Make a “sports” / “TV” social networking site. Could pretty much copy how twitter is set up. It seems like a lot of the people just want to talk about sports or whatever TV show is popular the time. I really don’t care about 95% of the overpaid athletes, shitty non-actors, and plastic ass, silicone breasted, fake lip “actresses”. Sorry but that hour long episode you just watched was really an advertisement for Vitamin Water. You thought you were good with the DVR skipping the commercials right? Nah, it’s called product placement and they write and edit scripts to put in these advertisements. Getting played twice, because you pay for it too.
But I’m getting off topic. I understand that people love sports. I love sports too. For the most part, watching it is boring as shit though. I’d rather actually pick up a ball and play. John Lennon said “if every American demanded peace instead of another TV set – there’d be peace”. I bet if every American played sports just as hard as they supported pro games the overweight and health statistics in this country would be a lot different.
Twitter is great. I get all kinds of amazing information from the people I’m following. Until there is a game. Then everything is drowned in a sea of “OHHHH SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT?!”. I like to know what’s going on in the game, but there’s 100 people saying the same thing. I think a “twitter” just for sports would be good. The market is there. Someone take that idea. Save my timeline! GET MONEY!
((I’ve found myself playing this many times these past few years))
((please press play before reading))
I’m getting older. New families are beginning. Old ones are fading away. I feel the transition. I’m 24 years old. In a little over a month I will be 25. I think my father’s father passed when he was 32. I didn’t get to know him. George. A big irish man. He worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard most of his life. Only 7 more years of my dad? A few of my friends never really had theirs. Now, more of my friends have lost theirs. My father just called me and told me about my great Aunt passing.
Aunt Fran. She was 83 years old, lived a long life in a Brooklyn. A loyal Mets fan and a true servant of the faith but NEVER not once did she “preach” to me or force me to believe in anything. Everything I learned from her I learned from how she treated me and everyone else. She didn’t tell me how to act. A few years ago their (her and my grandmother’s) older sister passed away from cancer. I am thinking now of them reuniting. They loved to play tennis & golf. I see them on infinite greens. I said in a tweet I want to name my first daughter (I suspect I will have daughters) Lucia, after her. I had that thought a few years ago and it’s stuck with me, I still believe in it. A beautiful name. They were both ill before they passed, and they both lived long lives. Neither of them had children but that was unnecessary as they both have many nieces and nephews who loved them. Who will remember them.
My grandmother is now going to be alone in her big old house in Brooklyn,without her sisters that have lived in the 2-family home for 50+ years now. My grandma, being my grandma, is cool though, she has friends, has been through pain before, is active in a neighborhood(bay ridge) theatre company, and she’s like me. Or rather, I’m like her. She goes on. I am one of 3. My grandmother was 1 of 3. I am definitely very much my own, independent. But without my brothers? Without the only 2 people on the planet who know exactly what I’ve been through since birth? 1 of 3 alone is a hard spot to be in.
I was going to write a blog about my mother tonight. I’ve saved the draft I started but I will say that one of the major points in my life, in my mother’s life, in my family’s life, was the loss of her older sister. I will elaborate on that in the other post but my point is we may fight with our brothers and sisters, we may say we hate them and genuinely mean it, but in the end, NO ONE on this Earth knows you better than your brother and sisters.
The importance of brothers & sisters.
We cannot rely or be dependent on parents or elders to be around forever to teach us. But we can rely on each other, brothers & sisters, to be here as we’ve been from birth. I have two brothers by blood, but I have many more brothers & sisters by LOVE. My peers. My family. We are here for each other. We are the only ones who know what each other have been through.
These past few years I’ve been to more wakes and funerals than in the 20 years or so prior. I didn’t go all of the ones I should have. I just couldn’t. Friends. Union brothers & sisters. Family. I don’t think there’s a black cloud around me, I think it’s natural, and I am seeing this because life is going by that fast.
I’m not sure that I am “good” at emotions. I know what I want to say. I know what I feel. I worry if I’ve shown enough compassion, if the people I care about know how much I care.
And then after all this agony and anxiety I find a song and I say, listen to this song..
I was in a head on car-crash on Snake Hill road. Seatbelt + Airbag probably saved my life. I was not driving. It was my father’s car, a beautiful 95 Gold Toyota Camry. I was in the front passenger seat. I let my friend drive because I was drinking and I figured why not let my friend get some experience driving. Cause of the accident? A reaction to an oncoming truck and a bit of oversteering… inexperienced driving. Life is funny.
What a name right- Snake Hill road, I lived in Staten Island 10 years of my life since I was a little kid, I thought it was the actual name, called the ambulance(I was the only one conscious pretty much), saying “Snake Hill road” and I find out it’s not the real name and dispatcher needs an address meanwhile this road is literally a 1 lane each way winding road through a golf course. No address. I get as fast as I can to the corner, I can’t remember if I ran, I don’t remember being in pain until the next day. I was the only one who didn’t leave in an ambulance of the 5 people involved (4 in my car, 1 girl in the honda accord we hit). Get a couple blocks up the road and give the dispatcher a corner. “Down the road from this corner”.
A month prior to this I had gotten 6 tickets and 13 (THIRTEEN) points on my license in one night. I was 110% sober. That is ANOTHER story. Basically these 2 events with cars in Staten Island really hurt me a lot. I lost a lot of money, almost lost my license, almost got ran off the road / NYPD guns in my face, then was in a head on car crash less than a month later. I am not going even 10% into the details of either of these stories.
On top of the accident and other events, I was 19 just starting to work in the film business and commuting to Queens/Bk/Manhattan every day not only sucked but I had just destroyed the form of transportation that I had, and that form of transportation wasn’t even mine.
What to do?
No more car. No more driving. I’m going to walk.
ANOTHER story for another day on how I lucked out on getting the perfect apartment in Brooklyn but needless to say I found a place where I was:
a)away from the typical hood shit on Staten that was taking down so many of my friends(I always think of the Cormega line “now I live in a peaceful environment, a secret asylum from the streets where people be wildin”)
b) able to commute to work easily
c) truly on my own as an adult
And I walked everywhere. And I felt good. I felt free. I felt stronger.
That is why I am making “Walk.” It is the expression of my freedom. My lack of fear. My individuality. I don’t expect it to sell anything because I will be giving it away. I only hope that people listen. I think they will eventually. And if they don’t, I am happy enough to have simply made it. A part of my journey. They say albums are dead. I don’t believe that one second.
You know so much of the time we’re just lost, we say please God, tell us what is right, tell us what is true. And there is no justice, the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time we become dead. Little dead we think of ourselves as victims. And we become victims. We become weak. We doubt ourselves. We doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law, but today you are the law…
You are the law. Not some book. Not the lawyers, not the marble statue. Or the trappings of the court. Those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are in fact a prayer, a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion they say “act is if ye had faith, faith will be given to you”… If.. If we are to have faith in justice we need only to believe in ourselves, and act with justice. See I believe there is justice in our hearts.
PEACE
TO OUR WORLD
ACT WITH JUSTICE
PLEASE DONATE AGAIN IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY TO THE HAITI RELIEF EFFORT
I never took a class in : public speaking, poetry, quantum mechanics, a musical instrument, saying good morning, saying thank you & please, holding doors or being courteous and respectful. I never took a class to be a busboy, to put up christmas lights, to rig 125 foot machines with lighting & grip equipment or fill dumpsters with the broken pieces of wrapped sets.
I graduated from Staten Island Technical HS in 2003. It’s like Bronx tech or BK tech there is a limited acceptance. MY zoned school was New Dorp HS. New Dorp HS at the time had a dropout rate of like 60%. Both of my brothers went to New Dorp. Now both of my brothers got GED’s. I was lucky to go to the other school. I still never went. At the end of the 4 years I had 196 absences total. I think there are 180 days in a school year. I used to figure out what days I would be absent by only showing up for the ‘review’ day before the test. I never did homework I only did the necessary projects. I had cutting school down to a science. I worked harder avoiding school than I would have if I’d have just went.
I was doing fine until my senior year first semester. My 1st two classes were Gym and English. I don’t need to walk laps around the track. I was playing handball every day. As a 17 year old kid I was as fit as I could be. English – I love english, obviously I write all the time, I HATED the class. SO BORING. They would dictate chapters of books I’d finished reading in 2 nights. And here I am in this so called special acceptence ‘smart’ school bored out of my mind because this shit is so simple. So I failed those two classes. Now the 2nd semester comes around and I have to make up for it.
The guidance counselor who was a very nice woman and I’m pissed I can’t remember her name came up with the idea that there are night school HS classes at the school and I could finish my last semester there. I had TWO gym classes and one english class. That was my last semester of high school. Because it’s a technical school with extra curriculum built-in I already had all the other required reagents and credits to graduate except for the 2 gym and 1 english. So off I am in night school. I show up at my graduation and not one of the kids in my graduating class had seen me for 6 months.
HOW’D YOU DO THAT?
I like to do things my own way. Common sense & experience have treated me very well and I’ve learned to trust them over data forced down peoples throats.
I’ll save my one and only year at SUNY Old Westbury for another blog. Ha. I haven’t been in a classroom in 6 years. I never stopped learning!
I was 20 years old. I’d been working in the film business 3 months. Up until that point I’d only been on small stages in regular size places moving a wall or two doing construction on sets. Learning. This WAS My first big job. I arrive at the Bedford Armory. It’s HUGE. If you live in NYC you’ve definitely seen the Armories - Marcy(in Williamsburg), Kingsbridge (in BX), Bedford (in Crown Heights) and there is one on Park Ave uptown in Manhattan. They look like castles. I think there are more but they are all National Guard buildings that as far as I know since 2003 they’ve been rented out for major film/tv productions. I’ve read that they want to make the Kingsbridge Armory (which is a place that will get a post of it’s own) into a shopping plaza. There’s a rumor that they’re all connected by underground tunnels. But that’s another story for another day.
I walk into the big bay doors in the middle of Union St. Here I am. In awe. A kid in the middle of all of this, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Picture Calvin[&Hobbes]. Gawking. Look at this huge production. I wish I had a camera then. My job? To clean the construction shop. Vacuum the saws. Sweep. Put away lumber. Keep things organized. Make sure no one trips on debris. Give the carpenters a hand when they needed to move something. Simple things. “Shop bitch”. I didn’t mind, I was a kid and I was learning. Happy just to be there making some money and watching it come together. It wasn’t easy.. there are no comfort controls in the massive armories. No A/C. We were starting at 6AM and sweating by 6:17. In the winter it was freezing cold no matter what you did. Here I am, I’m in the middle of 8 table saws going. Dust everywhere. A lot of it MDF (medium density fibreboard – another story…) – a toxic composite wood made of glued together sawdust. It was filthy. But from all this filth the set started to come together. The floor. Then the walls started rising. Then the carpenters added detail. Then the set dressers came in. The electricians lit it and the rigging crew had everything set. And then the shooting crew arrived. The cast. The exras. Craft service. Catering. Where did the star of the movie park their BIGGEST-EVER bus size trailer? INSIDE the armory right next to our carpentry shop. The armory, this HUGE armory, was EMPTY when I got there. By the time I had left we filled every inch three times over. We’d built sets, knocked them down, and built new ones, new floors on top of old, at the end of the job the floor we put down was 10 layers of wood and we used 2 forklifts to break it into huge chunks. At the end it was empty and cleaner than when we’d found it. And I saw it all.
One of the first mornings I was there, probably looking confused, “hair in my eyes”, a carpenter who knew I was new to the business said to me “C’mere kid I wanna show you something”. He turned me around and said “This is the first rule of the business” and pointed at the wall of our tool room – on it in huge letters was:
“SEE THE BIG PICTURE”
Sweeping is not just sweeping. If the floors don’t get swept the movie doesn’t get made. I applied that lesson to everything. I learned a lot from that carpenter. We did that entire job together and I didn’t see him for almost 2 years and he said he saw me working and he couldn’t believe how much I learned. I’m extremely lucky to work around people that are not just my peers but people who’ve lived life much more than I…. that carpenters name was Eddie Ferrara. He passed away 3 days ago of Lung Cancer. He was in his 50′s. A true character in the story of life.
Rest in Peace to all those we lost in 2009 and all of us left behind
A man living in a 10-20 million dollar townhouse on the Upper West Side approached us in a polite but astute manner saying “I’m the president of this block, and the mayor’s office of film & theatre permit says you can’t run this small generator”. We, ever so courteous to the people around[there is an ideal the people I've learned from in the film business have taught me - always leave a place better than you found it], will always oblige. We take his word for it. Now I say “it’s keeping us warm(it was powering heater on our truck)” and he gives me the ::so?Shrug:: like that’s nothing. Then he went back into his climate controlled mansion and we sat outside in the dark & cold. You tell me what I should think about that.
I grew up listening to hip-hop (naturally as a New Yorker born in the mid-80′s) and whatever my parents listened to. Most of my earliest memories involve music. I always remember hearing Michael Jackson with my mother. My father as a kid in the 60′s / 70′s naturally listened to Rock / Soul / R&B of that era. I’d always known the Beatles from Q104.3 … I’d never really been into them. If any band I really got into through my father it was Pink Floyd. But I knew who the Beatles were.
In November of 2005 I was looking for a birthday present for my father. I’m at the BestBuy in Staten Island and I see this :
...
And at this point I know that John Lennon was a Beatle. I know that my father liked the Beatles. And if I were to call anyone a ‘Working Class Hero’ (I’d at that point never heard the expression or the song) it would be him. But things aren’t so simple in any life and especially not in mine. My father on getting the gift says he doesn’t want it. Maybe the statement was too much. We’re a family of men, my father, my brothers and my saint of a mother. We don’t typically do very sentimental things for each other. And my father doesn’t want much – he says – ‘I want you to take care of yourself’. A true good man. Was then and still is my hero and grateful to have him.
But here I am with this John Lennon 2CD album called “Working Class Hero”. Now myself, a young working class man just starting out in the film business, always a lover of music, never a returner of anything, I decided to open this up and listen to it. I’d never listened to a full Beatles album before. I’d never listened to a John Lennon song and I’m pretty sure the only one I’d ever heard is “Imagine”.
And I listened. And I learned. And I sang along. And it’s been with me like I knew it all along. There is so much more to say. I work in a business where we are at different locations all the time, for instance last week on each day I started in 5 different places around the city. Tomorrow and tuesday of all places I will be working just up Central Park West from the Dakota where he lived and died… on the anniversary of his death.
How little I knew just buying what I thought was a gift for my father. There are people who will tell you with certainty that I am the reincarnation of the man. I’m not saying it. I want to say tonight that I’ve been thinking about it and though I wasn’t born until 5 years later, as I put his whole life, the world, and the events together I still can’t believe it. How could someone shoot John Lennon? How could someone kill someone like me?
There is so much more to every story…
love & peace
we have to say that no one remembered ever truly dies
Do you know where your children are? #NYC. AH I remember seeing that as a kid on Fox5 then watching X-files. I used to think I would get abducted. I always had trouble sleeping. Some of my earliest memories are of being up at night, I don’t know what it is. I’m awake. I was born that way. My last post it was 4:07AM and that was oh about 18 hours ago. I had planned to stay up but then fell asleep around 5:15 and woke up at 6. 45 minutes of sleep to start a Monday. I left my apartment at 6:30 and from Brooklyn off I was into Manhattan L to the 5 and I got off at 86 street still really in a daze not quite tired not quite awake not quite morning really unfeeling of day or night, just me being and I felt good.
First thing I saw – and this always helps – and is always a blessing because it’s always hard for me to get up early – the sunrise.
And of course I lucked out with the weather running on no sleep isn’t easy when it’s freezing cold or raining. It was nice. But I knew that the night before when I decided ‘it’s gonna be one of those nights’. 7 AM I reach my destination and the crew is all there and we do our thing, now I will explain more about shooting crew / rigging crew as pertains to film set in a more informative blog but I’ll say I am on the rigging crew and we are not necessarily tied to the camera while it is rolling. So today while I started with the shooting crew in the afternoon I was off to Queens via a crew van to prepare the stages for tomorrows shoot. (We the rigging crew are in first – last out – on-call) It was easy, and I got to go home relatively early. It all worked out for me. I even took at an hour nap at lunch. So now 10:25 PM I’ve been up from Sunday Noon-ish that makes 36 hours a awake with a couple of seperate hour naps and I’m good. I wonder how this will read to me tomorrow being not in the not quite debilitating but definitely felt feeling of sleep dimentia. It’s all good. I’m gonna get some rest I’m off tomorrow.
My alarm should be set at 5:45 AM. I have a 7 AM call time at 81st street & 5 ave. The Irish Historical Society. It is very hard (read: impossible) for me to get to sleep early on a regular night and Sunday is even worse because in the weekend I get back into my normal sleeping schedule which is more into the night hours. I would say in the past 5 years my average amount of sleep on a sunday night for monday is 2-5 hours. I find every so often I won’t be able to sleep at all the night before and so I start my monday on a second wind. Starting a week like that usually gets you rough on tuesdays after a pass out on monday night. I guess my body has grown accustomed to this schedule. My anthem for my day is going to be none other than the Beastie Boys…
