Peter Brusikiewicz Blog
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It has been a long time since I wrote s blog. Why? Because life is hectic in NYC. I rarely have a free minute for myself. At times, I find it hard to keep up with myself as I run around from early morning until late at night. Try juggling your personal life with your school? It’s not easy. The only way that you can work around this is if you intertwine the two. So my school and film is also a major part of my personal life.
Film has now become a part of my life more than ever. It’s not just a school thing. I come home and do some writing for future projects. I have been reading playwrights by such great writers as David Rabe, Adam Rapp, Rebecca Gilman, and Sarah Kane. I am trying to indulge myself as much as I can in all of this. On top of it, Acting requires you to have a body in peak shape. What better way then to take dance lessons to tweak your body and fine-tune your movements and rhythm? I need to tweak my body from the Hyundai that it is right now to the BMW that it will be eventually. I have learned all the things that I need to work on and so I have been working on that. One of them would be, breathing through the diaphragm and not the chest as I have been doing before. Or, not tilting my head up as I was in the habit of doing, because this puts strain on your vocal chords. These are just two of the fifty-or-so adjustments that need to be tweaked. Acting is a portrayal of life, but with all the boring bits out. One of the most important requirements of acting is concentration. This is a reflection of my life right now, because I need the concentration now, more than ever.
So with all of this, I think that you would all agree that it is difficult to juggle a personal life. But what if you meet an awesome girl? What do you do then?
New York is a city full of Hustlers. Everyone here hustles, from the homeless to the affluent. At times it can get tiring, but it has taught me that if you do not hustle, somebody will hustle you. Let me give you an example. I took a trip down in Brooklyn to pick up a mattress, desk, and chair that I have bought off of my friend. I thought that I would be able to get a car service that would help me get this furniture to my apartment, I called all of them in the region, but none of them were able to help. So my two friends and me began carrying this to my new apartment, which was a couple of miles away. I tried getting on the bus but it did not work. I tried haling down taxis and vans, but it did not work either. This local man walked by and he said, “Here in New York, you got to hustle. You got to get down in the middle of the road and wave them down. You cannot let the cars get away.” We ended up walking the entire way to our apartment. A couple of days later, I had a U-haul van that I rented out. I was driving it through Manhattan at night, when out of nowhere, a man jumped in the front of my car. I tried driving away, but he kept on running after my car banging on the window, yelling “I’ll pay you 50 dollars to drive me to Brooklyn. I have a desk that I need to take down there” This is what I mean by hustling. We were going to Brooklyn anyway and we needed the money, so my roommate and me took him.
I lead such a quick life here. I am up and about on my feet everyday, all day. At times I feel that I am moving around so quickly that I cannot keep up with myself. Put acting into this equation and it gets even more complicated because you have to spend time with the world that lives inside of you. Acting is an exploration of the inner world. We spend so much time exploring the outer world around us, that we never have time, or maybe try to even avoid the world that is within us. Maybe because we are afraid of what we may find there. You have to live from inside-out, and not outside-in. On top of that, Actor’s are great liars. You have to constantly lie to yourself about the world that you live in to take on your imaginary circumstances. You have to be such a great liar that you have to be truthful in these imaginary circumstances that you create because if you are fake then you feel it and you know that you are cutting yourself short.
I am learning more and more how competitive this whole damn thing is. I knew from the beginning that it is competitive, but I never thought that it is competitive to this degree. But it got me thinking about the people in my class in particular. It seems at times that even though we get along very well, deep down, there is a bit of competition between us. But then I began to ask myself the question, how could we compete with one another when we are so different? I compare this very much to editing. If you are an editor, a lot of the times you use the same software and even the same computer as other editors. Therefore, it is much easier to distinguish between the editors capabilities. But then in Acting, we each use a different computer (ourselves). So really how can we be compared?
I have been in touch with some people that are so passionate about acting and have been studying it for a very long time, that when they talk about it, they even get teary eyed. I have been hearing from few professors lately how acting is a spiritual thing, That you go out there and you play you objective under these imaginary circumstances and you never know when these great moments will hit you. You cannot predict them. All you can do is go out there and play the objective and some times these moments come and some times they may not come. It’s as if it’s not under your control but is controlled by some higher power. You can never play the end-result when acting. For example, if you think that you should cry in a certain scene and you go out there trying to cry, then you are playing the end-result. But if you go out there and play your objective and fully concentrate, then it will come sooner and easier, and it will be more natural. Or it may not come at all. The truth is, you will never know what will happen. That is the beauty of it. You will never know what will happen, same with in life. Who would have ever thought that I would be here in New York, the city of hope and the capital of the world, pursuing acting? Not me. But as in acting, same with in life, you have objectives, super-objectives, obstacles, and risks. Only difference is that in acting you have all of the boring bits taken out.
Today is the fourth of July and I plan on going to the South Sea Port to catch the fireworks. I am typing on my computer; meanwhile, I got my cat, which we got, pretty much off the streets, nibbling on my feet. I have to shower and cook dinner. Did I tell you all that I am learning to cook and loving it? It’s the art of flavours. This city is changing me, but I think it’s evolving me more than anything. This blog has been quite lengthy, but we have not spoken for a while so I owe it to you. I don’t know when I’ll write again. But I definitely will. I have to go now. As everyday, I am in a hurry and I got so many things to take care of..
PeterB
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