Man of La Mancha

I’ve never done anything creative in my life. “But, wait, Steve,” you may say, “that’s unfair. What about that brilliant profile on the blond auctioneer last December or the moving piece on Soul Asylum’s slow decline last spring?” Sure, sure, but that’s not really creative; journalism, the art of reportage, isn’t an art so much as a technical proposition, like expertly changing a timing belt on a Toyota. You could even be less charitable and argue that researching somebody else’s life, deconstructing it, and winnowing out an easy-to-read 4,000-word narrative is parasitical. It’s much easier to stand back and “objectively” critique somebody else’s creative choices than to create something beautiful, or ugly, yourself.

So now you’re thinking, “What a wordy, self-indulgent jackass.” And you’d be making my very point. That’s exactly where I was at—before Juan Antonio del Rosario and Cristina Cordova asked me to star as “Psycho Steve” in Chasing Windmills.

I met Juan Antonio and Cristina last year when I got the idea, like every other journalist in town, to write about the video blog phenomenon. Their vlog, Chasing Windmills, is a black-and-white serial drama (fancy terminology for a soap) about two people living in a claustrophobic apartment/relationship in downtown Minneapolis. Juan Antonio plays “Q” and Cristina is “Dee,” two Puerto Rican–born East Coast transplants who bicker, break up, get back together, wash, rinse, and repeat. They write, shoot, and edit every episode too, while holding down “real jobs” at a local ad agency. I interviewed the two of them last winter, in the middle of their first season. They’re a couple in real life, both former journalists who wrote for a newspaper and founded an ill-fated alternative newsweekly in San Juan. They’re a genial, intellectual pair—basically a calmer version of the characters they play in CW. (I’ve since seen their hot-blooded Latino/Latina side, but only at the tail end of long shoots, and usually expressed in Spanish, which keeps me pleasantly ignorant—it’s a beautiful language, really). But before I could write the story, about twelve other news outlets in town all wrote features about the show.

They didn’t need my ink anyway. During Chasing Windmills’ first season, the ballad of Q and Dee built a strong local, national, even international following. Vlogs were clearly a noteworthy phenomenon. News and documentary vlogs such as Rocketboom and Minnesota Stories were getting the most attention, but people were also watching scripted humor vlogs such as Tiki Bar TV and Yacht Rock. Still, Chasing Windmills was unique, with an arty black-and-white indie film look, Seinfeldian dialogue, and an elegiac acoustic guitar soundtrack that seems ripped out of an unmade Jarmusch film. It’s an attractive mix of film-school pretension and sitcom entertainment. And in a daily serving of five minutes, it’s the perfect distraction for anybody putting off a deadline at work. And it’s set here. So “think globally, procrastinate locally,” right?

Cut to the end of last season, when Dee has a miscarriage and breaks up with Q. Now, like I said, I’ve never done anything creative, but that doesn’t mean I’m averse to self-expression. In the YouTube/MySpace age, where every nobody has an online voice, I had been fooling around on a couple of local news message boards. It was basically my first experimentation with character, in this case as “stevemarsh” in the role of the brash, arrogant shit-talker. On this particular local message board, I was making fun of another dumb, faux-populist column Nick Coleman had written when I checked the thread on the CW finale and Cristina made an electronic proposition. She said that she had a part in mind for me in season two and she would contact me in the fall before shooting started. I had never acted before (unless you count my role as “The Stranger” in my seventh-grade school play, The Sultan’s Portrait, which you shouldn’t, so I won’t), but the prospect seemed intriguing, so I told them I was in. Three months later, Juan Antonio and Cristina invited me, or stevemarsh, to talk.

In late August, the three of us met for dinner on Babalú’s patio, with another potential actor—local journalist and message-board personality Max Sparber. Max is also a playwright (not to mention a dabbler in puppetry); so I was the only nonartist at dinner. Juan Antonio and Cristina explained that for season two they were expanding CW beyond the Q and Dee relationship, into a kind of sprawling, community theater ensemble, a vloggy Minneapolis version of something like Magnolia or Short Cuts. But their initial funding had fallen through, so instead of working with real actors, they were forced to solicit amateurs. And because of the long hours they shared writing, shooting, acting, and editing, not to mention those “real jobs” at the agency, they hadn’t made any friends or even acquaintances. They were relegated to surfing mnspeak.com, and they were looking for standout personalities—exactly the sort of attention-starved personalities who would volunteer to act in a black-and-white Latin soap opera for free. So after a couple of rounds of plantains and way too many rounds of mojitos, they enlisted Max and me for one weekend a month for the coming season. Two roles were available: Q’s new roommate and a detectivelike character who uses computer technology to track down software piracy and who “might have a romantic dance scene with Dee.”

Now copyright infringement is a fascinating field, but it seemed to me that playing the dorky, Krameresque roommate to Juan Antonio’s wacked-out Q would be the juicier, more appropriate role (and would offer the most exposure), so I subtly gushed about Michael Richards and professed ignorance of anything to do with computer code. Two days later, Cristina accused me of having a “weird rapport” with Juan Antonio, but what they wanted was an awkward tension between Q and his roommate, so the funny Kramer role went to Max and I got stuck with what seemed to be this half-sketched-out detective character.

“You won’t really be in it for the first month,” Cristina said. “A few light episodes in October, and a few heavier ones in December.”

I had to stop myself from saying, “Whatever.”

Turns out, acting is hard. Really hard. I assumed I’d be a natural playing “Steve Marsh,” which, in a hackneyed attempt at going “meta,” I had foolishly decided to name my character. But I had problems from the first day. We were shooting at my Uptown apartment on a Saturday morning, using a script they had e-mailed on Friday. So without much sleep, hung over, and without my lines memorized, I spent a drizzly Saturday afternoon shooting a scene with Alexis McKinnis (another local web personality—you might know her as Girl Friday and as vita.mn’s “Alexis on the Sexes”). Alexis’s character, “Maria,” delivers a bag of psychoactive anxiety medication to my character.

My first scene took place in the alley behind my apartment. “Steve”—who, possibly because I brought up 9/11 conspiracies at Babalú, was now written as a paranoid Xanax freak—keeps looking over his shoulder while he waits for Maria, his fixer. Juan Antonio and Cristina kept shouting at me (well, I remember it as shouting): “Could you be a little more frenetic?” The next morning, Cristina sent an e-mail addressed to “the entire cast,” with suggestions such as the following: “Keep hangovers to a minimum on shooting days. In my opinion, this is the worst thing you can do for your performance, mostly because you end up drained and your face reflects zero emotion.”

I started getting flamed on the message boards as soon as the episode posted. Here’s the thing about being creative: In the interactive age, the DMZ between artist and ass has shrunk to the point where they’re almost indistinguishable. Every time my character appears, people immediately post stuff like “I know Marsh, and he’s just playing himself.” (So should I have called myself “Frank”?) I also consistently get “I hate this storyline” and/or “I find this storyline unbelievable.” And, worst of all, “Is that a bald spot?”

Acting has always been a proposition in vanity. I get that the act of acting calls attention to both what the actor is creating and the actor who’s creating it. I don’t want to seem like one of those drama department chumps who muses earnestly and endlessly about his “craft,” but I really was trying to get to that Zen state where you’re self-aware without being self-aware. I tried to dispense with the petty vanities that both Steve Marsh and “Steve Marsh” are self-conscious about in order to concentrate on the noble vanity of creating something interesting and honest. I had to ignore my self-awareness of my thinning (but still glorious) mane, my self-awareness that sometimes I groom less than thoroughly, and my self-awareness after eating a big lunch. But that’s impossible in the interactive age, when two seconds after your episode posts some anonymous jackass responds “This storyline seems unbelievable” and “Is that a bald spot?” And, yes, I read every comment, every time.

Because CW is shot on digital video, my acting is easily edited. As they say, any jerk with an Apple computer can do it, and Juan Antonio and Cristina are not only jerks with an Apple computer, they’re talented jerks with an Apple computer—I’m consistently amazed at how they’ve sliced up my cheesy sub–Waiting for Guffman efforts into not only salvageable but actually watchable performances. Almost as important as their editing is their writing. Any Ben Affleck wannabe could deliver these lines in a wooden monotone and come off amusing (on “Surreal Date,” my favorite episode, I simply had to repeat, “I’m good. No, really, I’m good,” as Dee insists she needs to be alone and wants me to leave her apartment; the premise alone is too hilarious to screw up). Even if the writing leaves you cold, there’s that creepy acoustic guitar score. It’s an unfair dramatic weapon, imbuing a character washing his face with Hitchcock–level intensity.

But the most important element of Chasing Windmills is simply the open-ended dailyness of it. After my incompetent, mumbling debut, I would’ve probably been written out about 120 episodes ago if Juan Antonio and Cristina hadn’t written me in much deeper than originally planned by accident. For some reason, the software-piracy-detective angle didn’t work out, but a third of the way into the second season the two of them came up with the brilliant this-could-only-happen-in-a-black-and-white-Puerto Rican-daily-web-soap-opera twist. Now my paranoid character believes he’s Apple founder Steven Jobs’s long-lost son. I’m no longer some jerk with an Apple computer; I’m a delusional jerk who believes he’s the creator’s forsaken son. That’s biblical, man (and blatantly manipulative of all the Apple geeks out in the blogosphere). Now I’m going to make it all the way to the season finale this month. (Not any further, though. They’re undecided about the potential for Chasing Windmills 3, but apparently they’re very sure about my character’s fate. A week in, Cristina asked, “Do you know what defenestrated means?”)

It’s been an honor to be Juan Antonio and Cristina’s human parody of America’s obsession with marketing and self-medication. But the most pleasure I’ve taken is in the rite of passage every actor must take: freaking out Mom.

Halfway through my character’s arc, he becomes unhinged enough to start snorting his anxiety medication. One Saturday morning, I had to hoover a fat rail of ibuprofen. A month later, my sister and fifteen-month-old nephew were making their acting debuts, playing Steve’s mother and Steve as a very young man. With her favorite daughter (sigh) involved, my mom finally had a reason to catch up on the ’mill. So when I came home for Christmas, Mom, who watches Fox News and therefore understands the Internet as mainly a portal for sexual predators, wondered if it was the best idea for my young nephew to be participating, especially since his uncle is a “drug addict, evidently.”

Was she accusing me? Congratulating me? Was she saying that I blurred the lines so convincingly between Steve Marsh and “Steve Marsh” that she was concerned that the very existence of my make-believe character would somehow rub off on my young nephew? Or was she dismissing my performance, attacking me for simply playing myself? Was this maternal pride or concern, or another variant on “he-makes-it-look-so-easy-it-must-be-easy” criticism favored by the haters on the CW message board?

I was too flush with the n00by artist’s My Parents Just Don’t Understand outrage to equivocate. “That was ibuprofen, Mom,” I seethed. “You just don’t respect me as an artist!”

It was my finest performance yet.

See Steve Marsh vlogging at chasingmills.com and reach him at edit@mspmag.com when he’s not.