(no subject)
My sleep schedule is all fucked up, sooooo
First off, I just need to say that this was one of the weirdest days of my life, and my life has contained a lot of weird days. In addition to peeking into the inner workings of an American (and, particularly, a New York) cultural institution like Law & Order, there was like, this crazy race/gender/class mash-up going on, and this weird way that my actual life was being fictionalized, combined with the way that the environment transformed the celebrity into the quotidian -- it all made for this feeling that you had stepped into the weirdest Ambien dream ever.
The set-up here is that I was a background actor (aka human furniture) in an episode of Law & Order SVU in which a RADICAL TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION rips off a pharmaceuticals warehouse, stealing a stash of THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF HORMONES. The collective, known as the CHILDREN OF ARIEL (!!!), stashes the cache of HRT at the house of one of their junior accomplices, who seems to be a trans girl around the age of 14-16. The girl's dad is found maimed, and thus, due to the BIZARRE CIRCUMSTANCE of having a TRANSSEXUAL TEEN involved, the cops decide to call in the Special Victims Unit.
It should now be noted that the character Blake, a trans dude who is sort of a lead community organizer among the Children of Ariel, will be played by none other than one Daniella Sea, who, as we all know, played Max the trans dude on the L-Word. And moreover, Blake and Max look exactly the same down to the shaggy haircut and bad fake facial hair. I shit you not, at one point during a break in shooting, a make-up artist came over with a mascara wand to touch up Max, uh, I mean, Blake's scruff.
Daniella Sea just keeps popping up in my life. I used to see her at Bitch+Animal protests, and she would let me pet Bitch's chihuahua; she was a friend-of-a-friend's high school art teacher; one of her and Bitch's musical projects was handled by like the first dyke I ever met back when I was in high school; she has a radical fairy name; yadda yadda yadda. So, as loathed and reviled as she may be by some fellows of the transmasculine persuasion, I guess I have sort of always considered her a member of an extended dysfunctional queer family -- like, the dorky distant cousin who got kind of famous, if you will.
As such, it was deeply disorienting to see her getting grilled by Chris Meloni and Ice T! I grew up with this show, for God's sake! I watched it with my sister and my mom! Worlds colliding.
The scene we shot was set in a church basement, but like, a gritty urban gay church basement, with gay HIV prevention posters on the wall next to the cross. Set design Easter Egg: one of the public health posters depicts Ice T and S. Epatha Merkerson advocating quitting smoking. So, in the universe of Law and Order, Fin and Lieutenant Van Buren are not only themselves, but also like, stars on a teevee show. I am fascinated by this kind of thing. It's like when they talk about The L Word on Weeds. Like, all the characters in each show live in Southern California, and yet, in the Weeds universe, Bette and Tina are only TV characters. Are the Weeds people only characters on The L Word? These are stupid things I think about.
Anyway, what we, the extras, are actually doing there is assembling for a random meeting, like a support group or a community organizing thing. My guess is that the Children of Ariel (or COA, as we see it referred to on an on-set poster) is loosely based on Sylvia's Place, which is a queer/trans youth homeless shelter that is housed in the basement of the Hell's Kitchen MCC, where they also occasionally have trans drop-in meetings and other stuff. But uh, they are hardly illegal or even that radical, unless you count the minister there getting fake arrested for laying down in the street during ACT-UP actions. Some dialogue from the scene:
DETECTIVE STABLER: So, you rob from the rich pharmaceuticals and give to the poor transsexuals? You're like Robin Hood and Maid Marion rolled all into one!
BLAKE: I want a lawyer!
STABLER: If you don't tell us where she was between 8 and 10pm, she could go to jail, where there are no hormones, and she'll grow up to be a man! Is that what you want?
BLAKE: You don't know what it's like to have your body betray you!
ICE T (or merely "Ice," as he is referred to on the set): So you just had her along the ride and left the score at her house? You're no better than a drug dealer who makes a juvenile hold his stash!
STABLER: Be a man! ...if that's what you really are!!!
Okay, that doesn't make a lot of sense, I know, but I'm leaving out parts because I'm trying to type all that from memory. The order is fucked up, but the lines are pretty much verbatim. Particularly that "Be a man!" part, because that was my cue to walk behind Daniella and through the frame.
What I thought was interesting about this is that they seem to be portraying the NYPD as being familiar with trans issues and as having cultivated a culture of respect for trans people... as long as they follow the letter of the law!! Which, as we know, is not the case. But the twisted propaganda here is fascinating: instead of having cops profiling and sexually assaulting and beating up and stealing from trans women, and then putting them in jail where they will continue to be assaulted and beaten up, we have basically good cops who are trying to keep the crazy transsexuals from shooting up kids full of stolen hormones that will make them go crazy! and stab their parents! I am riveted to see how this will all play out.
Back to the some petty gossip and impressions: I hesitate to gauge anything about the actors' real personalities based on what we saw on set, because it's a weird environment and there's a lot going on and it all runs on a pretty strict hierarchy that would keep anyone pretty tightly wound. But I can say the following:
Daniella seemed pretty nervous and very much out of her element. She kept fucking up lines and cues and stuff. The director had to spend a lot of time coaching her w/r/t character motivation and basically had to drag the performance out of her, since she is a pretty flat actor. But then, I give her a lot of credit -- I would be nervous as fuck, too. Hell, I was nervous and all I had to do was walk across the room and pretend to eat cookies.
Ice T seemed very relaxed and easygoing and professional and was a pretty generous actor; he helped Daniella out a few times with marks and cues and other stuff. He briefly came in and got coffee in "holding," which is where they keep the peon extras. Chris Meloni, on the other hand, seemed like a pretty tightly-wound cocky asshole guy, but I mean, who knows. Maybe that's just him trying to stay in character. Or maybe he had something to legitimately be pissed off about.
What really strikes you is the banality of it all. Like, this is just some random warehouse in Northern New Jersey with mostly low ceilings and bad lighting and stale cookies and cold coffee. At one point, Chris Meloni asked this production manager, "What's the hot entree tonight?" and the PM was all, "Beef and chicken empanadas -- they're really good" and Meloni was like, "But what's the chicken entree?" and he was like, "The chicken empanada -- you can get a beef empanada or a chicken empanada" and Meloni was like, "Sweet, would you score me two chicken empanadas?" Like, these are just people who go to work every day in a decidedly not-so-glamorous work environment and get happy when they happen to be on the receiving end of good catering. All my illusions are shattered.
The thing about being an extra, or any kind of actor on any TV/film set, is that there is a lot of sitting around and waiting involved. "Holding," as I mentioned before, is a room very much like a '70s high-school cafeteria in which we spent most of our day. And honestly? This turned out to be as much as if not more surreal than the actual filming part, mostly due to the fact that these trans girls they found were, well...
Imagine, if you will, being in a room full of random cop and cop-office type extras penned in with five trans women of color screeeching at the top of their lungs, "COCK COCK COCK COCK CUNT CUNT COCK CUNT CUNT CUNT PUSSY CUNT realnessssss" all day long. "MISS THANG I GOTTA GO BEAT MY FACE CUZ I GOTTA LOOK CUNT ON THAT SET MISS THANG." "MISS THANG IF I CAN'T TAKE AT LEAST EIGHT INCHES OF DICK IN MY CUNT I'LL JUST KEEP MY PENIS MISS THANG." "MISS THANG I AM SO LOADED UP FULL OF MONES I'M ABOUT TO PISS DELESTROGEN MISS THANG." "MISS THANG IS GIVING ME ATTITUDE BECAUSE SHE THING SHE LOOK MORE CUNT THAN ME BUT I LOOK PRETTY CUNT MISS THANG AND ALL THOSE EVIL FAGGOTS SAY SO AND YOU KNOW THEY'RE EVIL MISS THANG." Like, there was really nothing these girls wouldn't talk about, and they talked about everything. Some other topix:
- taking prenatal vitamins to make your breasts look "fluffy";
- pumping and all the craziness associated with that: getting pumped with baby oil or even bleach, for God's sake;
- how semen tastes, and how it tastes different from man to man;
- hooking up with "trade" (straight guys) from the chat line, and how trade is crazy and will stab you in your apartment, and how quickly trade can go from being trade to a top butch queen to a bottom butch queen to a femme queen to a tranny;
- extensive discussion of how to "look cunt." (i.e, to describe being passable, or "real.") At one point, one of the PAs came in and was like, "Okay, your scene is up next, so get pretty or handsome or do whatever you need to do" and one of the girls was like "GIRL WHERE'S MY PERSONAL MAKEUP ARTIST" and the PA was like, "Uh, you can check your makeup in the bathroom if you need to?" and then Miss Thang was like, "BUT I NEED TO LOOK CUNT MISS THANG" and the PA was like, "Uh, what was the word again?" and Miss Thang was like, "CUNT. CUUUUUUUNT."
- and God help any man or anyone who looked like a man who came into holding. "HEY THAT'S A HOT PIECE OF TRADE HONEY COME OVER HERE YOU SINGLE?"
And if I sound like I am exaggerating, I must firmly impress upon you that I am not, and if anything, I really can't even begin to remember all of and therefor am relating to you only a tiny fraction of all the outré transgender wackiness flying around. Like it was seriously this full-volume cackle like this for FIVE HOURS. I know this probably plays into a lot of stereotypes of black and Latina trans women, but I'm just trying to tell it like it was.
What struck me as odd was how everyone who worked on set was totally respectful, at least on a superficial level, and you didn't even really get much of a sense of eye-rolling from the crew (though the other extras seemed a little freaked out by the potty talk). I didn't hear a crew member fuck up anyone's pronouns once. I guess they went to the right sensitivity training before hand or something. One could say with absolute certainty that the transgender talent harassed the crew way more than the crew harassed the transgender talent.
In retrospect, all it really goes to show is that the stylistics of communication are almost completely phatic and meaningless and more-or-less just class/race-based ephemera, you know? Being "polite" is just another way of codifying the status quo. I mean, you could say that these girls gave the crew hell, when really, the ladies generously gave up their time and dignity to some stupid show which certainly doesn't have their best interest in mind. I hardly trust that the NBC Universal/General Electric media industrial complex cares about the welfare of trans people, yet they train their employees about how to be nice, while exploiting some cultural panic around trans youth for ratings. So, in that regard, it was kind of awesome to see everything disrupted in the way it was. At one point, I was like, whoa, this could totally turn into an anarchist moment, if, instead of "quiet on the set," we all ran around screaming COCK CUNT DICK PUSSY REALNESS SPERM MONES CUNT CUNT CUNT.
In general, I would recommend we all more often consider doing just that.
Oh, and I guess a plane crashed into the Hudson yesterday? For whatever reason this news story has totally failed to excite me. I'm like, "Whatever, it's a plane in the river." Tom was all, "You're really hard to entertain."
First off, I just need to say that this was one of the weirdest days of my life, and my life has contained a lot of weird days. In addition to peeking into the inner workings of an American (and, particularly, a New York) cultural institution like Law & Order, there was like, this crazy race/gender/class mash-up going on, and this weird way that my actual life was being fictionalized, combined with the way that the environment transformed the celebrity into the quotidian -- it all made for this feeling that you had stepped into the weirdest Ambien dream ever.
The set-up here is that I was a background actor (aka human furniture) in an episode of Law & Order SVU in which a RADICAL TRANSGENDER ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION rips off a pharmaceuticals warehouse, stealing a stash of THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF HORMONES. The collective, known as the CHILDREN OF ARIEL (!!!), stashes the cache of HRT at the house of one of their junior accomplices, who seems to be a trans girl around the age of 14-16. The girl's dad is found maimed, and thus, due to the BIZARRE CIRCUMSTANCE of having a TRANSSEXUAL TEEN involved, the cops decide to call in the Special Victims Unit.
It should now be noted that the character Blake, a trans dude who is sort of a lead community organizer among the Children of Ariel, will be played by none other than one Daniella Sea, who, as we all know, played Max the trans dude on the L-Word. And moreover, Blake and Max look exactly the same down to the shaggy haircut and bad fake facial hair. I shit you not, at one point during a break in shooting, a make-up artist came over with a mascara wand to touch up Max, uh, I mean, Blake's scruff.
Daniella Sea just keeps popping up in my life. I used to see her at Bitch+Animal protests, and she would let me pet Bitch's chihuahua; she was a friend-of-a-friend's high school art teacher; one of her and Bitch's musical projects was handled by like the first dyke I ever met back when I was in high school; she has a radical fairy name; yadda yadda yadda. So, as loathed and reviled as she may be by some fellows of the transmasculine persuasion, I guess I have sort of always considered her a member of an extended dysfunctional queer family -- like, the dorky distant cousin who got kind of famous, if you will.
As such, it was deeply disorienting to see her getting grilled by Chris Meloni and Ice T! I grew up with this show, for God's sake! I watched it with my sister and my mom! Worlds colliding.
The scene we shot was set in a church basement, but like, a gritty urban gay church basement, with gay HIV prevention posters on the wall next to the cross. Set design Easter Egg: one of the public health posters depicts Ice T and S. Epatha Merkerson advocating quitting smoking. So, in the universe of Law and Order, Fin and Lieutenant Van Buren are not only themselves, but also like, stars on a teevee show. I am fascinated by this kind of thing. It's like when they talk about The L Word on Weeds. Like, all the characters in each show live in Southern California, and yet, in the Weeds universe, Bette and Tina are only TV characters. Are the Weeds people only characters on The L Word? These are stupid things I think about.
Anyway, what we, the extras, are actually doing there is assembling for a random meeting, like a support group or a community organizing thing. My guess is that the Children of Ariel (or COA, as we see it referred to on an on-set poster) is loosely based on Sylvia's Place, which is a queer/trans youth homeless shelter that is housed in the basement of the Hell's Kitchen MCC, where they also occasionally have trans drop-in meetings and other stuff. But uh, they are hardly illegal or even that radical, unless you count the minister there getting fake arrested for laying down in the street during ACT-UP actions. Some dialogue from the scene:
DETECTIVE STABLER: So, you rob from the rich pharmaceuticals and give to the poor transsexuals? You're like Robin Hood and Maid Marion rolled all into one!
BLAKE: I want a lawyer!
STABLER: If you don't tell us where she was between 8 and 10pm, she could go to jail, where there are no hormones, and she'll grow up to be a man! Is that what you want?
BLAKE: You don't know what it's like to have your body betray you!
ICE T (or merely "Ice," as he is referred to on the set): So you just had her along the ride and left the score at her house? You're no better than a drug dealer who makes a juvenile hold his stash!
STABLER: Be a man! ...if that's what you really are!!!
Okay, that doesn't make a lot of sense, I know, but I'm leaving out parts because I'm trying to type all that from memory. The order is fucked up, but the lines are pretty much verbatim. Particularly that "Be a man!" part, because that was my cue to walk behind Daniella and through the frame.
What I thought was interesting about this is that they seem to be portraying the NYPD as being familiar with trans issues and as having cultivated a culture of respect for trans people... as long as they follow the letter of the law!! Which, as we know, is not the case. But the twisted propaganda here is fascinating: instead of having cops profiling and sexually assaulting and beating up and stealing from trans women, and then putting them in jail where they will continue to be assaulted and beaten up, we have basically good cops who are trying to keep the crazy transsexuals from shooting up kids full of stolen hormones that will make them go crazy! and stab their parents! I am riveted to see how this will all play out.
Back to the some petty gossip and impressions: I hesitate to gauge anything about the actors' real personalities based on what we saw on set, because it's a weird environment and there's a lot going on and it all runs on a pretty strict hierarchy that would keep anyone pretty tightly wound. But I can say the following:
Daniella seemed pretty nervous and very much out of her element. She kept fucking up lines and cues and stuff. The director had to spend a lot of time coaching her w/r/t character motivation and basically had to drag the performance out of her, since she is a pretty flat actor. But then, I give her a lot of credit -- I would be nervous as fuck, too. Hell, I was nervous and all I had to do was walk across the room and pretend to eat cookies.
Ice T seemed very relaxed and easygoing and professional and was a pretty generous actor; he helped Daniella out a few times with marks and cues and other stuff. He briefly came in and got coffee in "holding," which is where they keep the peon extras. Chris Meloni, on the other hand, seemed like a pretty tightly-wound cocky asshole guy, but I mean, who knows. Maybe that's just him trying to stay in character. Or maybe he had something to legitimately be pissed off about.
What really strikes you is the banality of it all. Like, this is just some random warehouse in Northern New Jersey with mostly low ceilings and bad lighting and stale cookies and cold coffee. At one point, Chris Meloni asked this production manager, "What's the hot entree tonight?" and the PM was all, "Beef and chicken empanadas -- they're really good" and Meloni was like, "But what's the chicken entree?" and he was like, "The chicken empanada -- you can get a beef empanada or a chicken empanada" and Meloni was like, "Sweet, would you score me two chicken empanadas?" Like, these are just people who go to work every day in a decidedly not-so-glamorous work environment and get happy when they happen to be on the receiving end of good catering. All my illusions are shattered.
The thing about being an extra, or any kind of actor on any TV/film set, is that there is a lot of sitting around and waiting involved. "Holding," as I mentioned before, is a room very much like a '70s high-school cafeteria in which we spent most of our day. And honestly? This turned out to be as much as if not more surreal than the actual filming part, mostly due to the fact that these trans girls they found were, well...
Imagine, if you will, being in a room full of random cop and cop-office type extras penned in with five trans women of color screeeching at the top of their lungs, "COCK COCK COCK COCK CUNT CUNT COCK CUNT CUNT CUNT PUSSY CUNT realnessssss" all day long. "MISS THANG I GOTTA GO BEAT MY FACE CUZ I GOTTA LOOK CUNT ON THAT SET MISS THANG." "MISS THANG IF I CAN'T TAKE AT LEAST EIGHT INCHES OF DICK IN MY CUNT I'LL JUST KEEP MY PENIS MISS THANG." "MISS THANG I AM SO LOADED UP FULL OF MONES I'M ABOUT TO PISS DELESTROGEN MISS THANG." "MISS THANG IS GIVING ME ATTITUDE BECAUSE SHE THING SHE LOOK MORE CUNT THAN ME BUT I LOOK PRETTY CUNT MISS THANG AND ALL THOSE EVIL FAGGOTS SAY SO AND YOU KNOW THEY'RE EVIL MISS THANG." Like, there was really nothing these girls wouldn't talk about, and they talked about everything. Some other topix:
- taking prenatal vitamins to make your breasts look "fluffy";
- pumping and all the craziness associated with that: getting pumped with baby oil or even bleach, for God's sake;
- how semen tastes, and how it tastes different from man to man;
- hooking up with "trade" (straight guys) from the chat line, and how trade is crazy and will stab you in your apartment, and how quickly trade can go from being trade to a top butch queen to a bottom butch queen to a femme queen to a tranny;
- extensive discussion of how to "look cunt." (i.e, to describe being passable, or "real.") At one point, one of the PAs came in and was like, "Okay, your scene is up next, so get pretty or handsome or do whatever you need to do" and one of the girls was like "GIRL WHERE'S MY PERSONAL MAKEUP ARTIST" and the PA was like, "Uh, you can check your makeup in the bathroom if you need to?" and then Miss Thang was like, "BUT I NEED TO LOOK CUNT MISS THANG" and the PA was like, "Uh, what was the word again?" and Miss Thang was like, "CUNT. CUUUUUUUNT."
- and God help any man or anyone who looked like a man who came into holding. "HEY THAT'S A HOT PIECE OF TRADE HONEY COME OVER HERE YOU SINGLE?"
And if I sound like I am exaggerating, I must firmly impress upon you that I am not, and if anything, I really can't even begin to remember all of and therefor am relating to you only a tiny fraction of all the outré transgender wackiness flying around. Like it was seriously this full-volume cackle like this for FIVE HOURS. I know this probably plays into a lot of stereotypes of black and Latina trans women, but I'm just trying to tell it like it was.
What struck me as odd was how everyone who worked on set was totally respectful, at least on a superficial level, and you didn't even really get much of a sense of eye-rolling from the crew (though the other extras seemed a little freaked out by the potty talk). I didn't hear a crew member fuck up anyone's pronouns once. I guess they went to the right sensitivity training before hand or something. One could say with absolute certainty that the transgender talent harassed the crew way more than the crew harassed the transgender talent.
In retrospect, all it really goes to show is that the stylistics of communication are almost completely phatic and meaningless and more-or-less just class/race-based ephemera, you know? Being "polite" is just another way of codifying the status quo. I mean, you could say that these girls gave the crew hell, when really, the ladies generously gave up their time and dignity to some stupid show which certainly doesn't have their best interest in mind. I hardly trust that the NBC Universal/General Electric media industrial complex cares about the welfare of trans people, yet they train their employees about how to be nice, while exploiting some cultural panic around trans youth for ratings. So, in that regard, it was kind of awesome to see everything disrupted in the way it was. At one point, I was like, whoa, this could totally turn into an anarchist moment, if, instead of "quiet on the set," we all ran around screaming COCK CUNT DICK PUSSY REALNESS SPERM MONES CUNT CUNT CUNT.
In general, I would recommend we all more often consider doing just that.
Oh, and I guess a plane crashed into the Hudson yesterday? For whatever reason this news story has totally failed to excite me. I'm like, "Whatever, it's a plane in the river." Tom was all, "You're really hard to entertain."