Being Bi-Coastal, aka "Living the Dream"

I take the end of each year seriously, feeling great pressure to get closure on projects, set everything up for success the next year, and leave enough time before New Years to dig in to ritualized introspection. For a decade, I threw a weeklong New Years retreat with a bunch of friends. We’d head to the mountains of Lake Arrowhead, get a cabin, and discuss our year past and to come while enjoying lazy days and some bacchanalian nights. They are treasured, youthful, life-loving memories, and they’ve also instilled this state I enter every December…a state that, apparently, challenges blogging, given my absence.

We’ve also begun work on the 2012 iteration of Unscreened, an evening of theater that was originally thought up by Black Sheep Entertainment and which we produce together. We invite brilliant, buzz-worthy screenwriters to write short plays. The immediacy of theatre production them gives them what is always a rare and sometimes their only experience of working directly with actors – including me – on the words they write. It’s been absorbing. But more on that in posts to come.

I was going to write only about Being Bi-Coastal. I live in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles, with apartments in each, and I don’t have a trust fund. Artists often dream of this life – as I did years ago – and folks ask "how" often enough that I thought I'd say: there are a few tricks worth mentioning. Of course, you have to have built your career and/or sustenance job to a point that you can have some freedom. But, as you gain that – which is much less than you think – you’ll see people around you start spending more on...well, just about everything. Don’t. To boil it down: (i) Don’t ratchet up your standard of living while those around you do, even as you start to gain your first success. This is a key to lifelong living as an artist anyway. Live within your means. (ii) When others start moving into nicer digs, allocate for two cheaper apartments instead. With time looking, you’d be surprised what you can find. (iii) Double clothes and toiletries and put some at each place. (iv) Here’s the trick: you’ll pay for far fewer flights than you’d think. Get a credit card with airline miles attached and build points. Especially if you charge portions of production and start well ahead of your Bi-Coastal Launch, you’ll find you pay for only a minority of the flights you take. (v) You're done. You've come out as bi-coastal. You can fly with just a carry-on, knowing there's a toothbrush at the other place. And you can head to NY for foliage and LA for...well beautiful weather always, if that's your thing.

But it’s also interesting to me, as evidenced by my blog lag, how much I resist the whole Social Media thing, even as I recognize its power. I feel sometimes like my dad staring at a DVR. I never understood his hesitation before. But, yes: given what I do, my resistance is something I’m working to overcome. Speaking of which, a reader sent in an amusing and related link thinking back about how tweets from artists now gone might have changed things. 

Hope the holiday build-up goes well!