else. Why we voluntarily choose a life full of uncertainty, financial instability and rejection. Why Halloween or the local Theater Group on the side isn’t enough.
