Friday, February 27, 2009


The New York Times has a piece about Jeremy Piven’s mercury poisoning hearing today and it claims that he broke down and cried when asked about his experience trying to perform in David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow” on Broadway. He avoided penalties for leaving the show because he somehow convinced Actors Equity that he really was sick. The producers of the show suspected that he was actually just bored with the role in which he was cast and consequently, they were seeking to charge him with breaking his contract when he left the production.

I had almost forgotten about this story and one thing that strikes me about it is that either way, Piven is exercising his acting muscle pretty well. For one, he got pretty good reviews when the play opened so if he didn’t fake a thing and really is sick then great, it’s just unfortunate and if he is faking it and has been going out as opposed to staying in bed like he claims he’s been doing then he got away with the whole thing.


I don’t mind Jeremy Piven that much – apart from all the negativity he seems to dredge up in bloggers and the media. But, I mean, if you took that into account you’d hate everything.


Ok, so Piven saga is still going and he seems to be winning.


I am now working from home which is great except that there’s no internet so I’m sitting at a café in Williamsburg. It’s all very poetic. Coffee in reusable ceramic cups, hipsters everywhere, light, windows, old wood floors…yeah.


Except that I was given free face peel treatment gel from Sephora and I have applied it 4 days in a row and now look like I’m blotchily sunburnt. That’s really no big deal if you work from home but seeing as I’ve got no internet I had to leave the house today. The trick with shit like this is that you just pretend like nothing’s wrong and then people assume maybe there’s something wrong with their eyes when they look at you. I firmly believe that.

Plus, I’m reinforcing the notion that I’m completely normal by staring about the room contentedly every now and then. My my, how charming it is to step in and out of thinking and looking at my computer screen. I can do it at a whim as I'm just in an uninterrupted world of my own. There’s a huge map at the Atlas café - which is where I am – and I just realized that the US has dominion over a set of Islands called the Aleutian Islands which includes the Rat Islands. What a charming place they must be. Cancel my trip to Morrocco (which technically I had never booked). I'm going to the Rat Islands to be eaten alive by rodents. [source]

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