A word from William

Hi. I'd like to give my friend Will Bray a chance to chime in on my little blog.

That's him there.

Any passing resemblance to the author of this blog is purely coincidental, and I'd like to point out that my nose isn't nearly that big. If you think it is, you're looking at it all wrong, and you can order a special lens from the B&H Catalog.

A word or two ABOUT my friend, before a word or two from him. Will Bray is a rock musician, singer-songwriter, actor, novelist, Anglophile and waiter. He lives in Brooklyn. His apartment is not entirely unlike the black box theater pictured above.

He's got an indie rock band called "William and the Tradesmen." He writes all the songs and sings lead. They've got all the usual problems that result from a guy starting a band with his own name in it. His bass player is seventeen years old and is usually absent from gigs due to Finals and unplanned trips to planned parenthood. He's on drummer number seven, or six, he can't remember which.

He writes songs similar to THESE.

William is obsessed with certain aspects of British culture, such as:












He... doesn't have a girlfriend.

Sorry, Will, why don't you take it from here?


Thanks. Um.. hi. I don't want to take up too much of your time. Eli wanted me to do a sort of Topic of the Week segment with you guys to see if anyone out there feels particularly strongly about any of these... topics. Sorry, I've started this badly. Today's topic is Completion.

Do you ever feel like you never finish anything, and that with every "project" you abandon you add another year to your afterlife in hell? (Sorry, like most agnostic Jews, I'm not big on Heaven or God, yet somehow Hell seems real.)

I just want to finish something. I have half of a novel. I've written lots of plays, one of which I put into three envelopes four years ago. I've written about 75 songs, but no one's heard them, so I don't count them as finished. You know? I quit my sketch comedy group, four bands, and a string of pilates lessons. The pattern has sustained itself over enough years to beg the question, what kind of MAN am I?

Like, what if Thomas Jefferson went around saying to all his friends, starting in like 1774, "Oh man, I've got this great idea for a declaration of independence, and I wrote the preamble and two really strong paragraphs, but I just don't know where it goes..." And he just goes on talking about it for years, past 1776, into the 1780's. And by that time the whole issue has cooled off, and he just gets way too into beekeeping and inventing swivel chairs... and that's it. The world never gets democracy, we still have a king. Which, I don't know, maybe that would be cool, actually. But, like, years later, in the 1820's, Jefferson's still saying, "Yeah, I still love that declaration, but I didn't have a publisher at the time, so I was like 'Who's going to read it? No one.'"

Is it me? Is it the age we live in? Or is it the fact that I don't have a revolution or a Continental Congress to bounce ideas off of. Am I just... spending too much time alone? And if so, how do I stop doing that and find... a congress or a revolution?

It keeps me up at night. Well, that and Wikipedia-ing the lives of famous people to see how they broke through. Sometimes it's people I'm not even interested in. I had no idea Mandy Patinkin helped Kelsey Grammer get the audition for Cheers. I mean, aren't all our minds kind of blown by this?

I also stay up trying not to contemplate my roommate's lovemaking. I don't hear him having sex with his girlfriend - I'm just up half the night thinking of how they must be going at it just two feet from my bedroom door, and how they must be pretty good at keeping it quiet. How do they keep it so quiet? They sleep on a single-size bed. They possess subtleties I do not.

Anyway - completion. It'd be nice to feel completed. Before mankind. In the course of human events. But 'til that happens it is my every intention to finish this Topic of the Day post - without resorting to .... shit, did you know Anderson Cooper is Gloria Vanderbilt's kid?