THE SECRET OF GREAT ACTING

I have a Love/Hate relationship with Inside The Actors Studio. On one hand, James Lipton coaxes some great interviews out of his guests. On the other hand, many of those guests get mind-blowingly pretentious about "The Method" and "Their Craft." Sure, there are some great actors out there and just as many ways to conjure up a good performance. But at the end of the day it's all just... well, I'll let Sir Ian McKellen explain it.

THREE YEARS GONE

Today marks the third year anniversary of the day I took of for the Southern Hemisphere. As I look out my window, I see the same autumnal colors that bade me farewell back then, and its impossible for me to not get nostalgic. I can still picture the mist rolling over the mountains of New Zealand as my plane made its way into Auckland. The excitement of living on my own in a new country was raging through me. Yes, I did and saw some amazing stuff, but it all would have been pretty empty if I weren't sharing the experiences with some awesome people. And I miss those people terribly and it pisses me off that I can't just meet up with them at John Harvard's tonight.

I'd give you more of my Backpacker's Withdrawal Spiel, but thankfully Australian blogger Ben Groundwater sums my mood up perfectly in the article below, so I can go back to being the lazy American blogger that I have become. Enjoy.

THE WORST THING ABOUT TRAVELLING

I used to know a tour bus driver who loved telling people he was "world famous".

"I know people all over the world," he'd tell his latest bunch of wide-eyed tour passengers, "so I reckon that makes me world famous."

The guy was no Bono, but he had a point. He did know people from all over the world, fellow travellers he could call his friends - as could most people who've spent a bit of time overseas.

We've all got the odd mate in England, friends in Germany, people we could call on in the US, a couple of Dutchies we'd like to hang out with again, some South Africans who said we should come stay some time...

And you know what? It sucks.
Some people might like the idea of having friends all over the world, but I'm not one of them.

I don't want to know that I could go stay with one of my friends for a few nights if I ever found myself in Los Angeles. I want to know that I could go to the pub with them right now.

I don't want don't want friends on other side of the world - I want them on the other side of the street. I don't even like having to cross Anzac Bridge to see my brother.

There are plenty of downsides to a life of travelling - lack of money, career etc - but that, for me, is the worst. You meet these amazing people, have incredible experiences together, and then you bid them goodbye.

Sure, you swap emails, look each other up on Facebook, try to keep in touch ... but you both know there's every chance you'll never see each other again. And that sucks.

I used to work for a tour company in Europe, and without doubt the best part of the job was being presented with a new group of 30 or so people to get to know for the next three weeks. That was fantastic. The worst part of the job, without doubt, was then waving them all goodbye when those three weeks were up.

You tend to forge some pretty amazing friendships when you're travelling, not just on group tours, but just going about the everyday act of getting from one place to the next.

You're always more open to meeting new people when you travel. And through shared experiences like eating strange food, comparing bed bug bites, trying to speak a different language, or just the sheer act of living life in another country, you forge close friendships very quickly. And then you go your separate ways.

Some of those people, you'll never see again. They'll just be a funny character you'll tell bored mates about when you get back home. Others, you'll hook up with again at some other time, in some other place, and you'll find the magic's just not there any more. There'll be this weird moment when you realise that for all the fun you had together overseas, you really don't have much in common.

Others will become friends for life - only from the other side of the world.

The internet's made it easier than ever to keep in touch with the people you meet when you're travelling. All it takes is a couple of quick clicks, and few minutes of reading status updates, and you can tell what, say, Jorge from Argentina is up to now.

There's also a new website, Trip Reunions, where old tour passengers can register and get back in touch with the people they travelled with all those years ago. Some groups organise reunions, where you all get together to drink a few beers and reminisce about that crazy Kiwi bloke who always took his pants off when he was drunk, or the girl you could have sworn you saw dashing out of the bus driver's cabin one night.

It's all good fun, and you'll have a great night, but it's just not the same.

Some people might like being world famous - but I'd prefer it if all my friends lived here.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

I am a naughty, Naughty, NAUGHTY Blogger! Sorry for the delay. Spank me... I dare ya!
Last you all heard from me, I was working the streets of Perth convincing strangers to fork over monthly donations to charity. I ended up spending nearly five months in Perth, my longest stretch anywhere in Australia. To be sure, it’s a nice place - great beaches and lots of fun young people. My job worked out well and I made some great friends, but I needed to hit the road back home as my visa was running out. After several farewell shindigs, I hopped on the Nullarbor Traveller. It was a terrific 9-day bus tour that took me all the way from Perth to Adelaide, a distance of about 2,400 miles. The bus was populated by myself, three German girls, a Scottish lass, and Lachy (rhymes with “hockey,” short for Lachlan) our Aussie driver. Not a bad ratio there! We camped almost every night and saw lots of awesome stuff as we made our way eastward. Cape Le Grand National Park was particularly cool. We did some nice hikes, the best being Frenchman’s Peak. There was also the gorgeous white sand of Lucky Bay. It was already a bit too late in the season to go swimming, but it was stunning, nonetheless. Along the way, we also saw Wave Rock (It’s a rock that looks like a wave), lots of stunning coastline, fantastic caves, and many, many miles of flat treeless land along the Nullarbor Plain. One of the best spots was the area around Coodlie Park on the Eyre Peninsula. We stayed there for two nights and did all kinds of cool stuff. There was a moonlight 4X4 tour of the farm where we saw kangaroos and wombats, side trips out to spectacular caves and rock formations, and sandboarding down massive dunes. From there we departed to Baird Bay where we went snorkeling with dolphins and sea lions – probably the best thing we did on the tour. Our group went out on a little pontoon boat, donned wetsuits, and jumped right into the water with those crazy critters! Being wild animals, the dolphins didn’t really do much but swim by us very quickly. The sea lions were much more fun! They are like friendly, playful dogs that can swim. One was repeatedly putting his nose right up to my facemask. I stayed in as long as I could, despite the freezing water. So much fun!

Over the next few days we did some more hikes and tours. In Port Lincoln we went out to a tuna farm where I did some more snorkeling. There were massive tuna nets with dozens of big, fast tuna swimming around. I would feed them by hand and they swam with incredible speed right by my face. On the boat we got free samples of their sashimi-grade tuna steak. MMMMMmmmmm… fun and tasty!

One of the last things we did was a quick little surfing trip. I hadn’t surfed since I had left Gisbourne, New Zealand more than two years earlier, and it was great to do it again. One of these days, I gotta get a board of my own.

Oh yeah, we also killed a kangaroo. It was an accident. For all their cuteness and physical dexterity, kangaroos are pretty stupid animals. One evening crossing the Nullarbor, Lachy spied two roos a few hundred yards down the road. He honked the horn and flashed the lights repeatedly, but to no avail. One of the roos jumped right in front of the van and took one for the team. This is not an uncommon occurrence Down Under. The sides of any country road are littered with carcasses. Roos are far from an endangered species, so it was really just Darwinism at work. We were merely thinning out the herd. The surviving roo hopefully hopped back home and told his friends that Steve (as I called him) unfortunately got plowed down by a van, and that maybe in the future he and is friends should jump AWAY from oncoming vehicles, rather than towards them. I’m just sayin’…After disembarking in Adelaide (more like Ade-LAME!), and taking a few showers, I went on yet another tour around Kangaroo Island. It’s a huge island, more than 100 miles across. Because of its isolation from the mainland, it has been spared many of the environmental invasions that Australia has suffered since the Europeans showed up. Its name is no coincidence – there are all kinds of kangaroos all over the island, along with koalas (so cute and dopey!), penguins, snakes, seals, seal lions, and other unique species. Thankfully, none were killed by our tour group. The highlight of this trip was probably the Remarkable Rocks – huge & fantastic rock formations looking out on the Southern Ocean. Millions of years of wind & rain have carved these rocks into bizarre shapes. One can easily conjure up visions of pagan rituals being performed on these things. Very cool.Once that trip was done I returned back to Adelaide and hung out with my buddy Matt from Leeds before flying to Sydney for the long trip back to America. Whilst back in Sydney, my friends from “Wolverine” informed me that there was going to be a cast & crew screening of the movie at Fox Studios Australia on April 26th. Unfortunately, my flight was booked for the 23rd, so I couldn’t make it. Damn! I’m still pissed that I missed that. It would have been a great way to finish up my wacky Australian adventure. But, whaddya gonna do? At the very least, I got to spend my last three days in Australia at Noah’s Bondi Beach, one of my favorite hostels anywhere. Flying home was, well, it was flying home. I fell asleep somewhere over the Pacific and woke up in Los Angeles. I spent a week with friends & family around LA. Lots of Mexican food was consumed and I had a great time catching up with people whom I hadn’t seen in years. It was bizarre to be back in America to have “Wolverine” billboards and posters on every bus & street corner. Sadly, Fox decided that they didn’t need to credit the PAs from the New Zealand crew, so my name is nowhere to be found in the end titles. Still, it was nice to go see the movie on opening night in my hometown, at the very movie theater that I worked at all through high school, and being able to point at the screen and say “I was there for that!”

Anyway, I have had to adjust many things since I got home (chiefly my belt, as home cooking, car travel, and the most consistently bad weather in more than a century have contributed to my rapidly expanding waistline). I’ve had to make up for lost time by going to weddings, birthdays and other events that I didn’t have the luxury of attending over the last 2½ years (they’ve been great, by the way). Some things have changed since I left – Obama is president, Michael Jackson is dead, Massachusetts seems to have a viable film industry, the Natick Mall has metamorphosed into an up-market monstrosity dubbed The Natick Collection, Mom & Dad did some remodeling – and some things haven’t – war in Iraq & Afghanistan, debate over gay marriage, Kim Jong Il acting crazy, Mom & Dad’s busted skylight, etc.

There is no way for me be able to process all the things I’ve done, places I’ve seen and people I’ve met over the last couple years and come up with some grand conclusion, so don’t expect one. All I can say is that it has been a fantastic time in my life. Travel is extremely addictive, and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. I’ve had wonderful and horrible days. Though traveling has its hardships, expenses and unexpected speed bumps, it’s just too good to pass up. I may have to stay home for a while, but I know that I will be getting back out there someday. If you really want to do it, save up some cash and just go for it. You won’t regret it. So, dear readers, Moranadu will be reverting (temporarily, anyway) to its roots as a place for me to rant and rave over whatever I damn well please, rather than my international shenanigans. Expect the unexpected. Or don’t. I’ll write what I want, so there.

GONNA MAKE YOU SWEAT!

First off, in case anyone was concerned, I am alive and well and more than 2,000 miles away from the fires in Victoria. They are pretty horrific. Nearly 200 people have died already. Australians aren’t very used to large-scale natural disasters, and this one is hitting home hard. It’s nice to know that my current job has contributed to the relief efforts, but we’ll get to that in a bit.Where were we? Ah, yes. Darwin.

Darwin was getting way too hot and boozy. Before I left the Top End, I took a three-day tour of Kakadu National Park. I expected to encounter all sorts of freaky Aussie critters, and I was not disappointed. We saw frilled lizards, emus, pythons, crocodiles, dingoes, and wallaroos (too big to be a wallabie, too small to be a kangaroo). But the creatures that I will remember most from my Kakadu experience were the thousands upon thousands of flies that were buzzing around my sweaty head at any given moment. Australian flies crave the salty goodness of human perspiration. It is widely known that I am The Sweatiest Man in the World, and when The Sweatiest Man in the World went to Kakadu, The Sweatiest Place in the World, a perfect storm of Sweatiness erupted. The flies of Kakadu greeted me like manna from heaven. From dawn ‘til dusk, they never left me alone. They didn’t bite. Instead they just buzzed and crawled all over my face, occasionally creeping into my eyelids as I tried to appreciate ancient Aboriginal rock paintings (many of which are sex education literature in hieroglyphic form).Still, Kakadu was pretty awesome. We did some nice walks and took lots of dips in spectacular swimming holes. The highlight of the trip was our first night of camping, when I ate kangaroo meat and played a didgeridoo under a full moon while dingoes howled in the distance – my most quintessentially Australian experience so far. I barely got a wink of sleep and the tour group was kind of lame, but it was still a good time. It was our tour company’s last trip before they shut down for the wet season, and our guide made no secret that he was trying to score an English girl from another tour group at the campsite as a year-end bonus. Not sure if he succeeded.After several farewell drinks with my Darwin friends, I took to the skies and flew to Perth. Flying over the vast expanse of Western Australia was humbling. Gazing out my window, I could see astoundingly little evidence of human development – just miles upon miles of desert punctuated by the occasional mine site or dirt road to nowhere. The in-flight movie was “Mamma Mia,” so many of my future reminiscences of the Outback will be scored not with “Waltzing Matilda” or “Blue Sky Mine,” but with “Waterloo” and “Dancing Queen.” Thanks, Qantas. And for the record, Pierce Brosnan can’t sing for shit.

If Darwin is Australia’s version of a Texas oil rig town, then Perth is an Aussie San Diego – nice weather, great beaches, suburban sprawl, a mellow populous, not a whole lot of character, but still a nice place to live. My buddy Sam got me my current job, which involves me standing on the street and encouraging strangers to donate money to charitable organizations. It’s not as hard as it might seem (I got promoted!). You just gotta learn to deal with constant rejection. If I get four sign-ups a day, I’m doing well. The easiest people to sign up are recent African emigrants, and there are plenty of them in Perth. I’ve signed up folks from Sudan, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe (I had no idea there were so many white people from Zimbabwe). Black, white, male, female, old, young – the Africans are very charitable and generous. Without a doubt, the hardest demographic to sign up is suit-wearing, white dudes. Shocker.

I suppose that I can’t get through this entry without mentioning the election of Barack Obama. I watched the results come in at The Fox Ale House, one of the pubs I worked at in Darwin where my buddy Carboni was nice enough to let me put on the big screen TV. A girl from California strolled by the pub and watched it with me. As nice as it was to hear Australians cheering and applauding the speech of a soon-to-be American president, it was great to be able to share that moment with a fellow Yank. Hope home is treating you well, Marie! As for the inauguration, I was at a hostel in Busselton where I had to wake up at 1:30 AM to watch live coverage. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a live inauguration, not even for Clinton. I was hoping for some momentous “The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself” quote from Obama, which never really surfaced. But I suppose the fact that such a seemingly decent, intelligent, charismatic and inspiring person who just happens to be a black man became the president of the United States in front of a crowd of millions of proud, hopeful and motivated Americans speaks for itself. America, FUCK YEAH!!!!

Back to Australia…

Perth was Heath Ledger’s hometown. As big a city as Perth is, its isolation gives it a small-town familiarity, and all the locals seem to know someone who actually knew Heath or at least knows one of his family members. His Academy Award nomination for “The Dark Knight” came on the anniversary of his death, and made front-page news here. Assuming (and it’s a safe bet) that he receives a posthumous Oscar, it will be interesting to see how Perth reacts. I wonder what it must be like for his family to walk around Perth, where “Dark Knight” merchandise is inescapable, looking at images of their boy and his now iconic incarnation of The Joker displayed on posters, DVDs and t-shirts in every other store window. If any Ledgers are reading this, you have my sympathies.And if there are any Academy members reading this, how the hell could you not nominate “The Dark Knight” for Best Picture and Best Director? What the fuck is wrong with you people? The movie is beloved by audiences and critics the world over. It has a great story, terrific acting, and superlative technical artistry. It is now the second highest-grossing movie ever made. You gave the film eight other nominations, but just couldn’t see it in your crooked little hearts to give it the big ones, presumably because it is based on a comic-book character and therefore must be kid stuff - incapable of exploring significant psychological or dramatic terrain. That attitude is snobby and retarded. Why does Stephen Daldry have three (THREE!!!) Best Director nominations to his credit while Christopher Nolan has zero? The man has never made a bad movie. You weren’t even this mean to Spielberg in his early days. Wake up, douchebags!

Ah, well, at least some other genuinely decent movies got nominated, and it will be fun watching my former boss tackle the hosting duties.

Perth will most likely be my last major stomping ground in the Land of Oz. My vague plan is to save up money here, see a bit more of the outback (not sure where or what exactly – somewhere ABBA-free, if possible) and then head homeward in April. My big dilemma now is deciding which way to go. Next time you’re near a globe, find Perth and then find Boston. I am nearly as far away from home as the North Pole is to the South Pole. I could go east or west and spend about the same amount of money and travel time. As nice as it is, how the hell did I end up here?

Shameless Self-Promotion Alert!!!!

Click here to view the trailer for "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," the movie that completely consumed my life just a year ago. After all the hard work that thousands of people put into the production, it is hugely gratifying that the trailer looks as good as it does, biased as I am. I was physically present for pretty much every shot that features a motorcycle, helicopter, explosion, mountain scenery and/or Hugh Jackman fighting with Liev Schreiber. When I was a kid and fantasized about making movies, this is the kind of stuff I saw myself working on. The movie will be released on May 1st, and I hope it lives up to the trailer!

In the meantime, dear readers, I hope you all survive the Global Financial Crisis with your life savings intact. For those in the movie biz, try to get gigs on funny flicks – Hollywood thrived during the 1930s thanks in great part to cheaply made screwball comedies. To all my “Pineapple Express” buddies, keep Judd Apatow on speed dial, and please put in a good word for me!