Gone to America

I’ve been deluged with an email, and bombarded with a request, so I’ve decided to bow to overwhelming public pressure and bring back After the Party. Only twice weekly, though – Mondays and Thursdays. Six days a week was a little ambitious. But I’m glad some of you like it. If I can bring a little moment of pleasure into your humdrum lives, than all my hard work ain’t been in vain for nothing. I should also like to thank Hugh O’Conor, who, when others were simply berating me for being late or missing a day, stepped up to the plate and, with no thought of self, gave me some ideas to steal.

Congratulations to Nicola Lafferty on her new job. Nicola may well be the first person I know from college to get a job on a show that my parents actually watch – they’ll be thrilled! She’s going to be a director on the next season of Antiques Roadshow at BBC Bristol. Go Nicola! Wooo! Even if you do consider my Guestbook to be “remedial”. Huh.

Nigel’s blog seems to be going gangbusters. He’s a much more regular poster than me, so if you check here and are getting frustrated with my reticence you should head over there – even if he does just use a cheap, cookie-cutter, hosted guestbook and a bog-standard, untweaked blogspot template. Huh. What does Nicola know, anyway?

The Sopranos is (are?) back, and it’s (they’re?) wondrous.

Pretty good weekend – played poker on Friday night. Different crowd than before – these were mostly the crew of the short I’m working on at the moment (nearly finished).

Poker description follows. Please feel free to skip ahead.

There were eight of us, and we started off with a tournament – no limit Texas Hold’Em. Everybody put twenty bucks into a jar, the idea being that we each got $200 worth of chips to play with, and the first and second place winners split the pot – one hundred bucks for the winner, sixty for the runner up.
I was doing pretty well – Hold’Em is the game I know best, and it was great to be able to keep playing it without having to switch around to all sorts of bizarre home games. But I’ve never got the hang of no limit betting, and after being an early leader, I let it slip away by ill-advisedly going all in against the only guy who could call me. He did. I had high pair (kings) and a flush draw. He had three of a kind – tens. We turned over the cards. I didn’t make the flush, or get another king. I was third out.
Which was enough people to start a cash game, so we did. I bought in for six dollars – the only money in my wallet (did I mention that I was hard up? Buy my car). To put that in perspective, another guy bought in for $60.
But this was limit Hold’Em (50c BB, $2 limit) and I know how to play that. Through a combination of luck, skill, and being slightly less drunk I turned my $6 into $50, leaving me $24 up on the night. Go, me! Tonight, I eat!

(Joking, joking, I eat, I eat).

And the guy who knocked me out went on to win, so no shame there either.

On Saturday I met up with Phil Benson, one of my original teachers at Ardmore Sound (guys, are you ever going to put up that new website?), back in the day. By which I mean 1997. He’s based in LA, and he’s in New York for a screening of Jersey Girl, on which he is the associate producer.
A couple of years ago, he got the hell out of sound – which is basically what I have decided I really want to do. Unfortunately, this would mean giving up on the skills I’ve spent the last six years acquiring and improving, and starting pretty much from scratch doing something else. Which is terrifying. And New York is the wrong place to do it. I need a lifeboat, and the only place I’ll find one of those is probably Dublin, where I know people and they know me. But I don’t want to go home just yet.

So, what’ll I do? Am I right to want to quit sound? Is it real dissatisfaction, or am I just frustrated at not being able to get work here? Really, I’ve been disillusioned with it for at least a couple of years. Uninspired. The only thing that kept me going was the pleasure of performing a skill and the money; and, of course, the fear of change. The pleasure has been diminishing for a while, and now I’m not even making money. Even the idea of getting a job tomorrow in sound on a decent feature really doesn’t appeal. I’d have to force myself to do it (and I probably would, because I’m broke). I have no enthusiasm for it. If I’m going to be working all the hours in the day, and forfeiting my right to my weekends, then I want it to be in doing something interesting.
So why don’t I leave New York? Am I afraid that I’ll see myself as a failure if I leave without having accomplished anything at all? Maybe – but it doesn’t take much thought to realise that’s bullshit. Dropping everything and coming to NYC without a job offer or any support network was ballsy. Stupid maybe, but ballsy. And sometimes things don’t work out. At least I tried.
But I don’t want to leave just yet. New York is good for me – even this crisis is evidence of that. It’s been coming for a while, and I need to resolve it one way or the other – either embrace sound and continue with enthusiasm, or just quit and do something else. The worst thing I can do is avoid making any decision at all, and that’s what I was doing in Dublin.

Hopefully the car will sell soon, and that’ll take the pressure off of making any immediate decision. I need to think.

So, welcome to my career crisis – I don’t think I’ll be running a poll.

Although, now that I think of it…